What Jack Taught Me

© 1999 Charles Hackenberry

"Hey, Hack!" my track team buddy Larry yelled to me from the window of his old Ford. "You find a summer job yet?"

We'd just graduated from a high school in one of the sleepy little valley towns of Appalachian Pennsylvania, class of '57. And we'd both been accepted at Penn State. But I'd be starting in the fall only if I had enough money for tuition-which in those days was a lot more reasonable than it is now. Still, I didn't have it. Mom and Dad said they'd cover my living expenses, but they couldn't afford tuition too. I needed to come up with five hundred dollars.

"Nope," I confessed to Larry. "And I've looked everywhere. Dad couldn't get me in at the rayon plant because I'm not a college guy yet."

Larry smiled. "Well, you're in luck, then, man. My cousin Bill from Mifflintown called his dad last night. Up in Painted Post, New York. They need dozens of guys on the gas pipeline they're laying up there. Bill's bringing one of his friends, you wanna go along?"

It was like a gift from heaven. In those days I would have said that fate had opened a doorway for me and all I had to do was pack my suitcase and walk through. I talked to my parents and they said it was all right. Mom sniffled a little, it would be my first time away from home, an only child. Dad got kind of serious. He warned me that pipeline work was dangerous sometimes. He'd worked construction for a while when he was my age.

Sure, right. I'd be careful. What's a little danger to an eighteen year old? At that age when you think you're going to live forever, when you believe that nothing bad could ever happen to you?

We left late that next Sunday night, after I'd said goodbye to the girl I'd been dating. Larry's cousin Bill drove. To my surprise, Larry's friend Jack-who also sat up front--was black. There'd been only one black student in my high school, Fenton Short, and I'd never been in any classes with him.   We talked about what it would be like most of the way up there, but Jack didn't say much.

We got to the pipeline office at dawn and they hired us on the spot-at least they hired Bill and Larry and me. They took Jack's application and told him they'd call in a day or two. We were kind of surprised. Maybe we should go back home, since they didn't want to hire Jack. He told us to go ahead, take the jobs. He'd find something else to do.

It didn't seem right, but that's what we did. They hauled the three of us out to the job site, a railroad siding where we unloaded 50 foot sections of pipe covered with grease. We worked in the same clothes we'd worn in the car, doing back-breaking work. Twelve hours later we were exhausted and black, covered in graphite grease from our noses to our shoes.

Jack was waiting for us with Bill's car and he laughed when he saw us. We drove around looking for a place to stay that night, but no motel would take us, as dirty as we were.

We showed up at the pipeline office just as dirty as when we'd left, but they didn't care. The woman at the desk asked us where our friend Jack was. We learned later that Bill's dad had come in and raised hell.

Larry ran out and caught Jack just as he was pulling out of the parking lot. I thought Jack would tell them to go to hell and stick their damned job but he didn't. The upshot was that Jack and I were sent over to South Mountain while Bill and Larry stayed with the pipe-unloading job.

Jack cut brush but they said I was going to be a swamper on a dozer. I told the foreman that I'd never worked with heavy equipment, but he said I could pick it up as I went along.

A swamper greases the Cat, fuels it up, adjusts the angle of the blade when needed, sets or moves stakes for the driver, and a hundred other things I was completely ignorant of. It didn't take the Cat driver long to figure out that I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

"He's what they sent me!" the foreman yelled over his shoulder when the driver complained. "Teach him!"

Everyone yelled around the Cats because nobody could hear you if you didn't--above the roaring engines. Once in a while the driver would tell me what he wanted me to do but I could never hear him. I think half the words I said that summer were "Huh?" or "What?!" That first day he just sat up on his seat, the motor bellowing, and stared at me.

At the end of the day the foreman told us about a lady who lived nearby who would rent Jack and me a room. Over the next few weeks I got to know Jack. His job was a lot harder than mine, but he never complained about it. He was always playing jokes on me, nothing that made me look like an idiot, though. I could do that well enough on the job. Since you could buy beer at eighteen in New York then, we started going to the bars at night.

Jack could charm the ladies, and he often fixed us both up. He didn't think twice about lining me up with a black girl, but I noticed he never drank or danced with a white girl. Maybe he just didn't want to get in fights over it.

After a week the Cat driver stopped trying to tell me what to do and just got off and did it himself. That meant I was standing around most of the day. Another guy swamping did show me how to gas them up, grease them, and check the radiator. But that's all I really learned.

Two weeks before I was going to quit to start college, the foreman came up to me and handed me a slip of paper. "You were about ready to hang it up anyway, weren't you?"

Jack took the news harder than I did. They hadn't taught me right, he maintained. I told him it was okay, don't worry about it. I had seven hundred dollars in my pocket so I didn't mind having a couple weeks off before classes started. But I did appreciate that Jack was on my side.

The next morning before he went to work, we shook hands, said goodbye, and a Greyhound took me home. I never saw Jack again.

Right before college started Larry telephoned. "You'll never guess what happened to the guy who took your job." The next Monday morning, the new swamper had been killed. He'd opened the radiator cap to check the fluid level after the engine had been running and the cap had hit him right between the eyes. Killed instantly, his head smashed in.

"You are one lucky son-of-a-bitch," Larry told me.

I thought I was lucky too and still think so. But today I wouldn't call it fate that saved me for something else on down the road.

I've never believed in the ancient Greek's idea of fate-that everything that happens to you is mapped out somewhere, predetermined. That, like Oedipus, if you're going to kill your father and marry your mother, there's really nothing you can do about it.

To me, a different way of looking at fate makes more sense. That what you do, your decisions, and thousands of things you can't control determine what happens to you later. Of course you never know what anything will mean a year from now or ten or thirty. For example, if I'd never learned to like Jack, I never would have made friends with a lot of black students at the second university I went to-after I'd flunked out of Penn State and worked at the rayon factory for two years-where all the rest of my family worked then. And because I'd gotten to know a number of black students there, because I was open to the experience by knowing Jack, I developed an interest in African American literature when I was working on my Ph.D. That resulted in my editing and MANDY OXENDINE, the first novel written by Charles Chesnutt, an African American who wrote in the late 1800s. That book had been rejected by white publishers-for the same reason Jack had been turned down by the pipeliners at first. In a way, Chesnutt's first novel is available in libraries today because I was lucky enough to get to know a bright, funny young black guy named Jack on a construction job a long time ago. That's fate.

Email Charles Hackenberry

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Charles Hackenberry teaches literature and writing at the Altoona College of Penn State where he is Associate Professor of English. In additon to MANDY OXENDINE, he has published two novels of his own.  I RODE WITH JESSE JAMES appeared in 1996, and his first book, FRIENDS, won a Spur Award for the best Western novel of 1993.

The sale of this piece by Charles Hackenberry resulted from his response to the following ad in the Amazing Authors Newsletter #6 (so it pays to read the ads):

WANTED: A few more stories for "fate" anthology; how did being in the right place at the right time or not being in the wrong place at the wrong time change (or save) your life? Stories must be VERY COMPELLING with "fate" theme very obvious. Guidelines: irau@mcs.com

AWARDS

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