made us both feel small.
He yanked out a chunk of shimmering metal. “This here’s
aluminum,” he said. “See how it shines? Feel how light it is?” Dad put
the piece into my hand. He was right; it was not as heavy as it looked.
Next Dad handed me a dented pipe. “This here’s steel,” he said.
We began to sort the debris into piles—aluminum, iron, steel, copper
—so it could be sold. I picked up a piece of iron. It was dense with
bronze rust, and its jagged angles nibbled at my palms. I had a pair of
leather gloves, but when Dad saw them he said they’d slow me down.
“You’ll get calluses real quick,” he promised as I handed them over. I’d
found a hard hat in the shop, but Dad took that, too. “You’ll move
slower trying to balance this silly thing on your head,” he said.
Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the
worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the
anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw
every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time
needed to sort, cut and deliver it. Every slab of iron, every ring of
copper tubing was a nickel, a dime, a dollar—less if it took more than
two seconds to extract and classify—and he constantly weighed these
meager profits against the hourly expense of running the house. He
figured that to keep the lights on, the house warm, he needed to work
at breakneck speed. I never saw Dad carry anything to a sorting bin; he
just chucked it, with all the strength he had, from wherever he was
standing.
The first time I saw him do it, I thought it was an accident, a mishap
that would be corrected. I hadn’t yet grasped the rules of this new
world. I had bent down, and was reaching for a copper coil, when
something massive cut through the air next to me. When I turned to
see where it had come from, I caught a steel cylinder full in the
stomach.
The impact knocked me to the ground. “Oops!” Dad hollered. I
rolled over on the ice, winded. By the time I’d scrambled to my feet,
Dad had launched something else. I ducked but lost my footing and
fell. This time I stayed down. I was shaking but not from cold. My skin
was alive and tingling with the certainty of danger, yet when I looked
for the source of that danger, all I could see was a tired old man,
tugging on a broken light fixture.