Well, why should he? What was wrong, exactly, with not having the balls to rob a bank? Someone tell him that. Someone tell him what was wrong with being afraid to rob a bank. He wished he had had it out with that woman in the desert who called him Sugar. It wouldn’t have worked. “You’ve never heard the song ‘The Navy Is a Desert but Nothing Like This’? Do you think it’s unmanly of me not to rob a bank? Do you?” She would have said no. And that would have been the end of it. It was hard to get anyone to actually talk to you, and harder, if they did, to get them to make sense.
In this reverie Wayne suddenly smelled tar pitch. He looked around. People had come in. A black guy was saying to Harry, “Harry, is Cabriolet a goat and a Chevrolet or what?” Harry looked at him. “You know, man,” the black guy said, “cabrito.” The guy had on a T-shirt with a picture of the Last Supper or something on it over the words IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. Wayne thought the wearer of the shirt ought to understand what the fuck a Cabriolet was. It was a goddamned car.
“It’s a car, Stone,” Wayne said loudly. He had the balls to do that. The black guy looked at him and Wayne realized the tar-pitch smell was coming from him. “You a hot man, Stone?”
The black guy turned back to the bar and ignored him.
Wayne went up to within two stools of him. He could see the left side of the table of black luminaries on the guy’s shirt. The figure closest to him looked like Jesse Jackson. That seemed right to Wayne: he’d never understood Jesse Jackson. You’d think anyone who spoke in rhymes to uneducated people in the ghetto would be understandable, but he was not, to Wayne. Wayne called Harry and bought the black guy a beer and had Harry give it to him, and when the black guy looked at him Wayne said, more embarrassed than he anticipated being, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson,” and the black guy looked at him as if he was crazy.
“Well,” Wayne said, apologizing by raising his palms off the bar in a shrug, “I don’t. I just don’t. Cocaine is a pain in yo’ brain, I guess I get that. No, I don’t even get that. It feels pretty good to mine. You work hot roofing, right?”
“Okay,” the black guy said.
This threw Wayne a bit. Okay? Okay what?
“Okay what?” Wayne said.
“The beer.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Wayne drank his own beer as a kind of confirmation that they were drinking together. That seemed to be the way the black guy took it, too. When they had finished the beers the black guy bought the round and Harry gave Wayne a beer without having to acknowledge where it came from. Wayne said “Stoweno” to Harry.
To the black guy he said, “I work cold.”
“Cold?”
“Cold process.”
“What that?”
“No kettle. Shit in cans, barrels.”
“Sticky shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Man. No.”
“Better’n burning your ass.”
“Stick your ass to everything.”
“Más o meno.”
“You don’t understand Jesse Jackson?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand Mickey Mantle.”
“Sounds like a wiener.”
“What?”
“I dig it.”
“You crazy.”
“Stoweno.”
Wayne was smiling at all this and the black guy was shaking his head, not altogether unamused. Wayne had no idea what the black guy was talking about or why he was smiling. He looked about 230, most of it in his shoulders. The black guy had had some pot after work and the two beers, and he was feeling frisky because Wayne looked about 90 pounds wet and the bartender was a largish Mexican, not a small one.
“What I want to know,” the black guy said to Wayne, “is what would happen if Deion Sanders say to Mickey Mantle, Run it out, you piece of shit homeboy!”
From his distance, Harry announced, “Mickey Mantle had bad knees, he never run shit.”
“I know that,” the black guy said. “That ain’t my point.”
“I get you point,” Harry said. “All shit break loose is what happen.”
The black guy raised his hand and Harry high-fived it. Wayne looked on.
Wayne said, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson or Mickey Mantle or Deion Sanders.”
“I believe that,” the black guy said, and looked to Harry for another high five, but Harry declined. Wayne bought the round and Harry served the beers and neatened everything up. Wayne didn’t know why he wanted to talk to the black guy in the first place, except he was sure the guy was a roofer and Wayne would be needing a job, but he didn’t need a job this soon, so he didn’t know why he started talking to the black guy, roofer or not, but now he had a buzz and didn’t mind talking to him.
“Hey!” he suddenly said. “You mean this thing where Carlton Fisk says to Deion Sanders, Run it out, you piece of shit or something?”
The black guy and Harry exchanged glances.
“Einstein,” the black guy said.
“Git it, git it, git it, guitar Sam!” Wayne shouted. “I get it now.”
“Get my man a beer,” the black guy said. “That is one trazee white man.”
“That is John Wayne,” Harry said.
“Wayne, Stone,” Wayne said to the black guy.
“Robert Williams,” the black guy said to Wayne. “Don’t call me Bob.” Wayne and Robert Williams shook hands clumsily, Wayne attempting a black shake and Robert Williams a white shake. The fumbling resulted in Wayne chuckling and a white shake.
“So they hiring where you are?” Wayne asked.
“What day is this?”
“Friday.”
“Monday will be Monday, right?”
“Stoweno.”
“It’s roofing, right?”
“Water runs downhill and wet things don’t stick together.”
“They hiring.”
Wayne had a pair of the most bleached-out blue eyes Robert Williams had ever seen. It was hard to maintain, drunk or not, that those eyes could be connected to the devil. In fact, when Robert Williams shook Wayne’s hand, thinking it an act of racial duplicity, he was surprised to receive from Wayne a current of no malice whatsoever. Wayne was a new kind of blue-eyed deviclass="underline" one who could not say nigger with sufficient heat or conviction to be anything but comical or innocently self-referential. What Robert Williams felt, despite himself, when he shook the fumbling, dirty hand of this Cloroxed pinkish devil was a small surge of pity.
On Monday morning at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal Robert Williams spoke highly of Wayne’s credentials as a roofer and Wayne was hired.
After securing his position at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal, which also manufactured, it turned out, serious roofing equipment, for which Wayne thought he could be a sales representative, particularly for the gas-powered gravel scarifier, as it was properly called, or power spudder, as it was known by those who used it, Wayne went on a date. There was a woman in the office named Pamela Forktine and Wayne could not resist asking her every morning for plastic spoons for the coffee-stirring operations, which were prodigious operations at Ponderosa or any other roofing company at six in the morning among troops as hungover and blear — their brogans flared open at the untied ankles and sticking to the floor, their flannel shirts not altogether tucked in, their hair wet-combed — as the troops at Ponderosa or any roofing company.