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Fork Lift

Doug Downie

    I pulled my Chevy Corvair into the main entrance and found a spot amongst the splatter of shiny chrome and metalflake spread across the forlorn expanse of asphalt. I got out of the car, hefting the handle of the bent door up so that it would close fully, and looked up at the place I had to enter. It was a monstrous block of brick about four stories tall. Right in the center like some gaping mouth was a wall of glass that rose shear to the top of the brick and then some. I didn’t understand how such a structure could remain standing in storms of wind and snow and ice. But I knew pretty well what that faÇade covered up.
    As in so many other places like this there was a little grey box with a little clock where you punched in, here it was situated in a hallway lined by a row of lockers on the left side and which led to the coffee room, through a pair of swinging doors. The toilets were on the right side, just before the doors to the coffee room. There was always somebody hanging around in there, no matter how late you were, fumbling at their lockers, or filling a cardboard cup of coffee from the machine at the end of the hall, or smoking a cigarette in the toilet, leaning against the white tiles with a stained foot on the porcelain. On this day it was my junky fellow fork lift driver, Billy.
    “You gonna get fired you keep showing up late.” His head went forty-five degrees to the left and I thought for a minute he might fall over but he kept an even keel.
    “Hell Billy, I’m only ten minutes late and what the hell are you doin’ here anyway? How come you’re not out there workin’?”
    “Fuck ‘em. I thought I’d come in here for a little mornin’ taste.”
    Ever so slowly and gently he leaned against the nearest locker.
    “You going to be alright Billy?”
    He was silent for a moment but came out of it like a pop.
    “Yeah man, let’s go on out there and get ‘em man! We got the best job in the place brother! We be in the driver’s seat! I love the smell of propane in the morning!”
    It was common knowledge that Billy was a junky. He seemed a little loopy from the start but I was still surprised when someone told me, I think it was Jocko the clean-up man. He passed by me one day with his cart of garbage cans and stopped to watch Billy gun off through the racks with a plume of propane trailing behind.
    “You watch that boy,” he said to me, “he ain’t nothing but trouble. Just a good for nothin’ junky.”
    “Is he, really?”
    “Best believe it my friend, best believe it.”
    He pushed his cart off to the next stop on his circuit.
    But Billy’s addiction was accepted like so many other things were accepted; so and so was a drunk, and so and so was a flasher, and so and so was a peeper, and so and so was cheating on his wife fucking the little line girl over in packing, and so and so beat his wife and kids. We all needed jobs. As long as we did them with a modicum of attention we were part of the family. We were all fucked, crushed beneath a calloused thumb that cared nothing for us, our youth spent and dried up like spilled blood on a sawdust floor. It engendered a certain kind of brotherhood.
    Billy and I walked out together and it seemed to take forever to get out to the loading dock, where our fork lifts were parked. We had to walk through a white room where women wove pleated fabrics into a stack of alternating plys. A thick metal door with a reinforced glass window with net of embedded wire led us to the production line, where we could no longer hear each other, if we had wanted to speak, the din so loud and the hopeless call for help and new stock so dim. Everyone had to shout to make themselves heard, whether they called for another spool of thread, asked to go to the john, cursed a comrade down the line, or simply wanted to say hi to a friend. Foremen lurked over different portions of the line, occasionally accosting some worker for a perceived slackening, or pinching some ass. We were in the world of metal and grey dust, brown boxes and silver rollers. It was a little taste of hell, right here on earth.
    “I sure am glad I don’t work here.” said Billy, bumping gently off a passing rack as we came to another reinforced door, complete with glass netting.
    “Me too Billy, me too.”
    Billy the junky and Dugan the flunky both thought they were lucky, for just a moment.
    After a long trudge through rows upon rows of metal racks reaching to the roof’s I-beam rafters, like so many other places like this, Loreal’s, Kohler’s Roofing Products, you name it, we finally reached the loading dock. It was almost a relief.
    We had to check in with Franco, the dock foreman, forty and all forehead, his hair slicked back across his balding scalp. He lined us out on what we had to do before coffee break.
    Then we climbed aboard our smoky steeds and gunned it down the rows; all those rows of pallets, piled high with boxes, headed out there to the porcelain houses of suburbia.
    It was rather fun to drive a fork lift. I’d loved driving, and the whole concept of driving, from the time I was just past the snot-nosed stage and was reading my first literature, hot rod stories. This was simply another manifestation. There was a certain exultation in making sharp ninety degree turns and penetrating those planked racks and long muffled rows.
    Billy and I would have races.
    “I’m gonna take aisle B, you take C. First one to the end buys a beer.”
    “Alright Billy!”
    I wheeled mine around and lined it up straight down the middle. We eyed each other, winked, and went.
    The wind whipped through my hair as I sailed down the concrete, columns of stock on both sides, but I could look over to my left and see Billy through the cracks between boxes and struts, kaleidoscopic, and see him gaining on me. I gunned it even harder. The sound of our forklifts flew over and around the racks and Franco down on the loading dock was sure to be hearing us, shaking his head and spitting cigar juice onto the floor. “Fucking punks! Don’t know what work is!”
    We came to the end of our respective aisles almost simultaneously, Billy just the tiniest bit ahead, and turned radically, me to the right, him to the left. The tail end of my forklift overshot and sideswiped a steel strut. I managed to right it and slowed, smoothly turning around to see a stack of boxes teetering on their pallets. I stopped and watched. The rocking stack looked about to fall but when I could see the arcs begin to tighten I gunned it and joined Billy over between aisle A and B.
    “Alright. You got me motherfucker. I owe you one. See you at MacGready’s after work.”
    “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it.”
    “Why not?”
    “I got to go see someone.”
    “Maybe you ought to lay off that shit a little Billy.”
    “Sure, I know. But look at where we are, man.” He spread his bony hand to sweep across what view we had. “Is this where you want to be?”
    “No it isn’t Billy. Not at all.”
    “I always wanted to be an architect, from the time I was a kid. I wanted to build things, see things that I designed get built. I used to draw all these plans, for hours and hours I’d draw these tremendous buildings that were going to rise above the plastic crap that surrounds us.” His head fell onto his chest and a sigh left him like the deflation of a balloon.
    “Hey Billy, this isn’t such a bad job, we have some fun don’t we?”
    “Yeah we do man.” he said, lifting his head. “Franco must be pissed. Let’s get back to work.”

    “Where’s that fucking Billy!” shouted Franco. We had to get a truck loaded before the end of the day, and it was a big shipment. We’d spent most of the day collecting the pallets and stacking them on the dock, ready to be rammed into the semis, in the reverse order they would be offloaded.
    “I’ll go find him Franco.” I said. I had a notion of where he might be.
    Back in the far reaches, in the last rows of racks, along about aisle Z, Billy liked to get away from the world, park the forklift and hit up, take a break. I figured I’d find him back there, nodding in his chair.
    Sure enough, as I turned the corner I saw the yellow bumblebee shape of his fork lift, dead in its tracks. I gunned it on over and pulled up alongside.
    “Hey Billy, Franco’s getting’ real pissed off. We got a lot to do. It’s time to get back to work.”
    Billy was silent and motionless, and he stayed that way. A needle hung from his arm like a picador’s lance from the flank of a bull before he falls to the dust amid the shouts of Spanish and raised fists. A thin red trail of blood found its way down his arm.
    There were no shouts for Billy, and no one raised a finger.

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