The Price of Cartilage

Mateo peeled his flesh off the zinc sheet with a slow tug and left on the rusty edge a strip of skin that didn't bleed right away: it oozed a clear fluid before opening into a vermilion line that ran down his jaw, as if someone had drawn a sum on him with a badly sharpened stick of charcoal. The cut barely stung; what really burned was his right hip, where the foreign tendon's anchor refused to warm, knotted under the skin with the stubbornness of a dry heather root in a limestone wall. The air in the pit smelled of freshly cooled tar and of the burnt rapeseed lard the boilermakers used in brass stoves to heat their pots of barley, a greasy smoke that settled on the tongue and mixed with the sour reek of blood spilled on the pavement. High above the foundry pit, behind the service railing where sodden tarpaulins half hid the orange flashes of the arc welders, the figure of Bruna Varga still stood out against the slate gray of the precast blocks—if that stiff silhouette wrapped in an oilskin cape wasn't a tow-stuffed dummy the foremen had left there to keep the laborers in line, as the old men of the night shift sometimes swore.

Four blocks away the steam hammers rang out, a dull, rhythmic blow that traveled through the concrete foundations and made the tension cables hum against the back of Mateo's neck as if a fistful of sewing needles were shaking under his scalp. In the gutters, the standing water trembled with violet sheens of kerosene every time an ore hopper braked on the upper platforms with a screech of brake shoes that raised the hair on his arms. Someone coughed up on the planking.

"Your turnip broth's getting cold, Varga," a man said from the scaffold, in the thick voice of someone who has spent twelve hours chewing black tobacco. "The bowl's not even steaming."

"Let it," she replied, without taking her eyes off the mud at the bottom. "If the fat sets, you eat it with a wooden spoon and it fills the belly all the same. Watch the condenser purge and save your breath."

Mateo wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and felt the dry scab of his split lip catch on the rough twill. Out of sheer habit he slid his hand into the inside pocket of his sheepskin and his fingers brushed the ten-cent coin with the filed edge, smooth and warm as a pebble that has spent years at the bottom of an irrigation ditch; he liked to touch it when the pain of the grafts bore down too hard, to check whether the constant rubbing of the cloth had finally worn away the stamped profile. For an absurdly long moment he wondered whether there was still any stale bread from Tuesday's batch on the long tables of the laborers' canteen, the kind they broke with their fists because nobody could ever find the carving knife. He had to remember to change the rotten straw in his pallet before the damp from the floor—

Iron grated against gravel.

There were three of them. They came down the unloading ramp unhurried, tracing a half circle over the industrial silt with the heavy gait of haul carts loaded to the brim. The one in the middle had its back armored with hopper plates riveted on with badly fastened bolts—one of them loose, rattling in its socket like a rotten tooth—and it wheezed with a cavernous whistle that left strings of yellow slaver on the stones. The other two covered the flanks, testing the slabs with cloven feet that had the texture of timber sunk in mire; their tendons snapped silently, with a wet, elastic sound like old cattle being butchered in the harbor slaughterhouses. They knew the man was limping. They knew that in that pit, walled in by concrete weeping saltpeter, the flesh had nowhere to go.

The wall at his back, weeping cold lime.

Mateo took half a step back and his heel caught on the broken stump of the beast that had fallen half an hour earlier under the loading crane. The burst carcass laid bare a thighbone split lengthwise, a cavernous channel where the marrow was still pulsing, thick and gray as unrefined axle grease, giving off a fetid heat that turned his stomach from five paces away. Then the tendon behind his own left knee gave a sharp lash; the foreign flesh was starting to shorten, dragging at the bone with the violence of a soaked hawser shrinking in the frost, and Mateo knew that if he didn't feed it or bathe it in brine within ten seconds, the joint would spring out like a broken hinge. He knew the inventory of losses each swallow of that poison carried: the lullaby his sister sang in the doorway, the exact pattern of the tiles in his childhood courtyard, the weight of the first tool he ever held...

He knelt in the oily mud without thinking. He plunged his fingers into the hollow of the splintered bone; the viscous mass stuck to his nails with the consistency of hot pitch and chilled his fingertips with a cold that tasted of iron and silt. He shoved the handful into his mouth all at once and swallowed before the nausea could close his throat. The marrow tasted of rotten rust, of bile and sour snow. It went down like a lump of molten lead, and at first nothing happened, except for a small tremor in his eyelids that filled his mouth with bitter spit.

Then the bones sang.

The chimera in the middle hurled itself forward with its jaws open like shears. Mateo didn't dodge: he took the impact of plate and muscle on his bare forearm. The blow sounded like two anvils colliding in a dark forge, but his skeleton didn't give an inch. The tendons of his shoulders swelled with a dull snap that burst the seams of his shirt; the pain was so vast it went white, a blind force that widened his chest until it emptied his lungs. With his right hand—its knuckles thickened under a fleshy, purplish crust—he seized the monster's front plate; with his left he clamped the lower jaw where the metal bit into living flesh. He twisted. The beast's head gave with the sound of an oak beam splitting under the weight of a roof. Before the body hit the mud, Mateo was already pivoting on his bad hip; his heel came down like a foundry sledge on the back of the second, broke its spine and drove its armored ribs into its guts. The third stopped short, scraping the concrete with its hind hooves as it tried to back away—if a sack of hide sewn together by force can harbor the cowardice of animals born from a womb—but he threw himself at its head, drove his fingers into the joints of its neck and tore out the bundle of muscle in a single wrench that drenched his face in scalding fluid.

By the overflow drain, an empty tin can rolled along, pushed by the thread of greasy water running down the retaining wall. The water fell with a dull, lazy patter, monotonous as rain on a ramshackle tin roof. On the upper walkway, the stoker blew on his wooden spoon before putting a piece of warm turnip in his mouth, chewing slowly with the molars on his left side while he watched the purge steam dissolve among the main beams of the roof.

Mateo was still standing in the middle of the pit, his arms hanging at his sides and his knuckles dripping a thick blood that wouldn't clot in the cold. The tide of fire that had run through his spine was beginning to ebb, leaving behind a barren tingling, a hollow silence that weighed behind his forehead like a handful of wet sand. He tried to hold on to something that wasn't mud. He looked for the face of the skinny boy who used to wait for him with the carbide lamp by the dead tracks; the boy with a half-moon scar over his left eyebrow and the habit of blowing on his solder-burned fingers before he spoke. The image was there, clear, with his shirt frayed at the elbows and the shine of his brown eyes in the gloom of the cellar. But when Mateo opened his mouth to say his name, his tongue stumbled against an absolute void. He searched for the syllables. He moved his lips looking for the first sound, the hard consonant, the breath that used to come so easily when he called him over to share a crust of rye. There was nothing.

The name had been wiped from his head as if a rusty chisel had scraped the label off a drawer until nothing was left but dry splinters and a clean sore.