Heavy Tells A Story

When Heavy tells a story the millwright shanty under the electric furnaces chokes with quiet, amid the roar, as Heavy pauses, adjusts his mountainous weight over a creaky grease-stained metal chair and looks up at the whirling ceiling fan next to fluorescent lights hanging by wires. His fingers lace like so many sausages across the canvas of blue workshirt on his chest. Heavy tells his story and the voice of reason quickens the demise of foulness from red-faced millwrights just back from a repair job and sitting around for the five air whistles that again call them to combat on the furnace floor. All laughter stops, all nonsense sayings and cuts of wisdom cease their echo when Heavy tells a story. Heavy talks about the Mexican melter who once had an affair with the Pit Boss’s wife. The heart of the problem–and the fact from which the story’s plot revolves– was that the melter lived across the street from the Pit Boss. One night just before the graveyard shift, the melter left his home, kissed his wife’s round face and proceeded to walk to the bus stop. But a bullet pierced through his hardhat and he fell, like an overturned stack of fire bricks, onto the pavement. The moral of this story: Never have an affair with someone whose old man lives within shooting distance. Heavy tells a story about a furnace foreman who always yelled at the laborers for failing to clean the bag house of the built-up filth from hours of cooking scrap iron and ore. The men told him it was too dangerous to walk on the tin-roofed panels; their weight could cause them to fall some 30 feet into the gaping mouth of a flaming furnace below. “Nonsense,” the foreman yelled, “you’re all just lazy Polacks.” (he called everyone Polacks). The foreman then proceeded to walk across the roof as the men stood nearby, with mouths open, near the safety of side beams. “You see,” he said standing in the middle as hydraulics moved shutters up and down to capture the sulphur dust. Then the foreman moved forward and before anyone could shout, he crashed through the roof, screaming into a reddened pot of molten metal; the oxygen in his body making popping sounds as it entered. The furnace operates continued to pour ladles of scrap iron and to melt the steel. They skimmed the slag off the top and when it was ready, they poured the molten mass into ingot molds. There was nothing they could do for the foreman, they said. Production had to keep going. Heavy looks into the eyes of his listeners and says: Somewhere there’s a skyscraper in downtown LA with steel beams made from the ingot with the foreman’s body in it. Somewhere there’s a bridge or underground pipe with the man’s remains chemically bound within the molecular structure. Heavy tells a story. . . and the men lay down their tools, and coffee is poured into heavy ceramic cups, the shanty stills beneath the rumbling, and even foremen stop by to pay a listen when Heavy tells a story.