Deaf Man Listening

DEAF MAN LISTENING

Deaf Willy pressed his nine-and one-half fingers on the side of the Labeling Machine No. 6 and smiled. The regular rhythm beat of the machine’s 10 tiny steel feet pushing 10 gaudy “Alaska’s Best Salmon” labels out to be glued onto the waxed cardstock containers was music to his fingers.

CLACK Pause CLACK Pause CLACK Pause

Timing his movements to the rhythmic vibrations, he deftly slipped 50 more labels into each label bin, refilling one bin at a time during the pause between each beat. The missing middle finger on his right hand was a visual reminder not try filling more than one bin at a time.

With all of the bins refilled, he took a moment to silently embrace the cannery’s cacophonous soundless symphony for the other senses. The big Anchorage canning factory was located on an over-the-water wharf on the edge of Cook Inlet for the convenience of fishing boats bringing in their catch, and the building’s wooden walls and worn plank floors had literally absorbed a quarter century’s worth of smells since it opened in 1939.

The ol’ factory perfumes, he thought, savoring the pun.

Deaf Willy, or “Willis” as he preferred to be called and rarely ever was, inhaled deeply, happily, and began sorting them out.

Rotting seaweed on the shore.

Raw fish.

Cooked fish.

Hot paraffin wax.

The rotten eggs stench of the six Wax Kettles’ natural gas burners.

Machine oil.

The metallic smell of his machine’s cogs and gears worn smooth by time and use.

The sharp, sour smell of human sweat...

He sniffed the damp armpit of his own t shirt.

My own aroma, too.

Even in March, it was at least 100 degrees here inside what with the plethora of machines and cookers. Short-sleeved shirts were the norm in here, even now at the end of a colder-than-usual Alaskan March.

The label bins were almost empty again. Willis bent and refilled the them, then straightened, rubbing his aching back.

Getting too old to be standing on my feet eight hours straight.

Dismissing the achiness, he savored the visual stimuli of machines moving and their workers serving them in a perfectly synchronized industrial ballet.

Every thing

and

Every body

Turning fish to

Finished product.

A “danse de la machine” as the French would say.

Largely self-educated, Willis prided himself on his book learning and the vocabulary of three languages that he shared only on paper.

A Symphony of the Four Senses performed just for me.

He felt sorry for the other workers, the Hearing Folk, whose senses were dulled by the cannery’s incessant assault on their ear drums. He could almost find it in his heart to forgive his drunken stepfather whose fists, hardened by years of working on Bering Sea crab boats, had beaten the hearing out of him at age six.

Willis was idlily wondering whatever had happened to the man when something caught at the corner of his eye.

Ah ha! Enter Wax Boy stage left and right on time, reliable as my Timex watch.

It seemed the 18-year-old Wax Boy only owned six t shirts and he religiously wore each one to work on the same night shift each week. Willis approved of this; he liked synchronicity.

I wonder what he wears on Sundays?

It was the Thursday Night Shift, so Wax Boy was wearing the tie-dyed “1963 S.E. Alaska Music Festival” number that was mostly holes and greasy spots.

That was new just last year. I wonder if he’ll get a new one at this year’s festival and wear it? That would be nice.

The holes and greasy spots came from Wax Boy getting splashed as he filled the Wax Kettles at the six Labeling Machines scattered around the cannery.

Wax Boy faithfully made his rounds every hour and Willis’s machine was his last stop.

This makes the seventh time he’s come around tonight. So, it’s about 6:00 a.m., Friday morning now. Night shift is almost over.

Willis watched as Wax Boy climbed the tall, rickety ladder and propped open the Wax Kettle’s lid. He was always afraid that Wax Boy might fall over or in, and silently willed him and the ladder upright.

The lanky eighteen-year-old awkwardly extracted large blocks of paraffin wax from a bulky back pack, and cautiously dropped them, one at a time, down into the molten wax at the bottom of the kettle. His hands and wrists were scarred and blistered from being splashed.

Lost his gloves again. I see.

Finished, the young man shut the lid and climbed down the ladder. Seeing Willis watching him,Wax Boy grinned and mimed wiping his sweaty forehead before he started trudging back over to Labeling Machine No. 1 on the other side of the factory to start all over again. Willis gave him a thumbs up and turned back to his own machine.

Time to check the wax sprayer.

The melted wax was piped down from the Wax Kettle to Willis's’ machine where it was used to coat and seal the cardstock containers insides of before the labels were put on the outsides. Sometimes, during the “topping up,” the wax got too cool and the sprayer tip on Willis’s Labeling Machine clogged. That meant shutting down Line 6 until he got it cleared. When that happened, they docked your pay.

Everything looks fi-

thrum tremble

Whoa! What’s that? That’s new.

Willis had felt a new vibration, a discordant throb in the tactile symphony.

Coming from... what? Where?

He felt his machine.

Not from here.

thrum tremble

Feeling it through my feet. Coming from someplace else.

Curious, a little concerned, he topped up the partially-emptied label bins to buy himself some extra time, and speed walked over to the nearby Boxing and Shipping Area No. 6. The two older women there had scarves tied over their ears to protect their hearing, and were busily taking finished containers of salmon off the conveyor belt and putting them, 24 to a box, into the newly-made corrugated-cardboard shipping boxes Then the women taped the boxes shut, ready to ship to the lower Forty-eight.

One of the Box Ladies (the white one with the words, “1939 New York World Fair,” tattooed inside a heart on her flabby left forearm), shouted something at him.

Probably asking what the Hell I’m doing over here.

The other woman, a native, mouthed something through missing front teeth. It must have been naughty because the other woman smirked, wiggled her ample hips, and began making kissy faces at him.

Willis put on a “Je n'ai pas le temps” face and blew her a kiss with his left hand. because his four-and-one-half fingered right hand was firmly pressed to the side of the Shipping Box Making Machine, sensing its song, as regular as a heartbeat.

Stamp Fold Stamp Fold Stamp Fold Stamp Fold Stamp Fold

At first, he felt nothing off kilter. Then, just as he was about to give up...

thrum tremble

He imagined that it seemed a little more intense this time and, fingers still pressed on the machine, patiently waited to see if it would happen again, After three minutes, he gave up and, looking up, discovered that both women were frantically waving their arms, trying to get his attention. When they saw he was looking at them, they pointed over in the direction of his machine and then down at their conveyor belt loaded with dozens of unlabeled containers.

Oh, shite! Oh, dammit! The label bins are empty! Merde! verdammt!

He hustled back to his machine and started filling bins.

thrum tremble

The alien vibration was definitely stronger. It reminded him of what he felt when he put his hands on the railroad track to sense the vibrations of an approaching freight train so he could hobo a ride into Anchorage to go to the library.

Like a big train is comi-

A strong claw gripped his shoulder. Willis winced. He recognized the three-fingered grip. It belonged to Stubborn George, the floor boss.

Once upon a time, Stubborn George had tried to fill two label bins at a time and lost a finger. Once his hand healed, he had tried again with the same result. Willis suspected he would have kept trying until he ran out of fingers, if the Manager hadn’t made him quit.

Now, Willis reluctantly turned his head to read the words formed by the other man’s lips: “Deaf Willy.... What’s....The.... Fuckin’... Problem?”

Even after working together for almost seven years, Stubborn George still believed you could make a deaf person understand you if you just shouted loud enough and spoke v-e-r-y slowly. Willis pulled the stub of a pencil and the little notebook he used as a journal and started to write his excuse when...

thrum tremble jolt

It’s close. God dammit!

Desperate, Willis yanked the other man’s maimed hand off his shoulder and pressed it against the machine. Stubborn George held his three fingers there for just a moment, then took them away and shrugged, confused. “Are... you... sayin’... the... machine... is... broken?”

Can’t the man feel the vibrations?

Willis cupped his ears, pointed down at the worn, dirty floorboards and jumped up and down. Three-fingered George was still confused, still didn’t understand.

Desperate, Willis dredged up one of the few spoken words he still remembered how to pronounce.

“Lis-sin!”

But the floor boss wasn’t listening. He was cursing. Because every thing and every one had suddenly started jerking and shaking.

“Son of a bitch! Did you hear that? What have you done, you damn deaf mo-?”

thrum tremble jolt

Across the floor at Labeling Machine No. 3, Wax Boy’s ladder swayed like a trapeze and he grabbed the hot Wax Kettle for support. Big mistake. Mouth open in a silent scream, he yanked his blistered hands away as he and the ladder toppled backwards. Seconds later, the Wax Kettle toppled, too, slopping its blistering contents all over the fallen Wax Boy’s body. But he didn’t feel it. The fall had broken his neck.

thrum tremble Jolt

More sharp jolts, each one harder than the one before.

Like my dog shakes rats to snap their necks, thought Willis.

The floor of the wharf the cannery was built on began to ripple. The thick flooring planks bowed, nails popped, and a quarter-century of old fish scales and debris that varnished the planks exploded into the air like popcorn. Some of the planks fell down into the the angry sea below.

Then one of the heavy creosote pilings the cannery wharf stood on snapped like a rotten matchstick, dumping Shipping Box Machine No. 6, the two older ladies, and 102 cardboard boxes full of “Alaska’s Best Salmon” back into the sea from whence it came. One woman (not the one with the World’s Fair tattoo) would survive, riding out the subsequent tsunami on a raft of sorts she made out of boxes of canned salmon.

thrum tremble JOLT

The power shorted out. Showers of sparks flew about in the gloom. Willis knew people must be screaming and shouting. He certainly was. His screams reverberated inside his head until he thought it would burst.

The shaking and banging went on for three long minutes.

thrum tremble JOLT thrum tremble JOLT thrum tremble JOLT

Like living in a silent movie, Willis watched as, one by one, the ceiling rafters failed and the galvanized-steel roof panels came spilling down like sharp, rusty knives.

One of them sliced off Stubborn George’s head.

Stubborn to the last, his headless body refused to fall, remained standing, neck fountaining blood, until the floor gave way beneath it.

thrum tremble JOLT

The biggest tremor yet knocked Willis to the floor, Labeling Machine No. 6 toppled over onto him, the remaining flooring failed under them, and Willis and his machine dropped like stones down into the maddened sea.

≈≈≈

Sound travels better underwater and, as he sank deeper and deeper, the pressure of the water on his ruined ears grew stronger and stronger until, at the last, Deaf Willy thought he could actually hear the rending and shaking.

Drowning in noise, he listened and smiled.

___________

The 1964 Alaska Earthquake, also known as the Great Alaska Earthquake and the Good Friday Earthquake, was a megathrust quake that began at 5:36 P.M. AST on March 27, 1964. It had a moment magnitude of 9.2, making it the second largest earthquake on record. Lasting nearly three minutes, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history. Ground fissures and failures caused major structural damage in several communities. Anchorage sustained great destruction or damage to many inadequately earthquake engineered houses, buildings, and infrastructure.

— Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

END