JUST after lunch break one infernal Houston afternoon in 1995, I slammed the door of the company truck, cranked the engine, and punched the gas so hard that the truck fishtailed onto Jensen Drive. Beside me sat my co-worker Charlie. In his lap, he clenched a blood-drenched wad of paper towels over what had been, minutes before, his left thumb. The severed thumb, packed hurriedly on ice in a cup, rode in the center console.

“No more hitchhiking for me,” Charlie said, deadpan, a shiver running through him.

Just two years before, another pale-lipped co-worker — my good friend Tim — had made the same trip in the same truck for the same reason. The two accidents had been all but identical.

Both men had been using the “slitter,” a mammoth machine used to cut 10-ton rolls, or “slabs,” of rubber conveyor belting to custom widths. Slabs came from the factory measuring 7 feet wide by 1,200 feet long. A customer at a concrete plant might have a gravel conveyor that requires a belt measuring 2.5 feet wide by 200 feet long. The slitter made this simple work. It also made ripping one’s thumb meat off the bone exceedingly possible. Hence the truck rides, the cups of ice, the surgical reconstructions.

In my 10 years selling hose and conveyor belting in Houston, I heard many stories about industrial accidents, and I confess to a guilty fascination with them. There was the sugar refinery laborer who fell asleep in a freight car while taking his lunch break. The man was still asleep when the conveyors above cranked back to life, and he was buried — suffocated — in sugar.