Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Zombie?” I repeated, looking up from a tray of short black wires at

Kevin.

“You look like you sleepwalk through the day,” he said. “Are you high on something or what?”

He was just a stock helper or some such bottom-of-the-ladder type. He had no authority over me, and I didn’t owe him any explanations.

“I do my work,” I said quietly. I turned back to the wires, counted them, corrected the inventory slip, initialed it, and moved down to the next shelf.

“Buz told me you were a writer,” said the voice that I thought had gone away.

“Look, I can’t count with you talking to me.” I pulled out a tray full of large screws—twenty-five to a box.

“Take a break.”

“Did you see that agency guy they sent home yesterday? He took one break too many. Unfortunately, I need this job.”

“Are you a writer?”

“I’m a joke as far as Buz is concerned. He thinks people are strange if they even read books. Besides,” I added bitterly, “what would a writer be

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doing working out of a slave market?”

“Keeping herself in rent and hamburgers, I guess. That’s what I’m doing working at a warehouse.”

I woke up a little then and really looked at him. He was an unusual- looking white man, his face young, almost unlined, but his hair com- pletely gray and his eyes so pale as to be almost colorless. He was muscular, well-built, but no taller than my own five-eight so that I found myself looking directly into the strange eyes. I looked away startled, wondering whether I had really seen anger there. Maybe he was more important in the warehouse than I had thought. Maybe he had some authority …

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“I am now,” he said. And he smiled. “Just sold a book. I’m getting out of here for good on Friday.”

I stared at him with a terrible mixture of envy and frustration. “Congratulations.”

“Look,” he said, still smiling, “it’s almost lunch time. Eat with me. I

want to hear about what you’re writing.”

And he was gone. I hadn’t said yes or no, but he was gone.

“Hey!” whispered another voice behind me. Buz. The agency clown when he was sober. Wine put him into some kind of trance, though, and he just sat and stared and looked retarded—which he wasn’t, quite. He just didn’t give a damn about anything, including himself. He drank up his pay and walked around in rags. Also, he never bathed. “Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?” he asked, leering.

“Get out of here,” I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.

“You gonna write some poor-nography together!” He went away laughing.

Later, at one of the round rusting metal tables in the corner of the warehouse that served as the lunch area, I found out more about my new writer friend. Kevin Franklin, his name was, and he’d not only gotten his book published, but he’d made a big paperback sale. He could live on the money while he wrote his next book. He could give up shitwork, hope- fully forever …

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked when he stopped for breath. The warehouse was in a newly built industrial section of Compton, far enough from coffee shops and hot dog stands to discourage most of us from going out to eat. Some people brought their lunches. Others

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bought them from the catering truck. I had done neither. All I was hav- ing was a cup of the free dishwater coffee available to all the warehouse workers.

“I’m on a diet,” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, then got up, motioned me up. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“To the truck if it’s still there.”

“Wait a minute, you don’t have to …” “Listen, I’ve been on that kind of diet.”

“I’m all right,” I lied, embarrassed. “I don’t want anything.”

He left me sitting there, went to the truck, and came back with a ham- burger, milk, a small wedge of apple pie.

“Eat,” he said. “I’m still not rich enough to waste money, so eat.”

To my own surprise, I ate. I hadn’t intended to. I was caffeine jittery and surly and perfectly capable of wasting his money. After all, I’d told him not to spend it. But I ate.

Buz sidled by. “Hey,” he said, low-voiced. “Porn!” He moved on. “What?” said Kevin.

“Nothing,” I said. “He’s crazy.” Then, “Thanks for the lunch.” “Sure. Now tell me, what is it you write?”

“Short stories, so far. But I’m working on a novel.” “Naturally. Have any of your stories sold?”

“Some. To little magazines no one ever heard of. The kind that pay in copies of the magazine.”

He shook his head. “You’re going to starve.”

“No. After a while, I’ll convince myself that my aunt and uncle were right.”

“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”

I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.” “That’s better, at least.”

“Not to me.”

“Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”

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He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents,

like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.

“My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sen- sible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”

“What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”

I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”

“Is this the job you got?”

“No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk- typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could. They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”

“Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.” “I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was

good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.” He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.

Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”

I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”

“Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin. I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”

“No matter. I heard what he said this time.”

The bell rang ending the lunch half-hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.

But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward

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to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three nov- els, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on try- ing. And now, finally …