Claude reached his spot on the bank opposite the jutting tree, set down his tackle box, and struggled into his waders. Although he knew the water wasn’t anywhere near warm enough to dissuade its trout from feeding, he found a sunny spot and dipped in his thermometer. After a nod at the reading, Claude removed the ant from his styrofoam flyholder—black twine in lumps around a metal hook was all it was, but it sure looked like an ant, and when caught in a current it moved like one too. Claude attached it to his leader. He found a place in the shade and eased himself into the water. The jutting tree was a good twenty yards away, but Claude believed fish could sense changes in water flow from that distance—farther even—so he made sure to move in exaggerated slow motion. His boots barely rippled the water.
Claude poised his rod. With his left hand he tugged line from the reel. He wagged the tip of the rod, and the fly began to swing. Slack in the line ran up the pole. Claude’s forearm motion graduated from a roll to a snap, and before long the antlike fly at the end of the leader looped in long arches above the gurgles of the narrow river. And in! The ant landed at just the right spot, well short of the tree. It floated down the secondary current and disappeared behind the bank.
With the tip of his rod almost touching the water, Claude played the line with his left hand, subtly, so the ant wouldn’t hop or drag, but felt nothing beyond the pull of the current. As he continued to play the ant, he adjusted his rod so it pointed not where he cast the fly, but toward the fly’s present position downriver. A fish swam between Claude and the jutting tree; he could see the adolescent stripes on its side. He reeled the ant home and whipped it overhead to dry it out. Then he plopped it again in front of the jutting tree. From a not-too-distant cabin, the smell of wood stove reached Claude’s nostrils.
On his fourth cast a fish struck. Claude set the hook with a gentle tug and let the fish run, interceding only to discourage the fish from swimming toward a submerged log. As the fish tired itself out, Claude thought of Warren Taylor. They’d fished this very spot together once, about this same time of year. Warren caught the biggest trout that day. He landed his ant firm on the eroded bank, and then nudged it little by little until gravity tumbled it into the water. Back in the stores department the following Monday, Warren wowed the guys with his tale of conquering the Great Trout of Southern Maine.
“Did he really catch one that big?” Frank asked.
“Yes,” Claude said, “but he dapped it.”
“Cheater.”
#
The fish netted by Claude twenty minutes after his fourth cast was also a large trout, as beautiful as it was big, and after Claude set it free he climbed from the river, emptied his pockets into his tackle box (except for the wool gloves; it was getting nippy), and with his rod again pointed behind him headed back toward the shiny new boat.
This time he thought of Joan. What does she mean, she’s leaving? She isn’t going anywhere, she’s staying right where she belongs. Her place is home, with her husband. She supposed to cook, and clean, and sew, and vacuum, and fuss in the garden, and take Jamie shopping. She’s the woman, and home is where she’s supposed to be. I’m the man, and I’m supposed to be...
Claude stopped in his tracks. He stood as if swapping arguments with himself.
Well, he thought, it’s okay if I’m not at work. It’s not my fault. The company gave me a package.
Chapter 40
When Claude arrived home that night, he left the boat hitched to the truck and decided to unload his gear later. Although it was 7:30, the Amognes could still catch a good meal if they hustled, and Claude was ready to hustle, since he hadn’t eaten all day. He opened the front door and saw Jamie standing near the hallway to the stairs, arms folded, mouth closed, staring into his eyes. She didn’t say hello.
“Hi Princess,” Claude said. “Hungry? I promised your mother we’d eat at the best restaurant in town.”
“She’s not here,” Jamie said. “She took her stuff and went to Aunt Connie’s. She said you knew.”
Claude closed the front door. He moved slowly into the living room, and took off his jacket without breaking eye contact with Jamie. He set the jacket on a chair.
“She mentioned it,” Claude said. “But I thought she was just blowing off steam. Why she’s so upset about me getting to retire early, I’ll never know.”
“You’ve got to call her. She packed up a bunch of stuff, and she made me decide whether to go with her or stay here. When I told her it would be too hard to try to get back and forth to school and work from the seashore, she starting crying and told me how much she’d miss me and how much she loved me, and made me promise to call whenever I wasn’t working and set aside at least a day a week when she could visit. She was hugging me and saying goodbye like she was going forever. Like she’s never coming back.”
Jamie’s eyes watered. She looked little. The arms that had come apart to gesture as she spoke now folded across her tummy again. She leaned against the frame of the wide entrance to the small hall, her knees bent, her shoulders slumped, her head drooping forward so her eyes could see the floor. Claude wished for the wisecracking, in-command Jamie to return so they could go have a nice meal. He searched for words that would dismiss the emotional Jamie, the one he didn’t necessarily care for and certainly didn’t understand, but nothing he liked popped into mind. He had to say something, though, because the silence was becoming awkward. Move to hold her? Make a joke? Use a serious tone? He couldn’t decide.
“Aw, Princess,” he said, in a gentle voice, at last. “Don’t cry. We’ll get through this. Maybe spending a few days at Connie’s will be good for her. She’s not gone for good. We’re a family and families stick together. She’ll come back.”
“Will you call her?”
As Claude stared at her face, his head moved once to the left and back to the center. “I can’t,” he said. “I didn’t walk from her, she walked from me. A man has to have the respect of his wife.”
He dug the fingernail of his index finger sharp across his hairline.
“Rhode Island Electric put me out on disability,” he said. “That isn’t a crime. I done nothing wrong, and I’m not crawling to her to beg.”
“She won’t come back unless you call her.”
“She will, Princess, she will.”
“She won’t!”
The feelings Jamie’d been squeezing exploded from her. She slid down the frame until she slumped on the floor and sobbed like a fire trying to burn more fuel than it could handle. Claude crept toward her and knelt to the floor, but didn’t touch her, fearing contact would set off something even worse. The sobbing raged. Twice Jamie lifted her head to speak, and twice she returned her eyes to the floor without uttering a recognizable word. Claude said nothing. Slowly, Jamie’s breathing stopped shaking her. The gushing tears trickled instead. She found her father’s eyes.
“Why should I have to choose?” Jamie said in soft, barely-audible voice. “I go to school. I work. I’m not a slut or a druggie. I do what I’m supposed to. I didn’t cause this, and there’s nothing I can do to end it, but I have to choose, my father or my mother, and it isn’t fair. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. It’s not fair.”
Jamie and Claude shared their spot on the floor in silence a few more moments, until Jamie rose and walked to the downstairs bathroom. Claude shifted from his knees to his butt and pulled his legs in close to his chest. He listened to the water from the bathroom faucet as Jamie let it fall to the porcelain sink. She interrupted the flow to wet her hands and splash water on her face. Her heard the suctiony sound of lathered-up hands rubbing damp cheeks, and thought he smelled her lilac soap all the way from where he sat. Before long, Jamie emerged from the bathroom. Her eyes remained red and puffy, but better, much better, than before.
“I’m not up for a restaurant,” she said. “How about we order pizza instead?”
Chapter 41
Jamie and Claude agreed she’d do the laundry and he’d do the dishes. T
hey agreed to share the cooking duties, but instead fell into the more convenient routine of sandwiches, take-out food, and microwave dinners. Joan took the checkbook, and in a letter addressed to Jamie said she’d had all the important bills forwarded to Connie’s house and would pay them each month from there. She asked Jamie to tell her father to make sure the money for the mortgage, the two truck loans, and the minimum payment on his credit card were in the checking account. Since food money always came from her paychecks, she’d make sure she got it to Jamie, either by mail or in person, each week, along with the coupons she clipped from the Sunday paper, and although clipping coupons was a little like throwing snowballs at a heat wave, she wrote, every bit helped.
At the end of the month Claude’s first disability check arrived, and to his horror $647.37 came out in taxes, leaving him a net of just $1,664.65. It couldn’t be. He called the disability company, and then Brianna Mickleson, and both confirmed the figure was correct.
Claude grabbed a pencil and started scratching. Mortgage, two loans, $100 for his credit card—he’d have $61.11 to spend each month. Each month! Many a weekend night he’d spent that on parking, beer, Chinese food, and a dozen games of Keno, just tossed it away and not given it a second thought. It was $25 to take Jamie to a movie. And baseball, hell, he always went to Fenway Park once or twice a year, plus another four or five trips a year to McCoy Stadium. Now what? A single trip to see the Red Sox would cost him two months’ spending money. Two goddamn months!
Then he thought about Christmas, lurking just around the corner. He never knew what he spent on Christmas, but he always spent it. Three years ago, after Joan showed him an emerald bracelet she bought Jamie for $150, Claude rushed out and bought Jamie one with diamonds for $275. Two years ago, he bought Jamie a suit and matching shoes for $320. Last year, he didn’t buy her one big gift, he recalled, only a collection of “small” gifts: her own DVD player, four compact discs, two sweaters, a pair of blue jeans, a board game, a winter coat. Christmas, the ultimate family holiday, the one time of the year to show people you care about them, and he’d do it on $61.11? Funny.
Good thing for credit cards, he thought.
Although it was only 10:30 in the morning, he twisted open a bottle of vodka and poured himself a screwdriver. By noon, he’d had four tall glasses of the mixture and had grown some kind of pissed off about the number 61.11. He was already broke, while Joan had a full paycheck to party with each week. Well, minus food money. And minus the Buick payment. And minus car insurance and her own credit card payments and the loan to get a new furnace. Even so, that left her...Claude reached again for his pencil, but once he’d picked it up realized he had no idea how much Joan made at the department store. Well what could it be? Fifteen bucks an hour? Seemed low. He crawled under the bed and pulled out the box in which Joan kept her old financial records. He didn’t find anything recent—the box was full, so she must’ve started a new one—but did come across a year-old check stub indicating Joan made $12.05 an hour.
That’s all?
Claude emptied the orange juice carton into another glass of vodka, and stewed. Though he didn’t actually do the math, it was clear to him that while he sat in the family room with $61.11 a month to spend, Joan sat at the beach with $200 or $300 a month to spend. It wasn’t right, and she was going to kick in to make things even. He was still the man of the house, and no man of the house had less to spend than his wife.
But with his next exhale, Claude’s furor left him. He knew he’d never convince Joan to give him money, because to do so he’d have to convince Connie, and that wasn’t happening any time soon. He considered demanding the money on Jamie’s behalf, but chuckled at the very thought. Jamie had more money in the bank than he did. What’s more, she hadn’t asked for money from her parents since the sixth grade.
This is just great, Claude thought. No money, no wife, no vodka. Just great. I’m really living the life, ain’t I?
#
A week passed and although Claude had plenty of groceries he still didn’t have enough money. Already he’d switched to generic vodka, a fair savings, it turned out. But it wasn’t any good. Finally, he had the time to do whatever he wanted, and here he was, sitting around the house day after day because he couldn’t afford to do anything else.
One morning as he giggled at a particularly hokey television ad for a local lawyer, the words “workers compensation” rang in his ears, and in his mind the light above his head went from dim to bright. I was hurt at work, he thought. I could collect workers compensation benefits. It’s legit.
He called the 800 number on the television screen and was transferred by the secretary to Curt Moran, one of the junior attorneys at O’Brien, Borelli, & Hopkins, who set an appointment for 10:00 the next morning and asked Claude to bring all the paperwork given him by the company when he left. When Claude arrived at the law office, he was invited to sit but paced the floor instead. He smiled. When escorted to an inner office, he told Curt his whole tale, from the fleas at DiCecco’s Pizza to the hurricane headaches and the spiders that caused them, gave Curt the names of doctors and hospitals, and waited while Curt photocopied the paperwork from Rhode Island Electric. He signed authorizations to allow Curt to get his medical records. He agreed in writing to pay Curt a third of any award he collected. At the end of their meeting, Curt told Claude he wanted to do some preliminary checking and would call in a day or two to discuss their chances.
The call came that afternoon.
“Mr. Amognes, this is Curt from O’Brien, Borelli, & Hopkins. I have some good news and some bad news. Well, bad news, mostly.”
Claude remained silent.
“In reviewing the paperwork, I see you accepted a check for $5,000 on the condition you waived your right to sue Rhode Island Electric. Is that correct?”
“Well, yes, but we’re not suing, are we? Aren’t we just applying? There’s nothing in my paperwork that says I can’t apply for anything, at least that’s my, um, understanding.”
Curt sighed into the phone. “Sure, Mr. Amognes, you can apply for workers compensation benefits. My secretary has already filled out the paperwork and sent it to both the state and to Rhode Island Electric. But I have to be frank: without the ability to sue, there’s very little I can do for you. Rhode Island Electric will likely deny your claim, and okay, you can appeal it, but once they deny the appeal that’s it. You agreed you wouldn’t sue them.”
“But the paperwork says I’m afraid of bugs. It says the building I work in has bugs. Their own paperwork says I got this condition from getting attacked by bugs. How can they possibly deny that this is work-related?”
“Watch them. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”
Now Claude sighed into the phone. “So where does that leave me?” he said.
“As I indicated,” Curt said, “we filed the paperwork, because it’s worth a try. We won’t even charge you for it. But anything I do from now on I’ll have to bill you for, and our rate is $110 an hour. I’m afraid your prospects are not good.”
Claude dragged himself to the truck and drove to the liquor store to buy more vodka. While in line he saw an array of lottery tickets, and his eyes lit up at the odds and grand prizes: 1 in 4 a winner, 1 in 7 a winner, 1 in 3 a winner. Top prize $30,000, top prize $15,000, top prize $100,000. There were dozens of games, and rolls of cards for each game, in every color.
“Four bottles of vodka,” the cashier said. “Will there be anything else today, sir?”
“Yes, my good man,” Claude said. “One of those green scratch tickets, right there.”
The scratch ticket cost five dollars—Claude expected it to be a buck—and Claude was lucky he had enough money on him. Five dollars! He trembled the entire way to the truck. The game had a baseball theme, nine innings for the home team and nine innings for the visitor. Scratch all nine innings of both teams, and if the visitor scored more runs than the home team, the holder won the prize in the bullpen box. Claude scratched the bullp
en box first: $2,000.
He about dropped his scratch nickel. Two thousand dollars. He was just a few flicks of the wrist from the best Christmas he’d ever had. Claude started on the top line, with the visiting team. He scored two runs in the third inning, one in the sixth, and four in the eighth. Not bad, he thought, seven runs wins most baseball games. He then scratched the bottom line: zero, zero, zero, zero, one, zero, zero, zero.
“Bottom of the ninth,” he said out loud. “I got a six-run lead and my closer is ready.”
He scratched the ninth inning: ten. Ten? Ten! What a fucking rip-off! Who scores ten runs in the ninth inning? It’s almost impossible. It’d take a grand slam with the score tied. He ripped the card in half and threw it out the window.
Then it hit him. I just spent five dollars on that card. He opened the truck door and leaned out to pick up the pieces, which he still owned, which he could use to mark his place in a book or scribble a phone message on or start a very small fire, should he ever need one. As he started to reach, though, he stopped.
“What the fuck am I doing?”
#
To Claude’s relief, the only customer in the Rhode Island Electric credit union was an old retiree describing his recent surgeries to the helpless teller, who tried every conversation-ending phrase she knew without success. Although technically separate entities, the credit union was housed between the company’s customer service department and its relay department, and everyone at the company knew Archie the head of the credit union, Michelle the loan officer, Greta the old teller, Tawny the young teller, and Rachel the secretary. Claude didn’t recognize the face behind the glass, however. When the old man finally left, Claude stepped to the window.
“Hi there,” he said. “You new here?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “How can I help you?”
The Jig of the Union Loller Page 32