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12 MINNESOTA REVIEW DONALD WESLING FLINDERS OHIOAN: TWO STORIES Scatter these Into the smoky spring that fills The suburbs, where they will be lost. -Hart Crane, Ohioan FINE WORK WITH PITCH AND COPPER Once they took him in the trucks, the quiet kid. They roared out of the door of the shop on Springville Road, three of the men in the first truck, two of the men and Jake Flinders in the other one. Before leaving they had stoked the asphalt furnace, then hitched it to the coupling at the back of the first truck. So Jake, riding behind the furnace-on-wheels, could see the jounced embers sparking away into the foggy morning. It was a ten-minute ride to Redjacket Road and Radcliffe Wire. They pulled up behind the factory, which was near Jake's home and already known to him: he had played there, only a year to two before, going on his belly under a bent-up place in the factory's cyclone fence, and, with other boys, creeping through the three-foot-diameter coils of wire stacked behind in the yards. The stacked coils made tunnels which the boys wormed through, conscious of the danger: if the coils shifted anybody inside the tunnel would be crushed under tons of wire. But there was no chance for play when you worked with Ortman and Wilder Roofing and Siding; this time they were here to asphalt the roof of a new wing on the back of the factory, and Jake had been brought to run the molten asphalt up to the roof on the pulley. A Saturday: Jake thought of the radio programs he'd miss that morning: No School Today with Big John and Sparkie, Green Lantern (sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes: 'I'm Buster Brown, I live in a shoe, That's my dog Tighe, look for him in there too.'), Grand Central Station. And in the afternoon he'd miss jazz from the station in Toronto. Joe Wilder ordered him to feed the asphalt into the furnace while the men were rigging the pulley. Jake had to cut the larger lumps of asphalt into smaller lumps with the axe. Then he- slid the gleaming black pieces into the boiling asphalt in the furnace, taking care there were no splashes. A single WESLING 13 spot of the hot stuff could burn a hole in the skin, and Jake, like the others, had to put on thick gloves and galoshes for the day's work; they all wore the galoshes unbuckled, and the men were joking about hot tar creating instant clubfeet by being poured accidentally down open boots. When the furnace was full Jake had a quick look into the rear windows of the factory. The new wing was still empty, but in the older part of the building he could see thin strands of metal being drawn continuously around a room, passed on from machine to machine, as if the machine had fingers, each doing its lap and passing the wire to the next like a runner's relay-baton. In the last machine the wire was bent and clipped into lady's hairpins, which fell like light rain into metal baskets. Except for Joe Wilder, the roofers were up on the flat roof, having carried their nylon mops up with them on the ladder. Jake, below, would draw the hot tar out of the spigot on the furnace. He'd draw a bucketful, take it by the handle over to the pullley, attach it to the pulley's hook, then pull the bucket up by measured hauling on the other end of the rope. On the top the bucket was detached by one of the roofers, who'd then put on a few empties to weight the hook downwards. Up there, they'd dip mops in buckets and then swish the tar over the flat roof, giving a rainproof black cap to the new wing. It was a one-day job. Towards the end of the afternoon Jake was sent up the ladder to retrieve the empty buckets. From the roof he could see Radcliffe Wire's small rail-siding, with the tracks...

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