An Excerpt from the Novel At the Lake

Here is the first chapter of my novel, At The Lake. It's available at amazon and you can find the link on my CP page.

It was a late Friday afternoon in early January, 1967, almost closing time at the factory. Freezing winds made coifs look like rats' nests and comb-overs stood up like rooster's crests. No amount of clothing kept the cold from penetrating to the bone. This was a typical northern New Jersey winter. The weatherman, that bastion of accuracy, had predicted six degrees for that night, a virtual heat wave. It had been six below the night before.

The parking lot around the drab factory building was filthy with two-day-old snow and was jammed with rusting cars. Nothing looked new enough to bother keeping clean. The old munitions factory had been belching smoke since before most of the people in the town of Pumpkin Pond had been born. And most of them worked there now.

Inside the factory, the din of machinery made it hard to hear your thoughts. It smelled of machine oil and hot metal, the kind of smells that stayed in your hair and clothes after work, and even a hot shower didn't take the memory of it out of your nostrils.

Three generations of Pumpkinians (someone on the city council had once suggested Pumpkinites but old man Peevey said it sounded like a skin condition), male and female, hunched over large and small work stations, putting tiny pieces of glittering brass together with fingers that knew every notch and crevasse in the metal. Most of them could have done their jobs blindfolded.

The foreman, Joe Burke, was in his 50s. He was a quiet man with a crew cut, acting very much in charge. He strolled from station to station with his trusty clipboard. He had worked these machines himself when he was a kid and even after ten years as foreman, he could still work any machine in the place. He strolled past a double workstation where two women intently manipulated the tiny brass cylinders and springs.