BLACK MARKET LIT
About Sara Witt.
Never Been Pretty
SARA ROSS WITT is a graduate of the New School University MFA program. Her writing has appeared in Best of Ohio Short Stories, Arch City Chronicles and Parent to Parent. She authored Pregphobic and Pregnant, a blog about pregnancy and motherhood while expecting her first child. She co-produced Tuesday Funk, Chicago’s eclectic monthly reading series, from 2010-2013. She lives in Chicago with her husband, her son (now 2 years old), and two cats. Currently, she is writing a coming-of-age novel.
I saw the line down and I heard it too. Gave me the creeps, kind of walking up on a graveyard, worrying about whose soul you might be stepping on; and a line down could mean death, could mean that behind the machines, all the shelving and wirings, there was a body. It wouldn’t be a pretty sight – tangled and torn, flesh hanging off bone, bone scraped down to toothpick, blood mixed into every part making it rusty orange. As a Line Supervisor I saw it too damn often.
I knew the sound of every belt and machine in Warren Pipe; metal scratching against metal all day, pipe clanging down steel rails, the tolling of pipe sounding of demonic ceaseless bells, hitting pipe, hitting kickers, kickers kicking pipe. The foundry was alive; she had movement, she had sound, her ovens breathed, she smelled of sweat-coated bodies and metal that left a bitter taste in the back of your throat. She gave us something and she took something from us. That’s what living felt like to me.
Could’ve crossed over the line, taken a short-cut, saved me some steps. My wife always counted her steps, some crazy notion about saving steps and saving time. But I never crossed a line, even if it was dead and shut-off. That’s bad luck, crossing a line, people don’t belong on the line, iron pipe does and if you cross a line you’re dead – or worse, fired. But people did it all the time; the Plant Manager Nolan Edson was the worst offender, and of course the rules could be bent for him and he could walk wherever he pleased. I know some of the men on the floor snickered that Nolan thought he was Jesus, thinking he could walk on line like walking on water and wouldn’t they like him to try that and wouldn’t they like to watch him drown. Nolan was a pain in my ass, too feral to be Plant Manager, he never worked iron in his life, and probably thought someone else should wipe his ass. Still I don’t want to watch him drown and I’d give the guys a sharp glance for talking like that. They knew what I meant, they’d been here longer than me. Being Line Supervisor didn’t make me a kiss-ass, I’d like to punch Nolan a-time or two for being a little shithead, but you don’t kill a boy and that’s what Nolan was, a stupid boy. My father and grandfather had worked the foundry, but it doesn’t mean anything to the management or to the iron. They treated you the same, you’ve got to prove yourself. Still we’ve been here so long you’d think we felt like we owned something. It isn’t like that in Warrenton; everyone clings to the foundry’s skirts. There’s ownership in this town, just the wrong way round.
“The line’s down,” I said as I rounded the last machine and found my team assembled at Clyde Moody’s station.
“There’s a problem with my kicker,” Clyde said. His voice was whisper-quiet and it amazed me that he could be heard above the din, but I figured everyone did like I did and paid real good attention, gave his words the respect they’re due. Clyde worked the pipe at Warren for forty years. He’d lied about his age just to get the job at fifteen and had worked through all the lay-offs, knew every machine; made Line Supervisor twelve years ago, forced out of that position after his accident but returned to working the line. He wouldn’t retire until he was at least sixty-two, we couldn’t walk away from our pensions. There were sunken grooves on his dark face, from too much squinting at the machine, too much heat off the floor, too much time wasted in this hellhole. He never complained, though, about all the dirt that’d been heaped onto his shoulders, not even after the accident five years ago. He was working at a jam in an unguarded machine and right as he’d fixed the problem, his sleeve caught, his arm was crushed. Disintegrated before his eyes.
“Thought we should stop the line before sending someone to fix it,” Clyde said.
I nodded. “Did the right thing.” I’d get my ass chewed on by Nolan for shutting the line off. He never stopped production: not for machine malfunction, not for injury, not for death. Nolan was all about the numbers and the numbers were down. Every morning he posted the numbers from the night before and every afternoon he checked to see where your numbers were at. I figure the market created his paranoia. All I know is he’s always talking about shutting the plant down and that would shut the town down. “Who’s on it?” I asked.
They were silent. Shuffled their feet, slid their hands along their overalls as if they could smooth out the wrinkles or free some of the collected grime. No one looked at me.
“Ain’t no one on it,” Shelly said.
She’d never been pretty.
Scars and disfiguration are commonplace at Warren, and like Clyde with his pinned-up shirtsleeve, you can see the abuses the foundry laid on her from several feet away. Her appearance was so that you’d want to avoid her: pock-faced and sallow-skinned, like tobacco crawled into her flesh, teeth gnarled and overlapping, and mouse-fur hair, but she was a hard worker.
The foundry had been slapped with all kinds of pollution violations by the EPA for dumping waste into the piss-stream river several years back, but Nolan couldn’t let that stop him, he came up with a new plan to burn the waste in the ovens. One day he gave Shelly that job. She didn’t check in with me, because we didn’t work like that and Nolan would’ve hemorrhaged if he thought we doubted his authority. She went to the oven, threw the waste in. It exploded. The oven door fell on her, crushed her skull in a few places which required a metal plate, burnt half of her body, the half that was touching the door. We yanked it off her and pulled off her skin with it. I don’t know which was more horrifying, staring at the flesh melted to the door or at the body without its flesh, just bone and blood and muscle twitching on the concrete, blackened in some parts like it was grilled, her whole body smoldering. Any minute I expected her to turn liquid and disappear, I think I even wished it. But she recovered and came back to work a year later. Said she came back for the money because Warren’s compensation wasn’t great, but I know she could’ve hired a real lawyer and sued the ass off this place. Truth is, she was like the town, she was part of the plant; after being disfigured it’s the only place she feels comfortable. So, there was Shelly, looking at me defiant with her one good eye, the rest of her face stretched taut and folded from the burn scars.
My team’s busted. Good workers, cautious workers. For Nolan that delays production. For me it means I’m protective; keep Nolan happy, keep him away from my team. “What we meeting about, Shel?”
“We aren’t having a meeting,” Clyde answered. “We’re having a moment. We’re thinking.”
“’Bout what?” If I had a cigarette, I would’ve lit up; that’s how Clyde’s voice sounded – a pull-out-a-cig-and-talk voice.
“Thinking about Linden.”
“That’s bad luck,” I said.
“Talking about Linden don’t make a curse,” Shel said. “He doesn’t make machines break, doesn’t cause the injuries.”
“It’s asking for trouble.” Even to my own ears I sounded paranoid. An elevator had crushed Linden McClinty, a fine mechanic, a boozer and an instigator. Linden’s probably the only one of us who didn’t grow up in Warrenton. Came down one summer from up north, the city’s name he never divulged, and a past he never talked about. It scared me shitless that it was Nolan who’d found him six hours after Linden’d been ordered into the shaft. It wasn’t like Nolan to check on anyone.
“Nolan’s the trouble.”
“Watch it, Shel. Giving lip is a curse on the floor,” I said.
“Nolan’s got us trapped here,” Clyde said. “Working twelve, sometimes sixteen hour shifts. Pissing on ourselves because we can’t have no break. Reduce Man Hours Per Ton. You’ve seen it, that damned company policy. He won’t hire nobody to ease our load; instead he’s doubling our production quotas.”
“We’re gonna die here,” he continued. “Buried here. There ain’t no pension. I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t believe this bullshit,” I said. “This is superstitious crap.”
“What about you, Denny?” Shel said. “Saying Linden is bad luck; something’s got you spooked too.”
“Everyone knows you don’t talk about a downed man while you’re working the floor. That ain’t superstition.”
“Nolan’s overworking us, forcing some of us to work when we shouldn’t.” Clyde cocked his head a bit towards Shel, his eyebrows stretching up his forehead like pointers. “Makes you wonder if he ever intends for us to retire, or if he’s going to do us in like he did Linden.”
I was hotter than usual: hot from the inside out, couldn’t even feel the heat from the floor, I was cooking too much inside and I was shaking too. I lost it. “Enough of this! We’re all working here until we’re old enough to get our pensions and then we leave. We take our fat wad of money stuffed in our pockets to Florida and we drink some fancy beer on the beach and that’s it. That’s life.” What the fuck was I saying? Didn’t believe a damn word of what I said. I would never leave. Florida for me was same as retiring on the moon.
“Nolan’s got to him,” Clyde said to Shel. I wanted to punch him right in his mouth. My fingers curled into a fist, nails biting into palm and I felt the punch of the swing pulling at my shoulder. I’d thrust back and swing forward and lay right into his jaw. I’d feel skin, bone, hear teeth crack. I’d keep digging.
Shel reacted to the violence thundering inside me. Clyde didn’t move. He watched and waiting. I wasn’t thinking right. Lay a hand on sweet old broken Clyde? Never. Jesus, I needed to get the line up.
Shel placed her big hand on my shoulder, giving it her reassuring I-trust-you squeeze, my anger deflated. I saw Nolan crossing the conveyor belt, moving towards us with a scowl pinching his face. I watched him coming at us like a bulldozer, feeling his thoughts about closing Warren Pipe marching ahead of him. Closing the plant, closing the town, and where that would leave Shel, Clyde and me with our scars on top of scars.
“This line’s been down for ten minutes,” he yelled. His footsteps were muffled by the belt, but his voice boomed among the machines through the quiet. I’d give his little bug-sized body that much credit – he had a terrifying voice. “What the hell is going on here?”
He didn’t bother to get off the belt, just crouched down until he was face-to-face with me, the control panel between us. “We’ve got a situation, sir.”
“You better have the devil tied up and held for ransom, because we never shut down a line.”
“There’s a problem with a kicker. Need the line off while we fix it.”
“That’s not how we do things, Denny.” He lowered his voice, cornering me into a private conversation at to the control panel. “Have you been looking at the numbers? Look at the numbers every day, I tell you, those numbers don’t lie. We’re farther away from keeping this place open than we were a year ago. We’ve got numbers to meet and beat, D. Power on this line, get production up.”
“Sir. The kicker?” I looked down at the control panel, the green ‘START’ switch glowing near on the control panel. “You get down there and do it. I want that thing fixed and running in thirty seconds. And it’s your ass if you don’t make those numbers.”
He addressed my team. “Get your asses back to your stations. Got my bull’s-eye on you.” He held his fore fingers and thumbs up, two “L” shapes, formed a box, and squinted through his target at of us, lingering on Shel.
“Right in my target,” he said. Nolan uncurled from his squat. “Turn this line back on and never shut it down again.” He walked across it whistling, ignoring the power and ritual of the line. Then I heard Clyde whisper, his voice in my ear, dark and smooth, a long slow drag on a cig, a lingering pull from the whisky bottle, “we should just do it.”
I wondered if Nolan’s plan was to suck us dry, use up the town, and shut production down when nothing was left. He was about taking. The town and the plant were about taking and making. If we didn’t make something here, Warrenton would be a wound that would scar and be forgotten.
The green switch blazed at me. I saw the line down and I heard it too. “We should just do it before he does us,” Clyde said, and in all the silence I could hear him just fine, like he was sitting on my eardrum. His voice was loud. It’d been too quiet in here for too long already. The silence was weighing on me, and I heard him or maybe that was my voice or Linden’s or the line’s say, “hit the switch.”
Then she was alive again, and it was music: metal screeching against metal, pipe screaming along steel rails, and the tug of the belt. Nolan’s whistling crushed.