The refinery has been in continuous operation since 1909, a year after Henry Ford put all the horses out of business. In the beginning it was made mostly of wood. Teams of oxen heaved and strained and yanked steel cable through snatch block and tackle, raising heavy loads skyward.

The oxen are gone now, replaced by pickup trucks, forklifts, mobile cranes. The processing units are noxious and loud. Waves of heat rise off drums, pressure vessels, an endless maze of piping.

The place sits on twelve hundred acres. Part of it used to be a farm. Some of it was marsh. Sometimes, when I’m doing work out on the fringes, copper-colored grasses sway in sweet wind.

Butterflies seem possible.

Every once in a while, a confused seagull will make a nest on a high-up platform. When we climb the ladder, we get dive-bombed. They think we’re there to kill their egglings. No, we’re just trying to gently service the machines that are efficiently destroying the entire world.

Five of us took break in a slanted trailer. We were the welders, the mechanics. We could fix most anything.

As I came through the door, I took care to step over a hole in the floor.

Lou, our foreman, looked like a low-rent George Washington. He was eating a cranberry muffin and clearly had a story he was saving until a bigger audience arrived. When Joe and Dean finally came in, stinking of diesel, Lou raised his arms wide and said, “Fellas, I have news.”

“Here we go.”

“Goldie has come home.”

“Who?”

“Your cat?” Joe said in astonishment.

“Happened Friday night after car pool.”

They’d driven in together that morning in complete silence. Car-pool rules said no one was allowed to talk on the 5 A.M. ride up the highway. Story time was always saved for break. Which it was now: Monday, a few minutes after nine.

“Oh my God,” Joe said. “Where’s Mark? Does he know?”

“Maybe he saw it on Facebook.”

Dean leaned over and ripped the faded LOST CAT sign off his locker and we all had a good laugh. Mark liked to screw around⁠—⁠he’d printed that sign the same day Lou’s wife posted it on Facebook years before. He’d hung fifty-something posters, unit to unit.

Here’s what happened with Goldie. Lou had gotten a call from a veterinarian in Silverton, fifteen miles northeast of his place in Bamber Lake. Somebody had taken a kitty in for a checkup, and the vet found a microchip. Lou rushed to the vet’s office ready to punch the thief between the eyes. But the thief turned out to be a sweet old lady with a walker, who said the cat had shown up on her porch one misty morning.

Goldie now had long scars running down her flanks. The vet’s theory was that a hawk had grabbed the kitty and flown away. Carried her over the trees. Plenty of trees. Perhaps Goldie had slashed and thrashed or perhaps the hawk just got tired and let go. After that, maybe she had lived in the wilderness, recovering from her wounds, before stumbling across this little old lady’s house and becoming her beloved pet.

“Wait. She just surrendered her cat to you?”

“My cat.”

“She wasn’t upset?”

“A tad.” Lou was already starting to look like he wished he hadn’t told us any of this. He was turning pink, then red.

“I hope you didn’t go berserker.”

Lou was usually a mellow guy, but yes, he’d lost his mind at the vet’s office. When the lady began to cry, he snatched the cat carrier. She threatened to call the police. He deposited Goldie in his back seat and launched the empty carrier across the parking lot. To make matters worse, when they got home, Goldie attacked the other house cats that had come to replace her. Later that night she made a go at the cockatiels she’d loved when she was a kitten.

A few minutes after this revelation, Mark kicked open the trailer door and dug into one of his Mad Max road rage stories, as if everybody besides me hadn’t been in the same car during their commute. “Some guy in a blue Honda was playing tough at the merge but Dean heroically forced him into the guardrail. Sparks were flying.”

Lou’s eyes told me it was true.

“I do what I can,” Dean said.

Mark stuck something in the microwave and stood staring. His flattop got serviced every other Wednesday. Joe had a mullet he cut himself and it looked good, man. Real good. Dean was a jujitsu guy who shaved his head with a Bic every day during lunch.

These guys all lived an hour south on the parkway, down at the edge of the Pine Barrens. Owned small handsome houses on piney sugar-sand lots and swam in cold creeks or ran through sprinklers with their shrieking children. Chicken potpies for dinner. Dogs and exotic snakes to tend. Ex-wives or soon-to-be ex-wives. Worried over tax brackets and crypto. Had not a single college credit between them, same as me. Had calloused hands with random fingers severed at random joints. Bet on underdog horses and lost. Bet on champion NASCAR drivers and lost. Scrapped copper to get side money for ammunition or parts for dirt bikes or to take down to Atlantic City and slap down on black, just to lose that, too.

“Mark,” Joe said. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what, that every year it gets more impossible to drive in this state? Cars have doubled and motherfuckers still wanna drive under eighty in the slow lane.”

“Lou’s cat came back.”

“Southbound side, it’s clear sailing,” I said.

If I’d lived down where they did, we might have all ridden in together, in an old bread truck or a laundry van, tossing empty beer cans out the door, like brothers. Instead, I lived up in the mayhem of the city. Put up with apartment living, street parking, no yard, but got a peaches and cream reverse commute.