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Zero at the Bone

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

I smelled fire.

The first thing I tried to do was find my dad. It wasn't that easy — everyone in the mill looked the same, all snowy with cottonwood dust. Everyone wore white face masks and an improved kind of goggle ever since Leo lost an eye wearing the legally approved type of guard the day before Christmas two and a half years ago. Besides, no one could hear in there, the saws ripping up the timber so loud the workers wore ear protectors, green plastic earmuffs. You couldn't hear a scream.

So I hurried through the cabinet room, people stapling together nightstands. The hoses that powered the staplers hissed and the compressor thrummed so loud it shook everything inside my body, all my organs, the yellow air hoses wiggling, looping through the air.

I hurried into the office, hoping Dad was in there on the phone, but the only person there was Barbara. She was standing in front of the copy machine. She had just got the front of the copier to come off, and was looking down at a paper jam, a bad one, several sheets of paper crammed into each other. Barbara is a caved-in kind of person who expects this sort of thing to happen. She was holding the entire front half of the copier like she didn't know what to do with it, put it down or put it right back where it belonged and forget she ever saw the big white cauliflower of paper in the middle of all those rollers.

"Where's Dad?" I said.

As soon as I said it, I knew it sounded a little unprofessional, the boss's son needing to talk to his father.

Barbara gave me one of her vague looks. "Hi, hon," she said. Then my question worked its way into her, and she said, "I think he's in back on the spur, but I don't know."

This was bad news in two ways. If he was back on the spur, he was up in the boxcar, supervising. The railroad spur brought lumber to the back of the factory, and I could make it there in half a minute, but I'd have to get his attention, forklifts rumbling and shouting guys all over the place. If he wasn't up in the boxcar, he could be anyplace, and I'd be way in the back of the furniture factory, about half a mile from the nearest phone.

Besides, I wasn't sure. If I had been sure, I would have punched 911 into the phone right there in the office. But I wasn't. I didn't want to believe it, that was part of the problem. Another part was that I was glad to be able to help Dad take care of things now that the nightstands were starting to ship out, and I didn't want to make a huge blunder my first week on payroll.

So I hustled back, through the cabinet room, air hoses bobbing overhead, all the way back into the mill, workers white with hardwood sawdust, the air thick with the bitter smell of the wood. I found the place right under the hole in the ceiling, where you can feel the fans drawing up air, and I told myself I was wrong.

There wasn't any fire.

No fire. Nobody else noticed a thing. Of course they wouldn't, their faces masked, each worker concentrating on carrying the big, white, hairy boards, letting the saw take them, the air trembling with the shriek of the wood when the big saws ripped into them. I knew I shouldn't be in that room without ear protectors. Several spare ear guards hung on a hook, lightly dusted with sawdust.

I could run, now, and spread the alarm. But I didn't. I stayed, praying I was wrong. Up on my tiptoes, trying to argue with my own sense of smell. Trying to outsmart what I already knew.

There were red-and-white fire alarm buttons all over the factory, maybe even those fire extinguishers behind glass. All I had to do was kick the glass and the fire department would be here in record time.

But I could not see them. I saw useless, vivid details, a paper mask on the floor, its strap broken, the big sign, DAYS SINCE AN ACCIDENT: 940. I could see the hood off one of the lathes, the workers bent over the naked, still core of the power tool. They turned, glad to have a little downtime, smiling to see me. Their smiles went a little dead when they saw my expression.

It's amazing how that happens, people in the middle of routine, and then they know something is wrong.

This time when I rushed into the office, Barbara was crouched down by the copier, not even looking up, and I sat at her desk, her chair still warm. I could turn on the intercom and make an announcement, ask for my dad by name, as though he could hear me all the way inside the Southern Pacific car. I could push the buzzer for five o'clock closing time, although it was only four-fifteen. I could punch a series of preset numbers, call my mom, or Anita, or Dr. Pollock.

But I had to stop and think before I found the button for an outside line. I don't know why they decided 911 was a good idea. It doesn't matter now. But I think they might have thought about choosing 211, which would be easier.

Or even 111. And then when I was done, I pushed the intercom button and kept my voice slow and steady. "Mr. Buchanan, front office, please." This meant that someone on a forklift would hear me and get my dad's attention and tell him Cray was on the intercom, and in about five minutes my dad would get done taking care of whatever he was doing. Dad loves to work and he hates to be interrupted.

I found one, right by the women's lavatory, a big red Kidde fire extinguisher, and I tucked it under my arm. It was like running with a torpedo under one arm, a strange new game, half football, half war. I knew it was a little useless. Spray from an extinguisher like this would not reach up into the chute, past the fans, into the burning sawdust up in the hopper on the roof.

Jesse, the foreman, looked up from the lathe and ran after me, and he didn't even have to ask. Jesse can move fast. He hit the switch on the wall, and shut the fans down, the room falling still, the saws going from monster soprano to dull steel moan to nothing. So silent.

Jesse was under the chute, looking up, and he looked at me after I joined him, the fans slowing down, big propellers between us and the sky. Jesse is wide and tall, with ebony skin and a close-clipped black mustache. "Better get your dad," he said.

Smoke was sifting down, now that the fans were still. The gray fumes drifted, like something that was supposed to happen, a celebration everybody had planned, little charred specks of confetti.

The nearest fire station was on Fruitvale, only a few blocks away, and the sirens started up fast and then seemed to linger in the near distance, the sound hanging in the air. It was like all those other times when a siren has passed on the edge of my attention, nothing to do with my life or the life of anyone I love.

It was only as the siren grew closer that the thrill of it, and the fear, began to take hold of me again. The siren reached a crescendo and the sound of the engine was right outside.

Their footsteps shook the floor. The firefighters filled up the entire front entrance, marching through the front door into the office. Barbara was making one of her "don't look at me" expressions, one hand held out. Giants in black waterproofs and helmets clumped up to the counter where the UPS packages, Jiffy bags of touch-up paint, were piled.

One of them carried an ax. A bright steel ax with a red stripe up the side of the blade, and a sharp hook at the other end of the ax head. All I could think was — they're going to tear holes in my dad's factory. And I had better be right — there better be a fire.

"It's in the sawdust hopper," I said. "On the roof."

Then I shut myself up. Here I was, talking like I knew what I was saying, and the firemen looked at me, their visors tilted. Their faces had open, tense expressions. They were ready for a fire, but it was all right if the fight was easy. I half expected the head firefighter, an especially tall man, my size, to tell me I was too young to know very much — they wanted to talk to someone in charge.

But the tall fireman asked where the quickest access was, from the side street, or from somewhere inside the property. I told him I thought the side street was probably a good idea. And they left. They didn't bump into each other, scrambling. They were there, and then they were gone.

Barbara gave me a round-eyed expression. Her finger was pointed at the phone, ready to start punching numbers on the intercom, the telephone, but she didn't know what to do.

I tore outside, and ran faster than I had ever run before, faster than the time I ran for eighty yards and a concussion in the game against Skyline.

My dad was already on his way, and he can run. He pointed up to the roof with one hand, and he was running so hard his arm waved up and down a little.

By now smoke was rolling out of the top of the hopper, a funnel-shaped structure on top of the roof. Firefighters were taking their time getting up the ladder, making sure the ladder was steady, making sure their feet were in the rungs.

"Clear the finishing room," my dad said.

He said this without looking at me, but it was me he was talking to.

The finishing room was always a dream world, blue and pink chairs hanging from hooks in the ceiling. The floor was uneven with paint of all colors, as though a volcano of party colors had erupted once years ago.

The workers were spraying banana yellow just then, the stuff coming out thick. A bentwood chair hung there in the air and a worker aimed a nozzle at it and the blond, bare wood was suddenly clotted with paint, the stuff not cut thin enough to go through the gun, the metal nozzle a space weapon that didn't kill, it just made things change color.

If the factory roof began to burn, this place would explode. Barrels of black paint labeled FLAMMABLE lined a wall. I called out that everyone should go outside, there was a fire. Maybe I expected panic. People finished what they were doing. An air compressor stuttered into silence. Someone untied a smock and let it fall, but you would have thought I had just announced an extra coffee break, or closing time forty-five minutes early.

I wanted to jump up and down and tell them the paint they were spattered with was loaded with ketones and other chemicals that would burn white hot, but they all wandered past me, cheerful, saying, "How's it going, Cray?" and things like that.

At times like this, I felt my inexperience. This was the real world. Workers were used to this. A disaster could erupt, and they all accepted it. I was too new to stay calm, to saunter out through the sliding wooden door, peeling off a glove, looking around at the fire hoses kicking as the water pressure stiffened them, like all of this was an everyday affair.

For a few minutes the hopper was the center of activity, fire helmets bending down over it, my dad on the roof in his short-sleeved blue shirt. The smoke turned into steam, a hose sprang a leak, fine spray fuming out from the socket where it joined the hydrant.

The ax flashed. A gentle splintering sound reached the street.

Water pattered down into the mill, and workers put down buckets and plastic tubs to catch the water and then gave up, putting tarps over the saws. The drops of water blistered the sawdust that covered everything like a coating of eraser crumbs. The workers were on overtime now, the few who were left, and I was going to be late for my meeting with Coach Jack unless I hurried.

There was no smoke, only the scent of charcoal and the perfume of wet sawdust.

My dad trotted out through the mill, gave a quick order to one of the workers, and then he was gone. He was the only one in a rush now. I ran to catch up with him and reached him just outside the huge, metal-ribbed boxcar. It's easy to forget how big a railroad car is. In movies people jump up onto boxcars or roll out of them. I could not approach this warehouse on steel wheels without thinking how dangerous it would be to jump into one if it was traveling hard.

"I have to go," I said.

My dad scrambled up into the car, and looked down at me. The interior of the car was stacked with lumber, and there was a forklift inside the boxcar. It was one of my favorite visions, the way one forklift would lift another into the interior of the rail car, one yellow machine cradling the other like a tractor that had given birth.

"Tell Mom the shipment got here from Alabama and I have to unload." He usually called her Fran here at the factory, even when he was talking to me, keeping our home life separate.

I really had to talk to him. I had to say something, it didn't matter what, and hear his answer.

When people were cut at the factory, they didn't howl or get angry. They made their way out into the office and asked Barbara for the first-aid kit. If the cut didn't stop bleeding, Jesse drove them to the clinic. And even though the sign announced the number of days since the last accident, the accidents referred to were major accidents — a broken bone, the loss of something that wouldn't grow back, like what had happened to Leo despite all precautions, or like what had happened when my dad had just bought the place from Mr. Ziff, when Ziff Furniture was famous for its children's furniture and nothing else.

I thought about it sometimes: I hoped I would never have to do what my dad did that time, running back into the factory for something that had just been cut off. I couldn't help it: the fire had scared me. I needed a little reassurance.

"Everything's going to be all right?" I asked.

"Sure." It was one of my dad's characteristic sures.

Then he turned back and gave me a smile, looking down, and I could see the sudden shadows under his eyes. And I could see how guilty he suddenly felt, giving me a such curt response. "You did fine, Cray. Really good. Another couple of minutes and we would've had a five-alarm disaster on our hands."

That was what I had needed to hear. And I also needed to see him turn to the stack, the pale lumber stenciled GEORGIA PACIFIC in fuzzy blue lettering. He climbed into the seat and gunned the forklift, everything back to normal, the boxcar filling with bad air.

I was late getting the number 46 bus up Fruitvale to MacArthur, so I ran all the way. It's a long run, but I needed it, letting each stride burn off some of the leftover tension. I was a little out of shape, and I got sweaty inside my clothes.

Most people have jobs and they either like the job or they don't. They get up, work, look forward to vacation. Both my parents have jobs they love, jobs they care about the way people care about gardens they plant from seeds in a packet.

I already knew what Coach Jack was going to ask me, and I knew what my answer was going to be, in spite of the fact that crossing the football field gave me that wonderful feeling. The stripes every ten yards were faded, the chalk crumbled away, dirt and dead grass showing through.

One of the school district gardeners had tried to make the sidelines more permanent, a long, straight line burned into the field with an herbicide. The grass died, but didn't vanish, just turned a lurid orange color. It was the kind of thing nobody talked about, but I thought people would be glad when football began and the dead stripe was covered over by a thick chalk line. Something about the orange grass looked like science gone awry, like someone who tried a new dye on his hair and it came out all wrong.

There was no way I was going to play football this year. Not the way things were. I had been a pretty good quarterback, the junior varsity team winning four in a row at the end of the season. I was proud of that.

But a Skyline defensive back had nearly fractured my skull last year, and the varsity team had two fine quarterbacks. Coach Jack would extol the manly virtues of being third string, and tell me he needed a punter or another wide receiver. I liked football — and I hated it.

Coach Jack had one of the few offices with an outside door. It was a metal door, heavy, something you'd expect in a bomb-proof bunker. I'm not weak, but I had to wrestle against the power of this barrier.

Coach Jack had pictures all over his bulletin board. He is a private man; you can't read his eyes. So, to compensate, he put up a permanent display in his office. You could tell things about him without having to ask. They were mostly black-and-white glossies, Coach Jack in a UCLA jersey, looking young and smiling. It was one of my dad's rules: "Don't smile too much; it makes you look nervous."

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Excerpted from Zero at the Bone by Michael Cadnum. Copyright © 1996 Michael Cadnum. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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