After lunch I took Darlene back to her building and I went back to my building. I got back to the line just as everyone was going to lunch and that was fine with me, I like to work alone.
I checked all the stations. I refilled all the screws, set up the next rack of motherboards, counted the power supplies. When I counted the power supplies I checked the tags to see if Darlene had made any of them. Darlene was a line lead and she had to sign off on all the power supplies that her line made. Every power supply had a tag. An inspection tag with the initials of everyone that had anything to do with it. I looked at the first tag of the first power supply on the rack that just came over from the other building. The second to last initials were DS written in quick block letters. DS stood for Darlene Squglio, which is pronounced Schoolio, if you're not Italian and you don't know. I only know because back in Massachusetts, before Susan, before the nights of Jack Daniels walking the dog, I went out for a short while with a woman I really liked and her last name was Giglio, which is pronounced Jeelio. Something about the earlier name seemed like a premonition for the second name, like it was meant to be, somehow. Sometimes you search too hard for these things.
I looked at the second tag. The second to last initials on that tag were DS, but they were smaller and had periods after them, like D.S. On the third tag the initials were block letters like the first but they were DHS. H was Dar's middle initial. On the fourth tag, the DS was written in script, like you do in junior high school, the kind of script you did for that report on the natural resources of Argentina for Ms. Jauntig, where you had to write everything out in script and it was really hard because you didn't want to have any crossouts or misspells because Ms. Jauntig takes off points for crossouts or misspells so you write everything really slow and try to keep all the letters kind of the same size, but you get so caught up in the letters, trying to keep them all the same size that you skip a word or put in an extra f in coffee so you have to start the whole page over and there's a pile of like ten or fifteen pages you started and messed up and had to start over so all the messed up page balls are in a pile on the floor and when you're done and you look at the report you see it doesn't look like your handwriting even and you wonder whose handwriting it is and it all looks like it was done by someone who isn't really used to writing yet and you wonder if you'll ever get to a point where your writing looks like your writing and not like some kid's writing. That's what those initials looked like.
I think that's a good analogy.
Later that afternoon, it was time to crush cardboard. Every time Hal or I would empty one of the cardboard boxes that the parts came in we were supposed to pull the box apart and make it fold flat. Then we were supposed to stack the folded flat boxes and take them back to the cardboard crusher. What usually happened was that I would knock my boxes apart and Hal would leave his and go have a cigarette. When I was done knocking down my boxes, I'd knock down Hal's.
Every afternoon was about the same. Every afternoon about four o'clock it was time to run the cardboard crusher. It was all pretty routine, but one time, one afternoon, something different happened.
This one afternoon, the afternoon in particular, we went to crush the cardboard at four o'clock. Me, Hal, and that warehouse guy named Ricky who we all called Reekee like Reekee Reecardo from I Love Lucy. Me and Hal and Reekee we were all back there by the garbage crusher and this is how that worked. The garbage crusher was huge. It was like the size of one of those small refrigerated trucks. The kind that's all one truck, not a tractor-trailer, or maybe just the size of the trailer part of a tractor trailer, but not a really huge one, just a medium sized one, but when you got it inside a building, boy it looks really huge. So the machine is like fifteen feet tall and the way it works, there’s a sort of a bin at the bottom. The bin has thick metal walls and it's about ten feet long and four feet wide and maybe eight feet high. the back wall is really thick and has these slots that run from top to bottom, four of them evenly spaced from about eighteen inches in from each end, and you can see through the slots to the wall behind it. There's about two feet of space behind it, between it and the wall. The bottom is a solid steel slab with slots that match the ones on the back, running across the width of it. The ends are pretty thick steel too, but don't have any slots in them, and they are welded to the back but not the bottom. The front though, the front is thick steel too, but it rides up and down in tracks and it's counterbalanced and there's a motor that runs it up and down. Most of the time it's down. The front has slots that match the back, all the way through and you can see through them to the back part and you can see how much cardboard is in the bin, how high the pile is and there are braces that hold the five parts of the front and the five parts of the back together. Then there's the crusher part. Up there high up about twelve feet up is the top part. The top part is solid steel with another set of grooves to match the slots on the back, bottom and front and I'll get to those grooves in a minute. First though, the crusher part has these big hydraulic arms on top, bigger around than my leg, two of them, one on either end and there are tracks the top crusher part rides up and down on.
So you are supposed to put all the flattened out cardboard boxes in there flat, like parallel to the floor, because that's the way you're supposed to according to Hal, but some boxes wouldn't go flat so you just did the best you could. The night shift though, sometimes they got lazy and would just throw the boxes in there without flattening them out. Then someone would have to climb inside and flatten those boxes out. Usually me.
Now, this day. This particular day, Hal and Reekee and I were back there by the cardboard crusher getting ready to crush a load of cardboard.
Hal had a smaller box in his hand maybe about a foot square all around and instead of pulling the flaps off he just threw it on the floor and stepped on it. His foot slid off to the side and only half the box flattened out.
"Hey!," I said, "You're supposed to take it apart."
"Yeah?" Hal said. Hal jumped up in the air and came down with both feet on the box. The box flattened out more. Hal picked it up and flipped it over into the cardboard crusher. Hal was taller than me and didn't have to throw so hard to get the box over the side of the bin. Hal worked out his upper body, so he had round pectoral muscles that stood out from his chest like wide firm breasts. That's what I thought of when I looked at Hal.
"It's flat." Hal said. He reached for another box. There were about fifty boxes that size to break down, and then another fifty or so a little bigger that were in another pile higher than my head. We were gonna take care of the smaller ones first and then if there was room we'd put the bigger ones in. I pulled on the flap of the one I was trying to flatten. The glue was really strong. I pulled with one hand and pushed with the other. I pulled really hard and my shoulder started to hurt. When the flap came free, the edge of the cardboard scraped up under the arm I was pushing with.
"Shit!" I said.
"See?" Hal said. He put another box on the floor and jumped on it. Reekee laughed and put the box he had on the floor and jumped on it. It flattened with a noise like a dry plop, maybe halfway between the sound a cardboard balloon would make and the sound a paper bag makes when you blow it up and pop it.
I looked at my arm, the inside where the skin is lighter. The skin was all roughed up there, like road rash. Hal put another box on the floor. He stood up and held his hand in his work glove up beside his head. His wrist looked small going into that work glove and the fingers were all squeezed together wrinkled except for the pointer finger. Hal's pointer finger pointed to the ceiling. Hal's eyebrows were high on his forehead under his straw hair. Hal had straw hair, that's what my Mom called it. Straw hair.
"I think, therefore I crush." Hal said. Hal jumped up into the air and came down with both feet on the box. It didn't get all the way flat. Hal ran in place, mashing the rest of the box flat.
"A crush a day, keeps the doctor away." Reekee said. Reekee jumped on his box and then jumped up and down with both feet a few more times, looking down to see how it was working.
"How's it going, men?" Richard said. I was still trying to pull the other flap loose on my box and when Richard said "How's it going, men?" my legs popped and my heart clunked in my chest.
Richard was the materials handling supervisor. He was walking toward the loading dock, right next to the cardboard crusher. He had an unlit cigarette in his hand.
Hal stood up straight on the box he'd just been dancing on and saluted. Hal stood up like a soldier at attention. Not a real soldier but a comic soldier with his hand flat against his head, palm out like a British soldier's salute. Hal's other arm stuck out from his side a little all tense and hand flat like the saluting hand. Hal's chin tucked in and his mouth smiling under his mustache, smiling like Benny Hill, saluting with his face looking like he had an IQ of 22. I dropped my box and stood at attention, too. I saluted the same way, arm stiff palm out. Reekee looked at Hal and me, and Reekee stood at attention and saluted too, but not all stiff and quick like Hal and me and Benny Hill, but slow and grand like John Wayne.
"Right-O!" Hal said. "Pip pip, Cap'n sir."
Richard stopped and stood at attention. He saluted us, sharp and quick, American style.
"Good work, men." Richard said. "We'll show those Gerries yet."
"Jolly good." Hal said. "Rawther." Hal still held his attention and salute. I stood behind him and did the same. Reekee looked at us and snorted. He bent down to pick up the box he'd jumped on. Richard went out the door with the cigarette in his mouth, clicking his lighter.
"Right then," Hal said, "You heard him lads, let's to it, shall we?"
"Shall we?" Reekee said. Reekee jumped on a box with both feet.
"We shall." I said. I jumped on my box.
We waded into the pile of boxes and jumped on them and got them kind of flat, close to flat anyway, most of them and then we threw them all in the cardboard crusher. Then we found some more large flattened boxes and threw them in on top. It was hard to get the cardboard pile flat on account of all those jumped on boxes in the middle. They didn't want to make a flat surface, but the crusher was pretty much full anyway. So it was time to run the crusher.
The crusher could crush with six tons of force. The idea was to get that cardboard really compressed as far as it would go and then put these metal straps around the pile. That's what the slots were for, to slide metal straps through so that when the crusher part went back up the cardboard would stay all flat.
"Whoop, whoop whoop!" Hal said, voice high up there, looking around to see if anyone else was watching. Anyone besides me and Reekee.
"Are we ready men?" Hal said. He said it like a stuffy British officer from a war movie.
"Redaye." Reekee said, just like that.
"Redaye." I said, the same way.
Hal was standing next to the control box which was high up on one end of the cardboard crusher. There were four buttons. Three of them you had to be really careful to push because they were set into little rings so they couldn't be pushed by accident. The other one was a big red one that was the emergency stop. My feeling was that the only thing wrong with the emergency stop was that it wasn't on the inside where, if you were in there and the crusher thing was coming down, you could actually reach it and it might do you some good.
"Ignition!" Hal said, and he pushed the top button. The hydraulic pump started running and the top crusher part of the cardboard crusher started coming down making a screeching noise at first like a cat caught in a fan belt. Maybe that's not a good analogy. It came down slow, like hydraulic stuff does and we watched it make contact with the cardboard and a different sound started up. Actually it was a bunch of sounds. There was a kind of scraping cardboard on metal and some crinkling when the boxes we hadn't flattened out all the way flattened out the rest of the way and some popping noises like paper bags being popped and a sort of creaking over all that was the noise all the metal parts of the crusher made rubbing and straining against each other. We watched through the slots in the sides of the crusher box while the crusher part pushed all the cardboard down toward the bottom. Some cardboard got squeezed out of the slots. Finally the plunger part started slowing down and then stopped. The cardboard pile was about half as high as it had been. Hal pushed the lock button that turned off the pump but held the crusher part down on the cardboard.
"Right, then!" Hal said. He turned and saluted me and then Reekee. I saluted back. Reekee gave him the finger.
"Get the straps," Reekee said.
There was a pile of straps on the floor behind the crusher. They were black springy metal about a half inch wide and maybe as thick as a dollar bill and maybe eight feet long. It was dark behind the cardboard crusher, and the straps were under stuff at one end but Hal and I found eight of them and started feeding them through the top and bottom slots. The idea was that you could slide the strap through the top and bottom slots to the other side and then up and down through the gaps on the front and back and then clamp them together with a crimping clip and tool. There were two crimping tools and one tensioning tool. The real situation was that cardboard would sometimes get stuck crushed down in the slots and the strap wouldn't go through so you had to poke and poke with it and try it at different parts of the slot and sometimes you had to get that rod that was leaning up in the corner and jam it through the cardboard in the slot with a hammer and then there'd be room enough for the strap. This day, this particular day, Hal and I didn't have too much trouble getting our straps through and then I held them together while Hal used the crimping tool to crimp the clip and strap together. Because of course without the straps the cardboard wouldn't stay crushed.
Reekee was waiting while we got the first one crimped. I knew Reekee would put the tensioner on the straps on the front, wait for us to crimp the strap in back, then pump the tensioner real fast and put on his own clip. He was always bragging how he could do the tensioning and the crimping all by himself faster than we could do the back crimping together. The back crimping was a two man job, because one had to hold the clip and the straps in place while the other used the crimper. The front crimping had the tensioner to hold the straps, so it didn't need two people. Hal and I started on the first strap. The far left one on the back. Reekee was on the other side, on the front side.
"Got it?" Reekee said, loud so we could hear.
"Not yet," I said loud so he could hear. I lined the two straps up and slipped the clip over where they overlapped. Hal put the crimper in place and squeezed the big handles together, until they almost touched.
"Okay," I said and the strap tightened up with a rubbery sound against the cardboard. Hal and I went over to the second strap. I was lining it up and trying to put the clip on when the top strap pulled through my hand. I dropped the clip.
"What are you doin?" I said, loud so Reekee could hear.
"Got it, yet?" Reekee said.
"He almost did," Hal said, "You jerk, and then you hadda go messing with it."
"You take too long." Reekee said.
I found the clip on the floor and lined the straps up and put the clip into place. Hal put the crimper over the clip and squeezed the handles together until they almost touched.
"Shh." Hal said, quiet, so only I could hear.
"Got it?" Reekee said, loud.
"Not yet!" Hal said, loud.
We went over to the third strap and started lining it up. It made a noise and moved in the slot.
"Hey you fucks!" Reekee said. "Whyn't you tell me!"
"Sorry!" I said, way up in a high voice.
"Nobody here but us cheekins!" Hal said, way up in a high voice. He squeezed the crimper handles together on the third strap, until the handles almost touched.
"You gotta tell me when it's ready," Reekee said, loud.
"Okay, boss!" Hal said in his high voice.
Before we moved to the fourth strap the third one tightened up making those rubbery noises.
On the fourth strap, I was lining it up and just got the clip in place when the top strap pulled through my hand. It cut like a long knife.
"Ow! Shit!" I said, jumping back and slipping on a piece of cardboard. I sat down hard on my ass and banged my head against the back of the cardboard crusher.
"Fuck!" I said, squeezing my eyes shut. They were wet, my eyes. Wet eyes could wash contacts out. My head felt flattened where it had hit the crusher. Like there was still something pressing against it.
"Hey, you asshole!" Hal said, loud so Reekee could hear him. "You fucked him up!"
"What." Reekee yelled. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Hal said, "He just fell back and hit his head."
"He pulled the strap," I said. My jaw felt funny moving and my voice didn't sound like it had before. "It cut me." I said.
"Whoop, Whoop!" Hal said, "Emergency! Medic!"
Reekee's voice came from behind me.
"You okay?" Reekee said.
"Yeah," I said, "Just a cut, I'll get a Band-Aid when we're done. You gotta slow down, Rick."
"Sorry," Reekee said. But he didn't sound sorry. He sounded like it was just another lovely day at the beach La,la,la.
"Let's get this clip on," Hal said. "Then we'll get you to intensive care. Here, I'll hold the strap, you do the crimping."
Hal lined the two straps up and put the clip in place. I got the crimper over the clip and squeezed the handles together until they almost touched.
"Right-O" Hal said. He swatted dust from his hands and looked at me with his eyes crossed, sucking his lower lip up underneath his mustache and his cheeks into little round hollows. I put my cut finger in my mouth and sucked the blood. We went around to the front of the cardboard crusher. Reekee was waiting there, the strap tensioner on the last strap. Reekee had an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
"All set?" Reekee said, around his cigarette.
"Yeah," I said. I said it around my finger.
"Are you sure?" Reekee said.
I took my finger out of my mouth and looked at it. The cut was about an inch long and a little ragged, but not very deep. The bleeding had just about stopped.
"Because I wouldn't want to be going too fast," Reekee was saying, "Wouldn't want to be doin' stuff before you're ready."
"Just shut up, asshole and crimp the damn thing!" I said.
Hal was shaking his head behind his hand. One hand crossed over his stomach holding the other elbow, like Jack Benny.
"Now you boys just cut that out," Hal said, like he was a southern belle or something. Reekee pulled the tensioner handle until it got hard to pull, then stuck a clip on the straps and put the crimper in place.
"I want you two just to kiss and make up." Hal said.
Reekee squeezed the handles about halfway together, then let the crimper drop off the clip and slapped the quick release on the tensioner, catching it in the same hand he was already holding the crimper with and then he reached up with the other hand.
"Hey." I said. My tongue didn't want to work.
Reekee reached up, pushed the lift button on the control box with his free hand. The motor started loud and that metal to metal noise filled up the warehouse around us.
"Hey!" Hal said, stepping forward. "You call that a crimp?"
The crusher part was lifting and the cardboard was groaning like those old ships in the fog in the movies and Reekee leaned over around the side of the crusher to put the crimper away and there was a gun shot and something stung my leg and I started to turn and fall and Hal was reaching for the emergency stop button and there were three more gunshots all at once and a whoosh as the cardboard exploded in the crusher and Hal went down over backward with his hands up over his face and he screamed just a short little scream and then I couldn't see him because I was down in that pile of cardboard boxes we hadn't crushed yet and they all fell on top of me.
* * *
There was a lot of shouting and running and cursing. Someone close to me was saying Omigod Omigod Omigod over and over real quiet like to herself but I heard her and my leg was numb and my finger didn't hurt either and I didn't want to come out from the pile of boxes. Didn't want to come out where all the people were standing around and yelling and cursing. Didn't want to find out if my leg was hurt real bad. Most of all didn't want to find out what was happening to Hal. I heard someone say ambulance and someone else say convulsions and someone else say eye into his brain and then some more cursing and then everyone got quiet except for the woman near me saying Omigod Omigod Omigod over and over low so only I could hear. I heard Richard yelling at Ricky saying Ricky what happened? and Ricky saying I don't know the strap must have been defective and then Ricky saying my name and then Richard calling my name and I figured it was time to come out of the boxes.
"Over here." I said, but it wasn't very loud. My throat was dry so the sound came out like a whisper and the woman saying Omigod stopped and squeaked when I moved the boxes.
It was Merry. Merry's square face and dark eyes and eyebrows and black straight hair looking in at me with her eyes all shining and her hand over her mouth. She said my name.
"Here he is!" Merry said, loud so Richard could hear. Merry reached in a hand.
"Are you all right?" Merry said.
"Just my leg," I said. I grabbed her hand with mine, she squeezed the cut finger and it was like getting cut again and I hissed as she pulled my up out of the boxes.
"What about your leg?" Merry said.
"Something hit it." I said. My leg was starting to come back. Fire starting in my left leg right there in the middle in the front of my thigh. I looked down. I expected blood, but there was no blood. I expected a hole, but there was no hole. Richard was there holding my arm.
"What happened?" Richard said, "Are you okay?"
"My leg." I said. I tried to put some weight on it but the fire shot up and down. I made a face.
"Shit." I said. It’s one of the few words that you can say clearly through clenched teeth.
"Here," Richard said, "Come over here and sit down."
There was a siren sound that got closer and louder and louder and closer until it was too loud and right outside the loading dock and then it cut off and some men in fire suits were running into the warehouse with boxes of medical stuff.
Hal was lying there. Someone had put a handkerchief over his face and the handkerchief was bloody. Hal's straw hair stuck out from his head, out from under the handkerchief and some of it was dark and spiky. Hal's pants were wet at the crotch and there was a puddle around him.
"Hal?" I said to Richard. I was hopping over to the chair with Richard holding my left arm and Merry holding my right and my left leg felt like it was growing really fast and the bones didn't like growing really fast. A fireman came up to me all huge in his fire suit.
"Where's the fire?" I said. Richard and Merry let me down into the chair, my left leg out stiff in front of me. My face felt suddenly cool and sweaty.
"Where do you hurt?" the fireman said. He had straw hair like Hal's and blue eyes and a mustache.
"My leg." I said. I pointed to my left leg stuck out stiff and on fire. He should be able to see the flames.
"Here's the fire." I said. Pointing to the middle of my thigh where there was a volcano erupting, smoke and fire and lava. He should be able to see it. My face was cool and sweaty and there was a lot more traffic on the freeway outside now, it was coming closer.
"Let's get your pants off and take a look," the fireman said. He reached and unsnapped my Levi’s, pulled down the zipper. He took hold of the sides and started to tug. I started to slide off the chair toward him. There was more traffic outside.
"Hold his shoulders," Hal the fireman said. Hands went under my arms. He tugged on my pants
"Hal," I said, "I din't know you cared." And then all the lights started going out and a train started going by on the freeway outside.
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