East Side Ice & Fuel

by Caroline Lackey

"This is a factory job," Bud, the owner, explains as he looks me up and down.

"I understand that." I say, not understanding.

"Let me walk you through what we do here." As if this might clear everything up. Bud is maybe five-and-a-half feet tall, grey and bald simultaneously. He's heavy but something about his demeanor seems to apologize for it so it almost goes unnoticed.

We walk through a large refrigerated 'room' with a giant metal machine forming a sort of wall and large bags of ice stacked high against the perimeter. Through an opening, there's a back room partitioned so that a family room-sized area is filled to the high ceiling with loose ice. To the back is a loading dock and the rest of the space is filled with stands into which small bags of ice are packed tightly and dollied out into a truck by a young man.

The machines and refrigeration are loud so that Bud has to shout. "I'm trying to tell you that I'm not hiring for a secretary." We head, single-file, back outside.

"I understand." I reaffirm. All I want to hear is that I got the job. I don't really care what it is. It's been weeks as it is and my stomach knots as he hesitates. I am trying to bear the presence of someone whose dream is to do exactly this. Usually I have more to work with and still I don't get the jobs.

"We've never had a girl working here." Bud pauses and shrugs a little shrug. "If you want to give it a try you can be here tomorrow at 7. I'll put you in the schedule."

"Thank you." I hesitate to call him by his first name but grab his hand and shake it heartily. "Thank you, Bud. I will see you tomorrow morning."

I try not to show my excessive exuberance as I walk away. The overcast day and me in my favorite jeans add to the Olympic sprint and long jump over the dry riverbeds of litter as I head back to my car. I can feel Bud watching me and wondering what's what with this girl. I will endear myself to him and in some little way thank him for saving my ass. I smile and wave as I round the corner and slink back toward my neighborhood.

I park and re-read the job description in the ad, converting the hourly promise to the monthly take home truth. I find a figure for the highest I'd be able to afford in rent and start looking for an apartment. I'm scared to imagine what will fall into my budget, but I believe I can transform the hole into a welcoming space.

Although Jonah had taken Joseph out to talk over dinner, I do my apartment hunting in the car. Jonah felt Joseph would be more likely to ask questions and share his feelings if I was not there. I haven't been around in a long time as it is and the guilt of it consumes me. It's a catch-22 that makes me want to be farther from Joseph, which makes everything worse. Jonah and I agree that the swifter we can transition the better. This is the fire under me. What is the fire in me?

On the phone with its dying battery, I am able to make some appointments to look at places for tomorrow after work. I am thankful not to have to worry about first and last month's rent. Jonah is ready for me to go so I don't think it's arrogant to assume that the one-time cost is not at issue. I sleep in the car as long as I can stand it and then skulk in late to rest comfortably on the couch.

Inside, I cannot sleep. I am a secret in my former life as I move around the kitchen opening drawers to remember things I'm scared to forget. When I make the break, I want it to be clean. No money, no confusion. The guilt might kill me as it is.

I'm looking in the dark at our pictures lining the hallway. I feel like a thief but I am the opposite of a thief. I am trying to put things back, to put things right. But that's a lie, isn't it? I'm stealing something even if it is mine. I joined this nuclear family commune and what was mine became ours. And now I break the piggy bank while they shield their eyes from the shards. When they open their eyes, I will be gone.

I am scarcely acknowledged by the guys and Bud doesn't come in until 9, when the place opens. But it beats being treated with intolerance, which I worried a little about. Someone yells in my ear, but happily not in my face, the general instructions I will need to perform my job for the next few hours. The instructions, in brief, are take the bags off the conveyor belt and stack those across, as so. The bags are 8 lbs each; these are the smallish bags of ice one buys when having people over for dinner so as not to exhaust the ice trays.

With this, we start the machine. The ice pumps out in terse staccato intervals as one guy holds the bag at the opening. He runs the neck through an industrial, vertical kind of stapler. And he tosses it onto the conveyor belt.

Arranged around me are aluminum cartridges that I can fill 3 wide, 18 or so high with bags. There is a sea of them. There's a guy in the back room with me whose primary function is to keep the machine from getting clogged at any point. This requires agility that the health department would not imagine.

After I complete one cartridge, I learn that the blockage guy is also the means of removing my stack with a new, empty one. This is handy to be sure and it seems like I'd be appreciative. But though the net result is less work for me, it seems I'll always be working at a deficit. It makes me hate that guy.

I work as quickly as I am able which slows exponentially after only an hour. I am stiff from lack of use. My gloves become moist and floppy making swift impossible. I rip them off and struggle to keep up with the conveyor belt. Soon, I am getting only every alternate bag and the others roll onto the floor in a now growing pile. The cold makes the skin on my hands papery and without the gloves the corners of the plastic bags are enough to tear at my skin. Not bleeding but scratched and cold.

A dam inside me bursts and I work even faster despite the pain and growing fatigue. I am lit by anger and imagined injustice. When my co-worker in the back glides over and stacks the bags on the floor, I realize this happens and I am pushing for an impossible goal. I relent, laughing inside but not releasing too loose the hold I have there.

In four hours we're done. Seeing my enormous job complete, I am invigorated spiritually. I'm exhausted in ways I cannot even comprehend and I am beginning to be only faintly aware that this will be compounded in the days to come.

Outside the heat is suffocating, the humidity oppressive. I eat ice by the cupful and replenish my cup from the leftover ice in the machines.

After work I crave bed and I rest outside on the dock. When I close my eyes I can feel the weight of my fat cat sitting on my lower back as I waver between waking and sleeping on the pea green couch at home. But I have to go out and look for an apartment and I'm lucky I got appointments on short notice, or so I tell myself to propel forward into my future.

There were 3 and 2 of them were livable. I was getting all in a rush and made an offer on the third and best apartment, billed as a one bedroom but really a studio with stained carpet and subtle cat smell. The landlord said he'd need to do a credit check and speak to my previous landlord even though I explained that my husband is my previous landlord. I fill out the application, reduced to trepidation but buoyed by possibilities. He says he'll run it in the morning and call me as soon as he can. His leathery face has comfort for me, but I'm hesitant to take it. I will break if anyone does anything nice for me. I look away and thank him at the door.

My muscles ache. I am trying to eat a TV dinner under what feels like a spotlight at the kitchen table. Cutting and lifting the fork are excruciating. Somehow, it's easier if I lift something moderately heavy so I rest one wrist on the other forearm and this makes eating less painful.

Jonah comes in and asks me how it went. I realize I am slumping far over my not-quite-fully-cooked meal. In a glance he acknowledges my pathetic state and pulls up a chair. I tell Jonah what I can about the ice factory and the fact that having work means moving out is a visible speck on the horizon. We're past the wanting to somehow find a way to make this not be happening. Past even the sirens in the brain, blind, screaming delirious with grief. We have come to a place where we can sit at a kitchen table.

The following Monday morning I arrive at East Side Ice and I meet everyone, at last, cursory and blank. I learn through observing and gathering what I can from conversations. A couple of them head off to lunch and we will be relieved by them in an hour. When we return we'll load up the vans for delivery to restaurants and take walk-in orders, delivering 40-lb bags and cases of beer to the backs of pickups for parties, etc. A couple of guys go out in the vans while a couple of us stay and do customer service on the dock. Customer service means selling 40s of swill to the drunks that come up to the dock with their dollar, or wedging huge bags into the back of cars endeared to their owners.

At lunch break, I call home to check messages. I got the place. I go out back and sit on the dock. I breathe deliberately and thoughts go through my head, but I'm not exactly thinking. My whole life is about to change. I can't see one week into the future but it feels right. I wonder if this is how newly enlisted teenagers feel leaving home. I lie slowly back on the cool cement and pause, abruptly kicking my feet into the air and curling my back almost totally off the floor. Woo hoo.

I mill all around the plant eating bologna sandwiches with mayo on wheat. Everybody eats fast food but me. To make it less awkward I try to get out of the room before the menus break out and people are shouting in their orders. When pressed, I pretend it is about fat content because I am embarrassed that it's about money. They are kids, mostly.

I discover there is this one giant empty room, off the side of the building really. It has a floor made out of wood planks that don't touch and great, rusty chains and hooks running from the ceiling. When nobody's around to catch me I slip in. I come in here to eat alone. I'm not even sure I am allowed.

This afternoon I am watching the dock when a woman comes up in overalls asking for blocks. Bud comes out and helps her; clearly they know each other. They go into my lunch room and open the floor. There, below, are huge 6-feet-long blocks of ice. He pulleys one up, and puts it back. The he pulls another. I watch in fascination. Then he brings one out fully, ice picks it once, cracking it into a size that greatly pleases the customer. To pick it up, he uses massive steel-jaws. He scissors confidently on the thing and it bites the giant ice cube. With that he drags it to her pickup and then gently hoists it into the bed. She pays him next to nothing for this mysterious endeavor and Bud whomps me on the back as he heads to the register, smiling. "Didn't know our clientele included ice sculptors, eh, Sport?"

I look out at the little pickup weighted down with art supplies. The truck lunges a little as it pulls into the intersection and the woman inside looks out at me and smiles. Did Bud just call me Sport?

Copyright © Caroline Lackey 2003