Florida Heatwave (21 page)

The area around his station appeared empty. He wiped his fingers across the control panel, eyes closed, feeling the knobs and switches like some kind of industrial Braille. No sign of the letter.

He looked at the head box, walked over to it, and lifted the lid to peer inside. No pulpy soup, no wet mash, just a dry empty metal bin. He turned to look over his shoulder, back toward the additive section where the ground wood was washed, bleached, and refined. Could the letter have traveled upstream, fighting its way back to its very origins? No. Jim started fearing the worst, that the paper was gone.

A sound startled him. He couldn’t place it, the mill was so large and open. It sounded like a rustling kinda sound. Like a leaf on a dead branch. Probably just an animal. Or was it a person? Had someone followed him? Had someone stayed behind from this morning?

He looked up at the foreman’s office. Did the sound come from there? He stared at the darkness behind the office windows. Maybe the answers were hidden inside that room. He climbed the stairs, put his hand on the handle, and listened. Quiet. Opening the door he entered the dark.

Fumbling around for the light switch, his foot bumped into something. Lights on, he saw that he had kicked over a tall, thin trashcan. Paper had spilled across the floor. He shuffled his feet through it, making his way to the desk.

He sat down in the foreman’s chair and immediately became angry. An image came to his mind, he and Deb kissing, the kind of kissing where you touch the back of each other’s head. He pounded his fist on the desktop to chase away the memory.

He opened a drawer, rooted around just to see if something would come to him. But it was a bunch of nothing: financial documents, a deck of cards, spare fuses, and the like.

The documents gave him a thought. He went over to the black steel filing cabinet and started rifling through file folders. Employee records. The more he searched, the more frustrated he got. Something wasn’t fucking right.

His paperwork—Ream’s and Inveigle’s too—gone. They must have been pulled aside after the accident. But why?

He looked at the waste paper that had spilled out of the trash when he’d knocked it over. How had he not seen it before? He dove to the ground and snatched it up.

In his hands, the envelope that Deb’s letter had been in. It was further torn up and Van Wagener’s name was missing, but Jim could still see the word “Jacksonville.”

He looked around for the letter. No luck. He tore through the rubbish on the floor then dug in and emptied the entire can. He uncrumpled pages, pieced together sheets that had been torn. Nothing. However the envelope had made its way up here, the letter did not seem to have followed.

Jim threw the office door open and stepped out on the top stair. He hung his body over the rail and screamed down at the empty factory. “I know you’re here! You can’t fucking hide from me! You’re just a piece of fucking paper!”

He jumped down the stairs, taking two or three at a time. He ran over to the dry end, where Inveigle had had his accident. He stood in front of the coater unit, looked up at the calendar stack that was out of alignment. He pushed one of the cylinders and it dipped down, almost like a bounce, revealing a space farther into the machine. Jim looked inside, and he could see the place with the part that was missing, the part that Ream had removed.

He still had the gasket in his pocket, so he pulled out the oilcloth. It felt heavier now. He pulled back the cloth corner by corner. The gasket was gone.

In his hands a gun, an old .22 revolver.

He held the gun at his side and walked the length of the Fourdrinier, back toward the wet end.

Something caught his eye, a flash of white. Looking into the jaws of the paper machine, he saw the letter.

He reached in with his left hand, extended his arm as far as it could go. The letter was far away. He pulled his arm back out and thought a moment. He knew he wouldn’t be able to reach it that way.

He found a foothold on the machine and pulled himself up. Slowly and carefully he climbed into the guts of the machine. He inched his way farther inside, the space getting tighter and tighter. He pulled the gun closer to his body to try and fit better.

His knees shimmied his lower body into a ball creating a pressure that helped extend his left arm deeper and deeper. He could almost feel the edge of the paper.

The machine completely surrounded him. If the machine were running—if someone were to turn it on now—he wouldn’t be able to get himself out fast enough. The gears and rollers and wires would cut him up, chew him into mash, turn him into paper.

A final push forward and he grabbed the letter. Pulling it toward him wasn’t easy. He hadn’t left himself much room. And as he brought back his arm, it got caught in another piece of the machine.

The mill felt warmer. Had someone done something to raise the temperature? Was someone in there with him? He angled his head so his could see the letter.

He examined it carefully with a close, measured inspection. He read it again. It seemed different. It was a confession, signed Jim Van Wagener. The name sounded familiar.

Another sound echoed through the mill. There was definitely someone here. He wanted to cry out, but he second-guessed himself. Maybe this person was looking for him. Screaming would only draw attention to his hiding spot. Still, it could be local kids, causing trouble. All they would have to do is flip a switch or two and start the machine.

His right hand, still holding the gun, started getting tingly, going to sleep. He adjusted his weight, pushed off against one of the cylinders, and the machine gave way.

He knew he would now be able to get himself out of this trap, out of the machine, out of the mill, out of Port St. Joe. But where to next? He had a feeling he was supposed to go to Jacksonville. But one way or another he felt that Jacksonville would come to him.

Somewhere in the distance, miles and miles away, sirens screamed toward him.

He knew it wasn’t his fault, so he decided to do nothing but wait.

BY RAVEN McMILLIAN

Zane, for the most part,
had already made up his mind on what he was about to do, but he went through the motions of alternative reasoning for the sake of display. He opened the scuffed-up freezer door of his rental property refrigerator, looking towards the back corner behind a slab of venison, where a clear, plastic Gatorade bottle, the top half raggedly shorn off by a steak knife, sat filled with ice, an unblemished credit card trapped in the middle, hunched slightly sideways, sixteen numbers across the face still shining with an unused silver finish. Zane had $500 on that card; that was all they’d give him on it when he applied. He had been hoping for a few thousand more, to bankroll a jaunt to Atlanta, for no real reason other than to pretend he was still moving in a better direction in life, to spend a long weekend in a new place full of strange faces and stranger possibilities, where you roll the dice again and you might finally get lucky. When they only approved $500, Zane, in a rare flash of responsibility, decided to set the card aside for a forreal emergency, freezing it to make it more difficult to access when his attitude reverted to leisure as usual.

Now, he had collected a thick stack of cut-off notices, with the return envelope warning colors—pink for the car insurance, blue for the phone bill, and yellow for electric. The remittance envelopes always came out of the bills a safe white when everything was up to date; but once you fell behind regularly, begging off twangy female customer service voices, it was a splash of pastel PAY NOW OR LOSE YOUR SERVICE! envelopes cluttering up the kitchen table. It’d be about $325 to keep everything on, which the frozen credit card could cover, but what next?

Zane hadn’t worked the past two weeks, having gotten booted off his last jobsite for dragging the project along too slowly, making Mondays a regular extension of the weekend, even starting Friday nights early on Thursday afternoon sometimes. There wasn’t going to be any more money coming in anytime soon with no billable hours anywhere, and he hadn’t tried that hard to line up new work elsewhere. He didn’t want to keep siding houses anyways, even though he guessed he had to in order to keep feeding money orders into all these envelopes. He could thaw out the credit card and calm down this crop of pastel past due notices, but when they started blossoming back out of the mailbox in a few short weeks, what then?

Feeling he’d made a proper theatrical attempt for whatever audience might be watching over him while he was alone, Zane whipped the freezer door shut, cool air streaming across his left arm. Zane knew what he was truly building up to here, so he might as well get in the proper mind frame for it all.

The painting that hung on the opposite wall from the kitchen’s lone square window wasn’t that great a painting. Honestly, Zane didn’t much even see the painting itself, it being a gift from a Filipino chick he used to live with from her art school days. At first he kept it out of a polite obligation, long after he and the Filipino chick had exploded into separate directions. It ended up being useful, not for the indistinguishable smears of blood red, puke green, and dripping browns that made up some sort of woodpecker-looking thing, but because of the thick, 3×3 frame the canvas had been staple-gunned into, much thicker than a normal frame.

Pulling the painting off the wall from the bottom, Zane reached behind it on the upper left hand side, pulling out a small cellophane wrapper, twist tied at the top. Used to be Zane would stash his blow at the bottom of the frame, where the bag would sit hiding on its own, back when it was never anything less than cocaine flakes. But eventually, after repeating these motions to the same framed corner with the invisible audience watching, he wasn’t sure if it was secure. The downgraded powders he used nowadays to scratch his nose with stiff snorts on slow weekends that meandered into Mondays had helped change his outlook too, causing his mind to wander towards needing new hiding spots within the same framework more often. No accidental bumps against the wall would rattle the painting, causing everything to fall out, exposed to the world, no matter the fact hardly anyone came around except Zane. He’d roll a piece of duct tape backwards against itself to create a sticky tab at the top of the frame’s innards. A gentle press of the upper edge of his twisted bag of cheap speed—the bikers called it crank but the wiggers called it meth—against the duct tape, and it’d stay stuck there, ever so slightly, just enough to remain suspended in silence, but easy enough to pull loose when access was necessary.

He tugged out his cellophane of crudely crystallized chemicals, grabbed an empty CD case from off the counter, and sat down at the kitchen table. Pouring a healthy pile on the scuffed face of the light blue jewel case, he chopped at it ritually with a thick paper insurance card. He’d bought a whole long box of the CD cases at the dollar store, tired of his music sliding back and forth inside the pocket of his truck door, loose CDs scratching themselves out of function. The cases came in the same pastel shades as past due envelopes, and tended to snap into two useless pieces easily. Zane dragged the mound of powder into a pair of tight, parallel rows, the second one about half an inch shorter than the first. He pulled a piece of plastic straw from the penny-laden ashtray on his kitchen table, and sucked the long, right rail up his right nostril, shifted the straw quickly, pinched the other side of his face, and up the left nasal passage with the shorter line. Zane leaned back against the creaky chair, and looked out the window at his truck, silent in the yard, clean copper coat shining in the sun, perfect shape broken up by a deep dent in the front quarter panel from a plum tree that got in the way at a Saturday night pig roast party that had almost turned into a Sunday morning.

Motivated by the chemically triggered adrenaline rush, Zane got going. He twisted shut the cellophane, gave it a calculating eyeball to guesstimate how many more lines he could squeeze out of it, and tacked it back behind the painting. He grabbed his truck keys off the counter, a Pepsi out of the fridge, and slammed the kitchen door shut behind him. There was a crack in the wood from a work boot’s kick, and the hot water weather coming off the Gulf had swollen the wood. That, combined with foam stripping to keep cool Decembers locked out, and the door no longer fit into its jamb. Without a rough slam, it wouldn’t shut all the way.

The two Escambia Counties sat side by side, but in two separate states. Zane lived almost to the eastern county line of the Alabama Escambia, a few miles outside of the almost comically named Dixie, Alabama. Dudes around there took it seriously though, full of a locals-only Southern pride that saw Zane, regardless of the hint of twang in his voice, as an untrustable outsider. He wasn’t born from there, and his last name wasn’t painted on the mailboxes decorating the ditches up and down these back roads.

Zane turned his truck south onto Highway 29. In four years here, he’d never once driven 29 farther north than the twenty miles or so into Andalusia, always headed south, anchored to the Gulf, having spent all his pre-adult life and about two-thirds of the grown part scattered around the Florida panhandle. Since coming north to just outside Dixie, he’d gone South 29 over a thousand times it seemed.

This first stretch of the highway was his favorite because, before you got to Brewton, it was a normal-paced, two-lane artery through the eastern half of Escambia. The state squeezed as much life out of the asphalt as they could, pavement sun-bleached nearly white, and as cracks would appear, they’d come along with a tar truck and patch the gaps, leaving chaotic black patterns across the road. Zane had ridden that stretch of road many times, studying the scattershot tar patches, looking like alien hieroglyphics, trying to decipher their meaning. Coming home sometimes, as Sunday morning sunrises just cleared the pine trees, with a buzzing grip tingeing his brain, Zane’d imagine something real buried in those patterns. It had a meaning for him, he just hadn’t been able to read it right yet.