Page 295 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 283

from the third floor to the carousel spigots on the second where they
were flushed full of syrup, lidded and cooled, whipped through a
labeling chute and stacked automatically twelve on their sides, still
warm, ready to be pushed by a button into a cardboard carton held
by a man who started the boxes through the sealer, its brush tongue
and harrowing lips gluing and folding the flaps down hard, pressing
the boxes against the rollers moving toward the final chute to the
busy shipping dock.
The rest of the building was open-storied like a Spanish mission
built around an internal plaza, jammed with furnaces and boilers
and copper tubing. Vats from the basement, explosive with pressure,
flowed up to the second floor, their small openings steaming in the
close hot air. Piping raveled through them like catheters rinsing steel
patients. Everything was connected, explicit, unlike the Byzantine
tunnels and pipes under Misery. Brown sacks of flaked green-yellow
hops stacked in acrid bunkers stood ready for brewing. Periodically,
tugging men emptied them into the small mouths of the vast pres-
sure cookers that exploded in heat and steam and froth churning a
full story high. They flushed the crude syrup up through the swollen
tubing to a black steel hop-jack for rinsing and cooling, then drained
it down, dropping it a floor to twin one-story vats separated by a
catwalk, there to lay for final straining and cooling before canning.
That first day was like all first days for the new guy, isolated,
abandoned, nobody loves me, consigned to the shit-work high on the
catwalk. At least I was new. At least I was a guy. Fifty feet above the
floor, vertiginous, alone on a small platform, learning to be one of
the boys, I had to turn three-foot water valves from flow to ebb and
back again on tanks as big as a school bus. Angel of God, my Guard-
ian dear. I was standing on top of a kettle in hell, making thick tea
by sloshing a thousand gallons of water back and forth through two
tons of soggy tea leaves. Turning water into beer. The screen baskets
of the final seining filled with a brown wet sawdust steaming like
hot dung. The boiling brew, falling through the seine, bubbled down
from the hop-jack hissing in wet clouds from the small door opening
into the huge tank which I had to climb into with a shovel to scrape
out the last waste. If not a worker-priest, a worker. Many men feared
climbing into the small hole of the big tank. I was big. I was tough.

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