Thing is, there was absolutely no reason for that announcement. At the end of the day I always change clothes and shower off the worst of the dust, and then I have to walk right past Jake’s door on my way to the bike, which I keep parked up against the rear of his building so it stays relatively clear of the dust. Most of what we produced was a fine aggregate used for highway construction and concrete reinforcement, but that week we were filling an order for talcum that was headed to Indonesia. So that week was a particularly dusty one for me, what with the slightest breeze stirring up the material on the conveyer belts as well as in the big piles.
But whatever kind of order we were filling, it was always my routine to say “See you tomorrow” or “See you Monday” to Jake on my way out, unless it was the second or fourth Friday of the month, in which case he’d be sitting there with my pay envelope in his hand. So for him to make that announcement over the loudspeaker when it was completely unnecessary, well, I couldn’t do anything but stand there in that thick cloud of talcum and feel like every last drop of air had been sucked right out of me. I think I even took off my mask, which is a stupid thing to do when you’re enveloped in white dust. All I remember for sure is staggering over to the office building while coughing my lungs out. Even now I can taste that dust in my mouth. It’s a gritty, chalky, suffocating memory I’m not likely to forget.
“Stop right there,” Jake said when I stepped into his doorway. “I said before you clock out. Not this very minute. Meaning after you’ve showered and changed clothes first.”
“I’m here now,” I told him. “What’s up?”
“You must’ve left a trail of dust the whole way down the hallway.”
“Did something happen to Cindy or one of the girls?”
“Nothing like that,” he said. “Come back in an hour when you’re supposed to.”
“Tell me now. I’m already here.”
“You look like Casper the fucking ghost,” he said. “You’re not stepping in here looking like that. And I don’t want to have to tell you this without us sitting down face to face.”
“Are you firing me?” I said. I couldn’t believe he ever would, being a friend of Pops and all, and having told Pops several times already how glad he was to have me there. He’d said that in almost forty years I was the only foreman who ever went voluntarily down to the pulverizer to check on things. The only one who’d scramble up a belt if he had to, or get his hands up inside a piece of jammed equipment. Plus he was always joking around with me when I was at my desk across from him, working on my reports. Out of the blue he might ask me something like, “Anybody ever tell you you look a lot like Billy Conn?”
And I might answer back something like, “You mean James Caan, the actor? The guy from Honeymoon in Vegas? Man, he’s a dinosaur. He’s almost as old as you.”
To which he would say his standard line, “You fucking college kids, that’s all you know about, isn’t it? Movies and television and all that Internet stuff.”
I know all about Billy Conn, of course. You can’t have a grandfather who was a boxer and not know about “The Pittsburgh Kid.” I could even have quoted that line from On the Waterfront, which was Pops’ favorite movie of all time. And I don’t mean Marlon Brando’s line, the one everybody knows, when Brando says, “I could’ve been a contender.” I mean the one Rod Steiger says, “You could’ve been another Billy Conn.”
So not only did Jake like me but I was the best foreman he’d ever had. Plus he knew I was a veteran, and that fact cut a lot of ice as far as he was concerned. Plus I was his friend’s grandson. So he never would have fired me unless maybe I’d seduced his wife and their daughter and their granddaughter and then ate the Limburger cheese and onion sandwich he had every day for lunch.
“I told you a couple weeks ago that the Chinese made me an offer on the plant,” he said.
“And you also told me you probably wouldn’t sell. And if you did, it wouldn’t affect my job anyway. You said they’d need to keep me and at least a couple of the other guys on.”
“I was hoping,” he said. “But they say otherwise. Said they’re bringing in all their own people. In fact they’re selling all the equipment off for scrap, turning this into a high-tech operation. Bringing the whole shebang over prefabricated from China.”
I felt like I wanted to throw up. But it wouldn’t have done me any good to argue with him. The deal was done, I could see it in his eyes.
“How long do I have?”
“Shutdown on September 1.”
“Ten days?” I said. “We have orders to fill.”
“Canceled,” he said. “Russell, I’m sorry. You have no fucking idea how sorry I am.”
“I’ve barely been here half a year.”
“I know. And I know what I said when I hired you. Put in a year as the foreman, then I’d bring you in to handle all the accounts. Put in five more years to prove you could run this place, and I’d give you a chance to buy me out.”
“Except that you didn’t know about the Chinese then.”
“The only thing I knew about the Chinese is . . . Well, hell. Fuck what I thought I knew and didn’t. You’ll find another job soon enough. And until you do you can sit at home and collect unemployment.”
“I’m not eligible for unemployment,” I told him.
“The hell you’re not.”
I told him I collected that whole time I was home and without a job after my discharge. Used up all my eligibility. Then three and a half years on the GI Bill getting my business degree. “I started here the day after graduation,” I said. “I haven’t worked long enough to collect unemployment again.”
“Then welfare for a few months. I mean fuck it, Russell. You’ll do whatever you have to do. You have a family to think about.”
But by then I felt like my chest was being crushed. Cindy has a job at the bank, so there was no way I’d be able to get welfare. No way I’d even think about it even if I could.
I told Jake all that, and he said, “Well you better at least check it out. Fuck your pride. You know where my pride is right now? And I’m not even talking about all the ways the EPA’s been squeezing my balls for the past forty years. Charlie Chan said if I didn’t sell, they’d fill in the quarry and put their plant there, undercut all my prices, steal all my customers. I’d be bankrupt by the end of the year. That was the deal I was offered.”
All I could do was to stand there in Jake’s doorway and shake my head. It wasn’t going to do any good to plead or beg or cry, no matter how much I wanted to. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t even see the whole room for a while, like my peripheral vision had shut down. I started falling to the side and caught myself against the doorframe.
Jake came up out of his chair. “You okay?” he said.
I held up my hand and nodded, though I wasn’t okay at all.
“You need a drink of water or something?”
“I need a job, Jake.”
He settled back into his chair, and neither of us said anything for a while.
Once I felt like I could move without falling down, I turned to leave.
“One last thing,” he said. “I need you and the other fellas to keep this under your hat for a while. I know you got to tell your wives but don’t be spreading it all over town just yet. The new owners think there might be protests or something once the word gets out.”
“There ought to be protests,” I said.