“Missed a spot.”
It’s Tim Baker. He spits a hocker on the window and points to it: “Right there.”
He’s with Bob Wilson, who’s laughing his fat ass off.
These are my friends.
I say to Baker, “Jag-off,” but in a detatched way, and run the wet brush over the hocker. I don’t want any trouble. This is my first day on the job, first half hour in fact. And Baker is big, with red hair.
He says, “What’d you call me?” Being with Wilson, a witness, he can’t let it go.
I can’t let it go either, with Wilson there. “You heard me,” I tell him, working away. That’s a good answer because I’m not calling him a jag-off again, but I’m not backing down either.
He steps up to me and puts it this way: “Did you call me a jag-off?”
Now the answer has to be yes or no, and with Wilson it has to be yes.
I nod my head.
He nods too, while deciding what to do with me. He decides to reach down and pour the bucket of water over my shoes.
Wilson says, “Whoa!” with a big happy laugh.
Baker sets the bucket back down and stands there waiting for my response.
Even if Wilson wasn’t there, I would have no choice. I sigh, swing my fist and catch Baker on the side of the jaw.
“Whoa!” from Wilson again.
Baker steps back and works his tongue around in there, looking at me. He seems pleased. Then he begins a little humming sound, which rises higher and higher, and then he attacks in a blur of wild punches to the head and I go down with blood in my mouth and ringing in my ears. There are also tears in my eyes but I hope he understands you can’t describe that as crying. I hope Wilson understands that, too.
They walk away and I get up. Big fat nice Mrs. Petrocelli comes hurrying out, wanting to know what happened.
I tell her some jerk spit on the window.
She tells me I shouldn’t take this job so seriously.
In the John rinsing off the blood, I can see in the mirror my lip is already starting to swell. Lucille Hanratty might be drawn to a guy who lives like this, out on the edge, taking shit from no one. I let a trickle of blood run down my chin:
I’m no damn good, Lucille. Can’t you understand? I’m trouble, baby. Stay away. Go on home, little girl…
Mrs. Petrocelli taps on the door. “Are you all right in there?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like me to call your mother?”
“No.”
I wipe off my chin and come out and go fetch the bucket. I fill it up again and lug it back outside, zip my jacket all the way up, and finish the damn window.
Ditch Digger
ILLINOIS CENTRAL RAILROAD REPAIR YARD CHICAGO 1965
“If you could choose any woman in the world to do it to, who would you choose? Take your time,” he tells me.
We have a lot of it, about six more hours, with a break in about fifteen minutes, I’d guess. I don’t have a watch. Gary does, but he won’t tell me the time. He says I think too much about the time and that’s why it goes so slow. Yesterday he caught me sneaking a peek at his watch, so now he keeps it in his pocket.
“C’mon. Choose,” he says, digging away.
“I’m thinking,” I tell him, resting on my shovel.
Possibly Bridget Wyler, in my biology class this last year. Everyone calls her a whore but I like that about her, all that lipstick and eyeliner and those hoopy bracelets on her skinny wrists and the way she arches her back as she sits down.
“Raquel Welch,” I tell him, just to give an answer.
“Not a bad choice,” he says. “Rather predictable, though. I’ll tell you mine and it might surprise you. Beaver’s mom, June Cleaver. Go ahead and laugh. It won’t bother me at all.”
I’m not laughing.
“See, you don’t understand,” he says. “You chose Raquel Welch. Well, fine. Big tits, long legs. Sure. Why not? But the thing you don’t understand, being a virgin—”
“I told you, I’m not a virgin,” I say to him, although I am.
“Right. Okay. The thing you don’t understand, being an idiot—”
“Hey.” He’s taller than me and at seventeen a year older, but skinny and weak-looking. “Don’t be calling me an idiot.”
“Why not? Explain to me why I should not call you an idiot. Go ahead. I’d like to hear.”
“Because I’ll hit you with this shovel, how’s that.”
“I rest my case.”
He says that a lot—”I rest my case”—meaning I just said something that proves his point.
We work for a while.
We’re digging a culvert. That’s what Mr. Brunowski calls it, meaning a ditch. That’s all we’re doing all day long at the far end of a large field full of weeds. Mr. Brunowski wants us to dig approximately two feet deep and six feet wide, all the way around the field. This is our third day. We’ve both been hired for the summer. I have no idea why Mr. Brunowski wants this ditch, this culvert. I have a feeling he just didn’t know what else to do with us. I have a feeling if we ever finish it he’ll tell us to go back and fill it all in again. I would ask him about it, but he scares me. When I put it to Gary, he said the ditch is for “drainage purposes.” He doesn’t know, either.
It’s hot out here. It’s still only morning and already so hot.
I stop and rest for a while, leaning on my shovel, wiping my face with my t-shirt. Gary works on, humming to himself, grunting now and then. His half of the ditch is a good five feet further along than mine.
“All right,” I say to him. “Tell me why.”
“Why what.”
“Why you would choose Beaver’s mom.”
“June? Because she’s so unhappy,” he says, working on.
“Beaver’s mom?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re talking about the show, Leave It to Beaver “
“Right. She’s putting up a good front, but if you knew anything about women—which you don’t—you could see she’s very unhappy. Miserable, in fact.”
“Okay, why is that.”
“Why is she miserable?”
“Yeah.”
He stops working, puts one foot up on the blade of the shovel and wipes his brow with his forearm. “Because she’s sexually frustrated. Ward just doesn’t take her there.”
Sometimes Gary scares me more than Mr. Brunowski.
“So, is that… part of the show?” I ask, wanting to get this straight. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“How do you mean?”
“Beaver’s mom being sexually frustrated—is that, like, part of the script?”
He gives a laugh. “I kinda doubt it. It’s supposed to be a family show.” He takes out his watch. “Break time. Let’s go.”
In the lunch room I buy a Sprite from the machine, find a loose newspaper and sit alone at a table in a corner.
Sox shut out the Indians last night, 2-0. Cubs got pulverized by the Pirates, 13-2.1 study the box scores. I have a deep desire that a few years from now my name will begin appearing there, and a deep fear that it won’t.
Gary’s at a table with a group of loud relaxed men, acting like he’s one of them.
“Yeah, Brunowski’s got me out there keeping an eye on the kid,” I hear him say.
A little man in a shirt and tie and pens in his pocket walks up to me and introduces himself as Al Russo from Personnel, the guy who got me the job here—as a favor to my dad, he explains.
I want to tell him he had no right to do that. But I thank him.
“So how is it going?” he asks.
“Good. Fine.”
“What’ve they got you doing?”
“Just some … excavating, basically.”
“Oh?”
“Putting in a culvert.”
“A culvert. Well.”
“For drainage purposes.”
“Of course.”
“Isn’t it illegal to hire someone as a favor
to their father?”
“Not at all. Listen, good luck with your culvert.”
“Thanks.”
“And say hi to your dad.”
So hot out here. The sun like a gong. One cloud. One thin, wispy cloud. I stand there thinking of all the hours ahead … all the days … all the weeks …
I let the shovel drop from my hands.
“I’m quitting.”
“Again?”
“I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Four hours a day I could handle. I could do four hours. But eight. That’s ridiculous. Eight hours a day? Five days a week? I’m sorry.”
“Tell Brunowski.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“Good, because here he comes.”
I look and see someone heading towards us across the field and it can’t be anyone else because no one else walks like that—in a crouch, craning his scrawny neck, holding his arms away from his hips—like a huge ugly bird unable to fly.
I grab my shovel and begin digging and don’t look up until he gets here.
“Hot enough for ya, Mr. B?” Gary says.
He doesn’t answer. He stands there staring at the culvert, at how much further along Gary’s half is. He looks at me with disgust. “What the hell you been doing out here, beating your meat?”
Gary laughs hard at that.
Mr. Brunowski is waiting for me to answer.
“I guess I’m just … not very good at this,” I tell him.
“What the hell is there to be good at? You’re digging a ditch, for Christ sake.”
“A culvert,” Gary says.
Mr. Brunowski points at him. “Don’t be a smartass.”
“I wasn’t being …” Gary says, and stops, his eyes looking moist.
Mr. Brunowski tells me to get my lazy ass in gear or he’s going to give me a spoon to work with. “A teaspoon,” he adds, walking off.
When he’s far enough away Gary says, “Ever see his wife? She works in Payroll. Jesus, what a beast.”
We both laugh, so he says it again, “I mean, a beast” and we laugh some more.
I feel like maybe Gary isn’t really such a jerk.
“What time is it?” I ask him.
“Now, don’t start that,” he says, wagging his finger at me.
Lunch time I buy another Sprite and sit alone at my usual table. In my bag I find an apple and two Saran-wrapped sandwiches: strips of my dad’s Italian sausage on hamburger buns, with fried green peppers and lots of mustard.
Gary’s over there with his Fellow Workers, telling them about Brunowski’s visit:
“Starts trying to give me shit. I told him, ‘Hey. You wanna play tough-guy with the kid, go ahead. But don’t try it with me, pal, or I’ll put this shovel where the sun don’t shine.’”
It’s gotten even hotter out here, and muggy. I feel like the heat is so thick, Time can barely make it through. It has to crawl, slowly, one minute per hour.
I do a lot of leaning on my shovel, keeping an eye out for Brunowski. Gary works away, telling me about a James Bond movie he saw, giving me every scene, even bits of dialogue, and what each of the women looked like.
“And I mean, you should see this bitch,” he says, and gives a pretty good description, I have to admit. He uses the word “voluptuous.”
When he finishes telling me the movie, he says the reason he enjoys James Bond films so much is because he relates to the main character.
“To James Bond, you mean?”
“In many, many ways.”
That breaks me up.
“You find that amusing?”
I can only nod my head. Gary and James Bond. I like that.
“Keep it up,” he tells me, walking over, shovel raised. “Keep laughing. Go ahead.”
“All done,” I tell him.
He stands there holding up the shovel, breathing hard through his nose.
“All through,” I repeat.
He stands there another moment, making sure. Then he nods. “I rest my case,” he says, and goes back to work.
In the lunch room during afternoon break I hear him telling the men at his table, “Brunowski oughta fire that kid. All day, all he does, stand around bitching and moaning like a goddam woman …”
A couple of the men look over my way.
“It’s either too hot,” Gary says in a whiny voice that’s supposed to be me, “or the day is too long …”
More men are looking.
“Or the work is too hard …”
Now they’re all looking.
“I’m so sick a this kid, you can’t imagine. I finally told him, I said, ‘Listen, you lazy little …’”
I don’t hear the rest because I’m out the door.
To hell with this place. I’m a future professional ballplayer, for Christ sake. I don’t need this bullshit.
In the locker room I snatch my shirt off the hook—then stand there with it, trying to think what I’ll tell my dad. I sit on the bench, trying to think …
So hot out here.
Gary, digging away, is telling me his theory of the Kennedy assassination. It’s very complicated. Jackie masterminded the whole thing.
I look up at that one flimsy cloud, still there. I look down at the shovel in my hands. There’s no escape, I realize. And I give up. I surrender to this place. To the sun. To eight hours a day. To work.
I stab the shovel at the ground and stomp it in with my heel, then work the handle back and forth, bring up a load of dirt and weeds, and dump it off to the side. I stab the shovel at the ground again …
After a while I notice how hard I’m working. After a while more, I don’t even notice that.
“Okay,” Gary announces. “That’s it. We’re outa here.”
My t-shirt is drenched, my back hurts and my legs are wobbly. But I feel pretty good.
We head across the field towards the tool shack, Gary winding up his assassination-conspiracy theory: “So ya see, that’s the reason she always wore those pillbox hats.”
Instead of dragging the shovel behind me, I carry it over my shoulder.
Ballplayer
AL HAINES BASEBALL SCHOOL AND TRYOUT CAMP WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, CHRISTMAS BREAK, 1966
It’s dark when the train pulls into Louisville. I have the little overhead light on, reading a Baseball Digest article on Cleveland Indians manager Birdie Tebbets.
“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”
“No,” I tell her. “Not at all.”
She’s tall, not too homely, a lot older, maybe thirty, in a bulky sweater and a woolly skirt. Sitting down, she smells nice, like a vanilla wafer.
Just do your best, I tell myself.
I give her time to set her purse on the floor, turn on her overhead light, get comfortable. Then before she can open her magazine, I ask, “From Louisville?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you from Louisville. I noticed you boarded here and I was wondering if you’re actually from Louisville or perhaps only visiting. I’m from the Chicago area myself— the Windy City, as they say.” I give a little laugh. “Actually, it’s probably no windier there than, well, Louisville, for example.”
“You’ve been to Louisville?”
“Great city. Wonderful people. My name’s Max, by the way.” I can always tell her my real name later, if things work out.
Her name is Audrey, she says, and I have no reason to doubt it.
“So,” I continue, “you’re from Lousiville.”
“Actually, no. I was there for a teacher’s conference.”
“Well. A teacher. What is it you teach, Audrey? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Not at all. American history.”
“No kidding. I’m kind of a history buff myself.”
“Oh? What particular—”
“So, where ya headed, Audrey?”
“Atlanta.”
“I could tell.”
“Really? How?”
“That Georgia drawl. Cut it with a knife.”
“Actually, I’ve only lived there a year. I’m from Dubuque.”
“Hey, great city.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Just passing through. Had a pizza there. Wasn’t bad.”
“So where are you headed, Max?”
Max.
“Actually, I’m on my way to Florida. West Palm Beach. Baseball tryout camp down there.”
“Baseball,” she says. “Bet you’ll have fun.”
I give a laugh. “It’s not really for fun, I’m afraid. Good chance of me getting signed right there with a pro club.”
“So you want to be a baseball player, huh?”
Like I want to be a fireman or a cowboy.
“It’s quite serious,” I tell her.
“I can see that.”
I’m not getting through here.
“I’d like to sign with the White Sox, naturally, being from Chicago, but what I’ll probably end up doing, I’ll probably just go with the best offer.”
“Good idea.” She winks. “Go with the green.”
This woman is pissing me off. I look out the window and try to think of a big-league team that’s weak at second base. The White Sox, since trading Fox. But another team would sound more believable. I decide on the Cleveland Indians. When I turn back she’s reading her magazine.
“Can you keep a secret, Audrey?”
She looks up. “I… suppose.”
“I haven’t told this to anyone, okay?”
“Okay.”
“The Indians are after me.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“The Indians. They’re after me.”
“After you?”
“For about a year now.”
“Indians?”
“One of their scouts spotted me last spring. They’ve been hounding me ever since.”
“I see…”
“Driving me nuts.”
“Uh-huh. So … what is it they want? Do you know?”
“They want me to join ’em, that’s what they want.”
Reason for Leaving Page 2