Mike colored at that, being Baptist. Forty something at least, with a groomed black beard and sunglasses hanging from his neck by a neon-green band, he was the Prime Mover of the yard’s universe, spinning us into motion with his order sheets. My prayers must have climbed their way through the spheres and gotten to his ear. Ever since morning the minutes had crawled, and all I could think of was getting to quitting time and driving to The Hangout so I could pitch my woo Angela-ward.
“Where’s Jimmy?” Mike said, clutching the order sheet to his chest. Jimmy popped up behind him, out of the main warehouse, where he must have been lazing in the door room. A great place for smoking, he told me once, but not for getting high, not with all those doors. Jimmy was a couple years older than me, taller, muscled, long hair straight and brown, with these little round spectacles like you see on timid townspeople in westerns. I’d been paired with him since I started at the lumberyard. After the tornado hit, they needed some extra people, and my dad was friends with a guy who went to Mike’s church. My first week, though, I managed to put a nail through my foot and drive over a stack of Sheetrock, and Jimmy was the only one willing to take me on. He was a general master of fuckuppery, but he’d worked at East Texas since he graduated from high school and he knew the yard. Those last were Mike’s exact words.
His exact words now were, “Don’t screw it up.” The job was a shingle drop for two tornado houses. “Silver Linings to Greenhills and Chestnuts to Oak Ranch,” Mike told us. Jimmy snatched the order sheet from him, looked it over like maybe it was a trick, then beamed at me and told me to get in the truck. Mike gave us an “All right” and headed back to his air-conditioned holy of holies. We didn’t get good deliveries too often. We were always getting lost, and one time we’d scattered half our load on MLK when one of our straps came loose. But all the other guys were swamped.
We parked on the cool cement floor of the shingle warehouse, and Arturo scooted over in his forklift, glanced at the order, and said, “Pinchay my asshole.” Jimmy sat there, grinning as he held his hair up in a ponytail and snapped a rubber band around it. Arturo was always shouting something obscene, and most of the guys laughed without even thinking about the translation.
“Two drops,” Jimmy said to me, relishing it. “Tornado houses. And one of them in Longview.”
I let myself sink into the truck’s plastic leather, listened idly as Arturo put our pallets together and shouted “Pinchay my asshole” some more. Shingles were already easy because we wouldn’t have to pull lumber for a load, and the Longview drop meant a good long time of getting paid for just riding around. I’d sail through the afternoon, almost nothing between me and quitting time, between me sitting here now and sitting next to Angela at The Hangout and offering to buy her a Mountain Dew.
JIMMY DROVE US THROUGH DOWNTOWN, all cracked sidewalks and empty buildings and that line of tall oil derricks they lit up for Christmas, then over to Stone Road to skirt the tornado zone and come up along its backside.
“You got any stops you want to make?” he asked after we passed the new car wash with its imported palm trees and inflated gorilla in an Uncle Sam hat. He’d said it was a right, on long deliveries, to work in some idling.
But I didn’t want the risk. I’d already measured the afternoon out in my head. Once we did our two drops and got back, it’d be four. That was a good hour to return from delivery, four. Too late to start a new job, we’d hang out eating Popsicles from the yard freezer, straightening boards and picking up scraps while the day’s last minutes wound down, no worrying about getting to The Hangout in time. When I shared my dream with Jimmy — leaving out any mention of Angela, since the last thing I wanted was his needling — he said, “I got to have my stops.”
“What about this. We don’t fucknut around, Mike might give us some more good deliveries.”
Jimmy leaned across the truck, let it glide between lanes as he reached his hand toward me. “Two stops. I’ll have us back by five. I swear.”
A telephone pole loomed. “Jesus, fine.” I gave his hand a quick shake. “Two stops, back by five.” It was the best I could do.
The thing is, the tornado had deus-ex-machinaed my life pretty well, and I was fighting to hold on to the improvements. First there was my job. The one I had before the lumberyard was at Whataburger, and I couldn’t go back there. The grease coated my skin like wax, and I’d been fired anyway for leaving some meat out. I’d sat around for months, taking classes part-time at the junior college, and my parents had given me an ultimatum. I had to be out by New Year’s and doing something useful, they said, so I’d decided to move to Dallas and go to the locksmith school there. My brain turned to fuzz whenever I thought too long about most things, but it’d be cool spending your day getting into other people’s houses and cars. Since the tornado came and I started at the lumberyard I’d saved up about a quarter of the money I needed.
And second there was Angela. In high school I’d had only one real girlfriend. She was Church of Christ, and she kissed me with her lips closed and dumped me after a month because I kept putting my hand on her stomach and she thought I was trying to edge it somewhere else (I was). But Angela I’d already felt up once. Two weeks earlier she sat in the folding chair next to mine at The Hangout. The guy who ran The Hangout didn’t charge anything — he went to Grace Church and said it was his mission for the area youth, to give us someplace to go that wasn’t a cowboy bar or a random field where we might get up to who knew what. On Thursdays and Fridays the same Christian band always played, and that one night two weeks back when Angela sat next to me I caught her flipping off the singer while he was leading everybody in prayer. “He’s an idiot,” she said when she saw me. “He made fun of people at school and peed on my friend’s car.” I held her Mountain Dew for her when she went to the bathroom, and when the band took a break she told me she’d gone to high school at Pine Tree and that last year was her first year at SFA. “It sucked I missed the tornado,” she said. I told her I was out there every day, delivering wood and stuff to the houses. A light turned on in her eyes. She pushed her flat brown hair behind her ears and told me she was majoring in biology, wanted to do something with frogs. I said, “Frogs are cool,” and she started talking about going on a frog hunt with her science club in Davy Crockett National Forest. It was as if she’d unwrapped this hidden part of herself and was holding it out to me. I asked if she was dating anybody, offhanded-like, and she said no. So when she said she had to get home I walked her to her car. She opened her door and turned to look at me and that’s when I kissed her. After we did that for about a minute I slipped my hand up her shirt and kept it there until one of the Grace volunteers watching the parking lot started beelining our way. Angela pulled back and said she had to go but that she’d see me again.
But the next night at The Hangout she ignored me and instead sat with this group of mission trippers from Jasper who’d come here to shovel in the tornado zone. A freckle-faced, lanky guy with gelled blond hair kept putting his arm around her, and she kept letting him. I couldn’t figure it out. When I got her by herself, she’d barely talked to me, and it was that way every time after until last night I spotted her alone at the cake and candy table. At first I froze but then I said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey.” She was holding her arm across the chest of her Scooby-Doo T-shirt, Scooby’s eyes blacked out with marker, as she scratched at the eczema on her other arm. I told her I liked what she had done to her shirt and she said, “He’s a dog, it’s stupid, the others could still be alive now but he’d be dead.” Then I said, “I haven’t talked to you in forever,” though it’d only been since last Friday, and she said, well, yeah, that sucked, and now she was headed back to Nacogdoches in two days for summer school. One of the Jasper mission trippers barked her name in this voice he did that made everyone laugh. She smiled at him and started leaning in that way people do when they want to leave you for somebody better. My jaw finally flopped open and “See you tomorrow?” tumbled out. She said, “Sure,” and stopped scratching long enough to hold her hand up in good-bye.