Night Shift

  Hall worked the picker machine, a balky gadget manufactured by a defunct Cleveland firm in 1934. He had only been working in the mill since April, which meant he was still making minimum $1.78 an hour, which was still all right. No wife, no steady girl, no alimony. He was a drifter, and during the last three years he had moved on his thumb from Berkeley (college student) to Lake Tahoe (busboy) to Galveston (stevedore) to Miami (short-order cook) to Wheeling (taxi driver and dish-washer) to Gates Falls, Maine (picker-machine operator). He didn't figure on moving again until the snow fell. He was a solitary person and he liked the hours from eleven to seven when the blood flow of the big mill was at its coolest, not to mention the temperature.

  The only thing he did not like was the rats.

  The third floor was long and deserted, lit only by the sputtering glow of the fluorescents. Unlike the other levels of the mill, it was relatively silent and unoccupied--at least by the humans. The rats were another matter. The only machine on three was the picker; the rest of the floor was storage for the ninety-pound bags of fiber which had yet to be sorted by Hall's long gear-toothed machine. They were stacked like link sausages in long rows, some of them (especially the discontinued meltons and irregular slipes for which there were no orders) years old and dirty gray with industrial wastes. They made fine nesting places for the rats, huge, fat-bellied creatures with rabid eyes and bodies that jumped with lice and vermin.

  Hall had developed a habit of collecting a small arsenal of soft-drink cans from the trash barrel during his break. He pegged them at the rats during times when work was slow, retrieving them later at his leisure. Only this time Mr. Foreman had caught him, coming up the stairs instead of using the elevator like the sneaky sonofabitch everyone said he was.

  "What are you up to, Hall?"

  "The rats," Hall said, realizing how lame that must sound now that all the rats had snuggled safely back into their houses. "I peg cans at 'em when I see 'em."

  Warwick nodded once, briefly. He was a big beefy man with a crew cut. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was pulled down. He looked at Hall closely. "We don't pay you to chuck cans at rats, mister. Not even if you pick them up again."

  "Harry hasn't sent down an order for twenty minutes," Hall answered, thinking: Why couldn't you stay the hell put and drink your coffee? "I can't run it through the picker if I don't have it."

  Warwick nodded as if the topic no longer interested him.

  "Maybe I'll take a walk up and see Wisconsky," he said. "Five to one he's reading a magazine while the crap piles up in his bins."

  Hall didn't say anything.

  Warwick suddenly pointed. "There's one! Get the bastard!"

  Hall fired the Nehi can he had been holding with one whistling, overhand motion. The rat, which had been watching them from atop one of the fabric bags with its bright buckshot eyes, fled with one faint squeak. Warwick threw back his head and laughed as Hall went after the can.

  "I came to see you about something else," Warwick said. "Is that so?"

  "Next week's Fourth of July week." Hall nodded. The mill would be shut down Monday to Saturday--vacation week for men with at least one year's tenure. Layoff week for men with less than a year. "You want to work?"

  Hall shrugged. "Doing what?"

  "We're going to clean the whole basement level. Nobody's touched it for twelve years. Helluva mess. We're going to use hoses."

  "The town zoning committee getting on the board of directors?"

  Warwick looked steadily at Hall. "You want it or not? Two an hour, double time on the fourth. We're working the graveyard shift because it'll be cooler."

  Hall calculated. He could clear maybe seventy-five bucks after taxes. Better than the goose egg he had been looking forward to.

  "All right."

  "Report down by the dye house next Monday."

  Hall watched him as he started back to the stairs. Warwick paused halfway there and turned back to look at Hall. "You

  used to be a college boy, didn't you?" Hall nodded.

  "Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind."

  He left. Hall sat down and lit another smoke, holding a soda can in one hand and watching for the rats. He could just imagine how it would be in the basement--the sub-basement, actually, a level below the dye house. Damp, dark, full of spiders and rotten cloth and ooze from the river--and rats. Maybe even bats, the aviators of the rodent family. Gah.

  Hall threw the can hard, then smiled thinly to himself as the faint sound of Warwick's voice came down through the overhead ducts, reading Harry Wisconsky the riot act.

  Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind.

  He stopped smiling abruptly and butted his smoke. A few moments later Wisconsky started to send rough nylon down through the blowers, and Hall went to work. And after a while the rats came out and sat atop the bags at the back of the long room watching him with their unblinking black eyes. They looked like a jury.

  Eleven P.M., Monday.

  There were about thirty-six men sitting around when Warwick came in wearing a pair of old jeans tucked into high rubber boots. Hall had been listening to Harry Wisconsky, who was enormously fat, enormously lazy, and enormously gloomy.

  "It's gonna be a mess," Wisconsky was saying when Mr. Foreman came in. "You wait and see, we're all gonna go home blacker'n midnight in Persia."

  "Okay!" Warwick said. "We strung sixty lightbulbs down there, so it should be bright enough for you to see what you're doing. You guys"--he pointed to a bunch of men that had been leaning against the drying spools--"I want you to hook up the hoses over there to the main water conduit by the stairwell. You can unroll them down the stairs. We got about eighty yards for each man, and that should be plenty. Don't get cute and spray one of your buddies or you'll send him to the hospital. They pack a wallop."

  "Somebody'll get hurt," Wisconsky prophesied sourly. "Wait and see."

  "You other guys," Warwick said pointing to the group that Hall and Wisconsky were a part of. "You're the crap crew tonight. You go in pairs with an electric wagon for each team. There's old office furniture, bags of cloth, hunks of busted machinery, you name it. We're gonna pile it by the airshaft at the west end. Anyone who doesn't know how to run a wagon?"

  No one raised a hand. The electric wagons were battery-driven contraptions like miniature dump trucks. They developed a nauseating stink after continual use that reminded Hall of burning power lines.

  "Okay," Warwick said. "We got the basement divided up into sections, and we'll be done by Thursday. Friday we'll chain-hoist the crap out. Questions?"

  There were none. Hall studied the foreman's face closely, and he had a sudden premonition of a strange thing coming. The idea pleased him. He did not like Warwick very much.

  "Fine," Warwick said. "Let's get at it."

  Two A.M., Tuesday.

  Hall was bushed and very tired of listening to Wisconsky's steady patter of profane complaints. He wondered if it would do any good to belt Wisconsky. He doubted it. It would just give Wisconsky something else to bitch about.

  Hall had known it would be bad, but this was murder. For one thing, he hadn't anticipated the smell. The polluted stink of the river, mixed with the odor of decaying fabric, rotting masonry, vegetable matter. In the far corner, where they had begun, Hall discovered a colony of huge white toadstools poking their way up through the shattered cement. His hands had come in contact with them as he pulled and yanked at a rusty gear-toothed wheel, and they felt curiously warm and bloated, like the flesh of a man afflicted with dropsy

  The bulbs couldn't banish the twelve-year darkness; it could only push it back a little and cast a sickly yellow glow over the whole mess. The place looked like the shattered nave of a desecrated church, with its high ceiling and mammoth discarded machinery that they would never be able to move, its wet walls overgrown with patches of yellow moss, and the atonal choir that was the water from the hoses, running in the half-clogged sewer network that eventually emptied into the river below t
he falls.

  And the rats--huge ones that made those on third look like dwarfs. God knew what they were eating down here. They were continually overturning boards and bags to reveal huge nests of shredded newspaper, watching with atavistic loathing as the pups fled into the cracks and crannies, their eyes huge and blind with the continuous darkness.

  "Let's stop for a smoke," Wisconsky said. He sounded out of breath, but Hall had no idea why; he had been goldbricking all night. Still, it was about that time, and they were currently out of sight of everyone else.

  "All right." He leaned against the edge of the electric wagon and lit up.

  "I never should've let Warwick talk me into this," Wisconsky said dolefuly. "This ain't work for a man. But he was mad the other night when he caught me in the crapper up on four with my pants up. Christ, was he mad."

  Hall said nothing. He was thinking about Warwick, and about the rats. Strange, how the two things seemed tied together. The rats seemed to have forgotten all about men in their long stay under the mill; they were impudent and hardly afraid at all. One of them had sat up on its hind legs like a squirrel until Hall had gotten in kicking distance, and then it had launched itself at his boot, biting at the leather. Hundreds, maybe thousands. He wondered how many varieties of disease they were carrying around in this black sumphole. And Warwick. Something about him--

  "I need the money," Wisconsky said. "But Christ Jesus, buddy, this ain't no work for a man. Those rats." He looked around fearfully. "It almost seems like they think. You ever wonder how it'd be, if we was little and they were big--"

  "Oh, shut up," Hall said.

  Wisconsky looked at him, wounded. "Say, I'm sorry, buddy. It's just that . . ." He trailed off. "Jesus, this place stinks!" he

  cried. "This ain't no kind of work for a man!" A spider crawled off the edge of the wagon and scrambled up his arm. He brushed it off with a choked sound of disgust.

  "Come on," Hall said, snuffing his cigarette. "The faster, the quicker." "I suppose," Wisconsky said miserably. "I suppose."

  Four A.M., Tuesday. Lunch time.

  Hall and Wisconsky sat with three or four other men, eating their sandwiches with black hands that not even the industrial detergent could clean. Hall ate looking into the foreman's little glass office. Warwick was drinking coffee and eating cold hamburgers with great relish.

  "Ray Upson had to go home," Charlie Brochu said. "He puke?" someone asked. "I almost did."

  "Nuh. Ray'd eat cowflop before he'd puke. Rat bit him."

  Hall looked up thoughtfully from his examination of Warwick. "Is that so?" he asked.

  "Yeah." Brochu shook his head. "I was teaming with him. Goddamndest thing I ever saw. Jumped out of a hole in one of those old cloth bags. Must have been big as a cat. Grabbed onto his hand and started chewing."

  "Jee-sus," one of the men said, looking green.

  "Yeah," Brochu said. "Ray screamed just like a woman, and I ain't blamin' him. He bled like a pig. Would that thing let go? No sir. I had to belt it three or four times with a board before it would. Ray was just about crazy. He stomped it until it wasn't nothing but a mess of fur. Damndest thing I ever saw. Warwick put a bandage on him and sent him home. Told him to go to the doctor tomorrow."

  "That was big of the bastard," somebody said.

  As if he had heard, Warwick got to his feet in his office, stretched, and then came to the door. "Time we got back with it."

  The men got to their feet slowly, eating up all the time they possibly could stowing their dinner buckets, getting cold drinks, buying candy bars. Then they started down, heels clanking dispiritedly on the steel grillwork of the stair risers.

  Warwick passed Hall, clapping him on the shoulder. "How's it going, college boy?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Come on," Hall said patiently to Wisconsky, who was tying his shoelace. They went downstairs.

  Seven A.M., Tuesday.

  Hall and Wisconsky walked out together; it seemed to Hall that he had somehow inherited the fat Pole. Wisconsky was almost comically dirty, his fat moon face smeared like that of a small boy who has just been thrashed by the town bully.

  There was none of the usual rough banter from the other men, the pulling of shirttails, the cracks about who was keeping Tony's wife warm between the hours of one and four. Nothing but silence and an occasional hawking sound as someone spat on the dirty floor.

  "You want a lift?" Wisconsky asked him hesitantly. "Thanks."

  They didn't talk as they rode up Mill Street and crossed the bridge. They exchanged only a brief word when Wisconsky dropped him off in front of his apartment.

  Hall went directly to the shower, still thinking about Warwick, trying to place whatever it was about Mr. Foreman that drew him, made him feel that somehow they had become tied together.

  He slept as soon as his head hit the pillow, but his sleep was broken and restless: he dreamed of rats.

  One A.M., Wednesday.

  It was better running the hoses.

  They couldn't go in until the crap crews had finished a section, and quite often they were done hosing before the next section was clear--which meant time for a cigarette. Hall worked the nozzle of one of the long hoses and Wisconsky pattered back and forth, unsnagging lengths of the hose, turning the water on and off, moving obstructions.

  Warwick was short-tempered because the work was proceeding slowly. They would never be done by Thursday, the way things were going.

  Now they were working on a helter-skelter jumble of nineteenth-century office equipment that had been piled in one corner--smashed rolltop desks, moldy ledgers, reams of invoices, chairs with broken seats--and it was rat heaven. Scores of them squeaked and ran through the dark and crazy passages that honeycombed the heap, and after two men were bitten, the others refused to work until Warwick sent someone upstairs to get heavy rubberized gloves, the kind usually reserved for the dye-house crew, which had to work with acids.

  Hall and Wisconsky were waiting to go in with their hoses when a sandy-haired bullneck named Carmichael began howling curses and backing away, slapping at his chest with his gloved hands.

  A huge rat with gray-streaked fur and ugly, glaring eyes had bitten into his shirt and hung there, squeaking and kicking at Carmichael's belly with its back paws. Carmichael finally knocked it away with his fist, but there was a huge hole in his shirt, and a thin line of blood trickled from above one nipple. The anger faded from his face. He turned away and retched.

  Hall turned the hose on the rat, which was old and moving slowly, a snatch of Carmichael's shirt still caught in its jaws. The roaring pressure drove it backward against the wall, where it smashed limply.

  Warwick came over, an odd, strained smile on his lips. He clapped Hall on the shoulder. "Damn sight better than throwing cans at the little bastards, huh, college boy?"

  "Some little bastard," Wisconsky said. "It's a foot long."

  "Turn that hose over there." Warwick pointed at the jumble of furniture. "You guys, get out of the way!" "With pleasure," someone muttered.

  Carmichael charged up to Warwick, his face sick and twisted. "I'm gonna have compensation for this! I'm gonna--" "Sure," Warwick said, smiling. "You got bit on the titty. Get out of the way before you get pasted down by this water."

  Hall pointed the nozzle and let it go. It hit with a white explosion of spray, knocking over a desk and smashing two chairs to splinters. Rats ran everywhere, bigger than any Hall had ever seen. He could hear men crying out in disgust and horror as they fled, things with huge eyes and sleek, plump bodies. He caught a glimpse of one that looked as big as a healthy six-week puppy. He kept on until he could see no more, then shut the nozzle down.

  "Okay!" Warwick called. "Let's pick it up!"

  "I didn't hire out as no exterminator!" Cy Ippeston called mutinously. Hall had tipped a few with him the week before. He was a young guy, wearing a smut-stained baseball cap and a T-shirt.

  "That you, Ippeston?" Warwick asked genially.

  Ippeston looked uncertai
n, but stepped forward. "Yeah. I don't want no more of these rats. I hired to clean up, not to maybe get rabies or typhoid or somethin'. Maybe you best count me out."

  There was a murmur of agreement from the others. Wisconsky stole a look at Hall, but Hall was examining the nozzle of the hose he was holding. It had a bore like a .45 and could probably knock a man twenty feet.

  "You saying you want to punch your clock, Cy?" "Thinkin' about it," Ippeston said.

  Warwick nodded. "Okay. You and anybody else that wants. But this ain't no unionized shop, and never has been. Punch out now and you'll never punch back in. I'll see to it."

  "Aren't you some hot ticket," Hall muttered.

  Warwick swung around. "Did you say something, college boy?" Hall regarded him blandly. "Just clearing my throat, Mr. Foreman." Warwick smiled. "Something taste bad to you?"

  Hall said nothing.

  "All right, let's pick it up!" Warwick bawled. They went back to work.