Florida Heatwave (20 page)

One line in Van Wagener’s letter drove Jim particularly bat shit. He wrote, “It wasn’t my fault.” Like hell it wasn’t. Things don’t just happen to people … there’s this thing called responsibility. Maybe a pussy writer can let things just happen and then look down at the disaster with upraised hands and velvet-painting eyes. But you, sir, are the fucking instigator, the perpetrator, the cause, the man behind the wheel. It’s your fucking fault all right.

That first night Jim had kept making shit up, trying to impress her. He had known she was smarter than him and that she knew exactly what he was doing. Bolstered by the evening’s confidence, he’d blurted out, “Hey, how is your skin that white?”

She’d pulled at her shirt, stretching it down until she caught the edge of her bra and kept pulling, revealing the uninterrupted cream of her tit.

“No tan lines.” It wasn’t an answer, at least not to his question.

He wanted her to want him so badly. He couldn’t think of another single thing to say.

In the end he didn’t have to say anything. A forceful kiss and aggressive hands had provoked her to do things that had made him feel, in those moments, less than hollow.

He leaned hard against the Fourdrinier control panel. Too much water was spilling into the diluting chamber, threatening the mix. He felt dizzy. The blood rushed to his face; he started to lose sensation in his legs.

Van Wagener’s letter began to crumple in his fist. He held it like a gas mask over his whole face. He breathed in and out.

Cheap copy paper smells like bleach. Even when you dirty it with ink and sweat from your palm, even if it lingers in a humid room with the cheap cigarette smoke of strangers, paper betrays no secrets; it still smells clean.

He thought about December.

“Open the fucking door!” Jim slammed his fist on the thin wood of the bathroom jamb.

“No. Not when you’re like this.”

“You want me to calm down, I’ll calm down!” Jim paced in front of the door, pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to cut off the pain behind his eyes. “Come on!”

The door unlocked. She opened it and stepped past him.

“It’s not what you think,” she said.

He stood there fuming.

She went to her side of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

“He’s just a friend,” she said.

He recoiled his hand to hit her and she didn’t fucking move. He spun away from her, bouncing on one foot. He left the room that way, hopping on the balls of his feet, wanting to stomp something out. He fell into the chair at his desk. He opened one of the desk drawers and slammed it back into the desk a couple times, needing to unload some of his aggression.

“Don’t do that!” she screamed from the bedroom.

He yanked the drawer open as loud as he could to spite her. He stayed planted in the chair.

She spoke to him from the other room. “I don’t want to leave Jacksonville. You drive me crazy when you act like this, like a little boy.”

“Don’t you fucking do that!” Jim let out a frustrated grunt. “You always do this, twist things around. I’m mad at you! Don’t you turn this around. Fuck fuck fuck!”

“I’m not the one screaming,” she screamed.

Everything went still. The desk drawer was still open. He began rooting around in the mess. Fingers filed past unpaid credit card statements. His knuckles bumped a loose deck of cards trying to stay together. Random electronic adapters floated to the surface. His hand dove in deeper until he felt the metal.

He pulled out a gun, an old .22 revolver.

He cracked open the cylinder slowly, quietly. He pressed the tiny bullets into the chambers. His hands shook like he was in cold storage.

A light went off in the bedroom. He looked up at the ceiling, at the light above him. He kept his eyes open until they started to water. His jaw sore from clenching his teeth.

He put the gun in his lap. “I love you.”

He closed his green eyes.

“Goddammit!” Jim snapped out of the memory and into the reality of flashing lights on the Fourdrinier. His line was backed up and he expected Inveigle, who worked down at the dryer section, to give him hell. What he didn’t expect was the painful shriek that came from Inveigle’s small frame. It was the kind of sound that could hurt you.

Jim ran down the catwalk toward the other end of the machine. He knew that abandoning his station would mean problems in the line, but the pit of his stomach told him the problems were already here.

He had really only zoned out for a couple seconds—ten, twenty at the most—what could have happened in that short span? Certainly nothing that could be responsible for such a screaming.

A worker stumbled forward away from the loud, wet wailing. His knees nearly missed the metal grating of the walkway as he kept stumbling, trying to run without collapsing from nausea. The man couldn’t hold it back. He buckled over and emptied his stomach.

“Hey, you okay?” Jim nudged him with the tip of his shoe. “What happened?”

“My god … fuck!” The man spit up thin bile that clung to his lower lip. “His face … his fucking face!”

Jim started to gag on the warm odor of the vomit, so he moved on toward the back. He jumped down a short ladder to the factory floor. Over near another control panel, a crowd was forming. Everyone looked down. Jim couldn’t see Inveigle yet, but he could hear him. Hell, they could probably hear him in the next county.

Stocky workmen with tattooed shoulders flinched at the sound. Some of them teared up at what they saw. Jim pulled himself into the crowd, which, like the tide, tried to push him back. “Don’t look for god’s sake, don’t.”

Jim began to panic. Was this how it felt? He cried out Inveigle’s name, but neither Inveigle nor anyone else answered.

Then the crowd seemed to part, slowly allowing Jim visual access to the accident scene. First he saw the large, looming drying rollers of the paper machine. Next to them were smaller cylinders called calendars, stacked tight together around the coater unit. These smaller rollers were used to compress the paper into a uniform thickness. But now the calendar stack was off axis, and it gave Jim a clear indication of what must have happened. If something knocked the rollers out of alignment, the super-heated starch used to coat the drying paper could have sprayed out toward the operator.

As he was processing this theory, he heard a few voices mention AKD. Jim’s pulse went from a quick thrum to a deep, reverberating thumping. AKD was a type of chemical sizing agent used in the wet-end of production. Sometimes, as a cost-cutting measure, the mill would substitute fresh rosin from local sand pine trees. Sap.

Either way, Jim imagined that if, by some strange chance, while he wasn’t paying attention at his board, some excess AKD seeped undiluted into the dry end of the Fourdrinier, then the hot starch spray would turn into highly alkaline glue. A thick, super-heated, highly corrosive adhesive. But really, he thought, what were the chances of that happening?

Then he saw Aaron Inveigle’s face.

The man was curled sideways on the cement floor. His arms stretched out stiff behind him, locked at the elbows, and his hands shook at the ends like leaves on dead branches during a hurricane. His head rested uneasy in a shallow pool of discolored liquid.

Inveigle’s forehead bubbled up with blisters. His eyelids had fused shut; his nose flattened. Where his fingers had stuck to his face were now torn holes exposing pink muscle. His mouth was a hole filled with teeth and lipless screams.

Jim clenched his fists, unable to turn away. He felt someone clamp down on his upper arm, drag him away from the crowd. It was Ream.

“I know what you did,” Ream whispered into his ear.

“I didn’t fucking do this.”

“Don’t worry. This shit isn’t your fault. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t
do
anything. You
did
something.”

Ream straightened his back and lolled his head side to side, looking for eavesdroppers. Everyone was preoccupied with other atrocities. He leaned in for another whisper: “Now’s your chance.” He shoved a package into Jim’s hand. Jim grabbed the heavy object wrapped in a dirty, gray oilcloth.

With his other hand, Jim unfolded the cloth to reveal a medium-sized metal cogwheel. “What’s this?”

“It’s the missing piece of the machine.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Ream. What the fuck is going on?”

“I broke the machine. Took a piece out, so it’s incomplete and don’t work. Now it’s you. You got to fix what’s broken. Make it right.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jim grabbed Ream by the lapels. “Did you see what just fucking happened? You’re making jokes?”

“Didn’t expect Inveigle to get hurt, but face the facts: someone always gets hurt.”

Jim looked at his fists in front of him; they were no longer grabbing Ream. He stood a couple feet away and receded into the steam and distance.

Jim opened his fists. His hands, empty.

The next sound came from the foreman. “A’right, you nancys, clear out. Go home, go to a bar, go to a fish fry, I don’t give a fuck. Just get the hell out.”

Millworkers began to scatter like kitchen cockroaches when the light’s turned on. Jim stood still, wondering why Inveigle had stopped screaming. It didn’t seem fair. “What about Inveigle? Isn’t anyone going to come and help? You want us to leave?”

The foreman’s eyes look out into the thinning crowd, not connecting to anyone. “Ho! You people deaf
and
stupid? Make yourself scarce!”

The flow of Jim’s coworkers was already carrying him out toward the exit. He had nowhere to go but home.

He turned the knob on his front door. Locked. Deb’s pale red truck sat in the dirt driveway.

“Christ, Deb, what the fuck?” He slammed his fist on the thin wood of the jamb, as he reached for his keys.

He only had two keys on his ring. The silver one had FORD on it, and the gold one had SCHLAGE. He tried the gold one again. It fit, but it would not turn.

He threw the keys down and began to pace, pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to cut off the pain behind his eyes. “Come on!”

He heard the handle being worked from the inside. The door opened to show her face, her white skin glowing out of the darkness. Deb looked beautiful, more beautiful than he remembered her looking in a long while. She said, “Excuse me. Can I help you?”

“Accident at work. Bad. Now my keys and fuck, and why are we talking in the doorway?”

She had already begun to close the door on him. “Hey!”

“I’m sorry I can’t—”

“Deb, I’m in no fucking mood.”

Her eyes twitched. She took a breath, leaning against the door, trying to keep it between them. She said, “I think you have the wrong person.”

He pushed at the door hard, forcing her back into the house. He entered.

Jim looked at her face. “What are you trying to do?”

“Please … get out of my house.”

“My house? This is
our
fucking house.”

“I don’t have much money … I’ll give you the cash I have if you please—”

“This is because of
him,
isn’t it? You don’t want to talk about it and now I don’t fucking exist?”

“I … I can scream. The neighbors are home …”

“Where’s my shit?” He looked around. “It’s gone. What did you do with it?”

He chased her down the hallway into the kitchen. He started opening cupboard doors. “Everything is gone. Even my lunch bags.”

He pulled a knife from the block. She screamed.

He slammed the blade down on the Formica. He went over to the small table.

“Right here. It was right here.”

She backed herself into a corner against the refrigerator. She was crying.

He pointed the knife at her. “Sit down. Sit down!”

The chair scraped across the floor. She sat down.

“It was right here. This morning. You were sitting there. I made my sandwich. You gave me that fucking letter.”

He put the knife down, reached into his pocket. He felt the metal gasket that Ream had wrapped in the oilcloth. The letter was gone. He tried to remember exactly what happened. He knew he pulled it out, read it. Then that thing with Inveigle … did he set it down? Did he drop it? He had thought he put it back in his pocket, but he couldn’t remember. It must be still there. At the mill.

He heard her short breaths, her sobbing, getting louder.

He leaned in toward her. “What did you say?”

She whimpered.

“Don’t you fucking do that!” He let out a frustrated grunt. “You wrote a letter,
you
did. I’m gonna go get it and you’ll see. You can fucking hide my shit and act like you’re acting, but you … you just
wait.”

He drove back to the paper mill. The radio in his old Mustang didn’t work. His balding tires licked asphalt, occasionally hiccupping on the cracks in the highway. The Port St. Joe sky swelled above him, but something was different.

He rubbed his eyes with the fleshy part of his thumb.

The sky called out a clear, pale blue. Not a cloud up in it.

Then he noticed the smell. Clean.

A chain-link fence surrounded the mill parking lot. He had to park on the street. He climbed the fence and crossed the empty lot to the large building.

He headed first to the break room. The coffee pot had boiled off, and a dark crud ringed its way down the glass carafe. He looked in the garbage. All that rested at the bottom of the plastic-lined barrel was a crushed 7-Eleven coffee cup. Jim knew that it didn’t make sense for the letter to be
here;
he remembered waiting to open it at his station. It was out
there.
It had to be. Still, he wanted not to rush, take his time, retrace his every step in case he missed an important moment in the sequence that led him back here.

He walked onto the factory floor. The large Fourdrinier machine sat there, all three hundred feet of it. He laughed at the ridiculousness of it: he stood facing a machine that could spit out six hundred feet of paper per minute, and his goal was to find a single, crumpled, letter-sized piece of paper.