The Lightning Keeper (5 page)

“How far is that, sir?”

“Only a hundred miles or so, and there's gasoline aplenty in the jerry can behind. What do you think, young man?”

“I think we must stop. There is great danger in this.”

As if to confirm this judgement, a trolley car rumbled past them, headed south at a crawl, causing snow and an explosion of sparks to cascade from the overhead wires like a fireworks display.

“Turn the car, then, if you can. You'll go around the square and come by that big hotel on the south end. We'll see about some dinner and a good bed.”

 

T
OMA'S BED THAT NIGHT
was the backseat of the Packard. Coatless and shivering in spite of the sleeveless pullover of heavy boiled wool, he buried himself in a loose pile of his other garments, where his breath, trapped in haphazard layers of fustian, twill, and linsey-woolsey, warmed him, made him drowsy, released the odors trapped there. The sharpest smell was that of charred insulation from the cable that had failed in Stephenson's new prototype subway car. The white smoke tasted like fear. It had been an awful job today heaving the remains of that car, parts of it still warm, off onto a side track where they could pick it apart and see where the junction box had failed, the connections looking more like popped corn than bits of metal. It was those pieces he had been carrying back to show Stephenson, and a half length of the worthless cable too, when he had found Boylan at the window of the Packard, smiling at her, kissing the back of his hand.

There was another scent, heavier and older, less insistent than that of the burnt insulation but more troubling to Toma's empty stomach. Three days ago he had been taken to dinner by Mr. Stephenson, who knew something of his life and had done him other kindnesses in the past. He had no proper jacket or coat and so he and the old man ended up in the back of the alehouse, right by the kitchen, with the companionable fog of frying mutton chops rolling over them where they sat.

They lingered over their pitcher of ale, neither of them in any hurry to go out into the raw drizzle. The waiter asked if they needed anything else; Stephenson waved him away with the genial air of a man seated by his own hearth. There was some small talk of a circumspect nature about the shop. Stephenson, a strapping fellow in his youth and a match for any man on the floor, now spent most of his days in his office with the frosted half-glass walls, but Toma was his eyes and ears, in the tunnels and elsewhere. When Toma made a ref
erence to the work in the tunnels being stopped for half a day by an inspection team from the MTA, Stephenson sighed in sympathy and allowed as how it was, now, all paperwork. Not like the good old days, God bless 'em, when the emperor of China sends a letter asking would the John T. Stephenson Company please make him twelve trolley cars. A price was quoted. Several weeks later a check arrived—had to hold off a while to see if there was a real bank in Macau behind that fancy letterhead—and that was the last they heard from the Chinaman until the cars were delivered, and a letter—some kind of scroll, you'd say—arrived to express the emperor's appreciation. But there was something else, come to think of it, a package with a piece of cloth to show what was wanted in the way of upholstery. Well, you never saw such a thing: cloth of gold, it seemed, with a few red or green threads thrown in more or less to give the eye a rest. And you should have seen the cushions that we answered with. Old Fogarty snuck out to the urinals with one of them under his coat and broke his tooth testing the buttons, thinking they were gold.

But the truth of it was, and here Stephenson set his elbows on the table and dropped his voice to a more confidential tone, the truth of it was that there was more money to be made in this subway business than there ever was in trolley cars and fancy cushions for the Chinaman, even with all the paperwork, and even though it didn't look so fat, car by car. Look at your map of Manhattan, boy, and you'll see what I mean: this tunnel to Brooklyn's not the end of it, not by a long shot. Before long they'll be building another line, and they'll be wanting more cars, and new cars, and if we play the cards right, and you keep an eye on the tunnels, and I keep everything square with Tammany Hall, why, there's contracts that will come our way. Never seen a lad with such a head for details as you, unless I go back to when I was your age. And here Stephenson winked at him.

Now Stephenson's thought turned from such pleasing vistas of past and future, landscapes ennobled by monuments to remunerative folly, and entered a forest of rich, obfuscatory praise for the capabilities, mental, moral, and physical, of his valued assistant, praise punctuated here and there by shafts of dazzling light, intimations of success, if only…Toma perceived that their discourse had a destination.

“If only what, sir?”

“Well, I'm just thinking, boy, that I raised you five dollars more than two months ago, and I'll raise you again if I have to, but…”

“Yes, sir?”

Stephenson took a long pull of his ale and wiped his mouth on a vast checkerboard of a handkerchief. Then he signaled to the waiter, calling out for a whiskey, a double whiskey.

“You don't look like a man who's on his way somewhere, somewhere as matters. You come off a boat, what, five, six years ago? Well, in this country we've all come off a boat, and you look far enough back. But the point is not where you come from, it's what you do when you get here, see? Now, it's almost three years since I come across you in that tunnel, digging after some poor bastards as got crushed in the cave-in, and it looks to me as if you're wearing the same clothes as the day I first laid eyes on you.”

“I always remember your kindness to me, Mr. Stephenson. As for the clothes, my job still takes me to the tunnels.”

“Oh, it's not just the clothes I mean, it's everything. How long have you been living in that place over there, Eleventh Street, isn't it?”

“Yes, four years…I do not remember. But there are worse places.”

“Sure, you could find a worse place if you tried, but it might take a while. The point is that you can do better. What in God's name do you do with the money I pay you?”

Toma folded his hands around his glass. “I send it home to my people. There has been fighting. The Serbs will be free, free of Turkey, and of Austria.”

Stephenson put two small broken bits of sugar in his whiskey and stirred it with his knife. “Family is family, as well I know, but you'll remember what I said about getting off the boat. You're here now, and you're an American. You can't always be thinking of the past.”

“I think of the future, of my own future, so the present is not important, except I must study. Every Tuesday and every Thursday…”

“Oh, I know all about the studying, and your Franklin Institute, and I've nothing to say against it, except that you know more than enough about electricity to get ahead in this world, even to make a fortune for yourself.”

“A fortune, you say. I am not sure of your meaning. Is this the same as rich?”

“Rich? Yes, of course I mean rich, boy, and what else would I mean? Would you rather be poor? I guess you can have your choice.”

“I am not poor, Mr. Stephenson. I have never been poor, not even when I came from the boat. But I have not been thinking how to be rich.”

“And what else is there, unless you mean to be a priest of some kind? You don't seem cut out for that, though I mean no disrespect.”

“In my country, sir, the priests may marry, if that's what you mean. But no, I am no priest.”

“What then? Not rich, not poor, not a man of God. What?”

Toma drank and set down the empty glass. “I keep nothing from you, Mr. Stephenson. When I know what my fortune is, what I must do, I will go toward that thing, and I will not keep the answer from you.”

“You must have some idea what it is?”

“I know only that I am close to it, as the iron filing knows the magnet, and then not so close. At times I have felt it, the strength of the hidden thing, when I am on the shop floor fixing the motors, or down in the tunnel helping in that work. The closest of all was when I went to hear the great Nikola Tesla lecture at the Cooper Union. I could not understand the words he was using, not all of them, but when he touched the high-frequency coil, the Tesla coil they call it now, and made it glow, I felt that he touched me. Later, like a wizard, he made sparks fly from his fingertips. The others who heard him—some of them great, important men—gasped at these things, then clapped their hands. When the lights came on afterward, the professors and the engineers are going up to Tesla to shake his hand. Tesla bows to each but will shake no man's hand. He sees me sitting there, not able to move because my mind is so full of questions I have no words for, and no courage to ask, and he smiles at me. He knows.”

“This Tesla fellow, you know, he may be cracked….”

“It may be as you say. I know others say it. He is a Serb, as I am, and perhaps you will say the same thing about me. But that is how I want to be: my mind will be filled with some one thing, and I will do whatever I must.”

Stephenson raised his glass to Toma and then drank it off. “I'm thinking you'd make a pretty good priest after all.”

 

H
E AWOKE BEFORE DAYBREAK
in spite of the sweetness of his dream. The whisper of snow had ceased and a warm wet wind cleared the stale air of his bed.

His dream was an embroidery on that wind. She came to him bearing a basket that yielded the scent of food and the music of bottles. They put it down on the grass beside the car and sat on the running board with the lap robe beneath them and the sun-warmed metal at their backs, and he told her about his country, about his family, about himself. She was chiefly interested in the dead girl.

“What was her name?” she asked, offering him wine.

“Aliye.”

“What a beautiful name. I am sorry for her. What did she look like?”

And now she was twining flowers in her hands, such flowers as he knew in the meadows of the Sand
ak, where Aliye had woven them into her hair. His mind was full but he could say nothing. He held up a mirror, where she would find her question answered.

 

T
HE SNOW HAD TURNED
to melting slush in the street, and behind the racing gray clouds there was the promise of an even warmer day. He had stored his clothes and books in the boot and was wiping down the fenders and radiator with an old shirt when he saw her at the door of the hotel. She had a basket on her arm, and he nearly called out to her using the other name. He waited, grinning broadly, as she picked her way through the puddles of filth and snowmelt.

“Did you receive what we sent out from the dining room last night?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“And did you have enough to eat?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“Well, to make sure, I ordered breakfast for myself, a very generous breakfast, and as soon as they brought it I told them to wrap it up as fast as ever they could. And here I am. Look,” she said, pulling back the cloth to reveal a cup, a thermos, some silverware, and several items wrapped in table linens. “I am sorry the plates wouldn't fit, so this will be a bit untidy: I made sandwiches out of everything.”

She poured him a cup of strong black coffee; standing upon the running board out of the slush, she was able to look down on him and his feast spread out on the hood of the motor. He ate steadily, offering her half of everything. She declined all but a roll and one piece of bacon, taking off her glove to eat it.

“My mother loved picnics more than any other meals. She said they brought out the pioneer spirit, and that they were a relief from good manners. Did your mother like picnics?”

“I do not know this word, but I know how to eat with my hands. This is how we ate in my home. I think you do not call it good manners.” He held up his hand to show her how the yolk of the boiled egg had leaked onto his fingers, and they both laughed.

“Do you know, I worried about you last night. I thought you must be hungry and cold, and I almost came to see how you were. I even made a list, lying in bed, of the things you should have: a blanket, a pillow, a bottle of soup. But it wouldn't have been right.”

“Ah,” he said, looking up at her and no longer smiling, “but you did come to me. I had a dream and it kept me until the morning, and here you are.”

She did not know what to say. The dream was dangerous ground, and she felt the smile on her face turn brittle. Surely he could see past it to the confusion of her thoughts. She did not know what was happening, but she did not want it to stop: How could she tell him such a thing or explain it to herself?

 

J
UST AS THE SNOWSTORM
had been unlooked for, a freak of nature, so this day revealed itself, by the time they were ready to set out, as an intimation not merely of spring but of the summer beyond. Toma headed west on Twenty-third Street, then turned north on Fifth Avenue through a new lake that covered the road axle-deep from curb to curb, and the only disturbance to the blinding expanse of water was the wide, slow vortex of an overburdened drain.