Each of Leon Petrovsky’s days were ponderous replays of those that came before, like the endless parade of lumbering elephantine boxcars outside his dirty office window. One after another, a monochromatic freight yard tableau of corroding steel under a remorseless Illinois sky taunted him in the yard house at his painted metal desk. His eyes were gray. Even the untrimmed hairs protruding from his ears and nose seemed to be an outgrowth of the creeping arthritic tendrils in his graying bones.
His time on the yard forced him here, the logical next step in a trainman’s career if engineer or brakeman wasn’t an option. His body could no longer take the punishment the young gandy dancers continued to tolerate. They were so much like his son, and were for him beneficiaries of the anger triggered by that painful reminder. Especially Noles, the twenty-four-year-old switch tender with aspirations like his own. He wants to be on the trains. Well, so did I, thought Leon. He’ll put in his time just like everyone else.
Joe Noles complained that his job and boss were sapping his youth and vigor, the drone of a much older man, as if his days were numbered. When he headed to work at the yard, he left the care and comfort of his wife and a small apartment, steeling himself for another eight hours of repetitious exertion under the eyes of a tyrant. He hated second shift, the dimming light that consumed the train yard after a diesel-stained sunset, and the need to be extra alert to the dangers of performing maintenance on switches at night. Daylight turned to darkness with the speed and mechanical precision of all the other switches in the yard.
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