Radiator Reading

Radiator Reading
Word Count 672

I sat in the little red-bricked library by the train tracks in Vermilion, Ohio, listening to the steam pipes in the radiator and watching engine smoke from the yards through an almost-frosted-over window while others did the sledding and skating down the hill. Through the glass I could make out their shapes — small dark figures dropping fast toward the frozen creek — but the sound of them never quite reached me.

I leaned back, my feet toasting on the radiator, and continued reading. The room smelled of old bindings and radiator dust and something else, some permanent library smell that meant no one would bother you. Mrs. Hennessey, the librarian, had long since stopped checking on me. A train groaned through the yards outside, the whole building trembling faintly, and I barely looked up.

I was elsewhere, in South San Francisco, chasing Oyster Pirates or out on the Fish Patrol with Jack London. Out on the cold black bay, fog sitting heavy on the water, the reek of fish and brine, lanterns swinging on the patrol boat, someone shouting across the dark. The Bay was nothing like Lake Erie — it had mountains behind it and the Pacific in front of it, and the light, even in winter, had a golden quality Ohio never managed. The saloons along the Embarcadero smelled of sawdust and spilled beer, and the men inside were Irish and Chinese and Portuguese and spoke to one another in the shorthand of men who worked the same cold water. Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon leaned slightly, its floor warped by decades of tide, and the boy Jack had done his first serious reading there by lamplight, which seemed to me, aged ten with my feet on a radiator in Ohio, just about the finest thing I had ever heard. Since I was only ten, though, I’d have been drinking Long Boy soda pop while the Oyster Pirates were likely quaffing California Steam Beer or two-bit whiskey.

I spent the day reading London beneath that frosty window, occasionally looking up at the wall lamps in the musty old room and watching the afternoon light fail behind the smoke from the yards. When I finally walked out the front door, the cold hit like a wall and the hill was empty, the sledders and skaters all called home to supper. I stood on the step a moment, still half in San Francisco, blinking.

Walking home in the dark, I wondered whether a San Francisco boy like Jack was somewhere reading about the gill-net pirates of Lake Erie, raiding back and forth across the national border between Ohio and Canada. The book he might have found would have been colder and grayer than anything on the Bay. Lake Erie in November, shallow and mean, kicking up six-foot swells out of nowhere and laying flat again before you could name the storm. Ice floes in March that could pin a gill-netter to the Canadian shore for three days. A fog that didn’t roll in romantically but simply arrived, erasing Ontario entirely, leaving nothing but the sound of the other man’s oars.

The pirates would have been different too — Slovak and Polish mostly, out of Lorain and Ashtabula, working men turned poachers, cutting each other’s gill nets in the dark over territory that had no legal markers anyone could agree on. The borders between Ohio and Canada ran through open water and nobody quite owned it, which meant everybody did. The revenue men came out of Sandusky in fast boats, and the rum-runners — this would have been the twenties, Prohibition making criminals of ordinary thirst — hid their Canadian whiskey in fish holds that smelled like walleye and lake mud.

The saloons along those docks were not so different from Heinold’s, really. Rougher maybe, and colder, and the men inside spoke four languages at once. But somebody’s feet were up near the stove, and somebody was telling a story about last night on the water that nobody entirely believed.

I wondered where he rested his feet.

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