Forklift
by Tony Thomas
Wind off the San Francisco Bay blew beads of rain into Jackson Barlow's
face. After the three months lay off, three months when he didn't know
if the plant would stay shut forever, Jackson Barlow was back on the loading
dock at Alameda Precision Parts Incorporated. They called him to come
in at six, instead of the eight he'd started at before the shutdown.
The corrugated metal door to the plant his pal Vinnie opened each morning
at quarter of six was closed. The normal nicks and dents forklifts and
trucks had banged into the loading dock had been patched with white concrete
that clashed with the gray patina of grease, oil, metal, and the footsteps
of working women and men. Pallets once squared in four neat, low stacks
twisted up in a jagged tower.
Barlow couldn't shake off the shaky nerves that captured him during
the layoff. At fifty-three he had wondered if he'd ever work again and
if he did work, if he'd ever work for anything but shit wages. His muscles
and memory of the delivery routes and road had gone soft. A beer gut he
thought he'd never have now spread over his belly.
In the months off work the only things he believed he could do for himself
were broil a chicken, bake a potato, fry a fish, and drink a Lucky Lager.
Now, he yearned for his old life, his life before the layoff. Over good
black coffee Barlow would gab with Vinnie, the forklift operator, while
the women and men on Vinnie's crew pulled the orders and loaded the truck
Barlow drove. Chip Lamont, the shipping and receiving supervisor, would
show up with a schedule the computer spat out.
Barlow could always tell where the deliveries went from the size and
the labels of the boxes and pallets, the order they were put in. He would
create his own schedules quicker and cleaner than the computer's, schedules
that stole time to stop at Flynn's. The waitress there would have his
black coffee and his bear claw smothered with melted butter ready as soon
as his truck pulled in. Barlow liked that woman's hazel eyes and the way
she let her hair go gray. All the other women seemed to dye theirs nowadays.
She'd flirt with him. He never flirted back; never asked her name. He
just didn't have the nerve.
The electric motor rattled the roll-up door up. Startled, Barlow drew
back. Lamont strutted onto the dock, carrying a laptop computer. His hair
had grown out of his old dirty blonde crew cut. A long blue denim shop
coat with "APPI" printed on the breast pocket had replaced the sport coats
Lamont used to wear. Steel-toed boots had replaced his cordovan wingtips.
"Hey," Barlow said.
Lamont nodded.
Barlow wanted to walk past Lamont into the plant. He could not stand
schmoozing with foremen or anyone who did. "I need the truck keys?" Barlow
asked.
Lamont reached inside his pants pocket and held out a key ring with a
red Gothic "V" at the center, Vinnie's keys to the lift. Barlow dropped
the hand he'd lifted.
"You're not on the truck all day anymore," Lamont said.
"What?"
"In the mornings you will receive incoming deliveries on the forklift."
"What about Vinnie?" Barlow asked.
"We don't need one employee on the dock and another driving the truck
any more," Lamont answered. Barlow's gaze fell away from Lamont. "It was
either you or Vinnie," Lamont said.
"Best tow-motor guy I ever saw," Barlow said.
"Vinnie was hired by United Airlines," Lamont said, "otherwise he would
be here, not you."
Barlow's hands balled into fists and he shoved them deep inside his
pockets. His eyes followed a Yellow Freight semi that rolled West toward
Oakland.
"Under the new system, I am to sign all invoices. I will enter them
into the computer here on the dock." Lamont said. Barlow took the keys.
Lamont smiled at Barlow like the two of them were in it together. Barlow
had worked at APPI fifteen years and was lucky to make thirty thousand
busting his butt with hours of overtime. Lamont, twenty-one years younger,
twelve years younger in the job, cleared forty-five thousand without a
minute of overtime.
"Get that TCM out on the dock, now." Lamont said. "The Tull Truck's
coming." Barlow wondered what a "TCM" was and what it had to do with the
steel the Tull Metals truck would bring. It might be a computerized gizmo
they'd gotten during the layoff.
"Don't stand there," Lamont said. "We need the forklift."
Inside the plant, big whirling fans at the end of columns of machines
blasted the garlicky smell of tool oil and chipped metal into Barlow's
nostrils. Barlow wondered how he'd gotten so used to it. He didn't remember
these smells. Dust covered the electric forklift and its charger.
The lift's bright Safety Yellow had dirtied into a rotten-fruit orange
pockmarked with dents that exposed flesh-colored metal. The rear wheels
were chewed and notched, barely round. Only Vinnie's bumper sticker, "IF
YOU DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING, STAY OFF THE SIDEWALK," reminded Jackson Barlow
how Vinnie had kept the lift sharp and sporty like a teenage buck's
Camarro.
Below the bumper sticker, he saw a metal identification plate that identified
the vehicle as a TCM forklift.
Driving the lift out to the dock was like gliding through a cranky dream.
It didn't chug like a diesel or the bark or sputter like a gas or a propane
lift. Barlow heard only the wheels' slip-slop and the crossbar's jangle
when he raised or lowered the forks. He pressed himself down harder on
the seat just to feel the lift's motion.
Grazing a row of pallets, he felt lucky to stop before the lift ran
off the dock. Air brakes wheezing, its hoarse diesel engine grinding to
a stop, Tull Metal's flatbed truck backed up to the dock carrying two
tons of sheet steel wound in a roll.
As Barlow walked toward the truck, he noticed that rust scales covered
the staples that cinched the steel bands that held down the roll of steel.
Jagged splinters stuck out from the cracked weather-grayed pallet. No
wooden beams or metal bars braced the steel. Vinnie probably would have
told the Tull driver to take it back and get it right, and he would have
told Lamont where to go if he didn't like it. Yet, who was he. He was
barely back in the job himself, and then only because Vinnie had gotten
lucky and found a better job.
Barlow walked toward the truck's cab to talk it over with the driver.
At the cab, Lamont blocked his way. "The load isn't braced right," Barlow
told Lamont. "Before we sign anything, let me check out the bands and--"
Lamont reached inside the cab, took the driver's invoice, glanced at it,
signed, and then separated the different parts of the invoice. He didn't
know that it was the driver's paper and he wasn't supposed to separate
it. The driver wasn't Gene the usual Tull driver, but a young white man
with sandy hair and a Forty-Niners cap. That driver didn't say anything,
he just took his paper. He didn't even step out of the truck to help guide
Barlow as he took off the load.
Lamont turned around to Barlow and glared at him. "Come on!" Lamont said.
"That roll's been waiting at Tull for three months." Barlow didn't move.
"I need you to move that metal." Lamont shook the invoices in Barlow's
face. "Now, Jack."
After a deep hard breath, Barlow walked back onto the dock and mounted
the forklift. He wheeled the tow motor forward until his forks hung over
the back of the truck. Holding his breath, leaning his head out to look
beyond the lift's backstop, he angled the forks under the load. He tilted
the pallet tenderly and began to lift it. The steel roll slid back, crashing
against the rusty staples Lamont rushed from the front of the truck back
onto the dock, waving his hands at Barlow, hollering "Drop the load!"
When Barlow dropped the pallet, its ragged boards screeched across truck
bed. The steel swayed and rolled. A staple popped off the bands. The bands
whipped out from the load thrashing through the air like flying razors.
With a dull thud the roll of steel crushed the back of the pallet and
slammed his forklift's backstop. Back on the dock, Lamont waved his arms
at Barlow and asked, "Do you want me to do it?" Barlow's chest felt tight
and tender, his arms tingly and sore, the way he'd felt when he learned
he had been laid off. "Come on," Lamont said. "Get off that lift, Jack!"
Barlow looked straight into Lamont's steel-gray eyes and then back to
the Tull driver who'd finally popped out of the cab. Was this how it was
going to be, him messing up the first day, with Lamont always telling
him what to do even when it didn't make sense? Wasn't he Jackson Barlow?
He'd moved loads this big and bigger for thirty years. He'd never used
this TCM electric lift. Yet he'd run trucks and diesel lifts and cranes.
Once in the bad old days in his first job in a bucket shop up in Tacoma,
he'd bent his back with a gang of guys hauling bar stock with chains.
He'd moved big things all his life.
Shrugging, looking away from Lamont and back to that busted pallet and
those tons of steel, Barlow said, "I'll get it." It couldn't be much different
from moving a big load on his old truck. You grabbed its center of gravity
and made it your own. You didn't let it get out in front of you. You didn't
jerk or twist. You slow-danced until it fell where you needed it.
Barlow drew the forklift back. He tilted the forks flat and held them
less than an inch over the truck bed. When the forks touched the edge
of the shattered pallet, Barlow tilted the forks downward into the truck
bed. The forks shrieked as they grated against the metal. He feathered
the lift forward, flattened the forks until they got a bite under the
pallet, took his foot off the pedal, and let the pallet slide down the
forks as far as it would. Barlow repeated this dance. The load crashed
and wobbled until it bunched up onto the pallet. Barlow tried to wipe
the sweat off his face.
After a deep breath, he angled the forks back. Slowly, the forks eat
the swinging, swaying load. As he ran the lift back, the twisted boards
and splinters that had once been a pallet got stuck in the space between
the dock and the end of the truck. The steel roll clanked against his
lift's backstop, jolting Barlow's back and sending the tow motor skidding
into a row of stacked pallets.
"Put on your damned brakes," Lamont shouted. Barlow didn't even think
of hitting his brakes. That could only knock the load off his forks and
send it rolling down the dock. Barlow lifted his foot off the power pedal.
The forklift wobbled backward. Its dog-eared wheels spun in a pool of
grease. The steel roll crashed off his forks and splashed into a stack
of pallets. In the cracking of wood and a shower of splinters, two tons
of steel came to a rest. Barlow leapt off the tow motor. He braced a pallet
firmly in front of the steel. Then he headed off the dock and into the
plant to find the banding machine.
On Barlow's way out, towing the banding machine, Lamont caught up with
him "Come on Jack we got to get moving." He held his clipboard with
the shipping and receiving schedule in Barlow's face.
"You'd better forget that," Barlow answered, "You need to help me secure
this steel."
When Barlow dragged the banding machine out of the plant, Lamont followed.
Barlow took the clipboard from Lamont's hands, as he tried to figure out
how to get that steel roll on a pallet. He scanned the schedule and returned
it to Lamont. He might have to wait until the afternoon, but he knew he'd
find a way to Flynn's. Maybe he'd even ask that waitress to go for a drink
at Oscar's.
Tony
Thomas has an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Florida
International University. He lives and writes in North Miami Beach,
Florida, USA.
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