Chapter Seven #3
There’s no future in it, he told himself each time he slept with a man.
Back to the directives. Be a good person, a good worker.
Be a man. He resumed dating, as he had in college.
His attraction to women wasn’t what it should have been, he knew, but he still managed to go on some perfectly nice dates.
Though after one or two dates, he usually pulled away.
He was confident he could change what was wrong with him but knew it would only happen with the woman he had the right response to—in his gut, his heart, his brain.
And whoever that was would have to have the right response to him on all those levels.
If he could find that woman, he could put this other activity and all thoughts connected to it away forever. He believed that down to his core.
Then they promoted him, and relocated him from Akron to the main branch in Columbus, and three months later he met Margaret.
From the first minutes he spent with her in the bowling alley, he was drawn to her.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever been on a date with, there was that, but, more important, she was the least intimidating.
The most pleasant and carefree. She bowled strong and hard and didn’t care about all the gutter balls; she cared that he was watching her when she turned around, after pitching them.
Still, all those weeks they dated, he wondered if she was just biding her time until something better came along.
Even when he proposed—since he’d always pictured himself as married, a family man, and they seemed so easy together—he half-expected her to say no. But she said yes.
He didn’t take it lightly. He’d been with no one for months before he met Margaret—no one in Columbus—and as soon as it felt like they were getting serious, he put an end to the second looks.
As for the first looks, well, you couldn’t stare at the ground all the time.
First looks were just a part of life—and he had directives for them too.
Don’t move your brow. Don’t move your mouth.
Don’t turn your head. Don’t follow with your eyes.
Put it out of your mind.
By the time they moved to Bonhomie, he’d been married for two and a half years and was submerged in his job.
At the Bonhomie plant, he spent the beginning and end of every shift in his office, and in between he walked the walk in his hard hat, shirtsleeves, and tie, talked with a hundred different people—shouted with them, actually, because the plant was always loud.
It was a massive complex made up of one main building and half a dozen smaller buildings, with a moat of asphalt yard.
In one part of the yard, mountains of scrap metal waited to come in; in another part, stacked and cut ingots and coils waited to be sent out; in still another, uncut ingots, some weighing thirty to forty thousand pounds, sat cooling and steaming in the winter air.
Inside, scrap rode conveyer belts into the cast house, where the furnaces were lined up like hungry mouths and pure, molten aluminum was shoveled in, then raked out in troughs, first to the Hot Mill, then to the Cold Mill, while the dregs were sent to the dreaded dross house (hottest of all, at 120 degrees).
Crisscrossing over everything were the catwalks Felix plied for hours every day, to inspect the machinery from observation platforms and take readings.
To check in with supervisors whose offices were in corrugated rooms attached to the catwalks.
To interact with the machine shop guys and the jeep and forklift mechanics who sweated it out in coveralls.
Felix was the only suit those guys saw regularly and was generally thought of as a no-bullshit supervisor, a company man who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
If he was in the vicinity, he would always help put out the ash fires in the dumpsters when they flared up.
He loved this work, loved the idea of being well-thought-of by the people he assisted and supervised.
Even at the plant, with all that going on, he got the look. Once in the plant’s business wing, and once out on the catwalks. Nothing overt. In fact, the look was so subtle in each instance that Felix had to fight the urge to take a second look just to confirm it had happened.
Every day was a series of tests, accompanied by a litany of directives: be a good person, a good worker, a good husband.
Don’t slouch, don’t shirk, don’t stray from the intention.
Was he capable? Melt him down in a crucible and pour him into the mold.
Let him cool and harden, melt him down, try again.
Mark these words, Felix Salt will take the form he’s meant to take.
—
Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it seemed, Tuck & Sons had secured government contracts to produce tank parts and helmets and shell casings.
The aluminum plant in Bonhomie didn’t require refitting, because it was already set up to convert all kinds of scrap metal into ingots and plates and sheets.
In other words, it was contracted to keep doing what it had been doing all along, which was make aluminum and send it out on trucks and by rail—most of it now bound for factories refitted to make parts for planes.
Many, many planes. Felix was sending his QC reports not just to the senior executives upstairs but to a General Lewis at Camp Perry.
By the middle of winter 1942, some of his co-workers—fellow executives, themselves husbands, fathers—were enlisting.
Felix mentioned their departures to Margaret as if these men were close friends of his, when she’d only heard their names in passing.
He began to talk about how likely it was that Roosevelt was going to expand the draft to include fathers, and how he could see himself enlisting ahead of the draft, if things kept heading in that direction.
With his college degree, he said, he could go in as an officer.
If he did it early enough he could choose which branch he served in.
“What do you mean?” Margaret asked, feeling the floor tilt. She knew what he meant, and she knew she couldn’t do much to stop the way he was thinking. By April, he was resolved. He wanted to be a pilot, he said. Maybe even for one of the big birds: a B-17, a B-32.
He’d talked about wanting to fly before. Kid dreams. What did it have to do with climbing into a giant bomber in the middle of a war? That sounded like a death wish to her. Or, at the very least, a strong yearning to be somewhere else. She tried to talk him out of this flying business but couldn’t.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to. He went in for his physical and came out with a piece of information that surprised them both: he was colorblind.
“This chair?” Margaret asked, touching the wingback in the living room.
“Red. Is it red?”
It was dark green. Could he really not see that? “What about this pillow?”
He shrugged, dropped onto the sofa. “Brown.”
“Red!” she said, laughing.
He didn’t want to joke about it. She didn’t either, but she felt such relief, she was almost giddy.
They were just starting to enjoy the extra money he was making.
They were talking about a vacation to the Grand Canyon.
She wouldn’t say it aloud and was ashamed to even think it, but let other husbands go off and fight the war.
Felix, however, had already reset his sights on the Navy. No issue there with his eyes, he’d checked.
“I don’t think I could do this without you,” he said several times in the weeks leading up to his departure for basic training, and she thought, Yes, but how am I going to do this without you?
On his last night, after saying how strange it was that he didn’t have to pack anything, his eyes glassed over as he pulled her into a hug.
“It’s going to be a comfort, at least, knowing you’re safe back home,” he said.
Weren’t they in this together? Hadn’t they made a deal, even if they didn’t call it that? She felt like she was living up to her half of it. She was patient, she was here.
Hold down the fort, he said—as if the fort might leave, when he was the one sailing away.
—
He did not, necessarily, want to die for his country.
Not if he didn’t have to. But he wasn’t ignorant of the horror happening in the world and the possibility of where it might lead, nor was he immune to wanting to take part in handing it back to those bastards who were devastating whole countries, whole bodies of people.
He wasn’t about to sit around watching aluminum melt while half the country went off to fight.
He also didn’t want to be drafted into the Army and end up a foot soldier.
He wanted to go in with a little status, if he could get it.
For all he knew, this was the experience he needed.
The refitting that would finally move his interior gears in the right direction.
The discipline that would reset him.
The distance that would give him the required torque.