Hey, Joe
a new story from Tom Edgemon
The young man strained against the weight of the lumber, its corners digging into his shoulders. He balanced the load and carried it to the trailer across the yard. He would have bruises the next day, but he didn’t mind. He added the lumber to the growing pile and watched sweat roll down his nose and fall, making little dust plumes on the ground. An older man stomped towards him, waving his hands.
“You’re doin it all wrong. That aint how it needs to be laid”. The young man turned his head to look at him.
“The six by sixes need to be kept to the side from all them two by fours, not mixed in with em.” The young man stared at him with a blank face. “You hear me?” The young man looked at the mass of lumber on the trailer, then looked back at the man.
The old man groaned and walked back to the office. The manager heard him before he was through the door. He took his glasses off and waited.
“What kinda operation you running here?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That boy out there ain’t listenin to a damn word I say about loadin this lumber. You cut costs by hirin morons?”
“I’m gonna give you the chance to walk that back, and we’ll pretend you didn’t just insult me.”
“I said what I said.”
“You can watch your God damn mouth, or I can give you your money back and you can take your happy ass to the next lumberyard down the road. And maybe I won’t beat your ass in the yard out there.”
“So then what’s the deal with the kid? He don’t listen for shit.”
“He ain’t listenin cause he cant.”
“Do what?”
“The boy’s deaf. Completely. Wouldn’t hear an atom bomb if it went off ten feet away.” The manager put his glasses back on and scratched his beard.
“Makes workin here, or anywhere, hard, no?”
“Course. But it was the right thing to do, takin him on.”
“How you mean?”
“His daddy shot his momma point blank in front of him and his brother when he was little. I mean right in front of him. They had to clean his momma’s blood off his face. Don’t nobody know if he remembers it or not. Thank God aint no one around here that big of an asshole.”
“Lord in Heaven above.”
“That was twenty years ago, but the kinda thing that’ll always stick to anyone that was near to it. But anyway. His momma was a good friend to my wife. Our kids got along good when they was toddlers. And ever since don’t nobody want nothin to do with him, not even his kin. He gotta walk aroun with it like a shackle. Sins of the father an all that. And takin him on seemed like the good Christian thing to do.”
“What became of his daddy and brother?”
Daddy’s still in prison, got life without parole. Dont nobody know about his brother except maybe him.” The manager pointed at the young man through the window.
“They aint got go kin?”
“An aunt raised em, in a manner of speakin. Didn’t have no kids of her own. Didn’t seem to much like the boys. She died a few years back. But I done rambled enough. How do you want the lumber laid?” The old man told him, and the manager wrote it down on a scrap of paper.
“Go give him this and he’ll square it away.” The man took it, walked out, and gave the paper to the young man. The young man read it, nodded, and set to work. When he finished, he shook the old man’s hand, but there was something between their hands. The young man withdrew his, saw a folded twenty dollar bill, and considered it as one considers a strange object found on a midnight sidewalk. He looked at the old man, who nodded with sad eyes before getting into his truck. As he drove away, the young man sat down in a ragged lawn chair and drug a handkerchief across his forehead.
The end of the day came, and the young man was gathering his things to leave. The manager flicked the light switch on and off to get the young man’s attention. The young man turned and took a piece of paper the manager was holding out to him. The manager watched him read it. “She’s real sweet and pretty.” The manager used his hands to make curves in the sawdust-filled air. The young man scratched his head, handed the paper back to him, and nodded.
From across the street, he watched her enter the cafe, order coffee, and find a seat near a window. The winter wind was picking up, and he turned his collar up against it. She stared out at the street between long checks of her watch. She was beautiful, perhaps the prettiest girl he had seen in a long time. Not a girl, a woman. A woman his mother perhaps would have liked, maybe would have asked to join her at the farmers market to look for the year’s best peaches.
Joseph looked at his own watch. The time came, and then went. He turned and walked down a side street and left the girl sitting opposite an empty chair.
The house was dilapidated and abandoned decades prior. The sky hadn’t released rain in months. Exposed framing and rafters bent and gave against the wind. Joseph removed a jug of diesel from his bag and began to spread it across the house. Movement caught his eye in the corner of a back room. Trash and leaves trembled. He shined a flashlight on the corner and pushed the debris away. A newborn opossum floundered there. Pink limbs and tiny claws were outstretched and grasping at nothing. Hairless and shaking.
Joseph picked it up and closed his hands around it, blowing warm air through gapped fingers. The creature became still. A miniscule chest rising and falling against lungs somehow sustaining life. Joseph slid the animal into his shirt pocket and closed his jacket overtop it. He struck a match and held it to a clump of dry paper. The paper became subsumed and he let it fall into a pool of fuel.
The fuel lit and he stepped through an open doorway into dead, waisthigh grass. Joseph watched the silent flames grow and waited to feel their heat against his chest before turning and walking home.
The deadbolt to his apartment door required some convincing, but it eventually gave way. His brother occupied his usual spot, a cushion on the floor, and continued to do the only thing he ever did other than sleep: rock back and forth while staring at a faded Norman Rockwell from a magazine.
“Hey, Joe. Hey, Joe. Hey, Joe”
Joseph waved at him and kissed the top of his head. He kneeled next to his brother and withdrew the infant oppossum. Joseph touched his hand and pointed at the thing, but his brother was not interested. Joseph stood and began looking for a space heater, a shoebox, and a clean shirt. He withdrew the twenty dollar bill from his pocket and added it to a coffee can labeled “train”, which lived in a closet next to a cashier’s check for one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars made out to the Western Mental Health Institute. Joseph had not taken stock of the coffee can’s contents in some time, but it was beginning to overflow.