The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  I was sitting on a stack of crossties under the only tree in the rail yard, some thirty yards from the rows of tracks where Ron Wiegel and Hutch Wilson were building a line of cars for storage in the warehouse. Ron drove the switch engine, and Hutch served as his spotter, there to guide Ron in and make sure nobody walked between the cars. But he was taking a drag from his cigarette and looking out at the river, watching the university female rowing team sweat in the blue-green water beneath the bluffs on the other side. As soon as Hutch turned to see the man stuck there, he ran up to Ron waving his arms. He didn’t say anything, motioned for Ron to cut the engine and follow him around the side of the gondola. When Ron saw what he had done, he got on his walkie-talkie and stuttered out an emergency call.

  The man was in his late twenties, the youngest member of the crew. He had short, black hair, a square chin, and a wrestler’s build. He was a new guy I’d never said much to. All I remember about his name is Gary F. He must not have seen Ron pushing those cars up the tracks as fast as the engine would go, trying to get finished early so he could get off. He must have been headed past the tracks to the riverbank where I’d seen him take lunch before, a boiled egg and a thermos of soup. And he must have felt the steel’s touch during that tiny moment before it drove on through skin and everything else because he jumped a little, leaving his boots suspended two inches above the tracks.

  The male coupler entered the right side of his stomach and turned his body so that he faced the rear of the gondola Ron had rammed into him. The female entered the right side of his back, and they connected in the middle, somewhere near his liver. He didn’t scream or cry or fight mad to get loose like you would think. And he didn’t bleed except for a small amount on the couplers, darkening the steel. He just hung there with his eyeballs bulging, his teeth clamped down as if he was trying to lift the front end of a bus. If not for the swelling and shrinking of his chest, he could’ve been mistaken for dead.

  It didn’t take long for the clanging and banging of the yard to cease, leaving an unusual quietness that almost hurt my ears. All I could hear was the river flowing over riprap by the tracks and faint music coming from the Walkman hanging on Gary F’s belt.

  The other members of my switching crew soon left the shade of the warehouse, where I used to take lunch with them when I felt like hearing their wife jokes and stories, and gathered around the cars. Eight men wearing blue uniforms and hardhats, their gloves tucked in back pockets. Men I’d worked with for years, but didn’t know much about.

  Our foreman was the oldest. He wore a bandana under his hardhat and had a long, gray ponytail, had a problem with his voice cracking toward the end of sentences. It was a high squeal that sounded like an excited girl, and his words ran together. He quickly walked past Hutch and Ron, whose faces had grown pale, and put an arm on Gary F’s shoulder. “Can you say something, son? Can youmove?”

  Gary F didn’t speak or move.

  “I bet it got his spine,” said Archie Pedigo. He was middle-aged with an orange beard. The guys nicknamed him “C-clamp” because he never did anything.

  “He’s like a goddamn scarecrow that blinks,” said LeVan, a big guy who drove a motorcycle to work, the only member of our crew who’d been to prison.

  “It’s terrible, plain terrible,” said Ron.

  “I’m sorry,” Hutch said. “But how the hell didn’t he see it coming?”

  “Quit talking about him like he can’t hear you,” said the foreman. “This could be anyoneofus.”

  He reached out and turned off the Walkman, then gently pulled the earphones away and let them fall around Gary F’s neck. “Hang in there, son. Help’s on the way.”

  “Yeah, hang in there, man,” said some of the guys, giving one another looks of pain.

  The yardmaster, a fat dude who wore jeans held up by suspenders, puttered down the hill in a golf cart. He stepped out holding a first aid kit and looked at Gary F. He slung the kit to the tracks and said, “This won’t help him.” He glared at the foreman. “In all my years. Damn if I don’t have to watch every move your crew makes from now on. See what your horse assing’ll cause.”

  “We weren’t playing around,” said Ron. He leaned over and grabbed his knees.

  “He walked right between them,” said Hutch. “Who the hell?”

  “Tell it to the detectives,” the yardmaster said. Then he turned to Gary F, whose face was now covered with sweat that dropped to the dust. “What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t think he cansay,” said the foreman.

  “It got his spine,” said Pedigo.

  Ron disappeared around the corner of the warehouse.

  “We should get him off there,” said LeVan. “It’s about to make me crazy like I want to fight.”

  “Then walk away,” said the foreman, but LeVan just dropped his hardhat on the gravel and sat on it.

  I couldn’t do anything either but sit there and look at Gary F. I remembered seeing him a few weeks earlier in the parking lot one morning before our shift started. He rode up in a Volkswagen missing its front bumper. His wife drove and a boy with black hair sat in the backseat. Gary F got out and leaned into the back window. He puffed up his cheeks big with air, and the boy patted out the air and laughed. Gary F rubbed the boy’s head and then leaned in and kissed the woman. He walked up to me smiling and said, “Ready to get to it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me neither.” He watched the woman drive away. “But I don’t reckon we got much choice.”

  *

  It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive. It eased down the hill to a stop alongside the tracks. The paramedics paused for a second and looked at Gary F, then approached calmly while the yardmaster explained what had happened. One of the paramedics, a man with a ponytail who looked to be in his late thirties, about my age at the time, asked the yardmaster to give them some room then went to work cutting off Gary F’s uniform, sending strands of blue and white cotton floating to the gravel. Gary F’s chest was coated with thick curls, so pale every vein showed beneath the hair. The skin around the wound was such a dark shade of red it neared black.

  The other paramedic, an older man with part of a tattoo reaching out of his shirt sleeve, said, “Can you tell me your name?”

  When Gary F didn’t answer, the paramedic made a fist and rubbed his chest with his knuckles. When Gary F didn’t respond, the paramedic lifted his arm and let it slap against his thigh. Then he whispered something to the younger paramedic, slid an oxygen mask over Gary F.’s head and began to pump away on the bag.

  The younger paramedic checked Gary F’s blood pressure, then unstrapped the cuff and threw it across his shoulder. The paramedics spoke softly to each other again, and the younger went to the back of the ambulance and returned with a silver blanket and an IV bag. He sank a needle into Gary F’s arm and hung the bag from a loose bolt on the gondola. He draped the blanket over Gary F’s shoulders.

  He walked over to the yardmaster and led him away from the crowd. They stopped a few feet from me. “You should contact his next of kin and have them come down and see him before we radio LifeStar and pull those cars apart,” he told the yardmaster. “It’ll be a miracle if he lives more than a few minutes.”

  The yardmaster wiped a hand across his forehead and looked at the guys gathered around the gondolas. Many had stayed, but some had walked down to the river and stood along its bank, staring out at the shifting flow. He spotted me on the crossties for the first time. “Get off your ass, Atkins, and go call his wife. Can’t you see we’ve got an emergency here?”

  I didn’t see it as an emergency exactly, or a surprise, for that matter: We worked around tons of moving steel every day. I saw it as something else altogether, something much worse, a pressure behind my eyes I couldn’t quite explain.

  I climbed the hill and made my way to the main office, a block building in the parking lot beside an antenna tower. Hanging on a wall was a list of crew members’ names and phone num
bers. I found Gary F’s.

  I picked up the phone and dialed. A man answered. I asked for my wife. “Is it an emergency?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  When Cindy made it to the phone, I said, “It’s me.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said, out of breath. “They told me it was an emergency. I thought something happened to you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then why are you calling me? We’re in the middle of stocking a suite for the Chinese tourists, and I’m having hot flashes and some pain. It’s all I can do not to fall out. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s come back.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “You’ve been saying that for two years.”

  “Well, things can’t keep tumbling this direction forever. There’s got to be some relief up ahead.”

  “We need help. Just plain goddamn help,” she said. “Oprah Winfrey’s a bitch. You know how many letters I’ve sent her?” She took a deep breath. “Shit, the manager is coming. Look, I’ll probably be late tonight, so why don’t you go to the store on the way home. We’re out of toilet paper and milk and get me some sleeping pills and write some bills. Lord, if we have any money left.”

  After I hung up with her, I dialed Gary F’s number. A young woman answered, and I could hear a washing machine in the background. I pictured her dropping darks into the washer, the phone pinched between her chin and shoulder. “Is this Gary’s wife?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Who’s this?”

  “I work with him. There’s been an accident.”

  I heard the lid on the washing machine shut and her yell, “Drop it. Now.” The noise of the washing machine faded and she whispered, “Is he okay?”

  “They say you should get down here.”

  “Who’s they? What happened?”

  “You should just get down here. Bye.”

  I wasn’t too happy with the way I handled the call, but I don’t know what more I could’ve said. I had never been trained for such a thing and didn’t think it was right that I’d been the one chosen to do it.

  *

  I waited outside the office, watching the traffic on University Avenue and the college boys carrying backpacks up the steps of one of the fraternity houses across from the rail yard. They were laughing and slapping shoulders, unaware of me watching or what was happening down by the river.

  The summer before, all the fraternities on the street threw a back to school party. The Friday morning after, some of the guys found two boys huddled behind the office building in nothing but their underwear. One was handcuffed to the antenna tower, the other handcuffed around his waist so that his ear rested against the first boy’s neck. Their ankles were tied together with a pair of pantyhose. The guys got a good laugh out of it before finally cutting them free.

  I wasn’t there to see it because Cindy and I happened to be on vacation. I didn’t want any pity and had only told the foreman about Cindy because I had to miss some work to take her to the hospital for her surgery and then afterwards to stay at home and bring her water and pills and the TV Guide while she recovered. But he’d told the other guys and they decided to pitch in and buy us a trip to Myrtle Beach. After months of seeing Cindy weak and depressed with that same blank stare, having nightmares where she woke saying, “There’s a man in the closet!” so much different than I’d ever seen her, a vacation to the beach where we honeymooned ten years earlier seemed to be what we both needed.

  I bought Cindy a bikini imprinted with cherries, but she wouldn’t put it on. It wasn’t because of the scar (the bathing suit bottoms hid that) or because she felt fat (she was skinnier than ever) but because she said she didn’t feel like a woman. “I got these,” she said, grabbing her breasts. “But I’m nothing. Just some doll that shits and bleeds.”

  She wore one of my T-shirts that hung loose over her body and wouldn’t go down to the beach except at night after getting wasted on leftover pain pills and Corona all day. I finally quit trying to persuade her to do anything and joined in on the pills and beer and just lay around the hotel all day with the blinds shut, watching television in silence with her.

  On our last night there, I came out of the bathroom to find her on the balcony yelling at a group of college-age kids gathered on the beach volleyball court outside our room. There were three boys and three girls all wearing bathing suits and drinking beer from a cooler. The girls had one of the boys buried in the sand and his friends stood nearby. Cindy was angry, leaning against the wrought iron rail, the ocean wind blowing fierce against the T-shirt, asking them where her daughter was, where her daughter was.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about—she’d never had a daughter, or a son for that matter—and neither did the kids.

  The buried boy said, “Shut the fuck up, lady. A shark ate your daughter.”

  Before I could stop her, Cindy had climbed over the rail and was down in the sand, hunched over the boy. She didn’t say anything, just held one trembling finger an inch from his nose and stared down at him. The boy’s friends edged up behind her as if they were ready to tackle her. The girls stood nearby with their hands over their mouths. I’d never seen her so mad. I thought she might claw his face.

  I hurried down to the sand and pulled Cindy from the buried boy. She jerked away and took off down the dark beach. I looked at the boys and girls and said, “You have to forgive her. She’s been through some rough times.”

  “She’s a fucking loon,” said the boy in the sand and his friends laughed. One of them leaned down and poured a sip of beer in his mouth.

  “Come on now, guys,” I said. “Take it easy on her. She’s been cut all to hell.”

  “Been cut in the head,” said one of the girls.

  If I’d stayed there much longer, I think I would’ve killed them all or tried. I found my wife a half mile down the beach curled up crying behind a wooden umbrella box. “Can you make me feel the way I used to feel?” she said. “Can you try?”

  I crawled down in the sand and gave it my all, but I must not have done good enough because she cried through the whole thing, and after that night, she never asked the question again.

  *

  Gary F’s wife showed up driving the Volkswagen. The little boy sat on the passenger side, straining to look over the dash. She got out and helped the boy unbuckle. She was how I remembered her: young with fair mother skin, a good mother figure. The boy’s hair had grown some.

  He stepped out clutching a green water gun. “Choo-choos,” he said, looking around the yard.

  “Leave that in the car,” his mother said. She reached for the gun, but her eyes went to me and she grabbed his hand and dragged him across the parking lot. “I’m Gary’s wife,” she said. “Someone called me. I drove all the way here thinking the worst, but then I realized it could be anything. I realized it was probably something minor. Is he okay? Please tell me he’s okay. Are you the man who called?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know who that was, but I’ll show you where he is.”

  She started to follow me and then stopped. “Is he okay?” she said. “I have to know.”

  “I’m not any kind of expert on these things,” I said.

  “But for Christ’s sake, you know if somebody’s okay or not.”

  “I really don’t,” I said.

  She stared up at me, a bit frustrated but more scared than anything. She lifted her free hand, and for some reason, I reached out to grab it, thinking she was reaching for my hand, but then I realized that she was just swatting a gnat. I quickly put my hand to my cheek and wiped it, then led her toward the tracks, embarrassed.

  Looking back, I should’ve told her to wait by the office while I went and got the paramedic. I should have told her to leave the boy in the car. When we topped the hill, the boy broke free of her grip and ran down toward the ambulance. When Gary F’s wife saw her husband caught between the gondolas, her knees buckled and she let out a shriek that made everyon
e turn to look at her. I grabbed her arm to keep her from falling. The younger paramedic hurried to us. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why’s he hanging there and not at the hospital? Why is everybody standing around and not doing anything?”

  “We’re doing all we can, ma’am,” the paramedic said. “We wanted to give you a chance to talk to him.”

  “Help him!” she yelled.

  “We’re trying, but you need to speak to him while you can.”

  When he said that, the anger left her face and her body relaxed as the realization set in. Then she saw the boy down at the tracks, pointing his water gun at the guys and making like he was going to shoot them. “He shouldn’t be here,” the woman said, starting down the hill. “Jacob, get up here.”

  Hutch stepped away from the boy with a hand out, ready to block the stream of water. The foreman said, “Easy little fellow,”

  LeVan didn’t pay the boy any attention, just sat there on his hardhat, squinting at Gary F as if the sight were blinding. The other guys watched as the boy made his way laughing through the crowd to find himself standing before his father.

  By now Gary F was shivering. The older paramedic had removed the oxygen bag and wrapped his cut shirt around the couplers to hide the wound. If you didn’t know what happened or notice his boots suspended above the tracks, if you only glanced at him, you might think he was just standing there at the tracks about to give a speech to crowd, which is what the boy must have thought for a moment. “Daddy,” he said. He lifted the water gun and aimed it at his face. “You better run.”

  Then a frightened look washed over his face and he dropped the gun. He slowly began to back up with both hands out and was about to turn when his mother caught up to him. He grabbed one of her thighs and shuffled behind it.