The Power Plant
by
Charles W. Harvey
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
The Power Plant
Copyright © 2013 by Charles W. Harvey
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THE POWER PLANT
By
Charles Harvey
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Table of Contents
Similar Stories
Promise Goodday Excerpt
The Power Plant
“Damn it to hell! I wish we could get Hawkins to pass his exam, Walter. We’ve done everything under heaven’s stars to help him. I want to pay him more money. He’s a good fella, real docile. How many kids does he have, Walter?” Chief Engineer Barrett asks. His voice is soft and woeful.
Walter, the assistant Power Plant Manager, looks up from his Navy magazine. His hair is cut into a gray buster brown, but his bald spot makes him look like he’s wearing a white yarmulke. He’s Irish and in a bit of a stupor. It takes him a minute to remember who Barrett is and whom Barrett is talking about.
“Uh, yeah, Hawkins--I don’t know. Six I think. Maybe ten.” Walter’s head drops back into the magazine. His bald spot shines like a small porcelain saucer. His blue eyes sweep over the article he’s reading, “Navy Pensions--Cheating the Actuary.”
“Well I wish there was something we could do,” Barrett continues.
“He’ll pass it next year,” Walter answers not looking up. Furrows form between his eyebrows. His eyes follow his liver-spotted finger as it cuts a path through a table of numbers.
I watch the two of them from the corner of my eye. I want to say, “Hold on you guys. You know very well you can give Hawkins a raise as fat as a Christmas turkey.” I’m a Boiler Operator II in the Power Plant. However, I’ve never lit a water heater in my life. My job is to type and file away the stuff I type. I always file everything under “S” for stuff. I’m privy to secrets such as “Salary Ranges for the Plant Operators” and “Steamed Air--The Environmental Impact.” I know Hawkins is nowhere near the top of his salary for his job title. But I don’t say anything. I just sit and bang those keys.
Therefore, when you release valve A
steam heretofore unmentioned will
escape.
I ease my guilt for not speaking up by pretending to believe that Barrett and Walter have good intentions toward Hawkins. They made him Employee of the Month, which got him a dinner in his honor in the University Cafeteria, a five hundred dollar check, plus the chance to park his rusty red truck next to Walter’s spunky yellow Corvette. It’s not my fault Hawkins can’t pass any test.
Hawkins moves fast and does everything he’s told to do. He’s in charge of fetching the hamburger’s from McDonald’s at noon on Fridays. He plays dominoes with Jerry the plant supervisor and Walter when he’s in the mood. (Barrett snorts at dominoes. I can tell he wishes Walter was more interested in valves and steam.) Sometimes Hawkins beats Walter. Walter doesn’t like to lose at “bones.” I suspect he knows he would lose more often if Hawkins didn’t forget to write down his score from time to time. I believe that’s one reason Walter doesn’t care if Hawkins passes a test or not.
I catch Hawkins staring at me often, smiling as if we’re strangers wondering if we know each other, but aren’t quite sure if we should speak. I smile back at him. In my heart, I wish he would stop being so good. Stop bending so much and tell Jerry, Walter, and Barrett where to go. My Mother said my Father died from goodness--always doing what he was told by bosses, by preachers, by his family. He spread himself thin. “He was a doormat and just got wore out,” Mother said.
Turn valve stem A counterclockwise
such that it points away from
B valve at a right left angle.
Failure to do so will nullify
all other attendant processes.
This is the value of an education I tell myself as I type. I’ve just started college but look where I am so far. I’m high up in the air-conditioned office of the University’s Power Plant that blows like the hawk, chilled air over the Professor’s bald heads. I type purchase orders. I know salary information. I tap my feet and get full of myself. I will never be a doormat.
There are other men in the power plant I wish I could know. Jerry is one. He isn’t fat like Hawkins. He is red as the Georgia clay he sprang from. His eyes when you can catch them are ominous as dark clouds. His jawbone is chiseled and made for barking orders.
“Hawkins, I ain’t goin’ to tell Y'all no more; turn that bolt counter clockwise or else the water is goin’ to drown y'all's asses down there! C’mon, Hawkins, lift up on it!” Jerry talks and grabs his crotch at the same time--for emphasis I guess. The bolt doesn’t move until two men get on the wrench. Jerry relaxes his grip, but he keeps that squint in his eyes. He’s always frowning as if the sun is searing his pupils. Even on cloudy days, he keeps his eyes half shut. I wonder if this mean look is how he keeps the men in line. It works on Hawkins. The other men stare Jerry in the eye when they speak to him. Hawkins gazes at the oil-stained floor and shifts his feet. I tried for a week to squint like Jerry. People kept telling me to go and see an eye doctor. My Mother asked was I constipated.
Jerry’s coldness gets to me at times and so I go back to Hawkins. I imagine myself burying my head in his big oozy belly. I never think to be frightened of Hawkins until that day he stepped into the Power Plant office.
As you adjust the tension knob
which is located on control panel A
behind chiller number five, take
care as to also adjust the spring
bar on panel B
or a geyser may erupt.
I’m frazzled. The IBM Selectric decides to do carriage returns right in the middle of sentences. The three-wheeled Cushman stalled and I had had to get out in the rain and push it from the wooded edge of the campus back to the Power Plant. I do not need anymore frazzling. I’m typing hard--crunching words into the paper like someone stamping metal, when suddenly I feel as if I’m being smothered. I look up and Hawkins’s stomach is pressing against my elbow.
“What are you doin’?” he asks looking at the typewriter.
“I’m just typing up some of Mr. Barrett’s book,” I say politely and puzzled. Hawkins senses my unease, but he doesn’t back off. No one in a blue uniform ever comes into the power plant office unless summoned. Barrett and Walter wear dandruff speckled dark blue suits. Jerry’s uniform is a white shirt and dark trousers always bunched up at the crotch. I dress like nerdy white boys--earth shoes and shiny polyester. Hawkins picks up my papers and casts his eyes over a sentence or two. He put them down exactly as I had them and glances around the room.
“You’re not fooling nobody. You know that don’t you?” Hawkins says to me. “I’m on to you.”
My mouth opens and shuts like there’s a spring in it, but I can’t say anything. Hawkins smiles and walks out of the office.
For the rest of the day, my typing is slow and ponderous. My armpits stink. The musk is so strong, I get a dull headache. “Who am I trying to fool?” What does he mean, I ask myself. I walk, talk, and eat like any other man. I climb ladders and walk over scaffolding two stories off the ground. What secret is Hawkins trying to sniff out about me? Is it the same thing Bear tried to sniff out?
I was fourteen and Bear drunk and red-eyed told me he had a “problem” he thought I could solve. For some reason, I sensed Bear’s “problem.” People say things about a teenage boy who stays too close to his Mother. In the apartment’s humming Laundromat, Bear pat me on the ass and said
that was the problem that needed solving. I should have gone to war with him with my fists instead of looking down and shifting my feet back and forth. I even stood on my tiptoes like a ballerina.
Now it’s Hawkins. I should stare at him hard and ugly, like boys on street corners do at cars cruising by--like they sometimes look at me because I’m in college and don’t grab myself down there and say nasty things to passing girls. I had heard someone say that sissies smile a lot. For the rest of the day, I practice looking grim like Jerry, especially when I pass Hawkins. Hawkins doesn’t look at me. Maybe I do have war in me.
The next day Jerry and a few others stand above ground staring into a grave size hole. Jerry is quiet. He is not barking orders. His hand rests on his crotch as if he is quietly reassuring himself. I have just delivered a memo with attachments and footnotes from Barrett to the University’s buzzing Accounting Office. I start to walk by the hole. But a voice tells me that I should stop and take a look, that only women pass holes and the machinery that digs them with calm indifference. I peer over the edge of the hole.
“Hey, Jerry, grab him and put him down here with me,” Hawkins shouts up when he sees my face.
Jerry reaches for me and I clutch my hand to my chest. I instantly regret that reaction. Jerry’s lip curls.
“Shit, Hawkins, he don’t want to come down there with you. He’s scared. He’s scared the booger man goin’ to get him,” Jerry sneers.
I smile sheepishly, but I’m crying on the inside--crying because Jerry has sneered at me. It’s not that he ever smiles at me, but I don’t want him to hate me. I know right away he's sniffed something different about me. Maybe he and Hawkins are working as a team--one to pry and the other to judge me when my “sensitivity,” as Mother calls it, reveals itself in my walk or the gestures of my wrist. I feel lower than the dust on the Power Plant floor. I turn and sprint to the office. Barrett greets me at the door with version six of the dense Power Plant Manual he’s having me type. I wonder if there’ll ever be any war in me.
Hawkins is in charge of locking up the tool room. This symbolic gesture is on orders from Barrett. (“The man can’t pass a test and get a promotion, but we can still make him feel important.”) The tool room is where the men store their instruments of manipulation--pincers, claw-shaped wrenches, chains for hoisting, ropes for tying down, and hammers for driving nails into metal skin. In the cool darkness, I caress miles of fat orange electrical cord. I run my wrists lightly over the sharp teeth of the power saws. The conversation I had with Spikes (the Plant’s Chief Technician) echoes in my head.
“Where did you say that place was?” I had asked Spikes.
“What place?”
“You know, where you say the women dance naked at.”
“Oh yeah, man, they got some fine women there. And young cats like me and you, they be near ‘bout begging us to come in. Yeah, some fine women be there. Buck naked. Ain’t got on nothin’ but the air around them.”
“Well, where is it?”
Spike didn’t answer right away. He let me hang on his line baited with naked women.
“Spikes, where is the club at man?”
“On Rose Street, man. Thirty-five hundred block. Ain’t no sign on the place. But the address is in blue neon letters above the door. You goin’ to have to pay twenty dollars to get in the door, though, ‘cause they don’t know who you are.”
Twenty dollars, I think as I wander through the tool room. I want to be like any other guy, but do I want to pay twenty dollars to see naked women? What am I supposed to do once I see them? What do I do if they lead me off to a back room and ask me to get naked with them? I’m Nineteen and never even kissed a girl. If I had a gold tooth like Spikes and if I knew about liquor and drinking and sports and all the other stuff men do, I’d know what to do with a naked woman. If, if, if, when suddenly I hear a loud clang like a broken bell. Hawkins stands outside the gate, feeding the hook of a giant padlock through the wire. He smiles at me. My hands go up in the air as I run toward the gate.
“Hey man, let me out of here!”
“What you goin’ to do if I don’t?” Hawkins puts his hands on his hips and sticks his lips out at me. My stomach flutters. I stifle the urge to break wind.
“Let me out now!” I scream. Then I remember that men are not supposed to scream. We bark. So I bark. I sound as if I have a frog in my throat. Hawkins pays no attention.
“Say please Mr. Hawkins let me out,” he says with eyes half closed. He reminds me of a crocodile sleepy and dangerous. He puts his hand on the knob of the wooden door that closes over the tool room gate. I’m ready to give up some pride.
“Now, Hawkins let me out,” I whisper.
Hawkins looks off. His eyes follow an imaginary bird flying along the ceiling. His lips are still pursed as if he’s getting ready to whistle.
“That ain’t what I told you to say. What did I say?” He makes back and forth motions with the door.
“Mr. Hawkins, let me out,” I say flatly.
“You’re not fooling me. I know you want to say ‘please.’“
Hawkins looks stern as if he’s scolding a child. I try to see a hint of laugh lines around his eyes or around his mouth, but Hawkins’s face is rigid. He stops rocking the door. His right hand grips the knob. His left hand tugs at his crotch. Hawkins’ big belly rises over the top of his pants. I see it swell and push toward me.
Bells ring in my head. It’s my Mother phoning the Power Plant late into the night, to inquire why haven’t I come home. I know what time the night Operator is supposed to make his rounds and read the meters. But he will sleep half the night under the narcotic hum of the big chillers and fudge the numbers on the meter sheets. He’ll eat his lunch in the control room up front by the big gaping door of the plant. He’ll piss through the grate rather than come toward the tool room to go to the toilet. There’s a side door that’s always unlocked because the lock’s broken. It’s a good way for someone to get into the power plant unnoticed and into the tool room if they have a key like Hawkins has a key. I know Hawkins knows these things too. Because now he’s looking at me and the ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling. He breathes hard and his hand digs deeper between his legs. He moves the door back and forth.
“Goddamn, Hawkins, come on so I can lock the garage door down. That damn Barrett spotted oil on the floor. He’s mad as hell ‘cause he thinks the new night guy is fixing his car in here instead of watching the pressure boilers. He’s riding my ass about it. I’m ready to get out of here.” Jerry tugs at his crotch and walks toward Hawkins and me.
“Hey Jerry, look who I got in jail,” Hawkins says before Jerry can see me. Jerry laughs and points at me. I’m ashamed as If my pants have fallen and yet I’m glad to see Jerry laughing and pointing.
“Hey, Y'all!” Jerry shouts, “Come here and see who’s in jail!”
This would be the day when we have one hundred percent attendance. When the men have had their good guffaws, Jerry unlocks the gate and lets me out. I want to run away with my face in my hands. But men don’t do that. I stand outside the big door and throw my hand up at all of them as they back their power horses out of the parking lot and head toward the western exit of the University. Hawkins is the only one who doesn’t wave back.
Later that night, I circle Rose Street, around the dark little building with its tiny neon address above the door. A crisp twenty scratches my chest through the pocket of my thin red shirt. I wonder what a naked lady will do for me.
###
*****
My Manhood is Very Important to Me
Bark Too
When Dogs Bark 2
The Butterfly Killer
Promise Goodday - a novel
*********
Excerpt from Promise Goodday
Dear LaKeisha Ann:
Do you remember that rainy day, when the rain trapped you in my house, (when the r
ain was to me like Christmas tinsel and not razor blades), and we played husband and wife? Do you remember that day? My Big Mama dozed in front of the TV as Another World flickered in front of her closed eyes. Eric snoozed on his sickbed. The sheets formed a tent from his erection. We watched that tent rise and fall in time with his breathing. You wanted to touch it, but I wouldn’t let you. I didn't know then, but now I know why we all of a sudden wanted to play husband and wife. The rain fills people with romantic notions. That's why I can forgive a certain bus driver.
We argued over who was going to be the husband coming home from working hard on the job. You won when you said the husband had to be a boy. Why I thought a woman could be a husband, I don't know. I knew I didn’t want to be no boy.
You wore my Mama’s vegetable strainer for a hard hat and a Ninja Turtles lunch kit was your tool box. You looked more like a knight than a construction worker. You went outside on the front porch and stood for a few minutes while I pretended to be the wife inside the house washing dishes. You kept coming in before your time and I had to keep sending you out.
"Wait a minute, boy . . . I'm washing dishes . . . No you can't come in yet, I'm watching The Young and the Restless . . . Okay now you can come in 'cause I'm cooking your supper . . ."
You came in and pecked me on the cheek, looked in my make believe pot at the imaginary beans and rice I was “cooking” and said they smelled good. Then you said you had to get out of your wet clothes. I said, “You can't get naked in the kitchen. You got to go in the bathroom or the bedroom.” And you said, “Where they at?” And I said, “Silly husband, you don't know where your bedroom or bathroom is?” You twisted my arm and made me tell you. The “bathroom” was behind a big blue vinyl dinette chair where my Big Mama kept her flower pots. You said you had never seen a red commode. I said, “Pretend it's white.” Our “bedroom” was underneath the kitchen table.