He gave me detailed directions on how to find the plant entrance, eyeing me with impartial enthusiasm while he did so. I felt slightly cheered by his guileless admiration and slowly made my way to the steelworks, eating my yogurt with my left hand while I drove with the right.
It was just two o’clock. The plant was between shift changes, so mine was the only car going past the guard station at the main entrance. A beefy young man inspected the pass they’d given me at Pole Star.
“You know where to find the Gertrude?”
I shook my head.
“Take the road around to the left. You’ll go past the coke ovens and a slag heap. You’ll be able to see the ship from there.”
I followed his directions, going by a long, narrow building where fire danced inside, visible through sliding doors opened to let in the cool air. Slag formed a mountain on my left. Bits of cinder blew onto the windshield of the Omega. Peering through it at the rutted track in front of me, I continued on around the furnaces until I saw the Gertrude looming above me.
Great hills of coal framed the lakefront. The Gertrude was getting ready to dump her load onto one of them. Hard-hatted men in boiler suits had tied up the ship. As I left the car and picked my way across the pockmarked yard, I could see them turning the swivel top of the ship’s self-unloader to position it over one of the smaller coal piles.
Bledsoe was on the ground talking with a man in a dirty gray boiler suit. The two weren’t speaking when I came up, just looking at the activity going on above them.
Bledsoe had lost weight in the three days since I’d last seen him. It was shockingly noticeable—he must have dropped ten pounds. His tweed jacket sagged across his shoulders instead of straining as if to contain his monumental energy.
“Martin,” I said. “Good to see you.”
He smiled with genuine pleasure. “Vic! How’d you run me to earth!”
I explained and he introduced me to the man he was standing with, the shift foreman. As we talked, a great clanking started and coal began moving down the conveyor belt onto the heap below.
“The self-unloader is quite a machine. You ought to watch it in action,” Bledsoe said into my ear. He went back to his car and got a second hard hat out of the trunk for me. We climbed up a ladder on the port side of the ship, away from the self-unloader, and Bledsoe took me over to watch coal coming up the wide figure-eight belt from the holds.
The coal came through quite fast, in large chunks. It takes about eight hours to unload the holds with a self-unloader, compared to two days using manual loader.
Bledsoe was clearly tense. He walked around, talking a bit to the crew, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He couldn’t stand still. At one point he caught me watching him and said, “I won’t relax until this load is off. Every time I move a cargo from now on, I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know the ship has made it in and out of port safely.”
“What’s the story on the Lucella?”
He grimaced. “The Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and the FBI are mounting a full-scale investigation. Trouble is, until they get her out of the lock they won’t even be able to see what kind of explosive was used.”
“How long will that take?”
“A good ten months. That lock will be shut all summer and it’ll take most of next year to repair the gates.”
“Can you save the ship?”
“Oh yes, I think so. Mike’s been all over it with the guys from the Costain boatyard—the people who built her. They’ll take her out in sections, tow her back to Toledo, and weld her back together. She should be running again by the end of next summer.”
“Who pays to repair the lock?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not responsible for the damned thing blowing up. The army has to fix it. Unless the Court of Inquiry assigns liability to me. But there’s no way in hell they can do that.”
We were speaking almost in shouts to be heard over the clanking of the conveyor belts and the rattling of the coal going over the side. Some of the old energy was coming back into Bledsoe’s face as he talked. He was starting to elaborate on his legal position, pounding his right fist into his left palm, when we heard a piercing whistle.
The noise came to an abrupt halt. The conveyor belt stopped and with it all its attendant racket. An authoritative figure moved over to the opening into the hold and called down a demand as to the cause of the belt’s stopping.
“Probably just an overload on one of the side belts,” Bledsoe muttered, looking extremely worried.
We heard a muffled shout from the hold, then a young man in a dirty blue boiler suit erupted up the ladder onto the deck. His face was greeny white under its smear of coal dust and he just made it to the side before he was sick.
“What is it?” the authoritative man yelled.