by Sean Boling
Chapter Eleven: Rodrigo
The plan was to let Gio handle most of the tour. He had been a forklift operator at the distribution center back when Rod still owned Pluma Produce. Rod liked to deliver his own goods whenever possible, and Gio would help him unload. A bond developed that led to Rod hiring him to manage the center when he sold Pluma Produce and took over the corporation’s regional operations. He looked forward to an opportunity to watch his former apprentice run the show for the LOCA sixth grade field trip, but wanted to handle the words of welcome before handing the kids over to Gio.
He stood on a wooden palette that Gio had lifted a foot off the ground with a forklift to serve as a platform. Rod told the kids he understood how easy it is too feel isolated in a town like theirs, how small the world can seem. He said he used to think the same things. “Just me and the crops,” he would mutter as passed the fields, and later worked in them. “More crops than people,” he would curse the land around him, and wish for the kind of connections that were possible in a big city. But then he started to learn about where these crops ended up. He asked the kids if they knew. A couple of them raised their hands and guessed some of the nearest big cities. They were right, he told them, but there were many more right answers. Some other cities were named, and he praised their knowledge and asked them to think even bigger. They started to name countries, and as he told each one they were correct, eyebrows started to raise and mouths open. When the buzzing started to summit, he made his final push, telling them that they are more connected to the world than they realize, and that while their town may be small, it plays a big role. He closed with “And you can play a big role, too, if you work hard and stay in school.”
He had debated whether to use the line about working hard and staying in school, since it was so derivative, but went with it when the time came, since he figured they were too young to have been overexposed to it. He introduced Gio and hopped off the palette.
“You’re not going to tell them to stay off drugs, too?” Gio whispered to him with a grin as they switched places to the requisite applause of the class.
Rod chuckled and settled off to the side to watch his former disciple at work. He told the kids he started out driving the same kind of forklift he now used as a stage, and the image of him rising above his beginnings was not lost on Rod. He looked on with pride, then looked over at Artie, who looked back at his Dad with pride. His son nodded as if to say “thank you,” and Rod returned the gesture.
Their exchange of nods stared down any guilt he may still have been confronting over his efforts to keep his son from getting suspended.
Not that it took much effort. More than he would have anticipated, but a brief conversation nonetheless.
Dale had called him in to discuss what happened with Artie, even though Rita was teaching art that day.
“I would be more comfortable talking to you about it,” Dale said over the phone when Rod reminded him that Rita was on site. “Or maybe the both of you. But not Rita by herself.”
Rod rearranged his schedule and reached the campus within a half hour. He assumed Dale’s caution had to do with their business relationship, that he was hesitant to do anything about Artie without first consulting him. And though their phone conversation had been brief, little in Dale’s tone led him to believe his son was involved in anything drastic.
His worry grew upon arriving in the waiting area. Artie sat outside Dale’s office, and Wendy greeted him as though it was a prison visit. He nodded at her and asked Artie what happened.
“You should wait until the meeting is over,” Wendy gravely suggested.
Artie looked down and his lip started to quake, so Rod followed Wendy’s direction if only to spare his son’s dignity.
She tapped on Dale’s door and poked her head in, which added to the tension, as Dale usually came out to greet him. She leaned back out and announced with a chill that Mr. Copeland was ready for him. The chill dropped several more degrees when she told Artie to stay outside with her.
When Rod finally found out what instigated this pall, he started to laugh, and had to catch himself from getting too loud. He didn’t want Artie, or Wendy, to hear.
Dale seemed to want to join in, but the most he could manage was a tight smile.
Rod collected himself and leaned back in his chair.
“Boys will be boys,” he said.
Dale stopped smiling. He started to say something.
“I know, I know,” Rod interrupted him. “That sounds bad. But I never thought I’d be able to say that about Arturo.”
Dale appeared to loosen up.
“He has gone through some changes, it seems.”
“All of a sudden,” Rod agreed. “It’s like he got tired of being pushed around.”
Dale nodded, and proceeded to do so longer than Rod expected.
“So what has Artie been telling you?” Dale finally said.
“About what?”
“How kids treat him?”
“He’s a target,” Rod said.
“He said that?”
“No, that’s what I gathered. He doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Well, this isn’t the first complaint we’ve had. Just the first of this nature. Hasn’t Rita mentioned anything before?”
“Yes. That he gets picked on.”
Dale took a moment and looked away.
“Look, Dale,” Rod seized the pause. “We’re not holding you responsible for the other kids’ behavior. They’re jealous. We understand. We’re with you on this sort of thing.”
“You’re with me…” Dale needed clarification.
“We share your belief that kids need to work things out for themselves.”
“The adventure playground is one thing,” he replied. “This is something else.”
“Is it?” Rod posed.
Dale waited, perhaps for inspiration.
“Yes,” he finally said.
For the first time in the conversation, Rod felt like he truly was on the visitor’s side of the desk.
“So what were you thinking of doing?” he asked Dale.
“Suspension.”
He wanted to pull every cent he had donated and cancel the computer deal. But he took a deep breath and instead tried to explain why that was unfair, in a volume still inaudible through the door.
“Everyone is so sensitive these days,” he hissed. “So goddamn sensitive. How many butts did you grab when you were a kid, Dale?”
“I might have grabbed a few,” he admitted.
“And were you suspended?”
“No.”
“There you go.”
“Maybe I should have been.”
Rod was surprised at how much Dale was pushing back.
“The field trip to our distribution center is scheduled for next week,” he reminded him.
“It doesn’t have to be a week-long suspension,” Dale offered. “Three days would have him back in time.”
Since Dale was willing to negotiate, Rod assessed that he could still save Artie with some nuance. He didn’t want to dangle the money over him. They both knew it was there.
“Where would you be now, Dale, if you were suspended each time you did something wrong?”
“Nobody is suggesting that should happen.”
“But that’s the way it ends up going a lot of the time, doesn’t it?” Rod sensed he was on to something. “A kid gets suspended once, then when something happens again, people can’t believe he didn’t get the message, so he gets suspended again. Now he’s a problem. He’s got a reputation. He starts bouncing from one school to another…”
He stopped there.
More points were waiting to spill out, none of them intended as a threat. But now that he had stumbled upon one, a delicious combination of soft and jagged, he let it hang there.
Dale appeared to weigh the consequences of Artie bouncing away from Live Oak Charter Academy. They seemed to once again switch places around the desk.
“Why don’t you take him home today,” Dale ended the silence. “And I’ll write a report that either you or Rita can sign off on when you bring him to school tomorrow.”
“Fair enough,” Rod said.
He stood up and extended his hand toward Dale, who rose and shook it. But then Dale sat back down and gripped the handles of his chair, rather than come around and hold the door open, as was his custom. Rod waited for a moment to see if he would relent, but Dale had entered a trance. He caught himself and looked up at Rod.
“I should get started on that report,” he said, then started to open his desk drawers as though he had no idea what was inside them.
Rod let himself out and corralled Artie under his arm.
“Let’s go home, son.”
As they passed by Wendy’s desk, she managed to smile at them, but it came across as conditional. She looked past them toward Dale’s office.
Rod relieved her suspense.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
He waited until they reached the door to turn and check her reaction. She just managed to refasten her smile as they made eye contact, but it was even less convincing than before.
“See you tomorrow,” she attached to her smile.
He wrapped his arm all the more tightly around his son as they left and walked to the car.
The memory of that walk prompted him to re-enact putting his arm around Artie as Gio led them outside the distribution center to look at some the equipment his company made available to any grower who contracted with them. He was pleased that Artie didn’t fidget away from his grasp, as he imagined the other kids would if one of their parents tried the same maneuver. His son was proud of him.
Gio gathered everyone around a lettuce harvester they had recently acquired, a newer model that used water jets to sever the leaves from their base before rolling tongs scooped them onto the conveyer belt that guided the greens up and away from their roots to wherever they were destined.
When the jets first came on, most of the kids jumped with a start and laughed at themselves. Then as the gears started spinning the scoopers and belts, Artie started humming a song that Rod couldn’t quite place, but fittingly accompanied the whirring mechanism.
“What is that you’re singing?” he asked.
“It’s from the Bugs Bunny cartoons,” Artie looked up at him from the crook of Rod’s arm. “When they’re running around a factory or stuck in a machine.”
He went back to humming and Rod let it vibrate through his body as he kept Artie close until the tune suddenly tapped into some visuals that goosed a laugh out of him, and not only thanks to images from cartoons he hadn’t thought of in decades. As Artie’s soundtrack implied, the harvester was also rather cartoonish in how specific it was, in its elaborate and ingenious response to a single task. There was no other job it could perform.
He thought of how much he would have appreciated working with such a contraption back in his field days. But maybe it would have replaced him, or pushed him in a different direction. Maybe his resolve would not have been sharpened to such a fine point if he had been spared the thousands of hours stooped over, cold and wet, or hot and dusty. In combining the old with the new, he wished that old sensibilities could be maintained with new amenities, that struggle and want could somehow be programmed into the systems. He hoped such a marriage was possible in their plans for LOCA, that fortitude and ease could run parallel to one another. It would be a challenge, but staying hungry in a kingdom of convenience struck him as the great struggle of their times.
As Gio demonstrated some other cutting edge pieces of equipment, though, and led the flock of small, colorful polo shirts into a massive refrigerated warehouse filled three stories high with food that was on its way to their tables, Rod surrendered his dream of a tougher America.
It wasn’t a fair fight.