Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  “Ah, c’mon Muley, how long is that gonna take?”

  “No, seriously, here’s this joke,” Muley said. “So this family down in one of the south patches has like nine kids and they won’t have another, ’cause they heard that one out of ten kids born in America is Mexican, and the mom and dad don’t speak Mexican.”

  “That ain’t no joke. My old man says Mexicans are taking away our jobs.” That was Rich, the old new kid.

  “There aren’t hardly any Mexicans in this town. No work for ’em.”

  “What about that one junior kid?”

  “He’s the exchange student from Korea somewhere. They don’t talk in Spanish over there.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing then, because we need our jobs, my dad says.” Rich’s dad always said things Rich then said to us.

  “My grandfather gets drunk and still talks about the Irish coming into this part of Ohio and taking jobs.” My other friend Tim said that. He’ll probably get on this bus too before long.

  “Your grandfather is some old crapper.”

  “Why’d you say that? You Irish?”

  “I don’t know. I was born in Pennsylvania. Am I?” Muley again.

  “There’s this joke I heard. ‘Part of me says I shouldn’t be drinking so much’ and the other part says ‘Don’t listen to that drunk.’”

  “I don’t get it. Why ain’t he drinking anymore?” Like I said, sometimes it’s funny when Muley doesn’t get stuff.

  “When’s that cut under your nose gonna heal, Muley?” And when Muley didn’t get something, Tim was already there like that.

  “What cut?”

  “He means your dumb mouth, Muley.”

  “Is that some kind of joke?”

  “No, just one of those things, like how come your dad eats cake with a spoon.”

  “Football practice and school is starting soon,” I said. It was on my mind the whole time. It felt like a Sunday night, not looking forward to Monday.

  “Senior year we gotta take physics class.” Rich again.

  “Is that the one with triangles and math?” Muley of course.

  “We got almost another month of summer.”

  “But August goes by faster than July.”

  It was sometimes fun on the bus to remember those kinds of afternoons. Like all kids, I had no idea if I was livin’ in the best of times or the worst, I just lived in the only time there was. We could go on and on like that, talking without saying much, enjoying being young and stupid and irresponsible, warm and happy in the warm brown river water. We were boys.

  We didn’t yet know about the broken places in life, the dark threads.

  I SAY LET the young men in other small Ohio towns dream of bright lights. We didn’t need a fortune teller. We knew growing up we were going to work in that factory. We said, “Graduate today, factory tomorrow.” Life was rich, fat, happy enough. Hard at the beginning when rough guys looked at you like a puppy who couldn’t stay off the couch, hot and full of swear words in between and at the other end you had a pension and on Thursdays free bus rides to the new Atlantic City casinos, box lunch provided. I thought that factory in Reeve where everyone’s dad, and grandpa, uncle, brother and cousin worked was drawn in ink but it turned out to be watercolor. When the factory died, I was a Telemarketer. Tire salesman, one McJob after another. Christmas help at the Higbee’s, Hill’s, Halle’s, Uncle Bill’s, Giant Tiger, Gold Circle, Lazarus, Clark’s department stores that have all since gone belly-up. The development that had been planned for Reeve, the one that was gonna bring in big retail stores and jobs for everyone, fizzled on some complicated six-way derivative financing deal, whatever the hell that even is, and so, long after they tore down the factory, the land stayed vacant.

  There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. Better than what happened at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, which famously made cannon balls for the North including Ohio during the Civil War, where they left the pig iron making furnace up like a tombstone. At least when a person died they’d close his eyes and throw a blanket over him. Here they just left everything. The last men to work in that plant were the ones who tore out its guts and disassembled the machines. Same as in Weirton, in West Virginia, where my cousin was from. The whole town was built around a single steel mill and when it closed, a good Midwest town died of old age. A local newspaper ran a feature story about one worker, Jack Brown, who made $24.65 an hour in 1982 at the mill and now was unsure if he’d ever find work again. We were once the American Dream, and now we’re just what happened to it. I think God owes us an apology.

  People said we’d seen this kind of change before. At the time of the American Revolution, we learned in school ninety-five percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. Now it was only two percent. Thing is that those farming jobs were replaced with industrialized jobs, at a ratio of better than one-to-one. Now, with the factory jobs gone and not coming back, rock bottom isn’t a destination but an expectation for us. This town used to employ thousands of people, families really, and when the manufacturing jobs went away and weren’t replaced they also took with them a way of life. A regime change. What is the purpose of towns that used to have a reason for being and now don’t anymore?

  A couple of years later things got started again in Reeve during what was then the latest recovery and turnaround and corner turned, and another group of investors moved off the scrap metal and paved the factory site, like a mercy killin’. They then ran out of money and pretty soon the place was home to only itinerant peddlers with velvet paintings and stolen car stereos selling out of the back of vans. A big sigh of relief when they broke ground later for something, what turned out to be only a shitty strip mall. Since nobody in Reeve had much money, the dreams of high-end stores that would take that money ended up being satisfied by some fast-food places, plus a couple of dollar stores run by Koreans who found their way to Reeve God knows how. When I was a kid grandma used to say “Satan can’t be everywhere, so he created liquor stores.” Amen to that, ’cause there was also a new state store selling LOTTERY LIQUOR CIGS, the three main food groups for us working poor, all the sadness of the town there in those three words (the Ohio state government kept a monopoly on hard liquor sales, they knew their people).

  There was also a club with blacked-out windows I’ll let on more about later. Plus we had a coffee shop, a little joke from someone who knew unemployed people needed a place to hang out during the day, especially after revenue cuts closed the Carnegie public library with its ivy beard I always liked. Smaller businesses happy to extract smaller amounts of money was our economic rebirth here in Reeve. The town still had its looks, to a point. Old habits die hard. When middle class folks fall out of the middle class, they still tend to keep things neat and see that the grass gets cut. But what was once maybe quaint was now just old.

  Riding the bus, I remembered that waiting—time—is the real currency of this new economy. The more money you got, the less you gotta wait. Priority lines, expedient fees, private jets for some, for me, waiting twenty minutes or forty minutes, you never know so better leave early, for a city bus to take you sometime somewhere. Pretty soon you’re out here in a parking lot waiting for work from someone with more money but less time than you.

  IT HAD RAINED again overnight, puddles rainbowed with oil. March now, which should have been an improvement over February, but in Ohio this year it wasn’t, the wet snow and cold rain leaving you thinking Bambi had killed spring or something. Some familiar faces in the parking lot, guys I sorta recognized from way back when I was in high school, maybe the football team, I can’t really say—picking out their faces was like tryin’ to spot tears in the rain now as an adult. Here they weren’t that way no more, a long way from tan and tight-muscled, instead slurry-eyed and tired, sort of hunched over aga
inst the cold day, the wind leaning on them. While we sometimes talked, it was about nothing much, safer that way, as you never knew what a guy was carrying around with him that you’d stir up. Some of the guys had already had a few drinks no matter how early it was, some had given up drinking and seemed worse for not having it, some had just plain given up, emptied bottles.

  “I need tres hombres, arriba,” said the man in the pickup.

  “We speak English brother. We’re Americans, too.”

  “Well, yens’ are dirty like Mexicans. Anyway, I’m looking for three today.”

  “What’cha got? Construction? Painting?”

  “Three of you wanna work, get in the back of the truck.”

  “What’re you payin’?”

  “I’m at $2.50 an hour.”

  “That ain’t minimum wage.”

  “Did I say $2.50? I meant two bucks an hour. Now, another of you smartasses got a problem, or you like being poor and standing in a parking lot?”

  I had had enough.

  “If none of us take his shitty $2.50, he’ll have to pay us better.”

  “Shut up, Earl. I’ll take your shittin’ $2.50 mister.”

  “Get in the truck, and watch your mouth if you want a job today. And I still am thinking about the $2.50. We’ll see how it works out, if you’re lazy or not.”

  “Get out of his truck. C’mon, man.”

  “You go to hell, Earl. I need this.”

  Two more looked at their feet a bit too long, and I knew we’d been broken. They climbed, silently, into the back of the pickup. The guy driving flipped me off and hit the gas, splashing puddle scum at me, now with another eight hours ’til dark.

  The next day we were all back in the lot. Hungry and angry walk pretty close to each other. Puts the bullies up front ’cause regular people stop caring.

  “To Hell with you, Earl, man, just to Hell with you. I should’ve pushed them assholes out and gotten in the truck myself yesterday.”

  “How much that guy end up paying you all yesterday?”

  “We only got the two bucks an hour thanks to your smartass mouth, Earl, but he kept us on for nine hours so we did okay. Bastard had us tearing out insulation, worked every last dollar outta us. We asked for a break and the jerkoff laughed at us, saying, ‘What, you in a union?’”

  “It sucked but, yeah Earl, you keep your mouth shut next time and we’ll at least get some work.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, you asshole. You was being used and you’re too dumb to even see it.”

  “Fuck you, Earl. Go find a job with the Koreans movin’ into town. Maybe they’ll let you clean up their crap for them.”

  I hadn’t hit anyone since junior year of high school, and that was just Muley one time when we got into a fight over some stupid football game neither of us remembered right. There was a lot of trash talk and some pushing and shoving in between long lulled pauses like we saw in movies. I swung at him and Muley poked me once alongside of my nose and we wrestled a bit. It didn’t hurt much more than when you eat ice cream too fast.

  This time it was sudden and rough. We were older, hungrier and colder, and there was a lot more on the table than us just calling each other names in the parking lot. The first guy swung sloppily, but caught the side of my head with the punch, and his class ring tore off a part of my scalp. I reached up to touch at the blood and he hit me solid in the nose, starting a finger-width flow of blood down my face. His friend slid in and connected twice on my gut, making me bend over with sour vomit in my mouth. I stood up, dizzy, and tried to put my hands in front of my face, but they all took a couple more shots until I tasted blood over the vomit, and one tooth felt too sharp against my tongue, like it was chipped. I spit up some onto the pavement and that seemed to satisfy them somehow ’cause they stopped hitting me. only ’cause of the bleeding did I know I was still alive.

  “Come here again messing with our work my friend, and you’re a dead man. We will freaking wreck your shit, Earl.”

  They might have been done with me, but they weren’t done.

  A random passerby.

  “Hey, you, you Korean bastard, c’mon over here.”

  “Yeah, you son-of-a-bitch, come here.”

  “Bastard is probably on his way to some job he took from one of us.”

  He came over, saying something in Korean. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on.

  “Hey slant, you take my job?”

  “Why are you even here, you fuck? Go home to Korea.”

  Language barrier or no language barrier, he figured what he had walked into. He said something else none of us could understand, and turned to leave.

  “Hey, you trying to run away? You don’t like us? Why don’t you like us, you foreign piece of shit?”

  “Look, he keeps trying to say something. Speak American you little fuck.”

  He was scared now. He kept jerking his head at me, I guess ’cause I was the one off to the side and not up in his face, but Christ, look at me. A weak “Leave him alone” was about all I was good for.

  “So he’s your pal now Earl? You two buddies? You two boyfriends, Earl, that why you’re on his side?”

  “You little gook shit. We should fuck you up.”

  He went down pretty hard under the first blows. I couldn’t tell if he was hit, or he just crumpled up figuring that was best. Then I saw he had some blood on his mouth, but what really hurt him were those two or three kicks while he was on the ground. One of the guys ripped off his coat by the sleeves and threw it aside. His backpack got tore open and we saw his school books splay out onto the pavement.

  “Shit, he’s just some school kid. He’s probably only in junior high or something.”

  “You asshole, we just beat the shit outta a little kid. Let’s get the fuck outta here before someone calls the fucking cops.”

  It wasn’t the kind of place where anybody would call the cops. Some of the Mexicans lined up also looking for work came over and helped the kid to his feet, and kind of shooed me away. Them Mexicans had been at the game longer and knew when to keep their distance. I just went back to where I was staying, which wasn’t far enough.

  MOST THINGS ON the bus were nicer, at least at first. I remembered what my dad would always say to his friend Stan when I was a kid:

  “So Stan, how come we never ran into each other when we was serving in Korea?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because I was in the Air Force and you was in the Army? I flew over the mud and you wallowed in it.”

  “You weren’t in the real Air Force, you were a navigator.”

  Stan and my dad had done this routine for years, with the ease and confidence of well-practiced behavior. Bob and Ray, Ralph and Alice, Cheech and Chong, Homer and Marge, whoever had been on TV since before I started being more entertained by the ghosts on this bus than the stuff on the screen. It always ended with Stan taking a fake jab at my dad. I guess when they were younger it was like a movie punch, but over the years it had faded into a gesture, more like a half-wave than even an act of pretend violence.

  When my dad would entertain us with stories from Korea, usually after a few of, but not all of, what he was drinking that evening, he could be a pretty funny guy. Always sat at the table in his t-shirt, a towel around his neck like he was thinking of sweating hard even at home. The Korean War was his big life experience, his only time outside the U.S. and up until that point pretty much the only non-wedding or funeral trip he’d ever made outside of Reeve. Join the service, he’d tell me, make a man of you, have some fun seeing the world. Best years of his life in Korea. Got blind drunk in Itaewon on black market booze. Ran into some hookers (he said when Mom went inside for another jar of lemonade) and had more fun than $20 should be allowed to buy. Won money in poker Tuesday, lost it all back on Thursday. R&R in Yokohama, too much to talk about with such a sensitive boy’s ears around. Didn’t fight hardly none at all, sat guard duty on some stupid hill for the whole war, never saw a North Korean, n
ever saw many Koreans out there on that hill at all except some damn beggar kids and their wrinkled up old mamas. “Wouldn’t want to touch them women, even for free,” he’d say, pausing, then, always to laughs, “or even if they’d a paid me.”

  He owned one suit, one pair of dress shoes and two watches, always wore the cheap stainless one, never took the gold one from his father out of the drawer except for those weddings and funerals. Said he was saving it, but he died, and I just pawned it. He was the boss at home. “This house is a democracy,” he’d say, “but I got 99 of the votes and your mother has the other one. You, son, got none, get used to that.” He’d talk about that factory where he worked like some people would talk about God because—along with football—they were all the same in Reeve and you’d no sooner curse one than be damned by them all. The factory took the tip of his left hand index finger by accident, and it was crooked and a mean red when he pointed. Mom always said he was a man of two faces. He had one for daytime, especially with a drink, and another one at night, more purple, especially with another drink. Sometimes his meanness was almost casual, and sometimes it was like a tough ass dog let off the leash.

  Me and Dad had not done a lot of talking, and as he got older the reasons for us not to talk fell away, though the habit of not talking stayed. I’d call home from wherever I was looking for work, and his way of answering the phone was to say, “Here’s your mom.”

  I remember one Saturday in a December when I was maybe ten or so. It snowed overnight, a Midwest blast of twelve or fourteen inches all within a couple of hours, shutting down the Twentieth Century in Reeve. Every kid poured outside that morning and we built huge snow forts, great walls to rival that one in China, and a street-wide snowball war erupted. With nothing on TV because we had no electricity, the dads came out to see what was going on, and before we knew it, had joined into the snowball throwing. There must have been twenty men and their sons out there hurling wet snow, except one. I remember running into the house, the snow melting off me while my mom yelled about the mess, me crying, begging my old man to come out. He just said, “No snowballs for me, seen enough snow in Korea to last forever,” and laid down on the couch. My mom shooed me back outside, looking over at Dad, saying he needed to rest more, even though he’d just got up. My tears came down either side of my nose and outside froze in place and I can almost still feel them pinching. Even after I caught one snowball right in the nose and started to bleed, I wouldn’t go home that day.