Thirty-Two #2
It’s true. It stings. The effort to unionize had intensified over the last couple years, with walkouts and petitions and meetings with chapter organizers.
Until, earlier this month, the company announced that they’d be building a new plant in Santa Maria, more than 150 miles outside of Los Angeles.
They say it’s unrelated to the organizing, and no one can prove otherwise.
Once the new plant is built and running, the Hollywood plant will close.
I don’t like to think about it. Just how I didn’t like to think about Delphine’s photograph in the window back home.
I remember how Lionel followed me outside, all those years ago, to ask me about it.
“I used to be so curious about you,” I say. “Al’s little brother, always in trouble, a man of mystery.”
He laughs. “I was a knucklehead.”
“Was?”
He play-punches my shoulder, soft as a whisper. “Oh, here’s a place,” I say, pulling off the road. “You stay, I’ll be right back.”
This time it’s a woman at the register. She barely gives me a second glance, accepts my money, hands two paper cups over the counter, and it’s done. “Does it make you feel any kind of way?” I ask Lionel when we’re back in the car. “That it’s easier for me? It makes me uncomfortable.”
We’re parked behind the building, out of sight of the road by his request. “Does it make me feel any kind of way,” he says.
“Well, yes. I am quite aware of the freedoms that come with your complexion and the limitations that come with mine. But also, what’s the alternative?
Hi, I’m colored. May I order some coffee?
It’s not camouflaging that I despise as much as what some other colored people do. Felix, for example.”
“Which is?”
“Debase himself.”
“How does Felix debase himself?”
“A Pullman porter? His entire job is making white people confident in their superiority.”
Defensiveness rushes in and I don’t know why.
He still hasn’t been in touch—seven years and no word—but I can’t help myself.
“His job is making sure that all runs smoothly in first class. That the passengers are well taken care of. It’s a service role, sure.
And the trains still have an old way of doing things.
But it won’t be like that forever, and the porters have done so much to advance the cause.
Distributing colored newspapers and unionizing. There’s dignity in what Felix does.”
“The passengers call him George. A man has a choice in how he’s treated.”
“Then the passengers are debasing themselves,” I say. The coffee’s strong, bitter. I drink it anyway. “These are ideals that you’re talking about,” I say. “It’s easy to say them but that doesn’t mean they stand in the real world.”
“I stand by them in the real world.”
“And here we are! Hiding out behind a coffee shop because you needed me to go rescue you.”
“All right. Fair.”
I start the car and pull back onto the highway.
“I can’t believe you’d say that about Felix.
And all the men he’s worked alongside all these years.
Not everyone’s a genius, Lionel. Not everyone has a perfect little niche to fit into.
Most of us have had to take what we’re offered and make the best of it. ”
“Are you calling me a genius?”
“Find something for us on the radio.”
“It feels good to be appreciated.”
“Appreciated as a snob,” I say.
“A snob and a genius. Nobody’s perfect. I’ll take it.”
“You’re impossible.”
He laughs. “Okay, okay. I’m just blowing off steam. Nothing personal against Felix, apart from that he left you and the kids, of course. Can’t imagine why you’d get so worked up defending him.”
“I know. It’s just the principle of it. I fundamentally disagree with what you’re saying.
Take Bernard and Al. Al decides the company has to change, decides the only way is to unionize.
The boss becomes the enemy. The company becomes the enemy.
Unionizing is the only way. Meanwhile, Bernard is loyal to the company.
He’s working from within to get us higher wages, extra vacation days, shorter hours.
You might say he’s debasing himself, but I say he’s being a pragmatist. He’s being strategic.
He’s going golfing with the vice president, bending his ear, leaving him more sympathetic to the workers while Al’s at secret meetings, showing up on Mondays with a new list of demands and ultimatums. Which method works better? ”
“Clearly neither of them work. That’s why they’re moving the plant.”
I sigh. “I don’t even want to talk about this. I hate talking about it. It’s all anyone’s been talking about for years.”
“Have you started planning what you’ll do for work?”
From the back, there’s a rustle, a rattle of the cage. I say, “It’s the only job I’ve ever had. You know that. Some people are going to follow the plant to Santa Maria.”
“But not you, right?”
“No. Not me. I have some time to figure it out.”
“Maybe you could teach art lessons down in your studio.”
“I have no formal training.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I don’t know all the words for things. I don’t know enough about the history.”
“I’m certain that you know a lot more than you think.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But art lessons aren’t it.”
Just past Riverside, a song comes on the radio.
A fiddle. A lazy guitar strum. A woman’s voice, plaintive and sweet.
“We don’t listen to enough country music,” Lionel says.
His arm rests in the window, wind through his tight black curls, an unruly smile.
“Tell you what. When the kids are out of the house and your evenings are free, we’re gonna do it all the time.
I’ll show up with a bottle of something and you’ll have some country records for us to listen to. ”
“We’ll prop the door open and play them loud,” I say.
“Warm summer nights,” Lionel says. “I can see it.”
I can, too. The comfort of it. The absence it might fill. “I’m worried about the family,” I say. “Who’d have imagined Adele and Al would ever stop hosting on Sundays?”
“Bernard and Al will figure it out. The plant’s moving on and they will, too, once they’ve had some time to nurse their grudges.”
“But it isn’t only Bernard and Al. It’s also my sisters. They seem relieved to have an excuse to avoid each other. I’m not sure why.” We’re passing through Riverside now, getting closer to home. “If we were going to lose what we had anyway, why didn’t I try with Ginny?”
We drive for miles longer, quiet now, and once we’re back on city streets Lionel reaches for the cage and pulls the bird out.
He holds her, strokes her head. She coos.
I stop at a red light and look at her. I’m sure I’ve passed her before, pecking around in Lionel’s coop, but I’ve never looked closely.
Fawn beak and quick eyes, white head with black flecks, like a scattering of pepper in a bowl of salt.
Soft velvet-gray body and bold black-and-white tail feathers. “She’s beautiful.”
“Sure is. Here,” he says, “try this.” He shows me how to glide my index finger across her back. “See how you can’t even detect her spine? That’s an indicator of an impeccable bird right there.”
At the next light, he hands her to me. Her body’s warm, her feathers soft.
She smells like seeds and hay. Her heart beats against my fingers.
The light changes and he takes her back.
Soon we’re turning onto his street, and he puts the bird back in the cage.
He’s smiling his Lionel smile, his gotten-away-with-something smile, and I want to go back in time to each moment I’ve seen it before, and each time we’ve been together this way, the two of us.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” I ask.
“What could go wrong?” he says. But I see something horrible on his door, a smear of red, more of it on his stoop.
“What is that?” We both step out of the car.
It’s worse up close. Thick smears of blood on the wood and the knob, and below, on the stoop, pink entrails and white bone, guts spilled out and stomped on, and flesh, and feathers.
I gag. Lionel darts down the steps and around to the side of the house, to his coop.
I follow him, watch as he turns the combination lock and swings open the door.
Inside, his birds ruffle and preen, peck and nuzzle.
“Look,” he says. “They tried to break it open.” There are gouges stabbed out of the wood along the padlock. They could have pried it off with more time.
“How’d they get here so fast?”
“Must’ve had some guys come do it for them.
” He locks the coop. We go look at the mess again, closer.
A flattened head, bigger than a pigeon’s, topped with a dash of red.
A lifeless eye gazing out. “Poor little chicken,” Lionel says.
His face crumples, he squeezes his eyes shut. “They didn’t need to do all this.”
“Let’s leave it for a minute,” I say. I get the bird from the back seat of the car, aware as I do of every window on the street, every parked car. There’s a slam from behind me and I startle, but it’s an elderly colored man, emptying his garbage into the silver pail.
“Come on,” I tell Lionel. “Let’s go through the back.
” I take his hand and he follows me like a little boy, head hanging, tears on his cheeks.
Inside, his apartment is as it always is, undisturbed.
All I can think to do is call Al at the office.
“Avoid the front door,” I warn. “It’s gruesome.
” He comes straight over, dressed in his suit, an expression I remember from the blue house as though it were yesterday.
“How is it that we’re here again?” he asks after Lionel’s told him the story. “And how is it you thought Odette was the person to call?”
“I managed just fine,” I say.
“They’re just sending me a message is all,” Lionel says.
“And a damn clear one,” Al says. “The question now is where you’re gonna go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”