WIP Excerpt: Al Castle Meets… Someone Important

Background: This passage’s action takes place in 1959. The “Al” here is Al Castle, who owns a metalworking company in southeast Pennsylvania, in a small town named Caerleon. His company has been acquired by a big multi-national corporation named Sarras, which also owns a Welsh firm which brews a particularly elegant, powerful, and pricey ale. Sarras has asked Al to arrange the manufacture of a one-of-a-kind corporate emblem for the brewer: a mug, or a tankard — something like that — which they plan to feature in a series of TV commercials and print ads, at ceremonial corporate functions and the like.

One problem: Al’s company is a manufacturing firm, geared to mass production. He’s terrified that he’s taken on a job that he can’t perform, has promised more than he can deliver. He needs to impress his new board of directors. What can he do?

He’s pondering all this while he finishes up a cup of coffee in a local luncheonette, called Mr. Bill’s. And he’s pretty much decided he’s going to have to admit failure to the people at Sarras. He gets up from his table and leaves Mr. Bill’s.

—-

Outside the restaurant, Al stretches and yawns. He needs to catch up on his sleep, and just saying the heck with this whole beer thing will solve that problem, too.

He’s about to step into the street and get into the off-white Rambler American he drives these days when all thought and intention is driven from his mind by the clatter and roar of a battered red Ford pickup, careening around the corner of Railroad and Chepstow outside Mr. Bill’s. For a second Al thinks that the driver has succeeded in overturning the vehicle — it actually seems to balance, leaning, on the two left wheels. But then it’s back on the pavement. And instead of roaring off straight up Chepstow, it does the impossible yet again and turns right, without slowing, into a gravel driveway alongside Mr. Bill’s. Dust and grit fly up into the air and hang, suspended, like a veil drawn over a sleight-of-hand act.

Al’s heart thumps and so does his head. He wasn’t in any real danger of being run down but it sure feels that way. The noise and the sheer suddenness have somehow enlarged the moment, brought it closer to him, and he feels like he’s experienced a near-miss of a particularly cataclysmic kind.

As his pulse drops, his mind takes over. He notices in the street, in the sunlight, the familiar glint of metal, and his first thought is that the pickup must have been falling apart as it made the turn.

Then he looks closer. No. These are not scraps of fender and bumper, chrome trim and mirror. These are… tin cans?

He checks traffic, but no further cars or trucks are moving about near  this corner. He steps into the street, scoops the cans up, and bears them in the direction of the driveway.

The driveway. He’s been coming to Mr. Bill’s for almost ten years and he never even knew there was a driveway here. Or maybe he’d known it and just mentally written it off as functional and no more: a driveway for deliveries to the luncheonette, say. But as his feet crunch on the gravel and the dust settles before him, as he steps over the trail of crushed tin cans leading up the driveway, he sees why he’s never noticed it before: not because it goes to an uninteresting loading dock or side door at Mr. Bill’s, but because it doesn’t go anywhere, in particular.

At the end of the driveway, perhaps twenty or thirty yards from the road, crouches a shabby beaten old insignificant little building, maybe twenty feet on a side if that. Seeing the two wide doors facing the street, Al thinks at first: Garage. But then he gets closer and he sees that the weatherworn paint job and reinforcing planks nailed about here and there on the building’s exterior have just obscured the presence of a human-sized doorway set into the center of the right-hand big door, and something about that smaller opening causes him to emend: No, not garage. Workshop.

Then Al is at the front of the place, alongside the pickup now parked and vacant. He kicks at the little building’s door a couple times, and calls out “Helloo!” a couple of times, too, but no one answers. He turns to his left and dumps the armload of tin cans into the bed of the truck, already full of thousands of the things, and then he turns once more to leave.

But a squeak of wood and iron and a harsh voice (itself lined with gravel) interrupt him. “How’d you like it,” growls the voice, “I came along and dumped an armload o’trash on that Rambler of yours?”

As he turns back to the doorway, Al is already donning the look of sublime affability which he prefers to wear in the face of potential conflict.

But then he comes face to face with the voice’s owner, and turns to stone.

Standing there in the door is a man in overalls and a stiff canvas apron. The sleeves and legs of his clothing — and the surface of the apron, too — are smudged, pocked with burn holes; and although it cannot have been more than ten minutes since this fellow, presumably, rocketed around the corner by Mr. Bill’s, already he is quite obviously in the middle of something involved. He holds a mottled gray towel with which he is simply pushing the grime around the surface of his hands.

None of which is what stops Al. What stops Al is the man’s head:

Take Popeye’s already top-heavy head, tie a belt around it about nose-high, and inflate it a bit more with a bicycle pump. Then go away for a few years, come back and remove the belt. That is this fellow’s head. Almost an hourglass. He’s bald, which likewise fits the hourglass image, but has a scruffy beard, which doesn’t.  And what must it be like to shave a chin like that? To eat, for heaven’s sake? His mouth is situated on the upper surface of the lower globe which forms his jaw: he must have to practically drop food down into it.

So the conformation of the man’s skull, for starters, has immobilized Al. But then there are his eyes: the purest cornflower blue, the blue of worn denim. From the man’s voice and demeanor ripple waves of aggression and antipathy towards other humans, but in the eyes Al sees only kindness. Kindness and hurt. With a head like this, Al thinks, what must it have been for this man growing up?

“I was just,” Al begins, “I, well, I found all those cans in the street, they fell off—”

The fellow says, “Don’t try to con me, buddy. You think I don’t know how many cans I got in there? You think I wouldn’t notice, some were missing?”

Al barely hears this. For mesmerized again, he is, by the movement of the man’s jaw when he talks: not just opening and closing there, on top of his chin, but sliding forward and back and side to side. Thinking of one of the grinding machines over at the plant, Al startles and thinks for a second, If he rolls his eyes down he can see inside his own mouth…!

He’s staring, he can’t keep looking at this fellow, and before speaking again he looks to his right at the grimy window set in the wall next to the door. On the inside of the window, behind a smear of something like grease, Al can now see a blur of a sign which bears a single word:

TOYMAKER