Shorty (standard:other, 1233 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Oct 24 2008	Views/Reads: 3237/1967	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
What do you do when your work comes ro an end? Sell ice cream to the kids?

SHORTY 

Towards noon, after we poured off the last of the hot metal and we were
still soaking with sweat, Shorty and I headed across the street for ham 
sandwiches and cold beers.  Shorty told me of his grief.  His brother 
in Detroit was still looking for work; one kid had the flu and the 
other had sickle-cell anemia.  If Shorty was mad at the world, his 
gentle voice belied it.  Nevertheless, he put in a fourteen-hour day, 
receiving hot molds with his asbestos gloves and gnashing through 
clumps of stainless steel with a cutoff wheel -- a roaring disc of 
coarse abrasive. 

It was summer again, and after lunch the casting bay was hotter than
blazes.  Ken had already pushed the melting pot to its forty-ninth 
heat, and after we poured off, Shorty had the dirty job of relining it. 
He beat at the brittle black crust of slag and metal left in the ladle, 
prying it out, dumping the hot skull onto the cracked concrete floor.  
The pry bar was already blunt and warped from beating red-hot skulls.  
We had no pig molds for leftover metal so we bled it out onto the sand 
and let it congeal. 

Shorty had all the hot jobs.  Every time we got ready to pour a heat, he
buttoned up in a gleaming aluminum greatcoat that resisted the flames.  
I had to set the heavy helmet on his head so he could see through the 
gold-tinted visor glass.   Dan, the furnace man, reached inside the 
burnout oven with long tongs and lifted out a glowing pink, hollow 
ceramic shell.  As the yawning door closed, he placed each mold 
carefully into Shorty's hands, which were mitts with inch-thick itchy 
asbestos pads.   And Shorty carefully placed each ceramic shell on the 
sand bed where we poured the molten metal. Those gloves were the only 
thing between his bare fingers and a searing hot eighteen hundred 
degree ceramic shell.  They played this game of hot potato hour after 
hour, every day. 

Shorty stood six foot even, bulging muscles rippling inside his tight
blue work shirt and jeans.  We checked his weight once on the shipping 
scale; the needle shot up past three hundred and slowly drifted back a 
little.  I remember when, on a bet, he doubled an inch-thick bar of 
stainless steel across his knee and then bought us all beer with his 
winnings. 

Once I was on my way across the finishing room when Shorty swung around
and laid me out flat with a swat on the chest. 

"Wheel just cracked!" he yelled, "Get behind the wall.  I'll try to shut
it off."  I ducked for cover while he dove for the switch as the wheel 
blew apart.  That room put on a three-ring circus for the next ten 
seconds.  Every wall up to eye level was peppered in a smallpox pattern 
by the flying abrasive knives.  When all the chips and fragments had 
settled, Shorty came over to me. 

"I'm sure sorry I had to hit you like that.  Hope I didn't break
nothin'."  He had just saved both our lives. 

Sparse, tightly curled black hair covered his shiny brown scalp, and in
the shop he kept it covered with a nylon stocking, cut off at the knee 
and tied in a knot.  Folds of neck muscle rippled down from his ears 
and flared out into mammoth shoulders.  It was always astonishing to 
see such a big man move rapidly. 

Before the year was out, I heard many stories of Shorty's bad luck as
left end for a couple of football teams.  He didn't carry the ball 
often -- he could never catch a pass -- but once he got it in his hands 
from a hand-off or a fumble, and began moving down the field, it took 
at least three opponents to bring him to his knees.  When he was 
dropped from one team after another, Shorty found himself without a 
cent and took to building roads, loading trucks, hauling sacks of 
animal feed -- anything to make a buck.  He never learned to drive, and 
it wasn't easy for him to get around town.  Shorty fit some makes of 
car, but not others. 

Somewhere along the line, his woman became his wife and in the next
couple of years he acquired three or four children. 

Our foundry wasn't far from where he lived: a short walk in good weather


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