Same Place, Same Things

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Same Place, Same Things Page 10

by Tim Gautreaux


  No one could say anything for a long moment. “He’s in the engine room,” Bert finally said. Dixon turned his head and gave the river a long, openmouthed look. Bert peered out at the dull water while the crew boat’s pilot radioed an approaching Coast Guard cutter about the lost man. “We tried.”

  Dixon sat down and pushed the wrinkles out of one side of his face. “I saw what happened on radar. I heard it on the radio.” He looked over at the rescued hopper barge. “It’s fifty feet deep where it went down. Maybe I can have it raised.” He shook his head once. “Jeez, why couldn’t he get out of the engine room?”

  The men looked at one another, and Dr. Grieg, the cook, cleared his throat. “I guess he got trapped.”

  For a moment, Dixon hid his face in his soft, spotted hands. “What? Did the door slam on him?”

  Bert looked out at the river, which renewed itself every flowing moment without a thought. “Something like that,” he said, watching a little white cutter begin to circle above the wreck, two divers looking in the water for something to make them jump.

  People on the Empty Road

  Wesley and his girlfriend were parked in his father’s driveway on Pecan Street, arguing in his old Pontiac Tempest. Bonita was a sulky brunette with a voice as hard as a file. She wanted him to get the forty-dollar tickets to the Travis Tritt concert, and he tried to explain that the twenty-dollar tickets were a better deal. He looked down the humpback asphalt lane to where it turned off at Le Phong’s Country Boy Cash Grocery and ground his teeth. He sensed he was going to lose his temper again, the way a drunk feels in his darkened vision that he is about to fall off a stool. Bonita crossed her arms and called him the cheapest date in Pine Oil, Louisiana, and Wesley crushed the accelerator, leaving the car in neutral, letting the racket do his talking. The engine whined up into a mechanical fury until a detonation under the hood caused everything to stop dead, as if all the moving parts had welded together. Wesley cursed and got out, followed by Bonita, who spat her gum against a pin oak and put her hands on her hips. “Now you done it,” she told him. “When are you gonna calm down?”

  Wesley examined a volcano-shaped hole in the hood of his car where a push rod had blown through like a bullet. “You can walk home and wait for Travis Tritt to climb in your window with a bouquet of roses,” he yelled. “But don’t wait for me.”

  She started down the street, then turned and shouted back to him, “When you gonna grow up?”

  “When I’m old enough to.”

  Bonita continued toward her rental house in the next neighborhood. Wesley turned and went into the kitchen. The old man was at the table, home from his supermarket, sipping a glass of iced tea.

  “That’s the second engine this year, Wes. How many can you afford?”

  “I know. She got me so damned mad.” He fell into a chair. “I think we just broke up.”

  His father ran a hand over his gray hair and then loosened his tie. “It’s just as well. She was common. Her sister who used to check for me on register six was kind of rough. What was her name, Trampoline?”

  “Trammie-Aileen,” Wesley corrected. “She works for Le Phong now.” He put his head down and his red hair fell forward like a rooster’s comb.

  “Know what I think?” his father asked.

  “What?”

  “I think you ought go come back cutting meat in the store. You were the fastest trimmer I ever had. With a rolled rump, you were an artist.”

  Wesley held up the nub of his left forefinger, and his father looked out the window. “I want to do something else for a while, Daddy.”

  “I think you’ll be safer cutting meat for me here in Pine Oil than off driving for that gravel company. You don’t have the disposition for that.”

  Wesley’s face became as tight as a rubber glove. “You mean I’m reckless, don’t you?”

  “You just got to find a girl who’ll calm you down. Only thing’ll do that is a good girl and time.”

  Wesley put his head back down in his hands. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Well, when’s it gonna happen? You’re twenty-four and been through eight cars.” His father took a swallow of tea and softly grabbed a fistful of his son’s hair. “That old Tempest wasn’t any good, but it was transportation.”

  “I can afford Lenny’s rusty T-Bird. It’s for sale.”

  His father clamped the coppery strands in his fingers, an old game, his way of saying, “Calm down. Come back to earth.” Then he said, “I’ll get you a better car if you come back to work for me.”

  Wesley pulled free and moved toward the window. “I’ve got to go roll some gravel. I’m good at it.”

  “I don’t like you running those tight schedules.”

  Wesley leaned on the wooden window frame and watched a wisp of oil smoke rise from the puncture in his hood. “The construction folks want the rock quick. If we can’t get it to them when they need it, someone else gets the contract.”

  His father rubbed his eyes. “Your boss is making money on your lack of patience. You need to slow down and find a girl who thinks there’s more to life than fast cars and cowboy music.”

  * * *

  Over the next month he made more runs than any other driver at the gravel pit. His boss, old man Morris, pear-shaped, with skin like barbecued chicken, told him, “Boy, you’re a natural.”

  “A natural what?” Wesley asked, stepping up into a blue Mack.

  The old man spat on a wheel rim. “A natural way to get my rock moved faster than Ex-Lax.”

  Each day, his truck clipped a minute off the time to the big casino site in New Orleans, but each fast trip shaved a little off his nerves, the way the road wore down tires to the explosive air at the center of things. He couldn’t help the urge to sail across the twenty-four-mile-long causeway over Lake Pontchartrain like a road-bound cargo plane weighted down with many tons of pea gravel. A big sedan might be in the right lane doing sixty-five and he would be coming up from behind at ninety, water showering up from his wheels, a loose tarpaulin flying over the forty-foot trailer wild as a witch’s cape. Near his left rear mud flap there’d be another car, and the time to change lanes was exactly then or the people in the big sedan would be red pulp, so after one click of his blinker he would roll out like a fighter plane, road reflectors exploding under his tires like machine-gun bursts.

  He used his recklessness like a tool to get the job done. After every twelve-hour day, he would tear out of the gravel pit in his rusty Thunderbird, spinning his wheels in a diminishing shriek for half a mile. The road turned through worthless sand bottoms and stunted growths of pine, and the car would surge into the curves like electricity, Wesley pushing over the blacktop as if he were teaching the road a lesson, straightening it out with his wheels. When he would charge off the asphalt at eighty onto a gravel road, he would force the low sedan over a rolling cloud of dust and exploding rock as though he were not in danger at every wheel skid and shimmy of slamming into a big pine like a cannonball. For Wesley, driving possessed the reality of a video game. After thirty miles, he would skid to a stop, a half ton of dust boiling in the air behind him.

  His destination was a dented sea-green mobile home parked in an abandoned gravel pit. He would pull at its balky door until the whole trailer rocked like it was caught in a hurricane, and finally inside, he would sit at his little kitchen table and watch his hands shake with something beyond fatigue.

  One morning at six o’clock he was awakened by an armadillo rummaging in his kitchen. The animals were all over the place and had come in before. Wesley soft kicked it through the open door frame like a football and watched it land in a pit of green water on the other side of his car. He sat down to listen to a radio talk show coming from the AM station in Pine Oil.

  “Wouldn’t you say that giving a man the death penalty for stealing two cows is a bit excessive?” The host’s voice was pleasant and instructive.

  “If they was your cows, sweetie, you’d want him to fry like bacon,�
� a tubby voice said.

  Wesley forced himself to eat breakfast, and sometime between the cereal and the orange juice, he began to relax. The woman announcer’s voice was smooth as a moonlit lake, and he remembered meeting her at the store when she did a remote from the meat aisle during Pine Oil Barbecue Days. After breakfast, he sat on the galvanized step below his warped door frame, folded his hands, and rested his chin on his knuckles. He wondered how fast he would be driving in another month.

  Wesley watched a lizard race from under the step. When the pit around the trailer had been operating, years before, a watchman had lived here. Spread over it for two hundred acres were green ponds shaped like almonds or moons or squares. To the south was an abandoned locomotive, its wheels sunk into the sand. Shards of machinery and cable lay about as though rained down from the clouds. He had lived in the center of the wreckage for six months and not one person had been to see him. He needed a new girlfriend—his father had said it—one who would make him go to the movies, barbecue hamburgers over a lazy fire, read magazines with no girlie pictures in them. He remembered the woman on the radio.

  Turning up the ivory-colored Zenith left behind by the watchman, he listened to Janie, dealing with the farmers’ wives. She ran from six to twelve, starting each program with a simple question, such as: “Do you think people should send money to TV evangelists?” or “Should the federal government spend more on welfare?” Many of her callers were abusive or made inflammatory statements far beyond the boundaries of simple ignorance. Most, Wesley decided after weeks of listening to the program, were people too stupid to be trusted with jobs, so they just sat around the house all day thinking up things to call the radio station about. He turned up the volume.

  “Hello, you’re on the air.” The voice laid hands on him.

  “Miz Janie,” a high-pitched old-lady voice whined.

  “Good morning.”

  “Miz Janie?”

  “Yes, go on. Today’s topic is the library tax.” The voice was seasoned with a bright trace of kindness.

  “Miz Janie, ain’t it a shame what the law did those poor boys down in Manchac?”

  “Ma’am, the topic is the library tax.”

  “Yes, I know. But ain’t it a shame that those poor boys got put in jail for killing birds?”

  “You’re referring to the Clemson brothers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They killed over two thousand Canada geese,” she said, not the least hint of outrage in her voice.

  “Birds is all,” the old lady said. “Them boys is people. You can’t put people in jail for what they do to birds.”

  Wesley balled up his fists and glared at the radio, remembering Elmo, his pet mallard from childhood.

  “Ma’am,” the smooth voice said, “if everybody killed all the geese they wanted to kill, soon there’d be no more geese.” Wesley searched for some bitter undercurrent in the voice but found not one molecule. The announcer gradually guided the old woman through a long channel of logic that led to the day’s topic, the library tax.

  “Miz Janie, everybody wants to raise our taxes. It’s hard to made ends meet, you know.”

  “This tax is twenty-five cents a month.” That was slick, Wesley thought.

  “Well, it’s the principle of the thing,” the old voice complained. “Seems like we’re paying people just to sit around and read when they ought to be out doing something else. If everybody would quit hanging around the library and get out on the highway picking up trash paper instead, we’d have a clean community, now wouldn’t we?”

  Wesley glared at the dusty radio. But the lady announcer continued to speak with honesty and openness until the woman on the line lost interest and hung up.

  The next caller was an old man. “What the hail we need to spend money on a damned library for? Let them what wants to read go down to Walgreen’s and buy they own magazines. The old library we got’s plenty enough for such as needs it.”

  The next caller agreed with the millage proposal, but then a straight-gospel preacher came on the air and told that only one book ought to be in the library, and then another voice said he wouldn’t mind voting for the millage if they got rid of the ugly librarian. “I mean, if they want to renovate, let’s really renovate and get rid of the old warthog at the front desk.” The announcer, her words like April sunshine, explained that Mrs. Fulmer was a lovely person as well as a certified librarian. Wesley turned up the radio, got out the brushes and Comet, and scrubbed his trailer like a sandstorm, wondering whether the announcer was single and trying to remember what she looked like. Her voice made her seem young, in her mid-twenties maybe, like he was. Then the phone rang, and he was called for two runs to New Orleans.

  Down at the pit, he drew King Rock, a vast expanse of red enamel and chrome, the soul of the gravel yard. The foreman swung his gut out of the scale shack and climbed onto the truck’s step, shoving his bearded face through the window. “If you can’t push the son of a bitch to New Orleans by nine,” he said, “you better keep going, hock the truck, and leave the country.”

  Wesley pulled a steel bar from under the driver’s seat, got down, and walked around the rig, beating the tires as if he was angry with them, testing for flats. It was an extra-long trailer heaped with wet gravel. Wesley drove the rig onto the twisting two-lane blacktop, stomping the accelerator at every shift of the gears. He couldn’t make himself think about the danger, so he again chose to see the windshield as a big video-game screen he could roar through with the inconsequence of a raft of electrons sliding up the face of a vacuum tube. The challenge was time, and he would lose if he drove a real road. He checked his watch—five after eight. The New Orleans site had to mix cement by nine or send a shift of workers home. King Rock loped under his feet like a wolf after deer.

  Wesley streaked past a speeding Greyhound bus at the bottom of a grade, cut into the right lane, hit a curve, and felt the heart-fluttering skitter of nine tires trying to leave the ground. “Good God,” he said aloud, surprised and frightened. But when he came to a straight section, as empty and flinty as a dull lifetime, he raced down it. He turned on the radar detector and thought of the two trips he had to make. The order had come in at seven: triple money for a load before nine in downtown. He was the only man who could make the ride.

  Soon the truck was singing up to eighty. Wesley tapped his trailer brakes and drew ghosts of smoke from his rear tires. The video game had to be perfect now, for any mistake would cause a fierce yellow flash on the screen, the loss of a man.

  He saw pines swarm past his window until he rose over the crest of Red Top Hill, the descending road tumbling away from him, deserted and inviting speed. He tried not to think about how fast he could go; he just rode the machinery as though it were only noise instead of iron and rock, and when he slid into the curve at the bottom of the hill, he was not really alarmed at the rear of the stopped school bus ahead with its silly tin signs flopped out and a dozen children strung across the highway.

  Wesley stood on the brakes and hung on the air horn while his tires howled and a cumulus of blue smoke rolled up behind. Gravel hammered the roof of King Rock’s cab, and he could hear the retreads tear off the tires. He fell out of his video game when he saw the faces of the children, real kids whose only mistake in life was to cross a road ten miles down from a greedy man’s gravel pit.

  The truck slid, and the trailer wagged from side to side. The hair on Wesley’s arms bristled, the muscles in his legs cramped. Finally, like a child recoiling from a father’s slap, he closed his eyes tight and yelled, not seeing what happened as his truck dove past the bus.

  When he opened his eyes, the rig had begun to slide off the blacktop and into a roadside slough. The bumper bit a ton of mud that surfed over the windshield and roof, and the truck stopped at last. Wesley’s arms and legs felt rubbery and bloodless. His head turned to the all-seeing expanse of his side mirror, which would at least miniaturize the disaster behind. No one lay in the road, though
several children were cowering under the bus. Three or four heads popped up out of a roadside ditch, and he found comfort in the fact that they were looking in his direction, that perhaps there were no bodies to see. Wesley jumped to the ground, where he heard his tires hissing in the mud, and began running limp-legged to the bus. A river of powdered rubber lay on the roadway, and the air stank. The grammar school kids picked themselves up and stood silently on the grassy roadside, and he could see that no one was hurt. Standing next to the bus, trembling and accused by the young eyes, he felt a presence behind him and looked into the face of the driver, a veteran gray-haired housewife who watched him through the vent window as though he were a snake creeping on the highway. “They’ll ticket you, and you’ll be back on the road again soon as you clean your pants,” she said, her face quivering with anger.

  When the parish deputies showed up, they handcuffed him, and Wesley panicked, twisting against the steel loops as he sat in the backseat of the cruiser. His movement was taken, and all he could do was squirm and try not to consider what he had done. No one talked to him except to utter quick, bitten-off questions, and he longed for a helpful voice. When the deputies unlocked the gnawing cuffs at the jailhouse, Wesley shook out his arms like wings warming up for flight.

  * * *

  His boss claimed a favor from the sheriff and made his bail. That night about eight, Wesley drove down to Pine Oil as slowly as he could bear, found out where Janie Wiggins, the radio announcer, lived, and went to her apartment building. He was as shaky and light-headed as a convert come from a tent meeting. When he knocked on the door, a blond woman about thirty years old answered.

  “Miz Janie?” he asked.

 

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