by Nic Brown
The door to the lobby opened and people began finding their clothes and taking them into some sort of light. Cliff realized, stunned, that the sun was already up. Real daylight was shining onto that warm, dark tanning bed. The glow felt judgmental, as if he were standing outside with it, looking in at himself naked with this stranger, all of his secrets laid bare. It felt scary and sobering and urgent. He started to move but the girl held him tighter.
“Shhhh,” she said. “Shhhhhh.”
She gently pulled his head back down to the tanning bed. The door closed behind the last person and Cliff and the girl were again left in darkness. Cliff could hear the rain now on the roof and wondered if the wedding would be cancelled. The girl put her hand on Cliff’s face and closed his eyes again. Her little fingers were still warm and she started up again with the eye petting.
“Shhhh,” she said.
She swung a leg over one of his and it felt like his insides were testing all functions at once.
Cliff knew that his parents might wake up and notice that he wasn’t in his room at the Red Roof, but he didn’t care. This was a chance he might never have again.
In the tiniest whisper, he said, “Will you roll my dice?”
“What?”
He whispered it again, a little bit louder. “Will you roll my dice?”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“Will you roll my dice?”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
Cliff rolled over and looked towards the girl in the dark, where she was lying on the dead fluorescent bulbs. He felt lost in the void, suddenly unsure of how to even speak.
“What is it?” she said. “Just tell me.”
His eyelids were tingling. He registered the heat, the sound of continual rain. The absence of electric thrum amplified the weather, huge and encroaching and endless.
“Nothing,” he said.
Then a forehead touched his. The other person on that tanning bed was looking right at him. She took his hand and squeezed.
libertee meats
After punching his time card—10:57 PM—Bryce walked upstairs to the locker room. He replaced his Reeboks with a pair of large, sterilized orange rubber boots that rose over his jeans to his knees. He put on a khaki lab coat that hung down to the boots, then pulled on two pairs of gloves: first cotton, then latex over that. Beside the bin of gloves hung a selection of ring knives—short, U-shaped blades protruding from a ring—and he chose one, slowly slipping it over the latex on his right pinky. He then stretched on a hairnet. Bryce was handsome, muscular, and only twenty, but had been going bald since he was sixteen. There was a dark ring of thick hair around his head but only a layer of thin blondish down on the top. Still, they made him wear the hairnet. It was regulation at Libertee Meats.
Leaving the locker room, Bryce could feel the woven plastic settle onto his bald spot. No matter how cold they kept it in there, the hairnet always stuck to a thin layer of moisture on the top of his scalp. Today it was worse than usual. He was still damp from crossing the parking lot in the rain. He hadn’t worn a jacket, either, so his T-shirt was soaked to the skin and now, in the air-conditioning, even under the coat, it felt like it was turning to ice.
It had been raining every night for the whole week, but this particular rain was from Hurricane Hugo, which was supposed to be heading straight towards Lystra. On the way to work, WKNC had said Hugo was due to nail Lystra dead on, and Bryce hoped that it would. Huge wind, trees flying, rain in sheets. He was envisioning different storms from movies: The Final Countdown, Back to the Future, especially Places in the Heart. It could be so thrilling.
As his boots squeaked down the stairs, the smell of hotdogs permeated everything—pungent, hickory-flavored meat smell everywhere. The dangling rubber dust guards at the bottom of the staircase led to the main workspace. Here there were no windows, but even without a view, there was one sure sign that it was the middle of the night. During the day, the employees at Libertee Meats were all white, but at night, the shift was almost exclusively Hispanic and black. Of the eleven workers on the graveyard shift, only Bryce and the manager, Gary Malbaff, stood out in their whiteness. It was a hue made even more pronounced by the fact that neither ever saw daylight.
In the center of the room stood the Butcher Boy 8000 grinding and mixing machine. It was stainless steel, about the size of a Winnebago, and it had a little staircase on the side, at the top of which stood Moffett.
Only Moffett worked the mixing machine. He was in his early thirties, one of the two black guys on the graveyard shift, and he had a tattoo of a large crude triangle on his right cheek. His eyesight was terrible and he wore thick, metal-frame glasses. His was the most important job, second to Gary Malbaff’s, at Libertee Meats. He controlled the mixing and input of Orange Spice.
Orange Spice was the secret to Libertee Meats. It was a combination of salt and hickory smoke hotdog flavoring, and was called Orange Spice not because it tasted liked oranges, but simply because it was orange. It smelled like hotdog. That smell had nothing to do with cooking. It was all Orange Spice.
The only thing that went into the mixing machine other than Orange Spice was a white, fatty animal byproduct. This was the variety meat: basically the leftovers from a selection of animals that had been processed in every other manner possible. Hearts, brains, feet. As Bryce’s dad had always said, “Hotdogs ain’t nothing but peckers and lips.” And, Bryce thought, he was just about right. He had once seen a cow’s eyeball, with eyelashes, in an orange plastic cart of the stuff before it was processed.
Bryce had first begun working at Libertee Meats after his wife, Lizz, had given him an ultimatum: he had one week to get a job after he finished his second year at ATCC—Alamance Technical Community College—or else she was going to his mother.
It was clear that Bryce’s two years at ATCC weren’t going to get him any job in Lystra that he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. He wasn’t learning a trade or getting a certificate for anything, he had just been taking classes from the drama pre-major department. He spent all of his time thinking about acting, talking about being an actor. He had never acted in anything, though. He had never auditioned for even as much as a high school play and he was failing almost everything at ATCC.
Lizz herself had never gone to college. She made surprisingly good money, though, waiting tables at Fishbones, a seafood calabash off Highway 70. She killed it with the tips. Still, it wasn’t enough. They lived in a crummy neighborhood, so rent was low, but they had a two-year-old son. Heath. He was the reason they had been married so young, and he definitely wasn’t cheap. Bryce gave the kid free range. He let him fall and get into things and eat gravel and lick the cat. They were very good friends. Lizz said they had the same mindset.
Bryce could have found a job that at least had normal, daylight hours. He knew this. But during that one-week ultimatum Lizz had given him, after the spring semester had ended and Bryce was supposed to be job hunting, he had instead just smoked pot, watched a Murder, She Wrote marathon, and played Nintendo. It was like slowly driving into a wall. He knew what was going to happen but did nothing to avoid it.
So Lizz went to Bryce’s mom, who knew Gary Malbaff, and that’s how it happened.
All they had open for Bryce at Libertee Meats was a spot on the graveyard shift, 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. His mom said it would be a good job, that it would be easy. “You know, conveyor belt stuff.” She said it was in a cool environment. At first Bryce thought that she was trying to use some hip lingo to convince her kid, but he soon realized that she actually meant cool—that the job was indoors for the summer, that it was well air-conditioned.
After Bryce passed through the hanging rubber dust guards, he took one quick glance at the mixing machine. He looked away quickly, though, hoping Moffett hadn’t seen, then continued to the Frankomatic with his head down.
Bryce hadn’t always been this terrified of Moffett. On his first night, Moffett had shown Bryce how to run the Frankomat
ic, speaking in a low, husky whisper: “You just do it like this ok cool so you put this here like this see? And then you just want to wait for them to swing by until you cut it right watch this cool ok.”
Moffett’s Butcher Boy 8000 mixing machine connected to four Vermag Frankomatic sausage handling machines. Each Frankomatic regulated the amount of proto-hotdog mush that got shot into these plastic-type casings, then twisted each dog to separate it from the next. The casings were very thin, and Moffett explained that they would melt away in very high temperatures. Where they melted away to was a total mystery to Bryce, though. As far as he could tell, the stuff just stayed on the dog.
The Frankomatic shot out a constant stream of dogs, which were caught on spinning hooks that hung from a giant, rotating bicycle-type chain. Bryce would let ten to twelve dogs shoot onto the hooks before he would cut the casing with his ring knife and twist the links into a loop. He then lifted the looped dogs with a metal rod and placed them into an orange plastic rolling cart. This was his whole job. Cut the dogs, loop them, lift.
For Bryce’s first three weeks, Moffett kept a benevolent eye on him, sometimes bumping fists with him and saying, “What up?” or showing him how to do anything that he couldn’t figure out. “You want to save the leftover. See, it gets reused. Put it in here, and then send it back. No, like this.” And so on.
One night he approached Bryce with his T-shirt all bunched up around his chest and said, “Hey man, get this zit?”
“What?” Bryce said.
“Get this zit?” he said, motioning towards a raised welt on his back.
“You want me to pop the zit?”
“Yeah. Get it!”
Bryce put his thumbs on either side of the swollen mound and squeezed. A white blob shot out of Moffett’s back as if from a miniature tube of toothpaste. Bryce almost gagged.
“Ah. Oh yeah,” Moffett said. Then, pulling his shirt back down, said, “Thanks, Brother,” and bumped fists with Bryce.
At that moment, Bryce knew he had just done something with Moffett that he would never do with another human, not even his own wife. He looked at his hands, glad to have the latex gloves. This is the graveyard shift in a hotdog factory, he thought.
Moffett’s goodwill ended, though, one night in early June. Bryce was cutting a dog with his ring knife, when Moffett walked up and said, “Hey! I saw you looking at me. You looking at me, motherfucker? I see your fucking eyes looking at me. I see your eyes. You want my job? You want to take my job? I will fuck you up!”
Bryce’s heart began to pound. He hadn’t consciously been looking at Moffett. He thought about it. Christ. Had he looked over there by accident for a long time? Had he stared at something behind Moffett, something that would have made it look like he was staring at Moffett? No. He hadn’t. And how would Moffett even know? He could barely see across the room.
“No,” Bryce said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really . . . I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
This was just the start. For weeks then, almost every day, Moffett would launch these arbitrary attacks. At some point during this time, Moffett also found out that Bryce had gone to ATCC. This is when Bryce became College Boy.
Bryce couldn’t make sense of it. There was nothing. He had done nothing. As far as he could make it, Moffett was just bored and crazy and wanting to fight. Or maybe it was racial. He tried to employ some of the critical cultural analysis that he’d briefly brushed up against in classes at ATCC. Moffett had been working the graveyard shift for three and a half years, but they still hadn’t given him a daylight shift. Bryce was the only person on the floor to whom the manager, Malbaff, ever voluntarily spoke. If I worked even remotely as hard as Moffett does, Bryce thought, I bet I’d be working in daylight.
This was uncharted mental territory for Bryce, though. So, after trying to explain to Moffett that he wasn’t staring at him, that no he didn’t want Moffett’s job, that he in fact didn’t even plan to work at Libertee Meats for an extended period, that he was hoping to get a job at the Barn Dinner Theater, that yes he was actually hoping to do this (there was always a flyer in the grocery store for auditions—now it was Guys and Dolls), after explaining all this, Bryce eventually settled into complete silence.
He spent his silent hours at the Frankomatic thinking about movies, actors, and many actresses. Almost every actress he’d even seen had her own well-thumbed file in his mind, especially Kelly McGillis. He would envision having long conversations with these actresses at dimly lit parties, talking about craft. He would think up specific things that he wanted to say to each actress if he ever met her. He would compliment Debra Winger for her voiceover work in ET, maybe ask Sigourney Weaver about working with special effects, and Kelly McGillis—he would ask her if she’d learned to ride a motorcycle just for Top Gun, or (as he suspected) was she the type of woman who already knew how.
For a while, Bryce’s turn of silence had an effect. Moffett began bumping fists with him again, saying, “What up?” from time to time, or commenting on Malbaff’s comb-over. Bryce thought he had passed whatever test he had been put up against.
At lunch that night, which came at 1:30 AM, Bryce could hear Hugo on the corrugated metal roof, the rain like gunfire. The radio in the lunchroom was all weather.
Lunch seating was always the same. Bryce ate with the Hispanics and Moffett sat at another table with the one other black guy, Jeff, who worked in the tunnel where the dogs got cooked, where that casing melted away. It was another one of the top-level jobs.
Bryce liked the Hispanic guys. There were seven of them. They either worked the Frankomatics with Bryce or cleaned. The floors in the factory were always covered in animal byproduct and so constantly needed maintenance. This is why everyone wore the giant rubber boots. Jesus Silva, one of the guys who cleaned, didn’t speak English at all. He only knew the lyrics to Paradise City. Jesus knew Bryce thought it was funny when he sang, and that night at lunch he said, “You take me to Paradise City. The grass is green and pretty!”
Bryce laughed, snorting in bursts, and Moffett turned to him, staring and slowly shaking his head.
These guys at the Hispanic lunch table were always talking about family. About their kids. About girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-wives, girls that had been neither but still had borne their children. Bryce felt included because he could actually join in this conversation. He would talk about his boy, Heath, and joke about Lizz yelling at him for never being around when she was awake. This always got the guys laughing because the ones who spoke English all knew what he was talking about. All of their wives and girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and mothers of their children hated that these men worked the graveyard shift. Bryce hated the shift, too, not only because of Moffett, or the crazy hours, or the fact that he went to sleep at around 9:00 AM after eating dinner and drinking a screwdriver at sunrise, but because he never saw Lizz or Heath. They would be awake when he got home but he was a hotdog-smelling zombie by that point, and when he awoke at sunset, Lizz was at work and Heath was at Bryce’s mom’s place. Every day he slept in an empty bed.
A few hours after lunch, around 4:30 AM, Bryce was at the Frankomatic, dropping a loop of dogs into the bin and hoping the storm would strengthen, when he noticed that the floor was more slippery than usual. Usually the fatty stuff that splattered onto the floor was slick but contained to single spots. Today, though, the floor was covered in a layer of liquid, much more than usual. He could hear his feet sloshing around in it. Usually he couldn’t hear his boots doing anything other than squeak. He dropped the dogs, then shut the Frankomatic off and leaned his pole against the rack with the others. If the machines were leaking at all, even the slightest bit, it meant that all the dogs would be contaminated. Bryce walked up an exposed flight of metal stairs and knocked on the door to Malbaff’s office.
“Bryce. Hey there, pal! What can I do you for?” Malbaff said. He set down a huge spreadsheet. His comb-over looked amazing in the fluorescent light—
a horrific sculpture of hair.
“I don’t know,” Bryce said. “Oh, fine, thanks. Look, I don’t know, but the floor is really wet.”
Malbaff rushed past Bryce to a small metal platform outside the door. From there, it was clear that puddles were forming all over the place.
“Dagblad it!” Malbaff said. “Why didn’t somebody get me earlier?” He rushed down the stairs shouting, “Moffett! Moffett!”
Moffett stopped pouring a bag of Orange Spice into the mixer and looked up.
“Turn that thing off. Now!”
Moffett spun to the control panel like it had shocked him and Bryce heard the mixing arm gurgle to a stop. It was never this quiet in the factory. Then Moffett turned and looked through those thick glasses directly at Bryce.
It hadn’t taken long for Malbaff to discover that the liquid had been coming not from the mixing machine, but rather from a massive leak in the corrugated metal roof. It was Hugo that had been pouring down the walls and onto the floor, creeping between the machines and puddling up with all that animal waste. There were drains built into the concrete floor, so the actual water hadn’t been an issue—it would have been a disaster only if the mixing machine were actually leaking. There was nothing to do other than go back to work.
Just before 6:00 AM, Bryce stood at the Frankomatic with a rod in hand and a loop of links dangling off the end when he heard Moffett say, “Hey, motherfucker!” behind him. He had been waiting for this, trying to prepare mentally. Don’t freak out, he told himself. Just ignore him and he’ll go away. Just ignore him. But against better logic, he turned. Moffett stood there with his hairnet off. His shaved head glistened. The thick lenses of his eyeglasses caught the fluorescent factory light and glowed. His work coat was too small and fit tightly across his chest. The Frankomatic continued to shoot out dogs beside him, but Bryce didn’t move.
“Yeah, bitches,” Moffett said. “You want my job? Starting lies about me. Trying to start some shit. You want to start some shit?”