Cheeseburger Subversive (9 page)

“As each jar passes, you grab the jar between your knuckles, and push any pickles which are stickin' outta the jar
into
the jar with yer thumbs.”

“That's it?”

“It's the toughest damn job in the whole factory, bud,” he says. “Why do you think nobody with their union pants is doin' it?”

Bart steps back, and I take over. I grab the first jar between my knuckles and ram a protruding pickle into the jar with my thumbs. Then another. Then another. Another. Another. Man, do these jars move fast!

“How do you think I got all these muscles?” Bart says as he walks away. “Three seasons of pushin' pickle.”

By the time the horn blows for lunch break, my thumbs are completely paralyzed and I am unable to fold them back in. My wrists are throbbing and swollen. My elbows have begun to ache and, through the magic of muscle burn, I've discovered my underused triceps and shoulder muscles. With my wrists turned up and my thumbs frozen in position, I must look like a geeky, skinny version of The Fonz.

As promised, Bart shows up to help me with the job. With his help, it's done in a few minutes. He carries my lunch box to the cafeteria for me since I can't convince my hand to close around the handle. When some of the other guys in the cafeteria see me holding my sandwich sideways between my immobilized palms, turning my head sideways for each bite, they look at each other and say, “pushin' pickle.”

I'm not even half-finished with my sandwich when Cobb shows up at the cafeteria entrance.

“Sifter!” he barks, “get over here!”

Cobb is leaning on a long stick, like the handle of a rake.

I stand up straight, straining against the aches in my upper body, and walk over to him. Cobb's knobby nose hovers just beneath my chin.

“Just wanted to inform you that the company requires that employees wear steel-toed safety boots,” he says, in an even tone of voice. “Are your boots steel-toed?”

“I don't know. They belong to my dad.”

“Your
dad
? The overpaid, got-the-whole-fuckin'-summer-off
English teacher
? Your dad the
pussy
owns
workboots
?”

This pisses me off and I shoot off my mouth.

“Are those
steel-toed
running shoes you're wearing, Mr. Cobb?”

His thick neck begins to redden at the collar.

“I'm the boss, dipshit. I can wear whatever the fuck I want.”

The cafeteria has fallen silent. Cobb jabs the end of the poking stick into the toes of my right foot and leans his substantial weight onto it.

“Ow!” I yelp.

“Guess they're not steel-toed, eh? An
English teacher
wouldn't have steel-toed boots. Your pussy dad can't even teach you to mow the fucking lawn!”

“At least my dad isn't teaching me to abuse my mother,” I say under my breath.

“What did you say, pussy boy?”

“I said I'll get some steel-toed boots for tomorrow, sir.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I manage to keep up with the speed of the line. My clothes are saturated with sweat, and my entire body feels like it's made of jelly, but I fight on. This is a battle I cannot lose. Of course, in the time it takes this manly thought to cross my synapses, my left arm seizes up. I can't move it at all. Frantically, I pound the pickles into the jars with my functioning right fist, but it occurs to me that I will soon break my hand if I keep it up. Angry at myself, I slam the red button.

Cobb immediately comes running.

“Turn that line back on! There are ten minutes left in the shift!”

Just ten minutes? Boy, time flies when you're miserable and frantic.

A few of the other men begin to walk past us, toward the time clock, thinking the shift is over. Cobb chases after them.

“Hey! Hey! There's still ten minutes left! Get back here!”

The men keep walking.

“Goddammit, get back here!”

Cobb loses his temper. He kicks one of the machines, and his cursing momentarily stops. He falls to the concrete holding his foot, rolling back and forth, howling like he's just been shot with a .44 Magnum.

“My toe! My toe! Christ, I broke my fuckin' toe!”

The shift change horn blows, and all of the workers from the surrounding lines come over to see what's going on. The men who had departed early from L-17 also wander back. This is a show that nobody wants to miss.

And now I commit a serious error of judgment. I wander over to where Cobb is rolling around and say:

“Gee, Mr. Cobb, guess you should have been wearing those steel-toed boots, eh?”

Cobb's face turns from red to purple as the other workers laugh at him. He shimmies across the floor on his butt, still cradling his injured foot in one hand, and reaches up onto the halted conveyor belt. With his free hand, Cobb grabs a jar of pickles. Jowls shaking, his face glowing crimson, he screams:

“God! Damn! Fucking! Smartass! Kid!”

He hurls the jar at me with all his strength. I raise my stiff arms to shield my face. The jar shatters against my wrists.

I slowly lower my arms from my face, and the shard of glass buried deep in my left wrist comes into focus. I watch with fishbowl-eyes as my blood begins to spurt from the gash, spattering on the concrete, speckling my shirt, my jeans, and my dad's workboots. Pain sizzles where the vinegar from the pickle brine has penetrated the wound.

My memory of the rest of the day is sketchy. There are a few images of a nurse cleaning my wound, a doctor stitching the gash back together, the feeling of plaster hardening around my forearm and wrist. Through the blur of strong painkillers, I vaguely remember Mom and Dad helping me into the car just outside the emergency room exit.

I'm still not sure if I dreamed this next part, but I'm pretty sure it was real. After Dad wheeled the car into our driveway, he squinted into the rear-view mirror, and with his lips tight and his jaw muscles bulging, he jumped from the car without even closing the door. With the engine running, he strode across the street to where Mr. Cobb was sitting on his porch with his injured foot propped up on a pillow.

I couldn't hear their conversation, but it was short. Dad's voice was a lot louder than Mr. Cobb's, and Dad
definitely
had the last word. His face was white when he reached into the car to turn off the ignition. He did not slam the car door when he closed it, and his voice had its usual even timbre as he and Mom helped me into the house.

“Mr. Cobb has been made to understand that he will be in danger of suffering more than a sore foot if he bothers you again. If he forgets about this agreement, you will be sure to tell me about it, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

A few hours later, my brain is pleasantly humming from the effects of the painkillers. Dad shuffles in to my room to check on me.

“How's it going, there, Bud?” he says from the doorway of my room.

“My wrist hurts.”

Dad comes a little closer to my bed.

“Well, Dak, I'm proud of you,” he says. “You really took it like a man.”

Then Dad straightens up and clears his throat, the way he always does when the sentimentality-resistance circuit in his brain kicks in.

He pretends he doesn't hear me when I say, “So did you, Dad.”

Benjamin's Aliens

(Grade nine, with grade three flashbacks)

W
hen we were eight, Benjamin Cranston was obsessed with finding a way to escape planet earth. Now, six years later, it seems that he has finally achieved his goal.

Even though we lived on opposite sides of the city, I suppose that I was destined for a while to become Benjamin's best friend. I really didn't have much choice; a force greater than either Benjamin or myself was involved in bringing us together: The Faireville District Board of Education.

When my parents read me the letter that the school board sent them, I assumed that a “pilot project” had something to do with learning to fly an airplane. Naturally, I agreed to participate as any right-thinking, career-minded eight-year-old would have done. Instead of getting the flight training I expected, I was removed one afternoon from my grade three classroom and subjected to what my tormentors referred to as a battery of cognitive abilities tests. If you have ever been subjected to such testing, you will probably agree that the use of the word battery (as in assault and battery) is fairly accurate.

Before the end of the following week, I was attending a special school, which was so new that it hadn't even been given its own building yet, or even its own official name. Everyone involved simply referred to it as the Gifted School. It was located, for the time being, in a large, echoey room in the basement of an ancient, half-deserted technical high school on the other side of the city.

It was in this cavernous room that I first met Benjamin. I could only guess that he had made the same mistake as I: the accidental demonstration of abnormal ways of understanding certain things. Benjamin's crimes against being average were far more outstanding than my own; while I was certainly guilty of an early predisposition towards literacy, Benjamin was able to understand physics, chemistry, and engineering principles in the same way that other children understand Hot Wheels cars and Barbie dolls.

Benjamin and I were the only real children in the entire program, so we didn't have much choice but to spend a lot of time together. A dozen teenagers were also sequestered in that big, drafty room but just like the harried instructor in charge of our education, these older kids usually ignored us. As a result, Benjamin and I were given free rein to do a lot of “hands-on, student-directed learning,” which was edubabble for “fooling around mostly unsupervised.”

During our stay, we produced an inspiring assortment of toys, machines, models, and best of all, real chemical reactions (which were often stinky, smoky, explosive, or, in the best case studies, a combination of the three). I learned many things during my stay at the Gifted School: to this day I am still capable of producing a multitude of dangerous chemical reactions with ordinary household substances.

The program, by the way, was cancelled three months later. Perhaps it was because few of us brought home anything for our parents to display on the doors of their refrigerators, but more likely the cancellation was a result of the fire that burned the old Tech School to the ground. The program's end didn't really matter much, because by then, Benjamin and I had become best friends. Boys who make explosions together are friends forever. Blood may be thicker than water but explosives are more powerful than blood.