Poachers (4 page)

Authors: Tom Franklin

Glen shrugged and doodled (man dangling by noose) on his desk calendar while Roy took another order for grit.

When Roy snapped the phone shut, Glen said, “No. You can’t go to four nights. Who the hell was that? They want
two
loads? Never mind. Your night shift’s gotta stop altogether, end of story.”

“Impossible,” Roy said.

“Impossible?”

“Look out the window.”

Glen obeyed, saw a cute young woman in Roy’s car. She was frowning.

“You see that pretty little thing?” Roy asked. “You know how old she is? Nineteen, Glen.
Nineteen
. She the freshest thing in the world, too. She go jogging every morning, and when she come back she don’t even smell bad. Her breath don’t stink in the morning.” Roy coughed. “I wake up my breath smell like burnt tar.”

“Roy—”

“You think a fresh little girl like that’s with me ’cause she love me? Hell no. She with me ’cause I’m getting rich. So no, baby, we can’t stop. Business just too damn good. Which remind me—” He opened his ledger. “You back up in four figures again.”

“Roy, just stick to the subject at hand. I’m not asking you to stop. I’m ordering you to stop.”

“Baby,” Roy said quietly, “you ain’t exactly in a strong bargaining position. Who’s E and D gonna hold responsible if they hear about our little operation? You the manager. You the one been falsifying records. Naw, baby. The ‘subject’ ain’t whether or not old Roy’s gonna stop making grit. The ‘subject’ is what to do about all that money you owe me.”

What they did was compromise. Roy said he’d been too busy to make grit and look after his bookmaking business. So Glen would go to work for him, at night. Roy would forget about the two grand and pay Glen ten bucks an hour to work nine hours a night, four nights a week.

“I bet you can use the extra bread,” Roy said. “That alimony can eat a man up.”

Then Roy said he needed Glen’s office; the phones were better. It was quieter, he said. He could think. So that night Glen worked in the plant and Roy used the air-conditioned office. Sweating under the tanks, Glen saw Roy’s fat silhouette behind the curtains, and he uncapped his flask and toasted the irony. He spent the night in the hot, claustrophobic control room, watching gauges, adjusting dials and taking samples; climbing into the front end loader once an hour and filling the hopper with raw material; on top of the tanks measuring the amount of grit they’d made; and standing by the loading chute, filling Snakebite’s big purple Peterbilt.

At six that morning, with the plant shut down and Roy gone, Glen slogged to the office before the day-shifters clocked in. The room smelled like cigars, and Glen made a mental note to start smoking them in case Ernie and Dwight popped in. He locked the door behind him and pulled off his shoes and poured out little piles of grit. He lay back on his desk, exhausted, put his hands over his face, shut his eyes, and got his first good sleep in months.

Snakebite, six foot five, also
slept during the day, in his Peterbilt, in the cab behind the seat, the truck parked among the pines near the plant. He showered every other day in the break room and ate canned pork and beans and Vienna sausages that he speared with his pocketknife. He had a tattoo on his left biceps, a big diamondback rattler with its mouth opened, tongue and fangs extended. He wore pointed snakeskin cowboy boots but no cowboy hat because adult hat sizes swallowed his tiny head. To Glen, he looked like a football player wearing shoulder pads but no helmet. He said he “hailed” from El Paso, Texas, but he’d “vamoosed” because his wife, a “mean little filly” who’d once stabbed him, had discovered that he was “stepping out” with a waitress in Amarillo.

Glen knew this and much more because Snakebite never stopped talking. One night, as the truck loaded, Snakebite showed Glen a rare World War I trench knife, a heavy steel blade with brass knuckles for a handle.

“I collect knives,” Snakebite said. “Looky here.” He bent and pulled up a tight jeans leg over his boot, revealing a white-handled stiletto.

“My Mississippi Gambler,” Snakebite said. “It’s a throwing knife. See this quick unhitching gadget on the holster?” He flipped a snap and the knife came right out of his boot into his hand. “This is the one my wife stabbed me with,” he said. He showed Glen the scar, a white line on his left forearm. Glen didn’t have any scars from his ex-wives that he could show, so he uncapped his flask and knocked back a swig. He offered the flask to Snakebite, who took it.

“Don’t mind if I do, Slick,” he said, winking.

“Where’s this load going?” Glen asked, nodding toward the black stream of grit falling into the truck. He’d been curious about Roy’s clients, thinking he might try to steal the business.

Snakebite grinned and punched him in the shoulder. “Shit, boy. You oughta know that’s classified. You find out old Roy’s secrets and he’s outta business. Then I’m outta business.”

“So.” Glen swallowed. “I hear you do a little, um, collecting for Roy.”

Snakebite drained the flask. “Don’t worry about that, Slick. Old Roy ain’t never sicced me on anybody I liked. And even if he did, hell, it ain’t ever as bad as you see in the movies.”

Working nights for Roy Jones
Grit, Inc., Glen wore a ratty T-shirt, old sneakers, a Braves cap and short pants. He turned off every breaker and light he could spare to keep the electric bill low, so the place was dark and dangerous. He began carrying a flashlight hooked to his belt. He tried to cut power during the day, too. He adjusted all the electrical and mechanical equipment to their most efficient settings. He even turned the temperature dial in the break-room refrigerator to “warmer” and stole the microwave (supposedly a great wattage-drainer) from its shelf and pawned it, then called the day-shifters in for a meeting where he

gave the “thief” a chance to confess. No one did, and the meeting became a lecture where Glen urged the men to “conserve energy, not just for the good of the plant, but for the sake of the whole fucking environment.” To set an example, he told them, he would stop using the air conditioner in the office.

But not Roy: Roy ran the AC full-blast all night so that the office was ice-cold. Not that Glen had a lot of time to notice. Typically it took one man to operate the plant and another the loader. Doing both, as well as loading Snakebite’s truck, Glen found himself run ragged by morning, so covered with sweat, grit and dust that the lines in his face and the corners of his eyes and the insides of his ears were black, and his snot, when he blew his nose, even that was black.

One evening in mid-July
Glen trudged to the office to complain. He opened the door and came face-to-face with the young woman from Roy’s car. She had lovely black skin and round brown eyes. Rich dark hair in cornrow braids that would’ve hung down except for her headband. She wore bright green spandex pants and a sports bra.

“Hello,” Glen said.

“Right.” She flounced into the bathroom.

Glen hurried to Roy’s desk. “What the hell’s she doing here?”

Roy had his feet and a portable television on the desk. He was watching the Yankees. “Your new assistant,” he said. “You just keep your got-damn hands off her.”

“She can’t work here.” Glen glanced at the TV. “What’s the score? What if she gets hurt? She’s just a girl.”

“Woman,” she said from the door.

“Tied up,” Roy said.

“Sorry,” Glen said. “Miss…?”

“Ms.”

Roy cranked the volume without looking at them. “You been whining about having too much work every night,” he told Glen, “so Jalalieh gonna start driving the loader for you.”

Jalalieh
.

Ja-LA-lee-ay.

As Glen instructed her in the operation of the Caterpillar 950 front-end loader, she stayed quiet. It was crowded in the cab and he had to hang on the stepladder to allow her room to work the levers that raised, lowered and swiveled the bucket. She smelled good, even over the diesel odor of the payloader, and he soon found himself staring at her thighs and biceps.

“You work out a lot?” he asked.

“Careful big bad Roy don’t see you making small talk,” she said.

“Pull back on the bucket easy,” he said. “You’ll spill less.”

“That’s better, little man. Keep it professional.”

So with great patience and fear he instructed her on how to gain speed when heading in to scoop raw material, how to drop the bucket along the ground and dig from the bottom of a pile, locking the raise lever and working the swivel lever back and forth as it rose to get the fullest bucket. He showed her how to hold a loaded bucket high and peer beneath it to see, how to roll smoothly over the rough black ground and up the ramp behind the plant to the hopper. How to dump the bucket while shifting into reverse so the material fell evenly onto the hopper grate, and how to back down the ramp while lowering the bucket. She caught on quickly and within a few nights was a much better

loader operator than most of the day shift guys. Glen watched from the ground with pride as she tore giant bulging bucketfuls from the piles and carried them safely over the yard. And as he noticed the way her breasts bounced when she passed, he felt the hot, gritty wind swirling and whistling through the caves of his heart.

A few nights later, while
Glen and Snakebite watched the truck load, Snakebite explained about his tiny head.

“Everybody on my daddy’s side’s got little bitty heads,” he said. “It’s kinda like our trademark. We ain’t got no butts, either. Look.” He turned and, sure enough, there was all this spare material in the seat of his blue jeans. Snakebite laughed. “But me, I make up for it with my dick.”

“Pardon?” Glen said.

“Well, I ain’t fixing to whip it out, but I got the biggest durn cock-a-doodle-doo you liable to see on a white man. Yes sir,” he said, lowering his voice so it was hard to hear over the roar of the plant, “when I get a hard-on, I ain’t got enough loose skin left to close my eyes.”

Glen, whose penis was average, took out his flask. He was unscrewing the lid when Jalalieh thundered past in the loader. When Glen glanced at Snakebite, the truck driver was looking after her with his eyes wide open.

The next night, as the truck loaded, something clattered behind them. Glen unclipped his flashlight and Snakebite followed him around a dark corner to the garbage cans. An armadillo had gotten into the trash, one of its feet in an aluminum pie-plate.

“Well, hello there, you old armored dildo,” Snakebite said. When it tried to dart away, he cornered it. “Tell you what,

Slick”—he winked at Glen—“you keep a eye on our friend and I’ll be right back.”

He trotted toward his truck and Glen kept the flashlight aimed at the armadillo—gray, the size of a football, just squatting there, white icing on its snout. Soon Snakebite reappeared with a briefcase. He set it on a garbage can and opened it and rummaged around, finally coming out with something bundled in a towel. He unwrapped it and Glen saw several different-colored knives.

Snakebite grinned. “I bought ’em off a circus Indian chief used to chuck ’em at a squaw that spun on a big old wagon wheel.”

He took a knife by its wide blade and flicked it. The armadillo jumped straight up and landed running, the handle poking out of its side. Snakebite fired another knife which ricocheted off the armadillo’s back. Another stuck in its shoulder. A fourth knife bounced off the concrete. Glen glanced away, ashamed for not stopping Snakebite. When he looked again the armadillo lay on its side, inflating and deflating with loud rasps.

“I hate them sum-bitches,” Snakebite said. He stepped forward and drew back his foot to punt the armadillo.

Suddenly a light flared, catching the two men like the headlights of night hunters: Jalalieh, in the loader, bore down on them, the bucket scraping the ground, igniting sparks. Glen dove one way and Snakebite the other as she plowed in like a freight train, sweeping up the armadillo, the garbage cans, the knives. In a second she was gone, disappearing around the plant, leaving them flat on their bellies with their heads covered like survivors of an explosion.

“That’s a hot little honey,” Snakebite said once he was back on his feet. He dusted off his jeans. “You reckon old Roy’d sell me a piece of that? Add it to my bill?”

It wasn’t Glen’s jealousy that surprised him. “You owe Roy money?”