BY KURT SCHMIDT

Copyright is held by the author.

ON ANGEL’S first day at the factory she overhears Big Red saying, “They let the old man go Friday because he was too slow. He tried hard enough. He just couldn’t hack it. They thought about trying him on another machine, but he was just too slow.” This callous talk causes her to worry that taking a job in this wonderland of machines was a big mistake.

She names her training partner Crayfish, secretly, because he’s squat and bald and skitters when he’s nervous. To explain why he’s 64 and starting a new job, he says, “I spent 40 years at Rancourt — 24 as foreman. Then the owner sold out. The new owners let most of the supervisors go.” He shrugs. “The old owner promised us a pension, but we didn’t have anything in writing except a letter. Supervisors are non-union.”

“A letter is legal evidence,” she says. Angel Harrison has the lean muscular look of a marathon runner. As she moves, a long braid of brown hair swings against her back.

“Some of them talked to a lawyer.” He lowers his voice. “He wouldn’t take the case on consignment. I figured there was nothing to do but work here for a year — till social security.” He shuts up at the sight of Big Red approaching.

Though Big Red is a young man, he has been at this old brick factory for 10 years. His carrot-red hair is slicked back. He has a naked woman tattooed on his left arm. “You get a 60-day trial here,” he says. “You do okay after 60 days, Haig gives you 20 cents more.”

“And if we do a lousy job,” Angel says, “I suppose he subtracts 20 cents.”

“Don’t suppose anything,” Red says. “A couple women tried this job before.”

She picks imaginary loose skin from long delicate fingers more suited to the piano than factory work. The Beethoven print on her grey jersey verifies that she is a stowaway on the wrong ship.

Red turns his back on her and talks with two ink-stained men who run the machine. “Last night I put down a half a case of Coors watching TV. My old lady says I better start lifting weights again instead of Coors. Ain’t that like a woman? I tell her, ‘When we move to Florida, I’ll get back in shape.’ She says, ‘You better stop dreaming about Florida and get a job with one of those computer companies.’ She keeps telling me that’s where the money is…a real broken record. Ain’t that just like a woman? Always dreaming up crazy things for a man to do.”

Red’s grin contains ridicule as thick as his stomach. He offers Angel and Crayfish rubber gloves to wear while cleaning ink rolls. They accept, he grins. “Most guys don’t wear them,” Red says. “If you get M-E-K inside the gloves, it can’t evaporate. Turns your hands beet red. M-E-K’s good for your nicks anyway — stings a few seconds, closes them up without a scar.”

Rejecting the gloves is Red’s test of strength. She stuffs the gloves into her back pocket. “What’s M-E-K?”

“Methyl ethyl ketone,” Red says. “Incidentally, a spark next to a barrel of that stuff could blow this place sky high.”

“What if you get it in your eyes?” she asks.

“Don’t use that thing,” Red says, pointing to a porcelain eye-washer. “Water makes your eye sting worse. Best thing is to pry your eye open and let it evaporate.”

“Let your eye evaporate?” she says.

“Yeah. We got black eye patches in the nurse’s office.” Red leads Angel and Crayfish on a tour of the long machine, pointing out its dangers, telling them to keep their hands away from the rollers. Of the circle knives that roll, trimming edges automatically, Red says, “Eighty pounds air pressure on those knives — enough to cut a spike in half.” He elaborates on men in other departments who have lost a finger or two. “A few weeks ago a man lost his thumb. I had to carry that thumb to the hospital in a paper cup.”

She folds her arms across her chest and tucks her thumbs into her armpits.

***

The next day Angel drives her rusted Corolla down into the hollow where the red brick factory sits with its towering smokestack. She parks in a lot surrounded by a chain-link fence and stays behind her steering wheel, as if waiting for some sign that she should continue. Why has this decrepit building survived, she wonders, when others have been shut down and converted to fancy shopping malls?

Once inside she puts on the rubber gloves. The solvents cause them to stick together at the fingers and tear when she pulls them apart. She drops the gloves into a trash barrel.

Later she splashes methyl ethyl in one eye and dashes for the eye washer, spinning its handle three times before receiving a gush of water that makes the eye sting worse. She pries the eye open. Red walks past and says, “Tingles, don’t it?”

“Bastard!”

Red laughs. “You don’t sound like no angel.”

***

To begin the second week, she and Crayfish punch the time clock at 2:50 in the afternoon and take over the machine from the men of the first shift without shutting it down (per Red’s command). Red instructs them to tend the machine during their supper break.

“If something goes wrong while you’re eating,” Red says, “just stop the machine till you’re finished. Anytime you can’t fix it, get Stevens.” Red leaves at five.

She and Crayfish push hard against a mammoth cylinder of vinyl suspended on a wheeled A-frame, rolling it slowly into position. They fill the ink pan, start the machine, watch the wide red vinyl travel through its maze of rollers. She cuts off smaller, finished cylinders at the end, winching three into a pyramid on each pallet, pulling each load across the aisle with a fork lift.

Crayfish misses a break in the vinyl, jamming his end of the machine. Stevens, the night supervisor, spends an hour rethreading the vinyl through 42 rollers. The entire week goes by like this. They sweat over an old machine. Abused muscles, drenched jerseys, ink-stained jeans. Periodically, she gulps water from a plastic canteen. When the canteen is empty, she refills it at a water cooler. There is always the stench of ink and the chemicals. The only relief is when she and Crayfish part each night in the chill of the parking lot.

During their third week Red tells Angel and Crayfish, “You have too much downtime. You can’t get finished goods upstairs if the machine is down. You two better get your act together.”

Crayfish waves his arms slowly and says, “It’s not all our fault. The machine just breaks down, we have to wait for Stevens.” His explanation continues.

Red has abused us from the beginning. Red has grinned at our failures. She wants Crayfish to fight, not defend them with a whine and a wave of his arms. “We’re already working eight straight hours without a break,” she says, glaring at Red. “On a machine with a thousand safety hazards. As far as I’m concerned, you can stuff your downtime and let me go.”

“I don’t decide whether you go or stay,” Red says. “I’m just passing along what Haig says. I work for the union just like you.”

“I heard management’s got this union in its pocket. And you proved it by not backing us.” She nods, the long braid swings against her back. She turns away and confronts the machine again. Fired. Better me than old Crayfish. Her mind rolls with the machine. Motors churn, gears squeal, rollers clatter, air hisses. Red shouts at Crayfish. Red looks at Angel, leaves her alone.

An hour later Red stops the machine and leads them to a green bench. He says to Angel, “You’re ticked off, aren’t you?”

“How’d you guess?

“Hey,” Red says, “don’t be ticked at me. Haig’s the one who keeps pushing everybody. Strange man — Haig. I don’t like him and he don’t like me. Couple times I had to tell him where to get off.” He tells Angel and Crayfish of his confrontations with Haig, blames everything that’s wrong on him.

To show that he is the antithesis of Haig, Red relates his bar room brawls. “I’m not afraid of anybody,” he says. He tells about his strength too — how he lifted one of the A-frames off the floor and won some bets.

She smiles, which makes Red smile. Crayfish smiles too.

“I know you’re an intelligent woman,” he says. “Haig doesn’t know how to handle intelligent people. They see right through him.”

“What about the safety hazards?” she says. “What about getting a supper break?”

“I didn’t know you two weren’t taking a break,” Red says. “When Haig’s in the right mood, I’ll speak to him about shutting down the machine for 20 minutes at dinner time so you can eat without having to jump up and move the knives. If he doesn’t agree, then just take a break when you change A-frames.”

***

The next day Haig steps from the shadows and says production must rise. To ensure that it does, he stays through the second shift to watch what goes on.

Haig is a tall, thin man with a balding flattop and thick glasses. He has a meerschaum pipe peeking from his back pocket and white undershirt sleeves sticking out one inch below the short sleeves of a sports shirt. He is the voice behind microphone announcements in the factory.

Haig suggests ways to speed up the operation — like cleaning ink pans and tending the machine simultaneously, like speeding up the machine. “Let’s crank it up to 20 yards a minute,” he says, and then smells the vinyl to make sure the heat in the dryer is high enough. He warns Angel about keeping up the quality: “Some people don’t care what kind of goods they send upstairs. You gotta watch the goods for repeat marks. Last week you let a roll of black go by with spots.”

“When are we going to get a legitimate supper break?” she asks, raising her voice against the clatter.

“You eat while the machine runs. You can slow the machine down to 10 yards a minute.” He walks away.

“Obsessive repulsive personality,” she says to his back, using a term she’d coined for pompous psych professors.

Haig pushes harder. He comes running when the machine stops, even when he isn’t nearby, as if he could sense the halt.

Despite her determination to be tough, her muscles ache all the time. She is so weary she wants to cry. She slices her hand on a long blade that fits against the ink roller. In a distant cubicle, a lumpy nurse bandages her. Then she returns to the machine, where she discovers that depression hurts worse than the cut.

The next day she asks Red why OSHA hasn’t been there to clean up the safety problems. “OSHA’s been here,” Red says with a shrug.

***

Because of her cut and her complaints, a gap-toothed repairman installs a safety screen behind the giant print roll. Haig paces while the machine is idle. When the screen is on, Haig commands, “Crank it up to 20 yards a minute.”

Cut off 20 thumbs a minute, then put up a screen. Twenty thumbs, 20 thumbs, 20 thumbs . . .

She discovers the painful growl of resentment. She resents Crayfish for being unable to carry his share, for avoiding decisions, for being old; Red, for his pretense as a supervisor, his insecurity as a man; Haig, for his push and shove, his pretense of omnipotence. She resents the passivity of those who tolerate such working conditions. She abhors the machine for its inconsistency, for its danger.

At the end of six weeks she tells Haig that she’s had enough. They talk in his office, where a photograph of a small girl sits on his desk. She lists the safety hazards. He claims the safety problems can be corrected. “Not in my time,” she says. “The worst safety problem is your insensitivity.”

Haig doesn’t hear. “What you’re saying is our training program stinks. Okay. Look, I’m more pleased with your work than displeased.” He gives her a 10-cent-an-hour raise retroactive through the previous week, brings her work gloves and safety glasses, has the gap-toothed repairman install another safety device on the machine. Two days later he points to the results of their talk.

“I’m still leaving,” Angel says. “I won’t be back until you turn this place into a shopping mall.”

Talk of her departure makes her a heroine to those who have to stay. Men who never spoke to her ask now when her last day is.

***

Tex arrives for her to train. In his thirties, tall and solid, just off road-building construction. He talks perpetually and wiggles a top dental plate with his tongue. “Angel your real name?” he asks with an impish laugh.

She nods.

“My real name’s Norman. Nobody calls me that though.

She asks Tex about himself, what he’s doing here, why he left construction. Met his wife in Martinsburg, he says, when he drove a van that carried the world’s smallest horse. He’s a teamster, he says. Construction’s over when the ground freezes. “My second wife, actually,” he says. “We have a little boy. My first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. I was out on the road at the time — driving a truck. I couldn’t get over it — had terrible nightmares.”

Tex buys five Sloppy Joes and two cans of root beer from a metal-cart vendor who parks in the aisle at 5:30. When he pays, she sees photographs of a woman and a girl, of another woman. Tex never stops talking. He points to where his stomach was pierced by shrapnel in Iraq.

“Did that frighten you?” she asks.

He laughs. “Been shot twice more in bars — once in the foot and once in the thigh. Some guy just started shootin’ up the place. Suddenly my leg goes right out from under me.”

“What does your wife think about your barroom adventures?”

“She don’t care as long as I bring my paycheck home. She don’t miss the beer money I hold out.” He grins. “Man’s gotta always hold a little back — a little somethin’ the wife don’t know about.” Tex gives her four brownies that his wife baked. “Take ‘em all,” he insists. “I already ate enough, plus I got more at home. Trouble is some of ‘em are burnt a little on the edge.”

She puts aside her raisins and nuts and nibbles a brownie. “You shouldn’t work here,” she says. “This is a dangerous place. Men lose their thumbs here.” She tells him about Haig.

“He won’t bother me,” Tex says. “I met plenty of guys like him. I just nod my head and don’t pay no attention to them. Once I flipped a dozer over when some stupid supervisor ordered me to drive it up a steep bank. After that they left me alone.” Tex cackles.

On her last day Crayfish wishes her good luck, waving his arms for emphasis, exposing a deep black bruise on the soft side of his right arm. She advises him to be careful. At the end of the shift, she walks out with Tex to the quick pace of those departing and against the reluctance of those arriving. A bright harvest moon seems as close to the parking lot as the silhouettes of tall oaks.

“Winter’s coming too early this year,” she says, curling into her jacket.

“Cold don’t bother me none,” Tex says, walking straight and tall in a thin shirt.

“Buy some warm gloves before November.”

He grins. “You remind me of my first wife.”

They part for their separate cars. “Let me know if you find somebody wants to buy a Ford Focus,” Tex yells back. “Only 20,000 miles. I’m gonna get me a bigger car.”

She waves, finds her old Corolla, tosses in the plastic canteen half-filled with water. She drives. When she reaches an isolated country road, she snaps off the headlights and drives by the light of the moon. She sings a song called “Escape Route.”

I’ve got a life out there somewhere, it’s waiting
Lined with palm trees and only new faces
If I could look past the present and get there . . .

***

At home in her cottage she sits on a threadbare sofa with Mozart snuggled against her leg. Mozart, or Mozzy as she likes to call him, is a male beagle with an old dog’s grey colour around his muzzle. Living alone as she does, Angel tends to talk to Mozzy. Dogs are good listeners.

“Well, Mozzy,” she says, stroking his head. “We’re unemployed again. I know it seems irresponsible quitting a job without having a new one, but I just couldn’t handle the factory. People who’d been there a long time looked like they were dying. Or wanted to. I feel sorry for Crayfish and Tex. Even Big Red. Haig is a different story.

“I could try waitressing again. You meet some interesting people. Remember I told you about working with Rosemary. She was a trip. Said she didn’t like waiting on rich bastards because there tips were as small as their peckers. I met that author too. Said she’d read my manuscript. No encouragement though. All she said about it was she learned a lot about me. That’s the trouble writing first person. Everyone thinks it’s your personal story. Fuck it. It was probably crap anyway, and she was afraid to say it. The real downside is having to serve fuckers who have that condescending attitude toward waitresses . . . treating you like some kind of vermin. Remember that guy I told you about who kept calling me girl. ‘Girl, bring me this. Girl, bring me that.’ I would have enjoyed bringing him a vasectomy kit.

“There’s that tech magazine over in Branton. Maybe they need an editorial assistant . . . or something like that. Proofreader, maybe. Those jobs at least let you work with words . . . easier than dealing with people. Most of the time, anyway.

“Maybe, Mozzy, you’d like to go job-hunting with me tomorrow. You could stay in the car while I do some interviews. I bet you’d like that. A Corolla adventure.”

She lifts her hand from the dog’s head. “Let’s go to bed, Mozzy.”

Mozart’s eyes open. Angel rises and starts toward the bedroom. Mozart rises, stretches, and yawns. He plunks down from the sofa and follows her.

***

Kurt Schmidt is the author of the novel, Annapolis Misfit, (Crown Publishers) and chapbook memoir, Birth of a Risk-Taker, (Bottlecap Press). As cancer survivor with PTSD, he overcame anxiety to fly in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son, who previously crashed a dirt bike and Mazda Miata at various race tracks and now races a Porsche and flies his own plane (hopefully crashing neither). Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and the Rock Salt Journal and can be viewed among 30 others at www.kurtgschmidt.com.