Early next morning, we drove to Schmidt’s Scrapyard and parked out of sight around a corner, on a one-way street with nothing but vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. It was Friday, 7 a.m. The scrapyard had just opened. Wearing our shabbiest work clothes, with rips, frays, paint stains, to be discarded later, we dragged the shopping carts out of the pickup bed and filled them with the scrap metal we had collected. We wheeled the carts around the corner, through the yard’s open front gate. My cart had a wobbly front wheel that kept it pulling to the right. Mike’s cart worked perfectly, wouldn’t you know.
The only one in the yard, beside Mike and me, was one of Mrs. Schmidt’s employees. Wearing a welding mask, cutting lengths of metal with an acetylene torch in a shower of sparks, he paid
