The smell of cold copper and old grease always comes back to me whenever I walk past a hardware store shelf with those little black oil cans. Artie used to keep one right beside the synchronizer on the back workbench, and he would oil the gears every single morning before the first reel went up, even on days when the grease was fifty cents higher than it used to be. I was the one who kept the books and answered the phone when the distributors called about late fees, but Artie was the one who made the machine hum without a hitch.
Forty-three years we sat in that basement room behind the old Liberty Theater on 4th Street, cutting comedies together until our fingers looked like nicotine-stained paper.
It started out as a three-month gig back in nineteen-fifty-eight when the studio sent us out to Wichita to stitch together a two-reel short that had been botched in the lab. Neither one of us had two nickels to rub together, and Artie had a coat with grease on the sleeve that he swore he could get out with butter and cornstarch. We stayed at the YMCA for twelve days straight, eating saltines and drinking lukewarm tap water because we spent our last twenty dollars on a box of razor blades and splicing tape. By the time we got back on the train, we knew every bad habit the other one had. He knew I took my coffee black and cold, and I knew he always lied about how many cigarettes he smoked while threading the upper sprocket.
When the heart attack took him in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon in July, the projection room didn’t feel empty right away. It felt loud. The hum of the motor was still going because he had just dropped a reel of outtakes into the bin before he sat down on the old red vinyl stool and didn’t get back up. The paramedics were very polite, but they moved like they were in a library where someone had died of something contagious. I stayed down there for three hours after they took him away, just listening to the grease can drip down onto the floorboards because I couldn’t figure out how to shut the main breaker off without looking at his stool.
A year later, my own legs started giving out from thirty years of standing on concrete floors, and the doctor told me I needed to quit before the winter set in.
I sold the splicers to a kid from Topeka for seven hundred dollars, which was about six hundred more than they were worth to anyone who didn’t know how to fix the tension spring with a paperclip. But I kept the ledger books and the old oil can. I put them in the trunk of my Buick along with three boxes of photographs that had yellowed around the edges where the theater basement damp had gotten to them.
The morning I went down to Westwood Memorial Park to see where they put him, the wind was coming off the grass with that sharp, wet bite that makes your eyes water whether you are crying or not. There wasn’t a headstone yet, just a square of fresh sod that looked like a patch on an old pair of trousers. I stood there for a long time with my hands in my pockets, feeling the chill come up through the soles of my shoes.
I remembered the night we finished the final cut of that baseball picture in sixty-four, when we sat on the curb outside the editing house and shared a lukewarm bottle of ginger ale because the corner store was closed.
He leaned over that night and didn’t look at me when he said it. “You’re the brother I got to choose,” he told the pavement.
I didn’t say nothing back for a minute because my throat felt like I had swallowed a mouthful of sawdust. I just looked down at my shoes and kicked a pebble into the gutter. “Tough luck, kid-you’re stuck with me,” I finally muttered back.
And he was. He was stuck with me through three different studio bankruptcies, four flooded basements, and the winter my old woman left for her sister’s place in Denver. He never once asked me what went wrong with the house, and I never asked him why he kept sending money to that cousin in Ohio who wouldn’t write back. We just kept the sprockets turning and the grease cans full until there wasn’t any film left to cut.
I walked over to the sexton’s little green shed by the side gate to drop off the paperwork for my own plot, the one right beside his under the big ash tree where the leaves pile up four inches deep every November. The young fellow behind the counter had grease on his thumb from fixing the lawnmower carb, and he didn’t look up when I slid the envelope across the counter.
“You want the standard marker?” he asked, not looking at my face.
“Just the name and the dates,” I told him. “And leave room for the oil can.”
He blinked at that and finally looked up, his eyebrows pulled together like he was trying to figure out if I was making a joke or just losing my grip. I didn’t explain it to him. There wasn’t any point in telling a twenty-year-old kid about forty-three years of bad splices and cold coffee in a basement that smelled like vinegar and old wool.
I walked back out to the Buick and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes before I turned the key, waiting for the engine to settle into that familiar, ragged idle that sounded just like the old projector motor when the belt was wearing thin. The sun was going down behind the hills, turning the sky the color of a greasy tin plate, and the dashboard clock clicked over to four-thirty-two with a little metal snap that you could feel right through the steering column. I put it in drive and rolled out past the iron gates, leaving the motor running smooth all the way down the lane.
