The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (19 page)

“If it’s really for constipation, then what you puttin’ it on poison ivy for?”

“How about I kick your ass because you look like a dwarf?”

“I’m just saying. We think you need some new material.”

“Hey, kid,” said Pardue. “Did you ever notice that you suck? That’s what you ought to notice. That funny stuff happens to you all the time and then you tell it and it turns to crapola? Did you ever notice
that
?”

Which is when Meek appeared. Holding the clipboard down below his waist, with the white envelope stuffed in his shirt pocket. Striped tie, short sleeves, beeper clipped to his belt. Everyone knew what it meant. I remembered at that moment nights around our kitchen table with my mother talking about World War II, how the guy from Western
Union would bicycle right to your house with his satchel and take out the envelope as he was walking to your door. Everybody knew what that meant too. Except back then we were winning the war.

We knew before he even stepped out of the elevator. All of us looking up when the hoist light came on and the pulley started humming, because no one ever rode the elevator into the picking room. It was a one-way drop, like the caged descent into a coal mine, and you used it twice a day—once going in and once coming out. When the doors finally opened, we saw that it was Meek. The personnel guy. He looked like a child, alone, on a very broad stage, and he waited until the steel doors and the safety gate locked before stepping across the crack. We thought he was a bastard, I suppose, because it never occurred to us that he was simply afraid. When he got to us, he spoke in a low, mournful voice that we all recognized as fake. “Burkhard,” he said softly, “could I speak with you? Down in my office?”

“Fuck no,” said Kutschenko. “Do it right here. If you’re going to do it, you little maggot, you can at least be a man about it. Do it right now.”

And that’s the funny thing. The paper in the envelope really was pink.

3

The picking room was like a library where the pickers went their dark routes pulling scrolls of cloth from the bins and dropping them into boxes bound for other mills. We sent out boxes by the ton. It’s the way they measured us, not by the miles we walked but by the tons we lifted, until the numbers 12/25/
E
became only the rough coordinates of a seventy-five-pound roll of denim buried under twenty others just like it, headed for China, where it would get its real identity. Then get shipped back to this country as something by Levi, Wrangler, Arizona, Tommy, Ralph, Calvin. Who the hell knew?

It’s hard to imagine. A picking room is not like anything else. Not like a warehouse or an aircraft hangar or a cavern. It’s just different. I used to tell people to try to imagine a castle or, anyway, something that’s old and big like a cathedral, ruined and rebuilt over the years and then one day gutted so that all that remains is a hollow shell and not any kind of building that can be reasoned with. Just an outer wall circling back on itself like some kind of shape a kid would make with building blocks. Then fill that shape with shelves. Miles and miles of them. That’s your picking room. So that some sections of the outer wall might look like a ruined temple, like any stiff wind could blow it away particle by particle. Then in other places you might find a master mason’s work, delicate art woven in stone. Nothing surprised you after a while. There were bricked-up doors and windows all along the walls. Alcoves, arches, and columns. A forty-foot section of floor where iron rails pierced the brick and then simply stopped beside a nonexistent loading dock. There were squat tunnels done in yellow ceramic tile like the subway, with the same black vacancy at the extremities.

It was a huge and haunted place, more like a morgue than a library. You matched your ticket numbers to the little tags hanging on every roll of cloth; then you pulled your roll out of the bin, cradling it like a child for a moment before dropping it into its shipping box, always an avalanche of dust and grime falling in your face from the dark upper bins, the paper ripping on extrusions, the cloth unraveling like torn curtains. Until after a while you could convince yourself that they really were bodies, crumbling mummies stacked in open crypts like those war atrocities.

And then I try to imagine a man like Murtaugh inside that same place for twenty years.

He was the one guy who lasted, and he looked like the fifties never ended. Every day he wore a white cotton T-shirt, jeans, and biker boots—a uniform so unvarying that I accepted it as normal after a few weeks. The hair he kept in a disciplined flattop. His eyes were pale blue
pools of no particular depth. And his immense size was, in a sense, the only shape that stayed in your mind. Pardue told me that he had once served time for killing a man with a logging chain. “Don’t mess with him,” he said. And I did not. Murtaugh kept a Zippo lighter in his hip pocket that he flipped open with a single snap of his fingers, and he held his cigarette cupped, like this, against some imaginary hurricane. On weekends we did not visit him in the green boardinghouse on Broad Street, and on nights when they needed some overtime we did not volunteer to stay behind with him. Even during the regular shift, Murtaugh would sort through the packing slips, selecting orders that would take him to the farthest aisles, down the long tunnels, and out beyond the ordered bins where the only lights were hanging bulbs. On some nights we did not see him at the elevator drop at all.

4

Every once in a while Pardue would go off on Meek, about how he needed to be killed or at least thrown through one of the walled-up windows. “They’re doing layoffs again,” he would say. “And I think that asshole enjoys it. He needs killing. Did you ever notice that the personnel guy is the last one laid off?”

“I don’t think he enjoys it,” I said. “I think he’s just doing his job.”

“I’ll
tell
you what he enjoys. He enjoys porking that little gal in the commissary what you been going out with, name of Patty. I hear he’s been spending a lot of time down there.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t nothing rile you up, kid? You need to stomp that son of a bitch into the ground.”

“Patty’s not that kind of girl.”

“Forget Patty! You need to kill that bastard. I’ll tell you what you need.”

“What do I need?”

“You need somebody … from West Virginia. You need a dynamite man.”

“I need a dynamite man?”

“You need somebody from West Virginia, son, the Explosives State, where they mix gunpowder in your grits and a cook-off don’t have nothing to do with the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“I guess you might know somebody.”

“I
am
from West Virginia, boy. We got dental hygienists up there who use Primacord instead of dental floss, and when you hear a highspeed drill it don’t mean your wisdom teeth are coming out, Jack. It means the whole damn side of your mountain is about to lift and slide, that’s what it means. Hell, back home we got twelve-year-old boys can blow the wax out of your ears and not even wake you up during the sermon. In fact, you don’t even need me. You don’t need no dynamite man. You need a twelve-year-old. From back home. In West By God Virginia.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I don’t need anybody who’s from a state that’s just a chopped-off part of another state.”

“Now you’re catching on. Hey!” he yelled out over the room. “Riggs is developing a brain! He’s coming up out of the swamp! Go ahead, kid, give me your best shot.”

“Like y’all ought to change your name. I mean, West Virginia’s not a state, it’s a direction. It makes you look small.”

“It ain’t ever hurt West Consin none, has it?”

“So what were you planning to dynamite?”

“Meek, I done told you. I’m going to dynamite his ass into the middle of next week.”

“You’re going to blow up Meek?”

“Naw. Hell naw! A hunnerd times better than that. This here’s a variation on your classic cherry bomb in the toilet, except we’ll probably need a couple of sticks of
C
4 on account of we want him riding a geyser right after he flushes.”

Willie T. gave a piercing whistle and yelled, “Bring ’er on in for a minute, boys. This is going to get good.”

When he had his audience, Pardue said, “We’ll need to cut off the water for most of this section of the mill, you know, to build up the pressure pretty good, and then reinforce the pipe at the actual point of detonation. I want it to blow an eight-inch column of water through his butt. I want it to rocket that son of a bitch through the ceiling tiles so that his head will come through the next floor and somebody will step on him. I want it to look like he’s riding Old Faithful to the moon. You understand what I’m saying? I hate that cracker! I want him to pull down his pants, take a seat, pull that damn handle, and think that he accidentally launched the space shuttle. That’s what I want. And I’m telling you we can do it. It’s a matter a teamwork.”

“Have you ever done anything like this before?”

“Not me specifically. But I witnessed something similar back in high school. It was sad, really. Kind of tragic in a way. And it caused an international incident that you boys may have heard of, which should teach you the value of careful and strategic thinking and also something about the fragility of human life. So I reckon I’m going to have to tell you about it.”

“I thought you might need to.”

“Okay, there’s this one old boy name of Pruitt who hated the assistant principal the way I hate Meek and who came up with something of the same plan but without careful thinking. What I’m telling you is they forgot to reinforce the sewer drain pipe at a vital point. It makes me sick to this day to think about it, and, well, you can probably already imagine what happened. Pruitt and his boys stopped up most of the toilets on the third and fourth floors and waited for the crucial moment right before the assembly where the genuine Boys Choir of Wales, I’m not making this up, was going to give its international Christmas concerto for the backward children of West Virginia, you know, on account of they thought that would be a likely time for the son of a bitch to visit the toilet. And sure enough he did. Everything
was going to plan. The little Wales children was warming up backstage. Pruitt and his gang was hulking over several toilet bowls like vultures with a couple sticks of dynamite and a Bic, waiting for a miracle. And, by God, it happens. The assistant principal comes in with one of the singers, a little tiny pissant of a Wales kid name of Cardiff Glendenning it turns out, showing him where the bathroom is. Well, Pruitt and his gang are in this one stall, feet up off the floor hulking on the rim of the commode so the place looks deserted. And they hear their guy. Then they hear the stall door next to ’em close and the little lock go snick, like that; and they figure it’s a go for liftoff. So Pruitt gives the nod, and ffftt goes the fuse and flush goes the charge. Fifteen seconds later there’s this dull, distant boom like thunder rolling down the mountain. And, oh, sweet Jesus!”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” I said. “He’s making this up as he goes along.”

“I’m going to tell you what happened as soon as I get a grip on my stomach because it gives me the dry heaves to this very day. It makes me want to puke just thinking about it. There was a tragic miscalculation. And what happened, boys, is that one hunnerd yards downstream the pipe blew. It couldn’t take the blast, see, and it was like one of them submarine movies except it was blowing high pressure sewage through that cafeteria and it was like the u-571 taking the entire eighth grade to a watery grave.”

“I thought you said the entire school was in the assembly listening to the boys choir of some damn place you probably made up.”

“I’m telling you they was in the cafeteria, and they was
fouled
, fouled something terrible. But that ain’t the worst part. Because … oh my Lord, that poor little boy. You see, it was him in the toilet and not the assistant. It was horrible, just horrible.”

“It blew him up?”

“No! A hunnerd times worse. In fact, the exact opposite. When that pipe blew four stories below and every drop of water in the entire system
headed toward the center of the earth, what the hell you think happened? It created a suction like a hurricane blowing through your empty head. I can hear his screams to this day. And I can imagine the horror. Just think of it yourself, poor little Cardiff looking down between his legs and seeing what? A tiny ripple and then, all of a sudden, a whirlpool like the damn
Titanic
was going down. And the force of suction? Good God Almighty, boys, Superman couldn’t pull himself out of a force like that. It threw his legs together and formed a perfect seal so damn fast it was foregone before it was foredone; and that ill-fated child was bent in the shape of a V and singing soprano for sure, fighting for his life, and praying ‘Sweet Jesus, if you love a sinner, get me out of this American toilet.’ In fact, those might have been his last words.”

“His last words?!”

“That’s right. What I’m trying to tell you, boys, is that young Cardiff was never seen again. And I believe to this very moment it was the tragedy that turned my life in the direction that it eventually took, ruining me for medical school or one of the higher professions. That little boy’s story is in many ways identical to my own. It’s why I stand before you today a broken and humble man.”

“That’s a damn lie!”

“It’s no lie, boys. I swear on my sweet grandmaw’s grave.”

“It’s a gah-damn lie on account of you never been inside a high school in your life.”

5

When the layoffs began again, they started in the weave room and worked their way through the departments. The weavers were replaced by automated looms, inspectors by scanning machines. And the weave room went from being as noisy as a field of crows to being as silent as the grave. And the dye house lost its steam. Then I guess they sent the carding and spinning operations overseas where they weren’t as
particular about brown lung and wanted to share the opportunity with folks making twenty cents an hour. That’s what Pardue said. He said, “Boys, you better read the handwritin’ on the shithouse wall,” meaning, I suppose, that we were as obsolete as John Henry’s hammer. Still, I took pride in the fact that binners and pickers were the last to go, though when they came for Willie T., he simply said, “Fellas, I lost my job.” Never suspecting that it may have been lost for him.