The pay and the benefits are all that anybody else ever talks about and most of what they say is wrong. Massive inflation in all their numbers. Anti-union spin. He has done the real comparisons, added everything up and come out slightly ahead. To make the real money, you need to understand the complexity of the system and you need to think about taxes and shifting brackets. You need to figure out how to live with the overtime and how to get in there for the stat holidays. When the kids were small, he used to scramble for the possibility of a double-time shift or for the perfect conditions that came around twice a year on Good Friday or Christmas.
It is more difficult to calculate the value of the benefits. The kids’ braces and top-of-the-line Green Shield for their prescriptions. The education fund. He marched for those things. They walked arm in arm carrying the banner. Campaigned for the need to make progress, to look out for working families, to stand up against the big guys. Ken and Buzz and Bob making their speeches. A union puts you inside of something larger. Tickets for Tiger games and a rented bus. Tickets to the Wings and the Spitfires. Everyone sitting in the same section. All the good money his daughter picked up working TPT — Temporary Part-Time — in the summer. The card tournaments. The Christmas party and the Christmas bonus. The employee incentive plan. It was impossible to say no to the deal they gave you if you just bought what you built. Straight out of Henry Ford and the original Model T. Make enough to drive what you make. Four in a row. They went through four different vans before the last one. Hundreds of thousands of miles piled up. The kids grew up riding back there. It was their sole means of transportation.
He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. The only clear part left. Hand on the wheel, craning his neck around. Looking at him closely. Wife sleeping in the passenger seat. Daughter already away at school.
His son. The teenage slacker called up from central casting. Lying down sideways in the back seat, high-tops up against the window. Head on the armrest. Game Boy. Ear phones. Distortion coming out of his head. Tight jeans. Black hooded sweatshirt. Hair in his eyes.
What a kid can do to a parent. A wave of disappointment washing through him as he drives. Bitterness, like the taste of ammonia, coursing through his mouth and his entire bloodstream. He feels it in his feet. It has been nothing but continuous argument for months. The boy talking even though he can’t hear his own voice through the music. How it all sucks. His parents are hypocrites. They say one thing and do another. Smart teenager with bad grades and stupid friends. Comes home one day with an idiot tattoo on his shoulder blade. A tide of complaint that will not stop. How he doesn‘t want to be here. How this is stupid. How he’s going to run away. How he’s going to move out the minute, the minute, he turns sixteen. You think you own me. You don’t own me.
They cannot make him understand why it is important for a family to do the same thing every year. Why you have to hold on to your little traditions. It’s only one day, his mother says. A trip to the county in the fall. Follow the Number Three and go to Ruthven. Joe Colosanti’s Tropical Garden and then Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary. Plants and birds. Muck and Cluck, his wife used to call it. Maybe this weekend we’ll go for the muck and cluck. What do you say?
At Colosanti’s Tropical Garden they will sell you a miniature cactus in its own clay pot for two dollars. Get the one with the purple head. It can live on nothing. Push your finger against the needles for fun. There is no threat from a Colosanti’s cactus. It is what the kids will remember. The greenhouses. The turtles and a little alligator swimming in its pond. The humidity and the baby animals wandering around, goats and chickens. They will remember that you have to keep your palm flat when you feed an apple to a pony.
Then on to Miner’s. Every year the same thing. Canadian Geese by the thousands returning to Crazy Jack. A hundred years of banding and tracing routes and charting schedules. A warmer fall means a later departure. It doesn’t take long. You drive by and it’s over. You hear and you smell. The sound and the stink: incessant honking and acres of bird shit. That is what you get from a visit to Jack Miner’s.
But there is something else, too. Something a person has to see at least once. The way an entire field can take off at the same time. The land deciding to become the sky. Everything lifting at once. Tight formations and instinctive patterns. That V writing itself on the clouds. You look at that and you don’t forget you saw it. It can make you believe in order if you are the kind of person who wants to believe in order.
He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. Last words. I’m getting so sick of your bullshit. Watch, he said. You watch. A couple of years down the road, you’ll be thanking us for this.
Turning back, he catches a glimpse of his face as it passes the rear-view. The sneer. An angry man caught in a bit of glass. The red glint of the brake light comes through first, starts in the corner of his eye, then straight ahead. The back end of the flatbed. Too close. Already there. No chance to slow down. He tries to swerve, but they hit full tilt. Then rolling. They are strapped inside a rolling metal object. The V6 with 251 hp — a fire burning in the middle of a metal cube — the new fuel injection system. The driver’s side airbag explodes out of the steering wheel, knocking him back against his chair. The back of his head slams into the rest. Bad twist in his neck. Sharp pain and an instant numbness in his legs. Powder burning in his eyes. His vision blurs. It happens fast but he sees it slowly before the total black comes down. Two seconds worth of action is more than enough to fill in all the rest of the time that follows.
The airbags on her side do not deploy. The bags on the whole right-hand side of the vehicle do not deploy. They do not do what they are meant to do. Instead, they sit patient and useless, like a pile of neatly folded white towels in a linen closet.
Almost no visible change in her body. She is sleeping before her head goes against the window frame. Too hard. He knows it. The unnatural angle of her neck. The end of his wife. The way her ear moves too far to the side and her chin hangs too far down. One beat later, something flying past, about the size of a black hockey bag, thrown through the side window. He watches it move, following a smooth trajectory, an arc in the sky. That movement is the last thing he sees. It can’t be processed. Elegant, he thinks, or something like that. The curve in the air.
Two days later he wakes up in the hospital. Can’t feel his legs. His daughter holding his hand. She looks thin. His first thought. You need to eat more. Take better care of yourself.
There are six airbags in the Dodge Grand Caravan. Standard equipment, even on the base model. Safety sells. Front, side, and rear impact zones. They were the first to make it to market with protection like that. Went from design to production in an eighteen-month turnaround and caught everyone by surprise. Brought a little momentum back into sales. The car met or exceeded all standards set by the National Highway Transportation Safety Association. New sensors woven into the bumpers and the panels and the doors. Scored above average on all the tests. You watch the crash test videos and see what you see. Those are the standard factory models.