By Joshua Ryan

So that’s the way it was, as — what do they say? — the days stretched into weeks and the weeks stretched into months. If this was a movie, there would be a calendar with the pages flipping past. No reason to stop at any of them. Every day was the same, except for Sundays.

They don’t make you work on Sunday. Somebody said “it’s because Old Man Williams needs a day off,” which made everybody laugh because nobody could figure out what he did on the other days of the week. Him and the jeans dudes. Who turned out to have names. “Ethan is the one that locks us up at night,” I was told, “and Chad is the one that lets us out in the morning.” There were a lot of jokes about whether Chad and Ethan were always packing guns because they never had anything else to shoot with. But everybody knew that they wouldn’t think twice about shooting one of us.

That first Sunday I just laid on my bunk, listening to my body trying to recover from every kind of pain, in every member except one, which I hadn’t used in so long that I couldn’t remember it. But the overwhelming pain was knowing that I was a workie. On the other Sundays I was given more education about what that meant.

As long as it wasn’t raining on Sunday, we were allowed a few hours “on the yard,” which was all the space in the compound that didn’t have a fence around it, like the motor pool and the power house. From time to time, Chad and Ethan would come by and look at us through the fence, and most Sundays a couple of cops from the state WORC Patrol passed through and let us know we were being watched. But none of those guys did anything. The barn bosses took care of fights and shit.

Mainly the workies wandered around chatting with each other, especially the guys they knew from different barns. I didn’t know how to act around other workies, so I hung back along the path to my barn and sort of looked at my boots. Given enough time, though, it’s impossible not to meet workies who aren’t in your barn and have to listen to their sad stories about how “Dude, they really fucked me over after I swiped that shit! Now I’m doin life as a workie!” It was worse to hear stories about how “Dude, I really fucked myself when I volunteered for this shit! I had no idea what a workie suit would feel like!” So usually I just hung with the silent types and maybe watched the other guys walking around or playing basketball, which seemed like the thing that most of them wanted to do.

What I wanted was a drink. I wanted to lie on a couch and drink. I wanted to go to a pretty restaurant and order a froofy cocktail. Then I wanted to order a great Bordeaux. Then I wanted to relax after dinner with a lovely cognac. I wanted to be drunk for months. I wanted to be so drunk that I’d finally let Mike fuck me. I wanted to be so drunk that I’d finally wake up and find out that this had all been a bad dream. But I couldn’t get drunk, and I couldn’t take off the steel collar with my workie number stamped on the front.

Anyway. Next to the cannery was a concrete parking lot that must have been put in by whoever owned the farms before Jerry. The civilians that bossed Jerry’s canning operation didn’t want to bother driving into the compound, when they could park right outside, so the concrete slab stayed empty, and the field bosses put up a hoop. It was supposed to be for them and nobody else, but since they were just workies anyhow they couldn’t make that stick. So more hoops went up, and basketball was huge in the yard. There were always more guys that wanted to play than there was room for them to do it.

There were also a lotta guys that sort of squatted around on the yard, playing cards. Cards were huge any time after labor hours. If it wasn’t outside on Sunday it was inside in the barn, every night of the week. It was always about gambling, and the stakes were whatever the workies happened to pick up in the fields or found someplace when they were out on road maintenance. Because that’s mainly what they made us do in the winter. Jerry rented us to the county, which provided cops to watch us while we did our work. “Work” meant fucking around on the highways, picking up trash and pulling out junk from the culverts and fixing the johns and brushing out the trails at the roadside parks. That’s where you can find a lot of stuff that to normal people is just trash that you throw away, but to workies it’s something valuable, something you can trade or gamble.

The biggest prize you could find was a beer can that hadn’t been opened, followed by a beer can that had been opened but still had something in it, followed by packs of cigarettes, followed by butts of cigarettes … Sometimes you’d find a penny or a nickel or even a quarter on the ground, so now you had something to trade for another workie’s toothpaste that he hadn’t finished when the new tube was issued on the first of the month, or the extra towel he’d grabbed and hidden after showers. Everybody knew about this stuff, including the barn boss, but unless it caused a fight, nobody cared. Nobody was allowed to care. If you cared, you ruined the other workies’ pleasures. That’s one of the things Ace meant when he gave me that warning — one of those things that would get you killed.

But because everybody knew everything about everybody else, there was an unspoken rule that nobody could accumulate too much. At some point, you had to share it. Automatically, you had to share the can of beer. Or the full pack of cigarettes. Other stuff that was sort of over the top, you could just happen to gamble it away to your buddies. I was a bad gambler, so that was easy for me. Like Ace told me, I could lose even when the game was fixed in my favor. I didn’t tell him that making a bet was how I got to be a workie.

Of course, I didn’t want anybody to know that I had any relationship to “Mr. Hamilton,” AKA “Old Ham,” our owner. If they thought I was a snitch for The Man, or might somehow get to be a snitch, I was done for. And if they thought I could start doin favors for the barn, because I knew Old Ham, that would be big trouble too. How could I do anybody any favors? So much for my only connection with the world outside of workies — except for that half filled bottle of Chablis I found in the trash when we were cleaning up the rest stop on Route 89. I jugged that before anybody saw.

One night in winter, we’d been working the road, and I was cold and hungry, and when I went to the Chow Hall they gave us beans and bread for the fourth time that week, and it was like the same bread and the same beans, just cooked one more time and left to get cold. I looked at the stuff and I smelled the stuff, and I said something like, “This shit ain’t fit for a dog.” Then Ace said, “Nope. But it’s fit for workies. And that’s what you are.”

“Thanks, fucker,” I said. “I didn’t know that.” I’d been there long enough so he wasn’t my threatening older bro anymore.

He didn’t pay any attention to what I said. He never did. He just kept talking.

“I don’t mean the collar and the suit. I mean you. I mean it’s happened. The way it always happens. You didn’t notice it, but next time you’re in the showers, take a look at your body. Then check out the way you talk. You’re a workie now. So eat your grub, Butch.”

Yeah sure. Only please shut up while I try to swallow this shit. But the next day I remembered, and I looked. I hadn’t wanted to see what months of hard labor had done to me, but there it was. In place of the soft, supple shapes of what Mike called my “girlish figure” there were long hard plateaus of muscle. I’d gained 20 pounds, but everything that used to be fat was now lean, and everything that used to be lean and soft was now heavy and strong. My cock stuck out like a pipe from my hairless balls — not like it was asking to be massaged and loved but like it was ready to screw itself into any hole of sufficient diameter. It was a harsh, hard, ugly body, the kind of body that needed to be put in a workie suit.

“The rest of you has changed, too,” Ace said as we walked out of the shower room. “It isn’t just your body.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I used to be happy, and now I’m not.”

He ignored that. He was good at ignoring things. “You ever listen to your own voice?” he continued. “It used to be high. High and prissy. Like you were a queen that was just dying to camp. Yeah, I know you’re gay. It took me one second to see how gay you were. And I used to see those little gestures you’d make when you wanted to say that you’d sat at better tables than the old banged up stuff we got in the barn. You wanted to say it but you couldn’t, because you were afraid I’d smack your head off, so you sort of prissed around and said it to yourself that way. You don’t do that anymore. So I don’t need to smack you. You’re in the soup now. Your body got changed, and so did your brain. If any. And sorry, brah. It’s permanent. You’ll never go back. And by the way, you should check out your grammar. Those g’s are droppin like hail, dude. Happened to me too. Hey Mack! ‘Sup?” He moved off to his next conversation.

I spent some time wondering whether he was right. Yeah, those final “g’s” — I wasn’t showin em a lotta love. And “ain’t” was becoming a friend. “Don’t” was easier to say than “doesn’t.” “Can I suck on one a them road kills?” was how I asked to share a smoke that some other workie had jerked from the side of the road. Back at Druid Lane, I didn’t even smoke. Now I did, whenever I got the chance. And I had no hesitation about unbuttoning my pants and squatting over the shit hole. After the first time, I had no hesitation about getting hooked onto the Ball and toting it across the field till I got to the shitting platform and could do my business in front of all the coffles in the place. I was a workie; that’s what workies have to do. I didn’t weird off when a boss gave me some bogus order, even if it had “mofo” and “kick yo ass” in it. When a boss told me to grab my knees and wait for it, I grabbed my knees and waited for the paddle to hit. And I had no problem with not following orders, if a boss wasn’t looking. It was automatic; also automatic to lie about it later. I worked, ate, slept. So Ace was right. I’d changed, all right.

I would even have lost track of the months if it wasn’t for the change of seasons. We sweated in the summer and we got rained on in the fall. First we raked and hoed and troweled and dug and picked all the plants that Jerry grew, from onions to potatoes to squash to beans — lots of beans. Then when the harvests were in we fed Jerry’s shit into the machinery that processed it and put it into cans. We stacked Jerry’s cans in the warehouse and loaded them onto trucks. Then we went back in the coffle and were sent out to work the roads.

That was another education. When you’re out on the road, people slow down to look at you. Families stare at you and take pictures of your butt bending over to pry a Coke can out of the slush. Dudes with girlfriends hop out of their cars and take selfies with you as the background. When the boss starts towards them, they flip him off and yell “Later, losers!” And they’re right. What do you call a thing that’s dressed in a clown suit and chained by the leg to nine other things that look exactly like it? A thing that showers in an open-air “room” with snow drifting in and lives in a barracks where he gambles for cigarette butts? A hairless thing that’s priced like an ox, by the size of its muscles and its ability not to think? You might possibly call that a loser. A workie is something so low that even a workie would rather be anything else than a workie. And I was the one that had done this to myself. I was the one that had wanted to try it.

Ace was right. I needed to adapt to my new life. And I had adapted. No illusions. I knew what I was. And I finally started to realize that Ace was the most important thing in my life.

I was gonna say “the best thing,” but he was a workie too, and I hated the sight of him in his clown suit and his little clown cap and the dumb-as-dirt expression he had on his face when he squatted over the crap hole. It was the same expression, I knew, that I had on my face. Which made it worse.

Then one Saturday night we were hangin next to his rack, and a couple dudes had some road beer that they passed around, and the other dudes went away and Ace and me were finally at the point where he asked me how did I get here? I told him I was workin for some rich guy, runnin his house. Then the guy found out I’d been stealin, and he gave me the choice: go to jail, or join the workies. I thought sure, I’ll be a workie. But I didn’t know what I was gettin into.

Story was true … enough. Not nearly as stupid as the real one. Anybody can steal. Not everybody can be a fool like me.

It took about a minute to tell Ace that story. It took a week more for me to get any of his own. We were talking about the names that workies have. He said I probably got my name Butch because that was the farthest from what I was. “Yeah,” I said. “So is that the same with your name? You an ace or not?”

Does that sound like a sex thrust? It was. Suddenly I wanted something in my so-called life, even if it was this weird beautiful dude in a workie suit.

“OK,” he said, talking to me except backing away at the same time, like sure, I’ll tell you, cuz it doesn’t mean anything. “Old Ham named me, same as everybody else. Best expIanation, it was a joke.”

“A joke?”

“Yeah. Same as your name. Old Ham’s got a real sense of humor.”

Yeah sure, I thought. I knew better about Old Ham. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

“What do you mean?” I said. “About your name?”

“All I know … I was standing on the loading dock, and one of the delivery boys says to the other one, ‘Ace. That’s a funny thing to call a workie. A workie ain’t even a deuce.’ Then the other one says, ‘It’s supposed to be funny. That Lyons guy told me. This workie was a college prof. So, he’s an Ace.’”

“That’s what you were?!” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, giving me this look like, I guess I went too far. “Just keep it to yourself. You and Mack are the only ones that know it. I’m bored with jokes.”

“Yeah, sure. But I … I gotta know more. How did you …?”

He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest, and he looked down at them for a long time. The muscles in those sleeves were definitely not those of some college twit. I wondered if that was what he was thinking too. And whether that was bad or good. Maybe he was just thinking, should I tell him or should I just slap him around? I knew I’d taken a chance on that.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll tell you the story. Ain’t much, anyway. My dad was a big guy in town, and I was a smart little science geek. Graduated from Kingston when I was fuckin 20. Finished grad school when I was 23. Long hair, reading glasses … I bought some yellow Chucks to make myself cool. In other words, totally fucked. With a record like that, no wonder Greenford put me on the faculty. I could teach all the other little geniuses how to live.”

“What were you a professor of?”

“Physics, of course.”

“PHYSICS?” Nobody’s a professor of physics.

“Yeah. But … I like you, Butch, but if you tell anybody, I’ll have to hurt you. Bad.”

“I won’t. Why should I?”

“Because maybe you’re still a shifty little queen. Maybe down deep, on the other side of BUTCH, AT YOUR SERVICE, that’s what you’ll always be. I don’t know. But I know that my … capacities have improved since I abandoned my career in physics.”

On the other side of ACE, AT YOUR SERVICE, I was starting to see something a lot more than that mass of muscle.

“OK,” I said. “I get your point. You aren’t a little geek anymore.”

“Nope. To everybody’s surprise. Lyons must’ve knocked my price to the bottom before Hamilton bought me. Shit, he must’ve paid Hamilton to remove the trash. So that’s how I got my name. Ace. Big joke, eh? But who’s the joke on?”

“But how did you … why did you …?”

“Why did I sign my name on the contract that made me a lifetime participant in the Work Options for Recovery and Correction program?”

“Yeah dude. That’s what I wanta know.”

“What’s the matter? You can’t figure it out? I hated my students. I hated my ‘colleagues.’ They were all like me. House of mirrors. With nothing to reflect. So I decided to be a workie.”

He said it like that was the logical conclusion: “so …”

“That’s the explanation?! I don’t get it.”

When you’re locked in the barn with somebody, one of the first things you learn is not to demand an explanation. But OK, I’d already stepped over the line. I wanted to know the whole thing. Even if he decided to hurt me.

“Huh? OK. I could tell you a lotta things. I could even tell you that I don’t know why I did it. Or I could tell you that I’d been reading about WORC for a long time, and it got to be an obsession with me. That’s what science geeks are—obsessives.   And all that’s true. But what happened was, I woke up one morning and thought, what the hell? I don’t like who I am. I hate who I am. So I’m gonna do it. Something in my head about an equal and opposite reaction. Very scientific. So I signed the papers. Bad decision? Maybe. But here I am. Anything else you wanta know?”

This dude … What could I say? He was standing by his bunk, legs spread wide, chest spread wider, shirt thick and heavy, chest thicker and heavier, cap on backwards with its brim falling across his neck, and everything looked like, fuck I’m hot. His cock was tenting his pants, and the message on his chest said ACE, AT YOUR SERVICE.

“It’s Saturday night,” I said. “Let’s fuck.”

“OK,” he said. “Come here after lights out.”

So I did.

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