Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  Then I see, oh man my finger’s about bit in two. One half hanging to the other by some gristle. I’m so pumped up I don’t hardly feel the pain, what I need to do is yank the damn thing off, shove it in my pocket with the hammer, see I don’t want to leave my fucking finger behind. I’m pumped up but I’m thinking, too. Then I want Drake’s deputy badge, and his gun. Fucking brass badge my cousin sold his soul for and fucking .38-caliber Colt revolver in its holster, what I’m doing is confiscating the entire belt heavy as a leather harness.

  Last thing I tell Drake is, you did this to yourself, man. Not me.

  Ain’t pullin’ my leg are yah?

  These nights it’s Pop Olafsson I’m missing. Weird how I hear Pop’s voice like his nose is stopped up, thinking I am stone cold sober and awake but must’ve dozed off. Pop would blink them paleblue pop-eyes at me seeing the age I am, the face I have now.

  My left forefinger, ugly stub-finger, it’s a reminder. People ask what happened and I tell them chain saw and they never ask further even my wife, she’d used to kiss the damn thing like it’s some kind of test to her, can she accept it. A female will do the damnest things for you as long as they love you.

  It’s a fact there’s “phantom pain.” Weird but a kind of comfort like your finger is a whole finger, somewhere. Nothing of you is lost.

  These nights I can’t sleep. I need to prowl the house downstairs getting a beer from the refrigerator, hanging out the back door staring at the sky. There’s a moon, you think it’s staring back at you. Some nights I can’t hold back, like a magnet pulling me over to the garage. And in the garage I’m shining a flashlight into a toolbox under my workbench, rusted old tools and paint rags and at the bottom Drake McCracken’s brass badge and .38-caliber Colt pistol that’s a comfort, too. The claw hammer (that was Pop’s hammer) covered in blood and brains sticking like fish guts I disposed of in the Chautauqua River with the holster belt, driving home that night. My bloody clothes, I buried deep in the marshy pasture where Pop killed himself.

  Pop’s banjo that came to me, I kept for twenty years then gave to my son Clayton, damn kid rightaway broke like he’s broke about every fucking thing in his life.

  All this is so long ago now, you’d think it would be forgotten. But people in Herkimer remember, of a certain age. I need to switch off the flashlight and get back to the house, such a mood comes over me here. This lonesome feeling I’d make a song of, if I knew how.

  ZZ Packer

  GEESE

  When people back home asked her why she was leaving Baltimore for Tokyo, Dina told them she was going to Japan in the hopes of making a pile of money, socking it away, then living somewhere cheap and tropical for a year. Back home, money was the only excuse for leaving, and it was barely excuse enough to fly thousands of miles to where people spoke no English.

  “Japan!” Miss Gloria had said. Miss Gloria was her neighbor: a week before Dina left she sat out on the stoop and shared a pack of cigarettes with Miss Gloria. “Japan,” Miss Gloria repeated, looking off into the distance, as though she might be able to see Honshu if she looked hard enough. Across the street sat the boarded-up row houses the city had promised to renovate. Dina tried to look past them, and harbored the vague hope that if she came back to the neighborhood they’d get renovated, as the city had promised. “Well, you go ’head on,” Miss Gloria said, trying to sound encouraging. “You go ’head on and learn that language. Find out what they saying about us over at Chong’s.” Chong’s was the local take-out with the best moo goo gai pan around, but if someone attempted to clarify an order, or changed it, or even hesitated, the Chinese family got all huffed, yelling as fast and violent as kung fu itself.

  “Chong’s is Chinese, Miss Gloria.”

  “Same difference.”

  The plan was not well thought-out, she admitted that much. Or rather, it wasn’t really a plan at all, but a feeling, a nebulous fluffy thing that had started in her chest, spread over her heart like a fog. It was sparked by movies in which she’d seen Japanese people bowing ceremoniously, torsos seesawing; her first Japanese meal, when she’d turned twenty, and how she’d marveled at the sashimi resting on its bed of rice, rice that lay on a lacquered dish the color of green tea. She grew enamored of the pen strokes of kanji, their black sabers clashing and warring with one another, occasionally settling peacefully into what looked like the outlines of a Buddhist temple, the cross sections of a cozy house. She did not want to say it, because it made no practical sense, but in the end she went to Japan for the delicate sake cups, resting in her hand like a blossom; she went to Japan for loveliness.

  After searching for weeks for work in Tokyo, she finally landed a job at an amusement park. It was called Summerland, because, in Japan, anything vaguely amusing had an English name. It was in Akigawa, miles away from the real Tokyo, but each of her previous days of job hunting had sent her farther and farther away from the city. “Economic downturn,” one Office Lady told her. The girl, with her exchange-student English and quick appraisal of Dina’s frustration, seemed cut out for something better than a receptionist’s job, but Dina understood that this, too, was part of the culture. A girl—woman—would work in an office as a glorified photocopier, and when she became Christmasu-keeki, meaning twenty-five years old, she was expected to resign quietly and start a family with a husband. With no reference to her race, only to her Americanness in general, the Office Lady had said, sadly, “Downturn means people want to hire Japanese. It’s like, obligation.” So when the people at Summerland offered her a job, she immediately accepted.

  Her specific job was operator of the Dizzy Teacups ride, where, nestled in gigantic replicas of Victorian teacups, Japanese kids spun and arced and dipped before they were whisked back to cram school. Summerland, she discovered, was the great gaijin dumping ground, the one place where a non-Japanese foreigner was sure to land a job. It was at Summerland that she met Arillano Justinio Arroyo, with his perfectly round smiley-face head, his luxurious black hair, always parted in the middle, that fell on either side of his temples like an open book. Ari was her co-worker, which meant they would exchange mop duty whenever a kid vomited.

  By summer’s end, both she and Ari found themselves unamused and jobless. She decided that what she needed, before resuming her search for another job, was a vacation. At the time, it made a lot of sense. So she sold the return part of her round-trip ticket and spent her days on subways in search of all of Tokyo’s corners: she visited Asakusa and gazed at the lit red lanterns of Sensoji Temple; she ate an outrageously expensive bento lunch under the Asahi brewery’s giant sperm-shaped modernist sculpture. She even visited Akihabara, a section of Tokyo where whole blocks of stores sold nothing but electronics she couldn’t afford. She spent an afternoon in the waterfront township of Odaiji, where women sunned themselves in bikinis during the lunch hour. But she loved Shinjuku the most, that garish part of Tokyo where pachinko parlors pushed against ugly gray earthquake-resistant buildings; where friendly, toothless vendors sold roasted unagi, even in rainy weather. Here, the twelve-floor department stores scintillated with slivers of primary colors, all the products shiny as toys. The subcity of Shinjuku always swooned, brighter than Vegas, lurid with sword-clashing kanji in neon. Skinny prostitutes in miniskirts swished by in pairs like schoolgirls, though their pouty red lips and permed hair betrayed them as they darted into doorways without signs and, seemingly, without actual doors.

  At the end of each day, she took the subway, reboarding the Hibiya-sen tokkyuu, which would take her back to the gaijin hostel in Roppongi. She rented her room month to month, like the Australians, Germans, and Canadians and the occasional American. The only other blacks who lived in Japan were Africans: the Senegalese, with their blankets laid out in front of Masashi-Itsukaiichi station, selling bootleg Beatles albums and Tupperware; the Kenyans in Harajuku selling fierce tribal masks and tarry perfumed oils alongside Hello Kitty notebooks. The Japanese did not trust these black gaijin, these men who smiled with every
tooth in their mouths and wore their cologne turned on high. And though the Japanese women stared at Dina with the same distrust, the business-suited sararimen who passed her in the subway stations would proposition her with English phrases they’d had gaijin teach them—“Verrry sexy,” they’d say, looking around to make sure women and children hadn’t overheard them. And even on the tokkyuu itself, where every passenger took a seat and immediately fell asleep, the emboldened men would raise their eyebrows in brushstrokes of innuendo and loudly whisper, “Verry chah-ming daaark-ku skin.”

  Ari found another job. Dina didn’t. Her three-month visa had expired and the Japanese were too timid and suspicious to hire anyone on the sly. There were usually only two lines of work for American gaijin—teaching or modeling. Modeling was out—she was not the right race, much less the right blondness or legginess, and with an expired visa she got turned down for teaching and tutoring jobs. The men conducting the interviews knew her visa had expired, and that put a spin on things, the spin being that they expected her to sleep with them.

  Dina had called Ari, wanting leads on jobs the English-language newspapers might not advertise. Ari agreed to meet her at Swensen’s, where he bought her a scoop of chocolate mint ice cream.

  “I got offered a job at a pachinko parlor,” he said. “I can’t do it, but you should. They only offered me the job because they like to see other Asians clean their floors.”

  She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want to sweep floors, that too many Japanese had already seen American movies in which blacks were either criminals or custodians. So when they met again at Swensen’s, Dina still had no job and couldn’t make the rent at the foreign hostel. Nevertheless, she bought him a scoop of red bean ice cream with the last of her airplane money. She didn’t have a job and he took pity on her, inviting her to live with him in his one-room flat. So she did.

  And so did Petra and Zoltan. Petra was five-foot-eleven and had once been a model. That ended when she fell down an escalator, dislocating a shoulder and wrecking her face. She’d had to pay for the reconstructive surgery out of her once sizable bank account and now had no money. And Petra did not want to go back to Moldova, could not go back to Moldova, it seemed, though Ari hadn’t explained any of this when he brought Petra home. He introduced her to Dina as though they were neighbors who hadn’t met, then hauled her belongings up the stairs. While Ari strained and grunted under the weight of her clothes trunks, Petra plopped down in a chair, the only place to sit besides the floor. Dina made tea for her, and though she and Ari had been running low on food, courtesy dictated that she bring out the box of cookies she’d been saving to share with Ari.

  “I have threads in my face,” Petra said through crunches of cookie. “Threads from the doctors. One whole year”—she held up a single aggressive finger—“I have threads. I am thinking that when threads bust out, va voom, I am having old face back. These doctors here”—Petra shook her head and narrowed her topaz eyes—“they can build a whole car, but cannot again build face? I go to America next. Say, ‘Fix my face. Fix face for actual.’ And they will fix.” She nodded once, like a genie, as though a single nod were enough to make it so. Afterward she made her way to the bathroom and sobbed.

  Of course, Petra could no longer model; her face had been ripped into unequal quadrants like the sections of a TV dinner, and the stitches had been in long enough to leave fleshy, zipper-like scars in their place. The Japanese would not hire her either; they did not like to view affliction so front and center. In turn, Petra refused to work for them. Whenever Dina went to look for a job, Petra made it known that she did not plan on working for the Japanese: “I not work for them even if they pay me!”

  Her boyfriend Zoltan came with the package. He arrived in toto a week after Petra, and though he tried to project the air of someone just visiting, he’d already tacked pictures from his bodybuilding days above the corner where they slept across from Ari and Dina.

  Petra and Zoltan loved each other in that dangerous Eastern European way of hard, sobbing sex and furniture-pounding fights. Dina had been living with Ari for a month and Petra and Zoltan for only two weeks when the couple had their third major fight. Zoltan had become so enraged that he’d stuck his hand on the orange-hot burner of the electric range. Dina had been adding edamame to the udon Ari was reheating from his employee lunch when Zoltan pushed between the two, throwing the bubbling pot aside and pressing his hand onto the lit burner as easily and noiselessly as if it were a Bible on which he was taking an oath.

  “Zoltan!” Dina screamed. Ari muttered a few baffled words of Tagalog. The seared flesh smelled surprisingly familiar, like dumplings, forgotten and burning at the bottom of a pot. The burner left a bull’s-eye imprint on Zoltan’s palm, each concentric circle sprouting blisters that pussed and bled. Petra wailed when she saw; it took her two weeping hours to scour his melted fingerprints from the burner.

  And still, they loved. That same night they shook the bamboo shades with their passion. When they settled down, they baby-talked to each other in Moldovan and Hungarian, though the first time Dina heard them speak this way it sounded to her as if they were reciting different brands of vodka.

  After the hand-on-the-range incident, Zoltan maundered about with the look of a beast in his lair. The pictures from his bodybuilding days that he tacked on the walls showed him brown, oiled, and bulging, each muscle delineated as though he were constructed of hundreds of bags of hard-packed sugar. Though he was still a big man, he was no longer glorious, and since they’d all been subsisting on crackers and ramen, Zoltan looked even more deflated. For some reason he had given up bodybuilding once he stepped off the plane at Narita, though he maintained that he was winning prizes right up until then. If he was pressed further than that about his past, Petra, invariably orbiting Zoltan like a satellite, would begin to cry.

  Petra cried a lot. If Dina asked Petra about life in Moldova or about modeling in Ginza, she cried. If Dina so much as offered her a carrot, this, too, was cause for sorrow. Dina had given up trying to understand Petra. Or any of them, for that matter. Even Ari. Once she’d asked him why he did it, why he let them stay. Ari held out his hand and said, “See this? Five fingers. One hand.” He then made a fist, signifying—she supposed—strength. She didn’t exactly understand what he was driving at: none of them helped out in any real way, though she, unlike Petra and Zoltan, had at least attempted to find a job. He looked to her, fist still clenched; she nodded as though she understood, though she felt she never would. Things simply made all of them cry and sigh. Things dredged from the bottoms of their souls brought them pain at the strangest moments.

  Then Sayeed came to live with them. He had a smile like a sealed envelope, had a way of eating as though he were horny. She didn’t know how Ari knew him, but one day, when Dina was practicing writing kanji characters and Petra was knitting an afghan with Zoltan at her feet, Ari came home from work, Sayeed following on his heels.

  “We don’t have much,” Ari apologized to Sayeed after the introductions. Then he glared at the mess of blankets on the floor, “and as you can see, we are many people, sleeping in a tiny, six-tatami room.”

  Sayeed didn’t seem to mind. They all shared two cans of a Japanese soft drink, Pocari Sweat, taking tiny sips from their sake cups. They shared a box of white chocolate Pokki, and a sandwich from Ari’s employee lunch. Sayeed stayed after the meal and passed around cigarettes that looked handmade, though they came from a box. He asked, occasionally gargling his words, what each of them did. Having no jobs, they told stories of their past: Petra told of Milan and the runways and dressing up for the opera at La Scala. But mostly she recalled what she ate: pan-seared foie gras with pickled apricot gribiche sauce; swordfish tangine served with stuffed cherries; gnocchi and lobster, swimming in brown butter.

  “Of course,” she said, pertly ashing her cigarette, “we had to throw it all up.”

  “Yes yes yes,” Sayeed said, as though this news delighted him.

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nbsp; Zoltan talked of Hungary, and how he was a close relation of Nagy, the folk hero of the ’56 revolution. He detailed his bodybuilding regime: how much he could bench-press, how much he could jerk, and what he would eat. Mainly they were heavy foods: soups with carp heads, bones, and fins; doughy breads cooked in rendered bacon fat; salads made of meat rather than lettuce. Some sounded downright inedible, but Zoltan recalled them as lovingly and wistfully as if they were dear departed relations.