The Kerr Construction Company
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
The Kerr
Construction
Company
by
Larry Lee Farmer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
The Kerr Construction Company
COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Larry Lee Farmer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by
Tina Lynn Stout
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Vintage Rose Edition, 2014
Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-278-3
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
To Charles, Jericho, and Austin,
And to my dear friend Eva Gysi Lash
I was surprised how much I liked New Mexico. Being from rural Texas, I didn’t have prejudice against hicks and hick places like I pictured were in New Mexico, back before I first traveled there in the summer of 1977. Still I expected to see a bunch of nothing and open spaces. The open spaces were there, but even the desert was beautiful. The land of enchantment. By God, it was true. At almost every turn, behind every hill, red cliff, or mountain, I somehow anticipated buffalo, with Indians on horseback chasing them through the patches of brush and shrubs.
But I still had to get a job.
Gallup was Navajo country. Located off Route 66. The Indian capital of America, they called it, though only a third of the town was Navajo. And it was one of the few places in America that had a sizable Japanese population during World War II that stood up to the Federal Government and didn’t allow internment.
I’d heard all my life about Indians and firewater. It was depressing to see sidewalk after sidewalk with at least one drunken body passed out on it. So what was I doing here looking for work? My part of Texas was the poorest in America, the one part of Texas, not coincidentally, without oil. But that wasn’t why I was here. I wanted something different. This was different.
****
“So you’re Mister Dalhart McIlhenny from Texas.” The man wearing a khaki shirt and pants, and a welding cap, sat behind a wooden desk, reading over my application. “Says you’re six foot three and two hundred pounds. And you got blond hair with blue eyes. Boy, you should be looking for a job as a Storm Trooper, if you ask me. We got us a long, tall Texan.” He laughed, exposing tobacco-tainted teeth. His appearance was gruff, with grease stains all over his clothes, and a slight pudge hanging over his leather belt. “You have a college degree,” he said, surprised.
“Yes, sir. I just graduated.”
“We don’t have any managerial jobs, you know. Old Man Kerr owns this outfit, and he’s got three mean sons to help him manage it, if that’s what they do. And we contract out our drilling to wildcatters. We have a field foreman, too. All we got is openings for laborers.”
“That’s what I want.”
He scoped me out. “All right,” he said, scowling. “Whatever suits you.”
He read some more. “It says here you went to Texas A&M,” he commented in disbelief. “I worked the oilfields with Aggies. That’s what you call yourself, right? Aggies? I spent three years in Odessa in the Permian Basin. One of the most productive oilfields in the world. Seemed like Aggies ran that place. Son, I’m not trying to be condescending, but this doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
I gave a slight shrug as my reply. He returned to my application.
“Says you were in the Marines. His sons will like that. New meat. You’ll see what I mean.” He looked up from my application again, even more in disbelief. “You grew up on a farm?” He shook his head and snickered. “I thought people went to college to get away from this kind of life. When can you start?”
“Right now.”
“Those steel-toed boots you got on?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Stop with that ‘sir’ crap, will you? I work for a living. You’ll have to get work gloves, goggles, and steel-toed boots. We’ll supply the hard hat. Those are new jeans. You got any old ones? But that’s up to you. You can get this stuff at the hardware store downtown. You didn’t give an address.”
“I just got in. I don’t have a place. I have an old van. I can stay in that.”
“You mean that old panel truck outside, with ‘Desperado’ on the side? Is that a Buddha statue on your dashboard?”
I had to laugh. It embarrassed even me. “I didn’t want to sleep in my car. I left it back home. It’s too small. So I bought the panel truck from a friend of mine just before I left.”
“Son, do you have any money?”
“Enough to buy these supplies. Enough to eat on.”
“It’s minimum wage.”
“I know that. I can live on three bucks an hour. I used to work at a cotton gin for below minimum wage.”
“And now you got a college degree and are ready for the big bucks. You ain’t running from the law?”
“I know it doesn’t make sense.” I smiled.
“If you ain’t running from the law, it’s none of my business what you’re doing here. Go get your supplies and come on back. The crew’s already in the field. I’ll take you out there and introduce you. We’re doing landscape maintenance on a Navajo reservation. Moriah Energy is strip mining for uranium, and by law they’re obliged to replenish the earth. We’re contracted by them to make the reservation look normal again. Whatever that means. Environmentalists came in handy for a change. Thank you, President Carter, I guess, for once.”
****
The ride to the reservation passed through desolate countryside. I’d heard how sheep and goats can live on the sparsest terrain, and that probably explained why they were about the only living creatures I saw.
The highway was narrow but at least paved. I don’t know if everything got suddenly uglier or if it was my attitude, now that I was in the middle of nowhere trying to work for nothing at some menial task. But I remembered, from history class, how time after time the conquered native Indian population was forced on to the worst of the livable and least productive environments.
Our family farm near Harlingen, where I grew up in the southern tip of Texas, an area called the Rio Grande Valley, was irrigated, with good black, fertile soil. We even had citrus orchards. We hired help for below minimum wage, and illegal aliens were even cheaper. Now it was my turn to be one of the hands like we used to hire. I liked the idea. I’d always admired our helpers.
Another reason I’m doing this. I think.
“Doug.” The man who’d just hired me called to a young, husky, medium-height guy with a short cropped beard, after we pulled up to a double-cab pickup. “I hired this guy for your dad. He’ll work as a laborer. He just finished college and needs some extra bucks. He grew up on a farm in Texas and is an ex-Marine.”
Nothing fazed Doug until that last description of me—ex-Marine. His eyes narrowed, and I wasn’t sure if it was a cynical grin or a sneer on his face. He spit tobacco onto the ground right in front of my new steel-toed boots. I made a point of showing no expression.
“Did you go to Vietnam?” he asked.
I was used to being judged when people asked this. He just seemed curious.
“No,” I replied. “Nixon pulled the Marines out by then.”
“I thought about joining the Marines, just to go through boot camp,” he said. “To see how I’d do. I didn’t care about the rest of it, though.” He spit more tobacco. “Follow me,” he motioned. “We’re drilling. For uranium. This ain’t Texas. I’ll start you off mixing mud. You ever mixed mud before?”
“No.”
“You got college. You’ll figure it out.”
I hated hearing how I would figure things out. I didn’t on our farm. It drove my daddy crazy. I’m not very mechanically inclined.
Mixing mud was easy to do. You dumped a fifty-pound sack of some mixture they called mud into a trough with water, and stirred. Almost like mixing cement except the result was a soupy plastic. We did this into the night. It was ten before they finally let us go home. A lanky guy who came up to my shoulders, with dark hair cropped at his earlobes and an Abraham Lincoln beard, walked up to me.
“You the new guy?” he asked, in a strong Mexican accent. His accent surprised me because he had white skin. Another one not friendly. Nobody on the crew so far had been. “I’m Jose,” he said without offering his hand. “I work for Kerr Construction too. Everybody else on the crew already left. We come in two double-cabin pickups, but everyone else left at six.” He pointed. “We have that old Chevy pickup to get home. You drive.”
“I don’t know how to get back.”
“I’ll get you on the highway,” Jose instructed. “Then follow it to town. Wake me up when we get there. I’ll tell you how to get the rest of the way.”
I’ve been in college too long.
Some idealistic notion told me to be patient, but my instincts said to tell this joker where to go.
Wake him up, indeed.
But in some ways I liked him doing that. Being new, I was anxious and feeling out of place.
Go ahead, piss me off. It settles the nerves.
Jose needed a ride home when we got back to town. Good. I needed a shower. His wife and new baby boy were in bed when we got there. I wasn’t just dirty and grimy, I had this mud stuff on me, too. On my hands and face and on my clothes. Goo. I felt plastic-coated. Jose wasn’t pleased, but he let me in. I didn’t bother with the shower but washed at his sink.
I found a city park after leaving Jose’s and drove to the curb, changed clothes in the back of the truck, unrolled my sleeping bag, meditated, and went to sleep.
My Marine days weren’t that far behind. Though I wasn’t a combat veteran, every Marine is a rifleman first, no matter what military job they get assigned. That means a lot of drilling, firing, running, marching, and camping out. We camped out at Camp Pendleton in a desert environment like this, and it was so cold at night we had to sleep in full combat gear, including boots, and with two blankets. Coyotes would raid our grounds looking for scraps. So, in spite of getting soft in college lately, what I was doing now was really a step up.
****
I got up with the sun. Once at work, they put me to laying irrigation pipes. That beat the hell out of mixing mud. I used to lay pipes with my daddy on our farm, except the pipes at Kerr Construction were more permanent, and we bolted the joints together instead of just hooking them.
People still weren’t friendly. Up to now I was one of two whites, not counting the ones who owned and ran the company. But that had nothing to do with the competition going on among the workers. Not to see who won but who was tough and competent enough to keep from getting fired. Three dollars an hour, bottom-of-the-barrel work, and you had to hustle to keep from losing your job.
“Hey, College,” Doug shouted from his pickup. “What’s your name again?” I looked up after placing a pipe down. “Come here a minute,” he barked.
There was another guy in the pickup too. A huge, reddish-brown-skinned guy with the high cheekbones of a Navajo. He wore a red bandana tied around his head like some Geronimo character. His biceps were as big as my thighs.
“You’re going to be here all day,” Doug instructed me. “We’re bringing you some more pipe and will place them about a quarter mile down the road. You’re going to lay these out all the way till you get to that electric post back there on that hill.” He pointed behind me. “That’s about a mile. I want them in a straight line. You got thirty minutes for your lunch break, then get everybody going again.” Before I thought of any questions, he drove away.
“Hey,” I shouted, “you just ran over my lunch box.”
“What’s it doing in the road?” he shouted back. The rest of the crew, behind me, snickered.