Wildcat

Crazy Jack saw Ernie then, who had been sitting beside his lathe, the chuck spinning slow motion at about a hundred rpm’s. Jack knew he was going to have another problem one of these days—when management got tired of Ernie producing nothing day after day. The tool room superintendent had already given him the warning. “What’s up, Ernie?” Jack asked as he approached.

  Ernie looked up and then jerked his head to the longhair across the aisle. “He don’t belong here,” Ernie said.

  Jack knew the apprentice. He was old Vinnie’s boy. Vinnie worked in salvage and had always been a good union man, and his son was one of the best kids Jack had ever seen in the apprentice program. He just liked to wear his hair long.

  “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” Ernie muttered.

  Crazy Jack believed him. As he had grown older and lost some of his strength and quickness, Jack had started carrying a gun. He knew what only old guys know—that they become more dangerous the older they get.

  Ernie was one of millions of lumpy, middle aged guys getting tired with the coming of age and arthritis, weaknesses creeping into their boring, working men’s lives. Ernie was a dangerous man because he had nothing to lose. At least nothing compared to what he had just lost, his son, in a war that even lumpy, tired old patriots increasingly saw as a blunder. Going to send him to prison? He didn’t care. Hell, Ernie was right. Nobody should be able to get out of serving. Kids with the brains to go to college or to test into a GM apprenticeship shouldn’t get deferred from the draft. But to have all the bullshit with the war in Vietnam boil down to the length of an apprentice’s hair?

  “It’s them lying bastards in Washington that make the laws, Ernie.”

  “That don’t make it right.”

 

  Chapter 6

  Big Bill