Ghosts of Tom Joad (3 page)

“I need tres hombres, arriba,” said the man in the pickup.

“We speak English brother. We're Americans, too.”

“Well, yens' are dirty like Mexicans. Anyway, I'm looking for three today.”

“What'cha got? Construction? Painting?”

“Three of you wanna work, get in the back of the truck.”

“What're you payin'?”

“I'm at $2.50 an hour.”

“That ain't minimum wage.”

“Did I say $2.50? I meant two bucks an hour. Now, another of you smartasses got a problem, or you like being poor and standing in a parking lot?”

I had had enough.

“If none of us take his shitty $2.50, he'll have to pay us better.”

“Shut up, Earl. I'll take your shittin' $2.50 mister.”

“Get in the truck, and watch your mouth if you want a job today. And I still am thinking about the $2.50. We'll see how it works out, if you're lazy or not.”

“Get out of his truck. C'mon, man.”

“You go to hell, Earl. I need this.”

Two more looked at their feet a bit too long, and I knew we'd been broken. They climbed, silently, into the back of the pickup. The guy driving flipped me off and hit the gas, splashing puddle scum at me, now with another eight hours 'til dark.

The next day we were all back in the lot. Hungry and angry walk pretty close to each other. Puts the bullies up front 'cause regular people stop caring.

“To Hell with you, Earl, man, just to Hell with you. I should've pushed them assholes out and gotten in the truck myself yesterday.”

“How much that guy end up paying you all yesterday?”

“We only got the two bucks an hour thanks to your smartass mouth, Earl, but he kept us on for nine hours so we did okay. Bastard had us tearing out insulation, worked every last dollar outta us. We asked for a break and the jerkoff laughed at us, saying, ‘What, you in a union?'”

“It sucked but, yeah Earl, you keep your mouth shut next time and we'll at least get some work.”

“Don't tell me to shut up, you asshole. You was being used and you're too dumb to even see it.”

“Fuck you, Earl. Go find a job with the Koreans movin' into town. Maybe they'll let you clean up their crap for them.”

I hadn't hit anyone since junior year of high school, and that was just Muley one time when we got into a fight over some stupid football game neither of us remembered right. There was a lot of trash talk and some pushing and shoving in between long lulled pauses like we saw in movies. I swung at him and
Muley poked me once alongside of my nose and we wrestled a bit. It didn't hurt much more than when you eat ice cream too fast.

This time it was sudden and rough. We were older, hungrier and colder, and there was a lot more on the table than us just calling each other names in the parking lot. The first guy swung sloppily, but caught the side of my head with the punch, and his class ring tore off a part of my scalp. I reached up to touch at the blood and he hit me solid in the nose, starting a finger-width flow of blood down my face. His friend slid in and connected twice on my gut, making me bend over with sour vomit in my mouth. I stood up, dizzy, and tried to put my hands in front of my face, but they all took a couple more shots until I tasted blood over the vomit, and one tooth felt too sharp against my tongue, like it was chipped. I spit up some onto the pavement and that seemed to satisfy them somehow 'cause they stopped hitting me. only 'cause of the bleeding did I know I was still alive.

“Come here again messing with our work my friend, and you're a dead man. We will freaking wreck your shit, Earl.”

They might have been done with me, but they weren't done.

A random passerby.

“Hey, you, you Korean bastard, c'mon over here.”

“Yeah, you son-of-a-bitch, come here.”

“Bastard is probably on his way to some job he took from one of us.”

He came over, saying something in Korean. He didn't seem to understand what was going on.

“Hey slant, you take my job?”

“Why are you even here, you fuck? Go home to Korea.”

Language barrier or no language barrier, he figured what he had walked into. He said something else none of us could understand, and turned to leave.

“Hey, you trying to run away? You don't like us? Why don't you like us, you foreign piece of shit?”

“Look, he keeps trying to say something. Speak American you little fuck.”

He was scared now. He kept jerking his head at me, I guess 'cause I was the one off to the side and not up in his face, but Christ, look at me. A weak “Leave him alone” was about all I was good for.

“So he's your pal now Earl? You two buddies? You two boyfriends, Earl, that why you're on his side?”

“You little gook shit. We should fuck you up.”

He went down pretty hard under the first blows. I couldn't tell if he was hit, or he just crumpled up figuring that was best. Then I saw he had some blood on his mouth, but what really hurt him were those two or three kicks while he was on the ground. One of the guys ripped off his coat by the sleeves and threw it aside. His backpack got tore open and we saw his school books splay out onto the pavement.

“Shit, he's just some school kid. He's probably only in junior high or something.”

“You asshole, we just beat the shit outta a little kid. Let's get the fuck outta here before someone calls the fucking cops.”

It wasn't the kind of place where anybody would call the cops. Some of the Mexicans lined up also looking for work came over and helped the kid to his feet, and kind of shooed me away.
Them Mexicans had been at the game longer and knew when to keep their distance. I just went back to where I was staying, which wasn't far enough.

M
OST THINGS ON
the bus were nicer, at least at first. I remembered what my dad would always say to his friend Stan when I was a kid:

“So Stan, how come we never ran into each other when we was serving in Korea?”

“I don't know, maybe because I was in the Air Force and you was in the Army? I flew over the mud and you wallowed in it.”

“You weren't in the real Air Force, you were a navigator.”

Stan and my dad had done this routine for years, with the ease and confidence of well-practiced behavior. Bob and Ray, Ralph and Alice, Cheech and Chong, Homer and Marge, whoever had been on TV since before I started being more entertained by the ghosts on this bus than the stuff on the screen. It always ended with Stan taking a fake jab at my dad. I guess when they were younger it was like a movie punch, but over the years it had faded into a gesture, more like a half-wave than even an act of pretend violence.

When my dad would entertain us with stories from Korea, usually after a few of, but not all of, what he was drinking that evening, he could be a pretty funny guy. Always sat at the table in his t-shirt, a towel around his neck like he was thinking of sweating hard even at home. The Korean War was his big life experience, his only time outside the U.S. and up until that point pretty much the only non-wedding or funeral trip he'd ever
made outside of Reeve. Join the service, he'd tell me, make a man of you, have some fun seeing the world. Best years of his life in Korea. Got blind drunk in Itaewon on black market booze. Ran into some hookers (he said when Mom went inside for another jar of lemonade) and had more fun than $20 should be allowed to buy. Won money in poker Tuesday, lost it all back on Thursday. R&R in Yokohama, too much to talk about with such a sensitive boy's ears around. Didn't fight hardly none at all, sat guard duty on some stupid hill for the whole war, never saw a North Korean, never saw many Koreans out there on that hill at all except some damn beggar kids and their wrinkled up old mamas. “Wouldn't want to touch them women, even for free,” he'd say, pausing, then, always to laughs, “or even if they'd a paid me.”

He owned one suit, one pair of dress shoes and two watches, always wore the cheap stainless one, never took the gold one from his father out of the drawer except for those weddings and funerals. Said he was saving it, but he died, and I just pawned it. He was the boss at home. “This house is a democracy,” he'd say, “but I got 99 of the votes and your mother has the other one. You, son, got none, get used to that.” He'd talk about that factory where he worked like some people would talk about God because—along with football—they were all the same in Reeve and you'd no sooner curse one than be damned by them all. The factory took the tip of his left hand index finger by accident, and it was crooked and a mean red when he pointed. Mom always said he was a man of two faces. He had one for daytime, especially with a drink, and another one at night, more purple, especially with another drink. Sometimes his meanness was
almost casual, and sometimes it was like a tough ass dog let off the leash.

Me and Dad had not done a lot of talking, and as he got older the reasons for us not to talk fell away, though the habit of not talking stayed. I'd call home from wherever I was looking for work, and his way of answering the phone was to say, “Here's your mom.”

I remember one Saturday in a December when I was maybe ten or so. It snowed overnight, a Midwest blast of twelve or fourteen inches all within a couple of hours, shutting down the Twentieth Century in Reeve. Every kid poured outside that morning and we built huge snow forts, great walls to rival that one in China, and a street-wide snowball war erupted. With nothing on TV because we had no electricity, the dads came out to see what was going on, and before we knew it, had joined into the snowball throwing. There must have been twenty men and their sons out there hurling wet snow, except one. I remember running into the house, the snow melting off me while my mom yelled about the mess, me crying, begging my old man to come out. He just said, “No snowballs for me, seen enough snow in Korea to last forever,” and laid down on the couch. My mom shooed me back outside, looking over at Dad, saying he needed to rest more, even though he'd just got up. My tears came down either side of my nose and outside froze in place and I can almost still feel them pinching. Even after I caught one snowball right in the nose and started to bleed, I wouldn't go home that day.

He'd whoop me when I was little, usually 'cause of what he called my “goddamn disrespectful mouth,” them three words
said as one slur. He hit me like he'd never stop, then one day when I was about eight or nine he just stopped, like something grabbed his hand, held his fist and he never hit me again after that, not once, I never knew why. You remember the things from childhood that scare you and I'll never forget that.

I never knew him to pick me up when I was a kid, “Not his way, but he loves you all the same,” Mom would say, but as he aged I grew bitter at the loss of something never there, and when he did try and hug me like he saw the other old people around him do when I visited as an adult, I pulled back. We tried unsuccessfully a few times to patch things, but re-sew it over and over, you always can see the tear. Dad was never one of those dads that supposedly went out for a pack of smokes and never came home. No, he didn't abandon his family when things got messed up, but he'd sure as hell expect that we'd adjust to him. “I got to go to work, you know, so be quiet and don't get upset when I miss your game or raise a hand at your mother,” he'd say. Mom one time created this big deal where as a kid I was supposed to watch him shave, some father-son thing, but as soon as she left the bathroom he just said, “I shave every morning, don't see what the big goddamn deal is,” so I just went back to Mom in the kitchen. He left his mark on me like a thumbprint pressed into wet plaster, but I never knew how when we never even talked.

My mom was named something else, but everyone called her Sissy, after her being the only sister in a big family of brothers. That summer between junior and senior year I remember a lot, but it was only after my mom started getting on the bus with me that it started to make sense to me as an adult. It seemed there
was always more between her and Dad than I could see, like they played parts called “Mom” and “Dad” in front of me, but were different people with each other. Mom said Dad loved her and that was important for me to know, but that it was a Midwest kind of thing where he loved her almost enough to tell her.

It occurred to me that maybe Mom had it right, or at least saw it all coming sort of unconsciously. She waitressed at the Lenny's, now part of a big nationwide chain of diners, but the place used to be Anthony's Café, where food came in “baskets” or as “platters,” and old guys sat at the counter bent over coffee like bowed tree limbs. It was owned by Big Tony, then his son Little Tony, who died, and his own son who wasn't named Tony sold it to the Lenny's company, which is now owned by Dubai investors who can't find Ohio on a map. A thing owning a thing. Before it was sold, the Tony's used to put up hand-written signs all over the place, saying things like N
O
C
HECKS
with the N
O
in red and underlined twice or W
E
D
ON'T
L
OOK IN
Y
OUR
M
OUTH, SO YOU DON'T LOOK IN OUR KITCHEN.
Waitresses said “Here you go,” dropping off food, and asked, “Still working on it?” midway, and “Any room for dessert?” at the end, which was what good service was in a place like that. Didn't call people “Honey,” that was just at the Waffle Houses further south. Mom waitressed, mostly for tips, serving meals to people who paid using dollars they earned selling shoes made in Sri Lanka to people who made a living being personal trainers to other people who earned their living buying and selling bonds and stocks. Nobody made nothing, except maybe the cooks who broke eggs for omelets. Poultry was always big in this part of Ohio.