alouicious“That, son, is the unluckiest man in the world.” Bill
nodded toward the foreman passing down the shop floor for the
fiftieth time that day. The summer before starting grad school,
I’d landed a factory job where he and I spent all day rolling
towering racks of plywood in and out of a kiln hotter than
Dante’s ninth ring, laminating wood to be cut, shaped, and
polished for handles to Ecko paring knives.  The foreman—I’ll
call him Alouicious—was a dour man, with a face like he’d been
baked in one of those kilns—leathery, road mapped with wrinkles
and scars like the hired hand I’d known back on our Minnesota
farm who’d fallen off his tractor and been run over by a disk.
Even on the ninth ring’s hottest summer days, Alouicious wore a
flannel shirt under his overalls, and he walked with this
swaying, stiff-legged, cob-up-the-ass gait, barely glancing up
from the clipboard perpetually nestled in the crook of his arm.
In his presence, I made as if I were eager to please, but after
he’d pass by, I’d delight t