Was this odd laboratory how he would manage to stay in Chicago? Was this a means to seeing Brenda again? The room was dusty and smelled of burned metal. Charlie went to the lavatory and returned with towels to wash and dry the desk. They came away gray. As an afterthought he wiped the stool, too, and the towels turned black. But he hummed as he cleaned, his mood improving.
Beasley reappeared gnawing on a piece of jerky, and gulping from a bottle of pop. He chewed with his mouth open, forcing Charlie to turn his head. There were packages of jerky in Beasley’s shirt pocket, which he dumped out on his desk. Then, his face in a sour expression, he went to the doorway and switched off the overhead lights. Beasley returned, chewing audibly.
“Lesson two, Harvard,” he said, finishing the soda along the way, tossing the bottle in his metal waste bin, which clanged nearly as loudly as a church bell. “I am not teaching, I am demonstrating.” He sat at Charlie’s station, belched, and leaned over the desk. “Observe.”
For about one minute, he showed Charlie how to operate the soldering iron, how to set the temperature, and how to keep the tip clean. “I do this for you once, Harvard. After that, you’re on your own.”
Beasley uncoiled gray wire from a spool. When he touched it to the soldering iron, the soft outer layer vanished in a whiff of buttery smoke. The remaining core melted into a little volcano-shaped droplet. He made point after point, his hands deft and precise.
“It’s called tinning. You tin a component into place. You snip off the surplus wire. You tin another component. Done.”
Beasley rummaged in a bin, found a flat metal plate with rows of small holes, and set it in front of Charlie. “Tin all of these points. Don’t bother me till you’re finished.”
At that, Beasley made his storky way back to his desk. Charlie was glad to be left to himself. It seemed easy, and he started right in.
The outer layer would not melt. The core would not stick. The gun tip clogged with metal. Charlie sat back, breathing deeply to control his frustration, then tried again. Hours passed. The sponge dried out. The lighting was terrible.
“Pop quiz,” Beasley announced down his nose, holding out a hand as he stood beside Charlie’s station.
Charlie passed along the soldered plate. “I haven’t got the knack yet.”
Beasley touched his glasses, though they remained precisely as low on his nose. “Well, well.”
“Am I doing okay?”
He handed back the plate. “You are the worst at soldering I have ever seen. No one else in my experience comes close.”
“With a little practice, I—”
“With a lifetime of practice, you might advance all the way to mediocrity.” He peered at the control panel of Charlie’s iron. “No wonder. Your temp was set at two-ninety. That’s too cold to make anything but a mess.”
Beasley wrote something on a piece of paper, placing it facedown on a filing cabinet beside Charlie’s desk. “Shut down, Harvard. Go home. Come again tomorrow to fail another day.”
“I’ll keep practicing, if you don’t mind. At the higher temperature.”
Beasley ambled to his desk and snapped off the light. “You are permitted in here only when I am present, and I am leaving.”
“I’m a slow and steady kind of worker. How can I improve if I can’t practice?”
Beasley opened the dungeon door, sweeping his arm to indicate that Charlie should precede him. “My sincere advice to you is to go home, and stand awhile in front of your bathroom mirror.”
“My mirror?” Charlie shut off his own desk lamp, making his way to the door. “What would that accomplish?”
“You can contemplate what you will look like with an army helmet on.”
The next day Charlie turned his instrument hotter, and the wire melted, the iron made the wet sponge hiss. The basics were exactly as Beasley had demonstrated.
But he still didn’t make neat volcanos. Instead the wire clumped up on his iron. He wiped and wiped the tip on his sponge, but the clumping continued. Also the smoke had drifted away when Beasley demonstrated, but with Charlie it rose right up his nose—sweet-scented, but piercingly hot. He managed to solder a total of two points successfully before lunch.
Occasionally he spied on the stork. The man was a master, that was clear: cleaning and tinning and moving pieces with dexterity, never lifting his head except to stir one gloved finger through a bin of components, searching. When he finished a plate, he would clear his throat, gnaw off a fresh plug of jerky, and start the next.
Charlie could not imagine how many hours it had taken to develop that level of skill. A thousand, probably. Here he was, ten hours in, nine hundred and ninety to go.
“Buckle down,” he told himself. This was only the first full day. Soldering might be his only way of staying in Chicago.
In fact, the afternoon went better. A hotter iron did make the wire behave. One component seemed to melt into place properly, and when he snipped away the extra wire, he noticed that Beasley went still for a second at the sound. Still it took hours, and all of his focus. He was concentrating so hard, his nose inches from the hot iron, the tap of a finger on his shoulder startled him.
“What?” Charlie jerked upright.
The finger belonged to Beasley, who extended his hand. “Show.”
Charlie’s lower spine hurt from staying bent over for so long. He glanced at the clock, it was five already. The afternoon had flown. “It’s pretty rough.”
“Show.”
After covering the hot iron, Charlie handed over his plate. Beasley peered here and there, nodding. “Simmons neglected to tell me that you were mentally retarded.”
“You should watch your mouth.”
“Should I?” He flipped over the paper he’d left on the filing cabinet the day before and read aloud: “nine rows, eighteen contacts each.” Beasley dropped the paper in Charlie’s lap. “That was what you needed to do to get a C on this examination. One hundred and sixty-two contact points. Instead I count, let me see . . . if I allow this half-done area, it’s forty-one. You failed by one hundred and twenty-one.”
“Soldering is harder than I thought.”
“Fish, you dolt. Life is harder than you think. Show me your technique.”
Charlie picked up the hot iron, and began pressing the wire to it.
“Stop,” Beasley said. “Stop before I throttle you.”
“What?” Charlie asked. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Never touch the iron directly to the wire. I told you that. All it will do is clump.”
“You most certainly did not tell me—”
“I am now repeating myself, which I detest.”
Charlie rolled his stool backward, calming himself. When Simmons told him to resist the temptation to punch Beasley, he’d thought the man was joking. Not anymore.
“Pay attention this time.” Beasley demonstrated, placing the iron against a point on the square. “You heat the component, not the wire. The wire melts into place.”
Charlie was too angry to reply. The man’s instruction had deliberately omitted a basic step.
“I’m taking a meal break,” Beasley said. “Though your stupidity makes me sick.”