Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗

AN APPARITION PACED the empty lobby inside the glass front doors, a slip of paper in his hand. The click of his heels reverberated in the open. He placed the slip of paper on a desk and shook his head.

Eli let his boy go first. “You’re up, son.”

They opened the doors, and bright grey eyes as sharp as a cormorant’s appraised them, his suit a brilliant blue. Everett smiled. And when his pitch came out it was clean - smooth and natural. Fifteen minutes later they left with an order.

They rumbled over snow-packed roads, Everett talking like he was ten again. Eli nodded as the words tumbled out, absorbing the animation on his son’s face, filling Eli with a sublime contentment.

For the moment, all thoughts of war were forgotten.

Hammer and Tongs

Dill smoked as she paced. Cats made figure eights around her legs, tentative in their affections, unsure of her mood, then returned under the porch - out of the cold. Dill’s eyes were on the silos that cast the house and barn in shadow, empty husks of land borne giants. There would be no help from there. All the corn was gone.

Few orders had come recent. Tedium wound inside her as the machine shop neither advanced nor fell back, churning without noticeable change, producing a feeling like a month without whiskey.

She avoided her sister, seated with her hands encircling chair arms.

Up the drive the boys came. They bounded out of the car, all smiles and swagger. She spoke before they’d stepped on the porch. “So how was it?”

“We got an order,” Everett said, holding a roll of drawings and a small mechanical part.

“Only one?”

Eli’s hands were in his pockets, thumbs pointed out, his necktie askew. “Everett made a sale from a factory.”

She retreated into the house with the drawings and the sample and laid them out on the table, smoothing the pages. These were real drawings. The printing ink’s acidic scent filled the room. Blue lines dressed the starchy paper in whirls and squared corners. They replicated perfectly the part beside them, just bigger than her fist.

The door banged behind her. Coffee cups clinked on the stove. She wiped oil away with a small bit of rag, then held it to the light, reversing its formation in her mind to a flat piece of steel. She asked, “How many do they want us to make?”

“One hundred.”

“How much are they willing to pay?” Judith asked.

Dill watched Eli hand the purchase order to her sister. She whistled and showed it to Dill, who tried to remain calm as the numbers sunk in. Something warm tumbled and buzzed in her stomach.

“How much time do we have?” Dill asked.

Everett said, “Two weeks.”

Her hands crossed the drawings, traced the lines. She visualized the process forward this time, the flat sheet of steel becoming a finished part. She would need the steel before she could start. She estimated the time to get it delivered and her enthusiasm drained away. What was left behind began to boil. “That’s not enough time.”

Her coat felt tighter, as if it were constricting, pulled fast against her ribs. This was not what she’d come here for, years of tinkering in a barn for destitute farmers and distant factories. Eli was better.

She stayed because she’d given her car as collateral to keep the farm. Her bright red Studebaker Erskine had returned again in her dreams last night– traveling wide Chicago streets framed in hanging flower boxes and jungle animals reproduced in concrete, the air sweet with the scent of blooming roses.

“It’s all we’ve got,” Everett said. “Anymore, and the regular supplier delivers and we’ll miss the opportunity.”

Dill said, “We’ll have to find new vendors. The people we’ve been using can’t get this done in time. ” 

Everett set down his coffee mug and stepped closer. “Then we’d better get started. Haley Stovall won’t wait.”

She resisted the urge to reach out and shake him. But she slapped her open palm on the table hard enough that her sister jumped beside her. “How about you sell something we can actually make?” Everett be damned. It was no good to sell what a body couldn’t build.

Eli slid between them. “This is worth a month of visiting farmers. We deliver this order and there’s more where that came from.”

His words, as always, were a balm. She couldn’t look at him without seeing the stream of little gifts: the toolset, the toaster, electric motors, books. She turned back to the table, shuffled from one drawing to the next. The answer was there someplace. Something implied. She called to mind an engine, with the initial explosion followed by a chain reaction. This account could be like that. She opened her hand, extended it to Eli.

“Give me the car keys. The west side of town is where the industry is. I’ll see who can help.” Dill said.

“At this time of night?” Judith asked. “All the businesses will be closed by then.”

“You left off the ‘little sister’ part, and I realize that. You forget, I know where they all go to drink.” She placed a hand on the drawing and squared her shoulders. “You want it in two weeks, then we need a new vendor in a day. That’s the price. Did you think about that when you took the order?”

Eli and Everett avoided her eyes.

“I’ll go with you,” Everett said.

“Fine,” Dill said. “Try not to duke anybody this time. And no gin....”

“I should say the same to you.”

Unlike the old days, they left the radio off.  The dirt roads embraced them. Oak trees paraded motionless, outlined in the headlights. Broad Street at the center of town was a night time spectacle of electric lights. They turned left off the main drag toward the outlying streets, flickering with gas jets. Women’s clothing stores and dry goods shops gave way in a few blocks to laundromats, and then night time darkness outside of bars, machine shops, and flophouses.

Dill pulled up in front of a firetrap made of dark wood. A former speakeasy gone legit following prohibition, it was within walking distance from the surrounding factories. The sign outside read “Hammer and Tongs.”

Smells like axle grease or burned oil, stabled horses and old sweat emerged from a room as dark as a coal chute. She could make out sawdust on the floor and the profiles of workmen mumbling from mismatched wooden chairs.

She saw someone she knew and pressed forward, parting the crowd, ignoring the others, reaching for the prize a few feet away. She brushed a knot of seated men and ignored the tingling at the base of her skull, as if she’d just passed a dog that was ready to bite.

Closure

They passed so close she brushed Dawson’s shoulder, her eyes upon some man at the bar. He was startled at first, then he seethed with recognition; his soul a borderless lake of hatred, the knife turning nervous circles in his pocket. 

Baby, I found them.

He wished Anise were with him now, but his wife had been gone for awhile. She’d been so beautiful, smouldering beside him amongst the finer bars and steakhouses, flush with money from the bed and breakfast. Before the Steiners, they were known by name. He was respectable.

Then Doc Vickers had arrived beside a pair of police officers, which was unfortunate. Had he come alone, Dawson would’ve planted him next to the other fella out under the pines. Instead they’d interrogated Anise in their own kitchen, where she’d admitted to not reporting the stranger’s pox, burying his body, selling his car.

“She did it for the money,” the papers screamed, casting his love as a cold-hearted monster. Lots of beautiful things were cold. She never told his part in it, muscling the shroud wrapped corpse into the trunk of his own car, or digging the hole that became the stranger’s resting place.

The more she protested that the stranger was, “already done for” and “Steiner said he would be alright.” The harder they petitioned to give her the death penalty.

Then Anise went to prison. Patrons to their business became as rare as hen’s teeth. He’d ended the year bankrupt; an unconfirmed conspirator tucked into coveralls, supping on potatoes and shoveling thick turds in the horse stables.

Only charity from the new owners of the bed and breakfast kept him off the street. Hidden out back in the one-room caretaker’s shack, he followed a circuitous route as he left every day.

He’d thought about joining the war. It was in Europe now, but someday it would come to the US. Then someone else would shoot him instead of putting his pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger. The bed and breakfast, the house, the hogs; because of the Steiners, it was all gone.

Only memories of Anise kept him going. That last magical fall had been the best, mornings wound beneath the sheets, greeted by her cool smile. They’d walked the grounds hand in hand, surrounded by falling leaves in hues of copper and amber, a golden raiment for his love.

They’d spent the res of the day slaughtering hogs. Anise had watched the magical clouds of steam escaping the open wounds with rapt attention. She was so close, the spray of arterial blood spattered her coveralls. He twittered remembering the blade’s path, slicing the flesh like their wedding day cake.

And then it was her turn. Her normally translucent skin flushed pink, exuded an immortal vigor. His heart quickened remembering her grin, and the blade in her hand exuding the coppery sweet smell of new blood. He couldn’t imagine sharing an experience so special with anybody else. They’d felt so close.

He'd seen her last month in a sickly yellow visiting room at the women’s reformatory. He realized she’d entered when she shrugged her arm away from the guard, the motion catching his eye, and inhaled sharply at the sight. She had no need for pomade. Her wavy hair