The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  He must have seen us squatting there by the highway, but he kept his eyes on the road. I raised my hand and waved. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Oy, Siju! Look this way!”

  He swiveled his head toward us briefly.

  Manju’s big eyes followed him.

  Then one of the women working nearby, a woman with a missing eye whose eyelid drooped over the empty socket, spat out her tobacco with a harsh smack and said to Manju, “Enough of your nonsense. Go sit somewhere else. Leave those boys to do their work.”

  Manju didn’t answer, so the woman said more loudly, “You! Heard me? Go sit—”

  Manju picked up a pebble and flung it at her. It hit the woman on the shoulder, and she yelped.

  “Soole!” the woman hissed.

  Manju turned her thin face to the woman. “Soole?” Manju’s voice trembled. “You’re calling me a soole? You old dirty one-eyed monkey.”

  I looked at Manju, afraid to speak. She picked up my ore and began hammering at it.

  “Manju—” I began. I thought she was going to cry, but then she looked up. “I wish you had a lorry,” she said. “Then you and me could drive to China.”

  Later I took my full puttu to the weighing station. On my way I passed Amma working with a group of women at the base of a slope. I stopped to watch her. She was shaking a sieve, holding it away from her body, a red cloud billowing around her. Dark pebbles of ore danced and shivered in the wide shallow basin. A few feet away Munna, naked except for an old shirt of mine, crawled in aimless circles. If he got too far or tried to stuff a fistful of dirt into his mouth, Amma or one of the women would reach out an arm or a leg and hook him back in. When Munna saw me, he stretched out his short arms, ridiculous in their baggy sleeves, and screamed with delight. Amma looked up. She put down the sieve and straightened her back. She was as small as a child, her hands barely bigger than mine. The other women glanced at me and continued working. The muscles in their forearms were laid like train tracks.

  “How many?” Amma called up.

  “Three,” I said. I held up the puttu. “This is the fourth one.” There were still a few hours of daylight left. A few hours before the red hills of Bellary turned black and the day’s totals were tallied and announced by the sweating labor officer, Mr. Subbu, and no matter the numbers, how high or how low, the workers would be expected to cheer.

  With her eyes on me, she put a hand inside her blouse to touch the small velvet jewelry pouch she kept there. Whatever jewelry had been in there was pawned long ago. I knew that now it contained a few hundred rupees, two or maybe three. This was what she had saved, in secrecy, for months, money that Appa overlooked or was too drunk to account for. It was for me, my school fees, and she liked to remind me it was there. She eyed me, her lower lip hanging open. I knew she was debating whether to speak.

  “Guna,” she said finally. “Tonight, when Appa comes—”

  “Have to go,” I said. “Lots of work. It’s going to rain later.”

  She sighed. “You don’t want to go back to school?” she asked. “You don’t want to study hard and get a proper job?” She lowered her voice. “Such a clever boy you are, Guna. Such good marks you used to get. You want to waste your brains, fill your head with iron like a puttu?”

  I made no reply. I remembered what Manju had said about my potential, and I saw myself flinging the entire contents of the puttu in Amma’s face, iron flying everywhere, scattershot.

  Amma was keeping half an eye on Munna, who was trying to climb into the sieve. “Did Siju get a trip today?” she asked.

  “You’re asking about Lorry Raja?” I said.

  “Don’t act like those lorry-cleaner boys. He drives well.”

  I hopped from one foot to the other, balancing the puttu like a tray. “Lorry Raja tries to turn on his indicators and turns on the windshield wipers instead.”

  “Guna!” Amma said.

  “Lorry Raja is always combing his hair in the rearview mirror.”

  One of the women working next to Amma laughed. She had large yellow teeth and a gold stud in her flared nostril. Amma glanced at her, then at the ground.

  Encouraged by the woman’s laugh, I added, “Lorry Raja’s lorry doesn’t even go in a straight line.” I waggled my palm to show the route Siju’s lorry took.

  Amma scooped up Munna before he overturned the sieve. She sucked the edge of her sari’s pallu and scrubbed his cheek, which was, like her own, like mine, red with iron dust. The dust mixed with our sweat and formed a gummy red paste, which stuck to our skin and was almost impossible to get off without soap and water, of which we had little, except for whatever dank rain gathered in stray pits and puddles. It was easy to tell who the mine workers were. We all looked like we were bleeding.

  Amma put Munna down, and he began to try to crawl up the slope to me. She held her small body very straight and looked at the other women. “Siju is the youngest driver on-site,” she announced loudly. The other women, even the one who laughed earlier, took no notice.

  “Only fourteen and already driving a lorry.” Amma was breathing heavily, and under her red mask she was flushed.

  Munna slid back down the slope and landed on his bottom. He began to wail, his toothless mouth open in protest and outrage.

  “He’s your brother,” Amma said.

  We looked at Munna. Neither of us moved to pick him up.

  “I know,” I said.

  I registered my fourth load at the weighing station and emptied my puttu into the first of a line of lorries waiting there. The weighing station was marked off from the neighboring permit yard by a low wall of scrap metal: short iron pipes and rusted carburetors and hubcaps that sometimes dislodged and rolled of their own accord across the yard, stopping with a clang when they hit Mr. Subbu’s aluminum-walled shed. This shed, a square, burnished structure three times as big as the tent we lived in, was the labor office. Complaints were lodged there, and labor records were written down in a big book. How many laborers worked per day; how many puttus they filled; how many laborers were residents at the mine camp; how many were floaters, men and women who arrived by the busload in the mornings and stood in a ragged line, waiting to be given work. Mr. Subbu would come out of his office and point at random, and those who were not chosen would shuffle back to the bus depot on the highway, where they would take a bus to the next mine to try their luck. Those who stayed were given a hammer and puttu. Most of them, used to this routine, brought their own. During the day Mr. Subbu’s shed could be seen from anywhere at the mine. All you had to do was look up from your hammering, and there it was, a sparkle on the rust colored hillside. His maroon Esteem was parked outside, a green, tree-shaped air freshener twirling slowly from the rearview mirror. I noticed the greenness of the air freshener because there was not a single green tree near the mine; they all bore red leaves.

  Mr. Subbu stood in the shade thrown by a backhoe loader, drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was wearing a full-sleeved shirt with the top button undone, and I could see the triangle of a white undershirt and a few black tangles of hair peeping from the top. He sweated profusely, and there were large damp patches on his chest and lower back, and two damp crescents in his armpits, which swelled to full moons when he raised his arms.

  I stood there, watching him. One of the workers, a young woman with two long braids, came up to him to say something. Mr. Subbu listened with his head bent. Then he put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and replied. The girl stood so still that her braids did not even swish. When he finished speaking, he let his hand fall, then she turned and walked away. There had been a rumor in the mine camp about one of the new babies, and how it had Mr. Subbu’s nose, and the mother, a rail-thin woman called Savithri, had been forced to sneak away from the camp at night before her husband came for her with the metal end of a belt. I had heard Appa call Mr. Subbu shameless and a soole magane, but something about the way he stood all alone in his nice clothes seemed lonely and promising. And as I stood there watching him, it occur
red to me suddenly that he might be able to help me. My heart beat faster, and I pictured myself standing in the shade with him, talking, him smiling and nodding.

  I went over to stand by him, my empty puttu thudding against my thighs. He finished the Pepsi and threw the bottle under the backhoe loader, all without paying attention to me. Then he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “Taking rest?” he said. He had seen me around the mine, but he didn’t know my name, of course. There were hundreds of children running everywhere, and under that coat of red we must have all looked the same to him.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Only five minutes,” I added, lest he think I was shirking.

  “Very good,” said Mr. Subbu.

  His eyelids drooped, and he nodded his head slowly. I waited for him to offer me a Pepsi, and when he didn’t, I kept standing there. I wondered what a man like that thought about. I looked out over the mine, the land cut open in wide red swatches. Compared to the mine, the plain beyond seemed colorless, the trees sitting low to the ground, hardly different from the bushes, whose woody stems bore patches of dry leaves. In the distance there were hills that had not yet been mined, and they looked impossibly lush, rising and falling in deep, green waves against the sky. And the sun, the sun was a white ball that tore into everything, into the blistered skin on the backs of my hands, into the body of the backhoe loader, into the yawning red mouth of the mine.

  I cleared my throat. Mr. Subbu’s mouth parted and closed, parted and closed. Long strings of spit stretched and contracted between his lips.

  “Sir,” I said.

  Mr. Subbu’s eyes snapped open. “Hm?”

  “Sir, I want to ask something.”

  He looked at me. I took a deep breath and held his eyes. They were not unkind eyes, only a little distant, a little distracted.

  “I want to become a driver, sir. Lorry driver,” I said, speaking quickly.

  Mr. Subbu seemed to be waiting for more, so I continued, “I know driving, sir. My father taught me. He was the driver for the subinspector of the Raichur Thermal Station, sir. He drove an Esteem, sir, just like yours.” And I pointed to the maroon car that was parked outside his shed.

  I didn’t think of it as a lie. When Appa had driven for the subinspector, I had sat in his lap whenever the subinspector was in a meeting or on an inspection tour or at the flat of a woman who was not his wife. I would hold the Esteem’s steering wheel, dizzy from the musky odor of the leather upholstery, while Appa drove us slowly around the streets of Raichur, his foot barely touching the accelerator, whispering in my ear, “Left, now. Get ready. Turn the wheel slowly.” And his hands would close over mine, swallowing them, and I would feel the pressure of his fingers and respond to them, pulling as he pulled, inhaling the spice of the cheap home-brewed daru that was always on his breath, waiting for those moments when his lips brushed the back of my head, and we would guide the car together, the big maroon bird making a graceful swoop and coming straight again. “Expert,” Appa would whisper warm and rich into my hair as I frowned at the road to hide my pleasure. “So young and already driving like an expert.”

  I said nothing about the accident, about how Appa had been drunker than usual, how he had shattered the knee of the woman, how he had cried later because of the noise the woman made—a resigned sigh, oh—before she fell.

  Mr. Subbu’s fingers kneaded one another.

  “Please, sir,” I said.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  I paused. “Thirteen,” I said, rounding up.

  “Thirteen,” Mr. Subbu said. He squinted out into the sun, and then he pointed to the one of the workers moving over the surface of the red, undulating plain. The sun shrank him into a black dot, no bigger than one of the pebbles I filled my puttu with. “See him?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. And together we watched him for a while.

  Then Mr. Subbu said, as if posing a maths problem, “What is he doing?”

  “Working,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Subbu. “Smart boy. He’s working.”

  I watched a lorry wind its way to the bottom of a hill, heading to the highway, on an uneven road sawn into the hillside. Behind it trailed a hazy red cloud.

  “Work hard, and you will get whatever you want,” Mr. Subbu said, his voice louder than necessary, as if many people had gathered to hear to him. “That’s the best advice I can give you, my boy. Your father would tell you the same thing.” And he touched me on the shoulder, a fatherly touch, at the same time pushing me lightly so that I found myself back in the sun again.

  Instead of going back to the site beside the highway, I went to find Appa. Half-hidden behind a mound of earth, I watched him being lowered into a pit, a rope tied under his arms and passing across his bare chest. He had taken off his pants and wore only a pair of frayed striped boxer shorts. He carried a long-handled hammer like an extension of his arm. The loose end of the rope was held by three men, who braced their feet to hold the weight of Appa’s body. And then earth swallowed him, feet first.

  I often came to watch him work like this, when he didn’t know I was there. I would count the seconds he was down in the pit, listening for the steady crash of his hammer, muffled thunder. I would wait, alert to the slightest sound of panic, the faintest jerking of the rope. I knew that no matter how many times one did a job, the worst could happen the next time. And just as the waiting became unbearable, and I was about to run into the open, to give myself away, he emerged, red-faced, dangling, gasping like a man being pulled from water.

  They untied him, and he began rubbing his skin where the rope had cut into him. One of the men said, “Nice weather down there?” and Appa said, “Sunny like your wife’s thullu.” The man laughed. Appa said, “One day I want to tie up that bastard Subbu and send him down there.” The other man said, “He’d get stuck, first of all. Second thing is he’s too busy putting his fat hands all over girls. What else you think he does in that office all day?”

  “Fat bastard,” Appa said. He raised his hammer and brought it down once, hard. Then he lifted it again and let it crash down, and then he did it again, the rise and fall of the hammer all part of the same smooth motion. I could feel the impact of each blow travel through the ground between our bodies, from the muscles in his arms to the muscles in my legs, connecting us.

  “Thank god I have only sons,” Appa said, and the man laughed again.

  When I returned to the site beside the highway, Manju had disappeared. The ground where she had been squatting was scuffed. I crouched over it and tried to make out the marks of her bare feet. A few women were still hunched over, their hammers clinking in rhythm. The woman with the missing eye pulled a pinch of tobacco from a large gray wad and handed it to me. I took it and chewed on it slowly. The bitter tobacco juice flooded my mouth.

  The woman watched me chew. “Want to know where that girl went?” she asked.

  I tried to imagine what could have happened to her eye. I wanted to apologize for Manju throwing a stone at her, but I was angry at the woman for calling Manju a soole.

  “She probably went back to her tent,” I said.

  “Take another guess,” the woman said. “Shall I tell you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Smart boy,” she said.

  Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Listen to me. That girl is not nice. Okay? Not nice. You should stay away from her.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I have to work.”

  For the next few hours I worked without stopping. I pounded the ore with my hammer, the blows precise, never faltering, the ring of metal against metal filling my head. Sweat poured down my wrists, and I had to keep wiping my hands on my shorts. Lorries ticked by on the highway, marking time. Siju’s lorry did not drive past again. After a while the women stood up and stretched their backs. They flexed their fingers and curled their toes in the dirt. The one who had given me the tobacco smiled, but with just one eye her smile looked i
nsincere. They took up their full puttus and their hammers and walked off in the direction of the weighing station. As they walked, I noted their square backs, their strong thigh muscles showing through their saris, their strange bowlegged gait, their gnarled feet caked with dirt. None of them owned shoes except for the odd pair of rubber or plastic sandals. Manju had been right, I thought. They looked less like women and more like monkeys, the muscular brown monkeys that would swarm our village outside Raichur. They were fearless and feral, those monkeys, grabbing peanuts from children’s hands, attacking people with their small, sharp teeth. A pack of them would sit on top of a low, crumbling wall, chattering and picking lice from each other’s fur, in the way that these women scratched their armpits and laughed in low, coarse voices.

  The day ripened into purple and then rotted into black, the air sagging with the smells I never noticed when the sun was there to burn it all away, the stench from pools filled with stagnant water and buzzing with mosquitoes, the sweet whiff of shit drifting from the field we all used, furtively or defiantly, even the women and girls. I regis tered my last load of iron and returned to our tent, where Amma was preparing the coals for dinner. Clouds pressed down on the camp, our city of plastic tents, and we could hear the voices of the men coming down from the top of the rise where they gathered to drink after work every evening. I could hear Appa’s voice above the others, his laugh the loudest. Amma glanced up every now and again, her face a shining red circle of worry in the light of the coals. I held Munna on my lap, and he blinked sleepily into the coals. When we heard Appa’s singing, the notes warbling as he came down the rise toward us, Amma glanced quickly at me and began blowing at the coals. I pressed my nose into Munna’s neck and smelled his sour baby smell. The coals pulsed brightly every time Amma blew, her cheeks puffed with the effort.