Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Stuart Dybek

72 Stuart Dybek Bait Despite the shadowy shaft of light, clouded even on the brightest days, visibility was good. You could peer fathoms down to a bottom where the contours of broken flowerpots and fogged bottles took shape amidst a cobble of trash. Spongy knobs of moss bordered the foundation, and in the corners you could see silty webs, but not their spiders. The screwdriver that had plunged four stories was visible, too, its luminescent yellow handle resting beside what appeared to be the rotted arm of a doll. My father who could fix most anything had been using it to pry my bedroom window higher so that the room would be less stuffy on the hot summer nights. The window opened on what we referred to as an airshaft, although the so-called air smelled like an updraft of must. Leaning out for better leverage in a way that made me worry he’d fall, my father had lost the grip on the screwdriver when he’d banged his funny bone on the window frame. “Da damn, sonny boy,” he said, mournfully rubbing his elbow, “that was my favorite screwdriver.” Even then, when his pliers, hammers, and wrenches still fit in the tool bag he kept in the closet atop his accordion case, years before he would buy the brick six-flat on Washtenaw and the capacity of the tool bag would be expanded by an unfinished basement that gradually filled with grinders, pipe threaders, buzz saws that threatened amputation, a torch and welder’s mask, guns—pneumatic nail guns, caulking guns, mortar guns, solder guns—grouters, routers, a Roto-rooter that could reach to China, I knew how my father valued tools. I’d seen bait 73 that screwdriver do everything from dismantling engines to opening sardine cans whose tabs had popped off and couldn’t help but feel it had been sacrificed so that I might breathe easier. The day after the screwdriver was lost, my father brought home from the factory a brown lunch bag embossed with greasy fingerprints from which he emptied onto my bed a chunk of metal that looked like what I imagined a meteorite might. Its surface was machined to a dull, gray-pitted luster, and its edges were rough as broken rock. It was heavy enough to make an impression on the bedspread. My father worked on the reaper line at the Harvester factory. He’d been employed there since he’d been forced by the illness of his father to quit high school at seventeen. He’d recently been promoted to foreman . The factory was on Western Avenue, within walking distance from our house. When on weekdays at 5:00 p.m. church bells chimed and factory whistles blew, I imagined I could hear the Harvester whistle and knew that, unless he was working overtime, my father in his oily, steel-toed shoes would be taking the shortcut of Blue Island Avenue, a street that ran on an angle, on his way back home. Once, when I was little, he’d taken me to the factory, proud to show me where he worked, and the racket of the production lines, the foundry-scorched air, and the weariness on the grimy faces of the men had frightened me and made me cry, shaming him. It was a story always told in tandem with how, on my first trip to the Riverview amusement park, when he took me into the House of Horrors, I began to scream, and he had to carry me upstream against the crowd and back out the entrance. He never failed to add that at least he got them to refund our tickets. I vaguely remembered both incidents and of the two, the clanging Harvester factory with its nostril-searing furnaces was the more terrifying. The metal chunk resting on my bed looked like it could have been spit out white-hot from one of those furnaces. “Feel this, sonny boy,” he said. 74 stuart dybek I weighed it in cupped hands, almost expecting it to still be throwing heat. It felt dense. “What is it?” I asked. “Bait,” he said. We sat on the edge of the bed while, with many twists and intricate knots, my father tied the metal bait to the end of a ball of brown twine he’d bought for a kite we’d yet to fly—a kite...