I heard her in the bedroom, reading. She was just getting to the good part.
“And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack! From outside in the fields came a sickening smack of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.”
You need to think of T. J. and me. What would we do if you got really sick?
Heard the tree fall . . .
The pain came barreling back then, crashing through my head so fast that I almost screamed. My stomach churned. I lurched into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before the convulsions began. I turned on the exhaust fan so that Michelle wouldn’t hear me, and collapsed in front of the toilet.
I was choking. I couldn’t breathe, and my vision blurred. This wasn’t like before. Something pink and black and solid rushed up from inside me and splashed into the bowl, leaving a trail in the water.
What the fuck?
I’d just thrown up a piece of myself.
I knelt in front of the toilet for a very long time and just stared at the debris.
I’d never been more scared in all my life than I was at that moment.
* * *
When I came out, after gargling with half a bottle of mouthwash, Michelle was back sitting on the sofa, engrossed in her book.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just another headache is all. It’ll go away.”
“You were in there for a long time.”
“I had to take a monster shit. You don’t want to go in there for at least an hour. Better not light up a cigarette either!”
“Tommy,” she gasped, smiling, “you’re horrible!”
“Hey”— I smiled back—“you asked.”
We sat there for a while and she told me about her day. Irritating customers buying lottery tickets and paying for cigarettes in loose pennies and her manager’s latest personal crisis and the joke of the day that the potato chip delivery guy had told them. The most boring shit in the world, and usually I tuned it out, but not then. Not this time. I wanted to listen, wanted to hear it all. Wanted to know every detail. Wanted her to know that I loved her and that I was really interested in what she had to say.
The phone rang, interrupting her story of what happened when the lottery ticket machine broke down. We both looked at it.
“It’s probably my mom,” she groaned.
I reached for the phone. “She’s going to wake T. J. up, calling this late.”
“I know. I’ve told her.”
I picked it up on the third ring, and said “Hello?”
There was a pause, followed by an electronic whir, and then a nasal, female voice that I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” I said again.
“Hello, may I please speak with Mr. Thomas O’Brien?”
“Whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested. Put us on your Do Not Call list.”
“I’m not selling anything, sir.”
“Then why are you calling?”
“Are you Mr. Thomas O’Brien?”
I sighed, exasperated.
“Yes. Now who the hell are you?”
“Mr. O’Brien, I’m calling from Gulf Financial Credit Services, in regards to your Visa account.”
“I don’t have a credit card with Gulf Financial.”
“Yes, I know that, sir. We’re a collection agency, and we’re handling your account on behalf of Visa. Are you aware that your account has exceeded the credit limit and is currently past due?”
“Well no shit, Sherlock. That’s why we haven’t been using it.”
“When do you plan on making a payment, Mr. O’Brien?”
“When do you plan on getting a real job?” I countered. “Don’t call here again, you bitch!”
I slammed the phone down, and immediately felt better. Fucking around with telemarketers. There’s nothing like it in the whole world.
“Who was that?” Michelle asked.
“A bill collector.”
“Which one?”
“The credit card.” I sighed. “Guess they want their money too, just like the insurance company and the phone company.”
“Well, they’ll just have to wait. We need to pay the electric company with your next check in two weeks. Like I said before, they sent us a shutoff notice. And don’t forget, we’re behind on the mortgage.”
“But we need that to pay for the phone. Guess I won’t get the medicine after all— and don’t start on me about it!”
“But you have to.”
“I don’t see how. Jesus, I wish we’d hit the lottery!”
“It’s okay, Tommy,” she soothed. “We’ll get by. We’ll figure something out. We always do. T. J. and I can always count on you.”
She stood up and wrapped her arms around me. When she hugged me, I almost sobbed. Instead, I hugged her back and bit my lip, fighting to keep my emotions in check.
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” I whispered into her ear. “I really do, Michelle. I want you to know that.”
She pulled back, giving me a puzzled look.
“What’s wrong, Tommy?”
I shrugged, fighting back the tears.
“I don’t know. Long-ass day, is all. Long, long day . . .”
“You’re tired. Let’s go to bed, baby.”
I nodded. My face was buried in her hair, and it smelled so good. I took a deep breath, inhaling her scent.
Holding hands, we walked down the hall, undressed, and slipped beneath the covers. The cool sheets felt good on my skin. We cuddled in the glow of the television. Within minutes, Michelle was breathing softly, sound asleep. I was always amazed at how easily she could fall asleep. I watched her for a long time, the rise and fall of her breasts, the way her forehead wrinkled up as she dreamed. This was when she was most beautiful.
I smiled, content.
Then I remembered I was dying. The fact popped back into my head from out of nowhere. Most people don’t think about dying, especially at the age of twenty-five. The cop walking his beat isn’t dwelling on it, even though he knows that there’s a chance it could happen to him every night. The drunken driver isn’t pondering the ramifications right before he flies through the windshield and becomes a bloody skid mark on the road. For people like that, death happens quickly. It may be there in the back of their head, knowing that it could happen, but they aren’t thinking about it at every second.
What about the everyday schmuck? Do they think about dying when they get up in the morning, take their shower, and spill coffee on themselves during their commute? Do they dwell on it while the boss is hollering at them? Fuck no. Of course not. Human beings don’t walk around thinking about death because we don’t really believe that it’s going to happen to us. Sure, we know that it will happen eventually. Maybe sometimes we even stop and consider for a moment that it could be today. But we don’t know for sure. We’re never one hundred percent positive.
Let me tell you, when you know for sure that it’s going to happen, and that it will happen soon, you can’t think about anything else. I tried to, though. I tried to change the subject with myself. I thought about our debt, and how much we owed, and I wondered how the hell we’d ever get out of it. Wondered how Michelle and T. J. would survive it after I was dead. Would they be forced into bankruptcy and living on the street? I watched her sleeping and thought about T. J. and the Lorax and the sound of the axe cutting down the last Truffula tree. The very last one. And after it was gone, everything in the Lorax’s forest had turned to shit.
I knew I had to do something, but at that point I wasn’t sure what.
The volume on the television was turned down low, so it wouldn’t wake T. J. up. There was a cop show on, and in it, three guys were robbing a bank.
I fell asleep watching it. It looked pretty easy on TV.
I wondered if it was that easy in real life.
So, let me get this straight. You’ve got hair on your dick? Not on your balls but on your dick? On the shaft?”
“Yeah.” John took another bite of his bologna sandwich. “Doesn’t everybody? You mean that you guys don’t?”
Sherm and I arched our eyebrows at each other, and after a second’s pause we started howling. I sprayed soda across the lunchroom table, I laughed so hard.
“John,” I wiped the soda up with a napkin, “how many guys have you seen in porno movies with hair on their fucking dicks?”
He shrugged. “I just figured they shaved, dog. A lot of those guys shave their balls, you know.”
Still howling, Sherm turned to the table behind us.
“Yo, Louis, check this shit out. John’s got hair on his dick!”
Louis, who ran the Number Four line, looked perplexed.
“What, you mean like around the balls? Don’t we all got that?”
Sherm nodded at John. “Tell ’em.”
Frowning, John’s ears began to turn red.
“I’ve got hair growing up the sides of my dick. It goes about halfway up. I don’t see what the big deal is.”
The entire lunchroom exploded in laughter. John’s ears turned completely scarlet.
“I’m gonna start calling you Carpet Dick.” Sherm chuckled.
That was pretty much how it went every day. We’d file into the lunchroom at twelve, head back out at twenty-five after— just enough time to take a piss or call home before the bell rang and we had to be back in our work areas. Sometimes we talked about sports; how the Orioles and the Ravens and the Steelers were sucking, or listened to the various NASCAR camps debate the drivers; who’d forced who off the track and whether Ford was better than Chevy. Other times it was swimsuit models and porno starlets, or music, or hunting, or the latest movie, or what happened at the strip joint on the edge of town. In between these topics, we razzed each other constantly because that’s what guys do.
I bring this up, not because it’s important that my best friend was a mutant with a hairy dick, but because it was the last good time I can honestly remember before things turned to complete shit.
In the last twenty-four hours, I’d been diagnosed with cancer; told that I was dying and that there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it, thrown up a very large and disgusting piece of myself in the toilet, lied to my wife, and learned that the credit card was shut down, the electricity was about to follow, and we couldn’t afford to pay for any of it.
But it got worse. It got a lot fucking worse.
The whole day had been progressively bad. I overslept and was almost late for work. I felt like shit. Part of it was depression. It’s not every morning that you wake up and remember that you’re dying. But that’s what I did. I got up, looked at the alarm clock, cursed, shuffled to the bathroom, pissed, and as I was shaking it off, I remembered.
But it wasn’t just the depression. My head was killing me. I swallowed four aspirin with my first coffee, and they had no effect. I stopped on the way to work, bought another cup of coffee and some cigarettes, and puked the coffee back up a few minutes later. The cigarettes tasted like dried dog shit, but I smoked them anyway. My coughing fits came in spurts, and each time one struck, my head felt worse. All morning long, I hocked bloody phlegm into black piles of foundry dirt and covered them up with my boot so that nobody would see them.
The heat was bad. By nine in the morning, the temperature inside the foundry usually hovered around ninety-five degrees. That morning was no exception, especially around the furnace and ladle areas, where it was considerably higher. I ran the Number Two line, which was about fifty feet from the furnace. It was scorching in my area. The company provided us with free sports drinks that they kept in big coolers at different areas on the floor. I drank and drank, but it still seemed to sweat right through me. I felt like I had a fever. My mouth tasted funny too— a sickening, sour mixture of sports drink and tobacco and bloody saliva. Sweat ran into my eyes beneath my safety goggles and my skin felt tight and itchy.
The foundry wasn’t just hot; it was dirty and loud too. All day long, forklifts rumbled, dumping hoppers full of scrap metal into the furnaces. Every time they backed up, there was a deafening BEEP BEEP BEEP that made my temples throb. People paged each other over the intercom all day long. Each breath brought more dirt into my lungs. When I went home at the end of each day, our shower turned black as I scrubbed the iron particles and grime from my pores. I was never completely clean until the weekend, when I had two extra days to get the grit out of my system. My arms were a crazy quilt of pockmarks, where burning flecks of metal had spattered them over the last five years. I used to watch the old-timers, wondering if they had started like me. Most of them had ugly burn marks that put my little scars to shame. All of them suffered from a terrible, racking cough; what we jokingly referred to as “black lung.” I remember my old man had it, before he ran off with the waitress and did us all the favor of getting killed.
That morning, while I stood there sweating and aching, I wondered if maybe the foundry had given me cancer. Maybe Michelle and I could sue them. Then I lit up another cigarette and decided that it didn’t really matter one way or the other where I’d gotten the cancer.
The Number Two line mold machine— specifically, a ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot steel-and-hydraulic monstrosity— was called The Hunter, since that was the name of the company that manufactured it and because “compression mold maker” was too much of a mouthful for some of our more illiterate coworkers. It compressed tons of black sand into small four-foot-by-four-foot block molds. These blocks had a pattern inside of them. In my case, the pattern was of a power steering gear. The molds exited the machine and traveled down a roller belt to the pouring department, where they were filled with molten metal and sent to the next department via conveyor.
The sand entered the machine through a funnel at the top. Beneath this funnel was a small, cramped space where the pattern was kept. When the sand poured in, the pattern, along with the other three walls of the space, would squeeze together and form the mold.
Around ten that morning, I was wedged into the space between the pattern and the walls with a socket wrench in hand. I had to change patterns because we were starting production on a different mold after lunch. The machine was locked out, a safety procedure that involved the operator shutting off the power and putting a big red tag on the power button, warning everyone that turning it back on would be a very bad idea.
Except that Juan didn’t know it would be a bad idea because Juan couldn’t read English, including the warning in English on the lockout tag.
Juan was a good guy. He threw darts with his crew down at Murphy’s Place on Friday nights, was willing to trade lunches, and had been teaching me to swear in Spanish. We’d gotten as far as Chocho, Chíngate, Chinga tu madre, and Hijo de la gran puta. Now I was learning how to use them in a complete sentence.
That morning, he stopped by my machine, noticed my line of molds was getting low, looked around, and didn’t see me inside the machine. Figuring that I was in the bathroom or on break, and being the good guy that he was, Juan decided to help me get caught up on production. He removed the lockout tag and turned the power on.
I was still inside when I heard the hydraulics kick in. The motor shrieked to life a second later. I immediately dropped my socket wrench and sprang for the funnel. Juan pressed the first button and I heard a heavy rustling as two tons of sand filled the hopper above my head. I shouted, but with his earplugs and the noise from the furnace, he never heard me.
Clearing the funnel, I grasped the angle iron and pulled myself out. I slid down the ladder, and he finally noticed me cursing at him in both English and Spanish.
“Juan! What the fuck are you doing, man? You could have killed me!”
“Yo, I’m sorry Tommy!” He held his hands up in front of him. “I didn’t know you were in there. I figured I would—”
“Save it, man! For fuck’s sake, dog, what the hell were you thinking? Don’t you know what this is?” I fingered the lockout tag.
“I couldn’t read it.”
“Well you better fucking learn!” I grabbed him by the shirt, and his eyes grew wide. He pressed against me, and I shoved him backward, slamming him into the machine. His teeth clicked together, and I saw the anger building inside him. It was boiling inside of me as well.
“Let go of me, puta!” he shouted.
“Chinga tu madre, motherfucker! I’ve got a fucking wife and kid, man.” I ranted. “You want them to have a husband? Huh, bitch? You want them to have a father?”
He brought his knee up to my groin, but I blocked him. Enraged, I threw him to the ground. Juan landed in a pile of greasy shop rags and rolled to his feet, fists clenched. Growling, he circled toward me. I came in low, feinted left, and plowed into him with a right. He went down again.
“I. Could. Have. Died.” Each word was short and clipped, and punctuated with my fists.
“Don’t hit me no more, Tommy! I’m sorry, yo!”
He flung his hands up in front of his face, and I realized what I was doing. What the hell was wrong with me? I was fucking dying anyway! Why take it out on Juan? Was this one of the seven steps of coming to grips with my terminal illness, beating the shit out of my coworkers?
I dropped my fists to my side and stood there panting.
“I’m sorry man. You just scared me is all. Dammit, Juan. Look for these things from now on, all right?”
He nodded, mumbled something in Spanish, then let me help him up. He limped away toward the bathroom, still muttering under his breath. I finished changing the pattern, then zoned out till lunch, not thinking, not speaking. An automaton.
* * *
After we were done teasing John about his hairy dick, we filed out of the lunchroom. I was on my way to take a leak when Charlie had me paged.
“Thomas O’Brien, please report to the office. Thomas O’Brien, please report to Mr. Strauser’s office. Thank you.”
Charlie Strauser was the plant manager. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a decent guy. I got the feeling that when he had to give us shit, he was just following the shit dished out on him from above. And you know what they say about shit and hills and the force of gravity.
I knew what this was about— the fight with Juan. It had to be. Somebody saw us and reported it, or maybe the little fucker had decided to drop dime on me. I didn’t need this shit, and to be honest, I couldn’t see getting fired for it. Last year, Big Greg and Marty got into a knock-down, drag-out brawl over Dale Earnhardt Junior forcing another driver off the track, and Big Greg put Marty in the hospital for three days. But they didn’t lose their jobs. Still, at the very least, I’d get a few days’ suspension— probably without pay. And that paycheck was the one thing Michelle and I really needed right now.
I opened the door to the plant offices and stepped through it, savoring the air-conditioned coolness. The door swung shut behind me, and the silence was loud. Gone was the whine of the machines, the buzz of the grinders, the roaring furnaces. They’d been replaced by the quiet sounds of typing, and a phone ringing somewhere behind one of the closed doors.
I walked down the hall, my boots leaving black footprints in my wake. Reaching Charlie’s office, I knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer, but I heard a voice inside, so I opened the door and peeked in.
Charlie was seated at the desk, his back to me while he talked on the phone. Without looking, he motioned for me to come in. I closed the door behind me, and stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do next. Finally, I sat down in one of the oversized chairs and tried not to eavesdrop.
“No, I don’t think it’s what needs to be done. For Christ’s sake, Steve, you’re talking about half my work force. Half! And yet you don’t expect me to cut production. The night shift is shorthanded as it is, and attrition on the day shift always goes up in the summer . . .”
I tuned him out and looked around. On the desk was a family portrait; Charlie, his wife, and their two kids. Both looked about my age, maybe a little younger. Pencil holder from one of our vendors. Stapler. Big computer with the company logo flashing as a screen saver. Coffee mug, also with the company logo. A Far Side calendar. In-and-out basket. A few assorted other items. All in all, it was much cleaner than my work area.
But what really caught my eye was the wooden desk plaque. It read:
I have gone out to find myself.
If I should get here before I return,
please hold me until I get back.
“Fine,” Charlie continued. “That’s fine. No, I’m not being facetious, Steve. Whatever you say is how it goes. You’re the boss, right? And since you’re the boss, I’ll let you explain it to the media when they show up this afternoon.”
He slammed the phone down, then swiveled around in the chair to look at me.
I froze, gaping in shock. His face was . . .
“Sorry about that, Tom. That was the main office.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Strauser.”
I stared at his face.
“Is it Tom, or Tommy, or Thomas? What do you prefer?”
“Tommy’s fine, sir.”
“I let your foreman know that I needed to see you, so he has somebody else running the Number Two machine.”
“Okay.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He looked like a character from a Marvel comic book. His skin was pale, and his face and neck were covered with red and blue lines, like somebody had drawn on his skin with a Magic Marker. He stared back at me, and I tried to tear my eyes away, but couldn’t.
“Cancer,” he said, and I jumped in my seat.
“W-what?”
“Cancer. I’ve got cancer, Tommy. The blue and red lines on my face and neck. You’re staring at them. Don’t worry; everyone else has as well. It’s part of my treatment.”
“Oh.” Speechless, I felt like I was back in the doctor’s office again. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Strauser.”
“Charlie, Tommy. Everybody calls me Charlie.”
“Well, that’s messed up, Charlie. I’m sorry to hear that you’re sick.”