Onyx Read Free Page B

the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. “I have an appointment with Senator McMillan at the Federal Building,” he announced. “I’ll let you off here.”
    Tom plunged into the industrial warren paralleling the Detroit River. The busy waterway was hidden from him by enormous sheds and tall factories with smoke-blackened chimneys. As he neared Union Station the bustle grew furious with hacks, drays, wagons: a team of Percherons crushed him into a line of foreign laborers waiting outside Fulton Iron Works employment window.
    The particles of soot drifting like black snow, the roar clattering from every window were the breathing pulse of the new age. His age. Burdens were being lifted and incalculable gifts bestowed by machinery, and he was part of it. He forgot the hurt imposed by the Major.
    He turned onto an unpaved alley. Three ragged boys stopped their game of floating stick boats in a puddle to watch with respectful eyes as he climbed sagging front steps. The inhabitants were considered aristocracy because the subdivided old house had electricity.
    Tom lived upstairs in the back. A pair of crude pine stools were shoved under the marble-topped table that had been Coraline Bridger’s prized possession, and there was a sink and wood stove, but other wise the room was fitted out as a shop. It smelled of oil and fresh-worked metal. Racks of tools lined one wall. The window ledge was crowded with bottles of acid. Tom halted at his bench, turning the flywheel of a little contraption.
    â€œTom?” a boy’s adolescent voice cracked. “That you?”
    Tom frowned, opening the door next to the stove.
    This long, narrow closet, once part of the corridor, was just larg enough for two straw pallets placed head to head. Hugh Bridger lay below the oval window that rinsed his yellow hair in sunlight. He clutched a drawing pad. He was covered with his own and Tom’s winter jackets—that disastrous first winter in Detroit they had been forced to sell their mother’s hope chest bedding.
    â€œSo the high school’s declared a national holiday?” Tom asked sourly, in no mood to hear his younger brother’s complaints.
    â€œRight after you left I got an attack, a fierce one. I had to breathe in steam so long that my eyeballs ache.”
    â€œIf the asthma’s bothering you how can you draw?”
    â€œIt helps me forget how bad I feel.”
    â€œYou’re playing hooky,” Tom said, irritated.
    â€œI’m sick!”
    â€œBallocks! You’re embarrassed to wheeze in class.”
    Stung by this truth about his vanity, Hugh slammed down his drawing pad. “A fat lot you know! You’ve never had iron bands strangling you!”
    At thirteen Hugh Bridger resembled one of the angels that hover in medieval paintings, blond hair waving about a curved forehead, round pink cheeks, eyes of bright Saxony blue. His mouth, though, did not suggest angelic smiles or pouts. Even in this petulant moment it was a firm, calculating mouth. He lay back, rasping out each breath with a shudder.
    After a minute Tom asked gruffly, “Need me to boil the kettle?”
    â€œLater, please,” Hugh assented.
    Tom’s being six years older, strong and dominant, was bad enough: his weekly pay envelope weighted the fraternal relationship unbearably. It was no wonder that Hugh used hypochondria to tilt his side of the scales and to the younger boy’s credit, he cared as much for Tom as Tom cared for him. The affection between the two ran deeper than either comprehended.
    They did not speak as Tom took off his good suit, hanging it inside the slit of a bedroom, and unbuttoned the celluloid shirt collar, but sensing bad news, Hugh asked, “Didn’t Major Stuart let you rent the shed?”
    Tom shook his head. “No. But he played me along, pretending he would. He made me explain about horseless carriages. Hugh, he’s seen one! In Paris. Oh, he made me into a fine