by Mick Lowe
“So there are laws, but they just aren’t enforced by anyone?”
The question elicited a peremptory grunt from d’Aguire.
“You just don’t get it. Colonel Sanders runs this henhouse. Company’s got about a million ways to cover its ass while it breaks the law, starting with the fact the Ministry calls over to warn the company in advance any time they’re about to do an inspection. Watch graveyard shift. Any time guys are called in to work overtime on graveyards you know there’s an inspection coming the next day.”
“Oh, man. So we are well and truly fucked.”
D’Aguire raised a cautionary hand. “Yes and no. Some of us are trying to figure a way to fight back—that’s why I wanted to talk to you young fellers.”
Jake nodded. He was all ears. And with that d’Aguire lowered his voice and began speaking with quiet intensity. . .
5
A Very Bad Day
There were bad days in the smelter, Jake was learning, and then there were very bad days in the smelter when things went sideways faster and much worse than anything he’d ever experienced underground. A day in the first week of his second month there was one of the latter.
It started when Jake’s gang was summoned to clean up a hot metal spill in the furnace building. Such cataclysmic events were rare, but they happened.
The gang was called out to clean up the spill, which was still cooling when they arrived. A crust, or “blister” was still forming over the spill, which had pooled over much of the floor of the furnace building. There was nothing the gang could do but watch and wait, until the molten puddle solidified and they could begin their laborious task of cracking, prying and shovelling up the mess. As they were waiting Jake saw a foreman beckon to a furnace section worker Jake didn’t know. Although he couldn’t hear the conversation, Jake could tell the worker was being ordered to fetch something from the other side of the building. Jake watched as the worker surveyed the distance he would have to cross if he attempted a shortcut over the blister, compared to the distance around the spill. Jake had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the worker, anonymous though he was in his nondescript coveralls and safety glasses.
The worker tested the crust of the blister with the toe of his work boot. It held. Jake held his breath as the lone figure ventured gingerly out onto the crust, like a man attempting to walk across a frozen pond after it has just iced over. At first the short cut appeared to be a good idea, but after several steps the crust began to crack, and the molten metal beneath began to bubble through. Here the worker made a fatal mistake: he began to run. His footfalls became heavier, and now every time his boots hit the crust it gave way.
Like his comrades on the bull gang, Jake watched, mesmerized by what happened next. The running man began to shrink before their horrified gaze. The molten metal melted first his boots, then his feet and then his legs. He began to founder, and fell face down. Shrieking in pain, he lay sprawled atop the crust, which supported his newly distributed weight. They all sat transfixed, as if watching a horror movie—but this was no movie.
Jake turned to the supervisor who had ordered the man to fetch. . . whatever, but the boss seemed paralyzed by the scene and was clearly flustered.
Jake’s gaze returned to the injured worker, obviously in tremendous pain, isolated out on the blister.
“Somebody bring me a ladder!” Jake demanded of no one in particular, and a long aluminum ladder suddenly appeared. Jake hastily extended it to its fullest length before laying it gently over the molten puddle in the direction of his injured co-worker.
Then Jake, on all fours now, began to crawl cautiously out on the ladder toward the downed furnace worker. He could feel the intense heat radiating off the nearly still-molten spill, but the ladder distributed Jake’s weight sufficiently that the crust held. The ladder was just long enough that Jake was just able to reach the injured man from the top—and last—rung. Jake reached out and clamped his wrist with his right hand. “Okay!” Jake shouted to the members of the bull gang, “Pull us back!”
The crew reefed on the foot of the ladder, and soon all three—Jake, the injured man, and the ladder, were restored to the relative safety of the smelter floor. Jake heaved a sigh of relief to be standing once again on solid ground, and he was surprised to discover that his hands and legs were shaking uncontrollably. Abashed by his own hyper-adrenalized reaction, Jake began to pace in circles, both in an effort to conceal his condition from his workmates, and to walk off and to restore his own shattered nerves.
Robert “Haywire” d’Aguire, meanwhile, was oblivious to the drama playing out in the furnace building. Perched high above the floor of the converter aisle in his overhead crane, the burly biker had problems of his own—the gas was as bad as he’d ever experienced in his years working in the converters. The problem, he knew, was with the Number Three converter. Whenever it was running the gas was almost unbearable. His gas mask was really nothing more than a cotton cloth soaked in glycerine and then dusted with baking soda—but it worked, except that it covered only his nose and mouth, leaving his eyes exposed. The gas burned his eyes, and they welled with so many tears that Haywire was soon effectively blinded. No matter how many times he wiped the tears from his eyes, they just wouldn’t work in the intense gas cloud. Fuck this. With tears streaming from his eyes and his nose running inside his mask, d’Aguire could no longer do his job, at least not safely. He was moving thousands of pounds of molten material around over the heads of dozens of co-workers down there on the floor. Although he couldn’t actually see them through the gas, d’Aguire knew they were down there, and he also knew that one mistaken move on his part could mean raining down certain death upon them. No, fuck it. This ladle would be his last.
After delivering the ladle to its appointed destination d’Aguire returned his crane to its starting point and then reached for the phone that connected him to the convertor supervision office, a glass-enclosed cubicle so far below him that it might as well have been on Mars. “Listen, the goddamned gas is so thick up here I can no longer operate safely,” he growled into the phone. “I want a Drager and a shifter up here right away!” A disembodied voice on the other end of the line agreed meekly with d’Aguire’s demands. The biker then sat motionless in his seat and waited, knowing his inactivity would not go unnoticed from below. He also expected that his mention of a Drager, the device used to monitor the level of contaminants in ambient air, would raise red flags in the supervisor’s office down below. And he further expected the company’s minions would take immediate steps to cover the company’s ass. So, he waited. And waited. A good twenty minutes elapsed, and still no supervisor, and still no Drager meter. Also what he had expected. Though he couldn’t see it, Haywire knew what was happening around him: the Number Three converter was being shut down, and every window, stack and vent in the building was being opened to clear out the gas before the supervisor arrived to take the air quality test he’d demanded.
Eventually the gas began to clear enough so that he could see someone wearing a white hat clambering up the ladder that was the only approach to his aerie high above the converter aisle. He had a Drager, d’Aguire noted, but no gas mask. The latter omission elicited first a bemused grunt from the crane operator, followed by a grim smile. Very well then. Two could play this game. . .
D’Aguire welcomed the shifter into his cab, but he could clearly see the man’s unease. Whether it was the dizzying height, or the cramped space inside the crane’s control room, or his forced closeness to a burly, nasty, bearded shop steward nick-named Haywire, d’Aguire could not tell, but he could see quite clearly that his new guest had arrived short of breath from the climb, and that he was perspiring heavily. His welcome consisted of a peremptory grunt from his union adversary, and a nod at the Drager.
“Know how to use that thing?”
The new arrival’s white hat bobbed on his head in unison with his Adam’s apple as he swallowed heavily. “Y
es.”
D’Aguire watched closely as the shift boss began to take the air sample. The Drager could test for nearly a dozen contaminants, depending on the glass vial inserted in the machine before the air sample was drawn. D’Aguire guessed the shifter had inserted the vial for sulphur. The testing was activated by squeezing ten times—exactly ten—on the kind of rubberized bulb that always reminded d’Aguire of a turkey baster. The union steward carefully counted the squeezes on the Drager’s air pump while the white hat was absorbed in the same thing. When he had finished he paused, and the two men looked at each other.
And then, as if by mutual consent, came the moment of truth: the glass tube was carefully removed from its nest inside the device, and read. Mr. White Hat held it up so d’Aguire could see. Small black lines were painted on the side of the clear glass to measure gradations, and some kind of gas inside the tube would discolour in proportion to the impurity being measured, a form and process not dissimilar to a mercury thermometer. White Hat grinned broadly at the Drager tube he held between his fingers: the sulphur gas content had barely registered, indicating a reading of zero gas in the air. “There, see? Nothing to worry about!”
But d’Aguire only glowered at the tube, and at the shifter. “Zero,” he agreed grudgingly. “That’s what I want to work in all the time. Not a one, not a two. A zero.”
The shifter, still grinning, nodded agreeably, relief clearly evident in his demeanour. Now he could be the bearer of good news to his superiors. Union complaints of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions were highly exaggerated. Science didn’t lie, and he held the indisputable proof between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. Even the fearsome d’Aguire had had to agree.
The shop steward had already turned his attention to the controls of his crane, which he was running out on its rail to pick up his next payload, a ladle full of glowing, red-hot molten liquid. Hovering over the pot, he played out the wire rope, weighted by the heavy iron grapple at its end. Seemingly without effort he looped the hook into the liftpoint of the ladle, and began the heavy lift, which set off the shriek of sirens up and down the great length of the converter aisle. Within seconds the Converter Building Supervisor, observing with satisfaction d’Aguire’s crane once again in motion, gave the order to re-start the Number Three converter, which represented a significant fraction of the massive building’s total output. Like everyone else in the densely layered hierarchy of the company, he was measured strictly on the basis of throughput, and he could not allow an important cog in the machinery of production to remain idle a split second longer than was absolutely necessary.
At first, the return of Number Three to the line was not readily apparent in Haywire’s cab. But the bearded shop steward, who with his gas mask covering his nose and mouth now resembled a bank robber from the Wild West, was not surprised by the approach of the toxic fumes.
His guest, however, was caught unawares, and unprepared. The first warning of impending disaster was nothing much—a small tickle in the back of his throat, and an odd, not entirely pleasant taste in his mouth. Not so bad. The instinctive reaction was always the same: to swallow, as if to clear the mouth of the taste, which became much more unpleasant the longer it lingered. And then there was the smell—the overpowering stench of rotten eggs. The instinctive reaction here was to hold one’s breath—a futile and wholly unsustainable stratagem against a vast gaseous quantity of a mephitic thing that was suddenly being released after having lain dormant and undisturbed deep in the iron ribs of the Nickel Range for eons. Fearing that his lungs would burst at the losing effort, d’Aguire’s guest let the last air from his lungs escape with a whoosh! that left him gasping for breath, and it was game over. He sucked down great gouts of the foul air and his lungs, nose and throat suddenly recoiled at the unfamiliar abuse. And so the visitor began to cough and choke, while d’Aguire sat smugly at his controls, inured by experience to the conditions, and protected, to a degree, by his face mask.
The company man began to cough and choke, struggling unsuccessfully to regain control over his breathing. He was able to stop coughing for only the briefest intervals, during which he took the shallowest, most tentative of breaths, but even those attempts meant inhaling the reeking stench of sulphur which soon overcame him once again, triggering another spasm of coughing, each round more violent than the last. He looked around himself, and at d’Aguire, who was nonchalantly operating his crane, and realized he was well and truly trapped. His only means of escape from the crane cab, and from the gas that rose to the rafters in a smothering fog so dense he could almost chew it, was the fixed steel ladder by which he had come up. But the ladder could only be accessed from the crane’s stationary starting point, which D”Aquire, despite his watering eyes, now seemed to be steadfastly and studiously avoiding in order to maintain production.
Both men knew full well that the visitor had now become a hostage. The company man looked longingly at the small staging which would allow him to leave this hellish place, but d’Aguire was all business now, even though his eyes had begun to water once again, and he saw little need to return his crane to its starting point. In the meantime his guest had begun coughing once again, this time in great, gasping seizures that turned his face beet red. It was an awful sound, but d’Aguire ignored it. Finally, though, he had had enough, and he returned the crane to its staging. He gestured brusquely for the company man to be gone. “Just be careful out there,” d’Aguire offered in mock solicitude. “They say the gas out there is murder.”
The company man, already scrambling to get away from d’Aguire and the gas, nodded mutely, which set off another paroxysm of wheezing and gasping. And then he was gone.
As d’Aguire ran the crane back out on the rail for his next lift, he guessed that the company guy’s trumpeting of the Drager reading to his superiors might now be somewhat tempered—once he was able to stop gagging long enough to form a complete sentence. D’Aguire shrugged, and went on about his business.
“Tabernac!” was the reaction from a member of his crew as Jake and the gang entered the converter aisle even as d’Aquire’s erstwhile guest, between paroxysms of coughing, descended the fixed ladder from the rafters of the converter building.
Jake shared the cursed assessment of his French co-worker. This place was bad, just as gassy and dusty as he remembered from his first day orientation.
“Well, pitter patter guys, let’s get at ‘er,” was Jake’s only comment. The sooner their work here was done the sooner they could all get out of this hellish place. The remark was intended as an exhortation to his fellow members on the bull gang who, Jake sensed, had begun to look up to him as some kind of leader after his quick-thinking, purely instinctive reaction to the horrible accident that they had all just witnessed on the floor of the furnace building.
They had just begun work on the task at hand when they were distracted by yet another adverse reaction to the terrible air conditions. A worker none of them knew—a converter building regular, presumably—began to sneeze repeatedly. He was soon overcome by the fumes and began to cough uncontrollably. His body was racked by the coughing spasms, none of which sufficed to clear his nose, mouth and chest of the sulphuric tickle that afflicted them. The worker continued to cough, sputter and gasp until his face was flaming crimson and his weeping eyes were bloodshot. He dropped to his knees still retching when, before Jake’s horrified gaze he began to bleed from the nose and mouth. The only thing for it, Jake decided, was to get the man out of the building. The smelter yard was a filthy, dusty place, God knew, but the conditions were at least better than in here. He motioned to McIvor for assistance, and between them they were able to lift the sputtering fellow to his feet and half-drag and half-walk him out of the building.
They left him in the yard and returned indoors, and then, without warning, Jake snapped. His arms and legs stiffened, and Jake’s hands were suddenly balled into fists. Before either he or McIvor quite knew what was happening, Jake was charging at the first white
hat he could find, like a dangerous rogue bull.
“Look, this is bullshit!” he screamed, spittle flying in the face of the startled white hat. “No one should have to work in this shit!” He cocked his right fist behind his ear, clearly ready to haul off and hit the defenseless boss.
“Jake! No! What the fuck?” McIvor saved the day—and likely Jake’s job—by hastily grabbing Jake from behind. At some level even Jake, who was hyperventilating, knew he was on the dangerous verge of losing everything. Instead of delivering the blow he twisted free of McIvor’s grasp and began to pace in circles like a man possessed, his hands opening and closing, flexing in and out of fists of their own manic, reflexive accord. None of this was lost on the other members of the bull gang who had, to a man, stopped whatever they were doing to watch Jake’s meltdown with jaw-dropping amazement as the impromptu workplace drama unfolded.
Eventually Jake walked off his adrenalized state and his breathing returned to normal, although thoughts were still racing through his brain. Sure he had overreacted, but just as surely the events of this day could not stand. Jo Ann was right: somehow conditions in the smelter had to be made to change. But decking a shifter was not a winning strategy. As rage gave way to reason and he returned gradually to his senses Jake’s first thought was to speak to McIvor, and he approached his best friend on the bull gang, hand extended. “Thanks there, buddy, thanks a lot. I don’t know what happened to me . . . It’s just no one should ever have to put up with this shit!”
McIvor nodded his head in agreement, and lowered his voice as he shook Jake’s hand.
“I know, Jake, I know. Fuckin’ A! But we gotta think, gotta outsmart these bastards. I’ll set up a sit-down with d’Aguire.”
In the event, Jake’s rescue in the furnace, which was soon after described as “heroic” by the company’s Public Affairs department and the local news media, was unavailing. The incident itself—the sight of a man melting from the knees down—soon entered local lore, becoming a kind of urban myth, partly because of its gruesome nature and partly because there were so many witnesses to it.