Ghosts of Tom Joad

by Peter Van Buren

  “What concerns me deeper is the effect this is having on people not working—or working at deskilled jobs. For things to be better, you have to be able to wake yourself up, swap yesterday for a another shot at tomorrow, and too many of us stopped being capable of that. We broke down. Like bending metal, you can never get it back to its original state. You lose your resistance to sorrow. Work earns you money, but a job creates some value in yourself. Jesus said on the Mount, ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its savor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything.’ Some chance to feel you contributed, made something, did something, accomplished something, however small and likely unimportant, that’s inside us. I’m a preacher and so I’ll call it a soul. That was taken away. Without a soul, that salt, there is no hope, no redemption. You don’t just scroll to the bottom and click accept. Work saved more souls than most preachers.”

  MEN WOULD COME and go from the shelter. Most were passing through the area, looking for work or too crazy to know where they were, but feeling better because they were moving. Casey would take them all in. When we talked all together, usually only when Casey was there to kinda supervise things, it was like we were those Christmas ghosts, asking each other who we used to be when we were still alive.

  “So what’d you do before you ended up homeless?” asked Casey of one.

  “Used to be a machinist at the Stolle aluminum stamping plant.”

  “Never heard of it. Not from around here then? Where you from?”

  “Well, most recently I guess, from McAlester.”

  “Long trip?”

  “You could say that, Preacher. Took me four years, minus 28 days good behavior to get here.”

  “I understand, brother. If you don’t mind me askin’ …”

  “I’m used to it, no mind, especially from a preacher. After I lost my job I got caught selling weed. That’s all that people in my town was ready to buy. Family had to eat is why.”

  “And your family?”

  “Aw, Preacher, I guess it was God’s will that they had to leave me. While I was inside, the bank closed our account, sayin’ they had a policy of not conducting business with felons, or I guess, felons’ wives. Insurance company, too. Both were big companies you know, name brands even.”

  “I’m sorry man.”

  “It’s okay. My wife got her old name back in the divorce so she was marked to do business again. She said when I get back on my feet I can probably see the kids, so it’ll be alright, with the God’s help I’m hoping to become worthy enough to receive.”

  “What about you, brother?” asked Casey.

  “Me, came back from overseas. I tried to kill myself in the garage. I almost did to myself what the terrorists couldn’t, but my fiancée talked me into takin’ the gun outta my mouth. I never forgave her. So I left.”

  “What happened to that hand?”

  “I left it on a street in Basra. IED. Fucking squid corpsman saved my life, stopped the bleeding right there in the dust, screaming like some nut case, ‘Fuck you God, you ain’t gonna get this one, this is my Marine.’ The Corps gave me this robo-hand, works pretty good for most things, but then again, I can’t feel my daughter’s hair with it—”

  “And you can’t jack off with it neither, so stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Fuck off man, I do okay. Thing is, when I go for a job people either stare at me, or they freaking won’t look at me.”

  “Yo, I was in Iraq too, Preacher, but my job was to build shit for those people, schools and houses, so they’d like us. Freakin’ hearts and minds, same as in Vietnam movies. But now I’m home and seeing my home town looking like Fallujah. I wanna ask every fucking politician for everything we built in the sandbox, build two here at home. For every one of us soldiers, hire the same number of people here to work, at the same pay and the same benefits. When the politician says we can’t pay for that, I wanna tell ’em to pay for it exactly the same way they paid for it when it was happening overseas. When they say we had to spend the money over there to defend America, I’ll say that a job for me in America defends America better than any killing does—unless we just fucking start putting rounds into the unemployed.”

  “Ask the bastards,” said Casey, “where they got the four trillion dollars for the bailouts of 2008 and 2009, and how many new jobs that didn’t create, and why banks that spent more money on lobbying got more bailout money. And about how that home mortgage thing represented years of middle class gains sucked upward, a massive redistribution of wealth.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Me, over here, Preacher. I was one of those mortgages. See, I was a computer programmer. I made good money, riding the boom up. I had a nice house, too, one of those new big ones, with a soaking tub and rain shower. Then my salary was cut, then my hours, then I was told to work from home, then my job moved to Bangalore. Bank took the house. It isn’t fair. I always voted for the candidate that promised lower taxes for business to create jobs. I did what I was supposed to do, right? Now I see all that stuff on Fox about how great it is here and think I woke up in the wrong country.”

  “Okay, there it is. Now you white people are starting to feel our pain. Good for you suckers.”

  “Yeah, you wait brother, in a year or two this pain will all be suburbanized. Your turn is comin’ rich boys.”

  “Hell yes. Look around. Once upon a time them check cashing places and payday loans, they was only in the inner city, fucking slums and ghettos, man. Now they’re out here. How’d that happen?”

  “You are all pathetic man. Look at you. All you white dudes. I’m unemployed and homeless and freaking black, so stop your bitching. You all gonna have jobs someday, and I’ll still be here living in this preacher’s damn basement.”

  “You right man. That’s how it always was, how it is, and how it’s gonna be. We are still on the plantation as far as most are concerned. You tell them dumb white fucks.”

  “You all—we all—are niggers.”

  “You watch that shit—you callin’ us white guys niggers now?”

  “Now? We’ve all been America’s niggers for a long time. Some of us black guys just knew it sooner.”

  The room was hot. We weren’t supposed to talk about race. We didn’t know how to, anyways. Casey stood up. He had that look, the one where he knows what he’s gonna say even if you don’t have a clue what’s the right thing to do. He’d been here before.

  “What you say has a lot of truth,” Casey began.

  “Blacks are unemployed almost twice the rate of whites. Black men go to prison at higher rates, die of gunshot wounds at higher rates. It’s a sad legacy. But you are holding the shittier tip of the same shitty stick. Before we all got told we were white, a lot of people in this town hated the Polacks, or the Hunkies, the Jews or the Wops. It did us no good. Way back, the bosses used the new Irish immigrants to break strikes, keeping them separate from the rest of the town and playing off Catholic-Protestant prejudices the immigrants had packed in their trunks alongside their Bibles. It’s an old trick. Works nearly every time, too.”

  “Look, until we understand at a gut level we are all in this together, if we keep thinking black and white and never see the whole 99 percent of us are dirty gray, we’ll never get anywhere. We need to think leveling up, not leveling down to create an economy, hell, a society, that is sustainable. That’s the word—sustainable—because what we are doing now is gonna kill us all.”

  THERE WAS ONE guy, younger than me, spent a few weeks at the shelter. He helped out, but didn’t say much. In that kind of place, you don’t ask because you don’t know what a man is carrying with him. Some might have guns or knives, some might be carrying something far more deadly inside their head. A lot of them were just angry, and angry often turned to mean. There was a whole industry out there now that fed them and fed off them, hours of talk radio picking up and then handing back to them their anger turned to cynicism, of course with commercials.

/>   Casey remembered to me on the bus:

  “I was probably the only one who knew his name, and only because I asked him when we first met and he was being polite, hoping for a space at the shelter. I never had any reason to use his name, however. Never needed to call him. We’d eat and he’d clean on his own, he’d be up and outside raking leaves or shoveling snow without me asking, disappear during the day and back in his rack at night. Quiet isn’t bad the way we lived. Then we all heard the noise that night, metal on metal, some grinding, a squeal. You were there, Earl, looking more surprised than the rest of us, I guess because you were closer to it. That damn garbage disposal had never worked right. But that night it died, ground itself to death. I’d had a replacement waiting on Judgment Day for a long time but no money in the kitty to pay for a plumber.”

  “I can fix that.”

  “It was that guy,” Casey said. “After the loud noise, his quiet voice.

  “I used to be a plumber. I can fix that thing. I’ve done it a million times, In-Sink-Erator Pro SS. Still made in the U.S. even. Nice stainless steel grinding chamber.”

  “He wasn’t ‘that guy’ anymore; he had a name, he was the Plumber now,” Casey said. “I watched him poking around inside the old disposal unit, curious what took it to its death. Just as I thought the moment required a final prayer, he was set on an autopsy. He pulled out hunks of wet paper, old letters maybe, a postcard. I was angry at all you men, demanding to know who the hell was stupid enough to throw paper down the kitchen disposal? None of you had the courage to admit to it. I was mad. I pulled those little bits and scraps out, spent half the evening spreading them on the table like a jigsaw puzzle looking for clues. But most of the writing was smeared to the point where it was impossible to read. The most I got was part of a postcard, one of those ten-for-a-dollar kind tourists buy in Times Square.”

  “After that the Plumber did odd jobs around the area, getting some work before he moved on. I did not see him again. Good man though, smart enough not to throw away an old postcard that read GREETINGS FROM NEW YORK with half a signature saying ‘Ang’ or something.”

  Seeing the Devil

  JUST CASEY AND me on the bus, plus that creepy ass Korean kid I call Tom. Getting a little darker outside, a little colder too. Still kind of pretty, that last bit of orangey-pink time of day. Even dusty windows have a purpose I guess, making sunsets look better.

  “You still running the shelter Casey?”

  “Have to. I’ve got more and more people coming in. I hear it nearly every day, ‘We used to donate to you.’ Now they’re asking for help. The worst thing to do is nothing, so I do what I can.”

  “How you mean, Casey?”

  “See, the thing is, I’m beginning to think we’re distracted. The big issues in every election now are gay marriage, guns and abortion. Now I’m not sayin’ rights aren’t important, they are, but most politicians seem to just be saying things about those issues to stir up a crowd, and alienate one group from another. It’s almost as if they want us to be preoccupied with some things that don’t affect their profit margins to the exclusion of others that do, like the ancient Roman bread and circuses.”

  “Mention a word about raising the minimum wage to a living wage and either no one seems to care, or worse, you’ll be blasted by pols and business owners on all sides of the other issues calling workers lazy, like they are undeserving, when they are the casualties of a war.”

  “We need to think about the society we live in. Inequality undermines people’s faith, in government, in the economy, in each other. You start thinking justice comes only to those that can buy it. When you realize the system isn’t fair, ain’t meant to be fair, that the company owes you nothing, then you begin to owe them nothing, the cruelty of ambivalence. CEOs get bonuses because profits go up, whether they helped that to happen or not. Workers lose their jobs when profits go down, whether they caused that or not. Nobody caring about nothing is where it ends, or ends up. Without something to hold us together, things can’t work for long. No one ever washed a rental car.”

  “But how do you know who to trust, Casey? My dad trusted the factory. I wanted to trust my dad, my coaches, and every one of ’em left me.”

  “Dammit Earl, it isn’t about trust. Trust is a magic fairy dust way to try and easily resolve a really hard problem. Instead of asking you to trust me or trust each other, I want you to see what you have in common, what you share, and then have you build and organize around that. You know you all want a job, want a home, want that self-respect. You share that, and that’s enough for you to work together. It may not work at first, but that’s a piss-poor reason not to try. Not so many people need us anymore, but we need us.”

  “More than that, I’m thinking I may not be alone in this. I understand now the difference between wanting something to end and working to end it. I’ve been reading about these Occupy people. Reeve is a bit far off the path for anything like that, but I met a union guy in the Bullseye parking lot. He’d been beaten up pretty bad by some men who hung around looking for day work, but as soon as he’s healed, he’s heading back out. Maybe you know now why he stands there in the rain. There are so many of us, and it favors the few at the very top to keep us apart. Workers starving quietly isn’t news, so we need to make some noise, and we make more noise when we speak together. People ask me about politics, but I really don’t pay much attention. It ain’t about left or right anymore, it’s about up and down. Where did the 99 percent come from? We were always here, in Reeve, Ohio.”

  “So if you see a group standing up for themselves, look for me, because I’ll be there. If you see a cop beating a man, or a kid crying because she’s hungry, I’ll be there. It was another preacher who said ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ That isn’t going to be me. I’ll be there.”

  Casey paused, almost out of breath. It was dark outside now, even the day itself seeming to want to rest. I could see Casey was getting up to leave. All the negatives, all the cussing and contradictions, simply made Casey less of a saint, and more of a flawed human being tryin’ to find a way out of a mess he’d only recently been able to even see. I knew I’d miss him then forever.

  Casey looked out the window, then turned eye to eye with me. Serious now.

  “So what’ll you need, Earl?

  “For what?”

  “To move on, to get off this bus?”

  “Casey, you was always the one with the answers. Jesus, you tell me.”

  “Not my place to tell, Earl. Like God needs the Devil, you gotta wrestle it yourself. Time for you to go back to work, little brother.”

  THE BUS STOPPED, harder this time, the brakes metal on metal like that old trash disposal back at the shelter I’d messed up with that post card.

  First on was my mom.

  Right behind her, my old man climbed up, still wearing his work clothes. I think he just slept in them, even now that he was dead. I never knew a man who had so many pairs of pants all the same, so many work shirts, all the same, like some Rain Man who can’t stop doing the same thing over and over. I didn’t smell alcohol on him, and his eyes were clear. He looked at me, meeting my own eyes for the first time since, hell, I don’t know, maybe when I was a lamb in the third grade Christmas pageant and my mom made him dress up with that stupid clip-on tie. Who my dad was wasn’t my choice. Not loving him was. And so if his story now was gonna be a confession, so is mine.

  It was getting late on the bus. Who the hell knows how or why he was on it. I was not interested in what I expected was gonna be a “best days behind us, best days still in front of us” talk from a dead man, when all I wanted to do is get this day over with and get off this damn bus.

  I was stronger than my dad when he passed, the weight almost magically transferred from him to me as he aged over the years. A part of me still wanted him to put his arms around me, hoping I could feel his strength, but I held back, knowing it was gone and not needing another reminder of
that. I only saw that strength when I was younger, and then only in his anger and bitterness and the mean kind of sadness he got all over him when drinking. I remembered me and Mom would start playing a board game, and then Dad came home from work and we somehow had to stop. Or when he promised to help work on a school project, then ended up asleep on the couch instead. When your old man’s dying, those are the things you want to talk about, but we was quiet.

  Christ did time pass. I remember how near the end he got to climbing out of the car like it was a space capsule, the biggest part of the day was sorting out his pills for the week. Even after he died, frail, pathetic, comic, gimpy after a third stroke, I had no interest in the tears that didn’t come anyway. Medicine kept him alive, but my old man died old in the strictest sense of that word.

  Mom made me go through his clothes and things, saying maybe there was something I could use, and I followed her request out of habit more than respect. I wanted him to leave me something, give me stories to carry home—but there was nothing. I thought hard thoughts that day. I was alone in their bedroom, maybe for the first time in my life. I remembered being there with my friends when I was nine years old, delicately handling grandpa’s gold watch. With Dad passed, I handled his things with contempt, but worried at the same time that as much as I cursed the image in the old glossy photos, I could not deny the reflection.

  My mom started talking first. Every time she said my name now it sounded like she was crying:

  “Earl, sweetheart, you know your Dad and me tried for you. Life turned hard. We tried not to complain about it. We didn’t know what to tell you, so we said what we’d been told, to study hard, work hard, try hard—we knew hard. Your daddy loved you Earl, he wanted to see you grow up right, he thought the world of you, but we thought you wouldn’t understand, maybe until you was older, so—”