Her tits are worth it.

“You went up the old road where they still have the median and the resting pansies. The plant sat like an encumbered king on five terraces of grey folds. The main gate a short gap in a tall fence crowned with razor wire swaged on a wall of whitewashed cinderblock. There the gatehouse sat up on a small stool of concrete and there was a guard standing just outside it with the look of abdominal fatigue and scrawny arms but a visible sidearm.

“You watched the shipments go through here and into the arms of the plant and then swing into the folds. Just a mist of sooty exhaust hazing the whole place. There are lights mounted high that cast a god-glance over every square, and then the big field of open ground between the big block-thighs of the plant.

“But that’s not your way in. You have found another way, an old employee entrance. When the plant was just built it was much smaller. It was just the brick little core with three black-painted-brick smokestacks poking out and a simple chain-link fence. The back door accommodated deliveries.

“That core, with its stack pulled down and the machines pulled out and only their nibbled-away fixing bolts left to screw down aluminum refectory tables, was now part of this wall. The old windows have been bricked up. The back corner is overlaid by the road as it rears up and throws a bridge across a brown switch-yard. The door is still there.

“You crawled under the street and sidled along the damp concrete embankment to a saddle-shaped gravel pit, climbing which you found yourself at the corner. The fence threw a torn slip up you could slink under, and there was the ancient door behind a slew of junk and enwrapping vines in an obscuring shade.

“The door opens with some difficulty, but you are in. You have on your worker skivs, in which you rolled about in the dirt for a quarter-hour to get them to look used. The hall is brightly but unevenly lit, and empty. It smells like burnt steak and frying-oil.

“As you go out there’s a voice calling, one of the cooks with steam-raw breath, yelling ‘Hey! buddy!’ You shut the door and start walking at a tangent away from the block. Don’t you look back. The door slams shut and doesn’t open again. You join a small knot of workers.

“‘What’s your name, buddy?’ they ask, noting a new face. You look them each in the eye. The smile is warm, but not memorable. Certainly you remember the Duchenne smile. ‘Fourchette,’ you tell them. You explain you just got the job after you married into some contacts. Three months going on. Wife’s already starting to let herself go a little bit but man her tits are worth it.

“The big trucks come and go in three columns. You and the knot slide along a spotty rope of bow-legged workers close to the plant’s right thigh. The windows are blackened. An executive golf cart whizzes by with hard-hatted suits. Crunches the yard-gravel.”