Lions

~ ~ ~

Until this particular summer, whenever Gordon wasn’t with Leigh, he was with his father, and they were welding. While everyone else his age was riding bicycles, or playing Little League in Burnsville seventy miles down the highway, or later going to football games and cruising the main strip there, Gordon was being trained.

The work was a convenient excuse for what would have been inexcusable for a boy had he not been so occupied: he didn’t play baseball, football, or any sport; he neither hunted nor fished; he liked to read but disliked school, and he spent most of his time with Leigh, the only other person his age in Lions, who was herself for a long time a scrappy, friendless girl with a blistering case of eczema.

The truth, however, was that he loved the work: the elegant planning and subsequent execution with the plasma cutter, the metal cutting chop saw, the oxy wrench, and especially the Precision TIG 375, which cost John Walker just about a decade’s worth of discounted work to purchase. It was new the year Gordon turned fourteen, a beautiful shining red machine with a built-in water cooler, which meant he didn’t have to wait for the torch to cool, mid-project. He could glide right through weld after weld, so that all the background noise of the highway, the birdsong, the radio music, and the news of the day became part of the finished joint. His father told Gordon once that in his work he must seek a precision of more than mathematical or technical accuracy, alone, and Gordon always felt he was approximating that in summer, using the TIG.

Early summer mornings in the shop were his favorite: green ribbons of prairie sandreed combing themselves through the short yellow wool of last year’s grass, blue fields of new wheat. At seven o’clock he’d haul up the corrugated metal door of the shop that opened to the road, introducing a new silence, deeper than when the door had been closed. Dust motes and gold-dusted moths. Smell of coffee. Above the sheet-metal roofing, looping whistles of orioles and shrikes in the blanched sunlight. Out back his father would turn on high plains radio news. A red Dodge Ram or a long forest green Oldsmobile with shining chrome hubcabs might float past as Gordon stood in the open door. From the Gas & Grocer he might hear voices calling, a car door closing. There was the smell of sheep manure from the farms farther east. Everything moved in slow motion in clear light. He knew the days couldn’t remain so. It was a sort of presentiment, a flash of knowledge in the midst of dread, the medium its very message: none of this will last.

The morning after the stranger disappeared, Gordon’s father had gone north in his truck as he sometimes did for a few days at a time, and left him with two pieces of carbon steel pipe to look over. This wasn’t a real job, John had said, it was just an experiment — insurance against the future. He opened his large hand on the scrap pipe. “Likely more gas and oil pipe in the next few decades, and less irrigation pipe.”

“Jorgensen didn’t plant any wheat,” Gordon said.

John nodded. “There’ll be less and less wheat.”

“What do you want me to do with this?” It was much larger pipe than he was accustomed to working with.

His father had given him an odd instruction, but now Gordon had the shop door open and was doing as he’d been told. He set the pipe in the welding position, and began an imaginary weld, feeling how the electrode would need to move, how his sight lines would change continuously, how the weight distribution and position of his body would adjust themselves as he ran the bead. The line would be straight, but curved. This was difficult. Even without striking the arc, he kept losing his line. He could see why the dry run was important. He wasn’t used to welding pipe this large, and even scrap like this was probably as expensive as it was rare. He stood, brushed off his pants, and turned off the radio. He took a sip of coffee, and returned to the pipe. For a moment he closed his eyes, then held the torch without bracing his arm, and again, bracing his arm.

“It’s the Karate Kid,” a voice said. Gordon felt his cheeks warm and turned around.

It was Dex Meredith, a big, blond, three-sport athlete from Burnsville, on his way to some college in California. He was standing beside a short guy from school, a baseball player with reddish hair. Gordon thought his name was Ryan.

“Don’t let us stop you.” Dex put up his hands.

Gordon walked straight toward them, reached overhead for the shop door, and pulled it shut. He stood with his back against the door.

“Sorry man,” Dex called out. “You looked like the Karate Kid.”

Gordon said nothing.

“He really did, didn’t he?” Dex said to his buddy.

The other guy was still laughing.

“Guy is just like his dad,” Dex said. Gordon could tell by his voice that they were walking away. “They even look the same.”

“Got to respect him for one thing, though.”

“Nope, him and Leigh haven’t done it yet. Something about a family curse: welding torch for a dick.”

“Shit. I would have done her in, like, seventh grade.”

“I know, I know.”

For the next three days, Gordon sat in the shop with the power off, the coffeepot on, and a stack of paperbacks. He knew he was disrupting a sort of ceremony of his father’s — the paperbacks were to be read after work, after you’d washed your hands and eaten, and not before. But what was that rule but an arbitrary preference. After three nights, John Walker returned from the north in time for dinner.

He sat with Gordon and Georgianna at the kitchen table eating pork chops from one of Dock’s hogs, sugary applesauce from a jar, and frozen peas cooked in butter. There was a little sunburn on John’s cheekbones and his lips were chapped. He looked across the table at Gordon and smiled.

“The difficult thing with welding that pipe,” he said, “will be the tie-ins coming into and going off the tacks.”

Gordon looked out the window.

“In the morning,” John said, “we’ll turn up the grinder and I’ll show you what to do.”

Georgianna glanced at her husband and shook her head.

Gordon was aware of the sudden silence, and that his parents were waiting for him to say something, or look at them. He kept his gaze pointed out the window. “I was thinking maybe I need some time off from welding.”

John looked down at his plate and cut his meat.

He did not speak again at the table, and when he was done he walked outside. Over the next four days he and Gordon would speak little, working together not at all. Georgianna followed John outside and Gordon scraped the plates and washed them, watching his parents watching the magpies.