by Lewis Shiner
He hadn’t been sure until that morning that the job was real. Now he had a place in the world, a fulcrum. Mitch Antree had an air of moral certainty that Robert associated with success, and that success could sweep Robert along in its wake. It was all he asked, really. A few basic comforts and a chance to make a difference.
He cranked up the window and went inside.
He could hear Ruth’s voice from the kitchen as he let the screen door bang behind him. “Ooooooh!” she moaned. “I wanted to make you a special dinner to celebrate and it’s all going wrong!”
He stood in the kitchen doorway and accepted a quick, puckered kiss as Ruth brushed self-consciously at her apron. It startled him to see this pose again, when only a few days ago things had been so natural and easy between them. He managed an equally artificial smile, enough to keep her from pouting and peppering him with questions.
“It went really well,” he offered.
She whirled around to face the oven, which was emitting a thin, ominous curl of smoke. “Don’t look!” she cried.
“I’ll be in the den,” he said.
He’d worked the entire summer after his freshman year at State to buy his component hi-fi system. He’d realized by then that he was never going to be a musician himself and had accepted that fact, more or less. The hi-fi was a compromise with ambitions he’d given up before he’d ever told anyone they existed. He’d struggled with the trumpet through high school, going off into the woods by himself to practice in the afternoons. His embouchure had never developed. The band director had offered to let him try saxophone or clarinet, instruments that didn’t speak to him, except in the hands of a few geniuses like Parker and Goodman.
So he became, instead, an aficionado. A fan.
While the receiver warmed up he took out Kind of Blue, set it on the turntable, and cleaned it gently with an anti-static cloth, though it had never had a chance to pick up any dust. He flicked the needle with a brush and carefully lowered the tone arm. There was a slight hiss, then Paul Chambers’ bass eased into the room, a presence more than a sound. Then the horns, staccato, stark, and quiet, playing just for him.
There was little furniture yet: a folding card table to hold the receiver and turntable, speakers on the floor in the corners. An orange chair with a piece of plywood supporting the cushion, and two gray folding chairs from the same yard sale.
This too would change. Once they had real furniture and some money in the bank, once they’d established themselves and become part of the dynamic future that lay ahead for Durham, he was sure Ruth would relax. As Robert’s career grew more solid, her parents’ hold on her would weaken. In a few years, it would all be there in his hands.
Something crashed in the kitchen. Robert chose not to accept the invitation. Instead he closed his eyes and let the music fill his mind until there were no spaces left.
*
A year and two months later, Robert found himself on his first job in Hayti.
Twenty or thirty Negroes stood outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the property, a large lot on Pettigrew Street near Mangum, a few blocks south and east of Durham’s central business district. On one side was a grocery and on the other a coin laundry, both run down, both still in business.
As he slowed his Mercury, double-checking the address, individuals emerged from the crowd. He saw three old men standing together, a woman with an infant riding on her hip, a man Robert’s age with a cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt.
The peeling painted numbers on the side of the building matched the ones Antree had neatly lettered on a scrap of tracing paper. Robert drove through the gate, maneuvering around the crane, whose tank treads took up most of the asphalt parking lot. He pulled up next to a pale green Ford pickup from the 1940s that had somehow managed to tow in a generator. It was 7:30 on a late September morning in 1963, and the air was still and humid.
Three more colored men sat or leaned against the side of the pickup. These men, Robert saw, were there to work. One of them wore a hard hat with letters across the front in what seemed to be red fingernail polish. As he walked around his car toward the men, Robert saw that the letters spelled the name LEON backwards.
“Leon Coleman?” Robert asked him.
“Yes, sir,” the man said. He was over six feet tall, thin and wiry, and his skin had a reddish cast, like stained mahogany. He looked to be in his thirties.
“I’m Robert Cooper. I work for Mason and Antree?” Robert wasn’t sure whether to offer his hand. Leon’s arms remained folded, so Robert put his own hands in his pockets.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Antree told me to expect you. I see you looking at my hat. Mr. Antree gave me this hat. Said, one of them damn buildings falls on me, I can look in the mirror, remember who I am.”
Robert smiled. Leon’s expression didn’t change, nor did those of the men next to him. He glanced quickly at the crane. “I thought this was a building site.”
“No, sir. Demolition site.”
The building behind them was a one-story box made of “sticks and bricks,” as the precast concrete men liked to say. It was in an advanced state of disrepair, every window broken, tufts of fescue prying apart the cracked sidewalk. Through the missing front doors, Robert saw a stained, slick-finish concrete floor from which cut lengths of pipe stuck up like the stumps of a metal forest.
Robert supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. The first victim of the renewal had been the former Boy’s Club building on Fayetteville Street, demolished at the end of July. Antree, with Maurice in tow for publicity value, had led that crew himself.
A voice behind him said, “You in charge here?”
Robert turned to see an overweight white man with long sideburns and greasy yellow-white hair. He wore navy-blue zip-up coveralls like an auto mechanic, with the name “Steve” embroidered over the breast pocket.
“I guess so,” Robert said.
“I’m Porter. Crane operator.”
“Uh, okay. Good.”
Porter held out an open tin of Copenhagen. “Dip?” The moist tobacco smell turned Robert’s stomach, and he waved it away. Porter pointedly did not offer any to the Negroes. Instead he stuck in three thick fingers, rooted around briefly, then packed a wad between his lower lip and gum.
Robert felt a sticky sweat break under his arms. He’d never done any demolition work and he didn’t have the vaguest idea of what came next. Porter, Leon, the Negroes lined up at the fence, all were watching him, all with blank expressions. Robert was sure they were laughing inside, waiting for him to make an ass of himself.
When Robert couldn’t stand the silence any longer he cleared his throat and said, “Maybe we should get started.”
Porter took a step back. “Union says I don’t have to start till eight.”
Having played his one card, Robert could only nod.
Porter spat a stream of dark brown juice onto the sidewalk. “Tell you what. I’m going to go wait in the cab.” He sauntered back to the cabin of the crane, and moments later Robert heard country music through the closed windows.
Robert felt the humiliation burn his face. He coughed to give himself an excuse to look away, then he patted his shirt pocket for his Luckies. Better wait, he thought. His hands were shaking and lighting a cigarette would only make that more obvious.
To Leon he said, “You have to help me out. I don’t know what to do.”
“Mr. Antree said you wouldn’t. He just need you here because that crane operator won’t take no orders from no colored man.” The younger of the other men made a noise that could have been a laugh but ended as a cough.
“This here’s my nephew Tommy,” Leon said, pointing to the coughing man, who wore a baggy, striped cotton railroad hat. He was still in his twenties, darker, with a round face and the beginnings of a mustache. He touched the bill of the cap with one finger.
Leon hooked his thumb toward the other man. “This my brother-in-law, Booker.” Booker was short and heavy, bar
e-headed, balding, with bloodshot eyes. He nodded to Robert without moving his head more than a fraction of an inch. “Too early for Booker. Booker get going after dinner time.”
“Do you know what this place was?”
“No, sir. This is Hayti, here. I live out on the north side.”
“Do you know why all these people are here?”
“No, sir. Like I said, I don’t live around here.”
Robert looked at Tommy and Booker. Both of them stared at the ground.
“All right,” Robert said. “I’ll walk around and try to look important, and at eight o’clock I’ll come over here and you can tell me what to say to the crane man.”
“Yes, sir.”
With the toe of his boot, Robert turned over a piece of a wooden sign that lay in the dirt next to the building entrance. It said URSERY. Inside, he saw that the far half of the roof had once been glass, shards of which glittered on the concrete floor like misplaced stars. The acrid tang of fertilizer still hung in the dead, damp air. It couldn’t have been that long, he thought, since the place was in use. He lit a cigarette to cut the smell.
Just do your job, he told himself. Antree is testing you for some reason. You’re going to come through fine, and good things will happen to you.
As he came back outside, he saw Leon at the fence, arguing with one of the old men there. By the time Robert arrived, Leon was shouting, “You get along home now, don’t be hanging around here no more.”
“Something wrong?” Robert asked him.
Leon was already walking away. “Everything fine. Let’s tear this sucker down.”
In the end there was not much to it. The bricks were no match for the wrecking ball and by lunch time, when the bulldozer and dump truck arrived, there was nothing left but a pile of rubble in the center of the lot. The dozer scraped the shattered bricks off the concrete slab while they ate, then Leon backed the generator up to one edge and fired it up. Tommy and Booker wrestled two pneumatic jackhammers out of the pickup bed and they began to batter the slab into basketball-sized chunks. They worked for 20 minutes, then took a rest.
Robert asked Leon, “Do you think I could try that?”
“Yes, sir, I reckon you can if you want. You need to be very careful with that jack. Mr. Antree have my black hide if anything happen to you.”
In fact it was a perfectly simple machine. Robert relished its noise and power. The steel handles vibrated hard enough to make his palms tingle through heavy leather gloves. His first blows chipped and gnawed at the surface of the concrete, and for a moment he worried that he was doing it wrong, that the weight of the jackhammer alone was not going to suffice. Then, like magic, the first cracks appeared and the chisel point of the jack nosed its way into them and through to the dirt.
The machine wasn’t fighting him, he saw. All it wanted was to break things, and Robert had only to stay out of its way. It brought him full circle, from creating stone to destroying it.
He smiled at Leon and took one hand away long enough to give him a thumbs-up. Leon shook his head and stomped over to pick up the other jackhammer. “Damn if I can stand there and watch you work,” he shouted over the roar of the generator.
Tommy and Booker convulsed with laughter. “Look at that!” Booker yelled. “You got Leon working now!”
“Shut up, fool!” Leon shouted. “I work you into the ground any day of the week!”
They took 20-minute shifts, Robert and Tommy alternating on one jackhammer, Leon and Booker on the other. By four o’clock they’d broken up the entire slab, and the dozer had loaded the pieces into the dump truck. The truck, driven by a friend of Leon’s, had then made a parade lap around the empty lot in an excess of enthusiasm while Booker and Tommy cheered and applauded.
Despite his initial misgivings, Robert felt a warmth independent of the pain in his lower back. At 8 a.m. the lot had been part of the past—decayed, useless, finished. Now it was clean, new, full of potential. Now it belonged to the future.
“I guess we’re done?” Robert said to Leon as the others loaded the jackhammers into the ancient truck. The crane, dozer, and dump truck had all departed.
“Yes, sir. All done for today.” He seemed to be waiting for something.
“That was a good day’s work,” Robert offered.
“Should have been two days’ work, only I lost my head.” Robert had yet to see Leon smile.
“Is there anything else I’m supposed to do? Mr. Antree takes care of paying you, right?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Antree, he takes care of all that.”
“Well, okay, then. You be careful, now.”
“Yes, sir.”
As he walked toward his car, Robert saw the old man that Leon had been talking to at the fence. The man was shuffling toward the freshly plowed earth, where it shone red-orange in the afternoon sun.
Robert trotted over to him. “Excuse me, can I help you?”
The old man looked Robert up and down. His face was cracked like old leather, and tufts of white hair stuck randomly out of his head and chin. “Just looking around.”
“I’m afraid this is city property. We’re locking up for the night.”
“I know whose property this is. This was my place of business y’all tore down. I know whose property this is.”
“Your place…?”
“Hamilton Nursery. Mose Hamilton, that’s me.”
“You mean you still own the place?”
“Hell no, you think I’d let you tear down my place of business if I still owned it? City owns it now, like you said. Condemned it and now they tore it down. See, I kind of wanted to keep the sign. They get all these slums cleared, city going to build me a new place. Thought I’d like to have that old sign still hanging inside. It ain’t no big thing.”
Robert’s back was beginning to seriously hurt. Tiny spasms sparked up and down the long muscles of his waist. Still he was curious enough to ask, “How long were you here?”
“Opened up in nineteen and twenty eight. Thirty-four years it would have been next month.”
“Hey, old man,” Leon said, coming up fast behind Robert. “I thought I told you to keep the hell out of here.”
“Ain’t hurting nobody.”
“Somebody be hurting you, you don’t get on home.”
“This was his nursery,” Robert said.
“Yes, sir. I know he say that, but it ain’t his nursery no more. It’s Mr. Antree’s now.”
“I thought it was the city that bought it,” Robert said, more puzzled than suspicious.
“Whoever owns it, Mr. Antree be the one responsible for it, and he don’t want nobody trespassing.”
“Forgive us our trespasses,” the old man said. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.”
“See?” Leon said. “His mind nothing but mush.” He took the old man by the shoulders, turned him around, and gave him a shove toward the street. “Get going now, hear?”
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” the man said. He stumbled as he turned down Pettigrew Street.
“That’s all for today, Captain,” Leon said.
As Robert drove away he saw Leon in his rearview mirror, fists on hips, a fierce angel guarding vacant ground.
*
It was the spring of 1964. The office had hit its Friday afternoon stride, windows open to the late March air, cool flowering smells replacing stale cigarette smoke. Conversation had fallen off, and the room was quiet except for the hum of the fans, the zip of parallel bars, the slap of plastic triangles, the pop of the suction cup on the base of a lead pointer. When Maurice started humming, Robert wasn’t consciously aware of it.
Maurice broke off in mid-note and looked at him. “What are you doing?”
“What?” Robert asked.
“Hey, boss,” Maurice yelled in the general direction of Antree’s office, where he’d been holed up since lunch. “Come out here!”
“Look, I didn’t mean anything,” Robert said. It was the opening rif
f from Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” that Maurice had been humming, and Robert realized he’d been whistling along.
Antree emerged into the drafting room, collar open, pink shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. “What’s up?”
“Your boy here listens to Coltrane,” Maurice said.
Antree squinted at Robert. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” Robert said, pleased and embarrassed.
“Just Coltrane?” Antree asked. “Or anybody else?”
“Miles,” Robert said. “Jamal. Dizzy, Bird.”
“ ‘Bird,’ ” Maurice said, shaking his head. “ ‘Bird,’ the man calls him. Who said you could call him ‘Bird’?”
“Cool it, Maurice,” Antree said. “Everybody calls him Bird. Robert, step into my office.” Maurice followed without invitation.
Antree’s office was cool and dark, with only a floor lamp in one corner for illumination. Thick drapes hid the window, and wall-to-wall carpet muffled their footsteps. There were framed prints by an artist Robert didn’t recognize, full of distorted figures and odd blue colors.
“So tell me, Bobby,” Antree said. “How long has this been going on?”
Robert shrugged. “My father was into the swing bands, the early cool stuff. I started listening to bop when I was in Germany. American bands were always touring Europe. Art Taylor and Donald Byrd, Bud Powell with Kenny Clark—they were living over there. I saw Miles in Paris in December of ’57 at this tiny little club in St. Germain….”
Antree and Maurice looked at each other. “Definitely,” Antree said.
“You ever hear Charlie Shavers?” Maurice asked.
“I’ve got one of his records,” Robert said. “Like Charlie?”
“Well, tonight,” Antree said, “you’re going to be seeing him in person.”
Robert’s emotions felt like crickets, jumping in the cupped hands of his chest. “I can’t,” he said. “Ruth doesn’t even like music, and—”
Antree slid the pointer on his metal address book to “C” and popped the lid. He ran his finger down the listings, then dialed Robert’s home number.