men defined by their very willingness to act when others withdrew? Beyond all else, they believed they had momentum on their side. Nathan’s success had made him a minor name in construction circles. Lawrence had a small inheritance from his grandmother. Captains of Industry, they toasted each other. A young man in Lawrence’s apartment building offered to make introductions around his club.
When Nathan thought back to that time in his life, two events stood out, emblematic in his mind. The first was Lawrence showing up at his desk with champagne and signed papers from the bank. But the second, the one that was burned into his memory, a foreshadowing of what was to come, was the involuntary twinge at the corner of his father’s eye when Nathan explained what they were planning to do. Still, they pressed on, and it had been like a wonderful dream for a while. But a janitor named Larson had ended all of that.
From what Nathan had gathered over the months after the fire, Larson had started working when he was just a kid to help out with rent at the tenement where his family lived. An accident when he was a boy had left him with an unbending left leg, but he was a hard worker and he earned a reputation for reliability. He was promoted to his bosses’ new commercial property downtown, the one that Nathan and Lawrence’s fledgling firm had just completed that spring.
Nathan had envisioned twenty units in the stout, four-story structure, but the new owners subdivided, squeezing in thirty-two. The offices were cramped, with doors that in some cases couldn’t be opened at the same time without striking each other. Most offices had only a single window, but Larson’s employers sweetened the deal for their tenants by outfitting each office with a state-of-the-art window air conditioner. In the sultry, close heat of the Memphis summer, they were a godsend to the clerks and attorneys who worked there. Likewise to the bankers who had set up in the building’s main lobby. Larson’s bosses had been pleased. They paid him well, and he provided for his mother and sisters. But sometimes, in the mid-afternoon with all of the air conditioning units switched on, the overtaxed circuits, wired for twenty offices, serving thirty-two, would fail. The lights would go out. There would be shouts, complaints, and Larson would take his flashlight and hobble on his bum leg down the stairs to seek out the fuse box in the basement.
Electrons stream down a wire like cars on a busy town road. Try to push too many through, and they pile up on each other, snarl like traffic. Left with nowhere to go, the excess begins to escape as heat, and the wires grow warm. The weak spots in a circuit, an undersized connector, a section of the wire where the copper is a little less pure: these are the places where the heat shows itself. Fuse boxes, by design, contain the weakest link in a safe location. But plug fuses don’t come cheap, and Larson was using the box his bosses had given him at a steady clip. By the end of the first month of summer, he’d run out. That’s when he discovered a penny, turned edgewise, would fit in the fuse socket. The handles of his pliers had a coating of gutta-percha. If he took up the penny with the pliers, he could twist it into the hole.
So much hinged on that moment in the basement. If there hadn’t been change from lunch in his pocket, or if he’d had bare-handled pliers, it might have all been different. But that day, the lights came back on. Those squat, gray air conditioners churned back to life.
Electricity will always seek out the weakest parts. When Larson replaced that first plug fuse with the solid copper of the penny, he shifted the fail point.
By the end of June, he’d replaced nearly two-thirds of the fuses with coins and bits of scrap metal he found around the basement. The fire was July seventh, a muggy Memphis afternoon when every unit in the building was sucking power through the lines. A splice between the second and third floors heated up until it glowed, blackening the joists around it, then sparked white hot. The fire took hold near the stairwell, and sixteen people from the upper floors never made it down.
Nathan’s office had been across town from the fire. He’d just returned from lunch when the office boy came running to find him. His memory of the fire was imperfect. It was as if his mind, quailing before the horror, had shielded itself from the whole of the thing. What remained were brief impressions of arriving late and standing amid the crowd on the street watching the fire crews fight to save the building, seeing that it was already lost.
The smell of smoke had been choking, made worse by the steam from the water the fire crew was spraying. The bystanders surrounded him, pressed close to see despite the thin line of police who were struggling to hold them back. Every few moments the wind would shift and the heat and smoke rolled over them, driving them down the sidewalk, wild-eyed and coughing. With the wind’s change the crowd would press forward again, taking Nathan with them. Later, he learned that Larson had been there and—arriving even later than he had—Lawrence, too, but he remembered neither of them, his vision reduced to the tableau immediately before his eyes.
Above the mob, the afternoon sun had lost its warmth, filtered through the smoke. Everything was left dry and filmed in ashy grit. He vividly remembered the fire chief. The man had been screaming, spittle in the corners of his mouth, the veins standing out in his ruddy neck, and at his command a group of firemen set a ladder against the blackened brick of the building’s front. One tried to climb it to an upper window, but just as he reached the top, something gave way inside the building. There was a rumble and black smoke began to pour with redoubled volume from the openings. The man on the ladder shielded his face, began backing down. The chief threw his helmet, cursing. He turned and met Nathan’s eyes. For a moment, it was as if he knew who he was. The first prick of responsibility for this mess, for the lives of those inside, slipped in under Nathan’s ribs, cold and eviscerating. In the days ahead, he would become more familiar with the sensation.
Later, it was Lawrence who found him sitting on a curb, his head in his hands. Lawrence got them both to his car and took him home, neither of them fully grasping the moment’s portent. Their lives’ courses were changed that afternoon, though it would be weeks before they knew how profound their fall would be.
THE NEXT DAY TRAVIS PAID ONE OF THE WIVES IN THE shanty village to fry him a steak. She wrapped it in newspaper, and he took it home to eat on his porch in the evening’s cool. For a table, he sat at an upturned cable spool he’d dragged home from the dam site. His chair was an old apple crate. He ate with his fingers and his buck knife, sawing the steak into bite-size pieces. He speared a piece, put it in his mouth, and set to chewing. Twice he stopped and cocked his head, thinking he had heard a car on the road, but there were only the birds and the sun setting over the oaks like a golden fire. While he ate, he idly looked over the newsprint, eyes moving from picture to picture. There were three or four of them, each with a bit of writing. Travis studied the faces and recognized old Reg Jackson, who was a regular around the square downtown. Travis had seen him a thousand times, but Reg had come down with pneumonia and died, Travis was pretty damned sure. He peered at the pictures again.
“Hell,” he muttered, “the dead folks pages.” The thought of his food coming wrapped in obituaries unsettled him, but there was nothing to be done about it. Placing one work-grimed finger beneath Reg’s smiling face, cleaner now than Travis had ever seen it in life, he began to sound out the words.
He’d been in the habit of giving his paycheck to Claire every two weeks, and she’d seen to the buying of the things needed to run the house. Since she’d left he’d taken to putting what money was leftover into a coffee can near the stove. He’d never before had savings of his own.
He fingered a canvas patch that Claire had sewn onto the right knee of his overalls, the stiff fabric worn smooth from his kneeling. It had replaced the patch before that. Maybe he’d see if Clemmon’s down at the general store had any new overalls. He’d be damned if he’d give any of the money to Claire. She couldn’t go on hanging on her family forever. She’d need money, and then she’d have to
