Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
Anthony 'The Ant' Bovine was a real Mafia wanna be. He read all Mario Puzo's books, he dressed like a TV gangster, and the closest he had ever come to organized crime was selling football cards in high school for a neighbor who later became a cop. Anthony was short, under 5'2", and his weight stayed stubbornly below 130, despite two grueling hours a day in the gym. He had large ears that twitched on their own, and a nervous habit of moving his fingers, as if counting an invisible rosary when he was nervous. His nickname was inevitable.
Anthony managed to do his share of crimes as a sort of part time occupation. His chosen field of endeavor was selling things that didn't belong to him. Profits were high, since costs were non-existent, and selling is easy when you let the customer name the price. The risk involved in obtaining the goods was minimized by his patience in waiting for opportunities to present themselves. A combination of playing dumb and allowing others to believe that they were controlling him was the strategy for advancement that he had instinctively employed since childhood.
When Anthony was young, his family and neighbors had laughingly told each other that the boy was a born communist dictator. He seemed to have no understanding of private property at all, excepting of course those things that he took for his own. Anthony was in no way mentally backwards, and by the time he was three he had a perfect understanding of the rules of possession. His precocious talent was in pretending that he didn't. Being the child of his mother's old age, as she fondly of put it, he was encouraged in his behavior by being spoiled rotten by both his parents and a clutch of doting older sisters. His brothers were less enthusiastic about the burgeoning Marx in their midst.
"Mom! That's my race car Anthony has." Twelve year old Michael knew better than to snatch something away from three year old Anthony in the presence of their mother. Michael was rapidly becoming a sullen young man due to constant amateur psychoanalysis at the hands of his older sisters who believed that his hostility towards Anthony was based on the unexpected loss of his position as the family baby. "That's not it." he'd hiss through clenched teeth as he watched the Ant waddle off with one of his prized possessions, "I hate him because he's a stinking thief."
"Anthony, is that Michael's car you have?" their mother would ask him sweetly.
"Mikey has lots of cars," the three year old would respond.
"Don't you have another toy you can play with Michael?" their mother would coax.
"But it's mine, and he breaking it!"
"Daddy says the toys belong to all of us. You have more than you need." Marx stated.
"Did you hear that?" sister Mary said to sister Roseanne, "He understands instinctively what the rest of us have learned to repress."
"To each according to his needs," Roseanne would quote back.
"It's not a toy. It's a model," Michael would howl, tears of frustration running down his twelve year old cheeks, "I shoveled all winter for the money to buy that kit, and it took me three weeks to build."
"Very well," his mother would say coldly, "Take it from the poor child if it means that much to you."
The model, or whatever toy happened to be at stake, never survived the exchange. The sisters would nod sagely at each other, and say "Scorched earth. Stalin." Mary actually coached Anthony in secret, trying to teach him quotes from Mao and Lenin. Her only success came one night at dinner when in a rage that he couldn't have a second helping of cake before beginning his meal, he took of his shoe and pounded the table with it. His father almost died laughing, choking on his breaded veal. A then fifteen year old Michael saved the day by performing the Heimlich Maneuver on poppa, who as soon as he could speak again, awarded the sought after portion to his little Nikita.
By the time Anthony was a teenager, he had perfected the innocent follower routine to the point where even the older boys he was manipulating saw him as an unwilling victim of their bad company. When caught by the police along with a group of four other boys he'd subtly convinced to do a smash and grab from a package store window, his tearful accomplices had sworn on their mothers graves that they'd dragged poor Anthony along for the job. He got sent home with a warning.
After graduating from community college at twenty-one, the Ant found himself working as a security guard for the Axle company. He got the job on the suggestion of his father's cousin Pete, who as a personal injury lawyer, was the closest thing to a criminal in the extended Bovine clan. Pete occasionally used the Ant to keep an eye on his clients, to make sure that they weren't going out water skiing while he was investing valuable time in pressing their claims for whiplash, or work related back injuries. If Anthony could catch them cheating, the insurance company investigators certainly would, and Pete dropped the case. Pete had hoped that Axle would train the Ant in surveillance, thus creating a big savings for Pete, but the supervisor at Axle wasn't that stupid.
Anthony had the second shift at landmark Wilkins Valve in Springfield. The main facility was laid out like a busted trapezoid that ran for a half mile down Wilkins Road, about a third of a mile on Mechanics Drive, and between two to four hundred yards deep on the skew streets. Weekends, there was a second guard up on the hill for the "New" foundry, but during the week, one guard covered the whole place. The new foundry was a huge square structure built up on the hill, with overhead rolling twenty ton cranes, and a private electric railroad that ran down to the lower forty-eight. There were over five thousand guys working at Wilkins by the end of W.W.II. Between 1914 and 1952 there were never less then twenty-eight hundred, even at the bottom of the Depression.
The lions share of the buildings had been built before 1928, and the old iron and bronze foundries were of pre-W.W.I vintage. Red brick walls and wood brick floors were the rule. In the older buildings which hadn't been used since the late Sixties, nature was hard at work reclaiming the ground. Massive water damage was common, the wooden bricks bulged obscenely up from the floors, pockmarked in places by craters that spoke of neglect. Lacquered patterns of valves, the wood forms that were pressed into the sand to make molds, were piled high in the abandoned buildings, a tribute to forgotten customers and vaguely remembered contract clauses.
Wilkins Valve was pretty much a fire watch now, the sort of work that Axle really specialized in. The Wilkins company still continued it's corporate life in a working plant down South and several others in the Far East. Live security guards lowered the insurance premiums for fire and general liability. Liability was by far the more important of the two. If some neighborhood kid climbed the fence and fell through some rotted floor, the company could at least trot out their arrangement with Axle as a concrete token of good faith.
Theft wasn't a big concern at Wilkins because there just wasn't all that much that anyone wanted to steal. The last reported incident had taken place on the Ant's shift a few months after he started. Some joker had taken a battery forklift from the recharge station, just a few dozen yards away from the guard post at the main entrance, driven it out through the administrative building and used it to rip the chain off the gate in back of the old Iron foundry. When the Ant made the last of his three rounds, he saw the open gate and the fork sitting out in the middle of Mechanics Drive. It took the Wilkins guys two weeks to figure out that the thieves had gotten away with a barrel of tool steel, and a small Bridgeport. Trundled them right through the plant on the fork, and loaded them into a truck. Definitely an inside job.
The thieves acted just in time, because they shut the whole place down in December '00. Everything had long since been written off, and management didn't want the hassle of re-figuring the taxes with the salvage value. Anything they couldn't use in the Georgia plant got left to rust and rot. This included a couple of huge milling machines of pre-W.W.II vintage, but of no real value now in the age of laser measured accuracy and computer control. Most of the regular factory and office fixings were too trashed by the deterioration of the buildings to be saleable anyway.
Wilkins couldn't quite walk away from the place though. The problem was that the grounds were a borderline Superfund site. Heavy metals, solvents, anti-corrosion dips, topped by wood brick floors that had been soaking it all up for a century. Wilkins valve had been at it's most active during the two world wars, when the operational phrase was " Just get it done." On paper it was an ecological disaster. The only local wildlife known to vocalize an opinion were the pigeons, and they seemed pretty happy.
The law for old industrial plants was similar to that for old junkyards. While the place was in operation, it fell under grandfather clauses, putting limits on cleanup expenses for past offenses unless an immediate health hazard was demonstrated. Therefore, Wilkins kept a skeleton crew in working in the office building across Wilkins Road. It wasn't even on the plant site proper, and the white collar employees never ventured across the street. It was sufficient, however, to maintain the fiction that the plant was operational, pushing the cleanup bill off into some future quarter.
Anthony treated Wilkins like a private merchandise warehouse. He kept his eyes open on the rounds he was paid to make, and spent an equal amount of time prowling through the buildings and rooms that weren't on the Detex circuit. The Detex company manufactured the old fashioned, indestructible wind up clocks that the guards carried on their rounds, suspended from the shoulder by a thick leather strap like a ten pound purse. All over the plant, little metal boxes containing Detex keys were fixed to the wall, and these made up the guards rounds. At each Detex station, the guard would open the little box, remove the metal key attached to the end of a chain, inert it in the clock and turn it firmly to the right. The business end of the key carried a station number in relief, which made an imprint on the paper tape winding through the clock. The tape was theoretically changed once a week by a supervisor, who could check the impressions on the tape to see that the guards were making their complete rounds. Some of the doors the Ant forced open hadn't been disturbed for over a decade, and he often found old electric fans he could sell for five bucks, or a decent swivel chair that had been missed in the exodus. His best find to date had been some high quality beam balances in a abandoned lab. He sold these to some low level dealers he knew who wanted to pretend they were pros.
On his first round, he stopped for a while in the powerhouse, which had been kept in decent condition right up to the shutdown. He'd gone through the immense collection of porno magazines a couple dozen times, but he sat down at the old break room table, and shuffled through the mess again. The majority of the magazines had been gathered by the boiler firemen over the years as other buildings had been abandoned, and they dated back over twenty five years to when Playboy centerfolds wore panties. Pretty tame compared to the small collection the first shift guard kept in the security desk. He got up after a few minutes, punched the key next to the silent, rusting boiler, and left through the back door, down the grated stairs.
Leaving the powerhouse, he walked across the sunken, weed covered railroad tracks, and into the oldest, dirtiest building of them all. The worn cornerstone of the iron foundry bore the date 1897, and the building looked every bit its age. The foundry was a grimly functional rectangle, almost a eighty yards on the long dimension, and a little over thirty yards wide. The outside walls were of brick, but a steel skeleton supported the roofs and a maze of superstructure, which bore a jumble of overhead tracks for the electric hoists that had transported the pig iron and the finished castings. The foundry had been shut down more than fifty years before, just after World War II, and the building had become a vast dumping ground for junk from the rest of the plant.
Located in each corner of the building was a large wooden box painted bright red. These closet sized boxes contained the controls for the sprinkler system, upgraded at the insistence of the insurance company just sixteen years before. The guards had to let themselves into each box with a key, and record the readings of several pressure gauges on a preprinted form. These were later deposited in the file drawer of the main post desk. When the drawer was full, the forms were all transferred to a cardboard box, and unceremoniously tossed onto the pile in the old iron foundry. There was also a Detex key in each red box.
The junk piled up in the foundry building reached to the height of the window casements in places, some twenty feet above the ruined floor. The glass panes had all been broken by kids who would later end up in Vietnam, and most of the openings had since been covered with dull orange sheet metal. Enough breaches remained, both in the walls and the skylights, that small snow drifts formed in spots every winter, and the constant smell of decay always hung heavy in the air.
There was a regular path winding through the various hazards to the four sprinkler boxes that the watchmen had been treading for years. In the dark, with just a flashlight to go by, Anthony would never have strayed off the trail. On this, his first round of the evening, enough light filtered through the various openings for him to do a little exploring. Between the second and third booths, at the far end from the entrance, he decided to rummage through the pile against the overhead doors of the loading dock. In the days when there were still Wilkins employees on site, he had tried to be stealthy and to leave everything appearing undisturbed. Now, he threw around the old junk with abandon.
After just a few minutes work, he hit pay dirt. In an old wooden crib, excavated from a mound of wood debris and jagged pieces of sheet metal, lay several dozen lumpy burlap bags. He carelessly sliced one open with his pocket knife, expecting to find some slag bits, or overproduced valve parts. Out popped a bright red and silver half-ton chainfall. He quickly cut open another bag, and another. The oiled chains still gleamed in places, and he saw just a few small rust spots on one the casings. He heaved a heavy gear body up to the edge of the crib, and listened to the beautiful ratcheting sound as the chain ran through the mechanism.
Anthony's mind worked rapidly. He could bring his car in the gate next to twenty-three building, drive between the bronze foundry and the machine shed, through the dipping yard, then up past the powerhouse to the iron foundry entrance. The chainfalls weighed at least seventy five pounds, so he wouldn't want to put more then two or three at a time in the trunk of his old Pinto, which needed helper springs just to keep the wheel wells from scraping the tires.
He slid the exposed chainfall back into its sack, and gently lowered it outside the crib. He did the same with the other two he'd cut open, wishing that he'd been more careful with the knife.
After hauling the three sacks out to the sprinkler trail, he carefully arranged some sheet metal back over the crib, then piled the stuff from the old mound back on top. Anthony didn't want one of the other guards noticing the change and discovering his treasure trove. From the path, the junk all looked undisturbed. He used a stick to scrabble his footprints out of the thick layer of dusty pigeon droppings, and smiled to himself over his professionalism. Grunting, he picked up one sack, bearing it with him as he finished the circuit of the booths.
Eric was late to work for the first time that year. He got stopped for speeding coming south down I-91 by some cowboy cop traveling north who came sliding across the grassy median like he had done his police training in Hollywood. Like a lot of private people, Eric reacted terribly to authority figures, and getting pulled over always made him tremble from a combination of fear and anger. This was the first time he'd been caught in a couple years, but he knew that whatever the figure on the ticket, it would be costing him at least a hundred a year in surcharges for the next seven years.
It started the usual way, with all the rigmarole of producing paperwork and interminable waiting while the trooper called his license in. Finally, the trooper came back, handed him the ticket, and gave him a big lecture about safe driving. Eric's gut was burning as he scanned the ticket, registering the two hundred dollar fine for going eighty, and the check mark in the radar/estimated box.
Eric tried to hold it back for a moment, then interrupted the startled cop with "Radar/Estimated. What the fuck is radar estimated?"
The guy jumped back, put his hand on his gun-butt, and says "Get out of the car, Sir, and keep you're hands where I can see them, Sir."
Spitting out "Sirs" like that was something else they must have taught you at that Hollywood cop school, Eric thought, but wisely kept to himself. He was really shaking from the adrenaline now, but his mind was clear, and he was more pissed at the cop then at himself. "Lemme see the radar," he croaked.
The troopers response was to shove him against the car, and yell "Spread 'em," remaining consistent with his Hollywood persona. The apparent rule in Massachusetts was, if you talk back to an officer, you must be some kind of cranked up nut, because two more cruisers showed up before the cop finished patting Eric down and putting on the cuffs.
One of the newcomers was a supervisor, and he pulled Eric aside and said, "Listen son, and hear me out before you talk back. You might save yourself a whole heap of trouble. Trooper Wolinski hit his panic button, and though that appears to have been an over-reaction, we're going to have to go through our standard response procedure, because that's what procedures are for. Now if you'll agree to open the trunk for us, we'll take off the cuffs, and you can drive yourself home. Otherwise, we'll have to have the car towed, and get a warrant, and if you're going to put us through all that trouble, we're going to have to come up with some other stuff to book you for."
Eric stood silent through the speech, and finally mumbled, "I have to be in work."
"Uncuff him, Wolinski," the supervisor said, "He's going to cooperate."
Eric opened the hatchback of his Horizon for them, feeling like he had been kicked repeatedly in the testicles. He was breathing shallowly, and his whole right leg was twitching violently as the third trooper pawed through his stuff.
"What's this?" the guy said, pulling out his uniform shirt, which Eric kept in the trunk except when it was being washed, or worn at work. "I would have thought a man in uniform would know better then to be out speeding."
Eric mastered himself just long enough to choke out, "I was running late. We can't all work for the state."
"You're working for the state tonight, son," the supervisor cracked back, and the troopers all laughed. That kind of diffused the situation, and next thing Eric knew, he was alone in the dark. He remained for a few minutes trying to repack the hundred and fifty-nine Craftsman sockets and wrenches, plus another fifty or so cheap metrics that he kept in the toolbox before the cop dumped them all over the trunk compartment. He gave up, and they made an awful racket every time the car hit a bump or changed direction on the way to work.
He pulled up in front of the three-story administration building that housed the main guard post, shrugged his shirt on and went in.
"Sorry I'm late, Ant, but I got a fucking two hundred dollar ticket, and they tossed my trunk."
"Fuck'in cops," Anthony sympathized briefly, "Well, I got to get going, big night you know."
"Going?" Eric inquired, "You got a flat, man. I figured you were waiting for me to come with tools so you could fix it."
"A flat?" Anthony repeated, incredulously, "I can't have a flat."
"Afraid you do, Ant. I pulled up right behind you. Your right wheel is sitting on the rim, and the left one looked a little tired too." Anthony stood gaping and made no move to the door. "C'mon," Eric said, "I'll give you a hand. I'm so pumped up I could probably lift it off the ground without a jack."
"No!" Anthony came out of his stupor, "I mean, I'll take care of it. You go ahead with the round."
"Everything O.K. Ant?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm cool," he said, sounding more sure of himself now, "I could maybe use your tools, though. I lost my tire iron in a fight." That was actually true, but not the way Anthony made it sound. One of his brothers had caught him of stealing the tire iron out of the trunk of his T-Bird, and had beaten him up and taken it back. The Ant figured it was worth the beating to be able to say the line straight.
"Have fun," Eric said and tossed him his keys, "Just don't leave my tools in a mess, O.K.?"
"It's covered," he agreed innocently, "I'll put the keys in the top drawer when I'm done."
"I'll see you Monday then." Eric took the Detex clock, clipboard, and flashlight, and started the round. At the end of the hall, he glanced back at the strangely behaving Anthony, who waved like a adolescent kid faking sick and bravely seeing his parents off to dinner, so he could stay home and watch the full frontal nudity special on cable TV.
The trunk light in the Horizon was burnt out, and it took Anthony almost ten minutes of rummaging around with the flashlight to locate the right socket for the wheel lugs. "Jesus," he muttered to himself, "And people say I'm unorganized." He stuck his head back through the front door of the Administration building to make sure Eric hadn't returned for something, and looked up and down the street before popping his trunk lid. The trunk was a real mess, crammed with stuff like the two gallon gas can he'd bought when his fuel gauge had stopped permanently on 'F'. He located the scissors jack, wrapped in the beach blanket, jammed under one of the burlap bags. He slammed the lid down as soon as he wrestled it out.
The Ant forgot to loosen the lugs nuts before getting the wheel in the air and the emergency brake wouldn't hold the wheel from turning. He swore aloud, and jacked it back down, skinning his knuckles when the jointed handle got near the pavement. The breaker bar made short work of the lug nuts, and he jacked the wheel back up in the air. The extra couple hundred pounds in the trunk made the jack turn hard, and his sweating hands slipped and cost him some more skin. With the flat finally off, he opened the trunk to retrieve the spare.
"Shit," he yelled out loud, hitting himself of the head with the heel of his hand. He'd taken the spare out when he was rearranging the trunk fit to make room for the chainfalls. Now he'd have to sneak past Eric and roll the thing all the way back out. Fucking Eric. He'd stopped Ant from taking home some lousy plywood one night because it was "stealing".
"Like you don't ever take anything home!" Ant had shouted at him.
"No, I never have," Eric answered.
"Oh, bullshit," was all Anthony could think to respond, "Everybody takes stuff."
"We're the fucking guards here, Ant," Eric said in exasperation, "You know, like cops? Like we're not supposed to steal stuff?"
Anthony had backed down, and had made it a point never to get caught by Eric again. But the memory bothered him, and here he was now sneaking around in the dark with his own fucking spare. He made it back to the car without being discovered, and got the tire on. Then he looked at the mess in Eric's trunk.
"Fuck that," he said to himself, and wrote Eric a note to go with his keys.
"I forgot that I had picked up a new tire iron, so I didn't need to use your tools. Thanks."
Eric laughed when he read the note. He hadn't actually expected Anthony to straighten up all of his tools for him, but he'd been curious to see how he'd get out of the casual promise he'd been tricked into. The Ant had a funny sense of honor.