mercuryfern

Of Melons and Motorgraders

"That's not my lotion."

"What?"  Mike, my boss with only three years past my nineteen, had been talking about when he rode bulls in high school.  At first these stories interested me, as I am from one of the many states where rodeo is not a varsity sport.  Eventually I stopped listening, though, because it became obvious that it was all an attempt to compensate for his abundant wusiness.  The nervous lies only made the operators chafe at him more, and their attitude was beginning to rub off on me.  Bored, my eyes had wandered over to the frilly looking bottle of something sitting on the seat of the truck; they were just resting there, without my thinking at all about what I was seeing. 

"That cucumber melon stuff, that's not mine.  It's my wife's; she left it in here when we went to the, um, store last night."  He was lying.  I started to laugh when I realised this.  He picked up the lotion as if to hide it, finally putting it in the glove box.  Cucumber melon.  As if attempting to diminish one's scars and calluses were not a crime in and of itself, to do so with a product artificially scented as food, oh, it was too much.  His secret was safe with me, though, I would not tell.  I almost pitied him for the abuse he already suffered. 

Mike was supposed to be the foreman. He knew how to shoot grade, and he liked surveying, but manage the operators he could not.  They ate him for breakfast.  Earlier that day, Billy chewed him out for directing an end dump truck to the top of a pile of dirt to empty its bed.  The belly dumps have a hatch, sometimes two, which opens in the middle of the bed.  Everything inside slides neatly out while the truck keeps moving.  The end dumps, though, have a hatch that opens at the back, and the opposite end of the cab is lifted high into the air with hydraulic pumps.  The trucks are unstable when extended; sometimes they get stuck that way.  That's what happened this morning.  The belly dumps you can pour out onto a hill, but you are always supposed to keep the end dumps on flat ground.  Even I know that.

Billy had to use his motorgrader to push the truck down from the pile of dirt.  I'm not sure why it didn't just topple over, the bed thirty feet in the air like that. 

After awhile, the machines all start to look like they have faces.  The semis delivering fill look like great lumbering caterpillars, the dozers like friendly ogres.  The motorgrader had a snaky evil face.  I did not trust that machine.  It was thin and quick, not the biggest on site by any stretch, but its motor was the strongest and Billy ran it too fast.

"You should watch out for that Billy."

"Why's that?"  I was amused that this scrawny owner's kid would presume to offer me advice on how to negotiate the interpersonal dynamics of the Texas construction worker scene.  My techniques were working much better than his.

"Well... maybe your not supposed to know."  His voice got very quiet when he said this, as if he expected me to beg for his gossip. 

"Than you shouldn't tell me."  I looked away from him, out the window, wondering if it was going to stop raining so we could get to pumping out the site. 

"He killed a guy a year ago.  Ran over him with his machine."  Another lie.  Because Billy had made him look like an ass in front of everybody.  Just when I started to pity him, started to feel some solidarity as the other black sheep at the company.

"Mike, that's a shitty thing to say about anybody."  I stepped out of his cab then, just as Gus radioed in that we should just go home, it wasn't going to let up.

------------

The hierarchies of that job were an endless source of fascination to me.  Charisma had much more to do with it than any formal job title.  Billy was just an operator, and though acknowledged to be the best in four counties at running the most difficult machine, he was young, only thirty-five.  Mike was even younger, only twenty-two, the poor bastard, but all of the operators, older than either of them, deferred to Billy, not Mike.  Billy knew this and taunted Mike with it, telling us to do things he knew Mike hadn't thought of yet and then yelling at Mike for not being more on the ball.

All of the operators picked a laborer to mentor; that was another weird power dynamic.  Bear picked Jeff, from Midland-Odessa where the president summered as a child but poor as everyone who lives there year round.  Everybody called him Jeffro.  The two of them didn't like me much.  I'd told Bear wouldn't let him say the word nigger in front of me since I have five biracial cousins and no one says hateful things about my family in my presence, I'm sure he could understand.  Once I realised his southern chivalry would force him to grudgingly accept all manner of diatribes from me that would have gotten a man's jaw broken, I made it my duty to say what needed to be said.  Bear used Jeffro to try to make me look stupid and incompetent, teaching him to run the dozer so he would get more hours, telling me I wasn't strong enough to do this or that.

Billy figured this out and, loving a challenge, took me under his wing.   That and my work ethic impressed him.  I will pour my entire being into whatever is in front of me weather it be a freshman seminar paper on the continued influence of Oedipus Rex or moving a pile of dirt from here to there.  I made it my business to work faster and harder with a pickaxe than any of the other hands.

He put me on the roller and then had me directing trucks.  The two of us could dig and level a foundation in record time.  It got so he wouldn't work with anyone else.  We started talking more, he told me about his kids.  All the guys talked of almost nothing but their offspring.  Since this was in the months before Christmas, they compared notes on gifts.  The construction worker stereotype should be amended to include the lengthy and detailed bragging sessions on how many Rock Star Barbies one's daughter will receive under the tree.  I'd conned my way into this secret man's world and they would forget sometimes that I was in their treehouse.  I'd expected that moment to come- thought it would be a great ethnographic study, to see just which terms they used for the various pieces of women's anatomy.  Instead, they pulled wallets out to compare baby photos.  Not that tail didn't come up; it was just a distant second.

Billy got on really well with his daughter; he had a picture of his wife taped up on the inside of his cab.  He was a nice enough guy on balance, more than a little hot tempered and with no patience whatsoever for slack assedness. 

He tried to teach me to run the motorgrader.

"Billy, what do I need to run two machines for?"

"What?  You scared or something?  Look, it's like playing the piano, stand right there, I'll show you. See, I'm fixin to be foreman, but hey won't promote me unless they've got somebody to run the blade.  That's you, dar- ehem, Fern." 

"Uh huh. Cause Bear don't resent me enough already."  I'd shed some parts of my Yankee accent right away, but I couldn't keep from using those high minded words.

"So? Fuck him."

"Ah, no thanks.  He's starting to freak me out though.  I don't trust him, yknow?"

"He's an asshole."  Not a good enough reason.  His hard glare accused me of cowardice. 

"Okay, yes. I am scared to run it.  Those two and maybe more are waiting for me to fuck up; I don't think I should take any unnecessary risks."

There was a long silence; he looked rather dejected, like a kid whose fun plans for the day have been ruined.  That wasn't it.  No, obviously, he was disappointed to come up against the limits of my bravery, having imagined it boundless.  I see that look often enough to recognise it.  He turned away.

"They told you I killed that guy, didn't they?"

I was glad he avoided eye contact when he said this because I'm sure he could have read the disbelief in my eyes.  I kept silent, hoping he didn't actually want an answer.  An affirmative would have gotten Mike in more trouble than he would know what to do with, but I am a terrible liar.  Billy still wasn't looking at me when he started talking again.

"The things is, I didn't even feel the machine hit him, didn't even know... until the guy's head rolled out along the blade.  I thought it was just another dirt clump at first.  I got sick.  Sometimes I still do.  You never forget something like that."  I could hear in his voice why he wouldn't look at me.

"God, Billy, I'm so sorry."  Only this clumsy platitude fell from my mouth.  There should have been something better to say.

"I need to get off this thing." 

Early: Having Slept

I like to wake up before five. Some of my favourite jobs have required that I drive towards my eight, nine, ten, hours while the BBC is still playing on the radio.

In Texas that fall, I couldn't believe how empty the road could be so early. Its funny how the absence of shiftwork shows up then. Everybody went to their as yet unbursted bubble jobs at eight or nine and came home at five or six. That scene during the opening credits of Office Space? Every morning in the dark, I made my way down the road where they filmed that. It was empty, the way Austin must have looked in the eighties even after the sun rose. Tom Waits drove me down I35 and it really was six in the morning, the trucks were all a passin, the lights even were a flashin.

It was a welcome relief, the manual labour. Reminded me of my first job, working at a greenhouse, throwing bales of soil onto and off of trucks, carrying flats of wet plants from here to there. Physical work is intoxicating, more people should know that you can drown your sorrows in it. I have never found anything better for my pain.

My first day, they told me to be there early, 6.30 am- work would start at 7, they wanted me to be ready. I walked into the breakroom, filled with smoke, to find two older guys chain smoking and looking surly. The first was wiry and tall, wearing work clothes and cowboy boots, metal letters GUS tacked to the back of his belt. The other was stocky, a braid down his back, sunglasses and assorted Harley Davidson merchandise. One of them asked me what I was doing there. I swallowed hard, shifted my weight, tried to force myself to make eye contact.

I work here.

What, you a secretary? Office is downstairs.

No, I'm the new labourer; I interviewed yesterday, they said to come here at six thirty. Is this the right place?

They looked at each other, eyebrows raised, one or both snorted derisively. Well, sit down I guess. Billy'll be here soon enough. Coffee's over there.

At some point it became obvious that I would need a hard hat, back brace, earplugs and steel toed rubber boots. It had been raining; the shallow topsoil barely covered the silt pudding everywhere. My hiking boots would not suffice. Ear plugs were easily enough found, back brace and hard hat less so, but eventually GUS found one of each that must have been intended for the occasional skinny summer boy. The shoes, though. No teenage boy has size six feet. Gus looked through every pair they had before calling the San Antonio office. Do you have any of those rubber boots? . . . Size six . . . Yeah . . . No, its not a midget, its a woman! We all laughed for the first time that morning, as if my gender were a secret we had been avoiding, some wart now available for public mockery.

Things improved steadily from there. I give much of the credit for my assimilation to my proficiency with obscenities and sex jokes. Once, the Harley guy told me to put my hands on my knees and spell run. Instead I just asked him if he was used to hearing that. No bitterness or anger, I just gave as I got, laughing that time with everyone but Bear.

There was this one day at the church site; we actually got freezing rain. Texans don't know anything about cold- it might snow once every two years, at which point they cancel everything but the construction jobs. These guys like to think they can drive in anything, but they don't really know what ice on asphalt is capable of. I risked my life to get to work rather than risk my job security; you should have seen the accidents. I was bored at home anyway. None of us had winter coats, but at least everyone else's machine had a cab. My sheep’s foot was open, no heat, I wasn't even staying dry. Finally, the owner said it was bullshit, took us all to the honkey tonk.

I don't know if you have ever walked into a firestation/bar/mexican restaurant in Texas in the worst winter weather for maybe five years, soaking wet and covered in mud carrying a hard hat under your arm with a posse of similarly attired huge guys, but I recommend it. The whole rowdy place will watch in silent awe as you come in, the toughest badasses they have seen for a while. You will hear them whispering, is that a woman? But your boys, and you will be so proud of them here, will simply close ranks around you, will just treat you as another coworker shovelling down enchiladas and enjoying the attention after a satisfyingly impossible day.