“Yes, ma’am, I was the neck and liver man.” He gave her this information with great seriousness, as though she could not make a decision about him without it.
“Uh-huh. And you’ve been out of work for a number of years?”
Here, Curtis knew he had to be careful, because he didn’t want to confess to the uncomfortable flutterings in his chest. Nobody hired an unhealthy man. “You see, my wife had this wonderful job that supported us to just the upmost, and I never was a greedy man. No, ma’am, I figured to work on the every now and then and enjoy one day at a time. My daddy used to say to me, ‘Let the future take care of itself and never give a nail two licks when one’ll make it hold.’ My smartest, Nookey, he’s just like me. Quit school in ninth grade when he caught on that all he had to do to get a diploma was lay out four years and then take a dinky little test.”
Tammy Michelle made an unpleasant face, as if she smelled something out of the ordinary. “Mr. Lado, do you drink?”
“Not so that it affects my working, no, ma’am—just a few to wash down my meals, and at night with my podnuhs down in Hammond, but I seldom ever pop a top before breakfast.” He gave her a big leery grin just to show he wasn’t offended by the question.
“You know,” Tammy Michelle began, flipping her shiny hair behind her shoulders with both hands, “I can’t see much work experience that qualifies you for an opening here at the foundry. I notice you worked for a sawmill once. What exactly did you do?”
Curtis had to close his eyes to think, it had been that long ago. “I was a sawyer.” He looked at the young woman and knew that she didn’t understand. How could he explain what a sawyer was to someone who looked and smelled the way she did?
“Could you explain?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I used to ride the carriage, that’s a five-ton iron contraption, a frame on wheels pushed and pulled by a long steam piston. It goes back and forth holding a big log, running it against a saw blade and cutting it into boards. I had a bunch of levers to wrassle with, and I rode the machine feeling like a yo-yo. That was a real job, sure enough. Me and my podnuhs all worked the same mill those days, and we sure could make the lumber fly. I was real good at it. Real good. Thirty minutes into my shift, everybody handling the new boards was hollering for me to slow down.” His voice trailed off as he thought about that first job. “But the mill closed down after two years.”
Tammy Michelle seemed unimpressed. She gave her fluffed-out hair a toss and told him that they didn’t have a job he was qualified for.
He looked back at her, unblinking. “What about those boys that grind mistakes off the hot castings? A monkey could do that. I ain’t asking for a job as a machinist.” He felt Tammy Michelle’s appraising eyes on his face. She might be sweet-flavored and colored like a gumdrop, but he realized with a pang that she had hired hundreds of men. He saw her take in the bags under his eyes, the red map of veins in his eyeballs. He saw her look at his hands, soft and nicotine-stained.
“Mr. Lado,” she began, a hard edge creeping into her voice, “the casting shed is a place for young men. You’re fifty-two years old.” She folded his application and placed it in a folder with dozens of others. “You also need a high school diploma to work for us.”
“I can work steady for as long as you need me,” he said, getting up slowly. “I know there’s been some gaps when I ain’t worked much, but you can’t work too steady if you’re a Louisiana man. You got to lay off and smell the roses a bit, drink a little beer and put some wear on your truck.”
Tammy Michelle looked down at the next application. “So long, Louisiana man,” she said.
* * *
Curtis drove back to the Big Sicilian Lounge and drank one frosty can after another, washing down ten pickled eggs and four pig lips in three hours’ time. All the while, he filled the husky barmaid’s ear. Raynelle was sympathetic. “It’s a shame they ain’t got no place for a good soul like you, Curtis.”
“All they’re interested in is how educated a man is. They ain’t interested in what all he knows that’s practical.” He took a long drag on a Lucky Strike, flicking the ash on the floor.
“Education, education, education. That’s all I hear,” Raynelle sang. “Why everybody’s got to be so damned smart is beyond me. I never went past six grade and look at me.” She spread her ample arms. “Hell, I ain’t lacking nothing.” Curtis looked at her sleeveless Ban-Lon shirt and agreed.
“Yeah,” Curtis began, “used to be that all a man needed was guts and sweat to make money. All guts and sweat gets you now is laughed at.” Raynelle snorted once and adjusted her bra straps, which sank into her shoulders like steel bands on a cotton bale.
By four o’clock Curtis felt that he was beginning to be drunk, so he figured it was time to take a drive. He climbed into his truck, started it with some difficulty, and stabbed at a tuning button to bring forth country music, but grazed it with his stubby forefinger. Off in the static-filled distance he heard his favorite song, “If You Don’t Leave Me Alone, I’ll Find Somebody Who Will.” He lost his temper and hit the row of buttons with a fist. There was a crunch inside the radio and the little orange indicator lurched to the left side of the dial, lodging squarely on a Public Radio station. Strains of a string quartet filled the old Dodge’s cab, and Curtis made a face as though a polecat had just crawled out from under the seat. He tried the buttons and the tuning knob, but the radio was forever jammed on violins and cellos. He cursed mightily and banged on the dash until he could stand no more of the delicate, weaving melody. He snapped the switch. No music at all was better than whatever that was.
He fishtailed out onto Highway 51 and headed south under a sky filled with puffy summer rain clouds. At a traffic light in Independence, his eyes managed to focus on a hand-painted sign that read HELP WANTED. He pulled over to the mud parking lot of a small metalworking shop, went inside the rusty tin building, and spoke to the young owner, breezily telling all he knew about welding log trucks together. Finally, the owner looked up and said, “I like you good enough, old man, but I just need someone who can read blueprints and work the math.”
Curtis cocked his head like a feisty rooster observing a big yard dog. “Hey, I can cut iron real good. Ain’t you got nobody can draw some lines on the iron what tell me where to cut?”
The owner shook his head. Curtis pleaded his case a few more minutes, but he finally gave up and left. He climbed back into his truck, but the engine only grunted twice. He got out and raised the hood. Sometimes when he let the sun shine on the battery to heat the acid, enough juice built up to start the engine. Two doors down from the metalworking shop was a bar promising a cool place to wait. Inside Anselmo’s Oasis he began a lively argument with a group of strawberry farmers and pulpwood truck drivers about the value of education. One farmer told him that an education was important because you could maybe one day become a legislator and make millions of dollars. Most of the folks in Baton Rouge, he said, were real smart, lawyers even, and used what they knew to help their friends out in the construction industry by throwing an occasional bridge or firehouse job their way. “That’s what democracy is all about,” the old farmer said. “Spreading around the gravy.”
But Curtis would not give up in the face of logic. Under the sway of six additional beers he grew cranky, grabbed the farmer by his shoulder and shook him.
“You’re crazy. A Louisiana man ain’t got to be a four-eyed egghead to throw away money. I could work that dog and pony show in the state capitol myself. If I had a three-hundred-dollar suit and a two-hundred-dollar secretary with a tight butt, I could steal tax money with the best of them.”
The old men carped and hollered back and forth until Anselmo and a gravel truck driver grabbed Curtis and in a clop and skitter of boots threw him out the front door. He spun and weaved back to his truck, slammed down the hood, and succeeded in starting it up, getting it in the road, and aiming it toward home.
When he got to his house, he came in through the
kitchen and hit the light switch. Nothing happened. Sure enough, checking the side of the house, he found that the electric meter had been removed. Back in the darkened living room, he sat in his torn vinyl recliner and let the house spin around his head. He felt nauseated, his eyes hurt, and his heart knocked away like a big woodpecker in a hollow tree. He wondered what had gone wrong with him. Going back in memory, he saw himself as an ironclad buck that no amount of liquor, cigarettes, or wildness could ruin. When he was young, he’d planned to live forever by the strength of his body and a dab of skill he could sell for enough to keep him in fun. There was always work. He thought of his sawmill job, his favorite, riding the carriage like a cowboy on a fast horse, charging back and forth, crashing logs into the humming blade. That had been twenty-five years before. Tonight he stared at the dark outline of his television, feeling sick enough to cry, and could not for the life of him figure out what was wrong.
The next day was Friday, Nookey’s day off, and as usual he came over and got his daddy out of bed. His son was thin and big-boned, his shoulders rounding under a checkered long-sleeved shirt he wore winter and summer. His polka-dot welder’s cap was pulled down over a pair of patient gray eyes. Nookey woke his father by pulling one leg out of bed and dropping it toward the floor as though it might be a limb on one of the carcasses down at the sausage plant.
Everything in the refrigerator smelled bad, so they closed it up and climbed into the truck to drive to the Mudbug for breakfast. As soon as Curtis turned the key, Nookey spun on the radio. The passionate voice of a soprano shrilled from the speaker, and Nookey jumped from the truck as though it had suddenly caught fire. “What the hail is that?” he yelled, stumbling about for a moment in the gravel.
“Aw, the damn radio is stuck on the longhair music station,” Curtis complained, turning off the voice. “Quit fooling and come on.”
“Man,” Nookey hooted, climbing back into the Dodge. “Sounds like a tomcat hung up in a fan belt.”
“That’s just one more thing I got to pay to get fixed,” Curtis said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out onto the street. “I got to get a job so’s I can get the juice turned back on, too.”
Nookey gave a sideways nod, like a hound blinking off a horsefly. “We’ll get us some grits and eggs and I’ll help you apply every place we can think of.”
And that’s what they did. But the veneer mill said they needed someone who could operate a computer. The lumberyard told Curtis he was too old. The cement plant needed someone good with weights and measures. Finally, the auxiliary power plant would consider his application. They needed someone as a watchman five days a week and three hours Saturday morning. Curtis was offended when he heard the schedule and told the man doing the hiring as much. He was cranky by the time he got there, plus somewhat drunk, having found a handy bar after each turndown to build up his courage for the next application.
Afterward, in the Big Sicilian, Nookey tugged on the bill of his cap and tried not to sound like he was complaining. “Daddy, you shouldn’a called that man at the powerhouse a Communist just because he wanted someone to work on Saturday.”
“And why the hell not?” Curtis’s indignation, usually fueled by nothing more significant than cold beer, was blazing. “A job like that will run a man into the ground. Six days a week? When the hell will I have time for any recreation?” He knocked back half a glass of draft beer and motioned to the barmaid for another. “Son, I’d just as soon live in Moscow and eat potato soup all day as become a pheasant worker for the power company.”
Nookey pushed back his cap, bent over the bar, and examined his fingers. “Daddy, I work on Saturdays sometimes.”
Curtis glared at him, burgundy pools forming below his eyeballs. “Then you got the brain of a armadillo. What you think you’re gonna do, get rich? This is Louisiana, son. Ain’t nobody can get rich in this state through hard work.” He threw a dollar bill at the barmaid when she brought his beer. She was an old, dark woman with hair so coarse and black it looked tarred. Leaning on her side of the bar, she listened.
“Sometimes I think you drink a little heavy, Daddy,” Nookey said, rubbing the thin blond stubble on his narrow face and looking down sorrowfully. He picked up his half-full glass, wiggled it, put it down.
Curtis swilled his beer until his eyes watered, taking down half a mug. “You want to kill yourself working, go ahead. You’ll wear your fingers off down at the weenie plant all your life for what? So you can buy some trashy piece of red dirt with a used trailer on it while some real estate fool gets most all your money and a lawyer gets the rest. You think they work hard? You think just because they went to parties and chased women at a college for four years that they sweat and worry every day that the sun comes up? Hell no, son. They don’t have a education. They got a license to steal.” A snarl crept into his voice. He took a swig and looked at a cheerful beer poster where two girl skiers posed before an out-of-focus mountain. Curtis was confused and rueful. Something was wrong with him, but he had no idea what it was. “If I never drank a beer or smoked a cigarette and then worked eighty hours a week for the almighty auxiliary power station, I wouldn’t do better than a tar-paper house and a raggedy-ass Dodge.”
“Aw, Daddy. Come on, now.”
Curtis didn’t hear his son. He was looking at the poster. “What the hell’s them girls up to anyway?” he shouted. “Hey, one of ’em’s a lawyer and the other is a politician spending our tax money at two hundred dollars a night out in Colorado.” He waved a fist at the images, as though he could shame them for both their waste and his worries.
Nookey let out a long sigh. “I think it’s time we hit the road.”
The barmaid picked up his glass. “You want to know about a job?” she asked. “Mr. Cantrell is opening up the old sawmill in the woods back of Albany. His foreman was in here this morning. Said they’re hiring.”
Curtis’s eyes widened. “That’s the old Cantrell mill. I never worked there, but I worked one just like it.”
“Rode the log carriage like in the old days,” Nookey moaned, shaking his head glumly. In two minutes they were on the highway, the truck weaving between the white lines with the floating, mystical action of a street sweeper. Curtis was so drunk that Nookey tried to take the wheel from him. The old man responded by cuffing him twice across the bridge of his nose. When the truck stopped for a traffic light in Byron, Nookey jumped out. “Go on and drive in a ditch if you want to. I believe Momma was right when she took off.” He stood on the white line at the edge of the blacktop, seeming ready to cry. He waited for his father to say something, but Curtis didn’t look at him, just reached over and pulled the door shut, popping the clutch so hard that the Dodge shuddered like a horse and clods of dirt fell from under the fenders.
He pulled into the muddy lot of the Cantrell sawmill, dizzy and confident, seeing a great future ahead, full of money enough for the electric bill, cases of beer, and cartons of Lucky Strikes. That’s what money was for—weekends, free time, lots of smoke, and great big barmaids.
The mill was an obsolete complex of huge wooden sheds with tin roofs bloody with rust. Curtis parked in front of the office and looked to his left across the swampy yard. The building where the main saw was stood fifty feet tall, the carriage running twenty-five feet above ground level. There was a decided lack of activity even though the boiler shed, about two hundred feet to the rear of the main saw building, gave off shimmering white streams of sawdust smoke from its three crooked stacks.
Inside the office he spoke to a man slouching behind a cluttered, greasy desk. “You want a job?” the man asked. Curtis nodded. “You got to see Mr. Cantrell. What can you do?”
“How come there ain’t no sawing going on?” Curtis slurred only two words, but the room spun slowly, like a ferry leaving shore. Inside his head something hissed and popped like bacon frying.
“We’re just starting up again. This plant’s been closed down for eight years, and it was wore-out when it closed.” He smil
ed as though his comment was funny. “What is it you said you do?”
“I can run the carriage,” Curtis said, absently.
“We need a carriage man to run that old-time system until we get a new one set up, but we can’t try you out today.”
“You got steam up.”
“Yeah, I know. But we tore out the safety bumper at the end of the carriage run because all the timbers were buggy. Say, here’s Cantrell now.”
A large, ruddy man came through the door of an interior office. He wore a tailored white shirt, a narrow silk tie, and a yellow hard hat. He gave Curtis a stony, appraising look. “What do you want?” he snapped.
“My name’s Curtis Lado. I’m looking for work.” He put his hand to his chin and stroked the stubble there. Suddenly, he felt rusty and worn-out.
Mr. Cantrell’s face looked chiseled out of flint. He leaned forward and sniffed audibly. “I don’t hire old drunks,” he said, pushing past and into another office, rattling open a blueprint as he walked. Curtis felt as though someone had shoved him off a bar stool. He walked sideways toward the parking lot door, unable to control his movements. The door stuck in its frame and he took several moments to open it, feeling the eyes of those in the office on his back. He stumbled on the splintered steps. Out in the soggy mill yard, he leaned on his truck and stared at the building that housed the huge saw and log carriage. It looked like the one he’d worked in many years ago when he was young and sharp, a man with friends and a good job earned by his youth and raw strength only. Letting go of the truck, he set out tentatively, navigating the slop of the mill yard, climbing the long stairs that led to the big saw.
Inside, two men were welding. They glanced at him but continued to concentrate on their work. All around him, steam pipes hissed and dripped condensation. The main saw apparatus was dismantled, but the carriage was gleaming under a brush coat of linseed oil. A crew had rolled a three-foot-diameter log onto it for testing. He walked over to the carriage and stumbled, falling into the controller’s seat. Tall levers stood before him and he placed his hands on them and laughed. He nudged one and the carriage trembled. Curtis smiled and felt he could control it, remembering the magical thrust of the steam-activated rod that payed out of a long cylinder and shoved the iron carriage against the saw and then pulled it away effortlessly, as though it were a puff of air. He squeezed the lever, confident that all a man needed in life was what he was born with—common sense and confidence. He gave a lever a mighty thrust.
Same Place, Same Things Page 17