Page 59 - WTP Vol. X #5

Tyler smiled. “Nope. Lots of good parts. But not the kind you’re thinking.”
The man’s face displayed disappointment. “Well, I was just kind of wondering.” Who knew what libidi- nous fantasies motivated his question? He started to walk away, then pivoted and said, “I guess then maybe you’re just showing off.” Not everyone had accepted Tyler.
Yet there was also the evening Lenny Bartlett, a freckled and crew-cut young man from Midvale approached him. Two or three years ahead of Ty- ler, he’d dropped out of high school and marched straight to work at the factory.
“It seems like every time I see you, you’re reading that book,” Lenny said. “Is it hard?”
“Not too hard. Just kind of long and complicated. Lots of characters.”
“I read quite a bit myself. I like to read, mostly at home, though. Guys here would think I was weird if I read here.”
“Do they think I’m weird?”
“Some do. Some think you’re standoffish.” “I don’t mean to be.”
“I think they’re just green. Because you’re something they aren’t.” Then, as if part of the same thought, he said, “I wish I could read a book like that. I’m kind of stuck on Westerns and detective stories.”
“I could loan you some books if you’d like.” “Maybe for now you could just tell me the story.”
“Sure, I can try. At least as far as I’ve gone. How about tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
Lenny’s curiosity drew Tyler’s attention. Tyler began to realize he’d underestimated the people with whom he spent those night shifts. They weren’t all unthinking automatons like he’d first suspected. These men, at least some of them, had curious and active minds. But they’d become trapped in what he reckoned to be a dead-end life.
It disappointed Tyler that Lenny never came back. If Lenny were to stay in the factory, Tyler thought,
the guy’s curiosity and interest would over time be
stifled and he’d end up like the lifers, stumbling along in a haze of hopeless despondency. For the first time, it soaked in as to just how fortunate a life Tyler led.
More than once it struck him, he probably offended them. It was not anything he said or did. Likely his very existence, his very persona, disturbed them. He belonged to a world of possibility and mobility. They did not. On further reflection, it also occurred to him he might be on an ego trip; they couldn’t really care less about him, one way or another.
Sometimes he wondered how the workers did it. Repetitive brain-numbing tasks, over and over. He could handle it for a few more weeks. But could he do it for twenty or thirty more years? When he went out the door at summer’s end, they’d still be there; still doing the same things.
One night, coming back from a trip to the water foun- tain, Tyler passed a work area where assemblers faced each other across a hydraulic press. Here one worker extracted putty from a specially designed extruder and squeezed the gooey stuff into grooved wood rails that formed the sash. They placed the rails into the press, inserted a pre-cut glass sheet, and activated the press to seal the glass in place. Then, the men set nails in each corner of the frame. If they lacked precision, their hammers smashed through the glass. A wooden box provided a repository for shards. Tyler perceived the operation, like most oth- ers in the plant, as demanding and mind-numbingly repetitive.
On this evening, however, loud voices flagged Tyler’s attention. Someone called out, Putty fight! Putty
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