Ernie's Ark (8 page)

The night he crossed, Timmy came over to Elaine and Bing’s to confess before the fact. At the time he was living in the apartment on West Main with that dishrag of a cat he had practically on life support. He’d always been like that, sentimental, still wore a shirt my mother gave him in junior high. I’d like to know if he has that shirt now; that, and the rabbit’s foot I gave him for his twelfth birthday. The night he came over to see us at Elaine’s, he kept taking the rabbit’s foot out, rolling it between his palms like
a worry stone. We’d just gotten back from a rally and had turned on the late news to find out what the cameras had caught. The florid face of Henry John McCoy, CEO of Atlantic Pulp & Paper, flared onto the screen, his small mouth working as he stood in front of some Manhattan skyscraper after an acrid negotiation session that had lasted exactly nine minutes.

“The guy has a point,” Timmy said, standing between us and the TV.

Bing turned down the sound. “What did you say?” he asked Tim, and then we all got up in a confused shuffle, as if we were at a party and it was time to look over the buffet table.

“Nothing,” Timmy said. “He’s got shareholders to answer to, that’s all.” His face seemed flushed; he’d skipped the rally for a date with one of the dimpled girlfriends he’d been auditioning for the role of his future wife.

“Shareholders?” I said. In the entire history of our family I don’t believe the word
shareholders
had ever come up in conversation, not even during my father’s nightly vocabulary drills back when we were kids, long before Timmy was born. Out came the rabbit’s foot again, rolling along his palms.

“I can’t afford to wait around anymore,” he said. “I’m a short-timer.” He’d been in the mill two years, since his high school graduation, a pin-drop of time, and here he was talking to us about waiting. “Danny,” he said, turning to me, which he always did in times of uncertainty; I could feel the heat of his confusion trained on me. “They’re paying me eighteen bucks an hour, Danny,” he said. “How do I explain the strike to some stiff flipping burgers at the mall?” Which is not at all the point, not at all.

“Talk to him, Danny,” Elaine said just under her breath.
Bing said something, too, that I didn’t quite catch. It was so quiet you could hear a rumble of news emanating from the muted television.

“Union’s like family,” I said finally. “You stick by them even if they’re wrong.”

“Which they’re not,” Roy added.

“Which they’re not,” I said.

Tim has this thing he does, he peers at you from beneath a heavy wave of blondish hair that grazes his eyebrows, as if to remind you that you’re worth looking up to. If he says something that doesn’t square, you hardly notice it because you’re thinking about how if you had a son you’d want it to be him.

“It’s a business, not a charity,” he said, those gray eyes skimming across us: me, Elaine and Bing, Roy and his wife, Eppy. Sonny was at the union hall manning the phones, and his wife, Jill, was working the food bank with their two boys. The rest of the kids were in bed, either upstairs or next door at Roy’s.

“This is the kind of crap they teach in high school these days,” Roy snapped. “Like good faith doesn’t count, or tradition, or bad knees. We’re supposed to give back Christmas shutdown, give back Sunday double-time, subcontract all of Maintenance. We’re supposed to take the whipping and thank them for not using a gun.”

“I’ve heard the speech, Roy,” Timmy murmured. “All I’m saying is that you can’t blame a businessman for wanting all he can get from his capital.”

I stared into his upturned face. Instead of wondering what was all this business about capital and shareholders, I was looking for his freckles, which had disappeared without my noticing. His
freckles were just flat-out gone, and somehow a man’s face had turned up on top of them. Then Elaine said, “Daddy didn’t raise us to be somebody’s capital,” and the shimmy in her voice let what she realized filter down to the rest of us, who were not so quick about people: that our little brother planned to cross that very night, that he was going over there in twenty minutes to sign on for the graveyard shift.

Suddenly I was yelling my head off, fists raised, Elaine pulling on my shirt, the kids waking up and wailing out the bedroom windows. Tim’s yelling back at me, and I’m thinking, What the fuck happened to your freckles? Really, this is what I was thinking when I hit him, and you can analyze it all you want. He backed away like a stunned bird, a drip of blood at his lip, like I was some kind of something he didn’t recognize. But it was him. He was the one in disguise.

I tore after him, not because I wanted to land another punch but because during our scuffle the rabbit’s foot had thumped onto the stiff carpet of Bing and Elaine’s breezeway. “Here,” I said, catching him near his car. He reared back with his fist cocked but saw at once that I had come back to myself. To my relief—to my great relief—he took the rabbit’s foot and returned it to his pocket, where I like to think it remains, and that it reminds him of his twelfth birthday and good luck, our huddled warmth at a campsite on Moosehead Lake, a globe of stars swelling over our heads.

“I’m crossing, Danny,” he said. “I want the money. I’ve got plans.”

I lifted my arm to indicate the town, the torn-up families, the enflamed tongues on the picket line. “This is war, little brother.”

“I know,” he said, nodding, nodding, “I know.”

“You
think
you do. Listen to me, Timmy. You’re breaking my heart, my man.” I cupped his chin, careful not to touch his damaged lip. “Think of Dad.”

“Danny,” he said, “I didn’t
know
Dad.” Then he slid into his pickup and drove off.

It’s true, he didn’t know Dad, and that is his terrible loss. My father—our father, I should say—was fifty-two years old when our mother produced Timmy, a wizened troll with slammed-shut eyes. Tim was born twenty years after Elaine, nineteen years after Roy, seventeen years after Sonny, fifteen years after me. Our father was a faithful man and I miss him still, that machinist who loved scales, everything calibrated, quantified. He measured anger in ounces, surprise in feet, and happiness in degrees Celsius.

The happy scale, he called it. Zero to one hundred. Frozen-solid grief to boiling-over joy. “Son, you’re looking at a ninety-nine-point-five,” he said of himself as we studied Tim in his cradle. I figured he was hedging his bets with that last half degree: maybe the kid would turn out to be useless with his hands. But it was his own ailing heart our father meant. He died four weeks later, and we froze in that house for years. Our mother never thawed—I don’t think there was a day when her personal mercury rose above a degree and a half—so it was left to me to pass Dad’s lessons on.

I taught my little brother how to read a micrometer and sharpen a drill bit, but also how to navigate a library, flip an omelette, tell a clean joke. I tested him with Dad’s old math drills and word puzzles. I explained the workings of the happy scale, hoping my little brother’s life would turn out very, very warm. It never occurred to me to include in Tim’s instruction the sin of crossing a picket line.

The cameras stayed awhile, setting up behind the gauntlet three times a day as strikers spit on scabs’ pickups and brand-new Buicks, hollering things they’d slap their kids for even thinking. I was there, too. I got in their faces and threatened their babies and told them there was a special ring in hell with their names traced in fire. I didn’t do this to my little brother, but I let others do it. That’s the part that shocks you, the parts of yourself you get introduced to when push comes to shove.

Timmy wasn’t the only one who crossed, not that it matters. Superscabs, we called them, the ones from our own ranks. There was Earlen Lampry, who surprised exactly nobody by crossing since he came from scum and will be scum till his dying day. There were the Blake brothers and Zoo Pritchett and Millard Thibodeau. There were some guys from the west side, and a few girls, shiftless punks looking for beer money, no sense of obligation, no forebears writing union songs and waiting in the snow for a call-up. Thirty-one in all. Tim was the surprise, though, the one nobody could figure.

The other scabs were imports from the South, easy to hate for all kinds of reasons, their Bubba drawls and new trucks and big, stupid belt buckles with
Elvis
and
Jesus
welded into the clasp. And some of them were black, which inspired a fresh set of vocabulary words on the gauntlet, a turn of events that interested the hell out of the Barbie-doll newslady, who stuck that fuzzy microphone in all the likely faces. Then, there’s Timmy on the news, telling her we’re not a bunch of racists, just papermakers who want to make paper.

This was a mistake. Tim the Superscab defending his hometown. This was a bad, bad mistake, on national TV, and he
seemed to know it, his eyes darting beyond camera range like he was taking cues from someone, when I knew—and I was one of the few to be in a position to, I guess—that what he was doing was second-guessing, changing his mind after it was too late.

Which it was. Even if he’d crossed back over that very night, it was too late. Atlantic Pulp & Paper is a big operation, drawing from at least eight towns, but this town took the brunt, and what’s more the mill is right in front of our faces, looming up from the riverbank with its uneven row of windows. It makes a good backdrop, the smokestacks pushing out bluish clouds that look kind of beautiful scraping past the top of the hills. Tim’s a small guy, and you could see what they were shooting for: this helpless kid caught in the maw of something more powerful than himself, etcetera. It was no secret whose side Barbie was on, though she did her best to hide it, getting guys like Roy and Bing to pose as America’s backbone. She dragged one would-be denim-shirt movie star after another in front of the camera, but the message was that unions had gotten big and crooked, that America’s backbone had a whole lot of fat on it, that the sainted corporations had no choice but to put down the screws or move the whole shebang to Guatemala where people don’t whine about give-backs. They’d get pictures of us pummeling the cab of some guy’s waxed sky-blue pickup or racking up the paint with keys and nails. Sweaty-faced, eyes bulging, neck cords standing out like tree roots, we looked like lunatics out there, a mob of dangerous rabble-rousers who hated blacks and Southerners and were bent on bringing down America the Beautiful just to buy a new snowmobile.

Timmy’s moment on camera came right after one of these rabble scenes, which I was watching on the news over at Elaine’s
with my five-year-old niece, Linney. “There’s Uncle Timmy!” she squeaked, squirming out of my arms. She barreled over to the screen to touch his face. Bing got up to turn off the set. “Wait,” I said, “let me see this,” and man, I saw it, my stomach fisting as I realized how small and nervous he looked. How young.

“He’s fucked,” said Bing. Linney roared out to the kitchen to tell Elaine that Daddy was saying bad words again. “Shit,” Bing said, heaving himself into a chair. He liked Tim the best of all of us. “Shit. What kinda idiot did your mother raise?”

What could I say? There he was, live and in person, apologizing for the town racists. In the meantime Bing and Elaine’s other kids were whooping it up on the street with their cousins in a game of touch football. Bing lurched out to the breezeway and hollered at them: “Kids! Get in here!” I could hear a faint whine of protest from somebody, probably Eddie, Roy and Eppy’s oldest, and then another roar from Bing: “I said
now
!” The kids came in and lined up, goggle-eyed. “I don’t want trouble visiting this house. Anybody asks you about Uncle Timmy, you tell them he’s no part of this family. That’s what you say, you understand me?”

The kids—nine boys, this family’s loaded with boys—looked at their shoes. By this time Elaine’s out there, crying a little, holding Linney by the hand. “You understand me?” Bing repeated. Bing’s a big, lovable man, and though the kids aren’t exactly afraid of him, they answer when he poses a question. The boys mumbled something or other that sounded more or less like yes but not exactly yes. Tim is twenty years old and they kiss the ground he walks on, just like Tim used to with me, like I used to with my father. “Bing,” Elaine said, very softly, “let them go,” and the kids shot from the breezeway like bottle rockets.

The next morning Timmy wakes up with
SUPERSCAB
spray-painted across his landlady’s hedge and front stairs. Goes out to start up his truck and finds the tires slashed, the doors jimmied, and a hunk of dog shit on the driver’s seat. He tells my aunt Lucy, who tells Elaine and Bing, who tell Roy and Eppy, who tell Sonny and Jill, who tell me, and except for my aunt we decide officially that we’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it, that it’s his neck he stuck out there when he should’ve known better.

Tempers were running short, and money. This strange, gray calm had fallen over the town like the eye of a hurricane, and we were hoping the mediators could figure something out before we all got tempted to cross. We all thought it; you know we did. And Tim was out there shoving our worst secret down our throats. How could he not have known that?

I bought Timmy his first white shirt, when he was seven years old and making his First Communion. “I’m riding my bike to South America, Danny,” he announced, bow-tied and shoe-shined in the parking lot of St. Anne’s. The Host hadn’t melted on his tongue before he was imagining himself flying away on the midnight-blue Schwinn I’d given him for the occasion. Even back then he was full of plans.

Don’t get me wrong. I
wanted
him to get out. Me, I could’ve done it, too, I could have gotten out, and I didn’t, and that’s a whole other story. Timmy was getting out and I was glad. We were all glad. He was our boy.

I froze my backside at sixty-one football games over six seasons. I kept him near me through our mother’s wake and funeral. I taught him to drive. Then one day I woke up and he’d turned into a kid who could cross a picket line and talk about
capital, and it’s like he was saying a chimpanzee could make paper, it’s not worth what they’re paying you, you’re lucky to be working at all. This is what you get for loving a child.