THE SAINT ANN'S REVIEW

LATE WINTER
Eric Rawson

MY UNCLE’S HOUSE—it was 1995—was a plain, untidy split-level in a neighborhood that seemed to have been recently abandoned. The miserable trees, the skeletons of old bicycles and piles of lumber in backyards, the air of deprivation (although we were not poor), suited me. I did not want beauty or comfort or solace—I did not want love, which makes everything different from what it is—and I did not get it.

It was late winter, mid-March. Hard ridges of gray snow edged the sidewalks, and stale gray snow lay around the porches and under the trees. The skies were flat and pale, and the air smelled of hogs from distant lots and of diesel exhaust from the trucks on the highway. At night the branches of the elms—there were still a few elms—tapped on the bedroom window, tapped and tapped.

My uncle was a skilled builder, a man who could handle tools. The Army had paid for him to attend Purdue University, where he had studied engineering. For some reason he had stopped. By the time I came to live at his house—I was the oldest of five cousins—he was operating a company that built FHA homes on the weedy edges of the nearby towns. He despised these cheaply built houses, but he could not attract work that matched his level of skill, and he turned his frustration on whatever object happened into his orbit, including me. I desperately wanted his approval, but I did not have any skills, at least not of the sort he valued.

The previous autumn, I had borrowed a Canon single-lens reflex camera from the media center and enrolled in a photography class taught by the journalism teacher, Mr. Giffords. It turned out I had a promising eye, and Mr. Giffords invited me to join the yearbook staff. I had found something of a home there, although in the end I never mastered photography in a way that satisfied my yearning to be skillful.

Mr. Giffords was a superior individual. He served cocktails at yearbook-staff parties and played comedy CDs on Wednesday nights when the school-newspaper crew assembled to lay out the next edition. During the summer he rode bulls on the rodeo circuit. He was missing the tips of two fingers, the result of a bull-riding accident. In class, he cursed flamboyantly and made flattering jokes about us by name. Everyone loved and trusted him.

One Friday afternoon, while I was sitting in the journalism room, watching my friends David and Gilly play a game on the computer, a phone call came for Mr. Giffords. We could hear him in his office, talking on the phone. David and Gilly left off their game. After a while we heard his boot heels, and he came into the room and asked if we wanted to work at a printing company in the city the next day and maybe on subsequent Saturdays. It would be a chance for us to see how layouts were turned into yearbooks and other paper-and-ink products. The job paid seven dollars an hour.

It was the end of winter. The hard-packed snow had finally melted, and the days were gray and rainy. The three of us were broke and bored and impulsive, and of course we said yes, let’s do it. He instructed us to meet in front of the school at seven-thirty the next morning. A man named Lee Allen would pick us up and take us to the plant. He handed me a paper with Lee Allen’s phone number in case we, as he said with a half-smile, decided to pussy out.

At dinner, when I told my aunt and uncle that I was going to work at a printing plant in the city the next day, my uncle turned a speculative gaze on me and shook his head. My aunt said distantly: “I know Lee Allen’s wife. Melissa.”

***

The next morning David and Gilly were already standing at the curb in front of the school, stamping their feet and blowing on their bare hands. It was the time of year when the weather looked warmer than it was.

I nodded at my friends. “Gentlemen.”

The next morning Gilly was already standing at the curb in front of the school, stamping his feet and blowing on his bare hands. It was the time of year when the weather looked warmer than it was, and I was cold from walking the mile from my uncle’s house. David was just arriving from the other direction.

Gilly held a brown paper bag that looked as if it might contain food. David and I glanced at each other, suddenly worried about what we were going to do at lunchtime. At sixteen, we were concerned about other people gaining an advantage on us, so we did not say anything in front of Gilly. He hefted the paper bag and smiled. I thought that when lunchtime arrived, David might simply take the bag from Gilly. He did things like that.

Water simmered in the gutters. The skinny strip of brown grass in front of the school was sodden and smelled of earthworms. Mourning doves made soft sounds from where they perched on the telephone lines under the sagging sky. Our shoes were soaked, and we did not have much to say while we waited for Lee Allen. A city bus huffed by, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. The single passenger turned a blank face on us and gave us the finger.

After a few minutes a car came racing down the street and splashed to the curb. It was an old Mercury Marquis, a ’77 or ’78, the gold paint dulled by the relentless Midwestern weather, the body scalloped by road salt and rust. A crack ran down the center of the windshield. Although we were standing three feet away, the driver leaned on his horn, and he did not stop until we had climbed inside.

I rode in the front. The car reeked of cigarette smoke, beer, and a sour personal odor. I judged Lee Allen to be about forty years old, a trim, coiled man with short blond hair and pale gummy eyes and three days’ growth of beard. He wore a plaid hunting jacket and a faded red trucker’s cap with an Iron Cross stitched on the front in black and white.

He looked at me and grinned. “Who the hell’re you ladies?”

We mumbled our names. Engine grinding, the car shot off down the street.

“What’s your last name, amigo?” Lee Allen said, looking in the rearview mirror.

“Me?” Gilly said.

“Yeah, you.”

“Cabrera,” Gilly said warily.

Lee Allen frowned. His fingers twitched on the steering wheel, and he shifted restlessly, thrusting his shoulders forward and back. He lit a cigarette. While a radio call-in show muttered resentfully, Lee Allen talked to us. He had a lot on his mind. He did not like Bill Clinton, hated the Clintons together and separately. He was allergic to them. He always ate six eggs, no salt, for breakfast to maintain his muscle mass. He did not like rich people, and he despised the so-called working poor, to which, ha ha, he supposed he belonged sometimes. His wife (Melissa, I remembered) had found a supermarket that accepted expired coupons. Suckers. He despised suckers. And immigrants. (No offense, kid, looking in the rearview mirror). Immigrants, he told us, soaked up welfare and grabbed all the seats in school, even though they could barely read or write. It was his theory that by the turn of the millennium, when the schools had been overrun by illiterate immigrant children, the Clintons and their liberal allies would turn the United States into a socialist prison. It was more than theory; it was a certainty. Fortunately, he could survive for weeks in the wilderness, if it came to that. He could lay his hands on all the ammunition he would ever need. He had a raspy, petulant, hectoring voice. It was clear the he wanted to impress us with his insight. He was not trying to recruit us, three strangers in his old car. We, personally, did not matter. He just wanted to empty himself of something and be acknowledged.

The drive to the city took half an hour.

***

THE PRINTING PLANT WAS LOCATED on the east side near the fairgrounds. Behind a chain-link fence stood a long two-story building of red brick, dark with age, surrounded by a ruined gravel parking lot pocked with muddy potholes. The air was misty. As we pulled through the gate, I saw several men and two women in work boots and insulated vests standing on either side, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups. Placards on wooden handles rested on their shoulders. They were on strike. A bearded man slammed his fist on the hood and yelled. Lee Allen leaned on the horn and gunned the engine, splattering the strikers with muddy water as he fishtailed onto the lot. He drove to the far end of the building and parked next to two battered pickups with stickers plastered on the tailgates and windows.

“Losers,” Lee Allen said. I was not sure if he was referring to the strikers or the owners of the pickups.

We climbed out. David, Gilly, and I huddled together, ill at ease, not speaking. I noticed that Lee Allen’s license-plate tags were expired.

It began to rain.

We followed him toward a loading dock. The steel door had been rolled up, and the opening gaped blackly, like the entrance to a cave. He jumped onto the concrete platform and reached down and grabbed each of us in turn by the wrist, pulling us onto the dock.

Gilly and David were turned over to a big-bellied man wearing a hard hat. They disappeared into the bowels of the silent building. Lee Allen jerked his head at me, and we walked through a shadowed space filled with stacks of wooden pallets to another loading bay, this one opening onto a railroad spur.

He pointed at the open door of a graffiti-covered boxcar and said, “That load needs to be emptied by noon. Think you can handle that, sister?”

He strode off.

Boxcars were becoming obsolete, and this one had reached the end of its life. It smelled of sawdust and mildew. Heavy-metal music blared from a boombox sitting on the floor. The sound echoed incoherently from the steel sides of the boxcar. A man of maybe twenty-five, with an acne-scarred, razor-burned face was sitting on a pallet of flattened cardboard boxes, apparently awaiting my arrival. He wore work gloves and, despite the chill, a thin tee-shirt. His skinny arms were tattooed from wrists to elbows. The tattoos looked like the graffiti sprayed on the side of the boxcar.

He slid off the stack of cardboard and searched my face; I was inexplicable and then written off and then, on second thought, included in his morning: “Don’t stand there, you dumb nutsack. Get the pallet loader and let’s move this shit offa here.”

I was not sure what a pallet loader was, so Jacob—that was the name he gave me—had to leave the boxcar and get it himself. For the next two hours we hauled pallets of boxes and printing supplies to the warehouse. Jacob surprised me with his industry; he looked slothful and dissolute, but I could not keep up with him. The straps that held the loads kept breaking, and we spent a lot of time gathering unruly rectangles of cardboard. My hands blistered, and I slit one of my fingers.

After a while the batteries in the boombox died. The silence was overpowering. Out of nervousness I ventured, “I thought this was a yearbook plant.”

Jacob was pumping the handle of the pallet loader. “What?”

“I thought they printed yearbooks here.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “I don’t know what they do. Right now, not much. The whole crew’s given theirselves a vacation.”

“Don’t you work here?”

‘Hell no. I ain’t joinin’ the union.’

He began pushing the pallet loader into the warehouse. “You ever been in sober living?” he said.

“No, not yet,” I said, following him.

“It’s no picnic, I can tell you that.”

Later, he said, “Do you know where I can get fresh raspberries this time of year? I could really use some fresh raspberries.”

At twelve o’clock we went to the other end of the plant, to a break room lit by glaring fluorescent lights. It smelled of dead animals. The painted cinderblock walls were covered with Federal and state worker-safety posters and company announcements. The linoleum floor had worn through in several places. At a grimy white table the big-bellied man was eating lunch, his hard hat resting on his knee. I saw that he was bald. He had a collapsing quality, sitting there, as if he were protecting what was left of a bigger self.

Jacob sat on a metal folding chair across from the bald man, and they began conversing in low, purposeful voices, as if they were trading recipes. The bald man gave Jacob one of his sandwiches. The sight of the sandwiches made me feel hollow and weak.

At another table, Gilly and David slumped in glum silence. They had eaten the food Gilly had brought, and the brown paper bag lay crumpled on the dirty white tabletop.

“Thanks for saving me some,” I said, picking up the bag.

“We didn’t know where you were,” David said.

“I was working with that skinny guy. My hands are destroyed.”

They looked at me skeptically. I raised my blistered palms, and their expressions softened. I showed them the blood under my fingernails.

Gilly held up his hands. They were stained with red ink. So were David’s.

“We were silk-screening notebook covers,” Gilly explained. He cast an uneasy glance at the other table. “We kept messing up. That fat guy had to fix everything, and now it’s coming out of our pay,” Gilly said hopelessly.

“This is not what I signed up for,” David muttered. “No way, no how.”

“Do you think Mr. Giffords knew?” Gilly said. “Maybe we could leave. We could find a pay phone.”

“That’s not a good idea,” David said. “We should stick it out. It’s only a few hours.”

I agreed. I did not want my uncle to find out we had abandoned the job, and I did not know anyone who would drive a half-hour in the rain to pick us up.

“I hate that we crossed the picket line,” I said. “It’s against my principles,” I added.

“Your principles,” David said.

Gilly looked at the other table and said softly: “I don’t really know what a picket line is for.”

“Me either,” David admitted. “I wish we had some weed. That guy with the tattoos looks like he might have some dope on him.”

“He’s in sober living,” I told them.

Like Gilly and David, I had only a vague idea of what a picket line signified. These were the waning days of the unions, of the unions’ power to negotiate, and they were the waning days of small commercial concerns. Soon everyone—the workers, the managers, the owners—would be swallowed up or swept away by the changing economy. I knew that crossing a picket line was a betrayal, but I was not sure, exactly, what kind of betrayal.

After a while Lee Allen came into the break room, waving a potato-chip bag, and shouted, “Look alive, ladies!”

 Jacob and the heavyset bald man guffawed. Lee Allen tossed the chip bag into a trash can and swaggered over to us, preening, sour. He leaned over with his fingertips resting on the table. I could smell alcohol on his breath.

“Who’s the vice-president of the United States?” he demanded.

We looked at our hands. No one wanted to say a dumb thing.

“See, that’s the problem right there,” Lee Allen said disgustedly. He surveyed us with his gummy eyes. “I thought you boys might be serious. Come on! Up! Up! If you need to use the pissoir, now’s the time.”

We spent the afternoon on the second floor in a long room with a high ceiling. The space was filled with ancient grimy machines. Milky light leaked through the skylights.

My job was to operate a machine that riveted three-ring binder mechanisms into the spines of vinyl notebooks. Emblazoned on the front of each notebook was a shield insignia with the words Bedford High School. The boxes of vinyl notebook shells were dusty, as if they had been there a long time. Lee Allen showed me what to do. He hung around for a few minutes, explaining the merits of investing in gold, talking to hear the sound of his own voice, while I practiced riveting. At last he wandered off.

I picked rivets from a plastic tub and slid them into the two holes in the binder mechanism, then positioned the notebook so that when I pulled a lever, a shaft plunged down and a peen flattened the rivet with a pneumatic clunk. The smell of dust and cheap plastic made my eyes water. From somewhere deep in the shadowy factory, I could hear the sound of the machines David and Gilly were operating.

Every hour, Jacob made the rounds with a handcart and hauled off the cartons of finished notebooks. Each time, he said, “Is that all?” and snickered, making a running joke of it. This witless insult made me frantic, and I strove to do better, sliding the binder mechanisms into the covers, positioning the rivets, and manipulating the machine as fast as I could, until my fingers stiffened and my arms throbbed. I could not imagine how anyone could do this work day after day.

As the afternoon waned, the winter light filtering through the skylights faded. Once I heard Lee Allen yelling at either David or Gilly—perhaps both—but it ended quickly, and the sound of their machines resumed. Another time I heard the ambiguous scurrying of rats or mice in the shadows.

At last a long blast from a siren ended the shift. The siren must have been on a timer. As far as I could tell, there were only six people in the factory. Lee Allen strolled through the doorway at the far end of the room and cupped his hands around his mouth: “Let’s go, suckers! Quittin’ time!”

He took off his red cap and waved it.

David and Gilly emerged from the shadows, looking exhausted and angry. A streak of red ink ran across Gilly’s forehead where he had wiped his stained hand, and David’s nose was crimson from the cold.

We followed Lee Allen along the grimy aisle between the machines and down the stairs, through a steel door to the parking lot. Light rain was still falling. Over the door, a lamp with a metal hood and wire mesh over the bulb shed a wan light. The street lamps had come on, and haloes of light glowed in the rain. Blurred yellow lights shone in the windows of the shrunken houses scattered along the treeless street. The strikers were gone. A crow began to call, and I could hear truck tires hissing on the interstate and the falling moan of a far-off diesel locomotive.

One of the pickups was gone. The bald man in the hard hat climbed out of the other one. Eyes fixed on the ground, he shuffled over and without a word handed each of us a business envelope. We could feel the cash inside, but none of us opened his envelope, afraid that the amount would be less than promised.

“Thanks boys,” the man said gruffly.

“You don’t want a beer?” Lee Allen said to him in a thick voice.

The other man shook his head and turned to get into his truck. “See you Monday, Lee,” he said over his shoulder.

“Was that the owner?” Gilly said, as the engine started.

“Hell no. That guy’s management, like me.”

Later, I found out his name: Miller Geha. I found out Jacob’s full name, too—Jacob Johanson—as well as the fact that Lee Allen was a floor supervisor at the factory, the lowest rung on the management ladder at a business on the skids.

Miller Geha pumped the accelerator a couple of times before backing out, the taillights glowing in a cloud of exhaust. The headlights swept through the rain and caught the end of the boxcar on the railroad stub at the far end of the building. He turned and drove through the gate and disappeared down the deserted street.

“Let’s get out of here, chickadees,” Lee Allen said.

When he started toward the car, he stumbled and dropped his keys. They hit the toe of his boot and skittered into the weeds along the wall of the factory.

Cursing, he squatted and patted his hand drunkenly in the wet weeds.

“I don’t want to ride with him,” Gilly whispered. “Somebody needs to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” I said, but I knew what he meant.

Lee Allen straightened up with a satisfied grunt, and it was too late to do anything.

As we left the lot, he put the car in park and got out to close the chain-link gate. The wipers slapped on the cracked windshield. The call-in show was still playing on the radio. Lee Allen had neglected to turn on the headlights, and when he stepped out of the car, I reached over and put them on and turned off the radio.

Instead of going left, toward the interstate highway, Lee Allen turned right. “You don’t mind if we make a stop, do you, boys?”

“We’re expected for dinner,” I said.

“You are? You all live together, is that it?”

“I mean, we all have to get home.”

Lee Allen nodded. “Right! Gotta get you home.”

He kept nodding. He was driving with one hand. He started whistling under his breath.

When we had gone a couple of blocks, he turned into another parking lot, which was filled with cars and trucks. A green and yellow neon sign on the roof of a low-slung building advertised beer, billiards, and music. He pulled the car perpendicular to several other vehicles, blocking them in, and shut off the engine. “Out we go, ladies. Happy hour.”

“We really have to get home,” Gilly said from the back seat.

Lee Allen slammed his hand on the dashboard. “Get the fuck outta the car,” he shouted.

We climbed out and followed him toward the tavern.

“What about your lights?” I said.

“What?”

“You left your headlights on.”

He turned around.  “Shit. Wait here.”

***

 THE AIR IN THE TAVERN was smoky and damp. Along the bar sat men with glasses of beer in front of them, their faces colored by the lighted Pabst and Budweiser signs above the mirror. There was a television tuned to a hockey game, but the sound was off. I could hear the clatter of pool balls and a jukebox, not loud, from a back room. Opposite the bar were four booths crowded with men drinking beer and talking in low voices. Their placards on wooden handles leaned against the wall.

When they noticed us, the men stopped talking and stared and shifted in the booths.

Lee Allen, unsteady on his feet, approached the bar. “Give me a pitcher of Bud and four glasses, Henry,” he said.

The bartender wiped his hands on a towel and sighed. He pointed his chin in our direction. “Let’s see some i.d.”

Lee Allen turned around. “Show the man your driver’s license.”

“We’re sixteen,” Gilly said.

“Get the hell outta here! Really? Well,” Lee Allen said. He turned back to the bartender. “These boys have been working all day. They deserve a drink.”

“They can have ginger ale or Pepsi. They aren’t even supposed to be in here. You know that.”

The bartender fixed three glasses of ginger ale with ice and maraschino cherries and put them on a tray with a glass of beer for Lee Allen.

“When you’re done, you should leave,” the bartender said. He was speaking to me.

I nodded.

David leaned on my shoulder and whispered, “Ask him if we can call a taxi. We have enough money to get home, I think.”

“You ask him,” I said.

“I just noticed something, Henry,” Lee Allen said. He was staring into the mirror behind the bar. He picked up the tray of drinks, then set it down and turned abruptly. With exaggerated care, he stepped over to one of the booths and said “Good evening, fellas” in a loud, polite, provoking voice. I wondered if he had a gun under his plaid hunting jacket. It seemed likely.

The men mumbled a half-hearted greeting. Jacob, who had told me he would never join a union, was sitting at the table with three of the picketers from the factory, drinking beer. I wondered if he was really staying at a sober-living house. Although Jacob had been working while the picketers stood at the factory gate, drinking coffee in the cold rain, they appeared to bear him no animosity.

“You boys tuckered out?” Lee Allen went on. “You put in a full day’s work? Earned your pay?”

“Get out of here, Lee,” a man with a dark shiny face said. He was wearing eyeglasses and a corduroy jacket that bunched under his armpits.

Lee Allen turned around and smiled sarcastically at us. “Boys,” he said. “You see before you the goddamn backbone of the American workforce. Don’t it make you proud?”

“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” the man with the corduroy jacket said angrily. “We’re not on site here.”

“Thank Jesus for that.”

One of the men muttered something.

“What’s that? I missed what you said. What you were hoping to convey.”

Jacob snickered. “He said you’re actin’ like a dipshit.”

“What the hell’re you doing here anyway, Jacob?” Lee Allen said, the color rising from his neck to his face.

Jacob lifted his glass and took a gulp. He put the glass on the table. ‘Breakin’ my sobriety. You ever tried that, Lee? Sobriety?’

Lee Allen’s eyes narrowed. He swayed back on his heels. “Get up from there,” he said in a dangerous voice. “You got no loyalty, you punk. You got no character, sitting with these lazy-ass bastards.”

Jacob lunged to his feet. “I’ll drink with any man I want. You ain’t my boss, bitch.”

The men at the table jeered.

Lee Allen’s mouth tightened into a furious knot.

What happened next occurred so quickly that it almost failed to register. Lee Allen’s fist shot out like a bolt and crushed Jacob’s windpipe. Glass shattered as he fell onto the table, clutching his throat. His legs kicked at the air. He rolled to one side, onto the shards of glass, then onto his back again. Blood spurted from his neck.

Lee Allen sprang back and rebalanced himself, crouching slightly, his hands tensed. His eyes were bright.

In a panic, the other men pushed out of the booth.

On television people held the victim’s wrist or placed an ear next to his nostrils to see if he was dead. No one did those things. The men scrambled out of the other booths and stood with their backs against the walls, as far from Jacob as they could. It seemed as if they were listening to something, but the only sound was the music from the back room. The fingers of Jacob’s tattooed right hand were clenched. He was lying in a puddle of beer and blood, which ran over the side of the table and dripped on the floor. Something passed over his face and left it pale and waxy, and his eyes looked opaque, like metal moons.

More men, some carrying pool cues, came from the back room. Some women came with them, looking worried and pale in the bar light. One was wearing brown lipstick. The men on the barstools had stood up. Two of them grabbed Lee Allen’s arms and pushed him into an empty booths and then stood over him, holding him down, not knowing what to do next. The bartender, Henry, had come from behind the bar. He was holding a telephone receiver. He said something to Lee Allen that I could not hear, and Lee Allen nodded.

Almost immediately, the sound of sirens rose in the distance. The men let go of Lee Allen’s arms. He sat in the booth and smoked a cigarette, turning his head defiantly to look at the men standing around him. They seemed embarrassed. They were not angry. They were not prepared to respond to what had happened, with the police coming and the other men around them, men they worked with, drank with. Most likely, Jacob Johanson was not even their friend.

I did not know what Lee Allen could be thinking as he sat smoking his cigarette. His faded red cap was pushed back on his forehead. He looked scared and helpless. His life had suddenly changed, I knew that, but I did not feel bad for him, and I did not feel bad for Jacob. I felt bad for myself, for having seen what happened. I did not care about Lee Allen orJacob Johanson. I had never seen these people before today. I was afraid of what my uncle would say, and I felt ashamed of myself for feeling that way.

David’s breath was ragged in my ear. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

I turned and wrapped my arms around him. I could feel his heart pounding. Our friendship was only a few months old, and it was not going to survive this. I held him against my chest, the way I might hold a large dog.

Gilly looked at me anxiously. “Is it okay?” He could hardly speak.

“I don’t know.”

I let my arms drop.

The police came. The red and blue lights flashed from the parking lot when the door opened. Two police officers made Lee Allen stand and hold his arms behind his back while they fastened the handcuffs. One of the officers patted Lee Allen’s jacket and found a pistol, which he held by the trigger guard with one finger. Another officer took the red cap from his head and ran his finger around the inside.

Then the paramedics arrived, pressing everyone back along the walls and against the bar. They surrounded the table where Jacob Johanson lay and talked among themselves. Two of them left. The remaining paramedic folded his arms and stood with his back to the table, silent and watchful. After a while, the first two returned, rolling a noisy gurney, and two police officers led Lee Allen outside.

“We should’ve called a cab,” David said. “I said we should call a cab, didn’t I? I told you we should call a cab, but you didn’t listen.”

“Shut up,:” I said. I was angry that we were there.

“I didn’t know he was going to do that.”

“It’s okay,” Gilly said. “Right? It’s okay.”

“We should have gone home!”

“It’s fine,” Gilly cried. ‘It’s okay.”

I wanted to hit them both. After all these years, it still makes me angry.

Eric Rawson lives and works in the Los Angeles area. His novel Banana Republic was published in 2020. He is also the author of The Hummingbird Hour and Expo and a novel-in-progress, Any Better Than This.