The Fata Morgana

FOUR

I got home almost early that night and took my wife, Helen, out to dinner. We ate out often, since cooking was one of the things she didn’t like to do, and she wasn’t much good at it when she did do it. She made up for it in other ways. Even now, after a messy divorce, I still think that she is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met.

She was tall, or at least taller than I was, with a slender set of geometrically perfect curves that she carried with an inborn, aristocratic poise. She had long, straight blond hair that framed a face that was almost too perfect to be real. I don’t think that I ever looked at her without being amazed anew that such a vision of loveliness could be mine.

We’d gone to high school together, where she had been a rhythmic gymnast, a cheerleader, and the homecoming queen. Not that I was the homecoming king, far from it. And my only sport was karate, which in my neighborhood was more a matter of survival than something you did for fun. Actually, we didn’t have much to do with each other back then. I just admired from afar, knowing that I would never get a chance to get any closer to her. I doubt if she noticed me at all.

I went off to college, graduated, and went to work in the machinery business. All told, I’ve been fairly successful.

Helen spent a summer in charm school, something she didn’t need, and then went on to Michigan State University. Washing out in her freshman year, she came home and married her high school sweetheart. A big fellow, he had been the quarterback of the our high school football team, and was as handsome as she was beautiful.

His only big problems were that he was a thief, an alcoholic, and a worthless bum. The marriage broke up, and someone told me that for a time, Helen worked in Detroit as a topless dancer. I’ve tried not to find out much about that.

I met her again just after I’d started up my own company here in our home town. I was on a winning streak, and Helen seemed to be a part of all the good things that were happening to me.

Now, I was by then a long way from being a starry-eyed pup in high school. Yes, I noticed the small signs of drug addiction, just as I guessed that she was early in the second trimester of pregnancy. But I also knew that she was the loveliest woman I’d ever seen, and that one such as I was lucky to get her any way I could. With enough tender, loving care, we could work her through her problems.

Maybe, if I’d had a father to advise me . . . But I hadn’t seen my parents for fifteen years. And anyway, for the first few years after we were married, things worked out pretty well for Helen and me. If there really had been a drug problem, she licked it. Well, in later years she got to drinking a bit much, but that’s something else, entirely. In the same way, her stomach bulge disappeared, and she was no longer sick in the morning.

Yes, I was making a lot of money, and yes, she liked having lots of money. Well, I liked money, too. Hell, who doesn’t? I tell you that for a lot of years, being married to Helen was good.

By the time we started working on the boat, our marriage was starting to get less good. Quickly.

Inside of a week, the old warehouse had been leased, our big plotter had turned out full scale drawings of the ribs, and our plumbers and electricians were bending three inch black iron pipe into the flowing curves that would form the hull. More pipe and re-rod went into framing out the bulkheads, which were then wrapped with hundreds of yards of chicken wire and plasterer’s lath. Then it was all sewn tightly together with steel wire to form a dense mat, and by the third week these bulkheads were being welded to the massive "I" beam that formed her keel and stem.

Twenty layers of chicken wire and lath were stretched over the ribs and bulkheads, followed by three more layers of re-rod, and then even more chicken wire and lath. All this was stitched together by pairs of people with pliers, passing steel wire through the hull to pull it all together.

When this dense steel fabric was completed—hull, deck, and bulkheads—Adam handed out big rubber mallets to all and sundry, and we spent three days ‘fairing’ the hull, making it as smooth and hydrodynamic as chicken wire and lath can get. My wife Helen even showed up one day and actually did over an hour’s worth of manual labor.

We stood back and admired.

She was huge. Even though she was belly up and not yet infused with concrete, she was a thing of beauty.

Directing the work was Adam’s job, since I had to spend most of my time on the road, trying to find some real work for my young company. Still, it made my sales job easier, being able to show to potential customers a full crew working back at the shop.

Three times during the construction of the hull, we had VIPs over. Shirley would press a button on the underside of her desk that connected to an alarm bell in our boat shop, and then flutter about with charming, feigned inefficiency, getting the customer a coffee that he really didn’t want.

Meanwhile, Adam would be yelling "SHOWTIME!" and hustling our crew back across the alley to our special machinery factory. They’d turn on the machines, pick up the tools they kept laid out, and look as industrious as hell, while the customer was still getting past Shirley’s smile. I don’t think that any of our guests ever caught on to what we were pulling. Or if they did, they had class enough to not mention it.

While we were involved with boat construction, there was an ongoing debate as to what we should name her. Dozens of names were batted about and discarded. For a while there, it looked as though the consensus would settle on calling her The Wind-Lass, and the auxiliary boat The Wench, but in the end she became The Brick Royal, and the tender was The Concrete Canoe. I don’t know who thought up the names, but I liked them.

With the metal frames and mesh reinforcement completed, it was time to plaster on the concrete. Adam divided our people up into three shifts, since he insisted that the plastering be done in one continuous ‘pour’. Apparently, wet cement does not stick all that well to cured concrete, and he meant our hull to be perfect. Adam called it a "carbon-alloy reinforced composite ceramic monolith", one time when he was really tired. Cement mixers and plastering machines that squirted the mixture through long hoses were rented, two of each so that in case of a breakdown, our work could continue uninterrupted.

Adam himself carefully measured out all of the ingredients beforehand. The hydraulic grade cement, the sifted sand with its carefully measured moisture content, the pozzolana and other arcane chemicals, and a precisely measured amount of water. And God help the poor soul who dared add a single spittle’s worth of moisture over what Adam had allowed.

Work started at the bow, and in a continuous helical strip a few inches wide, the crew forced the cement mixture into the matted steel wire, rod and pipe, always careful to leave not the tiniest void in the material. Inside and out, with vibrators and trowels, every bit of hull, deck and bulkheads was plastered such that the new concrete never went against previously laid concrete that was more than a half an hour old.

Following closely behind them was a crew whose task was to trowel the wet cement to smooth perfection. At the end of each shift, the sections completed were carefully covered with plastic sheeting, so that the concrete would cure slowly and not dry out.

We were three days completing the task, and I don’t think Adam slept once during the whole process. I’m glad that it didn’t take longer than that because just after we started plastering, we got a rush job in from Saginaw Steering Gear.

Adam flatly refused to start on the new work himself, or to let anyone else leave off working on the boat until the task at hand was completed. I shouted and ranted and screamed for half an hour, but to no avail. Not one of my workers would obey me! Adam had the whole damn crew brainwashed! As I was swearing, shaking my head, and leaving, one of my Bridgeport operators came to me and said that they were sorry, but that the best they could do was to punch out and work for free until the hull was done. And then they all went and did just that!

I actually had to hire a dozen minimum wage types from Kelly Services to sit at the computers in engineering and look professional, just so the GM rep would think that we were working at his job! I mean, wasn’t this what the whole exercise was intended to prevent? But Adam had everybody so hyped up that they would have quit the company before they let that hull be ruined. I couldn’t fire them all, so I did what I had to do, trying to keep my customer satisfied.

Just don’t let anybody tell you that being the boss is all roses!

Business was good for the next year. The hull just sat there, but that was okay. The longer concrete has to cure unmolested, the better and stronger it gets.

Then I saw another dry spell coming, and I figured that it was time to get working on the boat again. I hadn’t been in the warehouse since we had wrapped her in plastic, and when I checked on her one Sunday around noon I was surprised to see that major changes had taken place.

The Brick Royal was now sitting upright in a huge wooden cradle. The rudder, prop shaft, and propeller had been installed. Nearby was a huge cast iron keel, resting upright on its horizontal wings. She had been beautifully painted in red and blue, and while her design was completely modern, there was a lot of antique gold covered scroll work at both the bow and the stern. It looked like it was heavily embossed in the concrete, and must have been painstakingly sculpted in when the hull was being "poured."

Adam’s head stuck up from inside the boat. "I tought I heard somebody out here."

"Hi. What are you doing here? It’s Sunday morning. Why aren’t you in church?" Another of Adam’s strange quirks was that he was a staunch Catholic, something I’d given up on when I was twelve.

"I went to da early mass."

It’s never wise to discuss religion with anybody who actually believes in the stuff. That wasn’t what I wanted to bitch about anyway. "Adam, all this fancy scrollwork pisses me off! It’s formed right into the hull! That means that while I was paying the Kelly Services people to do nothing, and sweating blood for fear that the GM rep would find out about it, you and your people were out here farting around with non-essentials! I’m about ready to kill somebody!"

"Cool down, boss. You neva hoid of an applique? I made all dat fancy stuff one Sunday a few munts ago, and glued it on wit epoxy."

I just grumbled, since I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. "So how did you get the boat turned over?" I asked.

"Easy. You know when we had to hire a crane to get dat big Ford Flatrock job on da railroad car? Well, when da crane and crew was here, it only took dem a coupla minutes extra to flip da boat for us, so dey did it, no charge."

"I’ll bet. What about that cast iron keel? Where did it come from?"

"Well, da guys at Chevy Grey Iron, dey needed a hardness tester, but dey didn’t have no budget for it, an we needed an iron keel, an we had a little extra time left over on a job, so we bote did da obvious ting."

"And the rest of this work?"

"Da paint, you mean? Well, you know when we had to buy all dat weird paint for dat Brazilian job? Well, I just ordered some udder kinds of weird paint at da same time an nobody noticed."

"Dammit, Adam, I meant to pay for the paint in any event, but as an employee, you shouldn’t pull shit like that! It sets a bad example! I mean, if you want some real authority around here, you should take me up on that partnership." I went up a long, shaky ladder and climbed into the boat.

"Nah. Like I told you before, boss, I like bein a lowly peon. No worries, no hassles."

"You’ll have lots of worries and hassles once I call the police and have you charged with theft. Where did this hydraulic power unit and all these valves come from? I mean, those are Vickers valves, worth hundreds of bucks each!"

"Well, you know. Sometimes you get trough wit a job, you got a lot of parts left over. Da distributors, dey charge you a hefty restockin fee if you send ‘em back, so I figured, what the heck. An you ain’t gonna have me arrested. You tink any judge would believe it, dat I stole your stuff, just so’s I could come over here on my own time an mount it in your boat? Anyway, look at da bright side, boss. Doing tings my way, you’re saving a lot of money on your taxes. I mean dis way, dese valves an stuff came out as a straight business deduction. Your way, after dat restockin fee, you’d have to pay company taxes on your business profits before you got da money for yourself, personally. Den you’d have to pay personal income taxes on dat before you could spend what was left on dese here same valves. I’m savin you a fortune."

"You’re putting me in jail if the IRS ever hears about all this."

"And how’re dey goin to do dat? Dere’s not a ting on paper anywhere dat shows you got anyting to do wit dis boat, let alone ownin it."

"You’ve got a point there. But next time, let me know what you’re doing, okay?"

"Boss, you got no sense of adventure."

"You’ve made some changes that weren’t on the plans. What’s this glass thing on the deck?"

"Dat’s a solar still. Dey was knocking down some old stores downtown, an I picked up da big plate glass windows almost for free. It’s only tree inches high and it’s strong enough to walk on. It don’t weigh all dat much and under ideal conditions, it should make about tirty gallons of fresh water a day. A nice backup, hey?"

"I suppose so, as long as we’re just distilling water. If I find a barrel of corn mash back here, somebody besides me is going to jail! What about that thing just forward of the still?"

"Dose are solar cells. Just another backup for all da udder generators."

"All what generators?"

"Well, dere’s da generator on da engine, right? Just like on a car? But most of da time we won’t be usin the big engine, we’ll be sailin, so dere’s a genset, wit a small diesel engine dat powers nuttin but a big generator. But dat uses fuel, too, so dere’s anudder generator dat works trough a clutch off da prop shaft, to give us juice like durin a storm or sometin. And of course da solar cells, because it’s free power, so what da heck."

"What? No windmill?" I said facetiously.

"I looked at dat, but a windmill would have to go on top of da mast, an a generator up dere puts too much weight right where you don’t want it. We got backups enough, for power, anyway."

"Weren’t the solar cells expensive?"

"Nah, dey were free. Dere was dis Air Force satellite dat got canceled, an we sort of got da solar panels donated to us."

"We ‘sort of got donated’ government property? You’re sure it wasn’t stolen?"

"Stolen? Boss, you use such naughty words! How about ‘was put to da highest an da best civilian use’? Anyway, dose guys, dey owed me a couple of favors and dis was da payoff."

I shook my head and went away with visions of prison dancing on my head.