weren’t enough rooms to go around in the civilian barracks. I had to share one with a southerner who probably resented my presence as much as I felt uncomfortable in his. A calendar hung crookedly on the wall. The days of July were crossed out up to the twenty-fifth, which had a red circle around it, inset with the word Hooray. My instructions were to unpack, get into some working clothes, eat lunch, and report to the superintendent’s office, wherever that was, by one o’clock. It was now almost noon.
I made it.
Then I waited for perhaps an hour in an atmosphere as cheerless as the rain that hit like sand grains against the windows. Apparently, a laborer was one of those low forms of animal life not deserving of a welcoming word or a handshake. I was moved gruffly along from the superintendent to the foreman and finally to a seamy-faced straw boss with a Wyatt Earp mustache. He didn’t introduce himself or ask me my name, so I stubbornly kept my mouth shut. He deposited me into a ditch with a shovel. His grunts and hand signals communicated that a leaky water pipe had to be exposed.
I scrabbled up shovelfuls of shale and mud until I had the pipe uncovered, but not for long. The water welled up around it. My feet got soaked. The steady cold rain seeped through the shoulders of my denim jacket. I had foolishly decided against the rain gear. A pump was started, the intake hose lowered to me, and the pipe appeared once more. The boot-ed plumbers then took over after I dug a sump hole for the end of the hose.
After that, I was whisked away in a truck to a large building. Compressors breathed and bellowed like shuddering metal monsters as they supplied air through the black hoses to the jackhammers that rumbled from within the clouds billowing from the entrance. Men were breaking up the cement floor. They were just shapes in a gray haze. While some trembled over the hammers, others shoveled up chunks into wheelbarrows. I was handed a pair of giant nippers, and as the lumps fell away from the probing of the bit, I cut the embedded steel mat of reinforcement rods. Again I felt involved with a nameless society. Discontent hung in the air like the cement dust. Between the stuttering bursts of the hammers, I caught their comments:
“I’m finishing the week and that’s all she wrote for me.”
“To hell with the contract. They can shove it. I’ll pay my own way back.”
“… I’ve had a bellyful …”
Sam in his room at the naval base on Kodiak Island.
“Who they kiddin’? This ain’t Alaska. They sent us to Siberia!”
One fellow loading a wheelbarrow showed me his hands, raw and blistered. His face was flushed. His hair and eyebrows were powdered with dust.
“All right for farm boys,” he muttered. “They’re used to it. Hell—I’m a musician.” He played a sax in the evenings in some joint in town. Something had to break for him soon besides his back. He couldn’t stand much more of this, he said. “Not even a respirator,” he grumbled. I just kept cutting and listening. This wasn’t as bad as the ditch. At least I was out of the rain.
About ten minutes to five, we loaded into the back of a truck and bounced on the plank seats as the vehicle careened over the gravel road. Men hurled epithets at the driver.
“I get stuck on this rock much longer,” one bearded character said, “I’m grabbin’ me one of them jacks and jumpin’ off a pier.”
We stopped in front of a low building with a sign on it: LABOR POOL. The musician nudged me.
“Spelled wrong,” he said. “It should read: FOREIGN LEGION.” We piled over the tailboard, out of the truck.
A gang clustered in a sloppy line around the time clock. They were eyeing its face, waiting for the minute hand to lurch to freedom. Young and old, white, black, brown, and Indian. They were like convicts doing time. My eyes roved over their faces. All had their reasons for being here. I wondered what they were.
Were they putting on an act for the new man? Well … they weren’t going to discourage me. I had a job and I intended to keep it. Hard work was what I needed. I’d done it before. Now I was going to jolt myself back into shape again.
CHAPTER 4
Taking Hold
The days wore on.
I progressed from sore hands to blisters, from blisters that rose in hard bubbles across my palms, to blisters that broke and burned like fire and peeled away, to stinging slits that healed into calluses. Jackhammer, “muck-stick,” pickax, and sledge were my insensitive taskmasters.
Unloading cement sacks from piled-high flatbeds, staggering with heavy vats of mess hall slop, muscling up heaped rubbish barrels to be emptied into a truck—all contributed to my shrinking waistline and the return of the old firmness to my arms and shoulders. I found myself reflecting on those Parris Island boot-camp days when we drilled in the sand, when I kept myself going by glaring at the Drill Instructor who drove us to exhaustion, when I blew at the sweat running down over my face and kept repeating under my breath, “I can take anything you can, you son-of-a-bitch.”
What boosted my morale more than anything else here was getting a room to myself. The physical punishment of the job was as nothing compared to the aggravation I felt returning to a roommate whose habits were the complete opposite of mine. He either had a cigarette bobbing on his lips or a bulge of tobacco in his cheek. Draining sinuses caused him to snort and sniffle almost continuously. Long after midnight, he kept a light burning, and the large can beneath his bunk was not only the target, often missed, for his cigarette butts, lungers, and jets of tobacco juice, but also a convenience for his urine. One evening he came in glassy-eyed from town and vomited all over his blanket.
He draped things anywhere that would hold them and piled his laundry into a neglected heap in the corner. Continually, he bragged of his sexual conquests. All conversation soon deteriorated into either lewd, detailed descriptions of his successes, or the agony, complete with facial grimaces, of some potent venereal disease he had contracted south of the border. When it seemed that I could stand his presence no longer, he happily announced the evening before my first day off that he was all through. To hell with this prison camp. He needed a woman, and was going back to civilization. With a suitcase jammed with dirty clothes, he left with my blessings the next morning.
I lost no time moving his bunk into the barracks storage area. Other men had private rooms, and I was going to have mine. The fishing could wait. Right now the room had top priority. I declared a field day, and transported everything into the hallway. I opened the window wide, swept out the place, scrubbed down the walls, and then with a clean swab and hot, pine-scented soapy water, I sloshed suds all over the floor. After going through several rinse waters, I felt I had purged the place.
When I stood back from the open door after mopping the floor dry, I knew the contentment of a thorough housewife. The window glistened. The floor gleamed. The air smelled fresh and clean and free again. I tried to picture how it would look with the red print curtains I’d seen in the Montgomery Ward’s catalog. Surely they would provide a finishing touch.
Heavy rain discouraged my fishing plans for the afternoon, but I was jubilant just the same. I had redeemed something that seemed hopelessly lost. Privacy was beyond all price. I lay on my bunk, hands folded behind my head, and listened to the onslaught of the rain. I dreamed of streams and mountains, but most of all I just stretched out in an atmosphere filled with the sounds and scents of my own.
