Trouble in the Labor Camp
John D. Nesbitt
Smashwords Edition
Trouble in the Labor Camp
Presented by Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4659-3820-6
Copyright © January 2012 John D. Nesbitt
Cover Art Copyright © 2012 Laura Shinn
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Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Trouble in the Labor Camp is a work of fiction.
Though actual locations may be mentioned, they are used in a fictitious manner and the events and occurrences were invented in the mind and imagination of the author except for the inclusion of actual historical facts. Similarities of characters or names used within to any person – past, present, or future – are coincidental except where actual historical characters are purposely interwoven.
Dedication
For my old pal Dave Madden
To find work in the early 1960s, Morgan Cross follows the crops. Temporary jobs, temporary housing, and temporary acquaintances are part of the life, along with trying to stay out of trouble.
But there's something different about this labor camp. Could it be Morgan wants something better, or is meeting a girl named Rosa Maria just making him restless?
During a lull in picking, tension fills the camp. Drinking increases, fights break out, and a man is murdered. Will Morgan find himself in more trouble than he can handle?
Chapter One
I followed the foreman's pickup into the labor camp and parked on the right side of the road behind him. I got out of my car and waited for him as he sat in the cab and lit his cigarette. As I had learned a few minutes earlier, his name was Len. He reminded me of someone I had seen before. It was one of those things I couldn't place, maybe something about his features or just the expression on his face. As he got out of the cab I saw it again, that look that said he was the foreman and I was just a laborer.
He waved his hand that held the cigarette. A row of four houses sat on the other side of the road. "That first house is empty," he said, "but you couldn't stay in it anyway because the floor's falling in. The second one has a Mexican family living in it, and the next one has a white family. The last house is empty, and I'm savin' it until another family comes along."
I nodded, and he turned to point at a quonset hut behind me. We had just driven past it and another one.
"You'll stay here," he said. "In the front half of the building. You'll share it with a man and his son. In the back half there's four young Mexican guys, brothers and cousins. In that other one there's a white family in front and a colored man with a white woman in the back half." He took a drag on his cigarette and said, "Follow me." He went up the steps and into the quonset where I was going to stay. He talked as I followed him. "This place has got running water, and each side has a kitchen area. Both sides use the same bathroom, here in the middle." He looked into one bedroom, where there were belongings all over the floor. He spoke with the cigarette in his lips. "This looks like Mack and his kid's room. Yours 'll be the other one."
I glanced into the room closest to the front door. It was empty. "Looks like this one."
"Yeah." He took the cigarette away from his mouth and gave me a steady look. "I shouldn't have to say this, but I will anyway. I don't put up with any trouble in my camp."
"I don't make trouble," I said. "I mind my own business."
"That's the best way to be." He raised his head. "Well, those others should be back pretty soon. You can go ahead and get settled."
He walked out, and a minute later I heard his pickup door slam and his engine fire up.
I went to the window of my room and looked out onto the road that ran through the middle of the camp. Len was parked in front of the third house, where a white woman stood on the porch smoking a cigarette. I couldn't hear voices, but I could tell they were talking.
I went back to the living room and took another look at the layout. I thought it was one of the better places I had stayed in for a while. It was clean, had solid floors and no broken windows, and didn't cost anything. Of course even at that point I knew, as they said about other things, that none of it was free.
When I heard Len's pickup rumble out of the camp, I went outside to my car. I paused for a minute and got a view of the quonsets. Mine was the second one on the right as a person drove into the camp. It looked as if the two of them had been put up where some even older shacks had stood at one time, as there were outhouses and piles of old pipe and lumber out back at the edge of the orchard. It all seemed normal enough, a place to stay while the work lasted.
I started unloading my stuff from the back seat of my car. As I came out of the quonset on my second trip, dust was hanging in the air above the road, and a car was pulling in on the other side of the second house. I heard car doors open and close, and I saw a dark-haired girl in work clothes walking around the back of the car and heading for the door of the house. It looked as if she had just taken off a scarf, as she had it trailing in her hand. It was a pale blue thing.
She glanced my way, and our eyes met for a second across the dust settling on the dirt road. Then she went into her house, and I carried a box of kitchen stuff into mine.
When I had all my belongings inside, I went to the bathroom and washed my hands and face. As I dried off and saw myself in the mirror, I recalled the dark-haired girl from across the road. As soon as I saw her I knew she was from the Mexican family Len had mentioned. Now I wondered how she saw me, whether she thought of me as a different kind of person because I was white, or whether she saw me as just another fruit tramp, white or otherwise, who followed the crops. I wondered how a guy like me could tell a girl like her that what he wanted was to work his way up out of this life, and I wondered whether she would think that was a good way to be or whether she would take it as an insult.
I went out to the living room and stood there listening. A car had just come in and parked between the two quonsets. I heard car doors, voices, then someone coming up the wooden steps. The door opened, and in came a man followed by a boy. They stopped short when they saw me.
"Hi," I said. "My name's Morgan. Len told me to move my stuff in here."
The man's eyes narrowed on me. "Yeah, he said we'd have to share." Then it seemed as if his face relaxed as he looked me over, and he said, "It's all right, though. We'll get along."
"Sure."
The man put out his hand. "I'm Mack," he said, "and this is my son Acie."
I shook his hand and nodded at both of them. Mack was a tall man with his head a bit large in proportion to the rest of him. He had close-set eyes. The centers were cloudy brown, and the whites were yellow and pink. He had a rugged complexion and uneven teeth. I was used to seeing people who had rough lives and looked beat to hell at forty-five or so, which he did.
Acie was about twelve years old. He was an overgrown boy, soft and weak, and he smelled of pee. He had straight blond hair, blue eyes, and a flushed white face that looked as if he had just finished crying or was getting ready to start.
Mack turned to Acie. "Go wash up, son."
"Yes, Daddy."
Mack took out a bag of Bull Durham and started rolling a cigarette. The drawl in his voice was noticeable as he bent his head. "It's a rough go. We been out here a while now. Come from Texas. My car gave out on me, and we ended up in this place. We ride back and forth with the old boy and his kids next door." He looked up and motioned with his head.
I didn't have anything to answer, so I said, "Uh-huh."
Mack finished rolling his cigarette and lit it. Acie came out of the bathroom.
"Ready, son?"
"Yes, Daddy."
Mack turned to me. "We're gonna go next door and eat with these other folks. They invited us."
"Sure," I said. "We'll see you later."
Acie gave me a whipped-puppy look as he walked past.
Except for his narrow eyes, I thought he was an unlikely son for Mack, who was dark-headed and slender. If I hadn't met them together, I would have thought Mack was an unlikely father. All the same, he had a natural tone in his voice when he called the boy "son," and when Acie said "Daddy" in his whimpering way, it sounded as if this was the only life these two had ever known.
Except for the circumstance of sharing a quonset hut, Mack and Acie were no more important to me than anyone else in the labor camp. If they spent more time with the family next door than they did in our place, that was all the same with me. No one was going to be friends for very long in this life. But they struck me as interesting all the same. As much by contrast as anything else, they made me think of my own old man.
* * * * *
There was a time, when I was Acie's age and a few years older, that my dad and I knocked around following the crops, living in labor camps and cabin courts when things were going all right and living in the car when they weren't. When we traveled, he would give me two twenty-dollar bills and tell me to put one in each sock. The first time I did it, I put the bills beneath the soles of my feet, inside the socks, but since we were just living in the car, I didn't take my socks off for a couple of days. When I did, fear spread through me as I saw the soft, greenish paper falling apart. Lucky for us, the serial numbers were still legible, so we changed the pieces for new bills. After that, I put money across the tops of my feet.
One day when I was fifteen I got separated from my old man. I was wearing clean socks with a twenty in each one, and I came out of the matinée to wait for him in the bright sun. He didn't show up. I waited outside the theater for four or five hours, getting hungrier and hungrier, but I didn't dare take out one of the bills to get something to eat. I just waited as the hollow feeling set in. Another crowd of people, all strangers, went in to the evening show as I stood on the sidewalk. When they were gone, I sat on the curb. Night came on. The cops drove by every once in a while and looked at me. Then when the night was dark and the theater lights were shining and all the bugs were out, a cop stopped and asked me a bunch of questions. He took me down to the station and told me they had my father there. They were going to let him out when he was sober.
Later that year his piss turned brown, dark as coffee, and he went into the hospital for a while. We picked olives, then oranges, and he went into the hospital again. He didn't come out the front door. The car disappeared, and I ended up in a foster home. It was one of a few.
When I moved in with Mack and Acie, then, it got me to remembering things I didn't think about every day. At least my old man had a car, and we both knew how to do our fair share of work, so we did end up with a couple of twenties now and then, even if they didn't last long.
I remembered the year my old man and I picked grapes, after the time he got thrown in jail and before his piss turned brown. We went down to Selma, in the Fresno area, where a contractor set us up in an old farmhouse. We got one bedroom, while a Mexican man and his son got another. They were clean and polite, and the man told us he had a regular job in a shop in Merced. He had two weeks of vacation, so he and his son came down here to make some money for the family. He said he had done this kind of work when he was growing up, and he didn't seem to mind going back to it for a while. Even when a big Mexican family swarmed in and took over the rest of the house, the man from Merced acted as if he was renting a room in a boarding house.
My old man and I didn't like it at all. When the loud radio went off in the morning and the pots and pans started banging, I went and heated a pan of water on the stove, then took it back to our room, where we made instant coffee. For the three weeks we stayed there we ate like we did in the car—bread and jam, Velveeta and soda crackers, bologna and white bread, cold food out of the can. As soon as the sun was up, we were out with our pans and curved knives, cutting grapes to lay on the brown waxed paper in the sun. After we ate in the evening we would go out and pick a few more trays rather than sit around in the house and listen to the racket. The Mexican family had the toilet in their side of the house, so the rest of us went to the rented toilets out in the yard. Even there, one of the Mexican kids would come up and ask questions through the door. Where are you from? How old are you? Have you dropped out of school?
I've lived in a lot of low places, even in a bunkhouse that was just a barn with plywood partitions and no ceiling, but that house at the edge of the long rows of grapevines made me feel more like an animal than any place I've ever stayed. By comparison, the quonset didn't seem bad at all.
* * * * *
While Mack and Acie were at the quonset next door, I unpacked. I had just gotten my few things put away when Mack returned. He had the other man with him, and they walked past me where I was sitting on the couch.
"It's in here," said Mack.
The man followed him to the corner of the kitchen area, where a white wooden box was mounted on the wall. The man opened the door of the box, which was a fuse box as I expected. On the bottom ledge of the box were a couple of round, screw-in fuses. The man picked up a fuse, held it with the flat face towards him, and tilted his head so he could look down through his glasses. Then with his head still tipped, he studied the fuses in the panel. A couple had yellow on the face, and a couple had blue.
"This one looks burned out," he said. He pulled the lever down to cut off the juice, then unscrewed a yellow fuse and put the replacement in. When he flipped the lever up, the refrigerator kicked on and started humming.
"That must be it," said Mack.
"Yeah, not much to it." The man closed the door of the box, and he and Mack came to the front part of the room.
"This is A.D.," said Mack.
I got up from the couch and shook his hand. "My name's Morgan," I said. "Morgan Cross."
The man was about average height and build, starting to go grey. He wore bifocals and a close-fitting khaki cap, the type that had a little pocket in front, right above the beak. He glanced around the interior of the quonset, then came back to me and said, "What do you think of it?"
"It's all right, I guess."
"You get along in this kind of work?" He looked as if he was at home in it, as he wore a loose, long-sleeved grey shirt and khaki pants to go along with his cap.
I had learned from my old man not to knock fruit tramping with people who did it. "Oh, yeah," I said. "I'm used to it. I'd like to move up, of course."
A.D. stood relaxed as he dug out a pack of Chesterfields. "I guess we'd all like to," he said. "But it's a way to get by until we do."
I nodded, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of Mack. Everyone had his own way of getting by, I thought, and anyone who moved up in this life was going to have to figure his own way to do it.
Chapter Two
The orchard was shadowy and cool when I started the day's work. The other pickers had left their buckets hanging on their ladders the day before, but I had to wait until Len brought a ladder and picking bucket for me. Then I went to work. It was not a very noisy place, just the sounds of workers talking back and forth, fruit falling into the metal buckets, and the third leg of a ladder clacking against the steps when someone pulled the ladder up straight and got ready to set it again.
Six of us were picking four rows—Mack and Acie, A.D. and his two sons, and me. When we took a break at ten, the day was beginning to warm up, but the shade of the trees was still comfortable. Mack told Acie and the other two kids to get us some empty lug boxes to sit on, so they put six boxes in kind of a circle. Then Acie stretched out on the ground and let out a long wheeze.
"Tired, Acie?" asked one of the other kids.
"It's just that the bucket gets so heavy."
From the next row over, I had noticed that Acie didn't work on a ladder. He picked bottoms, and he spent a good part of the time with both hands draped on the edge of his picking bucket as he stared away at nothing. He emptied the bucket before it ever got half-full, but still it was evident that the whole prospect was more than he could deal with.
A.D.'s two kids were good workers. They went up and down the ladder and didn't miss a motion. The older one was dark-haired, and the younger one had blondish hair. Now at break time they sat on boxes near their father.
Earlier that morning, I had seen A.D. and the kids waiting in the car for Mack and Acie to come out to ride with them. Now in the orchard I could tell that A.D. had taught his kids that when there was work, you worked, and when you took a break you didn't dick around throwing dirt clods.
Mack rolled a cigarette, and A.D. shook out a Chesterfield. I lit up a Winston. When Mack lit his, he blew away the smoke and wrinkled his nose.
"Len come by and give Acie some shit about pickin' green cots," he said. "I told him the kid was just learnin', and he said he knew that and he was bein' nice to the kid. Someone else, he might fire him. Said if he wanted to, he could fire someone because he didn't like the way he parted his hair."
A.D. leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees. "I've worked for guys like him before. Like the Chinaman says, 'He a plick.'"
His two kids laughed.
"Well," said Mack, "he's the boss and we ain't. But still, pick on a kid that's just learnin'."
A.D. sniffed. "I think they put on too many pickers. Go through too fast, before the fruit can ripen up. I don't know why they do that, but they do. Even on the second time through, there'll be green fruit. You wait and see. Makes it hard to try to do things right and still make a living." He looked at me. "Ain't that right?"
"Yeah," I said. "That's the way it seems." It reminded me of my own old man, who liked to do things right when he could.
"Green as gourds," said Mack. "Isn't that what he said, Acie?"
The kid spoke with a pout as he said, "Yeah."
"Well, screw him. I don't like him."
I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that Mack didn't like very many people at all.
* * * * *
Later that afternoon, Len came by where I was picking on my row. He was waiting when I came down from my ladder. I had been picking up in the top of the tree, so all of the apricots in my bucket were orange and blushed with red. He looked at them and didn't say anything until I came back from emptying my bucket.
"Pretty good pickin' here."
"It's all right," I said.
"It's pretty damn good, especially at forty cents a box. They're payin' thirty-five for this in all the other places."
I knew that was a lie, but I didn't answer right away. I just looked at him, and I realized why he had seemed familiar when he hired me the day before. He had dark, beady eyes, and the rest of his scowling face reminded me of the front-page newspaper pictures I had seen of Richard Nixon a couple of years earlier when he lost the race for governor. I didn't like this foreman any more than Mack did, but seeing him as Richard Nixon in a San Francisco Giants ball cap, looking to chew out poor fruit pickers, gave me a way to tolerate him for the time being.
"I'm not complainin'," I said.
"How 'bout the camp? You all right where I put you?"
"Oh, yeah. Everything's fine."
"That's good." He looked around. "Make sure you keep these four rows about even. Someone gets behind, whoever's ahead picks a tree on their row. The others already know that."
"Yeah, they told me." As soon as I said it, I realized I could just as well have let him have the word on that. But he found something more to say anyway.
"Nobody pulls any shit on a crew of mine. Some places, they let a bunch get out ahead of the rest, and then they go pickin' the bottoms of everyone else's trees. Or they skip a bad tree. Shit like that. But they don't do it here." He shook his head and held his beady eyes on me.
"That's good," I said, pleased to give him his own words back.
"You damn right it is." He turned and walked away, so he got in the last word after all.
* * * * *
The way Len had us set out, I took one row, Mack and Acie took one row, and A.D. and his kids took two rows. The lug boxes were stacked on each side of the drive that went between the two middle rows. So we made up one bunch that picked four rows. The four young Mexican guys made up another. They went like hell in the early part of the day, so I didn't see much of them. In the last drive, the Mexican family picked two rows, and the white family picked the other two. I wouldn't have seen much of them that first day except the father came over at about two in the afternoon to bum some matches from A.D.
He didn't seem to be in a hurry to go back to work. He talked to A.D. for a few minutes, then hung around Mack's tree for a few more. After that he stopped to talk to me.
He wore an old straw hat that looked as if it had been run over a few times by a tractor, and he had funny-colored, short hair that was either really light blond or prematurely white. I placed him at about forty. He was lean with a rough complexion and washed-out blue eyes, and he wore a long-sleeved work shirt. As soon as he spoke, I placed him in that general bunch of people who came from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.
"Naht gonna git rich at this, are we?"
"Probably not," I said.
He shook out a Lucky Strike and lit it. "Len says this fruit's gonna ripen fast." He gave me a squint-eyed look. "I told him, once the pickin' gits better, you'll knock it down a nickel a box. He said he wouldn't, but we'll see. The big boss has the say on that, but I 'magine he listens to Len."
"I guess."
He looked past my ladder. "You're lucky you don't have anyone on the other side of you."
I shrugged.
"You finish these rows before we do, then you'll have them Mexicans next to you. When we come back the other way."
"All the same to me."
He gave me a knowing look. "Maybe you haven't seen much. But they'll come back out here after work, switch ladders on you. They walk their ladder around when they're on it, and they loosen it up. Then they give it to you. They'll steal your pickin' bucket, too."
"Is that right?" I recalled the buckets hanging by their straps on the ladders that morning.
"You damn right. I told Len he should paint numbers on 'em, like they do in other places." He took a drag on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes again. "They don't do it to me, though."
"Uh-huh."
"When me and my boys leave for the day, I put a cigarette paper in the bottom of each one of our buckets. They see that, and they don't put their hands on 'em."
"No shit."
"You damn right." He cocked his head back. "Well, I'd better git back and look after my kids. They start to slow down this time of day."
"I'll see you later, then."
"Sure. By the way, name's Harold."
"Mine's Morgan," I said. "Morgan Cross."
He paused for a second. "Not related to Morgan Hill, are you?"
That was the next main town if you went south on the highway. "No," I said. "Morgan's my first name. My last name's Cross."
"Well, mine's Hubbs. Harold Hubbs."
"Good enough."
As he walked away, I wondered how he might think I was related to Morgan Hill. From the way he had said it, it seemed as if he thought the town was named after a person's first and last name, which would mean he had the notion that people were related through their first names. I shook my head. Then I pondered the logic of the cigarette paper, shook my head again, and went back to work.
* * * * *
Our group made the turn at the end of the orchard the next day, just before Hubbs and the rest of that group did, so the Mexican family ended up on my left as Hubbs said they might. I didn't mind it, though. There was a kid about sixteen or seventeen, and when he found out I spoke Spanish, we got along like old friends. On top of that, he had a sister who was a year or so older. It was the girl I had seen the first day. She kept herself wrapped up like Mexican girls do, to keep from getting darker and showing that they worked in the fields. She wore long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, gloves, and a scarf that covered her head and the sides of her face. I had already seen her without the scarf, and I was sure that underneath the bundling she was a nice-looking girl. Her brother called her Rosy, with a hard s, short for Rosa María as I found out. I thought the full name was a pretty one, and it reminded me of the desert rose you hear about, the kind that blooms in a place where no one ever sees it.
The brother's name was Francisco, and then there was the father and a couple of younger kids as well. No one under sixteen was supposed to go above the red line painted at the five-foot step on the ladder, but these kids went right on up. Len never said a word about it that I knew, not to them or to Hubbs or A.D.
The family's last name was Carrillo. They were nice people, and I couldn't imagine them scheming on my ladder or picking bucket. Of course, there were plenty others who would—Mexicans or Okies or you name it.
By the time the Carrillos made the turn and came up working alongside me, I had a count on who was working in which group. I realized that Rosa María was the only girl in the orchard. When she went to the bathroom, she had to go all the way to the end where the portable toilets were, so she took one of the younger boys with her.
By the third day, I got to wondering where the colored man and the white woman were working. I had seen them in the labor camp in the morning and evening, and I had seen their Tokay bottles in the trash barrel out back. They were an unusual couple, I thought. He was very dark, and she was light and brown-haired with a big purple birthmark on the left side of her face and neck. They had an old Black Dodge, a '52 or '53, with the ram's head ornament on the hood.
That afternoon, on the third day, I found out where they were working. It came up in conversation when Hubbs and his two kids came over to join our bunch for an afternoon break.
Hubbs was going on about how his kids got all ones and twos "baick East," where the schools were harder and of course better. I didn't care for the two kids and the way they skulked and glared, so I didn't look at them when their father was singing their praises.
I thought A.D. was playing along when he said, "Is that right?" Then he said, "Well, here's what Mike did." He pulled out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper, the kind that would have had carbon copies underneath. He held it out for each of us to see. It was a report card with Michael Ashburn's name on it, and the kid had gotten all A's.
Hubbs barely glanced at it, and his two kids ignored it, just as Acie did. None of them struck me as compulsive readers. Mike looked embarrassed, so I changed the subject.
"Say, where's that couple in the black Dodge? I don't see them anywhere out here."
Hubbs answered. "Len's got them in another orchard. The other camp's full, so he put 'em with us. Can't say that I care for it."
Mack's eyes came up from rolling a cigarette. "What's wrong with it?"
Hubbs tipped his ashes and said, "Well, in some places they've got laws about people shackin' up like that."
"Bah," said Mack. "Who the hell's business is it, what a man and a woman do?"
"I'm not just talkin' about a man and a woman." The white straw hat wagged back and forth as Hubbs lifted his cigarette and held it near his chin. "I'm talkin' about a nigger and a white woman."
"Ah, shit," said Mack. "What the hell's the difference?"
Hubbs got a tight look. "Where I come from, there is."
"Then you come from a different part of the country than I do. White woman wants to screw a colored man, it's no different than a white man wantin' to screw a colored girl. That right, A.D.?"
"I s'pose."
Hubbs wasn't giving up. "Well," he said, "they'd better not do it in some places, unless they want to go to jail."
"They do it everywhere," said Mack. "That and worse. I was in the service, and I know."
"Maybe so," said A.D., "but these kids don't need to know about it. Not yet."
Mack lit his cigarette. "Wise 'em up. Teach 'em to stay away from punks."
"You mean pachucos?" asked Hubbs.
Mack's eyes blazed. "I mean punks. A punk is a man that gets screwed in the ass."
No one said anything. After a long, uncomfortable moment, A.D. said, "I didn't know Len had two crews."