“You know,” one of those women said, “my mom had her last baby when she was forty-four! She was still working out in the fields at that time and there she was as big as a house with my kid sister Concepción! My oldest sister was already married then and pregnant at the same time. And now, I’m just barely going on thirty and I already can’t have no more kids.”

“Well, at least you have little Joshua,” another woman said to console her, referring to the first one’s only child.

“Yeah. But too bad I ain’t got the man that helped produce him …” And everyone kept quiet then, just went on eating their bologna and Kraft cheese subs from out of the vending machines, because really, what could anyone say to that?

There did seem to be something eerie and full of coincidences about it all to Fe’s mind, but she kept working right through the headaches that by then were part of her daily routine.

Every morning for the first six months this is what she did. She went to a little desk that was called a “station,” which gave it a kind of an official feeling, although all it was was a little desk. She had the same station every day. Another woman probably used it in the night shift, but Fe liked to think of it as her own, like the desk she had had at the bank (although not as nice) and that she never let nobody get near.

All the stations were situated in an open manufacturing area. Every morning each worker was given a pan about the size of a square foot which was filled with some nasty smelling chemical or other that would clean what Fe was told were parts for high-tech weapons.

Acme International was in the business of subcontracting these jobs from larger companies that had direct contracts with the Pentagon. They “cleaned up” the parts that in and of themselves did not seem all that dangerous, sent them back to the contracting company, and that company in turn took the parts and put them all together. As far as Fe could figure out that’s how weapons for the military came to be made, manufactured like anything else in factories by people like herself, plastic and metal, undecipherable shapes, pieces and bits, down assembly lines and one day, somewhere, they were all put together and went off to be used for what they were made to do.

Very important work, when you thought about it.

Being so good at utilization and efficiency, the queen of it, you could say, there at Acme International, she was on to bigger jobs and better pay in no time. She worked hard no matter what, even though, for instance, she did not like the last cleaning job she was given. It’s not like she had complained about it or nothing, but three months of working in a dark cubicle could get to anybody. The results of working with a chemical that actually glowed in the dark and therefore you could work with it in the dark, with special gloves and cap (and why you did, as a supervisor explained, was to be able to detect if any fingerprints or hair got on the parts) was this red ring around her nose and breath that smelled suspiciously of glue.