Texan Drowns in Vegetable Oil
Rebecca Beegle

I loved somebody who drowned. In Lubbock. In vegetable oil. He worked for a snack food plant. It was a new job. I was going to join him there, once he got settled. I've never been to Lubbock but I like the way it sounds. Lubbock sounds Texan, a lullaby that ends with a dull thud, followed by the clack and scrape of spurs on cement. Lubbock looks like Texas, hooks and points around the edges, loops and space in the middle. Lubbock Lubbock. When I say it a couple times in a row it makes me feel like I have been there. When I say it, I feel closer to him, the one who drowned in oil. Is he the only one? Ever? He was a repairman in a snack food plant and he fell into a 15-foot vat of unheated vegetable oil. He was reaching inside, trying to fix something, when he slipped in, through a two-foot hole at the top. To retrieve him they had to drain the tank of oil, like from a whale's head. It was later explained to me that there wasn't time for saving. The tank was tall and he went in head first. It was explained to me that the oil was unheated because it was a storage tank, not a cooking vat. So at least he didn't drown in hot oil. He didn't die in oil that was currently cooking Fritos, only oil that had once been used to cook Fritos and would eventually be used to cook Fritos again. I take some solace in that. I think about it a lot, more even than I think about him: what would it feel like, to drown in oil? It had never occurred to me that this might happen to anyone. Why couldn't he keep himself afloat, get his head above the surface? Can't you swim in oil? I don't know enough to understand why he had to die. I think maybe it had to do with his hammer. He was, I'm sure, wearing his tool belt and maybe his hammer dragged him down. And his boots, with their steel toes. He was drowned by his uniform. And how does it feel, to breathe oil? Maybe it hurts less than drowning in the ocean, choking on salty sea water. Maybe, at first at least, it felt good. The oil filling his mouth like too much pudding, almost like being in love, floating inside the oily corridor like a small boy's fantasy of suspended animation, with all of life on the outside of steel walls and nowhere to go but slowly down.

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