“Yeah, you want to switch today, let me do some upper-body?” Alan said, nodding to the hydraulic lift. “I could use the stretch.”
Elmer scoffed. “Oh, that’s rich. You’re gonna make an old man throw frames and roll pallets ‘ cause ‘you need the stretch?’”
“You keep going with that ‘old man’ shit, and we’ll find those seven or eight boxes to tape together and ship you back to Juarez or wherever so they can finish the job.”
“What do you know about finishing the job, Louisiana trash?” Elmer shot back. “Every time I turn on the news, they got some guy looking just like you on TV from New Orleans standing in front of roof with no house under it all, ‘Yeah, I been rebuilding. Don’t it look good?’ Fuckin’ NOLA trash.”
“Oh,” Big Time nodded as the line started rolling again. “Bring it, Fat Boy. You think Houston’s got one step on the Crescent City, then you’re thinking wrong.”
“Hey, hey, I’m just saying,” Elmer replied, shoving boxes of manuals and cords into a still-open computer box as it made its way to the tape machine. “Here in Houston, we don’t flood the streets with raw sewage and free all the prisoners out of County and call it ‘Mardi Gras.’ God had to build up the worst hurricane anyone’s ever seen to finally clean all that shit up. And you guys were doing that by choice!”
“Oh, you want filthy?” Big Time retorted. “Go downtown, take the elevator to that observation deck on the Transco Tower the day before the window washers come. You’ve got a film on there an inch thick. Now go on the roof and take a breath. Tastes like the tits of a dead mule. You guys do know you beat out Los Angeles as the most polluted city in the nation, right? Mardi Gras is filthy, but that’s a week and it’s all sex.”
“Wow, that is just some of the most backwoods, Cajun bullshit I ever heard roll out of anyone’s mouth,” Elmer replied. “Like everybody knows the taste of a dead mule’s tits.”
Beverly snorted. Alan jumped in.
“Nah, just he knew most everybody round the factory had taken turns sucking at your mom, so it was just natural.”
All eyes went to Elmer as his mind raced. For a second, he looked like he had the perfect comeback at the tip of his tongue, but then he deflated.
“I got nothing.”
“Ha-hah!” Big Time crowed. “New Orleans in the house!”
“Hey, you guys want to know what really stinks?” Beverly asked, leaning in. “You smell that Indian guy this morning? Smells like a bucket of ass.”
Elmer chortled, but Big Time shook his head.
“Yeah, I knew a guy like that on another job,” Big Time said. “It’s like deodorant’s against their culture, sort of their religion. You’ve got to go unadorned by perfumes or something. I never understood it.”
Everybody glanced down the line towards Muhammad’s station. He worked alongside another Indian man, Mukul Patel, doing random system checks of computers pulled off the lines at the midpoint. If the computers passed, the pre-installed software was loaded. The units were then placed back on the line to be finished and have their hoods screwed on before being packed and shipped out the back door.
“You’d think walking through the rain would help, but it’s even worse,” Beverly said, waving a hand under her nose.
Big Time rolled his eyes and got back to work. He looked over at Alan, only to see him staring down the factory.
“Dreaming of Olympic glory?”
Alan chuckled and grabbed the hydraulic lift. Though he seldom thought of anything else, today he had actually had other matters on his mind.
• • •
“All right…go!”
The four third-graders standing at the front of the classroom began analyzing the math problems on the chalkboard. Two began working the problem out on the board. The third stared at the numbers as if hoping the answer would simply reveal itself. The fourth, Mia, seemed to be doing the same thing, but the sharpness of her gaze gave away how quickly her mind was racing.
She marked down the answer to the first problem, eliciting cheers from the other members of her math “team” sitting behind her. Even her teacher, Mr. Klekner, allowed himself a non-objective grin from where he sat on the edge of his desk.
The answers corresponded to letters chalked up on a separate board. Mia glanced over at it and then wrote a “T” under her problem before moving to the next of a dozen quotations.
By the time Mia was on the ninth problem, her closest competition was just beginning his fifth. But there had never really been a question. While Mia wasn’t necessarily the best in her class at math, she was as competitive as her father when it came to contests like this. She knew the most important thing to do was get out ahead early, as this would give her a subconscious edge against the other kids. She had also figured out the “secret word”—trigonometry—after four letters and had discreetly matched up the letters she knew would come next with the answers. She still worked out the multiplication in her head but avoided the simple mistake of eight times eight being fifty-six. This answer was what first jumped into her mind when she saw that the “m” she wanted was next to “sixty-four.”
“Trigonometry,” she said, putting down her chalk.
“Correct.”
Mia beamed as her team cheered. She liked school fine, but a lot of that was the grading. She liked getting a 100-percent on tests others were happy getting a 90-percent or less on. They might have studied enough to understand all of the material, but she studied hard enough to then be tested on it.
“All right, Mia’s team’s prize is that they only have to turn in the odd-numbered problems on tonight’s homework,” Mr. Klekner announced. “That’s assuming we even have classes tomorrow.”
Mia’s triumph was short-lived, as everyone’s thoughts moved on to the exciting prospect of a day off due to the incoming
