walker, nurse's aide, devoted daughter acting as crutch be damned: these elderly men are the celebrities in this crowd and they're not heading in to sit where their shrunken bodies will be hidden by the pews.
Jacob Kolski from Youngstown raises a hand from his walker and offers his condolences. "He caused trouble," Jacob says.
"Jacob, glad you could make it," the Senior says, shaking his hand.
Next to Jacob is Happy Lazar, down from Cleveland. "Thought he'd never die," Happy Lazar says.
"Happy, glad you could make it."
Happy is looking poorly since the last time John saw him, having developed the turtle-ish slouch—shoulders high, head low—that John recognizes from his grandfather's last months. Clasping Happy's hand, now thin as a girl's, he feels a sadness at the fan of finger bones plucking through his palm like four sharp piano keys.
The last of the old guard is Murray Kempleton, all the way from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, home of the first gas cutting-torch. In the world of scrap, the gas cutting-torch was an invention equivalent to talking movies. Murray probably tries to take the credit for both the torch and the talkies. He's about eighty-five, eighty-six. He had John's grandfather beat by a couple of years.
"Murray, great to see you. Dad would be happy you came."
Murray grasps the Senior's arm and pulls himself close. He gets up into the Senior's air space. "I told him many times. I told him, listen here, John Bonner, just because . . ." Murray Kempleton twirls the air, doesn't complete the sentence, lets the important advice hang in the sunless September breeze. His daughter is there next to him, holding his forearm. The daughter, with that stockiness that sometimes turns linebackerish in fifty-something women, seems nice enough, but John can see from the ironing lines that Murray's shirt has been sent to the dry cleaner's. John's mother wouldn't wash his grandfather's shirts either. Nor would she pick them up off the floor for him. It's true, he had begun to smell a little, but his mother's distaste for the man had settled in long before that. Although he dressed neatly, the clothes didn't necessarily have to be clean. His grandfather was a man who tried to turn his scrap yard into an obsessively organized and disinfected medical tent. He would stand under the wet scrubber and watch the iron drop into a bin until he spied a small piece of magnesium tangled in with the ferrous. He'd yell, There's sixty cents in here, get it out! But he was also a man who would stand in his bedroom among a sea of dirty socks, and a pair from the floor was the same to him as a pair from the dresser.
John Bonner & Son Metal Shredders.
A proud business for three generations. Three generations of John Bonners. The ghosts of scrap metal past, present, and future, John liked to joke. He used to milk the Shredders as fodder for all his funny anecdotes. Especially at dinner parties. He'd talk about his Strange Job. He'd talk about his Strange Employees. People loved it, especially the husbands, with their dragged-here-forced-to-do-this faces. He'd weave a few Shredder tales and suddenly he was the center of attention and loving it. Of course Elise was always there to throw him a look. She'd heard all of the stories before—the wild dogs, the live-body shredding, the various perils of the various night watchmen, the attempted scams of the father-son hillbilly teams who make their living scouring the blue highways for roadkill scrap. Elise didn't find the human condition illustrated by these stories something to brag about. The high school English teacher in her, the spelling-test roll-call schoolmarm part, came out in times like this. She didn't find any of the employees particularly amusing—not Tony or Greenslade or Worm or Ada or the hapless octogenarian Don Capachi. She didn't throw her head back and howl like the others. She looked elsewhere, out the window, where her own thoughts were gathering until they formed a riot and she left. First the party, then him.
Everything made of metal contains scrap
And everything made of metal eventually becomes scrap
from the pamphlet Don't Ignore Scrap, It Won't Ignore You,
written by John Bonner and passed out free at the
weighmaster's station.
An invisible force is at work. The mourners have self-classified in their seating choices. The church has turned into a scrap yard with the mourners ranked like grades of metal, best to worst. The purest grade, the family, are here in front: John's mother, who hated his grandfather with the purity of No. 1 copper; his mother, whose coiffed hair has never moved in the thirty years John has been alive, not even long ago when it hung in a ponytail and she was pitching a softball to him. His sister, Octavia, home from Boston—for a while, she says. His cousin, Rory who's decided to quit the business. Presumably Rory's mother, the Senior's sister, will be here at some point, since she's the sister. Nobody's heard from her. She lives in Florida.
The finest alloys come next, the old guard, his grandfather's peers in the business; then business colleagues in other fields, Judge Cotter from the federal court among them, and some guy who looks like the exmayor, not that being an ex-mayor of Columbus is any great shakes, but it's enough to get him into the alloy seats.
Iron, the scrap yard's tumbleweed, sturdy but rusty, takes up the middle ground of pews: Ada, the weighmaster cashier, sits here, as do Tony and their night watchman, Joe Greenslade. There's Dooley, the Linkbelt and shredder operator. He's either hungover or green with grief. Worm is here, too, that's sort of a surprise. Marcus, the yard boss, looms head-andshoulders above poor aged Don Capachi. And the Welbargers are in attendance, the hillbilly entrepreneurs of the blue highways, who've forgone a day of scavenging the roads to pay their respects and no doubt stockpile some good food from the reception afterwards.
The self-classification continues all the way to the rear where, hiding behind the sturdy iron middle, sit the contaminants. Here begins the sprinkling of lead, the Hispanics and the Cambodians who draw their salary in cash. Some stragglers John might have recognized had they not gone further downhill from the last time he barely recognized them—in fact, if he knew who they were he'd be surprised they weren't dead. And now some older folks, black men and women gone gray and white, people John doesn't quite know but suspects he might have long ago, people from a bygone era; some old ghosts whose loyalty his grandfather bought when such things could be purchased—Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas presents and school shoes and paid-for medical bills. They liked his grandfather and they're not afraid to say so.
At the back of the church Tommy Landers from Indianapolis has just made his entrance in Olympian fashion and he could be a clone of the Senior: good looks, big body, eyes that can ripple with emotional depth or cut like a shear. As if hearing John's thoughts, Tommy poses at the back of the church to let the sun's rays beam off him in a holy crown.
Like the Senior, Tommy's been wanting to redirect his scrap business into white goods. The scrap yards won't take refrigerators, or washers and dryers any more, too many fluorocarbons and PCBs, it's now classified as hazardous waste, so there's a market out there that Tommy wants to exploit. The Senior seems to be in some kind of race with Tommy to get his up and running and profitable. It's personal, John is sure of it. Each is too used to being the only one who parts the sea into two behaving halves.
Distracted by Tommy Landers, John doesn't notice Hayley Badecker until she's gripping his biceps with—he could swear—a flirtatious squeeze. She looks very good in her tight black suit. She's a rep from the railroad company but she looks more like the woman behind the Clinique counter, the one who's actually beautiful with or without the makeup, the one heads above the rest in commission. John notices his sister checking out Hayley Badecker with a who the hell is she type gawk, startled, he can tell, at Hayley's modelesque aura with the edge of trashy tartness the blond hair gives. John undertones an abbreviated introduction. Hayley Badecker reaches out to shake Otty's hand, smiling broadly at his sister before remembering funeral! sad! and abruptly shutting the curtain on her sparkling teeth. She goes back to regulation sympathy, mouth closed, lips together. She takes her leave with a clamped, tragic smile, using both hands to enclose the Senior's grip. "Such a wonderful man," she whispers to his father.
"Thank you, Hayley," the Senior says.
Tommy Landers