Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  This act, however, was not solely the result of an accident of geography (his having been discharged on the West Coast and returning home to a place farther north and east than that of any of his friends), though that was of course of some importance. But rather, it was also something he himself desired—to compartmentalize his past. He did not want any of his old Air Force buddies dropping by to spend several days drinking and talking about the past. He did not want any of his previous life overlapping his present and smearing onto his future. In a way, it was how he made himself available to himself: he now consciously thought of his past as a batch of differently shaped and variously colored boxes or blocks, all strung together in simple chronological order, like a chain of islands that happened to fall along a single meridian or degree of latitude. Among these blocks, Alvin numbered: Early Childhood; Early Adolescent Period of Self-Recrimination; The Religious Conversion Period; The Two Years He Wanted To Become a Minister; The Year He Wanted To Go to College; Giving Up; and In the Air Force.* To Alvin, no coherent relationship existed among these blocks of time except, of course, that of simple sequence. And by the time he was twenty-two, he was beginning to feel comfortable with that absence of relation. In fact, he was learning how to utilize and even to depend upon it—just to keep moving.

  “Well, what d’you plan on doing now?” his father asked him across the table.

  It was at breakfast, Alvin’s first morning home. Having served him bacon, fried eggs, orange juice and coffee, his mother was now bustling silently, smilingly around the kitchen. “I don’t know,” Alvin said. “I just thought I’d call up a few people, maybe go see some old friends. You know…”

  “I don’t mean this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, do. For a living. Or are you just up early because it’s a nice fall day?”

  Alvin wasn’t sure he understood. “Where are the girls?” he asked his mother.

  “Oh, they’re still sleeping, Alvin. You forget, they’re teenagers, and this is Saturday. No school.” She smiled apologetically.

  His father snorted.

  “Yeah, well, I guess I’m just excited about being home and all.”

  “What’re you planning to do now?” his father asked again.

  Alvin put down his coffee cup and lit a cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he stared down at his half-emptied cup. “Pa,” he said, “I don’t think I know for sure what you’re asking.”

  The older man looked straight ahead, across the table and out the window. “For work. A man has to do something. You’re a man now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. What’re you going to do?”

  Alvin’s mother had stopped her busy movement and now, looking down at her hands, stood motionless by the stove. None of the three people in the room was looking at any of the others. A gust of wind cracked against the house and whistled along its sides from north to south. Outside, the sky was stone dry and blue, a cool, windy, October morning. The ground was gone all to browns and yellows, and the trees had turned violently red, orange, yellow, purple. The dry leaves, about to fall from the branches to the parchmentlike ground, were clattering noisily in the wind and could be heard even from inside the house.

  “Well,” Alvin began, “I’ve thought about it. A lot. And I thought I’d drive over to Loudon on Monday and see if I could get a job working for the state. Department of Public Works, maybe. Then I’d take it from there—I mean, about where I’d be living and all, and when.” Alvin spoke slowly, with care, obviously tense, as if he were lying.

  “Okay. But before you do that,” his father said, “I want you to consider this.” The older man was still staring out the window. “Say you come to work for me again. But not part-time, not as a helper. As a pipefitter this time. Gradually, working together, we can take on a few bigger jobs. Schools. Maybe a hospital or something. Apartment houses. You know a few things about engineering now, and I know a lot about installation.” He paused, as if waiting for Alvin to answer.

  When his son remained silent, he went on. “We can get capital from the bank or the government. In a few years we can turn this one-man plumbing business into a regular contracting outfit. Fifteen, twenty, thirty men laying pipe. Maybe doing some good-sized jobs all over the state.”

  Again, the older man paused, as if to gauge his son’s response, and getting none, continued speaking, but more rapidly. “Here’s the deal. You go to work for me on Monday, day after tomorrow, as an apprentice pipefitter. I can get you into the union. Easy. The Loudon local. I’ve already talked to the business agent over there. I’ll pay you apprentice wages, what anybody else’d pay you. It’ll take you five years before you can get your journeyman’s license. If you’re still at it then, and if you’ve given all you’ve got to make this into a solid, medium-sized plumbing and heating company, I’ll make you an equal partner in the business. Where it goes from there depends on what we both decide. Together. In fifteen years or so I’ll retire. Then the whole thing’ll be yours. Assuming you’re still at it and want it.” He finally looked over at Alvin’s face. “How does that sound to you?” he asked somberly.

  Alvin sighed and rubbed his cigarette out in his saucer. He looked up and saw that both his parents were looking down at him, waiting for an answer. “Starting Monday, eh?”

  “I already spoke to the union brass over in Loudon. They’ve got a couple of openings for new apprentices coming up this month. They’ll hold one of them for you, if you want it.”

  “Five years?”

  “Five years. On the job as a pipefitter early every morning. But doing a hell of a lot of estimating, too. And paperwork, engineering at nights and on weekends, too—making this operation into a regular contracting business. You can go on living here if you want to. Or you can get your own place. Up to you.”

  “Can I have till tomorrow, before I give an answer?”

  “Sure. Take all the time you need. Between now and Monday morning.” That was a joke, and Alvin’s father smiled to indicate it.

  Alvin laughed. “Ha!”

  Then his father got up from the table, put on his old green cap and coat, and went out the door. After a few seconds, Alvin heard the pickup truck start and rattle past the house, down the dirt road toward town.

  “Has he been planning this a long time?” Alvin asked his mother, who had gone back to work, this time at the sink, washing dishes.

  “A long time,” she answered over her shoulder.

  He accepted his father’s offer. It didn’t appear to him that he had much of a choice, so he accepted the offer with a certain reluctance and with the type of resentment that gets felt by everyone concerned but never expressed by anyone at all. He worked for his father—dutifully, methodically, punctually—but never more than was specifically required of him. His father told him, “Far as I’m concerned, you’re just another apprentice pipefitter. A helper. And I’ll treat you the same’s I treat anyone else I hire out of the local. And if you don’t do your job, pal, you can pick up your pay and head on down the road. Either you cut it, or you’re down the road. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Alvin thought that was fair enough as long as he, for his part, was free to treat his father the same way he’d treat any boss he happened to be working for, any foreman whose crew he ended up on. He thought that, he decided it, but he never mentioned it to his father, his employer, his foreman.

  The offer, then, almost as soon as it had been made and accepted, was corrupted. The bargain, sealed, was instantly broken open again—with the father treating his son like an employee but demanding in return filial loyalty and commitment, the son treating his father like an employer but resenting any demands placed on him which were not covered specifically in the union contract. Neither party, naturally, was satisfied. Each felt he was being cheated by the other.

  Throughout the fall they worked together this way—father and son, boss and helper. Most of the work they did was small repair jobs, the kind of w
ork Alvin’s father had always done, jobs which Alvin hated because the work was often difficult, usually dirty, and frequently unacceptable to the customer. They replaced burst water pipes, cleaned out the drainage system in a supermarket, and installed several new oil burners in old furnaces. They repaired half a dozen water pumps, countless leaking faucets, clogged traps and toilets; installed washing machine drains, garbage disposals, drainage vents, lavatories, laundry tubs and bathtubs. They built furnace fireboxes, set toilets, installed radiators, piped up hot water heaters, and repaired sump pump systems. And in practically every case they were working on the plumbing or heating system of an old house, renovating or, worse, often merely repairing facilities, fixtures, equipment and pipes that had been used for several generations. Consequently, the work was filthy—in cobwebs, dust, soot, mucky water, shit and garbage. And it was always difficult, exacting work, trying to make an old piece of equipment work like a new one, trying to install pipes and fixtures where an architect had planned a closet or a stairwell, trying to run sharp-edged metal heating ducts where there was no basement, no light, and barely enough room between the floor joists and the cold ground for a man to crawl in. And because it was repair or renovation work, it inevitably took more time than the customer expected it to take, the equipment never functioned quite as well as it did when it was brand-new, and more parts and material were used than the customer had thought necessary. “Why can’t you guys use more of the pipe that was already there?” was the typical complaint. And of course the bill always came to more than the customer thought the job was worth. Exhausted, filthy, Alvin would write out the bill and hand it to the customer, who would look at it, cluck his tongue, and say, “Jee-suz! I used to want my kid to grow up to be a doctor, but now I think I’ll tell him to become a plumber!” In a way that Alvin couldn’t quite name, conversations like that always left him feeling slightly humiliated.

  Two or three nights a week Alvin and his father pored over blueprints, specifications, price books and long columns of figures, estimating and bidding on the kind of work they both wanted to do, each for his own reasons—shopping centers, filling stations, apartment houses, small schools, small-town office buildings. For Alvin, new construction meant work that was not dirty and was difficult only in a technical, interesting way. It was also somehow less demeaning than repair work. For his father, no such nice distinction seemed to exist. For him, the difference was strictly money. “All you can make on a repair job is your time and maybe a few pennies on the materials,” he would grumble. “And for every job where you make a little more than what the job costs, you have two more that you lose money on, because either you took the job too cheap in the first place or the damn customer’s a dead-beat.”

  On new work, however, there was a clear profit to be made. The two men would estimate all the costs, materials, time, overhead—and then they’d add up the figures and tack fifteen percent on top. That fall the Stock & Son Plumbing & Heating Company put out bids on six jobs—a school in Gilmanton, a filling station in Laconia, two garden apartment buildings in Loudon, and two ski lodges, one in Belknap and one in North Conway. But they were too high on all six. Not by much, but enough to be out of the running and in no position after the bids had been opened to bargain secretly with the general contractor against the other subcontractors, as was the practice. “Those fuckers all play footsie with each other,” Alvin’s father explained to him. “And the only way to get in on the game is to get in on the game fair and square. On your own. Prove you can do the job on time and for what you said you could. Next time, the big boys, the general contractors, will know to play footsie with you, too. But you still got to get that first job or two on your own. After that, you’re golden.” So they continued to estimate and bid for jobs two or three nights a week, Saturdays and Sundays, working the rest of the week “out of the pickup,” as his father put it.

  Alvin was a reasonably good plumber. He was extremely large and strong, close to tireless unless he got bored. And he was basically skilled—after all, he had worked for his father after school and summers since he was fourteen years old. On the other hand, he was more adept at estimating new work than his father was, because he was better able to read blueprints and to work rapidly with numbers. Nevertheless, he was paid only for the time he worked as a pipefitter, at a first-year apprentice’s rate, and paid not at all for the time he spent estimating. To his father, that was part of the deal, the offer. To Alvin, it was not. But he said nothing.

  He didn’t gripe or grumble about it to anyone, not even to his friend Feeney, whom he saw frequently—whenever he wasn’t working for his father. His social life then was actually not much different from what it had been during his last year of high school, four years before, except of course that he didn’t attend any of the school functions and no longer could avail himself of the company of Betsy Cooper, his high school girl friend, who, then in her senior year at Mount Holyoke College, was engaged to marry a medical student at Columbia. Alvin drove around with Feeney, drinking at bars and in cars, picking up girls at roller-skating rinks, road-houses, country-and-western dances, and drive-in restaurants. He often successfully made love to these girls (in the car, or sometimes at Feeney’s house, now that Feeney’s father had left), and he usually got boisterously drunk, and he inevitably got into a fistfight with a stranger. These three activities he had rarely, if ever, indulged in as a high school student, and, therefore, people concluded that Alvin Stock had “changed” since coming back from the service. It was a reasonable conclusion.

  His father told him, “I don’t give a shit what you do on your own time. As long as you get to work on time in the morning and your hangover don’t slow you down any. And as long as I don’t have to bail you out of jail. Far as I’m concerned, you’re free, white, and twenty-one. Except when you’re working for me.” He smiled quickly, the movement almost unseen, like a lizard’s tongue. It was a joke. Alvin was supposed to laugh.

  His mother was not as sanguine, however. Every night when he went out, dark hair combed slickly back, clean T-shirt and khakis, loafers shined, Feeney outside in the car rapping impatiently on the horn, she would watch him leave and then would sit down and wait for him to return, no matter how late. In the kitchen, seated at the table, working a crossword puzzle and listening to the radio (turned low, so her husband, in the bedroom adjacent, could sleep), she would wait for her son to come home, and finally, at two or three in the morning, she would hear Feeney’s car drive up, and she’d snap to attention in the chair, her eyes dry and red from sleeplessness and fatigue, and when he entered the house, usually by the front door, she’d call to him. “Alvin!”

  “Whut.”

  “In the kitchen. Come in here, I want to talk to you.”

  He would tip and stumble through the living room and take a seat opposite her at the long table. “Whut.” Sometimes he would be wearing a bruise across his face and lipstick across his shirtfront. Sometimes one or the other. Rarely neither.

  Then she would begin: “Alvin. Son. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. Look at you. You can’t be this way, you can’t become the kind of person who … acts this way all the time. I’m worried about you, son.”

  “Well, don’t. I am who I am. That’s all,” he’d answer, lighting a cigarette.

  “You’re unhappy, aren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t … until I come in here and started gettin’ nagged at.” He looked her in the face, blew smoke at her. One mean bastard, he thought.

  She coughed, got up abruptly, walked into her bedroom. “Good night. Shut off the lights before you go up.” Angrily. It ended this way every time she waited up for him. She wasn’t ever going to do it again.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sneering. Rubbing out his cigarette in the saucer of her cup. Sliding away from the table and standing up. Going from the kitchen through the living room to the stairs and up to his bedroom, having left the lights on behind him. On purpose.

  Whose purpose? He didn’t k
now. He sat in darkness on his bed, kicking his shoes slowly off. Oh, what the hell, she was right, right about everything, for God’s sake. The nights he turned into a bum, a nothing, a big slob screwing every whore in Belknap County, brawling in every bar and road-house, drinking himself sick all the nights he didn’t have to work for his father… And she knew it, knew that these were the nights he turned into a bum, a slob, broke, drunk, fucked out, the taste of vomit on his teeth, his knuckles scraped, nose swollen, half the preceding six hours completely blacked out, erased from conscious memory, the rest remembered only in terms of sudden movement and roaring… And it was all her fault, his goddamned, sweet, nagging and high-falutin’ mother’s fault. She should’ve left him the hell alone, or else helped him get away to college, anywhere, just away… And it was all Betsy Cooper’s fault too—that touchy, virgin, cock-teasing bitch, and all her ambitions, her promises to write letters to him, all her lies to him, how she didn’t care what he did with his life, she would love and respect it… What a pile of crap that was! In a week she’d be home from college for the Christmas break. He’d go over to that big white barn of a house on the hill, and he’d tell her what the hell he thought of her, and then he’d fuck her, right in front of that big living room mirror, and she’d watch, and she’d love it, but she’d hate herself for loving it, and when he’d fucked her, he’d get off and stand up and laugh, laugh like a loon, laugh and laugh and laugh, Goddamn it. Goddamn it. Damn it. It was nobody’s fault—but his own. He knew that. Impossible to deny. Impossible to blame anybody else, least of all his mother, least of all Betsy Cooper, both of whom were guilty merely of having thought him better, stronger, smarter, than he was, both of whom loved him—or had once loved him. He deserved himself. Everyone else deserved someone better. Only he was bad enough, weak enough, dumb enough, to deserve being who, in the final fact, he was…