20

Jesse was showing one of the new workers where he should keep his lunch next time, not on top of the glue press, where it had fallen behind the equipment and would be eaten by mice during the night. Jesse’s body language was easy to read; there was still hope, his gesture said, indicating the outdoors where a lunch wagon had pulled up beside the shipping room.

Beside the factory is a yard of piled-up lumber, some of it just arrived and pale, leaking sap from the ends, little amber blisters, some of it weathered and gray, warped, two-by-fours tumbling off the stack because they won’t stay straight. The first time my dad had shown me this open-air storage he had said only two words. He had nodded in the direction of a stack of cracked plywood and said, “Black widows.”

The spiders were easy to find. I discovered one just then, over by a bucket of tar. The bucket was unopened, but I knew what was inside. Dad sent a crew up every year before the rainy season. They would pop open a bucket like this, hammer on the bottom until the black cylinder of glassy tar fell out, and they would melt tar down and use it to seal cracks in the roof. They never got them all. Every time it rained, drops found a way in, a whisper of water.

I knew there must be another ladder around somewhere, but there was only this one, the rungs over-scribbled by the messy web of a spider. She hung in the shadow, a glittering ebony creature in mid-dark. Only when I stepped to one side did her forgetful-looking web catch the light again, a tangle, hairs left in a brush.

Anita would wonder why I had to do it harm. I would argue how dangerous it was, and I would be right. But I stood there making noise, kicking the ladder, clearing my throat, and actually talking out loud, telling the spider that I was sorry but I had to ruin her web.

The ladder was wood, each rung cobwebby, dangling a moth cocoon or a wisp of trash. I leaned it against the roof and began to climb. Each rung creaked. All the way up I told myself that the ladder was strong enough to hold my weight.

The factory roof is paved with tar paper. Wherever a skylight gleams, the roof is scabby with extra tar, all the way around the frame of the skylight. Ventilation pipes murmured, the voice of someone singing in Spanish erupting eerily from a pipe as I passed it.

The places where the fire ax had broken open the hopper were sealed over with bright yellow tin, the tin nailed into place. I clambered up to the edge of the hopper and opened a trapdoor. There was only a little sawdust, at the bottom, and the bitter smell of cottonwood told me that the light glaze of sawdust was fresh.

I turned to go back, and stopped. A big man, a silhouette against the sunlight gleaming off the foundry windows down the street, was making his way up the ladder. Only his head and shoulders were visible as the ladder shook and the man grew cautious.

“I think this is the ladder OSHA told us to destroy,” said Jesse.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspected the factory from time to time. Dad complied quickly with their recommendations, and I knew that, somewhere in the factory, there were at least two strong new aluminum ladders.

I didn’t know what to say to Jesse. “Be careful. You weigh more than I do,” I said.

“This thing is making all kinds of groans and moans,” he said, not moving.

“I just had to see,” I said, after debating inwardly how to explain myself.

“You just had to see if I was lying,” said Jesse, easily, as though he was saying something pleasant.

“You weren’t,” I said.

“But you didn’t believe me,” said Jesse.

I told him I was sorry.

“That’s all right,” he said.

Some people want to make you apologize twice, just so they can enjoy it the second time.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “It tells me something.”

Roofs shouldn’t be so ugly. Nobody ever sees them, so they are ignored when it comes time to paint window frames and plant flowers by the sidewalk. I found myself thinking just then that if I ever owned a factory I would put pink shingles on the roof, or nice gray gravel.

Jesse made me nervous. I liked him, but he knew things I didn’t, and he was used to telling people what to do. He was taking advantage of me now, keeping me on the roof, squinting into the sunlight, while he stood on the ladder looking around, the freeway off toward the Bay, and the railroad tracks, our own railroad spur empty now. The two of us paused to take in the view, rust red boxcars in the distance, the plume of white steam from the tomato cannery.

“We’re three days ahead of schedule,” he said.

“That’s good to know.”

“You can go home now, if you want,” he said. “Tell your dad I’m keeping my eye on the production chart.”

There was some meaning behind his voice, something I could not figure out. “No, I think I’ll stay,” I said. “Maybe break up that ladder, make sure nobody ever uses it again.”

Maybe I expected Jesse to be annoyed. He was telling me I could go home, and I wasn’t going.

He smiled. Gold flashed somewhere in his mouth. “That’s good, Cray,” he said, like I had passed some kind of test.

Every time I stepped into his office, I knew he would be there, phone to his ear. But he wasn’t. The trouble was that, as soon as I stopped working, I remembered her, and that hurt too much.

We weren’t three days ahead of schedule. Whenever there was a shipment a square was shaded in on the big sheet of graph paper in Dad’s office. There was a line in ink, where we had to be by the closing buzzer every day in order to stay on schedule. We were one day ahead, at best. Maybe two, I reasoned, if you counted today’s shipment. That was the point of shipping nightstands on a Saturday—we picked up a day on the chart. And then tomorrow was Sunday, when the factory was always closed.

My dad never said the factory was closed, or open. He said the factory was “down.” The factory was always down on Christmas Day. The factory was always up on a weekday. I left the office and went out to the lumber lot and broke up the ladder. I expected it to take half an hour, but sometimes I forget how strong I am. In five minutes the ladder was broken scrap. As old as the wood was, it was white inside, where the sun had never touched. I tied it into a neat bundle and tossed it into the Dumpster.

When I was done with the ladder, I went into the finishing room and grabbed a paint gun. We weren’t just making nightstands. We were making chairs and children’s furniture and dressers. Pink and yellow chairs hung from hooks. I worked the lever of the hose, like the lever of a garden hose, only what came out was a blast of blue, sky blue, Florida blue.

Someone handed me a mask, and I put it on, and after five or ten minutes, I was almost as fast as anybody there. I sprayed nineteen chairs myself, and by the time the buzzer sounded, fifty-three bentwood chairs hung overhead, turning slowly as though they were living creatures, all those brilliant colors.

When I got home that evening, there was a white van parked at the curb. Another van, I thought. No big deal, I tried to tell myself. I thought maybe it was another television station, but I stopped to read the lettering on the door, two big red letters: FC.

And beneath that: Find the Children: The National Center for the Missing

I told myself that this was simply more help. And we needed help—I knew that. But another part of me went cold.