Yellow Mama E zine

Clusterfuck at the Processing Plant

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Robb White

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        The Week before the Party . . .

        DeLuxe Custom Meats in Middlebrook was unique in Amish country. The county’s biggest employer outside the chemical plants in Northtown, it had a reputation for the highest turnover rate because of harsh conditions inside the plant, the non-union pay, and management’s relentless cost-cutting, which meant safety regulations often flew out the window for the bottom line. It was known throughout Jefferson County as the one place could get work even if any one or all three conditions applied: your rap sheet was a mile long and no respectable employer would touch you with a barge pole; you were in such dire need of a fix you would work one day and come back for your paycheck the next; you were looking for a place to try out another slip-and-fall scheme to file a lawsuit.

        Just like high school, the plant had cliques. The cutters and slicers were tough, middle-aged women with domestic abuse in their wake. Many had come from the hills of West Virginia or Kentucky where they’d worked the same kinds of jobs under worse conditions. The held down certain tables in the break room and didn’t like it when new hires tried to join them. They were downright hostile to anyone attractive with all their teeth. Maintenance and machine operators formed another tight group, although on a more congenial level.  They attended picnics with one another’s families. These events were looked forward to and sometimes indistinguishable from  Civil War reenactments because of the excess drinking, fights, and illicit couplings in the woods behind the campground area. Office personnel were the elite of the plant, the company “snobs” envied and despised by the other groups. They didn’t rub shoulders with the workers on the lines. Anyone promoted to an office position off the line never returned to witness activities in the kill chutes or slaughter pens.

       Anyone hired off the street was advised to stay away from the exsanguinations and eviscerations areas “for sanitation reasons” after the first day’s orientation.   

       The HR man who conducted the tours and handled the orientation sessions for new workers said the same thing every time: “If you folks want to keep enjoying your breakfast sausage and hamburgers, you’d be wise to give the lairage and stunning pen of our operations a wide berth.”

        The one group that remained aloof from classification were the slaughterers, who constituted an elite group of their own. When job openings for grinders or meat packers opened, applications from this section flooded the office. Many were known to carry guns, keep an eye out for La Migra, or raids from the FBI’s Fugitive Task Force. Like the Dalits of Indian society, they occupied the lowest rung of the company’s hierarchy as far as esteem went. In fact, they looked down on the “shirts and ties,” the “squarejohns,” and the “nine-to-fivers.”  

        Within this group—Bucky Duvall, Billy Evan, J. C. McCorkle, and Ernie (“T-Rex”) Tucker—were an Untouchable caste all to themselves. They had one another’s backs inside and outside the company walls. All were single or divorced except Duvall, who impregnated and married his high-school girlfriend—while still married to a woman in Meigs County. Evan considered himself the “shotcaller,” who made all their big decisions.

         J.C., or Janice Christine McCorkle, as she wrote in block print on her job application form, was the lone female of the group. She’d earned admission through sheer toughness. With a long prison stint at the Ohio Women’s Reformatory near Marysville behind her for murdering an older man when she was a teenager, she told the story every time she got high or drunk. He offered to share drugs with her but got grabby hands when they were high. Cops found him in an alley with both his eyes jammed down his esophagus. She still wrote passionate letters to her “wife” back at ORW.

        When she drove a cab in Northtown, she carried vinyl knuckles and a four-shot Derringer under the seat. Sideswiping a car on slick roads one winter cost her that job when she told the cop to “go ahead and search her vehicle,” knowing her drug stash was safe in her apartment. She forgot all about the weapons. Even the knuckles were illegal. “T-Rex” loved to hear her tell the story every time they got high.

        They four kept apart, drank apart, and refused to socialize even with other slaughterers even when they were preying on someone outside the company like a dog pack.

        Dave Klingman in Sales had inadvertently made himself a target of their wrath by talking shit about Maggie Spewell’s cleavage in her tacky witch costume at the last Halloween party. Billy had a thing for her, had one date with her, and never had a second because Maggie got a good look past his ruggedly handsome features at the blackness of his heart. He still thought he had a chance even though, as T-Rex said, “Snowballs would roll down Hell’s highway before Maggie gave in.” Klingman’s remark “chapped my ass,” he said to the posse standing around Evan’s F150 in the parking lot smoking. “I’m gonna fix that motherfucker good.” The Posse agreed; they were going to take “that big shot down a couple pegs.”

        The posse was notorious for pranks—the meaner, the better. That Halloween, they’d built a “human toilet” out of plywood and pâpier-mâché around J.C. and carried her into the ladies’ restroom of Clem Goodie’s Bar & Grill next to the working toilet. J.C.’s head was disguised behind a plastic flower pot. The first two women came in chatting, each placing tissue around the bowl rings. When the one at J.C.’s toilet bent over with her jeans around their knees to sit down in her lap, it took her a full second to realize she wasn’t sitting on an actual toilet. She leapt up, screaming.      Before she fled the lavatory, she threw an elbow backward at J.C.’s jaw, chipping a tooth.

Sheriff’s deputies were called in, but no charges were filed once it was clear to all the patrons who was behind the prank. J.C. and the men had reputations as loud, gun-toting troublemakers not to be messed with. Every New Year’s Eve, they let off a fusillade of rounds from deer rifles, automatics, and AR-15s at Duvall’s trailer park. People hid behind heavy furniture and lay in tubs like in tornado drills.

        The slaughterer hall was a beehive of gossip that Monday but none of the office personnel would confirm it. Gossip said the plant was giving out bonuses but four employees were getting pink slips the following week.

        “What the hell did you tell that woman when you was tryin’ to screw her, Billy?” Duvall said. “Maggie Spewell told Nita Taylor in the breakroom we’re the ones gettin’ our dicks chopped off.”

        “Fuck you, I didn’t tell her jack shit,” Billy growled.

        That stung. He’d never got past that one goodnight kiss on that one date and it soured in his mouth like ashes. The memory hit a nerve because she’d turned away at the last second and he planted a wet kiss on her cheek, which she swiped off walking back to her front door.

        Then he remembered: he bragged offhandedly about the posse’s “midnight requisitions” of company tools and property at McDonald’s where he took her for dinner. But it was worse. He’d had a few boilermakers before he left his trailer. He’d bragged not only about the group’s five-fingered discounts but about a Southern & Norfolk robbery last summer. Cops were still investigating the theft of high-end electronics from a boxcar. Evan suspected the man who was actually screwing Maggie was also the rat who’d snitched to the front office about the thefts—namely, Dave Klingman, a suckup and company man.

        Billy Evan figured no one else could have learned about the group’s thieving except from what he told her that night. Maggie had fallen in his eyes in one fell swoop. Lust was gone. In its place stood loathing. Just behind that red murk was Revenge.   

       “Whatcha got in mind, boss man?”

       “We are going to fix her and her new boyfriend,” he announced. “And I mean royally. You boys remember ‘the Two O’clock Jackoff Man’?”

        One of their best pranks. T-Rex hid a camera with a pinhole lens in the men’s stall where one of the slaughterers visited every day at exactly two o’clock. Tucker said he was in there jacking off. The man was so humiliated that he quit immediately and never came back for his last check once he learned that his pud-pulling photos had been spread from phone to phone up and down the packing line. When it became an open secret, Evan was summoned to the HR office to be questioned. He denied knowing anything. The man wrote it up that way and filed it. He knew better than to make a stink about it.

       Billy told them exactly what he had in mind for the pair of “shitassed lovebirds.” Only Tucker, the youngest member to join, hesitated for a long moment.

       “Shit’s not like the Jackoff Man,” he said, kicking some loose gravel with his boot. “We could do prison, man. I ain’t eager to go back, good as the chow at LECI was.” The lake Erie Correctional          Facility was the privately run prison on Ohio’s eastern border with PA.

       “What’s wrong, Tucker,” Billy sneered. “Pussy hurting you?”

       Duvall’s instinct for sadistic fun kicked in. He never hesitated at the prospect of seeing someone getting hurt or humiliated. He said, “Tuck’s afraid of them Heartless Felons from Cleveland. Them gangbangers will change his name to ‘Mary,’ make him wear a dress and grow his hair out.”

       “Shut the fuck up, Duvall,” Tucker shot back. “I heard you rubbed yourself with Vaseline to keep the booty bandits off your ass down in Lucasville.”

       Doing time at the prison in Lucasville on the Ohio River, where the state’s bad boys went, carried cachet as opposed to a minimum-security prison like LECI, however, so it was deemed Duvall had the better of the argument.  

      “Alla you shut up,” Evan said. “It’s settled. Break’s over. Let’s get back in there before my balls freeze off.”

       Friday Evening at the Party . . .

       J.C. returned to the group, all three standing off among themselves near the snack tables.

        “Damn woman goes on like a whore’s dream,” she said. “I practically had to promise to marry her.”

        She’d spent twenty minutes flirting with the office secretary so Evan could use Tucker’s bulk to obscure him while he slipped the Everclear and tequila into the punch bowls. Everybody, even office staff, expected the punch to be spiked, just not with the highest-proof vodka and tequila on the market.

       Tucker was the only slaughterer who didn’t inspire immediate fear in the other employees. His nickname came from his eating habits, not his personality. He was jovial around the plant. He exploited his baby-faced looks everywhere except in the joint, where he had his two-hundred-fifty-pound cell mate to keep him safe.

        Duvall was the last to join them. He’d been in Billy’s truck checking the feed from the WiFi connection to the laptop on the truck’s seat.

       “How’s the pixel resolution, Duvall?” Evan asked.

       “The what?”

       “Can you see everything clearly?”

       “Hell fuckin’ yes,” Duvall said. “You’ll be able to count the freckles on Klingman’s butt while she’s smoking his bone in there.”

       Last night, Billy had bribed one of the midnight shift cleaning crew to let him into the office “to check whether “that lazy-assed bitch Marilee” finally got around to adjusting his 1040 tax form.      Once inside, he attached pinhole camera lenses in the both the men’s and women’s stalls for a live video feed. The assumption was that Klingman would bring Maggie to the office restrooms, avoiding the common bathrooms for the workers. The man didn’t want to do it, told him he could ask Marilee in the morning, until Evan told him in simple English in a calm voice exactly what would happen to him and everybody in his house if he hesitated “one more motherfucking second.”

       “Been a whole lot easier in our shitters,” Tucker said. “All that flaking paint and graffiti on the sides, you could stick a satellite dish in there and they wouldn’t see it.”

       The company routinely painted over the obscenities and cartoons with exaggerated genitals.  It was like expecting a railroad freight car to go untagged.

       By nine-thirty, the effects of the high-powered booze were evident. The decibel level of talk and laughter went increasingly higher, although the four stood off in silence and were avoided by the other employees. Management had to open a big section of the packing floor to accommodate the employees’ tables. Duvall’s wife insisted on coming to the party. She wandered off to talk to some girls she knew from high school.   

       “Tucker, U asshole,” Billy Evan typed; “where R they at?”

       Tucker’s job was to track the couple and report Maggie-Klingman sightings in the crowded room via his cell phones DM. He’d last seen them talking together near the office doors fifteen minutes ago.  

       “Oh shit,” Tucker said.

       He’d been steadily drinking once the speeches started, preferring to ignore the president’s bullshit lines, meaning “we at DeLuxe are family” bullshit-bullshit—his grandfather, a man who’d “come from a village in Czechoslovakia”—or was it Hungary, one of them Eurotrash shitholes to start the business was a saint, a legend, “beloved of all his employees.” The same thing “ever’ fuckin’ year,” Tucker whined. Employees attended for the bonus check—no show, no check.

       They commandeered a table with a clear view of the couple, deeply engaged with each other. J.C. and Tucker came back to the table from the parking lot. Tucker staggered, his glassy eyes and slurred speech showed he was too wasted to care where he was. Despite the freezing cold outside, people still stepped outside to grab a smoke. A few couples would risk more than cold to sneak off to a car for a quickie. Billy didn’t know how to interpret the expressions on his gang’s faces. Something was up, for sure.

       “Maybe you should go take a looksee for yourself,” J.C. said. “It ain’t quite what you had in mind, Billy.”

       “Go, Duvall,” Billy said. “I’m going to pull the circuit breaker on the lights. See if I can nudge those two into some action.”

        “Maybe Duvall should stay with us,” J.C. interjected; “ya know, in case we need an extra eye on Maggie or Klingman, Tuck here being shitfaced . . .”

        Billy ignored the suggestion. They rose from the table and headed for the exit door.

       “Well,” J.C. said, turning to Tucker, “Get ready for Mister Shit to meet Mister Fan.”

        “Huh?”

        She watched Billy head off to find the circuit breaker.

        While Billy was gone, Duvall burst into the big room in a rage, bellowing like a wounded ox at the top of his lungs, running fast toward the office doors.  People stopped talking to watch him. Tose in bis path scattered to one side or the other like a bow wave splitting a rock in the stream.

        J.C. heard two people talking near her. One said it wasn’t the first time one of those “mental cases” went off his rocker. The other agreed: “They’re a cunt hair from crazy on a good day.”

        When the lights went out, chaos erupted. A couple old scores were settled, sucker punches were thrown. Glass broke, tables crashed to the floor. Shouts and screams from all directions. One unpopular supervisor had his eye blackened and his shirt ripped off. Another supervisor who liked to pat female employees’ asses while they worked the line was kicked in the crotch and lay moaning on the floor.

        The Day after the Party . . .

        The scandal spread from one corner of the county to the other. The entire processing plant had to be shut down while cops investigated. Evan, Tucker, and J.C. were arrested at their homes by SWAT that morning.

        Billy Evan had to be dropped to the frozen ground and trussed up like a Yuletide turkey. It took four cops to pick him up and load him into the back of the cruiser. He spewed curses, foamed at the mouth.

        Duvall was already in the county caboose for the beating of Dave Klingman. Duvall’s wife refused to press charges against her husband. Klingman had a severe concussion and a broken jaw.    Duvall’s wife’s bruises didn’t require a hospital stay. Klingman’s member required sixteen stitches when Duvall burst into the men’s room in the office and kicked the stall door open where she was giving head to Klingman. He told the doctor stitching him up that he didn’t expect her to clamp down in her terror.

         J.C. was the lone member of the posse to escape legal retaliation. She claimed no knowledge of the illicit taping. The investigators couldn’t find evidence other than guilt by association.  Tucker’s cell phone did him in. Besides Duvall’s assault charge, they were slapped with multiple violations of wiretapping, video voyeurism, and audio recording offenses that combined to send them back to prison for years.

        The company president himself intervened to get J.C. exonerated. She willingly cooperated with authorities. The cleaning crew employee testified to Billy’s threat to him and his family in exchange for dropping charges or dismissal from the job. A criminal coercion charge was added to Evan’s tally.

        Unconfirmed rumors swept the plant for months afterward.  Despite the confiscation of the cameras and laptop from Evan’s truck, a video recording was still out there. It was rumored inside the company that Maggie Spewell had “occupied” a restroom stall for a short time before the blackout. Gossip along the line said she had not been alone in there. That one was reserved exclusively for the personal use of the president.

        The final tally of the damage done in the dark that night was hard to estimate. At least four people wound up in the hospital with concussions, lacerations from broken glass, and broken bones. Besides the arrests, four couples wound up getting divorced. One couple who managed to find their way to each other in the dark became engaged. Three employees were fired. One was promoted.

Billy Evan’s prior record guaranteed him the five-year sentence the judge handed down despite his lawyer’s assertion of mitigating circumstance based on his client’s “diminished mental capacity.” Evan fired his lawyer on the spot.

         Of the remaining posse in the year after the party, Tucker’s boated body was found by hunters in the woods. The autopsy revealed a shotgun wound to the left tibia but his blood was too advanced in decomposition and bacterial contamination to say with certainty he’d been drunk at the time of his death. The Sheriff said that was likely the case, given the fact the shotgun lying near the body and a spent shell in the chamber of his 30.06 deer rifle. Tucker was known to poach deer out of season. It was rumored there was a woman with him based on forensic evidence at the scene.  J.C. was interviewed, admitted she liked to hunt deer herself but said she was asleep at home with the flu. Could anyone vouch for her? Unfortunately, she said, she alone that day. Case closed.

        Duvall was one of the divorced couples from the party. He and his wife later made up, began dating again and remarried. He stopped drinking, found Jesus, and started his own church with her at an abandoned gas station in Northtown. The church marquee outside their small concrete building had been donated by a new member of their congregation. It stated, in thick black letters: “No Religous  [sic] People, Saducees [sic], or Pharysees [sic] Are Welcome Here.”

        J.C. stayed on at the company. She eventually rose to a supervisor position, switched sexual gears, and married. She produced four children from two different men, both willing to share her. She even ran for city council in Northtown, but the rumors of her participation in “that clusterfuck out there at the processing plant” surfaced to ensure her defeat at the polls by a handful of votes.

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     Robb White is a Derringer-nominated author with three series detectives: Thomas Haftmann, Raimo Jarvi, and Jade Hui. Betray Me Not was selected for distinction by the Independent Fiction Alliance in 2022. Fade to Black is a collection of noir tales. Jersey Girl is his latest thriller (2025). A forthcoming crime novella is languishing at Brick Tower Press.

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      Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.