The Trouble Way (4 page)

No need to check his pockets for any missing money. Except for some pine needles, his pockets were as empty as they were that morning when he left to work in the woods with his uncle.

“Pig-fucker,” Jake said as he walked up the steps to his back porch. He smiled. The only positive shit he ever got from the bastard all summer, a couple of
de-luxe
burgers and some really classy cuss words.

When he thought back on it, his experience in the woods with his uncle and the fifty-five dollar log, or more accurately, the
dee-luxe
burger, fries, and chocolate malt log, it was his earliest lesson on how
The Man
takes advantage of the powerless working stiff; it would not be his last. Too bad
The Man
had to be family. He’d worked his ass off all summer for a fast-food meal. He was too timid to confront his uncle on the subject, the fucker was a gypo-logger and infantryman in Italy during the big one; Jake was fifteen, for Christ sake. On top of that, there was his uncle’s temper. Jake witnessed more than once Uncle Wendell flip out. Once, when a nut wouldn’t loosen on his John Deere cat, Uncle Wendell’s face turned purple and he flung the eighteen-inch crescent wrench into a pond. That was the first time he’d heard “pig-fucker,” but it was far from the last. Uncle Wendell didn’t give a tinker’s damn who heard him. Jake’s grandmother was sitting in the truck when Uncle Wendell displayed that particular dramatic talent. Jake looked at a similar wrench at the hardware store and saw the price tag. It was darn near half the amount of what Uncle Wendell owed him.

On the flip side, he
’d had lots of time to think of time and tides and a perpetual motion machines. Another plus, he packed on some muscle that summer in the woods.

Guess I
’m officially enrolled in the school of hard knocks. This is what I learned so far: Lesson Number 1:  Avoid working for relatives. Lesson Number 2:  Never, ever work for your cheap-ass Uncle Wendell again. Lesson Number 3:  Same as Number 2; that’s an important one.

Events going the
“Trouble Way” slowed down for the first three years of high school and everything seemed to be going hunky-dory. Things were better when he got his driver’s license the first day they tested after his sixteenth birthday. The family was still poor as hell but he did snag a few jobs, like whacking weeds at the ol’ holly farm for one. He raked in a buck an hour for that gig. That gave him gas money. His mom let him drive the family ‘56 Chevy pretty-much anytime he liked. After all, he was the man of the family since his ol’ man checked off the last item he was ever going to cross off on his bucket list, complete or not.

Priscilla showed up darn near on his doorstep one time shortly after Jake turned sixteen. She belonged to her school choir and was on a tour with her high school class and ended up in Portland, a hundred miles from where Jake lived. She had written him a note and they planned meeting at one of her choir events.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t cry.” Jake said when his first comment out of his mouth when he saw her was, “Boy, you sure did get tall.” He had caught up to her and passed her by two inches; she was six feet tall.

“
Under the circumstances, I forgive you, Jake,” she said. “After all, it’s been years.” She wrapped her long arms around him and gave him the same tight squeeze he remembered from when he had last seen her eons ago. “I still really, really like you, Jake,” she whispered into his ear causing Jake’s freckle face to feel as though he had spent the day in an outdoor pool on a sunny day without lotion.

“
I really, really like you too, Priscilla, more than ever. You are gorgeous.”

They didn
’t have much time together. There were enough chaperones around to choke a good size herd of dairy cows so it was not in the cards for them to spend any serious alone time. So, after about an hour of talking about riding horses, picnicking by the creek under the alder trees, and getting caught up on their lost years, they parted once again.

“
Keep in touch, Jake.”

He leaned over to her and gave her a kiss on the cheek, chaperones be damned.

“I will … you too.” He tucked her address into his wallet and walked up to her and gave her a hug. Then, on some weird impulse, he kissed his cousin on the lips and she didn’t shy away, she kissed him back.

“
Oh, dear,” she said and then he turned and left her standing ten feet from the nearest chaperone on the steps of the high school the choir was to sing at that evening. He didn’t have the price of a ticket, so he couldn’t go to that. Probably just as well, Priscilla had a boyfriend, David. He was a Mormon so he was David, not Dave. David made a quick appearance but had to go practice for that night’s performance.

“
Nice to meet you Buddy,” David said and gave Jake a noodle handshake. He almost made Jake puke. He nearly responded with, “My name’s Jake, you can call me Jacob,” but he resisted the temptation. He didn’t want Priscilla to start blubbering.

Jake got into the
‘56 Chevy and headed home, thinking of Priscilla’s soft, luscious lips, kissing her in his mind a thousand times during that windy-ass hundred plus miles back along the Columbia River to home. She disappeared from his life for the second time, forever, for all he knew.

Jake had begun asking girls out the first Friday after he passed his driver
’s test. Mostly, he took girls to a drive-in movie down near the ocean or, if he was short of cash, which he nearly always was, to the local Finnish Cemetery. All the girls, he soon realized, were nearly as eager to go to the Cemetery as he was, even those uppity church going Lutheran girls. In fact, two of the churchiest girls even suggested the Finnish Cemetery before he got the courage to broach the subject. Nobody bothered them there, except for the one time when a County Mountie came nosing around with his flashlight and caught in him at the exact moment he was about to mount a frontal assault on Alice’s blouse. Jake was so occupied that he hadn’t noticed the patrol car pull up beside him. Boobs can be pretty, pretty, pretty distracting.

Alice taught him to kiss. Bernie taught him rejection ... bitch. And Janis taught him the meaning of real Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for Phucking. That Bitch with a capital B that rhymes with P that also stands for Pregnant which, in anybody
’s Phucking language in 1963, stands for Marriage.

So, travel down
Trouble Way resumed once again and continued for four more years while Jake spent his time, first eloping with Lunatic Janis to Idaho and then, on the expert advice of her equally Lunatic father, joined the Air Force.

As it turned out, th
e advice of her Lunatic father wasn’t such bad advice after all. Jake hadn’t had the fortune to become the hero he’d always dreamed of being but he accumulated some veteran’s benefits which came in handy when he attended Oregon College of Education.

Her father
was eventually exposed as a child abuser, wife beater, and cross-dresser who came out in grand fashion by getting spotted by a state patrol officer while he was running down a county road wearing Janis’s favorite fuzzy white sweater and her dark pleated skirt.

Jake went through
ten months of excruciating misery and three additional years trying to extricate himself from his legal commitment to Janis. Those three years of nearly constant anxiety was followed by a relatively calm period of college years and on to several years more of working as an assistant manager and finally a manager of Big Richards, a discount retail store.

Jake walked into the interview room and shook hands with a man who had an uncanny resemblance to a man of Jake
’s past. He studied the man for a moment, but he couldn’t place him. It was Mr. Hedd’s nose, he was sure that was it. He’d seen it before. Jake found it difficult not to stare. When he walked out of the interview with Mr. Hedd from the Big Richards Corporation, he was confident, and actually felt grateful he wouldn’t be offered the job. He would never be talking to, not to mention looking at, Mr. Hedd in his black and white hounds tooth jacket with the nametag with red lettering that looked like they had been stuck on by a one and a half year old. And then there was that nose.

Judging from the nametag, Big Richards is tight with a buck. I see where the low-ball salary offer fits right in
.

Being an Assistant Manager of a Big Richards discount store was definitely not his first option, it was his nineteenth choice. His first option had been to be an accountant but with his final GPA of 2.61 there was not likely to be any of the Big-Eight accounting firms would be offering him any lucrative signing bonuses anytime soon.

Jake was a half a block from the placement office when that nose became perfectly clear in his mind. Mr. Peter Hedd looked like the desk clerk of a hotel Jake and his new bride, Janis, stayed at in Portland eight years earlier. Like that unforgettable clerk, Mr. Hedd’s nose was enormous. The nose could have been the twin to the nose of the actor Karl Mauldin. It was the first time Jake thought of an apt nickname for Mr. Peter Hedd, ol’ Dick Head. He did doubt, though, he was the first, nor even be the last to fix the moniker to Mr. Peter Hedd.

When the letter came, he accepted the job. It was the only employment offered to him from the nineteen firms he had interviewed with at the at Oregon State University
’s placement office during his final months before graduation. The starting salary offered was chicken shit. Not chicken shit in shiny red cellophane with a stick-on bow, simply chicken shit in butcher paper … sans the bow with a promise of extended hours and an equally chicken-shit schedule.

“
This is at the extreme low end of the salary range for a college graduate. You do know that, don’t you Jake?” his advisor asked, making no effort to conceal a smirk or wait for Jake’s response. “In fact, Jake, I haven’t seen a lower offer. I was almost embarrassed for you, Jake, then I looked at your GPA, and well ... goes to show you, they’ll take just about anybody. No offense. Under the circumstances, it’s probably about as good as you’re likely to get. Might have been in your best interest to have hit the books a little more often and forgone the beer parties.”

Thanks a bundle, jerk.

Jake walked out of the advisor’s office and let the door bang the wall.

What the fuck does he know about study habits? Or beer parties, for that matter. They
’re pot parties ... it’s the 70s man ... where ya been? He’s probably right. Fuck me.

When he received the offer of eighty-four hundred dollars a year from Mr. Hedd, he typed out his acceptance letter, thumb his nose at
The Man
by purposely placing the stamp askew on the envelope. He walked to the mailbox on the corner and with a “fuck me,” slid the envelope in the chute and sent the door banging closed, a slap at the fuckin’ post office. The USPS is one of the organizations he’d interviewed with. He was tapped out and desperate and could wait no longer. His final one-hundred fifty dollar check from his G.I. benefits had arrived a few days earlier. Big Richard’s was the single offer he had received. He hadn’t even received a Dear John letter from any of the other eighteen companies he interviewed with.

He sent his acceptance letter in to their headquarters in Michigan and drove his
‘58 VW to Seattle to start his career in the retail industry. Whoop-De-Diddlie-Fucking-Doo.

On the bright side, beaucoup snatch worked at Big Richards stores. Looking at the up side, meeting his carnal needs was pretty-much assured. It was a
“duck soup” situation if he ever saw one. He prayed to his Lutheran/Atheist God he would have enough cash for gas in the reliable old ‘58 VW for the two-hundred mile jaunt to Seattle. The rent for an apartment in Seattle was guaranteed to be more than at his recently vacated one in the home of the Oregon State University Beavers, Corvallis, Oregon. Maybe Old Mr. Hedd would front him a few bucks till the eagle crapped, as payday was referred to in his Air Force days.

Present

You would think that after a certain amount of years, a guy would forget some of the stuff that didn’t make any difference in his life one way or the other. But, it’s not like that at all. You just remember things that make an impression on you, insignificant or not. Sometimes that insignificant stuff is not nearly as insignificant as you might have thought; they are the bullet points of your life.

A thing or two comes to mind right off -- not nice things -- and I make a concentrated effort not to make similar mistakes with Bella.

Once, when I caught myself teasing Bella, I would make a concentrated effort to make sure I did not hurt her feelings.

“
I very knew you were teasing me,” she said, and gave me a huge hug.

I come from a long line of mean-teasers. My dad, for instance, thought it was a joke to set fire to a little dancing man figure I made in the first grade. We made these stupid little cutouts of a man and pasted the top of their head to a full sheet of tracing paper. When a light, such as a flashlight, is shined a on the back and moved around, voilá, a shadow man appears to be dancing on the paper. Daddy used his Zippo lighter for the light and
“accidentally” got too close to the paper man. I remember his laugh as he watched the paper man dance in flames to a charcoal black paper cinder that drifted to the floor. I missed the humor apparently; I cried. I guess Daddy wasn’t big on paper dolls, dancing or otherwise.

I have every little piece of artwork Bella has given me since she could hold a crayon.

My dad wasn’t mean-teasing when we were on a vacation across country in the Olds. I was pretty little, maybe eight. My dad wouldn’t stop for a bathroom break. I was afraid to ask more than once and I was covered with cold goose bumps I had to shit so bad.

Funny thing how things carry down the generations. My dad died fifty years ago but my cousin (my age) inherited the same behavior from long dead relatives and will refuse to stop for bathroom breaks for anyone in the car he is driving unless it is he who has the urge. His wife doesn
’t use the exact word, “abuser” (that is what he is), and defends his pathetic ass by offering the excuse he makes up for the abuse by his vast knowledge of plumbing and carpentry. I’ve seen her run through the house without pausing enough to even say “Slap my ass and call me Judy” on her way to the can she has to piss so bad after one of their marathon family drives. I see no difference between that and the burning of a kids paper doll art project. It’s fucked behavior and it’s abuse and he can shove his vast knowledge of carpentry straight up his tight, skinny ass.

Back to that trip across country when I was eight, I got a hard slap on the rear while I was riding in the middle of the front seat. I sat motionless, in silence, for a good hundred miles before my dad asked me if I knew why I got the swatted.
“Swat” is the term used back then instead of spanking, more manly, I’m guessing.

No clue.

That was over fifty years ago and I’m not sure what the lesson was there except that I remember that clearer than I remember his face in the casket when he died.

“
You kicked my arm when you were horsing around with your sister.” She was riding shotgun.

In another insignificant incident, I probably should have forgiven old Uncle Wendell for not paying me the fifty-five dollars for that damn fir log that I worked my ass off for darn near all summer. After all, what
’s fifty-five bucks over fifty or sixty years? Probably shortened my life thinking about it. It no doubt cost me more in health care cost over the years for contributing to my high blood pressure. It’s just that, dag-nab-it -- as those cowboy sidekick characters in the movies would say -- he owed it to me.

I probably got him back anyway quite a few years later when he gave me a heads-up on selling firewood to some old widow who lived a mile up the county road. I was trying to make a few bucks after being fired from that retail management job at Big Richards.

The county would sell firewood permits for anybody who wanted to go up in the forests and cut wood from the slag piles from logged off areas. There was a limit of three permits per year and each cost fifteen bucks. Each permit was good for three cords of wood. The Man’s reason for selling so few permits was to keep people from doing exactly what I planned on doing, making a profit and helping old people heat their houses in the rainy winters in Oregon. Mainly, it was making money so I could eat. I was unemployed at the time.

My first solution to combat The Man
’s permit limit was to cut wood into campfire size bundles and sell to campers at the state parks for five bucks a pop. I’d rake in nearly two-hundred smackers a truckload. Things were prospering for several months until a local KOA Kampground operator wasn’t keen on the competition from Jake-O’s gypo firewood setup so they went to the city and insisted the police enforce the ordinance where someone selling anything had to have a building and a permit. Parking a truck full of firewood alongside the entrance to the state park and across the street from the entrance to the KOA Kampground did not qualify. The Man won that round; not a problem, I came up with an alternate business plan.

I didn
’t spend all those years at Big Richards watching the little people get their due for nothing. My solution was to sell wood by the cord to those who couldn’t cut their own, old ladies, or disabled people. The rat in the feed barrel was that nine cords of wood was hardly enough to bring in a livable income. The state used a semi-honor system to keep count of the number of cord one hauled from the woods. A permit holder would record the amount of wood on his truck and the date. When the three-cord limit was met, the permit became invalid and one would have to purchase another. I filled out everything on the form but left the date blank and left it within easy reach on the seat beside me as I drove down the gravel logging roads out of the woods. If I got stopped by the forest ranger, I quickly filled in the date. If I did not get stopped, I left it blank and didn’t subtract that load from my three-cord limit.

I didn
’t work for The Man for so many years and learn diddly. It turns out, I never did fill my three-permit limit for the year. I was only checked one time and must have hauled fifty cords of firewood out of those logging roads of northwest Oregon in one summer. Hell, I’d sell the firewood to old ladies or disabled men who had no way of getting their own wood. The state has millions of acres of wood in those state forests. I was helping the state clear out the fire hazard slash piles. Piles they would eventually burn. I was helping the environment and doing a service for the disabled of the community. I was officially one of the little people and it was now me against The Man.

“
How about a little finder’s fee?” Uncle Wendell said after I’d delivered that cord to the old lady up the road.

“
You must be joshing me,” is what I said. Hell, I just laughed. But the bastard was serious as a horny Black Angus bull.

“
Back in my day it’s customary to give a fifteen percent finder’s fee to someone who gives you a lead on a job,” he said. “No bullshit.”

But, I still couldn
’t believe it. What does a retired longshoreman need with a finder’s fee from a recently fired, out of work nephew? So, I just laughed again. He actually wanted me to fork over some money for him telling me some poor old lady was cold and wanted to buy a load of firewood. She didn’t have much money so I only charged her sixty bucks for a cord. The going rate was around hundred but, what the hell, my grandmother always said to give the other kid the bigger half of the candy bar. If I gave him fifteen percent finder’s fee, he’d still owed me forty-four bucks of the fifty-five he owed me for that summer’s worth of labor in his logging operation.

When I think back on it, he did buy me a three-dollar rain slicker when he saw me getting soaked, standing on the corner, waiting to get picked up by my grandfather, who was a bus driver. The bus was due in a few minutes. So, if you calculate that into the mix, he
’d still be into me for forty-one bucks. Hell, maybe I should forget all about it, it was a long time ago. After all, he is dead.

It crossed my mind to bill his estate for the forty-one bucks but thought maybe that would be a little sucky of me to do that to his widow. I didn
’t have anything against her. Then again, she got a bundle from his longshoreman’s death benefit. She could sure as hell afford to give me a lousy forty-one bucks.

When I think more on it, I remember old Uncle Wendell mentioning that three-dollar rain slicker damn near every time I saw him after that. Tried to put the old guilt trip on me, like I owed him three bucks or something. I never asked him to buy me a rain slicker in the first place.

I should spend time remembering better stuff. My grandfather deserves a hell-of-a-lot more of my memory time. Now, he was okay. I can tell you stuff about him all day and not run out. You know what I remember when I think of him. The first time he said “fuck.” He was sitting on the wooden plank cover of the well near the back porch just outside the kitchen. My grandmother had died and I don’t even remember why he said it. I’d never heard him use a swear word. It sure did catch me off guard and stuck in my mind.

He taught me to drive a stick-shift on snowy roads, and how to operate a big old forty pound McColluch chain saw; that
’s what I should be remembering.

He could split wood too, like Abraham Lincoln.

The best thing I remember about my grandfather was that he trusted me. Hell, he didn’t trust his own son, Uncle Wendell.

Dad (Dad is what my sister and I called my grandfather.) let me drive the old Case tractor to pull hay into the barn. I was only nine when he let me do that. I could have pulled the back end out of the goddamned barn if I hadn
’t stopped when the person on the trip-it line called “TRIP-IT,” signaling the tractor driver to stop. The tractor was hitched to a rope pulling the mound of loose hay into the barn up a pulley and down a track along the rafters into the barn. It was one serious-ass job, I shit you not.

But what comes to my mind first when I think of those old days? Right ... old Uncle Wendell, the cheapskate. Why couldn
’t he have just written me a lousy check for fifty-five bucks right then and there when we were sitting in Pat and Len’s Cafe eating a dee-luxe burger with mustard and onion with fries and a chocolate malt? It wouldn’t have killed him. I could see his blue checkbook, the kind of checkbook that folds over and has a snap, sticking out of the pocket of his damn dirt-covered flannel shirt. I just don’t get it. I thought about making a claim against his estate after his widow dies. She must be eighty-six by now and has a caretaker coming in every day to help her. If I did that, it’d make me no better than he was. It’s been fifty years, probably more. Maybe I should just quit pissing up a rope about it. When you think about it, it is almost funny, in a way. Thing is, you just don’t get over being cheated out of fifty-five bucks.

Another thing, I should think about my mom instead of her stingy brother, Wendell. She
’d have paid me if it were her log truck I was helping to load. In fact, she did give me some money once, even though she had damn little to fork out and scant reason to do it. She gave me three dollars once for being a shit-ass. No kidding. That’s what she said, word-for-word, “Here’s three dollars for being a shit-ass.” A person doesn’t forget something like your mom telling you that you’re a shit-ass. Now, you have to be a really good person inside if you’re going to give your son three dollars for being a shit-ass. I really was one. I can tell you that for sure ... I was there. It was the kind of person she was. She’s dead now too. But, I remember that three dollars she gave me. I almost didn’t take it. But, I did. I wanted to go to town and needed gas money. That sort of tells you what sort of person I am, I guess.

Maybe that
’s why I give Bella dolls and stickers all the time, I’m paying my mom back for the lesson of how to be a good person.

Bella told me not long ago,
“Papa, I’ll still love you even if you don’t buy me presents every day.” I think she is going to turn out like my mom. Or my grandmother.

I bet my mom never called her brother, Uncle Wendell, a shit-ass. I
’d have been hurt if she had. I bet Uncle Wendell never gave anybody the bigger half of a candy bar. I’d wager a large slice of Baker’s Square carrot cake against a single Reese’s piece he always kept the biggest piece. That’s darn good odds, but that’s how confident I am.

I haven
’t told Bella that; about the shit-ass comment. She’s only a baby. She says I’m “The best grandfather in the whole wide world.” A person remembers when some tell you something like that, that’s for sure. Especially when I’m not anybody’s grandfather. The thing is, though, I haven’t had all that long to remember it, or to forget it. So far, so good.

Giving the other person the bigger half, that
’s been a hard one for me, but I’m getting a lot better at it, especially since I passed sixty. Goes against one’s basic instincts, especially if you really, really like candy. I’d give someone the bigger piece of a chocolate cake or Reeses Pieces. I’d give you a whole jar of Jiffy Peanut Butter. That’s a no-brainer. I’d have a struggle with carrot cake or Almond Roca, for obvious reasons.