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Red Hook District, Brooklyn, New York

February 15, 1911

T ití Luz used to tell me, “No hay mal que por bien no venga,” which was a timeworn proverb for saying every cloud has a silver lining, hurricanes notwithstanding.

She was the reason I’d sailed sixteen hundred miles to get here, a promise she’d pressed out of me on her deathbed. The way she saw it, Nueva York was a stockpile of the freedom America had pledged to Puerto Rico, and she couldn’t rest in peace if I didn’t vow to claim my share. There wasn’t really a choice; Tití Luz could out-stubborn even the tuberculosis that was killing her, and would have kept breathing just to guilt me. So I agreed. Sailing away from the solitude that had hung around me my whole life seemed a decent enough silver lining once she was gone.

Bueno , the joke was on me. Because, in a city of almost ten million people, being boricua in a dingy Brooklyn foundry gets you nothing but solitude.

Speaking nothing but Puerto Rican Spanish, it’s not like I got off the boat expecting to share nightly drinks with the entire Sixth Ward. But ironwork always takes a crew, and English wasn’t so hard for a malleable mouth like mine to learn. I didn’t think I’d be stripping ingots four years later with a bunch of Irish extranjeros who’d never bothered to learn my real name, still hunting for silver linings.

Then again, the way my life turned on its head when I volunteered to build that maldito tank, maybe I just hadn’t gotten the right commission.

“All right ya useless cabbages, who wants a crack at a head-smelter?”

From his perch on the stairs overlooking the molding floor of the Structural Ironworks Department, Paddy McCoy was a wobbly-jowled guard in his watchtower, scouring for inmates. My coworkers and I nearly fit the bill; we were busy sweating buckets at the blast furnaces below him, prepping beams for another millionaire’s monument to himself: the Woolworth Building.

At our station next to the cooling beds, Farty Walsh shuffled away from me and into the foreman’s line of sight holding up two sooty palms like he was facing arrest. “Wasn’t it you sayin’ beam rollers’ hands is too thick for smelters, chief? Or did the gombeens in Ornamental waste ’emselves makin’ pretty gates for the Vanderbilts now?”

Two dozen snorts and snickers blended with the furnaces’ roar as I turned back to my work. Farty was better at wagging his lips than helping me strip iron bars fresh from the crucibles, but I hated to admit the malcriado had a point. Head-smelter commissions were troublesome, technical puzzles—so named for being a legitimate dolor de cabeza to deliver on time. They usually fell to the twiggy, smooth-fingered craftsmen in the Ornamental Ironwork Department the next building over, not the rough nuts in Structural, most of whom were built broader and only slightly fleshier than the metal we pounded.

Don’t ask how a flaquito like me wound up in here.

“ day, you’ll get that smart mouth o’ yours caught in the forge, Mr. Walsh,” McCoy snarked on his way down to the shop floor. “The Ornamental lads is all tied up with the Woolworth, same as you.”

Across from Farty and me, Innis scoffed around the pipe between his teeth. “Meanin’ it’s a shite job.”

“Meaning it’s an opportunity,” McCoy countered. “It’s headed to one o’ them Coney Island parks. Might be a good time, if you’ve had your fill of rivets and beam rollin’.”

Farty spat, the only wet thing in this building that wasn’t petroleum. “Aye, if it’s so much fun, I bet Wheezy’ll do it. He’s havin’ a bad dose.”

Just to be clear, my name’s Benny, not Wheezy—a nickname Farty invented for two reasons: the first being the busted lungs God saw fit to give me, and the second being Farty’s need for a pithy way to remind everyone that, sure as I was shorter than him, I’d always be lower too.

No one called Marty Walsh “Farty” but me, the only reason being that anyone who talked out of his ass as much as he did deserved a name to match. Not that I’d ever said it to him out loud.

“Ah, lay offa Wheezy!” Farty’s cogging partner and drinking buddy Dan sidled up next to us with a black stripe drawn thickly across his forehead from wiping sweat. In the reddish glow of the furnaces, we all looked brown...

“He’s just mopey ’cause Long Island’s got no palm trees!”

...but I was the one who got it rubbed in his face.

I knelt over the mold and tugged my cap down over the scene of heckling coworkers, taking smaller sips of air to ward off the whistle rising in my chest. If I started coughing, I’d never stop, and the day was long enough without these pendejos cracking wise about my shitty breathing.

I was still staring at the ground when McCoy’s shoes shuffled into view followed by a leaf of folded stationery.

“You interested, Caldera?”

Farty leaned leisurely on one leg to watch his influence play out. I would deliver the apology he owed me on his behalf in the mirror later; if he knew how good my impression of his voice was, it would wipe that self-satisfied smirk clean off his grimy face. Standing up, I stripped my leather gloves, wiped my sweaty palms on my corduroys, and took the order.

The “blueprint” was just an artist’s sketch. Drawn in black ink was an iron-and-glass cage balanced on a steel undercarriage, albeit the bars wrapped around only three sides leaving an unobstructed viewing pane on the fourth. It looked fit to hold a small lake, with a drainage hatch by the bottom and another in the lattice roof reachable by a set of iron rungs built onto the side. Tiny script cluttered the drawing—stuff like “Panes must be impervious to rupture” and “Padlock or rim lock? You decide.”

I smoothed my expression in case anyone was looking for a crack in it to stick a fingernail through. “On wheels?” I asked.

McCoy lifted his bowler hat to scratch at the patch of thinning cabello underneath. “Just the rims. As for the tempered panes, Bushwick Glass Works will take care of ’em sure. But the gentleman did say the asset must be transportable.”

That wasn’t so bad. The wagons that ran coffee between the plantations and piers in Puerto Rico had needed rims too. At my old foundry, I’d forged everything from shipping vessel parts to mill machinery to ornamented ceiling tiles for la Casa de la Alcaldía de San Juan by the time I was fifteen. It was fascinating work, easy to disappear into if you had a brain full of noise like mine.

“By when?” I asked.

Pink-faced, he stepped around the paper and pointed to the corner of it. I had to read the words aloud to make sure I didn’t misinterpret them.

“‘Asset needed before next’—” My voice shrank. “‘ Full moon ’?”

Sniggers spread around us like a rash as I did the math. The last full moon was two nights ago, which left only nineteen working days to finish this head-smelter unless I came in on weekends.

More to the point, what the hell sort of customer sets deadlines by the moon?

“Mangy gobshites,” McCoy muttered. “Let’s take a walk, Benny.”

He steered me by the shoulders away from those cabrones , toward the stairs leading up to his office. “You know I had my reservations four years ago, hiring a kid who didn’t speak a lick o’ English,” he said. “But you’ve always had a surprising aptitude for metalwork. Most of these lads ain’t made for labor what needs sharp eyes and imagination, but I don’t mind sayin’ you got plenty of both.”

What McCoy called “aptitude” was what got my coworkers resenting me in the first place. Right off the steamship, I’d walked into his office and sold him a thumper in broken English about how the Humacao sugar mill at el Centro Pasto Viejo had sent me as their Spanish-speaking envoy. A factory full of grim, sweaty smithies watched me hammer on the gears they’d cast for the production plant to prove they had been improperly made, and though McCoy knew I was lying about who sent me, he also knew I wasn’t lying about the gears. I was on the payroll by lunch.

Maybe he’d always known what I was worth, but he’d never said it aloud.

“Thanks.”

Near the foot of the stairs, he stuck his thumbs under his too-tight suspenders and leaned toward my ear, a tang of stout beer and café on his breath. “Ever fancy yourself working in our Ornamental Department, Caldera?”

I stopped walking. “Beg your pardon, chief?”

“I’d give you the lead. Dan, Innis, and Elmer’ll be your crew. Who knows—” He gave my filthy striped shirt a tap. “Could be this head-smelter’s your ticket away from the furnaces, hm?”

Like every other smithy in Structural, fantasizing about a desk in the clean, well-lit Ornamental building next door was an unspoken part of the job description, and he knew it. But unlike my coworkers, I wasn’t so thirsty for the pay raise or the white-starched shirt. The only thing less tolerable than being brown and spare in a sea of burly Irishmen was my asthma.

And no one in Ornamental had to breathe black air.

A moment of mute disbelief passed before the furnace heat on my teeth told me I was smiling. “All right. I’ll do it.”

“Good lad!”

McCoy clapped me on the shoulder and swung us around to face a dozen sooty ears cocked in our direction. “Back to the boilers, ya nosy eejits,” he hollered, giving me a light shove back toward the ingots. “Woolworth Building ain’t gonna reach the sky by itself!”

I resumed my spot next to Farty where a new mold glowed like a small sun, and tucked my smile away before he could see it. That lambón had gotten his wish; I’d expected his standard smirk waiting for me, smug and sour like a lemon peel was permanently wedged between his molars.

No smirk, though. Rather, his expression gave off a chill that cut through the heat like an ice pick. I looked away before it could stick me in the neck.

Farty Walsh was always a bigger hazard when he wasn’t smiling.

The month rattled past like a subway car. Busting a lung to meet a batty deadline with second-rate help would have slowed down any other smithy, but nothing motivated me like having the freedom to run my own project. McCoy had said I could do as I pleased if I thought I could improve the design, so I gave myself permission to speculate. What kind of person would pay to visit a big, metal box by the ocean when the ocean was right there— for free ?

I sought inspiration closer to the equator. From the dusty recesses of my brain, Caribbean lines spilled onto the blueprint: whiplash ocean wave panels, sea spray membranes, cast-iron clamshells. While my team rolled bars and hinges, I molded frames and panels with San Juan sabor .

Once the cage was constructed and the glass installed, what assembly remained fell to me alone, which I far preferred to negotiating tasks with my cranky coworkers. At some point through lunches, overtime, and weekends, I’d begun assembling a dream instead of a tank, and I wasn’t keen to share it. I’d glance daily out the window at the building next door, too impatient for a future inside it to mind the dots of blood that started showing up on my handkerchief when I coughed.

I’d begun to believe what Tití Luz had said. That in America, “todo es posible.” Because on the second Sunday evening in March, less than a month after the head-smelter arrived, it sat finished in the moonlit delivery bay, polished, sealed, and mounted on six burnished steel wheels I’d hammered myself.

I stood back to survey my work like an artist who’d mixed the powdered pigment of his hope with linseed oil and painted with it. Then, I draped the tarp over the tank for the last time and punched out.

Walking down Second Street toward Gowanus Bay the night before pickup day, neither my exhaustion nor the sting of New York winter could douse my excitement for what tomorrow might bring. My favorite spot on the dock was out there waiting, a row of crusty pilings where the barges lined up hull-to-hull like oversized sardine cans to frame a clear view of the water that wrapped around Brooklyn and beyond. It was pretty in its way, though a far cry from the waterfront I missed.

La Bahía de San Juan was blue. The kind that smelled of salt and seaweed and made you forget your island was still bloody from a war it couldn’t win. Even after the San Ciriaco hurricane blew the dream of Puerto Rican liberation away with the gunpowder, the sea did as the sea does and made it like nothing had changed. Had I known I would never see that shade of blue again, I would have paid better attention.

The Gowanus Canal looked like spilled wood stain and stank of piss and horseshit. If you felt brave enough to stick your hand in it, it would disappear into the silt, then probably fall clean off your arm once the infections set in. But at this hour, it was easy to imagine a different waterfront if you squinted. Night turned the steamship soup colorless, emptied it of commerce, and left you in the peaceful company of a waxing moon, an island wind, and musical currents lapping their rhythm against the hulls of lonely barges. Out here, even a guy with busted lungs could breathe.

I took the necklace Tití Luz gave me out of my pocket and ran a chilly thumb over the San Cristóbal embossed on the pewter medallion. Across the bay, a different patron saint of travelers guarded the Iron City with her back to Manhattan, Lady Liberty’s glowing torch held high like a promise. I’d made a promise too, to Tití Luz. Maybe I’d finally make good on it. Find the liberty America never gave us tucked somewhere between the tenements and brownstones.

Until then, I hung San Cristóbal back around my neck and blew on my fingers, grateful for a place where I could forget I was a man without a country.

Pickup day was the sort of Monday you hated punching in for. Gray and cold, with factory-smoke skies shedding dirty snowflakes too sparse to make a home on the pavement. My coworkers dragged themselves in by the neck with their usual torpor, half rat-assed on whatever they drank the night before.

I was sober enough to dry up the canal, and twitchier than un gato estresa’o waiting for the tank to meet its new owner. While Farty, Dan, Innis, and I took up our next assignment at the furnace—rivets for the Woolworth—I pictured a stiff, whiskered jefe in winter wools and starched whites, fragrant with leather.

Maybe everyone else did too, because as soon as the mustachioed man swaggered unannounced onto the foundry floor in his faded fur-trimmed cape and bright green suit, productivity ground to a halt.

“Sir! It’s a mite dangerous in here for visitors!” Our illustrious foreman rushed out of his office and down the stairs with a fresh coffee stain on his shirt, one hand snatching off his wayward bowler hat and the other held out in greeting. “Patrick McCoy, at your service! Mr. Samuel Morgan, is it?”

This threadbare dandy commissioned the tank? He looked like an avocado stuck in a bird’s nest in his rubber boots, matted cuffs, and missing waistcoat buttons comically at odds with his lime-colored clothes. Floating next to him was a young lady—pretty, with large eyes and creamy skin flushed from the chill. She wasn’t shopworn like her companero ; in her fancy woolen winter coat, tight coils of apple-red hair poking out from under a hat that matched her crimson skirt, she looked like she’d stepped off the December cover of The Delineator .

Mr. Morgan removed his top hat, revealing slick waves of neatly parted brown locks. “My apologies for letting myself in. It appears your receptionist is out to lunch, and I couldn’t wait.”

My ears fastened on his voice. The Avocado Man had no accent I could trace beyond Long Island Sound, no telltale bump or angle in his features pertaining to coordinates beyond the spot where he stood. No one in the foundry qualified as American by most of America’s standards, least of all me, but this guy sure sounded like the real deal.

“Right this way, sir,” McCoy said amiably. As our visitors walked ahead of him toward the delivery bay, McCoy spun back to wave a frantic hand at Dan, Elmer, Innis, and me. We threw off our leather gloves to join them outside.

Halfway out the barn doors, I almost walked right into McCoy’s backside.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” whispered McCoy as I looked over his shoulder and said, “Madre de Dios.”

Beyond the tarp, four white horses stood in a neat line hitched to a brightly painted stagecoach, giant rhinestone-encrusted plumes sprouting like palm fronds from their green bridles. On the coach’s endgate and side panels, the words “Morgan’s Menagerie of Human Oddities” shone in gilded red letters.

The tank was headed to a sideshow .

“Tell me I did not come all the way out here to freeze my beans off, Sam,” a deep, tetchy voice called from the driver’s seat. “I’m shivering fit to shake the coach to pieces!”

By now, all the smithies were congregating to watch, and our eyes blinked wide as a Black man made entirely of muscles swung out onto the gravel with a hefty thud. He strode over, his thick neck, thick arms, and thick calves bulging through his clothing like a sneeze would provide all the force necessary to make his sleeves explode. This guy didn’t have the manicured air of his companeros —too busy was he with rubbing warmth into his massive hands and burrowing his head into a scarf that barely reached around his neck.

“Strongest man in the world, weak against a little chill,” Mr. Morgan muttered before he remembered we were there. “Ah, where are my manners? Introductions, yes?”

He gestured to the pelirroja first. “May I present Miss Sonia Kutzler, our own Flexible Fraülein.”

She cut in front of Mr. Morgan with a dainty outstretched hand and a greeting that sounded like German words forced through a Brooklyn sieve. “ Guten Tag. ”

“And this”—Mr. Morgan gestured to his freezing friend—“is Matthias Martin.”

Mr. Martin cleared his throat. The Avocado Man rolled his eyes and added, “That is, the Mighty Matthias.”

“Great Galahad!” cried Dan, who elbowed past me to snatch the hand the Mighty Matthias had offered McCoy. “You’re the strongest man in the world! Marty, c’mere and meet the strongest man in the world!”

“Shut your flatter-trap, I know who he is!” Farty tore off his cap and sidled up to Dan. “I say, it’s a real treat, Mr. Matthias, sir! I’ve still got your flyer from my last jaunt to Luna Park! Got to see you lift two thousand pounds!”

My eyes bulged. Never in my life had I seen Irishmen fawn over a colored man. Was this what it took to get respect in America? A body like Hércules?

Mr. Martin’s mighty head gave a restrained nod. “Ain’t that nice.”

“Well now, can you really lift two thousand pounds?” McCoy asked breathlessly before Mr. Morgan smoothly inserted himself between them.

“Fifteen cents for a ticket to find out, my good man! The asset, if you please?”

Everything above my neck went weightless as McCoy motioned for my coworkers and me to remove the tarp. It seemed to take an age to fall away, but suddenly, there it was, the effort of the longest month of my life on six wheels, towering fourteen feet above the ground. I swayed on my feet like I’d exposed my guts instead of a tank.

Mr. Morgan’s face was unreadable. “This... is not what I illustrated.”

I reached for San Cristóbal , my heart beating like my blood had gone thick. McCoy had allowed me liberties with the design—had I taken too many?

The foreman’s mouth drew a thin line between his jowls as he removed his hat. “If it don’t meet your requir—”

“It’s better.”

McCoy and I both stood up straighter.