Beep.
Jim rolled up quickly behind Bradley out of nowhere.
The engineer turned to greet the skilled trades’ foreman just as the three-wheeled industrial-strength golf cart rolled to a stop.
“Hop on. I’ll give you a lift.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah. Sure,” said Jim, who jammed a burning cigarette with a quarter-inch of ash back into his mouth. The years of nicotine, caffeine, and restraining his enlarged impatience had tanned his raspy foreman’s voice.
Bradley stepped aboard and sat down on the rear seat, back-to-back with the trades’ boss. The yellow scooter jerked forward under Jim’s quick acceleration and they became two heads of the same coin rolling down the aisle. For the rear-facing Bradley, it was as though he was now traveling backwards through time.
A trades’ boss needed transportation to keep up with his crew. Whose millwrights, pipefitters, electricians, welders, and unskilled laborers could be dispatched to any one of a dozen departments on construction projects in the plant’s west-end like some kind of unchained gang. Though a millwright by trade, Jim had crossed over some time ago and went on supervision. No longer one of the boys among the blue-collar brethren, he traded for a white shirt and became just another suck-ass foreman.
Jim could still play the game, though. Union solidarity, with its power of seniority and other levers, made it easy for a crotchety journeyman to teasingly tell him to go to hell sometimes—especially if the company was being stingy with overtime. But to those tradesmen caught sliding back late from lunch who would dare laugh at the prospect of being written-up, his response was resolute with fake indignation—“you guys stop that laughing ‘cause I’m the one who’s got to do the paperwork”—which told everyone Jim’s heart was in the right place.
Bradley had subbed in as a trades’ foreman one summer as a college intern and was familiar enough with the terrain; the hazing and all. He thought such behavior fostered an independence that bordered on downright insubordination at times. A strong union made it possible. And in this one-horse town, the union was a Clydesdale.
So he kept his mouth shut. Mostly.
Besides, Delcorp Vehicle Systems was in a fight for survival and the great corporate mothership had begun to seriously rethink its longtime practice of keeping all the automotive-supplier business in the family. Rumors had become the plant’s chief product and were churned out regularly about how the plant was destined to be sold, spun off, closed, or dynamited. Other companies could make the same products and components for much less. And they weren’t unionized. So, their wages dropped lower and the workers didn’t tell their foremen to kiss their ass, jokingly or not. Without question, the union was a thorn in the company’s paw, forcing the giant beast to tread lighter.
Bradley was sympathetic of the autoworkers predicament and respected their tenacity, at least in theory.
•
Jim chuckled, breaking the silence as the two men scooted through the plant. He plucked the cigarette from his lips and asked if Bradley knew some guy named Pulaski. The name meant nothing to Bradley.
“He’s a trades’ superintendent,” Jim said. “Ha, that cocksucker can be a real prick. But he’s a good guy. I guess… He went to this Halloween party the other night dressed as a black hobo.”
Bradley grimaced, hoping he hadn’t heard what just did. “Excuse me?”
“A black hobo,” Jim laughed.
Bradley contorted himself just enough to see if Jim was serious. As he did, he got a face full of factory stench—a medley of lubricants, solvents, exhaust, and mustiness—and felt the sting of cigarette smoke in his eyes. He squinted and sharpened his focus.
The scooter zigzagged around forklift trucks loaded with raw or finished parts, scooters driven by other suck-asses, and the black and white bodies of pedestrians that filled the aisles inside the division.
“Yeah,” said Jim, still amused. “He wore black shoe polish on his face and what not. And I guess he couldn’t get much of it off come Sunday morning. So he couldn’t go to church.”
His voice was loud over the factory din and rushing air, his amusement undeniable. Except for the churning sounds of factory life, the men were again separated by silence. The scooter raced on before stopping in the spark plug fabrication area near Bradley’s cubicle.
“Thanks,” he said, hopping off.
“Yeah, sure thing, buddy.”
Jim turned and proceeded to drive off. He had traveled a short distance before stopping again after hearing Bradley shout: “Hey?”
Jim turned and saw the young man motioning for him to stop. He threw the scooter into reverse and backed up slowly.
“Hey, let me ask you something.” Bradley stepped toward Jim, meeting him before the scooter had come to rest.
“Yeah?” Jim’s reply was quick with a manufactured cheerfulness.
“Were there any black people at that party?”
There. He’d said it. There was no taking it back now. He didn’t want to. His words struck like a brick through a plate-glass window separating the inside from the out. With the slightest arch of his eyebrows and a halfcocked, mirthless smile stretched thin across his lips, Bradley’s cool expression said: Well?
Appearances can be deceiving. Though something of a late bloomer physically, the once college boy now stood a shade over six feet with a lean build. But his heart now throbbed in his throat and he felt the awakening of dormant butterflies in his stomach.
Jim was rough-hewn in manner and dress, with small rump roasts for forearms. The foreman was built like a rook but the engineer was braced with resolve.
Bradley swallowed slowly to control his breathing and to push his heart back down to its anatomically correct position.
Jim’s back stiffened. His expression flipped. He cleared his throat and his right eye twitched as a crimson tide washed over his fat head and thick neck. Jim’s big hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter as though he were trying to negotiate the bends on a dangerous stretch of highway.
“No, uh, I don’t think so. I don’t know really. I wasn’t there.” The words tumbled from his lips. “Another guy told me about it this morning, but he didn’t say anything about any bl-acks being there.”
Bradley hung on the way Jim said “bl-acks.” That subtle emphasis on the “acks” by some whites. The speaker gagging on its mere utterance, the enunciation signaled a thinly veiled contempt for its racial connotation. It was choked out in statements like, You bl-ack guys have big cocks, and bl-ack sonabitch.
“Eh,” Jim chuckled, “you know, I hope I didn’t offend you or nothing. You know I didn’t mean anything by—” He shrugged, as if to say, Oh, well, fuck it. He reached for a crumpled package of Merit cigarettes in his shirt pocket.
Bradley’s face smiled before he spoke. “I was just curious.”
Any thoughts of a rumble right there on the dirty factory floor dissipated quickly. There would be no blows exchanged because otherwise reasonable men don’t have fistfights at work, unlike on T.V. The disappointment each man felt was palpable by the brief, awkward silence that followed. No, there would be no blows exchanged but there wouldn’t be any communion either. And each man prepared to leave with what he carried.
“Well, thanks again for the ride.”
“Sure thing, pal,” said Jim.
“Yeah, sure.”
Bradley turned and strode toward his cubicle. The foreman scooted away in the opposite direction.
•
Bradley’s coat dangled on a hanger on the wall of his cubicle. The makeshift closet also included a hat rack—for those days when he wore a brim—and a small vanity mirror, which he faced.
Tearing at his tie, he fumed about the black hobo costume and at the superintendent—a superintendent, a fucking unclassified salaried employee!—for his audacity.
The nerve! To hurl such insults—What did God say after He created blacks? Oops, I burnt one—and expect shared laughter and camaraderie to ensue. Yet, to deny the blue-collar select—or any of those motherfuckers for that matter—of what some considered their birthright was to risk exile to the land of darkness, exempt status stripped along with one’s latitude, such as it existed. The holiday privileges revoked, as Martin is transmuted into Malcolm.
Bradley had bitten his tongue so often it felt as though he had scar tissue for taste buds. People like his brother were far less forgiving. Still, was this the price of his modest success? His willingness to go along; his so-called tolerance of such folly? Mastering that way of being present and accounted for without really being there? All of him, that is?
No, not particularly. It didn’t take much convincing, even if the math supported the theory of accommodation. Yes, he often found himself outnumbered but low-key is who he was. So, he rarely complained aloud. Each morning he rose, shaved, knotted his tie, and reminded himself over breakfast of what mattered most. And yet more times than he cared to recall, this had been his reward.
He was certain the guy wouldn’t have worn such a costume if he thought a black person might have been present. Bradley didn’t know Pulaski but was confident that he neither socialized nor worshipped with people like him.
But why a black hobo with a counterfeit complexion, no less? He pictured how ridiculous and offensive this Pulaski guy must have looked in his Birth of a Nation getup. Pitch-black, with pale skin encircling his white eyes, creating the illusion his eyes were bigger and bugging more than perhaps they already were. Surely, Pulaski gave his buddies a little show on Saturday night. He must’ve asked for a quarter or two to buy a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. No doubt Pulaski’s cohorts obliged his little charade and the truly generous ones probably gave him a dollar, if he asked them real nice like. Of course the show wouldn’t have been complete without an expression of faux indignation by some asshole who wondered aloud why the black bum didn’t get a job and quit relying on handouts from the working man.
If he wanted to be a truly funny black man, why not Richard Pryor? Anything just to demonstrate we could laugh together, that it wasn’t anything so negative or personal. But it was personal, Bradley concluded. That’s why the guy did it.
And of Jim, he thought: Yeah, fuck you, too! What did Jim expect? That they would share a laugh and instantly become boys allied against that cocksucker, Pulaski? There was no hint of shame or embarrassment in his re-telling. It was an ax wielded as some kind of imaginary payback. Payback for having to hire more blacks on skilled trades? Payback because the plant and city seemed to be dying a slow, painful death. And white people, it seemed, those like Pulaski and now Jim, felt they needed a face—a black face—to blame? All of the above?
Bradley chuckled. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and, together, the two faces shared a laugh.
“What am I doing here?”
Bob Campbell is a writer based in Flint, Mich. His creative nonfiction and essays have appeared in Belt Magazine, Forge Literary Magazine and Gravel Magazine. He is a contributor to Belt Publishing’s Midwest Architecture Journeys, published in October 2019. Bob was a staff writer for the Flint Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader and Detroit Free Press. He was also an electrician at AC Spark Plug, formerly a division of General Motors, before moving into journalism. His debut novel, Motown Man, will be published by Urban Farmhouse Press in October 2020.