Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

  “Listen,” he said. “You never stole anything from me. You were a pretty good employee, even though you got a fucked-up hand now. You’re still young, though. You’re just a kid. Let me know if you wanna deliver St. Augustine for me in the summer. It’s pretty easy. You order around a couple of wets, maybe throw a piece of sod every once in a while.”

  I walked past him and stopped by the silver fence. I stared up again at all the bright white bulbs suspended over the Douglas firs and Scotch pines. “Hey . . .”

  Danny walked up beside me. “What?”

  “You wouldn’t want to give me a Christmas tree, would you?”

  “Well, no, not really. . . . I can’t give ’em away. Nobody’s buying any of them, and they cost me a lot of money.”

  “Right.”

  “Besides,” he said, “what the hell are you gonna do with a Christmas tree?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just left. I hadn’t even thought about that.

  A few miles down from Danny’s Grass and Wood the city really started. There was a large strip mall with a Tom Thumb grocery and some other stores. I tried to cash Danny’s check inside of the grocery store but the service counter was closed and the cashiers flatly refused. They probably already had several of Danny’s hot checks posted on the wall in the manager’s office. I ended up sleeping outside on my laundry bag that night, behind the mall in some tall grass above a dry creek. The ground was cold, uncomfortable.

  There was a small savings and loan, Texas State Bank, set off as an independent building in that strip mall also. The next morning I briefly thought of robbing it. I didn’t have a gun, but you didn’t need a gun to rob a bank. All you had to do was pretend you had a gun and clearly insist the teller watch her hands and slowly give you some of the bank’s cash and then casually walk out the front door. I thought about it that morning for several minutes. Then I remembered all the ex-cons I had worked with and how only one guy robbing a bank by himself was for dumb-asses who wanted to go to jail for very little money. The whole system was set up to catch you for it. The real money was in running the bank itself from the top down into the ground, which many people were already doing anyway with the savings and loans in 1986. I also remembered that I didn’t have a car or even a getaway bicycle.

  I couldn’t bring myself to call Susan, so I went to a pay phone outside the bank to call my brother, Alton, instead to ask for a ride, and a job. I was lucky to reach him, to find him back home in Texas at his little cabin in Cypress, where he had a phone.

  Since he was a freshman in high school, Alton had been working his ass off to make his own money. I mostly worked in grocery store or landscaping jobs to make my money after school, but Alton’s work paid more so I started working with him. Alton was friends with Cecil Keith, the oldest son of the well-known and well-liked Keith family in Cypress. The Keiths owned a thousand acres of hardscrabble land they had been working for more than a hundred years, ranching cattle, cutting and selling cedar posts and coastal hay. They lived modestly, but the whole clan worked from dusk to dawn, seven days a week, and they were worth some money. Cecil Keith was a good-natured, strong, and big man who had two silver front teeth and spoke in a high-pitched feminine voice that did not fit with his body. Alton and I worked for him throughout much of high school, hauling hay, cutting cedar posts, selling and delivering firewood. Some days we helped his small crew of laborers from Mexico, who lived on their ranch, to work, feed, and ship the Keith family’s cattle.

  Alton, though he had nothing close to Cecil’s resources, modeled himself somewhat after the young man and started working for himself, finding other rancher’s cedar posts, mesquite, or live-oak wood to cut, other people’s hay to haul. He was a hard worker, a hustler, which he had learned from both Cecil Keith and our own tough father. Alton started dealing with the Hill Country cedar choppers who lived out in the woods himself, without Cecil Keith, buying their cedar posts and wood for cheap and then reselling it at a profit. Like me, he never wanted to be at home, but, unlike me, he wasn’t very good at school or sports. Soon he was staying away from everything and everyone, more and more every year. By the time he barely graduated from high school, Alton had started his own wood-delivery business and moved into a small cabin he rented in the woods that doubled as his office. He had his own cards printed, which he showed me proudly, that simply read “Alton’s Wood and Posts” with his phone number underneath.

  Alton always seemed to want something more. Either that or maybe he just wanted to escape, to get out of our house, our town, and take off somewhere, anywhere else. While I was reading what I considered literature, Alton was reading every soldier or spy thriller he could find and was heavily drawn to the action-packed 1980s B movies of the Vietnam War. He loved watching the films of Sly Stallone as Rambo or the Chuck Norris movie Missing in Action in what little spare time he had. Otherwise he was always working, making more money to buy and trade up for more and bigger trucks, longer trailers, and heavy equipment for much larger jobs.

  Just before I went to college, I made even better money with Alton one last summer when he came upon a new business: hauling railroad ties. He had noticed one day, while driving across a railroad crossing in the nearby town of San Marcos, that when the railroad company replaced their old ties, they left hundreds of the old ones scattered for miles down in the grass and ditches along the steel tracks for months at a time. One evening he hooked up a used, thirty-two-foot gooseneck trailer to his wide Chevy dooly pickup, asked me to help him, and he and I loaded up the big trailer by hand for hours, with dozens of good, straight, solid two-hundred-pound-apiece railroad ties. The next week he proceeded to sell all those free ties for fifteen bucks apiece to local nurseries to be used for garden-bed borders, landscaping, and shoring up hills and lawns. They bought every last tie he had, each time we filled up the gooseneck trailer, to the point that he then sought out wholesalers—the people who sold plants, trees, dirt, fertilizers, and other materials to all of the big nurseries in Texas—businesses that wanted even more railroad ties, as many as we could gather, as fast as we could get them.

  We got so busy he hired a small crew of three, strong young men from Mexico we found on a corner in San Marcos, and paid them to help us fill the thirty-two-foot gooseneck with heavy ties we stacked and sold to the wholesalers. We were so busy that we forgot that those creosote-covered railroad ties were really the seemingly discarded property of the railroad company, and not ours. One night Alton and I and three other workers were caught gathering ties by two men from the national railroad company that ran and repaired many of the lines, the tracks, through Texas. We were briefly worried, but Alton was a genuine good old boy, and after talking for thirty minutes with the reps from the railroad, their company offered to hire him and his business to pick up all the ties they had discarded and to dispose of them, while allowing him to keep any good ones that he found in the grass to sell or do with what he liked.

  Five years later, when I called him from that pay phone, his business was called Texas Cross Ties, and it was pulling in a couple hundred thousand dollars a year through long-term legal contracts with the same railroad company. He was still working seven days a week, but now had three crews of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America and half a dozen foremen who ran them, two rickety semis to pick up the railroad ties and truck them to nursery and landscaping wholesalers, and a number of big shitty trucks and large tractors, front- end loaders, to pick up the ties and ship orders. His business stretched from far South Texas to Houston, to New Mexico and the high plains, up into Kansas and Nebraska. It was really a miracle I found him at home when I called. His life was now always spent on the road, chasing the next big tie job for the railroad company, and he was about to leave again. He was happy to hear from me though. He came to pick me up in Austin, where we stayed that night at a cheap motel on far South Congress and got drunk on a case of Miller.

  * * *

  The next morning Alton and I drove out of
town in an old yellow five-ton flatbed. The truck had holes in the floorboard, and you could see the highway whizzing by under your feet. There was no gas pedal, just a steel rod coming up through the floor. Around two in the morning we stopped in Longview at the Starlight Motel in northeast Texas. The place was a group of run-down bungalows crowded along the highway. We parked the truck, and I followed Alton inside a bungalow.

  The walls were cheap, warped paneling. A radio was playing loud ranchera music. A short middle-aged man was sitting on a mattress without sheets holding an old suitcase in his lap.

  “This is Augustine,” Alton said.

  Augustine nodded to me and smiled. He had a wide face and a little, thin mustache that ran down around the corners of his mouth. His hair was black and shiny and speckled with white flecks of dandruff. He clutched a knit cap in his hands with the words “Washington Redskins” stitched across it.

  “Round everybody up,” Alton said. “Let’s vamonos.”

  Augustine walked outside and started knocking on bungalow doors. Alton and I trailed behind him. At each bungalow Alton walked inside and yelled, “Everybody get the fuck up! Hurry up! Vamonos! Ándale! Let’s go!”

  Alton had a black beard, long black hair, and a black cowboy hat. He was well over six feet tall and wore cowboy boots. He looked like a giant pirate. The men were sleepy but worried, and they frantically grabbed their clothes.

  It was very cold and a long way to Kansas. When everyone was ready, Alton told them to get up on the back of the flatbed. Nine men slowly climbed up and huddled against the cab. Alton and I got inside the truck where the heater was. Before we left, Alton called to Augustine and a seventeen-year-old boy named Juan and told them they could sit inside the truck. Alton explained: “They stink like shit, but Augustine keeps everybody in line. Juan’s the best goddamn driver you ever saw. He drives our front-end loaders like a car. I pay him twenty dollars a day. That’s more than anybody else out here.”

  Juan and Augustine squeezed into the cab between us. Their faces were blank, dark, and tired. The men in back jostled one another, talking loudly for a moment. Their voices faded out with sound of the engine, and we left the hotel.

  * * *

  We drove through flat North Texas. When I was driving, Alton thumbed through his collection of Vietnam War action books, read the novelization of Rambo: First Blood Part II, and talked.

  “Ya know, Jake, I could survive in the jungle,” Alton said.

  “Yeah?”

  “No, I could do it. I been researchin’ it. Readin’ up on it.”

  “Good for you.”

  I stared at the road. Augustine had fallen asleep and had his heavy head on my shoulder. I looked in the back and saw that the seven other men had stopped moving. Maybe they’d frozen to death. . . .

  “See,” Alton said, “I’ve studied it an’ I’d know how to survive. How to blend into the jungle and how to kill the gooks. Those guys don’t look that tough to me. They’re all short as shit. I could pick ’em up an’ throw ‘em two at a time.”

  I watched the road.

  “You gotta be willing to die, right? I mean, I’m willing to die. I know I can kill ’em. I have to. We need to go back there and get rid of the Russians. The Russians are trying to take over the world.”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me this. . . .”

  We bounced along the road and drove into Oklahoma. The sun began to rise. There was nothing but dark, flat ground around us.

  “Are you listening? Tell me this—”

  “What?”

  “Okay, what if, say, I went to Thailand on some mercenary kind of thing, an’ I was trying to save some POWs an’ I, uh . . . I disappeared in the jungle. I was missing. Would you get some people together and come get me?”

  “No.”

  “What if I was tied up in some bamboo cage with rats and no food—”

  “A bamboo cage?”

  “Right, right, an’ I was skinny an’ starving an’ had been missing for a long time an’ everyone knew I was missing. You understand?”

  “Yes. You’re missing.”

  “Right, right, I’ve been gone a long time. Would you get together your friends and come get me?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Come on, I need to know this shit before I go. That I have someone who’ll come an’ get me.”

  “Maybe you should take a nap or something.”

  “I’m gonna bring my AK-47 and my Uzi. They’re under the seat. I’ll show ’em to you later. They’re converted to automatic. I need ’em out here working with these criminals. I carry a lot of cash on me sometimes. Every foreman I got is a scumbag convict. I tell you the white guys and the niggers are the worst. The Mexicans are the only ones you can count on.”

  “Right.”

  “All right, I’m gonna take a nap.”

  He turned over and went to sleep. I got tired of Augustine leaning on me and nudged him roughly. He grunted once, put his head on Juan’s shoulder, and fell back to sleep.

  * * *

  Our base was in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. Thirty miles south was Cassoday, Kansas. From there we’d work our way back along the railroad tracks. We arrived in Cottonwood Falls in the afternoon and stopped at a motel. It was on the Cottonwood River and called, the Cottonwood Inn. The owner was an old man with big hands and big ears named Mr. Sealy. He showed Alton and me around the motel. He lived in the biggest of the rooms, and we went inside and he introduced us to his wife who was watching some old black and white movie on TV. She sat next to an open gas heater with moving blue flames. Mr. Sealy told us his story.

  “I used to be a farmer. I was a farmer all my life. So was my daddy and granddaddy. Everybody was going bankrupt around here, though, so Mary an’ I sold the land just in time and bought this motel. We did real good. This is a nice place. There’s fishing in the back. They catch big catfish here. Come on.”

  He led us around the motel down a slope to the wide brown river. There was a tall cottonwood tree on the bank with large rotten catfish heads stuck on hooks embedded in the trunk.

  “Look how big these fish were,” Mr. Sealy said.

  “Those were big fish,” Alton said.

  Mr. Sealy looked at me and tilted his head, puzzled. He gestured at the trees around the clearing. “Most all of these are pecan trees. Come on in here and look at the garage.”

  We followed him into a garage that ran lengthwise under several of the rooms. Against the walls there were some farm tools, old tires, and some furniture. The old man walked up to three, round steel tubs full of pecans. He ran his fingers through the brown pecans.

  “Look at all these pecans,” he said.

  “Wow,” Alton said.

  “Take some. Here.” He grabbed many pecans in his big hands and gave them to us.

  “Thanks,” Alton said.

  “Thank you,” I said. I broke one open and started eating it.

  “I guess we need to check in,” Alton said. “I got some cash here. I’ll pay you a month in advance for three rooms.”

  Mr. Sealy smiled and seemed excited. “Okay, fellas, good, okay. Let’s go on up to the living room an’ I’ll get you a receipt.”

  * * *

  We got up at six every morning. Juan and Augustine were sharing a room with Alton and me. They blared conjunto music while cooking a breakfast and lunch of tortillas, eggs, beans, and anything else they could throw in there. Alton and I got up slowly, pulling on stiff, tar-covered clothes, and staggered outside to the truck. The other workers were out there already waiting. No one ever said anything at dawn. They just sat and shivered and dozed. We drove down to Cassoday and started working our way back to Cottonwood Falls, making a mile or so a day.

  Alton drove one front-end loader, and Juan drove the other. The rest of us walked along the tracks picking up railroad ties the company had left and stacked them on the forks of the loader. When we had twenty stacked, the driver stopped, raised up the bundle, and Augustine and I
ran a steel band around the ties. We tightened the band, put a clip on it, and crimped it. The driver left the bundle in the ditch to be loaded on a flatbed later. The flatbed driver would then take the bundles to a central location in Cassoday or Matfield Green, where the company driver would come by in an 18-wheeler to be overloaded and take the ties away.

  From sunup to noon, we stacked the ties on the loaders. Occasionally, a rabbit would dart out from under a pile of ties. Hector and Tomas, the two biggest and quickest men, would catch the rabbits. They’d chase after them, hit them with a rock or a piece of wood, and throw them on the truck to be eaten later. It was very cold out there on the brown plain. None of the men had any coats or jackets. Alton said they were saving their money to buy some warm clothes. Most of their money, he said, went to their families in Mexico. Every one of them, even Juan, had children at home.

  At lunch we left them huddled together out on the tracks with their cold tortillas and water and went into Cassoday to have a lunch of steak and potatoes on the company’s tab. When we returned, full of beer and food, the men were already back at work, and we joined in. At the end of each week Alton would let another man drive his loader, and ask me to join him for a walk down the tracks to find elusive ties hidden in the tall grass. We’d walk for miles, hours, down the endless tracks. Yellow-and-brown fields flanked us, and a wide blue sky covered our heads. We said nothing. We walked quietly, searching the grass, or we stared at the converging rails and tripped over rocks.

  When it was too dark to see, every night, Alton would shut off his tractor’s engine, and all the men would drop their loads and gather around the flatbed. It seemed very quiet then, without the engines and shouts and orders. We loaded into the truck, silent and tired, and drove back to Cottonwood Falls. The men butchered their rabbits and ate. Alton and I drove in to a restaurant in Strong City where there was a liquor store. We ate, then went to the liquor store, and stocked up on beer and whiskey. Back at the motel I would soak in the tub and drink from the bottle and try to wash the creosote off my hands and arms. Alton and I were so tired and sore, we just sat in the room, got drunk, and watched TV. By ten-thirty Alton passed out on the bed. I passed out on the fold-out couch. Before I knew it, Augustine’s radio was blaring, his breakfast frying, and he was dressed and loudly telling Alton to get up.