There was nothing left of the old man except for a portrait that hung on the wall behind the chair of the son. There we a few left who were loyal to the old man’s ideals but the board, for the most part, had succumbed to the young man and his ideals. The son sat in a stupor as the young man pointed to the graph and used coded terms, such as growth, prosperity, and change, to convey that employees were now liabilities, to be dispensed with when they were no longer needed, and; benign, meaningless, terms such as stockholder value were used, as a narcotic, to soften the dichotomy of loving the people who buy your product, while, loathing the people who make your product. And everyone knew not to speak or gesture while the young man spoke. Chapter -8
Twelve
Success, as with failure, often depends on luck and timing. And for Pete Delaney; he was no exception. Warren had taught him honesty and pride but failed to mention anything about deception and prejudice. Pride kept Pete from asking for what he needed and honesty often left him with not much to say while deception and prejudice, or lack there of, kept him from taking what he wanted and left him with no one to blame for what he could not have.
He and Jenny would marry after she graduated from college and he would work at the brewery with his father but these promises slipped away from Pete and out of his reach. His friends were drifting off and marrying off and Pete was alone in the city with little to nothing except for a tiny apartment, a low wage job and a used pickup-truck that Warren had given him on his eighteenth birthday.
But all wasn’t misery at first. After his failed attempt at college, Pete shared an apartment with his friends and together they saw the world through the false hope of youthful abandon. Some succeeded and some failed but each began to drop off one by one into better paying jobs and settling into lives with girlfriends and wives. But Pete held on. Pete held on the dream of Jenny and the life that they would have together: the house, the children and her gentle skin as they grew old together. But some dreams never come true. Some dreams were never meant to be.
For Pete, the dream died when Jenny showed up at his door on a cool and crisp fall day. He remembers her scent and the nervous look on her face when he let her inside. She never strayed far from the door as she broke the news to him. She hugged him one last time and pulled away from him when he tried to hold her. Pete stood in the doorway and watched her spring down the steps and to the parking lot where an idling coupe, with a male figure behind the wheel, sat waiting for her. She got in the coupe and it sped off as fast as it could go taking Jenny with it and the life that Pete had hoped for.
Although Pete’s prospects were low, he started to feel better after a couple of months. And when Warren showed up the day before his twenty-first birthday, Warren had convinced him that his life was going to get better whenever he got hired on at the brewery. For a couple of days after they had filled out the employment application, Pete started imagining how his life would be after he was making good money. Maybe he could get Jenny back or maybe he could start over and find someone else or he could get a better place in a better part of town or perhaps a house and a yard and maybe he could afford to do things or go places like he saw the people on television do. Pete was starting see things in a different light until Warren came back a few weeks later.
Warren broke the news to him and Pete told him that it was going to be alright and that he was going to make it. But Warren pushed on. For a couple of months after the brewery job was lost, Warren had brought over applications from the shipyards, refineries and terminals along the ship channel and the two of them would fill out the applications with the same diligence and care that they did with the brewery application. But all was lost; there were no jobs.
Warren went away defeated but Pete continued on. He tried hard and he worked hard at his low paying job at the retailer but there was never enough to dig out of where he was. Warren had
offered him money but Pete always told him that he was making more than enough to get by. Warren knew this wasn’t true but he would never take from Pete the only thing that he had left: Pride.
It was pride that kept Pete going and it was pride that would not let him fall into the comforts of vice. But despair is a private hell that pride cannot defeat. And the despair went away the day he went through Charlotte’s checkout line at the grocery store around the corner from his apartment. He knew the moment he looked into her eyes that they could escape the bonds of loneliness that they shared. But it would take time. Pete would take his time and approach her tepidly as his pride wouldn’t let him lose her and it told him that he couldn’t lose her if he never had her. And Pete wanted to tell her things during those brief moments they had together but his pride would never let his honesty tell her that he was lonely—that he needed her.
Time moved on and Pete’s life became more difficult. His pay never increased but his rent and expenses did. He was scraping by on what he had and he nothing left to sacrifice except for his pride. But his pride would never let Pete sacrifice itself. And when the time came for him to renew the insurance on his little pickup-truck, he didn’t have the money and had to let the policy go.
Then the rains came. They came as they had always done before but now Pete was aware of their existence and their persistence. The grayness and the coldness and the wetness were ever present and the space-heater in his apartment could never keep any of them away for long enough to be forgotten about. But Pete forged on and he kept his struggle to himself even after he had driven the little truck through a rain-swollen dip in the road that was concealed by the grayness and the darkness. The engine died and was ruined and the water flowed freely into the cab as Pete pushed the crippled vehicle, through knee-deep water, to the side of the road. Pete walked home in the rain and when he went to check on the truck the next morning, it was gone. He knew the moment he saw the empty place where the truck had been, that it had been towed to the impound lot and that he would not have the money to get it out and to repair it. He knew then that it was gone forever.
Pete adapted without his truck. The bus stop was around the corner from the store where Charlotte worked. Pete’s pride would not have to avoid Charlotte because it knew that she would never see him waiting for the bus. He would be long gone in the early mornings so he could be at work on time and she would be working whenever the bus would let him off around the corner. He could continue to see her because she would not know that he was destitute.
But the rains continued. The rains continued the day that Pete got off of the bus and made his way to the store where Emily worked. He walked along the path next to the road being careful not to muddy his shoes or his clothes. He never saw the truck, driven by Larry Conrad, but he could hear its rumblings behind him. He could see Charlotte’s store ahead of him and he looked to his left when the giant truck hit a mud-filled hole in the road that gushed mud and road-oil all over Pete. The truck never slowed and Pete stood there with the rain gently washing the mud off of his face and out of his hair while turning the mud and oil into solution that worked its way into the woven fabric of his clothes.
The grimy and stained Pete watched the glistening truck, which seemed unaffected by the mud and rain, pull to the front of the store, where Charlotte worked, and a clean and sharply dressed Larry Conrad exited the truck and headed into the store. Pete walked closer to the store but stayed far enough away as not to not be noticed. His heart sank when he saw Larry Conrad escort Charlotte out of the store and into his shining truck. And Pete mistook Charlotte’s nervous smile and laugh to be one of happiness as the truck sped off and took with it whatever dreams that Pete had left.
Pete’s world began to close in around him and he knew that he had no one and nothing left. He put his head down and walked to his apartment defeated and wet. When he entered the apartment, he took off his clothes and threw them in a pile next to the closet door. He took a long hot shower and put on clean and dry clothes. He went to the table where the television sat and picked up the picture of Jenny that was lying face down on the table. He studied the picture for a moment and lay it back down and went to the kitchen and put a frozen dinner in the microwave.
While the dinner was cooking, Pete began to clean the apartment. He wiped down the counters and kitchen table and picked up things that were lying around the apartment and put them in the places where they should be. Pete took his time and when the apartment was as clean as it could be, Pete sat down and ate the dinner. He ate slowly, and when the dinner was finished; he threw the empty cardboard tray into the trashcan and washed the fork and knife and placed them neatly in the drawer.
Pete looked around the apartment for a moment and went to the bedroom and opened the closet door. He removed the four-ten shotgun that sat propped against the back wall of the closet and laid it on the bed. He went to his chest-of-drawers and removed a single shell from a little box that he had tucked in the back of one of the drawers. He closed the door gently and without emotion he took the shotgun and shell from the bedroom to the kitchen table. He sat at the table and chambered the shell. He cocked the gun’s hammer and put the stock against the floor. Pete put the gun’s barrel to the soft spot under his chin and closed his sweet, innocent, eyes for the last time.
Across From the Bayou: Copyright 2010 by Harold Robert Hunsaker
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