We entered a long, shed-like room in which I saw a series of overhead doors along one side and a row of small offices on the other. I followed the boy down an aisle between endless cans, buckets and drums labeled with the company's trademark, a screaming eagle. The paint was stacked in neatly pyramided lots along the concrete floor. Then, starting into one of the offices, the boy stopped short and grinned.
"Listen to that!"
Someone inside the office was swearing violently over a telephone.
"Who's that?" I asked.
He grinned. "Your boss, the terrible Mr. Kimbro. We call him 'Colonel,' but don't let him catch you."
I didn't like it. The voice was raving about some failure of the laboratory and I felt a swift uneasiness. I didn't like the idea of starting to work for a man who was in such a nasty mood. Perhaps he was angry at one of the men from the school, and that wouldn't make him feel too friendly toward me.
"Let's go in," the boy said. "I've got to get back."
As we entered, the man slammed down the phone and picked up some papers.
"Mr. MacDuffy wants to know if you can use this new man," the boy said.
"You damn right I can use him and ..." the voice trailed off, the eyes above the stiff military mustache going hard.
"Well, can you use him?" the boy said. "I got to go make out his card."
"Okay," the man said finally. "I can use him. I gotta. What's his name?"
The boy read my name off a card.
"All right," he said, "you go right to work. And you," he said to the boy, "get the hell out of here before I give you a chance to earn some of the money wasted on you every payday!"
"Aw, gwan, you slave driver," the boy said, dashing from the room.
Reddening, Kimbro turned to me, "Come along, let's get going."
I followed him into the long room where the lots of paint were stacked along the floor beneath numbered markers that hung from the ceiling. Toward the rear I could see two men unloading heavy buckets from a truck, stacking them neatly on a low loading platform.
"Now get this straight," Kimbro said gruffly. "This is a busy department and I don't have time to repeat things. You have to follow instructions and you're going to be doing things you don't understand, so get your orders the first time and get them right! I won't have time to stop and explain everything. You have to catch on by doing exactly what I tell you. You got that?"
I nodded, noting that his voice became louder when the men across the floor stopped to listen.
"All right," he said, picking up several tools. "Now come over here."
"He's Kimbro," one of the men said.
I watched him kneel and open one of the buckets, stirring a milky brown substance. A nauseating stench arose. I wanted to step away. But he stirred it vigorously until it became glossy white, holding the spatula like a delicate instrument and studying the paint as it laced off the blade, back into the bucket. Kimbro frowned.
"Damn those laboratory blubberheads to hell! There's got to be dope put in every single sonofabitching bucket. And that's what you're going to do, and it's got to be put in so it can be trucked out of here before 11:30." He handed me a white enamel graduate and what looked like a battery hydrometer.
"The idea is to open each bucket and put in ten drops of this stuff," he said. "Then you stir it 'til it disappears. After it's mixed you take this brush and paint out a sample on one of these." He produced a number of small rectangular boards and a small brush from his jacket pocket. "You understand?"
"Yes, sir." But when I looked into the white graduate I hesitated; the liquid inside was dead black. Was he trying to kid me?
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know, sir ... I mean. Well, I don't want to start by asking a lot of stupid questions, but do you know what's in this graduate?"
His eyes snapped. "You damn right I know," he said. "You just do what you're told!"
"I just wanted to make sure, sir," I said.
"Look," he said, drawing in his breath with an exaggerated show of patience. "Take the dropper and fill it full ... Go on, do it!"
I filled it.
"Now measure ten drops into the paint ... There, that's it, not too goddam fast. Now. You want no more than ten, and no less."
Slowly, I measured the glistening black drops, seeing them settle upon the surface and become blacker still, spreading suddenly out to the edges.
"That's it. That's all you have to do," he said. "Never mind how it looks. That's my worry. You just do what you're told and don't try to think about it. When you've done five or six buckets, come back and see if the samples are dry ... And hurry, we've got to get this batch back off to Washington by 11:30 ..."
I worked fast but carefully. With a man like this Kimbro the least thing done incorrectly would cause trouble. So I wasn't supposed to think! To hell with him. Just a flunkey, a northern redneck, a Yankee cracker! I mixed the paint thoroughly, then brushed it smoothly on one of the pieces of board, careful that the brush strokes were uniform.
Struggling to remove an especially difficult cover, I wondered if the same Liberty paint was used on the campus, or if this "Optic White" was something made exclusively for the government. Perhaps it was of a better quality, a special mix. And in my mind I could see the brightly trimmed and freshly decorated campus buildings as they appeared on spring mornings -- after the fall painting and the light winter snows, with a cloud riding over and a darting bird above -- framed by the trees and encircling vines. The buildings had always seemed more impressive because they were the only buildings to receive regular paintings; usually, the nearby houses and cabins were left untouched to become the dull grained gray of weathered wood. And I remembered how the splinters in some of the boards were raised from the grain by the wind, the sun and the rain until the clapboards shone with a satiny, silvery, silver-fish sheen. Like Trueblood's cabin, or the Golden Day ... The Golden Day had once been painted white; now its paint was flaking away with the years, the scratch of a finger being enough to send it showering down. Damn that Golden Day! But it was strange how life connected up; because I had carried Mr. Norton to the old rundown building with rotting paint, I was here. If, I thought, one could slow down his heartbeats and memory to the tempo of the black drops falling so slowly into the bucket yet reacting so swiftly, it would seem like a sequence in a feverish dream ... I was so deep in reverie that I failed to hear Kimbro approach.
"How's it coming?" he said, standing with hands on hips.
"All right, sir."
"Let's see," he said, selecting a sample and running his thumb across the board. "That's it, as white as George Washington's Sunday-go-to-meetin' wig and as sound as the all-mighty dollar! That's paint!" he said proudly. "That's paint that'll cover just about anything!"
He looked as though I had expressed a doubt and I hurried to say, "It's certainly white all right."
"White! It's the purest white that can be found. Nobody makes a paint any whiter. This batch right here is heading for a national monument!"
"I see," I said, quite impressed.
He looked at his watch. "Just keep it up," he said. "If I don't hurry I'll be late for that production conference! Say, you're nearly out of dope: you'd better go in the tank room and refill it ... And don't waste any time! I've got to go."
He shot away without telling me where the tank room was. It was easy to find, but I wasn't prepared for so many tanks. There were seven; each with a puzzling code stenciled on it. It's just like Kimbro not to tell me, I thought. You can't trust any of them. Well, it doesn't matter, I'll pick the tank from the contents of the drip cans hanging from the spigots.