Excerpt from Ten Seconds

from "And He Was 27 Years Old . . ."

He is standing at the back entrance to the shop. He has just walked in from the field. The shop is a big tin shed of a building where the machinists do their work and where all of the craftsmen—carpenters, pipefitters, welders, and machinists, too—have their lockers, a place where they all congregate when they're on breaks, during any free time. The workers call it "the house." When it is almost quitting time, a man still in the field might look at his watch and say to his partner, "Let's head for the house." The ceiling is high above, so the shop isn't nearly as hot as it might be. The floor is a deep gray marble-smooth concrete. A long ten-foot-wide path runs north-south through the middle of the shop, front to back. The north half of the shop, the front end, the end closest to the entrance gate of the refinery, is mainly the locker area. There are pale green benches about eighteen inches off the floor placed in front of each row of lockers. The men sit here and drink coffee from Styrofoam cups and tell jokes during the breaks. Another path runs east-west, dividing this area from the machinists' work area. This walkway leads to an air-conditioned trailer outside, on the west side of the shop, about twenty yards away across a gravel lot where the workers pick up their paychecks every other Tuesday. To the east, this walkway leads to double doors that open to a dark, stuffy hall that turns to the right. About midway down the hall on the left are the restrooms; at the end is light—the lunchroom. The south half of the shop is the area where the machinists work. It is a danger area. Even if there were no caution signs, drilling sounds, buzzing saws, or shooting sparks and flying iron filings, the missing fingers would be warning enough. The wide garagelike rear entrance, the one Eddie has reached, places you right in this area. He has been standing, just outside the shop, kicking gravel. His eyes have been staring down for a few seconds through safety glasses at his black work boots, following them as they move like the feet of a procrastinating child, one digging under the rocky surface, then the other swinging lightly over the gravel, both becoming coated with the floury gravel dust. He is afraid to look up (though he knows he is about to) and into the machinists' area, where they are still working (there are still a few minutes before the last break). He is afraid that if he looks up he will see all kinds of ugly memories. He will see what resembles to him a kind of war zone. A scene complete with a frightening clamor, buddies falling, and teamwork with an obscured purpose. To him it is not a house; it is a hell. (When someone in the field says to him, "Let's go to the house," he thinks to himself, "Okay, if we must, let's go to hell." ) If he looks up he will not see men smiling beneath hard hats and behind safety glasses saying "Howdy" like in the films they show sometimes. He will see men struggling. Men fighting for survival. He will see blood. The blood of those who did not make it. Men like Malcolm. Malcolm fell so quietly, they told Eddie later, that it must have been five minutes before Moonie looked down and saw him lying still, unconscious on the floor, blood oozing from a hole in his chest made by a drill bit as thick as a finger. "Jesus!" Moonie yelled. "Somebody help me! Somebody help me!" No one heard him over the din and through the earplugs, but his arms were flailing so wildly that he drew Clem Landry's attention. Clem rushed over to where Malcolm lay, followed quickly by Roger Hebert, Joe Phillips, and the rest of the shop. Then the place was complete madness. Screaming. Men running to Safety to get the doctor and the nurse. Others hurrying to tell the foremen who were in their offices at the two front corners of the shop. The blood was beginning to spread across the floor, so the crowd around Malcolm kept a five-foot radius between him and themselves. They were silent. Some of them exchanged glances with one another, then they looked over at Roger Hebert, the senior machinist under whom Malcolm was an apprentice. They shook their heads. Hadn't the dumb-ass shown the man how to operate the fuckin' drill properly? Probably not, knowing him. Yep, it looked like another classic fuck-up by old R.H. He hadn't long ago taken his own left index finger and two years ago his pinky on the same hand. Johnny Dixon always told the story about how R.H. had once tried to use a welder's torch to cut some old scrap metal to take home from the plant, and he had somehow managed to burn his right foot in half. R.H. always swore that the ugly, crescent-shaped scar on his right forearm was from when he was in the war, but no one believed him. And now this. This was too much for even old R.H. A lot of guys didn't have fingers, but they had never killed anybody. And there was no doubt: Malcolm was dead.

Copyright © 1991 by Louis Edwards. All rights reserved.