Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

“You know, Gord,” Dock said. “It’d mean the world to us to have a little steady work aside from alfalfa and hogs.”

“I know it.”

“Alfalfa’s not great. Everything else is glutted. Wheat’s too cheap.”

“It’s OK, Dock.” He wanted Dock to stop talking.

“I know you think you have responsibilities around here.” He nodded out the window toward the horizon, and held up a hand. “Hear me out. Try it for a year. It’s only a few hours away. You can come back whenever you need to. Or if I get stuck. You’ve got a good truck right?”

They laughed at that. That truck had had four transmissions in its five-hundred-thousand-mile life.

“Would give us a year to save a little from whatever work comes through here to get Annie and Emery back to her family in Kansas.”

“You’d go?” Gordon looked stricken.

“Here you were thinking you had to hold the town together like your father did, but the town’s disappeared on you,” Dock said. “You’re free.” He extended a hand, and Gordon gave him his own, and they shook. Dock’s face broke open in a smile of relief. “Boy howdy,” he said, “am I ever going to have Leigh Ransom on my good side. Guess who’s getting free peach pie for the next couple days before she leaves?”

Gordon handed Dock a coffee mug, and they looked outside. The morning was yellow and sere. Horseflies glinted over the browning turf and thick, needled weeds.

“Not much left to it, is there?” Dock said. All they could see from where they stood was the closed Gas & Grocer, one broken window and its lawn already overgrown with thistle. “Maybe it’ll get a second wind.”

“What’d you bring?” Gordon asked, looking at the trailer hitched to Dock’s rig.

Outside Dock had some rusted-out lattice and a broken axle on a tractor trailer — parts for a refurbished ATV for Emery.

“New used.”

Dock nodded. “You got it.”

“You know what Dad would’ve said.”

“‘That’s a good man.’”

They both laughed.

“Be expensive to do?” Dock asked.

“Only if you charge yourself. You’ll be the one doing it.” Both of these sentences were John Walker’s, verbatim, and Dock wanted to laugh but Gordon was serious. “Whatever you can’t find in the scrap metal pile we’ll have to purchase, and then there’s the cost of the electricity.”

“That’ll be it?”

Gordon nodded.

“How do we start?”

“Prep and clean up. That’ll take a full day.”

“Like your father.”

“Yes, sir. What do we need from the back?”

“Metal.” He grinned sheepishly.

“But what kind?”

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“You start. Any ideas you have.”

“Can we reinforce the ramps with angle iron?”

“We could.”

“But,” Dock considered, watching Gordon’s face, “rectangular tubing is stronger. Do the job right.”

Gordon nodded. “What else?”

“We’ll need enough plate for fenders.”

“Quarter inch?”

Dock stooped down and felt the ramp hangars. “Quarter inch here,” he said. “Eighth inch for the fenders.”

“Let’s go check the scrap,” Gordon said. “See what we’ve got.”

The pile was out back in a circle of blinding sun. A sheet of metal so rusted it looked like copper-colored eyelet; sections of cemetery gate; curled edges of warped, corrugated steel; a bicycle wheel; six bicycle frames and four spools of wire and railroad spikes, chain-link, two bulldozer buckets, hubcaps, trash bins, iron piping, steel piping. The pile was twelve feet wide and organized by metal and by function but still half as many feet high. Bright, upright stacks of sheet metal like mirrors flashed in the daylight and they held their forearms up against their eyes.

“He never threw anything away,” Gordon said.

Dock nodded at the pile. “Think we can use that?” He picked up a sheet of low carbon steel and miller moths lifted from beneath its shadow and batted softly against their faces and shirts.

“Perfect. How are you with a torch?” Gordon asked.

Dock unraveled the loops of gas hose and turned on the acetylene, then the oxygen. He checked the pressure, tapped the regulators with his index finger, and Gordon pointed to the wall. Dock retrieved two face shields and began again. He cracked open the valve on the torch, spark-lit the acetylene, and black smoke woofed up between the two men. He slowly cracked the oxygen to make the flame cleaner and shorter, and the smoke disappeared. The torch had its own distinctive roar. As he adjusted the oxygen down several blue points of flame jetted from the torch nozzle. When they were tight against the nozzle, the torch was ready to cut.

“Now let’s turn it off,” Gordon said, “and clean up some rust. You need to grind that area smooth and remove the paint from the area where we’ll have to weld. First job is always to prepare the joint — no rust, no paint, no dirt.”

“God help me, I know. But when we do start welding?” Dock returned to the torch and stepped toward the machine.

Gordon nodded. “Go ahead. Show me. Check your connections.”

“Check.”

Dock showed him: socks pulled up beneath his pants, which came down over the tops of his boots. Sleeves rolled down. Helmet on, hood lifted for the time being. He pointed to the lifted shop door. Ventilation. Dock pointed to the ground beneath his feet. Dry. He turned and showed Gordon his back pocket: work-duty gloves, ready to go.

“God,” Gordon laughed. “Where was I when you learned the routine?”

“School,” Dock smiled. “He put me through the wringer. Once I poured water over a couple spot welds on a broken johnny bar and I thought he was going to punch me in the gut.”

“You poured water on them? Mid-project?”

Dock winced. “Alright, alright. I know.”

“OK, next. What’s your material?”

“Gordon. You remind me so much of your dad.”

“OK.”

“Don’t feel bad about going. It’s the only choice,” he said. “And you know I’ll need you. There’ll be a long line of customers with money in their hands, right?”

“Sure, Dock.”

“And I’ll call on you.”

* * *

That night in the factory Gordon told Leigh about the morning with Dock, and that he’d get his things together. He was leaning against the brick wall and she took her place in his arms, her head against his chest, and took his hand in hers.

“Aren’t you happy?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, but was surprised not to feel anything as she said it. It used to be that her words created the feeling they described. Now she sensed the gap between the two, and wondered if it’d always been there. She wasn’t sure what she felt. “And you?”

He was quiet a full minute. “Happy.” He bumped his tennis shoe against hers.

Tonight he was a mile farther behind that line he’d never let her cross, had never crossed for her. When she closed her eyes, she couldn’t picture his face. Something else had claimed him. She thought maybe they could still outrun it.

Before coming West the Walkers were camped briefly in a northeast Atlantic state, in a small town with verdant rolling hills, clear lakes, moss-covered barns, and hardwood trees with wide, flat-leafed blades that grew big as wet green hands. There, each man at his turn sweated before a rock slab hearth, shaping and twisting red-hot steel with a four-pound hammer on a heavy cast anvil. Some thousands of years before that, they were watchmen gathered high on a windswept moor beneath a spray of stars, sitting late into the night around a fire hemmed in by a ring of stones. Long after the women and most of the men had gone to sleep, and the constellations had tilted above them, and all the nocturnal creatures and insects clicking and whirring in the brush had fallen silent, their bellies filled with blood and feather and bone, these old Walkers stared into the flames as minerals began to shine and liquify in the rock, and they knew just what to do. It was a discovery they would not have made had they not been sentinels of a kind, and each Walker in his time relayed the message to his son: the metalwork should ever afterward remind them of this duty. And so in the midst of the hundreds of wars that followed, and during years upon years as migrants among the hungry and hopeless, they would have learned that compassion is fearless and unthinking, or it’s not compassion.