The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

by Randy F. Nelson

  “Fuck no,” said Kutschenko. “Do it right here. If you’re going to do it, you little maggot, you can at least be a man about it. Do it right now.”

  And that’s the funny thing. The paper in the envelope really was pink.

  3

  The picking room was like a library where the pickers went their dark routes pulling scrolls of cloth from the bins and dropping them into boxes bound for other mills. We sent out boxes by the ton. It’s the way they measured us, not by the miles we walked but by the tons we lifted, until the numbers 12/25/E became only the rough coordinates of a seventy-five-pound roll of denim buried under twenty others just like it, headed for China, where it would get its real identity. Then get shipped back to this country as something by Levi, Wrangler, Arizona, Tommy, Ralph, Calvin. Who the hell knew?

  It’s hard to imagine. A picking room is not like anything else. Not like a warehouse or an aircraft hangar or a cavern. It’s just different. I used to tell people to try to imagine a castle or, anyway, something that’s old and big like a cathedral, ruined and rebuilt over the years and then one day gutted so that all that remains is a hollow shell and not any kind of building that can be reasoned with. Just an outer wall circling back on itself like some kind of shape a kid would make with building blocks. Then fill that shape with shelves. Miles and miles of them. That’s your picking room. So that some sections of the outer wall might look like a ruined temple, like any stiff wind could blow it away particle by particle. Then in other places you might find a master mason’s work, delicate art woven in stone. Nothing surprised you after a while. There were bricked-up doors and windows all along the walls. Alcoves, arches, and columns. A forty-foot section of floor where iron rails pierced the brick and then simply stopped beside a nonexistent loading dock. There were squat tunnels done in yellow ceramic tile like the subway, with the same black vacancy at the extremities.

  It was a huge and haunted place, more like a morgue than a library. You matched your ticket numbers to the little tags hanging on every roll of cloth; then you pulled your roll out of the bin, cradling it like a child for a moment before dropping it into its shipping box, always an avalanche of dust and grime falling in your face from the dark upper bins, the paper ripping on extrusions, the cloth unraveling like torn curtains. Until after a while you could convince yourself that they really were bodies, crumbling mummies stacked in open crypts like those war atrocities.

  And then I try to imagine a man like Murtaugh inside that same place for twenty years.

  He was the one guy who lasted, and he looked like the fifties never ended. Every day he wore a white cotton T-shirt, jeans, and biker boots—a uniform so unvarying that I accepted it as normal after a few weeks. The hair he kept in a disciplined flattop. His eyes were pale blue pools of no particular depth. And his immense size was, in a sense, the only shape that stayed in your mind. Pardue told me that he had once served time for killing a man with a logging chain. “Don’t mess with him,” he said. And I did not. Murtaugh kept a Zippo lighter in his hip pocket that he flipped open with a single snap of his fingers, and he held his cigarette cupped, like this, against some imaginary hurricane. On weekends we did not visit him in the green boardinghouse on Broad Street, and on nights when they needed some overtime we did not volunteer to stay behind with him. Even during the regular shift, Murtaugh would sort through the packing slips, selecting orders that would take him to the farthest aisles, down the long tunnels, and out beyond the ordered bins where the only lights were hanging bulbs. On some nights we did not see him at the elevator drop at all.

  4

  Every once in a while Pardue would go off on Meek, about how he needed to be killed or at least thrown through one of the walled-up windows. “They’re doing layoffs again,” he would say. “And I think that asshole enjoys it. He needs killing. Did you ever notice that the personnel guy is the last one laid off?”

  “I don’t think he enjoys it,” I said. “I think he’s just doing his job.”

  “I’ll tell you what he enjoys. He enjoys porking that little gal in the commissary what you been going out with, name of Patty. I hear he’s been spending a lot of time down there.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t nothing rile you up, kid? You need to stomp that son of a bitch into the ground.”

  “Patty’s not that kind of girl.”

  “Forget Patty! You need to kill that bastard. I’ll tell you what you need.”

  “What do I need?”

  “You need somebody … from West Virginia. You need a dynamite man.”

  “I need a dynamite man?”

  “You need somebody from West Virginia, son, the Explosives State, where they mix gunpowder in your grits and a cook-off don’t have nothing to do with the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

  “I guess you might know somebody.”

  “I am from West Virginia, boy. We got dental hygienists up there who use Primacord instead of dental floss, and when you hear a highspeed drill it don’t mean your wisdom teeth are coming out, Jack. It means the whole damn side of your mountain is about to lift and slide, that’s what it means. Hell, back home we got twelve-year-old boys can blow the wax out of your ears and not even wake you up during the sermon. In fact, you don’t even need me. You don’t need no dynamite man. You need a twelve-year-old. From back home. In West By God Virginia.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I don’t need anybody who’s from a state that’s just a chopped-off part of another state.”

  “Now you’re catching on. Hey!” he yelled out over the room. “Riggs is developing a brain! He’s coming up out of the swamp! Go ahead, kid, give me your best shot.”

  “Like y’all ought to change your name. I mean, West Virginia’s not a state, it’s a direction. It makes you look small.”

  “It ain’t ever hurt West Consin none, has it?”

  “So what were you planning to dynamite?”

  “Meek, I done told you. I’m going to dynamite his ass into the middle of next week.”

  “You’re going to blow up Meek?”

  “Naw. Hell naw! A hunnerd times better than that. This here’s a variation on your classic cherry bomb in the toilet, except we’ll probably need a couple of sticks of C4 on account of we want him riding a geyser right after he flushes.”

  Willie T. gave a piercing whistle and yelled, “Bring ’er on in for a minute, boys. This is going to get good.”

  When he had his audience, Pardue said, “We’ll need to cut off the water for most of this section of the mill, you know, to build up the pressure pretty good, and then reinforce the pipe at the actual point of detonation. I want it to blow an eight-inch column of water through his butt. I want it to rocket that son of a bitch through the ceiling tiles so that his head will come through the next floor and somebody will step on him. I want it to look like he’s riding Old Faithful to the moon. You understand what I’m saying? I hate that cracker! I want him to pull down his pants, take a seat, pull that damn handle, and think that he accidentally launched the space shuttle. That’s what I want. And I’m telling you we can do it. It’s a matter a teamwork.”

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?”

  “Not me specifically. But I witnessed something similar back in high school. It was sad, really. Kind of tragic in a way. And it caused an international incident that you boys may have heard of, which should teach you the value of careful and strategic thinking and also something about the fragility of human life. So I reckon I’m going to have to tell you about it.”

  “I thought you might need to.”

  “Okay, there’s this one old boy name of Pruitt who hated the assistant principal the way I hate Meek and who came up with something of the same plan but without careful thinking. What I’m telling you is they forgot to reinforce the sewer drain pipe at a vital point. It makes me sick to this day to think about it, and, well, you can probably already imagine what happened. Pruitt and his boys stopped up most of the toilets
on the third and fourth floors and waited for the crucial moment right before the assembly where the genuine Boys Choir of Wales, I’m not making this up, was going to give its international Christmas concerto for the backward children of West Virginia, you know, on account of they thought that would be a likely time for the son of a bitch to visit the toilet. And sure enough he did. Everything was going to plan. The little Wales children was warming up backstage. Pruitt and his gang was hulking over several toilet bowls like vultures with a couple sticks of dynamite and a Bic, waiting for a miracle. And, by God, it happens. The assistant principal comes in with one of the singers, a little tiny pissant of a Wales kid name of Cardiff Glendenning it turns out, showing him where the bathroom is. Well, Pruitt and his gang are in this one stall, feet up off the floor hulking on the rim of the commode so the place looks deserted. And they hear their guy. Then they hear the stall door next to ’em close and the little lock go snick, like that; and they figure it’s a go for liftoff. So Pruitt gives the nod, and ffftt goes the fuse and flush goes the charge. Fifteen seconds later there’s this dull, distant boom like thunder rolling down the mountain. And, oh, sweet Jesus!”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” I said. “He’s making this up as he goes along.”

  “I’m going to tell you what happened as soon as I get a grip on my stomach because it gives me the dry heaves to this very day. It makes me want to puke just thinking about it. There was a tragic miscalculation. And what happened, boys, is that one hunnerd yards downstream the pipe blew. It couldn’t take the blast, see, and it was like one of them submarine movies except it was blowing high pressure sewage through that cafeteria and it was like the u-571 taking the entire eighth grade to a watery grave.”

  “I thought you said the entire school was in the assembly listening to the boys choir of some damn place you probably made up.”

  “I’m telling you they was in the cafeteria, and they was fouled, fouled something terrible. But that ain’t the worst part. Because … oh my Lord, that poor little boy. You see, it was him in the toilet and not the assistant. It was horrible, just horrible.”

  “It blew him up?”

  “No! A hunnerd times worse. In fact, the exact opposite. When that pipe blew four stories below and every drop of water in the entire system headed toward the center of the earth, what the hell you think happened? It created a suction like a hurricane blowing through your empty head. I can hear his screams to this day. And I can imagine the horror. Just think of it yourself, poor little Cardiff looking down between his legs and seeing what? A tiny ripple and then, all of a sudden, a whirlpool like the damn Titanic was going down. And the force of suction? Good God Almighty, boys, Superman couldn’t pull himself out of a force like that. It threw his legs together and formed a perfect seal so damn fast it was foregone before it was foredone; and that ill-fated child was bent in the shape of a V and singing soprano for sure, fighting for his life, and praying ‘Sweet Jesus, if you love a sinner, get me out of this American toilet.’ In fact, those might have been his last words.”

  “His last words?!”

  “That’s right. What I’m trying to tell you, boys, is that young Cardiff was never seen again. And I believe to this very moment it was the tragedy that turned my life in the direction that it eventually took, ruining me for medical school or one of the higher professions. That little boy’s story is in many ways identical to my own. It’s why I stand before you today a broken and humble man.”

  “That’s a damn lie!”

  “It’s no lie, boys. I swear on my sweet grandmaw’s grave.”

  “It’s a gah-damn lie on account of you never been inside a high school in your life.”

  5

  When the layoffs began again, they started in the weave room and worked their way through the departments. The weavers were replaced by automated looms, inspectors by scanning machines. And the weave room went from being as noisy as a field of crows to being as silent as the grave. And the dye house lost its steam. Then I guess they sent the carding and spinning operations overseas where they weren’t as particular about brown lung and wanted to share the opportunity with folks making twenty cents an hour. That’s what Pardue said. He said, “Boys, you better read the handwritin’ on the shithouse wall,” meaning, I suppose, that we were as obsolete as John Henry’s hammer. Still, I took pride in the fact that binners and pickers were the last to go, though when they came for Willie T., he simply said, “Fellas, I lost my job.” Never suspecting that it may have been lost for him.

  When they came for me, it was like I had done something wrong, which I guess I had in a way. I should have tried some college after all. For a time I worked security at a country-western place called Boots, where they let me try my hand at a few stand-up routines, but it never clicked. You got to make the crowds go wild if you want to do real comedy. You got to leave them gasping for air. Which I guess I never did. Within two years the mill was down to half production and only one shift. Businesses closing on Main Street while the pawn shops flourished. I got reports from my sister, who was a photographer at the local paper. She told me the mayor was applying for federal grants. Within two and a half years everyone was gone from the picking room except Murtaugh.

  In my mind I could see him working alone, in his world where he had been shaped by the accumulated weight of years, dark and threatening as a thundercloud. Muscles corded under that white T-shirt like bridge cables. Hands and arms, God, like he could catch a Volkswagen if you could throw him one. Sometimes I think he had just been waiting for the rest of us to leave. Which is the way, I believe, that monsters are made. He stayed until the mill itself closed, about the same time I moved to the mountains and took up carpentry. My sister Emily sent me a picture of the picking room when it had been emptied of cloth, but it had no human perspective. It was just a photograph of a junkyard, like you could go searching the aisles forever and find nothing but the dry emptiness of canyons. And after that I tried to imagine Murtaugh walking the streets of our little town at night. Up and down, across and back, following the grid.

  Jimmy John Pardue went into the movies and was arrested within a year for making the wrong kind. He bought a used video camera and a Volkswagen bus, which he drove through the mill village, offering money to girls who would accept a ride.

  “Hey, sweetie, where you headed?”

  And they would tell him downtown or to the movies or none of his business.

  Then he would ask them, “You need a ride? Cause we can give you a ride and even give you a little money if you’ll answer some questions, me and Patty here.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Hop in, I’ll give you forty dollars to tell us the first time you ever kissed somebody.”

  “What’s she need a camera for?”

  “That’s Patty. And, Patty, I want you to meet the love of my life, the most gorgeous and most talented girl without a ride on this street whose name I want recorded right now on account of she’s got the best-looking little legs I’ve ever seen and a smile that would stop a train. Are you Sarah? Because that’s what somebody told me and you sort of look like a Sarah, you know, in a real fresh and perky kind of way. Why don’t you hop in, and we’ll give you a ride down to the shopping mall. I mean, if that’s where you want to go. And you don’t need to worry a bit. Ain’t nobody going to make you take any money that you don’t want to take, no sir, not one dime of this fifty dollars.”

  In the film that they used for evidence, there is no sound, only unsteady images of the girl herself and the occasional hand or foot of the person holding the camera. Jimmy John is at the wheel, and you can see through the windows that they are driving through the country, trees and pastures spooling by in a blur. The girl is adjusting her skirt and pulling her hair behind her ears and touching the buttons of her blouse as she answers questions from the front seat. She is smiling, handling the interview well. Relaxed and talking to the camera. At one point she giggles and
leans forward, planting a mock slap on the side of Jimmy John’s head. He cringes in pretend fear. And they all laugh some more. You can see the camera jiggling.

  A few minutes later the girl covers her face in mock embarrassment and then answers cautiously, looking out the window at tasseled rows of corn. There’s a shrug and a few more words from the front seat. Some folded twenties that get handed to the girl who stuffs them into her backpack and sits meditatively until the scene goes blank. When the light and motion resume, she is on her knees in an impossible position, her rump in the air and one shoulder and the side of her face on the floor in the middle of the van. She’s smiling and talking to the camera as she lifts her skirt and tugs at the elastic of her panties. Everyone seems to be laughing and having a good time.

  6

  I did not marry Patty the commissary girl or play professional baseball or become a big star, but my life is all right. Today I am a wood turner in a furniture shop in the mountains where the guys say things like “Hey, Riggs, run outside and get us a tree” and I feel like I am at home. At night I lie down in a bed that I made with my own hands beside a woman named Elise who gave me the one thing that I love most in this world. And she is so tiny. Normal and perfect like her mama and as light as a snowflake in my hand. At least that is what it feels like to me.

  Sometimes I tell her stories. I am still pretty good at that, and as I tell, I remember. Like how you got there by following the yellow line. One foot wide, repainted twice a year by men who never got off their knees because for them it was a never-ending line that wound through the carding room like a country road on a map. Then across the metal bridge and into the weave room where you dodged air cleaners drifting above you like jellyfish, tentacles hanging all the way to the floor and sucking up the cotton fibers so it’s like the cleanest floor you’ve ever seen, weavers bustling around in hairnets and masks like surgeons. Then you took the yellow stairs down. Punched through two sets of swinging doors and went down some more until you smelled vinegar or maybe heard the dyer himself slamming at a bolt with one of his wrenches. And pretty soon there he would be, sweating on account of the steam and not even wasting a glance in your direction. Most of the time you only knew him as a pair of legs and a leather apron there in the blue fog, but it would be him all right. He never left the dye house. It was like the laundry room of a prison, the air a roiling thundercloud of blue steam. But sometimes you could see him in one of the aisles between vats, where he’d be roasting like a pig, arms absolutely blue to the elbows and where, if you came close enough, you would notice the one startling fact that stayed with you all the years. That his eyes were perfectly matched to his arms, the cobalt blue of new blue jeans.