Free IN & OZ: A Novel by Steve Tomasula Page B

lumber, the company was able to capitalize on a single design, the Standard Design, that allowed them to output a carriage every five hours, modifying each during production to be either a horse-drawn buggy for Sunday drives or a wheeled cannon mount. They also made their first horseless carriage: a motorized vehicle which could be fitted with a Gatling gun for military use, but was in fact first used to break up a strike by workers at a factory that supplied the rivets in its frame.
    The expansion that had been fueled by the war allowed the company—now known as The Standard Automobile & Armament Factory—to again survive the peace, this time by making automobiles: black carriages with gasoline engines that had to be started with a crank. It was during this period that the mansion had been built, the great-great grandsons of the original Blacksmith having grown so very rich and powerful that once a President even spent the night in their mansion. A third shift had been added and production ran night and day. By this time the shifts of SAAF were a kind of nature to the people of IN, the factory whistle marking the rising and setting of their sons who grew up to become their fathers on its assembly lines though Photographer pointed out that this history was not so evident in the history of IN that was written in the sheets of metal they forged, a history that ran from the black-carriages to the sedans with running boards for gangsters to stand on, to the amphibious troop carriers and rocket launchers of WWII, then the tail fins and flamboyant hood ornaments when times were good, which fell away as times grew lean and the expected WWIII remained forever just beyond the horizon. The last car the company ever made was a single prototype built for a World’s Fair: a Futuristic Car of the Future from a future that, of course, never came.
    The group stood in reverent silence, their funhouse reflections dim in the tarnished titanium of this last car, shaped like a torpedo with high rocket fins. In the hush of the museum, the memento mori moved Mechanic to thoughts of his own dead parents, and how blueprints for this stillborn future must have been created at about the same time that his father, who had never intended to be a mechanic, had opened his garage. Living under a bridge as Mechanic’s father and mother did, whenever someone’s car broke down it would coast downhill and end up at their door. Usually owners of the broken cars simply asked to use the phone. Sometimes they would ask his father to have a look-see at the engine. Eventually, the increasing business brought on by the ever-more severe cost-cutting measures at the plant forced him to put up a hand-lettered sign listing fees for various repairs. He never returned from his next layoff, having metamorphosed during it into a full-time mechanic.
    Following the group into the art gallery of the museum, Mechanic had all of this in mind, taking in the succession of company calendars that hung there depicting the evolution of the factory with its ever-more modern train loads of coal and trees at one end, acres of completed cars at the other, plumes of PROSPERITY issuing from each of the factory’s many smokestacks. One photo showed a heraldic shield fashioned from the oranges, greens and browns of autumn—Trees in autumn, Mechanic and the others realized, once they were close enough to see that the heraldic shield was actually an aerial view of a forest that had been cleared in such a way so that the trees left standing would form a corporate logo the size of a small fiefdom. There were other portraits of inheritance: an unbroken lineage from the painting of a long-bearded founding father, all the way up to a studio photo of a smiling, great-great-great CEO-grandson, posing with his movie-star wife as if the more money earned, the more attractive the people making it became. There was no other art. And looking at this art history, Mechanic saw how if his parents had not