by JT Pearson
many shells as I managed to stack or package. The line manager threatened to can me just about every day and I thought at the time that he may have been right, that tacoing just wasn’t in my blood. My hands weren’t graceful enough, just born too clumsy, too heavy. But as I said, I gradually became more delicate and faster with the product and soon the line manager had me training in new workers. I got pretty cocky. I told jokes and sang songs. The other workers seemed to like it. Then one day they hired a new girl, Barbara Wormter. Went by the name, “the Boss”, just stole it from Bruce Springsteen. I hate that when somebody just steals someone else’s nickname because they fancy it. Just seems wrong. The Boss was a thick girl who wore her hair short and slicked back. She rolled her cigarettes into the sleeve of her company smock – not very respectful of the company in my opinion. Chewed gum all of the time. And the strangest thing, she was able to grow sideburns. I learned later that she was an aspiring Elvis impersonator but was only doing birthday parties and such until she was ready to try the big league – Vegas.
On the Boss’s first day the manager assigned me to train her in. I tried to make jokes but she never even smiled. I still wanted to see her succeed at Taco Taco so I did my best to train her well. I had always been a stickler for procedure and showed her how to stack the shells vertically as they came down the line, the way that I was taught, but she decided to stack them horizontally. I tried to explain to her that her formation could cause the shells to push into each other and crumble resulting in a horrible waste of product. I changed what she was doing and then I left to check on other important issues that trainers had to be aware of, like employees missing hairnets. By the time I got back she was laying them horizontally again. I started to correct her but she grabbed my wrist with an iron grip and told me to “go twist it.” I wasn’t sure what that meant but I figured it was something vulgar. Then she threatened me to keep my mouth shut. I walked away angrily. Fine, I thought to myself. I’d let her go down in flames, let her learn the hard way by not following procedure. Before long shells were pushing into each other and cracking, sometimes even breaking in half. It was a disaster. I felt bad about what had happened but she really had it coming. The lead foreman had to shut down the line and our supervisors rushed in to examine the wasted product. They looked at the mess with disappointment and asked her if she was alright. She told them that she was okay and that she was just following the way that she’d been trained to stack shells and that all of a sudden the shells had just started breaking. I was livid.
“I’m so sorry Miss Wormter. We’ll straighten Jeff out.” My foreman glared at me, his arms crossed in front of his chest. And he had called her Miss Wormter! What was that?
My foreman and his supervisor took me to a separate room and explained to me that I had to train people better than that if I expected to hold a privileged position in the plant. They told me that before I even knew it I’d be demoted, back in the dough room, sweating and panting, shoveling dough again. I tried to explain what had actually happened but they didn’t want to hear it. They sent me back out on the floor with a warning that I’d also better find a way to get along with Miss Wormter.
Later in the break room during lunch I tried to shake the morning off and started to tell a joke but the Boss cut me off.
“What’s that you’re saying, Cupcake?”
The entire break room busted into laughter.
She had called me Cupcake and everyone had laughed. That became my new nickname around the plant, Cupcake. It seemed like they laughed at everything she said. Even the girl that I’d had an eye on but hadn’t had the nerve to approach yet, Minnie Erickson, she laughed. Minnie was so tiny and neat and I had liked her so much. The Boss and Minnie became a regular pair at the taco plant. The Boss carried her around all of the time like her personal Teddy Bear. I thought that was highly inappropriate for a business environment. I was jealous and humiliated.
I had gotten pretty familiar with some of my neighbors in the trailer camp and we had made it a fairly predictable event to shoot the shit at the end of the night around a campfire. Among the regulars, there was Jenny that I’d met the first night, and Victor, an old timer that talked about the old country a lot but never offered to tell anybody where that was. There was the Pudden’s, Josh and Jill, who worked construction jobs together but only as a package deal. There was Pearl who had danced over at LA BIRDS until she was sixty. And then there was Gunner, middle-fifties, loner, who seemed to know a little bit about everything but not a whole lot about anything particular.
“My garbage has been getting tipped every night. At first I thought it was probably those kids from the western side of the court but I look out my window and I never see anybody. It’s just eerie,” said Victor, staring into the fire.
“Could be extra terrestrial. It’s always country folk that those travelers from other planets come courtin,” Pearl offered, and took a pull of her beer.
“I got abducted once.” Jenny pulled another beer from the cooler that she had conveniently slid next to her chair. “They just wanted to fool around a little. Play a little doctor. It was no big deal. Everyone’s got needs. Why not aliens? I didn’t mind. I kind’a liked it.”
“There’s been documented alien attacks in which entire villages of people were zapped to death. No survivors,” said Victor. “Back in the old country, that was common.”
“Naw, it’s nothing as exotic as aliens. It’s just an old raccoon that’s been sneaking around at night looking for food. I saw the tracks. He’d been hangin around on the western side until old Murphy tried to nail him with his pistol. Must’ve drug up for safer pastures,” said Gunner, while he traced something in the dirt with a stick.
“We could push our cans together. I got an old chain that was left in my trailer that I could wrap through the handles and lids at night so that he can’t get into anything,” I offered.
“That’s a good plan,” said Gunner, not looking up from his drawing.
“How you like working at Taco Taco?” asked Jenny.
“I was liking it fine until this girl showed up to work,” I threw a rock into the woods. “The Boss. She calls me Cupcake and even threatens to fight me.”
“Ain’t the Boss Bruce Springsteen?” asked Jenny.
“I know.” I told her.
“Is she like an Elvis impersonator?” asked Pearl.
“Yeah. You know her?” I finished my beer and tossed the can in the fire.
“She performed at my cousin Winky’s birthday. Not only does she do a terrible Elvis act but she got drunk and broke my nephew’s nose. Can’t do nothin about it. That girl’s one of them Wormters.”
“No shit?” asked Gunner.
“I think there’s like fifty of them altogether,” said Pearl.
“That many?” Gunner finally looked up from his drawing that had come out pretty good. An image of a horse. “I didn’t figure there was so many of ‘em.”
“There’s at least five families.”
“One family of Wormters is too many,” said Josh, and Jill nodded. “Me and Jill were talkin to a girl once that said one of the Wormters showed up at a keg party with a state trooper all bound to the top of his pickup, struggling to get free, like folks do with a deer. Said one of them Wormter women was trying to put an apple in his mouth. The girl said she got herself out of there before she saw anymore. Said nobody ever told anything to anybody about that night.”
“But she told you,” corrected Gunner.
“Almost nothing. Nothing, but that it happened,” retorted Josh, and Jill nodded in agreement.
Wormters are mean and they don’t care for nobody but other Wormters. They wouldn’t bother to piss on you if you were on fire,” said Jenny.
“Naw, that aint true,” said Pearl. Everyone looked over at her. “Wormters’ piss is flammable. It’ll also blind ya if ya get it in yer eyes, same as snake spit.”
We laughed.
“Bein’ serious though, I heard that the Wormters ate a person o
nce, a visiting preacher that came to sub in for Father Gabriel at the Cathedral when he had his hip replaced. They caught the preacher broke down along highway 2, snatched him up, brought him to where all the Wormters live and they all just up and ate ‘em,” said Victor.
“You’d think the authorities would investigate some of the stuff people hear,” Josh pulled Jill a little closer to him.
“The authorities just forget about their duties and do their best to keep their distance from the Wormters like everybody else,” said Pearl.
“Now, this is about the damnedest thing I ever heard and I’m not even entirely certain whether it’s actually true or not but I heard that one of them Wormters took a puppy just after it was born and squeezed it into a root beer jug and raised it in there. You know, like them model ships that people see in bottles and wonder how in the hell somebody got it in there. I heard them Wormters carry that little dog all stuffed in that bottle around with them sometimes. Folks say they’ve seen it. Myra Thatcher, from the west side of the court said she seen it at Bug’s Tavern once.” Victor teared up and looked like he was going to start crying. “I love dogs. That’s about the sickest thing that I can imagine.”
“That can’t really be true, could it, Gunner?” Josh’s young face was horror stricken, and so was Jill’s.
“I
