The Working Man
Graveyard Shift, bad bosses, and the justice of vermin
If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, a Stephen King book club. Right now, we are reviewing one story a week from his first short story collection, Night Shift. If you would like to join in, grab a copy and read Night Surf for next week’s post! As always, please comment, engage, and enjoy!
When I graduated high school I got a job at a bagel shop as a baker. That meant early starts, 2 a.m., and days spent rushing bagels and muffins onto baking sheets and into steamy ovens. I loved it, those first couple of hours before the opening supervisor came. I would put on the radio and work, always in the same way, in that serene flow state that comes from repetitive motion.
The place I worked was well run and in a good part of town. The back of house was always clean, and the people who worked there were pleasant. I decided to stick with the same company, and transferred to another location when I moved four months later to Kansas City.
If you’ve been to or lived in the West, you’ll understand my shock when I moved to an older city. In place of new, cookie cutter suburbs were old brick buildings, abandoned industrial plants, old river casinos and highways for days. If you live in New York or Los Angeles or Houston, you’re probably laughing your ass off. Kansas City is small time in the big scheme of things, but to me, it was unknown country.
My new job wasn’t so nice. The people were mostly unhappy. They were older than my last place by ten years at least, with families and small children to support. Like most food service jobs, the pay wasn’t great, and a few people worked side jobs to make ends meet. I got a job cleaning dental offices at night for that very reason.
At some point in my working there, a girl who I got along with fine outside of work, but who was a relentless, micromanaging nitpicker who didn’t work very hard herself and wasn’t that great with people, became my supervisor. You know the type. They always make it to middle management.
(My apologies to all you middle-managers who are actually good at your jobs and great with the humans you work with)
It was awful working for her, having her watch you do something you had done a million times before, and nodding as she picked apart the nuance of placing turkey on a bagel, or spreading cream cheese properly. The girl knew how to criticize, always showed up when you didn’t need her, and seemed busy with managerial duties when you did.
So when King introduced Warwick, Mr. Foreman at the old textile mill that Hall works at, we were fast friends. I know Warwick through and through. I’ve worked for him and with him in the bodies of a dozen other supervisors and co-workers. Over-eager, self-important, joyfully empowered over people who don’t have better jobs for one reason or another and are therefore at your beck and call.
Hall was sitting on the bench by the elevator, the only place on the third floor where a working joe could catch a smoke, when Warwick came up. He wasn’t happy to see Warwick. The foreman wasn’t supposed to show up on three during the graveyard shift; he was supposed to stay down in his office in the basement drinking coffee from the urn that stood on the corner of his desk.
But he won’t stay where he should be, will he? He has to poke, and ask stupid questions like
“What are you up to, Hall?”
And Hall has to tell the truth, that he’s pegging the rats that sit and watch him from rafters and corners, with cans, instead of what he’s paid for.
Working Conditions
The textile mill where Hall works is falling apart. The machines are old, the place is overrun by rats. They sit in plain sight, watching as the men work. But that’s on the main floors of the mill. The basement level is another matter altogether.
When Warwick offers the nightshift workers some extra pay cleaning out the basement, an area no one has touched in years, the men take the job. We all know why. It’s not because they want to. It’s because they need the money.
Every aspect of the work is disgusting, some of it dangerous. High power hoses that can send a man to the hospital, electric wagons—little dump truck contraptions that put off an odor so potent it makes you nauseous, old machinery and bins of fabric, poorly lit by stringed bulbs. There is no electricity in the basement. Once it starts, the work is grueling.
Hall had known it would be bad, but this was murder. For one thing, he hadn’t anticipated the smell. The polluted stink of the river, mixed with the odor of decaying fabric, rotting masonry, vegetable matter.
But nothing, not the darkness or the moss or the smell, can compare to the rats.
…huge ones that made those on third look like dwarfs. God knew what they were eating down here. They were continually overturning boards and bags to reveal huge nests of shredded newspaper, watching with atavistic loathing as the pups fled into the cracks and crannies, their eyes huge and blind with the continuous darkness.
There is a not so thinly veiled correlation between these descriptions and some of the hardest industrial jobs. Mining, grueling factory work, oil rigs—jobs that can take your fingers and give you cancer. That isn’t what Hall faces here, but there’s an allusion to it in these descriptions.
The rats represent the most disgusting parts of those dangerous jobs, especially when they start lashing out. The first man to be bitten is Ray Upson.
“Goddamndest thing I ever saw. Jumped out of a hole in one of those old cloth bags. Must have been big as a cat. Grabbed onto his hand and started chewing.”
As the men make their way further into the bowels of the basement, the rats get worse. More men are bitten, and Warwick does nothing until his hand is forced. The men refuse to work without rubberized gloves. But the problem gets worse.
A huge rat with gray-streaked fur and ugly, glaring eyes had bitten into his shirt and hung there, squeaking and kicking at Carmichael’s belly with its back paws. Carmichael finally knocked it away with his fist, but there was a huge hole in his shirt, and a thin line of blood trickled from above on nipple. The anger faded from his face. He turned away and retched.
The foreman’s response to the men’s disgust and protest at the job? Their refusal to work under such conditions?
“Okay. You and anybody else that wants. But this ain’t no unionized shop, and never has been. Punch out now and you’ll never punch back in. I’ll see to it.”
The working man against his boss. Warwick spends his time in his office behind glass windows, eating cold hamburgers and reading magazines. The men actually doing the hard work, beating rats off their chests and bellies, risking injury and disease, are treated with indifference and disdain. Warwick mocks them, seeming to enjoy their disgust and unease. Tale as old as time.
College Boy
A small detail here, but a noticeable one. Warwick has taken to calling Hall, “college boy,” a nickname we can all infer is meant to be an insult. You were a college boy, and look where you are now. Not better than me. Hell, making minimum wage while I sit in my office. A lot of good it did you.
This culminates when Hall confronts Warwick about working conditions. After a visit to the library, Hall finds out that Warwick has to hire an exterminator to deal with the rats, or risk being shut down.
“Good thing you kept reminding me I was a college boy. I read the town zoning ordinances, Warwick—they were set up in 1911…
Warwick’s eyes were cold. “Take a walk, college boy. You’re fired.”
But Hall isn’t done. He threatens to go to the commissioner with the ordinances and get Warwick fired. And that’s when Warwick gets an idea. They’ve discovered a sub-cellar below the basement, where the rats are no doubt breeding. Warwick wants Hall to do the exterminating, and to that, Hall has another retort—he wants Warwick to come with him, to make sure the management is represented.
The Rat Gods
And after a while the rats came out and sat atop the bags at the back of the long room watching him with their unblinking black eyes. They looked like a jury.
As Hall’s anger at Warwick grows, each offense greater than the last, the story churns towards justice. There has been a foreshadowing all along that Warwick is going to get his, and that we, the readers, are going to enjoy it very much. But something else happens too, something we do not expect.
The vengeance is cut short by what feels like a cosmic evening of the scales. Three men, Hall, Warwick, and the whiny Wisconsky, make their way into the cellar armed with flashlights and a hose, and quickly discover two oddities. The first, a wooden box with the name “Elias Varney 1841” on it. The mill wasn’t built until 1897, meaning the tunnel here is older than the building above it. Hall’s flashlight catches the concrete, outer wall of the mill, the dark tunnel stretching beyond it.
“I’m going back,” Warwick said, suddenly turning around.
Hall grabbed his neck roughly. “You’re not going anywhere foreman.
Hall marches Warwick on, with the hose pointed at his head. Wisconsky bails, seeing his out and taking it. As they step outside the edge of the mill’s outer wall, they find themselves surrounded by staring, unblinking rats. They close in behind them, gnawing at the canvas hose.
Bats roost overhead, and then, the two men see a skull. Then a ribcage. A pelvis. The rats are everywhere, and they’re changing the further underground they go.
Something had happened to the rats back here, some hideous mutation that never could have survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden it. But down here, nature had taken on another ghastly face.
The rats are enormous, some three feet, their rear legs gone and their eyes blind. They drag themselves forward, slither on their bellies, searching. And then, the queen, a large, bloated, blind monstrosity, the mother who birthed all these rats in the tunnels under the mill.
Warwick turned and faced Hall, the smile hanging on by brute willpower. Hall really had to admire him. “We can’t go on, Hall. You must see that.”
“The rats have business with you, I think,” Hall said.
Warwick’s control slipped. “Please,” he said. “Please.”
Hall turns the hose on Warwick, punching him right in the chest with the water and knocking him backwards. The rats attack, tearing Warwick to pieces in the darkness. But Hall is nothing but prey down here himself, and his hose is losing pressure. In the end, he is overtaken by hoards of rats, and succumbs to the same fate as the foreman.
Some Backstory
I’m sensing some obsessions from the young King who wrote Graveyard Shift. Last week, Jerusalem’s Lot brought us booms and bangs, which our protagonist believed were rats in the walls. In this second story, King goes all out and brings us rats, rats, and more rats! They sit watching Hall, a drifter who works at a crumbling textile mill, unfortunate enough to be the subordinate of the unreasonable foreman, Warwick.
The story was inspired after 19-year-old King worked at the local Worumbo Mill. He wanted to volunteer for the dirty time-and-a-half job of cleaning up the basement, but all the slots were taken before they got down to the high school kids. The men who did work came back with tales to tell, and the stories stuck with King.
“The rats down in the basement were big as cats, some of them, goddam if they weren’t big as dogs.”
—Stephen King, On Writing
It wasn’t until King had finished finals and found himself alone with a typewriter in college that Graveyard Shift was written, the seeds for the story sown years before. I’ve found that the same happens to me. A conversation, a brief observation or encounter inspires stories years after. Something sticks and won’t let go.
And now to you dear reader, I ask the big questions:
What was your worst job/boss/or both, and why? Give us some juice here!
Did you feel good when Warwick got his, or did it seem a little extreme?
What does it mean that Hall suffered the same fate? Is there a lesson on anger in there? Something about how the working man never comes out on top? Am I reading too much into what amounts to a gross rat horror story?
My worst job was at 14 working in an office for a company my father ran. My job was to file (this was 1976!) massive amounts of paperwork. The files were very stiff and sharp, I was clumsy (still am!), but wanted to be efficient. Result: a painful festival of paper cuts.
In King's short stories, there's usually not enough space for anyone to overcome the evil, so the evil usually wins. To challenge evil and defeat it generally needs a novel in King's world. I write this from memory so I'm happy to be corrected!
robertsdavidn.substack.com/about
I love the layers of basement in this story. It like something of a journey closer to hell the deeper we go. It makes sense that King had worked in a place not dissimilar to this fictional mill, because the descriptions were so icky, accurate and I felt I needed a shower after reading. The foreshadowing is right from the start, as you say, and I wonder if this takes away the element of surprise, or is a great way to get readers to automatically relate to the situation, like with your boss?