A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

second dishwasher and lift out three without tearing a carton.He could take that same quiet propane-swigging machine and go down the dim and lonely aisles between the tall, rusted steel die racks, next to the Press Department, where hundreds of dies that sometimes weighed thousands of pounds were stacked on dark oily shelves, and pluck one from its resting place thirty-three feet high as nimbly as an osprey grabs a mullet from a marsh. […] One day they’d staged an in-plant forklift-driving contest, no contest. If anybody in the plant had a flat tire by lunchtime, he’d drive his lift out on the parking lot while he ate his sandwich with one hand and raise the car with it to keep anybody from having to jack it up. He’d eaten unfried baloney on white with mayonnaise and two or three drops of Louisiana Red Hot Sauce every single work day on his lunch break for the last nineteen years. Only two sick days, and was actually sick both times, the flu once, and then the heartbreak of salmonella poisoning from some bad chicken his mother fried one Sunday. Didn’t make her sick. Didn’t like chicken.
    But in order to get this gear down off this crucial machine, which was dangerous as hell, since they were way up there in the air messing around with very heavy stuff, which could kill or amputate somebody or maybe even several somebodies real easy if something happened, say something gave, or broke, or slipped, as something sometimes does, what they’d done through an outside contractor in Dallas was set up near the big monster press a huge yellow Mitsubishi bridge-building crane they’d brought in through the tall back doors of the factory and amid all the workers and the other presses and the moving forklifts like the one John Wayne Payne drove and the slamming and the whirring, and Jimmy’s daddy had gone up on a wooden pallet on another forklift, one they called Big Mama, to attach a chain on the crane to the gear and knock out the retaining pin and catch it before it fell and then force the gear off its spline with a hydraulic press so that they could lower it to the floor and fix the crack, weld the crack, and that was taking a while, a couple of days, and slowing down everything in the Press Department, because people who were supposed to be working in the middle of all the bedlam were always standing around rubbernecking and watching them take the big press apart, because it was pretty amazing, what they were doing, up in the air like that, and now Jimmy’s daddy was pausing for a smoke break twenty feet off the floor, standing on the pallet, lookingout over everything, the Spot-Welding Department and the Tool-and-Die Department and the Porcelain Department and even down to the edge of the line where they were putting the stoves together, and he could just barely catch a glimpse of that new girl with the God-awful tit-ties who worked down there, unbelievable, like half-grown watermelons, the same woman everybody in the break room snuck looks at while they were eating their baloney sandwiches. Everybody was chickenshit to say anything to her. Jimmy’s daddy wanted to say something to her, something like
Hey, baby, you want to come over here and sit on my face?
Who knew? Hell, she might say yes. Fuck her damn brains out maybe. In the parking lot? At lunch? Was that too much to hope for? Reckon what she ate for lunch? Probably not baloney.
    […]
    â€œYou gonna stand there all day with your thumb up your ass or you gonna get that gear off that spline?”
    Jimmy’s daddy looked down. Collums’s face was still looking up. Collums. Chief of the Maintenance Department. Hardly ever said anything. Big guy, gray haired. No teeth on top. Kept his hands on his hips a lot. Mysterious background. Maybe from up north. Had kind of a nasal voice. Always wore neat blue coveralls and a neat blue cap. You never saw any grease on him. It was almost like grease wouldn’t stick to him,