Greg
I heard the honk of geese over a silence under a hum. And then their fleeting shadow casted across the pages of the book before me. And on the other side of cold window glass their wings appeared against blue sky. I heard a sound that may not exist as they touched down, breaking the thin sheet of ice on a shallow pond outside my view, a pond that for all I actually know, may not be frozen at all.
Prior to that, while the narrator carried out his research of a dead man, whom only the narrator and the dead man knew to be not dead at all, I was thinking, between the written lines, about a black man in Texas named Greg.
Greg was raised in parts east Mippisipi on a plantation run by white folks. The white folks treated Greg as their own and in fact better than they treated their daughter by birth, who according to Greg was so white she mostly disappeared every time she walked in front of the white columns of the portico. While he was allowed to swim in the pool, she was forbidden. He was home schooled and cherished and loved and allowed to recreate most of the day while she took the bus to the public school in town and was forced to scrub the floors on her return.
This upbringing did not exactly fit the man we knew as Greg, a man who blurted out snippets of Hendrix or Rod Stewart, and to amuse us or distract us would eat snuff sandwiches or clamp down with his teeth on smashed aluminum cans and tear away jagged chunks. Greg at one point starting taking a machete home from work, ostensibly to wait along the railroad tracks behind his house so he could catch the man coming to see his wife.
It was in a Texas town famous for its ice cream that I met Greg. We were doodlebuggers, searching across farmland and woods for oil 12 hours a day, 10 days running with four days off. Greg was barrel-chested, I was a wisp. My co-workers joked that I would have to run around in the rain to get wet. We lugged cables and planted geophones and swung machetes. We slung pipe for drilling holes and dropped into these holes 20 pound charges that came in five pound yellow plastic sticks which could be threaded together and then tied to a blasting cap with a 100 feet of wire attached. We were warned to pull on the wire before detonation because sometimes the charges floated to the top. There were stories about people who didn't pull on the wire.
All the jobs were separate and you did the one job everyday until told to do something else. If you swung a machete you were on the survey crew. If you planted geophones you were on the jug crew. Pipe slinging made you a drill helper. Working with the cables was the layout crew. If you got to drive the big equipment tractors you were a buggy driver. If you detonated the charges you were the shooter. The vibration of the explosions were read by the geophones attached to the cables that ran over a straight surveyed line of maybe a mile or less to a recording truck, inside of which the vibrations came out as jiggly lines on paper that were then studied to determine the feasibility of there being oil or gas pockets below.
Nine or ten of us drove to work together in a Chevy Suburban. In the mornings on the way to work we smoked commercial Mexican dope, lot's of it, and the seeds would fall into crevices caked with mud and little marijuana plants would grow and we cherished the little babies until the bosses told us enough was enough. For lunch we would drive to the nearest convenience store in the nearest town and eat microwave burritos with a bag of chips, and cellophane wrapped carrot cake for dessert. In the summer we would wash this down with one of those 48 ounce fountain drinks. If we were too far from a town we would only stop in the morning on the way to work and, in the winter, buy canned chili or soup or dinty moore stew which we would heat up on the manifold of the buggy driver's engine. With a church key we would punch triangular holes in the top until it could be folded back enough to slurp down over the jagged tin edge whatever was inside.
Greg's stories of his upbringing on the white people's plantation grew in complexity and detail over time, even if occasionally the details were contradictory. Some of our co-workers were unaffiliated bikers with that appearance than can instill fear in people who don't know them well as individuals and Greg was cautious around some of these guys, who in the first place had little tolerance for his blackness and secondarily, his bullshit. This all took place coinciding with the 444 day Iranian hostage crisis and Greg seemed at times relieved that his imagined inferiority was supplanted by the hatred many of these guys expressed for Arabs.
A couple of months into Greg's tenure the bosses hired another black man from the town and this man knew Greg, and had known him all his life. He said Greg had never lived anywhere but in this Texas town and that in fact these 20 and 30 mile drives to work in the surrounding areas was likely as far as Greg had ever been from his birthplace, and that he was certain Greg had never been to or lived in parts east Mipissipi (Mississippi).
Whether because of his hoax having been exposed or because of the sneaking ways of his wife (the new man said Greg was not married), Greg grew very erratic over the last days of his time on the crew and his lyrical rantings which had included song and fantasy became more tortured in nature. It was a few weeks after he first took a machete home that he stopped coming to work. And where my memory of Greg ends is hearing that he had been locked up, in that jail in the town he had never left, except for the journeys he took with us for a handful of long days one summer.
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