Chapter Three

 I Get in the Broom Business

My first day at Redskin Brooms, I was going to take the bus, but I didn't know what the building looked like. Rusty kept trying to describe it to me, but I didn't understand where it was. "Across from the gasket company," she kept saying. "Right across the street from the gasket place." But I couldn't picture it in my mind, so she drove me in the first night, even though she didn't have to be there until five.

I had to be at Redskin at four to get trained. After we got there I said, "Oh, this place." I didn't notice it at first. What I noticed was American Gasket Company, because it was made of concrete blocks painted bright yellow. Like Imperial margarine, that yellow, and a big sign about as big as the building that said GASKETS ARE OUR ONLY BUSINESS. The O's in the sign was round black things that must of been gaskets.
That's what I seen, the gasket place, and at first I didn't even notice Redskin Brooms. edskin was just about all parking lot, with just a little building stuck down at one end. "Big lot, little building," I said.

"Even during day shift, when the most people are here," said Rusty, "there's always ten times more places to park than there is cars."
We got out of the car and grabbed our lunch sacks off the back seat. When we walked up to the building, I seen metal bars on all the windows, with big old padlocks hanging off them.
"Somebody running a ring of broom-stealers around here?" I asked.

"Looks like it, don't it?" Rusty said. "No, the bars is from when this used to be some kind of a F.B.I. place."

"The F.B.I. worked out of a broom factory?" I said. "You're shittin' me."

"It wasn't a factory then, it was a F.B.I. place," said Rusty. "Don't be in there talking F.B.I. or you'll be clocking out before you clock in."

The women that worked at Redskin—it was all women except for the bosses—said the window bars was on there to keep the workers from jumping out. Five minutes after they clocked in they started thinking about working there until retirement. They would of done a bellyflop out a window but the whole building was only two stories.

The boss was named Vernon True. There was other bosses but Vernon was the only one that talked to workers. He had to, it was his job. That first day Rusty walked me in, and Vernon was waiting by the time clock for me. He punched my card and showed me which slot to put it in, Number 16. After he dropped my card in the slot he started walking so I guess I was supposed to follow him. He looked like a porcupine, little and round with a gray crewcut. He walked like a porcupine, too, kind of flat-footed and his toes turned out.

I followed Vernon through the factory. Some factory, the whole thing was four offices and three work rooms. All the walls was cement blocks, real gray and real dirty. The first room was the biggest one, where they put the broom bristles on the handle and all that. There was maybe twenty women in there, but none of them looked up when me and Vernon come through. There was seven or eight big heavy work tables, made of splintery wood painted gray, with three women working at each one. At a couple of the tables, the women was talking quiet while they worked on brooms and mop handles. The rest of the women was acting like they was all alone with their work.

For a porcupine, Vernon walked fast. I had to hurry up so I didn't lose him when he went down the hall to the middle room. That's where Rusty worked. Her and two other women was dipping handles down in big sinks full of paint. The air had so much paint and chemical smell, I got choked up. Rusty and the other two women was breathing okay, I guess you got used to it. Somebody had painted NO SMOKING on the wall, great big brushy letters as big as my head.

Vernon flat-footed off into the last room and I followed him. The walls of the finish room was full of wooden bins. The bins was full of gray lumpy stuff, I finally figured out the gray stuff was mop heads. There was only three walls in the finish room, and the other side was just a little partition. I could see over the partition, across into the middle room, where Rusty was working. The finish room had two big flat plywood tables in it, and a woman with curly hair was working at one of them. Me and Vernon was standing next to the other table. Nobody was at this one, stacked up on it was some paper labels, and jars of glue, and razor blades, and other junk.

"Now, here, look here," said Vernon. He picked up one of the labels and started explaining all what I was supposed to do. My job was doing paper, that's what they called it, doing paper. He talked about ten minutes, I didn't get any of it except "Got it?" Every couple minutes he said, "Got it?" and I said yeah, so he wouldn't think I was dumb or something. After a little bit I figured out he could talk all day without me understanding a word, so I started watching the middle room out of the comer of my eye. Rusty was the only cheerful worker at Redskin, looked like. The other two women working over the paint tanks was quiet and frowning, all bent over stiff-backed. Rusty was singing while she put paint on the broom handles. There was two dip tanks, green paint for the regular brooms and red paint for the heavy-duty industrials. Rusty's dip rack was getting full of green and red handles. I could hear her singing, "It's be-gin- ning to look a LOT like Chriss-muss."

Vernon was still blabbing. He said "Got it?" one more time, and I said "yeah," and he left. I was standing there at my work table, thinking "maybe I'll figure it out somehow or other," but I couldn't even get started. At the other table in the finish room, the curly-headed woman was putting clear plastic bags on mop heads. She kept looking at me, so I knew I ought to get busy. The pile of paper labels was laying in front of me, they went on the brooms some way. There was lots of brooms standing up in racks next to my table, each broom got a label on it. I wished I knew how.

I decided to peel one of the labels off a broom that was already done. Maybe I could tell how they fastened it on. The curly- headed woman put down her mop head and come over. "Here, hon," she said, and she started labeling broom handles.

"Oh," I said. "I get it." She went back to her mop heads. Doing paper was easy once you got it. First you put a white paper sleeve around the bristles, slopped a little glue to hold it. Then you took a Redskin Brooms label, put it around the handle, and slopped on glue to hold that. The label was kind of pretty—it had an Indian chief with a war bonnet, paint stripes on his cheek, and behind him there was six different totem poles. But if you looked close you could tell it was the same totem pole, they painted the heads on it different colors. I guess Redskin didn't want them wasting time drawing all different totem poles.
When I started doing paper, I was way slower than the other woman. Every once in a while I put a heavy-duty sleeve on a regular, and I had to tear it off unless I caught myself before I glued it. If I did that more than once or twice, I had to fold the tore-up sleeve and put it in my pocket or they would write me up for Inattention To Duty and dock me. I couldn't put a regular sleeve on a heavy-duty, because it wasn't big enough to go around. That was good because any more mistakes and I couldn't of hid what I done wrong. Two or three of them babies folded up in my pockets and I'd of been kind of bulgy-looking.

Elsie Pelton was the name of the woman that worked in the finish room with me. She did plastic, putting a plastic sleeve on the mop heads. Redskin made Glad Maid mops, too. After she asked me what my name was, I asked Elsie, "How come the factory ain't called Redskin Brooms and Glad Maid Mops?"

She said, “They’d need a hell of a big sign, they’re waiting on American Gasket to go out of business, to get their sign.”

Most of the other women wouldn’t talk to Elsie because she was married to an Arab man.  She treated everybody else good anyway.  She brought in her old National Geographics for everybody to look at in the break room.  Every week on her Friday afternoon break, she cleaned the big coffeepot while everybody else smoked cigarettes and talked quiet about how having a dark-skinned father was ruining Elsie’s kids and how the Lord made us speak different languages at the Tower of Babel to keep the races separate.

Elsie was nice to me, too Nobody else was very talky because I was friends with Rusty. The only thing worse than a foreign person was a lesbian, which they didn’t know for sure, but she had awful short hair and no wedding ring.

The other workers complained all the time about working at Redskin, but Elsie never did. She’d been putting plastic on Glad Maid mops for years and years. And years. She was only forty-nine, but she’d been working at Redskin ever since she was twenty-two. She told me about both her husbands, and how her folks fed the family on squirrel and cornbread when she was little. After she grew up and got married, her first husband didn’t want her working but he drank and that took money.

“He wouldn’t even let me go in the backyard to hang up clothes unless he was there,” said Elsie, “cause he was afraid that some other man would look at me. Then he came home one time extra drunk, and fell down. He yanked the tablecloth with him, and then he tried to take a gun to the kids for making him break all the dishes. So I got a divorce for mental cruelty.”

Then Elsie met Ralph, he was the Arab man that was her neighbor. She started talking to him while they was both hanging out clothes, Ralph had to hang out his own laundry cause he wasn’t married.  Elsie was mostly friends with Arab people after that, because most of the white neighbors wouldn’t speak. Every once in a while somebody got their unlisted phone number and said they were going to firebomb Elsie and Ralph’s house.

Elsie was one of the skinniest women I ever seen, and real nervous. She had thin eyebrows and dark hair, dark and curly. Or it was supposed to be curly, sometimes it was half curly and half straight, cause most of the time Elsie would give her kids the money she was saving for a permanent wave. Elsie paid for their orchestra uniforms and their yearbooks and their prom dresses, they had everything that the other kids had. Elsie was always worried about work, about getting her quota. She al­ways got her quota, usually she finished ahead, really, but she worried about it every day.

I liked talking to her. Elsie and me was the only ones in our work room and there wasn't anything to think about but the radio, and that was in the dip room where we couldn't hear it very good.

* * *

After I saved up a few dollars, I started thinking about get­ting me a car of my own. Me and Rusty was sharing her car and it was getting to be a drag. If one of us had the car, the other one had to stay home with no way to go except the bus. So I started looking in the paper every day, trying to find me some­thing to drive. I went and looked at a couple cars, but the bod­ies looked too good. If a car cost $150 and it didn't have rust or a smashed-in front end, I knew not to buy it. I wanted to see why it was so cheap. Rusty kept telling me "wait and look when I can go with you," but I said I could handle it. Shit, I was in the army and all, I could take care of stuff. The third day I went looking, I dropped Rusty off at Redskin and drove out about four miles to look at a '62 Plymouth. It was the second most crummy car I ever saw. (Marlene's keys was in the first.) It was the second most crummy car I ever saw. (Marlene's keys was in the first.) The guy that was selling the Plymouth was fat like Santa Claus, and gray-headed. One of his legs that was shorter than the other one, so he walked up-down, up-down.

He had a nice-looking house, though, white aluminum siding and green awnings. The Plymouth for sale was parked on the grass in front, a red sedan with no front grill, a broke-off antenna, no right wind­shield wiper. When I walked around it, I saw the rest. Only two hubcaps out of four. A rough deep old scratch went all down the passenger side, where somebody had run it too close to a post. The trunk lid was wired shut with a coat hanger. A rock must of flew up and hit the left rear window, it had all these spider-web cracks in it. All the window edges had rust rings around them. “It looks horrible," I told the man. "Til take it."

I picked up Rusty after she got off work, and brought her out to the man's house to drive the Plymouth home for me. When we got out there, Rusty laughed at my new car. "1 don't want to be seen in this thing," she said. "How about you drive yours and I drive mine?"

"No," I said. "I want you to listen, see how it sounds. You're the mechanical one.”

"What’re you going to do about it now?" Rusty said. "It's yours. He's got your money." But she drove it home for me.

When we got back to her trailer, she had to admit the Plymouth run good. "Not bad for three hundred years old," she said. "If the guy would of just quit running it into stuff."

"Hush," I said. "If he'd of been a careful driver, this car would of cost $500."

"Just don't park it near mine," said Rusty. "I don't want the rust to rub off."

* * *

On our nights off, me and Rusty usually went to pick up a couple cans of pop at the store, and then we'd go over to her trailer and watch teevee or play euchre if we could get a couple other people to come over. I didn't really know anybody to ask. I had mostly just gone around with Rusty, and what people I used to know had probably forgot me while I was in the service. I know I forgot them. So it was friends of Rusty that come over, if anybody did. They was all women, and all of them had real short hair.

I was always at Rusty's trailer, except for going to work or over to my old lady's to sleep. After a while Rusty said, "Why are you going to Marlene's to sleep when you hate her, and besides we're burning up gas driving back and forth to each other's house?" So she moved her junk out of the spare bed­room and I brought over my bed and my duffel bag full of socks and movie magazines. I started giving Rusty fifteen dol­lars a month and going half on the groceries.

Marlene probably didn't even notice I was gone except if she needed to borrow money off me. After a couple days, I called her up to make sure she was all right and she said, "Nobody don't care when you're an old woman, not your kids nor any­body."

"I do too," I said.

"You don't act like it," she said. "Run off and not even tell your poor old mother where you're at."

"My poor old mother was passed out," I said. "I guess I could of wrote a note and taped it to the vodka bottle."

She hung up on me. I didn't call her back.

* * *

About a week after I moved in, Rusty stayed out all night. She had done that every once in a while, ever since I got back from the service. She'd come to work wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Then there'd be some woman she'd run around with for a little while, two or three weeks. At first she acted nervous, if she had the woman over to the trailer for supper or something, but it never bothered me. I'd seen plenty of girls together in the army, it just looked regular to me.

So one night Rusty stayed out, and the next evening when I come back from the grocery store there was four or five women over visiting Rusty. I didn't know none of them. We all watched Dick Van Dyke and after that an old movie, "Marie Antoinette," with Norma Shearer. It was about this French lady whose hus­band was John Barrymore, he was a king but his wife was run­ning around with Tyrone Power. I could see big trouble was coming, but I went to bed.

In the morning I got the rest of the story from Rusty and one of the short-haired women, who was still there. When I came in the kitchen to start coffee, the woman was sitting at the table looking at the Daily News and smoking. She said John Barry­more and Norma Shearer had both got their head cut off. Her hair was a little bit mashed down in back where she'd been sleeping on it.

"Carol," Rusty said, "I don't think you ever got introduced, did you? This is my girlfriend, Mary Gold." She was getting bacon out of the refrigerator.

"Oh," I said. "How you doing?" I didn't say "Since when" cause I knew that already. Once Rusty stayed overnight with a woman, it was like they was married.

I just said, "Mary, you want some coffee? We got milk for it, don't we, Rusty?"

I went and did a couple loads of laundry, and when. I come home Mary was gone and Rusty was out on the porch steps hitting a paddle ball. Whamma, whamma, whamma, she was really good. She could shoot the little red ball out and in, every direction, and still lay the paddle to it.

"Let me try," I said. I never did one before, maybe it was pretty easy. She give it to me. I couldn't even get the ball to hit the paddle once, it jumped crazy all over, or it just flopped loose on the stretchy cord. "Shit," I said. "What's the matter with this thing?"

"Hold your wrist straight," Rusty said. She tried to bend my arm right. "Just move from here, your elbow." She took the paddle back. "Like this, see?"

She held it out to me. "No," I said. "I've had enough. How'd you learn to do it so good?"

"Aunt Shirley showed me,” she said. "She is the paddle ball queen of Skeet."

"Shirley is a lot of fun," I said. "For an aunt."

"Yeah, she thinks the world is funny,”' said Rusty. "Viv thinks the world is really bad, but Shirley just has one big laugh all the time."

"You're more like her than Viv," I said. "I mean, you and her are glad to be alive."

"Viv's a worrier," Rusty said. She got the paddle ball going, whamma whamma whamma. "She don't understand, you get sick and die just the same. You lose your job just the same, if you worry or not. You can't help what happens, but shit, why not try to get over it? If your car quits on you, it quits."

I reached out and knocked on the wood porch rail. "Watch it," I said.

"That Plymouth," said Rusty, laughing. "What a car." Whamma whamma whamma.

* * *

Mary Gold was around the trailer quite a bit, once her and Rusty got close. She was okay, I guess, kind of pretty when she had got rested up a little. She was real thin, olive skin, brown eyes but the circles underneath was awful dark. She didn't say a whole lot but those little dark eyes would be watching me sometimes, I'd turn my head quick and catch Mary looking at me.

She was trying to get something on me, so she could cover up her drinking. From Marlene I knew all the tricks. At first, I was glad that Mary would go out and pick up a case of beer for us every once in a while. There was always beer in the fridge when I lived with Marlene, but I was lacking two months of twenty-one so I couldn't buy any. Me and Rusty both liked to have a couple beers and watch teevee. At the end of a night, we might each have three, four beer bottles on the coffee table in front of us. Mary, she'd never have more than one bottle on the table. Mary took her empty beer bottle back when she went for a new beer. She didn't want Rusty to see how many empties there was.
Mary tried to get us both to drink more, she'd bring us back extra beers from the kitchen. I wouldn't have hardly started one and there'd be a cold bottle waiting for me. On my way to the restroom, I would take the extra beer with me and stick it back in the refrigerator.

So Mary had to cover up, and she was digging for something to use on me. She started asking me questions. I'd be trying to watch a good Rosalind Russell movie and Mary would say, "Carol, you ought to get out a little bit, meet people."

"Probably got a point there, Mary," I would say, and I would just keep looking at Rosalind Russell. Mary wouldn't quit, she'd put her hand on my arm, like buddy-buddy, she'd go, "Carol, why don't you go see a new movie? You could ask somebody to go with you. Or I could ask for you, I've got lots of friends, I'm sure I could find somebody for you. To go to the movies with."

I knew Mary was trying to make it look like I had a problem or something. So Rusty would listen to her and not me. Seemed like it might be working, too. Rusty started asking me questions, she never did before. She wasn't as fake as Mary, she just asked what she wanted to know. "You got a boyfriend? Or anything?" Which she saw me at work, and she saw me at home, so she knew whether I did or not.

"Me?" I said, and that was all I said.

Rusty had started up this romance shit and now she was getting personal and nosy and bugging me when she ought to know you're not supposed to bug your best friend. The big expert on love was getting led around by the nose. Nobody, not drunks or nobody, had ever led me around.

* * *

When I come in to work one Wednesday morning, all four of the Redskin bosses was standing in the hall talking. That wasn't no big shock, but there was four strange men with them. All the men had their hands down in their pants pockets, rattling change. Sounded like all the Santa reindeers was visiting the office, jingle jingle jingle.

"Wonder what's up," said Rusty while we was clocking in.

"Don't know," I said. "Can't be good, all them neckties in one place."

"I bet Rhea Dailey knows," said Rusty. "She notices everything."

"Yeah," I said. "Like she'll notice us down here visiting the time clock instead of working. Let's get going."

On morning break, I usually played euchre with Rusty and Elsie Pelton and Mildred Hatch. Mildred didn't care for Rusty's haircut or Elsie's husband, but she still got the euchre deck out when we all come down for our coffee. Mildred was a fool for euchre, she would of played euchre with a cow if she could of taught it how to hold the cards.

Rhea Dailey come in while Rusty was dealing. Rhea was usually the first one down for break, but she had been in Vernon True's office. Rhea was a good worker, she didn't have to be Vernon's spy but some people buy all the insurance they can get.

Everybody knew Rhea carried tales, nobody told her good secrets. And she was a double agent, she told us office secrets.

"Your hair looks cute," said Mildred, when Rhea come in the break room. Rhea had her ponytail tied back with a blue scarf. She kept her eyebrows shaved off and put them on with pencil. Sometimes the right one had a jump on the left one, but today they was even.

Rhea didn't say nothing yet, she was keeping Mildred in sus­pense. Rusty and me both wanted to know what those office guys was going to do, but not enough to chase Rhea's tail.

"You get your mop handles done early, Rhea?" said Mildred. She picked up her cards and looked them over. "I make it hearts." She put down the ace. "I noticed you was gone when I come down." She took the trick, and picked up all our cards.

"I had some business with Vernon," said Rhea. She poured her coffee cup full and put in three sugars.

"What are all them guys here for?" said Mildred.

"Mildred, if you're gonna play, play," said Elsie. "What did you put the right down for? I already had the trick."

"They got a different way to put the paint on or something," said Rhea. "Supposed to be faster."

"Yeah, I'll bet," said Elsie. "The last time they speeded us up, we got three days behind." She put down the jack of diamonds.

I put the right bower on top and slid the cards over to my pile.

"Why didn't you get that?" Mildred asked Elsie.

"I thought you had it," said Elsie. "You're the one that called trumps."

Vernon True come in the break room, and we all jumped up.

When Vernon showed up, usually it meant break time had run over a minute and a half.

"You don't have to go yet," said Vernon. "You still got a min­ute or two yet." He was right, by the break room clock we still had four minutes. "I just come in to let you all know that we'll be improving the system for running our, ah, system. Our new system will be an improvement, it'll improve the, ah, system we use—the one we were using."

Rhea and Mildred was looking happy, Vernon meant a lot to them, I guess. Elsie just looked regular, she was still playing euchre but she had one eye on Vernon. Rusty looked disgusted, she never raised her eyes up from the hand I dealt her. I tried to look like Elsie did, not happy, not disgusted. I turned up the nine of spades. We all passed once, the second time around I made it clubs. Rusty put down the ace first, and then the left.

Vernon was still talking. "So you all should notice an im­provement in our system, once we get it improved. So that's it, I guess, we'll be coming around the floor with the individual im­provements. When we get the new system running." He looked around at all of us. "Everybody got it?"

Rhea smiled, Mildred smiled.

Vernon smiled. "Is there any questions?"

"How many tricks was that?" said Rusty.

"Pardon?" said Vernon.

"Nothing," said Rusty.

"All right, then," said Vernon. "Let's get back on it."

We scooted our chairs back, while Rusty put down the nine of diamonds. Elsie put down the ten of clubs. I put down the queen of clubs, but Mildred tossed the other jack on top.

Shit, euchred again," said Rusty. We all started crowding out the break room door.

"Pardon?" said Vernon, turning around to look at Rusty.

"Nothing," Rusty said.

Two paint experts, two industrial management experts, two regular old office guys and Vernon True was watching Rusty and Betty Lamb put paint on broom handles. The necktie men had stood and jingled their change while two maintenance men moved the dip tanks against the back wall in the paint room, and moved the dip racks up against the other wall. So now Rusty and Betty had to walk across the whole room to get a set of handles, walk back, dip them, carry them back. And do it again for the heavy-duties, they got two coats. The Chiefs, I mean. Vernon had told us that the Redskin bosses wanted new names for the brooms. The regulars was supposed to be called Squaws, and the heavy-duties was supposed to be called Chiefs. If the factory made whisk brooms, they probably would of called them Papooses.

"This'll work out all right," said Vernon to the neckties. "You think?"

"Oh, yeah, it's quite a bit of an improvement," one of the managers said.

"This system runs a lot smoother than the old system," said a paint expert.

The routine had got two hours behind cause of moving the tanks and all that, and then it got later and later cause Rusty and Betty was nervous and messing up from being stared at by necktie men. And having to walk to the racks and walk back took way longer than the old way, at 11:15 there was only three sets each done of regulars and heavy-duties. The night shift was supposed to get fifteen sets of each kind done. I was surprised Vernon looked so easy-natured, the paint room being twelve sets behind. All the necktie men looked like they felt pretty good, in a couple minutes they was all going down the street for a beer and to tell each other how smart it was to move the dip tanks back against the wall.

You, uh," said Vernon, looking at me. "Doing paper, ah—"

"Carol," said Betty.

"Of course," said Vernon. "I knew that. Carol, why don't you come on in here and help these girls get caught up?"

"Caught up?" I said. It was only a couple hours till clock-out time, and there was five hours of work left to do.

"We don't want these girls here all night, do we?" said Ver­non. "You can stay a little bit, can't you?"

At 2:30 in the morning, Rusty and me was still going strong. The rest of Redskin was shut down and dark, we had two more sets of heavy-duties to go. Betty Lamb had went home at the regular time, two o'clock, she had to get up super early to get her kids off to school.

"If they keep improving us," Rusty said, "they are going to improve my butt right into the grave."

"No shit," I said. "No, wait, here's my improvement." I took a heavy-duty handle out of the set-up box and held it in my hand, sideways, like it was a javelin. I heaved that broom handle out into the air, I never knew I was going to till I did it. It curved and flew, and plop! it slid right into the green paint tank.

"Whew, look at that," I said. "Did I do good or what?"

"Would of been perfect if it was a regular handle," said Rusty. "A Squaw, I mean."

"Well, watch then," I said. I got a regular handle out and threw it, but it went short and hit the front of the tank and bounced over under a work table. "Them smaller ones don't have as much heft," I said. "I'll get it now. Fire number two!" Direct hit, the handle slid right down under the surface, not hardly a splash.

Rusty threw a Chief, it went into the right tank, but it splashed pretty hard.

"Put more curve on it," I said. "Then it slides right in."

She done better on her second one. Then she said, "We better quit and finish working."

"I am working," I said. "This is my improved system of ap­plying paint. It improves the handles, this system of paint." I almost missed with a heavy-duty, but it just barely made it in.

"No, I'm serious, though," said Rusty. "Let"s get back on it, I want to get out of here."

"Okay," I said. "Just one more." I threw a regular handle. It zoomed over the top of the dip tanks and through the doorway of the back room. I waited to hear glass break, but I didn't hear no smashing noises. But after about three or four seconds, something went WHUMP.

"Whoa, shit, what was that?" said Rusty.

"I don't know," I said. "Guess we better look, huh?"

When I looked in the paper room, I couldn't believe it. There was mop heads on the floor, every inch of the whole floor, mop heads a foot thick. Two feet thick some places. Heads for big wet mops, little wet mops, dust mops, all kinds.

"What the hell?" I said. "What—"

"The mop bins," said Rusty. "Look, it hit the side support thing and knocked it loose." There was rows of wood bins that used to stand up by the wall, each row had a different size mop head in it. The whole thing had got tilted down on one side, and all the mop heads had slid out, almost every single one. The support arm was just hanging loose on one side of the bins.

"Can you put it back?" said Rusty.

That part was pretty easy. The loose piece was supposed to be fastened onto two metal pieces that made an X on one side. That was what held the bins up. I pushed it back in place. One of the bolts was gone but I hunted in a junk drawer till I found one that would fit. But there was three or four hundred mop heads laying on the floor, different sizes all mixed up together. I picked up a couple of them. "Shit, Rusty, how can I put them back? I don't know what’s size ten and what's size eight."

"It’ s on there," said Rusty. She took one of the mop heads out of my hand. "See, on the flat part, stamped on there in blue ink? See? That's a ten, it's a size ten."

"Okay, good," I said. I started picking them up.

"Huh-uh," said Rusty. She touched me on the shoulder. "First we got to finish up our handles, then we can come back and do this."

"Oh, man," I said. "We're gonna be here all night."

We got the handles done about four, four-fifteen, something like that. We clocked out, then Rusty stayed in the building and I went to B & E Sweet Shop and got us bear claws and choco­late-icing long johns and enough coffee to fill up the heavy-duty dip tank. I come back and we run around like crazy women, picking up mop heads and putting them in little piles, wet mops size 8, dust mops size 4. We put the last one away at 6:45 a.m., and we got out before the seven-to-four shift started com­ing in. The three cups of B & E coffee never affected me at all, when we got back I took off my shoes and laid down and it was Snore City till Rusty woke me up and it was time to go back to work.