It's writing contest redux. This year the Mercantile Library Fiction Competition has returned after a brief hiatus. CityBeat got in on the action as a sponsor and publisher of the winning entry. (And don't overlook this issue's poetry contest, too.) Unlike the hard asses at CityBeat, the Mercantile imposed far fewer rules: No restrictions on subject or length, just turn in a short story. The result was an eclectic potpourri.
Judges were CityBeat's Literary Editor Brandon Brady, Fine Print columnist Richard Hunt and Erin McGraw, a former professor at UC headed for Ohio State University this fall. Larry Dickson took third place ($150), for "All in the Numbers"; second place ($250) went to Marcie Warrington for "Ascension." Keith Vanden Eynden submitted the winning entry, "Making a Mark," published here. (He also earned a $300 cash prize.) His story is clever, unique and perhaps not to everyone's taste, but that's all we'll say.
To find out more, you'll have to read further.
Making a Mark
By Keith Vanden Eynden
Reed Rouche parked his car outside the National Industrial Gases Warehouse. A chain link fence, topped with a curl of barbed wire, surrounded the cinder block building. It seemed that, at times, Reed could see the ruins of World War II Europe superimposed over the building, like a flashback or a strange precognition. Sometimes he even imagined the explosion and the planes falling from the sky like wounded birds. But a bogie or a Panzer wouldn't flatten this building. It could only be destroyed from inside.
Reed started the first day of his second year at NIG as he always did, chewing an antacid as he hit the time clock, cringing at the dull click it made. It reminded him of the sound of a padlock clicking into the hasp. He grabbed his hard hat, settling it into the permanent, artificial halo it made in his hair. He noticed that Wade Meyer, a fat man of fifty, had drawn the early shift with him.
"Hey, Lifer, you're running a little late, aren't you?" Wade said around his toothpick, which was a permanent fixture in his mouth since he quit smoking. Wade never called any other man, no matter who he was, by his real name, instead using the first nickname that popped into his head. If there was a crowd of more than two men, it was difficult to tell who he was referring to -- a man, who the day before was Chubby, would be Flat-top, Chicken-fingers, or something even more enigmatic. Today, the nickname hit Reed hard. He tried not to think of spending his life here.
"Change over the oxygen line so we can get it filled up after lunch, okay, Mr. Year-and-a-day?" Wade called across the warehouse.
Reed walked silently to the row of dark green cylinders, each standing four feet tall. He unscrewed the caps. There was a hole on either side that reminded him of eyes. He often imagined himself a caretaker of these aliens, which were poised to take over the world.
The living creatures were all in his head, he told himself, screwing the feed lines to the nozzles one at a time. The cylinders stood in two rows, fifteen on each side of a manifold that connected to the vent, the feed valves, and a pressure gauge. His hands went into their Monday morning cramps as he opened thirty valves and waited for the residual pressure to bleed off.
Wade let out his loud whistle, and Reed ran obediently to see what he wanted.
"What do you need?" he rasped when he made it to the other side of the warehouse.
"Nothing. Why?"
"You whistled for me."
"I didn't whistle for you. What are you? A dog?" Wade turned back to his work and then asked, "You're not angry are you?"
Reed shook his head and walked away, knowing that everyone in the warehouse called each other that way. It was one of the first things he had learned to do when he started. Not only did Wade whistle for no reason, he would ask Reed several times a day if he were angry, until he was. Reed wondered if he was supposed to be able to interpret Wade's intentions by the tone of his whistle.
When he was eleven, Reed's father had told him that African tribes and American Indians had used different whistles and sounds to communicate over large distances.
"You'll never know when you might need to know these trivial things, kiddo." He looked down at his near-mute son, his pride apparent in his eyes. "All great ideas are nothing more than a bunch of trivia gathered up by a sharp mind. Einstein flunked out of school, you know. He was too worried about the details. So if you're no good in school, focus on what seems trivial, and you can still be a great man."
Mason Rouche, who had worked at NIG for thirty years, wasn't Einstein and he didn't understand relativity, but he would sit for hours watching PBS, amazed at how one unkempt, "uneducated" man like himself had revolutionized physics.
At the end of the exterior dock, Reed moved one of the liquid cylinders, which was twice as tall as him, into a corrugated shack separate from the warehouse. He had never been graceful and almost let the two-hundred-pound cylinder fall on his foot. The shelter was already hot, even though it was only 10:30. The billowing cloud escaping from the valve caught his eye, and he used his crescent wrench to tighten it down. He rubbed the red scar on his biceps that was a perfect imprint of the crisscross pattern on the liquid line.
They all had marks from their job. Reed had received his early last year when he forgot that liquid nitrogen is a couple hundred degrees below zero and leaned against the hose. Wade had a row of circular scars, which bore an odd resemblance to the Hawaiian Islands. Some liquid had dropped on his forearm and bubbled like hydrogen peroxide on an open wound. While everyone else had scars of initiation, Reed's father had been unscathed until last February.
Reed was the one who found him. When he opened the door, Mason lay on the floor, excess nitrogen flowing onto his right arm and turning it into a solid marble sculpture. Reed shut off the fill-line and dragged Mason outside, careful not to bump the arm for fear it would shatter into a thousand shards.
Now his father was in a coma, his arm amputated at the shoulder. Reed wondered if he dreamed of Einstein and if his mind was free to chase trivia and a great general principle.
Shaking off the memory, Reed walked outside the sweltering heat of the shack to relax on the dock while the cylinder filled. As he leaned against the smaller, high-pressure CO2 cylinders, he felt something brush against his hand and jumped back. There, couched among the valve covers, lay a dead crow. The bird's open eyes were black and unfeeling and seemed to mock Reed. He repositioned some of the cylinders and found that the bird was pasted to one of them by its insides, which had been pressed out. Decay had taken most of the body, but left the head and the wings attached. His gaze locked on the eye of the creature, which appeared ready to blink at any moment. Reed waited for this grotesque winged head to rise up and tear at his face.
He shook the cylinders, and the monstrosity fell to the ground. He gave it several dragging kicks until it tumbled off the dock like a crumpled paper airplane.
"Hey, Fred, your liquid's done." Reed jumped at the sound of Wade's voice behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mist crawling out the doors toward him. "Get in there and shut it off before you blow us both up. If I'm going to get toasted, I sure as hell don't want it to be on a Monday."
"Your subconscious mind can do amazing things," Reed's father said in his memory. "When you're asleep, your mind can convince itself that it's somewhere else, and make your body get up and walk around. I don't buy this guy Freud's idea that we make everything look like a penis, though. I don't think that I carved those candleholders for your mother just because I had a small dick. What do you think, Reed? Do you think that the guys at NASA had no dicks, so that's why they built those huge Apollo rockets -- to compensate? No. It's simple aerodynamics. Well, complicated aerodynamics to me, but aerodynamics just the same. Not little dicks. I saw it on the space race special last night."
Reed walked outside. The rustle of wings startled him as a bird flew past his head. He ducked behind his arms, his heart pounding. He dashed to the edge of the dock to see the crow still there, still dead. Then he saw the sloppy nest spilling out from under one of the eaves of the shack.
By the time he finished lunch, a truck had arrived to be loaded. Reed grabbed the order off Wade's clipboard. The acetylene he needed was stored with the oil supply, in the explosion room. He stood in the cool space, staring at the spinning vent in the ceiling, enjoying the stale smell of the air. He wondered if this place was really explosion proof.
He grabbed an acetylene cylinder in each hand, tilted them so their bottoms met to form a V and rolled them outside. The reflected heat from the truck bed caused him to break into an instant sweat. Two down and forty to go, he thought, as his head began to pound. Reed ran his finger along a chain that hung from the side of the truck.
"You know that's certified Marine chain around that truck," Mason's voice said again. "I don't know if Marines really make it or not, but if you look at every fifth link, there's a man's initials -- the man who forged it."
Reed turned the link over in his hand and saw the initials: RR. He knew they were not his, but ever since his father had shown them to him, he always searched them out. That man had something that would outlast him, even if he had only made one chain. Reed hoped that someone would come up with his name when trying to fit a name to the initials. Even if the man making the chains didn't care about his legacy, he could offer a way for Reed to be remembered.
When he was eleven, Reed had helped his father put new wallpaper in the hallway. As they stripped away the old paper, they uncovered some scrawled handwriting on the wall. There were two names, Mel and Scott, a father and his son. Scott's age, eleven, and the year, 1955, were written on the wall as well. Scott was the same age as Reed when he papered the hall with his father. Reed had lain awake that night imagining Scott, his pale gray eyes and black hair. He believed that they would meet one day in the sandbox behind the school and exchange their stories.
It was not until Reed stood in the heat that he realized that he had overlooked the fact that the boy was twenty years older than him and maybe nearing retirement by now. Yet that boy had more than he did. Every twenty years someone would peel away the layers of wallpaper and reveal his name again. Scott would emerge from the skin of paper to be reborn in someone's imagination. Somewhere, there was also a man, with his initials, who once made chains. His name would last until the rust and rain wore the letter on the chain flat. Reed had no way to be remembered. He could wish for the initials to be mistaken for his, but that really didn't make it any better. His father would not live on either. He, like his son, had made no mark on the world.
Reed walked off the truck to retrieve the rest of the order. Inside, Wade was filling the line of oxygen that Reed had set up that morning. The temperature on the magnetic thermometer, which clung to one of the cylinders, read one hundred forty.
"It scares the shit out of me when they run this hot, Junior," Wade said as Reed glanced over his shoulder at the pressure gauge and thermometer.
"You've still got another thousand psi to go." Reed knew that in the summer, they ran a greater risk of blowing a safety valve because of the heat. "Let them cool off. You're making me nervous."
"I can't. We've got another thirty more to fill after these."
Reed couldn't bear the thought that Wade might blow a line before he had a chance to set up his own monument. He walked to the far corner of the warehouse to the re-valving machine and the cylinders that needed repairs. Reed looked at the selection and felt a jolt of disappointment. There were no oxygen cylinders. Then, farther in back, he caught a glimpse of dark green -- a lone cylinder hid behind the others like a schoolboy trying to avoid going to the board. After he dug the cylinder out, he clamped it on the machine and removed the valve. Then he screwed the new valve in by hand so he could remove it easily later. He replaced the cap and rolled the cylinder outside toward the explosion-proof room.
"What's wrong with that one, Lefty?"
"The threads are stripped. I'm going to set it outside so we can send it to the shop."
"Sounds good to me. Start bringing in some more empties. I'm just about done with this line. We might just get out of here on time."
Or earlier, Reed thought.
Reed nearly ran to the acetylene room, rolling the oxygen cylinder awkwardly in front of him. He took the cap off and removed the valve. Unsure of the amount of oil needed to destroy the building, Reed filled the cylinder three-quarters full. He pulled the crescent wrench out of his back pocket and tightened the valve. It didn't matter if this one leaked a little bit, he thought. He rolled the repaired cylinder, plus another empty, back inside.
"What did you do, get lost?" Wade asked.
"No, just wanted to grab a quick smoke before I came back to the oven." Wade went outside and started doing Reed's job for him. Reed grabbed a thick-tipped marker from Wade's desk and wrote his initials on the container sloshing with oil.
After they had hooked up the line, they went into the break room while the excess pressure bled out of the cylinders. Reed sat, not talking, while Wade rambled in a high-pitched voice that sounded like he'd been sucking helium. He called this his funny voice. For once, Reed actually smiled at his performance.
"It's about time you got a sense of humor, boy. You know, I bet you didn't talk until you said yes to this job. I honestly don't know what you and your father talked about. He must have liked talking to himself."
"I just need a little time to warm up and understand what's going on. Dad always told me to analyze a situation before I made my move." Reed's face was calm at the thought of his father. It was the first time he had spoken of him since the accident.
"That's Mason all right -- too much watching, not enough action. You're your father's son, all right."
"Maybe just a little more action," Reed added.
· · ·
The fireball shot straight up like a bottle rocket or a flushed quarry of birds. The explosion scarred most of five blocks around the warehouse. There was a crisscross pattern on the ground where the fence had fallen. From the air, the crater and scorched patches of soil resembled an island chain. The investigation that followed revealed little. It was suggested that one of the cylinders had been filled with water and had exploded because of excess pressure. The violent nature of the explosion, however, implied that one of the employees had failed to smell test the cylinders for acetylene or check the valves for traces of oil, both of which explode on contact with oxygen. No shrapnel with the initials RR was ever found. The lettering had been burned beyond recognition. ©
