 
        from FUGUE FOR AN OCTOBER AGE                        THE STEELERS 1.
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             By the weekend, the weather has turned cold and raw.  About mid- 
        morning  Sunday  it  begins  to  rain.  As Carl and I drive down the 
        interstate, the rain turns to sleet and begins to  gather  in  trans- 
        lucent  little  globs under the windshield wipers.  He pulls off his 
        glove and adjusts the defroster. 
             "I'm sorry about the way I acted last night at Ron's," he  says. 
        "I  guess  I was  pretty drunk.  And I guess I said some pretty wild 
        things, didn't I?" 
              "I guess we all did.  But  you shouldn't have left Ellie alone 
        like that.  She was in bad shape.  The least  you  could  have  done 
        would  have  been  to come up and see how she was doing. But all you
        cared about was shooting off those goddamned guns."
             We  come out into the river valley, the opposing hills shrouded 
        in mist.  We pass the J&L blastfurnaces, gargantuan  steel cylinders 
        reeking  of  burning sulfur and spurting smoke and steam and tongues 
        of yellow flame. 
             "We had a lot of fun, though," he says. "Ron was showing us his 
        Schwarzlose.  Did  you  ever  see a Schwarzlose?  It's a German auto- 
        matic pistol, only instead of the slide blowing backwards the barrel 
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