Wild World

by Peter S. Rush

  “Nice to meet you.” Steve smiled and extended his hand to the small lady with her grey hair arranged in a tight bun.

  Mrs. Fisher looked him over again and said politely, without taking his hand, “Nice to meet you.”

  She turned to help Roxy with one bag into the small second bedroom decorated in pink flowered wallpaper, with a single bed and a clown table lamp. “I redecorated the room for you in your favorite color.” Roxy hesitated at the door of the room before entering, putting down her two other bags.

  “Very nice, Mom, but pink is not my favorite color,” she answered.

  “Of course, it is, dear. I remember when you were little, you wanted your room painted pink, and Daddy did it one weekend.”

  “That wasn’t my room. That was Audrey’s room.”

  “I found a nice pink comforter which really brings it all together. And I found your old clown lamp—I know it’s silly, but I thought you would . . .”

  “Mother, are you listening to me?” Roxy’s mother stopped for a moment, looking at her. “Me, Roxanne, your other daughter. That was not my lamp, not the color . . .” She shook her head, giving up, not wanting to start an argument. She looked at Steve, shrugging to indicate she wasn’t sure if her mother had grasped what she had said. He felt sorry for her. She had come out of duty, not because she wanted to. She looked at him and rolled her eyes.

  “It’s very cozy. This new apartment is smaller, but I know you will like it.” Her mother followed her out into the hallway.

  She was a compact woman with grey hair and heavy wrinkles on her forehead. She moved slowly, weighed down with life and a bad hip.

  “Mom, I’m sure it will be fine. Thank you for decorating it. I will get used to the bedroom.” Roxy looked at Steve, pleading for him to take her away, but he knew that was not an option.

  “Steve needs to stay here until he finds a place at OSU,” Roxy informed her mother, who looked unhappy with the announcement. “I told you about it on the phone. Don’t you remember anything?”

  “Maybe for a day.” Mrs. Fisher looked around the room, moving protectively toward her furniture. “He can sleep in the living room, but he has to clean up.” She looked at Steve, the side of her mouth turning down as if she had bitten a lemon. “I can’t have his things . . . lying around.”

  “Yes, Mother. We’ll take care of it.” Roxy’s voice was patient if strained, like she was explaining something to a child for the third time.

  Mrs. Fisher looked at the two of them, and then abruptly averted her gaze as she entered her small kitchen.

  After a dinner of canned tuna baked over egg noodles with a Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and canned string beans cooked grey, Steve picked up the plates and began to bring them to the kitchen, but Mrs. Fisher quickly intercepted him.

  “Let me help you clean up,” he offered.

  “No, it’s my kitchen. I will do it.” And she quickly ushered him away.

  “Aunt Irma and I will be away tomorrow, doing our volunteer work at the Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers. Those poor fallen women need so much guidance. We’ll be going to services on Sunday. I think it would benefit you to come.” She looked directly at Roxy. “And you, too, young man. The way of Jesus is open to all. He is a loving Lord.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Steve nodded politely. He would go through it all for Roxy.

  “Mother, Steve is Catholic.”

  Her mother shook her head. “Jesus has forgiveness for idolaters. You can learn the way of the righteous.”

  “He has to find a place to live, and we have to get jobs.”

  “God will provide.” She sat down in the living room and turned the television to Lawrence Welk.

  “Mother, we’re going for a walk.” Roxy took Steve’s arm and walked him out the door.

  From the apartment complex, they walked into a more residential area of small, tidy Cape Cods and Levitt-style houses, many with second-floor additions or dormers. Steve recognized the same house design, only a thousand miles away from Long Island. Were the people any different? He didn’t think so. Roxy was silent in the warm summer air. The sound of children splashing and laughing in backyard pools echoed among the trees.

  “I don’t know if I can take it,” she finally said, laughing and taking hold of his hand. “This isn’t home. I feel like an animal in a zoo, on display. I don’t think my own mother even knows who I am.”

  “Of course, she does. She has been through a lot. Give her time.” Steve was doing his best to be positive, but he didn’t see much chance that her mother was about to give him her blessing.

  “You don’t understand. I hate pink. I’ve always hated pink, but even more after Audrey got sick. It was her color, not mine—ever. Audrey was her favorite, but when Audrey got sick, Mom couldn’t handle it. Not after my dad died. I was just in the way, but I was necessary.”

  “Don’t say that. Parents don’t feel like that.” He was trying to help, to deflect the anger. They walked awhile in silence. “Was she always this religious?”

  “She was brought up that way, but, around my dad, she dialed it down. We all went to services, but he was a union man—that was his religion. Dad died suddenly, and there wasn’t any dam holding it back. And when Audrey died, the dam burst.”

  “It must be difficult for her.”

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t even come with me to the hospital in Cleveland unless I begged. She wouldn’t deal with it, with the doctors, with the decisions. I was only sixteen. I had to tell her what to ask, what to say. What did I know about . . .” Roxy began to cry. Steve embraced her, letting her tears run down his grey t-shirt.

  “It may get better now that I’m here. Thank you for being my strength. I love you.” They kissed. “Want to go to the high school? I can show you the place under the bleachers where the kids would go to fuck. Maybe I’ll even show you how they did it.” She smiled, taking his hand. They skipped to the high school field.

  Steve and Roxy drove toward the sprawling Ohio State University. Traffic slowed as they neared the sandbagged National Guard checkpoint surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. It looked like the entrance to a prison camp.

  The campus had been occupied by troops since the beginning of May. It was now June first, and the armored vehicles, troop trucks, command Jeeps, and fortified sandbagged sentry posts were still stationed in various configurations around the oval and designed to funnel traffic to the checkpoints. Storefronts whose windows had been shattered early in the demonstrations were covered with plywood. Peace signs and Stop the War and Remember Kent State were spray-painted in red and black on the wood. Several burnt-out cars, their tires gone, hugged the curbs behind the protective barbed wire, too late for their own salvation. The National Guard troops looked exhausted, tense, and young.

  Steve slowed as the car in front of him stopped. He could feel himself tense, not from fear but because he knew this was wrong.

  “This wasn’t a good idea,” Roxy said. “We should turn back.”

  Steve watched her eyes dart around at the armored personnel vehicles and fortified strong points.

  “It’s all right. I called the fraternity, and they said I could have the room. It’s still a free country, and we haven’t done anything wrong.” He patted her hand gently.

  He stopped his Volkswagen at the barricade, manned by two soldiers his age brandishing M-1 rifles with bayonets attached. The scent of tear gas emanated from the uniforms.

  “What’s your business?” the corporal demanded, putting his chin in Steve’s face as he looked into the backseat of the green Bug. “Out of the car.”

  Steve was surprised by the order but exited the car. A soldier pushed him hard against a Jeep. Another soldier, who smelled of week-old dirt, roughly frisked him. He took Steve’s wallet and handed it to the corporal. Two other soldiers circled the Volkswagen. Anger was boiling inside Steve—it was still a free country.

  “New York plates on this foreign car,” one soldier said.

&
nbsp; “What’s this about?” Steve asked, moving forward and squaring his shoulders. He felt violated but knew he had to keep his temper.

  “Shut up.” The solider raised his M-1 as he pushed Steve back to the Jeep, the bayonet in his face. Steve’s anger was rising. He could feel the cold steel of the bayonet against his neck. He pushed down against his anger as he clenched and unclenched his fists. Don’t do anything stupid. He felt he was caught behind the Iron Curtain. Who was in charge? Could they do whatever they wanted? Was there martial law in Ohio? Who the fuck were these storm troopers?

  “You SDS? One of those East Coast radicals?” the corporal demanded.

  Steve tensed and enunciated the words slowly. “I’m going to Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity on campus. I’ll be living there for the summer.”

  A solider looked at Steve’s collar-length hair. “But you’re from New York?” He motioned to the driver’s license. “You lost, or are you an outside agitator?”

  “My girlfriend is from Columbus, so I’ll be spending the summer working and being here with her.” The guard peered into the car, and Roxy gave him her all-American smile. The boy soldier seemed to soften a bit and smiled back at her.

  “Ma’am, where are you from?”

  “Westerville. My whole family is up there.” She batted her eyes flirtatiously at the tired soldiers, and two more came over to speak to her. Steve could see her animated gestures and her constant smiles. One of the soldiers smiled as she continued to work her charm.

  “All right.” The corporal looked Steve over with a weary disgust. “All public demonstrations are banned. Any group that assembles without a permit will be dispersed immediately or arrested. The campus proper is closed until further notice. Carry on.” And he waved them through the barricade.

  Steve gripped the wheel, his fingers blanching. He clenched his jaw as he put the car into gear. He looked at Roxy, who held on to her fearful smile. They were now face to face with the war. “Shit. This is straight out of a Costa-Gavras film; the generals have taken over,” he said.

  Steve walked through the gate to the employment office with the clipping from the newspaper advertising for temporary labor at $6 an hour. The application form was simple to fill out, and he sat in the sparse waiting room, needing to be cleared by the company doctor.

  Buckeye Steel Casting Company is located on 90 acres off Parsons Ave in South Columbus.

  Steve read the company brochure on the table as he waited.

  With more than 22 acres of factory under one roof, the massive foundry has produced railway couplers and other equipment for the railroad industry since it was founded by E.H. Harriman and Frank Rockefeller to supply the great railroad boom of the 19th Century. The company became an industrial giant under the guidance of its President, Samuel Prescott Bush, at the beginning of the 20th Century.

  “Home from college?” The company doctor was middle-aged, with signs of alcohol wear on his face, which explained his current choice of careers.

  “Yeah. Need to pay the bills.”

  When he reported to work, he was wearing the required steel-toe boots, a long-sleeve denim shirt, and jeans as instructed, despite the hot, humid day. The muggy air sat on his skin like a wet sheet, and Steve, who had never been in a factory before, immediately developed a new appreciation for the working class.

  The foreman escorted the new temporary workers through a building that housed the blast furnace and the giant bucket that poured the molten steel into the various forms. The bucket was suspended on a series of railings that allowed it to be drawn down the row of forms—red hot batter poured into little cookie molds that made up the pieces of a railway undercarriage: couplings, wheels, frames, tie bars. Even from a hundred feet away, the heat from the liquid steel caused Steve to break out into a shirt-soaking sweat. Watching the glowing metal stream so smoothly from high overhead was like watching a ballet of industry, each movement endlessly rehearsed and executed, with every man filling his role perfectly.

  The foreman, a man in his forties with thick arms and short hair, directed him to a metal stamping machine. He was instructed to cut metal bars into various lengths with a foot-operated stamp that made a loud chopping sound with each cut. Steve adjusted his plastic goggles and set to work, moving at an easy pace until he filled the two bins with the correct sizes.

  When the lunch whistle blew, one of the other workers tapped him on the shoulder and gestured to him to go outside, where the noise and dirt were not as intense. Steve realized how loud the steady drum of machinery within the factory was when he sat on a packing crate in the yard. They could speak again in normal voices without the constant din of the factory.

  There were a half dozen men sitting in the shade of the factory wall, where the temperature seemed cool after the relentless heat of the building. Each man had a metal lunch bucket, some with thermoses of cool liquids. Their faces were painted with perspiration streaks of dirt, each with a different texture or color from the swirls of grit in the air.

  “Got to slow down, kid,” a small, wiry man with jaundice-yellow teeth said, letting out a long stream of pale tobacco juice. Steve opened his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You ain’t getting paid by piece work, so make the job last.”

  “Where you from, kid?” the bad-toothed man asked, taking a bite of some meat and then picking at his teeth with a piece of wire.

  “Back east. New York.”

  “Ow-eye,” a taller farmer said. “A big city boy.”

  “Not really. I’m from outside the city.”

  “I’m from Kentucky. Up the hollers, as people say. Been down here with kin. Once some of them found work, we followed. This is better work than the mines—at least there is daylight during lunch. What you doing here. Coming to work with us?”

  “Summer job. Going back to school.”

  “Why here?”

  “My girlfriend is from Columbus, so I came out for the summer.”

  “Pussy whipped already. I tell ya, once the old lady has her hooks into a man, there is no going back. Lead you around like a bull with a ring in his nose. Ain’t seen no good come of it.

  “Some time ago, young guy like you come work here. He wasn’t getting any regular, like you. So we told him, you go over to the sand shed and you will see a big barrel with a hole in it about the same size as a pecker. Told him, you put your pecker in there and everything will be all right. So this boy goes over and comes back with a big smile on his face. Says, ‘Boys, you were right. Went over to that barrel and put my pecker in and sure enough, I’m all satisfied.’ So we tell him he can go over there every day except Thursday. Now, this boy is all happy about it, but then says, ‘Why can’t I go over on Thursday?’”

  The Kentucky man paused and the other men smiled at Steve.

  “‘Cause that’s your day in the barrel.’”

  They all cackled with laughter, Steve with them. He admired how focused they were at their jobs, creating sand forms, assembling forged iron into working wheels and railroad undercarriages. He had never seen things made, and he was impressed at their skill. It was a workingman’s world—honest work that they would do for the rest of their lives. What kind of life would that be for him, working in the mill for the rest of his life, hoping to make foreman one day? But he knew he wouldn’t, and he appreciated that he had other opportunities. The whistle blew, signaling the end of the lunch hour.

  “You’re not going out looking like that?” Mrs. Fisher stared at Roxy, who was dressed in a yellow tube top and blue denim miniskirt. Her slim shoulders and legs were already tanned from the summer sun.

  “You should dress like a young lady, not like some trailer trash,” she continued.

  “Mother, I know how to dress.”

  “Do you? What are you advertising? When will you be home?”

  “I don’t know. We’re going into Columbus.” Roxy rolled her eyes as she looked at Steve, who was standing helplessly, witnessing the exchange and knowing his opinion was not welcome. Rox
y was looking very sexy, and he was hoping she would stay the night in his little frat house room.

  “Well, be home by eleven.”

  “Mother, I’m in college; I don’t need a curfew. I may stay in town with friends.”

  “Who?”

  “Enough with the cross examination. We’re going out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Roxy gave her a kiss on the cheek. A scowl crossed Mrs. Fisher’s face, and she turned her back to them, returning to her television.

  As they got into the car, Roxy told Steve, “I don’t know if I can take a full summer of this. I love her. She’s my mother, but I can’t stand her attitude.”

  “You’re all she has left.”

  For several weeks, Roxy had met Steve at the door so he didn’t have to come into the apartment. This time, she had invited him in before they went to the movies.

  “I am going to a revival with Aunt Irma in Finley tomorrow night.” Mrs. Fisher directed her remarks to Roxy, treating Steve like an unknown bystander or a piece of furniture that happened to be in the room. “We’ll be back on Sunday morning after the services. Don’t make a mess of things and create work for me.” She smiled at Roxy. “You should come with us. Two days with the Lord will improve life for you.”

  “Yes, Mother. Have a good time. And give my love to Aunt Irma.”

  “I’ll pray for you.” Mrs. Fisher turned to Steve. “And you, too.”

  “We have a double bed,” Roxy said when they returned from the movies and rolled her eyes to her mother’s bedroom. It didn’t take much encouragement, and they fell into each other’s arms and passionately made love.

  Roxy woke up in a panic, searching for a clock. “What time is it? Shit, shit. Steve, wake up.” She shook him hard to wake him. “It’s almost noon. I don’t know what time she will be home.”

  He fell out of bed, heading for the bathroom.

  “No, no! Not that one. Use the one in the hall.” Roxy was hurriedly pulling the sheets onto the bed. She then carefully made hospital corners at the foot of each side and pulled the bedspread up over the pillows.