PLACES; Eight Place Stories

by Ralph Bowden

  *****

  The next morning, Friday, Lola was waiting at QC, but Sherri came running in, red-eyed and scowling, with just a minute to spare. Lola wondered if Little Jim had put his teeth in this morning and waited for Sherri at the time clock with the warning form. Maybe her behavior with Wild-Eye yesterday had stiffened him. When Little Jim went through the booth during break, he looked chipper and chatted amiably with Maria about running off to the lake tomorrow. That could mean he’d unloaded his burden and was enjoying the relief. Or it could mean that Mr. Coates was out today, and he could put off what he had to do. Little Jim was a short-term kind of guy.

  Joe arrived ten minutes before lunch. He didn't have much to do. All the presses and conveyors were working for a change. He was gloating to Lola about his good fortune when the electric fork truck came by.

  "Uh-oh, here he is again." Lola pushed up her respirator and peered out of the booth. "Just like yesterday." Joe’s face wore the blankness that always meant he had no idea what she was talking about. "Remember, I told you last night about how they . . ." But she could see he didn't remember anything, so gave it to him again, a truncated version, while she went through the routine of putting up her spray gun and respirator.

  "The foundry? Why would they want to go back there?" he asked.

  It always amazed Lola how Joe, who could just look at some machine and intuit its innermost intricacies, could be so naive. She looked out again just as the lunch whistle blew, and the QC line jerked to a stop. Sherri and Wild-Eye were already leaving on the fork truck.

  "Sex, drugs, or both, I expect."

  "Really? You think so?"

  "I think we ought to tell Little Jim. If he doesn't want to do anything, at least we've done our part."

  "Now wait a minute. Is that the guy they said was just out of jail? Something about aggravated assault or second degree?" Lola hadn't heard those details.

  "Okay, maybe we should call plant security. Use your radio. Say you saw somebody headed into the foundry. You don't need to say who you are."

  "They know me." Joe was being pulled. Lola knew he was no coward. There were dozens of times in their twenty-five years together when he had stood up and spoken his mind and taken a stand for what was right, even when it would do him no good. Why was he backing off here?

  "Seems to me it's meddling."

  "What makes it meddling?" Lola asked. "Wouldn't you do something if you saw somebody robbing a bank?"

  "Sure."

  "Whether your money was in that bank or not?" she pressed.

  "Sure. It's a clear violation of the law."

  "But the EPA says it's poison back there," Lola pointed out.

  "That's baloney. Maybe if they lived back there for years and ate the dirt, but . . ."

  "If they're taking drugs, that's against the law," Lola said.

  "Yeah, and adultery is too in some places, though not in Kentucky. But nobody besides them is involved."

  "So it's just other people. No matter how they hurt themselves, you don't care."

  "Well, actually, not much when it's their own doing. I do feel some for her kid and husband, but it's not for me to rat on anybody." Joe got up from the stool and stretched. "We'd better get in line for the microwave."

  Lola gathered up their cooler and followed. She wasn't finished, though, and maneuvered Joe to a table for two in the corner of the break room. Before he could start talking about fixing fences tomorrow, she jumped in.

  "You think it would be ratting to turn them in?"

  "What? Oh. Well, sort of."

  "But somebody is sure to write them up before long. If we could give Sherri and him a warning before, it would be doing them a favor."

  Joe made a face as he swallowed some of the warmed over spaghetti Lola had brought. "You can if you want," he said.

  That wasn't what Lola wanted. "Well, suppose it wasn't the factory. What if you saw a couple rolling around, you know, in a school yard somewhere, and doing drugs?"

  "These aren't kids, and they're not doing whatever it is where anybody can see them." Joe countered.

  "Really, they are still kids, in a way. They've never grown up and learned responsibility."

  "Maybe. But that's not our job. We put in our time, remember? What’s it to you? Sherri ever done anything to you?"

  “No. I don’t think we’ve ever had occasion to speak since I showed her how to do the element test. It’s not a personal thing. But it just seems to me somebody needs to stand up against bad behavior. If everybody just looks the other way all the time the whole country will fall apart. . . . I think we ought to go check on them. It's nice out today. If they've gone off somewhere, I'll just forget the whole thing. It's none of our business what they do somewhere else."

  She gathered up their plates, hustled around with the cooler, and was ready to go fifteen minutes before the whistle. She was afraid Joe might find some excuse to beg off. He did have that resigned 'in service to Lola' look, but seemed to have accepted her deal.

  They walked back toward the warehouse the way she had yesterday, by the loading dock. It was beautiful out, clear, cooler and drier than it had been all summer, and everybody was outside in the recreation area, pitching horseshoes or socializing at the tables under the big oaks. Nobody would willingly go into the dingy, filthy old foundry on a day like this. But the electric fork truck was nowhere around the dock or in the warehouse. She pointed Joe down the aisle next to the warehouse. Neither of them said anything until they reached the roll-up door, and saw the missing locks. Joe checked the floor with his penlight. The tracks were plain. He turned to Lola and asked, softly, "So what now?"

  "We wait until they start out and then just happen to walk by."

  "'Just happen to walk by?' Nobody comes back here. This line hasn't been used in years."

  "Couldn't you say you were looking to scavenge a motor or something off the old conveyer here?" she asked.

  "I'd rather not . . . uh-oh." They heard something inside the door, and then it started to roll up quickly. Lola dove behind a control panel, the only available cover, and only big enough for one of them. Joe had no way to get out of sight. The last she saw, he had taken her suggestion and was leaning over the conveyor with his penlight to look at something. She heard the electric truck come through and then stop for Wild-Eye to roll the door down.

  "Hey! What's going on?" Joe asked. He would have to, given the situation. If he hadn't said something, Wild-Eye would have suspected a setup. This was going better than Lola could have planned.

  "Just giving the lady here a little plant tour, man." Lola heard the sneer in Wild-Eye's explanation.

  "Foundry's off limits. How'd you get the key?" Joe answered.

  "Hey, man, I got contacts in the plant. I wouldn't say nothin' about this, if I was you." The fork truck buzzed loudly and was gone. Lola emerged to find Joe standing there, hands on hips looking after them.

  "That punk! Threatened me! You heard that?" He reached for his radio.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Calling security."

  "No, wait. You don't need to get involved."

  "He threatened me!" Lola knew how Joe was when crossed. Stubborn and pig-headed like a man.

  "Wait, damn it! It's none of your business. 'Meddling,' remember? 'Ratting?' Let me do it my way. Come on now, walk me back. The line'll start up in three minutes."

  Joe growled, but put up his radio. Before they reached the QC area, Lola suggested, "Maybe you better go on to your shop. I was at the ladies’ and didn't see you, Okay?"

  "I don't see why we can't just . . ."

  "That's all right now. I'll take care of things and you won't have to meddle." It sure was convenient having Joe's own words to use on him.

  But just what would she do? If she turned Wild-Eye in now, the first person he would suspect was Joe. She couldn't make Joe Wild-Eye's target when he hadn't wanted to be involved in the first place. But beyond that, there was still the basic issue: was it meddling
and ratting? And was Joe right? Here she was, an ex-mother – well, not really, but a mother who had no more chance to be a mother, the central core of which, after all, was telling others what to do. But didn't plant rules have some of the same force as law? Weren't they for the community good?

  Joe didn't show up at break time. Lola looked out and saw him working a hundred feet away on the drive controller for the final assembly line. If she knew him, he had forgotten the whole thing, and was happily immersed in circuit boards and overload relays.

  It wasn't fair that women had to wrestle alone with all the important human questions.

  McCutcheon Meadows

  Ed first noticed pink ribbons on some bushes one afternoon in September when he and Marge came back from one of their occasional trips into town. Neither of them had seen surveyors, but a week later, stakes appeared along both sides of the road out front, with lot numbers on them. Big lots. The stakes were far apart. There was nothing he could do, though, until real estate signs appeared one frosty morning a week after Thanksgiving. Marge saw them when she went out for the mail and told him. He dashed out to get the number and called the real estate agent. Old Mildred McCutcheon had finally died and the estate executor was liquidating assets. Five acre tracts, “mini ranches,” the agent said. “Priced to sell. A great deal. I’d be glad to take you out there. Are you from around here?” Ed wasn’t about to tell him anything, and banged the phone down.

  He sat and fidgeted at his desk for a few minutes trying to sort out the implications until the Waller woman dropped off her boy for his piano lesson with Marge. To escape the noise, he suited up – it was the first really cold weather of the season – and went out to the greenhouse. With no sun to collect, it was little warmer inside than out. He mixed sand and some of his best screened compost and tried to plant arugula and chard seeds in paper cups, but kept knocking them over with cold fingers. Trying to work was stupid when all he could think of was what the agent had told him.

  He went out to check the fence, one of his daily routines. Since he had finally decided to go vegetarian a year ago, the fence had little to do but discourage deer. Ed stopped, leaned on the crooked locust post he had dug in 25 years ago, and watched the little creek that ran under the fence wire. A thin crust of ice clung to the mud and dead leaves along the edge. No telling what would become of the creek if developers started clearing the woods for “country estates,” the other term the agent had used.

  And the spring. It wasn’t really theirs, of course. Leo McCutcheon had helped Ed build the catchment dam and lay pipe to it, 300 feet up the slope on Leo’s land. Leo was a good neighbor, who had let Ed harvest firewood, mushrooms, and ginseng in his woods. But he had died 20 years ago. A developer would surely bring city water in to where they could buy a tap. Wonderful. Who wanted to drink city water, with its chlorine and fluoride?

  “Shit,” Ed muttered, as the consequence chain lengthened. Everything would fall apart now, the life he had built over the last 25 years.

  Scenes from those years drifted by. Planting the fruit trees and stirring up Bordeaux mixture, the first strawberries, mulching and tending the asparagus beds, building the greenhouse onto the barn, experimenting with different kinds of compost bins, saving seeds, building the sunroom on the house for Marge’s studio, the pain of overhearing Walter and Arthur complain to Marge about their “Neanderthal” lifestyle, the boys leaving for Vanderbilt, Walter first, and Arthur the next year.

  Ed roused himself, jumped the little creek and continued along the fence. It wasn’t long. Three acres didn’t qualify as a “mini ranch,” though they still largely fed Marge and him. Fences might keep deer out, but they were no protection against the encroaching “great American lifestyle,” a disease, an epidemic of mass excess. He’d explained it to his students. Perfectly legitimate to point out social and economic trends in history classes, but parents complained that their impressionable darlings were being fed “liberal propaganda,” and that young asshole who took over as principal apparently agreed. He “rotated” Ed out of the department chairmanship and then encouraged him to retire in ways that became increasingly obvious. Ed eventually had enough and quit in a loud and public fit. Nobody supported him, though.

  The first “sold” tag, across the road and down two tracts, went up in December. Part of the old pasture. Two others, out near the intersection with the main road, appeared in early January. Those were level tracts, mostly open and easy to build on. On either side of Ed and Marge’s land, the tracts were steeper, almost all wooded, and more challenging, though they had a striking view of Shadow Mountain’s long ridge line. Maybe those tracts didn’t sell because they bordered on Ed and Marge’s old place, the original farm house, surely an eyesore to anybody buying in the new upscale subdivision. “McCutcheon Meadows,” the sign out on the main road called it.

  The rest of the winter, nothing happened. By early March, Ed had managed to push the whole issue to one side, at least part of the time. But then on March 21, Marge came back in from the mailbox with a report. “There’s a big white station wagon with a ‘First American Real Estate’ sign on the door. Couple people tramping around over there.”

  “Where? Next to us?”

  “Yes. North side. Maybe our yard will turn them away. It’s really pretty shaggy. I know you don’t care, but . . .”

  “What it needs is a couple junk cars and a trailer,” Ed growled. He certainly wasn’t about to haul out the mower for the sake of the neighborhood. Back when they had kept a sheep, there was no need to mow. Having a lawn that needed mowing was stupid.

  Sure enough, a week later, the dreaded ‘sold’ tag appeared on the sign next door. Ed spotted it from upstairs, the north end of the loft, Arthur’s end, when he went up to raise the storm window for the season. He told Marge. Neither of them said anything for the rest of the day.

  The following Sunday afternoon, while Ed was on his computer firing a letter to the editor blasting a reactionary columnist, he heard something turn in the driveway and looked: a big, black Hummer with lots of chrome. A man and woman got out. They were young and looked as if they had just come from church. Kids waited in the back seat.

  Ed heard Marge at the front door. She greeted them and invited them in, being gracious and pleasant. She would know, after 40 years, not to call Ed out to be sociable.

  “They’re not your kind of people,” she told him later. Obvious, of course. “Or mine, for that matter. He manages his father’s GM dealership on the Athens highway. She runs around with the two boys, 9 and 12. Soccer, little league, some kind of martial arts classes, guitar lessons and so on.”

  “Where do they live now?”

  “She didn’t say. I suspect it’s downtown somewhere. The kids go to Twelve Apostles school.”

  “And I suppose she’ll run them in every day in that tank. Must be 17 miles one way. Idiots! Got no business living out here. I hate to think what kind of house they’ll have built.”

  “He said they have a company and local contractor lined up. Log construction, he said, for a ‘rustic look.’”

  Ed made a gagging noise. “‘Rustic look’ my ass. Factory, precut kit. Fake. Excuse me while I throw up.”

  “She said they wanted more room for the kids to get outside. You could give them that, at least.”

  “Outside for what? They’ll just set up an ATV track through their woods and a target range with one of those plastic deer . . . . Did they say anything about our spring?”

  “No. They probably don’t know about it.”

  Ed made a mental note to ask Sam, an activist lawyer friend, about the spring and rights to it.