The Furnace

        Against the hazy city of McKeesport, the blast furnace towered,
rusting and black, the summer wind humming through its maze of pipes,
rusted cables, and pulleys.  A group of men in yellow hard hats stood at
the furnace's side, their truck idling, two doors ajar.  One of the men
pointed to orange blocks, each the size of a breadbox, fastened to the metal
support columns about the furnace's circumference.  The others followed his
aim to chunks of plastic explosive, brightly wrapped and trailing wires to a
control box, nearly a thousand feet away.  He walked about the furnace's base,
talked to his men, motioned with his hands.  Ten of the twelve solid steel
posts had been severed with cutting torches.  Only two remained.  Once they
were cut, the explosives would finish the job.

        On a hillside across the river, a boy stood in his backyard and
watched them through binoculars.  His shirt rippled in the breeze.  He stood
barefoot on a concrete pad, on which sat a wooden bench.

        He focused on another group of men, surrounding what appeared to
be the blasting equipment.  They, like the boy, observed the men standing
beside the furnace.  He lowered his binoculars as his mother walked toward
him.  Her arms were full of damp laundry.

        "Are they ready yet?" she said.  She placed a wooden clothespin between
her lips.

        "No.  They just started cutting the support beams.  They'll probably be
at least another hour."

        The men had gotten to work.  Several of them stood behind a welder,
wearing an apron and a helmet.  The shielding protected him from showers of
sparks.  He held a cutting torch connected to a compressor.  A white-hot flame
sliced through the support beam.

        "Are you hungry for lunch yet?" his mother said.

        The boy didn't reply.  He stared through the binoculars, his elbows
flared outward.

        "Scott, do you want lunch yet?"

        He lowered his binoculars, his face angling toward her.

        "Can I have a jumbo sandwich?  And some pickles, please?"
He stood there as though he had a job to do, not moving from his spot near the
backyard fence.

        "Okay."  She finished pinning the white sheets to the line and
disappeared through the basement door.

        He sat on the bench and continued his watch.  The wind gusted,
moving the binoculars from their focus.  He lowered them to his lap and felt
his feet warming upon the concrete.  The city of McKeesport shimmered in
the summer's heat, its squat skyline interlaced with busy streets.  Beyond
the business district, miles of backstreets vanished into the haze.

        He wiped the sweat from his forehead and drank several gulps of
orange pop when he heard a loud metallic grinding sound.  Small yellow
dots were streaming away from the base of the furnace.  Through the binoculars,
he saw that the men were dashing for cover.  They ran a few hundred yards,
stopped, and grouped together to watch the blast furnace.

        Behind him, the door opened, and his mother approached, carrying a
plate of food across the yard.

        "Did you hear that?" he said.  "Those guys ran away from the furnace
as fast as they could!"

        "I was in the house.  What happened?"

        "I think it shifted in the wind.  It must be unstable.  Those support
posts have been cut.  I bet they were afraid it would collapse."

        "Holy Moly!"

        "Thanks, Ma," he said, and took the plate from her hand.  He began to
eat the sandwich.

        "Is Luke coming over?" she said.

        "Probably not.  He has to cut the grass.  That takes a few hours.
By the time he's done, he'll be too hot and tired to walk all the way here."

        "They're walking back," she said.  She squinted, her hand shading her
eyes from the sun.

        He looked through the binoculars again.  The hard hats glinted in the
sun.  The men were proceeding toward the furnace, their eyes fixed upon the two
hundred foot tall structure.

        His mother returned to the laundry.  The wind gusted, the clothesline
poles rising and falling, the white sheets billowing.  He could smell the
cotton as it dried.  The flickering white light of the cutting torch vanished.
The men inspected the severed post as the welder began to cut through another.
Only one post remained.

        He had watched them work all day yesterday, and they had cut through
the majority of the support beams.  His father, a supervisor at the Duquesne
plant, had told him that the furnace would be blown down by mid-afternoon
today.

        Another metallic crunch boomed across the valley.  He tensed,
strained to detect any movement of the furnace.  Once again, the workers were
dashing for cover.  One of the men lost his hard hat and left it on the ground.
Scott shouted to his mother, and she came running to the fence.

        "I think the furnace shifted again," he said, keeping the binoculars
focused on the furnace.  He knew he would have done the same.  He recalled
the previous winter, when he was cutting down trees at the edge of the woods
below the backyard fence.  He was sawing an eight inch trunk when the tree
began to split.  He dove for cover, afraid the trunk might shatter, the
ripsaw's blade still embedded in the wood.  A few years ago, the next door
neighbor was cut very badly in a similar incident.  Suddenly the cutting
torch flame sprang to life again.  Roughly a foot of metal remained.

        He began to eat the second half of his sandwich.  He was sweating,
despite the gusty winds, which provided some relief from the heat.  His mother
had finished hanging the laundry and sat down on the swing, in the shade of
the oak tree.

        "Is Dad going to watch?" he said.

        "He has meetings today, so he won't have time."

        "Don't you think it's sad that they're blowing the furnace down?"  He
removed the binoculars from around his neck and lay them upon the bench.

        "In a way.  For so many years I hated having the mill across the
river, sending smoke at us every day.  Now it's quieter and the air is
cleaner, but there's so few jobs since the mills shut down.  Every day
Dad hears something new about what's happening with the Duquesne plant."

        "I wonder if they'll have a single mill running here in ten years."
He remembered watching the furnace crews at night, steam rising to fill the
sky, the orange glow of iron lighting the clouds.  Over ten thousand people
once worked at the McKeesport plant.

        "Everything is falling apart," she said.  "Dad is sick from worrying.
He hasn't slept right for a month.  He put in too many years with U.S. Steel to
leave them now..."

        A pit of worry formed in his stomach -- the thought of his father
losing his job, the house, the car, everything they owned.  He knew they were
in debt, how much he didn't know, but his father was always worrying about
money.  There were quiet arguments between his parents, flaring tempers at the
mall when too much money was spent.  Recently, his father had taken to selling
old appliances, radios, and tools to neighbors.

        A siren wailed across the valley.  Its pitch rose and fell, and the
workers packed up their truck near the furnace.  In a few minutes, the truck
pulled away and  drove toward the demolitions team, now buzzing about their
equipment.  They checked wires, inspected gauges.  A truck with siren horns
sat near them.

        "That's the first warning!" he said.  His heart raced, the binocular
eyepieces firm against his face.  Traffic rushed a half mile behind the
blasting crew.  He wondered how many people knew what was about to happen.  
There had been a report on last night's news, indicating that all surgery
had been canceled at the hospitel from noon to 2 PM.  The hospital was less
than a mile from the furnace, and the blast would be hazardous to any patient
under the knife.

        His mother left the swing and rushed to his side at the fence.  Fritz
was barking at the basement door as the siren ended.  Scott forgot the wind,
the heat, the taste of lunch still in his mouth.  The siren wailed again.

        "I can't believe this is really happening," he said.  The blast crew
was ready, men standing behind their gear, their eyes trained upon the
furnace.  He lowered the binoculars to take in the whole view.  His heart
thudded in his chest, his breathing hard, as the wind fell away and left no
sound between him and the furnace.  The phone rang from inside the house, but
neither of them moved to answer it.  The ringing stopped, and then it
happened.

        White flashes of light strobed about the base of the furnace.  Brown
smoke jetted outward from the blast, and the sound finally reached his ears.  A
tremendous thud rattled his ribs, rolled through the valley, the brown cloud
swelling about the lower half of the furnace.  Like a gargantuan robot losing
its footing, the furnace fell slowly backward, the metal crown, the metal pipes
thicker than a house, holding their collective form.  Sounds of metal
crunching, groaning, cracking, filled the sky.  The furnace struck the ground,
and his breathing stopped.

        The sound of the impact reached him, as the brown cloud engulfed acres
of vacant millworks.  The thunder peaked, then slowly faded.  Silence.  He
could hear his mother's breathing and the flapping of the white sheets in the
wind.

        The neighbors were standing in their own backyards, their mouths hanging
open, expressions of disbelief on their faces.  Bill, the retired steelworker
next door, shook his head, turned, and walked back inside.

        "My God," his mother said.  Scott knew that he couldn't say anything
more profound than that.  She had said it perfectly.