Noodles Beneath the Drenched Tarp

Nico didn't let go of the stone until the sheet-metal door wedged tight against the rotting jamb. The blow was neither heroic nor clean: it sounded like an old tin can crushed into the mud, a dull snap lost beneath the pounding of the steam hammers still throbbing four blocks away, beating the boiler plates with the blind regularity of a heart underground. He dragged Mateo by the armpits over the rotten planks of the switchman's shack, leaving a viscous trail where the gutter water mixed with the freshly cooled tar and with that grayish slime, thick as axle grease, that oozed without letup from Mateo's left side.

The room smelled of rust, of the dried urine of forgotten workmen, and of the rancid vegetable fat someone had let burn on an abandoned brass stove sitting on an empty ammunition crate. Outside, the tarred canvas over the broken little window lashed against the frame with a heavy, damp flap and let through only a dirty orange glow: the flash of the welding arcs that Bruna Varga's pickets kept driving into the embankments of the dead track.

Mateo lay flat on his back, his nape pressed against a sack of ballast that gave off basalt dust with every heave of his lungs.

It was a thick cold.

Nico didn't stop to check whether the guards from the cat ladder had lost the trail in the drain. He knelt beside him, breathing through his mouth so as not to choke on the sour stench soaking Mateo's burlap shirt, and pulled from his jacket pocket an unlabeled bottle of greenish glass, stopped with a cork wrapped in rag. He uncorked it with his teeth. The vapor that escaped from the neck smelled of pure turpentine, of pine resin distilled with sulfur—the smell the old railway shops associated with the varnish of first-class coaches, though here it served only to burn the rot before it ate into the nerve. With the tip of a blunt pocketknife, Nico cut the black hemp threads that held Mateo's flesh to the fibrous tissue throbbing, out of rhythm, beneath his collarbone.

The skin didn't yield gracefully. It cracked like old leather folded over a forge fire.

Mateo arched his back without a sound. The scream strangled behind his clenched teeth. The grafted tissue—that grayish mass of foreign tendons that never should have shared warmth with human blood—shortened all at once in a dry spasm and dragged the shoulder blade toward his throat, as if an invisible rope were hauling the bone from the bottom of a well. Nico pinned the shoulder with an open palm against the rough concrete floor and emptied a stream of turpentine straight into the wound. The liquid boiled into a pale foam as it bit the exposed flesh. The harsh vibration of the track's tension cables rumbled through the loose bolts of the floor and climbed Mateo's spine to lodge behind his eyes like a magnesium flash.

"Stay still," Nico said through his teeth. His voice didn't tremble, but his shirtsleeve was soaked with cold sweat and stuck to his ribs. "If the foreign flesh shrinks two fingers more, it'll tear your head off your collarbone. Bite this."

He shoved a piece of tarred drive belt between Mateo's jaws. Mateo bit down. It tasted of dry pitch, coal soot, and the iron of his own blood.

Nico cleaned the wound with a rag that had once been a neckerchief. He worked with the methodical haste of a man patching a burst bellows before the pressure blows the whole boiler: he scraped off the greenish crust, pressed out with his thumbs what was left inside, and ran the hemp twine through again with a curved sacking needle whose tip was black from being tempered in a candle flame. Every stitch was a yank that jolted Mateo's body against the loose boards. At the fourth knot, the grafted muscle let go of its tension with a wet snap and settled like an exhausted animal lying down in the mud.

"Done," Nico murmured, and wiped his hands on the thighs of his corduroy trousers, leaving two dark streaks like India ink on coarse parchment.

Mateo spat out the strap. He lay staring at the ceiling of rotten beams, where rainwater dripped at a slow, maddening rhythm into an empty tin can.

"Tell me you didn't lose the can," Mateo said. His voice didn't sound like his own; it was a rasp of sandpaper on wet stone.

"I didn't lose it."

Nico crawled to the corner where his bundle lay. From between two oily rags he pulled a three-legged brass stove, blackened by years of miserable fires, and a dented saucepan with the remains of the soy-flour noodles they had stolen the night before from the warehouses on dock four. The stove coughed up a low, bluish flame that stank of methylated spirits. Nico poured in some murky water from a canteen and stirred the cold paste with a pine splinter.

"They've got saltpeter in them," Nico said, watching the flame as if he were afraid it would go out just from being named. "The sack at the warehouse was torn at the bottom and touched the dock floor. They taste like a dead man."

"Doesn't matter."

"If you don't want them, I'll eat them myself. But you're going to need something in your gut when we have to cross the switching yard before the four o'clock siren."

"Give them here."

Nico passed him the hot saucepan. Mateo tried to sit up, but his left arm wouldn't answer: it hung dead, the fingers stiff and curled like butcher's hooks, the skin so cold it seemed to have spent three winters buried in snow. With his right hand—the one that still belonged entirely to him, the one with the old white scar on the index knuckle—he took the splinter and put a mouthful of pasty noodles in his mouth. They were lukewarm outside and ice-cold inside. They tasted of burnt engine grease and of the slaked lime they used to disinfect the gutters.

He ate slowly, chewing without hunger, looking at an old copper coin Nico had left on the ammunition crate: a smooth piece with no relief left, worn down by the fingers of men who must have died before the central boilers were lit for the first time.

"That coin was your brother's," Nico said suddenly, blowing on his numb fingers to bring the blood back, "or did you give it to me at the coal pier?"

Mateo stopped the splinter halfway between the saucepan and his lips.

There was a hole in his head. Not a stabbing pain, but a blank, a page torn from a ledger with a careless yank that leaves only shreds of paper stuck to the spine. He tried to remember the face of the man who had given him that coin—the gray sideburns, the smell of cheap tobacco and rapeseed oil, the way he limped on his right foot coming down the ramp from the silos—but all he found was a shapeless panic that wasn't his: the rattle of a throat crushed under a hobnailed boot, the violet glare of oil burning on a puddle, and the screech of brake shoes on an ore hopper sliding down a slope with no way back.

"I don't remember," he whispered.

"What do you mean, you don't remember? He gave it to us to pay for the barge on the lower canal."

"I don't know what barge you're talking about, Nico."

Nico stopped stirring the noodles. The splinter went still between his coal-smudged fingers. The silence that fell over the shack weighed more than the roar of the steam hammers, which outside kept pounding the iron in a dull rhythm and shaking the sodden tarp that never stopped dripping onto the planks.

"He was your brother, Mateo. The older one. The one who stayed behind in the coking ovens the year of the collapse."

Mateo blinked. The pupil of his left eye, dilated by the graft fever, reflected the murky orange of the little window without shrinking.

"I never had a brother."

Nico looked at him. There was no reproach in his lean face, only an immense fatigue that seemed to bend his spine toward the dust of the floor, as if the whole weight of the hoppers and embankments they had left behind had suddenly fallen on his narrow shoulders.

"The password," Nico said, and his voice had lost all its usual roughness and turned flat, ceremonial, like a clerk reading out a casualty list at a counter window. "The one we agreed on before we went into the drainage gallery, in case Varga's pickets split us up. Say it."

Mateo set the saucepan down on the floor. A little grayish broth spilled onto the silt between the planks and made a greasy circle that caught, for an instant, the violet light of a distant flash of lightning.

Nico waited. He had waited like this before, in the drainage gallery, counting the pickets' footsteps over his head; it had never been so hard to breathe.

Mateo said nothing. He opened his mouth, but all that came out of his throat was a dry gasp. He looked at Nico's face—the nose bent by a blow from a shovel, the coal dust under the nails, the eyes reddened by the turpentine fumes—and saw only a stranger holding a plate of cold noodles in a room that was falling to pieces.