Works and Days

“It’s almost cold tonight,” Shannon noted while Russell was climbing into the truck in front of 1421 Curtain Street and Chayne was saying goodnight to Jewell. Soon Jewell’s taillights went on, the car headed down Curtain, turned left at Reynold and was gone. And then Chayne came to the truck, looked in and said. “One of us should get in the back. I’ll do it.” he said, and climbed into the truck bed. Shannon rolled down the window and crawled out and then was followed by Russell.

“What’s this all about?” Chayne asked as Shannon threw the tarp over the three of them.

“I guess I’ll be all alone in the cab!” Bill shouted back a false lament, and then started the truck and they pulled down Curtain, coming to Kirkland where the car sped up. They went beyond Kirkland, which deadended and ended up in the midst of downtown. Main Street was empty on the busiest days and in the night there were a few people walking, traffic lights flashing, the buildings, the highest one only ten stories, looking down blankly. If you looked between some of the buildings there was a glimpse of the river, but soon Chayne, between Russell and Shannon put his head down and looked at the sky which, as they left town, rolled out its stars. Main Street turned into a state route They passed a few scattered apartment complexes, strangely named taverns and isolated houses like Jewell’s, and reached Bill and Shannon’s place, the dogs barking to welcome them.

“We’re here,” Bill shouted as the truck rumbled to a stop.

Knees aching, Russell climbed out of the truck with his book bag, and Chayne’s assistance. When he’d waken this morning on Breckinridge Avenue, he’d never expected to end up here.

There were few people in the bar and Jewell said, “That’s because it’s Sunday.”

“Don’t worry, there’ll be more soon enough though,” Chayne said, shoving Russell in the door.

“Hey, Bobby,” Jewell greeted the bartender. She turned to her friends and said, “First thing to do, is change this damn music.”

Merle Haggard was playing and Chayne put Russell as the bar and took a seat beside him.

“Welcome back, kid,” Bob said. “What’ll it be?”

“You know I’m fancy and fuck. A long Island Ice Tea. Two, cause I drink fast.”

“You’re gonna give one to that kid,” he pointed to Russell.

“Let’s just say I drink fast.”

“Alright,” Bob winked at him. “Fuck you, Chayne Kandzierski, Black Polack and corrupter of minors.”

Chayne smiled and put his cigarettes on the bar before him, but turned to smile at the man in snug blue jeans and the cowboy hat who was looking at them, his smile white under the shadow of the hat brim, his eyes twinkling.

Chayne lit a cigarette and inhaled, exhaled. The cowboy in snug worn jeans and striped shirt did the same.

“I told you,” Chayne murmured to Russell, ashing his cigarette.

“Men are everywhere.”

“And then he says ‘Gee honey, I wish you’d done something to yourself!’”

“He didn’t!” Felice Wynn’s eyes and mouth opened up into O’s over her coffee.

“He did,” Patti told her friend, crushing out one cigarette and lighting another. “And there was no thank you honey, no offer to help. Jeff Cordino and his little girlfriend were the ones who set the table—”

“I like her,” Jackie said, tipping the ash off her cigarette.

“Yeah, me too,” Patti said. “And then after that—” all three women, sipping coffee around the kitchen table shut up as Thom came down the back stairs with his brief case.

“Felice! Jackie!” Thom flashed his wife’s friend and his sister a smile. Felice had to admit that he was attractive—for a white man.

“Did you call Chayne to make sure Russell got to school?” Thom asked Patti as he reached for one of the oranges in the basket on the table, and went to the counter to fill a thermos with coffee.

“How could I when he doesn’t have a phone?”

“Doesn’t have a—” Thom stopped in mid action, looking a little mystified.

“He just got back yesterday, Thom,” Felice informed her friend’s husband, feeling a little of Patti’s irritation as she pushed a long brown hand through her thick braids.

“Oh,” and because Thom didn’t know what else to say, he added, “Well.” and then said, “I’ll be back around six. Later, ladies.”

“I love you too,” Patti said to the door, and lit another cigarette as the door opened again.

Thom stuck his head back in and said, “Honey, you should really lay off the cigarettes. They’re gonna make you look old.”

And then he was gone.

Patti waited a second and then let loose with a scream her friends were waiting for.

“He does it every time. I can’t take it!” Patti said. “I know he’s your brother, Jackie, but I can’t take him. If I divorce him do I have to lose the whole Lewis family?”

“The whole Lewis family and half of Russell’s genetic makeup will go to Thom,” Jackie said seriously, smiling like Buddha.

“If it bothers you this much, you need to talk to him,” Felice said.

“Yeah, Patti,” Jackie chimed in.

“I do talk to him, but he doesn’t listen. I used to actually be able to talk to Thom. We actually—I’m pretty sure once upon a time we had something. I mean, after all, Russell came from somewhere. But he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t really listen to anything.”

“He’s a man,” Jackie said, dismally.

“He just smiles his dashing smile,” Patti said waving her cigarette in the air like a magic wand, “He’s polite. Sometimes he’s out of line, but he’s never attentive. It’s like talking to a brick with a smiley face painted on it.”

“It’s a cute brick, though,” Felice said.

Patti eyed her friend.

“Girl, I’m sorry but Thom is cute.”

“He is short as fuck.”

“He was short when you married him sixteen years ago,” Jackie said. “You knew it then. He hasn’t changed.”

“He’s bite sized,” Felice went on. “It just makes him cuter. You wanna put him in your pocket and do all sorts of things to him—”

“Felice!”

“Just because I’m not getting along with my husband doesn’t mean I’m advocating you having fantasies about the man.”

“Thom Lewis is the only white man I have ever fanta— ”

“Could we leave this subject alone?” Jackie said.

“Thank you,” said Patti. But then she added. “And he even fucks like a brick—”

“Here we go again,” Jackie rolled her eyes.

“Up and down, up and down, and it’s over and I’m sitting in bed thinking, ‘I gave up ER for this?’”

Felice shouted and clapped her hands.

“And—” Patti went on, “It doesn’t help that he’s attractive. I know he’s attractive. And it doesn’t help that he’s charming and has dark wavy hair and deep soulful eyes if neither one of them is benefiting me, and I don’t know what bitch in Grand Rapids is trying to get into his pants or what he’ll do—”

“Thom wouldn’t—”

“Jackie, you don’t know what Thom would do. I married a younger man—”

“Two years younger—”

“Grant it, but now it’s starting to show.”

And it was. Patti had once heard that she and Thom were a beautiful couple. Now Thom was usually impeccably dressed, always darkly handsome, and she was a loose conglomeration of jogging pants, hooded sweatshirt, cigarettes, pale skin, and pinched nostrils held together by a riot of gold-brown curls.

“You know what I think it is?” Jackie said, taking another sip of her old coffee. “I think it’s the role reversal.”

Patti raised an eyebrow.

“Well, you’re right about Thom,” Jackie went on about her brother. “He’s handsome. Women like to look at him, but for a long time that was all he had. I mean you were the one with the Masters that got the Ph.D. and made all the money and got this house. And now, for the first time, Thom has a good job and he’s really respected—”

“And the fact that I’m an unemployed housewife is just icing on the cake?”

Jackie paused, eyed her pack of Carltons and said, “I wasn’t going to say that.”

“I think,” Patti, not heeding her husband, took another cigarette out of the pack, “that it’s the only thing we can say.”

Kirkland ran west and deadened at Lincoln Street three blocks past Saint Adjeanet’s. Here stood Our Lady of Mercy, the high school Shannon and Chayne dropped Russell off at that morning.

“I do not want to go,” Russell said, climbing out of the truck.

“I don’t blame you,” Chayne looked at the long waterstained and age blackened three story behemoth. If possible, it was even uglier than when he’d gone there.

“Look at it this way,” Shannon said. “We shaved off at least an hour from your schedule.”

He made the walk up to the third floor, and the placing of books in his locker take as long as possible, but Mr Connelly with the crooked nose stuck his head out of his classroom and said, “Hey, Lewis, stop slow poking and get to class.”

So he stopped slowpoking. He had thought about sitting in the bathroom and waiting for the end of second period, but he actually liked second period, as much as he liked anything, and so he entered the classroom, and as he took his seat in the very middle it seemed like everybody in blazers in ties was eyeing them and none of them was doing it in friendship. Ralph Balusik smiled at him and so did Jason Lorry under his hooded eyes, but he wouldn’t call smiles like theirs friendship, and when a spitball landed in his hair and there was a little chuckle, he knew it wasn’t.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?” Chayne demanded three days later of the phone he was shouting into as he walked around the kitchen and Russell watched him.

“A long ass time! No—not a long time. A long ASS time. Now the phone company was here yesterday. You said you’d be here yesterday. Do you see what I’m doing?” Chayne moved to the light switch. “Do you see? I’m flicking on the light switch. Do you see what’s happening? That’s right. Nothing. I don’t have to call again. I don’t want to have to walk over to the that power plant myself and—what’s that? Thank you. You—you have a good day too.”

Russell, sitting at the table, bit into an apple and said decidedly, “I want to be you when I grow up.”

“Oh, you grew up a long time ago. Playing hookie again?”

Russell nodded. “I made it to homeroom, but general science came next, and I couldn’t take that.”

Chayne checked a parental impulse, the small voice that would have said Russell, how are you going to do on the test if you don’t go to classor One day this will all catch up to youorFace your problems head on, high school is very valuable. Saying any of that would have just let Russell down. There were enough people to tell him this, and the eighteen intervening years between high school and Chayne’s present had told him that all those little voices weren’t really true. The best he could do for Russell was to help him get through childhood’s end as unscarred as possible.

Russell got up and went into the living room. It was bare except for one of Chayne’s grandmother’s old sofas and, at the large window, a bingo table Chayne was now using for a desk. Outside the front yard was overgrown with weeds and late summer flowers.

“Are you going to work on the garden?” Russell asked.

“I don’t know what the point would be,” Chayne said. “It’s almost winter. All the weeds’ll be dead by then. Maybe I’ll work on it next year.”

“Yeah,” Russell lifted an eyebrow. “Maybe you will.”

“Maybe I will,” Chayne insisted, reentering the empty living room and looking around. “I need to get Grandma Wynn’s furniture.”

“Chayne?” Russell asked, “Why did you leave your school?”

“I wasn’t happy,” he said. “It was getting old. But that wasn’t enough. I got squeezed out. Plain and simple. Without tenure, I was just a simple adjunct and there’s the end of that. You can only spend so much time cobbling out a living running between three schools teaching, and so now my only plan is to wait for the next step.”

“Next step?”

“Yes,” Chayne said. “There’s always a next step. Even if you can’t see it.”

That the next step would have been a lot easier had he not written a seventy-five thousand dollar check to his parents, he did not say.

“You sound like my mom,” Russell told his friend.

“We both had a job and we both spent a long time getting it, and we both mostly got fired,” Chayne said. “Her esoteric crisis is if she’ll ever find a job again. Mine is that I always can get one—I think, I hope. But nothing looks worth anything except sitting right here. And that’s a whole other sort of crisis.”

“I think that’s my crisis,” Russell said.