The Pulse of the Ballast

Mateo pushed the cast-iron grate with the calloused heel of his left hand, holding his breath so as not to swallow the crust of gray foam licking down the sewer. The grate gave barely four fingers. It protested with a rough, rusty groan—exactly the sound of a dull blade scraping a wooden trough—before jamming against a mass of ballast petrified by freshly cooled tar. Mateo didn't curse. Cursing wastes air, and air in the drainage shafts is a luxury paid for with blood in the throat. He slid through the gap sideways, dragging his ribs against the jagged edge, like an old animal making for the bank after escaping a poisoned flood.

He spat oily mud against the stones.

The spit came out blackish, streaked with the burnt lubricant of the ore hoppers and with that sour, warm, penetrating stench that down there spilled across the stones and never dried. As he straightened, his left collarbone burned with the fury of an ember wrapped in wet wool. Three pale tendons from a pit beast—stitched to the living bone with a saddler's curved needle and tarred hemp twine—pulled the skin inward into a festering braid that throbbed beneath his neck. They didn't hurt the way a clean workshop wound hurts; they vibrated. It was a harsh, constant vibration, like the invisible strain in the steel cables below deck when the cranes lift a cast-iron block to the point of snapping.

The air on the surface was no better than in the galleries, but at least it was cold. Four blocks away, toward the dry docks, the steam hammers boomed with a dull heartbeat that made the embankment gravel tremble and crept up from the ankles to the hip. The sky had the slate gray of the precast concrete blocks stacked in the yards, and the fine rain beginning to fall washed nothing clean: it only stretched the grease stains across the puddles in the gutter and drew from them those murky violet glints the foundries call the slag's eye.

Mateo leaned against a rough concrete pillar coated with a slick layer of industrial silt. He ran the back of his hand over his chin. His skin was rough, coal dust ground into the pores, and the scab on his lower lip split open again with a sharp sting.

He limped toward the Lower Causeways junction. He remembered the way with the mechanical precision with which a lathe operator remembers the pitch of an English thread: twelve steps from the storm drain to the switch shanty, turn starboard down the awl alley, and look for the oak doorway with the hammered iron base where his family had repaired connecting rods for three generations. He remembered the smell of his own workbench: brass shavings tempered by fire, beef tallow for the bedways, and the cheap tallow candles with which he illuminated fine adjustments late in the evening.

He reached the corner and slowed.

There was no corner.

Not a single oak beam was left, nor the chestnut frame, nor any trace of the tin sign where his father's name had held out against thirty years of damp and saltpeter. In its place rose a blind wall of rough concrete, freshly stripped of its forms, where the marks of the pine boards and the badly fastened bolts that had held the metal guides could still be seen. Behind tarpaulins soaked by sleet, the dull orange glare of arc welding crackled with an electric hum and cut shadows against the mud.

The demolition had been meticulous, as if an entire committee of scriveners had drawn up the inventory of destruction before swinging the pickaxe: gone was the two-hundred-pound spindle press, the fourteen hand-forged open-end wrenches, the German bench vise whose handle had a play only his left wrist knew how to compensate for, the two wobbly wicker stools, and the brown earthenware mug with the chipped rim where he used to cool his chicory coffee.

In the mud at the edge of the ditch, half-buried by the ruts of a dump truck, lay a crushed can of axle grease.

Mateo stared at it for a long time without moving, water trickling down the collar of his filthy shirt and sliding over the braid of tendons stitched to his chest. The old leather of his boots creaked when he shifted his weight from one leg to the other to ease the cramp in his thigh. It was a dry creak, much like the snap of a chicken bone breaking under a thumb. He thought of looking for a stick among the rubble to poke around in the mud, but his hands wouldn't obey him. They hung there, heavy as lead clappers.

"That hide of yours is going to end up attracting the estuary gulls, master," a voice said from the hollow of an abandoned hopper.

It was Nico. The boy was sitting in a squat on a rotted wooden crossbeam, sheltered from the wind by a warped sheet of zinc. He had a brown wool scarf wrapped around his neck up to his ears and was slowly chewing a piece of stale bread smeared with rancid lard, tearing it with his front teeth because he had no knife. With his free hand, he held a strip of copper wire that he bent and straightened against his thigh in a mechanical, pointless motion.

Mateo took a while to find the breath to answer. His larynx rasped from the quicklime of the pipes.

"When did they bring in the machine?" he asked. His voice was no more than a muffled rasps.

"The Thursday before the Feast of the Snows," Nico said, without stopping the wire-bending. "Three crews from the Consortium came with two steam crawlers and an order bearing a lead seal. They said the foundation was blocking the alignment of the high-boilers' return pipe. They were hammering away until midnight. The racket wouldn't let anyone on the block sleep, but by four o'clock everything was loaded onto the rubble barges and dumped at the bottom of the roadstead."

"The tools..."

"The iron was kept by the one-eyed foreman from foundry five. He carted it off in a mule-drawn wagon before sundown. You got any tobacco, master?"

"I don't have tobacco."

"Bad luck. Down at the docks they're paying ten cents for a dry butt if it's overseas leaf. They say tobacco chases the wood-borer from the lungs, though my uncle smoked chopped cherry branch and burst spitting foam out his nose in lock seven. Maybe cherry doesn't count as a good plant."

Nico finally raised his head and fixed his gaze on Mateo's shoulder. The boy's eyes, small and glassy like cheap glass beads, lingered on the bruised flesh where the beast's tendons poked through the tears in the fabric. The surrounding skin was swollen, taut, and tinged with a bilious yellow that seemed to stain the very cloth of the shirt.

"That smells like a ditch-dead, Don Mateo. Like a gutted dog that's been rotting in the sun for three tides."

"It's pulling tendon."

"Well, it pulls badly. It moves on its own, like bait worms when you leave them out in the tin in the sun."

Nico took another bite of bread and wiped his greasy fingers on his trouser leg. The gesture was so ordinary, so devoid of terror or pity, that the coldness of the dock returned to Mateo the dry certainty of being alone.

Mateo thrust his right hand into his vest pocket and felt for the two brass washers and the old ten-cent coin he had left in the world. The coin was ice-cold, worn down by the friction of other coins that no longer existed. He remembered the blind tunnels beneath the foundry, the collapsed brick vaults where water rose to the waist in a matter of minutes and the air reeked of caked carrion. He remembered the three laborers who remained trapped in the drainage gallery during the collapse of the sluice gates; men whose names the foremen had already erased from the day-wage slates with a damp rag to avoid paying compensation to the widows.

"Down there, there was nothing left to scrape," Mateo said, swallowing hard with difficulty. "Just dirty water and cave-ins."

Nico chewed calmly, looking toward the pit where the welding continued to flicker in the fog.

"Well, up here you won't find a better broth, Don Mateo. Beef is expensive, and those who come from the canals get tossed onto the pontoon before they even manage to ask for charity slop."

The rumble of footsteps over the ballast lacked the haste of the afternoon-shift workers or the lightness of the coal thieves. It was a measured, heavy, dull tread, the gait of those who walk with leather soles reinforced with three-headed nails to keep from slipping on greased ties. Four men with oilcloth coats and carbines slung over their shoulders advanced along the edge of the foundation trench. Leading them was Bruna Varga.

The inspector wore no coat. She wore a dark green cloth quartermaster's tunic, frayed at the cuffs and with the shoulder loops ripped out entirely—leaving barely a few yellowish threads where the lock-guard stripes had once shone. Her hands were thrust into stiff buckskin gloves that creaked like dry cartilage every time she closed her fists. Her face held that sallow, hard paleness of people who have spent thirty winters in front of calcining kilns without blinking at the sparks; small eyes, sunken beneath straight eyebrows, and a white scar splitting her upper lip up to the side of her nose, giving her a permanent expression of disdain.

"Hold it right there," Bruna said, without raising her voice.

Her tone had the dryness of a sentence read before an empty bench. The three guards accompanying her fanned out, resting the stocks of their carbines against their hips with the mechanical reluctance of old hunting hounds.

Nico, who knew the music of those boots better than prayers for the dead, slipped away from the bottom of the hopper like a water snake, leaving behind only the bread crust and the piece of twisted wire on the ground.

Mateo didn't run. Not because he had courage to spare, but because his right knee had locked up with the cold and the three tendons of his collarbone gave a violent tug, forcing him to arch his back to the left. The pain blurred his vision for an instant, dyeing the dock a dull red.

Bruna stopped two yards from him. She smelled of sour pipe tobacco, old leather, and the phenol disinfectant with which the militia sprayed barracks cots to kill scabies.

"Look what the main sewer vomited up," muttered one of the guards, a big lad with pockmarked cheeks who spat a thread of tobacco onto Mateo's boots.

"Shut up, Pardo," the inspector said without looking at him. Her eyes immediately locked onto Mateo's chest, scrutinizing the grotesque seam running up his neck like a vine of living flesh. "You were supposed to be at the bottom of foundry four's cesspool, Cerna. Your name went into the cave-in casualty report fourteen days ago. The contractor paid for your white pine coffin out of public charity."

"The pit... gave way," Mateo managed to say, forcing each word out between clenched teeth.

"The pit was sealed with liquid concrete last Saturday," Bruna retorted, taking another step. The leather of her gloves creaked loudly as she rested her right hand on the hilt of her service machete. "And names that get entered into the casualty log don't go out for a stroll on the ballast at shift change. The dead have no right to occupy space on the public right-of-way nor to breathe the coal smoke of the town council's boilers."

"I had... the workshop," he said, pointing his numb arm toward the wall of precast blocks.

"There is no workshop anymore. There is new quartermaster construction. And you are not registered in this district. Identify yourself by street, number, and guild registration number, or I'll shove an iron rod up your spine and throw you back into the collector the way you came out."

Mateo tried to take a deep breath. The cold air filled his mouth with the acrid taste of soot and kiln sulfur. He wanted to say the name of his old street. He wanted to pronounce the words his father taught him before steam engines reached the causeways: Ratchet Alley, number four, next to the old dock forge. It was a simple phrase. A phrase that any patrol guard ought to respect before drawing steel.

He opened his mouth.

His swollen, parched tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like a mass of leather soaked in brine. He tried to force air through his uvula, but the braid of tendons grafted onto his collarbone gave a brutal jerk, an internal lash that twisted the nerves of his neck toward the back of his head. His street's name broke at the bottom of his throat. Instead of human words, an animal, cavernous, and dry snap burst from his lips—the dull crunch of a beast's jaw closing over a bone joint in the gloom of a pit—while his lower jaw began to tremble with an uncontrollable spasm that made his teeth chatter with the violence of two sharpening stones striking dryly together.