The Knudsen Lutheran church proposed building swank baseball diamonds so we could host county-wide tournamentsâsimple, right? But Dad, in his sweated-through golf shirt, stapled fliers to telephone poles, declaring
out-of-towners bring in unwanted elements
. This might've been a hard-won lesson from the swampy Mekong, but every kid just thought he was a jackass. Out-of-towners, like from Lewiston and Pawnee City? Knudsen couldn't join the little league without diamonds, so we couldn't even pretend there was such a thing as a baseball scholarship unless we had a parent who'd drive us up to Burchardâand who had a parent like that?
“We could make our own league,” we said. “The Shit-hole League.”
The Lutherans got too busy arguing about Dad to get the diamonds built.
“You could look right at them,” he told me, teetering on the edge of my bed, “and never know what they really were.”
Keister the dog had been backed over by then. As I got older I was able to fight back more effectively on the living room floor, and Dad seemed to like that even better. His expanding gut stayed hard as a rock.
In twelfth grade, Mom started taking me into Lincoln on Saturdays, showing me art galleries and even a play. She hadn't turned chubby like other guy's moms, and her legs got looks.
“I don't care if you even get
married
,” she said in the middle of the sunken gardens, solid hands on my shoulders, “but I want to teach grandkids to canter. I see buck-toothed girls on palominos. Leave 'em with me, then go to Europe if you want.”
“But I don't want a buck-toothed wife,” I said.
“There are worse things,” she whispered, retying her chiffon scarf over her head.
I told Dad I was making hunting knives at Buck's apartment but instead pimply Buck and I were studying like maniacs for scholarship exams. “Giller,” he'd whisper whenever I dozed off. “Your mom's totally Alanis Morissette.”
And after midnight I was calling modestly toothed Lydia in MacArthur while we simultaneously filled out applications to the same dozen schools.
Then from my eventual dorm at UC Denver I'd call Mom when I knew Dad would still be asleepânot to worry, I won't be talking about the guy much longerâand one morning she told me that after fifteen years his lungs had somehow
recovered
so the doctor had said he was no longer eligible for disability. They went to Pawnee City where Dad started as an apprentice millwright. So, yeah, once I was long gone they actually moved away from Knudsen.
The
Pawnee Republican
of November 18, 1996:
A 41-year-old Pawnee City man, formerly of Knudsen, was killed when he was ejected from a 1991 Buick Skylark that flipped multiple times before colliding with the Sit-Stay Dog Food warehouse on the northeast corner of Broadway and Sheridan.
State police reported William R. Giller was pronounced dead at the scene by Pawnee County coroner following the 10:45 p.m. crash. One witness reports the Skylark traveling in excess of 90 miles an hour as it turned south off Western. Giller, the sole occupant of the car, was not wearing a seatbelt.
Pawnee City fire and ambulance personnel assisted at the scene. An investigation into the crash is continuing.
Even at four sentences it seemed long-winded. The investigation found cocaine in his system. The symptoms of Mom's disease were still in our future and every morning she was bicycling to the accident site to look for more windshield glass to keep in her purseâI couldn't understand her grief at the passing of an asshole, so we weren't talking much. And what did I insist to the minister, beside the cooler at the after-service potluck?
“Families are shit, Your Worship,” I said, waving the wasp away from my beer, “and I'm not going to have no part of 'em.”
Yet years later, I'd set Josie up on the change table, unbutton her sleeper and put my nose under her drool-slick chinâthat sour scent of pure baby.
“
Hey
,” I'd say in a goofy voice. “Dat smells pretty
good
!”
And she'd give a deep-throated chuckle before gazing across the room at her mother, who'd be on the couch asleep, or folding laundry, or embroidering daisies onto a curtain. Her auburn braids curled down onto her T-shirt, her sinewy shoulders creaking with strength.
So while we were in Hoover my kids' Grandma Jackie sat waiting in Pawnee City, with doctors, acupuncturists, massage therapists and her rattle-brained son all unable to end her latest ordeal. Their grandpa was in heaven, apparently, stapling flyers to the Pearly Gates and eyed nervously by St Peter.
“Just think about
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and all the wonderful happenings at
that
factory!” Rob Aiken shouted over the machines' roar. “When people hear there are tours at
our
factory, they all jump!”
We stood in the loading dock between a parked forklift and towers of cardboard boxes stacked on pallets. The kids shuffled their sneakers on the pebbly concrete and blinked up at the black rafters, as though the wonderment might put them to sleep. Rob had a yellow collared shirt tucked into his jeans and close-cropped white hair. He laced his fingers in front of his crotch like he was about to hoist someone over a fence.
“Is there really going to be lunch?” asked Colleen. “I brought a little burrito just in case!”
“Yeah, oh, hot dogs!” Rob said. “Now, just through here, let's get started. We're going to see the pumps we use to load the resâuh, the additive with.”
A loose-limbed guy in orange coveralls rolled up a handcart and stacked it with boxes, wagging his elbows like he had a Run-DMC song playing in his head. Rob skipped over to him, put a wide hand on his shoulder.
“Ah, no, pal!” Rob hollered. “Latches for the bins won't go on until next week! If it's ball bearings just take a box at a time, things weigh a hundred pounds!”
The guy unloaded his boxes without a break in rhythm, and Rob turned back to us with a watery smile.
“Lot of guys off sick this week but we've got good people filling in!”
We ambled after him through a pair of tall steel gates into the main room of the factory, smelling of machine oil and garden hoses. It was the dimensions of a football stadium. I'd done construction work during summers in college, and I wondered how many guys it had taken to build the operation in the first place, much less to keep it running. Brown and green machines filled the floor, each with white dials, blinking red numbers and ten or fifteen greased and whirring axles winding up spools of plastic two and three feet wide. If they'd replaced the banks of fluourescents and the guys in orange with gas lamps and half-starved ten-year-olds, Dockside Synthetics could've been an Industrial Revolution cotton mill. A few eleventh-graders looked up but mostly they just kicked their toes against the concrete or tried to give each other wedgies. Pierced-lip Willow, in jean shorts, held hands with black-clad Craig, an inch shorter than herself. Rob turned to us, chin raised amicably, hands still a hammock in front of his crotch.
“So to start, here's a machine that measures the amount of additive that's going into the plastic for garbage bags.”
A mile of light-green plastic film, stretched taut between one set of rollers and another, climbed the wall next to us in four-foot increments, then over and under the rafters fifty feet above our heads. There were too many machines cluttering the place to see where the film came down exactly. It was cold and my shirt chafed my nipples.
“Now, through here,” Rob yelled, “the guys are running extrusion moulds!”
Brace-faced Lydia performed ballet turns. Her orthodonture was so severe that confusing her with my Lydia was not possible.
“Which chemicals exactly are going into the garbage bags?” asked Megan.
“Well!” Rob raised his hands to his chest as if to catch a basketball. “For
these
bags we're using polyethylene terephthalate, and we're taking a chance on that because it's a lot sturdier than you'll usually find for a domestic trash bag.”
“It's a wonderland!” said Colleen. “Your father would love this, wouldn't he?”
“Any of this could be on a quiz,” I announced.
“And what's its molecular breakdown?” Megan asked.
I stood taller in my shoes at that. Harv clicked a ballpoint and prepared to write on his handâhe could
not
miss this.
“Terephthalate is CââHâOâ.” Rob thrust a hand out for each element, like he was pat-a-caking the periodic table.
“HâOâ,” Megan echoed. “That's a lot of gas for a plastic bag.”
“No, dude,” Amber hissed out the side of her mouth, “don't ask that!”
“Do the bags contain coltan?” asked Grace.
“Coltan? I don't know it,” said Rob.
“They dig for it in the Congo. It's in lots of things, people don't even know.”
“Now, not to get off on the wrong foot, Rob,” I called, “but is there anything really
beneficial
to the environment that your operation might be putting out?”
Colleen looked back to show me her lopsided smile and oversized Bambi
eyes.
“Oh, good question, you'd be surprised! For sure there is.” Rob intertwined his fingers again, bounced them against his groin. “Our new Split-Proof line is fifty percent less likely to lose its integrity at curbside, and
that
keeps waste out of our groundwater.”
“Sorry,” said Harv, half-raising his hand, “but fifty percent less likely than what?”
“Well.” Rob nodded earnestly. “Than our popular line.”
He led us around for another forty-five minutes, explaining what various read-outs meant and introducing us to a dozen different guys who grimaced at us from behind their safety goggles while brandishing aerosol cans of lubricant.
“Oh!” Rob clapped his big hands. “I called you Walt 'cause you're wearing Walt's coveralls!”
The substitute valve-tightener rubbed the freckles on his nose and tried to look cheerful. I didn't have to wear George Reid's coveralls, true enough, but his name was on my classroom door and his framed photo, for some research citation he'd won, watched me from across the hallâhe wore a blue-and-pink checked shirt in the picture, in front of a blue and pink backdrop, so it looked like his bodiless head was just floating there, all forehead and beard. I imagined him hovering behind us like the Great Gazoo on
The Flintstones
.
“Dockside's travel bin is the only one in the industry that's TSA approved,” Rob announced. “Hundreds of companies manufacturing travel bins across the country, but ours is the only one that has that, uh, approval, so we think that's pretty neat.”
Behind us a set of double doors yawned open to reveal a loading bay and a gleaming white semi-trailer with a tangle of tubes emerging from a hub in its roof. Stenciled on its side:
do not use steam
boiling water or sharp objects to clean
enter only in soft-soled shoes
“What's all this go into?” I asked Rob.
“That stuff? Can't say for sure! We always get, uh, approached by businesses that need specific equipment for a stage in their manufacturing, whether that's, oh, custom moulds, extreme high temperatures or additive introduction, we always say, âHey, if we can make plastic, we can make anything!' ”
“How about plastic explosives?” grinned Eric.
Shawn frowned from behind his bangs. “Dude, no.”
“No weapons,” said Rob. “Now if you'll just follow me around here, we're nearly, nearly at the end!”
“You sure love your job,” Colleen told him. “That's so nice to see!”
Harv lobbed an imaginary three-point shot into a bin of translucent beads.
“You see,” said Rob, “what we have here is plastic turning from a solid to a liquidâsorry, liquid to a solid. See, it goes up forty-five feet there⦔
It sounded like monsoon rain but there were too many criss-crossing pipes for us to see exactly what was happening up near the ceiling, though down where we were, the clear plastic was perpetually forming the shape of a hot-air balloon thanks to a constant gust of wind from below. The plastic bubble looked like a cross between a twenty-foot goblet and an upside-down tornado. Light shimmered across it.
“Cool,” said Amber, snapping her gum.
Harv, a few feet in front of me, nodded whole-heartedly as he stared straight up, his head craned back into his hood. Little Craig started licking Willow's neck.
“I want a tent like that.” Colleen trailed fingertips across her teeth. “All our camping trips.”
“That
is
cool,” said Grace. “Whoa.”
Rob stepped away, hands clasped behind himselfâhis work was done. It could have been
my
moment if I'd chosen to embrace it, but how to make it teachable without aggrandizing the plastics industry?
“Moments of beauty,” I improvised, “when you least expect them.”
I thought they'd look back at me and roll their eyes, but they kept their pierced and mascara'd and acne-blighted faces trained on that flickering balloon.
I noticed a pink glob, the size of a quarter, on the back of Harv's head. Had it been there all along?
“How long does it stay suspended like that?” Megan asked.
“Oh, all day, three eight-hour shifts!” Rob smiled, rocking forward. “It looks like a solid piece, I know, but there's twenty gallons of the stuff coming down every minute!”
Harv ran a hand over his head and brushed across the pink glob. Most of it stuck to his fingers so he brought it down in front of his face and sniffed it. Strands stretched between his fingers. With his other hand he felt his head again.
“We'll head upstairs from here and look over some pamphlets,” Rob said, “so if anybody's in the mood for a hot dog, we've even got veggie⦔