GAME by Bob Beach Hack watched a handful of birds buzz the stacks of the Whirlpool plant, a quarter mile away beyond Walmart and the city park. Buzzards and hawks, probably, mooching a free ride to the top on warm air from towers that belched steam twenty-four seven. Up and up until they escaped into the clouds. Why? No dinner up there. Maybe they liked the view. Above the trees, the windowless grey corrugated walls of the plant stretched as far left and right as Hack could see from his porch. More poor grunts stamping and drilling and bending and bolting, in each shift, than the population of the whole damn town. A giant black hole, an accretion disk of homes and schools and businesses and churches for miles around, spiraling slowly around it toward eventual extinction, when cheap Chinese or Korean junk finally put it out of business. Sons and daughters sucked relentlessly into its depths and spit out forty years later, shriveled husks. Hack’s knee was complaining despite the heat, and he stretched his left leg across the width of the porch swing. His bare right foot danced across the hot wood floor, keeping the swing moving in a pale imitation of a breeze. “If this is what global warmin’s like, count me out.” He took off his glasses and scrubbed them on a nearly dry corner of his sweaty T-shirt. “Foggin my specs.” “Man, you’ve had those stupid hornrims since you were a kid. When are you going to wise up and spring for a new pair? Something looks like it was made this century.” Dale Swolsky lay flat on his back on the porch floor, his head propped up on a brick, his dark blue Yankees cap covering his face, his thin cotton tank dark with sweat. God had set the midsummer sun on broil, then walked away and forgotten about it. Even the cars felt it, wheezing and gasping as they puttered past the house in low gear, parboiled drivers limp and spent. The lawns up and down the street were going brown and thatchy, except for Mrs. Halloran’s yard, which was mostly begonias with the sprinkler wobbling back and forth all day.
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