catfish 19

 In this segment Catfish gets hired, but he doesn't get laid, and there is just a hint of menace creeping into the story.

There was an actual big job building a nuclear plant in Clinton.  The most chronically unemployed of my beer drinking buddies got on it.  Suddenly the biggest bums who would normally be cadging beers were setting up the bar.  What a world we lived in.

The next thing I put my knuckles around was a shovel.  

Sector 5 opened up that Monday.  Some guy in a hard hat came in and looked at me and maybe ten other guys just settling in with our newspapers and our magazines and our cards, and looked at us like we were in a police lineup.  “I’ll take them all,” he said. 

Well wasn’t that something?  I bummed a ride from a couple of the chosen and then we were down the road to Clinton, to the Big Job.  Hot damn and damn I wasn’t so sure about all this suddenly.  Still a little sore from that softball practice, and was it really true, as Ted had described it that they just lined you up, handed you shovels, took you to a spot of dirt marked up with chalk and told you to get started?  I wouldn’t like that. 

Turned out that it was and that I didn’t.  Some guy at the gate with a clipboard checked off our names and led us off single file, like a chain gang you know, to another guy who had a stack of, that’s right, shovels.  And then some other guy came and took away a couple of us, and another guy took maybe three more, and I’m just standing there resting my eyes a bit when I hear some guy yelling something, and then I realize it’s, “Island girl.” 

What?  Is this some kind of coincidence?  I open my eyes and this huge guy in a Budweiser tee shirt says it again, “Island girl!”  It looks like he’s looking at me.  What the fuck?  I point to myself to make sure it’s me he wants and as I look down at my tee shirt I realize that I am wearing that damn shirt Itch gave me the night before.  Hadn’t even thought about it, just put on the first shirt at hand that morning, and now, at The Big Job my name is Island Girl.  Fuck.

 “Hey, you gonna do the hula all morning or are you gonna dig some holes?” 

 And everybody laughs.  I quick think maybe I could do some little hula motion, to go along with the joke you know, but I realize straightaway that that’s just not going to work.  The new guy is there to be laughed at, not to make jokes.

 And then I am facing the chalk line.  It fades into the distance like when you’re walking down railroad tracks.  “Two feet deep,” Budweiser says, “and two feet wide.  Just keep going as far as you can.  I’ll be back in a couple hours to let you know that it’s time for your first break, until then just keep digging.”  I put the shovel into the dirt.  “Way to go,” he says, “Island girl.”

 It’s only like 8 AM and it must be like 80 already, and it hasn’t rained in a week or two and that dirt is hard.  I like to think I’m a pretty strong guy but I haven’t worked hard in, well I can’t remember when.  Still when Budweiser comes back for my first break he looks at how far I’ve gotten and I can tell that he’s not that disappointed.  Fifteen minutes.  There’s a tree not that far away, though sore as I am it takes a while to get to it.  And when those fifteen minutes are up I can barely stand, can barely limp back to that chalk line.  But I think about those pay stubs Ted showed us a few weeks ago and then I am digging away.

 But not that well maybe because when Budweiser comes back to tell me it’s lunchtime, he’s not that impressed by how far down the line I am.  I’m not interested in his disappointment as I struggle out to the tree.  I haven’t brought a lunch, but I am not really hungry and I just fall next to the tree.

 And when I wake up that sun is just right down on me.  Right at the top of the sky and right down on me.  Well maybe not because it’s daylight saving time, so it’s maybe an hour over to the west, I think it’s the west.  Doesn’t seem like it’s possible that that dirt could’ve gotten ten times harder in just like four and a half hours, of course it’s gone from 80 to like, I don’t know, 110. 

 And actually it all becomes funny when I get back to the chalk line.  I put my foot to the back of the shovel and it just skitters off, doesn’t even break the dirt and I go ass over teakettle, and it’s just hilarious man.

 And I’m still in that sunny good humor when Budweiser is back again to tell me it’s time for my second break, and looking at my two foot wide and two feet deep trench, confirms my suspicion that since the last break it has only moved like a foot towards that distant horizon, by asking “What have you been doing, the hula?”

 “Woolie Boolie, “ I answer and go over like a tree. 

 And those last two hours of work aren’t bad at all.  I’m in an air-conditioned trailer, there’s some kind of nurse who looked really good when I first came in, but not so good later, and she had looked interested In me when I first came in and it looked like I was dying, but got bored when it looked like I wasn’t going to.

 It sure looked like the end of the job for me, but it turned out that this happened all the time.  “Just takes awhile getting used to,” the nurse said patting me on the arm and leading me to the door, really bored I could tell.

 “Are you sure?” I asked, but by then the door was slammed in my face.

 “Come back tomorrow,” the guy with the clipboard said as I hula-ed out to the parking lot to find a ride home I asked, "You’re sure?”  

“We’re short,” he answered.