from the tyranny of stratigraphy
He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other holding up a thick sheaf of worn paper. He sat with a large styrofoam cup, half-filled with warm coffee, between his legs. His legs were short and stout. His ample white-shirted belly hung out through the leaves of his suit jacket above the cup. He tossed the papers on the dashboard and they slid forward and lifted slightly and fell and lifted again with the warm air rising from the vent.
He smiled and placed his hand on the shoulder of the much younger man. “Sol,” he said. “The spelling is S-O-L. The full name is Solomon. As in the wisdom of Solomon. The wealth of Solomon.” He chuckled and the kid chuckled with him. “Saul, this way, as you have it, is an entirely different character.”
The older man’s fingers felt very short, thick and heavy on the shoulder of the younger. The older squeezed the shoulder of the younger gently. The younger man knew that when the older man stood he appeared to be much thinner because his chest was thick, and the old man had the countenance of standing, leaning slightly forward, with a posture resembling an angry bear. The older man’s hair was still dark and cropped very close at the sides and was almost flat across the top. His eyes were a light powdery blue. The skin of his face was reddish and mildly bluish in places and showed the passage of many years. His eyebrows were thick. The white of his eyes were clear.
“Sorry,” the younger man said.
“Am I your first Solomon?”
The younger sat rigidly and stared straight out of the front window of the car with his hands resting flat and open on his thighs. His eyes moved anxiously, searching, what was to him, a very new terrain.
“Well I am-” he said. “I am from Montana; and in Montana, where I’m from-“
He paused and thought longer and cautiously of the proper way to say it.
“I understand,” the older said. He squeezed the shoulder again and he began to laugh. It began with a soft chuckle which flowed, abruptly like a small stream into a large lake, into a well fed and fleshy sort of roar. Again, it was the bear. The laughter shook the car. And it seemed to shake the highway. The older man reached down and held up his coffee cup to keep it from spilling. The red and brown marshland and all of the red-brick buildings and white refinery structures and tanks around them seemed to tremble with the depth and breadth of it.
In the office, John Phillips would be talking to one of the ancient secretaries, or any of the engineers, or talking on the phone. The laugh would rise up from Solomon’s office in the back of the narrow first floor of the building. It would begin as a sonorous, distant ticklish song and slip quickly into the roar. Abraham Finch, who was a soft mountain of a man with reddish blonde hair and pale red translucent skin at all times of year, would be sitting at his vast green drawing table at the center of the large room where the engineers worked. When the roar began, Abraham Finch would slide his pen well off course. And he would slam his hand against the drawing and say, “Damn it Sol.”
Then he would begin to laugh himself. The laugh of Abraham Finch was a high girlish laugh and his eyes would light with tears and his belly and the flesh of his arms would quiver. This would set the kid and the five engineers and the secretaries to laughing softly. And so, in this exact fashion, the laughter of Solomon Wolfe would spread like a glad contagion through all of the staff of his small office every day.
“You needn’t be so sensitive,” said the old man. “I’m sure there are aspects of life in Montana with which I am not familiar. Yes.”
“Yes,” the kid said.
John Phillips was an awkward sort. He wore a gray suit that was both too silvery and too large. It glistened on him. It was the first thing he’d bought in New Jersey and was one of his two suits. Strangely, his hair was gray, though he was very young. He had only just finished graduate school. He was slender and tall, but had a constant look of out-of-placeness, something less than the look of fear and more than that of concern. He always seemed to be saying the wrong thing or facing the wrong direction or looking at the wrong place. He felt that whenever he was in Solomon Wolfe’s presence he was a young kid. Solomon called him kid.
The older patted the shoulder of the younger and returned his hand to the stack of papers. He read the papers, drank the coffee and turned the steering-wheel of the car. The younger looked to the east where the white sun had risen above the water of a bay and the tall grasses of marshland, which had once, a long time ago, run out a few miles to the bay and now had diminished to a point where the bay reached all the way inland to the highway. The water was chopped with faint short white lines from a light wind. Beneath these lines, at many places, the south side of the small rises of the water reflected the sun obliquely in bright winks and lean shimmers. The grass of the marsh land was tall and amber and was everywhere bent with the wind toward the highway. Along the line where the marsh land and the bay came together the soil beneath the grass was visible to a great distance and the soil was very dark.
“Were you born in New Jersey?” the younger said.
”No, in Germany. I moved to New Jersey when I was eleven. I lived in the Bronx for a year before that. My parents were immigrants. My mother never learned English very well. I was at school at Syracuse. Other than that I’ve been in New Jersey. Were you born in Montana?”
“In Arkansas. I’ve lived all over. My father was a writer. He lived in New York, in Manhattan, for a while. I never lived there. Did you get your Doctorate at Syracuse?”
“Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate, chemical engineering, you know. All at Syracuse. After the army.”
They passed a large gray bridge of concrete with steel cables which rose up and over the bay and a small black tug boat churned against the wind beneath it. Glances every now and then showed that the black boat was moving. With the enormity of the bridge above it, it seemed in a single glance to not be moving at all. As they passed the bridge they came to a long row of very large, stout, upright, white cylindrical tanks. They were the kind of tanks that held oil or chemicals with roofs which floated on the top of the oil or chemicals within the tank. The air smelt first sweetly and then became pungent with a harsh, acrid scent that filled the car.
The younger man held his arm with the sleeve of his shiny suit up to his face and held the fabric against his nose and his mouth as he breathed. The older took a long deep breath and filled his lungs with it and began to laugh again.
“One thing you should remember,” the older said as he finished laughing. “That smell is the smell of men and women working. Always remember that.”
The younger couldn’t help but to smile beneath the fabric of the arm of his suit.
“As you work in this business,” the older continued. “There’ll be plenty to tell you that smells of that nature are wrong things and shouldn’t be. But you remember. It is a good thing to do what can be done. And to do it in an honest and straight way. Always honest and straight if you work for me. But you remember that at the bottom and the top of it, that smell, that is the smell of men and women working. It is an easy thing to forget.”
“I understand,” the younger said. He removed his sleeve from his face and the car had moved beyond the smell.
John Phillips thought of a walk he had taken in Montana the summer before. It was in the hills above the lake where his uncle kept a small old cabin with tarpaper on plywood for walls and a roof. He had gone there to the quiet and solitude to finish writing his thesis. He walked up above the cabin that day and came to a clearing, a clear-cut that his cousins and uncles had made. Right above the cabin the forest was an old forest with trees fifty feet in height. They were fir and spruce. Between the trees and beneath the dense high blue canopy of the branches of the trees the earth was a mat of needles and his feet pressed against the mat of needles and the earth pressed back at him. The air was cool and the walking clean and easy with the trees widely spaced and no growth of brush at the ground and the soft spring of the floor of the forest.
Then he had passed into a kind of new beginning where the trees were gone and all that was left of them was a city of white stumps. The stumps had been cut three years before and after three full summers of sun had passed to gray, to light gray and then to white with fine light lines and swirls that were all that were left of the memory of life in them. The ground around the stumps was dry and also gray and had no spring in response to the step. A wiry mesh and entanglement of third year growth of brush had in places filled around the stumps and it made hard walking with the stepping over and through it.
The rains of spring had left the leaves of the brush with a fine mottling of gray dust. Everywhere in the clearing he could see the ghostly fading tracks of the bulldozers and the long slender lines where the logs had been wrapped with chains and skidded in groups of four and five down the face of the hill and to the road. Scattered at the margins and in one great heap in the center of the clearing were the piles of slash. These were the branches of the trees that had been cut and had been piled high and had been set on fire with kerosene torches that were manually pumped to make the pressure to spray the flaming kerosene. The branches that had not fully burned were a light rust-colored red and gray and were also spotted with the grey dust. The black charcoal in small blocks and chunks and pieces of the branches that were half charcoal and half dry wood lay at the base of the piles of slash.
A small stream passed through along the edge of the clearing and past the empty narrow road. Long, deep triangular ruts ran across the earth of the clearing and into the stream at sharp angles from above. The little bit of grass did not take well to these and they were barren. The stream ran straight away and did not meander. The sides of it were walled with the gray clay of the same soil as the barren ruts and the clinks of charcoal.
The water was cloudy with the clay and surely it could not be fished. John Phillips had seen clear-cut land many times. Clear cut land was the family business. But this had been the first time he had felt it.
The car took the long curve of an exit ramp that wound down from the highway to a stoplight on a wide and nearly vacant avenue. Across the avenue was a tin sided diner with windows that seemed black because the tin walls of the diner reflected the sun. The asphalt of the parking lot of the diner was weathered and full of holes and was beginning its return to an earthen condition that was only patched here and there with gravel. The asphalt of the avenue was patched in zig-zag strips with a darker newer asphalt. The yellow and white lines of the avenue were so diminished as to be unrecognizable.
Gaunt and tall black men and heavy black women and small Puerto Ricans and colorful wiry Cuban men and larger Cuban women walked beside the avenue. They walked in small clusters of twos and threes along the road in the dirt where a sidewalk was fashioned of bare earth, studded with broken bottles, beneath clusters of paper and patches of thin and desperate grass. Behind them was a fresh cyclone fence that was ten feet in height. Along the top of it was coiled razor wire and behind it were more coils of the wire piled three high and a second smaller cyclone fence that held the coils of wire in place.
Beyond that fence was a wide lawn of cut green grass that folded over shallow hills and slopes. At a distance of five hundred yards, in the midst of the green lawn were three tall buildings that were constructed of tiles of red granite and thin lines of shining steel which made tall columns between enormous panes of green mirroring glass. Beyond these and filling all of the horizon and all of the land to the north was a vast sea of tubes and pipes and cylinders and tanks. These were of every conceivable shape and size and rose and fell across the landscape. All were painted a bright white or were the silver of stainless steel. Each seemed to be connected to another.
Occasional and periodic puffs and hisses of white steam rose from here and there within the midst of it and dissipated into the sky. Solomon Wolfe steered the car onto a slip of fresh asphalt and to a gate-house beneath a stainless steel and gray concrete portico.
“Morning to you sir, Mr. Archibald,” Solomon said. An elderly black man in blue coveralls smiled and showed a line of golden teeth.
“Good to see you Missir Wuf,” he said.
“Likewise Archibald”
“How ya been Missir Wuf,”
“Good! And you? And how is Julia these days? Is she still acting?”
“Yez, but that’s a hard way for her, ya know.”
“She is a beautiful girl, at least in that picture she is. Did you ever put her in touch with Michael Dewey?”
“I don’t ‘member him?”
“He’s the producer I mentioned, a friend of my son.”
“Oh I dunno know about that. I give her the name. But I never checked after ’bout it.”
”This fellow here is Mr. John Phillips, he’s a geologist that works with me. A good fellow I’ll say. He’s from the part of Montana where they have the big grizzly bears you know.”
“Well I dunno about that. Never been. But fine to meet you. Any friend of Solomon Wuf is a friend of mine.”
John Phillips leaned forward, “It is a pleasure to meet you Mr. Archibald.”
“Archibald is my first name. MacAlister is my second.”
“John is having trouble with names today,” Solomon interrupted.
“Well it is a pleasure, Mr. MacAlister.”
“Yes sir,” and the elderly black man walked with a stoop, with one shoulder deeply leaning; and he lifted, by hand, a yellow and black wooden gate that rotated on a large gray counter weight to a slant up above the road. As Solomon passed beneath the gate the elderly man waved timidly and smiled a broad golden smile and lowered the gate behind them.
“Tried to set that fellow’s girl up with a producer, not much of a producer. But in that field I think anything helps. I wonder if he mentioned it to her.”
Solomon Wolfe had a way of always wishing to help. He was quick with advice and introductions. Whether this was a conscious, planned part of his style of doing business or simply a manifestation of his character or both — the one evolving from the other — was difficult to judge. His advice covered virtually every topic and was invariably offered with a pat on the shoulder and strange sort of sensitive, sympathetic wink as if it were both a quantitative, indisputable, scientific fact and a secret that was rarely told:
“If you’re ever held up anywhere because of a delayed flight or a canceled meeting, or waiting for equipment, get a hair cut. Even if you don’t need a hair cut, get a hair cut.”
“Never confuse a Cuban with a Puerto Rican and never confuse either of them with a black. If you do, if you call a Cuban a Puerto Rican, they’ll always remember you and not in a good way. If they’ve been drinking it could mean a fight. Even years later it could mean a fight from their remembering it.”
“There’s only one restaurant for oysters in Hoboken. I’ll take you there the next time we’re in Hoboken. But don’t eat oysters anywhere else in Hoboken; and never eat oysters in Kearney.”
“Always treat your client’s secretary as if she were your wife’s sister and you haven’t seen her in a year.”
“Never go with Abraham Finch to see the naked dancing girls. You’ll eventually meet his wife and she’ll ask and you won’t know if she is asking to see if you are honest or if she really wants to know.”
“Never imply that you know something when you don’t.”
“Always wear a hat when it is cold.”
Solomon followed a narrow asphalt lane, that took an elegant haphazard course across the lawns, to a parking lot hidden behind a hill in front of the middle of the three tall buildings. Many black men and fewer Puerto Ricans and Cubans, the later two indifferentiable to John and therefore, now, a source of worry to him, and, fewer still, women and white men, most in clean blue coveralls with blue and white hard-hats and some in white smocks, rode bicycles with wide black tires and open wide handle bars and large steel baskets back and forth between the large glass buildings and out into the crisp sea of white and silvery metal pipes and tanks.
The two men entered the center of the three buildings and were given visitor badges and provided brief and terse safety instructions that they seemed to receive in the same easy-to-swallow capsulated form wherever they went. They were told to take an elevator to the seventh floor and the receptionist would direct them to Mr. Adams.
The elevator doors opened to an odd vista through the green glass windows. The skyline of Manhattan was barely visible as a line of sinewy white-green rectangles that grew and diminished in places along their length as winds shuddered the windows, like a phalanx of distant bodies approaching a carnival mirror. The intervening estuary of the Hudson River and the bays of the small New Jersey islands were strangely absent and could only be recognized by inference. The green of the windows somehow resolved the green of the estuary and the bays into a placid nothing.
Floating occasional shifts and levers of mist rose and fell into the void and dissolved and reappeared. Those long industrial islands which should have occupied the middle distance were absent, except where the warming sun reached them in part and the rusted web of asphalt and steel that was stretched awkwardly across them was lit. The sun itself was absent from the cloudless sky. It hid beyond Manhattan and shown only as a hint of yellow in the green-brown haze that rose above the city and concealed the sea and sky beyond it.
“You’re expected Sir,” the secretary who sat off to one side of the elevators said to Solomon Wolfe, “Please use the doors to the left.”
The two doors were eight feet tall and each was three feet wide. John Phillips opened one of the doors and both men entered. The room was large, spare and elegant. All of the furnishings and a carved paneling along the base of the walls were of a dark wood that swam with natural black swirls and streaks. An array of lit dew drops of an imposing six-armed chandelier were reflected up at the two men from the polish of a long conference table. Around the table fifteen men sat in the indirect sunlight of the one large green window.
Diffuse spots of stronger light from the chandelier and from the reflection of the chandelier faintly highlighted unusual places on their faces, neck-ties and suit-jackets. Behind them and somewhat discretely concealed by the immensity of the table, baroque Rubinesque scenes of warmly polished maidens, cattle and fruit and thatch-roofed cottages glistened in dark wooden wainscot around the room.
The man at the head of the table, who stood abruptly as they entered, was Nicolas Adams. He always wore dark suits and well polished shoes. His shirts were stiff and immaculate and presented the angular lean figure of a broad shouldered and wide-chested man that he did not himself possess. He wore several chains and bracelets on one wrist, which robbed him, apparently without his knowledge, of all of the affect of his other fineries. His hair was graying, short and well cut: braced back against an absent wind with thick curls that played in a haphazard array above his forehead. He did not smile except to form short and partial masks of gratuity or pleasure where the comers of his mouth rose slightly and rapidly, and then fell with only a little less suddenness as they had risen, like Aspen leaves turned slightly with the snap of breeze on a warm summer evening.
He didn’t speak much either. He answered and asked questions with a fixed direct eye. He never reduced himself to anecdote or convivial conversation. Nor did he punctuate or embellish with gesture or tone. He spoke at an even pace which derived something of power from a featureless form.
“As most of you are aware, this gentlemen,” he said to the center of the table, “is Mr. Solomon Wolfe. Here all the way from Somerset, to tell us the results of his investigation.”
All of the men at the table gestured with nods and shy smiles toward Solomon and John. John recognized several of them. There was a little gray lawyer named Rabicus, Emanuel Rabicus, who had gone with him to the Staten Island plant. Rabicus had gold teeth and a shiny head.
At the beginning of the day they’d met on Staten Island, Rabicus had arrived twenty minutes late with a few hundred strands of longer hair combed neatly across the top of his head. He had carried two briefcases. As the day progressed, John noticed that the hair had slipped from the top of the man’s head and hung a little awkwardly to one side. At the Staten Island plant, they made red. The chemicals were mixed in enormous batches in old steam jacketed tanks. There were perhaps a hundred tanks and these stood on a wide frame of metal supports with the base of each tank about six feet above the floor. The steam ran through pipes and then around the outside of large steel tanks. And the tanks and the pipes together had been sprayed with a mixture of plastic foam and asbestos. The mixture of foam and asbestos had been died red with the process and was old. Strands of it hung away and down from the tanks like red flesh away from silver bone. The men beneath the tanks walked, under a metal grating, with wide iron shovels in groups of four from tank to tank. The air in the room was composed alternatively of clouds of white mist or a powdery crimson haze. The floor was a red-stained metal and striped with red-stained black rubber conveyor belts that ran in parallel across the enormous room. On the side of the room to which the belts were directed was a wall of red-stained asbestos that also hung free in spots here and there. A separation, kind of an intentional crack of no determinable purpose, ran beneath the wall for the length of the room and an orange blaze could be seen beyond it only punctuated by the black bases of columns that became smaller with distance.
The men were all large muscular black men and stained to red. They wore t-shirts and jeans that dripped with a mixture of pigment and condensed steam and sweat. At each tank, a small light would flash green through the red haze and a team of men would go to the base of the tank and press a button and fling open the base of the tank with a horizontal lever. A mass of several tons of hot and wet, red pigment would slide and fall and drip down through the base of the tank. And the team of men would shovel it quickly on to a conveyor belt and in a long viscous line the pigment was carried away into the adjoining room which was a large furnace. Then the lever pull was reversed closing the base of the tank and a second button was pressed and pipes that ran into the top of the tank shuddered abruptly as material ran through them and into the tank.
John had stood on a steel balcony that ran the circumference of the room beside this gray lawyer Rabicus and his two briefcases. John remembered the way the lawyer’s eyes were reddened by the steam and red particles in the air and the way the lawyer’s shining scalp reflected the orange flame that worked its way beneath the far wall of the room. John remembered that, in answer to all of his questions, the lawyer had only nodded in a fashion resembling agreement and said, “I’ll have to look into that and get back with you”.
Sitting beside Rabicus was a younger man who ran the plant in Chicago. At that location inks were produced in large steam heated vats where bags of pigment were poured into solvent. There were perhaps fifty vats. The young executive, John could only remember that his first name was Bruce and that his last name was Polish or Russian, had walked energetically, eagerly around the vats and had explained the process in great detail. Above them, workers: men and women, white and black, walked along a steel fretwork carrying bags or wheeling platters of bags which contained red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet powders. When they reached the appropriate vat, they flicked a small lever and a solvent that smelled of alcohol or sweetly like soda pop syrup began filling the vat. Then they stopped the flow with a pull of a chain and began cutting the sides and emptying the contents of the bags into the vats. They operated large slowly turning mixers with a small control panel.
Bruce walked quickly from vat to vat. He knew every detail. He worked beneath the workers. “You’re young,” he said to John.
John nodded. “You’re American.” John nodded again. “This is a yellow for the newspaper comics. Almost certainly, all of the yellow you have ever seen, in your entire life, in the newspaper comics was mixed in this room. The plant is over fifty years old and this room has been in nearly continuous operation for over thirty-five years.”
He described at length the process of electric controls, the chemistry of the pigments and the solvents, the use of the contents of each vat. John respected executives more than the bankers and lawyers because they appeared to operate on an openness and logic that could be understood. It seemed to him that the way of thinking that made for a good pipe-fitter or electrician or for that matter a good logger was the same logic that made for a good executive. They were practical men, unlike the bankers and lawyers who cryptically seemed to operate on the basis of voices in the shadows which only they could hear.
Next was the New York lawyer. John wasn’t sure if he worked for the company or was an outside lawyer. His role was clear from the beginning. He was the man they were to talk to if there were serious problems. His name was Wade Mitchell. He was slick and sleek, elegant with always the right colorful tie on the right starched shirt and the suit jacket folded neatly over his arm. He never seemed to carry a briefcase and operated with charm in the same way a lion operates with violence. He established his objective and set out with full determination to achieve it. If anything questionable were observed, he was the man to talk to. If he was involved, all conversations were protected from disclosure. And no mention could ever be casually made that a serious matter had been discovered and not acted upon.
He had a habit of interjecting himself into a conversation before it occurred to him what exactly he intended to say. He would stand in a group of three or four men and when something was said which he didn’t care for he would move his arms, abruptly aligning his hands in front of him with the palms pressed together as if in prayer and he’d look with seriousness at the person who had said what he didn’t like. Then everyone would become silent and look at him. He’d then move his mouth a little as if he were trying to speak but couldn’t. Then in the shortest most declarative yet evasive sentence he could muster he would say whatever it was that should or shouldn’t be said. Though he would never mention why.
Beside Mitchell were three Japanese who John didn’t recognize. They seemed not to speak English but he couldn’t tell for sure. Whenever anyone spoke they all sort of leaned toward that person as if they were listening and acknowledging, but they never spoke or even nodded in agreement or disagreement. They were all a little overweight and well and similarly dressed. All had black hair parted the same way and hanging overlong and slightly to one side and cut short in the back.
Next was Ned Jessup and John liked him a great deal. He was the manager of the Newark Plant and an old friend of Solomon’s. He was a very fat man with a bad New Jersey accent, though he moved with agility and grace. To him every moment, every phrase, every wink and smile were opportunities for laughter and if the moment, phrase, wink or smile were missed he regretted it and it showed.
The Newark Plant was a large old building: seven or eight stories. In it most of the inks for the New York papers were mixed. It was an old operation too. The men who worked in it were old, in their fifties and sixties, and a few in their seventies.
At all of the plants, John had to lead long interviews of the most senior employees: what was made and stored when and how? That sort of thing. It was the Newark Plant which had over a hundred years of history. None of the employees had been there for that length of time, but some had been there for fifty years. And some spoke of dead or retired fathers or uncles who had been there almost from the very beginning. The thing that was most striking about Ned Jessup was the way that he knew and understood the men. He knew their pride. He knew the names of their children. He knew that they were old and were therefore both fragile and wonderful. He would introduce them by saying, “the respectable Mr. Watson” or “the respectable Mr. Olson”.
The plant was an old warehouse built of delicately carved stone with gargoyles and other strange things which hung out from the intricate stone of the upper floors. It was a narrow building with enormous windows because, when it was built, electricity was costly and not well distributed and good electric lighting was rare. The operations were very old with leather belts that ran from pulleys and spindles along the walls and the ceilings and wire hooks that hung down and out from the leather belts. The pigments were in a kind of heavy plastic bag that were dangled from the hooks on the leather straps and the men could move the bags of pigment around with small levers that would engage and disengage the leather belts from the continuously spinning wheels.
The old men knew which printer or newspaper they were mixing for and how much of red or blue or whatever to add to the drum of solvent. They used large electric hand mixers about half the size of a person to mix the ink. They would add some white and mix it and then some red and mix it again. Then they’d compare the color of the ink with a swatch of glossy paper from their pockets or from a book beside them. Then some yellow and another mix. They’d ring a bell and a team of three Puerto Ricans or Cubans, who only spoke in the Spanish, would come and seal the drum and roll it away and return a moment later with another empty drum.
John remembered walking around the outside of the building with Ned Jessup. They’d walked around the back beside a rusted green dumpster and Ned Jessup pushed against John with his whole arm against John’ stomach and John noticed that Ned Jessup was looking down. On the ground in front of John was a pile of a dozen syringes and needles splayed in all directions. John might have stepped on them had he not been been nudged to the side. They were piled beside a cardboard box next to some railroad tracks behind the plant. Jessup was explaining about who owned the rail lines and how that was a problem for the company when the box moved and both John and Ned Jessup stepped back quickly. A small worn and dirty woman rushed out from the box. She was carrying a greasy blanket and she ran with a long stick in a leaning stiff-legged jog around the corner of the building beside the dumpster.
John remembered Ned Jessup kneeling in an awkward sort of fat-mans way and pulling something out of the box and walking quickly around the corner after the crippled woman, saying, ”Hey Mam, Miss, Ya Shoe, Ya Shoe,” until she was clearly gone.
John was seated between Ned Jessup and Solomon. Beside Solomon was Jonathan Swart of the Ohio Plant. Jonathan Swart was such a worried man and Abraham Finch called him Jonathan Swift because he never understood things the first time they were said. At the Ohio Plant they made a chemical to produce a particular color. John had never heard of it. It was known to rapidly cause cancer in those who were exposed to it. There had been testing done in the forties by the Germans on Jews, actual human testing. A British report issued just after the war identified ten or so chemicals as having been found by the Nazis to be extremely carcinogenic and this chemical was one of these. There had been a few instances of cancer in the work force at that Ohio Plant and the chemical was in the ground water between the plant and a river that ran behind it. Jonathan Swart was a man broken by that chemical. He seemed always to be considering the implications of it, festering with the knowledge of it. It was destroying him as surely, and nearly as swiftly, as those who had contracted cancer from exposure to it.
Although the company was working to solve the problems with it and had solved the problem with workers being exposed to it, and the company hadn’t owned the plant and Jonathan Swart hadn’t even heard of it when the exposure and the releases to the ground had occurred, it was clear and tragic that he had assumed a sense of moral responsibility for it and allowed that to consume and destroy him. He was ruined by the circumstance of, and at the same time, dealing with the problem and acting on the direction of executives and lawyers who lived and worked thousands of miles away and had never seen the plant or known the people who had come down with cancer.
Beyond Jonathan Swart there were another half a dozen men, all were well dressed lawyers and bankers from New York. They were the organizers of the deal. The deal was the purchase of the company by the Japanese. Solomon and John and another six or seven men who worked for Solomon had visited most of the plants, and soil, water and air samples were taken and an estimate of the costs of the environmental and worker safety compliance costs for the business had been prepared. This was the final meeting. They were to provide the cost estimate and the basis for it in great detail.
The meeting went the length of the day with chicken salad sandwiches for lunch. John drank too much coffee and in the beginning he had trouble concentrating. They showed hundreds of slides and charts, and Solomon presented vast spreadsheets of various costs under various circumstances. the bankers asked questions about inflation adjustments and spreading out of investments in infrastructure. The time-value-of-money was a phrase that was used a lot. The lawyers said things about regulatory climates and potential civil litigation. The Japanese said nothing. When the discussion came to the Ohio Plant, the executives were almost silent as Jonathon Swart worried his way through the complex and tragic story. One lawyer asked another, “What are the safety regulations like in Malaysia?” Another said something softly that John couldn’t hear. “How about Taipei?” the first lawyer said. “Taipei is good,” the second answered. “Taipei is very good,” a third interjected. “Sounds like Taipei, Solomon what do you think?”
Solomon Wolfe rose quietly and stood straight with his left arm across his stout firm belly. He wiped a small fragment of bread crust from his tie. “It seems to me,” Solomon said and he looked at both John and Ned Jessup. John had noticed that Jonathan Swart appeared to be distracted and minimally smiling. “It seems to me,” Solomon repeated, “that that kind of thinking is what caused the problem in the first place and if carried to its fullest will cause a second similar problem. Your Ohio liabilities are now fixed and will only be increased, perhaps more than doubled, by moving the production. I am not an attorney, but that is my read of the situation.” Solomon sat down then and the lawyers spoke very little for the remainder of the meeting.
As the two men emerged to intersecting ovals of overhead lighting in the nearly vacant parking lot of already early evening black, although it was only five or six o’clock, Solomon clutched John on the arm and winked at him. “Good job,” he said.
They traveled in silence with Solomon behind the wheel. From the turnpike, the lights and fires of the refineries shown in a continuous, incessant, harsh and foul sort of New Jersey poetry. Solomon sometimes lowered his window slightly and raised it again moments later. The air was cold and crisp. John noticed that, for the first time in his experience, this New Jersey refinery air didn’t smell all that badly. And he wondered if he’d ever return to where he’d been at the beginning of that day.