Chapter Eighteen
Supply and Demand
As the month of July passed quickly by, the reality of the journey we were preparing to take started to set in. Mitty's Plan, which we had undertaken in the beginning, honestly, as something of a lark, was starting to look like something we were actually going to have to try and attempt. The logistics of it all were suddenly quite overwhelming. The engine, the rolling stock, producing fuel – we had made a lot of progress in all of these areas – but the sheer number of other details that we hadn't even begun to address almost prompted us to cancel the whole thing.
Most prominent in all of our minds was actually acquiring the boots we were planning to sell. Laying our hands on them was not a problem – there were freight containers full of boots lining the road out to The Shop, just laying there unguarded – but purchasing a large number of shoes was a different matter.
Exactly who could we go to and place an order for ten thousand pairs of boots and not raise any suspicions? Despite our secrecy and our fear of how the authorities would react if they discovered the details of Mitty's Plan, I honestly think that everyone involved with The Cordwainer considered it a legal venture. We weren't thieves. In the end, to get The Cordwainer rolling on its tracks, we understood that we might be forced to perform quite a large number of petty thefts, but the boots themselves... well, if we stole those, was there any way to maintain the pretense that we weren't embarking on something that was anything other than a simple criminal enterprise?
But can you steal something with no value? It was an honest question. If, as I had come to surmise, the value of the boots made in Boot Hill was in the labor needed to make them, not in the product itself, could it be said that the boots themselves had any real value? The intrinsic value that footwear has when it's on your feet, sure, but realistically no one was ever going to wear a boot that had been rotting, forgotten in those storage containers beside the road. Not unless The Cordwainer took them to a place where people were short on shoes. The Shop made them, not for anyone to ever wear as boots, but as a way to keep a population employed and distracted. Weren't we imparting to the boots their only real value by putting them on The Cordwainer and taking them to market? Could you steal something that no one would miss? Yes, perhaps, the Concession would not share my view, but were we really being thieves?
Then, we had to consider the hydrogen peroxide we were about to help ourselves to. There was no store where we could go and purchase such a product in the quantities we would need them. The five thousand gallons we eventually stole was a literal drop in the bucket to the amount in the mega-gauge tankers stored behind The Shop.
But more so than the boots we took, the H2O2 would have eventually been put to use. I feel safe in the assertion that if the adventures of The Cordwainer had managed to remain a secret, no one would have ever noticed any peroxide missing. But it was still theft. Pilfering perhaps would be more accurate, but stealing all the same.
In the years since the affair of The Cordwainer, I've been asked by many people if I still feel that the enterprise was justified, considering the scale and scope of the larceny required to accomplish our goal. And while I try not to stand as an example of how stealing can sometimes be right, I cannot think about the thefts without framing them in the larger context of the Concession's stranglehold on towns like Boot Hill.
If anyone had owned anything at all other than the Concession, perhaps stealing would never have been required. We could have built our train and crossed the mountains legally, purchasing everything we needed on an open market. But no such market existed, so we were forced to improvise. Was that wrong? Perhaps. But never in the intervening years have I been able to muster the strength to feel guilty about what we stole. Role models perhaps we are not, but I can hardly call us hardened thieves, either.
What really came to concern us, however, as the departure of The Cordwainer neared, was the risk posed by the Polypigs as we crossed the mountains. The Polyamorous, Bigamist, Mormon separatists had been operating all that summer in the mountains outside of Boot Hill. The state newspaper was increasing full of the military's attempts to flush these outlaw gangs out of the hills, as they'd been flushed out of Utah, Nevada, Oregon and Idaho. None of us was sure of the path the old Northern Pacific took through the mountains, but it was a fair guess that our path would take us through the middle of Polypig-infested territory. Fluky and Mitty suggested, and I reluctantly agreed, that we were going to need to arm ourselves, lest we lose everything to bandits before we had even seen the slopes of the western side of the mountains.
Fluky went to his Cannabis chums and came home with three .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers wrapped up in a sack. He showed them to us one evening while we were working on The Cordwainer's engine. Unfortunately, he was only able to acquire two rounds of ammunition – bullets in those days being far scarcer than guns – and one of the cartridges looked significantly corroded. It was hardly an arsenal, but it was all he could rustle up. It would have to suffice.
As July was coming to a close and Sophie's engine was beginning to near completion, the need for the traction motors to complete the design became critical. Her engine, essentially, was the first stage of a two-stage design: Hydrogen peroxide reacted with a catalyst, which produced steam, which turned the turbine, which generated electricity. The electricity then needed to run electric motors – Sophie had specified one per car of our rolling stock – which would propel our cargo of boots and ourselves up and over the snowcapped mountains, and down to the Big City.
But as the first days of August arrived, we had begun no work to construct these motors. Sophie, when questioned, dismissed their absence as unimportant. But I pressed the issue, and Sophie relented, loading us all up into the wrecking truck and taking us to a remote fenced-in lot on the wrong side of the tracks I had been completely unaware of until she drove us there.
Inside the fence we found a cornucopia of old, rusting trolley cars of the same make and model as the one I rode daily to The Shop. There were at least twenty, parked in amongst the brambles. Some seemed very old, some almost new. Sophie instructed us to salvage whatever electric motors we might need from the trolleys there scattered about. She assured us that all the trolleys, if otherwise well used, were still perfectly serviceable.
The Luma Transit Authority, she said, received a new trolley car, annually, every April like clockwork on a flatbed Concession car – a new trolley, ever year, if they needed it or not. This was where the old ones – and sometimes the brand new ones if it was just too much trouble to trade out a trolley – were abandoned.
We had our traction motors, and after a dozen trips to and from the LTA yard, we had them bolted to the chassis of our freight rolling stock, driving both fixed axles by the means of chains. On top of all of this, Fluky constructed the hoppers we would be filling with the boots, out of corrugated sides of old delivery trucks. Some of the old advertising was still visible on the iron. One car sported an advertisement for Jefferson's Safe Cigarettes. Another the logo of a long forgotten haircare product. The last of the three cars had an epic mounted silhouette advertising Tom Mixx Trail Ready Cereal.
This advertisement I had to stare at for awhile. I could barely remember the advertising campaign from when I was a child, back when there was still the need to influence people's purchasing decisions. The cowboy on horseback and his trusty cereal, providing all the energy he needed for a hard day working the trail. It seemed comical now, but it was still the cereal I ate every morning – the only cereal available at the Concession Store. Tom Mixx? Would you have been happy being the last Cowboy Cereal left on the shelf?
With all the pieces of The Cordwainer puzzle falling into place, we made the collective decision that the time had come to move our whole operation out of Zimmerman's junkyard and over to the ghost town of Pottersville, in preparation for our departure.
An unannounced visit one Sunday afternoon by Deputy Aesop precipitated the move.
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He came riding into the yard around three o'clock on the back of his slow, old white pony, all dressed up for duty, pistol at his side. We only had a moment to rapidly throw a tarp over the partially completed engine before he was close enough to make out what we were up to. We tried to look busy, working at tools as the Deputy dismounted. He made his slow way into the large workshop, looking gingerly around.
“Afternoon, boys,” he said as he came in out of the sun. Fluky was sitting up on top of the turbine housing, swinging his feet leisurely over the side.
“Sheriff,” Fluky nodded.
The Deputy moved, all hunched over with age, and did a circle around the shop. We all waited quietly while he had a look around. The Cordwainer freight cars were plainly visible, but unless you knew what you were looking for, it was almost impossible to tell them apart from the rest of the junk filling Zimmerman's yard.
After almost a minute, the Deputy returned to the front of the shop, apparently unable to find what he'd come to look for.
“Boys,” was all he said as he stepped back out into the yard and back up onto his old pony.
What he'd come to the junkyard looking for, I can only guess. It was obvious that something about Mitty's Plan had drawn the attention of someone in Boot Hill, and it was more than enough to put the fear of God into the three of us. That night, we hooked up the rolling stock, one at a time, and towed them under the cover of darkness over to the terminus of the Stephenson gauge tracks in Pottersville. There we mounted them onto the rails, all in line at the platform of Union Station. It cost us all a night's sleep, but when we were done, we had, for the first time, the whole Cordwainer fully assembled and pointing in the direction of the Big City.
It was a heartwarming sight, the sort of thing that sets the hairs on your neck on end, seeing the machine set up in its entirety. The cargo hoppers were still empty, true, and we lacked fuel or even a fuel tank to hold it, but the frame of our train was on its tracks, and it required no imagination to see that The Cordwainer was a real, solid thing – a train that was going to take us all across the mountains.
Moving the operation to Pottersville had a secondary advantage: peace and quiet for the mass refining of hydrogen peroxide that we still needed to achieve before The Cordwainer could depart.
Sophie had put an end to vacuum distillation as a means of purification. She said it was recklessly dangerous and downright stupid. She wanted to refine the industrial strength peroxide we had access to at The Shop into high test via fractional crystallization. Basically freezing it, in a number of steps – I was hazy on the exact details. What I did understand was that the process would require a professional-grade cooling unit, nothing we could jury-rig together ourselves. And there was only one of those in Boot Hill.
“Not Mrs. Frostynips!” Fluky had exclaimed when we broke the news to him that we'd have to steal Putter's freezer coil, if only for a few days, to process the peroxide. “Ain't there another way?” he'd begged.
“We all have to make sacrifices, Fluky,” I consoled him. I was thinking of my mother's silverware. I had had to steal two more place settings to fashion a new catalyst for Sophie's engine, our last having been blown to bits along with our first engine and the statue of Mr. Potter.
“But Mrs. Frostynips? She ain't never hurt a soul.”
“She's already lived more than her alloted time,” Mitty commented, solemnly. “That a woman of ice and snow might live for six years... She will always live on in our hearts...”
“Ain't there no other way?”
It broke my heart to see Fluky so distraught. But we needed that freezer coil, or The Cordwainer would never leave the station.
That Saturday, there was a fiddle band playing in the bar at Putter's. The place was packed with young people; the whole town under thirty seemed to have turned out. No one was manning the kitchen. With no demand for food and girls dancing out on the floor, the cooks were loitering in the doorway to the bar, watching the show. Mitty, Fluky and myself easily slipped in through the back door. And while Mitty and I tapped our toes to the banjo player, Fluky quietly unbolted the electric coil from the wall of the walk-in freezer. Twenty minutes, and we had it in the passenger seat of the truck. We let Fluky have a few minutes of peace, alone in the rapidly warming freezer with Mrs. Frostynips. When he emerged, he looked like he'd been crying.
With the band still playing, Mitty and I sent Fluky and the freezer coil off in the truck, opting to walk home instead of clinging to the hitch of the truck for the whole ride home. As the clamor of fiddle and upright bass faded into the distance, Mitty and I turned onto C Street, casually chatting about Mitty's Plan. As we walked and talked, we became aware of the low rumble of an engine behind us. It was too even, too dulcet a noise to be Fluky's truck. We turned to see one of the low, wide, black cars I had first seen in The Shop's yard turning off Main onto C, and falling in behind us. We paused in our step as the car rolled up, the driver's window automatically rolling down.
In the car were three clean-cut, black-suited men. They turned to face Mitty and me as the car slowed to a halt. They were young, probably not much older than Fluky, Mitty or myself, and they gave off the strange vibe that they might be brothers, or triplets, or something. They almost seemed to move in unison – of one mind.
“Evening, gentlemen,” the driver said, the car idling.
“Nice car,” Mitty commented, looking over the long sleek chrome.
“Out for a stroll?” he asked, ignoring Mitty.
“Taking in the honky tonk,” I said, then cocked my head up C. “Heading home.”
If the Concession man believed me, or if he suspected we'd been up to something else, he didn't let on. “Andrew Rice, correct?” he said, looking me up and down.
“Yeah,” I replied guardedly.
“Yeah, we've heard about you,” he said and smiled. The Concession man in the back seat let out a small chuckle. “Number Six.” It was an innocuous thing to say, but somehow he made it sound like a threat.
“Yeah, what of it?” I asked, leaning forward, putting a hand on the door of the low, black car. The driver looked at my hand like it was an offensive invasion, then at Barry's watch around my wrist, and then back up at my face with a smile.
“Be talking to you real soon,” he said, and then the window of his door began to raise under my palm. I quickly pulled my hand back, out of the path of the closing glass, and the car pulled away, the engine rumbling.
“Nice car,” Mitty said again to the receding taillights.
I slugged him as hard as I could in the shoulder.