When he finished, Lennox went to the window to discover the future.
Scott Wolven
EL Rey
From Lost in Front
Before the logging operation in Maine closed, Bill drove a big rig and generally got paid more than I did. I ran a saw. I drank quite a bit. It ate into my wallet. We kicked around in Maine. I was in good shape from working so much and in a bar outside Houlton I managed to sneak a right hand in and knocked a guy out for two hundred dollars. I thought I was a boxer.
We finally ended up at Bill’s mother’s house in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont. On the way there, we stopped at a reservation and picked up some tax-free cigarettes for her. She didn’t seem happy or sad to see us when we pulled up. She didn’t hug Bill, but she did take the cigarettes. “Are these for Mother’s Day?” she asked Bill when he gave her the cigarettes. “They are now,” he said. “You don’t have to pay me for them.” Hard times had made that love, for the two of them.
In the morning, I walked down to Thompson’s wood lot and fifteen minutes later, I was working. When I first started in late May, my back took a month to come into its own. I was lucky I was in decent shape to start with, or I couldn’t have done it at all. I hurt so bad some nights after work that I slept on the hardwood floor. My hands hummed from running the chain saw all day. My spine rusted tight. I didn’t think I’d be able to raise myself out of a bed to walk to work in the morning.
Bill started to cash a check, driving a log truck down from Quebec for a big outfit and then an accident got him, crushed him against the steering wheel. He sat totally paralyzed in a wheelchair at the house. He could look out the window and see me at the wood lot, and I would wave up to him, give him the high sign. Nurses from the county came in to feed him. His mother made sure the door was open so people could get in. A buddy of his, Tom Kennedy, came to see him once in a while. His voice still worked, and I imagine he gave those county people hell for the hour they were there. He hated being paralyzed. Beyond hate, really.
I ran the chain saw most days, filling firewood orders as they came in and trying to stay ahead, as people got ready for winter. We had as many as fifteen orders a day, mixed cords and half-cords. Gary worked with me, a wiry little local with a mustache and a tattoo on his arm that said amber inside a hand-drawn heart. Gary ran the hydraulic splitter and packed the cut cords into the rusted dump truck. He was a good worker. We managed eight cords a day, ten if nobody drank heavy the night before. The heat would drive it out of you anyway, sending you behind the shed to puke before eleven o’clock in the morning. We all did it, kicked sawdust over it, and kept right on working. The log trucks made the turn off the road down into the main yard and the French-Canadian drivers would hop up into their cherry pickers and unload themselves right onto the big stacks, and then walk over to the pay shed where Harold sat, answering the phone and paying cash for any decent load of logs that happened to come his way. He didn’t care where the logs came from or whose property they were. The log business can depend a lot on timing. You leave a load on the ground in the forest too long and bugs can get at the wood and ruin things quick. Or maybe somebody crossed a property line on a clear cut and had to get rid of some wood fast. Once the wood found its way into Harold’s yard, it was his, and the exchange rate being what it was, the French-Canadians made sure plenty of wood always managed to show up. Bill watched all day from his bedroom and we’d talk about my day at the woodlot when I got home.
“Better than television,” he said. I always knew if Tom had stopped by because Bill would be drunk. Tom left beer and sometimes whole bottles for Bill. “He keeps me in the juice,” Bill said. Then I’d join him for a drink in his room and look out the window at the woodlot where I worked all day.
Whether it was the heat or the work or the booze, I don’t know, but the job made everybody pretty mean. In the beginning of August, somebody made a comment at lunch about Gary’s pregnant girlfriend and the next day, Gary came in and took a swing at this new guy who was standing near the barn and came back to work the splitter with a bloody nose and the beginnings of a black eye. About two weeks later, a log truck pulled in and unloaded and while the driver walked across the yard, I looked at him through my goggles for a minute with the chain saw still running, He gave me the middle finger as he walked into the shed, and I started to move fast. I shut the saw down and took off my Kevlar chaps, headphones, plugs, and helmet, tossed my goggles into the sawdust, and met him as he came out the shed door. I hit him right in the face and then again and he fell to one knee and I picked up an ax handle that was leaning against the shed and started beating him on the shoulders and ribs and back. I hit him so hard that the ax handle stung my hand to the bone. As he lay in the sawdust, I reached into his right front pocket and took the money he’d just earned from the log delivery. Somebody helped him back to his truck and he sat there for a while and then drove out. Later that night, I counted five hundred dollars with my hurt right hand and then I went out and walked to the corner Gas Mart and treated myself to a twenty-four pack of cold beer. I drank three of them before I made it back to my sweltering attic room of Bill Doyle’s house. Bill was howling, laughing upstairs when I came in.
“You gave it to that frog,” he called down to me. The door to his mother’s room was closed with light coming out underneath. I walked upstairs. Bill’s face always looked tight and windburned, from all those years driving a truck. “That’s what I feel like doing, every day. Jumping out of this fucking chair and giving it to somebody.”
I poked my head in his room. “I hurt my hand doing it,” I said.
“You’ve got another one, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I wish Tom could have seen that.”
“Tell him about it,” I said. Bill talked about Tom Kennedy so much, I felt like a big deal to be mentioned in the same company.
“I will,” Bill said. “He loves a good fight.”
I came home from work one day and called up into the empty house from the bottom of the stairs like I always did and there was no answer. I went up to Bill’s room and opened the door and got sick. Bill really wasn’t there anymore: he’d sprayed most of his head onto the wall with a shotgun blast. A faint blue haze hung close to the ceiling. The wheelchair was there with the headless torso slumped in it and the shotgun on the floor. A bunch of beer bottles and a liquor bottle, cheap whiskey. Empty. For so much violence in such a small room, you’d have expected to hear noise, an echo, something. But it was silent. His mom left after the funeral, went to Florida to live with her sister, and I moved out too, got a new room in another house for an apartment.
In the last week of August, two shiny black four-by-fours with tinted windows and New York plates pulled off the highway and down into the main yard. I assumed they were new homeowners, maybe up from New York City, looking to fill a wood order for winter or with some land they wanted clear. I was wrong.
The man who got out of the first truck was a dapper-looking Hispanic, with the whole outfit on. The sunglasses, the gold chains. Shirt open a couple of buttons. The creased black dress pants, black pointy shoes. He spoke with a thick accent. Harold, his gut hanging out of his denim coveralls, walked out of the pay shack and shook hands with the Hispanic man. The rest of us stopped working, wandered over, and listened.
“Hello,” he said to us. “I am Melvin Martinez and we are looking for strong men to spar with.” His accent was so thick I could barely understand him. Several more Hispanic men got out of the trucks. Young, muscular, with black hair, all in blue warm-up suits.
Harold looked over at the men standing by the trucks. “Where’d you last fight, up in Quebec?”