Peter Abrahams: Last of the Dixie Heroes

Their building appeared in the northwest, just off the connector. It was a shiny brass-colored tower, not unlike the color of the sky at that moment, with the word Chemerica in red letters at the top. Except this morning, when all it said was: hem.

“What’s going on?” Gordo said.

“Putting up bigger letters,” Roy said.

They parked in the employee lot in sublevel five under the building, got into an elevator containing two execs. “Up five-eighths already and it’s only-” one was saying. He stopped when he saw Roy and Gordo. Roy noticed that the execs had their weight on the balls of their feet, like sprinters. The elevator couldn’t go fast enough for them.

Roy and Gordo got off at sublevel one. A right turn led to shipping, left to receiving. Roy and Gordo turned right. No actual shipping or receiving took place in the Chemerica building; nothing went in or out but product orders, the weights, volumes, packaging protocols, routes, carriers, tariffs, handling instructions, and state, federal, and internationally mandated warnings, all coded in digital transmissions. Roy and Gordo worked in the Asia/Oceania section, a cluster of a dozen cubicles in the far corner of the floor. A sign overhung their section from one of the strip lights: the irregulars. The sign had been slung up at a Christmas party several years before by a shipper fired not long after. The name remained.

6:59. Roy entered his cubicle, B27. It had shoulder-high padded walls, a chair, a desk, a monitor, a keyboard, a shelf holding the reg books- tariffs, carriers, customs, rates, routes, safety-and a framed photo of Rhett in his Pop Warner uniform. Next to it was an empty rectangle of unfaded wall padding. Marcia’s picture lay in the bottom drawer of Roy’s desk.

Roy checked his screen. He had a ton of KOH from Mobile due at their subsidiary in Osaka in a week; calcium carbonate, amount unspecified, to Karachi, P. of O. unspecified, date unspecified; two ounces of radioactive uranyl acetate to the Ministry of Science and Engineering in Singapore; three forty-footers and one twenty-footer of “Gentlemen?”

Roy looked up; got up, since you couldn’t see over the wall sitting down. Cubicles worked against you coming and going. Curtis was standing in the open area between Asia/Oceania and Central/South America (except Mexico). The shippers from the two departments, all men, all white, were looking at him over their walls. Curtis wore a wireless headset so he could communicate at all times with whomever he communicated with, a charcoal-gray suit, a navy shirt with white collar and cuffs, a deep crimson tie. He was probably the best-dressed employee in the building, including the ones in seventeenth-floor corner offices. That bothered a lot of the guys, but not Roy. Roy liked Curtis.

“Morning,” Curtis said. “There’s been a little-”

P.J., B33, two cubicles behind Roy’s, came hurrying in late from the elevator, knotting his tie-they all wore ties, a Chemerica rule-saw there was some kind of meeting, slowed down, tried to look inconspicuous, not easy at his size. Roy noticed that P.J. had a shaving cut too, worse than Gordo’s.

“-screwup,” Curtis continued, not even glancing at P.J. “Email on this was supposed to go out from New York last week, with activation set for next week, but A didn’t happen and B seems to be happening ahead of schedule. Like today. Anyone see anything different on the way in?”

No one had.

“No one noticed the company name descending?”

Roy had, of course: he just hadn’t known that was what Curtis was after. He’d been too busy listening to the way Curtis talked; long sentences and big words just rolling out of him, like he should have been a preacher.

“Fact is,” Curtis said, “as of today, there is no Chemerica.”

Roy saw something flash across the computer screens, looked down at his, saw that Chemerica had been replaced by Globax.

“Welcome, gentlemen, to Globax.” Curtis paused, appeared to be listening to something. “A new name, more in tune with the reality of our position in the world economy. Everything else stays the same.” He looked around. “Any questions?”

“This mean raises all around?” said DeLoach, B30.

“You won’t believe how big,” said Curtis.

No one laughed.

“And in the real world,” Curtis said, “the stock was up a couple ticks in the overnight.”

No one said anything about that. Roy himself owned no shares of Chemerica, Globax, or anything else.

“New ID tags’ll be down by three.” Curtis turned to go, paused. “And P.J.?”

“Yeah.”

“Stop the bleeding.”

Curtis walked away toward his office, a big glass-walled room built on a sort of square dais in the center of the vast space. As he did, he spotted something on the wall of Gordo’s cubicle. It affected his stride for a moment, as though one leg had gone fleetingly numb. After he was gone, Roy stood up to look. Gordo had stuck a tiny flag on his wall, the red flag with the crossing blue bars and the white stars.

“Stop the bleeding?” said P.J. when they were all back in their cubicles. He spoke in a low voice, but Roy could hear him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve got a shaving cut,” Roy said, not looking up from his screen. Three freight cars of ammonium nitrate had gone missing somewhere between Shanghai and Chongqing. He clicked on Maps.

Voices rose over the padded walls.

“And your ass is on the line,” said DeLoach.

“Fuck you,” said P.J. “And that’s pretty funny, what with him taking a shot at New York. Curtis is New York’s blue-eyed boy.”

One weird way of putting it, even if true. There was a long silence. Then Gordo spoke, almost inaudible. “Ain’t going to be no jobs for nobody.”

“What are you talking about?” said DeLoach.

“Globax,” said Gordo. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”

“It’s just a name change,” Roy said.

He stared for a moment at the map on the screen. Shanghai, Chongqing, Osaka, Karachi, Singapore: he’d never been to any of those places but he kind of knew their quirks. That was one of the things he liked about the job. What else? He liked the guys. And there was opportunity for promotion-Roy had seen lots of men get promoted from his floor, transferred to jobs all over the world. At Curtis’s suggestion, he’d signed up for an industrial management course at Georgia Tech one night a week, to make his chances a little better. As for the negatives: the hours, seven to four-thirty, which always meant five, Monday to Friday; the vacation time-Roy was up to thirteen paid days after eight years with the company; the health plan Roy stopped thinking about it. Every job had negatives.

He got back to those three overdue freight cars of ammonium nitrate somewhere between Shanghai and Chongqing. Ammonium nitrate was water reactive: that was the tricky part. Roy wondered whether it was raining in China and whether they’d made sure to use the watertight cars specified in the order. For a moment Roy, picturing what happened on the training films when moisture got into a load of ammonium nitrate, felt that not-getting-enough-air thing. He clicked back to his original order and found that he had indeed specified watertight cars. He took his hand off the inhaler in his pocket.

Roy sent thirty overdue gallons of methane sulfonic acid on a commercial flight to Kuala Lumpur; found himself in a misunderstanding with the Miami office over a container of assorted specialty chemicals and tried without much success to sort it out; sent a twenty-footer of methyl mercaptan to Manila via a freighter out of Oakland; tried again with Miami; failed to find the ammonium nitrate between Shanghai and Chongqing; went down to the cafeteria, came back with a burrito and a Coke-Coke ran free in the cafeteria, one of the perks-ate at his desk. He heard Gordo ripping the tinfoil off his fried chicken from homedidn’t have to look, he could smell it-and was thinking of saying something about that flag stuck to the wall of Gordo’s cubicle, when his phone rang. He thought: Cesar in Miami. But it wasn’t.