A Miracle of Catfish (28 page)

He rolls over onto his back and looks at the ceiling. It has those glowing stars plastered over it, but they're very dim now. He wishes he didn't have to get up in four and a half more hours. He knows he's going to be hurting for certain. But it's unthinkable to miss work. Then he wonders if the alarm clock's set. Oh shit. What if it's not? Surely it is. Surely she went ahead and set it before she went to sleep. She sets it every Sunday night so that he can get up in time on Monday morning.

He lies there and thinks about it. He'll have to turn on the lamp to see if it's set or not. He doesn't want to do that. He doesn't want to take a chance on waking her up right now. He hasn't had time to rest. He hasn't had time to think about what he's going to say. And he's too tired
to move. So he doesn't get up and check it. He just lies there until he doesn't know that he's lying there anymore.

The amplified voice of Kenny Chesney singing with Uncle Kracker erupts beside Jimmy's daddy's bed in such a volt of surprise that he nearly leaps from under the covers. He gropes for the snooze button and slams his hand down on it, then groans aloud to the blessed silence that follows. It will only stay off for two minutes, and then it will come back on. They're selling tickets on the radio this week for that concert in Tupelo and Jimmy's daddy knows how badly Jimmy and the girls want to go. He lies there, trying to go back to sleep. But he has to get up. Go to work. To hell with breakfast. Just getting there on time will be job enough. He moans.

He doesn't feel very good. He wishes he didn't have to get up. He wishes now that he hadn't drunk all that beer yesterday afternoon and evening. And then the sudden memories of Lacey's naked body and all the things they did for hours come rushing in. He groans again. It's still dark in the trailer. He looks at Johnette. She's asleep on her back, her face turned away from him. What if she wants to eat lunch with him?

“
Two big shows!
” the radio screams. “
At the Bancorp South Center! Kenny Chesney! Live!
”

Jimmy's daddy hits the snooze button again and closes his eyes. Oh my God. If he had known he was going to feel like this he would have just stayed home yesterday. All day long. He groans and turns on his side. He's going to have to get up. He's going to have to go into the bathroom and turn the light on and piss and shave and find his work clothes and his work boots and put them on and get in the car and go. He isn't going to have time to make a baloney sandwich. He'll have to eat another can of that chili. But they've put in a sandwich machine now. He thinks it has hamburgers and ham and cheese. Maybe hot dogs. He doesn't know what else. Salads? With those little packets of dressing? Sausage and biscuits.

He lies there. Johnette is not moving beside him. He's going to have to fix his life somehow because it's not working the way it is. But what's he going to do? What's the first move he's going to make? What's he going to do today that's going to be different from yesterday? Why couldn't he have been born rich?

Jimmy's daddy can hear the waking birds when the central air stops running. There's going to be dew all over the windshield of the '55, and he'll have to run his headlights for a while on the way to work. The road will be filled with other cars, in them people all hurrying to town, to work, to jobs, to steady employment, and some of them will be going to the same place he's going. They'll be coming from College Hill, from Paris, from Dogtown, from Yocona, from Tula, from Potlockney, from Bay Springs, from Cambridge, from Bruce, from Water Valley. All of them rushing to punch their clocks, start up their machines, work away their lives. He's doing it, too, and already can feel his life seeping away, one day at a time. It's enough to make him sick. But it's nothing new.

[…]

Jimmy's daddy punched in at 6:59 and saw Collums eyeing him when he walked into the Maintenance Department, which had a big table with a lot of disassembled tools and loose nuts and bolts and welding rags and rods lying on it, and a bunch of metal cabinets hung on the walls with tools in them, air hoses, work lights, air wrenches, and a cleared space on the grease-soaked concrete floor for parking Towmotors that needed work. And they all needed work. Just about every day. Because every one of them was a piece of shit. Because the company wouldn't get any new ones and just kept buying parts for whatever tore up on them, and getting Collums and Jimmy's daddy and a few other guys who worked in Maintenance to fix them. It got old. Crawling around on the floor.

“What's up?” Jimmy's daddy said to Collums, who was sitting on an upturned five-gallon plastic bucket, sipping a smoking cup of coffee.

“You look like you had a rough night,” Collums said. “And the damn toilet in the ladies' pisser's stopped up again. So you better get on up there and fix it.”

“Aw
shit
,” Jimmy's daddy said. “I done fixed that son of a bitch eight times already.” Well, he'd unplugged it eight times anyway.

Collums sat there sipping his coffee in what looked like utter comfort. He brought it from home every morning, piping hot, and sat there sipping it, and it never failed to chap Jimmy's daddy's ass. And the son of a bitch never offered him any either. Like right now, Jimmy's daddy couldn't think of any one thing that would be better than a hot cup of
coffee, but do you think the son of a bitch would offer him any? Hell no. Stingy bastard.

“I think they using the wrong kind of toilet paper in it,” Collums said. “I thought toilet paper was toilet paper,” Jimmy's daddy said, wondering if there was any way he could sneak into the break room for a cup of that watered-down coffee that was sold from a machine. And then he stopped thinking about it. He knew there was no way he could because somebody would see him and nobody was supposed to be in the break room unless it was break time except for the people who took care of the break room, swept it up, emptied the trash cans, wiped off the tables, emptied the ashtrays. He'd bet they snuck a cup of coffee sometimes. Lucky bastards.

And how did Collums get away with sitting on his ass on a five-gallon bucket and sipping coffee after 7 a.m.? That was easy. They were scared to make him mad. Afraid he'd quit. The people in the front office wouldn't say shit to him. They needed him too badly. And the plant manager knew it, too. Even
he
wouldn't say anything to Collums. But it looked like the son of a bitch could at least offer Jimmy's daddy a little coffee.

But he didn't. So Jimmy's daddy grabbed his tool pouch and a pipe wrench in case he needed it — he didn't know why he would, but it might be better to take it just in case — and a rubber plunger and headed down the aisle toward the assembly line, first past the Spot-Welding Department and then the Porcelain Department, where Lacey worked, and hoped maybe she'd have her back turned when he walked by.

And she did. She was spraying a stove liner with liquid porcelain. She had her mask on and she had her right arm raised holding the spray gun and the liners were coming by her on hooks and she was concentrating on what she was doing. That was real good. That was terrific. He had no time to talk. Up ahead he could see the brightly lit cavern of the two assembly lines, where the stoves were built up from the porcelain-coated liners. Then the insulation was wrapped around them. Then wires were put in. Hinges. Handles. Heating elements. Thermostats. Dials. Broiler pans. Each person stood there all day on the concrete and put one or two things on the stove and sent it on down the line, where somebody kept doing something to it until it was all pretty and new and finished and
ready to be boxed up by the people holding the glue guns down on the very end, who rolled them down a little ramp to a waiting pallet, where eventually somebody on a forklift would come to get it and all the others and store them in the warehouse on the other side of the tall block wall until they were put into trailers by people in the Shipping Department. Some days they made hoods. Some days they made self-cleaning double ovens, some days non-self-cleaning single ovens. Nobody seemed to know why they built what they built on any given day. It all came down from the front office through some mysterious process. Jimmy's daddy knew he could have run the whole thing if they would just let him. But of course they wouldn't.

Here was going to be the tricky part, turning the corner, going right, and walking down the side of the first line, right past the edge of the Porcelain Department, where if Lacey was looking up for the six or seven seconds he'd be in sight, headed to the stairs to the women's bathroom, she'd see him going by with his bag of tools and his plunger and his pipe wrench. And the big question was, Should he turn his head and see if she was seeing him? Or should he just ignore her and walk on past? What if he turned and looked at her and just waved and kept going? There wouldn't be anything she could do about it because the liners were coming through and she couldn't stop what they were doing because somebody on the other end was loading them onto the hooks from a long rolling cart that held about twenty of them, with some more lined up behind it. And they'd keep coming until the baking booth was full of them.

He got closer and he could begin to see all the people scattered up and down the line, men and women, old and young, pleasant and skanky, dark hair and gray, spectacled and unspectacled, fat and skinny, all shapes and sizes. They were all busy working and some of them were wearing safety glasses that were just cheap plastic things like you wear to run a Weed Eater. The line was rolling slowly along and a boy on a forklift was lowering a long pallet of insulation to the end of the line where the workers were wearing gloves against the itch of the rock wool they were wrapping around the stove liners. The foreman was walking around and smoking a cigar, his tiny desk set up in the middle of all the bustle, air hoses hanging from the ceiling, and the noise: clanking
and whirring and talking and shouting and laughing, the high whine of the air wrenches and the hundred little
zipzipzip
s of screws going into stoves destined for the kitchens of America. […]

He went on down the aisle beside the assembly line and over to the metal stairs that led up to the second floor and clanged on up there. He stopped outside the door. He couldn't just barge in. He had to wait for a woman to come out or a woman to head in. If one was coming out he'd have to ask her if anybody else was in there and if one was going in he'd have to ask her when she came out if anybody else was in there. Then after he'd made sure there were no women in there, he'd have to prop the door open with a
MAINTENANCE WORKING
sign that was stored in the broom closet just around the corner. He went and got the sign and then he stood at the rail overlooking the assembly line while he waited. He could see all of the line from here, and there were eighty or ninety people working down there. He could see the edge of the Porcelain Department but not the spot where Lacey was standing since it was hidden by the baking booth.

He stood up there for a long time. If he didn't fix the damn thing pretty quick and get on back, Collums would say something about him taking so long. He was about tired of Collums's shit. He was damn sure tired of fixing those ragged-ass Towmotors all the time. One of them had gotten in such bad shape that it wouldn't even think about cranking without a shot of ether in the mornings, like an old man needing a shot of whisky.

He went over to the door of the bathroom and knocked on it with his knuckles, but it was made of metal and hurt his knuckles, so he stopped. Well shit. He guessed he might as well have a cigarette while he was waiting. Somebody would have to take a piss sooner or later. If Collums said something to him about it taking so long to fix the toilet, he'd just say,
Well, Collums, I can't make em piss, you know.
That'd shut his ass up.

Jimmy's daddy lit a cigarette and stood there at the rail smoking it. He wondered if the Shipping Department boys had any coffee back there. They had a nice big office with a desk and a couple of chairs and even a radio and they had some big glass windows and he wouldn't be surprised at all if the foreman had a little private Mr. Coffee or
something back there. It wouldn't take him two minutes to walk back there and see.

Nah. He'd better wait. Some woman might come up the stairs at any minute. Or out the door at any minute. Then he got to wondering how a woman down there on the line took a piss without getting behind on all her stoves. Did she get somebody to cover for her, do her job as well as theirs while she went to the bathroom? Did the foreman take over for her? Maybe he did. Hell, he probably knew every assembly procedure on the line. Kind of like one of those orchestra conductors who has to be able to play every instrument in the orchestra before he can conduct it. Jimmy's daddy figured it was the same kind of deal: orchestra, factory.

He looked at his watch. He'd already been at work for twelve minutes. Break wasn't until nine thirty. What he was going to do was kind of ease away from whatever he was doing about a minute before break and be somewhere poised to bolt out the door and into the break room and hopefully be the first one in line to put some money in the coffee machine, sip it, have a few cigarettes, maybe a sausage and biscuit if that new machine had any. Maybe what he could do was be the first in line at the coffee machine, put his money in, punch the buttons for the kind of coffee he wanted, with cream and sugar, extra sugar, extra creamer, wait until the cup rattled down, then rush over to the new sandwich machine and put the money in and push the buttons for a sausage and biscuit, get it out, then rush back to the coffee machine in time to take his cup out. But then he'd probably have to microwave the sausage and biscuit because all that shit in the sandwich machine was cold. He damn sure didn't want a salad for his morning break. And he damn sure wasn't going to drink any beer this afternoon when he got off. He saw where that shit got him.