“Right,” I said. “Air.”
“So what they do, what Colonel Roebling does—he’s the boss, the big boss, the chief engineer, they call him—what Colonel Roebling does, he makes it so men can go down inside here.” He tapped the little glass. “Men go down in there, and they dig. They breathe the air that’s pumped down and they dig and dig, and all the dirt they dig is hauled up and out from inside the caisson, and it—the caisson—it goes down into the mud at the bottom of the river. The men dig out the mud and dirt and rocks from all around the floor of the caisson, and down and down it goes, into the earth, while up top they keep laying on more and more stone blocks. The caisson goes down more, and more, and more … until it is on bedrock.” He thumped his fist on the table. “Solid.” I peered down at Mischke’s upside-down vodka glass, sitting in the bowl of murky soup. “Inside … that box … under the water … under the bottom of the river … That’s where you go? To dig?”
He was grinning at me, his big yellow teeth showing. “Inside, Dudek! That is the job I got for you. Me, I already worked on the Brooklyn caisson. Now you and me, we go work on the New York side. We go in there and we dig, dig, dig.” He put his free hand near the glass, extended the first two fingers and made waggling motions with them, like the scratching, digging legs of a rodent. “There is more,” he said, his grin becoming uncertain. “Much more for you to know, to learn, to find out. But that is enough for now. You know more now than I did when I started.”
I had a dozen questions, and probably there were a hundred more that I didn’t know enough to ask, but I said nothing. It was a job, and a job that paid well. Two dollars and twenty-five cents a day was more than any other job I’d ever heard of.
The next morning I was standing on a sea of stone, half a city block in size. Scattered here and there were huge boom derricks, steam engines spewing out black coal smoke and white steam, and everywhere men busy at a myriad of different tasks. Mischke and I worked the first shift, so the start of our day came at six in the morning. We were in a cluster of about a hundred men grouped around a small opening in the center of the stone plateau. Most of these men had an easy slouch that showed they were familiar with the setting, but a few of us were what the foreman called new guys. “You new guys come with me,” he said. “I’ll lock in with you.”
“Lock in?” I asked Mischke, not sure I liked the sound of it.
“It means go in through the air lock. You’ll see.” The foreman led us through the crowd of workers and then down a long spiral staircase. When the steps ended, the outside world had been reduced to a small disk of light above us, and we were standing on an iron deck the size of a big room, surrounded by walls of stone. There was a square hatch built into the floor, and the foreman went over to this, opened it and climbed down through it, calling up to us to follow. One by one we went through the door and down a ladder and found ourselves in a smaller room, this one cylindrical and walled with more iron. There were about ten of us in our group, but there was space enough in the room for at least twice that many. The foreman climbed back up the ladder and closed the door we’d come through, and then called out to Mischke, “Open the valve, Mickey!”
Mischke turned a thing like an oversized faucet handle, and the room was filled with a howling roar. Air was rushing through the valve, bringing with it a stifling flood of heat and humidity. After a short time I felt a piercing pain in my ears, and it was obvious that others of us “new guys” were feeling it too. The foreman was yelling an English word at us over and over, but I was distracted by the pain and I couldn’t think of the word’s meaning. “Swallow!” Mischke translated, shouting at me. “Swallow, swallow!” Some minutes later the roaring stopped, and the foreman opened another hatch at our feet. Again there was a ladder leading down, and again the foreman went first, then Mischke, then the rest of us.
It could have been another world, a world out of a fever dream.
It had been explained to us that the caisson was divided by timber walls into six lengthwise sections, and we were in one of these sections. So the width of the chamber was not so great, but the length seemed interminable, the far wall invisible in the misty gloom. The roof was three or four feet above our heads, and the ground we stood on was hard-packed dirt and gravel. At intervals along the walls there were blazing white lights, so bright that it hurt to look at them. But as bright as the individual lamps were, the steamy air seemed to swallow up the light before it had gone any distance. I could see that the walls had been whitewashed at one time, but months of spattering mud had blackened all but the uppermost few feet.
One of the men standing near me swore in English, and his voice was so strangely thin and weak that we all turned to look at him. He repeated the word, listening to himself, and then laughed, saying that he sounded like his own mother. The foreman spoke to us then, and his voice too was transformed into a thin, wheezing treble.
We new guys were directed to a shelf where we could stow our lunch pails, and to pegs where we could hang our jackets and shirts. I saw then that the men who had “locked in” before us were all stripped to the waist. Outside it was a chilly November morning, but in this place it was miserably hot and humid.