The Kerr Construction Company (4 page)

“You were a bullfighter, Jose?”

“I was even good. I had sponsors. But then I got my wife pregnant. We weren’t married then. So, I had to get married and raise a kid. It’s better to come to America. And meet a
gringo
crazier than me. I’m talking about you,
hombre
.”

“You mean minimum wage in America is better than bullfighting at entry level?”

“For sure.” Jose sighed. “I’m alive. I might be dead if I stayed in the bullring. And now I learn to use heavy equipment. I can make it if I become legal.”

“I used to work the fields with illegals,” I related. “We called them wetbacks, for swimming the Rio Grande to get to Texas. You can’t say that now. Anyway, we barely paid our illegals anything, but we gave them a shack for free. They not only saved but sent money back to their families. One guy was like my big brother. Then, with another hand, we were both disking a field. At quitting time he looked at me from his tractor, smiled, then went home and asked my daddy to borrow our twenty-two rifle to go rabbit hunting. We found his body the next morning. He blew his brains out with that twenty-two.”

“Hey,
amigo
. Dalhart.” Two of the others called out to me as they walked to the pickup for a break. “
Merienda
,” they said. “Dalhart, we have for you.”

They wrapped a tortilla around three chili peppers and handed it to me. I bit into it and felt something bite back.
Hellfire reincarnated.
I wanted to scream, except I was from Texas.

I looked at them in disbelief as they munched away on theirs. I could not let Mexicans beat me, but my nose kept running. I pictured steam coming out of my ears like in some cartoon as my eyes watered. I tore off a piece of tortilla without any chili pepper and tossed it into my mouth to pacify what was left of my tongue.

Jose took it all in. “You’re a crazy one.” He shook his head and grinned. “You try hard, for a
gringo
.”

****

It felt commonplace now, even though it had been just a week since I first started seeing Carmen. I would go to the house of my work colleague to shower, then to the restaurant where she worked. If she wasn’t in the dining area when I arrived, I would seat myself and wait until she appeared. Otherwise, I’d walk up to her, even if she was in the process of taking an order. We would always kiss. Nothing dramatic, considering where we were, but a definite show of affection. A continuum for our territorial claims on each other, as well as a renewal of commitment. That’s what it was now, commitment. We just had no idea what we were going to do about it.

They had a jukebox where she worked. Somewhere during the process of me waiting for her to finish work, each of us would play a song on it. Something to show what kind of mood we were in. Perhaps a message directed at the other one that was to be figured out. A moody sentimental song, or an energizing Beatles song, or a he-done-her-wrong type of song. And before we went home, either during the song we played or one we got off to that someone else played, we’d dance, right there in the diner in front of everyone. It got to where people in the restaurant encouraged it, even by playing a song of their choice, hoping we would dance to it.

Carmen didn’t live far from where she worked. We could have walked. But that was part of the courtship now, me driving her to her mom’s, then staying awhile. I still left the house when our evening together was over. That part hadn’t changed. It wasn’t so special now to me, being so pure. It seemed more like a duty. That was a bad sign. Something was going to give somewhere, I was sure.

****

I hated working Saturdays, especially since it took away from time with Carmen, but I needed the money. Usually the work on a Saturday was especially boring, though. So I was glad when Doug pulled me away from the others as we policed the area. He led me to the workshop.

“I need you to hold this bar up,” he said. “You better have rubber soles on your boots, because this may shock a bit when I weld.”

I felt the red hot filings hit my arm as I looked at our shadows from the electrical flares spewing out of the welding rod. Then suddenly I felt an electrical jolt on my shoulder. I turned to look just as Doug poked me again with the tip of the rod, knowing I wouldn’t drop the bar I was holding. Then he did it yet again.

“Ow!” I yelped, dropping the steel bar onto the floor to defy him.

“Is it hot?” He laughed as he put down the welding rod. “Let’s go to my place and landscape. Get the others. We’ll put something on the grill and have a beer.”

We laid out plots of carpet grass and dug a flowerbed in his back yard while Doug got the grill going. He still wore his hard hat but was shirtless. He had a new four-bedroom brick house, and I could feel the pangs of envy as I dug in the yard. I’d lived like that most of my life. But the pangs were there anyway. Why did some people have and others not? And why was I asking a question like this all of a sudden?

“Everybody have a beer,” Doug invited as we put down our shovels and entered his patio area. “That’s enough work for today.”

Ira dug out a wad of tobacco from his cheek and threw it into a bush before getting a can of beer from the cooler.

“In Texas you leave the chaw in, don’t you?” Doug ribbed. “When you drink a beer, I mean.”

“McIlhenny doesn’t chew tobacco.” Ira snorted. “It’s beneath him. Are you sure you’re from Texas? You sure you’re a Marine? Hell, Doug, the other day we came back to town and I saw him pick up a
Playboy
off the seat of the truck. I thought, hey, this guy’s human after all. But I’ll be damned if he didn’t read instead of look at the pictures.”

“It was on Rhodesia,” I answered. “They’re on the verge of having a black President.”

“Rhodesia?” Ira howled. “Who gives a damn? Ain’t you got hormones?”

“But he knows everything,” Jose said. “Ask him anything. Anything about this whole universe.”

“He doesn’t know how to build a fence.” Doug laughed.

“Who was the nineteenth President?” Ira asked.

“Rutherford B. Hayes,” I answered. “I wrote a paper about him in high school. The Democrat Samuel Tilden should have won the election, but the radical Republicans managed to rig the Louisiana vote. That got it thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.”

“Shut up,” Ira said. “Shut the hell up. Who cares?”

“Don’t ask.” I smirked.

“I won’t,” Ira returned. “You wrote a paper in high school on it. Give me a break. Hell, I couldn’t write in high school.”

“You still can’t.” Doug snickered.

“Kiss my ass, boss,” Ira came back.

“McIlhenny,” Doug said, “after we eat, you and me are going at it. I want to see if I can beat a Marine. The only reason I hired you was because you were bigger and uglier than me and you’re a Marine.”

“I ain’t ugly, Doug. And I don’t want to fight.”

“You got to earn your pay,” he challenged.

I saw a bottle of whiskey freshly opened on the panel of the grill. “Is that yours?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

I walked over and guzzled down half of the bottle in one gulp.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shrieked.

“Getting ready to kick your ass and get it over with,” I answered.

“The hell, you say,” he sneered. “Come on, then.”

I loved this guy. He was so predictable. Perfect timing, perfect wording. I walked up to him and saw him double his fists. I grabbed a wad of his chest hair and jerked it. A large white patch appeared in the middle of his carpet of black hair. He howled in pain and lunged for me. I moved to the side, stuck out my foot, and pushed him down, then swigged more of his whiskey.

“On the other hand, I enjoy a good brawl now and then.” I smirked. “Good food, good fight, good whiskey. You throw a swell party, Doug.”

“Don’t do that again,” he said, getting up, trying to appreciate what I had done. “We’ll settle this someday.”

****

The next weekend I had off. Since we didn’t always have Saturdays off, I wanted to take advantage now that I had one free. Plus, I just got paid. I wanted to do something. And with Carmen. Just get away. Just the two of us.

“The Grand Canyon’s not far,” Carmen said as we got out a map. “I don’t know how fast we can get there in your Desperado,” she added with a laugh, “but we should make it in about four hours, if we don’t stop much. It’s a great drive, and even if we don’t hike down, the view from the canyon rim takes your breath away.”

The thought appealed to me, but I studied the map to see what other options we had. I had never been to this part of the country and everything excited me.

“My grandma lived in Pueblo,” I commented as we looked things over.

“Pueblo Indians or Pueblo, Colorado?” she asked. “You have to be more specific in this part of the country, you know.”

“Colorado,” I said, approving of her request for detail. “I spent parts of some summers there. Grandma lived on a farm with no electricity or plumbing. My grandpa, actually step-grandpa, plowed by mule. I felt like Daniel Boone when I was with them. We could see Pikes Peak from their log cabin.”

“Is she still alive?” Carmen asked me. “We’d be pushing it to get there and back in one weekend. It would be basically drive up, say hello, spend the night, and drive back.”

“She lives in Denver now that Grandpa died,” I explained. “That’s okay. I’ve been there. Let’s go somewhere new.”

My thoughts perked as I zeroed my finger onto a spot on the map, then gleefully looked at her.

“Monument Valley’s not much farther away than the Grand Canyon,” I said. “Just a different direction.”

“Everybody wants to see the Grand Canyon, and the object of my affection here, meaning you, goes the other way,” she said, shaking her head. “Why Monument Valley?”

“Haven’t you seen those John Wayne movies? They’re eerily spiritual.”

“Spiritual?” She scoffed. “Monument Valley is spiritual to you? It’s desert. We have that around here.”

I nodded. “It’s like ghosts live there. It has soul.”

“Ghosts are spiritual to you?”

“It’s this wide open setting,” I tried explaining further, “with sculptures carved by God. Sacred. And not only that, John Wayne had this special style. While the rest of Hollywood was making B movies, he had depth and setting. Command. At least his better movies did. Like at Monument Valley. And on top of that he’s the one who took up for the serviceman during the Vietnam War.”

“A lot of people took up for servicemen during the Vietnam War,” Carmen corrected.

“But he stood up for us. He went out of his way to do this. He challenged those that were down on us, those burning the flag, and making Marines out as baby killers.”

She studied me for a moment. “You seem scarred or something. I heard of guys coming back from Vietnam being scarred, but you seem scarred and you didn’t go.”

“I wanted to go.” I struggled for the words. “I believed in the war. So, no, I wasn’t scarred from the war. I was scarred, if that’s the word, from the mindset. From our generation. And even though I think people have a right to dissent, they were burning the flag, and taking up for Communism, and making us out to be the aggressor. We talked European powers into giving up their colonies, but were accused of holding on to them, just because we were trying to keep the Communists out. Did you see what the North Vietnamese did when they took over South Vietnam? And everywhere else?”

“I don’t want to talk politics,” she said meekly.

“Me either,” I answered, apology in my voice. “I just appreciated John Wayne for his stand, and somehow there’s all this about Monument Valley, too. It represents something to my psyche somehow. I want to find out more why it does. It has character. Let’s go. We’ll go to the Grand Canyon next time.”

Carmen rubbed my upper arm affectionately. “You said the magic words, Dalhart. You said ‘next time.’ There’ll be a next time, and we’ll go there then.”

“Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon look the same distance on the map,” I said refocusing my attention on how to get there.

“It’s not direct, though,” she explained. “But I think we can get there in the same amount of time.”

“What are these little fiber-like lines on the map?” I moaned. “Just before we get to the famous mesas in the John Wayne movies.”

She stared at them, trying to figure it out with me. “Maybe farm-to-market roads,” she said. “This is New Mexico and Arizona. Our roads suck eggs. We’ll go due north to Shiprock first, that’s a good highway, and it’s all in New Mexico. But once we turn west into Arizona, it’s all desolate terrain. That’s when those fibers for roads on the map begin. They might even be dirt roads. It happens in this part of New Mexico, too. It leads us to a sparse area and then we’re on our own. Nobody lives there, I guess.”

“We’ll stock up with food and drink,” I instructed, “and extra water for the radiator, just in case.”

On the way, we passed by Window Rock. I recognized it because the Indian reservation where Kerr contracted was near there. All these eroded hills and giant rocks. Like the roadrunner and coyote cartoons I used to watch. New Mexico was the world’s best-kept secret, I decided.

The town of Shiprock had an eroded hill that did indeed look like a ship. A sandstone hill, I assumed, that had worn down to a God-made sculpture of a ship floating on just enough rock to keep it afloat.
How long has it been here
, I wondered as I stared,
and how much longer before it crashes? Will they change the name of the town when it does?