Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  But just the same she had got the guest room and she had it yet. Well, did it matter? Nobody ever came to see him any more, nobody to stay overnight anyway, nobody to stay very long . . . not any more. He knew how they laughed at him. He had heard Frank humming all right—before he saw how serious and sad the situation was and took pity—humming, “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” But then they’d always laughed at him for something—for not being an athlete, for wearing glasses, for having kidney trouble . . . and mail coming addressed to Rev. and Mrs. Stoner.

  Removing his shirt, he bent over the table to read the volume left open from last night. He read, translating easily, “Eisdem licet cum illis . . . Clerics are allowed to reside only with women about whom there can be no suspicion, either because of a natural bond (as mother, sister, aunt) or of advanced age, combined in both cases with good repute.”

  Last night he had read it, and many nights before, each time as though this time to find what was missing, to find what obviously was not in the paragraph, his problem considered, a way out. She was not mother, not sister, not aunt, and advanced age was a relative term (why, she was younger than he was) and so, eureka, she did not meet the letter of the law—but, alas, how she fulfilled the spirit! And besides it would be a slimy way of handling it after all her years of service. He could not afford to pension her off, either.

  He slammed the book shut. He slapped himself fiercely on the back, missing the wily mosquito, and whirled to find it. He took a magazine and folded it into a swatter. Then he saw it—oh, the preternatural cunning of it!—poised in the beard of St. Joseph on the bookcase. He could not hit it there. He teased it away, wanting it to light on the wall, but it knew his thoughts and flew high away. He swung wildly, hoping to stun it, missed, swung back, catching St. Joseph across the neck. The statue fell to the floor and broke.

  Mrs. Stoner was panting in the hall outside his door.

  “What is it!”

  “Mosquitoes!”

  “What is it, Father? Are you hurt?”

  “Mosquitoes—damn it! And only the female bites!”

  Mrs. Stoner, after a moment, said, “Shame on you, Father. She needs the blood for her eggs.”

  He dropped the magazine and lunged at the mosquito with his bare hand.

  She went back to her room, saying, “Pshaw, I thought it was burglars murdering you in your bed.”

  He lunged again.

  Annie Proulx

  JOB HISTORY

  Leeland Lee is born at home in Cora, Wyoming, November 17, 1947, the youngest of six. In the 1950s his parents move to Unique when his mother inherits a small dog-bone ranch. The ranch lies a few miles outside town. They raise sheep, a few chickens and some hogs. The father is irascible and, as soon as they can, the older children disperse. Leeland can sing “That Doggie in the Window” all the way through. His father strikes him with a flyswatter and tells him to shut up. There is no news on the radio. A blizzard has knocked out the power.

  Leeland’s face shows heavy bone from his mother’s side. His neck is thick and his red-gold hair plastered down in bangs. Even as a child his eyes are as pouchy as those of a middle-aged alcoholic, the brows rod-straight above wandering, out-of-line eyes. His nose lies broad and close to his face, his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow into easy flesh. In the fifth grade, horsing around with friends, he falls off the school’s fire escape and breaks his pelvis. He is in a body cast for three months. On the news an announcer says that the average American eats 8.6 pounds of margarine a year but only 8.3 pounds of butter. He never forgets this statistic.

  When Leeland is seventeen he marries Lori Bovee. They quit school. Lori is pregnant and Leeland is proud of this. His pelvis gives him no trouble. She is a year younger than he, with an undistinguished, oval face, hair of medium length. She is a little stout but looks a confection in pastel sweater sets. Leeland and his mother fight over this marriage and Leeland leaves the ranch. He takes a job pumping gas at Egge Service Station. Ed Egge says, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” and laughs. The station stands at the junction of highway 16 and a county road. Highway 16 is the main tourist road to Yellowstone. Leeland buys Lori’s father’s old truck for fifty dollars and Ed rebuilds the engine. Vietnam and Selma, Alabama, are on the news.

  The federal highway program puts through the new four-lane interstate forty miles south of highway 16 and parallel with it. Overnight the tourist business in Unique falls flat. One day a hundred cars stop for gas and oil, hamburgers, cold soda. The next day only two cars pull in, both driven by locals asking how business is. In a few months there is a for sale sign on the inside window of the service station. Ed Egge gets drunk and, driving at speed, hits two steers on the county road.

  Leeland joins the army, puts in for the motor pool. He is stationed in Germany for six years and never learns a word of the language. He comes back to Wyoming heavier, moodier. He works with a snow-fence crew during spring and summer, then moves Lori and the children—the boy and a new baby girl—to Casper where he drives oil trucks. They live in a house trailer on Poison Spider Road, jammed between two rioting neighbors. On the news they hear that an enormous diamond has been discovered somewhere. The second girl is born. Leeland can’t seem to get along with the oil company dispatcher. After a year they move back to Unique. Leeland and his mother make up their differences.

  Lori is good at saving money and she has put aside a small nest egg. They set up in business for themselves. Leeland believes people will be glad to trade at a local ranch supply store that saves a long drive into town. He rents the service station from Mrs. Egge who has not been able to sell it after Ed’s death. They spruce it up, Leeland doing all the carpenter work, Lori painting the interior and exterior. On the side Leeland raises hogs with his father. His father was born and raised in Iowa and knows hogs.

  It becomes clear that people relish the long drive to a bigger town where they can see something different, buy fancy groceries, clothing, bakery goods as well as ranch supplies. One intensely cold winter when everything freezes from God to gizzard, Leeland and his father lose 112 hogs. They sell out. Eighteen months later the ranch supply business goes under. The new color television set goes back to the store.

  After the bankruptcy proceedings Leeland finds work on a road construction crew. He is always out of town, it seems, but back often enough for what he calls “a good ride” and so makes Lori pregnant again. Before the baby is born he quits the road crew. He can’t seem to get along with the foreman. No one can, and turnover is high. On his truck radio he hears that hundreds of religious cult members have swallowed Kool-Aid and cyanide.

  Leeland takes a job at Tongue River Meat Locker and Processing. Old Man Brose owns the business. Leeland is the only employee. He has an aptitude for sizing up and cutting large animals. He likes wrapping the tidy packages, the smell of damp bone and chill. He can throw his cleaver unerringly and when mice run along the wall they do not run far if Leeland is there. After months of discussion with Old Man Brose, Leeland and Lori sign a ten-year lease on the meat locker operation. Their oldest boy graduates from high school, the first in the family to do so, and joins the army. He signs up for six years. There is something on the news about school lunches and ketchup is classed as a vegetable. Old Man Brose moves to Albuquerque.

  The economy takes a dive. The news is full of talk about recession and unemployment. Thrifty owners of small ranches go back to doing their own butchering, cutting and freezing. The meat locker lease payments are high and electricity jumps up. Leeland and Lori have to give up the business. Old Man Brose returns from Albuquerque. There are bad feelings. It didn’t work out, Leeland says, and that’s the truth of it.

  It seems like a good time to try another place. The family moves to Thermopolis where Leeland finds a temporary job at a local meat locker during hunting season. A hunter from Des Moines, not far from where Leeland’s father was born, tips him $100 when he loads packages of frozen elk
and the elk’s head onto the man’s single-engine plane. The man has been drinking. The plane goes down in the Medicine Bow range to the southeast.

  During this long winter Leeland is out of work and stays home with the baby. Lori works in the school cafeteria. The baby is a real crier and Leeland quiets him down with spoonsful of beer.

  In the spring they move back to Unique and Leeland tries truck driving again, this time in long-distance rigs on coast-to-coast journeys that take him away two and three months at a time. He travels all over the continent, to Texas, Alaska, Montreal and Corpus Christi. He says every place is the same. Lori works now in the kitchen of the Hi-Lo Café in Unique. The ownership of the café changes three times in two years. West Klinker, an elderly rancher, eats three meals a day at the Hi-Lo. He is sweet on Lori. He reads her an article from the newspaper—a strange hole has appeared in the ozone layer. He confuses ozone with oxygen.

  One night while Leeland is somewhere on the east coast the baby goes into convulsions following a week’s illness of fever and cough. Lori makes a frightening drive over icy roads to the distant hospital. The baby survives but he is slow. Lori starts a medical emergency response group in Unique. Three women and two men sign up to take the first aid course. They drive a hundred miles to the first aid classes. Only two of them pass the test on the first try. Lori is one of the two. The other is Stuttering Bob, an old bachelor. One of the failed students says Stuttering Bob has nothing to do but study the first aid manual as he enjoys the leisured life that goes with a monthly social security check.

  Leeland quits driving trucks and again tries raising hogs with his father on the old ranch. He becomes a volunteer fireman and is at the bad February fire that kills two children. It takes the fire truck three hours to get in to the ranch through the wind-drifted snow. The family is related to Lori. When something inside explodes, Leeland tells, an object flies out of the house and strikes the fire engine hood. It is a Nintendo player and not even charred.

  Stuttering Bob has cousins in Muncie, Indiana. One of the cousins works at the Muncie Medical Center. The cousin arranges for the Medical Center to donate an old ambulance to the Unique Rescue Squad although they had intended to give it to a group in Mississippi. Bob’s cousin, who has been to Unique, persuades them. Bob is afraid to drive through congested cities so Leeland and Lori take a series of buses to Muncie to pick up the vehicle. It is their first vacation. They take the youngest boy with them. On the return trip Lori leaves her purse on a chair in a restaurant. The gas money for the return trip is in the purse. They go back to the restaurant, wild with anxiety. The purse has been turned in and nothing is missing. Lori and Leeland talk about the goodness of people, even strangers. In their absence Stuttering Bob is elected president of the rescue squad.

  A husband and wife from California move to Unique and open a taxidermy business. They say they are artists and arrange the animals in unusual poses. Lori gets work cleaning their workshop. The locals make jokes about the coyote in their window, posed lifting a leg against sagebrush where a trap is set. The taxidermists hold out for almost two years, then move to Oregon. Leeland’s and Lori’s oldest son telephones from overseas. He is making a career of the service.

  Leeland’s father dies and they discover the hog business is deeply in debt, the ranch twice-mortgaged. The ranch is sold to pay off debts. Leeland’s mother moves in with them. Leeland continues long-distance truck driving. His mother watches television all day. Sometimes she sits in Lori’s kitchen, saying almost nothing, picking small stones from dried beans.

  The youngest daughter baby-sits. One night, on the way home, her employer feels her small breasts and asks her to squeeze his penis, because, he says, she ate the piece of chocolate cake he was saving. She does it but runs crying into the house and tells Lori who advises her to keep quiet and stay home from now on. The man is Leeland’s friend; they hunt elk and antelope together.

  Leeland quits truck driving. Lori has saved a little money. Once more they decide to go into business for themselves. They lease the old gas station where Leeland had his first job and where they tried the ranch supply store. Now it is a gas station again, but also a convenience store. They try surefire gimmicks: plastic come-on banners that pop and tear in the wind, free ice cream cones with every fill-up, prize drawings. Leeland has been thinking of the glory days when a hundred cars stopped. Now highway 16 seems the emptiest road in the country. They hold on for a year, then Leeland admits that it hasn’t worked out and he is right. He is depressed for days when San Francisco beats Denver in the Super Bowl.

  Their oldest boy is discharged from the service and will not say why but Leeland knows it is chemical substances, drugs. Leeland is driving long-distance trucks again despite his back pain. The oldest son is home, working as a ranch hand in Pie. Leeland studies him, looking for signs of addiction. The son’s eyes are always red and streaming.

  The worst year comes. Leeland’s mother dies. Leeland hurts his back, and, in the same week, Lori learns that she has breast cancer and is pregnant again. She is forty-six. Lori’s doctor advises an abortion. Lori refuses.

  The oldest son is discovered to have an allergy to horses and quits the ranch job. He tells Leeland he wants to try raising hogs. Pork prices are high. For a few days Leeland is excited. He can see it clearly: Leeland Lee & Son, Livestock. But the son changes his mind when a friend he knew in the service comes by on a motorcycle. The next morning both of them leave for Phoenix.

  Lori spontaneously aborts in the fifth month of the pregnancy and then the cancer burns her up. Leeland is at the hospital with her every day. Lori dies. The daughters, both married now, curse Leeland. No one knows how to reach the oldest son and he misses the funeral. The youngest boy cries inconsolably. They decide he will live in Billings, Montana, with the oldest sister who is expecting her first child.

  Two springs after Lori’s death a middle-aged woman from Ohio buys the café, paints it orange, renames it Unique Eats and hires Leeland to cook. He is good with meat, knows how to choose the best cuts and grill or do them chicken-fried style to perfection. He has never cooked anything at home and everyone is surprised at this long-hidden skill. The oldest son comes back and next year they plan to lease the old gas station and convert it to a motorcycle repair shop and steak house. Nobody has time to listen to the news.

  Lewis Robinson

  OFFICER FRIENDLY

  Ziegler was into cheap thrills, like me, and cared only about not getting caught. We had this routine which involved going to the J.M. Biggies parking lot and sending bottle rockets over the road. Cars often stopped but we hid behind J.M. Biggies’ dumpsters so people couldn’t find us. One night a cop came into the parking lot at full speed without his lights on. This startled us. We started running. On the rink in skates I was quicker than Ziegler but on foot he had me. The cop spun to a stop in the snow and hopped out, like a pro. He hoofed it after us. Ziegler hit the snowbank just as the cop yelled “Freeze!”

  I couldn’t believe it. He actually yelled “Freeze!” as though he was in charge of the situation. We knew all the cops in Point Allison. They were subpar. This one yells “Freeze!” just as Ziegler is getting over the snowbank. I’m still running, and I’m thinking, This chump’s going to shoot me. Shoot me dead for sending up bottle rockets. Sixteen years alive and I was going to get shot in the back by a Point Allison cop. The local force was generally incompetent but capable of occasional displays of accidental heroism. So I stopped, and the cop kept running, and just as I turned around he tackled me in the snowbank.

  I’ll hand it to the guy: it was a great takedown, executed cleanly, powerfully. In fact, the enthusiasm of the tackle sent his fur hat to the top of the snowbank. He held me and caught his breath. He was wheezing and his warm stomach was pressed against my chest.

  “Don’t . . .” he said, but then he had to catch his breath and start again. “Don’t . . . ever . . . run . . . from . . . an officer . . . of . . . the law.”

  His nos
e was inches from my forehead. It was Officer Friendly, the cop who in fifth grade had visited our classroom to write the word drugs on the chalkboard. Later in his speech, he crossed the word out, and later still, he erased it. This routine was mimicked by many of us in the years that followed.

  When he put his hands on the snow on either side of me to push himself up, his arms sunk in and he was pinning me again. I was pressed deeper into the snowbank.

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  In his squad car, we sat in silence near the sidewalk on Main Street. He idled the engine and set the heat at full blast, the blowers on our faces, and I wondered if he was trying to compose what he was going to say, or if his strategy was more fine-tuned, if in fact the silence was his way of trying to scare me, trying to get me to realize the gravity of the situation, the detriment of firecrackers. His breath was loud because he pushed it through his teeth. Aside from his gig as Officer Friendly, he patrolled the hockey games; I’d seen him standing by the entrance before the puck dropped, and once the action started he’d go up into the bleachers. His name tag said Belliveau. He looked my dad’s age.