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The home nurse showed up and pronounced Eli’s wound as “doing well.” His mom came in shortly afterward. She let herself in, knowing the door was unlocked during the day, and plunked two bags of groceries on the counter.
“I got you guys some things you’d probably not get for yourselves,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “I’m amazed at how well Bo’s taking care of you, and to be honest, I feel like I’m sort of in your way.” She started unloading drink bottles, plastic clam shells filled with treats, and bags of fruit from the paper shopping bags. She paused. “Oh, look, tulips. I’ve been thinking of getting you flowers, but I see you’re covered. Now these need to go in a proper vase. Where does Bo keep his vases?”
Eli chuckled. “I doubt he even has vases, Mom. He’s a guy.”
“If he’s gay he’ll have vases,” she said breezily, opening and closing the kitchen cabinets. There were no vases – not anywhere. “Hm.” She looked at Eli with raised eyebrows. “Are you sure he’s gay?”
“We never talked about it, Mom. Come on!”
“You should, then. I don’t want you to pin your hope on a man who’ll find some woman more interesting down the line.
“That would make him bi, Mom, and that doesn’t mean...” What didn’t it mean? That he’d take off with a female of child-bearing age and do the more common thing? “Look, it’s complicated. But he was the one to get the tulips yesterday. Just, it’s been busy. Not a big deal.” And no need to go into details, either.
“Okay, dear.” She came to where he was standing, beckoned him to bend his head down, and brushed a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll just keep my fingers crossed for the two of you.”
Normally Eli would’ve rolled his eyes at her fussy sentiment. He didn’t this time, though. Whatever superstitious magic charm Mom decided to throw their way was fine by him.
THE FURNACE felt hotter than usual, the air was stifling, and not even the blue Gatorade helped Bo find his groove. He didn’t think the others noticed, but to him, his aches and pains were unmistakable. When they finished a run of small orange condensing lenses for railroad use and it was time to switch to another pot and reset their workstation, he was grateful for the break.
Halloran came over to supervise the shift, making a useful comment here, a suggestion there. His deep, no-nonsense tone made Bo realize he used to hang on his every word. Halloran had decades of glass-working experience, and had worked glass longer than Bo had been alive. Whatever he had to suggest had always been pure gold – until this morning, when Eli confessed his difficulties. Why wouldn’t he want Eli to solve the problem?
Maybe Halloran didn’t want some young whelp to show him up, especially when his hard-earned experience could be trumped by an analysis on a fancy new instrument and a bunch of photos from an electron microscope. Eli knew how to do that. Bo was reasonably certain Eli could’ve solved the Pot 16 problem by now, yet this old dinosaur, useful as he was, was keeping Eli from doing his job.
“I need you to skim Pot 12 while we set up by Pot 11,” the foreman said to Bo. “We already took samples of Pot 12 at five this morning, but it still looks streaky. Skim it, take another sample, and run it through the lehr. The boys in QC will want to have a look.” He sneered. “I told them they should’ve stuck a potato in there, but Paul upstairs doesn’t want to do that anymore. Something about a potato not being a controlled material. Young idiots, all of ‘em.”
Bo nodded, grabbed his punty, and moved on to Pot 12. The borosilicate glass was colored turquoise blue with copper and nickel, and was usually well-behaved. Or would’ve been, had the saltpeter flux not needed extra help in turning sand into glass. Adding cullet was a time-honored method of lowering the melting point of the whole batch. The trick was to get the color right. The lab calculated the amount of colorant in the cullet, added the right amount into the batch of dry ingredients, but sometimes the glass produced barely discernible, lighter or darker streaks.
There was no good way to stir a pot of glass. None, except for the potato. Bo loved the potato. It was so much fun, taking a raw baking spud, sticking it onto a long rod, and plunging it deep under the surface of the melt.
The high temperature incinerated the potato within seconds, releasing all its water. That water came up as bubbles, and the rising bubbles stirred the melt. The rising bubbles also added extra oxygen, which sometimes threw the color off-spec. Bo didn’t know why, but he knew he could ask Eli, and Eli would be happy to tell him.
Or he could ask Paul.
Bo mulled his options as he skimmed the ball of his punty over the glass melt surface, picking up crud. The melt surface glowed a sullen orange instead of its usual bright yellow, and its surface was punctuated by angry, dark-red spots. He propped the punty against the refractory wall of the furnace, hot ball up, took off his dark face shield, and turned to Halloran. “What’s the temperature? I think it’s crystallizing.”
“Fuck,” Halloran spat. He walked all the way to the equipment counter, weaving through working teams, yet ignoring them. He soon returned with a pyrometer. Bo took up the instrument, aimed its ocular at the melt surface, and waited for the reading to stabilize. Halloran craned his neck to read the display together with Bo. “2,006 degrees. That’s almost fifty too low, dammit.”
“Yeah.” Bo eyed the half-circular glory-hole. “I’ll close it up for a few hours.” He waited for the foreman’s nod, then he stuck a pipe into a hole in the middle of a half-circular sheet of firebrick and eased it to close the opening.
“We’re supposed to work this one tomorrow,” Bo said in a conversational tone. “You want me to check it before I leave?”
“No,” Halloran said way too fast. “I’ll do it myself. I’ll be staying late anyhow.”
SHORTLY before lunch, Bo made yet another gob, swung the punty over the mold, and watched the gold, glowing teardrop of molten glass ooze into its elongated shape. The rate of elongation and the color of its glow told Bo’s experienced eye that this particular production run should be a good one. The realization surprised him. He wasn’t as achy, his hang-over grumpiness has pretty much disappeared, and to his surprise he felt the lunch-hour countdown tick away in his stomach.
This was good. Life was good, and since they would work this pot for the rest of the day, Bo relaxed into the rhythm of his work and thought back to Eli, and Eli’s hurt leg, and Eli’s sweet and comforting smell. His tousled bed-head, his soft brown eyes, and the way he forgot he shouldn’t be jumping on one foot while serving Bo coffee.
And the Pot 16 conversation.
Despite feeling the slightest tickle of hunger, Bo knew it was better not to eat. He’d subsist on Gatorade till dinner. Just as well – he had ceramic manufacturing information to hunt down.
GOING down to the catacombs wasn’t exactly unusual. Bo did run down the narrow staircase behind the foreman’s office every so often to pick up a new ring from one of the storage caves, except that had been during the regular workday. Not during lunch, and not all by himself. As he emerged from the narrow opening at the bottom of the stairs, he looked left, then right. He was alone, silent and motionless. Only the huge furnace fire burners went off at predetermined intervals under the ceiling as they heated the glass pots from underneath.
Bo took few hesitant steps toward the furnace, drawn by its familiar heat. This was ridiculous, Bo almost felt as though he was skulking around. He turned his back to the red brick pillars which supported the weight of the furnace above him, and encircled the ring of fire that was the heart of the whole factory. Every winter, the finishing shop guys would come down here to warm up during lunch. He wondered whether they felt the weight of molten glass overhead the way he did.
Did they know that just few inches of glass pot material separated them from a certain and untidy death? Did they feel the voracious, liquid heat, corrosive and relentless, as it slowly chipped away at its ceramic container in an effort to be free?
Glass fascinated Bo, yet he secretly feared it. He’d rather stand next to it than under it. The decision to step forward, away from the soaking warmth of radiating rock, was unconscious.
He realized how creepy the place was all of a sudden. The nooks and crannies, the alcoves, the drying and storing caves that lined the stone-paved, sloped path that lead to the lehr room, and, eventually, the hot floor itself. The whole factory was interconnected by sloped paths, a relic of a bygone era when men pushed loaded trolleys of heavy materials from place to place.
Those trolleys were still in use. Raw materials, mixed and labeled, got loaded into the steel dump-carts and pushed up the hill, toward the hot floor. Unused cullet was wheeled downstairs to the mixing room, where bins upon bins held colored glass of predetermined composition within its old, wooden walls.
A modern factory would have elevators, conveyor belt systems, and a lot less dust. Glass dust, flux and sand dust, dust of metallic colorants that lent the glass its vibrant hues.
Ceramic dust, too. Bo stopped gazing up the long, narrow ramp and the way it receded into the ill-lit darkness. Instead, the pale, dry residue of greenware ceramics caught his eye.
That’s where the rings were made, left of the furnace. The doors for the pots, too. No sense buying something they could easily make.
Slowly, as Bo walked to the ceramics area, he realized he was skulking around.
Wasn’t he? Finding out all he could about ring manufacturing had nothing to do with his regular duties as a gatherer. On the other hand, he’d been ordered to cooperate with Eli. If anyone asked him what he was doing, he could just pass the buck to Eli’s boss Joe, or even to his own foreman. He grinned, knowing his answer would depend on who was asking. And if any of the union employees saw him working during lunch – well, then, he’d pretend a headache. He was pretty sure he had looked worse for the wear this morning, and a story of seeking a quiet place to relax instead of eating would be plausible enough.
Union workers always obeyed the clock.
Always.
So why was Halloran staying late?
Bo filed the untidy bit of information away as he turned the corner. The wide space was only high enough to accommodate the height of a custom-built electric kiln. The refractory brick structure, along with it being a size of a small cabin, always filled Bo with unease. Hansel and Gretel. An oven – because a kiln was just that – so big, the guys had to walk in to load and unload the goods.
Its steel doors were shut and the round, glass-covered thermometer showed a residual temperature of three hundred degrees Centigrade. Bo converted into Fahrenheit quickly. Aha, so the firing cycle must have ended just recently. Its heat was mild compared to the furnace burners he could still hear go on and off in the distance. The air smelled of drying clay and dust.
Despite the traces of recent activity, Bo didn’t see much that would help Eli figure out what went wrong. He looked at the dirty casting tables and the rubber molds that sat on the floor next to their sturdy wooden legs. A pile of twenty-gallon pails still sat on a wooden loading pallet, right next to a pile of empty pails that were ready for recycling.
“Hi there.”
Bo spun on his heel, feeling off-balance and trying for a casual expression. His face relaxed when he recognized the familiar outline in the dim glow of economy bulbs. “Hey, Paul.”
“There’s a light, you know,” Paul said and reached over to the wall behind the kiln. Few clicks later, overhead fluorescents bathed the scene in their bluish glow. “Eli called,” Paul said without a preamble. “I’m supposed to help you find something.”
Bo gesticulated wildly, feeling at loss. “The problem is, I don’t know what makes this good or bad. I just... it’s not glass, y’know? I don’t even know what to look for!” He hated the frustrated edge in his own voice. Eli had been injured because he was getting close – but he didn’t know whether Paul knew that. If not, then Bo wasn’t going to divulge the information. He’d just play dumb and see what happened.
“You have a camera?” Paul asked quietly.
“Yeah.” An iPhone, even. That’s what birthdays were for.
“Let’s take pictures of everything, systematically,” Paul suggested. “Let’s go clockwise and document the whole room. It’s probably useless, but even if we can’t tell the difference, maybe Eli can.”
“Fat chance,” Bo grumbled as he fished the phone out of the pocket. “But worth a try. It’s not like I’ll be eating today.”
Paul shot him a wry grin, but he didn’t say anything, and Bo suddenly wondered whether Eli trusted the glass technologist a little too much.