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Steve Brown stood at his job in the pressroom, loading door inner panels into press P3, the blanker presses nearby banging so hard they shook the entire forty acres under roof. The presses were as loud as a fucking LAAW fired over your head. The pressroom was in full motion, the draw dies at the front of each line whoomphing as they pressed the metal into its various shapes, everything from quarter panels to inner panel support pieces. The trim dies could be heard crunching the metal, with the trim pieces clattering down the scrap chutes. The hem dies did their clump, clump-clump dance hammering the panel flanges from every conceivable direction. The gap presses on the quarter panel lines added their own special thumps each press cycle. The place was an affront to the senses.

  Steve loaded the panels, one after the other, 575 an hour, and grew numb to his task, wishing by eight o’clock that he had a beer to drink, to work with the Bennie he had taken at daybreak to get him up and into the factory for his Saturday shift that paid time and a half. The fog of noise and oil mist drifted over him just like the dawn mist and the last few C-40’s of the night in a rice paddy in Nam would have only a few weeks earlier.

  He still wore the Vietnam suntan, dark all over his body except for his skivvies lines. He should maybe have taken a few months off, but knew he probably would have just drunk himself to death. He had gotten home, signed in at the plant office, and was back to work only a week after he had stepped out of the bush in Nam.

  He hadn’t slept in three nights, had sat up drinking beer, popping the Bennies and acid he got from the longhairs in the plant. Strange, him just back from Nam and the only people he could relate to were the kids who were against the war. Hell, nobody in their right mind was for the war. Not now. He still wore his fatigues, but only because they were the only clothes he had that fit him. Some of the older guys thought it was because he was proud. He wasn’t proud of anything right now, not a fucking thing he could think of, and wasn’t even sure he wanted to live. Nothing in his life made any sense at all.

  This place was pure bullshit, but it was something to do, something to get him off the couch above the garage at his parents’ house and out into the world. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to sit with them on Thanksgiving Day and talk about shit with his sister and her family, her gung ho kill-a-gook husband who had never set foot out of the states in his defense services job.

  He had sat the night before watching the news, watching the rerun of his buddy Tinker getting blown away as he ran for a helicopter two months ago. He couldn’t believe it—reruns of the fucking war and folks at home watched the same shit night after night, not even knowing they were watching reruns.

  The line was running good today, and if the P line workers ran rate they might have an hour to get a nap, or get in the eternal poker game in the cafeteria, or, more likely, go through the hole in the fence and walk the quarter mile through the woods to the Roundup to get started on the nightly drunk. The Roundup was good for the plant. When a foreman wanted to track down one of his guys, all he had to do was call the bar. And it was easier to get guys to work all the overtime, since they could get started on their decompression, after-work drinking at time and a half.

  At lunch time, Steve went to the Roundup. He had three shots and two and a half beers, and was feeling much better about his life. And on the way back to his job one of the longhairs slipped him a blotter, righteous blotter acid, maybe from the master Owsley himself. By twelve-thirty, the stinking, noisy fender factory was looking mighty fine. The noise was music now, and the oil mist was the fragrance of industry and prosperity for all. But then the line went down. The foreman got Wimpy the die maker, called Wimpy because he looked like Wimpy in the Popeye cartoons, to put his gin and tonic down and diagnose the problem—a broken trim steel—and the line would be down the rest of the shift.

  This was bullshit. Now they would get beat out of the hour they had coming in rate for busting their asses all morning. There went their nap time and their drinking time. The foreman set the men to work cleaning up, and gave Steve a chisel to pry slugs out of the tar floor. He took the tool docilely. A week out of the bush and he was supposed to make sense of sitting on a tar floor in 90+ decibel noise prying fucking metal slugs?

  Thanks to his sedation, he was doing all right, squatting and prying with the chisel-like tool, stacking the slugs into three piles—one inch, three-quarter and half inch, with the smaller slugs in a haphazard pile. He imagined it as a game, and was doing just fine until someone came by and kicked all his slugs toward the scrap chute. He looked up and it was the white shirt dude. Then all of a sudden over by the tree line, where Tinker and Doper were on lookout, a C-40 exploded.

  He clutched his chisel and crawled along the press line. Ah, good, somebody had called in the coordinates, and the napalm was already dropping. The fire and smoke filled the air over behind V line where a group of press welders was operating. Now all they needed was to get the lieutenant to send a recon out to back up Tinker and Doper. They hadn’t returned fire, and he knew they were down. He would go himself. He would slither the rest of the way to the hole they were in and bring them out.

  Chapter 5.2

  The Mathematician