Chapter Twelve
The Cordwainer
If life was a picture show, all the hard work of a project would be easily abbreviated by a montage. A montage of sweaty, hardworking men laboring away at tools, sizing, cutting and generally looking serious, perhaps occasionally tossing each other an encouraging thumbs up. The montage would encompass and parenthesize all the hard labor, as great works of artisanship and engineering coalesced into something approaching a working device.
If only real life was a simple as a picture show.
In our movie, the one we were living and breathing, we suffered a number of intolerable false starts and dead ends. I can scarcely blame anyone other than myself. Fluky – correctly, as I estimated – was a first-class man with machines and tools. But he was not a “high concept” kind of guy. That role I was required to fill. And it was a role I was only barely able to live up to.
The problem was communication. The schematic I had on the back of my four-boxed form was, being charitable to myself, rough. There was very little there for Fluky to work from. A Lame pencil drawing at best. While I considered my design brilliant – still consider it brilliant – actually communicating its brilliance to someone else proved to be a task I neglected to invest time or spare patience for. And without that task done, well, all other tasks were forced to the wayside until everyone understood exactly what it was we were all working on.
Our first prototype turned out to be little more than a hunk of inanimate steel. Fluky had hit on the idea of using a pair of old engine blocks welded together for both expansion chambers and pistons. We would basically double my design. Two pistons in one block and two pistons in another, moving in the cylinders bored for internal combustion, with the cylinder of the opposing engine block directly above containing the catalyst. The high and low pressure pistons were parallel instead of in opposition as intended in my original design, but the whole thing was otherwise compact and quite innovative.
In practice, however, it required doubling of the crank shafts and the cams. This turned out to be a confusing clockwork mess, with chains and jury-rigged gears. After a week's time invested, we could barely turn the whole contraption over by hand without something flying off. It would have never survived the RPMs required for a fully functioning engine.
We wrote that one off as a learning experience.
For our second attempt, we stuck with the notion of using existing engine blocks, but this time we put a single crank shaft between two blocks welded flat to a car chassis. We quadrupled my design for this attempt, with a high pressure then a low pressure piston alternating along each block. We opted for an external expansion chamber, fashioning one out of a used propane canister. Fluky made a clever manifold out of copper piping that would have been trivial to time, but the weakness of our new design instantly manifested the second we pressurized the system. We were only using an air compressor, nothing extravagant, but the copper solders self evidently were not going to stand up to pressure generated by a hydrogen peroxide system.
We scrapped that design, too.
Two weeks were wasted and we had nothing but scrap metal to show for it.
We had to take a step back and attempt to understand what it was were were trying to accomplish. Fluky and I confabbed over beers one evening after work. We sat in the bar at Putter's and were able to agree after much arguing and finger pointing that, perhaps, we were both overthinking the issue. We were trying to be clever – too clever, and clever in multiple directions at the same time. We needed to focus on constructing an engine that was sufficient for our task, but no more than we needed. Clever technical solutions to engineering problems were all well and good, with infinite time and infinite resources, but we had a timetable. Cleverness always required just that little bit more cleverness to reach a practical, functional design; one more innovative solution to a problem that was, if truth be told, only created because of the cleverness in the first place.
We were over-engineering our engine. Being smart for smart's sake. We had to focus on the simplest possible solutions to the simplest possible problem. Break the task down into its individual component tasks and solve each one in turn, as simply and completely as allowed. We were giving ourselves a crash course in practical engineering, Fluky and I, and it was eye-opening to realize how little my education had prepared me for it. So much for all the book learning.
For our third prototype, we stuck with a simple two-piston design, as originally outlined in my schematic. We kept the parallel pistons from our first attempt – that made sense – a single crank had the advantage of simplicity, and the closer we mirrored the function of an internal combustion engine the less we had to re-engineer parts to fit roles they were never intended to fill.
One of the four cylinders in the block we designated the expansion chamber. Here again we opted for simplicity. With a metal slug welded to the base of the cylinder, the thick walls of the block would take whatever pressures were created by the expanding peroxide. And the existing engine head was already pre-drilled in a configuration quite similar to what we required.
The last cylinder we filled with a condensing coil. The low pressure stage would evacuate quicker with the vacuum created by the cooling water. Fluky re-piped the exhaust manifold to channel steam from the expansion chamber to the high pressure piston. Lower pressure piston to condensing coil, and lower pressure piston back to the expansion chamber, we plumbed with heavy, braided hose. The hydrogen peroxide was to be fed to the expansion chamber via a length of plastic tubing, a small supply of which Fluky had miraculously spirited away.
This engine passed our preliminary tests. We hand cranked it, pressurized the whole affair, and tested our custom-lathed cam shaft for timing. After three weeks of laboring away, we had something very close to a prototype.
Of course, even if the engine did work, we needed a train in which to put it.
Here, Fluky went insane, working all sorts of strange, long hours at the junkyard. I had nothing to contribute to this portion of Mitty's Plan and Fluky never asked for my opinion. Early on, we had agreed on rolling stock of three freight cars, an engine and rear caboose. A freight car, I figured, roughly the size of Fluky's wrecking truck, with no engine, cab or winch, could conceivably carry eight crates the likes of which I watched every day rolling off the production line at The Shop. That would be 24 crates, very close to the 25 I was aiming for, and well within the manageable, if plodding, pace of an engine that might, perhaps, produce 80 to 100 horsepower.
How, exactly, we were going to modify rusty, dilapidated old road vehicles to function as rolling stock, I hadn't put much thought into. I wouldn't need to. Fluky took the task on with relish. In the junkyard, Fluky found the chassis for three 1953 Ford pickups. They had already been stripped of their bodies, cabs and engines. Fluky removed the rear axles, cut them down to the required 56.5 inches and welded them back together. Reattached to the chassis, the shorter axles looked peculiar, but the wheels still had plenty of room within the wheel wells to move. He found spare rear axles and welded them in place at the front, replacing the rack and pinion.
Onto these axles, Fluky put regular street tires. This seemed peculiar at first, railroad cars usually rolling on steel, rimmed wheels, but Fluky's solution to that problem was wholly unique, and among the cleverest pieces of jury-rigging I was to ever see.
Tires, of course, were no good for train tracks, the rim of the wheel being the guide that kept the train on the rails, but Fluky didn't want to give up on the traction that road ties provided – even on steel rails. We were looking at a hill climb, after all, of unknown and perhaps steep grades. Fluky wanted poorly inflated rubber ties to give absolutely the best possible grip to the track, wrapping them around in rubber. But what was going to keep the car on the track? A simple guide, just like a train wheel, but not attached to the wheel itself.
Fluky welded a crossbar of steel, parallel with the ground, attached to two tire jacks, adjustable with a third
tire jack at its center. This bar could be lowered down below the bottom of the car, between the two rails the tires would be riding on, and adjusted to the point where they where almost touching, but not quite, their tips to the rails. If the car began to slip left or right off the rails, the crossbar was there to keep it on the tracks. It took some calibrating to find the sweet spot where the bar allowed the car to still move freely but didn't allow for too much shimmy, but after a few hours of testing we stumbled on the right setting.
The genius of the design was that the crossbars served multiple purposes. Cranked tight they functioned as brakes. Pulled in and all the way up, the chassis and axles were still road worthy. But the true wizardry of the whole dingus didn't reveal itself until after The Cordwainer had started its actual attempt. Out on those rails that hadn't seen use for over thirty years, we derailed our train on at least a dozen occasions. We would have been completely sunk, but we quickly learned that if we cranked out the crossbars totally, then cranked them down, setting them fully on the top of the track, we could lift up a five-ton freight car and drop it back on the rails with little more than a simple block and pulley. It was a life saver – it was more than a life saver – it was an absolutely critical piece of machinery that none of us had had the foresight to actually build. But the crossbars did the trick.
And all of it was created by Fluky, laboring away on his own late into the night.
All this time, I was still working days at The Shop. I'd come home on the trolley, catch a quick bite to eat with my father, then ride a bicycle over to Zimmerman's junkyard where we were working in his largest garage. Mitty, without fail, would join us every evening, though there was little work for him to actually do. But he was a first-class tool hander, and we employed him mainly in that capacity. He would prattle on constantly about the War and Patton and the Iberian Campaign. Fluky had a radio in the garage and we'd sometimes turn it on, hoping that Mitty might get distracted; but unless it was the bluegrass hour, Mitty was always more interested in listening to his own voice than the radio.
He'd occasionally discuss exactly how he was planning on spending his million dollars (I hadn't had the heart to tell him it'd be significantly less), but usually he just kept prattling on about the War. Intermittently, Fluky and I would have to shush him to discuss some technical detail, but by and large we went about our work mutely. There was so much to get finished, and so few hands to do it. By ten o'clock I'd call it a day, and Mitty and I would head on home. But Fluky would stay up for two or three hours more working on the rolling stock or a perpendicularly difficult problem we'd encountered with the engine. Some nights I think he didn't sleep at all.
But the train that would take us up and across the mountains was starting to take shape.
A month after we had begun our labors, in the heat of a bright July day, Fluky towed the first of his completed freight cars over to Pottersville for a road test.
With the crossbars raised, we were able to maneuver the bare chassis onto the tracks just behind the Union Station, where a road crossed over the rails. We lowered the crossbars into place and tightened them up to the rails, moving the chassis slowly forward. With the freight car free of the street crossing, we were able to correctly position the rails. And after a few minutes of tentatively maneuvering, we were soon racing up and down the tracks, the freight car running handsomely on the rails.
Fluky and I were pushing. Mitty rode on the chassis, ostensibly to control the width of the crossbars, but mostly because he was in no shape for running. Back and forth for three hundred yards we pushed the car, trying to pick up as much speed as two people on foot could provide. Mitty sat bolt upright on the car, cackling in joy as the the cravat around his neck snapped behind him like a fighter pilot's.
After three complete trips there and back, Fluky and I were beat. We screwed the crossbars into braking position and collapsed back onto the skeleton of a freight car, popping open a few cartons of Frau.
We were flush with our success, laughing and telling jokes. It was only natural, that presented with so few obvious obstacles to our eventual success, our talk soon turned to how history was going to remember us.
“A train needs a name,” Fluky said, “a good one.”
“Something fitting for the ages...” Mitty agreed, looking off towards the horizon.
“We can't name her yet,” I disagreed. “We haven't even built her.” After all, we were just sitting on the chassis of an old '53 Ford pickup with some steel welded on. It was hardly a train.
But everyone sat there for a long moment, thinking. It wasn't hard to guess what everyone was contemplating.
“The Prometheus,” Mitty said theatrically, breaking the silence.
“Ah, hell...” Fluky didn't approve.
“No, see,” Mitty said excitedly. “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and delivered it unto mankind. It's apropos.”
I laughed, “Yeah, he also got chained to a rock for his trouble and a bird ate his liver. Sounds like bad luck to me.”
“Oh, balderdash!” Mitty dismissed. “No one remembers the fire, everyone remembers the liver...”
“The Boot Hill Ass-Press,” Fluky volunteered, laughing at his own joke. “Get it? Ass-Press?”
“Oh, God,” was all I could say.
“Ass? Press? Get it?”
“Yeah, yeah, got it.”
“The Booty Hill-” Fluky was riffing.
“Thanks, Fluky,” I interrupted.
“Well, then you name the damn train,” Fluky said, finishing off his beer.
“How about we build it first and then we can give her a name,” I brooded.
But Fluky and Mitty weren't going to let it go.
“White Lightning!”
“The Hermes.”
“The Luma Flyer.”
“The General Patton.”
I shook my head to all of these, “If you've got to give it a name, make it appropriate. We're trucking boots over a mountain to sell on the black market...”
“The Midnight Marauder,” Fluky said with an air of conspiracy.
“The Outlaw Cobbler,” Mitty tried.
“No. For a start, a cobbler repairs boots, here in Boot Hill we make them.” I was being pedantic. “If anything, the train should be called The Cordwainer.”
And there it was. I don't believe we ever actually agreed on the name. But after that day, for the rest of the project, we all simply referred to the train that was slowly taking shape as The Cordwainer.
Of course, I think Mitty thought it was some Greek god, and Fluky insisted on calling it The Cordwiener, but I didn't care. I had every hope that our adventure would take us across the mountains and back without drawing the slightest bit of attention – from the authorities or history. I was interested in money, not notoriety. Notoriety, I reasoned, would get us all a one-way ticket to a dark jail cell somewhere, though the further along in Mitty's Plan that we got, the more I tried to reason out exactly what law I thought we were breaking. There was no law against building a train from junk, and no law against running one if it didn't produce any carbon. There was also no law against buying boots at cost and selling them at a profit, though this was obviously frowned upon by the powers-that-be.
What was it about Mitty's Plan that I felt was so wrong? I felt a need to be secretive, though no one had made even the slightest suggestion that something like The Cordwainer was anything illegal. Still, I was cautious not to mention Mitty's Plan to anyone I didn't have to, and I had advised the others to do the same. Perhaps I was being paranoid, perhaps the people of Boot Hill would have welcomed our efforts as an affirmation of a can-do, American attitude – but somehow I doubted it.
I knew, deep down in my core, than if The Cordwainer was ever going to roll on tracks, we would have to play our hand very close to our chest. Maybe I couldn't put my finger on exactly what about Mitty's Plan was illegal, but I knew for sure that I had grown up in a world where such attempts at self aggrandizement wh
ere strongly discouraged.
After all, who were we helping except ourselves? How did our actions in any way enrich the community?
Who were we to think we could be rich?