Page 91 of By Any Means

That was all, the unfeeling bastard. Not even a salutation.

He and a dejected Chary left the Algonquin to meet again at a Raines hotel—rooms sold by the hour, usually situated above a saloon—being that there was no convenient place Uptown to chrysalis from tailored suit and hat to overalls and cap. There, Laurie helped Chary put on one of his false beards, and Laurie had a mustache and a few extra hairs—dyed black—between his brows put on himself. They set aside their suits and rode the El to the docks.

Chary led him through the iron gates of Wright Glass at seven o’clock shift change, and then Laurie was officially in. He’d done it, undercover as never before: exploited a man’s trust and intimacy to infiltrate one of the most notorious industries in America.

“You’ll be a threat no matter where you’re put,” Chary explained, “unless you are completely incompetent.” He shook his head. “If I’d known... I would’ve taught you something at Berryfield. But you can’t muddle through this,” he stressed. “You’ll observe only, all right? Someone could get hurt.”

And so it was that, for perhaps the first time in his undercover life, Laurie became almost completely useless.

He hadn’t seen Chary fire up the furnace at Berryfield, but even if he had, he’d imagined it as a solitary endeavor. A furnace shop was anything but.

There were roughly fifty shops across all of Wright Glass, and every shop, Chary explained, had one or two blowers, and three to four gathering-boys. Each had its own rhythm of work but the same essential steps. Gather, blow, press, blow, away for finishing and annealing, repeat. It went nonstop until the hour meal break, four and one-half hours through. And that consideration only due to very recent legislation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While in service, Laurie had felt often that the constant sense of being pending, being on call to another’s whim and bell-ring made him want to scream. But he at least had been able to sit down.

Chary occasionally sat, for he was provided a bench, but not often. The boys never. They endlessly ran. Crouched and ran.

The cycle went like this.

A boy brought Chary molten glass on the end of a long, skinny tube. Chary whacked it on a flat slab of steel and rolled it for an indeterminate amount of time, some animal judgement; he tipped the tube and blew a little. Then, with unerring accuracy, he plopped the neon glob of taffy glass into a mold. A boy pressed the mold shut, and Chary blew again. The boy opened the mold, strangled that new bottle’s neck with a pair of jacks—a kind of sharp tongs—and Chary cracked it off swiftly from his blowpipe. Another boy took the blown bottle, or jar, or cup, already clear and hard, elsewhere; and by this time, Chary had already taken another bit of molten glass from the first boy and begun again. On and on and on.

Laurie knew this rote, had seen it many times before, had accomplished it a few times himself. It was the same as the field worker’s toss of cabbage into another’s arms, from theirs into another’s who stood in a rumbling cart and stacked it, all down the row without skips or halt. It was the cotton weaver’s shuttle and pedal, their forward-back rock; the slaughterer’s hooking knife.

The rhythm of work. Muscle memory. Either you learned it and it sank into your bones until you dreamed it and woke up tasting it, or you didn’t earn, didn’t live—or, worse, your children didn’t.

Each shop’s productivity and speed depended on its blower, and Chary’s shop ran like a machine. Unthinking, graceful, interconnected in a way that was hard to look away from. Laurie watched him keep count as each piece was taken away. Ten thousand a day, he’d said, for the whole factory. He wondered if he was keeping count for himself or the boys. It came out to six dollars a week, on average, for Chary, a mere sixty cents for them.

Did he want to take the count out of his father’s soul?

Laurie did.

If he’d thought he felt bad watching Chary go in and out of Wright Glass, this was worse. Laurie’s face burned to be standing useless. But he folded his hands behind his back and observed and sweated.

It was hot as hell. Hotter than a Florida field on a July noon. Ninety degrees, perhaps a hundred. Hundred ten. The furnaces were continuous-burn, bringing streams of molten glass never-ending. The boys who ran everywhere and faced the furnace, back and forth, again and again, became so soaked with sweat, their hats lay limp and their hair turned stringed and sticky and their shoes squeaked beneath them. Chary fared a little better, but sweat guttered down his red face, through the fake beard, into his shirt.

And it wasn’t… it wasn’t really attractive, played out in flesh. Not like Laurie’d thought it would be—Chary at the continuous furnace, the molten-red heat glow upon his face, sweat falling down the curve of his neck. It was surely competence and skill and practice, long fingers strong around the blowpipe. It was also wrung-out exhaustion, shaking shoulders for a bit of relief, hoarse singing and the gritted-teeth breath of sheer endurance. Sometimes, the hacking cough of silicosis, like Irving’s. Chary didn’t have it—by some miracle, thank god—but Laurie heard others like a chorus around them, short repressed coughs of the too-damn-busy-for-this.

At times, Chary’s apprentice—an older white boy who could’ve been Irish or Italian or Polish or Russian, and Laurie couldn’t tell because what little he said carried only the accent of a New York orphan—would take the reins, like trapeze artists switching bars. Then Chary would crack his back with long fingers, take the place of the boy pressing the mold, and watch his protégé carefully as he blew.

When they switched back, the apprentice boy took the place of a different one. He switched out every forty minutes or so: for the gatherer-boy, the mold tender, the snapper-up, the running-boy. Chary remained steadfast and irreplaceable.

Was this what he wanted Laurie to see? That the boys made the place go on but that they were merely worn-tooth cogs?

At eleven-thirty, the lunch bell sounded. Laurie was numb from his knees down and had more questions than ever. First and foremost was: why?

Chary wiped his face with his shirt. The glory hole was shuttered. The boys disappeared, and the workers enmassed themselves outside to the streets.

The first thing Laurie said was “You’ll take my lunch pail and not a goddamned word about it.”

Chary winced, nodded, and walked on. He brought them to the waterfront space between two plain piers—a less-popular spot for a break than Laurie would’ve figured, probably because it was pitch-black and dangerous-feeling—where he folded himself up into sticks and cloth, legs pretzeled, and sat. The East River gleamed darkly before them. Sleepy ferries and schooners with closed-up sails bobbed at anchor. Behind them, the city was still lit up with life. To the south, the Williamsburg Bridge’s suspension cables were hung with points of starlike electric illumination. The Times had called them “Necklaces of Pearls” in a column mention when they’d been installed three years earlier, and they looked the same now.

Chary bit into his sandwich.

Laurie sat. “I’m sorry.”

Chary only raised eyebrows. Didn’t even stop chewing.

“I called you cuckoo,” Laurie said, “but… how long have you been doing this?”