In progressive circles, working for a defense contractor marks you as complicit. My father clocked in there for over thirty years. No one in my family really ever took a stance on my father working for them. Although, there have been more than a handful over the years happy to tell me I was raised on blood money.
My dad doesn't engineer the jets. He does paint them. He got good at it the way he got good at everything. Hard work like asbestos removal, construction, demolition, lumbering. You learn to do what pays to survive.
He has to put on a white suit that could pass for hazmat gear when he paints. The airbrush in his hand fires paint at dangerous pressure—the kind that could blind you. Then it's just hours in the booth: parts arrive, he waves his gun, and then they leave. 10 hours every day, 4 days a week, 30 years.
The paint never stayed only on the suit. Stray droplets found his shirt, his shoes, his pants. He'd come home and go straight to the bedroom to strip them off. But the cough always lingered. Decades of paint fumes don't leave the lungs. I think he hated carrying those stains home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One time I had a dream where I spoke to a woman in my living room. When I woke, I was still standing in the living room, in the exact spot I was while dreaming. I'm unsure if it was really a dream or not.