The Last Shift

The factory closed on a Thursday. Judy Ramirez knew this because she was writing a parking ticket on Route 9 when a man in a grey pickup truck pulled up, rolled down his window, and said the factory was closed, not because of the weather, not because of the economy, but because the owner had packed up the last machine on a Thursday in October and driven to Tennessee and nobody had seen him since.

Judy wrote down the man's name—Carl Henderson, though he could have been lying about that—and finished her ticket. It was a Tuesday in March and the temperature was forty-two degrees and the wind blew from the north and the sky was the color of a penny left in rain. She was twenty-four, Mexican-American, from Cleveland, and she had been a part-time auxiliary officer in Millerton, Ohio for six weeks.

Millerton had twelve thousand people when the factory was open and eight thousand now. Main Street had three open businesses: a Dollar General that sold everything from phone chargers to frozen pot pies, a pawn shop that had not sold anything pawned after 2008, and a diner called Ray's that served coffee in chipped mugs and burgers that tasted like they had been cooked on a surface that had not been cleaned since the Clinton administration.

Judy's job was parking enforcement. She wrote tickets for cars that were parked in front of businesses that were closed, which was a circular exercise that made her wonder if she should be looking for something more. But the chief had said: "We don't have the budget for more. You write tickets. You answer the phone when it rings. That's the job."

The phone did not ring much. Sometimes it was a noise complaint—a fight at the Dollar General parking lot, a dog barking at 2 AM, a teenager playing music too loud. Sometimes it was nothing—a misplaced mailbox, a pothole on Elm Street, a cat stuck in a tree that turned out to be a raccoon.

On her fifth week, a stray dog was killed on Route 9. Judy went to the scene. The dog was a shepherd mix, medium size, brown and white, lying in the ditch with one leg still moving. The driver of the car that hit it was gone. Judy called the number on the dog's collar—it had a tag that said Baxter and a phone number that went to a disconnected voicemail—and waited for someone to come. No one came. She took Baxter to the animal shelter on her own time and paid for his burial out of her own pocket. It was twenty-seven dollars.

On her sixth week, a fight broke out at Ray's diner. Two men argued over a game of pool, one of them got angry, and he threw a stool at the other man's head. The stool missed and hit a mirror. The mirror broke. Judy called the state police because there was no one else to call, and by the time they arrived, the fight had ended and the men were sitting at the counter drinking beers like nothing had happened. The state police wrote a report and left. Nobody was charged.

On her seventh week, an elderly man named Walter came to the sheriff's office and complained about his property taxes. He was eighty-one years old, lived alone in a house that had belonged to his wife's family for fifty years, and could not understand why his taxes had gone up when the value of his house had gone down. Judy listened. She wrote down what he said. She told him she would look into it. She did not.

The wild predators appeared in her eighth week.

She was doing her rounds on Elm Street when she saw tracks in the mud near the abandoned steel mill on the edge of town. They were not dog tracks. They were too large, too spread out, and they had claw marks. She crouched down and looked at them for a long time. A coyote track, maybe. Or a bobcat. Or something else. She had never been trained to identify wild animal tracks. The academy had not covered it. She took a photograph with her phone and put it in a folder labeled "Wildlife" on her desk.

Three days later, she drove past the steel mill and saw movement behind the rusted fence. Something large and thin moving fast, then gone. A coyote. She slowed the patrol car and watched the fence line. There were three sets of tracks leading into the mill. She noted the date and time in her notebook.

The next week, the bobcat was gone.

She found out from Nicky Torres, who worked at the auto repair shop on Elm Street and knew everything that happened on Elm Street because he had been working at the same shop for twelve years and had developed the habit of watching everything.

"You see those wild animals near the old mill?" he said, leaning against the doorframe of the sheriff's office. He was a fox of indeterminate age, wearing a grease-stained jumpsuit and a smile that had stopped being confident around the time the factory closed. "Coyote, bobcat, hawk. Three of them. Last time I saw all three was last week. This week, only the coyote."

"That's it?"

"That's it. The bobcat's gone. And the hawk."

"Where do they go?"

"I don't know. But I know the mill. Kids have been using it for a few months. I've smelled something."

"Meth?"

He nodded. "Probably. Or something like it. Chemical smell. Strong enough to make your eyes water."

Judy went to the steel mill that evening. She parked on the road outside the fence and walked to the nearest gap, which she had to crawl through because the fence was six feet high and she was five feet four inches. The mill was enormous and dark and full of the kind of shadows that were not really shadows but absences—places where the light had been consumed by something else.

She found the meth lab in the second building. It was a single room, maybe thirty feet across, with three folding tables, a hot plate, some glass containers, and a ventilation fan that was held up by a wire hanger. It was ugly and small and completely ordinary.

She called the county sheriff's department because this was not Millerton's jurisdiction. The officer on the phone listened, took notes, and said they would send a team. It was after nine PM and the team would not arrive until morning.

"Can you secure the area?" the officer asked.

"I'm the only officer in Millerton," she said.

There was a pause. "Do not enter the building."

She did not enter the building. She sat in her patrol car outside the fence and watched the mill through the windshield and thought about the bobcat that had gone away and the hawk that had gone away and the coyote that was still there, moving between the broken windows like a shadow that had not yet decided whether to leave.

At midnight, the coyote was gone too.

She saw it happen. The coyote emerged from the second building, stopped at the edge of the light from her headlights, looked at her with eyes that reflected the dashboard glow, and turned and walked away into the pecan grove on the other side of the road. It did not run. It did not hurry. It just left.

She drove after it for half a mile, then turned around and went home.

The next morning, she drove to the auto repair shop and found Nicky Torres oil-changing a pickup truck.

"Did the animals come back?" she asked.

He looked at her. "Which animals?"

"The ones near the mill. The coyote, the bobcat, the hawk. Are they back?"

He wiped his hands on a rag and leaned against the truck. "I don't check every day. But I passed by yesterday and I didn't see anything. Probably moved on. It's spring. They breed in spring. They move."

"Just moved on."

He looked at her for a moment. "You OK, Judy?"

She thought about the meth lab. She thought about the officer who would send a team in the morning. She thought about the bobcat that had disappeared and the hawk that had disappeared and the coyote that had looked at her with glowing eyes and walked away. She thought about Walter's property taxes and the dog she had buried and the fight at Ray's diner and the mirror that had broken.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine."

"I sound like I sound. It's eight in the morning. Nobody sounds fine at eight in the morning."

He smiled. It was a tired smile. "You want a coffee? Ray's is two blocks down."

She thought about it. Coffee was coffee. It was either good or it was not, and in Millerton, it was almost always not. But it was hot, and it was something to do, and she had nothing else to do that was important.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, please."

They walked to Ray's in the morning light, which was thin and grey and did not make anything better. The Dollar General was opening. The sign flickered once and then stayed on. The pawn shop was still dark. Ray's neon sign buzzed the way it always buzzed, like a fly trapped in glass.

They sat at the counter. Ray poured them coffee that tasted like burnt water and set two mugs down without asking how they wanted it. Nicky added sugar. Judy did not.

"That's it?" Nicky said after she told him about the mill.

"Yeah," she said. "That's the whole thing."

"You were expecting something else?"

She thought about the factory closing and the town shrinking and the three open businesses and the twelve officers who used to be forty. She thought about the academy in Cleveland and the oath she had taken and the way the officer on the phone had said do not enter the building like it was a script he had read a thousand times.

"No," she said. "I guess not."

Nicky drank his coffee. The diner was quiet except for the buzz of the neon sign and the sound of Ray cleaning glasses with a cloth that was not clean.

"You want me to drive you home?" he said finally.

She thought about her house—a small rental on the edge of town with thin walls and a radiator that made a noise like a dying animal and a kitchen where the sink leaked and she had meant to fix it for three months. She thought about the folder on her desk labeled Wildlife, containing one photograph of tracks in mud. She thought about the meth lab that would be processed in the morning and the charges that would be minimal and the animals that would have already moved on and the coyote that had looked at her and left.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, please."

He drove her home in his pickup truck with broken air conditioning that blew hot air in the summer and cold air in the winter and in March was just air. He dropped her at the curb and turned the engine off and sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel.

"See you around, Judy," he said.

"See you around, Nicky."

She went inside her house. The radiator was making its noise. The sink was leaking. She turned on every light in the apartment because the power was included in the rent and the darkness was more expensive than the electricity. She sat on the couch and looked at the wall across from her and thought about nothing and everything and nothing again, the way thoughts come in a small town when there is no one to talk to and nothing to do and the morning has not yet arrived and the night is still far away.

Outside, the neon sign of the Dollar General flickered on and off, on and off, a heartbeat that had decided to keep going even though it had no particular reason to.

Author Note & Copyright: