Gravity Hill
Chapter 1
Jordan Hawkins sat on a metal stool inspecting amber beer bottles as they spun by her lamp. Built out of sky blue sheets of metal and plopped in the middle of a paved lot, Glass and Company offered the highest paying factory jobs in Connecti- cut’s eastern corner. Twenty-four hours a day, florescent light shone over the lines and the furnace blasted dry heat over the workers, finding moisture and sucking it back up into the air.
Jordan was looking for split necks and cherry stones, the two most common defects in the bottles. Split necks were easily detected because light shone through the crack in the lip of the glass, whereas the stubborn pebbles that resisted melting could only be found by scanning for shadows in the body of each bottle. Jordan twisted her ponytail around her hand and tugged. The pain felt good. Down the line a pair of cherry stones danced. The inspection lamp caught the im- perfections each time the bottles turned, so that they looked like bugs encased in amber. She kept her eyes on the pair. Beer bottles spun by very fast, a combination of their size and shape, about sixty a minute, but Jordan liked that—she liked to feel that nothing on the line was too much for her to handle, and when they reached her, she knocked them off the conveyor belt down into a hole in the floor. Another belt would carry them back to be fired over again. “Better luck next time, losers,” she whispered.
Jordan had barely taken off her high school graduation gown when she filed into Glass and Company’s orientation with the other new recruits weeks earlier. Mr. Tilchek, one of the shift supervisors, filled a beer bottle with water and
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rapped it lightly against a counter. The bottle popped wide open, revealing a pebble and he joked, “Resistance is futile.” Jordan got the joke, but grief had a way of flattening every- thing, especially humor. Tilchek explained that every bit of sand had to be melted to make perfect glass. “Defects weaken the bottle,” he said, pointing to the flashing light of the furnace where the bottle would be fired again, and the best Jordan could do was nod in acknowledgment. She saw not the furnace but an ambulance and lights splitting open the darkness.
That was only a month ago, but it felt like somebody else’s lifetime. Tonight, at eight p.m. just as he did every night, Mr. Tilchek tapped Jordan on the shoulder for her break. He was a short, stout man with straight brown hair that hung over his ears and hid the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. His smile hitched up on one side, apologetic and hesitant. Jordan removed her Styrofoam earplugs, and the roar of the plant filled her head.
“You want to work a double?” Tilchek shouted.
A double shift meant overtime and the third shift made the most money. She would make $25 an hour, $200 extra for the night. Her bank account had $7,000 before starting at the factory, the total accumulation of her lifetime wages. In just a month, she had added another $2,000.
She plucked a split neck from the line.
Tilchek smiled. “I was going to tell you this at the end of your shift, but I might as well tell you now. I’m giving you a 3% raise, starting next week.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said without taking her eyes off the line. She knew that by taking the double she wouldn’t get home until after eight in the morning and that meant her father would have to do most of the morning milking alone.
“You have a 97%, Grade A inspection rate,” Tilchek added, pushing his glasses up on his nose. Jordan saw not her green eyes, pale skin, and blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, but rather her frown lines reflecting back to her.
She’d been taught to deflect compliments and she knew
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Tilchek’s admiration wasn’t just for her bottle inspecting. She kept her head down, glad for the baggy shirt that hid her compact form.
Tilchek touched her arm lightly. “Hey,” he said. “I know you’ve had some bumps in the road. But you’re gonna make it.” Jordan jerked her arm away and punched three split necks
into the gutter.
Tilchek seemed to get the message. He stepped back.
“Why don’t you go take your break? And then go to Line 3 and start packing.”
Jordan slid off the stool. “Thanks again for the raise,” she said, but Tilchek had already put his earplugs in, which was a good thing because her thanks sounded ambivalent.
Workers milled about the break room, but even in the crowd, Jordan picked out Tom Hesip, Regional High’s sexy football star: doe-eyed, streaked blond hair and fat, juicy kissing lips. He sat in the corner at one of the square Formica tables, his lunch box open in front of him. Since graduation he worked full time at the glass factory and lived in a reno- vated mill apartment in Putnam with the high school French teacher. Jordan had flirted with Hesip once at a football game, and he’d responded by asking her to go with him to a party after the game, but she’d left the party early to get home for chores.
The vending machine was in that corner and she was hungry, having already eaten her sandwich on the way to work. She pretended to study the bills in her wallet as she stood in front of the machine and selected a bag of peanuts. She got as far as stuffing the peanuts in her back pocket, when Hesip called out.
“I’d know that ass anywhere,” he grinned. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you. Working,” she said flatly. She looked into his lunch box, which held two sandwiches with lettuce and tomato, a package of baby carrots and an apple. In the high school cafeteria, he’d filled his plastic tray with bags of chips
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and starchy entrées and carried it to Room 107 to eat lunch with Mrs. Logee, a cute pixie of a woman in her late twenties. Jordan hadn’t believed the rumors of the affair, but two weeks before the end of school Mrs. Logee was fired, and a substitute took over the French classes.
“When did you start working here?”
“Last month.” Jordan started to move away when Hesip slapped his head and said, “What a jerk I am. Sorry. Are you still going to college in the fall?”
Jordan shook her head. “I’m taking a year off.”
“It’s too bad,” Hesip said. “About your brother.” His gaze slid away. “I know how much school means to you.”
Some of the men sitting at the table with Hesip stopped talking and looked at her. Hesip picked up one of his sand- wiches and unwrapped it. Were they waiting for her to say that she wished she were the one who had died? Because she wasn’t going to say it.
“And I’m sorry Mrs. Logee lost her job. I know how much it meant to her.”
Hesip dropped the sandwich. His face reddened. “You are such a bitch.”
Jordan whipped her gloves out of her back pocket and moved out of the break room. She didn’t want to admit how good it felt to hurt Tom Hesip. When she reached Line #3, Norma Helfin didn’t look up to see her there, although she certainly must have, but instead heaved a box onto the con- veyor belt and poked Jordan in the side. Norma scowled as she adjusted the box but made no apology. Jordan didn’t expect any. Norma was a lifer and even though Jordan worked at the factory, she wasn’t a lifer, and everyone knew it. The lifers hated the college kids because they came in, made good money to pay their tuition, and then they were gone. So, the lifers did what they could during that time to make factory life miserable for them. If they could leave a line backed up with bottles, they did. If they could put the college kids working on the lines nearest the furnace, where they fainted like flies,
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they did. Then they belittled them for being so weak. If lifers found defects that the college kids hadn’t caught, they’d save them all until the end of the shift and then take them to the shift supervisor. But the lifers hadn’t been able to get anything on Jordan and a few showed their grudging admiration for her. She had the best eyes of the teens on her shift and her life of farm work made her tough enough so that the heat of the plant, long hours, and heavy boxes didn’t faze her. But those attributes seemed to make Norma even madder.
“Hey, Norma? You want to work third shift? Well, you can’t, because Mr. Tilchek asked me,” Jordan called out as she started flipping bottles into boxes.
Norma glared at her and veered over to where Tilchek watched the lines.
Jordan heard Norma shouting at him. Although she couldn’t hear what Norma said, she knew the general content. The rule was that the person with seniority always got the offer to work overtime first.
Tilchek hefted his pants over his belly. He wore navy blue work pants with a crease ironed down the front of the legs. He kept his thumbs inside the waistband as if he feared Norma might tear him to pieces. He spoke in a low tone to counter hers. Norma frowned over at Jordan, and then spun away toward the break room. Jordan looked at the bottles spin- ning down the line toward her. They were backing up so that the person at the inspection lamp, someone she didn’t know, didn’t care to know, shouted. “Hey, get packin’!” The empty boxes began falling off the overhead line.
Tilchek hustled over and started throwing the bottles into boxes. His practiced motions jump started her own. He was pissed. A man from the next line over, someone Jordan had never seen before, tall and wiry, wearing a ponytail of long hair and a Harley T-shirt came to help. The line started running smoothly.
“You got this?” Tilchek snapped.
Jordan nodded and the two men went off.
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The plant’s smells—damp sand, wet cement, dry fire, and the sweat of hundreds of people—filled her lungs. She packed bottles into boxes and heaved them onto the conveyor belt to be carried into the warehouse. The muscles of her forearms roped over bone and her small hands swelled. She thought about her mother and father at home in bed and she thought about the way her house looked in the moonlight, the white paint taking on a blue hue of the night, so that the house itself looked peaceful. Ever since she’d been a little girl, she had a recurring dream that a giant came along and lifted off the roof of the house, to see each of them, her mother, father, brother, herself, huddled in sleep and then the cows in the barn, lying in their stalls, and the calves in their sheds. The giant never scared her, he was just a curious giant and after he’d checked on them, he always went away. She thought of God and the giant as one and the same.
Across the factory floor someone yelled, “Watch out!”
The girl on the line next to Jordan had fainted and her line jammed solid. A box tumbled and crashed near Jordan, sending shards of glass everywhere. Jordan stepped over the broken pieces and continued from the other side flipping bottles into boxes and heaving them onto the belt. She didn’t want the lifers pointing at her, saying she was weak. She saw the girl being helped up by another supervisor, a short woman with broad shoulders and leather wristbands. The su- pervisor got an extra to fill in and she led the pale girl to the staff lounge. Jordan could see why they hated the college kids.
As she turned back to her line and reached for the next bottle, her hand touched something soft and furry. There on the line lay a rat, bloated stomach, eyes congealed with death, scrawny claws clenched. She stifled the scream in her throat and whipped around in time to see Hesip and two other guys peering out of the warehouse. They laughed, slapping each other on the back. Jordan grabbed the rat by its tail and marched to the door of the warehouse, where the guys were too busy enjoying their joke to look up and see her.
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“You’re so funny, Hesip,” she said, whipping the rat down at his feet. “This place is just the right speed for you. I can see that.”
“Look at Miss High and Mighty. She fell down to Earth. Boo. Hoo.”
“At least I’m not a lifer.” Jordan saw the hurt cross his face for a second time. She glanced at the line, backed up all the way to the flashing fire of the furnace. The supervisor was looking for her. Jordan could get docked for leaving the line unattended. She ran back to it. Hesip’s words, her own words, everything hurt. She pounded bottles into cartons, trying to pack it all away.
“You got a problem in the warehouse?” The supervisor stood next to her, tightening her wristbands. Muscles bulged in her forearms, the byproduct of years of lifting bottles and boxes.
“No.” A hypotenuse was the longest side of a right-angled triangle. The theme of Plato’s Cave was about shadows and reality and helping others out of the shadows.
“Then don’t leave the line. Or next time I’ll write you up.” Willa Cather wrote My Antonia, The Song of the Lark. “Do you hear me?” The supervisor put her hand over the
box so that Jordan had to stop and acknowledge her.
“Yeah. I hear you.” Jordan tried to give the woman the kind of look she’d seen Clay and his friends give to the people who hassled them: the you can’t hurt me look. Jordan had never been able to perfect that look before, but it came easy now. The woman turned away and for the next hour Jordan packed,
waiving her five-minute break to the girl who’d fainted.
The girl came off her line. She still looked pale. “How do
you do this?” she asked. “What?”
“You’re like a machine. Doesn’t this place get to you?”
Jordan breathed in the vapors coming off the bottles. The smell burned her lungs. “There are worse things,” she said.
“I don’t think I can take this,” the girl said. “I thought I could, but I don’t think I can.” Her voice trailed off as she walked away.
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At her last break of the double shift, Jordan avoided the break room and stood outside with the smokers, the group of older workers in their late fifties and sixties, those who had already raised their children, some of those children working in the factory now. Most lived within thirty miles of the plant and conducted their lives within that radius. The July night sky was a solid lapis blue, lit by the lights around the plant except for the one chute of foggy steam from the smokestack. The parking lot was filled with American cars and trucks, a few motorcycles. Someone drove a Mustang. That had always been Clay’s favorite car. He’d been saving money to buy one. Someone mentioned the rumor that the plant might close soon.
“We make more bottles than the country needs.” “Automation,” someone muttered.
“They speed us up and put us out of work.”
One of the guys changed the topic. “How ‘bout a bike ride
this weekend? We could go over to the Bean and get lunch.” Jordan knew he rode a motorcycle to work. His name was Merle, stitched on a jacket with a red embroidered patch. He took a silver pocket watch out of his pocket. The plant management forbade workers to wear jewelry on the line because of the danger of it getting caught in the machinery. Many of the older workers carried pocket watches instead of cellphones.
The other man looked like a gnome to Jordan. He was small and stooped and his skin had an unhealthy pallor; even in the dead of night she could see that.
“Nice watch,” he said to Merle. “Is it new?”
“My kids gave it to me last weekend for my birthday.” “That a train etched on there?”
“A barn,” Merle said, rubbing his thumb over the cover
before he offered the watch for his friend to see. “My daughter takes jewelry classes, and she did it for me after we had to sell the farm.”
Merle’s daughter was a year ahead of Jordan in high school.
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She’d gone away to college and Jordan never saw her anymore. Jordan wondered if Merle had pressured her to stay and work at the factory or if he’d encouraged her to leave.
The gnome shook his head and handed the watch back. “How many acres?”
“We kept twenty-five.” Merle stuffed the watch back in his pocket. “And the barn. The rest is gone.”
“That seems to be the way of it,” said the gnome as he stroked his beard and took another puff off his cigarette. Jordan watched the two men pull the nicotine in and hold it in their lungs as if the smoke was a solid word of comfort.
