Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  “Only if it’s right in front of me,” Rid said. He kept the truck straight. “Plus it looks like it’s gonna storm soon. Got two jobs almost right next to each other coming up soon.

  “Yea, but we’re driving into the storm. It could start any minute. Better ten bucks now than maybe twenty later.” The truck moved on. “Rid, the boss wants it done. I need the sure cash. We’re going. We can get back to Samson in fifteen minutes the way you drive.”

  “Shit, kid. What’s with you?”

  “Need the cash.”

  “We all need the cash,” he said.

  “The wife and I want a house. Want it sooner than later.”

  “Takes a lot of lawn mowing to buy a house.”

  “She used to babysit her cousins but they’re old enough to be on their own now. She’s been selling Wrap-It for about a year now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, it’s a body-wrap-type deal. You stretch it around your waist and thighs and it makes you thinner.”

  “So she sells girdles?”

  “Not really; these make you lose weight. Like the ones sold on those late-night infomercials. Only Alice sells them in person. Hired a few people to sell for her.”

  “Like Tupperware and dildos?”

  “What? Jesus, no,” I said. “They’re weight-loss apparel.”

  “How do you lose weight with them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know but my wife says it works. She sells diet pills too.” He looked at me as if I had just thrown up in my lap. I remember the first time Alice came home with a neon-blue brochure filled with men and women with huge smiles, wearing nothing but underwear and their wraps. She said someone had an info desk set up at the Laundromat and had told her all about the benefits and earning potential while our linens were on the spin cycle. I love Alice, always have, and it’s that love that kept me calm when the first shipment of wraps came and I opened a box of what looked more like flesh-colored cling wrap and caffeine pills than a good investment. She was thrilled, though, and kept saying that this wasn’t just a second income, it was her ticket to getting back into the body she had “before.” It never bothered me that I didn’t know anybody who was in the same shape as they were when they were seventeen because I think Alice knew that to be in a seventeen-year-old body when you’re pushing twenty-seven wasn’t just unrealistic, it was unhealthy. What bothered me was the way she always said it: before. Period. As if the boy was an edit cut off the end of her sentences, off her memories from when we were kids.

  “We do what we can,” I said. The road hummed under the truck as Rid pushed toward the dark clouds in the west.

  “All right, kid”—he pulled onto the shoulder of the highway—“we’ll head back to Samson. Looks like we ain’t beating the rain.”

  ■ ■

  Rid turned down the cul-de-sac and kept the truck slow as we passed a line of houses with actual people living in them. Two-car families one right after the other with wives and husbands and children. Lawns that people mowed themselves. Or lawns that people paid teenagers to mow. People who had made it. The job came up on the right just before the loop, a lawn so overgrown that it folded back onto itself in matted, brown clumps. Weeds cluttered along the sides of the house and the edges of the driveway. The top of a Realtor sign poked through the mess like the face of a friend in a crowd of strangers. Price Reduced in red letters.

  “Shit,” Rid said. “Looks like nobody’s had this job on their list. It’s gonna take us over an hour to mow this place, not to mention the time to rake all this shit up.” He glared at me and I saw him calculating all the money he wasn’t making now that we had committed to this one job. He parked the truck in the street and we climbed out. From the house, I heard someone yell to us. In the shadow on the porch, propped back in a plastic lawn chair, a man in faded jeans and a torn flannel looked out to Rid and me.

  “You people are late,” the man said. He ran a hand down the stubble on his cheek.

  “Excuse me?” I said. “This job just came to us.”

  “I don’t pay you to not mow my lawn.” Rid and I looked at each other and we both shrugged.

  “You don’t pay us, man,” Rid said. “The banks do. They own this place.”

  “That’s only till the loan papers go through.” The man rocked in his lawn chair and began to laugh. “Been taking a little longer than I’d planned but don’t you worry, loan’s coming and I’ll be moved back in quicker than it’s taking you to mow this place.” He didn’t get up to talk to us, he was happy to just sit in his chair and yell across the yard at us. I looked around the neighborhood. I could hear the screams of children playing in one of the backyards and someone had fired up their grill with too much lighter fluid. I could smell the gassy smoke from the street.

  “All right, buddy,” Rid said. He turned to me. “C’mon, let’s get this job done. We’re gonna get rained on. I’d rather be less wet than more when we finish.” He pulled on his leather gloves and dug into the bed of the truck while I lowered the trailer’s tailgate.

  I mowed along the side of the house slower than what Rid would’ve liked but I wanted to get a look at the man. A bedroll lay along the back of the porch and empty tin cans stood lined against the house. When Rid passed the front of the porch with the weed whacker, I saw the man point and mouth something to him. I couldn’t hear over the mower but it looked like Rid was trying hard to ignore him and just get the job done.

  Halfway done with the backyard and the rain came. Quicker than I had thought and harder than I had wanted. Damp grass didn’t stop Rid and me but this was too much. I killed the zero-turn and ran to the truck just as Rid was chucking a pair of clippers into the bed.

  “Goddammit,” he said. He slammed his door, wiping water from his face. “You know we’re not getting paid for this. And the day’s shot, can’t mow soaked grass and make it look good in the pictures.” I wiped my face on my sleeve and leaned back. Fat drops pounded the truck and I wished I were back at home on the couch listening to the wind and Alice snoring in the bedroom.

  “Well, we started early today,” I said.

  “We only got eight jobs in, so starting early don’t mean much, does it?”

  “Better than nothing,” I said. I looked out toward the house and the man. He was standing now at the edge of the porch, positioning the empty tin cans under cracks in the eaves trough to catch the rain.

  “This isn’t much more than nothing,” Rid said. He had his hand over his eyes as if the rain had been an inconvenience to him more than anybody else. Like it was an insult. “Get me my lip smoke out of the glove box,” he said.

  “Your what?”

  “Chew, kid. Got a tin in there. Get it.” I popped open the glove box and sitting on top of the truck’s manual was a handful of tins all with their labels ripped off. I grabbed one on top. “Not that one,” Rid said. “Can’t you read?”

  “Read what?” I looked down at the tin in my hands and saw a length of Scotch tape stuck across the top that said Thursday. The ink of the letters filled the tiny grooves of the tape, making the writing look old, like the tin had seen so many Thursdays that it knew nothing else.

  “Move,” Rid said. He leaned across the bench and grabbed another tin. He popped it open and wedged a healthy pinch under his lip. “We’ll wait to see if this passes. If not, we’ll load out.” He tucked the tin under his thigh and looked up to the house. “Been doing this job for years now. Mowed a thousand lawns, three times over, and you know how many times I’ve run into shit like this?”

  “A few?” I asked.

  “Zero. Zilch. Goose egg. And do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because most people know there aren’t any do-overs.” He cracked his door, spit, and came back dragging his teeth up his bottom lip. “People like our friend out there don’t get that.” He leaned back in his
seat and closed his eyes.

  We watched the rain for another half hour without many more words. Every couple of minutes, Rid cracked his door to spit. The man on the porch tended to his tins of rainwater. He didn’t pay us any mind once the rain fell. It looked like even in his situation, he still had the ability to separate the necessary from the secondary. A mowed lawn means nothing to a thirsty man.

  ■ ■

  I was home early that afternoon, soaked.

  “Mowing at the bottom of a lake?” Alice asked. She smiled at me from over her laptop.

  “I know, right?” I said.

  “Don’t think about leaving those clothes in a pile,” she said. “Put them in a plastic bag. Tomorrow’s laundry day.” I grabbed a balled-up Walmart bag from under the sink and went into the bedroom to change.

  “How was today?” I asked.

  “Sold a wrap,” she called. “Got a lady’s e-mail. Said she’d be interested in selling too.” I didn’t know much about Wrap-It but Alice told me that if she could sign up three full-time sellers, her immediate boss would give her a larger percentage of what they sold. She had a hard time keeping her sister on board. Alice had me convince my ma to sign up and I remember the look on her face when I told her about it. It was the same look that Rid gave me.

  “Do you think she’ll sign up?” I asked. I came out in a pair of gym shorts and a stained Beatles T-shirt.

  “She should.” She didn’t look up from the message board she was posting to. “What’s for dinner?”

  I opened the fridge and just stared. A few cans of tuna. Eggs. Half-gone gallon of milk. Loaf of bread. Mason jar of pickled asparagus my ma had made. Mustard bottle propped upside down so what was left didn’t crust on the bottom. “Tuna sandwiches,” I said.

  “Wonderful!”

  “Babe, it’s only tuna,” I said.

  “What? No, no, I’ve been messaging this woman. She lives in Detroit. Says she is interested in selling.” She tapped at the keyboard and didn’t look up. “Just think, if I sign her up by the end of the week, I’ll have a foothold in a whole new market. More people means more buyers.” I turned on the stove and started mixing the tuna and eggs. “Then if she signs up a few more people, that automatically places me in the Sapphire Salesman category.”

  “And that’s a good thing, right?” I dug in the cupboard for some salt and pepper.

  “Of course it’s a good thing.” She turned to me, propped up on an arm of the couch. “That means I can start selling the Pro-Fit–style wraps and vitamins!”

  “And those are better than what you’re selling now?”

  “I would guess so.” She got up and pulled down her pants. “See?” She had wraps around her butt and her thighs, stretched past the elastic of her panties. With her pants around her ankles, she shimmied around to show me her backside. “This Basic-Fit style just comes in a rectangle shape. The Pro-Fit forms to curves and targets trouble areas.”

  “And what does that mean?” I really didn’t know and it looked like my wife was wearing a sweaty diaper so I think I was allowed to be a little confused. She pulled her pants up and fell back to her laptop.

  “It means more money, Timothy.”

  There was a silence while I mixed the ingredients into a passable meal.

  “And who can beat that?” I said.

  I scooped up a handful of eggy tuna and molded it into patties before sliding them into the pan. I watched the oil pop and hiss from under them and thought about the man and his cans of water. I mean, I can live on canned tuna just fine and I’m sure even the pickiest of eaters would eventually get used to it. But when I saw that row of cans, placed just so under the steady streams of gutter runoff, I think a part of me planted itself into that lawn like a patch of crab grass, unable to remove, unable to forget.

  ■ ■

  Every ten days or so, that ranch rotated to the top of the list and before we could unload the equipment, the man would holler from his lawn chair.

  “You guys should be out here once a week. Grass grows too quickly to have you slacking off.” Beyond the grunt he gave when we parked outside the house, it was easy for Rid to ignore the guy. He just put his ear protectors on, cranked the edger or the weed whacker or the clippers on, and went to work.

  But it wasn’t that easy for me. Every time I swung the mower close to the house, I’d stare at the man. He wasn’t old, around forty, forty-five. The age where you have enough to lose that you’ll lose yourself in the process. The third time we hit that place, I put half of a sandwich I’d bought on the front step before I hopped on the mower. I nodded at the man before walking back to the truck but all he did was suck on his lip and shout to Rid that he’d better make sure to not crack the siding with the edger. The next time we stopped out, I found that bag wedged under the propane tank out back. Looked like a raccoon had gotten to it.

  ■ ■

  Five months into the job, Alice told me that she stopped taking her birth control. I came out of the shower and she was sitting, tapping away at the laptop, scrolling past pictures of people in underwear and cellophane. Her telling me that was something that ages a guy a couple of years when he hears it. I asked her why and she pointed at the computer screen and read: “Too many toxins, like alcohol, drugs, and even contraceptives, can hinder the effectiveness of Wrap-It products.” Besides, she said, we’re ready.

  ■ ■

  It was past six, the sun had just come up, and Rid and I were pulling out of the day’s first job. On the highway, heading toward the ranch outside Samson, I couldn’t stop replaying the nonconversation Alice and I had the night before. Rid had been hollering at me while I was on the mower but I didn’t hear him. To hell with the straight line.

  “You go stupid overnight, kid?” he asked. “Or do you just not care?”

  “Sorry, Rid. I got lost in my head. That’s all.”

  “Lost? This job doesn’t need a map.” He slowed as we came close to Samson.

  “It’s my wife,” I started. “We got into it last night.”

  “Fighting with the woman, eh. First time I ever heard of such a thing.”

  “Well, you see we don’t fight. She just kinda, you know, tells. And that’s that.”

  “What? You go out with the buds too much? She find a girlie mag on the back of the toilet?”

  “She wants to start a family.”

  Rid looked over to me and just stared. Lines of dust folded into the creases of his mouth and dry grass stuck to the hair at his temples. “So what’s the fucking problem?”

  “We don’t own a home yet,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “So how you suppose to raise a kid without a house?” I knew I was talking at a guy who I had no business talking at. And maybe he was thinking, Who the fuck does this kid think he is? but I didn’t feel the need to justify myself. Sometimes you just want to talk and damn whoever is stuck listening to you. “There’s a way of things, Rid,” I said. “A plan of action.”

  “It’s all broad strokes, kid,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. All this”—he waved his hand over the steering wheel, across the windshield. “Chaos.” He turned down a dirt road. The way he said it, so convinced, maybe not of what he was saying but of himself saying it, sounded like a man familiar with stupidity. He’d seen a world of zero-turn know-nothings and empty houses. He heard too many people say too many things about everything from bank loans to weight-loss Reynolds Wrap. And he didn’t buy any of it. He just wanted his jobs, one at a time, looping forever. Part of me hated him at that moment, hated the dismissal of how the world was according to eyes that weren’t his, but also knowing that he’d probably been some kind of stupid at some point in his life.

  “Yea, but—”

  “But what?” he asked. “But nothing. So your old lady wants you to throw one in
her? That’s her right and who are you to keep that from her?” He pulled into the cul-de-sac. “Not what you had planned? Tough, man up and do it.” He stopped the car before we got to the house. “Now, what in Jesus’ pecs is this righteous mess?” Out the windshield we saw two police cruisers parked in the yard, cherry tops blaring.

  “Might as well pull up and see what’s what,” I said. A cop met us outside the house.

  “What do you two want?”

  “We’re the guys who take care of this place,” Rid said. “We’re with Secured Properties.”

  “Not today, you’re not,” the cop said. He looked into the back of the truck and then at me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Neighbors heard a crash and saw someone moving around inside. You happen to know the squatter here?”

  “No,” I said. Rid shook his head and looked at his watch.

  “But you knew he was living on the front porch?”

  “Not my job to report the homeless,” Rid said. The officer looked over his sunglasses at him and clicked his teeth.

  “We only cut the grass, sir,” I said. “The guy sat on the porch and watched us, nothing else. Been here every time we’ve come around.” I heard someone yell from the house.

  “I told you I’m waiting on the loan. Call the bank. Call them!” The man came from the front door, handcuffed and pushed by two officers. They led him to the back of one of the cruisers. I watched as they tucked his head past the doorframe and could feel the officer’s hand on my own head. Feel the fingers as they matted my hair and locked me away.

  “He busted in the front window,” the officer said. “We found him asleep on the living room floor, using a landscape brick as a pillow. Listen, you guys aren’t working here today.”

  “We don’t work, we don’t get paid,” Rid said.

  The cop didn’t listen. He tapped on the hood of the truck and walked toward the cruisers, pointing and directing the other cops. The car with the man backed out of the lawn, tire tracks rutted into the soft earth, and I wondered how Rid would hide them in the after pictures. As the cruiser passed us, I looked for the man. Here was someone who was being kicked out of his house for the second time. The first time for failing to keep it, the second time for succeeding to get back in it. What else was left for him? I didn’t know but I thought that maybe, if I could see the man, see his eyes, have them tell me across the space of two passing cars that this was all right, that I’d get my answer. I needed that. But I didn’t see the man. He must’ve laid himself down in the backseat because it was like he disappeared as soon as the car left the property, as if, without the house, the man was nothing.