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On the Line, February 1952
By Donna D. Vitucci

Evan Wunder worked Fernald second shift, mostly driving trucks and forklifts around outside the buildings, moving barrels to and from storage. Lab workers pried the top off a barrel for samples and to Evan it looked like plain old dirt. He wasn’t keen on knowing exactly what was in the barrels he shuffled through the outside glow of second shift anyway.

"Build your future around atomic energy." He’d read that sign posted in the administration building so often the saying was burned in his brain. As he tooled around the plant at night, with the outdoor lighting reflected off his white coveralls, Evan felt a warmth of belonging. He felt proud, almost blessed, to be a part of some greater effort.

He liked the noise of the machinery he operated as well as the great rumble of the Pilot Plant running and milling the convoluted processes that it did, all those workers inside, cranking out, producing, perfecting the procedure of refining uranium. Word was each step of the process would get its own building once this newest wave of construction was complete. He liked the night above him while he worked, and though the immense outdoor lighting stole the dark, he often imagined the stars cast across the sky up there like a girl's spread of jacks on blacktop.

At the start of his shift, after the checkpoint guard approved his ID badge, Evan nodded and moved into the perimeter of the plant. His own smell coming up out of his coat collar comforted him, the useful smell of cotton that had soaked up sweat and dried out again. He came to work at Fernald in the clothes he’d been wearing all day. No need to dress up when he’d soon be shrugging into his “uniform” -- white coveralls and a ridiculous little white cap. It amused Evan to think of these hundred or so men clocking in like they were working a bakery shift. That’s what we look like, he thought -- a bunch of doughnut makers.

Cliff Emminger caught up with Evan, Cliff’s stride measuring one step to every three of Evan’s. While the man’s height helped him gain respect in their crowd, it was his thick grey hair and his blue eyes that cemented attention before he even opened his mouth. Cliff knew how to work a room.

“The ground where they started that new expansion’s a damned swamp,” Cliff said.

Evan nodded as they paced towards the Service Building, to their lockers, always towards the time clock. “A few forty degree days like we’ve had are sure to melt the snow.”

“I hear they’re trucking construction guys to where they’re digging, otherwise they're stepping socks into muck because their boots are stuck sure in the clay.”

“They don't want outsiders walking free through the inside perimeter anyway.”

Cliff concurred. “Business you have is no business unless cleared with the guard at the gate.”

More security personnel, guards as Cliff called them, perched up in towers keeping an eye, and maybe rifle sights, on strays. Evan couldn't blame outside folks for cocking their heads and maybe wondering what went on inside here, everything battened down like Fort Knox.

Once in the Service Building, they followed the line of workers through the turnstile and headed for the locker room. Evan began to undress, as did they all, with no embarrassment, their eyes on the clock and not each other. His shirt felt soft and worn between his fingers as he began to hang it on the hook inside his locker, then brought it to his face instead. The scent of Beth’s lilac perfume lingered in the flannel.

Hundreds of times he’d shed clothes like these, or any clothes needing washing, while he stood in the basement of his house, his bare toes gripping the cold cement. He’d grab a clean shirt from the line, all the laundry hanging down and slapping him, some of it wet, the smell of bleach in his face.

He'd maybe sneak upstairs and surprise Beth then, itching to be wrapped in her arms if she'd have him, shutting Mazie outside the bedroom door, forgetting about his little girl for the moment. Amazing Mazie, he sometimes called her if he wanted to tease. Evan had tried to make up for the neglect when he could, but there were times when Beth overwhelmed him, when they'd go off and leave Mazie to fend for herself while they caved in to the urge that came upon them so suddenly. Nothing left to do but scratch the itch. Always a gamble, since everything between him and Beth was so iffy. You had to be ready for Beth’s graces, when she distributed them like a queen doling out favors. The gamble had paid off for Evan this afternoon.

“Some lucky charm perhaps?” Nothing got past Cliff.

Evan smiled and closed his belongings in his locker. “I’d say the luck’s all rubbed off by now. Nothing charmed to look forward to tonight except eight hours of work under the stars.”

“Supposed to go down to fifteen tonight. That’ll stop the thaw right quick.” Cliff sat on the bench to pull on his socks and Evan looked away.

Cliff had fought in the Pacific and had plenty of stories of hell’s new half acre–that’s what he called the Phillippines. Some of his tales might have been tall but the one about jungle rot was pure truth. When he came off tour the government had to pull out all ten of his toenails. Between the required change of clothes and daily showering on this job, Evan had had plenty of opportunities to see Cliff’s toes— plain, babyish and blind looking without their toenails, like some kind of mutant in a science fiction movie. Those shows were just the kind of thing Beth begged Evan to take her to and then she’d spend half the time with her face hidden in his arm, not that he minded in the least.

They clocked in at four and then Cliff and Evan separated. Cliff could be called to anywhere inside Fernald to fix a broken machine but he was starting out this shift at the new Boiler Plant, his crew working like mad to get that building operational. All winter they’d been depending on an old steam engine to heat the entire compound, but next month the Boiler Plant would be up and running. Cliff liked to brag about how he was busting his tail to keep “y’all warm and toasty.” On a night like tonight Evan would gladly give Cliff credit for warmth, if he could come by some. He stuck his hands in his armpits and made his way to the back of the Mechanical Shop, where they had a garage to work on trucks, tractors, forklifts and other vehicles. The sky darkened early on winter evenings, and like Cliff said, it was turning cold again. Evan flipped up his jacket collar—more company issue. The air he inhaled held a smudge of burning and it looked like a plume of smoke rising in the west but those were just odd clouds in the night time sky. To the east, a different story, where he saw smokestacks chugging rhythmic from the top of the Pilot Plant.

Inside the garage Evan stomped his feet and his steel-toed boots would have sent out a solid ringing if there hadn’t already been three or four motors stuttering and revving and chugging as the guys did their best to troubleshoot the large machinery brought in for repair.

Smitty hailed him, but didn’t bother competing with the noise until Evan stood right in front of him. “Got a job for you, Wunder.” Evan mostly read Smitty’s lips as his boss pointed a grease-stained finger. All the soap in the world wouldn’t clean their hands of the engine crud ground for good into the heels of their palms and the tips of their thumbs.

“Take a fork, get yourself an empty drum, and head on over to the Pilot Plant.” Smitty cocked his head. “Got word a flock of starlings was flying over and flew straight through a plume. That is they started to, but hit that damn smoke and dropped down dead.”

Maybe that’s what Evan had caught a whiff of —roasted bird.

“Shovel up the mess and dump ‘em in the pit,” Smitty said.

“Looks like you got clean-up detail, Wunder.” Danny James. Even with his head buried deep inside a dump truck’s engine, nothing got by Danny without him having a word to say about it. He was the garage commentator, chatting you up like a best friend and then broadcasting your news to the whole damn crew.

Evan shrugged. “Need to do something to pass the time around here.” He began walking to one of the forklifts.

Smitty raised his voice over two motors dueling in a far corner. “And wear gloves; you never know what kind of disease those birds are carrying.”

Evan dug a pair of canvas gloves out of the drum by the door and pulled them on as he crossed the garage. The gloves were supposed to come fresh daily from the laundry and he guessed they did because they sure had the stink of drycleaning in them. Keys already in the fork, waiting for him, and when he turned the motor and tooled out of there Smitty and Danny and a couple of the other guys raised their hands. In the din of the garage nobody wasted their voices.

Dozens, no, hundreds of barrels sat up on skids just waiting to hold some kind of waste. Tonight, for Evan at least, it would be birds. He shifted levers so the fork lifted one of the empty barrels, and as he drove the perimeter of Fernald his thoughts played over the earlier hours of the day with Beth.

He conjured the memory of how their afternoon had started with high hopes only to sputter out. He’d spied when she thought no one was watching, found her sitting like a hunchback at the kitchen table, bringing her head down to sip her coffee instead of lifting the cup, rounding her pretty shoulders and hiding her breasts until her sloppy posture caved her in and turned her slender body ugly. Then he watched as she sat straight, pulled her shoulders down and back. She’d tip her head right then left, stretching her neck longer than it already was—all of it putting Evan in mind of birds. From ugly duckling to swan, she transformed right before him.

“Your neck…” he said, making her find him and his voice in the doorway. Evan used his lips instead of words to admire that tender, scented curve.

She shied away. “Quit lurking.”

“You look like a teenager when you slump like that. Like you’re disobeying every mother’s nagging to sit up straight.”

“And you’re my mother?”

“I’m not complaining about your backbone.”

“What are you doing?” She was always suspicious.

“Only getting close.” He lowered his head to kiss her again.

“Did you forget we’re fighting?”

“Break up to make up.” Evan plopped in her lap and Beth shrieked from the weight of him, or maybe just because he’d crossed the line without invitation. Beth had her own rules and damn if Evan could keep them all straight. A married couple shouldn’t be operating on guesswork, they should talk, for Chrissake.

Beth’s clamor brought Mazie running, a four year old with fly-away hair, naked except for a thin petticoat and tap shoes. She held her hands out like she was accepting audience applause. Jeez, the things Beth taught her.

“Get some clothes on,” Evan said.

Beth pinched his side and lifted her knees to shove him off her lap. “Dollbaby, be a peach and go get Mama her cigarettes off the night table.”

Mazie’s dark eyes widened. “Can I blow out the flame?”

Beth fluttered her fingers. “Sure, darlin’, just go.”

Evan watched Mazie tap across the linoleum, no formal dance steps, just God-awful clatter. But it was kind of cute.

“Doesn’t she have something warmer to wear? It’s still wintertime.”

“There’s the sun.” Beth cocked her head at the streaky window as she pushed back the lunch plates and leaned forward on her elbows, slouching again.

The afternoon light made the house lemony, cozy. Evan softened. He wasn’t really yelling at his little girl, he wasn’t really mad at his wife. It took so little to please him; why couldn’t Beth see that?

Mazie’s shoes clattered the floorboards of their bedroom and then the hallway, the shuffle growing louder as she joined them in the kitchen.

Short of breath, she handed over the cigarettes. Evan watched her little heart beat in her temple, the faint blue vein there that pulsed just like Beth’s when they made love, or argued-- whenever he managed to take her breath away.

Mazie and Beth performed the flame duet they’d perfected and Mazie tapped off down the hallway, satisfied with her huffing and puffing.

Come to think of it, Beth looked as rosy-cheeked as Mazie, and she didn’t wear much more than a slip herself. With only two grownups in the kitchen now Evan’s thoughts turned to grownup things.

Beth held up her hand as a STOP sign. “I’ve lost my youth; my looks are going downhill.”

She had such a pout on her. Evan wanted to kiss it right off.

“You’re as pretty as the girls I flirted with in high school.” No lie, even accounting for the crows’ feet she’d acquired from squinting through cigarette smoke. Evan rested on his heels, with his backside against the stove, then leaned in her face as if he was going to take what he wanted. Instead he tapped out a cigarette from her pack.

He stood half bent to the stove burner when Beth tossed him the lighter. “Every minute I sit here with you life’s passing me by.”

The nicotine he inhaled lacked its soothing power. He routed his finger between the two of them. “We’re the life. We make the life, here, a family, us.”

She frowned. “Not enough, Evan. Not nearly measuring up to my dreams.”

“Of?”

She could dip into starry-eyed at the drop of a hat. “Fame.”

Evan tried to disguise his laugh as a cough.

“No fooling, Ev.” She shook the butt-end of her cigarette at him, the stubby thing between fingers with newly polished red nails. “You plucked me right in the prime of my career.”

Which was nowhere but the rickety honky tonk stages in the flat-out country, miles of nothing but fields all around, one long road to some saloon where drunks and crap shoots flourished as she sang into a boozy microphone with more static than sound. Hell, he thought he’d saved her from that, but had more sense than to say so.

“I plucked you like a ripe flower, darlin’.” He angled again for her kiss.

“You’re always trying to change the subject.”

“The subject is roses,” he murmured into her neck. He bent down on one knee; he knew the gallant moves that could sway her. She was a woman of drama and he’d cater to it when he could. He set his cigarette in the ash tray.

Beth sat stiff as a mannequin until he lifted his head from her breast and she blew smoke in his face. “You’ve got a line of bullshit if ever I heard it.”

In her voice he heard softening. From the back of the house Mazie sang, “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me…” She was a four year old mimic. One guess who she’d been studying.

His fingers cinched Beth’s waist, waiting on her go-ahead, for the deep blue that would swim into her eyes, turning them indigo, letting him know he’d gotten on her good side.

“Mazie, crawl under those bedcovers.” Evan stood up and reached for a last drag on his cigarette. “Time for a little nap.”

Beth mocked him with her best stage smile. “Oh, napping are we?”

Her smoke ring chased his up to the ceiling.

He stepped through the kitchen doorway to call down the hall, “I’m coming to tuck you in, Maz. We all need a bit of rest.” He lowered his voice and pointed at Beth. “Now you crawl under our covers. I’ll be tucking you in next.”

And that’s how it was, Evan striving for his rightful place beside his own damned wife, and Beth meting out pleasure in dribs and drabs like those bouncers who allowed customers, after they’d been checked for knives, two or three at a time through the busted doors of the moonshine shacks she called her stepping stones to fame.

Grateful for her acceptance of him in bed and then angered by that very gratitude, he thought of his flighty Beth and how he might just let her go if she was so bent on chasing dreams in countryside bars. He wouldn’t send her packing, but he wouldn’t beg her to stay either. Wouldn’t that send her for a loop? Just see how far she’d get on her own.

Damnit, he’d withhold, too; he could toughen up. His thinking always wound this way when he backed off from hanging on Beth’s every word or whim. For a while, their love-making freed him from weaseling new ways to please her. Not to say she wasn’t worth every charm he used, but he knew his lure didn’t measure up to the rhythm of a three-piece combo behind her and a wild-mouthed audience ahead, even if they were mostly drunks. When Evan got to this point in his mulling he usually tossed it up for lost—the whole kit and kaboodle of marriage. Just chuck it, was what he thought.

Still, there was Mazie. A girl needed her mother, didn’t she? His Mazie was a brown sparrow next to show-stopping Beth, cute in the way children were, but nondescript like Evan, brown-eyed, brown-haired, with none of Beth’s chorus girl pizzazz. In nature, male birds were the prettier sex; in their little nest Beth was the farthest thing from drudge.

Speaking of birds, how many dead ones might there be, he wondered? Ten? Twenty? Two-hundred? He could be at this cleanup all night. Evan parked the fork lift in the shadow of the Pilot Plant. First he’d take a look at the mess; maybe one barrel wouldn’t be enough. As he turned the building’s corner, the wind kicked the smell right into him. He rigged the scarf he normally tucked inside his neck around his nose and mouth so the cloth smothered him with his own breath, and when he inhaled, lint in the weave tickled his nose. Even his own breath smelled bad and he was up to his eyeballs in it.

To Evan the blacktop appeared ruffled. A flock of starlings, he guessed, a good fifty or sixty dead ones, and the wind playing with their wings and feathers, not knowing its usefulness, in this case, was done for. The sight of the Pilot Plant’s stacks pulled at Evan’s gaze. The stuff chugging into the cold night kept rising and rising until it blotted out the stars. It was waste, with nothing more to be squeezed from it. If that smoke had value, this place would have found a way to capture and extract it.

An old joke of Cliff’s rang in Evan’s head: “We use everything but the squeal”—the point being that, just as a butcher used up the pig’s parts from hoofs to tail to snout, Fernald lab workers and head honchos were ever figuring new ways to burn and slurry and forge and shave each valuable metal, gas, and liquid byproduct from the ore refining process.

With the edge of the fork Evan began nudging the dead birds towards the drum he’d dropped down, one of several dozen he thought he’d just painted black last week, but he stopped when he saw the mess he was creating. Better to shut the damned machine off, climb out of the seat, and just get dirty.

As Evan picked up the dead carcasses he felt he could crush them in his grip, and so he held each in a particularly gentle way. He didn’t toss them into the drum, but lay them atop one another, a sandwich of birds, a stack of birds, a drum deep with birds. Suddenly he hated every single one of the chemists and engineers, hated the easy life they had in their protected lab environment, beakers and equipment to boil up samples, never touching the metal or the powder or whatever danger there was. They peered from behind goggles at their measurements; they logged tiny numbers on graph paper. They wore respirators when required, and maybe even when the rules didn’t say to. But Fernald sat smack in the middle of the birds’ route from the south along the Miami River Valley to some tree hole or nesting place their kind had haunted for years. What lay ahead of them could have been chimney smoke or burn-off from a brush fire. They hadn’t a clue. He knew that’s what Cliff would say later at Flick’s, when the shift bore out and they’d cluster around the bar, pitching back their beers in their own clothes again, their freshly showered bodies in their own clothes, with scents of detergent or early supper or afternoon love, their Fernald uniforms shed and sent off to the laundry, including Evan’s work clothes, smeared with the stench of burnt birds.

Grime didn’t show on their black feathers but it coated Evan’s gloves. He was tempted to go back to the garage for a second pair but then he felt torn about leaving the birds half done, half buried, if burial was the name he’d give to this little ritual. Each time he put another one in the barrel he genuflected in honor of birds that once exploded from perch to full flight in a blur.

Good thing Evan had a machine to ride because the clean up took a lot out of him. His wristwatch read two hours since he first started barreling birds. He managed the drum with the forklift and by the beam of his headlights drove to the pit at the far west side of the complex. Intervening distance muffled the Pilot Plant’s noisy chugging.

His seat up in the machine gave him a good view of the pit, of the wet, oily skin atop the muck that made it look like a newly slapped giant mud pie. The pit bubbled from the deep bottom of its black swamp, with a little smoke emanating as the cold in the atmosphere slowly tempered the hot waste. Kind of eerie, as if a creature from one of those horror films Beth so loved might rise up to terrorize Fernald once Evan turned his back. Already he’d been at this job too long. Smitty would soon send Danny James hunting for him, to keep him honest, scratching this last chance to pad his time card with a moment of silence for a fucking flock of birds.

Later at Flick’s, Evan gloried in the warmth and scent of his own well-worn flannel, the caress of the collar as comforting as Beth’s fingers. He shrugged off the joshing of his buddies, tuned out Cliff’s pontificating, chugged a second beer, and headed the long way home, a drive that wound a three quarter-circuit around the Plant. Activity and the mere shape of the place dwarfed the surrounding landscape, drawing the eye, and damn if a cloud of something wasn’t flying to bisect those smoke stacks.

“Always more where those came from,” Cliff’s voice reminded inside Evan’s head. Ever practical, unsentimental Cliff.

Evan’s foot played the brake until he drew off the side of the road. His Ford leaned in the gravel when he opened his door and stood half in and half out of the car, his knee resting on the seat for balance.
Whatever they were, birds or bats, flew right on, swallowed up by the night. Evan got back into his car.

Beth and Mazie were asleep when he came in at almost two o’clock in the morning. Evan had lingered longer at Flick’s than he’d realized. Funny, because he couldn’t remember saying word one to anybody. Cliff would surely needle him about that tomorrow when they suited up in the locker room.

His two girls were sleeping together in his bed, their slips hiked up past their knees from tossing in their dreams. Did they even bother dressing today? He lifted Mazie and carried her down the short hallway to her own small bed. In his arms she was a feather’s weight.

Again in his own room, he sat to untie his shoes and the mattress leaned. Beth opened her sleepy eyes and he saw recognition register there. When she adjusted her slip from where it had twisted underneath her, her knuckles grazed Evan’s knee crossed upon his other leg. She said, “Kind of late aren’t you?”

“I stopped at Flick’s.” He kicked off his second shoe.

“Did you eat?”

Come to think of it, he hadn’t. No appetite. But he was touched by the fact that Beth maybe saved some dinner for him, that she considered his hunger and planned for it.

“Any leftovers?” Standing, he shucked his flannel shirt from his arms.

Beth rubbed her nose. “I thought maybe Les fed you guys barbeque chicken.”

Evan paused, his head hidden in the T-shirt he was stripping off. “Why?” He reappeared to watch her shrug and settle her blond curls into a new spot on the pillow.

“You smell fiery is all.”

He’d stepped out of his jeans and his underwear. Naked, with the braided rug bumpy under his feet, Evan tried to smell his own body. He’d taken the usual exit shower after shift, in fact scrubbed extra long. Beside Beth, he fit his nakedness all along the slippery fabric she wore. She snuggled in, too. Something about nighttime allowed the day’s mockery and gripes between them to bleed away. Evan kissed her pale lips and thought maybe her congeniality had to do with lipstick, in that she didn’t wear her warpaint to bed. They settled under the covers and he told her about his curious job, the loading and unloading of dead birds, sticking to the simple facts, though Beth would probably have enjoyed gruesome description. For such a sweet, likeable face, she had a tendency to be cruel, to act flippant. Evan harbored the details.

“It wasn’t pretty,” he said.

“Sounds creepy.”

“It was. And sad.”

She shivered. “Let’s go to a movie tomorrow.”

Beth could turn on a dime. Her investment rarely extended beyond the gloss of the world. He needed reminding of that, and Beth always managed to oblige.

“I have to work,” he said.

“A matinee.”

“What will we do with Mazie?”

“What do we ever do with Mazie?”

“Take her with us.”

Beth yawned. “Sure.”

Turned as she was from him he could only guess she’d closed her eyes. If sleep for her was an easy escape, Evan had to find his way there alone. Beth’s breath came even and unbothered. Except for her “lost career,” which she worried like a snaggly tooth, she tossed her cares out the back door at the end of the day. They’d bicker again tomorrow. It was their way. Evan smoothed the sheet over her shoulder, ran his hand down her back, felt her wing bone where it jutted out because of the way she lay curled in the same direction he faced. He stared at the back of her head, smelled the setting lotion in her hair, but in his mind flickered a review of the night’s exhausting work. He’d done what he could and it had been enough. Yet here in the warmth of his very own bed his eyes smarted as he faced the fact that he did not know how to make Beth happy. His wooing, this marriage, had been one big stall tactic, furniture piled at the door to prevent her leaving. He put his hand on this sleeping stranger, in whom sat potential for a sudden burst of flight. She was, would always be, as far from him as the starlings. No, the birds were closer and they were dead.