Wildcat
Page 8
In high school, Dana was on the math team, one of only seven members the year he was a senior. Algorithms, calculus, trig functions, and advanced geometric configurations were the language he spoke best. His high school math teacher said that Dana had one of the best analytical minds he had ever seen and should apply to both Case Western and MIT.
His dad had laughed at him. “Hell, you’re an idiot! College? You can’t even build a fucking dog house,” he had shouted at Dana, referring to his attempt to build one so he could get a dog when he was eleven years old. The old man had bought him a four by eight sheet of plywood and some two by fours and nails and set the wood up against the saw horses in the corner of the garage. Dana drew a picture of the dog house and would go out to the damp, dark garage everyday after school. He even cut the two by fours in half to make them easier to deal with, but the handsaw kept getting stuck in the plywood.
It was about this time, after the dog house defeat and after his mother left home, that Dana started walking with his head down. Folks mistook him for a wizened old man when they saw him shuffling along, never looking up, like he carried a great weight on his thin, young shoulders. It wasn’t until he met algebra a couple years later that he snapped out of his physical slump and began walking upright again. He might never have a dog, but math was something that felt good and true, just like he imagined it would have felt to have a dog when he was eleven.
He had been somebody for a while. He always got the top scores in math on the Iowa Basic Skills Tests, and scored in the top one tenth of one per cent on the Merit Scholarship tests. He would be a professor, maybe, or a scientist. But his dad just laughed at him. “Shit, boy,” he would holler at him and hold out the big roll of money he carried in his pocket at all times. “Here’s what it’s all about!” And the old man would point out the back window of the dilapidated farmhouse to the junkyard he had made out of the forty acres he had inherited when his dad died.
Dana’s dad was rich. He worked second shift, seven days a week at the stamping plant and ran the junkyard during the day. When the boy was a senior in high school, his dad gave Milt Jeffers $1,000 to get Dana a job when the company was hiring again. Sure enough, by the fall of 1969, Dana had been hired, and had become a full-fledged autoworker. Once again, he started walking with his head down.
Then in the spring of 1970, he found love, got laid, got married, and he straightened up again. She was a kindly, plump girl, as happy as Dana was to have found someone, and she didn’t see any reason he shouldn’t check into going to college part time and studying math. There certainly couldn’t be any harm in it. So he had enrolled in the regional Ohio State campus in calculus, and was scheduled to start in the winter quarter of 1971.
But then had come the draft notice just before Thanksgiving in 1970. “Viet fucking Nam,” he had muttered over and over as he and his wife sat at their little kitchen table, and he drank beer for only the second time in his life.
“It’s time for bed, dear,” she had finally said, as midnight approached.
“Viet fucking Nam,” he had answered and passed out on the table.
Dana started walking with his head down again. He would never be a college professor. He would never win the Fields Medal. He would never do anything but stack five thousand fucking door support panels every day for the rest of his life. His fate was unthinkable, and he hatched a plan, which, if successful, would not only keep him out of Vietnam but put him in college fulltime on the way to fulfilling his destiny as a mathematical genius.
He would get hurt at work in order to make his plan a success. If he were permanently disabled, he could collect Workman’s Compensation benefits, or even Social Security disability benefits. For days, he imagined the various ways he could get injured—get run over by a tow motor, get his foot caught in the conveyor track, get crushed between a rack and the press, get his arm tangled in the parts conveyor—he would figure something out. But after a week of flirting with tragedy and death, Dana had gotten nowhere. He always stopped at the last moment before walking into the aisle in front of a vehicle, and the one time he forced himself to carry through, he got honked at and told to get the fuck out of the way. Another day he tried to cut his hand off in a press, but only got grease on his shirt before he pulled his arm away. Disabling himself was proving to be more difficult than he had imagined.
Finally, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Dana decided to walk into a scrap chute. He didn’t know how badly he would be hurt, but some of the guys who had fallen in got pretty fucked up; one had been killed, but Dana was sure that could not happen to him. Right after lunch, he abandoned his post and walked across the aisle to the quarter panel line. Phoomph. He fell faster than he had thought he would. Immediately he was struck by the putrid smell. Then he felt the sharp scrap pieces cutting him. He cried out, but it was too late. More pieces came down on his head, cutting his scalp. Then he got stuck, and the slime from the panel lube was suffocating him as he struggled. Finally, after a full minute in the bottleneck at the bottom of the chute, he came piling out onto the conveyor belt in the basement. Shit, he told himself, this was really a bad idea.
He was coated in blood from head to foot. He tried to get up and off the moving conveyor belt, but kept slipping and cutting himself even more. Then his conveyor hit the main conveyor. He had to get off this thing. Hadn’t anyone seen him fall, he wondered? He made one violent lunge to try and roll off the conveyor and onto the concrete floor six feet below, but his leg was stuck. Dana realized he might die. And he wasn’t ready to die. Better to die in Vietnam than in this stinky, slimy pile of scrap.
He passed other conveyors feeding into the main one, like so many small streams feeding into a river. And the conveyor was getting wider. Shit. The baler house was only another thirty yards away. He pulled himself up and looked ahead at the scrap metal feeding into the compartments and being squashed into two foot cubes. The noise was deafening, and he knew that no one could possibly hear his yelling and crying, yet he kept it up, tugging at his leg, which was held fast with the frayed wire of the conveyor belt deeply entwined in his blue jeans. He forced himself onto his side to try and get his pocket knife out.
He was on the final uphill run to the baler house. Then he felt the pain. A panel stuck along the side of the belt sliced him, and he looked down, his crotch already red from the gushing blood. He lay back and waited for death, suddenly feeling calm. Let death come, he told himself. Maybe he could get a dog in heaven, or puppies even.
Up in the baler house, Howard belched and said, “I got all the cans?” They were tidying the place up for the next shift, and Howard was getting ready to toss the day’s beer cans into the compacter when he saw a big red thing on the conveyor. It was a body! Howard hit the E-stop and yelled for the others, then called the maintenance base to get some millwrights over to get Dana unstuck. Hell, he wasn’t going to wade onto that slimy mess. He didn’t have to—the conveyors were maintenance work. It was a millwright job, not his classification.
Chapter 5.3
Kent State