Without a Trace
It was a hot afternoon, the kind that left your shirt soaked in sweat after being in the sun for just a few minutes. I was on the jobsite a little after noon. The Labor Depot had sent me to this job for four days in a row which usually meant this job might last a while. I needed the money and they were flexible in letting me come into work at noon. All my classes were scheduled in the morning, so this was working out perfectly. The work was hard and the Gulf Coast heat was relentless. But I couldn’t complain, it was hopefully somewhat steady, and it paid $4.50 an hour. If I could manage to get thirty hours a week, that would give me a take-home of about $100. LeeAnn was about six months along and wouldn’t be able to continue working at the school office much longer, maybe a couple of months if we were lucky. The baby was due in mid-August. This job felt like a Godsend.
A massive concrete slab was going in. The excavation was done, and some of the underground plumbing had already been set, but crews were still hauling PVC pipe across the dirt, laying it into open trenches.
Off to one side, ironworkers carried lengths of rebar, two men carrying two pieces, the rods bowing slightly with every step. Wooden forms boxed in the entire site. It had to be three acres, maybe more.
Big job. Probably a warehouse for some company with money.
My job was to go where the site superintendent sent me. He was easy to spot, the only one wearing a red hard hat, standing off in the distance, shimmering through the heat rising off the ground.
I shut the car door and started toward him.
The super didn’t waste time. “Electricians just showed up,” he said. “You’ll be helping them.” He pointed toward a box trailer. “Foreman’s in there.”
I was glad to hear that. I’d always been interested in electrical work, more than plumbing or rebar.
I walked up to the open end of the trailer and didn’t see anyone. “Hello?” I called.
“Yeah,” came a voice from the back.
A short, fat man stepped out of the shadows into the light. “What can I do for you?”
“The super sent me. I’m from the labor pool.”
“Good,” he said. “We need the help. You ready to work?”
“Yes sir. You bet I am.”
“All right then. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
He came down the wooden steps and pointed to a pile of conduit beside the trailer. “See that? All of it needs to go out there.” He nodded toward the center of the site.
“Yes sir, I’ll get started right now,” I said as I turned toward the stacks of conduit. I pulled some gloves out of my back pocket, pulled them on and picked up four pieces of conduit. It was heavy, but I wanted to impress the foreman since he was still standing there watching me. As I started toward the worksite, he climbed up the steps back into the trailer.
I spent the rest of the day carrying conduit out to the center of the jobsite. The heat was searing. After one trip my clothes were soaked in sweat. I only carried 3 pieces of conduit after the first load. The foreman wasn’t watching any more, and four pieces were too heavy. By six o’clock all of the conduit was in the center of the jobsite. I hollered into the dark trailer at the end of the day, “All done, see you tomorrow.” A response came from the darkness at the end of the trailer, “OK dude, see ya tomorrow.” I showed up the next morning before he did.
I was sitting on the wooden steps to the trailer when the foreman walked up.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I said as I moved from the steps. He stepped up and unlocked the supply trailer as the big doors swung to the side.
“Ready to get started?” he asked.
You betcha,” I replied.
“Got another hand coming in today,” he said. “Should be here soon.”
“Super,” I said, “what’s the plan for today?” I asked.
“Today we’re going to dig trenches for the conduit. The survey crew has laid out some markers for the conduit, when the new guy gets here, I’ll take you out and show you where they are.”
Just as he finished talking, a man walked up to the steps.
“Good morning, I’m Charles Barker from the labor pool. The super sent me here, to this trailer. I go by Charlie.”
“Good, good, glad to see you, Charlie. I’m Frank, this is, what’s your name again?”
“William, William Oglesby. I go by Will.”
“OK, guys, we’ve got a lot to do today. We’re going to start digging trenches for the conduit today. Survey has it all laid out, I’ll take you guys out and show you how to follow the markers,” he said. “Give me a few minutes.”
The foreman retreated back onto the darkness of the trailer. Charlie and I introduced ourselves to each other and shook hands. I asked if he had done this type of work before, he said, “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of construction work. You?”
“Yeah, I’ve done some, I’m doing this part time while I go to school.”
“I like that. I like a young man who’s working his way through life. “Stay with school, young man, you’re on the right path.”
The foreman emerged from the trailer and said, “Follow me guys,” as he headed out toward the conduit I had hauled the day before.
After learning how to read the markers, and being given a couple of sharpshooter shovels, the foreman left and Charlie and I started digging. He followed one line of markers, I followed another. Ever so often, he’d stop, look down the line of markers then keep digging. By six o’clock that evening we had dug about five hundred feet of trenching between the two of us. We returned to the trailer, put our shovels inside the door, and shouted into the trailer, “See you tomorrow Frank.”
“See ya tomorrow guys,” came from the dark shadows of the trailer.
By the end of the week, Charlie and I had dug almost a mile of trenching. At the end of the day Friday, we returned our shovels to the box trailer. No sign of Frank, but he had to be around somewhere. He was the only one with keys to lock up the trailer, so Charlie and I left.
On the way to the parking area, I asked Charlie if he might like to grab a cold beer on the way home.
“Sure,” he said. “Listen I don’t live far from here, how about stopping at my place. I’ve got some cold ones in the fridge.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Soon we were pulling into a trailer park. Lots of old trailers, not many new ones. In fact, there weren’t any new ones. We drove past several, all the way to the back. There were five cabins there, old from the looks of them. Weathered gray clapboard, white trim badly in need of paint. Charlie pulled up to the last one and parked.
As he got out of his Ford Maverick and I from my pickup, he said, “Home sweet home. For now, anyway. Come on in.”
The cabin had a small porch in front with two old wooden rocking chairs. Charlie opened the door and we stepped inside. It was tidy, everything in its place. The furniture was old but not worn. Faded sheer curtains covered the windows, filling the room with a soft, yellow light.
Charlie disappeared through a doorway into a small kitchen. I heard the fridge door open, bottles clanking as he closed it. He came back with two beers and handed me one. Before sitting, he opened his, I opened mine and we clinked bottles.
“Cheers,” we said in unison.
As Charlie took a seat across the room, he asked, “So, what courses are you taking in school?”
“History and English,” I replied. “Not my favorite subjects, which is why I’m taking them in the summer. Six weeks instead of four months in the fall and spring semesters. Both classes require essays; I have one in each class due next week. Writing doesn’t come easy for me, it’s hard. I turned in my first one last week, it was an essay on the Civil War. I got a C on it, felt lucky to get that.”
“What’s hard about it?” he asked. Coming up with ideas? Organizing your thoughts? Sentence structure? Grammar?”
“All of it,” I said. “It’s just not where my interests are. They’re just courses everyone has to take to get through college,” I told him.
“That may be,” he said, “but learning to write well is a skill that will serve you the rest of your life, in whatever field you choose.” He paused, then added, “I’ll make you an offer, I’ll help you with your essays. You still have to write them, but I’ll review them and help clean up the grammar and to generally tighten things, help you say what you mean.”
He took a sip of his beer. “I’m an English professor. Taught at a small midwestern university for fifteen years.”
“Seriously, you’re an English professor?”
“Was,” he said.
He held my eyes for a moment, then took another drink.
“Story for another day, Will.”
He lifted his bottle slightly. “Another beer?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The next day on the job, I couldn’t help but see my new friend and workmate in a new light. I had worked a few construction jobs before; this was not the sort of person you would normally encounter on a construction site. Not even close. With a doctorate in English literature, what the heck was he doing on a construction site anyway? What possibly could have happened in his life to bring him here? To give up a prestigious career, a family, stability, to be laboring on a construction job, and living alone? The more I thought about it, the less I liked the answer I kept coming back to.
I couldn’t help but keep an eye on my new friend as we worked together. As the days went by, I noticed that he was steady and consistent. He had a good twenty years on me; he had to be in his mid-to-late forties. But physically, he appeared to be an equal to me. In the ninety-degree temps, he took no extra breaks and seemed to be no more affected by the heat than I was. Being a sports fan, I knew there were exceptions to every rule. George Blanda played until he was forty-eight. Tom Brady played to forty-five. So, this guy working construction into his forties wasn’t that much of a stretch. But a PhD digging trenches on a construction site, that was a stretch.
A week had gone by, and we hadn’t spoken much, other than greetings and pleasantries. After a long hot day in the sun the following week, I asked him if he’d like to meet up again for a cold beer. He said that would be a great idea. I followed him to his bungalow again. I was pretty sure he didn’t care for noisy, smoky bars any more than I did.
“Come on in, make yourself at home. I’ll grab us a couple of cold ones,” he said. As he handed me a cold beer, he said, “This heat is tough, huh?”
“It drains every ounce of energy you have,” I said. “At the end of the day, your tank is empty.”
There was a pause in the conversation, when all you do is dig trenches all day, interesting discussion topics are limited. I had questions on the end of my tongue, but I didn’t want to pry. My curiosity was pushing me, but my respect for his privacy was restraining me. So, I hesitated from jumping right into personal questions and gave him the chance to choose a topic and continue the conversation.
“After our last conversation, you’re probably wondering, what am I doing here. Why is an English professor with a family working a dead-end construction job, and not at home teaching and taking care of his family?”
With all the questions I had, he had turned the tables and put me on the spot. “Well, yeah, I mean, that’s your business, but why are you here? Why are you doing this? You’re obviously capable of much more than digging trenches?”
“Fair question,” he said, then took along swig of his beer. He held my gaze for a moment before he spoke. “I’m an alcoholic, Will. I drink too much. It was causing problems for my family that they didn’t deserve.”
There was another pause in the conversation as I pondered a few more questions. Lots of people are alcoholics but they don’t disappear from their lives, and their families. I wanted to ask more questions and get to the bottom of it all, but I couldn’t. This was his life we were talking about, and he didn’t owe me any answers. So, again, I waited for him to speak.
“I drink too much, and I just wasn’t holding it together. It just became too much to handle, and it wasn’t fair to them.” he said.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said, not knowing really what to say. I’d never been around anyone who was an alcoholic, I knew it was bad, but not much more than that. If it was something that could cause a man to leave his family, then it was a lot worse than I imagined it could be.
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Charlie. Have you ever thought about AA, or something like that?” I asked.
“Don’t think that would work for me,” was all he said.
We sat in silence for a few moments, then he asked, “What’s your favorite baseball team?” he asked.
“Astros,” I guess. Don’t follow it that close.
Royals for me,” he said. George Brett, Bo Jackson, Danny Tartabull, we’ve got a shot this year.
“I like baseball,” he said. “Life imitates it sometimes.”
He smiled a little, “Yogi Berra had it figured out.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.”
He looked down at his beer.
“Seems about right.”
A few more weeks went by, as Charlie and I worked through the unbearable summer heat of the Gulf Coast. We spent a couple of weeks digging trenches for conduit, then moved on to digging trenches for the underground plumbing lines. Not much difference, a trench is a trench. The plumbing trenches were a little wider, which meant the progress was slower.
During those few weeks, I had four papers to write for my English and history classes. The routine settled in. I’d write the paper, slide the envelope under his door, and pick it up at the office the next day.
The first paper I gave him was an essay on the Reconstruction Era following the Civil war. When I pulled the paper from the envelope, I was surprised, even a little shocked. I knew I wasn’t a good writer, but my essay was covered in red. Notes filled the margins. Sentences were crossed out and rewritten. Whole sections were reworked.
I made the corrections and followed his suggestions, sometimes rewriting entire paragraphs. When I compared the revisions to what I had originally written, I began to see the difference.
Charlie was teaching me to think deliberately—to focus on what I was trying to say and say it with as few words as possible.
As I began to do that, the red marks became fewer, and the grades improved. What I was writing after Charlie reviewed my papers made sense—it read clearly.
I could write an essay before. Charlie was teaching me how to write one well.
The end of summer was approaching. The workdays were long and seemed to blur together. We dug trenches, carried conduit and pipe to fill them, then filled the trenches. The pay was good, I was covering all the bills, and we still had some money in the bank. Charlie didn’t talk much at work. We had a few more beer drinking sessions where we talked about various things, solving the world’s problems. I enjoyed those talks, he was a smart guy and I liked hearing his perspective on things.
I wrote a few more essays and put them in envelopes and slid them under his door. With the last essay of the summer session, I did the usual, slid the envelope under his door then went to pick it up at the office the next day. As I pulled it out of the envelope, I couldn’t help but notice the scarcity of red marks. There were a few, some mindless grammar mistakes and one phrase marked out and rewritten. I was proud of how much I had learned from the ‘mark-ups’ over the summer.
The morning after I picked up the last essay, I was surprised to see that Charlie wasn’t at work. I carried on as usual, carrying pipe out to the trenches. At lunch break, I stopped by the box trailer and asked Frank what happened to Charlie today?
“Don’t know, haven’t heard from him. Sumbitch needs to call if he can’t make it in,” Frank said.
After work, I stopped by Franks’ cabin on my way home. I knocked at the door, no answer. Didn’t hear any sounds from inside. I looked at the rockers on the porch we sat in and noticed the cushions were missing. Made me think something was ‘off’. His car was missing, the cushions on the rockers were missing, I immediately felt that Charlie was missing as well.
I stopped at the office on my way out and caught the attendant as she was locking the door on her way out.
“Excuse me, I knocked at Mr. Barkers’ cabin, and no one was home. We work together and he wasn’t at work today either. Has he checked out or something? “
“Yes, actually, he checked out yesterday about this time. Turned in his key and left.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address or anything?” I asked.
“No, I had a quick look at his cabin, looked good so I gave him his hundred-dollar deposit and he left.”
“Oh,” I said. I was stunned and didn’t know what to say, other than ‘Thanks.”
I got in my truck and headed toward home. I couldn’t believe that he just left like that. Didn’t mention that he was leaving, didn’t say goodbye. Just gone. I had questions running through my head. Why would he do that? We had become friends and he just walked away without a word. I felt a pensive sadness, like I had lost someone without ever understanding him. It almost felt as if he had died.
Over the course of that short summer, Charlie had taught me something about myself that I had never realized. That I could write. Not just put words on paper but say what I needed to say and get right to the point, without floundering. With clarity. His red markups, picked up in an envelope the next day, had changed me. He had shown me, without ever saying a word, an ability I didn’t know I had.
He left me with a feeling of emptiness. A friend who had disappeared without a trace. I could understand the drinking, but it didn’t explain everything. I couldn’t help but think it had to be something more than he had told me. Something he didn’t think anyone else should carry. Even me.
