| |
Joy
By
Jonathan Lyons
At 6:45, John Denver belted out "THANK GOD I'M A COUNTRY BOY!" from the bedside AM radio, his croon a distorted rattle in the tinny mono speaker. Billy-Ray Doyle didn't need much time to get ready for work: time to pull on a reeking, stained pair of jeans and one of his faded Pepsi-logo T-shirts. But Billy-Ray needed a stomachful of meat to fuel a day at the rendering plant; Joy flinched awake at the first sound from the alarm and, wide-eyed, nervously tugged her robe on and made for the kitchen. She ruffled a hand through a head of tangled yellow hair and scurried to the kitchen to fry up Billy-Ray's four large, greasy Jimmy Dean sausage patties and toast a slice of Wonder-bread for herself.
Billy-Ray Doyle did not like it when the woman was late with his meal. She knew her place, she knew her routine, and she knew what he wanted for breakfast every day: "No chink food an' no spick food, woman; make me somethin' American." A wide-swath ruling on all meals in the Doyle household. There was just no God-damned excuse for her to fuck up, and she'd forced him to remind her of that from time to time — remind with a crushing backhand.
Life sucked enough, having to drive all the way to Badger every day without her getting in his way.
Just no God-damned excuse.
Bo Tyler was already plopped down at a table in the break room when Doyle arrived; he always made it to work ahead of Doyle. The reek of fouling meat and blood clung to the air, the equipment, and the rubber aprons and gloves at DuCharme Meat Packing. It held fast to the workers and to their clothes. No soap, no shampoo, no detergent had ever bested that lingering stench of decay.
Bo, the plant's grizzly-like foreman for nearly two years now, didn't notice anymore.
When Doyle arrived, Tyler was sloppily smacking his way through a pack of Ho-Ho's. Doyle still had trouble eating at the plant, and would have told Tyler to knock it the hell off, but Tyler was his foreman, and Doyle needed the job that made it possible to buy his big, red four by four and have K-C lights installed.
"Bo," he said by way of greeting.
Tyler waved an index finger. Tyler's red bramble thatch of a beard held amorphous globs of Ho-Ho and spittle snared in mid-fall. Doyle actively didn't acknowledge Tyler's plumber-butt work jeans; his guts felt twingy from the armada of Old Milwaukee Tall Boys he'd put down the night before with a Bailey's-and-two-percent-pasteurized-store-brand-milk chaser.
"Billy-Ray, how's the little missus," Bo Tyler asked phlegmily, moist, chewed clumps of Ho-Ho spattering a chocolate and mucous spatter onto the table before him.
"Woman's good," Doyle replied with gruff disinterest.
"Y'wanna pick up some overtime?" asked Tyler, tearing open another twin pack of Ho-Ho's. He crumpled the plastic-and-cardboard packaging onto the pile of discarded wrappings before him.
Billy-Ray Doyle, never highly motivated by or about anything, did what came naturally: He began thinking of ways to get out of the work. Depositing a mucousy glob into the drinking fountain, he said: "Hafta think 'bout it."
"Need someone to foreman for me after two 'clock break. I got a appointment," Tyler confided.
Maybe, Doyle reasoned, they were testing him out, checking to see whether he could handle a promotion to shift foreman, maybe even out of the plant's rendering line and into the better paying packaging end. That would mean more money. He could jack up the pick-up.
"Can you cover the OT, Billy-Ray?"
"How much OT?"
" 'Til seven."
Doyle could always use the money.
"Y'got it."
The break room began to fill with workers as 8:00 drew near. Doyle tugged at his jeans and punched his time card. The dingy room smogged with a Marlboro-Reds and body-odor exhaust while they waited for the buzzer that told them to work.
Ruffling his greasy, stringy black hair, he wandered over to his locker and began strapping on his rubber work suit: heavy, black gloves; a blood-spattered, white hard hat with "Doyle" scrawled across the bill in dull, black marker; black rubber boots; and the clumsy, smeared goggles the plant provided.
The buzzer deafened the plant's employees for four seconds; Pavlovian responses.
As they shuffled slowly into the steel and fluorescent-light work place, Doyle could hear the first truck of the day docked out back, hear the deep, throaty panic in the bovine calls. The tube lights gave him a headache.
He took up his position. Trained in most of the stations on the rendering line, Doyle manned the machine that tears the hides free from the livestock.
Red Sammy Schmitz, with a spare tire at the waist and the florid complexion that earned him the nickname, didn't have to work much till the end of the shift. He'd made a studied practice of inactivity that included the development a dissuasive battery of complaints to hurl at anyone looking to assign him work. They weren't about to interrupt his inactivity.
The rendering line directs the flow of blood from its day's slaughter into two monstrous vats. Red Sammy, newly appointed rendering line custodian, found his cherished inactivity interrupted when the first vat's fill-level detectors failed, and the tank overflowed, dowsing him in lumpy, coagulating, lukewarm beef blood. After a trip to the break room, where a guffawing Bo Tyler hosed him down, he returned to the line with visions of a professional wrestling battle royal dancing in his head: He would swab up the flood with his lone mop and bucket. He would emerge the unlikely victor. The crowd would go wild, chanting: "USA! USA!" Hulk Hogan was on his side. Hulk-a-mania running wild.
But Hulk-a-mania petered out on him: Red Sammy's fight only watered down the sticky, caking tide, redistributing it across the white tile. Bucket after mop bucket of the thinned blood found its way into the company's drains, out into the company's sewers, untreated into Badger Creek.
Billy-Ray Doyle lived for times like this, for a good laugh.
He lived for the 10 a.m. coffee break.
After that, he lived for noon, and his half-hour lunch.
Then the 2 o'clock break.
And finally, 5:00.
In the course of a good day, he could see the compressed-air hammer gun shatter the skulls of two thousand head, bursting some of the huge bovine eyes, off-white eye-gelatin glomming onto split skulls in a bloody still life, popping others from the head, dangling from the sockets. Doyle hardly noticed; that was somebody else's problem.
A bloody, stinking job, but he had the four by four, his Pepsi, and he had to pay the woman's way, because he was the man. He traded stench and queasy guts for a solid week's paycheck, money to live on, money for Friday after work at the Turkey Tap. That was the way it was supposed to be.
When the 2 p.m. buzzer shattered the stupor of the rendering line workers, Bo Tyler peeled off his rubber gear and began hosing the blood and small bits of flesh and fur off; the heavy rubber clung with his sweat, and made a sound like Velcro when he pulled it off.
Bo Tyler stepped into the break room and hollered, "Lissenup! Doyle-here's gonna be in charge 'til five. I got a appointment, so I'll be gone till tomorrow."
Blank stares from exhausted workers demonstrated no particular resistance.
Bo Tyler retrieved his beaten aluminum lunch box and left.
Doyle saw an opportunity; if Tyler made him his sort-of second in command, Doyle would be made foreman if anything happened to Tyler.
His co-workers sat, stinking, covered with chum, muck, flesh, bovine bodily fluids and solids, some smoking.
The full-timers didn't let themselves think about their surroundings or work conditions, even what it was that they were doing — an unconscious defense against the horrors of a shift at the plant. The nearest employees came to demonstrating even minor signs of self-awareness came in bets on whether they could piss off workers from other sections of the plant by sitting next to them in the break room as they tried to eat.
Earl Holbrook, who manned the air-hammer gun at the start of the rendering line and who, as a result, was constantly covered in blood, bits of hair and flesh, and the gelatinous ooze of pulverized bovine eyes, took up the challenge. Fats Billy-Joe Schmitz — plant maintenance and absent father of Red Sammy Schmitz, who Red Sammy had never gotten to know well, despite a resident population never quite totaling 1,200 — hadn't found the bet amusing and, as he was wearing his tool belt during the break, found his trusty crescent wrench the first weapon within reach.
The end result was a concussion for Holbrook — who won the bet — and 2 1/2 months in county for Schmitz.
The buzzer shattered any daydreams the workers might have had.
Billy-Ray dreamed of adding a gun rack to the four by four he'd name "Daisy" as soon as he could afford personalized license plates.
Entrails slid to the spillway warm, a washed-out steaming splash of red slapping onto stainless steel.
Joy Doyle was a slight, timid girl with a long-standing conflict with slumber. Sleep did not come easily to her; she spent her nights twitching violently, breathing erratically in short, percussive bursts. Coming back to awareness was a terrifying wrench into the real world.
She'd thought of finishing high school, getting her G.E.D, but Billy-Ray would hear none of it.
Her father reminded her throughout childhood that she needed to find a man to take care of her.
"Woman gotta know 'er place. Bible says," her father would preach, thumbs in the pockets of his coveralls. And: "Y'cain't leech offa me ferever."
Easily frightened her entire life, Joy carried an odd, subjective, individual beauty about her, a beauty her tension and timidity masked entirely; sub-shoulder length, very straight, dishwater yellow hair lent to an air of plainness.
She'd never had many suitors, and she was nearly seventeen, so when Billy-Ray Doyle showed interest, what with his steady job at the plant and all, she decided she'd probably better take the offer while she could. She'd only ever had one other boy show interest in her before, and when she wasn't certain she should marry him after he forced himself on her, he dropped the offer and rode off down that long dirt road. She hadn't acted quickly enough. Her father reminded her of her failure every day until Doyle showed up.
"Don' fuck this one up, girl," father had warned.
She didn't.
To say that sex was not something that Joy Doyle enjoyed would be to grossly understate human capacity for revulsion. She detested the act. She detested the thought of the act. But she knew she couldn't change the rules; sex was the man's right, the wife's duty. Bible said, her father said.
She repressed the memory of their honeymoon night at the Pull'R Inn. Memory of Billy-Ray's sweating body pinning her to the hotel bed's used linens, his beer-swollen gut jiggling like Jell-O when he mounted her, made her clutch hand to mouth to hold back the gush while she ran for cover — a bathroom, the bushes — anything.
It reminded her of father's barn.
Doyle's breath reeked of stale Old Milwaukee, the dank odor of a decrepit bar that hasn't been scrubbed or aired in years. The stench brought vivid recollection of the honeymoon.
Sex was nothing like it was supposed to be; she'd watched TV; she'd seen the movies; "love making,"
they called it — the people on TV, where men did not hit their wives. Sex was supposed to be pleasurable, at least enjoyable. She got no pleasure from Doyle's crude fucking. And though the thought of his disgusting phallus made her stomach churn, she had no choice: He was her husband.
She had spent the morning shuffling nervously through her day's chores, picking up after Billy-Ray Doyle, cleaning his fouled work clothes as best she could, making sure there was enough Old Milwaukee in the 'fridge. Normally she wouldn't have to worry this early, but she had an appointment.
God sent her massages through the TV and AM radio, like the line he'd sent in "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" about getting up at sunrise. So she knew He loved her.
On the tinny AM, through Tammy Wynette, God told her to Stand By Her Man. With a shamed flush, Joy turned it off.
She'd always put off Bo Tyler's passes when she went down to the Turkey Tap to fish out Billy-Ray in the hours after his shift, but after three years of marriage to Doyle, she wondered if her life would always be like this: the way it was supposed to be. Sunlight streaming in through the living-room window, she craved salvation.
The knock on the door, like most things, startled her. Bo Tyler stood at the door, looking in through its torn screen. He'd wetted and combed back his ratty hair and pulled on his best powder-blue leisure suit: Her suitor.
"Billy-Ray's gon' work overtime. Till seven," he said through the torn screen of the door, smiling a conspiratorial smile through that tangled, red beard. He tapped his temple with an index finger, pointing out his wily wits.
Billy-Ray Doyle, never highly motivated by or about anything, did what came naturally: He lived for 5:00.
When the last buzzer finally sounded, he decided to get something to eat, then maybe he'd come back and finish up. He decided to forget to punch out; he'd be back soon anyway, and he could use the money.
Doyle pulled his red pick-up into the dirt drive, the four by four kicking up dust. On AM, Hank Williams Jr. gleefully groused about the fall of the South:
If the south woulda won, we'd-a had it maaaaaade!
When he entered the kitchen, he couldn't believe his eyes: dinner wasn't even started, much less ready. He'd have to remind her about fucking up.
Doyle dragged through the house, searching looking for Joy. The sight of Bo Tyler in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, atop Joy, a crushed Old Milwaukee can by Billy-Ray's nightstand with a Bailey's-and-two-percent-pasteurized-store-brand-milk chaser, his beer-swollen belly swaying, cast everything in a blur for Billy-Ray Doyle.
Sunlight bathed the room, pouring in past red curtains, the shadows of leaves swirling interruptions on the sheets. It was as though he was seeing her for the first time, in the soft-focus haze of spilling light; seeing that losing her might be a bad thing. He heard a peculiar ringing in his ears, a controlled, continuous, subdued screech of amplifier feedback.
"J — " he tried distantly to ask. "Joy?"
Billy-Ray Doyle went back to work. He found the air-hammer gun, and put it to its intended use. Because the plant was deserted after 5 p.m., he had to handle all the work himself. But he remembered his training. He ran meat hooks into the carcasses. The air-hammer gun made a mess of eyeball goo, and this slowed him momentarily. He secured the carcasses to his work station, turned on the machine that peels the rinds from livestock; he opened the still-twitching carcasses, dumping steaming, slippery entrails into the spillway. As he mopped aside a few entangling, dirty-yellow hairs, he noted with distaste that Red Sammy Schmitz hadn't completely finished mopping up the spill from earlier; the white floor tiles still held a reddish tint.
Billy-Ray Doyle skillfully halved the carcasses and, proving his readiness for promotion to the packing division and the other end of the plant, cut the meat down into ribs, flank steaks, roasts, whole hams to be cured, and packaged all of the cuts, Styrofoam trays underneath, plastic cling wrap to seal them. Some excess remained, and Doyle emptied this into the hot dog vat and meat grinder, where all meat waste was dumped in accordance with company policy.
The work finished, Billy-Ray Doyle punched out. He craved burger.
Copyright © 2004 Jonathan Lyons
|
