Light Lifting (25 page)

His daughter, the one who wasn't there, the one still left, says he needs to get out. Find something smaller, something more manageable. Maybe a condo downtown. A place where no one has lived before. Walking distance to everything from there. Think how much better that would be.

When it was all over and they finally let him out of the hospital, she took a semester off from her school in Kitchener. They tried to fill in the blanks and get their rhythm back, tried to live as close to the original pattern as possible, but even while it was happening, he knew it couldn't last. A girl, a woman in her early twenties, must go back to what she is. Things have to be done when they need to be done and the somewhere-else schedule will not wait. Friends and paper deadlines, she says. Assignments and exams. Picking up extra shifts at the restaurant. Been very, very busy these last few days.

She calls twice a week now. Usually Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. Usually on her cellphone. How are you, Dad? He hears other voices in the background. Are you in a car? he asks. Are you driving? Don't talk to me while you're driving. I'm hanging up right now. Pull over and stop and talk to me then. Not driving she says. God. Just a bad signal. Sitting in a restaurant. Poor reception. Then five dutiful minutes of their voices passing each other on a satellite network. I have to go, she says. Love you.

He picks up the receiver and hits
Talk
. They say it works both ways, but this is different. He would go with her if she came to pick him up. He would make an exception for her. Tomorrow will always be a different day. The dial tone comes through steady and clear and he puts the sound up on the speaker. If you listen carefully you hear a clacking in the background, behind the tone, something like a train. He puts his ear toward it, straining. Feels like he is getting close to something before a quick ring cuts in. A ring inside the dial tone. A message from the phone itself. A stranger's voice, a man who seems official. He says: If you would like to make a call, please dial a number. If you need help, please hang up and dial your operator. The voice starts to say it again, but the phone cuts him off. The phone cuts itself off. The phone is frustrated with this situation and cannot allow it to continue. A high pitched squealing rises. Like talking to a fax machine. Then a hard, extra loud busy signal. Bomp bomp bomp bomp. He hangs up. Pushes
Off.

Anniversary, he thinks. It makes him so angry. Parents and their kids, nothing can be done. Connected and separated, different ages at different times. They can never really live together. By the time they are who they are going to be, they're gone. He thinks about the fundamental difference between remembering and being reminded. The next time they talk, she will say something about how she lost track of time, how she was in the middle of it, squeezed up against an immediate pressure that blotted out everything else and she simply forgot. She will likely cry and she will be so, so sorry, but it already makes him feel sick. Jesus Christ. A person should know where they need to be and when they need to be there.

He listens to the forecast, takes out his map of the county and studies the Number Three. An inch here is equal to two miles there. He measures with a ruler, estimates distance, and considers the problem of travel. How to pull it off. Probably close to thirty miles, definitely more than twenty-five. It will take some doing, but if she doesn't call by tonight, then that is it. He will go by himself.

It felt like rescue in the beginning. Ninety days in and a chance at safety for the rest of their lives. A guaranteed spot on the seniority list as long as he kept up his end of the deal. Collective bargaining, the way work works. It meant everything for them. Getting in and hooking up for the steady ride and a reliable flow. Pure blind luck. He was hired off the street, plucked away from the rest of the world and delivered from what other people have to do to make a living.

We can go for another now, can't we? She whispered it in his ear. It was the night of the ninetieth day. Their girl just three years old, still sleeping in a toddler bed. Yes, he said. Her hand moving under the sheets. Tingling in her voice. His eyes on the ceiling before he rolled his knee against her thigh. Yes, he said. It was the night of the ninetieth day. I think we're going to be okay.

Around here, nineteen-eighty-three is the year that counts and that is where the line should go if they ever write a history of this place. This was long before he started, years before they got in, but nineteen-eighty-three matters for everybody. The way it came along and shook up the whole domestic side of the business. Lee Iaccoca taking a risk. The famous picture. His not-so-confident smile as he stands there at the Auto Show in front of the first generation. The paint they used to have. That in-between shade of maroon and a strip of Wood-grain paneling running down the side. It was the last of the real game-changers and they decided to build it here. Somebody's arm got twisted on that, a face was pushed up against a wall. He knows that, thinks about it sometimes, the question of origins. Why it is where it is. The first one, the one in the picture, it's in the Smithsonian now.

It goes by different names. The
Magic Wagon
or the
Grand
Caravan
. The
Voyager
or the
Town and Country
. Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth. The customer picks the model and the trim package. A hood ornament that holds the eye. Chrysler looks like a star that lives inside your house. His daughter used to say that. His son drew pictures of the long-horned sheep. A Dodge is
Ram Tough
and always red. Plymouth is more mysterious: a silver ship with wind in its sails. What is that supposed to be exactly? The Mayflower, he thinks. The Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock. A car for pilgrims. Word associations that don't quite hook up. None of it matters. The company will sell it any way you like, but it is always the same underneath. You do not fool around with a machine that works.

He has seen enough of them to know that there is no secret behind the Grand Caravan. It is exactly what it appears to be, an object designed to fulfill a basic need for a reasonable price. In the beginning, the sliding door was its signature. The way the whole side of the car could detach and roll along its track to give you such a large opening, even with only six inches of clearance on the side. A big door that wouldn't bang against all the other doors in the mall parking lot and enough room inside for seven people and all their stuff. Those were the original brute facts, the Caravan's simplest truths. Parents and kids piling in and out all the time – the soccer mom, yes, the soccer mom – but a seat for the visitor, too. A place for grandma when she has to be picked up at the airport. The driver and passenger up front and two benches in the back. You click down and the rows pop out. No points for style, but versatility has always mattered for this segment of the market. You take out the seats and there's enough space back there for a 4x8 sheet of plywood. A plan for all the standard dimensions. He knows nothing fits together like that by accident.

People in the city feel the car in different ways. The Caravan goes past the men and women who work in the plant, beyond Chrysler and the CAW and Local 444. It moves over his family to reach everybody else. The guy who sells carpeting or the orthopaedic surgeon or the lady who teaches grade two French immersion. They all know. They can tell when things are going well and when they aren't. They understand the way it sits on every bottom line.

It was the number-one selling minivan all by itself for more than a decade. The number-one selling vehicle for the whole country. Took years before the Asians caught up. Millions rolling away from this spot. They build it on the S-platform, then the AS, then the NS, then the RS and the RT. It started with a piece of crap 2.2 litre in-line 4 with barely 85 hp and that weakling would whine and complain and shake like you were re-entering the earth's atmosphere every time you pulled into the passing lane. Now you go for the optional 4-litre turbo-charged V6 with 251 hp and that monster can pull your whole crew and all their bikes and your little hardtop camper up a mountain in the middle of July. He liked to watch the temperature gauge whenever he took theirs out on a long trip. The way it never budged and always stayed straight up, right in the middle, balanced between the red hot H and the cool blue C. He used to think that was all a person could ask from a car. An engine that was ready when you called.

The way it comes together is something to see and he has never taken it for granted. The interconnecting lines of yellow and orange conveyors, bodies and chasses moving separately before they mate. The bright white lights in paint, the orange robots swivelling in for their welds. The flash and the flash again. He used to think you could count the individual sparks and always arrive at the same number.

People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it's not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundredth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn't hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty. It gets confusing after awhile if you have to watch a robot work and you watch it and you watch it again. The repeating sequences start to blur and it seems like time stops and there is only this one task left in the whole world, this one job, separated from everything else, and it has to be done again and again, forever. The robot sees a hundred divisions in a millimetre and it always hits the same spot. The same weld. The same number of sparks.

A standard dash assembly comes as a single unit. It moves on a hydraulic but has to be guided into its spot by hand. You need to feel it in. An engineer told him once that they were decades away from creating a robot that could mimic the instinctive muscular adjustments of the human wrist. The engineer swivelled his hand around a couple of times. Think about this thing, he said. The wrist. You can't imagine the number of interrelated calculations. The way it pulls together force and angle and time, the way it cross-references. Makes it look easy, but never the same way twice. Can't replicate intuition. A bolt. An infinity of bolts tightened just enough. Not too far and not not far enough. A car is held together, fastened more than assembled.

They think of everything. The big stuff and small stuff, it all matters. Subtle cosmetic redesigns for the interior and complete retoolings. Power windows and locks. ABS. The new transmission. The second sliding door. Keyless entry and remote starter. The new suspension. Standard air bags – multistage and curtain – even in the base model. Five-star safety. Side impact beams. Always tweaking the engines to find a little extra. Before the gas got crazy, 20 miles a gallon in the city wasn't so bad. Stow n' Go seats rolling straight into the floor. Swivel n' Go seats spinning around. A built-in card table. Two different DVD players for the kids showing two different movies. Everybody gets their own headphones. Nine cupholders. Chrome accents. They move the shifter off the column. They fix the clock. Put in the MP3. The GPS. Every small change in the finished product is a bigger change on his end.

He liked to ride along sometimes as the next one rolled off the line and into the world. He liked to be the first person to read the cooing odometers with all their 0's in a line. A fully loaded special edition Town and Country with the windows that go down in the back to let the fresh air get in. One minute in there and you know. They flick the wipers, honk the horn two times and flash the brights just before it leaves. When it passes the last inspection, it gets the all clear and begins its life. He liked moving inside his work and feeling it moving around him. He liked understanding the interconnected parts and being the first to look through a clean windshield and see everything from this point of view. You cannot beat a brand new minivan. Ask around. Ask anybody. A person appreciates being up high when they're driving.

There are gaps built into the process. A couple of extra seconds before this one goes and the next one comes. Sometimes, in that space where nothing is supposed to happen, he used to take off his glove and press his palm flat against the glass or the body. Then he'd pull away quickly and watch the print flash up clear and detailed. A perfect outline of his hand visible for one second against the new paint or the dark tint, even the individual grooves of his thumb coming through. Whenever he did that, he used to imagine a detective. A smart person, somewhere far away, working with a magnifying glass and a light and a fine brush, dusting for clues. He used to imagine a person who could trace this car all the way back to him, back to this spot and this moment. A detective who could follow the chain of material evidence and find all the linkages and establish an incontrovertible proof.

The pay and the benefits are all that anybody else ever talks about and most of what they say is wrong. Massive inflation in all their numbers. Anti-union spin. He has done the real comparisons, added everything up and come out slightly ahead. To make the real money, you need to understand the complexity of the system and you need to think about taxes and shifting brackets. You need to figure out how to live with the overtime and how to get in there for the stat holidays. When the kids were small, he used to scramble for the possibility of a double-time shift or for the perfect conditions that came around twice a year on Good Friday or Christmas.