The Hotel Eden(58)

The fascinating thing about Victor and Jesse was their lunches. I had been eating my lunch at a little patio behind the main building, alone, not talking to the five or six other employees who sat in groups at the other metal tables. I was the college kid and they were afraid of me because they knew my dad knew one of the bosses. It seemed there had been some trouble in previous summers, and so I just ate my tuna sandwiches and drank my iced tea while the sweat dried on my forehead and I pulled my wet T-shirt away from my shoulders. After I burned my face, people were friendlier, but then I was transferred up to the dock.

There were dozens of little alcoves amid the gas cylinders standing on the platform, and that is where I ate my lunches now. Victor and Jesse had milk crates and they found one for me and we’d sit out of sight up there from eleven-thirty to noon and eat. There was a certain uneasiness at first, as if they weren’t sure if I should be joining them, but then Victor saw it was essentially a necessity. I wasn’t going to get my lunch out of the old fridge on the dock and walk across the yard to eat with the supply people. On the dock was where I learned the meaning of whitebread, the way it’s used now. I’d open my little bag, two tuna sandwiches and a baggie of chips, and then I’d watch the two men open their huge sacks of burritos and tacos and other items I didn’t know the names of and which I’ve never seen since. I mean these were huge lunches that their wives had prepared, everything wrapped in white paper. No baggies. Jesse and I traded a little bit; he liked my mother’s tuna. And I loved the big burritos. I was hungry and thirsty all the time and the hefty food seemed to make me well for a while. The burritos were packed with roast beef and onions and a fiery salsa rich with cilantro. During these lunches Victor would talk a little, telling me where to keep my gloves so that the drivers didn’t pick them up, and where not to sit even on break.

“There was a kid here last year,” he said. “Used to take his breaks right over there.” He shook his head. “Right in front of the boss’s window.” It was cool and private sitting behind the walls of cylinders.

“He didn’t stay,” Jesse said. “The boss don’t know you’re on break.”

“Come back in here,” Victor said. “Or don’t sit down.” He smiled at me. I looked at Jesse and he shrugged and smiled too. They hadn’t told the other kid where not to sit. Jesse handed me a burrito rolled in white paper. I was on the inside now; they’d taken me in.

That afternoon there was a big Linde Oxygen semi backed against the dock and we were rolling the hot cylinders off when I heard a crash. Jesse yelled from back in the dock and I saw his arms flash and Victor, who was in front of me, laid the two tanks he was rolling on the deck of the truck and jumped off the side and ran into the open yard. I saw the first rows of tanks start to tumble wildly, a chain reaction, a murderous thundering domino chase. As the cylinders fell off the dock, they cart-wheeled into the air crazily, heavily tearing clods from the cement dock ledge and thudding into the tarry asphalt. A dozen plummeted onto somebody’s Dodge rental car parked too close to the action. It was crushed. The noise was ponderous, painful, and the session continued through a minute until there was only one lone bank of brown nitrogen cylinders standing like a little jury on the back corner of the loading dock. The space looked strange that empty.

The yard was full of people standing back in a crescent. Then I saw Victor step forward and walk toward where I stood on the back of the semi. I still had my hands on the tanks.

He looked what? Scared, disgusted, and a little amused. “Mi amigo,” he said, climbing back on the truck. “When they go like that, run away.” He pointed back to where all of the employees of Ayr Oxygen Company were watching us. “Away, get it?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I do.”

“Now you can park those,” he said, tapping the cylinders in my hand. “And we’ll go pick up all these others.”

It took the rest of the day and still stands as the afternoon during which I lifted more weight than any other in this life. It felt a little funny setting the hundreds of cylinders back on the old pitted concrete. “They should repour this,” I said to Victor as we were finishing.

“They should,” he said. “But if accidents are going to follow you, a new floor won’t help.” I wondered if he meant that I’d been responsible for the catastrophe. I had rolled and parked a dozen tanks when things blew, but I never considered that it might have been my fault, one cockeyed tank left wobbling.