Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

by J. R. Helton

“Right.”

  “Did you see that guy’s wife? That hair goes down past her butt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I told her I had a little boy too, an’ she started talking to me. Kids are great conversation starters. She’s a good-lookin’ lady.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Maybe her husband will leave and she’ll come over to the trailer. I’d like to bend her over a chair, grab that ponytail, and fuck the shit out of her. I bet she really likes to fuck. She smokes. A girl that smokes likes to fuck. Maybe I can get her to come give me a blow job or sit on my lap.”

  “Maybe.”

  Nobody fucked him, but later that day the Christian couple did sell some wood. They were down the road about twenty yards from Danny’s sign. People stopped by their truck often and bought small bundles of wood. The next day they had even more customers. Danny called me into the trailer from stacking wood.

  “Run ’em off,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?” He pointed to the couple at the road. “They’re taking away my business.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe I should sell little bundles of wood instead of these big cords. What do you think?”

  “Man, I don’t know.”

  “The math calculations I made on this wood will be all screwed up, though. . . .” He sat and thought. “I don’t know. Maybe I will sell little stacks . . . maybe—” The phone rang and we both jumped. “Go ahead and get rid of them.” He answered the phone: “Danny’s Grass and Wood.”

  I walked back out to the couple on the side of the road. I talked to them for a while. The little boy was standing up in their truck bed now, staring at me. I saw the truck was old and falling apart. I asked them how business was.

  “It’s going great,” the husband said. “This is a good location.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See, well, Danny said that a policeman stopped by here yesterday evening and told him there’s a law against people selling things this close to the road. It’s some county ordinance or something, but the police told Danny y’all need to move.”

  “We gotta leave?’ the husband asked.

  “Yeah, but the county ends about a mile or so from here. If you just move down the road a ways, it’d probably be all right.”

  “Does he want us to move right now?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Can we have a minute to load up?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We made a lot of money here yesterday,” the wife said.

  “You got some good wood.”

  “We both cut it together,” the wife said.

  I stood there. “Yep, it’s good wood. . . . Well, I gotta go back to work.”

  The husband told his son to get out and started loading up the truck bed. He nodded his head to me sincerely. “Thanks.”

  “All right.”

  I walked over to the trailer and went inside.

  “Well?” Danny said.

  “They’re going up the road.”

  “I hope they park in front of Smithville Grass and Wood. He’s trying to sell all that crappy wood. Okay, good, now go out there an’ load up the white truck with small pieces of wood. Pull it out there next to the highway and make a bunch of stacks of wood where they were.”

  “Okay.”

  “And put up a sign that says ‘Firewood for Sale.’ And put a fish on it. How much were they charging again?”

  “Fifteen bucks.”

  “Let’s charge twenty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get them as close to the road as you can.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have you eaten lunch yet?’

  “No.”

  “Let’s just skip lunch today.”

  “All right.” I started to leave the trailer and stopped. “Hey, I just remembered. Yesterday was payday.”

  “Was it?’

  “Yeah, what happened?”

  “Well, I forgot. Can’t people forget things?’

  “Yeah, but not my check.”

  “Listen, can I pay you tomorrow?”

  “I kinda need that money.”

  “I gotta make some deposits. If you wait one more day it sure would help me out. I don’t want to have to write you another hot check.”

  “All right.”

  I walked out of the trailer. Danny yelled after me: “Make those stacks three feet high!”

  * * *

  The weather turned warm again. It was November and eighty-eight degrees. Nobody bought the stacks of wood. Danny said he had another idea: used cars. He started leasing out the highway frontage to a salesman who said his name was Johnny Florida. Johnny had a large potbelly, long sideburns, and always wore huge mirrored sunglasses. Every day he wore the same brown slacks, a pink shirt, and a red-and-black Wind-breaker that said, “Red Adair Oil Well Firefighters” on the back. He drove a blue Trans-Am and wore a scraggly toupee that moved up off his scalp whenever the wind blew. The first day I met him, he was underneath the dashboard of an Impala turning back the odometer. He continued to reset the odometers on every car he had, and put the vehicles out by the highway where my little firewood stacks had been. Then he hired an unemployed electrician to sit inside Danny’s office trailer and wait for customers.

  The electrician brought a couple of joints to work every day, and we smoked them in the trailer while Johnny and Danny rode around in Johnny’s Trans-Am talking about how much money they were going to make. After about two weeks Johnny sold one car, and he and Danny immediately started arguing. Johnny was supposed to give him a commission on each sale, and now he didn’t want to cough it up. Danny got pissed and yelled about Johnny’s girlfriend calling the trailer all day and about how he’d advanced Johnny the first lease payment on the lot. He also said something about blowing Johnny’s head off. Johnny became nervous and paid him.

  Shortly afterward he made another sale. I was the only one on the lot. The electrician was gone. Johnny had never paid him, so he quit. Danny was off getting new business cards printed somewhere. He said a new card could turn things around. Johnny came into the trailer after the sale. He was happy.

  “Hot fuckin’ damn! Got another one. We’re rollin’ now, buddy.”

  “Great.”

  “Listen, I’m gonna give Danny his cut when I get back. I gotta go close a deal right now that’s gonna blow everybody’s socks off.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You know Barney Johnson?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Of Barney and Joe Johnson Ford?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “They want to front me ten practically new cars and maybe even finance me for my own lot.”

  “That’s great.”

  “It gets better. They’ve already given me a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars up front to make a purchase at auction at Round Rock this afternoon. I’m tellin’ ya, Barney Johnson loves me. We were both in Korea. He said he’s gonna make me some money, an’ I told the man he ain’t gonna be sorry. Now you just tell Danny—wait. When’s Danny gonna be back?”

  “I don’t know. He just called me on the mobile phone, but I couldn’t understand anything he said.”

  “That’s okay. Now, listen. Tell him I’m moving all of these piece-of-shit cars outta here. We got a whole new ball game. I’m gonna have a driver take these down to San Antonio an’ we’ll sell ’em in Mexico. He should be here any minute. I’m gonna take this ten thousand an’ go up to Round Rock an’ use it as a down payment. I’ll be back tomorrow with some real cars. Some pretty cars. Tell Danny these cars are gonna sell so quick his head’ll spin. An’ he’s gonna get a commission on each one. Okay, I gotta go.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll talk at ya.”

  “Okay.”

  He got in the Trans-Am and sped away. A large car-carrying truck did show up then and hauled away all the cars. When Danny returned, I repeated what Johnny had
told me. I also mentioned he’d sold a car.

  “Where’s the check? How much did he sell it for?”

  “I think three thousand, but he didn’t leave a check.”

  “Why not? Dammit, why didn’t you get one?”

  “Hey, man, he’s your pal.”

  “Shit. I’m gonna call him.”

  He punched some buttons on the office phone but just kept putting it on speaker and talking to himself. “Hello? Hello?” Finally he rang Johnny. No answer.

  “I’m gonna make him pay me the lease money now. Before he puts the other cars down.” He kept punching buttons. “Where is that bastard?”

  * * *

  The next day the Barney Johnson came into the trailer. He was a tall man in his late sixties with gray hair, a heavy black brow, and a permanent frown. He looked pissed and asked Danny and me if we’d seen Johnny Florida. Danny said no but that he wanted to find him too, because Johnny owed him a lot of money.

  “He owes me almost a thousand dollars,” Danny said.

  “Son,” Mr. Johnson said, “he’s into me for over ten thousand dollars now. He was supposed to meet my brother, Joe, in Round Rock yesterday, and he never showed up.”

  Mr. Johnson proceeded to ask Danny suspicious questions as if Danny was in on it with Johnny. Then Mr. Johnson asked me to tell him exactly, word for word, what Johnny had said to me. I told him everything, about how Johnny had come into the trailer bragging about the check, how he was going to buy some good cars, ship the others to San Antonio and Mexico, and that he said he was coming back.

  “Oh, he’ll come back,” Danny said. “He’s coming back.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Mr. Johnson said. Then, just before he walked out the door, he turned and said, “You know, I wondered about that loudmouth son-of-a-bitch. I did.” Then he left. Danny sat there with his fake jaw hanging open. He turned to me.

  “Don’t you have something to do? How come you’re always in here? Listen, I’ve got a wood order for you to take off. I know you can use that hand to prop shit up. Don’t tell me you can’t. When do you get that cast off?”

  “In a couple days.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  * * *

  Johnny never returned. It was fine with me. It turned cold, though, and that wasn’t too great. I started taking off cords of wood, delivering all over town for Danny. Most of the customers ignored me as I carried large, heavy armloads of firewood into their backyards, stacking up a cord. I wore leather gloves and a canvas Carhartt jacket to keep my arms and hands from being cut up. Each delivery could take more than forty-five minutes or longer, depending on how far I had to carry it. Some of the older retired men often watched me working and, bored or lonely, they told me of their lives as I hurriedly but neatly stacked each cord so it wouldn’t fall over. One old man told me he was a veteran of World War II, that he had been a German prisoner of war.

  “I was a paratrooper,” he said. “They dropped us on the wrong side of the Rhine, and we ended up fighting and got captured. I ran out of ammunition and got my throat cut by this German bastard.” He pointed to a half-inch-wide, ragged white line of skin that hung down like a necklace below his wrinkled face. “When their captain came, he was pissed that I was still alive. That soldier missed my arteries, so it looked bloody, it looked bad, but I was okay. They ended up having to take me back to a POW camp and stitch me up.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Once I got better, I escaped from the POW camp, got back across the Rhine, and found a British unit that rescued me.”

  “Wow. Jesus.” I finished stacking the last piece of firewood. “Okay, sir, that’ll be ninety dollars. . . .”

  I knew Danny was finally making some money. I usually had about seven or eight deliveries to make, but I could never get them all. Every night after work, I put the day’s checks in a zipper bag and locked them in a metal drawer in his desk, right next to his big bag of weed and a loaded .38 pistol. I always came in late at night and was very tired. I would sit there in the fold-out chair before my open trailer door, staring at all the cars driving past on 183, drinking a beer that was as cold as the air around it.

  Sometimes I thought of Susan. I even tried to call her one night at Martin’s house, but I got her mother, Betty Sue, on the phone instead. She told me that Susan had landed a job on Martin’s CBS pilot. She said Susan was only an intern for a week before they started paying her well. She also mentioned how much she liked the new house Susan and I had just started renting together in Travis Heights, which surprised me. She asked me where I was, what I was doing, and, “Now, why are you working out of town again?” I didn’t know what Susan had told her. Or if Betty Sue was just pretending, playing dumb, and giving me a chance. She told me she missed me but that Susan really missed me. I told her good-bye and hung up. I thought of Susan working on this TV pilot. I pictured her meeting all these new people, laughing, and having fun. Or I thought of her flirting with some emotive handsome smiling guy in her acting class, her hand on his knee, and could feel myself getting pissed. I shut the door, lay down on my cot, and watched the old TV in the corner of the trailer. It got three channels, four counting the UHF if I could tune it in. I was drinking the cheapest beer I could find, a twelve-pack of Buckhorn, and smoking Danny’s weed until I passed out.

  * * *

  I came in one night and saw that Danny had started to put up a chain-link fence in the shape of a square near the highway. The next day he told me to help him finish with the fence and then string up a bunch of lights in lines running from the top of the fence in zigzags, from side to side, hanging over the space below. When we finished, he hooked up the lights to a Honda generator. A semi came in then, loaded with Christmas trees, and me and the driver and Danny unloaded all of them and stacked them inside the fenced area.

  “I’m gonna sell Christmas trees,” Danny said. He gave me some address then and sent me out to deliver more wood.

  * * *

  I was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with oak logs into someone’s backyard one night, and I tripped. The wood flew out and hit the cord I’d already stacked and everything fell over. I decided to quit. I reached Danny’s Grass and Wood around eight, and I found Danny standing behind a stack of wood taking a piss, a cloud of steam rising from the wet ground.

  I walked up to him and took off my gloves. He began complimenting me on all the money I was bringing in now.

  “Yeah, that’s great. Listen, I quit.”

  He stared at me. “Well, that kind of leaves me high an’ dry, don’t it?”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah, but all these wood deliveries. You’re bringing in a lot of money. Maybe I could give you a little raise in a couple weeks. Twenty-five cents more an hour or something.”

  “No, I’m quitting.”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t go any higher.”

  “Forget it, man.”

  I started to walk to my trailer, and Danny ran up next to me. “Can’t you just give me some notice? Just two more weeks? Just stay till Christmas, man, an’ I’ll make it worth your while. I promise.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Come on. I’ll give you a Christmas bonus. A big one. I took all these orders from people, an’ I gotta deliver them now. Come on.”

  I thought about the bonus. “All right.”

  He heaped the wood orders on me then for two weeks, trying to cram them all in. Every night my hand was throbbing. I finally told him I was through, and that last day ended up being my longest. I had ten deliveries to make. Danny said he would have liked to help me but he had to stay there and sell Christmas trees. I started at six-thirty that morning and didn’t get back to the trailer until ten-thirty that night. I was extremely tired. At the last delivery I quit even stacking the wood. I just threw it in the guy’s backyard and left.

  I walked into the construction trailer. Danny was sitting down, an
d I handed him all the checks.

  “Oh good,” he said. “This is great.” He went through the checks while I stood there. The wind blew cold into the trailer. “Is this all of the checks?”

  “Yeah, that’s all of them.”

  “I guess you better get on the road then. I moved all of your shit out of the trailer. It’s sitting outside.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?”

  “My check.”

  “I pay you on Fridays. It’s Wednesday.”

  “Yeah, but it’s my last day.”

  Danny rose out of his chair and walked over to the table I was leaning against.

  “Well, I tell ya, when somebody quits me an’ leaves me inna bind, I usually like to make ’em wait for that check.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, I usually make ’em wait. You know, they can go pound sand if they don’t like it.”

  We stared at each other. I could feel my legs starting to shake. I looked away for something nearby to hit him with, but there was only the pumpkin scale, and he’d bolted it to the table. I saw then, out the door, all of the strings of white lightbulbs, moving in the wind, hanging over the Christmas trees. I decided to beg.

  “You’re really not gonna pay me?”

  He shrugged. “Times are tough.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Christmas.”

  He laughed. “So?”

  “So, I thought you were supposed to be a Christian an’ all that shit.”

  He stared at me for a good ten seconds. His pink scars were moving back and forth. “Well, shit,” he finally said. “Fine, that’s just fine. I’ll give you your check, but you know what, you’re lucky. I fired Pete yesterday and didn’t pay him at all. You’re lucky, man. You don’t know how lucky you are.” He took out his checkbook. “How much was it? One thirty-five?”

  “One fifty-five.”

  “Are you sure?’

  “I’m positive.”

  “Fine, whatever.” He wrote the check and handed it to me. “Here.”

  “I guess I’m not getting the bonus,” I said.

  “I guess not.”

  I looked at the piece of paper. “Is this check good?’

  “Hell, yeah, it’s good.”

  I folded up the check, put it in my pocket, and walked out of the trailer. I picked up my bag of clothes off the metal steps, and Danny followed me.