Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

On new work, however, there was a clear profit to be made. The two men would estimate all the costs, materials, time, overhead — and then they’d add up the figures and tack fifteen percent on top. That fall the Stock & Son Plumbing & Heating Company put out bids on six jobs — a school in Gilmanton, a filling station in Laconia, two garden apartment buildings in Loudon, and two ski lodges, one in Belknap and one in North Conway. But they were too high on all six. Not by much, but enough to be out of the running and in no position after the bids had been opened to bargain secretly with the general contractor against the other subcontractors, as was the practice. “Those fuckers all play footsie with each other,” Alvin’s father explained to him. “And the only way to get in on the game is to get in on the game fair and square. On your own. Prove you can do the job on time and for what you said you could. Next time, the big boys, the general contractors, will know to play footsie with you, too. But you still got to get that first job or two on your own. After that, you’re golden.” So they continued to estimate and bid for jobs two or three nights a week, Saturdays and Sundays, working the rest of the week “out of the pickup,” as his father put it.

Alvin was a reasonably good plumber. He was extremely large and strong, close to tireless unless he got bored. And he was basically skilled — after all, he had worked for his father after school and summers since he was fourteen years old. On the other hand, he was more adept at estimating new work than his father was, because he was better able to read blueprints and to work rapidly with numbers. Nevertheless, he was paid only for the time he worked as a pipefitter, at a first-year apprentice’s rate, and paid not at all for the time he spent estimating. To his father, that was part of the deal, the offer. To Alvin, it was not. But he said nothing.

He didn’t gripe or grumble about it to anyone, not even to his friend Feeney, whom he saw frequently — whenever he wasn’t working for his father. His social life then was actually not much different from what it had been during his last year of high school, four years before, except of course that he didn’t attend any of the school functions and no longer could avail himself of the company of Betsy Cooper, his high school girl friend, who, then in her senior year at Mount Holyoke College, was engaged to marry a medical student at Columbia. Alvin drove around with Feeney, drinking at bars and in cars, picking up girls at roller-skating rinks, road-houses, country-and-western dances, and drive-in restaurants. He often successfully made love to these girls (in the car, or sometimes at Feeney’s house, now that Feeney’s father had left), and he usually got boisterously drunk, and he inevitably got into a fistfight with a stranger. These three activities he had rarely, if ever, indulged in as a high school student, and, therefore, people concluded that Alvin Stock had “changed” since coming back from the service. It was a reasonable conclusion.

His father told him, “I don’t give a shit what you do on your own time. As long as you get to work on time in the morning and your hangover don’t slow you down any. And as long as I don’t have to bail you out of jail. Far as I’m concerned, you’re free, white, and twenty-one. Except when you’re working for me.” He smiled quickly, the movement almost unseen, like a lizard’s tongue. It was a joke. Alvin was supposed to laugh.

His mother was not as sanguine, however. Every night when he went out, dark hair combed slickly back, clean T-shirt and khakis, loafers shined, Feeney outside in the car rapping impatiently on the horn, she would watch him leave and then would sit down and wait for him to return, no matter how late. In the kitchen, seated at the table, working a crossword puzzle and listening to the radio (turned low, so her husband, in the bedroom adjacent, could sleep), she would wait for her son to come home, and finally, at two or three in the morning, she would hear Feeney’s car drive up, and she’d snap to attention in the chair, her eyes dry and red from sleeplessness and fatigue, and when he entered the house, usually by the front door, she’d call to him. “Alvin!”

“Whut.”

“In the kitchen. Come in here, I want to talk to you.”

He would tip and stumble through the living room and take a seat opposite her at the long table. “Whut.” Sometimes he would be wearing a bruise across his face and lipstick across his shirtfront. Sometimes one or the other. Rarely neither.

Then she would begin: “Alvin. Son. You’ve got to get hold of yourself. Look at you. You can’t be this way, you can’t become the kind of person who … acts this way all the time. I’m worried about you, son.”

“Well, don’t. I am who I am. That’s all,” he’d answer, lighting a cigarette.

“You’re unhappy, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t … until I come in here and started gettin’ nagged at.” He looked her in the face, blew smoke at her. One mean bastard, he thought.

She coughed, got up abruptly, walked into her bedroom. “Good night. Shut off the lights before you go up.” Angrily. It ended this way every time she waited up for him. She wasn’t ever going to do it again.

“Yes, ma’am .” Sneering. Rubbing out his cigarette in the saucer of her cup. Sliding away from the table and standing up. Going from the kitchen through the living room to the stairs and up to his bedroom, having left the lights on behind him. On purpose.

Whose purpose? He didn’t know. He sat in darkness on his bed, kicking his shoes slowly off. Oh, what the hell, she was right, right about everything, for God’s sake. The nights he turned into a bum, a nothing, a big slob screwing every whore in Belknap County, brawling in every bar and road-house, drinking himself sick all the nights he didn’t have to work for his father… And she knew it, knew that these were the nights he turned into a bum, a slob, broke, drunk, fucked out, the taste of vomit on his teeth, his knuckles scraped, nose swollen, half the preceding six hours completely blacked out, erased from conscious memory, the rest remembered only in terms of sudden movement and roaring… And it was all her fault, his goddamned, sweet, nagging and high-falutin’ mother’s fault. She should’ve left him the hell alone, or else helped him get away to college, anywhere, just away… And it was all Betsy Cooper’s fault too — that touchy, virgin, cock-teasing bitch, and all her ambitions, her promises to write letters to him, all her lies to him, how she didn’t care what he did with his life, she would love and respect it… What a pile of crap that was! In a week she’d be home from college for the Christmas break. He’d go over to that big white barn of a house on the hill, and he’d tell her what the hell he thought of her, and then he’d fuck her, right in front of that big living room mirror, and she’d watch, and she’d love it, but she’d hate herself for loving it, and when he’d fucked her, he’d get off and stand up and laugh, laugh like a loon, laugh and laugh and laugh, Goddamn it. Goddamn it. Damn it. It was nobody’s fault — but his own. He knew that. Impossible to deny. Impossible to blame anybody else, least of all his mother, least of all Betsy Cooper, both of whom were guilty merely of having thought him better, stronger, smarter, than he was, both of whom loved him — or had once loved him. He deserved himself. Everyone else deserved someone better. Only he was bad enough, weak enough, dumb enough, to deserve being who, in the final fact, he was…

It was mid-December, a blowy, snowy, Friday evening, cold enough that the wind crackled against the windshield of Feeney’s Dodge, and the snowflakes, dry and hard as salt crystals, blew against the car and swiftly away from it, finally settling in long, wind-carved drifts along the sides of the road and edges of the woods and against the buildings they passed, as they drove back from Pittsfield to Crawford.