by J. R. Helton
“You’re asking me?”
“Yeah, I’m asking you. How much do you think we should charge?”
“Less than twenty cents a pound.”
“How much less?”
“Shit, I don’t know. They’re your pumpkins.”
“That’s right. I guess I’ll charge eighteen cents a pound. That sound good to you?”
“Sure.”
We went into the trailer, and Danny showed me the scale to weigh pumpkins on.
“This scale cost twenty-five dollars so be careful with it. Keep an eye on it. Don’t let anybody steal it.”
“Okay.”
“Be careful with it when you weigh those big pumpkins. If you break it, you have to buy me a new one.”
“Okay.”
He gave me another tour of the grounds, and we smoked a joint. He had some ugly patio furniture for sale and asked me to memorize all the prices. There were also several large heavy barbecue-pit smokers. All were very expensive. Danny wanted me to memorize a little speech he’d made up to tell customers about the smokers, but he couldn’t remember it himself. He gave me a little booklet on their construction instead. We walked back through the yard, went over the grass prices one more time. All the St. Augustine was stacked on pallets, and it was turning yellow and brown. He saw me looking at it.
“It just does that,” he said. “It turns green again when you plant it.”
“Right.”
Vicente was out there working, stacking a small supply of oak logs and throwing away rotten pumpkins.
Danny drove away. Whenever he left, I was supposed to sit at the phone and wait for pumpkin, grass, firewood, patio furniture, or barbecue-pit customers. I spent most of my time smoking his dope. Danny had said I could help myself to the large bag of “Mexican shit weed” in his desk anytime, so I did. One day, at his request, I made a flimsy scarecrow out of old clothes and hay Danny had left me and put it next to a stack of pumpkins by the freeway. It was supposed to attract customers, he said. Few came, and nobody called.
Danny was gone a lot. One day he happened to return just as a woman was driving up in a station wagon. She and several kids jumped out. The kids ran around the pumpkins Vicente and I had stacked up around some scraggly trees next to the highway. They looked at my scarecrow. The woman asked me if we had any pumpkins for sale.
“Yes ma’am.”
“How much are they a pound?”
Danny stepped between us. “Well,” he said. “The big ones are eighteen cents and the little ones are twenty-five cents a pound. They’re more expensive.”
“They’re only thirteen cents a pound at Tom Thumb for all sizes,” the woman said.
Danny looked at me and frowned.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, “but, uh, these are organically grown.”
“They are?”
“Yeah, up in Deaf Smith County. They got lotsa organic stuff up there.”
“Oh well,” the woman said. “I was hoping I could maybe buy a few big ones and you’d give me a bag of those little ones for the kids.”
“I don’t know about that,” Danny said.
The woman was very nice and polite. “I’m sorry, it’s just that they’re from the orphanage.” She smiled. “I work at the orphanage off Highway One and we don’t have a budget to speak of. I have enough money for a few of the big ones, but I can’t pay for all the little ones. See, we were hoping every child could have his own little pumpkin. We’re having a Halloween party.”
“Well, I’m sorry about this,” Danny said. “But I can’t just give them away.”
“I can probably bring some more business down here,” she said. “I know some other teachers who need pumpkins for their classes.”
Danny looked at me and the woman warily, as if we were in it together. “Listen, I’m sorry, but how do I know that’s true? Those teachers could come down here and ask me to give ’em away too.”
“I guess they could,” the woman said. “Come on, kids.”
The children were confused. “No pumpkins? We can’t get any pumpkins?”
“No, the prices are too high here. We’ll go down to Tom Thumb.”
“I can’t give ’em away,” Danny said.
The woman said nothing, loaded up the kids, and drove off.
“Shit,” Danny said, “that was our first customer.”
* * *
Not many people were buying Danny’s pumpkins. As Halloween approached, they rotted in increasing numbers. Vicente hauled them off, working hard all day. I sat in the trailer. Every once in a while I’d sell a pumpkin, or Danny would send me off in a rickety truck, pulling a rickety trailer, overloaded with St. Augustine pallets to deliver to someone’s yard.
My first delivery was a large one in a new subdivision off MoPac, unloading three full pallets of grass onto some doctor’s bare dirt front yard to give him a lawn. When we were finished, he and Vicente and I stood back at the edge of the street and surveyed all our hard work. The grass was obviously dying when seen as a large yellow and browning whole, with only a few hints of rectangular green here and there. The doctor shook his head.
“It just does that,” I said. “It turns green again when you plant it.”
He stared angrily and reluctantly handed me a check made out to Danny. We got in the truck and got the hell out of there. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t believe it either.
* * *
When Vicente rode in the truck with me, we’d try to talk. I spoke a little Spanish from a semester in college and growing up in Central Texas. The first thing that Vicente got me to understand was that he wanted some clothes. I told Danny about it.
“He wants to go to the store.”
“He wants everything. He smells like shit. I told him to take a bath.”
“It’s his clothes. They have rotten pumpkins all over them.”
“Tell him to change his fucking pants.”
“Those are the only ones he’s got.”
“Well, shit. All right, I’ll take him to Kmart. Answer the phones.”
He drove away with Vicente and left me in front of the silent phones.
Halloween came and went. In spite of my scarecrow and lowering prices to seventeen cents a pound, Danny sold few pumpkins. Almost all of them had rotted anyway, and Vicente hauled them off.
* * *
Danny came in one day wearing a new, expensive, Western-style suit and new cowboy boots and a white hat. “I’m thinking of running for sheriff,” he explained.
Another day he bought an unusually expensive speaker phone for the office trailer. He couldn’t figure out the buttons, and nobody called anyway. Then he ran off and dropped a bunch of money on two mobile phones for his trucks that barely ran. The mobile phones were from Motorola, two large beige plastic bricks with black antennas. The one for the truck had to be attached to some battery bag to keep it charged. They cost about fifty cents a minute to talk on, but Danny was very excited.
“You can reach me from all over the city. I can call in wood orders to you while you’re still out delivering.”
“Great.”
The mobile phones didn’t work at all. It seemed they had a range of about five miles or so and hung up on the caller constantly. They worked correctly one time when I had to call Danny and tell him the police had just pulled me over and given me four tickets personally because of his piece-of-shit truck, and that they were questioning Vicente about being an illegal immigrant.
“Did you tell them my name?” he asked me.
“It’s on the side of your truck.”
“Oh yeah. But not my last name. Just get out of there.”
I hung up, gave them Danny’s last name, his address, everything, and they let me go. But they kept Vicente, yanked him out of the truck, stuck him in their car, and sent him back to Guatemala.
* * *
Nobody bought any of the crap he had lying around. People stopped by occasionally out of curiosity, saw the high-priced patio furniture, the expens
ive barbecue smokers that weighed several tons apiece, rotten pumpkins everywhere, and they drove away. The grass business was down because it was fall and the economy was down, and when the economy’s down, I guess the last thing people need to do is run out and sod their yard. I sat in the trailer with Danny, smoking dope, and it drove him crazy that he was paying me and there wasn’t much to do.
His driver came in one day, delivering a full load of brown St. Augustine pallets to the yard. The driver’s name was Pete, and he talked to me while Danny looked over the truck. Pete told me he was pissed because Danny rarely paid him, and when he did the checks bounced half the time. The big semi he drove constantly broke down, and it was Danny’s truck, not Pete’s, and he felt Danny should have to fix it rather than blame him for everything that broke. Pete then told Danny this, and Danny threatened to fire Pete on the spot.
“You don’t know how to drive a truck, goddammit! I oughtta can your ass right now. What did you break this time?”
Pete was nervous and stammering. “Don’t fire me, Danny. I need this check to pay my electric and water. I gotta lotta bills, an’ child support an’—”
“I oughtta take this shit outta your check. What did you say was broken?”
“Uh, it’s that spring under there. I told you we loaded too heavy this time.”
“Well, Pete, we gotta overload because if I don’t overload I don’t make any money, and every other driver I’ve ever had who’s overloaded don’t get pulled over or break down near as much as you.”
“I’m sorry, Danny. I’m just doing what you tell me. I know I told you ’bout that leaf spring before. I thought it was gonna break.”
“Yeah, yeah. . . .” He looked at me. “Go get that big wrench up in the cab.”
I ran up to the cab, climbed in.
“It’s under the seat!”
I found the wrench and ran back. “Come here,” Danny said and crawled under the flatbed.
I crawled under there in the mud and we looked at the leaf springs. They were five-inch-wide strips of half-inch steel stacked together. The top strip was clearly broken into two pieces. A large nut and bolt held all the strips down.
“See where it’s cracked?” Danny asked.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s take that bolt out and look at that top one.”
I put the wrench on the nut and started to turn. It never occurred to me that the truck was still overloaded and that a thousand pounds of pressure were on those leaf springs and that the nut was the only thing holding it back. I put my body and head directly above it and started to turn harder. It wouldn’t budge.
“Turn it,” Danny said.
I leaned away from the springs and pulled on the wrench with all my weight. There was a loud clang and pop, and several large pieces of steel exploded upward. I was dizzy for a few seconds and didn’t know what had happened. I heard Danny’s voice faintly: “Oh my God. Oh shit.”
I looked down at my right hand. My index finger and my middle finger were broken and twisted out at odd angles. All the skin was scraped off the top of my hand and half my thumb was missing. A red stream of blood spurted forcefully out of the hole. I held my right hand up with my left hand and crawled out from under the flatbed. Pete helped me over to another truck.
“Shit, this hurts,” I said.
Danny ran around panicking. “Well shit! Just take it easy, everybody just take it easy, all right? You’re all right. You still got your fingers. Goddammit! Where’s the emergency room? Where’s the hospital?”
“There’s a minor emergency center up the road,” Pete said.
“Okay, shit, let’s go,” Danny said and jumped into the truck. Pete handed me a dirty rag. I put it on my right hand and got into the truck. Danny talked to me as we sped down the freeway.
“You’re going to be all right. Are you okay? You’re turning pale. Are you okay?”
I could barely hear him. Everything started turning white, from the outside in. I heard a loud steady buzzing sound in my ears.
“I think I’m passing out.”
“Don’t worry, man. I’ll get you to a hospital.”
We drove to a little strip mall, and Danny got out and ran inside what looked like a medical office. I stepped out of the truck, and my blood ran down my arm and dripped on the sidewalk. Danny ran out of the office.
“Get back in the truck. Hurry up. You’re bleeding all over the place.”
“What about the doctor?”
“This is a dentist’s office.”
I climbed back in the truck, and we eventually found the emergency center. Danny took me in, talked to a nurse, and said to me, “Are you gonna be all right? I have to go back to the trailer. Nobody’s at the phones.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t worry, I told ’em I’d pay for it.”
“Okay.”
He left. The nurse X-rayed me and cleaned the oil and dirt out of my torn skin. She scrubbed hard and fast. “I know this hurts,” she said. “But I have to do it.”
I told her it was okay, and the doctor came in.
“Your wrist is broken,” he said. “These two fingers are broken, too.”
He straightened out my fingers, taped them up, sewed up my half thumb, bandaged my hand, and put a cast over my wrist, and I called Danny. The doctor prescribed some codeine painkillers, and when Danny arrived I asked him to take me to the pharmacy. He seemed pissed.
“What for?”
“I need these pills.”
“I suppose you want me to pay for them. . . .”
He paid for them and we went back to Danny’s Grass and Wood. I went to my little trailer, and Danny followed me in. I found a warm beer under the card table, took the lid off the pill bottle with my teeth, and downed several of the pills.
“Do you really need those?” Danny asked.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Give me a couple.”
I poured two out on the card table, and Danny swallowed them dry.
“Are you sure you really broke your wrist?” he said. “I thought I heard the nurse say it wasn’t broken. They didn’t cast your whole arm”
“They cast halfway up it,” I said.
“You know,” he said, “when I was working as a roughneck out in West Texas and something like this happened, they would’ve just slapped a bandage on it and told me to go back to work.”
I sat down on my cot and had another swallow of beer. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Danny stood there for a minute, his hands on his hips. “So, you’re just gonna lay here now?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t sue me, you know.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good. That’s good.”
I didn’t say anything else, and he finally left.
* * *
It started to get a little colder after that, and some wood orders trickled in. I took the orders, found the different routes to the houses on the city map, and tried to write down the directions for Danny with my left hand. He had to deliver the orders now, but he kept asking me when my hand would get better.
Every couple of days he sent me down the road with a check and a flatbed, and I bought several cords of wood from another business off 183. The owner’s name was Greg, and he was short, and fat, and had a little black mustache. He was always talking to me, telling me what a great hunter he was. Every time I went there, he had another little pink deer hanging up by its legs under a tree, all of its skin ripped off, dripping blood, and covered in flies.
Greg had a little firewood factory going with twelve laborers working on an assembly line from six in the morning until dark, seven days a week. They stacked wood on a conveyor belt in small bundles, wrapped them in plastic, put them on pallets, and stacked them in a warehouse. I pulled up to their large, loose woodpiles, and they loaded four cords onto the flatbed. I’d get out and help them stack the wood with my left hand. The workers complained to me in Spanish.
Basically they said that they hated Greg and that he wasn’t paying them enough money. After we loaded the truck, I drove it back to Danny’s and slowly restacked the wood in his yard. Danny watched me stacking wood one-handed for a week or so and followed me around, asking questions.
“So how’s your hand feel? You gonna be ready to deliver soon? You still got part of your thumb. You know, if you lose your thumb, sometimes they’ll sew your big toe on there. You need a thumb more than you need a big toe. Can you go out there yet? You think you’re ready?”
“I should get the cast off in a couple weeks,” I said.
He looked pissed.
“All right, fine, I’m paying you to sit around all day and stack wood, but that’s okay, I guess that’s okay! Fuck it!”
He walked into the office trailer, and I kept stacking.
Business was bad. Danny said he was losing money by the handful. A cold front had come through, but it was a weak one and people weren’t ordering firewood. One day a young husband and wife pulled up on the side of the road in an old truck. They set up a few stacks of wood and a sign they’d painted in big red letters that said “Firewood for Sale.” They had a sloppy Christian fish symbol painted under the letters, dripping red.
“Go see what those people are doing,” Danny said.
I walked over there and talked to them. They both wore old jean jackets, and their faces were sunburned and thin from hunger. The woman was tall, with unusually long blonde hair she’d put into a thick braid that ran down her back like a tail. They said they only had a little bit of wood to sell. They’d cut it off the land they were living on. Their little boy was with them. He had snot and dirt all over his face and was bundled up in a cheap coat, standing by the road with cars whipping past. I went back and told Danny what was up.
“I don’t like it,” he said. He walked over to the edge of the highway, talked to them for a minute, and came back.
“I told them to leave,” he said, “but then they told me they were born-again Christians too, so . . . you know, I guess they can try it out. There wood’s shitty anyway, an’ those little stacks they sell are expensive. They’re not gonna make any money. People get a much better deal buying a full cord from me.”