Eight to the Gate
Brent Fisk
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After graduation the heat of summer settled in. By late June the grasses dried, the fronds of the honey locust curled, and water maple leaves showed their white bellies. Japanese beetles clad in metallic-green armor clung to my mother’s roses and chewed them down to thorns.
My friends packed and peeled off to college one by one: Whitney, to Texas.  Jody flew to Irvine, desperate for an apartment. Purdue lured Caroline, Pam and Glenn with scholarships, while Jeff headed north to Muncie with his Bug’s ragtop down.  I was the last shriveled grape on the vine.

My Chevette ran low on oil and threw a rod. Smoking, it coasted dead beneath a tree. Two greasy men dropped from their low slab porches and ambled over. They smelled of fish and their boots were bright with viscera and the glimmer of scales. They poured in four quarts of oil, but the car had gone to scrap.  After that I might as well have been a third grader ferried everywhere by a harried parent. My mother at the kitchen table rattled off a list of all the other kids and their big plans. She left help wanted classifieds taped to cereal boxes and the bathroom mirror.

My father, an electrician, pulled strings at work and got me a job at the plant. First, a series of tests before they officially hired you: lift a fifty pound anvil, pee in a cup, give blood. They asked who my father was. A whole summer of paychecks stretched out through June, July and August so there would be enough coverage while the union guys could take their long vacations. The pay in 1987 was fifteen bucks an hour. We worked swing shifts and beat our bodies down. At orientation, a foreman banged through a heavy metal door and tried to scare us to death. He said old timers cut corner and that if we followed their lead we could lose more than our jobs. He tossed a leather work boot onto a scarred steel table. Its laces had evaporated in a molten stew. The boot had barely saved the leg, but the man was lucky. He listed the ways workers died: crushing, falls, heat stroke and electrocution. I worked out in my head how I’d spend all that money.
 
The plant hummed in the background of my childhood, a deep source of mystery. My father recuperated at home for several weeks when a drop of molten aluminum found a gap between his pant leg and boot. I remember how they shaved his leg like a woman’s and how the burn was damp with ointment, a sticky mess of brown blistered flesh. Normally if he was home, my brother and I used his body as a playground, hanging from his arms or attaching ourselves like little monkeys to his boots. With the burn, he was off limits. We watched him sleep in his recliner beneath a ratty afghan, leg up, foot sticking out, pale and lifeless. He slept hard and ran far away in his dreams. His eyes did not move behind his lids like my brother’s did when I watched him sleep. It was the first time I was scared of him when there wasn’t a whipping on the way.

The crews that worked each line were tribal, and my father, like the other skilled tradesmen, went where they were needed. That fact coupled with their higher pay kept them outsiders. No coworkers visited while my father healed.

Factory tours were given once a year. We stuck our hands in a pail of silky aluminum oxide and felt the heft of raw bauxite. We climbed atop a pyramid of bundled cans crushed and ready for the smelter. We walked a mile through a constant roar until I tuckered and my father shouldered me. There was ice cream at the end.

There were plant-wide picnics and pig roasts with big wash tubs full of ice and soda, and a troupe of clowns squeaking animal shapes from long thin balloons. My mother gossiped in the sun so long the lawn chair marred the back of her bare legs. Basketball and softball leagues were lubricated with beer. I once found a denim hat and a six pack of Tab in the dust beneath the bleachers. The hat was lined with black ringlets of hair, wired and bristly. Mother said it got lost in the wash. When I was very small, I watched through my bedroom window as my father scraped ice from the car. I climbed from my bed and shrugged on my coat. He pulled from the drive and headed to work. I’d have followed him through the ice and cold if not for the intricacies of lace-up shoes.
 
 
My Uncle Larry used to say a factory’s no place for a pussy. If you didn’t act a certain way, even the union stewards wouldn’t protect you. They would bury themselves in paperwork and let management feed on you. A workforce of second stringers, war vets, and drop outs: No scholars hunkered in the booths of the break room talking about books in low voices. They drank industrial grade yellow swill, pure electrolytes and essentials salts the physicians said kept the heat at bay. They ordered us to prime our bodies with it before shifts. It coated the tongue and stunned the liver. It turned our urine a disturbing shade of amber.

A wiry cuss named Marchon held court when there was downtime. His hair was a blistering-red cropped short around his temples. He was always quiet around the foremen. You didn’t want his eyes on you. After the allotted work was completed each shift, the men napped or played cards at the meal tables. The break room stank of lunch meat and perspiration, the acrid scent of slag stung the nostrils.

Marchon stretched out, an entire bench to himself. His eyes were shut behind his safety goggles. We hoped he slept, but it was like walking past a cottonmouth near the river. His freckled neck was creased and deeply dirty. A black worker just back from Carolina crumpled a cup and rattled it home in the trash. He went back to his line, the door hissing closed behind him.

“That nigger,” said Marchon with his eyes still closed, “never worked an honest day.”

 I had nowhere else to go so I opened a book and began to read.  The college intern from South Dakota State waltzed in. Her clipboard was pinned beneath her arm; attached with string, a bright yellow pencil dangled. She tried to make small talk. She was thick around the middle, stout, with a short, practical haircut and skin like fine leather. So young to be so weathered. She was homely as a possum and the union boys called bull dyke from the shadows, but out of something they thought of as kindness, they did not say it to her face. I hated my father for getting me the job. Marchon sat up and watched me finger the pages of my novel.

“Whose boy are you?” he asked.

“My dad’s Allen Fisk,” I said. We were not allowed to work the same shifts as our fathers.

Marchon nodded.

“How did you know that man was black?” I asked.

He made a show of sniffing the air.
 
 
Each building at the plant held a long line of electric ovens. The building was skinned in vinyl, and large squares of dusty windows glowed at night like emeralds. Blocks of carbon were craned in overhead; they hung upside down like giant black suckers. Alchemy to me, but it fed the ovens. Workers drew off molten aluminum at the end-- big crucibles that glowed red as they cooled in holding. The crane would lift them down the line, a slow rumble as they built up speed. Their job was so hot and monotonous, you had to be vigilant-- the crane operators often fell asleep.  A loud, resonant boom as they hit the safety buffers and the whole building would shudder and shower grit down upon us. The foremen would cuss and write them up. If they did it too often, they risked reassignment or termination. Someone was crushed between a crucible and an oven the previous summer; a guy from maintenance climbed a ladder and changed the sign near the entrance gate, “It’s been 0 days since our last accident.”
In the news section before the funnies, small stories about company trucks laden with tons of ingots-- families smashed in station wagons. The plant manager would fire off a letter to the editor touting the safety record of the facility. The stories that bothered me most were about trapped drivers burning alive at the margins of interstates.

There were times, too, when the walls of the oven cracked open and the lava-like aluminum flowed through the side. We’d grab the framing along the wall until the spill cooled enough to walk on. The floor steamed, metallic and lunar.
 
 
You’d think the night shift would be cooler. We’d come on at 10 p.m. and the second shift would peel from the parking lot in old Mustangs, sedans and station wagons, trucks that roared like lions, a wash of empty beer cans clanked behind them as if they’d just been married. 
The law of the land was “Eight to the Gate.” Employees were free to do what they wanted as long as they sobered a shift before work. Old timers would clock out and head straight to a bar. I still can’t imagine how their bodies took it: rye straight up, boilermakers, bourbon and Coke after being wrung out in the heat all day. Some of the men came back to work with clean breath, but those first hours, you could smell the alcohol sweating from their pores.
Any accident, management popped you for a drug test. I was drunk on sleep, and haggard. Studies show a higher incidence of psychosis in the swing shift worker. It upsets our internal rhythms. Our brainwaves move like moths with damaged wings. I often thought of shattering the alarm clock and I drowned my sorrows in whole bottles of Nyquil. My eyes guttered like coal burning on a grate. I couldn’t sleep and didn’t even have the energy to cash my checks; I just kept a washcloth over my face and felt my swollen lymph nodes.

My ex-girlfriend, Caroline, dropped by the first of August. I was on the couch, feverish, staring at the TV though it only showed my bent reflection. I heard a car door slam, and saw the bob of her hair pass the picture window.  She dabbed the sweat from her brow with a kitchen towel and sipped a glass of apple juice. I sucked the ice cubes in my sweet tea. She looked sad. The clock dragged its hands through a quarter hour. She wore a white blouse and cherry lipstick. And perfume. The house was empty and she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. I buried my face in the hollow of her neck and we lay together beneath a crisp white sheet and watched the fan wobble above us. Then she, too, drove off to college.

Little kids from Bible Camp jumped off a yellow bus. Their lunch boxes clattered against each other and they laughed in sudden showers of happiness and play. They moved in curves instead of straight lines, touched everything, holding objects to their lips. I could smell Caroline on my chest and fingers and imagined the feel of her nipples in my mouth. Everything I thought of was covered in ash.
 
 
The physician at the plant said everything was normal. Some people have elevated temperatures their whole lives. He scribbled on a pad, coughed into his hand, and passed me a prescription I’d never fill.  The union guys would go outside for smoke breaks. Weeds struggled through the broken pavement. The skeletons of fallen fledglings came apart in the courtyard’s corners. In August the evenings settled in the low nineties and a haze hung above the rail yards. Deer spooked and ran off toward the river. The cries of night hawks pinged off the buildings. There were always bastards who loved a good prank and they’d whistle dirt clods and brittle slag against the siding, a bang and a shiver of laughter as we were covered in grit.

Eight to the gate meant a shift for sleep, a shift for life, a shift for work. My life was eight hours of work, sixteen hours of dreading it. My dreams were slag.

When work was slow at the factory I would talk to South Dakota. She was awkward in her skin, apart from everyone, like me. She was interested in metallurgy while I loved literature. She had never read “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” but promised to some day.  She admitted to missing her home state, Native American jewelry, the spray of stars we could never quite see here. We had nothing in common but loneliness, the one thing we never spoke of.    
 
 
I straddled the scaffolding and jackhammered a carbon block free from its mooring. My shoulder gave, a searing pain that arced through the nerve from neck to fingertips. The snap was audible, like leather laces giving out on a boot. The old man at the end of the line came to berate me, his belly jutting out. Tattoos withered on his arm. His white shirt was haloed with sweat around the collar.

“By god, your daddy needs to toughen you up.”
My arm hung limp and useless. “I’ve run 10Ks,” I offered, but I was grasping. 

“10Ks,” he looked on, and spat in the grit. His safety glasses gave him an owlish look.

“They’re races,” I said, “over six miles at a time.”

He reached out and worked the glove off my hand, and turning the palm over in the yellow light, he inspected the calluses and blisters there. “Well ain’t that alright then.”

The old bastard growled into his radio. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but South Dakota wheeled up in a mechanized cart a few minutes later. She was wearing a thicker heel, and she gave me a smile and nodded, “What the problem?”

He jabbed a thumb at me, his body turned sideways, “Says he’s hurt.”

They made me reenact what I’d done. I climbed the ladder with one good arm. She scribbled in the blanks of the incident report, “Technique fine. Nothing improper,” but they made her change it before the shift was done. They woke up my father to come drive me home.  

Our lunch boxes, mine empty, his full, rattled between us. He was already in his work clothes, and smelled of aftershave, Winstons, and bacon. He fiddled with the sun visor and adjusted the side view mirror. I put a booted foot on the dash despite the pain in my shoulder but he didn’t say a word. Several mockingbirds chased a crow from a tree. As we turned on our street, my father reached across the seat and squeezed my bad shoulder.

I crashed in the empty house for two full days, an old army blanket tacked over the window. My mother went in and out, and once as if I were a child again, I felt her cool palm on my forehead. When I woke HR blinked on the answering machine telling me I was terminated for failure to show. Two weeks short of one full summer, I was the only son who failed to make it to the end. They docked my last paycheck for my boots and glasses.
 

From the safety of marriage and a distant two decades, I pass the plant once or twice each year on visits to my parents. Its smokestacks billow endless steam into the air. They have taken down the sign about the accidents, and no one mans the guard shack at the entrance any longer. Redwing blackbirds dot the fence posts along the highway marking the meadows with song. My friends skip weddings and graduations and stuff envelopes with big fat checks instead. They do come home for funerals. They have lines around the eyes and their mouths have fallen. They know where they’re from and are afraid where they’re going.
Dad mostly sleeps in his recliner, a Louis L’amour book butterflied across his chest. The house is too big and quiet, like the ones in old horror movies, and I expect something to jump out at us at any moment.

Mom, when she phones, can’t help but reel off a list of the dead and the dying. People I played soccer with, the divorced and the broken, the schoolmates who never got out of bed one morning. She hums old gospel songs when she thinks no one can hear.  
The benefits have gone to shit. My parents no longer dream of the white beaches of north Florida. When I picture my father, he’s wearing those same light blue denim shirts, his name stitched above his heart. Those heavy, heavy boots.  There are days when I still hear Marchon’s voice, still think of the union men and how they measured hours and offspring, bluffed with bad hands, retired with ravaged bodies. And until the day they die, they will call what they did making a living. 

About the Author:
Brent Fisk's work has been in Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, and many others. He's applied to several MFA programs for this upcoming fall and has been accepted at American University and wait-listed at Wyoming-- still waiting to hear back from the others. 

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