The next day we woke around ten. Bobby brewed a carafe of coffee in his tiny kitchen and the three of us sat outside on the stoop of Bobby's apartment to drink it, as there was hardly room inside. Hazel and I were going to set out to find a place to stay after waking up and having a few cups of coffee. We'd already pretty much decided we were going to stay at the Red Boiling Inn, but we were anxious to go ahead and get checked in and get settled.
As we sat out in the warm sun, watching the small stream of cars driving up and down the strip, Bobby told us about the new job he'd just secured at a plant in Lebanon, about forty-five miles away.
"I can get you on, if you want, the only thing is, you'll have to start off working third shift," he said, tilting back his mug and taking a gulp of coffee.
"Nah, I don't have a car and you work second, I don't know how I'd get there..."
"Yeah," he agreed, "that is true..could make it difficult.." Bobby drove a small Yugo. He'd paid a thousand dollars for it.
"The last time I was here when we were at that pool hall in town, I was talking to that guy Hector. Remember him? The Guatemalan? He said you could make fifty bucks a day cutting tobacco. You think that's true?" I said.
Bobby nodded, "Yup, you can, but cutting tobacco's not an easy job, you gotta work in the hot sun... it can be brutal...you think you're up for that kind of hard work?"
I didn't think it sounded too hard but I didn't say that. Bobby was muscle gone to fat, but I was still muscle. Bobby and I had been friends in junior high school and we'd both been athletic. I was still athletic but Bobby was a bit on the lazy side and he'd gained a good thirty pounds in the last couple of years. I had just come back from a Boys' Wilderness Camp. Before I'd left, Bobby had been muscular and played football but when we'd reconnected the year before, I found that in our time apart, Bobby had quit football and pretty much all sports and had gotten sort of fat. That was all well and good, I didn't care if he got fat, but it was sort of funny for him to be telling me about hard work and that cutting tobacco wasn't easy. And as for the hard work? Ha! I'd been working hard for the past two years straight! And for the most part, he didn't like to break a sweat and he liked his junk food. It was funny though, he still considered himself an athlete and was always boasting about his athletic abilities, even though he got winded walking to the mailbox.
_____
At the Red Boiling Inn, a thin lady dressed in a pink gown and a sheer orange kimono stood behind the counter. Her brown hair was curled in tight pin curls and silver clips held them in place in a sort of harried frenzy. She wore tons of jewelry; long necklaces and bangles on her arm. She didn't really stand behind the counter, but more, she leaned over the counter, held onto it- almost like it were keeping her up.
She looked us up and down suspiciously.
"You new in town?" she said. She smelt like alcohol. She reeked of alcohol. But, it didn't seem as though she was drunk at the moment, more like, the aroma seemed to be emanating from her pores.
"We got here yesterday," Hazel said, reaching for a pamphlet that sat stacked on the desk.
"You have family here?" the woman said suspiciously.
"No, but I have a job lined up," I lied.
She asked what kind of job.
"I'm going to be working in the tobacco fields."
To that, she perked up, "They pay pretty good," she slurred, "my nephew does it."
She told us her name was Bonnie and pointed to the room directly across the hall from the front desk.
"That's my room, rent's due at the beginning of the week, if I'm not at the front desk you can put it in an envelope and slide it beneath the door, just make sure you write your name and room number on the envelope..."
Suddenly she became agitated and wagged her finger as she spoke and said, "I don't make payment arrangements- rent's due on Monday- Tuesday at the latest."
We thanked her, paid her our fifty dollars for the week, (at the time, fifty dollars a week included your room and board and breakfast) and went up the stairs to our room.
Our room was at the top of the stairs and at the end of the hall. It was a large room with a bathroom and since there was no central heat and air, a large air conditioner was noisily blowing and filling the room with cold air.
Hazel walked over and turned it off.
"It's freezing in here!" she said, hugging herself and plopping her suitcase down onto the bed. She pulled out her blue terry cloth robe and wrapped it around her.
"Brrrr," she pushed the suitcase out of the way and sat down on the bed. I dropped my bag by the front door. Everything we owned were in those bags. Our entire life in two bags. Hazel was seventeen and I was nineteen. We were young, but we felt older. I, at least, felt like I was seventy-four at that point in my life. I was ready to get away from my life. To start a new life. Somehow, for some reason that I couldn't explain, Red Boiling Springs felt like the place to do that. It felt like that was where we should be, at that point and time. I knew that Hazel felt the same way.
"The room's alright," Hazel said, looking around the large room. The bed was wrought iron, covered in a cream chenille blanket and with big, fluffy pillows. The walls were covered in flowered wallpaper- pink and blue and yellow flowers. The wallpaper was peeling in some places, curled at the edges in one or two corners of the room but it was okay. It was a nice room. It reminded me of a room from a long time ago, maybe the forties or the fifties. Red Boiling seemed to be outdated, but in the most marvelous kind of way.
"Yeah," I said, "it's not bad."
"I like that it's big," Hazel said, walking to the window and looking out.
"It feels like we're so far away," she said, her back to me, "even though we aren't really. Only a couple hours drive from home, but it feels like it's far... don't you think so?"
"Yeah, I see what you mean..." She seemed to be reading my mind. She did that quite a bit. Probably one of the reasons I liked her. Sometimes it felt like we shared a brain.
"You do?" she said turning around to face me.
"Yeah, It does seem like we're far away. Also, that bus ride took me around the world and back so..."
Hazel cut her eyes at me, "Dummy! That's not what I meant!"
"I know, I know," I said, laughing, "I get what you're saying. I agree. This place feels like it's across the world."
_____
We didn't have a television in our room so we spent the night walking around the town. We found a restaurant called Houston's, where we had dinner and then sometime around nine o'clock we returned to our room and turned on the radio that sat on the dresser and listened to some light eighties rock. Hazel took a bath in the claw foot bathtub that was in the large bathroom down the hall. We had a small bathroom in our room but she liked the large one with the big bathtub. It was a communal bathroom but no one could get in if you locked the door. Plus, most of the other lodgers just used the bathroom in their rooms, no one really took advantage of the big one. When Hazel had seen the claw foot tub, she'd gotten so excited. She said it was like something from an old novel, like something in a fancy hotel or an old haunted mansion. She could be quite dramatic at times.
As Hazel was down the hall taking a bath, I remembered the letter that I'd stuffed in my pocket on the bus. I took my jeans that were crumbled on the floor and felt around in the pocket and pulled out the letter. It was addressed to a woman's prison in Macon, Georgia. I felt guilty as hell to be reading it – I'd liked Tracy so much, just from the hour or so that I'd spent with her, but, for whatever reason, I wanted to read it- almost couldn't help myself from reading it – and so, I ripped the envelope open and took it out and read:
Dear Mama-
Hi! How are you doing? Why haven't you written me back? I miss you! Please don't rip this letter up. Please read what I have to say. I know you're mad at me. I'm sorry for what I did. I'm sorry I told that social worker what your boyfriend did to me- that was wrong of me and I feel bad! I feel terrible, mama! But, please, PLEASE forgive me. It only happened twice- I don't know why I thought I had to tell that! It doesn't even matter- I don't even care! It hurts my feelings that you won't return my letters. I know you get them because grandma said you wrote her back and she mails her letters to you to the same address I mail mine to. I know because I've double checked to make sure I wrote it down right. Why won't you write me back? Please stop being mad at me. I love you.
Anyway, I left that crummy group home in Columbus. It was a real crummy place. Mr. Bunn kept asking the girls to come to his house which was back in the woods behind the group home. Some girls went. I wanted to leave before I had to visit him at his home. I'm getting on a bus tomorrow to go to Nashville. I am going to find daddy! I am going to get him off drugs! We can be a family again! I know you'll be happy to hear that! Grandma says they won't keep you long over the business with the checks and by the time you get out, daddy will have a job and I will have our new place fixed up and you can come live with us!
I will write you when I find him and once we get a place so you know where we are. Please write me back and most of all, mama please FORGIVE ME! I won't say anything ever again about anything. I know better now. I don't even care about any of it. All I care is that you're not mad at me anymore. I hope you'll write me back.
Love you always and forever,
XOXO Tracy
I sat down onto the end of the bed. I felt sick. Poor Tracy. Why was she apologizing? And what had her mother's boyfriend done to Tracy? But, I already knew the answer to that. I felt like going and finding her mother and kicking her in the teeth. I thought about that proverb in the Bible about a dog returning to his own vomit. Suddenly I wished I'd just given Tracy the letter. Why had I read it? It wasn't my business and now I felt sick about it. I sat on the end of the bed for a few minutes. I'd known a lot of kids like Tracy in my lifetime. Unfortunately, there were too many. She seemed like a good kid- she had a great attitude- she seemed excited at life's possibilities. But I knew how that went too. Look her up in ten or twenty years and all that would be gone, more than likely.
Just then, I heard Hazel turning the doorknob- coming into the room. I was about to hide the letter but she didn't even notice. She breezed past me, her hair wrapped in a towel and smelling like Vanilla bean and said, "This place is great, I took the longest bath and nobody bothered me at all! That tub is amazing..."
She walked into our bathroom and I could hear her opening the cabinet to put up her toiletries. I stuffed the letter into my shirt pocket and turned around.
"Want to go down to the kitchen and make some tea?"
"Can we? Do they have tea?"
"Yeah, Bonnie told me there's tea and coffee and you can use the kitchen up until eleven."
"God, I haven't had tea is so long... wonder what kind they have?" Hazel said, going over to her suitcase and changing into black leggings and a loose top. She pulled the towel off her head, combed her hair out and put it in a bun at the nape of her neck.
"Ready?" she said.
I stood up, "Ready."
We went downstairs.
The next morning, I went to the cafe in town. They had a board with various job postings and missing cat alerts and various other things pertaining to the town tacked up. I was hoping there would be a job posting for the tobacco fields and luckily, there was. From the pay phone in the back of the cafe by the emergency exit, I called the number and talked to an older woman who said her husband, Curtis was who I needed to talk to. She told me to be at the covered bridge the next morning at 7:00 a.m sharp and that I could speak to him and see if he could use me. She told me not to be late or I'd miss him. I told her I would be there.
At ten till seven the next morning, dressed in Levi's and a white t-shirt, I went to the covered bridge just at the edge of the park and waited. There were a few other guys standing around, two white guys and four Guatemalans. I didn't see Hector.
"I've never seen you before," some guy with stringy brown hair pulled back into a pony tail said as I stood smoking a cigarette and waiting on Curtis to show up.
I introduced myself and told him I was staying at the Red Boiling Inn.
He asked what I was doing in town.
"I came to get away from the city," I said. He didn't question why I wanted to leave the city or what city I'd left, he just nodded and asked if I liked the town.
"I haven't really been here long enough to tell," I said taking a drag off my cigarette, "but I think so."
"I came here two years ago," he said, "my girlfriend is from Hermitage Springs...but her dad lives here and we live in the trailer behind his house...I been cutting tobacco for about a year now..the old guy pays pretty well..it's not a bad job, he works you as much as you're willing to work and he's good about paying, he'll even give you an advance if you really need it."
"Hmmph," I said.
Didn't sound bad. I was just hoping to get some work that paid well and was steady. A few minutes later, the old guy pulled up. He was driving a flatbed F350 truck. He looked to be about seventy years old and was wearing overalls and a white t-shirt. You wouldn't think he was that old if you saw him move, though. It was obvious he'd spent a good bit of his life working outdoors. His skin was as dark as it could be, tanned, the darkest brown- like beef jerky.
"My name's Curtis," he said when I'd climbed in the back of the truck with the other guys. I'd just climbed in like I was supposed to be there. I didn't even ask if he needed me. I just pretended that he did.
"I'm Steve," I said.
"You the guy that called and talked to Margaret?"
"Yes."
"I pay fifty dollars a day, in cash," he said.
"Excellent," I said, smiling.
"You mind hard work?" he said, raising an eyebrow. I had to keep myself from laughing. I'd just left a brutal boys' Wilderness Camp. Hard work was something I did in my sleep. I could run circles around almost any boy my age. I wasn't the least bit intimidated by hard work.
"Not a problem," I said, "hard work doesn't bother me."
He shook my hand and told me he was glad to have me. I was glad to have work!
I settled into the back of the truck with the rest of the guys and he drove us to the tobacco fields, just outside of town. It was a bumpy ride and Curtis drove at a clip of about twenty five miles an hour. By the time we made it to the tobacco fields, I was sea sick.
At the tobacco fields were rows and rows of tobacco plants as far as the eye could see. Four or five other old flatbed trucks sat parked, ready to have their flatbeds filled with tobacco stalks and be taken to the various hanging barns scattered throughout Red Boiling Springs. A small white house sat off at the edge of the fields. The house belonged to Curtis, or, more formally, Mr. Prichard.
Cutting tobacco was just that; cutting tobacco. You used a machete or a small hatchet and chopped it off at the base of the stalk. Then we would grab the wooden spike and stab it in the ground and push the stalk onto the spike and fill it until it was full of stalks and then pull it from the ground and put it on the back of the truck. Then we moved on. We did that for 5 hours until Mr. Prichard sounded a horn and we all came out of the fields to eat lunch. There were two old picnic tables that sat beside the house and all the guys walked over to them and sat down. Mr. Prichard's wife Margaret had made peanut butter and jelly and ham sandwiches. They were laid out on the two tables, along with tea and coffee. I thought coffee was odd because it was blazing hot but, for whatever reason, there was coffee. Margaret was there at the tables waiting for us- smiling and ready to serve us lunch. She was a lovely woman- really sweet and she kept asking if we needed anything else to eat or drink- hovering over us constantly. The guy with the pony tail, who I'd met that morning, told me that every day it was something different. A plate of homemade peanut butter cookies sat in the middle of the table. Those were gobbled up quick.
At 3:30 the horn sounded and we walked back towards the picnic tables. Mr. Prichard (Curtis) pulled a huge wad of cash from the front of his overalls and started counting out money. When he got to me he handed me a fifty dollar bill and said, "Fine work, son. I pay every day or every Friday, whichever you prefer." I told him every day sounded good to me.
On my second day, Hector showed up. I was glad to see him. Besides the stringy haired guy, Hector was the only person I had to talk to. The other guys didn't talk much- I think because they didn't speak very good English. Hector spoke very broken English but he was outgoing. I knew him from the pool hall in town, months before when I'd come with Bobby when he used to come and spend weekends in Red Boiling before he'd moved there. We used to come for the weekend so he could see Tori and I spent a lot of time at the pool hall while Bobby was off romancing his girlfriend. Hector told me to stick with him the first few days and I did, although I'd already gotten the routine down after my first day, but I liked having Hector to talk to. He was pretty funny- he had a great sense of humor and he told jokes while we worked- some were so corny- but that made it even funnier, because they were so corny. He also talked a lot about Emma Mae. He was obsessed with Emma Mae. At the time, I was nineteen and Hector was somewhere around eighteen or nineteen but Emma Mae was only fifteen. I knew who she was. I'd seen her around town, always riding her bicycle with her older sister. Both girls were pretty but what I didn't like about her older sister was that she knew she was pretty and she played the part. You could just tell that she knew all the guys were looking at her and that she loved it. I wasn't looking to date her because I was with Hazel, but I couldn't stand her hot shot attitude. Anyway, I tried to explain to Hector that fifteen was way too young for him but he didn't seem to understand. He would just shrug his shoulders and say, "She's beautiful, I don't mind her age." and I would try to explain that it didn't matter if he minded, it was the law he had worry about. But he didn't understand and he talked about her constantly.
So, Hector and I worked side by side that spring and summer and became pretty good friends. On the ride to town one day, I asked Hector how he'd ended up in Red Boiling Springs. He said like most of the other Guatemalans, working in the fields, that their mothers and fathers worked at the mill in Lebanon. He said cutting tobacco was the only work they could get and that he used the money to help his mother pay the bills. I thought that was nice, to help his mother like that. Hector was a good guy. They were probably all good guys, I just wouldn't know because Hector was the only one I talked to.
After about three weeks working in the fields, Mr. Prichard appointed me one of his head guys. That was pretty cool because I could then drive one of the old trucks to the other fields he owned and take a crew with me and we would cut and stack stalks until three thirty in the afternoon when the horn sounded. It went like that for months. We would stack the stalks that we spiked onto the truck and then drive to one of the many hanging barns and hang the spikes in the barn so they could dry out. One day, as we were having lunch, I asked Curtis why he'd chosen me as a lead person. I was new. There were guys who'd been there for years and they hadn't made it to lead guy. He said "I can't trust the others out on the road, they probably don't have papers or a driver's license!" I smiled and said, "Oh, okay. That makes sense." The funny thing is, he'd never asked to see mine. If he had he would have known that I didn't have a driver's license either. Mine had been taken away when I'd driven my drunk mother home from a bar one night a few months before coming to Red Boiling, because she was stinking drunk and couldn't drive. We'd been involved in a terrible wreck that night- my fault- and there had been obscene fines that I was to pay. Fines I hadn't paid and my driver's license had been taken away. But I didn't tell Mr. Prichard that. I just said, "You don't have to worry about me, sir. I certainly have my papers!" He'd laughed and said, "Of course you do, boy- that's why you're my lead guy!"
_____
A few weeks into my working at the tobacco fields, I came home and Hazel told me she applied for the waitress job at the cafe in town. She'd been trying to apply ever since we'd come to Red Boiling but they didn't have a proper job application. They kept telling her she would have to catch the owner's wife, Mary Frances when she was there but Hazel was never able to. One day she finally did.
"The woman, Mary Frances, is a real nightmare," Hazel said, "but she said she's not there a lot cause she also runs a tanning bed place in Lebanon – which, of course she does, the woman looks like a handbag, she's so tan- and some other shop they have, and, thank God! I wouldn't mind that job but I'd hate having to see her everyday. She's absolutely awful..."
"That bad?" I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking off my shoes.
"She's a witch."
"Her husband's pretty nice," I said. I'd met her husband a few times. He owned the pool hall and the video store next door. He'd once told me that he used to be a professional pool player and that he'd traveled around going to tournaments. He would hustle people who stopped by the pool hall who were passing through, and pretend like he didn't know how to play very well and then beat them to a pulp and take their money.
Hazel fell back on the bed, "She asked me why we'd come to Red Boiling. She asked me if I was pregnant!"
I threw my shoe into the corner and began unlacing the other one. I glanced back at Hazel.
"Pregnant?" I said, "why would she think you were pregnant?"
"Because we're so young and we're here for no apparent reason, I guess. She must think I've run off because I'm knocked up or something."
"So, you think you got the job?"
"She said they'd let me know."
_____
On weekends, we met in the dining room and had breakfast with the other lodgers. There were a few besides us who lived at the hotel, in fact, more people were permanent residents there than stayed for the night. At that time, The Red Boiling Inn was more like a boarding house than it was a hotel. Sometimes Bonnie was sober and when she was sober she was pleasant and nice. She made big, buttery biscuits and fresh brewed, strong coffee and would fry up a plate of crisp bacon. One night she made salmon croquettes and they were delicious. I'd eaten so many I got sick. When Bonnie was sober, she was delightful. I liked her. But when she got to drinking, that was when all hell broke loose. She would sometimes fall down drunk in the hallway, her dress tangled up around her waist, other times she would fall out flat on her face in her bed, with the door wide open, and you could hear her snoring all the way down the hall. Usually, some of the older lodgers, who knew her and who had been at the hotel for some time, would quietly shut her door or help her into her room and onto the bed. One old guy who apparently was used to her antics, was most times, the one who helped her into bed. After coming out of her room he would shake his head, almost like he was embarrassed for her and say, "She just needs to sleep it off, that's all."
A few times, when I'd paid her, she would accuse me of not paying and since I was paid at the tobacco fields in cash and had paid her in cash, it would leave the two of us arguing over my bill. Of course, the answer to that would have been to have asked for a receipt, but, at the time, I was young and didn't think of it.
Our time at the Red Boiling Inn came to an end one night, about a month after our arriving, when Hazel and I were watching television downstairs in the small room just off from the foyer.
Bonnie had a boyfriend who came around from time to time, and he, like her, was also a raging alcoholic. I had grown up with a mother who drank and I was used to alcoholics but Hazel had never been around anyone who drank and she hated it. She also didn't understand that alcoholics were always spewing at the mouth. And for some reason, as they sat there shit faced, alcoholics always loved to turn the attention on you and tell you what a loser you were. I was used to this kind of behavior, I had unfortunately spent way more time with alcoholics that I'd cared to, but Hazel hadn't spent any time around alcoholics and didn't understand this.
So, Hazel and I were watching television on the couch in the front room and Bonnie's boyfriend came and sat down in the chair opposite us. He was about fifty and had a beer belly and a head full of grey hair. He sat smoking quietly and glaring at me for about thirty minutes without saying a word and then he said, out of the blue, "What are you doing boy? What are you doing so great with your life? You are a loser! A loooo- ser!"
"Are you talking to me?" I said, even though, it was obvious he was. I was the only person besides Hazel in the room. And he was looking right at me.
"You're not gonna amount to nothin!" he slurred, "cause you're a loser!"
Hazel didn't realize that this was what alcoholics did, and she straightened up and said, "Oh my God! How dare you! Who do you think you're talking to?!"
"It's okay," I said calmly, "I'm used to this... it's just because he's a drunk..."
"You calling me a drunk, boy?" the old man slurred, trying to get up but falling back into his seat.
I held my hand up, "Sit down old man, sit down."
"You're gonna amount to nothin! Look at you! You're nothin but trouble! TROUBLE!" he yelled.
Bonnie came slinking out of her room, shit-faced as she normally was in the afternoons, and came lurking into the television area. She was wearing a peach slip and had on black pantyhose and her feet were pushed into old, ratty house shoes.
"This boy is a troublemaker," the old man ranted, "and he's going ...he's going to...to hell... in a basket, that's right... in a handbasket!"
He began to laugh at his own stupid joke.
Bonnie turned to me.
"What did you do?" she said, reeking of liquor, "What'd you do to upset Teddy?"
"He didn't do anything!" said Hazel, "We were just watching television and..."
The old man was pulling forward on the arm of his chair, trying to get out of his seat. Why, I have no idea. He was so drunk he could hardly move. I stood up and grabbed Hazel. We were about to go up to our room but the old man had somehow managed to get up and was coming towards us. He was wobbling toward me and shaking his finger and saying, "Don't you run off when I'm talking to you, boy...you always do this.. since you were small, you were always running from me..."
Bonnie was behind him, pulling at him and telling him to come back and sit down and forget about us troublemakers. On her last attempt, she fell backwards and lay cursing the ceiling as Teddy lunged forward.
He got in my face then, wagging his finger and calling me a loser, saying this was why he hadn't bothered to marry my mother, because he known I'd amount to nothing. He'd always known it, he said. Apparently, he thought I was his son. I didn't know if he was just drunk or if now we were venturing off into dementia or what exactly was happening. Goddamn alcoholics. I'd dealt with alcoholics all my life and I couldn't stand the sight of them. After a few minutes of this, I took both hands and pushed him back. He fell onto his butt with a loud thud. He wasn't hurt, just shocked. Bonnie pulled herself up, grabbing onto the arm of the chair and began shrieking. She told us to get the hell out, not to come back, she threatened to call the police.
Hazel and I realized that our time at the Red Boiling Inn had come to a close and we went up to our room, packed our bags quickly and walked out onto the front porch while Bonnie stood behind the counter, her hand on the telephone, staring us down, an unspoken threat to pick up the phone and call the police. We still had two days left that we'd paid for. But, we were young and we knew that if the police were called, more than likely, we would be the ones in trouble. We weren't sure that would be the case, since there were two gin soaked alcoholics struggling to walk a straight line inside, but we didn't want to take our chances, so we left. As we stood on the front porch wondering just what in the hell we were going to do now, we stared down the street to where the Anzara sat. We looked at one another and shrugged. What else could we do but walk across the street and see if the Anzara had a room to rent? We had spent a little over three months at the Red Boiling Inn and now we'd been kicked out by two old drunks. We were getting off to a rocky start, to say the least.