“I’m looking for the foreman,” I said.
“He’s at lunch,” one of the Spanish speakers said in heavily accented English. “You are looking for work?”
“No. Just the foreman. Is he in the building?”
One of the women pointed silently at a door at the far end of the room. It had a chicken-wire glass top; neon shone dimly through it. I made my way past the assembly tables toward it, but then stopped.
“Really, I’m looking for someone who might have seen my uncle last week. He used to work here, and he came back around a week ago yesterday.” They stared at me blankly. “After that he fell into the canal and drowned. They only found his body yesterday.”
A little buzz started behind me in Spanish. The group near the windows coalesced as though drawn by gravity. After a few minutes one of them asked what I wanted.
“I’m hoping someone might have seen him.” I spread my hands in embarrassment. “He was an old man, a drunk, but my mother’s brother. She wants to know if he talked to anyone, or if anyone saw him. The police don’t care about him, but she needs to know—she’d like to know just when he died. He’d been in the water too long for the doctors to be able to tell her.”
The buzz sounded approving. “What did he look like, this uncle of yours?” a heavyset woman about my own age asked.
I described Mitch as best I could. “He used to be a machinist here. For many years.”
“Oh, a machinist. They work on the other side, you know.” It was one of the women by the window speaking, a person of about fifty with a matted yellow perm. When she saw my blank look she added, “You have to go around all the offices and turn left, and then you come to the machine shop, honey.”
I was turning back to the door when she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I seen your uncle, honey. Last Monday, you say? But I don’t think it was then. It was before that he was around here. We were just getting off shift, see, and we could hear some hollering coming from the other end of the hall, and then this old guy came around the corner, kind of shuffling, and laughing a little to himself, and one of the bosses showed up behind him, still yelling.”
“Do you know who it was? Which one of the bosses?” I tried not to speak too quickly.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know, my mind was on dinner, what I felt up to cooking, what I might be able to find in the store, you know how that goes, honey.”
“You don’t remember what he was saying, do you?”
She chewed on her lower lip a minute, trying to remember. “It was more than a week ago, and I wasn’t paying that much attention.”
A younger woman standing near her spoke up. “I remember, because he looked just like my uncle Roy.” She looked at me apologetically, as if not wanting to imply I had an uncle as bad as Roy. “I don’t know who it was yelling, because the light was behind him, I could only see his shape, but he was just yelling at him to get the hell away from Diamond Head.”
The far door opened and the foreman came out. “Time to get back to work, girls. Who you talking to here?”
“Just a girl.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“She thought maybe you were hiring, but we told her we were all lucky to still have the jobs we got.” It was Roy’s niece, protecting me the way she probably had to protect him, and her own mother, and perhaps herself as well.
“You shouldn’t be on the work floor, girlie,” he said to me. “You looking for a job, you should go to the office. It’s marked real clear and this door ain’t. So scoot.”
I didn’t say any of the things I was thinking of. He was the kind of guy who’d take it out on the other women as soon as I’d shut the door.
I moved down the hall at a good clip, not wanting to run into Dexter or any of the others on their way from the can or the lunchroom or whatever they did this time of day. Following the directions the woman in the assembly room had given me, I made it to the far side of the building and another set of high double metal doors. Beyond these clearly lay a machining room: it was filled with gigantic machines.
Their size was so monstrous that I somehow couldn’t imagine a function associated with them. Large curls of steel lay on the floor near me, like the curls of wood that used to fall when my uncle Bernard was planing boards for shelves. Perhaps the monster above it was some kind of metal plane.
Lost in the scale of the machines were a dozen or so men in overalls or work clothes. The ones actively engaged with the tools wore goggles. As I saw sparks fly near me I stepped back nervously. I needed to find someone who wouldn’t torch me or lose an arm himself if startled by a stranger. Finally I spied a man sitting at a drafting table in a corner and went over to him.