The Four-Night Run by William Lashner Page B

sheet spread over something large and irregular that sat flat on the tabletop. And in the four corners were bizarre conglomerations of twisted metal that stood tall on wooden pallets, each about seven feet in height, roughly cylindrical in shape. At first they looked like pieces of junk joined together haphazardly, possibly by chance bursts of lightning. But as Scrbacek examined them one by one, he could see coherent shapes and forms assert themselves through the jumbles, as if each contained something of great beauty struggling to pull itself out of the chaos. They reminded Scrbacek of Michelangelo’s prisoners wrestling to free themselves from their cages of stone.
    “I didn’t know you were an artist,” said Scrbacek.
    “It’s just something I do.”
    Scrbacek kept walking, slowly, as if at a gallery, examining everything, and then he stopped at one of the workbenches, where he spotted a pile of steel wool, rows of narrow brake lines with holes drilled through them, a cylinder filled with stiff metal drill rods. He picked up a wide piece of metal tubing painted a flat black and hefted it in his hand.
    “What do you make here, Donnie?” said Scrbacek. “I mean, besides the art.”
    “Stuff,” said Donnie. “Little things I can sell. I learned metalwork at vo-tech, and I’ve been doing it ever since, but mostly it’s the sculptures. I like it when the metal starts to heat, and then glows hot and becomes soft enough to play with. I like cutting through steel with the torch. I like the feeling of control it gives me.”
    “You know, you could get a job doing this. I bet there’s a high demand for experienced metalworkers.”
    “Yeah, maybe, but then there’d be some foreman with hairy knuckles telling me what to make and I’d be doing their work instead of my own. Let me show you something else.”
    Donnie walked over to the table covered by the sheet.
    “This is the main project I’ve been working on,” said Donnie. He stood there for a moment, staring down at the table, gripping the sheet by its edges. “Something new.”
    When he yanked the sheet away, what lay underneath glistened with so hard a brightness it took Scrbacek a moment to realize exactly what it was he was seeing.
    It was a model of a city—streets and houses, skyscrapers and parks, all hammered and welded from blocks of polished steel. Breathtakingly intricate, random and ordered, primitive and rough, it reminded Scrbacek of the great visionary art of the American South, tinfoil palaces made by men and women who had been touched by the Lord and thereby inspired to make their devotions substantial. And this thing, too, formed of secondhand junk, seemed charged with a divine electricity. It held, this vivid cityscape, a vision of hope and promise and dignity, a vision of Casinoland and Crapstown joined as brothers, a vision of a shining city by the sea. But there was also, suffused in every weld, evident in every surface, amidst all the glittering facets of metal, a sadness, because it was a silver urban paradise that never was and never would be.
    Scrbacek stared at this complex metal thing, stunned by its mystery, gripped by sensations that stirred him deeper than he could understand. “This is magnificent,” he said.
    “You know what I call it?”
    Scrbacek looked up at the grinning young man.
    “New Town C-Town,” said Donnie. “I like the rhythm of the words, don’t you? New Town C-Town .”
    Scrbacek looked down at the cityscape again, the familiar streets and the shining buildings formed from cast-off metal. He pointed to a large cube of polished steel. “What’s that?”
    “That’s a community center. Next to it is a public pool. Then a school, see? Surrounded by homes. Out here is the industrial park, factories and high-rises where everyone works. And there’s the music hall and the basketball arena. We’re going to have a basketball team, D-League only, but still. And when they’re not playing ball, there are going