The Industrial Park

Ruben Morales left Sparks in the dark, the way he had every morning that winter, and drove east into a country that got emptier the farther he went. The rail yard slid past on his right first, the long strings of freight cars standing cold under the sodium lamps, the switch engines working somewhere out in the middle of it the way they did at every hour of the day and night, and he thought, without quite meaning to, of the roundhouse that used to stand on that ground and had been torn down before his mother was born. His grandmother had the stories. A Morales had worked that yard when it was new, back when the whole town of Sparks had been hauled in on flatcars from Wadsworth and set down in the mud, and another one before that had worked the Reno yard when there was nothing here but a river crossing and a name. Ruben went past all of it at seventy miles an hour and did not slow down.

The road climbed into the canyon and the town fell away behind him. There was only the river then, running black and fast below the guardrail, and the hills coming down close on both sides, and no houses anywhere, no lights but his own. Then the canyon let go and the land opened out flat and pale toward the mountains, sagebrush to the edge of everything, and the sun came up over it gray and then gold. Twenty miles from his mother’s kitchen table and it could have been the far side of the state. He took the exit at the parkway, the long straight spur they had cut across the desert into the industrial center, and slid into the river of taillights already flowing the same way he was, hundreds of them, thousands, a whole valley’s worth of people driving out into the empty to build a thing that had not been here two years ago.

He could see it from a mile off. The factory stood up out of the flat like a mesa somebody had squared off with a knife, longer than he could take in from the road, and it was not even finished, would not be finished for years, the cranes standing over the far end of it where the walls were still going up. His grandmother said the land had been zoned for exactly this in the year 2000, heavy industrial, every acre of it, more than a hundred thousand acres of Storey County high desert set aside and waiting a decade and a half before anybody in the world knew what a gigafactory was. She had sat on boards. She knew how a thing like this got drawn on a map long before it got built on the ground. When the company chose Nevada she had called him up just to say she had watched them argue over that dirt when he was a boy and nobody had wanted it, and now look.

Inside he clocked in and went to his line. He built battery packs. Not the cells, the cells came off the machines the Japanese partner ran at the other end of the floor, but the packs, the long flat modules that would go into the walls of people’s houses and hum there quietly and hold the sun. It was clean work and close work and it did not feel like anything his family had ever done, no coal smoke, no felt, no river silt, just the cool bright shop and the parts coming to his hands in order and the same three motions ten thousand times. The men on either side of him were from everywhere. One had come up from a valley town in California, one from Texas, one had driven out from Ohio with a truck full of everything he owned when the plant back home closed. Reno had been a place people came to leave from, his grandmother said, a place a wife came to end a marriage or a gambler came to end a night. Now they came to it to start something and could not find a room to rent when they got here.

That was the part nobody had drawn on the map. Ruben still lived at home because he could not afford not to, and half the people he had gone to high school with had already gone, priced out of the town they were born in by the very thing that was supposed to save it. Rents had gone up by half in the time he had worked here. A friend of his had watched three families bid against each other for one bad apartment, all of them holding the deposit in cash, and the winner had been a couple from the Bay Area who worked from laptops and had never set foot in the plant. The boom came in from the east and the money came in from the west and the people who had always lived in the middle of it were the ones getting squeezed thin.

He worked his shift. At the break he stood at the big east windows with his coffee and looked out at the desert going on and on toward the mountains, the parkway a gray line ruled straight across it, and he tried to hold in his head the whole long reach of the thing. His great-great-grandmother had come up from Sonora and worked a rail yard by a river. Her grandson had ridden a bus in from Sparks to stand at a casino cage counting other people’s money. His daughter had drawn the streets of the growing town at a desk in city hall. And now here he was, another twenty miles east of all of them, out past where the town even reached, building the future in a shed the size of a canyon on ground his own grandmother had helped set aside before he could walk. The family had been moving east and moving up the same road the whole time and had never once been asked whether it wanted to.

The whistle went and he set the coffee down. On the way back to the line he passed the wall by the time clock where somebody had taped up the printed schedule for the grand opening that summer, the day they would let the reporters and the officials come out and stand where he stood and marvel, and he thought that none of them would drive back in through the canyon in the dark the way he did, or go past the cold yard where the roundhouse used to be, or know that a family had been walking east toward this exact building for a hundred and fifty years without any idea it was coming. He put his gloves on. Down the line the machines came up to speed, and the first modules of the shift came sliding toward his hands, and he caught the first one and began.

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