Ghosts of Tom Joad (12 page)

“Nah, it'll be okay.”

Matlock hit a pothole big as a wading pool, mud up on to the windshield.

“I better watch out for them.”

“For sure.”

There was a long pause and the car traveled further on down the road.

“Was a time when Reeve was a better town.”

“How's that, Mr. Matlock?”

“Life was like walking on ice. It took a little effort to keep from falling on your ass, but you could at least do it. Things are
more uncertain now. Everything we used to figure was right, ain't. It's like change changed.”

“You're gonna pass it.”

“What's that, Earl?”

“My house, you're gonna pass it.” Mr. Matlock was still pretty drunk, and started on about better times, thinking stuff old people do.

“I tell you, summers die Earl, summers die. When my own dad came home from the war, Japan was a wasteland along with Europe. Somehow we did to ourselves what the Krauts and the Japs couldn't. In Reeve, we had what we thought was a promise. The factory would give us jobs and we'd work hard for her. Nobody would be sleeping under the old Highway 61 railroad bridge like some do now.”

“My old man told me he took two months to come home from the Japan war by boat and train and bus, walked into the house, kissed my mom on Friday, got blind ass drunk on Saturday, and went to work Monday, swearing that the best and worst days of his life always seemed to begin with a hangover. Jesus, money was everywhere. The factory was still making glass and houses were going up fast. When the work started to taper off, the Reeve family slipped some in how they ran the place—everybody remembers those years when lame old Harry Reeve was in charge, before his brother stepped in. But at least when the Reeve family made tough business decisions, they knew the families they'd be affecting.”

“I put in a lot of good years alongside Stan and your dad. As hard as we worked, our product wasn't selling as much. The changes to the factory, more computer things and all, seemed
necessary, but how can they expect a man to become high-tech when they don't pay for any education? Not much has changed in Reeve High School since I went there, and some of them textbooks you're using probably got my name still in them. Hell, Mrs. Reardon has been sixty-two for the last twenty years.”

“We kept our part of the bargain, and we got played. The people who used our commitment realized they could take more and give us less. Wages went down ‘to save our jobs.' Benefits went away ‘to protect the company's future.' We all pushed our mortgages out, bought American cars, and now Reeve's gone. Nobody knows who owns that factory anymore. Maybe nobody owns it and it's just a ghost. There never was no bargain, they just kept telling us there was. We did our part, they slipped out the back door while we were wondering how we got from there to here. I don't know anymore, Earl. I wish I could think of some way to set it back right but it ain't gonna happen. Some people see this as a dismantling of the past, but I wonder if it isn't really just the future.”

T
HE LIGHTS, WELL,
some lights, were still on when I walked in the house. I wasn't sure if I was in trouble or not, so I was cautious entering the living room. I heard giggling. Walking through the house, I went to the kitchen, seeing Dad at the table with Mom on his lap, her arms wrapped around Dad's neck. I'd never seen them like that before, ever. They were both damn drunk and kissin' at each other, Mom stroking the hair at his temples, smiling delicately, like she was remembering something only she knew. An empty whiskey bottle was on the floor.

“We got company, Sissy.”

“Who's that?”

“Looks like my fucking loser of a son, drunk like his old man.”

“Earl, where you been?”

“I been out.”

“Where's that?”

“At the bowling alley.”

“Our boy's grown, you know that Ray,” said Mom. “I remember when you was just a baby, little—”

“Sissy—”

“You was about three months old, and your daddy had you over his shoulder. Daddy was different then, still trying, don't be angry now Ray, it was like that then. And I heard him say, ‘Look, I got a son.' Or how's about on the first day of school, when you walked home alone, and your Daddy hid in the bushes to be sure you'd be alright, embarrassed that you'd see him watching out for you. He loved you so much, Earl, was so happy putting you in the bath way back then. He'd take you as a baby to the park, push you on the swings saying, ‘Back and a-wwwway, back and a-wwwway,' as you swung. Things changed, though, they did change.”

“That's enough, Sissy. Earl, you better get off to bed, you came home too late. And tomorrow I'll take you down to the factory, see the foreman about a job. Shit, fall's almost here already,” he said, and I just went up the stairs, leaving them alone with their drink and the last of the summer and each other.

I
LOOKED FOR
work in all the places. The worst part was the first contact. You walked in and the store people smiled at you, thinking you were gonna buy something, “May I help you sir?” and then as soon as you mentioned a job, the smile dropped hard and you were no longer wanted and if they even continued to say “sir” it sounded sarcastic. A few would send you off with an application form they'd toss unread later, or, as time went on, push you away to a web site. Most Korean-run businesses that had opened in Reeve had no use for anyone outside their families, and the State liquor store hired from outside town, about the lowest rung on the ladder of political favors you could buy by helping elect the governor. I took to hanging around the parking lot, what we joked was called the slave market, talking with others there, all of us convinced we'd gather in case someone would come looking for day help. They'd come in from Mars, I figured, because there was no reason I could think
of why anyone in town would need our labor. Still, sometimes someone would need something done and I made a few bucks. I cut grass and delivered newspapers, jobs I did now as an adult that I used to do for pocket money as a kid. I was a member of the “working poor,” words that are a profanity together.

Another one way to get by for me was pay day loans. A shop set up business in the strip mall. If you could show you had pay stubs from some sort of job, and they were easy enough to borrow or fake, and the shop guy never looked too close anyway, you could get a short-term loan to cover you until the next pay check. Anybody could get one, not like a credit card or a proper bank loan. The problem was you paid a $15 charge on every $100 borrowed, but if you didn't pay it back on time it got big fast, zooming up to 390 percent a year. Something like two out of every ten people never paid it back at all, and the shop owner said he charged the rest of us more because of that. I asked him about the damn interest rate, and he said that borrowing from him cost less than the fee on a bounced check, knowing that kiting checks at the end of the month was another poor man's way of “borrowing money.” Still, it was important to get the cash, especially after Ohio started locking up people who couldn't pay off their parking tickets. Ain't no judge or court in them cases either, it's all administrative.

Soon enough it wasn't just these store-front bastards doing it, the big name banks got in on it too. They called it a better name, like “Early Access” or “Ready Advance,” and said it was a kind of civic service, a short-term solution for money emergencies. But the average borrower took out thirteen of these emergency loans a year until it all caught up with him. The loan was
supposed to be paid automatically by direct deposit. However, if your money was short, the bank stuck you with fees and even more interest on the unpaid part until you cycled down into a hole so deep you'd never pay it out. There was almost no way to get ahead of it once you started down that road, and the banks knew it.

Celebrated one Labor Day by borrowing against my car title. You could get half the value of your car in cash the same day. If you couldn't pay it back on time, they'd give you an extension, at a higher rate. Rates was high to begin with; at that time it was close to one hundred percent interest, but now a lot of states protect working men by limiting the rate to only thirty percent. Still, for most, it all led to a cycle of debt with the constant repo threat overhead. When you failed to pay up and they called the loan, you lost the car. Try and keep the car anyway, they report it as stolen and the cops'll go pick it up for them, throwing you in jail for stealing your own car at no extra charge. Who the cops working for, right?

I couldn't qualify for a credit card, the middle class way of borrowing money. Those people pay like twelve to fifteen percent interest, so not a helluva lot different from payday loans. Just looks cleaner. I also bypassed those fuckin' rent-to-own thieves, who let you rent a TV or a washer and dryer until you paid them a lot more than the appliance is worth and it's old, at which point you own the thing, dropping $450 on a $200 item 'cause you had no choice but to pay over time and nobody else would give you credit. There's whole industries out there that sprang up because us working poor became a new market.

With that in mind I even tried to cash in on it myself, working briefly for a collection agency. When folks could not pay, the debt got sold down the line. Some big bank wasn't gonna fuss over small change, so it sold the debt to a big agency, who sold it to a smaller one like I worked for, a place that might see profit in getting twenty percent of a two hundred dollar collection. At those rent-to-own joints, you ended up having to sign tons of papers, all looking like they was written by a Keep Lawyers Employed committee, so that if you miss a payment the store takes back the whole appliance, not just the half they still own. This scared the dumb asses renting, but actually the last thing that company wanted was to repo a two-year-old TV, so my job was to knock on the door and try to get them to pay something, and at the same time see if they'd refinance at an even higher rate. Loan to pay a loan, how's that sound? That old TV was worth nothing to us, but was some kind of magic shittin' thing to some old lady. If she was a single mom, the TV was her babysitter—feed your sister after Wheel of Fortune, lights out after Idol—and she wasn't gonna give it up easy. When I talked them into an even more fucked-up refi deal that let them keep the TV, they'd usually thank me for helping them out. Sometimes them moms would offer me what we called a couch payment, head or bed in return for me to report to the boss no one home. My last customer was a returned soldier who owed $100 for a bicycle he was buying over time for his daughter's ninth birthday. Fuck if I was gonna repo a Barbie two-wheeler with pink streamers on the handle bars. I quit the job that day. No one home in this part of America.

After my old man died I got his, well, actually his own dad's, gold watch. I was never gonna wear it hanging around parking lots, and could care less about remembering him more anyways, so I ended up at one of Reeve's new pawn shops. These things have been around elsewhere since God invented dirt, but really took off as the economy tanked. It works pretty simply. You walk in with something, and they give you a “loan” of usually ten to twenty-five percent of actual worth and a ticket receipt. If you can pay back the loan, plus interest, in ninety days, you get your thing back. If not, the shop takes your item and sets in a display case and tries to sell it. Seems pretty straight, basically gettin' loaned money at 75-90 percent interest.

Only what really happens is this. I walk in with that watch, at least halfway hopeful thinking I'm gonna snag some quick cash. Instead, soon as I cross the door frame I am nine years old again, sneaking with Muley, Tim and Rich into my mom and dad's bedroom, pulling open his moth-ball-smelling (Mom protected the house against a plague's worth) underwear drawer and showing them that gold watch. We had just seen a pirate movie and were all full of talk about gold and treasure, and that was about the most valuable thing I thought we owned. The group of us looked at it, turning it over in the light, feeling how heavy it was. It was a magical thing, more a jewel than a watch, something from another time. It glowed new because it was old. We had seen all sorts of “gold” things, but I think that was the first time we had held anything that was real gold, heavy, cold, valuable. We were gonna actually put it in a model car box and bury it in the yard to dig up later playing pirates until we heard my mom coming up the stairs with laundry and I shoved it back
into the drawer and ran to my room with my friends. I think I almost wet myself that day, it was all so exciting.

Standing in the dark pawn shop, the guy inside the sales cage gave me the hairy eyeball, I guess thinking maybe I stole the watch or something. Like he cared. He looked at it, checked some catalog, weighed it on an ancient old scale with little weights like chess pieces, and said twenty bucks. Twenty bucks. My grandpa, my dad, me nine years old, or food money for four or five days if I skimped. Two nights of beer if I didn't. I asked him for more and he said twenty bucks, this ain't a yard sale. I remembered my dad near the end, holding that watch. “I can't remember anything anymore,” he told me. “You can,” I said. “That's the point of a thing like this.” It stood in for everything that was missing. I started to tell the pawn shop guy about my dad, and he turned his back on me. He'd heard it all and had no interest. Just business. “You want stories?” he said. “I got people coming in here pulling their wedding rings off their fingers tryin' to pawn them. You wanna tell someone your story? Find a preacher who cares.”

Twenty bucks. That same day I also bought some lottery tickets and stood outside in a thunderstorm, as I had an equal chance of winning and being hit by lightning and couldn't decide which I'd prefer. The pawn shop stole from me, but to get by it was either let him or I'd of had to steal from someone else. I learned you could rob someone with a pen as easily as a gun.