We're All in This Together (8 page)

To which Henry said, "I don't think we can put it back together again, but I bet we can borrow one."

And the two boys leaned against each other, sharing legs, Henry's right and Tom's left, taking turns, one foot after another
to get home.

"That's how far and deep I went back with that son-of-a-bitch Tom Hellweg."

So far and deep that, twenty years after Tom Hellweg's family moved to New Hampshire and the last time Henry saw him, when
the former appeared on the latter's doorstep one morning and asked for a job, Henry never even paused. "For Christ's sake,
Tom, put your hat back on. We're going to be late for work."

A full-time position in the painting shop was assigned to Tom Hellweg before the day was out, and by the time the quitting
bell rang, a group of men on their days off had already moved his wife and three children into an apartment house.

The matter of his friend's felony record—eight months upstate for running a bait-and-switch telephone scam hustling Quebecois
migrants into wiring emergency money to their gravely sick
meres
back home in the province—a felony being a strict prohibitive in the strongest union in Maine, was no prohibitive at all to
Henry McGlaughlin. Henry believed in second chances, and Tom Hellweg was a man who had once propped him up, and borne his
weight as if it were his own.

That the Tom he knew had matured into a gaunt, raccoon-eyed malingerer capable of bilking people so poor they made their shoes
out of potatoes was something Henry refused to consider. Neither did he permit himself to disapprove of his old friend for,
besides being the slowest worker in his shop, ritualistically painting the word
CUNT
into every plate and board that came before his brush, and then filling in from there. The only thing that mattered was that
the work got done, and after all, someone had to be the slowest. Henry also chose to overlook Tom's drinking, and his habit
of sitting apart from other men at lunchtime; and although it was a struggle, he even kept it to himself when someone told
him that the Hellweg children collected handfuls of cigarette butts out of street gutters and brought them home for their
father. Some men drank; some men liked to eat alone; and some men had their own ideas about raising their children.

And Tom was his friend, goddamn it. That was something you never forgot. That was the essence of decency.

"That was what the union was about," said Papa.

Gil cleared his throat.

My grandfather cut him off before he could start. "Not a word, you. Just keep driving."

A few months passed, however, and a situation arose regarding his old friend that Henry could not ignore. Henry received a
report that Tom, on two occasions, both well after midnight, had blithely asked other workers to give him a lift from a local
bar to the pipefitting shop on the Ironworks campus, because he wanted to see "how they had things set up." Tom said he was
thinking of putting together a workshop himself, at home, you see, and he just wondered how they had things arranged.

These reports matched up with another set of reports, from the morning foreman of the pipefitting shop, who found tools scattered
around along with signs that someone had been welding after hours.

"What's that sound like to you, Gerry?" Henry asked his wife. He didn't look up from the table.

"Cross-training," said Geraldine McGlaughlin, and went to retrieve the bottle from the cabinet. She poured two straight.

This came at a time when Local 219, like every other union in the country, found itself in a battle to find some kind of higher
ground in the wake of the Taft-Hartley debacle. After fifty years of struggle and progress, the Taft-Hartley Act had served
notice to the entire movement that the cripple was buried in Hyde Park and the men who inherited the family monopolies were
back in charge—and they had the veto-proof Congress to prove it. In the name of free trade, TaftHartley's deregulations had
kicked the Communists out of the movement, limited the unions' power to strike, and above all else, pinched off the increasing
influence of organized labor over middle management positions.

It was one thing for the commoners to organize, Taft-Hartley seemed to say, but it was quite another for such things to get
out into the greater community, where men wore ties and worked at desks. That wouldn't do at all.

And it was this last point that should have resulted in Local 219's complete unawareness of the midnight shop work, because
this group of low-level white-collar workers most certainly included all of the foremen of the Amberson Ironworks, the on-site
representatives who filed the reports to New York. Except—

—Except that upon the passage of Taft-Hartley, Henry McGlaughlin had, much more quickly than most, gauged the new lay of the
land, and taken preemptive action. That is to say, in the best interest of his constituents, Henry immediately began giving
a select group of Ironworks' foremen a monthly token of Local 219's appreciation—a very modest bribe. Along with this cash
subsidy, in 1952, it may still have meant something to these managers that Henry was a fellow like them, who lived in a house
like theirs, and not in some apartment in New York City with twelve-foot windows overlooking Central Park, and a bathroom
with one of those gold-plated sinks to wash your ass.

Or, as Gerry put it when she visited the wives of these managers every third Monday afternoon to present the crisp ten-dollar
bill that promised their husband's loyalty, "You know we're all in the same boat, honey."

Nonetheless, as Local 219 flouted the direction of the Taft-Hartley wind, and demanded new safety regulations and full benefits
for a dozen part-time hires, Henry McGlaughlin had lately been much concerned; the
Lewiston Sun-Times
reported that several unidentified sources promised that a lockout was inevitable.

"We [company officials] don't like it [Local 219]," says one anonymous source. "Those people [the workers] have been given
an inflated sense of self-importance. It's bad for them [the workers], and it's bad for business. We're not running a socialist
enterprise here. We plan to re-establish the chain of command. We need workers who want to work, do their jobs. What we don't
need are whiners, reds, and other undesirables that the unions typically carry along and suckle."

All of which leant Tom Hellweg's unauthorized after-hour's visits to the pipefitting shop a particularly suspicious appearance.
It was a well-known scheme among downsizing companies to cross-train workers, to teach them how to do more than one skilled
task, so that in the case of a sudden layoff production would not be affected. The problem, of course, was that while production
would not be affected, the men who lost their jobs and the families of those men would most certainly be affected.

After a second glass with his wife, this one with a bit of ice, Henry McGlaughlin went off to find his old friend, Tom Hellweg.
He went off to ask Tom—formerly the boy with whom he tamed the black roller coaster of Drummond Street Hill, the boy who bore
Henry's weight as if it were his own—just what was going on.

Or, as Henry McGlaughlin put it then, "What the fuck are you up to here, Tommy?"

Tom stood at his station in the painting shop. He stared at Henry from beneath drooping eyelids, a crocodile stare, the one
that says that the crocodile would eat you, if only the meal weren't so paltry as to make the effort redundant. Tom spat a
tiny cigarette butt out onto the floor, probably one that his children had picked from a gutter so that he could get another
three drags out of it.

"Well, speak up, Tommy," Henry said. "I'm asking you a question."

Tom turned back to the section of metal plating that he was spraying with red industrial paint, and carefully spelled the
word "HENRY." Over the top of this word, he then wrote the word "CUNT."

"No," said Tom. "I'm asking you a question, Mr. McGlaughlin: just what the fuck do you think you are doing?"

Then his old friend plucked another grimy butt from his pocket. Tom lit it, turned his back on his union representative, and
returned to work.

From that point, the plot unraveled with the craven simplicity that was considered standard business practice among the upstanding
board members in New York and D.C., whose knowledge of the Amberson Ironworks extended only as far as the third column of
numbers on a monthly profit sheet.

A cursory investigation revealed that a stranger, a gentleman from Boston who carried his cigarettes in an ivory case, had
in recent weeks spread around a great many free drinks in the local pubs. Among the stranger's drinking partners had been
several members of Local 219—including Tom Hellweg.

Acting on this tip, Gerry called the Portland hotel where the stranger with the ivory cigarette case was said to be staying.
She spoke in a deep baritone, and started to badger the desk clerk before he could even say hello: "This is Mr. Fink, Chief
Officer of the East Coast Branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and I need to speak to my man immediately. I don't know
what name he's using, you can never be too careful when you're dealing with the sort of riffraff we deal with in this business,
but he's been charging the room to a company account, and I really must speak to him right away."

The jolted desk clerk quickly rifled through his ledger. "Do you mean Edgar Hallsworthy in room sixteen? Oh, but wait a minute:
he's charging his room to an account belonging to St. Cloud Detective Agency—"

"—That's right," Mr. Fink cut him off. "That's exactly right. He's from the St. Cloud arm of our operation. Now put me straight
through to Hallsworthy."

A moment later, the clerk connected him to room sixteen, and a man with a Brahmin accent answered. Gerry asked if he had sent
down four shirts to the laundry. The cheerful Brahmin-voiced man said, "Wrong room, sweets. I don't go around trusting my
linen to just any old chink, you know." She apologized, and rung off.

"So?" asked Henry.

Gerry shook her head and went to refill the glasses, but the bottle was empty.

Henry put his foremen on alert, and by the end of the week received another series of corroborating reports: all of their
shops were opened in the night, as well, tools and equipment disturbed.

The president of Local 219 added the sum of all these figures, and concluded that the company was preparing for a strike by
buying off a skeleton crew of cross-trained workers who could keep the Ironworks going during a lockout.

"We've got blacklegs, honey," said Gerry.

"So we offered a quarter pension to the traitors who turned themselves in, and in exchange for another quarter pension, the
rats all ratted on each other. Every man except that son-of-a-bitch Tom Hellweg. They all fingered him, but he wouldn't admit
anything."

Gil had piloted the Skylark all the way around the neighborhood again, back to the house with the whirligigs on the lawn.
It was almost noon. Papa's voice slipped to a monotone, and I sensed that he was reading the story from a set of long-prepared
notes. I risked a glance in the rearview mirror and saw that he now sat deep in the corner of the backseat, as if his narrow
body were slowly being sucked into the crevice of the cushions.

"So, he got nothing, and that was that. But Tom wanted to rub our faces in it. He hung around, sent his children and his wife
out begging. The woman used to knock on our door almost every night and ask for another chance—and we gave her nothing. All
winter they stayed, until the kids, there was hardly anything left of them—you could look out the window and see the wind
push them up the street. And we gave them nothing. And when Tom himself finally came around, we gave him nothing. And he cried.
And that didn't matter, either, because when Tom Hellweg cried no one could even hear it. Because that could have been our
wives and our children. Because that was a goddamned fight.

"And that's how it is now, that's my point, with these so-called Christians who are running our government. They want everything
for themselves, and piss on the rest of the world. We're not even humans to them. Well, they're not even humans to me, not
anymore. Tom showed me that, way back then, but I guess I didn't learn the lesson well enough."

The wheels droned over concrete. Gil smiled broadly at the road.

Papa groaned, and dropped his head against the seatback. He gave the well one last, half-hearted stomp. "You know, I almost
feel like that little son-of-a-bitch spray-painted me. It's a microcosm of the whole sorry state of the nation. We all saw
what happened down in Florida: a bunch of fat little fraternity boys didn't want the votes counted, so they banged on the
doors until they stopped. A brave little bunch of trust fund patriots, barging in to stop the vote. They bullied the country
away from us. We can't let ourselves be bullied anymore. I won't be bullied anymore."

We waited for more, but my grandfather was done talking.

6.

Papa was asleep by the time we turned onto Dundee Avenue. Gil stopped the car at a red light a couple of hundred yards from
a strip mall. It was a C-shaped structure, holding an office for the local branch of the DMV, a Laundromat, a sporting goods
store, along with several empty storefronts, windows plastered with For Lease signs tanned the color of parchment by the long
summer.