The two-man press was the largest one in northern Mississippi at that time, imported from Germany, a green monolithic monster that rose twenty-two feet above the grime-encrusted, fourteen-inch-thick concrete floor of the loudly slamming, wheel-whirring stove factory: wham! bang! pow! blang! all day long. All night long when they were running the third shift. It was the kind of press some company like GM could use to make car fenders. Or say if GE needed a bunch of washing-machine panels, or cooktops, it could make them as well. With the proper dies. The press was driven down and back up by a pair of big round gears on top. They were eight feet in diameter and a foot thick with teeth the size of steam irons. Beneath the press was a concrete pit six feet deep and fourteen feet wide and ten feet long where the slugs of round or rectangular or oblong or oval metal that were punched out by the various dies used in the press fell and stuck together with white lithium grease, which dripped down like melting candle wax from the machine. Somebody had to go down in there with a snow shovel and some five-gallon buckets once in a while and clean all that shit out, but Jimmy’s daddy’s job was to take the left gear off the press and fix a bad crack in it before it killed somebody. He didn’t really know what the hell he was doing, had just transferred to Maintenance from Spot-Welding a few months ago, was just doing what they told him to do: take a big gear off. John Wayne Payne, the guy he accidentally crushed, had evolved over the years into a nonpareil forklift driver who still lived with his mother in Water Valley and was smooth and efficient and deadly quiet, his Towmotor muffler noise muffled way down by good mufflers that were put on at the Towmotor factory. He was so good that he could drive his lift up to a railroad car full of dishwashers, stacked in their soft cardboard cartons four high, cross the dockboard without looking down, and squinch his eyes up behind his glasses and peer through the greasy yellow mast and insert the hand-grinder-sharpened tips of his forks between the first and second dishwasher and lift out three without tearing a carton. He could take that same quiet propane-swigging machine and go down the dim and lonely aisles between the tall, rusted steel die racks, next to the Press Department, where hundreds of dies that sometimes weighed thousands of pounds were stacked on dark oily shelves, and pluck one from its resting place thirty-three feet high as nimbly as an osprey grabs a mullet from a marsh. […] One day they’d staged an in-plant forklift-driving contest, no contest. If anybody in the plant had a flat tire by lunchtime, he’d drive his lift out on the parking lot while he ate his sandwich with one hand and raise the car with it to keep anybody from having to jack it up. He’d eaten unfried baloney on white with mayonnaise and two or three drops of Louisiana Red Hot Sauce every single work day on his lunch break for the last nineteen years. Only two sick days, and was actually sick both times, the flu once, and then the heartbreak of salmonella poisoning from some bad chicken his mother fried one Sunday. Didn’t make her sick. Didn’t like chicken.
But in order to get this gear down off this crucial machine, which was dangerous as hell, since they were way up there in the air messing around with very heavy stuff, which could kill or amputate somebody or maybe even several somebodies real easy if something happened, say something gave, or broke, or slipped, as something sometimes does, what they’d done through an outside contractor in Dallas was set up near the big monster press a huge yellow Mitsubishi bridge-building crane they’d brought in through the tall back doors of the factory and amid all the workers and the other presses and the moving forklifts like the one John Wayne Payne drove and the slamming and the whirring, and Jimmy’s daddy had gone up on a wooden pallet on another forklift, one they called Big Mama, to attach a chain on the crane to the gear and knock out the retaining pin and catch it before it fell and then force the gear off its spline with a hydraulic press so that they could lower it to the floor and fix the crack, weld the crack, and that was taking a while, a couple of days, and slowing down everything in the Press Department, because people who were supposed to be working in the middle of all the bedlam were always standing around rubbernecking and watching them take the big press apart, because it was pretty amazing, what they were doing, up in the air like that, and now Jimmy’s daddy was pausing for a smoke break twenty feet off the floor, standing on the pallet, looking out over everything, the Spot-Welding Department and the Tool-and-Die Department and the Porcelain Department and even down to the edge of the line where they were putting the stoves together, and he could just barely catch a glimpse of that new girl with the God-awful tit-ties who worked down there, unbelievable, like half-grown watermelons, the same woman everybody in the break room snuck looks at while they were eating their baloney sandwiches. Everybody was chickenshit to say anything to her. Jimmy’s daddy wanted to say something to her, something like Hey, baby, you want to come over here and sit on my face? Who knew? Hell, she might say yes. Fuck her damn brains out maybe. In the parking lot? At lunch? Was that too much to hope for? Reckon what she ate for lunch? Probably not baloney.
[…]
“You gonna stand there all day with your thumb up your ass or you gonna get that gear off that spline?”
Jimmy’s daddy looked down. Collums’s face was still looking up. Collums. Chief of the Maintenance Department. Hardly ever said anything. Big guy, gray haired. No teeth on top. Kept his hands on his hips a lot. Mysterious background. Maybe from up north. Had kind of a nasal voice. Always wore neat blue coveralls and a neat blue cap. You never saw any grease on him. It was almost like grease wouldn’t stick to him, and he practically lived in grease. Had the habit of staring at something he was going to fix for a very long time before fixing it. Like he was thinking about how he was going to fix it. Could fix anything mechanical. Could fix any machine in the entire plant, didn’t matter what it was: sheet metal brake, computer, forklift, cherry picker, spot-weld machine, glue gun, press, Mr. Coffee, time clock, Towmotor. Could fix any machine on the entire parking lot: Ford, Chevy, GMC, Dodge, Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, Buick. Could weld anything. Could weld aluminum. Most people couldn’t even think about welding aluminum. Drank a half pint of whisky every afternoon. Stopped at C&M liquor store down on South Lamar every afternoon and got one. Jimmy’s daddy didn’t know how many he drank on the weekends because he didn’t see him on the weekends. He didn’t want to see him on the weekends. He saw enough of him five days a week. Jimmy’s daddy dropped his cigarette on the pallet and was going to step on it, but it fell through a crack and landed on top of somebody’s head down on the floor and the somebody looked up and said something. Fuck him if he didn’t like it.
“Yeah, just had a smoke, Collums, I’m about to get it,” he said.
“Don’t let that pin jump out,” Collums said.
“You done already told me twice.”
Then he picked up his hammer and started hitting on the retaining pin again. It was about four inches in diameter, about twenty-four inches long, and it was hard to drive out, even with the locking collar off, but he was making progress, hitting it with some steady long swings, only thing, the small sledgehammer gave your arms and shoulders out after a while, and you had to stop and rest, you couldn’t just keep swinging it forever. But he was making progress. It was moving out a little, not much. It was a very tight fit. He guessed it was supposed to be that way.
Jimmy’s daddy kept hitting it. Where in hell could those people be going on those four-wheelers? How’d they keep from getting caught by the cops since four-wheelers weren’t legal on roads, just off-roads? He’d seen some deputies loading some four-wheelers up on a car hauler one night on the road down below his trailer, where he’d almost wrecked the go-kart. He kept hitting it. He needed to get an inspection sticker on the ’55 before he ran through a roadblock one afternoon. He kept hitting it. Suddenly it jumped out and before he could grab it or try to it fell and bounced off the edge of the press and turned in midair, a flying cylindrical metal projectile, and catapulted into the gray block wall of the Grinding Department and knocked a big chunk out of it about a foot above some guy grinding something with sparks showering his face and dark goggles. Cement dust rained down on the guy’s head and he looked up. It bounced off that wall without killing him, but then bounced across the floor tumbling like a runaway bowling pin. It hit a good-looking secretary from the front office wearing safety glasses who was walking back to the front office through the Press Department in the leg and, since it weighed nearly eighty pounds, broke it. She screamed and fell and kept screaming. A shard of bloody bone was sticking out of her leg and there was grease on her red dress and Jimmy’s daddy could see that she was wearing black bikini panties. John Wayne Payne quietly passed beneath Jimmy’s daddy on his lift at almost the same moment. That was when the crack in the gear, which must have been much worse than they’d thought, gave way close to the chain, and the enormous gear broke into two halves, one to crash thunderously straight down to the floor twenty-two feet beneath, shattering concrete, knocking workers off their feet, raising a big cloud of dust, narrowly missing two running workers, the other to fall directly on the yellow steel cage over John Wayne Payne’s Towmotor, which was not built to adequately protect the driver from something that weighed as much as half the big gear. It made a horrible sound. Like a bomb. Dust flew out.
It looked pretty awful down there from what Jimmy’s daddy could see. There was a lot of sickening blood. People were gathered around. More were coming. The word was spreading through the plant and from his high perch he could see people walking and running up from the line and the Porcelain Department. Shipping Department. Stockroom. Maintenance. Spot-Welding. Paint. He wondered if the new girl with the big titties was going to run up from the line. Guys in ties were running from the front office. Some of them, when they got there, kept going and ran off behind sheet metal brakes and other presses to hurl. The secretary kept screaming. People were gathered around her, too, making kind of a human wall around her. He thought her name was Ethel. He wondered if she wore black panties all the time. He guessed they’d fire his ass now. Even though it wasn’t really his fault.
It was so bad that the ambulance people who came to get what was left of John Wayne Payne vomited on the fourteen-inch-thick floor in front of everybody. These were hardened people. And Jimmy’s daddy had to stand up there and watch all that. It made him think about just going ahead and changing jobs and made him so nervous he had to have another cigarette before somebody got on Big Mama and brought him on down. That’s when he got a real good look at what he’d accidentally done to John Wayne Payne. […]