I picked the box of matches up off the railing and turned it in my fingers, because I wanted him to see that my hands were steady. “I sold them Kerr Industrial Coatings, Mr. Pettigrew,” I said. “Eleven crews. A hundred and twenty men. The bridge contract for the whole Upstate. A national industrial services company, which I will not name, because it is New Year and they are probably asleep.” A few people laughed, uncertainly. “The price was ten million, four hundred thousand dollars. It is on the second page, if you want to read it. The sale closed in October.”
The string quartet had put down their bows. The champagne in the glass of my son trembled on the rail. The father of Brooke said nothing. He was a banker, and he had spent his life reading the ends of papers before the beginnings, and now he read the second page twice, and then the third, which was the schedule of equipment. I watched him come to the line with the Sullair, and the serial number circled in red. He looked up, not at me, but at Austin. “Son,” he said, in the voice he must use on delinquent loans, “whose compressor is in your driveway?”
Austin did not answer right away. He was thirty three years old and he had my jaw, and I watched it work. I said, “Austin, I have never been angry with you. Not once. Not when you wrecked my truck at seventeen. Not when you quit college. But you took a compressor, a second compressor, a boom lift, and a blast pot out of my yard, under my name, and you put the name of your father in law on the door.” I said it quietly. “That is not a family argument. That is a theft of goods the buyer already paid for.”
A box of kitchen matches was set down on a railing at midnight and gave one sandblaster the last minutes of the year to bring his son back from a stolen rig.
“Dad, I can explain,” Austin said, and then he did not. Brooke had let go of his arm and stepped away, and she was looking at the boards of the deck, at nothing. “You told me the company was underwater,” Austin said finally. “You told me we were losing the bridge work. I thought, he is going to lose all of it, and I will be left with nothing, and everybody will say, there goes the son of the sand man.” His eyes were wet. “I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be a man who owned something, not the son of a man who owned a lot of something.”
I let the silence run, because there are moments when a father should say nothing. Out on Lake Bowen, a late firework burst green and fell. In that light I saw the faces on the deck, the oysters melting on their ice, the champagne going flat, and it came to me how small the whole thing was. I had spent forty years in a hood and a respirator, blasting rust off bridges so that strangers could cross them safely. And I had never once told my son why. “Austin,” I said. “You were never the son of the sand man. You were the son of a man who wanted you to have clean air.”
Mr. Pettigrew cleared his throat. He set his champagne on the rail, very carefully, and for a moment I thought he would defend his son in law. Instead he said, “Wes, I have called you the sand man for nine years. I did it because I thought it would make me look larger.” He glanced at the guests, who were all staring at their shoes. “Every bridge I drive across to get to my bank, I have been driving over your work. I looked it up on the way over here. The Highway 29 overpass. The bridge over the Pacolet.” He wiped his mouth. “I never once said thank you.”
Here is what I decided, and I decided it standing on that deck with the fireworks smoke still hanging over the water. The rig goes back to the yard on Monday morning. Austin goes with it, on his own time, and tells Hector what he did. The second compressor and the boom lift come back too. In exchange, I would not take it any further, and I would square it with the buyer myself, quietly, so that nobody at the company would have to explain to a lawyer how a man got hold of their equipment.
Brooke was the one who moved. She walked across the deck to her husband and stood in front of him, and she did not slap him, though I think she wanted to. She said, “Austin, you are going to apologize to your father. And then you are going to apologize to me.” He nodded. He kept nodding. She turned to me, in her evening dress, with her chin up. “Mr. Kerr, I am so sorry. My father taught me to be proud of the wrong things. I want you to know I never thought less of you.” I told her I knew. I had always known.
At midnight the clock in the house chimed twelve, forty minutes late, and the party, which had gone strange and quiet, slowly started up again. Somebody opened another bottle. The quartet found its place in the middle of Auld Lang Syne. Austin came and stood beside me at the rail. We did not talk for a long time. Then he said, “Dad, what do I do now?” I told him I had a check in my pocket for him, made out for the first of the year, and that I was going to keep it in my pocket until I was sure he could carry it. He nodded, as a man nods at a sentence he has earned.
In June I handed him the check. By then he had done five months on a crew for the buyer, running a blast pot in a hood and a respirator in the heat, and he had come home gray from head to foot every night. He had paid his own way. He had called me every Sunday. The check was for a million dollars, with a note on the memo line that said, Clean air. He held it for a long time. Then he said, “Dad, I would like to buy a compressor.” I smiled. “Buy a used one,” I said. “And paint your own name on the tank.”
