If He Hollers Let Him Go (4 page)

‘Hello, baby,’ I said. The sickness went. I leaned close to her and whispered, ‘Still keeping it for me?’

She giggled and said half seriously, ‘You don’t want none.’

I’d already broken two dates with her and I didn’t want to make another one. ‘I’ll see you at lunch,’ I said, moving quickly off.

I found a clean spot in the sun and spread out the print. I wanted an over-all picture of the whole ventilation system; I was tired of having my gant kicked down in first one stinking hole and then another. But before I’d gotten a chance to look George came up and said Johnson and Conway were about to get into a fight.

‘Hell, let ‘em fight,’ I growled. ‘What the hell do I care, I ain’t their papa.’

But I got up and went down to the third deck again to see what it was all about. It was cramped quarters aft, a labyrinth of narrow, hard-angled companionways, jammed with staging, lines, shapes, and workers who had to be contortionists first of all. I ducked through the access opening, squeezed by the electricians’ staging, pushed a helper out of my way, and started through the opening into the shower room. Just as I stuck my head inside a pipe fitter’s tacker struck an arc and I jerked out of the flash. Behind me someone moved the nozzle of the blower that was used to ventilate the hole, and the hard stream of air punched my hard hat off like a fist. In grabbing for it I bumped my head against the angle of the bulkhead. My hat sailed into the middle of the shower room where my gang was working, and I began cursing in a steady streak.

Bessie gave me a dirty look, and Pigmeat said, ‘We got Bob throwing his hat in before him. We’re some tough cats.’

The air was so thick with welding fumes, acid smell, body odour, and cigarette smoke; even the stream from the blower couldn’t get it out. I had fifteen in my gang, twelve men and three women, and they were all working in the tiny, cramped quarters. Two fire pots were going, heating soldering irons. Somebody was drilling. Two or three guys were hand-riveting. A chipper was working on the deck above. It was stifling hot, and the din was terrific.

I picked up my hat and stuck it back on my head. Peaches was sitting on the staging at the far end, legs dangling, eating an apple and at peace with the world. She was a short-haired, dark brown, thick-lipped girl with a placid air—that’s as much as I’d seen.

‘Where’s Smitty?’ I asked her. She was his helper.

‘I don’t know,’ she said without moving.

Willie said, ‘While you’re here, Bob, you can show me where to hang these stays and save me having to go get the print.’ He was crouched on the staging beneath the upper deck, trying to hang his duct.

I knew he couldn’t read blueprints, but he was drawing a mechanic’s pay. I flashed my light on the job and said, ‘Hang the first two by the split and the other two just back of the joint. What’s your X?’

‘That’s what I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I ain’t seen the print yet.’

‘It’s three-nine off the bulkhead,’ I said.

Behind me Arkansas said, ‘Conway, you’re an evil man. You don’t get along with nobody. How you get along with him, Zula Mae?’

‘He’s all right,’ she said. She was Conway’s helper. ‘You just got to understand him.’

‘See,’ Conway said. ‘She’s my baby.’

Arkansas gave her a disdainful look. ‘That’s ‘cause she still think you her boss. Don’t you let this guy go boss you ‘round, you hear.’

‘He don’t boss me ‘round,’ she defended.

‘You just tryna make trouble between me and my helper,’ Conway said. ‘I’m the easiest man here to get along with. Everybody gets along with me.’

‘You from Arkansas?’ Arkansas asked.

‘How you know I ain’t from California?’ Conway said.

‘Ain’t nobody in here from California,’ Arkansas said. ‘What city in Arkansas you from?’

‘He’s from Pine Bluff,’ Johnson said. ‘Can’t you tell a Pine Bluff nig—Pine Bluffian when you see him?’

‘Hear the Moroccan,’ Conway sneered. ‘Johnson a Moroccan, he ain’t no coloured man.’

‘You got any folks in Fort Worth, Conway?’ Arkansas asked.

‘I ain’t got many folks,’ Conway said. ‘We a small family.’

‘You got a grandpa, ain’t you?’ Arkansas persisted.

‘Had one,’ Conway said.

‘Then how you know?’ Arkansas pointed out.

Peaches was grinning.

‘You going back?’ Homer asked.

Arkansas looked at him. ‘Who you talking to? Me?’

‘You’ll do. You going back?’

‘Back where?’

‘Back to Arkansas?’

‘Yeah, I’m going back—when the horses, they pick the cotton, and the mules, they cut the corn; when the white chickens lay black eggs and the white folks is Jim Crowed while the black folks is—’

He broke off as Smitty came in with a white leaderman named Donald. They didn’t see me. He showed Donald where he had cut an opening in his duct for an intake vent, and Donald said he’d cut four inches off the X.

‘That’s where Bob told me to cut,’ he said.

Donald shook his head noncommittally; he was a nice guy and he didn’t want to say I was wrong. I’d often wondered if he was a Communist. He had a round moonface, pleasant but unsmiling, and that sharp speculative look behind rimless spectacles that some Communists have.

I stepped into the picture then. ‘When did I tell you to cut out there?’ I asked Smitty.

Donald turned red. ‘Hello, Bob,’ he said. ‘Smitty said you was off today.’

‘Jesus Christ, can’t you coloured boys do anything right?’ Kelly said from behind me. He had slipped in unnoticed.

Air began lumping in my chest and my eyes started burning. I looked at Kelly. I ought to bust him right on the side of his scrawny red neck, I thought. I’d kill him as sure as hell. Instead I ground out, ‘Any mechanic might have made the same mistake. Any mechanic but a white mechanic,’ I added.

He didn’t get it. ‘Yeah, but you boys make too many mistakes. You got to cut it out.’

Donald started moving off. ‘I ain’t made a single mistake this month, Mr. Kelly.’ Conway grinned up at him from where he knelt on the floor, soldering a seam.

Pigmeat nudged me. ‘See what I mean? Got ‘em skunt back to his ears. He thinks the man a dentist.’

Kelly heard him but acted as if he didn’t. He said to Conway, ‘I wasn’t talking about you. You’re a good boy, a good worker. I was talking ‘bout some of these other boys.’

In the silence that followed Peaches said, ‘Oh, Conway gonna get a raise,’ before she could catch herself, having thought we’d keep on talking and she wouldn’t be heard. Somebody laughed.

I kept looking at Kelly without saying anything. He turned suddenly and started out. When he had gone Smitty said, ‘How come he always got to pick on you? He don’t never jump on none of these white leadermen. You know as much as they do.’

I unfolded my rule and tapped the duct he was working on. ‘Cut your bottom line ten inches from the butt joint,’ I directed, trying to keep my voice steady. He was just a simple-minded, Uncle Tom-ish nigger, I told myself; he couldn’t help it. ‘You’ll have a four-inch gap. Take this duct over to the shop and get a production welder to weld in an insert plate and grind the burrs down as smooth as possible.’ I turned and started out, then stopped. ‘And remember I’m your leaderman,’ I added.

Ben was standing in the opening, grinning at me. He was a light-brown-skinned guy in his early thirties, good-looking with slightly Caucasian features and straight brown hair. He was a graduate of U.C.L.A. and didn’t take anything from the white folks and didn’t give them anything. If he had been on the job for more than nine months he’d probably have been the leaderman instead of me; he probably knew more than I did, anyway.

I grinned back at him.

He said, ‘Tough, Bob, but you got to take it.’

I bumped into Red Williams in the companionway and he said he’d been looking all over for me.

‘Will you get me a tacker, Bob?’ he said. ‘I’m tired of fooling with these people. I’ve had enough.’

He was a tall, rawboned, merriney-looking Negro with kinky reddish hair and brown freckles.

Me too, I wanted to tell him, but the fellows in my gang looked up to me; whenever they had trouble with the white workers they looked to me to straighten it out. So all I said was I’d see Hank.

Hank was the tacker leaderman, a heavy-set, blond Georgia boy about my age and a graduate of Georgia Tech. White mechanics could go to him and get any tacker they wanted, but he made the coloured mechanics wait until he could find a coloured tacker that was free. Most of the white tackers didn’t like to work for coloured mechanics, and Hank wouldn’t assign them to. He wasn’t offensive about it, he’d just make the coloured mechanics wait, and if they got mad about it he gave them a line of his soft Southern jive. I found him on the quarter-deck talking to a couple of white women tackers in their welders’ suits.

‘How ‘bout a tacker for a half hour or so?’ I said.

He hadn’t seen me coming toward him and when I spoke he jumped. Then he put on his special smile for coloured. ‘Why, if it isn’t the shot,’ he said. ‘Whataya say, big shot, long time no see. What’s cooking?’

‘All I want’s a tacker,’ I said. I knew it wasn’t the way to go about it but I wasn’t in the mood for jive.

‘Say, fellow, you’re getting fat—a regular capitalist.’ He kept on as if he thought he was going to thaw me out. Then he turned to the two women. ‘Here’s a boy who’s come out to California and made good in a big way; he’s a leaderman in the sheet-metal department—one of Kelly’s boys.’

I saw I couldn’t rush him so I decided to dish out some too. ‘You’re doing fine yourself,’ I said. ‘The folks back in Georgia wouldn’t know you.’

He kept his smile, but he began getting dirty. ‘You said it, bo.’ Then to the women, ‘This boy’s really a killer, got all the little brown gals in a dither about him.’ To me again, ‘How
does
you do it, bo?’

I got all set to curse him out; then right in the middle of it I realized that I was jumping the gun; he hadn’t really said enough to start a rumpus about. I had to laugh. The three of them started to laugh with me. I said, ‘Don’t sell me
too
hard, buddy, you just might find a buyer.’

Hank caught it first; the creases stayed in his face but his smile went. The two women dug it from the change in his expression; neither blushed; they just got that sudden brutal look.

‘You don’t want a tacker, sho ‘nuff?’ Hank said, trying to get back his advantage.

But he had lost it. ‘Sho ‘nuff,’ I drawled. ‘An’ ri’ now.’

We looked at each other, measuring. His eyes were hard blue, hostile but not quite angry. I don’t know how mine looked but I tried to make them as hard as his.

He decided to play it straight, where he always had the advantage. ‘To tell you the truth, Bob, all of my tackers are busy, will be busy all day.’

I tried to get it back again. ‘How about one of these ladies?’ I’d started to say ‘Southern’ ladies, but decided not to press him that far.

‘They’re busy too,’ he said. Now he got some of his smile back.

I started to turn away, saw a couple of tackers lounging over at the port rail by the generators, gabbing; turned back. ‘How about one of them?’ I nodded in their direction.

He glanced over at them, looked back at me. Now he had all of his smile back. ‘They’re busy too,’ he said. ‘You’re just out of luck, Bob. Why don’t you try Tommy?’ Tommy was another cracker bastard.

I couldn’t call him a liar; that’s where he had me. I couldn’t go down to Kelly and say, ‘Hank said he ain’t got any tackers’—even if I would have, which I wouldn’t. He’d look at me as if I was nuts and say, ‘Why, goddamn, why tell me?’ I turned away, thinking. The white folks win again, trying to laugh it off. But it stuck in my craw. If I couldn’t get the work done I’d have to take Kelly’s riding; and in order to get it done I had to eat everybody else’s. I had my usual once-a-day urge to tell them to take their leaderman job and shove it.

But half-way down the ladder I thought, What the hell, and turned around and went back to the tackers who were gabbing by the rail. I saw they were Southerners, but I asked anyway.

‘Look, can I get one of you fellows to tack a couple of stays for me?’

They looked at each other. For a moment I thought neither one was going to answer, then one said, ‘We’s waitin’ fuh Hank.’

‘You’re not working on a job, though, are you?’

‘No, we’s jes waitin’.’

I couldn’t tell whether they were making fun of me or just talked like that. I decided to try again. ‘If Hank says it’s all right, can I get one of you then?’

They looked at each other again. The other one spoke this time. He said, ‘Sho.’

All of a sudden I had to laugh. They knew that Hank wasn’t going to assign them to me. ‘Okay, boys,’ I said. ‘Get your rest.’

I walked off but I didn’t know where I was going. I couldn’t go down and tell Red that Hank wouldn’t give me a tacker, either; they’d get down on me too. Then I thought of Don. I found him at the forward end supervising the installation of a cowl vent.

‘Wanna do me a favour?’ I said.

He turned that bright speculative stare on me. ‘Shoot Kelly?’ He didn’t crack a smile, but I laughed once anyway to show him it was funny.

Then I said, ‘Let me borrow one of your tackers for about a half-hour.’

He thought for a moment. ‘There’s a girl down aft—Madge. They’re doing these things.’ He kicked at the cowl. ‘You can have her till dinner-time, anyway.’

‘Fine,’ I said, hurrying off. I noticed the white mechanics give him a dirty look, but I didn’t think anything about it at the time.

She had her back to me and her hood up so it covered her hair, so I didn’t recognize her right off. I was about twenty feet away, hurrying toward her, when one of the white mechanics looked up, and that caused her to turn. I saw that she was the big, peroxide blonde I’d run into on the third deck earlier; and I knew the instant I recognized her that she was going to perform then—we both would perform.

As soon as she saw me she went into her frightened act and began shrinking away. I started off giving her a sneer so she’d know I knew it was phoney. She knew it anyway; but she kept putting it on me. I didn’t know how far she’d go and I got apprehensive. Before I got too close to her I began talking to her, like you do to a vicious dog to gentle it.