Gone South Read Free

got a ticket,” Joe said as he offered Dan some of the newspaper. “Fella came by ’bout ten minutes ago, lookin’ for a man to set some Sheetrock. Picked Terry and off they went.”
    “That’s good.” Terry Palmeter had a wife and two kids to feed. “Fella say he might be needin’ some more help later on?”
    “Just the one Sheetrock man.” Joe squinted up toward the sun. He was a lean, hard-faced man with a nose that had been broken and flattened by a vicious fist somewhere down the line. He’d been coming here to Death Valley for over a year, about as long as Dan had been. On most days Joe was an amiable gent, but on others he sat brooding and dark-spirited and was not to be approached. Like the other men who came to Death Valley, Joe had never revealed much about himself, though Dan had learned the man had been married and divorced the same as he had. Most of the men were from towns other than Shreveport. They were wanderers, following the promise of work, and for them the roads on the map led not so much from city to city as from hot-tarred roofs to mortared walls to the raw frameworks of new houses with pinewood so fresh the timbers wept yellow tears. “God, it’s gonna be a cooker today,” Joe said, and he lowered his head and returned to his reading and waiting.
    Dan drank the iced tea and felt sweat prickling the back of his neck. He didn’t want to stare, but his eyes kept returning to the man who wore the desperate hand-lettered sign. The man had sandy-blond hair, was probably in his late twenties, and wore a checked shirt and stained overalls. His face was still boyish, though it was starting to take on the tautness of true hunger. It reminded Dan of someone he’d known a long time ago. A name came to him: Farrow. He let it go, and the memory drifted away like the acrid barbecue smoke.
    “Looky here, Dan.” Joe thumped an article in the paper. “President’s economics honcho says the recession’s over and everybody ought to be in fine shape by Christmas. Says new construction’s already up thirty percent.”
    “Do tell,” Dan said.
    “Got all sorts of graphs in here to show how happy we oughta be.” He showed them to Dan, who glanced at the meaningless bars and arrows and then watched the man with the sign again. “Yeah, things are sure gettin’ better all over, ain’t they?” Joe nodded, answering his own cynical question. “Yessir. Too bad they forgot to tell the workman.”
    “Joe, who’s that fella over there?” Dan asked. “The guy with the sign.”
    “I don’t know.” He didn’t lift his gaze from the paper. “He was there when I got here. Young fella, looks to be. Hell, every man jack of us would work for food if it came to that, but we don’t wear signs advertisin’ it, do we?”
    “Maybe we’re not hungry enough yet.”
    “Maybe not,” Joe agreed, and then he said nothing else.
    More men were arriving in their pickups and cars, some with wives who let them out and drove off. Dan recognized others he knew, like Andy Slane and Jim Neilds. They were a community of sorts, scholars in the college of hard knocks. Fourteen months ago Dan had been working on the payroll of the A&A Construction Company. Their motto had been We Build the Best for Less. Even so, the company hadn’t been strong enough to survive the bottom falling out of the building business. Dan had lost his job of five years and quickly found that nobody was hiring carpenters full-time. The first thing to go had been his house, in favor of a cheaper apartment. His savings had dwindled amazingly — and frighteningly — fast. Since his divorce in 1984 he’d been paying child support to Susan, so his bank account had never been well padded. But he’d never been a man who needed or expected luxuries, anyway. The nicest thing in his possession was his Chevy pickup — “metallic mist” was the correct name of its color, according to the salesman — which he’d bought three months prior to the crash