One of the responsibilities of the worst job I’ve had in my life was to periodically enter hell on earth. This hell wasn’t the abstract kind where one’s soul floats in a black void all alone. Neither was it the ironic version of hell where one is condemned to live out the rest of his wretched days in a bleak apocalyptic landscape totally alone with all the books in the world and a pair of shattered glasses in a breast pocket. This was a fire and brimstone type of hell with fire pouring from the ceiling, a blue flame of natural gas, and a heat that would boil flesh if given the opportunity.
The worst job I’ve ever had was working at a plum dryer. A dried plum is a prune. You stick a plump wet plum in one end of the dryer and a few days later you get a prune out from the other end. You dehydrate a plum by exposing it to heat. You dehydrate a person by just about doing the same.
At season’s start in August, the surrounding plum trees in the orchards were heavy with fruit, their branches weighed down by purple gems plump with water. Every morning flatbed trucks, stacked with open-top wood crates of fresh fruit picked by migrant illegals, would drive up to the dryer. The fruit would be loaded onto wooden trays that would be stacked one atop another to about eight feet tall. These stacks would be moved around the yard on steel rails like train tracks, and this is what I would do, move them around the yard in and out of the dehydrators, huge warehouses with natural gas heating elements above in the ceiling.
The foreman told us not to stay in them too long. It was a hundred degrees outside on a typical central California summer day. It felt like double that in the dehydrators. Outside was actually chilling. Luckily, there weren’t many reasons I could find to go inside them. The majority of the time I would drive a little gas-powered railroad car. It would shake enough to rattle the fillings out of teeth, and this was all for just about minimum wage.
It was on the morning shift that I met Hercules. He was not muscular in the least. Herc was about my age at the time and as skinny as the gleaming rails I would drive my little rail car over. At first I took him for a meth addict. He never spoke, but would often hitch a ride to the back of the yard, jump off the car, and find the strength to push ten stacks of wet plums, plums heavy with water, into the bellowing mouths of hell.
“Hey man!” I would say to him as I popped the hand brake and he would jump on. He just nodded and looked off into the stacks as if strategizing how to get the most work done with the least amount of exertion. The heat was already rising above the concrete in shimmering waves as we would chug along, superheroes of industry and agriculture, wearing our common uniform of hard hat and sun-bronzed skin.
Herc never wore the earplugs that were a necessity in my work. He would never say anything. Halfway through prune season, I discovered that Herc lived in a world without sound.
My suspicions first began at lunch when I would clock out and eat in my car parked under an old oak. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, passing up the air conditioned break room for a turkey and Swiss sandwich and a Snapple iced tea out in the shade. Hercules had the same go-it-alone tendency I did, a characteristic that could be interpreted as aloofness, of not wanting to play with others. He was walking along, and I said something toward him, a question I remember. He would just smile, wave, and walk off into the orchard across the street. I later learned he lived in a farmhouse on the opposite side of the phalanx of plum trees.
My hunch was confirmed when I caught the foreman talking to Hercules. The foreman would stand in front of Herc and talk slowly, his lips moving deliberately forming each letter with intention. Hercules could read lips. The foreman could also sign. He had a limited vocabulary, the foreman, but enough to get Hercules moving in the right direction.
During a brief shift shutdown to replace a belt on a vital machine, the foreman told me Hercules had worked every season for the past five years. One of the most dependable of workers, who was never sick the foreman added. After the rice season (many of the prune workers would work rice in mid-September), he would tutor deaf kids in American Sign Language at a program in Chico.
I never had much of a direct conversation with Herc but I did learn how to sign “Hey Man!” or something like it. He seemed to appreciate my attempt and his mind didn’t seem so lost in the dryer stacks as my rail car chugged to the back of the yard.
He attempted some communication on his part, writing a note to me on some of the dryer company’s letterhead he had pilfered from the yard office.
Hey man. Come check out the girls at the Sign School. They are young and very lonely. They can teach you more signs. I can give you a ride if you need.
I responded with the universal thumbs up sign, with no real intention of taking him up on the offer. He smiled and made a motion with his hands, the universal voluptuous sign indicating ample tits and a pleasant, shapely ass. Hercules rode with me again to the back of the yard.
The next day, near the end of the season, something happened that turned an uneventful prune season into something to be remembered. I was there at the other end of the dryer when it happened. It was hot as hell as usual. The last of the year’s prunes were releasing their moisture under the flame. Hercules was pushing a stack of dried prunes out of one end of the dryer, and someone else was pushing a stack of wet plums into the other end. For some reason, Hercules stopped pushing. He just stood there in the middle of hell. He couldn’t hear the heavier stacks of wet plums rolling in behind him.
He was found the next day as they were pulling stacks of dried fruit out to be cured. Hercules had been pinned between stacks of heavy drying fruit. Falsely assuming he was outside the dryer, the crews had closed the doors until the next batch of dry fruit was to be pulled and the next stack of wet fruit pushed in. Hercules had already stewed in there for an hour as we were punching out and rushing home to dinner. His absence went unnoticed as the heat of midday broke with the sun falling behind the trees. I suppose we had all assumed he had disappeared into the orchard like an apparition leaving only a slight disturbance of air in his wake, something like a sound.
