I know exactly why Tench Belmont didn’t come to work at the veneer plant on that terrible night, and I had nothing to do with it. That’s what I told Kal M. when he said, “You probably pushed him into the machine.”
I was leaning over the chipper at the time, pushing more scrap wood down into the grinders, just before Foreman Ellis put me on forklift duty. Young twitchy Kal came up behind me, like he always did, and shoved my shoulders. I ignored that.
“Can’t you hear the voice?” I shouted. “It’s screaming “Let me Out!”
“You’re going to end up in the nuthouse,” Kal answered. “Not me. One day I’m going to be President of the United States.”
Talk about nuts. Bury Tench alive? All I did was hear his voice, from the dimensions beyond and below the roar of the machine. And Kal’s presidential ambitions? Seemed weird coming from a guy who spent his off-job time picking up pop cans from the ditch.
Tench Belmont was the forklift driver who delivered scrap wood for the chip machine. Tench: Like me, worked midnight shift at the veneer mill. Burly, always moving, took uppers to stay awake, raced around with his forklift, purposely banging into walls for excitement. He poured warm tea down Kal’s neck as the young fella descended the lunchroom stairs. I shouldn’t have laughed but I needed monotony relief.
“Even you !” Kal pointed, his crooked teeth bared. “Even you!” He repeated as his huge halo of yellow hair puffed out the sides of his orange hardhat.
Then he screamed at Tench. “When I become President of the United States you will pay for this!”
Tench laughed then, exactly as I heard his laugh beneath the grinder.
I figured Kal and Tench fed off each other. Kal: always angry. Tench: always bored.
I worked the midnight shift outside in the mill yard. I liked turning my head to see the moon rise and fall. To stay awake, I moved fast, throwing in the scrap wood and tamping it down with my sturdy iron pole, over and over. Reality faded with repetition as the grinder tore the wood to shreds.
“Keep your head up, you don’t want to fall in,” said our religious fanatic foreman, Ellis. “Watch the stars, lift up your eyes to the heavens towards God, not to the devil in the chipper.”
“What do you mean, there’s a devil in the chipper?” I asked as Ellis walked away repeating “read your Bible, Leon.”
But yes, I often hung my head over the lip of the machine, because of what I heard down there, behind the grinding roar of splitting wood. It became clearer than the sky around me.
“Let me out!”
Yes, from below the spinning augers, as they ripped and tore, like a new world opened, and from below them a shout, a scream, a bloodcurdling yell “Reach in! Reach in for me!”
It seemed more like an echo, then mocking and cruel, like Tench.
Tench liked to take breaks from his forklift deliveries to stick pieces of bread on the end of fish hooks, and cast out in the darkness for seagulls. He snagged Kal’s ear as the irritable skinny 18 year old pushed his clean-up cart past us. Tench’s reel unwound as Kal screeched and slapped his hand to his face. “Aaaaaa!”
Tench snipped the fishline with his jackknife. “Looks like I gotcha there little buddy.”
“F… you!” Kal shoved his clean up cart ahead of him and scooted away, holding his wound with one hand. Later, he sat eating in the lunch room, blood dripping from his earlobe, Tench stepped up behind him clapped two slabs of sourdough bread on either side of the boy’s wooly head and yelled to everyone “That’s cannibal filling!”
Kal screamed loud and long, grabbing out at Tench, who twisted the boy’s thumb, held it as the kid shrieked.. Nobody said or did anything. Tench held Kal’s thumb until the kid yelled “O. K, I give!”
“Why don’t you tell Foreman Ellis?” I asked the boy later.
“Why didn’t you try and help me?” he snarled up, throwing the bandaid I gave him into the chipper. “I don’t rat.”
In the mill the rule was “Mind your own business.”
Nobody wanted to be part of any work drama.
Besides, Foreman Ellis was stoned over his Bible most of the time, carrying it around open wide, hanging his head to read and walking right into walls.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!” he called out.
I thought about Tench snagging Kal’s ear, couldn’t sleep because of it.
After work I hitchhiked a ride into town, Tench and two girls picked me up, we all crunched into the front seat. I saw Kal staggering in the ditch carrying a garbage bag, “I’d huck a beer bottle out the window for him to pick up, but I’m on the wrong side of the truck,” Tench told us.
“Why do you hate him so much?” I asked, and the two young ladies laughed.
“I don’t hate anyone!” Tench roared. “The guy gives me a rush, man. His reaction, trying to fight me last night with his arms all up like a girl’s. He’s such a joke!”
Tench’s face went all blurry and blotchy for a second. I rubbed my eyes. Must be lack of sleep. But in that moment his devil voice pierced right into my mind, I couldn’t forget the tone as he disparaged Kal. Like everything was a prank, and he was the King of Gags. The two girls in the cab with him ate it up, giggling and wriggling around in their seats.
At the chipper that night I heard his voice louder, that voice screaming “I’m suffocating! Get me out!”
I turned off the machine and stared down through the augers. Something grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. It was Kal.
“You see?” He said. “When you’re in trouble, I help you!”
“The machine is off,” I said.
“I could’ve turned it back on when you were leaning,” Kal said. “That’s what that bastard Tench would’ve done.”
“Don’t you hear the voice?” I asked.
“Nothing there, Leon,” said Kal. “Except your own hollow brain.”
That morning Tench didn’t come into work. Foreman Ellis said “I tried to call him but he’s not answering. Do any of you guys know where in the name of God he’s at?”
As usual, nobody knew anything.
At around 3 am Ellis came around to the lunchroom and announced.
“Leon, I’m going to substitute you on forklift. Kal’s going to relieve on the chipper.”
“If you hear the voices,” I told Kal, “Don’t reach in. It’s Tench. That’s why he’s not here. He’s in the world behind the machine.”
“The insides of your head are talking back, KooKoo Leon,’ Kal told me. “And I won’t do anything that will stop my rise to be President of the United States.”
I jumped onto the forklift, an hour later was rolling by the railway tracks when Foreman Ellis came running.
“Everyone get out and look for Kal! God yelled out and told me something bad happened!”
I raced towards the chipper machine. The moon shimmered bright and the stars lit up over it.
Foreman Ellis had already turned off the power. He held a huge flashlight towards the grinder. I pushed my head forward into the machine, saw red all over the metal maw inside, and what looked like a pair of boot laces wrapped up in the augers.
I couldn’t figure it out. Kal hated Tench. Why would he reach in with the machine running? Was the voice that strong? He said he hadn’t heard it before.
The company shut the whole mill down for the investigation.
“His tamping pole dropped, and he leaned over to reach it,” Ellis told me when the plant opened up two days later. “The machine pulled him in.”
Tench stood with us, staring into the grinder.
“Why were you away that day?” I asked him.
“Because of my nightmare,” Tench said. His voice trembled as he spoke. “Kal was screaming how much he hated me. I reached out like I did in the lunchroom and grabbed his thumb. He was trying to wriggle away and I wouldn’t let go.” He turned to me. “It was a hangover dream, Leon. It wasn’t real, was it?”
“The devil’s voice travels far,” Foreman Ellis stated. “For those fated to hear.”
Now, in the wee hours, Tench slumps in the lunchroom with his face forward, trying to rest on the table. He’s taken his fishing rod home. “No more jokes,” he tells me.
The voice in the grinder hasn’t gone away.
“Let me out of here. Reach in and pull me out!” Kal screams.
This is what I tell myself: I don’t know why the boy still yells like this, because all they found were his boot laces. The pole slipped, and he reached too far in.
∼ Harrison Kim
© Copyright Harrison Kim All Rights Reserved.
Pen of the Damned 