Part 15

He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width. He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.

I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the second-helper.

"Throw her over," he said.

Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity.

The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.

When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside the furnace shot back, it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95 deg. I wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open in his face.

We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.

"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job," he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."

"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.

"Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.

Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."

I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.

"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"

"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"

"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.

"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"

"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?"

WORKING THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SHIFT

7 A.M. Sunday

I tried to get a lot of sleep last night for handling the long turn; managed about nine hours. When I came to the locker, Stanley was there, dressed, cleaning his smoked glasses.

"How much sleep last night?" I asked.

"Oh, six, seven hour," said Stanley.

"You're a damned fool," I said; "this is the long turn."

"I know, I know," he returned, "I have t'ing to do. No have time sleep."

I looked at him. He had a big frame, but his limbs were hung on it, like clothes on hooks. His face was a gray pallor, sharply caving in under the cheek-bones. His eyes were very dull, and steady. I'd noticed those eyes of his before, and never could decide whether they showed a kind of sullen defiance, or resignation, or were just extraordinarily tired.

"Two month more," he said.

"Two month more what?"

"Two month more this work every Sunday--goddam work all day like hell, all night like hell. Pretty soon go back to good job."