by Ed Pavlić
The first step was the worst. The tanks had been drained. But a thick layer of acid sludge and grease remained. That needed to be shoveled out and carried away. As he shoveled, Shame noticed his arms began to itch. It wasn’t like a poison spider itch. It wasn’t local and it didn’t hurt. It was just there. He asked about it. Cutting the question short and without looking up, the foreman said, “Don’t worry about it.” Shame shoveled up the sludge and loose brick into buckets. Jay Brown pulled the buckets up by a rope tied to their handles and took them off to dump. There would be about a week of this per tank. Layers of heat in Shame Luther’s days: the heat outside; the heat from the blast furnaces next door; heat from the sweat under the work clothes. Then there was the heat of the anger on a job. Anger was the currency of this kind of labor. Anger and its cousin, physical violence. Work was dead in the water without them. They had to be there and they had to be focused, contained. And then there was a new heat itching Shame from whatever film covered his exposed arms.
On his way to lunch he noticed a small tear in his white T-shirt. The shirt was only a week old. He wore old clothes to work, but never torn. The union allowed no torn clothing. Even the flagrant extravagance of this cotton shirt wasn’t old enough to be garbage yet. He sat with Jay Brown and ate his sandwich and didn’t, as usual, say much. His mind surveyed the new heat itching at his skin.
One way to gauge a job was to compare the work on whatever plant he was in to whatever work went on in the plant. At times, the construction crews looked pretty bad. Budweiser, for instance, in St. Louis, Houston, New Hampshire, or in LA. It made you feel like shit. The brewery employees whistled tunes and tugged hoses around the tank rooms. Three breaks per day. Regular raises. They went home every night. Word was they had to cap wages and overtime in the brewery so that the wages of senior plant workers didn’t surpass the salaries of bottom management. God forbid. It looked pretty great to Shame. Welch’s and Kraft were like that. Tropicana, not quite.
Then there were places where the construction crews looked pretty good. Places like Tootsie Roll in Cicero, a hateful, dirty, slimy place with workers to match. One day Shame asked someone to use the water hose and got cussed out six ways from Sunday. Even years later, if Shame saw someone about to eat a Tootsie Roll:
–I wouldn’t do that!
And he remembered off-the-path places, usually in the South. No unions allowed in the plants, some unions weren’t allowed in the state! One plant in Mississippi had a seven-foot corrugated ceiling over the battery line. They made car batteries for Sears. That’s what they were told; the batteries weren’t labeled. That happened elsewhere. The place had no ventilation that Shame could see. It was so bad the local union steward wouldn’t even let visiting construction crews like them carry their lunches through the plant. Shame had looked around in there. There wasn’t a full smile in the place. Acid fumes ate the teeth. He had walked through to go to the bathroom a few times during the brief (thank Christ) few weeks they worked there. He saw more than one visibly pregnant woman working where the union wouldn’t let him carry his sandwich. All that, Shame knew, for at most a third of his Chicago-scale wage. The South. But that South wasn’t south enough, apparently, because most of those off-the-path and out-of-the-way plants went elsewhere altogether. The global South—Shame worked there before it was global. He’d watched it go global and he knew why. In a way, he was why.
Shame and his laborer partner Jay Brown watched the Joycelan Steel workers and thought they were doing OK. Shame thought he’d be doing better once the shoveling of acid slop was done. He looked down and there were several new tears in his shirt. By the end of the day, the shirt was ready to come apart thread by thread. There were holes where he’d splashed grease against himself. And there were two round holes near the back of his neck that burned and would thereafter always burn when the sun hit them. These hurt more than the others. He’d tried to keep his eye on it, but a few times the crane had gone overhead unnoticed and dripped the fresh acid-wash on him as it made its way across to rinse a load of wire in whatever solution they had in tank number four. Shame brushed the first off without a thought. When he felt the second drop he paused and looked up. The glare of the glass in the crane’s cab blocked his view, but he thought he could see the crane driver looking down at him, smiling. Motherfucker.
Shirt or no shirt, by three, he and Jay had a good quarter of the tank cleaned out, revealing the old brick. Next step was to tear out the old brick, too, then scrape out the tar lining. So that was job number one. On this particular August afternoon, it was 3:45. Shame was on his cycle headed home to get job number two on the table for whatever kids showed up. After that he planned to be home to meet a woman named Ndiya Grayson for date number three at his place. The last part, he thought, “if she showed.” He assumed she wouldn’t.
Melvin loved puzzles. Shame had a stack of them and Melvin had gone straight to the shelf where they were kept, took two boxes down. Ndiya watched as he dumped out the pieces on the floor and began to pick them up and put them in place without apparent effort or pause as if the pieces were totally interchangeable. She checked, they weren’t. The top left corner appeared first, castle spires and a dark sky grew down until the narrow river at the bottom right corner appeared. Melvin stood up, put both hands, palms up, in the small of his back and bulged his belly out. He stood there for a second, stretched his back, then he stepped to the opposite side of the puzzle, now pictorially upside down. He began to place pieces in the bottom left, a mirror of what he’d done before.
Shame came into the room carrying a short stack of clothes, a folded pair of jeans and a white tee shirt with an old leather belt coiled up on top. He handed the stack to Ndiya, staring at her soaked skirt.
–You can’t wear that all night. These’ll be loose but, hey, roll them up and use the belt if you want. I guess the shirt’s optional, depending.
–Thanks. I guess I’ll give it a try. Umm—
Shame pointed to a closed door to the left.
–Bathroom.
–I think I remember.
The bathroom’s floor was wooden, bright grain, and thickly glazed with a glossy coat of something hard as glass. Someone had tiled the three walls adjoining the shower, in front of which was a clear curtain of plastic. A streetlight glowed outside a window on the fourth wall. Ndiya hung her matching aqua and blue linencotton blouse and skirt on brass, two-fingered hooks. After quickly splashing off the gutter water in his shower, she slipped her legs into Shame’s jeans. She guessed they were his. She wondered how close in size she and he really were. She hadn’t thought about it. She stared at herself in the mirror. A thin gold chain S’d its way along the V-neck cut of the shirt he’d given her to wear. A white knot at her waist tied up the shirt’s baggy excess. She’d cinch the top of the jeans with the worn brown belt and roll the bottoms, twice, up past her ankles. Fine belt, she thought. She lifted it to smell the age in the leather and paused when she noticed faint teeth marks along one edge. Pain beach on each eye, she saw the setup and whispered into the mirror,
–What kind of … get me in here, dress me up, and in his clothes, what’s next? Half the living room’s a daycare, or is Melvin his kid? Does he have kids? Jesus, what’s wrong with me? What am I doing here?
After getting upstairs, Ndiya had told herself that she was more at ease than this, at least. Now another voice was telling her she wasn’t.
The impulse to walk out of the bathroom and straight out the front door was familiar. Ndiya walking away—she’d already seen that film. She felt it in the backs of her thighs. She knew the route it traveled up her spine and into her shoulders. And by now, she knew where it led: Phoenix. In the mirror, the impulse popped into her jaw muscles. Involuntarily, she visualized angles between the three points of her escape: her current position, her purse, and the front door. She knew her shoes were next to the door. Then she heard a different voice:
–Ndiya, sweetness, may we have a quick word?
&n
bsp; She half listened to her memory for a knock at the door, almost checked behind the clear shower curtain and then looked around, laughed to herself, and stared back at the question in the mirror:
–Sure, it’s all Shame-what’s-his-name’s master plan. You do know, of course, that it was you who got off the bus and decided you needed to wade in the water? That’s not beyond you, is it? I know that. So? What’s the man supposed to do? Have you sitting wherever you’re going to sit wearing clothes soaked in that nasty water? Or maybe you think he should have a rack of replacement clothes for women who decide to go swimming on their way to his place? I get it. Good, you can dial it back, right? Plus, if you’d stop playing Phoenix and blowing kisses to your eyelids for a second, the blue scarf doesn’t look half bad with the jeans.
Ndiya answered this out loud:
–OK, but do you have anything intelligent to say about the teeth marks in this belt?
–Well, you do have your knife, right?
–Perfect.
Now, that was a knock on the door:
–Ah, Mrs., Ah-kneedia? … Ms. I Need The—I mean, when you’re done talking to the mirror, ma’am, I gotta go.
Under her breath:
–Good thing none of this is really happening.
Out loud:
–Yes, sweetie, one second. OK, it’s all yours.
Ndiya passed Melvin in the doorway of the bathroom and reentered the living room to find six puzzles finished on the floor, two of them facedown, complete, and blank. And Shame nowhere to be seen. She heard “Gotcha” and water running and thought for a moment she’d left the water on in the sink. Turning, she saw Melvin’s sturdy little legs and his tiny butt looking like a couple of eminently spankable baby melons in a brown paper bag. Melvin said, “Direct hit!” His head bowed in concentration and his red shorts accordioned down at his ankles.
She walked past the puzzles and the shelf with games, another shelf of bright, oversized books, boxes of cards, and a big laundry basket of colored wooden blocks. There were six booster seats in primary colors stacked up in the corner. She’d somehow seen none of this on date number two. None of it. This was the same place, right? There was a four-foot-tall, blue-tiled wall jutting out halfway into the space that separated all of this from the flat couch, dining table, and a time bomb–looking thing connected to speakers on a low table. Two doors were at the end of the room, one open to the kitchen and one closed to what must be the bedroom.
As she looked back at the old piano pushed up against the dividing wall and near an open window, the “must be the bedroom” phrase in Ndiya’s survey of the space sent another spiral of flight-impulse through her body. Silent voices:
–Was that “must be the bedroom” I heard you think, just now? Date number two and you didn’t even get to the bed? Don’t tell me you all did it right here on the living room floor? Least you let the man get up the stairs and down the hallway. Least you seemed to know where the bathroom was.
Ndiya felt her face flush. Color photos flipped in front of her eyes. Her index finger and thumb slip behind a silver button on a pair of blue jeans, an upsweep of black hair in a stream out of the denim. An out-of-focus image of an electrical outlet, a few wires, and the legs of a piano bench. A clear photo of her fingers, palm down, grasping the golden fringe of a coarse, kilim-weave floor rug, her hand rolling and wrapped up in the rug. She knew the sounds would come next and so she shook the vision off and headed to the kitchen.
–Hey there.
–Dry? And you used soap?
She frowned and nodded. Shame stood at a worn-looking rectangular butcher block. The top of the block was low, midthigh height. Its top sloped off-center toward the edge and was streaked with white lines. Ndiya slapped the first thought out of her mind. He kneaded a grapefruit-sized ball of dough, an open stainless container of flour to one side, flour on his jeans and white dusted up each wrist. Behind him squatted a cobalt blue stove with several doors on the front and a ventilation hood above. Sausages fried in a pan beneath a screen cover and a large silver pot with a blackened bottom sat in the center of the stove. Above his head on her right, two empty clotheslines were strung from side to side. His eyes fell to the floor and bounced back to her eyes. She looked at the big silver pot.
–Nice jeans. How’s Melvin doing?
–Last I saw, his aim’s dead on.
She had so many questions loaded up, she could almost see a red squadron of laser dots hovering on Shame’s chest and forehead: Is Melvin your child? Do you have kids? Were you ever married? Or: Why not? Hell, are you still married? What’s with the damned teeth marks on this belt? The booster seats? And, as ever, what’s the story with the name? There were other questions, she could feel them, but they moved in an atmosphere she wasn’t going to breathe. Not for a while in the “when ‘if’ means ‘ever’” kind of way. With all this stirring, she came up with:
–Is there something I can do?
–Two plates, water glasses, two wine glasses if you’ll drink some. One if you won’t.
–Where?
Shame palmed the dough with his right hand and gestured with his shoulder and forehead behind him. Ndiya turned and heard three slow knocks on the front door.
–That’s Muna.
After nodding at his flour-dusted hands, Shame gestured toward the door with both hands as if he was cuffed at the wrists:
–Could you get that.
It wasn’t a question. Ndiya completed the spin and a quarter and exited the kitchen, crossed the rug—“Shame’s rug, that rug,” she thought—behind the piano and proceeded to the door. As she did, Melvin fell in behind her and grabbed hold of the gathered knot of fabric at the bottom of her shirt. Ndiya opened the door and found a short, rail-thin, dark-cinnamon-skinned woman. She wore her hair in a tight, bright-red, smooth wrap around her almond-shaped head. A three-pronged lightning bolt tattoo appeared diagonal behind her right ear, ending just before her jawline; a spark from a diamond chip in her nose searched the left side of her face. She had on a short, beige second-skin of a dress, and brown flats. Red satin dance slippers with wide, black ribbons for laces dangled from her right hand. The woman held the hand of a little boy—maybe he was eight?—with a few dozen newly twisted knots of rust-tinted hair on his head. The boy gazed up at Ndiya as if he knew her and immediately revealed an off-center three-tooth gap in his smile. The woman’s eyebrows were line-thin and tinted with a red pencil that matched her hair color. Her left eyebrow was split in two: the two lines abutted into what looked like a cross between a timeout sign and a signal with glowing cones to a taxiing airliner. The effect was that the top left of the woman’s face was stuck in an appearance of broken surprise. Her right eye was cut low enough to pass for asleep. Before the door was all the way open into the room, Ndiya was still stepping back and unaware of Melvin stepping back behind her.
–Sha—oh shi—well, hi.
Muna stepped back one pace. She did an up-and-down glance at Ndiya in Shame’s rolled-up jeans, and assumed a first-position stance for a theatrical smile. Then, after holding the pose for a beat, she made a perfect dismount from surprise into speech:
–Look, tell Shame I’ll be right back, an hour or so, tops. Go on in, Ahrrisse. I’ll be back in a little while.
She placed the accent between the syllables of “little” and somehow shrunk the amount of time implied in the phrase. The woman nudged the little boy gently with her hip and let her fingers fall between the knotted twists over the top of his head and down his neck. The way Muna’s hand traveled the boy’s head stuck in Ndiya’s eye. She thought again of what her brothers used to call touch.
Just as Ndiya began to introduce herself, Melvin came from behind and dove on Ahrrisse. The two rolled across the floor in a tumble of yous and bes and bets and nots and don’ts in various combinations. Immediately it sounded to Ndiya like one of them was laughing and one was crying. Without a thought, she’d grabbed them by the arms and stood them up.
–Boys, b
oys.
–We just playing.
–Who she?
–Her name “I Need A …”
–Ooh, she Mr. Shame’s honey-y-y.
Both faces twisted up to look at Ndiya while, somehow, the boys still stared directly at each other. Ndiya swung back around to the open door holding onto both boys’ wrists in her right hand.
–You know I’m not really—
Muna cut her off with a wave of her hand. She stared at the boys dangling from Ndiya’s grasp.
–Doesn’t matter, girl, you sure good at this!
The hallway was empty behind Muna who stood there and smiled. Ndiya thought she heard car tires peel off down in the street and then she heard,
–Her name be “She Need A—” if she don’t let go my arm.
–What?
Ndiya’s free hand flinched up, ready to—and Shame slid into the room:
–Ahrrisse! Catch. Hey, Muna.
Ndiya saw a pale ball fly through the air across the room. She ducked. Ahrrisse caught the ball with his free hand in front of his face. Shame pivoted back toward the kitchen:
–Give and go. Hit me.
Ahrrisse wound up and threw the ball back to Shame, who made the catch, then released the dough ball. He yelled “Crip!” and slapped the doorjamb with both hands, snatched the ball back out of the air, and disappeared through the door back into the kitchen. Then, in a voice that sounded like it had been turned inside out, she heard Shame say,
