2

         "Tractor Supply?!?"

          It was hard to believe:  Adam Micheal Etzweiler, aka Buddah Bob, aka BeeBee, was abandoning me. For retail. Eighteen years.  For retail!

          I was sitting on Frances McAllister's grave, mouth agape, 1864-1909, Beloved Mother and Wife.  I had my footlong BMT with extra olives, as the cemetery was private and slightly isolated about twenty yards behind the only Subway in the county.  See, people think that death makes cemeteries a bad place.  It's still just a place--death occurs everywhere and on one knows that better than me and BeeBee--well, to a degree. Here no one bothers you and you and your partner can sit outside and talk about business without worrying about anyone listening in.  And apparently, business included a switch to a theoretically noble cause to horse wormer, barn-themed decor, and John Deere apparel for all occasions including--I suspect--the prom.

          I looked at him with disbelief.  He stood there--the gall he had to stand there--with a Subway bag in one hand, his sandwich untouched, upright squalor in his overalls, faded, caked on muddy boots, a worn white t-shirt and a cap he'd been wearing since high school, the brim so folded together that it almost touched when it became humid (the South only has two seasons:  humid and less humid).  I had just asked him why he wasn't eating.  He's called Budda Bob for a reason:  when he was a baby, he was so fat in the yellowed Olan Mills he looked like a Budda.  His fat cheeks pushed up on his eyes so hard that they were slanted, as if he had toddled out of the belly of China going towards a higher plane that had first-class french fries.  At 44, he's arrived.
          "Beeb.  Beeb.  You can't be serious."  I swipe my lower lip with the back of my left thumb.  Crumbs. Thick beard.  In my line of work, doesn't matter what I look like, so I grow it out as I wish.  Beeb had one and shaved it years ago.  The work, he claims, is just too hot for one.
          "It's... Come on, Earl, you know.  It's thankless.  It's..."
          "And retail isn't?"  My ire rose.  You and I--for eighteen years--"
          "And three weeks." He was unwrapping his sandwich, sitting down on the grave directly across from me.
          "Irrelevant.  Have been dealing with farmers all that time. You really want to be selling them bits and pieces and dammit, goin' down to their level, getting comments about how you left a bigger hole years ago than you promised, and those boulders really smelled when you removed them, for weeks?  You're going to see these people all the time. I know--I see them in there when we go to pick up stuff."
           "They offered me a position."
           "And?  It's going to beat the pay here?"
           "It ain't about the pay and you know it."  His dark brown eyes darted up to my face and back down to his sandwich.  "Pickles.  They put on damn pickles."
           "Pay, right?  Cause you got everything paid off."
           "So do you.  You could have a good house with a little pond and anything else you want if you so choose."
            "I have student loans to pay off, Beeb, you know that."
            "Yeah, how's that master's workin' out for you here?" Bite of sandwich.  Beeb was always such a plain person--it's ham and cheese, again, same thing year after year day after day and not even toasted.  But I'm being overly critical at this point:  I'm angry.
            "My master's is just fine."
            "And I went to high school and then through this deal and here I am, same as you.  And yeah--the pay is good--I got everything paid off--boat, pond, you name it.  Make as much as my brother who works off shore and is miserable.  But I can't keep it up forever, and there ain't no reason to."
             "But it's retail."
             He just shrugged.  "It's safe.  I'm sorry C. J., but I gotta go on, you know.  I like bein' round people, too."
             "You sure as hell don't like farmers, and that's what you're going to have there!"
             And then it hit me.
             "It's that cashier."
             That's when Beeb looked embarrassed.
             "That's it!  You want that cashier!"
             "Look, C.J.  I went to high school with her.  I had a thing for her--a big thing.  And she married some trailer park manager's son and got pregnant--I don't know which one came first--and I saw her in there when they opened the store and I want to get to know her better.  This is lonely work, C.J., or hadn't you noticed?"
             That stung a bit.  Our work took us across the entire South, and once even up into Southern Maryland and Southern Kansas--one little hold-out pocket.  And here was the truth:  I'd lost a wife to it.  Or maybe I did.  She left me a long time ago, taking our son.  I got to see him often as I was home, in my little trailer (well, once I had a house, but that's a long story) and I don't know... You know how divorce is--sometimes you don't know what went wrong but it did and maybe--maybe it wasn't the job, but I couldn't help but blame it in some way.  I didn't miss her, but I didn't miss much of anything lately.  My son was a teenager in his first year of college and forming a rock band that actually may do something.  He's a bit of drummer.  Beeb's favorite joke is, "What did the drummer get on the IQ test?  Drool."
             At least, I think, my boy is smart enough to stay out of this business.  I can't tell him for a while anyway, don't want to--breaking with family tradition going back almost two centuries.  But here I am, with the one goddamned person who knows what I and how fucking hard it is and how ungrateful everyone on this humid mosquito-infested former nation doesn't appreciate us.  And he's leaving me for a crush on a cashier who can tell you where the horse wormer is without looking up from the weekly flyer. It's so fucking unfair that I can hardly stand it.
              Beeb's face is all Droopy dog.  He's right, he's getting older, everything's paid, it's the dirtiest work in the world (and hell if we can tell Mike Rowe--his show got canceled but hell, even before, Beeb and I would enjoy the hell out of it and wonder what he would do with the glory of our removing "calcium deposits" and "dicantouneious fossilized carbonate boulders" for "research" at Mississippi State, Bama, or LSU, or whatever college we happen to see declared in the yard--sometimes by the color of the bird houses. Whatever will appeal to the landowner. Nothing. We don't have work that a film crew can follow.
              Beeb.  I forgive him, even by the time the mud from my boots flakes off on my washateria cleaned sheets.  $3.25 is what it cost me to clean these.

             Damn.  Damn.  Damn. Damn.  Buddah has abandoned me.  How very fucking zen.

1

              You just think you're tired.  Yeah, you've been at work all day, laboring away, dealing with the drama, and the boss, and the cubicle and you are a cliche.  Unless you work changing tires at a dock, or you are a waitress, or you work with teenagers (maybe) you don't know real work.  You just don't.  If you don't come home smelling like sulfer, bromide and a couple of other not-a-Yankee-Candle fragrance smells, you just don't get it.  Save humanity day in and day out and not get anything for it than an odd look and a 401k you can't tell anyone about then yeah.  Be tired.  Otherwise, lay in bed with your Kindle Fire everything dead out around you like three week old embers and then tell me tired.

               I'm tired.  I AM TIRED.  I am laying here just trying to get the feeling back in my legs so I can get up and go into the living room slash kitchen slash laundry room and clean what I know to be a roach fest--dishes.  Old mac-n-cheese blue box variety stuck to a paper plate in the sink, over cans of chili, etc., that during this particularly hectic season I ain't been able to address.

             The bed I never dirtied.  The bed I always kept clean.  The bed was always my refuge. Yet here I lay, smelling to high heaven, letting the dried mud on my boots flake off where I lay.

              If you think this is laziness, have at it.  If you lose respect for me as a housekeeper or a human being or nominate me for an episode of Hoarders, have at it.  Believe you me, if I gave a shit what you thought I wouldn't be laying in this bed. I care more about the mud than I do of what you think. Because believe you me, you wouldn't know what to think of me.
             Don't worry.  I'll explain it all.