Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  “Not that way. Use your head.”

  It goes on.

  Coleman turns back to his house, and sees a bee float out from a crack in the plaster, just beneath the east-facing window of the spare room. He steps closer. Wilkins’s shouted curses make him wince. He glances back and sees the boy struggling with the mower, Wilkins following close behind, poised as if about to strike. “You don’t have the brains God gave green apples. Look at you. I swear you’d foul up a steel ball!”

  Coleman tries to tune it out. He watches the place in the plaster, the seam where the house and the foundation meet. Another bee comes from there, and still another. In a minute or two, several come and settle close to it, then enter. After a time, Coleman goes up on the deck and in through the back door. Peg is working the puzzle.

  “It’s a nest, all right.”

  “I already called them,” she says. “They can be here in a couple of hours.”

  “Can you hear what’s going on out there? He’s at it again. That poor scared little boy. I was sheriff, after all. I really ought to go over there.”

  “Stop talking about yourself in the past tense.”

  “Well, I was.” He can’t keep the anger out of his voice.

  She says, “I’m sorry.”

  He looks out the window, at the scene of the boy struggling with the heavy machine, and the man moving along slow behind him—a tall, rounded figure of disapproval. Wilkins gesticulates, shouting. The boy works in a feverish, hopeless hurry to get it done.

  “You know the terrible thing?” Peg says. “I used to talk to Mrs. Wilkins when Janine—when Anya—was in school. The librarian, his wife. I ought to be able to remember her first name. All they think about is that boy—they actually believe it’s for his benefit. It’s all out of love. Think of it. They believe they’re doing it right. She yells at the poor kid, too. I’ve heard her over there letting him have it, the same way.”

  “Jesus,” Coleman says. “Somebody ought to do something.”

  “How long have we been saying that?”

  He occupies himself in the workroom, sanding the crest of the clock he’s been building: yesterday, while cutting the wood according to its pattern, he allowed the blade to gouge it slightly at one edge. The inside of the mechanism, the weights, the chain, and the pendulum, are all connected and ready. He has finished the trunk, and the plinth, or base. The moon dial and the clock face are installed. As it has begun to look like itself, the hours he worked on it have increased.

  Peg calls him when the pest control man drives up. She has spent the last hour out in front, pulling weeds out of the flower bed. Coleman finds them already walking around the house, to the site of the nest. Peg wears a red bandanna and white garden gloves, and she’s carrying a trowel. She laughs at something the pest control man says, and in that sunny, grass-smelling instant, seems completely her old self. This tricks Coleman into forgetting the misery they’re in. The pest control man is young, and dark, a quiet, shy-seeming boy, with round features and intelligent, humorous eyes. He knows his work, recognizes immediately that there is a nest in the wall, and that it will take a spraying of foam between the foundation of the house and the ribs of the inner walls to eradicate it. Also, the hole itself must be sealed with mortar.

  “They can have a pretty good-sized nest built up in a day or so,” the boy says. “They work fast this time of year.”

  He walks back to his truck, glancing toward the Wilkinses’ house as he goes. Wilkins is alone there, now, weeding in his own garden patch. Peg stands a little to one side, gazing at the place where the yellow jackets lob themselves out, and come back.

  “Does he have the stuff to spray now?” Coleman asks.

  She shrugs. “It’s getting time to go to the airport. Do you want me to do it?”

  “I’ll go,” he says.

  At the airport, he finds that Janine/Anya’s arrival is delayed an hour. He waits at the gate. Perhaps some of the people gathered in the waiting area recognize him from the newspaper photographs. Perhaps they stare furtively, he can’t be sure. He feels exposed, keeps to one side, beyond a bank of telephones, holding a magazine up. Flight Lines.

  When her plane comes in at last, she’s among the last ones out. He’s surprised at how much weight she’s gained. Her hair is a mass of crinkled curls as if she has just let it down from being braided, and she’s dyed it bright red. She walks up to him, throws her arms around his neck, and hugs tight. “Dad,” she says, stepping back from him. Then she turns slightly and with a gesture that looks like dismissal, says, “This here’s Lucky Taylor.”

  “Lucky,” he says, repeating it as if he’s not certain he could’ve heard it right.

  Standing at her side is a very small, thin, ragged-looking boy, with bad skin and a look of the street about him: holes in his jeans; a long tear in one sleeve of his shirt. His hair is unkempt and very long. The motion with which he pushes it back over his bony shoulders is decidedly feminine. “Hi,” he says, offering a thin hand. There’s something hangdog about him.

  Coleman shakes it, glancing at his daughter, who gives him a look as if to say she means to explain. But no explanation comes. They go to the baggage carousel and wait for their bags, and Lucky chatters nervously, talking only to Coleman, about the turbulence they went through coming east. “It’s the jet stream,” he says. “It just buffets you.”

  “Lucky’s supposed to spend a couple of days with us and then head on north.”

  Coleman clears his throat, and finds himself momentarily unable to say anything.

  “I can always go on,” Lucky says.

  “No, we agreed.”

  “Well, actually, there is a little problem,” says Coleman. “We’ve got a yellow jackets’ nest in the spare room, Janine. You’ll have to sleep on the sofa in the living room as it is.”

  She stares at him for a beat. “Nobody told me this.”

  “I just discovered it today, hon.”

  “And it’s Anya, now,” she says. “Remember?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I can sleep on the floor,” says Lucky.

  “You can sleep on the roof, too.”

  “I said I’d go on.”

  “Just cool it.”

  For a few seconds, they stand watching the bags come by on the belt. Lucky reaches for one, and then another. They go on waiting.

  “Lucky and I met in a theater group in Santa Monica,” Janine/Anya explains. “He’s a future Broadway star.” There’s a note of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Anya’s very gifted, too,” says Lucky, without any tone at all.

  Coleman says, “Do you two want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on,” Janine/Anya says. “Is anything going on, Lucky?”

  “Is Lucky your given name?” Coleman asks.

  “No, sir.”

  They wait. Others step in, retrieve suitcases, and leave. The airport voices make their repeated pronouncements about unattended luggage. Lucky lifts another bag, the largest yet, from the belt, and steps back.

  “Lot of stuff,” says Coleman, wondering where he’ll put it all.

  “Anya thinks we shouldn’t mention your trouble,” Lucky says abruptly over Janine’s protesting repetition of his adopted name.

  “Well,” Coleman gets out.

  “I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Lucky has to have his own way in everything,” Janine/Anya says. “Don’t you, Lucky?”

  “I’m being honest, okay?”

  “Lucky puts a premium on honesty, like a badge everybody absolutely has to wear.”

  The young man looks at Coleman and shrugs. “I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable.”

  “I’m a little uncomfortable,” Coleman says.

  “Try sitting in a plane for five hours with him,” says Janine/Anya.

  They put the baggage on two carts, and push it out into the parking lot. There’s a problem about where it will all fit into the car.
It’s far more than will go into the trunk alone. The two young people keep a low, muttering argument going all the way, seeming more and more like squabbling children. Janine/Anya decides that the only way they can accomplish getting the car packed is if she sits on Lucky’s lap. “It’s not that far home,” she says.

  They have to take everything out and start over again twice, and finally they succeed, with Janine/Anya on Lucky’s lap in the front seat. Lucky perched on a stack of duffel bags, and Janine/Anya holding a box of books. The only avenue of vision Coleman possesses is out the windshield and to his immediate left. The passenger-side window is completely obscured by the box of books his daughter holds. He can’t see Lucky’s face for his daughter’s bulk, and the box she holds, and anyway Lucky has to report for him what is out that window. They make very slow and halting progress out of the airport parking lot. The simple matter of cooperation has stopped the bickering for a time.

  “So what’s happening,” Janine/Anya asks. “Any more news?”

  “There’s no change from the last time we talked,” says Coleman.

  “Well, they can’t get away with it. You have to attack their character.”

  “Let’s not talk about it now,” Coleman says. “It’s been pretty hard on your mother. Rudy’s handling it, lining up people to testify for me and all that. It’s just that the air is sort of poisoned by it.” The weight of this comes down on him anew, and he has to work to keep himself from uttering the phrases of his outrage. It is fairly certain that he’ll never be able to go back to his job.

  He drives on into the brightness, the traffic on the highway south, with its shifting lanes and blinking arrows. There’s a lot of traffic; it’s stop-and-go all the way. He reads the personalized license plate on the panel truck in front of them: bad-arse. He thinks of the bar he used to go to with the two women, the loud talk and the laughs—Deirdre had a fund of remembered personalized plates, funny ones from her travels, she said, though Linda accused her of getting them off the Internet.

  And perhaps there is no such thing as a completely innocent time.

  But he stirs in himself and his heart hammers in his chest. He experiences a wave of nausea, scarcely hearing the other two as they negotiate in the small space for comfort, Janine/Anya shifting her weight and Lucky complaining that she’s pinching the skin of his thighs. They come to a place where the traffic is at a standstill. bad-arse is still in front of them. Lucky remarks about how odd it is to be stopped in the middle of a superhighway. No one answers. A moment later, he says, “My leg’s going to sleep.”

  “You’re such a whiner,” Janine/Anya tells him.

  “Can’t you lift yourself a little?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lucky. I’m not all that heavy.”

  “Tell my leg that.”

  Coleman grips the steering wheel. The traffic moves a little, and he swerves onto the shoulder of the road and heads to the exit, which is in sight up ahead.

  “We’re gonna get a ticket,” Janine/Anya says in a singsong voice.

  “Let the guy drive,” Lucky says.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Coleman strives for a light tone: “Are you two gonna argue the whole time you’re here?”

  “My legs,” says Lucky.

  “Stop the car,” Janine/Anya says. “This is ridiculous. I don’t want to go another ten feet with him.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Lucky says.

  “Look,” says Coleman, feeling the blood rise to his face. “Both of you calm down, okay? I’m sure whatever it is you can settle it without acting like children.”

  They make the exit and he speeds a little, managing to beat the light at the first intersection. They are all quiet now, moving at a good clip.

  “Will you stop the car?” Janine/Anya says.

  “We’re almost home,” Coleman tells her. “Cut it out, I mean it.”

  “You can let me off anywhere,” Lucky says.

  Silence. Coleman’s head is throbbing. When they reach the house, he walks around the car and opens their door.

  “That was dicey,” says Lucky.

  The pest control truck is gone. Peg comes out and stands on the porch, arms folded in the slight chill that has come with the waning afternoon. “I thought something might’ve happened,” she says.

  Janine/Anya hugs her mother and then walks into the house, half turning to say, “The asshole there is somebody named Lucky.”

  Lucky offers his little white hand. “Forgive the confusion,” he says. “‘If I could use your phone to call a cab.”

  “I don’t understand,” Peg says. “Are you two—together?”

  “Well, we were.” He shakes his head, looking down.

  “Janine, come out here,” says Peg.

  Janine/Anya comes to the door. “My name is not Janine anymore, God damn it.”

  “Hey, who do you think you’re talking to?” Coleman says.

  “We got in an argument on the plane,” Lucky says. “It’s stupid.”

  “No, I learned something about you,” Janine/Anya says. “I learned that you have to have your own way in everything and that you think the truth happens always to coincide with whatever the hell you happen to be thinking at the time.”

  “Oh, and you’re the only one who knows any truth, is that it?”

  “Both of you shut up,” Coleman says. “Jesus Christ.”

  For what seems an excruciatingly long moment, no one says anything.

  “You want to use the phone?” he says to Lucky.

  Janine/Anya storms back into the house, followed by her mother.

  “I don’t really have any money,” Lucky says.

  He and Coleman carry the bags into the house. It takes four trips. Peg and Janine/Anya remain upstairs for a long time. The two men sit in the living room, with all the luggage and the bags and boxes between them on the floor. They can hear the low murmur of the women contending with each other. Janine/Anya sobs, and curses.

  Finally, Coleman says, “What happened?”

  The other man is startled, and has to take a moment to breathe. “I don’t even know. She’s tense. She didn’t want to come home.”

  Coleman is silent.

  “I mean she didn’t want to give up.”

  “Are you involved?”

  The other man doesn’t answer.

  “I guess it’s none of my business.”

  “No.”

  Coleman feels the blood rising in him. “Although this is my house, and I’m not gonna tolerate this kind of thing.”

  “We’re married, sir. That’s my wife up there.”

  He comes to his feet, but then sinks back down in the chair.

  “And I’m this close to taking a taxicab out of here.”

  Peg comes downstairs, walks through the kitchen, and pours a glass of water. She brings it into the room and offers it to Lucky.

  “No, thanks,” he says.

  “Take it,” she says, with some force. “And cool off.” Then she turns to Coleman, with the slightest motion of unsteadiness, as though she had suffered a sudden vertigo, and says, “I guess you’ve been told, too.”

  He nods.

  She sighs. “The poor kid sprayed the foam as far as it would go. And then we found another entrance, under the side porch. He thinks it’s the same nest and he’s going to need some more foam and some other kind of equipment because of where it is. And he thinks the thing extends around in the wall to the opening we saw.”

  “So the room is out,” Coleman says.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” says Lucky.

  “I wish somebody’d told me,” Peg says. “It would’ve been nice if somebody had told me about it.”

  “Maybe I can move some things out of the workroom,” Coleman says.

  “I could go look for a motel or something,” says Lucky.

  “What’s your name, anyway, son?”

  “Lucky.”

  “Tell me your name, will you? First, middle, and last, okay?”


  “Woodrow Warren Copley. But I don’t think it matters because I’m leaving.”

  “You need a lift somewhere?” Coleman asks him.

  “No,” says Peg. “He’s not going anywhere. Janine’s going to have his baby.”

  Coleman stares at him. There is nothing he can think to say or do. His vision seems to be leaching out, light seeping from the pupils of his eyes. He thinks he might keel over out of the chair, and he holds on to the arms. “Okay,” he says. “Now suppose you tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  “She just did,” says Lucky, indicating Peg with a gesture.

  “I want to hear it from you, boy.”

  “I’m not a boy. I’m twenty-nine years old.”

  “You look like you’re about fifteen. And I don’t mean it as a compliment either.”

  “Everett, that’s enough,” says Peg. “They’re having an argument. Stay out of it.”

  He looks at his wife. The disbelief and unhappiness in her face makes him wince. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Jesus Christ.”

  Peg turns to Lucky. “I’m involved enough, though, to know that you brought our situation into the argument. Tell me, young man, what did you think that would do? Was it just to win? Was that it? Just to hurt your new wife and win your point?”

  “What’re you talking about?” Coleman says.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned the—the charges,” says Lucky. “She shouldn’t’ve told you I mentioned it.”

  “I got it out of her,” Peg says.

  He gazes off, frowning, looking like a pouting boy. With that feminine motion he pushes the hair back over his shoulder. “We were—we were arguing about appearances. That was one of the things we were arguing about. We argue about absolutely everything.”

  Coleman stands. “Get out of here.”

  “No,” says his wife. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “If I decide to leave,” Lucky mutters, “nothing will stop me.”

  Coleman hauls himself outside with a series of lurching strides, weak in the legs and fighting the sensation that he’s about to collapse. He goes out onto the lawn, in the chilly sun, fists clenched, heart drumming. His own momentum seems part of a single staggering motion, and he’s faintly surprised to find himself at the side of the house, peering in to where the foam drips down the wall. Across the way, Wilkins is shouting at his son again. The boy is attempting to lift a loaded wheelbarrow.