“Uh-huh. You are sure that all our best people will go along with this plan?”
“Natch. I’ve already talked it over wit each one of dem, sort of on da sly, you know?”
My thought was, What the hell. It will probably keep most of my key people happy, and it just might turn out to be fun.
“Okay, let’s do it. But if I hear one single joke about boat anchors, the whole deal is off.” In the Special Machinery business, a boat anchor is a machine that never did work properly.
As he got up to leave, I said, “Say, have you given any further thought to that offer I made you the other day? You know, about being a partner here.”
“Nope. Don’t have to tink about it. Da answer’s da same as it was last week an’ last munt an’ last year. I don’t want nuttin to do wit da headaches o’ being a boss. Da way it is now, I do what I like to do an’ I got nuttin to worry about. An’ I still figure dat in da long run, I make more money gettin a paycheck den you do gettin to keep whatever’s left over after da bills is paid.”
“Well, perhaps true, but there are some great benefits to running your own show.”
“Bennies? What do I need wit more bennies? I got a big new company car, a company parkin spot wit my name on it, an’ a company expense account in case I feel like takin a cab to work. Shit, now I’m even gonna get a company yacht!”
FOUR
I got home almost early that night and took my wife, Helen, out to dinner. We ate out often, since cooking was one of the things she didn’t like to do, and she wasn’t much good at it when she did do it. She made up for it in other ways. Even now, after a messy divorce, I still think that she is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met.
She was tall, or at least taller than I was, with a slender set of geometrically perfect curves that she carried with an inborn, aristocratic poise. She had long, straight blond hair that framed a face that was almost too perfect to be real. I don’t think that I ever looked at her without being amazed anew that such a vision of loveliness could be mine.
We’d gone to high school together, where she had been a rhythmic gymnast, a cheerleader, and the homecoming queen. Not that I was the homecoming king, far from it. And my only sport was karate, which in my neighborhood was more a matter of survival than something you did for fun. Actually, we didn’t have much to do with each other back then. I just admired from afar, knowing that I would never get a chance to get any closer to her. I doubt if she noticed me at all.
I went off to college, graduated, and went to work in the machinery business. All told, I’ve been fairly successful.
Helen spent a summer in charm school, something she didn’t need, and then went on to Michigan State University. Washing out in her freshman year, she came home and married her high-school sweetheart. A big fellow, he had been the quarterback of the our high-school football team, and was as handsome as she was beautiful.
His only big problems were that he was a thief, an alcoholic, and a worthless bum. The marriage broke up, and someone told me that for a time, Helen worked in Detroit as a topless dancer. I’ve tried not to find out much about that.
I met her again just after I’d started up my own company here in our home town. I was on a winning streak, and Helen seemed to be a part of all the good things that were happening to me.
Now, I was by then a long way from being a starry-eyed pup in high school. Yes, I noticed the small signs of drug addiction, just as I guessed that she was early in the second trimester of pregnancy. But I also knew that she was the loveliest woman I’d ever seen, and that one such as I was lucky to get her any way I could. With enough tender, loving care, we could work her through her problems.
Maybe, if I’d had a father to advise me . . . But I hadn’t seen my parents for fifteen years. And anyway, for the first few years after we were married, things worked out pretty well for Helen and me. If there really had been a drug problem, she licked it. Well, in later years she got to drinking a bit much, but that’s something else, entirely. In the same way, her stomach bulge disappeared, and she was no longer sick in the morning.
Yes, I was making a lot of money, and yes, she liked having lots of money. Well, I liked money, too. Hell, who doesn’t? I tell you that for a lot of years, being married to Helen was good.
By the time we started working on the boat, our marriage was starting to get less good. Quickly.
* * *
Inside of a week, the old warehouse had been leased, our big plotter had turned out full-scale drawings of the ribs, and our plumbers and electricians were bending three-inch black iron pipe into the flowing curves that would form the hull. More pipe and re-rod went into framing out the bulkheads, which were then wrapped with hundreds of yards of chicken wire and plasterer’s lath. Then it was all sewn tightly together with steel wire to form a dense mat, and by the third week these bulkheads were being welded to the massive I beam that formed her keel and stem.
Twenty layers of chicken wire and lath were stretched over the ribs and bulkheads, followed by three more layers of re-rod, and then even more chicken wire and lath. All this was stitched together by pairs of people with pliers, passing steel wire through the hull to pull it all together.
When this dense steel fabric was completed—hull, deck, and bulkheads—Adam handed out big rubber mallets to all and sundry, and we spent three days `fairing’ the hull, making it as smooth and hydrodynamic as chicken wire and lath can get. My wife Helen even showed up one day and actually did over an hour’s worth of manual labor.
We stood back and admired.
She was huge. Even though she was belly up and not yet infused with concrete, she was a thing of beauty.
Directing the work was Adam’s job, since I had to spend most of my time on the road, trying to find some real work for my young company. Still, it made my sales job easier, being able to show to potential customers a full crew working back at the shop.
Three times during the construction of the hull, we had VIPs over. Shirley would press a button on the underside of her desk that connected to an alarm bell in our boat shop, and then flutter about with charming, feigned inefficiency, getting the customer a coffee that he really didn’t want.
Meanwhile, Adam would be yelling “SHOWTIME!” and hustling our crew back across the alley to our special machinery factory. They’d turn on the machines, pick up the tools they kept laid out, and look as industrious as hell, while the customer was still getting past Shirley’s smile. I don’t think that any of our guests ever caught on to what we were pulling. Or if they did, they had class enough to not mention it.
While we were involved with boat construction, there was an ongoing debate as to what we should name her. Dozens of names were batted about and discarded. For a while there, it looked as though the consensus would settle on calling her The Wind-Lass, and the auxiliary boat The Wench, but in the end she became The Brick Royal, and the tender was The Concrete Canoe. I don’t know who thought up the names, but I liked them.
* * *
With the metal frames and mesh reinforcement completed, it was time to plaster on the concrete. Adam divided our people up into three shifts, since he insisted that the plastering be done in one continuous “pour.” Apparently, wet cement does not stick all that well to cured concrete, and he meant our hull to be perfect. Adam called it a “carbon-alloy reinforced composite ceramic monolith”, one time when he was really tired. Cement mixers and plastering machines that squirted the mixture through long hoses were rented, two of each so that in case of a breakdown, our work could continue uninterrupted.
Adam himself carefully measured out all of the ingredients beforehand. The hydraulic grade cement, the sifted sand with its carefully measured moisture content, the pozzolana and other arcane chemicals, and a precisely measured amount of water. And God help the poor soul who dared add a single spittle’s worth of moisture over what Adam had allowed.