Chapter 5 - The Arrival on Sprague Avenue
The shop smelled the way it had smelled since the autumn of nineteen-eighty-one: sulfur-based cutting oil, ozone from the three-phase transformers, the sweet, burnt-sugar scent of hot coolant hitting cast iron, and the cold, gray dust of ground carbide.
It was eight o'clock on Monday morning.
The three men who worked for me—Jack Kowalski, who was sixty-one and had one eye that looked slightly to the left from a grinding accident in ninety-four; Bobby Chen, who was twenty-four and could program a toolpath faster than anyone I’d ever seen; and my brother Henry, who was sixty-eight and mostly spent his time rebuilding the hydraulic pumps on the old horizontal boring mill—were already at their stations.
The shop was quiet. The heavy radial arm drill in Bay One was humming with that low, thirty-cycle vibration that you feel in the soles of your work boots rather than hear with your ears.
A black town car—a Lincoln with tinted windows and King County plates—pulled off the asphalt of Sprague Avenue, its tires crunching over the gravel apron between my scrap bins and the overhead door.
Jack Kowalski looked up from his lathe, his face blackened with grease around the goggles, and then looked across the bay at me.
"Company, Arthur," Jack said.
"I see them, Jack," I said, setting my six-inch vernier caliper down on the wooden workbench. "Keep the coolant running on those spindle housings. We need to clear the tolerance check before the noon freight."
The driver of the Lincoln climbed out first. He was a young fellow in a black suit who looked like he had never seen an industrial building with corrugated iron siding in his life. He hurried around the rear of the car, pulled open the passenger door, and held it as Richard Montgomery stepped out onto the gravel.
Richard was not wearing his wedding tuxedo. He was wearing an expensive dark gray overcoat made of wool that was too thin for an inland Northwest autumn, a silver silk scarf tucked into his lapels, and a pair of thin-soled calfskin shoes that instantly picked up the gray dust from our driveway.
Behind him came Daniel.
My son had not shaved in forty-eight hours. His eyes were small, rimmed in raw red, his tie crooked beneath a rumpled blue blazer that had a white salt stain on the left elbow from the lake water. He looked like a man who had spent two nights sleeping in the back seat of a car that smelled of wet silk and cold flowers.
They walked through the five-foot pass-door set into the large sliding bay door.
Henry didn't stop his grinder. The sparks flew off the wheel in an orange rooster-tail, hitting the steel backstop with a steady, dry hiss-shhk-shhk.
"Arthur," Richard Montgomery said, stopping five feet from my bench, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat. He had to raise his voice to get over the sound of the drill. "We need to talk in private."
I picked up an oily rag from the red metal safety can and slowly wiped the cutting fluid from my thumbs.
"This is private, Richard," I said. "The only people in this room are the people who pay the taxes on the building."
Daniel took a step forward, his voice cracking before he even got the words out of his mouth. "Dad... please. Send Henry and Jack outside. Just for ten minutes. Please."
I looked at him.
He had that same expression on his face that he had worn when he was fourteen and had stolen my credit card to buy eighty dollars worth of computer games, sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up to his chin, waiting to see if I was going to hit him or call the school.
"Henry stays where he is, Daniel," I said. "And Jack has three hundred dollars' worth of high-speed steel turning in that chuck. If he steps away, the tool chatters and the part is scrap. What do you want?"
Richard Montgomery pulled his hands from his pockets. He held an executive leather folder—the kind with the gold brass corners that firms in Seattle use when they present an acquisition to an institutional board.
"Arthur," Richard said, his tone shifting into that smooth, measured cadence he used when he was trying to convince a municipal council that a six-story condo building was an asset to a neighborhood of single-family bungalows. "We have an emergency situation regarding the rail delivery on Siding Four."
"There is no emergency on Siding Four, Richard," I said. "The car is flagged. The rail police have the manifest."
Daniel made a strangled, wet sound in the back of his throat. He lunged forward, his hands hitting the edge of my workbench, knocking over a tin can filled with center drills.
"Dad! The rail police were at my apartment in Bellevue at seven o'clock this morning!" he yelled, his face turning an ugly, purplish crimson. "They had two inspectors from the Federal Railroad Administration with them! They served an administrative subpoena on the firm's general counsel! Do you have any idea what that means?!"
"It means you committed wire fraud on an interstate bill of lading, Daniel," I said, my voice completely level. "Which is what happens when you use another man’s corporate credit line to buy structural steel for your father-in-law's dock project."
Richard Montgomery’s face tightened. His smooth, cultivated expression slipped, just for an eighth of a second, revealing the hard, cold calculation underneath.
"The steel was an internal allocation, Arthur," Richard said. "Daniel had every reason to believe that the machine shop’s commercial facility was available for the family enterprise. We were prepared to pay a five percent origination fee to your company upon the completion of the port terminal's first phase."
"A family enterprise," I repeated.
I looked down at the workbench. My father’s six-inch steel rule lay there, its thirty-second-inch markings worn down to gray silver near the three-inch line where his thumb had rested for forty years.
"On Saturday afternoon," I said, "my wife was part of your family enterprise. She was the part that got kicked into the grass so the dresses wouldn't get dirty."
"Arthur, that was an unfortunate domestic misunderstanding between two women," Richard said, waving his hand as if he were brushing away a fly. "Vanessa has agreed to write a formal letter of apology to Elaine. She has already drafted it on her personal stationery. She is prepared to deliver it in person with a floral arrangement from the florist in Manito Park."
A dry, whistling laugh came from the back of the bay.
It was Henry.
My brother had shut the hydraulic pump off. He was standing with his arms crossed over his leather apron, his gray beard stained with tobacco, his one good eye fixed on Richard Montgomery with an expression that would have peeled the paint off an old tractor.
"A floral arrangement," Henry spat. "Listen to this bastard, Artie. He’s going to bring some carnations to the woman he shoved in the ditch."
"Stay out of this, Henry," Daniel snapped, turning on his uncle with that wild, frantic arrogance that was his only defense against the truth. "You’ve been turning iron in this dirt-hole since the Carter administration! You don't know the first thing about corporate development!"
Henry didn't move an inch. He just spat a dark brown stream of tobacco juice into the chip bin beneath his lathe.
Ting.
The sound of the liquid hitting the hot brass turnings was louder than any shout.
"I know this much, Danny," Henry said, his voice dropping into that deep, slow gravel that runs in our family. "I know that when my brother was thirty years old, he didn't run to Seattle to hide behind a woman’s skirt when his bills came due. And I know that if my father had caught me talking to my elders the way you’re talking right now, he would have taken a piece of three-quarter-inch heater hose to the back of my legs until I couldn't sit on an iron seat for a week."
"Enough," I said.
The shop went dead quiet again. Even the compressor in the back room kicked off with a wet, mechanical sigh.
I looked at Richard Montgomery.
"The steel stays on Siding Four, Richard," I said. "The federal inspector is meeting me at the yard office at one o'clock. I am going to sign the contested affidavit. I am going to tell them that Miller Machine & Tool never authorized the shipment, never authorized the billing, and has no legal or financial connection to Montgomery Infrastructure LLC."
Richard’s mouth opened. For the first time, I saw genuine, unadulterated fear in his eyes.
"Arthur," Richard whispered, stepping so close I could smell the expensive mouthwash he had used to hide the sourness of his stomach. "If you sign that affidavit, the bank will freeze our construction draw for the airport terminal. We have forty-two subcontractors who are scheduled to pour twelve thousand yards of concrete on Thursday morning. If the draw doesn't clear by three o'clock today, the union will pull the pump trucks off the job."
"Then you’d better find twelve thousand dollars to pay the freight bill out of your own pocket, Richard," I said.
"We don't have twelve thousand dollars liquid today," Richard said, his voice cracking into that thin, desperate whisper that belongs to men who have lived for thirty years on rolling credit lines and deferred management fees. "Everything is leveraged into the terminal’s mezzanine debt. Everything. Even the house in Bellevue."
I looked at Daniel.
"Is that true, Daniel?" I asked.
Daniel didn't answer. He turned his face toward the dark corrugated iron wall, his hands shaking so hard that his fingernails were digging through the pockets of his blazer.
"He knows it’s true," Richard said, his shoulders slumping under the thin wool of his coat. "The wedding was supposed to buy us thirty days, Arthur. Vanessa’s trust fund has an age-thirty distribution that clears on the first of November. Two point two million dollars. We needed the wedding to be formal, public, and documented to satisfy the family trustees in Boston so they would release the principal early."
He looked at me with those soft, useless hands hanging at his sides.
"If the wedding is legally contested... if there is an active police report for domestic battery on the day of the ceremony... the trustees in Boston have the unilateral authority to hold the funds until she's thirty-five."
I closed my eyes.
The whole pathetic, gilded machine was laid out on the bench before me now. Every gear, every linkage, every rotten wood pin that had held it together.
They hadn't pushed Elaine because they were cruel; they had pushed her because they were terrified. They were drowning in four million dollars of paper debt, and they had looked at my son as a life preserver—a boy with an old-money name they could borrow, a father with an unencumbered shop they could mortgage, and a family they thought was too simple, too modest, and too quiet to ever fight back.
I opened my eyes.
"Get out of my shop, Richard," I said.
"Arthur—"
"Get out," I said, and my voice was no louder than the hum of the small drill on the bench, but it had the weight of thirty-five tons of cold steel behind it. "And take your associate with you."
Richard Montgomery looked at Daniel, shook his head once with a look of pure, bitter disgust, and walked out through the pass-door into the gray Spokane wind.
Daniel stayed.
He stood by the bench, his shoes covered in iron dust, his head hanging down like a dog that has been kicked in the ribs by a mule.
"Dad," he whispered.
"Don't call me Dad, Daniel," I said, picking up my vernier caliper and setting the jaws against the chrome-moly spindle. "I don't have a son who lives in Bellevue. My son died in the mud by the lake on Saturday afternoon."
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He stood there for five seconds. Ten seconds.
Then he turned and walked out the door, his thin leather soles crunching over the gravel, disappearing into the dust behind the town car as it pulled back onto Sprague Avenue and headed west toward the freeway.
