Robert B. Parker (9 page)

I love you

I had been lunching on ketchup soup at the Automat for a couple of days when I finally got a job with a company called Conray in Cleveland. Conray advanced me the plane fare. I stiffed my landlord two months rent, spent most of the plane fare on beer, and hitchhiked to Parma with ten bucks to my name. I was a tech writer. We were supposed to be writing maintenance manuals for maintenance equipment used to service a solid-fuel missile called Cardinal. Neither the missile nor the maintenance equipment had been built yet, and we were supposed to write the manuals by reading blueprints and schematics and engineering drawings. Nobody in my technical writing group knew how to read them. My supervisor was a Negro named Earl Toomy, who had once been a junior high school science teacher and understood the task at hand no better than I did. I had been hired because I had technical training in the army, though my mastery of international Morse code never did prove useful in understanding a stepdown transformer. Earl decided that we should go to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama,
one week, and he got us travel advances and reserved the company plane and had the conference and travel department reserve us rooms at the Redstone Holiday Inn. I never knew exactly why we were supposed to be going. When we registered at the Holiday Inn the desk clerk explained to us with some courtesy that it was against Alabama law to domicile whites and Negroes under the same roof. He said it the way you would tell someone that it was illegal to keep chickens in a hotel room. Earl complained, which in retrospect was probably what we went down there for. The argument escalated to include middle- and upper-level management of Conray, and concluded when the plant supervisor told me to rent a car and drive Earl immediately to the nearest free state. Conray knew the makings of an incident when they saw one. I thought it would make more sense to get on a commercial airline plane and go back to Cleveland. Earl agreed, and we landed in Cleveland at 11:15 that night drunker than three goats. The Conray people fired Earl for some other official reason shortly thereafter, but they thought I was a hero, like I’d saved the company from scandal. They promoted me. Being a group leader made it easier to conceal the fact that I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. There was some strain in not knowing, but it was alleviated a bit by the fact that as far as I could tell nobody knew what he was doing. It struck me that I may have stumbled upon life’s mainspring.
Adams’s Law
, I wrote in Jennifer’s journal.
Nobody knows what the fuck he’s doing
. It might be the law of nature.

One Tuesday morning I woke up with a brutal hangover and didn’t go to work. I stayed in bed and read the
Plain Dealer
and drank beer and ate some bologna sandwiches and watched the Indian game on TV. I liked that so much I did it the next day and then the next, and by Friday I’d stayed out too long without calling in to explain what had happened and I realized I’d quit. The rent was due on my room, so I left without paying and took a bus to Cincinnati.

I was working in a machine shop near the river and being trained. Until I was trained I couldn’t join the union and until I joined the union I couldn’t actually make anything usable on the machines. So all day I made useless pieces of metal—zigzag shapes, donuts, rhomboids, and crescents—on the jig borers and metal lathes and evenings I got drunk, and ate four-way chili if I had any money left over.

Just before Thanksgiving I was working a metal lathe and sneaking a few drinks from a hip flask and it seemed like it would be funny to make a three-foot metal dildo. It was funny, but no one knew it except me. The shop super fired me, and called me a goddamned pervert. I didn’t get to keep the dildo either. In Chicago I worked in a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the south side near Comiskey Park. I was drunk most of the time. I was okay loading the trucks; I’d done it before during summer vacation from school. It didn’t take precision, but the fine motor work on the production line needed more sobriety than I was bringing to work. The shipper found out I’d worked in a Coke plant before and moved me up to the production line. I was the relief man, filling in for the people on break, so that every fifteen minutes I moved to
a different spot on the line, until my break came. The job I liked best was screening the bottles. You sat and watched the empty bottles rattle by on the conveyor as they came out of the washer. They passed against a brightly lit white background and you kept a sharp eye peeled to detect any foreign substance in there, like the legendary mouse, or that’s what you were supposed to do. I rested. It was the casing table that gave me trouble. The full bottles of Coke came off the line onto a rotating table in black identical procession and piled up. The job was to take them, three in each hand, and put them into the crosshatched wooden cases twenty-four to the case and shove the full case onto the final run out to the stackers. If I caught that job early in the day, before I was too drunk, I could manage it, but once I got to it after lunch. The bottles began to pile up all at once and after five minutes I got dizzy and sat down on a low stack of cases and closed my eyes and waited till the dizziness stopped. The line kept its implacable progress and before the dizziness stopped there were broken bottles and newly made Coca-Cola in a sharp-edged sticky swamp all over the area.

In Dallas I worked a couple of nights washing dishes in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant on McKinney Street. It was hot and I didn’t show up the third night. Instead I took a six-pack and sat in the gravel slope beneath an underpass off Elm Street and blanked my mind the way I did and felt the beer seep into me. I was on my fourth beer of that six-pack when a man scrambled over the guard rail above and stumbled down the side of the overpass and started to take a leak with his forehead
pressed against the cement and his feet backed off and braced to keep himself steady. Even then he swayed and before he was finished urinating he slid down the wall and passed out in the recently created mud. I looked at him. His left arm stretched out toward me was in the small splash of light that spilled from the headlamps of his car parked with the motor running on the road above. He wore a wristwatch. Maybe it was expensive. Maybe the guy was rich. I drank some more beer. I got up and walked over toward him, my feet sliding a little in the gravel. Only that left arm was lighted. Above in the dark the cars swooshed by; the man’s car motor still idled. Faintly I could hear music from his car radio, hillbilly stuff. I stood looking down at him. He wore a suit. I poked him with my toe. He didn’t move. I squatted down and shook his shoulder. “You okay?” I said. He groaned a little and burrowed his head into the wet gravel. I patted his hip pocket and took out his wallet. A flashlight beam hit me with a force that was almost physical. I squinted into it.

A voice said, “Boy, you put both your hands on top of your head and don’t you make another move.”

I let the wallet drop and put my hands on my head. Behind the blinding light was a Dallas cop with his gun out. He made me lie flat while he patted me down, then he let me sit up.

“You rolling this man, boy?”

“No, I was looking in his wallet to see who he was. I was going to call somebody.”

“Mmm.”

The cop was feeling the artery pulse in the man’s neck.

“He came down to take a leak and passed out,” I said.

“And you down here sipping a few cool ones and looking at the dirt. That right?”

“Yeah.”

“Where you live?”

“I don’t live in Dallas. I was just passing through.”

“Got money?”

“I got five bucks,” I said.

The cop holstered his gun. “Boy,” he said. “You was going to roll this man, and we both know that. But I don’t guarantee the night court judge will believe it, and I got a lot to do tonight, including getting this gentleman out of the gully here, and getting his car off the road. So you get up on that highway and start walking west, toward Fort Worth, and if I ever see you in Dallas I’ll slam your ass in jail. On sight.”

I scrambled up the gravel bank and started walking. It tended to fuse after that. A flat-bed truck hauling chickens. A railroad station in Santa Fe where I was two days before they kicked me out. A woman at night in a park telling me to go home and sober up. A drunk tank where some guy kept crying for Betty. Brackish water in a ditch, motionless white-faced cattle, Hershey bars and day-old bread, the taste of Four Roses whiskey from the neck of a quart bottle passed around in a Quonset hut outside Tacoma. I was picking cranberries by hand, not even a scoop, five cents a box. At night on the bare mattress on the folding iron cot the medicinal cheap whiskey was all there was. All of us drank it, men and women. All of us slept in the Quonset and used the latrine out back. The teenage Indian girl next to me slept every night in a
man’s workshirt and by morning it was often twisted up around her waist. I looked at her pelvis blankly when I woke up in the morning. She had good thighs and a nice slope to her belly, but I was living so slightly and so deep inside that nothing much got through to the reduced quick of me. That night, though, when the whiskey was burning my throat and warming my stomach, I asked her to go out back and we copulated on the ground near the latrine without any talk at all. She was simply passive except when I was in her; then she humped up and down as if she were trying to buck me off. I had been a long time without sex, and the first time, I ejaculated quickly. She wiped herself between her legs with the bottom of her cotton dress and we went back into the Quonset. Most of the pickers were Indian, with some Negroes and a couple of Chicanos. I was the only white. After that we used to copulate most nights, but I had a lot of trouble ejaculating and usually had to roll off finally because I was exhausted. She would hump steadily until that time and stop the minute I did, and get up and go in without comment. I don’t know how long I was there, stooped over all day, drinking and humping at night. We took turns buying the bottle and passed it around in the fields during the day. It was shared without question and without reservation, and when it was gone, the man whose turn it was would get another one. The women weren’t expected to buy one, though they could drink as much as the men. Usually we’d nurse it, keeping a kind of steady buzz on all day, and not get really washed away until nighttime so we could sleep. Sometimes I would miscalculate and get drunk too soon and have to head back to the Quonset early, reeling as I went, to pass out on my
mattress. On nights like that the things I wrote to Jennifer in the journal were barely legible, and very often made no sense.

A fly woke me. It buzzed and hummed as it circled my face, and then was silent when it landed. I could feel it walking along my cheek toward the flare of my right nostril. I brushed it away. The fly buzzed again and hummed as it flew. As I became conscious I could feel how hot I was, and how wet I was with sweat. I opened my eyes stiffly and saw a strange place. My head ached, I was thirsty, and as I shifted slightly, my whole body felt trembly. I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand. I looked at my hand. The fingernails were dirty and there was a scratch along the back of it that had a ragged scab on it. The fly came back and walked on my face again. I brushed at it and it flew a short distance away, and someone next to me slapped at it. I looked around. I was lying on a cement floor against a cinder block wall in the corner of a room with ten or twelve other men in it. Across the front wall were bars. I was in the drunk tank; I knew what a drunk tank looked like. I’d been in one before. How about this one? Had I been in this one before? No. I had never seen this one before. I didn’t know where I was. Across the room somebody was having the dry heaves in the single seatless hopper. I edged my way upright against the wall. A Mexican-looking guy next to me was smoking. I tapped my two fingers against my lips in a smoking gesture. The Mexican looked at me and looked away. The smell of his smoke made me want a cigarette badly. I felt in my pockets. There were no cigarettes. In fact there was nothing at all in my
pockets. After a while a guard came and let us all out. They gave me back the tattered mass of notebooks that I kept, and we trooped down a long corridor and out onto a hot sunny street. It was a street I’d never seen. I didn’t know where I was. I walked down the hill in the heat. At a newsstand I saw the
Los Angeles Times
for sale, and the
Herald Examiner
. I was in L.A. and my last memory was a thousand miles north and five days ago. I felt shaky and sick. In a store window I saw my reflection. My hair was stringy and long; my face was half covered with a scruffy beard. One sleeve of my shirt was gone and the zipper on my fly was broken. My pants gaped. There were no laces in my shoes, which made it harder to walk, and as I moved away from the window I shuffled. I needed a drink. I needed cigarettes. I panhandled. By evening I’d gotten nearly a dollar and a half’s worth of change. I bought a pack of Camels and a bottle of port wine, and sat on a bench in a park off Broadway in downtown L.A. and smoked and drank my wine. After half a bottle I felt pretty decent. I studied my pants. I tried to figure out what they had been when I got them. I wasn’t even sure they were mine. They seemed big in the waist. They were so dirty that I couldn’t tell what color they were. The knee was ripped. I looked at my shirt. It might once have been khaki. Maybe an army shirt. I couldn’t tell. I sipped my wine, trying to make it last. The weather got a little cooler after it got dark. Somebody sat next to me on the bench. I gave her a cigarette. She had a bottle of muscatel, full. I gave her a sip of my port. She gave me some muscatel.

“Cops hassle you here?” I said.

“Nope, not if you’re quiet. They let you sleep.”

I nodded.

She said, “I know where there’s another bottle. You want me to get it?”

I said yes.

She said, “You let me have some of your smokes?”

“Yes.”

She was gone a bit and then she was back. She had a jug of sherry. We drank it all and smoked most of the Camels. Late in the night on the grass by the bench I remembered fumbling under her clothes.