The Jig of the Union Loller

by Michael Burnham

“Well I still have all of you,” he said.

  The four others exchanged another round of glances. An awkward silence ensued. Bots walked toward the door and sat at a stool near Greg. At first, Bots, Walt, Greg, and Hal spoke softly, but gradually the awkwardness wore off, and the alcohol flowed, and the conversation became more spirited, and the decibel level returned to normal and then some. Claude sat two stools removed from the men, refrained from looking in their direction, and drank.

  After an hour, he left some money on the bar, waved to Walt, and walked toward the door.

  “Take care,” Walt called.

  The others watched him go.

  Claude walked past the plaza near the insurance building to an Irish pub where a dozen or so college students relaxed after a class-filled morning. They played backgammon, cribbage, and pool, kept the jukebox blasting their alternative-music favorites, and drank dollar beers from plastic cups. The television above the bar had the closed caption option on, so interested patrons could read what they couldn’t hear.

  Although as the only non-student in the pub Claude drew some interesting looks and comments, he didn’t care to fit in, or try to. He sat at the end of the bar, ordered dollar beers, and read an afternoon’s worth of soap operas.

  At five, he headed for the truck, taking the route by the arts center to avoid the Victory Tavern. When he arrived home, Joan asked why he was home so early.

  “We had a few beers,” Claude said, “but there weren’t many people there, so I left early. I wanted to come home and spend time with you and Jamie. Come here and give me a hug.”

  “Not tonight,” Joan said. “Go brush your teeth. You smell like a brewery.”

  Before Claude could make a second attempt, the doorbell rang. It was Frank.

  “Hey old-timer,” Claude said in a loud voice. “What can I do for you?”

  As Frank stepped through the door, Claude put a finger to his lips and pointed to the kitchen.

  “Joan, Frank’s here. We’re going to the family room and make ourselves comfortable.”

  “Hi Frank,” Joan yelled from the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”

  “No thanks,” Frank said from the living room.

  In the family room, Frank sat down and Claude closed the door halfway.

  “What’s up?” Claude said.

  “Just seeing how you are. Are you coming back tomorrow?”

  “Unfortunately,” Claude said. “Let me tell you, though, I could get used to this not working routine in a hurry, no early mornings, no union bullshit, no Schulke. Permanent vacation.”

  Frank laughed. “Bugsy, you’re something. It’ll be good to have you back. I’m sure Joan’ll be glad to get rid of you—you must’ve made a heck of a mess hanging around the house all week.”

  “Actually, I didn’t tell her,” Claude said. “I figured no sense getting her all worked up. What’s done is done. I know what I need to do, and I’ll try to do it. Believe me, it’s a lot easier when she’s not yapping about it every five seconds. Plus, I didn’t hang around the house at all. Out the door by seven each day.”

  He lit a cigarette and pushed back in the recliner to bring the footrest up from the base.

  “So what did you do all day?” Frank said.

  “Partied, mostly. I wandered into this pub downtown, and the guys there were really cool. This one guy, Malcolm, used to drive trains in Pennsylvania. He’s a hot shit. The first day Malcolm and I went out for a sandwich, and the bartender says he’ll trade us beer for a ham and cheese sub. He drank as much as the regulars. There was this huge biker guy—he was scary—and a guy named Greg who has the same taste in music that I do. We talked a lot about bands from the sixties and seventies and stuff. And the other guy got totally blitzed, then sobered up, then got blitzed again, like three or four times each day. It was a hoot.”

  Frank stood up and prepared to go. “Sounds like a good three days,” he said.

  “It was,” Claude said, also rising. “The only thing was, I got a couple of nasty headaches. It was a little weird, because I rarely get headaches. But these were whoppers.”

  #

  Claude rose early Thursday to make a good impression on the boss. He reported to work at 6:30, told Schulke he’d seen the error of his ways, punched in, and began entering invoices into the computer. As Schulke signed forms, Claude turned to him.

  “Excuse me, Tom,” he said. “Is there any word on Warren’s replacement yet?”

  Schulke had grown used to being called “Mr. Schulke sir” by Claude, and the change up caught him off guard.

  “Not yet,” Schulke replied. “The posting is up. When it comes down Monday we’ll open the bid box and see who gets the job. Actually, that reminds me, I’ve got to have Scotty write down a list of everything the new man will need to be trained in. Could’ve used one with Gino, that’s for sure.”

  “Anything I can do?” Claude said.

  “No. I’ll have Scotty take care of everything.”

  Outside the office, the men of stores accomplished nothing, sitting on forklifts and talking about the hurricane that whacked the Caribbean in the night. When Schulke noticed, he dispersed the group. Back in the office, he remembered the training list, so he called Scotty in and mentioned the project.

  “No problem, boss,” Scotty said.

  “Anything I can help with?” Claude said.

  “Sure,” Scotty said. “When you’re done with those invoices, why don’t you draw a good map of the department the new person can carry around. No need to get too specific, just list general categories like regulators, safety clothing, recycling bins, and so on.”

  “Roger dodger,” Claude said.

  Schulke began to object, seeing no reason why Scotty couldn’t do the map himself, but stopped short. An hour before lunch, Claude grabbed a clipboard and climbed to the nest to draw his map. Frank pointed to the security camera, and Claude responded by waving and pursing his lips to the humming box. Darezzo sat on an outside rail near the meter department, flirting with one of the young honeys as she took a smoke break, and John Carrollton carried a small box of something up and down the rows, seeking without success the correct place to store it.

  The map complete, but with ten minutes to go until lunch, Claude lingered in the stacks and practiced facial expressions a severe headache might spur. He pressed his temples with his palms, pushed a fist firmly against his forehead, and squinched his eyes while biting his lower lip. Gino rounded the corner and caught Claude squinching.

  “If you’re too lazy to walk to the bathroom, fine,” Gino said. “But Jesus, at least have the energy to drop your drawers.”

  Chapter 28

  The last Saturday in September brought warm temperatures and sunny skies. Claude and Nate Coffey went to the Central High football game to watch Aaron Coffey run Central’s offense. Jamie and Betty Allen went to the West High football game, and afterwards planned to attend the senior corn roast, where Peter Greeley would join them.

  Joan sat in the kitchen and looked at the sky through the window over the sink. It’s truly a day to be happy, she thought, so nice outside, with the trees changing color and a gentle breeze blowing. I bet everyone I know is having fun right now. It’s a perfect day.

  She reached for the phone and dialed Connie, who answered after the second ring, but Connie only heard the throaty, chopped-up squeaks of someone sobbing.

  “Who is this?” Connie said. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Joan dragged two short sniffles through her nostrils. “It’s me,” she managed.

  “Joan?”

  No direct answer came, but a wave of sobs confirmed Connie’s guess.

  “What’s the matter?” Connie said.

  “Everything.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “I’m fat, I have a crappy job, my husband doesn’t think I’m sexy...”

  “Oh,” Connie said. “Everything. Listen, Joan, I’ve got the girls here for cards, but we should
be done in an hour or so. When we finish, I’ll come right over. Can you hold yourself together for another hour? Hello?”

  “You don’t have to come over.”

  “Yes I do. And I will. I’ll be there in an hour, and we’ll talk. Maybe we’ll take a drive. Or go for a walk. We’ll sort the whole thing out, you’ll see.”

  “Okay,” Joan said.

  “In the meantime, go out to the garden and make it a little better than it is now. Pick whatever’s left. Weed anything that doesn’t belong. Heck, if it’s a big pile of dirt with not a thing growing, all right, then grab a rake and smooth it out, just as long as you’re doing something in the garden until I get there. Promise me you’ll work in the garden until I get there.”

  “Okay,” Joan said. “I promise.”

  Connie scanned the three faces around the card table. “Oh and honey,” she said, “leave the hedge clippers in the garage.”

  Joan smiled, but held the phone to her ear long after her sister hung up.

  Joan started toward the garden, but never made it. On her way through the breezeway, she dropped to the floor in front of the bookcase and plucked a photo album from a shelf. Before she opened it, she looked around. Nobody ever spent time in the breezeway. Nobody else Joan knew even had a breezeway, and the Amognes wouldn’t either if the realtor hadn’t named it for them as she led Claude and Joan from the kitchen to the garage on their initial tour of the house. The name made sense, because when the door leading to the driveway and the door leading to the back yard were both open, voila, a breeze. But no work went into the breezeway. It had a bookcase, two small stands, and a floor lamp, and on the walls still hung the three pieces of yard-sale art Claude purchased for $2 each the week he and Joan moved in. The breezeway didn’t even have a chair. Joan counted on her fingers: kitchen, living room, family room, our bedroom, and bathroom downstairs; Jamie’s room, the guest room, and Jamie’s bathroom upstairs—not counting bathrooms the breezeway was one-seventh of their house, and it didn’t even have a chair.

  We’ll fix that, she thought. Every house in this room is going to feel wanted. I’m going to buy a nice chair and put it here and once in a while come out just to sit in it. No, one chair is no good. Need two. What am I saying? A room feeling unwanted? I must be going nuts.

  She flipped the album open to a picture of Claude and Jamie in the back yard. Jamie stood straight, stiff almost, her spaced-out baby teeth bared in a way that showed she hadn’t yet learned to smile for a camera, with her arms by her side and her fingers extended flat against her thighs. Joan moved her eyes left to Claude, dressed in cutoff shorts and a gray concert tee shirt with maroon sleeves, wearing sunglasses and a huge grin. His left hand held Jamie’s left shoulder. His right arm stretched in the other direction, hand open, fingers spread, and when Joan took the photograph she thought it was simply a “ta-da” motion by Claude—hey, here we are, take our picture—a fluid movement frozen by the camera, but later, when Joan opened the envelope from the photo lab and saw the picture, she knew immediately it was a punishment from God. There was her husband, her mate, smiling the definition of happiness, with his left hand on the shoulder of the daughter they had and his right hand on the shoulder of the son they didn’t. When she first saw the photo she thought to destroy it, but knew that would only bring another punishment upon herself, and dutifully placed it in the album among the other pictures.

  Before the picture had been taken, she’d agreed to have another baby. When she saw the photo, she immediately went off the pill, where Claude thought she’d been for weeks. But instead of making babies, she made excuses. She feigned illnesses large and small and did not have sex with her husband. Early in her next cycle, with her husband on the edge of forceful and her imagination exhausted, she opened her legs and let her husband make love to her. When Joan fell asleep that night, that very night, the first in which she believed there was a chance of pregnancy, nightmares tortured her. She awoke screaming, not once but hour after hour. When the nightmares continued for three more weeks, Joan spent a succession of midnight-to-morning hours crying on the couch, huddled with a stuffed bear as her husband snored a room away. Then her next period came, and after it did, Joan called in sick and drove to her childhood church, where she hadn’t appeared in years, to thank God for not impregnating her again. However, as she knelt, praying in silence and gazing above the altar at the statue of a tortured Jesus on the cross, guilt crept upon her, and she resolved to try for a second child, nightmares or no, for her husband and for her family, and sure, for her god too. Even though she and her maker had been estranged in recent decades, she believed the signs, so sure, she’d try for her god too.

  It wasn’t easy. The prospect of pregnancy didn’t bother her so much, because her pregnancy with Jamie had been a breeze. But the weeks after her birth were anything but. Joan thought back to Jamie’s infancy, to the day she searched every inch of the house for a revolver Claude might have hidden within its walls, to the day she stood atop the stairs with Jamie and wailed because she wanted to throw her baby to the bottom, to the day she picked up the phone to commit herself as an awful monster unfit to continue in society, replacing the receiver only after she realized she’d be leaving Jamie with Claude, at least when Gail needed a break, and she couldn’t do that to her little girl. When she pictured the son she might have, it always looked like Jackie, and swore like Jackie, and drank like Jackie, even as it waddled in its diapers, and although she succeeded in purging from her mind the image of herself standing atop the stairway with that son in her arms, never could she purge the image of that same son broken and bloody eighteen steps below her, Little Jackie dead for the fears Joan Amognes could not keep from strongarming her soul.

  Joan never again exposed an unprotected womb to her mate. She renewed her prescription and hid the birth control pills beneath the front seat of her car during the week and on top of the lighted mirror in Jamie’s bathroom on weekends. She told Claude she loved him, and told him this time, this time, this time, she hoped she’d conceive the son they both wanted.

  #

  Joan heard a car door slam and craned her neck to be sure the vehicle belonged to Connie and not Claude. It did. Connie came in through the front door to the living room, heard her sister call, and followed the voice to the breezeway, where she saw Joan smiling beneath red-welted eyes, still seated on the floor with the photo album open on her lap.

  “I never made it to the garden,” Joan said. “Sorry.”

  They both laughed. Joan stirred to get up, but before she could rock herself toward her feet Connie dropped beside her and wrapped both arms around her younger sister’s shoulders. For a moment they just sat. When Connie released Joan, she lifted the photo album, gently closed it, and returned it to the wrong spot on the shelf.

  “Don’t tell him,” Connie said. “At the lake you promised me you’d never tell him.”

  “I won’t,” Joan said. “He’d only fly into a rage. But still, it’s hard. I remember how sad he was when I told him I was going back on the pill, and geez, that was when Jamie was ten. If he knew I’d been on it all along...”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “It’s everything,” Joan said.

  Her lip quivered and tears pooled in her eyes. “I’m such a loser. I work in the appliance section in a crappy department store, and I’ll never move up because I’m fat and uneducated. Connie, I’m not that old! But this is what it’s going to be for me every day for the next 25 years. This is the best it gets for me: a bottom of the barrel job that anyone could do. That’s what I am.”

  “So quit. Nothing says you have to do something you don’t want to do.”

  “I’d love to quit, Connie, I’d really love to. But whenever I work up the nerve, I get this empty feeling in my stomach, you know, like how you feel inside when a friend drops in and you know you haven’t cleaned the bathroom. Those bad juices.”

  “But those bad juices go away,” Connie said, “when
you clean the bathroom. Maybe if you quit your job, the bad juices will go away then, too.”

  “They won’t,” Joan said. “That’s the problem. I can leave my job, but I can’t leave my job. You see what I mean? I can quit Home & Yard tomorrow, but I can’t quit being a salesperson at a department store, because if I try another line of work I’m as bottom as it gets there, too, and at least with a department store I know what I’m doing and I’m good at it. So even if I quit Home & Yard, all I’m going to do is turn around and apply to another department store, because that’s what my resume says I do. And what if I can’t find another job right away, what kind of loser would I be then? An unemployed floorwalker. I don’t think I could handle it. What would Jamie think? What kind of example would that set for her, if one day I just decided I wasn’t going to do the things I have to do? Plus, I mean, I couldn’t go to Claude and ask for money. He wouldn’t give it to me. ‘Get a job,’ he’d say. And he’d be right, because if I can work I should work. And there I’d be, right back at the very bottom for the first department store willing to take me.”

  Connie shook her head. “Listen to yourself,” she said. “Listen to yourself talk about how much your family needs you and how much you’re there for them. You go to work so Jamie will be proud of you, so you have money for fun things to do, so your husband will respect you. You just said so yourself, and that’s not the talk of a loser, Joan. That’s the talk of a somebody. You have responsibilities and you meet them, you know your job well, and you do it well. You fit in. You belong there.”

  “I belong there. Oh brother. Do you know they gave a promotion to a twenty-year-old kid? She got an associate’s degree, and now she’s an assistant manager. I’ve been there for years. But she’s a size three with a college degree and I’m five times bigger with no education at all.”

  Connie swiveled from Joan’s side to a position directly in front of her. She held Joan’s wrists.

  “Listen,” Connie said, “it’s never too late to go to school if you want to. Community colleges are loaded with people our age, and it isn’t that expensive, plus I can help. And you can lose weight too, if you’re willing to watch what you eat and exercise regularly—not just here and there, but every day, hard, until you’re good and sweaty.”