In the glow of the neon above us, Missy smiles a purple smile.
A family at a table near the emergency exit screams that its orders are wrong. “We said rare! That means bloody, you hear? Spurting!” The whole family’s screaming — two pudgy boys, a prim little girl, a chunky man, and his pregnant, pear-faced wife.
Missy’s telling me her desire to change the world probably began as a craving to change the school lunch menu when she was a kid. “I remember, every day it was tacos, taco salad, taco pizza, taco burgers …”
When the waitress brings our check, Maisie’s lovely baby cuz and I slide into our first long silence of the meal, wondering what to do next. Finally, Missy says, “If I hadn’t been with you tonight, what would you have done? After the meeting?”
“When I drop you off, I’ll head on over to Joe’s. Just to see how the confab went.”
“With what’s-his-name, the union president?”
“Right.”
“You’re worried about those fellows, aren’t you?”
A little.”
“What could go wrong?”
“Wilson’s paranoid. He thinks, any minute, he could be the next Jimmy Hoffa — ”
“Was Jimmy Hoffa that ‘Been to the mountaintop’ guy?”
I stare at her. She’s pretty, even purple, even yellow.
“I’m kidding,” she says. “Can I go with you? I mean, it’s like I’ve told Maisie, who knows when I’ll be back? I should witness the whole shebang, right? The Lone Star thing.”
“Absolutely.” I draw the word out slowly. Somehow, from an evening of errors, between the sweaty meeting on the docks and a dusky, deep-fried dinner, it’s become a night of promise. A night of solid action.
As we’re spinning along the bayou, I explain to Missy — my date! — that Houston’s labor history is a sorry saga of stumbles: from the gas rate disputes of the 1860s, which idled the skilled and delicate workers mining gas from oysters and coal; through the botched streetcar strikes of 1904, when a parade of drivers was stoned to death by scabs; to the failure of the unions in the 1960s to woo the mayor’s office.
I studied these events in the public library, in legal volumes so dusty they wheezed, when I first came to Houston with Linda; soon I was adding to the long, silly film reel of pratfalls.
I sued the Direct Navigation Company, a shipping firm, on behalf of a waterfront local, and lost.
I sued the Houston Labor Council on behalf of fifty consolidated unions, for failure to represent them properly, and lost.
My support of the Transport Workers Union ended in bitterness, recriminations within the local, mass firings.
I figure I’m not a bad lawyer. But these days, there’s not much an independent can achieve. The National Labor Relations Board has lit out for the Territory. The unions are putzing around like stray animals on the streets, and I guess the best thing to do is put them to sleep.
I love them, God knows, I tell Missy. They used to be frisky and effective, but now the old legs are thinning, scabby and pale, and I hate to see them suffer.
I wheel into the old steel district, south of downtown, with its shallow blue shadows and rust, the brittle ribs of its girders, the riotous smell lifting in mist from the bayou (an odor like moss and paste and rotted eggs). New Deal, Reconstruction finance, rank and file — the Old Leftie rosary can still move me with its Carl Sandburg music of sweat and grunts and hopeless faith.
Missy’s right. A sentimental fool. I pick a tape.
“Woody Guthrie.”
I glance at her, but can’t see her features in the dark. “I’m shocked,” I say. “I didn’t think a mosh-pit rocker would know this old Okie.”
“My first job in Minneapolis,” she tells me. “KSNF. K-Snuff, we called it. ‘Your Country Connection.’ Tammy and George, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff. Sometimes we’d slip in a few old folk tunes. Not my kind of deal, but it was steady work, midnight to eight. I’d get these phone calls from truckers, bread bakers — people on all-night shifts? They were exhausted,” Missy says. “I heard it in their voices — but most of them also seemed … I don’t know … centered? Sure of themselves? Something. Not like the wackos in the morning calling Dr. Lois, our on-air shrink, wondering what the hell to do with their lives.”
“You still got Lois’s number?”
She laughs, a low rasp like a laptop computer warming up. “I remember nights when I was little — this was about the time Maisie and I met — my dad used to come home, whipped. He’d put some Benny Goodman on the hi-fi, flop into his easy chair, shut his eyes …”
“What did he do?”
“Carpenter. I’d rub his shoulders — which wasn’t easy; I could barely reach the top of his chair — and hum to the clarinet until I heard him snore.”
“That’s nice,” I say.
“Made me feel needed. While he slept, I’d draw pictures of him measuring 2×4s. He kept my scribbles in his truck — said they always cheered him up on the job.”
All night, I realize, I’ve figured Missy wrong. “So, earlier, when you asked about Merle — ”
“I knew who he was,” she admits. “It was you I didn’t have a handle on. I mean, Merle’s great about the blue-collar stuff. But he’s also into drinking and whoring and stealing — ”
“Got you.”
“Which Merle jangled your little bell?”
“Take the measure of your man.”
“Something like that.”
“Smart.” I wish I’d been as bright with the sharks. The Armani army. Linny.
Woody’s telling us now that it takes a worried man to sing a worried song. It’s a bad recording; his riffing sounds like a shaky phone connection, crackling, in the chilliest part of the night, when you get an urgent call from a friend.
Joe France’s neighborhood, a cul-de-sac just east of Main Street, downtown, is easy to spot: there are a fair number of wheel-less cars propped on cinder blocks in damp gravel drives; three or four washer/dryers rusting in pyracantha bushes; several hail-damaged roofs. Their unshingled spaces look like gaps in the mouths of pasty children waiting for a raise from the Tooth Fairy.
Missy shifts uncomfortably in the seat beside me. Light from a Fiesta Supermarket two streets west filters through the top of a row of elms, giving the bitter air (it smells of grease and stale coffee from a nearby shirt factory) a powdery shimmer.
Joe’s lawn is clipped, the eaves of his boxy house freshly painted, warmly gray — he’s a conscientious man — but still somehow the place looks tattered, like his baggy old cutoffs.
He’s sitting, as I feared — as I expected — on his porch, bleeding from his mouth and ears. His wife, Carla, compact and nifty as a backyard Hibachi, dips around him, dabbing his red, raw face with a Baggie full of ice.
As we leave the truck, Missy finds my hand.
“Hal, Jesus, I’m so glad you’re here,” Carla says, straightening up, resting her fingers on Joe’s right shoulder. We’ve done this dance before, Carla, Joe, and I — it’s not a tune I like. “That low-life, rat-nosed bastard, Frankie Wilson, with his little pea-shooter eyes, he sent his bullies after Hughie and Joe.”
I nod.
“Joey just wanted to talk to the man.”
Nod.
“Hal, some major readjustment’s gotta be made!”
Missy squats next to Joe — I hear the hiss of her hose — plucks a Kleenex from her skirt. She scoops crimson bubbles from the creases of his ears. “It’s okay,” she says, and I imagine her little-girl body, skinny as a pogo stick, curled over her daddy’s wing-backed chair, the heartbreaking paleness of the backs of her thighs. Behind her, Benny Goodman breathes sweetly.