Bloodthirst in Babylon

by Searls, David

  Todd liked working with tools and machines, the smell of lubricating oil and diesel engines. It was always being the new guy he didn’t treasure. Always the temp, checking in for a day or a week or a month of employment. Sometimes just getting into the routine, making a tentative friendship and learning the best places to eat, when the boss calls him into his office. Sales have died, the work’s caught up, the budget’s blown. Whatever the case: out on the street again. Bills piling up, landlords threatening, kids whining. Helluva life.

  Before getting out, Todd observed the Corwin Corrugated Company from the cracked windshield of Kathy Lee Dwyer’s borrowed boat of an Impala. She’d insisted on him taking it after he first dropped her off at the Old Time Cafe. He’d practically watched the gas needle drop. If his usual luck held, he’d owe Kathy Lee more for fuel than he’d make for the day. Then get told not to report back tomorrow.

  Sales died, work’s caught up, budget’s blown.

  There was no lobby, just a single-file row of battered metal desks piled high with paper crap. Behind the desks he could see ten-foot stacks of cardboard and hear a forklift sputtering into action, its propane tank filling Todd’s nostrils. Just light a match, he thought.

  A fat girl sat behind a computer at one of the desks.

  “Uh huh,” she said, as though confirming a fact Todd hadn’t raised. He asked her for Jack Traynor, and she wordlessly pointed. “Jack,” she said.

  She’d pointed to a cubical that seemed to be the equivalent of a corner office, the only thing here with walls. When he got to the doorway and saw the thin, balding man sitting at a desk that faced the back wall, Todd cleared his throat to start some kind of greeting that wasn’t readily coming to mind.

  The balding man heard him. He swiveled his desk chair to face his doorway and Todd and offered a smile that looked equal parts guilty and confused. “Yes?”

  Todd said, “The cop, er, police officer—Marty?—he told me to see you.” Nothing. “That you’d have a job for me.” He stared at the blank face, then thought of a much better starting point, one that he should have used from the get-go. “I’m Todd Dunbar.”

  “Oh. Marty. Yeah, he said something.”

  Jack Traynor shoved his glasses back up his nose and shot so quickly out of his office chair that it wheeled backward and crashed into the back wall of the rattly metal office cubicle, shuddering the entire flimsy structure to the point that Todd was sure it was going to collapse. Fine way to begin his first day.

  But the thin man hardly seemed to notice. His shoulders were boyishly narrow, the arms coming out of his short-sleeved shirt hairless and stick-like. Standing, he stooped like a man covering up excess height, but went five-seven stretched out. He gestured with a flick of his head for Todd to follow him deeper into the building.

  “Marty said something,” Traynor mumbled as he led the way down a poorly lit hall and into a break room with two vending machines against a water-stained wall. A countertop held a coffeemaker, stacks of styrofoam cups, stir sticks and a powdered cream container. The company boss motioned Todd to a rickety table where they took opposing seats.

  Traynor leaped up almost immediately, muttering, “Forms. I gotta…you gotta fill out…” He left, and returned seconds later. “Forms,” he repeated, dropping tax forms, insurance forms and God-knew-what-else on the table.

  When Todd pawed his shirt front for a pen he knew wouldn’t be there, the new boss waved him off. “Don’t worry. Fill ‘em out…whenever. Come on.”

  And that was, apparently, the end of the interview.

  “Um, aren’t there any other, um, details?” Todd asked as he followed the other man out of the break room.

  “Let’s see,” Jack through over his shoulder. “Work hours are eight-thirty to five. Be prompt. Pay’s eleven-fifty an hour to start. Overtime if you get called in weekends.”

  “Eleven-fifty?” Todd asked stupidly. Hardly a fortune, but frankly more than he was expecting to make at the decrepit-looking building.

  Traynor stopped in the dark hallway and made eye contact for what seemed like the first time. “I think that’s the rate,” he said slowly. “But if Marty McConlon promised you more we could…I could check…”

  “No. No, that’s not it,” Todd said. “It’s just…nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  There wasn’t as much noise as he’d expected in the cavernous work space. The cement floor sharply echoed what sounds there were: loud radio music and conversational male voices under the rumble of a forklift and two or three machines. The air smelled dry and dusty with cardboard accumulation and sharp with engine oil.

  “We’re not as busy as we’d like, but wait here,” Jack said. “I’ll see where we can fit you in.”

  Todd felt foolish, holding up the concrete block wall just inside the large room. He watched Traynor approach a bearded man in a big-ass cowboy hat with jean-clad legs wrapped around a metal stool. He was wrestling flat cardboard panels into the back of growling machinery. The man’s back was to Todd. From that view, his beer belly hung so low as to resemble round ears on either side of his hips.

  The two turned and stared openly at Todd, then Beerbelly shook his head. Traynor said something into the man’s ear, the machine still roaring. Beerbelly shook his head again, sharper this time. Traynor shrugged—obviously not worth arguing about—and walked away. Beerbelly didn’t need or want help, and he wasn’t shy about it.

  A yellow diesel forklift whined into view and wheeled to a stop not ten feet from Todd. The man glaring down at him from the driver’s seat had a face that looked like it had been rubbed raw with steel wool. Trying to cover it, he’d added a scraggly beard and attitude. Lava Face fluttered the accelerator pedal, gunned the engine.

  “Mark.”

  Lava Face, aka Mark, twisted in his seat to turn his glare upon Jack Traynor before releasing the clutch and pealing away without a word.

  Traynor sighed, shook his head and said to Todd, “Follow me.”

  Men of few words. About a dozen feet from Beerbelly’s machine stood another. Long and narrow and yellow, it seemed held together by conveyor belts. At the head—or the back—of the machine, a man in a ball cap stood on a short platform. His job seemed to be to feed die-cut cardboard from a flat stack into the works. When it came out the other end it was picked up and restacked by another man on the opposite end of the conveyor belt. All Todd could see of the man in the ball cap was his back and the silver chain that dipped into his back pocket, no doubt keeping his wallet in check.

  Traynor broke into his thoughts with another barely heard comment, and Todd had to cup one ear to get it repeated.

  “It’s a taper,” Traynor screamed against the twin rumble of machinery. “One guy holds the ends together and sends the cardboard through, and it comes out taped.”

  The machine made a rhythmic snap of a sound as it automatically cut lengths of tape and slammed them onto the boxes shoved through by Ball Cap.

  Traynor indicated with the twitch of a finger that Todd should follow. “The second guy,” his new boss was saying, “takes the cardboard off the belt and ties them in stacks of twenty. The third guy—that’s you—takes and piles the stacks on top of this pallet here.”

  Todd turned his attention to the second worker, who currently seemed to be having no problem handling both of those last tasks by himself. He was easily accepting the taped panels off the conveyor, stacking them, counting off twenty, looping twine around the stacks, and filling the pallet.

  Jack stooped over the second guy and spoke. A round-faced man who’d managed to keep most of his baby fat, this second man glanced over his shoulder at Todd, then lowered his head and moved away from the pallet.

  “Okay, you can get started,” Jack called to Todd.

  Time crawled. Chain Pocket kept stopping to get Lava Face on the fork lift to bring him more die-cut stacks or to refill the taper when it ran dry of water for sealing. It seemed the only practical way to know that the taper was dry was to wait till
it started spitting out a bunch of unsealed panels, at which point Chain Pocket would let loose with a string of oaths and kick the machine in its ass before calling a temporary halt to matters.

  But even when production ran smoothly, there was simply too little work. To pass the time, Todd tried making a comment or two to the round-faced man sweating and wheezing next to him, but got nothing. So he did like everyone else and, despite the floor to ceiling stacks of dust-dry flat cardboard, smoked to fill the empty time.

  He also had a chance to figure out Beerbelly’s machine across the room. The man in the cowboy hat was feeding it long, flat cardboard panels which came out scored for folding and tabbing, and printed. Similar to the working arrangement of the taper crew, Beerbelly had two co-workers at the end of the machine stacking and loading pallets that Lava Face, in his rumbly forklift, picked up now and again and exchanged for empty pallets.

  One more similarity between the two crews: neither needed three workers.

  The third wheel on the printer-slotter seemed to be one of the black guys Todd had seen at the Sundown. Seeing the man carefully stacking panels that didn’t need his attention, Todd recalled Kathy Lee Dwyer’s words about getting overpaid for waitressing. There’d been something else she’d been about to say. Something about what had drawn her to the town, but that’s when Melanie had screamed, and Kathy Lee had never finished.

  Todd made a mental note to ask her about it.

  He dragged on a cigarette and strained to think. What companies went out of their way to pay strangers to take jobs that didn’t need taking? In this economy?

  Both machines cut off just then and startled him with sudden, deafening solitude.

  “What is it?” he called out to Roundface.

  “Break,” the man grunted.

  The men gathered by the open bay door, several tearing off their shirts and raising their faces to the mid-morning sun. Todd hesitated, then figured they’d think even worse of him if he didn’t at least try to fit in. He took a few steps in their direction.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  The black guy from the Sundown perched on a pile of pallets. He was about thirty-five, with forearm muscle that bunched up as he scratched his jaw. He reached into his pocket, popped a breath mint and said, “They’re not too friendly to the likes of you and me.”

  As if the men sunning themselves on the loading dock had heard, they turned and glared at the outsiders with expressions that seemed to support the statement. Todd could hear the black guy’s teeth clinking against his breath mint.

  “What do you do here?” he asked. Something to say.

  The man grinned. “Well let me tell ya, massah, I done push a broom. I steps and fetches tools, I empties trash barrels. But mostly I just stands around looking helpless.”

  Todd jerked a thumb at the machine behind them. “You were helping out there a few minute ago.”

  “On the printer-slotter? Yeah. That’s because ol’ Jack heard me bitching and moaning ‘bout having nothing to do. He nearly passed out in a dead faint ‘cuz he’s thinking I’m thinking of quitting. First thing he does, he ups me to twelve-fifty an hour.”

  He waved a finger at Todd. “I see you got your own bullshit job.” He grinned. “It’s like one of them light bulb jokes: how many Sundowners it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer…as many as you can hire. You stick around, man, you gonna see how funny it really is.”

  The crowd at the loading dock had forgotten them in a haze of cigarette smoke and throaty chuckles.

  “What’s your name?” Todd asked.

  “Jermaine.” He sucked noisily on the breath mint slowly disappearing on his tongue. “Jermaine Whittock.”

  “You with that other guy? Little older than you, a bit of a gut?”

  “You mean the other black guy, right?”

  “No, not, well yeah, but—”

  “Don’t worry about it. No, that’s Carl Haggerty. He’s from Philly or Pittsburgh or something. I’m here with my old lady.”

  Jermaine swung his head for another look at the work crew on the loading dock. “Carl hit town with another guy. The buddy, he slipped out after his first paycheck, I guess.” Jermaine clicked the mint between his teeth for a few thoughtful seconds. “That other guy? He’s the smart one.”

  “How come?”

  “For disappearing like he did. Ain’t the world’s friendliest town.”

  Todd thought it over. It was hard to find disagreement, but the pieces didn’t fit. “If they don’t like strangers, how come they draw us here? Cheap lodging. Good pay. Busy work just to keep us on the payrolls.”

  Jermaine stood, and Todd followed his gaze to the crowd coming toward them.

  “Break’s over,” Beerbelly grunted before starting up his printer-slotter.

  Jermaine Whittock moved in so as not to be overheard. “Now you asking the right question,” he said, no longer grinning.

  Chapter Ten

  Todd’s stacking job ran out about a half hour before lunch and job assignments seemed to shift, leaving him out entirely. The hell with it, he thought as he reached for his smokes. He plunked his ass down on an idled forklift near an open bay and puffed away. Let them tell him to get back to work.

  He was still there by lunchtime.

  Conversation stopped when he entered the break room, so he stuffed a fistful of change into the vending machine and retrieved soda pop, chips and a single-serve can of peaches, then joined Jermaine. He’d arranged piles of cardboard into a makeshift table and chair where he sat with napkin, plastic utensils and a paper plate piled high with deviled egg, potato salad and rice-stuffed pepper.

  Todd’s stomach rumbled as he stared at the other man’s set-up and twisted the lid off his cold peaches. “Makes you hungry doing nothing,” he said.

  Jermaine smacked his lips, but didn’t reply.

  Todd formed his own stacked-cardboard chair and sat. “So what brought you here?”

  Jermaine dabbed almost daintily with his napkin. “Place called the Time-Out Market and Deli. One of them twenty-four-seven convenience stores near the famous 8 Mile Road in Detroit. And in case you don’t know Detroit, it ain’t Mister Rogers’ Fucking Neighborhood.”

  “Never been there,” said Todd. “Been thinking about it a little. My brother-in-law’s heard Ford’s going to be hiring again soon.”

  Jermaine’s laugh sounded high and genuine. “I bet your brother-in-law don’t know who tole him this or remember any of the details. He don’t have a phone number or a hiring manager’s name. You get an economy this bad for this long and rumors send you traipsing the country to that next place on the map jus’ dying for help. ‘No experience? No training? Ain’t had a full-time job in three years? No problem. We’re hiring!’”

  He laughed again, but this time it didn’t sound so genuine. “I was telling you about the Time-Out Market and Deli.” He popped his deviled egg in his mouth and spoke around it. “Place was run by about four Arab guys. Cousins, brothers, I don’t know. ‘Bout half of them named Mohammed. They was hiring, that’s the thing. They only paid five or six bucks an hour, but all off the books. And for the graveyard shift, ten to six, they went up to a whole seven bucks. Well, I hadn’t had any work but an occasional day-labor gig for months, and my old lady—Tonya—she’d lost her job at this lamp assembly plant ‘cuz—get this—the feds fined them like a hundred-thousand bucks or something for not having enough brothers on the payroll. So they shut the goddamn thing down and moved to, I don’t know, India or some goddamn place where the wages are lower.”

  “Anyway,” said Todd, trying to move it along before lunch break ended.

  “Point is, I took the graveyard shift on Murder Avenue cuz we got three kids and really needed the money. Okay?”

  He crumpled up his paper waste and dumped it into a nearby trashcan. “First night, I’m scared shitless but everything’s cool. Next night, same thing. Night after that, not so good. There’s a kid, eighteen or nineteen, at the end of the aisle wh
en this other brother comes striding in in a long coat. He goes, ‘Hey, Roosevelt,’ and the first kid looks up. This first kid gets a real serious expression on his face, then he breaks into a grin.”

  “A grin,” said Todd, wanting to know if he heard right.

  “Yeah. A grin. Like ‘shit, what else can I do.’ Then this dude that called out his name whips out a sawed-off from in his coat. He pumps it and starts spraying shots at the kid. I mean, it’s this roar of sound like an explosion that won’t stop. The kid, like, steps back a little so he’s kinda behind an aisle, but that’s all he does.”

  Jermaine stopped to wipe at the sweat sheen that covered his face. Maybe from the heat, maybe not. “I’m standing there behind the counter like a statue, man. Like if I stay real quiet and still, the shooter won’t see me. But he don’t give a shit I’m there or not. All he’s interested in is putting bullets in my beer cans, my soup and chips and feminine napkins, everything but this kid standing there with a stupid grin on his face.”

  Jermaine was also grinning at the telling.

  Todd said, “The shooter ever get the kid?”

  “That’s just it,” Jermaine all but shouted, then glanced around nervously as if fearing he’d been overheard. “He fires four, five times, whatever the motherfucker had in that hogleg of his. By the time he’s finished, my ears was ringing so loud I barely hear my beer cans still exploding. The shooter just stares at this kid standing there, grinning. He goes ‘Shit’ one time, the shooter dude does, then he splits. Runs like hell. The kid, the grinning kid, starts stroking his body and I figure after awhile he’s looking for bullet holes. When he don’t find any, he walks out the door still smiling his stupid-ass grin. He’s stepping over shattered glass, but it’s like it’s no big deal. Just a tough day at work, you know?”

  Jermaine’s eyes shone. “No big deal ‘cept last thing I notice is the kid’s got this dark stain on the crotch of his baggies.”