Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  I never asked you to give up any of your hopes or dreams to go work there, you gave those up on your own!

  A man works his whole life away and he grows angry because he can’t make anyone understand how it feels to scrub your hands so hard after a day’s work that the palms start to bleed.

  Goddammit, Dad, shut up! I know it’s crummy but it’s not my fault!

  I remember my Daddy’s hands, the machine stink on them. The day he had my dog put down he tried to apologize to me, told me about how sick old Ralph was, but I was too hurt to listen. He just stood there and touched my cheek. I opened my eyes and looked at his hand and saw it was stained with machine grease. It was the hand that fed me but it was also the hand that killed my dog. He did it. Because he had to. Had to and hated it. He knew he’d never have to tell me he was sorry because his hand against my face, trying to wipe away my tears, said it all. His cruel dog-killing hand with its grease and machine stink so lightly against my face.

  Take a good look at my hands, boy. A man’s flesh was never meant to be like this, the lines so dark from oil stains they might as well be cracks in plaster. Sometimes I hate the idea of touching you mother with these hands, having her feel the calluses and cuts, the roughness on her cheek. She deserves tenderness, boy, the soft, easy touch of a lover, and she ain’t never gonna feel it from these hands.

  But she loves you, we all do, you should know that.

  I know you do, boy. And I wish it helped more than it does, but sometimes it don’t and that just makes me sick right down to the ground.

  4

  Jackson climbed the front steps of Herb Kaylor’s house and knocked on the door. Darlene answered, nodded, and invited him inside.

  The house smelled like coffee, uneaten dinner, and grief.

  “I made meatloaf tonight,” whispered Herb Kaylor’s widow. “It was always his favorite. Don’t know what I’m gonna do with it now…” She bit her lower lip and closed her eyes, locking her body rigid against Jackson’s embrace. Pulling away, she ran a hand through her thinning gray hair and coughed. “I have to…apologize for how the place looks. I, uh..I—"

  “Place looks fine,” whispered Jackson as she led him toward the kitchen.

  “Nice of you to say so.” Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, making the lines on her face harsher.

  Her son, Will, was making coffee; the teenager exchanged terse greetings with the sheriff and took his coffee into another room.

  “Would you like a cup?” asked Darlene. “I grind the beans myself. Herb says…said that it made all the difference in the world from the store-bought kind.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  As she handed him the cup and saucer her hand began to shake and she almost spilled the coffee in his lap. She apologized, tried to smile, then sat at the table and wept quietly. After a moment she held out her hand and Jackson took it.

  “Darlene,” he said softly, “I hate to ask you about this but I gotta know. Why was Herb working the picket today? He wasn’t supposed to be there again until Friday.”

  “I swear to you I don’t know. I asked him this morning right before he left. He just kind of laughed—you know how he always does when he don’t want to bother you with a problem? Then he kissed me and said he was sorry he’d got Will into this and he was gonna try to fix things.”

  “What’d he mean?”

  “He got Will on at the plant. Was even gonna train him.” She shook her head and sipped at her coffee. “You know Herb’s father did the same for him? Got him a job workin’ the same shift in the same cell. I guess a lot of workers get in that way. Didn’t your father work there, too?”

  Jackson looked away and whispered, “Yeah.”

  “Place is like a fuckin’ family heirloom,” Will stood up in the doorway.

  Jackson turned to look at him as Darlene said, “What did I tell you about using that kind of language in the house? Your Daddy—"

  “—was stupid! Admit it. It was stupid of him to go down there today.”

  Darlene stared at him with barely-contained fury worsened by weariness and grief. “I won’t have you bad-mouthing you father, Will. He ain’t”—her voice cracked—“here to defend himself. He worked hard for his family and deserved a hell of a lot more respect and thanks than he ever got."

  "Thanks?" shouted Will. "For what? For reminding me that he put his obligations over his own happiness, or for getting me on at the plant so I could become another goddamm factory stooge like him? Which wonderful gift should I have thanked him for?"

  “You sure couldn't find a decent job on your own. Somebody had to do something."

  "Listen," said Jackson, "maybe I should come back—"

  "When was I supposed to look for another job? Between running errands for you and helping with the housework and cleaning up after Dad when he got drunk—"

  "I think you'd better go to your room."

  "No," said Will, storming into the kitchen and slamming down his coffee cup. "I'm eighteen years old and not once have I ever been allowed to disagree with anything you or Dad wanted. You weren't the one who had to sit down here and listen to him ramble on at three in the morning after he got tanked. To hear him tell it, working the plant was just short of Hell, yet he was more than happy to hand my ass over—"

  "He was only trying to help you get some money so you could finally get your own place, get on your own two feet. He was a very giving, great man."

  "A great man? How the hell can you say that? You're wearing clothes that are ten years old and sitting at a table we bought for nine dollars at Goodwill! Maybe Dad had some great notions, but he wasn't great. He was a bitter, used-up little bit of a man who could only go to sleep after work if he downed enough booze, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna end up like—"

  Darlene shot up from her chair and slapped Will across the face with such force he fell against the counter. When he regained his balance and turned back to face her, a thin trickle of blood oozed slowly from the comer of his mouth. His eyes widened in fear, shock, and countless levels of confusion and pain.

  "You listen to me," said Darlene. "I was married to your father for almost twenty-five years, and in that time I saw him do things you aren't half man enough to do. I've seen him run into the middle of worse riots than the one today and pull old men out of trouble. I've seen him give his last dime to friends who didn't have enough for groceries and then borrow money from your uncle to pay our own bills. I've seen him be more gentle than you can ever imagine and I've been there when he's felt low because he thought you were embarrassed by him. Maybe he was just a factory worker, but he was a damn decent man who gave me love and a good home. You never saw it, maybe you didn't want to, but your father was a great man who did great things. Maybe they weren't huge things, things that get written about in the paper, but that shouldn't matter. It's not his fault that you never saw any of his greatness, that you only saw him when he was tired and used-up. And maybe he did drink but, goddammit, for almost twenty-five years he never once thought about just giving up. I loved that...factory stooge more than any man in my life—and I could've had plenty. He was the best of them all."

  "Mom, please, I—"

  "—You never did nothing except make him feel like a failure because he couldn't buy you all the things your friends have. I wasn't down here listening to him ramble at three in the morning? You weren't there on those nights before we had kids, listening to him whisper how scared he was he wouldn't be able to give us a decent life. You weren't there to hold him and kiss him and feel so much tenderness between your bodies that it was like you were one person. And twenty-five years of that, of loving a man like your father, that gives you something no one can ruin or take away, and I won't listen to you talk against him! He was my husband and your father and he's dead and it hurts so much I want to scream."

  Will's eyes filled with tears. "Oh god, Mom, I miss him. I'm so...sorry I said those things. I was just so angry." His chest began to hitch with the abrupt force of
his sorrow. "I know that I...I hurt his feelings, that I made him feel like everything he did was for nothing. Can't I be mad that I'll never get the chance to make it up to him? Can’t I?” He leaned into his mother's arms and wept. "He always said that you gotta ... gotta look out for your obligations before you can start thinking about your own happiness. I know that now. And I'll ... I'll try to ... oh, Christ, Mom. I want the chance to make it all up to him. . ." Darlene held him and stroked the back of his head, whispering, "It’s all right, go on ... go on ... he knows now, he always did, you have to believe that…”

  Ted Jackson turned away from them and swallowed his coffee in three large gulps, winced as it hit his stomach, and was overpowered by the loss that soaked the room. He'd never felt more isolated or useless in his life.

  Someone knocked loudly on the front door. Darlene turned toward Jackson. "Would you ... would you mind answering the door, Ted? I don't think I'm ... up to it just now."

  Jackson said of course and went into the front room, quickly wiped his eyes and blew his nose, then turned on the porchlight and opened the door.

  5

  Even if you manage to scrub off all the dirt and grease and metal shavings, you've still got the smell on you. Cheap aftershave, machine oil, sweat, the stink of hot metal. No matter how many showers you take, the smell stays on you. It's a stench that factory workers carry to their graves, a stink that's on them all the days of their lives, squatting by them at the end like some loyal hound dog that sits by its master's grave until it starves to death, reminding you that all you leave behind is a mortgage, a pile of unpaid bills, children who are ashamed of you, and a spouse who will grow old and bitter and miserable and empty and will never be able to rid the house of that smell.

  Stop it.

  That smell is your heritage, boy, don't deny it. You were born to be part of the line, part of the Machine, and it will mark you just like it marked me.

  I won't listen to this.

  Breathe it in deep.

  SHUT THE FUCK UP!

  That's a good boy.

  6

  Seven men stood on the porch, each with some sort of bandage covering a wound. Though Jackson recognized all of them as strikers, he only knew a few by name.

  A barrel-chested man in old jeans and a grimy sweatshirt stepped forward and offered a firm handshake. "Evenin', Sheriff. We come to ... to pay our respects to the family. Herb was one of the good guys and we're sorry as hell that he died because of this."

  "Darlene's not feeling up to a bunch of company," said Jackson. "I shouldn't even be here myself but—"

  "Nonsense," said Darlene from behind him. "Herb would never turn away a fellow union man, and neither will I."

  Jackson stepped back as the men entered and stood in a semi-circle, each looking sad, awkward, lost, and angry.

  The barrel-chested man (Darlene called him "Rusty") offered the group's sympathy—each man muttering agreement and nodding his head—and said that if there was anything they could do she was to give the word and they'd be right on it

  Darlene thanked them and offered them some coffee. The men seemed to relax a little as each found a place to sit.

  Then Will came into the room.

  Once, when Jackson had still been a deputy, he'd arrested a man suspected of child molestation. When he'd opened the door to the holding cell every prisoner there had looked at the man with such cold loathing it made Jackson's blood almost stop in his veins. The guy hadn't lasted the night—Jackson found him the next morning beaten to a pulp. He'd choked on his own vomit with three socks rammed in his mouth.

  The workers in the room were looking at Will Kaylor exactly the same way. Jackson felt the nerves in the back of his neck start tingling. He released a slow, quiet breath and surreptitiously unbuttoned the holster strap over his revolver.

  "Hello," said Will flatly.

  The men made no reply. Eyes looked back and forth from Will to Jackson.

  "Well," said Darlene with false brightness, "would one of you like to give me a hand in the kitchen?"

  Rusty and another man said they'd love to and followed her in, but not before giving Will one last angry glance.

  As the remaining men started to whisper among themselves, Will touched Jackson's elbow and asked the sheriff to follow him upstairs.

  Jackson excused himself and went after Will. They walked quickly up to Will's room at the end of the hall and closed the door.

  Will turned on a small bedside lamp. "You know they really came here to see me, don't you?"

  "I figured it was something like that."

  "I was supposed to work the picket line today. My first day at work was the morning the strike started. Dad barely had a chance to show me the press before the walkout." His eyes filled with pleading. "Please believe I loved my dad and I appreciated what he tried to do for me, but I ... didn't want to end up like him. He was so goddamn tired and unhappy all the time. I just ... didn't want to let that happen to me."

  Jackson put his hand on Will's shoulder. "Your dad told me once that he hoped you'd do better than he had. I really don't think he'd blame you, so don't go blaming yourself."

  "But those guys downstairs blame me. As far as they're concerned I should have been the one who died today." He crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain. The factory in the distance shimmered with an eerie phosphorescence that seemed both peaceful and mocking.

  "Have you ever been in the lobby of the bank downtown?" asked Will. "All those windows facing every direction? Have you noticed that you can't see any part of the factory from there, not even the smokestacks? I worked for a while last summer as a caddy at the Moundbuilder's Country Club. They used to give us a free lunch. The factory's only five miles away but you can't see it from anywhere on the club grounds, even using binoculars."

  "You're not making any sense."

  "It's almost as if the people who don't want to know about it can't see it." He turned around and pulled the curtain farther back. "Can you see the factory, Sheriff?"

  "Yeah.”

  "My room faces north, all right?"

  "Okay…?"

  Will dropped the curtain and crossed to open the door, gesturing for Jackson to follow him to the other end of the hall. They entered Herb and Darlene's room. Will pointed at the curtains.

  "Their window faces the exact opposite direction of mine. Pull back the curtain."

  Confused, Jackson did as Will asked—

  —and found himself facing a view of the factory. The angle was slightly different, but it was undeniably the factory.

  "That's impossible," he whispered. "The damn thing's north and this window—"

  "Dad showed it to me the night before I started at the plant. If you go downstairs and look out the back door, you'll still be able to see it. Look out any door or window facing any direction in this house and you'll see the plant."

  Jackson let the curtain fall back.

  Will shrugged his shoulders in defeat. "I don't know why I'm showing you this, telling you these things. I doubt you even understand."

  Jackson faced him. "I know exactly how you feel, Will. My dad was killed at the plant when I was seventeen. Up until the day he died he'd been priming me to go work the line. I didn't want to, God knows, I saw what it did to him, how it sucked his life away. He was dead long before the...accident. I watched it happen bit by bit, the way his spirit just ground to a halt in a series of sputtering little agonies. I hated that place, even used to have these dreams where the machines came alive and chased me. The morning he was killed my mom started in on me to go get a job there. I didn't know what to do. But I got lucky and was drafted. Even Vietnam was preferable to that place. Mom died while I was over there. As terrible as it sounds, for as much as I loved her I was almost relieved that she was dead because it meant she wouldn't hound me about taking my father’s place at the plant."

  "Why did you stay here?"

  "I wish I knew." Jackson absent-mindedly scratched at an area near
the center of his back, thinking about the marks he'd found there when he was a child, and pulled his hand away. "Maybe it was my way of defying that place. I kept remembering the passage from Revelations that the priest read at Dad's funeral: ‘Yea, sayeth the spirit, that they may rest from their labours, and their works do follow them.' Well, I wasn't going to follow and I was damned if that place was gonna drill into my conscience and follow me. For so many years I'd listened to Dad talk about it like it was an actual living thing that I came to think of it that way, so I guess part of me decided to stay here just to spite it, to drive past it every day and think, 'You didn't get me, motherfucker!' At least that way I can ... I dunno, make my Dad's death count for something." He exhaled, smiled, and put his hand on Will's shoulder. "Those men can't force you to do anything you don't want to, not while I'm wearing this badge, anyway."

  "Thanks, Sheriff. Dad always said you were one of the good guys."

  "So was he. So're all the workers."

  Will stared down at his trembling hands. "You know the funny thing? I keep thinking about being ... a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl. I've been trapped here all my life, waiting to follow in my dad's footsteps, watching him and Mom waste away, not able to do a goddamn thing about it I spend half my time feeling like shit and the other half mad that I feel that way. I look in mirrors and think I'm seeing a picture of my dad. I think of everything he and Mom have missed out on and I just…surrender, Yknow? Because I love them. And I don't know if I'm my own man or just the sum of my family's parts."

  Jackson started out of the room. "You stay here. I'm gonna go send those men on their way."

  Will rose from the bed. "Sheriff?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Thanks for telling me about your dad. It helped me to decide. I'm gonna go with them."