Slice

STOBAUGH COUNTY

“Sumbitch ain't gonna make it, workin’ that fast."

“I give him three hours,” the wife, who was “slow,” said.

He worked from nine-thirty to four-thirty without a break. Seven straight hours unloading treated timbers as fast as he could. For the first four hours he was lightning-fast, pulling them from the big truck bed as fast as he could touch them. Then he'd grab a timber in each huge paw and waddled over to the slowly escalating stack he was making alongside the building. At the end of four hours he had a large, neat stack of timbers. He'd offloaded more landscape timbers in four hours single-handedly than a two-man crew could handle in a full eight-hour day. He'd lost an enormous amount of water and was replacing it too quickly, drinking too much water from a nearby garden hose.

“Fucker ain't gonna’ last much longer,” the man said. The slow woman only shook her head in disdain. They had been sitting there on the porch watching him for four hours straight, as if he were a television game show. Fascinated. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. The man got up and stretched. “Ah'm gonna sack out awhile. Fuck it,” he said, and went in, the screen door slamming. The slow wife said nothing but continued to sit on the rump-sprung chair watching the big man from the porch.

The water intake hit him hard. He felt a terrible rush come across him. Vaguely like the red tide that would wash over him and make him do the bad things, but he figured this one was maybe heatstroke or blood pressure. Either way, he thought, I work. He wet a bandanna and tied it around his neck, put on his floppy boonie-rat hat, and slowly went back to work.

He could feel the heat had sapped him. He could no longer pick up a landscape timber in one hand. His fingers would let it go. When he dropped one on his foot he quit trying. But he stayed with it, working slowly, methodically, using both hands to pick up each timber, walking slower now, feeling a little twinge in his back as he set the heavy timbers down on the stack, which was taller and wider than a pair of double beds.

About three-thirty the man came out, yawning. He looked over and said, “Shit. Still at it.” He walked down the rickety steps and across the junk-strewn yard. “Hey,” he called out aimlessly. Chaingang may have tilted his head slightly but he said nothing. “Y’ better ease up ‘air, hoss.” His tone was jovial.

Chaingang grunted and kept working. The man disappeared back into the house, taking the woman with him this time. After another hour or so Chaingang finished.

He was hurting in his back a little, but not too bad. He'd worn a large hole in one of the work gloves. His ankle was sore as always. He had a headache. He was having a little trouble breathing. Just tired more than anything. He went into the sharecropper's shack and drank a little more water from the jug. Hopped down on the mound of blankets and was snoring immediately, fully dressed, filthy dirty, and sweat-soaked. Dead to the world at a quarter to five in the evening.

Sissy had been out in their “back yard” looking at all the sights. There were ducks, two kinds. Turkeys. Pea fowls. Peacocks strutting around. Dogs. Cats. It was something. All the junk fascinated her as much as the animals. She came in and was surprised to find Daniel sound asleep on the blankets. She didn't know what to do next so she went back outside and watched the ducks and turkeys and peacocks and junk until dark. And then she came in and lay down by the snoring mound that was her new mentor.

The next day Chaingang did no work. He couldn't. He could not get off the blankets on the floor, much as he tried. His back felt like it was broken. He had dreamed about this, that two of the blacks in D had taken baseball bats to him and he wondered if his kidneys were bad. He could not get up to piss, so he rolled over and urinated out the door.

Then he saw his ankles. Both ankles were swollen. His right ankle, the bad one, was the size of a large grapefruit. He knew there would be no point in continuing this sort of work as long as his weight was so great. The building process might cripple his weak ankles. He'd forgotten what it would be like to carry all that weight on top of his own. He had to be able to walk. This wouldn't get it.

He was finally able to roll into a sitting position, and he pulled himself up by the strength of his upper torso. Using a broken wooden chair for a kind of walker, he hobbled outside with his big fighting bowie, moving toward the ditch that ran through the middle of the property. On the way he cut himself a huge crutch from an oak tree, and he limped through the field of weeds in the direction of the running water.

He removed his clothes and immersed himself in the ditch, which was ice-cold and muddy brown. It felt so good to let his weight push his sore feet and ankles down into the cool mud. He stood motionless for a long time. Then he washed his clothes in the cold water and, pulling himself out with the aid of a nearby, overhanging tree, managed to get back on the bank. He soaped himself thoroughly and went back into the water, washing himself as best he could. His enormous pants and shirt dried like blankets in the nearby willow limbs. The sun was hot and he came back out and sat naked on the bank, thinking of nothing, trying not to feel the pain and soreness and the aches in muscles he'd forgotten he had. He stayed there on the bank through the noon hour when he went back to fetch Sissy.

“Come on,” he told her. It was only the second thing he'd said to her in two days and it was enough to make her smile and start a flood of pent-up commentary about everything she'd done or seen or thought during the last forty-eight hours. He heard not a word of it as they walked toward the hidden vehicle, back through the overgrown fields bordering the junkyard.

“...and he says they're called coots, those little black ones, you know, or mud coots, somethin’ like that, and they'd come up...” And then they were in the car and moving toward town. Sissy was happy again, and her soft stream of chatter was like playing a radio low in the background.

The first stop was at a medium-sized grocery store in a small would-be shopping center that had a laundromat, a Radio Shack, a video store that was apparently out of business, and a Western Auto. Chaingang went in to get them their lunch. He came out with a can of V-8 juice that he'd paid for, and pockets full of apples, a package of cold meat, and a tomato, which he plucked out of a sealed package. Nobody could shoplift like Daniel. While the clerk was ringing up the V-8 he dropped some mints into a voluminous pocket. He had plenty of money, but he always stole on principle.

He got in the car and handed Sissy her apple. “Here's your lunch."

“Thanks,” she said. “Is this all we're gonna eat?” She wasn't complaining. Just asking.

“Yeah. You need to lose weight for your modeling. Tonight you'll fix the meat, some greens, and tomato.” He had their menu all planned out.

“You know,” she said, telling him for the tenth time, “you're the only guy I've ever known who didn't think I was too thin."

“Ummm,” he grunted as he drove across the expanse of parking lot toward the Western Auto store.

“I went to this one doctor, ya know, and I was getting a physical and he was you know going on about how I was too skinny and all and...” She was so pleased that this man who had actually had professional experience producing model layouts would be truthful with her. She had always suspected she was too heavy for high fashion work, and even though she hardly ate anything she just couldn't lose weight. Chaingang, the ultimate mind-manipulator, had instinctively played to her most secret fear. That she was FAT! A borderline anorexia victim, Sissy could sometimes stand in front of a mirror and look right at those protruding, skeletonlike pelvic bones and see only disgusting bulk. He heard her singsong little-girl voice say with great earnestness, “And I sure do like for ya to be honest like that with me,” and she touched him.

He was turning off the ignition when he felt the little bony hand reach over and rest on his leg, and she almost bought it right then and there. Some miracle stopped that steel shotput from crashing out and stilling her simple brain. He loathed being touched by anyone when he wasn't expecting it and he almost took her down as an involuntary reflex, but somehow he caught his reaction in time. All she saw was a little tremor like a flinch as he slid out of the vehicle, the springs creaking in relief as he removed his bulk from the car. She thought to herself, Interesting, and knew then that they would have something between them.

He went inside and a jovial, redneck clerk boomed out, “Hot enough for ya?” which Chaingang ignored as he searched the row of merchandise.

“Whatcha looking for there, Tiny? Can I help you?” The man had no earthly idea how close he was right at that second to shuffling off his mortal coil. For some reason Bunkowski's huge bulk evoked that sort of a response in a certain-type person. People who worked in hardware stores, gas stations, tire retailers—they weren't used to seeing a 6-foot-7-inch 460-pound man waddling though their aisles. It upset them, put them off their feed a little, these certain jolly types, and they “kidded” him sometimes to help smooth over their surprise. Some he didn't even hear. Others he ignored. Once in a while he would go over and hurt them in some way. Something would fall on the person. An accident. A can of paint would drop on their foot. Or he would shoplift an unusually large amount right in front of them in silent revenge.

“Where's the whipsickles?"

“Where's the Popsicles? Haven't you et lunch yet?"

“Whipsickles? Weed slingers?” Chaingang beamed. It was his most dangerous smile.

“Right over here,” the man said, sensing something and backing off a notch. But it was too late. As Bunkowski walked past him, filling the aisle with his massive body he “brushed up against the man and lost his balance,” as he said later, and 460 pounds came down viciously on the clerk's arch and the man let out a bloodcurdling scream, “AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR."

“OHHHHH” Daniel echoed as if he too were hurt and out of control, pushing against the man as he threw his poundage into the witty clerk, who slammed backward into a cascade of about four hundred cans of aerosol paint spray, and then Daniel let himself fall, just so, slapping the hard floor just as he timed the fall, and screaming, “Oh, my back,” surreptitiously pocketing something, then getting up limping.

There were apologies all around. Daniel wished he could help the clerk pick up all the paint cans. If he only had more time. Outside, Sissy had heard the screaming and racket and was peering intently trying to see what was going on inside the store. Chaingang said he wanted to leave a tip for the accident, and he left a ten-dollar bill on the counter. The weed slinger was $8.49. SPECIAL! He couldn't wait for the man to ring it up.

He tossed the tool into the back seat and drove out of the shopping center. He drove a couple of blocks and pulled over to a garbage can behind a café, where he took the money from the clerk's wallet. It was only twenty-six dollars but it pleased Chaingang greatly. He found nothing else of interest and threw the wallet and cards away. It would be hours before the clerk realized he'd lost his billfold, and he would never connect the two events.

“Ask that man where a welder is,” he told Sissy, interrupting her accounting of how she'd thought he'd “got into a big fight with that guy inside the store."

“Where's a welder?” she shouted out the window in a high, birdlike voice.

“Heh?” a moron said, walking over and looking in the window to hear better.

“Where can we find a welder?"

“A welder?” he repeated, looking at Bunkowski. Daniel had noticed that everyone around these parts had the habit of treating ordinary English words as if they were astonishing surprises. He was pleased by his choice of locations for a “fat farm,” as surely this part of the country could lay claim to some of the most obtuse, moronic, and vapid imbeciles he'd ever encountered. And the stupider the human, the less the possible threat to him.

“Somebody who can weld? A welder? Do you know of a welder around here? Somebody who does welding?” To weld. Transitive verb. To allow metallic parts to flow together; to unite by heating, or by hammering, or by compression without heating, or compression with heating; to anneal, strengthen, toughen; TO WELD, yes. Do you speak English? Even as a third language?

“Oh, yeah. You want a BLACKSMITH. Oh, well—yeah.” The moron ruminated, his face lighting up like a neon sign as he chewed over this dramatic, earth-shaking turn of events. “Uh. Hemphill's done retired. He was the blacksmith hereabouts."

“Do you know of anyone else around here who can w—can do blacksmith work?” Chaingang smiled his most dangerous killer-gargantuan grin.

“Um. Herb Cannell might can. He's over acrost from the bank catty-corner."

“Thanks."

“Go ta the second stop sign an’ hang ya a left and go—"

“Thanks,” he muttered in a foul-tempered rumble. He didn't hear the last of the directions, as he was halfway there by the time the man finished.

He pulled up in front of Cannell's Repair and went in. A man was talking to someone on the phone and he hung up in what appeared to be a rage and snarled at Chaingang, “Yeah?"

“People say you're the best welder in four states. They say you charge the fairest prices and that you're the most expert welder in this part of the country.” He looked at the man with his most trustworthy and genuine smile.

“Um. Well, I reckon that there is true. Leastways about the fair prices. ‘Course NOT EVERY GOD-DAMMNED BODY THINKS SO."

“Well, personally, I'd be PROUD to have ya do a piece of welding for me—if ya was of a mind to.” Chain beamed.

“Yeah. Well.” He, took his glasses out of his pocket, calming visibly, and walked over to the huge man. “Whatcha need welded?"

“I want this reinforced.” He held the cheap whipsickle up in front of the man's face. “Here,” he said, touching it, “and all along in here. Could that be done?"

“I suppose it could, but why in the hell would ya WANT to?” The very idea offended him.

“Good point. Because they don't make things worth a damn anymore. Sloppy workmanship. Lack of care. Inattention to detail. A craftsman—somebody like YOU—is a genuine rarity today.” He pronounced it gin-u-wine, which he thought gave it a nice touch.

“That's for goddamn sure."

“I'm TIRED of goin’ out in the fields and workin’ and the least li'l bit of heavy-duty usage and the daggone whipsickle blade busts, or the shaft snaps ... I'm tired of it."

“You can't BUY a damn tool anymore."

“It's the damnedest thing,” Chaingang agreed, speaking the words in the man's exact speech cadence as he shook his head. The two of them stood there, shaking their heads at the sorry state of affairs.

“Feller could run a brass strip along here. Not just an ordinary piece of shim.” He took the whipsickle out of Daniel's hands and walked away, talking to himself. “I gotta brass strap here someplace that might work...” Ten minutes later Chaingang was standing outside the shop watching the white-hot blade cooling blue and then red as the new brass-reinforced weed slinger cooled in the water.

“How much?"

“Two dollars be about right?"

“Right as rain.” He smiled, handing over some sweaty ones.

The man pulled it out of the cooling trough and gingerly touched the blade to see if it could be handled. He gave it to Chaingang.

“NOW bust ‘er."