The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  He rubbed a tight spot in his chest, the place where his breakfast crumbs always landed, where the hollow between his pecs surged out into the hard, round curve of his stomach. He carried his fat high and close to his heart.

  “I’ll see you, then,” he said to Boss.

  The dog stared at him with his tired, milky eyes, and Wyatt went on and left.

  He took the long way to the plant, cutting through town instead of using the bypass, even circling the square so that he could drive by Citizens Deposit and see the temperature. Fifty degrees. It was supposed to be warm again after the weekend’s cold snap, maybe even up to the seventies, and Wyatt was of two minds about it. At fifty-five he felt the cold a lot more than he had at eighteen, when he first started at Price Electric, and so the short, halfhearted winters of recent years were in some respects a blessing. Saved him on electricity bills, too. But it didn’t seem right that you could walk around outdoors in almost-November in nothing but your shirtsleeves. A lot of things didn’t seem right about the world today, a lot had changed without Wyatt’s say-so, but what could a guy like him do about it? Price had been talking for years now about shutting down the Kentucky factory and moving to Mexico. They’d already closed a plant in St. Louis, and these had been some strange years lately, foreigners coming in and local guys, folks Wyatt had worked with since his mother was still alive, getting laid off or retiring early, tired of switching from one job to the next and fighting tooth and nail for the sections of the plant with the better pay grades.

  Wyatt held on, took whatever the higher-ups were willing to give him. He’d gone from the winding room to the die cast to the repair shop, and now they had him out in packaging, one of the lowest pay grades a man of his seniority could get, working alongside Bosnians with dark circles under their eyes and knobs of muscle under their T-shirts, guys who could load and seal a crate of motors before Wyatt could get the packing materials printed. And that was part of the problem right there: all these computers you had to use now, computers controlling the machines and computers to replace what had always been done with triplicate forms and an ink pen just years before, a system that had seemed fast and fine to Wyatt. Lord’s sake, who couldn’t operate a damn ink pen? Who in the hell had decided that wasn’t good enough anymore?

  He was ten minutes early at the plant and decided to go in, get on with it. The usual bunch of guys was stationed beside the Coke machines, smoking and sipping sodas. The cafeteria had been shut down two years ago, after the corporate office started making cutbacks. No coffee these days unless you brought your own. You got a frozen turkey at Thanksgiving, a ham loaf for Christmas, and there was a company picnic once a year with a free meal, rides for the kids, and a prize drawing. That was the extent of the freebies. Wyatt had won, in various years, an eighteen-inch color television—that had been the best luck of his life, and he still marveled at it—an off-brand clock radio, and something called a Whopper Chopper that he’d immediately traded in at Wal-Mart for store credit.

  “Hey,” Sam Austen said, tipping his Mr. Pibb can toward Wyatt. He was a good-looking kid, tall and blue-eyed with longish sandy-colored hair and a brand-new Dodge Ram that his pop had gotten him as a graduation present. He’d started at Price in May, right after school let out, telling everybody who’d listen that he was just earning gas-and-girl money through the summer until he went to WKU in the fall. Here he was, though, still at Price, working as a temp but hoping to get on full-time as soon as there was an opening. He grinned, swigged from his soda, and put the can high in the air as if he were making a toast. “Tubs! There you are, you silly bastard. So you heard from that woman you hooked up with yet? Man, she was a dog.”

  He was talking about the woman from the dance hall. Wyatt had been getting grief about her—about the shots he’d drunk in front of the guys, the fact that three alone had been all it had taken to get him to sing along with “Wichita Lineman” on the jukebox—all last week.

  “I didn’t do anything with that woman,” Wyatt said, knowing it was stupid to get drawn into this but feeling trembly and flushed, mouth running on before his better instincts could check him.

  “There’s no shame in it,” Gene Lawson said. “She wasn’t that fat. She had a decent face.”

  Wyatt was red now, he knew, scarlet probably, and everybody was going to start laughing soon, egging him on, saying Way to go, Tubs and No shame in Tubs’s game and More cushion for the pushin’. He hadn’t taken the fat woman from the dance hall home. He hadn’t.

  “Leave him alone,” Morris Houchens said. Wyatt hadn’t seen him. He’d been in the back of the room, sitting and reading a section from a Courier-Journal, and the other men had blocked him from view. “Don’t know why y’all care so much about another man’s love life anyhow.”

  “Love life,” Sam snorted. “We’re just having him on a little, man. It’s all in fun.”

  “I know your brand of fun,” Morris said. They stared at each other for a moment, silent, and then the shift bell sounded. The men lined up at the time clock.

  Wyatt hung back intentionally, waiting to go through after Morris. “Thank you,” he said, embarrassed. He was too old to be bullied. Too old to need a rescuer.

  Morris, hands plunged in his pockets, shrugged in an exaggerated way. He wasn’t quite Wyatt’s age—Wyatt had ten years on him, probably—but he wasn’t one of the young turks, either, and he’d been around long enough that they had one of those pleasant but limited acquaintanceships, the kind that had weathered nothing more serious than an argument about who should take the last Nip Chee bag from the vending machine. “That son of a bitch Sam gave my boy trouble the whole time they were in school together,” Morris said. “Him and a pack of his buddies came and set fire to a Halloween dummy we had in our yard, probably would’ve caught the whole house on fire if I hadn’t seen it in time. I knew it was him, but I couldn’t prove it. Nobody did a thing to him.”

  “That’s how it goes around here,” Wyatt said.

  Morris punched his card. “You got that right.” He paused before crossing into the factory. “No offense, but you’re asking for this kind of thing, going out with those guys. They’re not your friends. They’re not good people.”

  Wyatt remembered Glen Campbell on the loudspeakers and his own earnest, drunken crooning, the guys all laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes, wiping them away and patting their knees and saying, “Woo! Shit!” before erupting all over again. “I am a lineman for the county . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “I made a mistake. I thought it would be better if I gave in and went along one time.” His hand was shaking so badly that it took him two tries to punch his own card.

  “It’s never better,” Morris said. They were in the factory now, at the point where Morris would split left toward die cast and Wyatt straight ahead to packaging, and Wyatt dreaded the day so badly that he felt almost paralyzed. Despair was what it was. The despair of living a life that you didn’t understand and hadn’t bargained for, hadn’t deserved, could only wish upon your worst enemy.

  “I’d lay low if you could,” Morris said, barely audible over the clank of machinery. “Don’t give them ammunition, don’t egg them on. Having them ride you is bad enough, but you don’t want this guy and his buddies jumping you in the parking lot.”

  “You think he’d do that?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  Wyatt sighed. He couldn’t figure out how he’d made such a mess of things.

  They parted, Morris lifting his hand a bit in good-bye before striding over to his station. Wyatt continued on, unsurprised to see that Jusef was already in motion, pulling motors off one of Saturday’s pallets and loading them, lickety-split, into rows in the first crate. “You move slow today,” he said in that strange accent of his, the way he seemed to force each word off the thick mass of his tongue, his heavy fringe of eyebrows punctuating the syllables, making all of his pronouncements seem ill spirited whether he intended them that wa
y or not. “You put me behind.”

  Wyatt went to the computer and jabbed the space bar with his thick, clumsy forefinger, interrupting the screen saver’s neon-on-black pattern of spinning spirals and pinwheels. The program loaded, yellow text on a black background, little boxes in which he was supposed to type addresses, product ID numbers, quantities. “Do you hear me?” Jusef was saying behind him, and Wyatt was trying, he really was, but his finger was quivering, and the screen seemed to be quivering, and it occurred to him that it was absurd, going through the regular motions of a day and plugging numbers into a machine when nothing else in his life was regular. Morris’s kindness had taken him by surprise. What he felt now, contemplating it, was not gratitude but despair.

  He was warm, sick to his stomach, and he leaned against the table to steady himself.

  “You put me behind,” Jusef repeated. “Do you hear me?”

  2.

  Roma was what the locals liked to call a damp town in a dry county: you could purchase alcohol legally from a liquor store and beer from the grocery store but nothing by the drink and nothing at all on Sundays. If you wanted a bar or a dance hall you had to drive twelve miles south to Tennessee, to a strip of highway that had long ago been dubbed “the Tobacco Patch,” where you could find enough 101-proof liquor and legal adult entertainment to keep you satiated until the next trip to Nashville. Just over the state line there was a decent barbecue joint with an attached grocery store, which was stocked floor to ceiling with cases of Coors and Natural Light and a shelf of nothing but Boone’s Farm, the bottles gleaming under the fluorescents like quartz. POKE’S, the sign out front read, and the shack’s other features included a half dozen picnic tables, good for the congregating smokers, and a large blue Port-o-San positioned maybe a dozen steps away from the restaurant’s entrance. Down the road a bit from Poke’s was the Patch’s first real bar, the Salamander, a one-room lean-to that was always getting shut down by the fire marshal. The clientele there were locals, regulars, full-blown alcoholics. The Salamander opened at four and closed at one A.M., when its regular stable of old drunks was either unconscious or wandering down the highway toward Nancy’s, where the luck of meeting up with a woman was better, though the drinks were much pricier.

  Nancy’s was a dance hall. It was a Quonset hut the size of a roller rink and similar to a roller rink in design: The dance floor was a broad oblong of polished oak with a DJ’s station positioned right in the center. To the right of the dance floor was a long bar and two levels of seating, floor and deck, and this was where you could usually find a decent crowd of drinkers on Fridays and Saturdays, sometimes hundreds of them, their cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling where it hung, trapped, like a storm cloud. Nancy’s had a live act and a cover charge on Saturday nights, the bands always country or rockabilly, their playlists never more daring or obscure than the tracks you could choose on the jukebox any evening of the week. But you paid for the thump of bass through the floorboards and the high screech of electric guitar vibrating off the metal walls, the three-dimensionality of the music when it was live and sweating and right in front of you. This was the appeal of Nancy’s. This was why, two Saturday nights ago, a group of coworkers from Price Electric had journeyed southward in three different pickup trucks, Sam Austen’s Dodge Ram leading the way, swerving left and right over the double yellow line because its driver was already halfway to sodden, a flask of something raw and almost chemical-smelling tucked between his legs and up next to his groin.

  Wyatt, who was balanced in the backseat of the king cab between a Styrofoam cooler full of beer and what appeared to be the remains of the truck’s factory stereo system, thought the brew smelled more like kerosene than any drink he knew, and so he turned it down, politely as he could, when Sam offered him a pull on it. Already he felt foolish. Here he was, fifty-five years old, riding in the backseat of a drunk teenager’s truck—he’d be in jail by the end of the night. But the boys had asked him, no, begged him, to come, and they’d been almost kind about it, and Wyatt couldn’t rightly tell them that he had anything better going on. Most Saturday nights he and Boss sat on the couch and watched a movie Wyatt had rented for free from the public library. Sometimes, when the newspaper ran a coupon, he’d order a pizza for carryout, seeing no reason why he should pay a delivery charge and tip when he could drive the five minutes and get it himself. More often he would pick up a pound of ground chuck from Piggly Wiggly and fry burgers and onions in the same skillet he’d used in the morning to cook his sausage. Every now and then he’d purchase a six-pack along with his groceries, but he never had more than two beers in a night, and these he spread out over hours, savoring them. Wyatt was no great drinker.

  Sam was singing along to an Alan Jackson song playing loud through his new compact disc player, a marvel of electronics so complicated looking, so full of buttons and blinking neon lights, that Wyatt thought it looked more like the panel on a spaceship than something you could purchase for two hundred bucks at the nearest Circuit City. Gene Lawson, riding shotgun, tipped back his can of beer, swallowed the dregs, and pitched the empty out the window, nailing a stop sign. “Bull’s-eye,” he said, putting his left hand up, palm open, as though requesting a high five. Wyatt, now well trained, opened the cooler and fished a can from the bottom, where the ice was packed. He put it in Gene’s hand.

  “Appreciate it,” Gene said.

  Sam gunned it through a yellow light, the truck’s transmission squealing before he could jam the gearshift into fourth. The kid didn’t know what he had, didn’t know how easily he could lose it all, daddy or no daddy. Wyatt couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been that foolish, but maybe that was his problem. His own father had died of a heart attack when Wyatt was seventeen and a senior in high school. Wyatt hadn’t been a good enough student to set his sights on college, so he probably would have ended up in one of the local factories anyway, but he’d missed out on those Sam-style years of partying and blowing his money and trolling the honky-tonks for pretty girls.

  “State line,” Sam called, and he and Gene touched the roof of the cab with their right hands, a gesture Wyatt didn’t understand and cared too little about to bother questioning. The thought of his couch, of Boss’s warmth under his left hand and the TV’s remote control in his right, had never been more appealing.

  “That’s our little ritual,” Gene said in the silence that followed. Gene was a few years older than Sam, old enough to drink legally, but he had a chubby boy’s face that he attempted to hide, or age, with coarse whiskers. “Say a little prayer to your angel when you get to Tennessee, ’cause you’ll probably need it. And thank the Lord for Kentucky when you drive back over.”

  Sam took another swig from his flask. “Praise the Lord!” he said stupidly.

  The boys clinked their drinks together.

  They passed Poke’s and the Salamander, and then Nancy’s was visible just around a bend in the road, glimmering in the moonlight like a half-buried relic. There was something kind of mystical about it, the metal structure pulsing like the mother ship, the security lights outside all haloed in clouds of limestone dust from the gravel parking lot. And of course Wyatt’s presence here, riding backseat with a couple of man-boys, smelling of the English Leather cologne that he usually only broke out for funerals and occasionally church, was surreal; the night had the texture of a dream. He would wonder, hoping, the next day: Was it?

  “All right, Tubs,” Sam said once they parked and shut off the car, cutting off Alan Jackson before he could finish his plea to not rock the jukebox. “We’re parked. We’re going to a bar. Might as well have you a beer while it’s free.”

  “I don’t mind waiting till we’re indoors,” Wyatt said.

  Sam leaned around the seat and popped the lid off the cooler, making the Styrofoam squeal. “Get your ass a beer, man,” Sam said. “We’re not going in until you drink one. I’m determined to see you have a good time tonight.”

  Wyatt thought about saying that
he didn’t need beer to have a good time but knew how square that would be. And it wasn’t the beer he had a problem with, anyhow. But how could he tell these boys that? I’m too grown-up for all of this. I was always too grown-up for all of this. He’d come, hadn’t he? He was in it for the night, like it or not.

  “All right, Christ,” he said, pressing the tab on a Coors Light. He took a long swallow, appreciating its chill, and then followed with another draft.

  “Chug that sonofabitch,” Gene said, and Wyatt thought, What the hell. He finished the beer a moment later, belched loudly, and leaned forward to pitch the can out of Gene’s window. The boys laughed and clapped Wyatt on the shoulder, and then they were all climbing out of Sam’s truck, Wyatt a little flushed but otherwise fine. All of this was silly, yes, but not the end of the world. He would convince Sam to let him drive home once the guys had gotten their partying over with, and if Sam refused, he’d slip out and call a cab. Nobody would notice, anyhow. In the meantime, he’d have a couple of beers, listen to the band, and watch the rest of the bunch get shitfaced. They were gathering together now, seven men from three different trucks, none of them except for Wyatt a year older than thirty: Sam the best looking of the bunch (and knowing it, too) with his blond hair and blue eyes and his slim waist, cinched in even tighter by a set of light-washed Levi’s; Daniel Stone nearly as pretty with his black hair and suntan, but lacking the charisma to make the sale the way Sam could. The rest were passably attractive in the way that men who could attach themselves to more attractive men sometimes were. Wyatt hadn’t even been that lucky. At Sam’s age he’d been five foot ten, his current height, and about twenty pounds overweight (lean years compared to now); he’d worn his hair, already thinning, long in the front to hide his white bulb of a forehead. And what few friends he’d made in high school he lost upon dropping out, because he was too busy, always too busy, for anything but work and his mother, and when she died he was thirty-eight and already past the point, he’d believed, of being anyone different than he was already.