The foreman showed him the boiler house, a big corrugated tin shed with three iron smokestacks rising fifty feet into the fetid air of the plant. “Here you go. T-Bub, is that what they call you?”

“That’s a fact,” Paul said, zipping up his coveralls.

“You got three two-hundred-horsepower boilers here, two Eries, and that old Babcox we ain’t used.”

Paul looked at a tarnished brass steam gauge and shook his head. “What you burning in ’em?”

“Whatever the oil companies send us to get rid of. We mix that with number-two oil to get the flame fairly clean.”

“What you do with the steam?” He looked up at the shed roof where a spritz of hot vapor showed a leak in the main supply line.

“Some goes to cookers and reducer vessels full of the bad shit they send us from Italy. Some goes to a kiln where we’re sterilizing soil and drying out dry cleaner’s sludge.”

“Damn.” Paul crinkled his nose.

“This ain’t no bakery, that’s for sure.”

Paul put on a glove, bent down, and jerked open a fire door, looking into the combustion chamber and the honeycomb of fire tubes beyond. “Shit.”

“You gonna need a fireman?”

“Hell yeah. These flues need scraping bad. Send me somebody big and stupid. Somebody who can stand a lot of heat.”

“I got just the man,” the foreman told him, heading out into the sunlight, wiping sweat.

Paul studied the injectors, which were piped wrong, the auxiliary boiler feed pumps, which were corroded and stuck, and the gauge cocks, which were limed shut. He heard a pair of boots coming along the cement firing apron and stepped from between two boilers to meet Bucky Tyler, who was wearing a shiny new hard hat and sunglasses.

“Hello, coon-ass,” Tyler said.

“What’s going on, Texas?”

Bucky looked away a moment, then swung an expressionless face back. “I hear you can keep up steam.” He gave Paul a slow, nasty smile, little strings of spit hanging off his eyeteeth.

“If you can sign a paycheck, I can keep up steam.”

Bucky looked up at the main gauge, which read a paltry fifty pounds. “What’s wrong with these things, anyway?”

“Nothing and everything. They just gonna take a lot of babying along. I’ll have to change out a few pipes on the water supply. The main problem was, your last engineer had his head three miles up his asshole.”

“Let’s not make that a tradition around here.”

He ignored the statement, thinking of the money. “I’ll lower the safeties to one sixty.”

Bucky shook his head. “We need the extra heat and pressure for faster turnaround.”

“Somebody’s got ’em set at one eighty per square inch. That’s over your state ticket, and if you keep running over pressure, these things will cause you big problems.”

“Let me worry about that,” Bucky said, louder than he had to.