by J. R. Helton
“Damn, Tyler.”
“I get home, an’ my worthless fuckin’ cousin from Conroe is there. He’s stayin’ at my house, an’ I really don’t like that. He don’t bathe, he stinks, don’t clean up after himself, he won’t do the dishes, he’s always drunk. I told him he was gonna have t’ leave. I don’t wanna hear his sorry-ass problems, I got enough of my own. He better be gone when I get home . . . which is, uh, see, that’s another thing: I don’t have my truck no more.”
“Uh-oh.”
“An’ you know Tim, if you ain’t got a car, you ain’t got a job.”
“Where is it?”
“They impounded it, an’ I can’t get it out ’cuz I got all these fuckin’ tickets. I was wonderin’, uh, I knew you, uh . . . lived close by, maybe if you could give me a ride home. I know you’re eatin’ an all—”
“You want a sandwich?”
“No thanks, I’ll just throw it up right now.”
“I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Okay, man, I’d ’preciate it. I’m kinda in trouble right now.”
“No problem, Tyler.”
I finished my sandwich, locked the apartment, and we went down to the LTD. I’d put some windows in it now and propped them up with one-by-fours inside the doors. It was a vast improvement, no more rain or snow in the car, but it got hot in there since I couldn’t roll them down. We drove around the corner to Tyler’s duplex. I stopped in front, and Tyler got out.
“Oh shit,” he said.
“What?”
“My cousin’s still here.”
“Well. . . .”
Tyler looked depressed. “Say . . . uh, you think I should call Becky? Just call her, maybe go by her house, just walk by—”
“I wouldn’t go back over there, man. She’s called the cops on you twice.”
“I oughtta go bust out her windshield, like I did last time. Bust it out with her head.”
“Listen, you really shouldn’t go back over there. In fact, you should blow her off completely.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. You need some time apart. I think if you stay away, maybe she’ll call you.”
“She’s done that before. When I gave her the cold shoulder, she came crawlin’—”
“There you go. Just do something else. Maybe even get another girlfriend for a while—”
“But I love Becky. I wanna marry her.”
I sighed. “Well, you can’t marry her if you keep going to jail.”
“I got other girlfriends, I guess.”
“Call one of them, shit. If you go back to jail, you’ll miss work and you’ll be broke and fucked.”
“Okay, man, thanks for the ride. Sorry ’bout bargin’ in. Maybe . . . uh, you could . . . uh, give me a ride to work tomorrow or somethin’ . . . . Maybe?”
I hesitated. “I don’t think so. I have to take Susan to work every morning.”
“Oh.” He seemed upset. “Well, that’s okay. I’ll get up there some way. I guess I’ll see ya tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
I went and got some gas, put some oil in the big leaky engine, and drove back to the apartment. I thought maybe I should give him a ride to work. But that was how it started. If I gave him one favor, he’d ask for a million more. I’d seen him mooch off everyone in the shop. I turned on the TV and forgot about it.
I got drunk that night and was late getting to work the next morning. I walked into the shop hungover and tired. I went into Tim’s office. He was sitting behind his desk interviewing an old well-dressed painter. Some painters, the older they got (if they didn’t disintegrate into nothingness) the more artistic they became, dressing like dandies almost, wearing funny hats, silly overalls, and sweaters. I handed Tim my time card so he could mark down my lateness. He checked everyone’s punch-in time.
“You’re late,” he said loudly.
“I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“You’re late. You’re ten minutes late.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“It’s seven forty. I’m gonna have to dock you thirty minutes for that.”
“All right, Tim. What do you want me to do? Go back in time?”
“Huh?”
“It’s already happened. I wasn’t here and now I am. It’s over, so quit telling me about it.”
“I’m gonna have to dock you.”
“Then dock me! Shit!”
Tim turned to the old painter: “What’s his problem?”
I walked out of his office and into the coffee room. Everyone sat silently beneath a flickering fluorescent, reading their papers, smoke rising from their cigarettes and white Styrofoam coffee cups. I sat next to Jay, a congenial, muscle-bound country boy from San Marcos who was the best and highest-paid painter at APS. He asked me, “Did you watch the game last night?”
“No, I missed it.”
I looked around the shop. It was the same every morning. We sat there like we were already dead, waiting for Tim to dole out some work. Some of us would go home, some would work. We never knew until the last minute.
“Hey, man,” Jay said.
“What?”
“Did you hear about Tyler?”
“No, what?”
“He’s in jail again.”
“I just saw him yesterday right after he got out. I gave him a ride home.”
“No, no, he’s going to the big jail, Huntsville. He shot his cousin last night.”
“No shit?”
“Shot him in the head.”
“He killed him?”
“I think so.”
Several others wearily lifted their heads and confirmed it. “Yeah. He killed him.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “Are they sure Tyler did it?”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “He called the police and turned himself in. Tim was gonna fire him anyway.”
“Yeah, he told me that.”
Jay was looking at the sports section of the Austin Times-Tribune.
“Are you reading that?”
“Not really, here.”
I began to read the front page of the paper, lit a cigarette, and waited for Tim to tell me where to work.
* * *
Susan and I moved out of the apartment. We wanted to get our own place since the apartments were so noisy. If creative people like Dwayne the filmmaker weren’t dropping by, speed-freak couples were screaming and fighting with each other below us, or some guy was beating up his wife and kids next door, or somebody was stealing from somebody’s apartment, or the guys next to us had their music turned up so loud the bass line shook my teeth.
We found a rent house in a nicer neighborhood called Harris Park. The house was very small, like a playhouse almost, just one room with a kitchen and half-bathroom, but it cost much more than the apartment, and the rent alone was tough to make. It was behind the garage of a nicer, normal-sized home rented out to a red-haired Episcopalian priest who was in school at the seminary across the street. He had a wife and two red-headed girls. Some cokehead girl from UT had lived in our shack before, and the place was full of roaches, giant clumps of them, moving in masses across the walls and floors. We roach-bombed it twice and barely made a dent in the population. I painted the tiny place, which was easy but our new landlord was very cheap and didn’t reimburse me for my time or the paint or knock off any of the already exorbitant rent.
Susan was happy at first to be in the new Crackerjack box, and I guess I was too. The move broke us financially, but we had enough money left the first week to buy some food and dope and wine. We moved our stuff in, got drunk, and celebrated. I needed a raise to pay for our new high rent though, and a new transmission for the LTD, and on and on. I’d been at APS for a couple of years and still made only $7.50 an hour. I felt I did the same work as the ten-dollar-an-hour men now and wanted equal pay, but I had to catch Tim in a good mood, which was an incredibly difficult thing to do. I decided to hang around on a Friday evening. Everybody had been paid that day, and the
y were drinking and doping in the parking lot, figuring out ways to spend it all. Around six-thirty I told Tim, “I need to talk to you.”
He look worried, said, “Oh shit,” and walked away.
I cornered him in the shop. “I need to talk to you, Tim.”
“So talk.”
“In your office.”
“I don’t want to hear this shit.”
“Come on. . . .”
Tim waddled into his office and eased himself down into the big leather chair behind his desk. “Are you gonna quit?”
“No, I want a raise.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“Well, I need one.”
Tim pulled out a file from a drawer—my file, I guess—and looked it over, tapping a pen on his desk. “You’ve been late a lot.”
“I’ve been here about two years. I think I deserve a raise.”
Tim stared at the file. “You know times are getting rough again. The commercial business has really slowed down. You’re lucky you have a job.”
I stared at him, his big jowls and shiny forehead. I sat there silently and waited for him to talk.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he finally said. “We don’t want to lose you. You’re a good worker, you always have clean whites on, you show up for work, you have a car, you can talk to customers—”
“Then why can’t I have a raise?”
“First I want to know what your intentions are.”
“What?”
“What are your plans for the future? Are you just going to quit and run over to Mike at Mike’s Interiors and use everything we’ve taught you over there? If you did that I’d be very disappointed.”
I took a sip of my beer and spilled some down my shirt. “Tim, I don’t know what my plans are. What I’d really like to do, if anything, is quit. I can’t believe I’m even working here. I should probably go back to college.”
He stared at me for a second and then shrugged. “Well, at least you’re honest. Let me tell you something,” he went on. “This wasn’t exactly where I wanted to end up either, you know, babysitting a bunch of dumb-asses. When I was your age in Alabama I never knew I’d be running a painting business over here in shit-hole Texas trying to feed a family.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Well, you’re only forty.”
“I’m thirty-nine. What I’m saying is I don’t want to stay in this painting business forever either. Besides, the economy’s slowing down. I’m seriously thinking about selling this business and starting a new line of work. A new profession. I’ve only told a few people about it.”
“What profession?”
“You know I’m very active in the church.”
“Right.”
“You saw my pastor the other day—”
“He drives that yellow Lincoln.”
“Right, that’s him. He thinks I’m a real good public speaker. He let me give a couple guest sermons at the church. So, I don’t know. . . . I was thinking of becoming a preacher.”
“Really?”
I briefly saw that other side of him again. He seemed shy about it all, insecure. “Yeah. I don’t know, maybe. What do you think?”
“I think you’d be a good one. I think you’d be perfect.”
Tim smiled, his whole face brightened up. “Really? You think so? My wife thinks I can do it, too.” He looked down at my file and pushed it aside. “Alright, I’ll give you nine dollars an hour, but with more money comes more responsibility. I expect you to take some of that responsibility.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks, Tim.”
He opened the top drawer of his desk. “You coming to the Easter party?”
“I thought Easter was last week.”
“No, it’s this week. I’m having a party, and you better show up. You haven’t come to one company party yet. You better be there.”
“I will.”
He pulled a vial out of the drawer, got up and locked the office door, and took a framed photo under glass of his family off the wall. “You can keep a secret, right?’
“You know it.”
“You wanna do a couple lines? It’s pretty good stuff.”
“Sure.”
Tim did out a couple of large lines. He handed me a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill, and I did half of a white line that stretched across the length of the picture. I swallowed and tasted the good bitter cocaine against the back of my quickly numbing throat. That first rush came, and I felt better than I had in months.
“Don’t tell anybody I do this,” Tim said, bending to the glass.
“No problem.”
“Jesse was the only other guy who knew.”
“And look what happened to him.”
* * *
I was made a foreman then and hooked up with Jay, the friendly farm boy from a small town called Martindale, just outside of San Marcos, thirty minutes south of Austin. Jay and I would only paint residential now instead of commercial. It was strange when Jay and I painted someone’s house; it was like we moved in with them for three or four weeks. Jay, with much more experience than me, set the tone for our behavior on the first job we did. It was a lawyer’s expensive house in Tarrytown. After the man left in the morning, Jay opened his refrigerator, took out some milk and snacks, went into the living room, and turned on the big-screen TV. He even watched one of the guy’s videos, some movie called First Blood, with Sly Stallone running around in the woods with a bandanna on his head shooting people.
Jay told me he was a real country boy, raised by a sorghum and corn farmer on their family land outside of San Marcos, where they worked from dawn until dark every day but Sunday. His father was now crippled by a stroke though, and in a wheelchair. Jay went to visit him often.
“He had the stroke, and then Mama had the tumor, they sold off almost all the land and now, he don’t do nothing. He just sits in that goddamn wheelchair. I go out there every few weeks and take him out and drive him around. Last week I took him to see all the maize coming up. I pushed him down the road around the edge of the fields. I know he likes it, but he don’t say nothing no more. His face is all paralyzed.”
Jay’s favorite subject was sports, particularly the high-school-football schedule of the San Marcos Rattlers. Every Monday he’d ask me: “Did you read about the Rattlers’ game?”
“No.”
“Oh, they’re kicking ass, man. You gotta come out to one of the games with me. The Rattlers are gonna go all the way to state this year.”
Jay said he had once been a San Marcos Rattler himself, had played football there, but was forced to drop out at sixteen when his girlfriend got pregnant. Now, on his second wife and several kids later, he still talked about his big mistake.
“I let my little head do the thinking for my big head. That bitch is taking me for everything now. She’s married and has three of the kids and she’s brainwashing them against me. I never should’ve fucked her, and now Sheila wants to have another baby. That’s gonna be five. I can’t even pay the support for the other ones, and this new dip-shit Attorney General Jim Mattox has that goddamn child-support law and they wanna throw my ass in jail or garner my wages. Man, I was a ballplayer, fastest guy in the school, faster even than the brothers, and then I shot it all to shit.”
Jay had many, many problems, but he was always laughing and smiling about his fate, and I liked that. He was a religious man, a Christian like Tim Wilson, and went to church two times a week. But he had a secret wish he shared with me.
“I want to fuck a nigger whore. I just wanna do that one time before I die. See that big black ass in front of me and climb all over it. I’ll never do it,” he said sadly. “Sheila’s gotta know where I am every goddamn second of the day.”
While he talked, we painted and I nodded and said “Yes” and “Really” occasionally, but mostly I tried to let my mind wander. Leaning over somebody’s toilet, painting their smelly baseboard, I’d daydream about being somewhere, anywhere, else. Whenever I did get there,
Jay would walk into the bathroom and, however good-naturedly, bring me back home.
“Hey, man, you wanna go to San Marcos High tonight and kick some field goals with me?”
I got up from behind the toilet. “I’ll pass, Jay.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. Sheila’s gonna bring a stopwatch and time me in the hundred. You’ll get to see how fast this white boy really is. I’ll prove I still got it.”
“That’s okay. I believe you.”
“All right, man, you’re missing out.”
* * *
We were painting a big house that belonged to a successful insurance salesman named Mr. Abernathy. Jay was in love with the guy since he’d played football for UT years ago. Mr. Abernathy was also a very religious man and had sculpted praying hands jutting off the walls in every room. Church diplomas of some sort were framed and mounted. Bibles lay on the bedside tables next to pictures of his wife and daughters. When the family left in the mornings, Jay and I went through their papers and belongings as we did in every house, not trying to steal anything, just looking for something interesting. Mr. Abernathy wasn’t very tricky. I found two large stacks of Cheri and Hustler magazines hidden in his bathroom cabinets, their covers fairly tame, topless women with large bad perms. In just about every house I painted, the husband had some porn mags stashed somewhere. Jay and I went through them and put them back.