Road to Nowhere

  Poppy Corn fell silent. She reached in her coat and knocked out a cigarette. Coughing, she lit it and took a long drag. She stared out the window at the ocean. The waves were black foam, rolling towards invisible sand. Teresa kept waiting for her to continue, but the strange girl remained silent.

  “Well?” Teresa said finally.

  “I’m tired of talking,” Poppy said.

  “Good,” Free said. “I’m tired of listening.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to hear the story,” Poppy said.

  Free twisted round. He was going to have a stiff neck by the time they arrived where they were going – wherever that was. “I wanted to hear the story minus all the added B.S.,” he said.

  Poppy tapped her ashes into her palm. Teresa could see the girl in her rear-view mirror. “There was no B.S. I just knew her better than you is all.”

  “You made her out to be a saint,” Free said.

  Poppy chuckled softly. “Hardly.”

  “But did Candy ever get back together with John?” Teresa asked. She had really got into these characters – despite herself.

  “No,” Poppy said.

  “What?” Teresa grimaced. “You mean they never saw each other again?”

  “They saw each other,” Poppy said. “A few years later – one more time – on a dark and stormy night. Do you want to tell them about that night, Jack?”

  Free was sullen. “No.”

  “Come on,” Poppy taunted.

  Free suddenly smiled. Teresa watched him out of the corner of her eye. The smile was a curious affair: mischievous, grim, excited – all rolled into one. He glanced over at Teresa.

  “Where did we leave John?” he asked.

  “He had just got out of juvenile hall and was searching for Candy,” Teresa said.

  “I didn’t tell you he was searching for Candy,” Free said seriously.

  Teresa stammered. “I – I must have misunderstood you.”

  Free stared at her a moment more before refocusing the road in front of them. The endless road – a single broken white line brushed by headlights that showed nothing new. Teresa wondered if she hadn’t half hypnotized herself, driving so late at night, listening to this story. No, it wasn’t just the story. It was Free and Poppy’s voices. They both had such unusual, sleepy voices – as if they were related, maybe brother and sister.

  “I’ll tell you what happened to John when he got out,” Free said finally. “I’ll tell you the truth. That’s all I can do.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “It’s true what Poppy said,” Free began. “John didn’t get out of juvenile hall until after Candy had been at school for three weeks. He didn’t call her parents to ask for her phone number because he knew they wouldn’t give it to him. He also wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Candy right away, and the longer he thought about it the more certain he was. He was mad at her. He had spent hours in juvenile hall thinking about how she had taken it for granted that he was going to help her cheat on her test. She had done so because she was too lazy to study, and because she never thought about his risk. Of course, he hadn’t minded helping her until he got caught. But that was just the point – he shouldn’t have been caught. She should have swallowed the cheat sheet the second that Annie – or Sally, or whatever her name was – had raised her whiny voice. John had spent an incredible amount of hours thinking about how Candy had frozen at that critical moment. It bugged him, it really did. He only needed her help that one time and she let him down.

  “He was also embarrassed to get in touch with her. She was in college, and he was just out of juvenile hall. He wanted to get his life back together before he called her – to show her that he had bounced back after a hard rap. Even though he was mad, he had every intention of seeing her eventually. He missed her more than he could stand, and had spent many nights in juvenile hall remembering them lying together on the beach. Those had been the happiest days of his life.

  “John's stepdad lied to Candy when he said that John never came home after getting out. John did go home – for one day. That was all it took for his stepdad to get on his case, calling him a no-good teacher beater and saying he’d never amount to anything. John repaid him by busting his nose. Juvenile hall had not improved his tolerance for abuse. It’s hard to stay in someone’s house once you’ve broken his nose. On his first day of freedom, John was out on the streets before the sun even set.

  “He didn’t have many friends but he had some. He was able to stay at a few guys' houses for a few days. But he had to get a job quick. He didn’t want to go back to the garage where he had worked before. He didn't want to do anything he had done before. He wanted to start fresh, stay out of trouble, and make a million dollars so he never had to kiss anybody's ass. At nineteen John was already tired of being pushed around.

  “He got a job in a bakery. It wasn’t an ordinary mom and pop place. It was the bakery for one of the largest food chains in the western United States. The place was gigantic – several football fields long. You couldn’t get within a mile of it and not smell the baking dough. You couldn’t work there and not smell like yeast. The place was hot – it felt like it never got below a hundred degrees inside. But the job had advantages. First, it was a union job and the pay was better than at most places. Second, he could work the graveyard shift and have most of his day free to do what he wanted.

  “Finally, the job they put him on was easy. The bakery had five machines that sealed various bakery goods in plastic – things like rolls and Danish, stuff like that. John’s job was to take the machines apart and clean them. They got clogged pretty quick. The guy who had had the job before John must have been a goof off. The head of the bakery – his name was Tyler – believed that if a guy worked his tail off he could clean all five machines in eight hours. Of course, John was good with machines. He wasn't working at the bakery more than two weeks when he got his job down to three hours. That meant he could take five hours off – if he could stay out of sight – and at the same time give the impression that he was busy with his machines.

  “Like I said, the bakery was huge. It had its own shower room, on the upper level. But none of the employees used the showers. The architect who designed the plant didn’t realize that when a guy got off work he didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to. He could take a shower as easily at home. John would come on at eleven at night, and by two in the morning he’d have his machines sparkling clean and ready for another day of cinnamon rolls. Then he would head on up to the showers and hide in a stall, reading, listening to tapes, or taking a nap. Sure, occasionally one of the night janitors would find him crashed out. But these guys had no love for the company. They admired a guy who could get his work done and take time off.

  “John had it pretty good at the bakery - in the beginning. But things were not going so great outside in the world. He got himself a small apartment in a cheap part of town and that was OK. John never cared where he laid his head as long as there wasn’t someone around who was going to wake him up with a kick in the ear. But it was only during this time that John learned to what lengths his chemistry teacher had gone to keep him out of getting into a decent college. See, John figured he would work full-time for a few months, get a little money together, and go off to school. His first choice was the University of San Francisco. He figured he’d be able to see Candy as much as he wanted. Yeah, he hadn’t even called her but he was planning how he was going to spend the next four years with her – or however long it took for them to graduate.

  “But the university wrote him back a stern letter of rejection. He next applied to U.C. Santa Cruz – again, another school not far from Berkeley. He got the same kind of rejection letter. It made him wonder. He did some investigative work and learned that not only had all the universities in California been contacted by Mr. Sims, but all the state colleges as well. John couldn’t believe it. All that was left were a bunch of junior colleges.

  “His plans were in ruins. I said he of
ten spent his free time at work goofing off, but he also spent a lot of the time studying the subjects he needed to become an engineer – maths, physics, chemistry. He figured he could catch up in no time at all. Now all that was out of the question – at least for the time being. That’s the way he thought. Sure, you could say he was overreacting. He could have gone to a junior college and worried about getting into a four-year school when the time came. But he didn’t want to do that because he didn’t want to have to call Candy at big important Berkeley and tell her that he was taking a few night classes at Cerritos Junior College. I mean, he had his pride and there’s nothing wrong with a guy having pride.

  “More overtime was offered at work and because John had nothing else to do, he took it. Rather than going in at eleven, he started at six in the evening. He didn’t know that Tyler, the head of the bakery and a staunch company man, usually worked to seven or eight. This was the first time the two began to have regular contact. Tyler liked John initially. During the extra hours, he put John on another one of the plushier jobs. John was given a list of what the supermarkets wanted and he’d go round to collect the stuff – forty boxes of doughnuts, fifty boxes of rolls, a hundred loaves of bread, and so on. Then at eleven, with Tyler gone, John would clean his machines and take the rest of the night off. The overtime paid double – he couldn’t complain.

  “John often took his first break when Tyler was about to leave. Tyler had been a marine, which should have set off warning bells in John’s mind right away. John had never done well with people who were into authority and discipline. But John could be respectful, when it suited him, and Tyler saw in John a kid who’d had a few lousy breaks but who was bouncing back. The two spent a lot of time talking about sports – boxing in particular. John really enjoyed a good fight and boxing was a second religion to Tyler. Tyler, in fact, had boxed in the marines. He was built like a tree stump. John laughingly thought to himself that there was no way he was ever going to take a punch at this guy.

  “John didn't get his plush overtime every day. Now and then, the conveyor bells that carried the bread pans away from the oven would break down. When this happened, Tyler would grab whoever was handy and have them manually unload the pans on to racks so that they wouldn’t all start piling up. Working right beside the oven was intense – the temperature had to be over a hundred and twenty, maybe a hundred and thirty. The pans themselves were also very hot. When you were put on the hell detail – that's what it was called – you had to wear damp gloves with sleeves attached that reached all the way up to the top of your arms. If you so much as bumped your arm with a pan after taking it off the conveyor belt, it sizzled a nice little black hole in your skin. But the long gloves were a pain. The arm covers were loose and slid down all the time, leaving your arms exposed. The pans didn't even need to touch your skin to cause third degree burns – they radiated so much heat.

  “John hated the hell detail with a passion. But Tyler began to use him on it more frequently because the oven belt was breaking down more often and also because John was quick. John could unload the bread pans faster than anybody. At breaks, though, he would have to drink a gallon of water just to keep from getting dehydrated. He began to wonder if the overtime was worth it.

  “John was not only quick, he was clever. After working the hell detail a number of times he began to see just how inefficient it was. Men should not be doing what machines could do better, he thought. He examined the conveyor belts and saw that they kept breaking down for a very simple reason. Too much dough was slopping off the sides of the pans as they travelled through the oven. John reasoned that if that slop could be cut down, the conveyor belts would break down only occasionally. He figured a couple of metal scrapers, situated at the receiving end of the oven, would solve the problem. He worked on making them in his free time, late at night, using spare parts. He tried his invention out when no one was around. Invention was too big a word. They were just metal bars, that cleaned and steered the pans as they went by, but as far as John could see, they worked great. He installed them without permission and looked forward to the next day, when he could take credit for his handiwork.

  “But John decided, during the night, that he would wait and let his bars do the job before taking credit for them. This they did over the next month – the conveyor belt didn’t break down once and there was no need for Tyler to yank people off their usual jobs and put them on the hell detail. The odd thing was, during all this time, nobody asked who installed the new bars. Not even Tyler. John wondered at that, until one evening, when he was having a break, and Tyler was just about to leave for the day. It was then John got another lesson in human nature.

  “John was sitting alone in the corner of the break room eating a bagfull of fruit. Sandwiches used to be his staple, but since he had begun to smell like the Pillsbury Doughboy he couldn’t eat bread or anything with flour in it. John was just about to open his mouth, when Tyler told the workers that he’d had the bars installed to scrape the bread pans so the conveyor belts wouldn’t jam so often. Tyler puffed up his chest as he spoke. He said he decided to fix the problem himself and be done with it. The men around him nodded appreciatively. A couple even suggested that Tyler should get a patent on the bars, to which Tyler laughed as if that wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  “It was then John opened his mouth. He said, ‘Hey, I was the one who installed those bars. I was the one who figured out what the problem was. What are you talking about?’

  “The room fell silent. John had just made Tyler out to be a liar and a braggart at the same time. Some of the men had worked for Tyler for several years and knew how tough he was, and how he didn’t like to be embarrassed – ever. They knew John would be fired.

  “But John saw none of this. It was just like the time Mr. Sims came striding towards him in chemistry class. John thought he could open his mouth and explain the situation and everything would be all right. But John made situations when he opened his mouth, and he had just made a big one. Yet Tyler didn’t say anything to John. He just stared through him and left the lunchroom. The rest of the room went back to eating and John finished his apples and didn’t give any of it much thought.

  “A couple of weeks later John lost his job cleaning the wrapping machines and filling the orders for the individual stores. He was moved on to the hot dog machine. The hot dog machine didn't actually make hot dogs, of course. It was a complicated arrangement of metal fingers and slamming bars that worked to keep the preformed dough in the proper grooves in the steel pans so that they could grow into nice bundles of eight connected fluffy hot dog buns. The job was worse in some ways than working beside the oven. It was noisy, and it was dangerous. The operators of the hot dog machine – there were usually two of them at a time – were responsible for keeping the maximum number of buns in the metal grooves. In other words, the people were there to straighten up anything the machine had missed, which was plenty.

  “The danger came when you tried to mix metal fingers with human fingers. But that was exactly what the hot dog machine operator had to do his entire shift. He was always darting in and around a pan filled with white dough and steel prongs. It was a good place to lose a finger. John hated the job. He was no fool and knew why he’d been reassigned. Or maybe he was a special kind of fool. He wanted to show up Tyler again – for all the good the first demonstration had done him. He was not working with the hot dog machine a week when he figured out a way to make it more efficient.

  “The buns were sticky before they went in the oven, which was natural – they were made of flour and water. It this stickiness that kept them from resting in the roper grooves. John figured if the buns could be dried just a little before they went into the oven, they would rest happier.

  “Next to the hot dog oven was the doughnut oven, which had a row of fans along one side to take off the excess heat. The doughnut oven was always overheating, which was not good – even for an oven. What John did was redirect the conveyor belt that brought in the
uncooked hot dog rolls so that they went by the hot air. Then by the time they got to the hot dog machine, they were semi-cooked and much easier for the machine to handle. John did all this work late at night without getting permission from Tyler. He wanted to show the bastard up, make it clear who the inventive genius was. Once again John was able to cannibalize parts. It wasn't much more difficult than setting up a train set.

  “Naturally, Tyler immediately knew about the change. John had half expected the jerk to have it torn down right away. But Tyler left the conveyor belt’s new turn up long enough to prove its usefulness. John began to think maybe he wasn’t such a bad sort, after all. Tyler called John into his office. He started by asking if John was responsible for the reworking of the hot dog roll line, and John said, ‘Yeah.’ Tyler asked why he had done it, and John quickly explained the logic behind it. In fact, John blabbed on about how it was working great, that it was no longer necessary to have two people work it. Tyler appeared interested. He asked John to accompany him on to the floor and demonstrate how much less attention the machine needed. John thought it was a curious request. It was easy to demonstrate how you had to do something; hard to show how you didn’t have to do it. But John decided to play along. What could it hurt, he thought? The worst Tyler could do was fire him.

  “So John lined up at his usual place beside the metal fingers of the hot dog machine, alone, while Tyler and a bunch of others looked on. Soon the pans of blown dry sausages of dough started rolling, and for the first few minutes John didn’t have to do anything because all the ‘wannabe’ buns were sitting easy. But even with John’s improvement, there was an occasional bun that sat cock-eyed – a bun that the prongs of the machine would miss so that it got burned in the oven. Such a bun came by and John reached out to scoot it into its proper place.