Handiwork (part 1)
A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.
When Jim was stressed he drove very aggressively. The night we went to visit his father, Elmer, he seethed: at slow drivers, drivers who turned without signaling, and even one who stopped short for a traffic light that turned yellow.
It had been years since he’d last seen his father. Jim didn’t know exactly how many. He’d lived in foster homes since age 7. Since their last visit, he’d graduated from high school, served 3 years in the Navy, and been out for two years, working as a machine operator in a factory that manufactured kitchen cabinets.
Jim was my friend, roommate, and sidekick. I’d just graduated from college and was teaching in a Catholic elementary school. Recently divorced, I didn’t have much to do the night he asked me to take a ride with him to visit his father. Not exactly a thrilling excursion, but better than sitting at home on the couch watching TV. Besides, Jim said he needed me. He had no idea what would happen if he went to see his father on his own.
Elmer had been a painter for the city of Atlanta. Since retirement, he’d worked nights as a security guard at a warehouse on the southeast side of the city. Jim wondered aloud if he worked because he needed the money or just to get out of the house. Either way it gave them somewhere to meet. If Jim had had to go to the house he would have encountered his mother. That wasn’t happening. She was the reason the state put him in foster care.
As we neared our destination, tension ratcheted up a couple of notches. The warehouse was set back from the road. We drove back and forth several times before finding it. Jim didn’t appreciate having to search out someplace he’d never been before on a dark road with no lighted sign.
At last we turned into a parking lot fronting a long, low building, gray against the night sky. It looked like we’d found the right place A slight balding man in a faded green uniform shirt stood under a floodlight near the front door. We got out of the car and approached cautiously.
“Jim!” They embraced awkwardly. Jim introduced me. Elmer asked, “How’d you get that scar on your forehead?”
Jim winced. He didn’t like people noticing the scar. That cut wasn’t nothing, he said. He’d been in a car wreck in high school, before he went in the Navy. It had healed a long time ago.
“You been out a pretty good while now, ain’t you?”
“Two years.”
“I kind of thought you’d come see me before now.”
Not a good start. Jim’s face darkened. He didn’t want to be here. His foster parents, born-again Christians, had urged him to get back in touch with his father. Jim didn’t want to, but when his father called at his job, he felt like he had no choice. If Elmer didn’t change his tune quickly, the visit wasn’t going to last long.
“Daddy, I been kind of busy. Ain’t nobody going to pay you for not working.”
“Carl said he seen you.”
“I gave Carl my phone number. I told Charlie that, didn’t I, Charlie?” He turned to me, grinning incredulously. “Anyone who wants to can call me.”
Elmer looked like he was about to say something, but to my great relief thought better of it. No telling what driving home would be like if Jim stormed out of here before the visit even got started.
“Come see my office, boys,” said Elmer, breaking the impasse.
Elmer led us inside. At the end of a long dimly-lit corridor, we entered a small office. On the floor a small dog leashed to the leg of the desk lay curled up on a cushion. Jim stopped and stared, then knelt down beside him and scratched his head, murmuring something I couldn’t hear.
“Careful, Jim. He’s kind of nervous.”
The dog sighed. The shadow of a frown crossed Jim’s brow. I knew what he was thinking. There was a pretty good reason for that dog being nervous. He lived with Jim’s mother.
Elmer set up a couple of folding chairs for us and pulled out his desk chair. Jim asked how he liked being a security guard. Elmer said he liked it fine because it was peaceful and dark and the dog slept. Except when he went on his rounds, all he really had to do was sit here in the office and not fall asleep in case someone called him or one of the bosses came in. Pretty hard to get into an argument, he added, if you’re the only one there.
Jim nodded absently, his mind far away—in childhood, maybe.
Elmer said he was surprised when Jim came back to Atlanta instead of staying on in the Navy. He guessed that was what he would have done if he’d been single. You’ve got a place to stay, you’ve got your meals, you’ve got all your doctors there if you need them. You have nothing to worry about like you do in the regular world.
“Daddy, people’re always saying the Navy’s so great. The ones that say it never been in the Navy, not as enlisted men.”
“That don’t mean it ain’t true.”
Jim shook his head, and he began explaining to his father what it was like being a cook’s assistant on a destroyer. I settled back in the folding chair, trying to find a way to get comfortable. When Jim got going like this he could go on for a long time. For a while Elmer just let him talk without interrupting, though a couple of times I could see that he wanted to. That was a good sign. Elmer was listening.
“I guess it’s about like working for the city,” he said when Jim wound down. “Seems like there ain’t no good jobs anywhere unless you got money behind you or you get in somewhere where there’s a union.”
“That's what I’m fixing to do, Daddy. That’s exactly what I’m looking for, somewhere where they got a union and you got some kind of protection.”
“You ought to talk to your Uncle Carl. Carl knows about where the jobs are.”
It sounded innocent. In Jim’s eyes it wasn’t. Silently I pleaded with him to just let it go. Without realizing it, I was beginning to root for this visit turning out well. Even though Elmer was Jim’s father, not mine, I had a sudden glimpse of how heartbreaking it would for both of them if it didn’t.
“Daddy, Carl ain’t going to help me.”
“Carl cares for you, Jim. Carl knows people.”
“If Carl cares for me how come he never tried to come see me? More’n ten years I lived in foster homes I never seen Carl. When I ran into him in the restaurant I didn’t even know who he was till he called my name.”
Elmer knit his brow and looked down at the keys in his hand. It was a painful moment, the kind that makes you wish you’d had something else important to do that night so you weren’t there to see it. At some level Elmer must have realized Jim wasn’t talking only about Carl.
“Maybe he did want to come see you, Jim,” said Elmer at last. “Maybe he figured you were doing all right with them people, and if he came there to visit it would only get you stirred up and make everything harder.”
Jim bowed his head and looked at the dog. I could feel him turning over in his mind what Elmer had said. It made sense to me, but I wasn’t the foster child. This was going to be a long night. Though we’d been here only a half hour, it felt like it already had been.
Somewhere in the distance a machine started to hum—a kind of deus ex machina, resetting all of our thoughts. Elmer stood up and asked if we wanted to walk with him on his rounds. We walked slowly down one low-lit passageway after another, pausing while Elmer checked doors, and waiting while he turned the key in his watchclock.
On the way back we stopped in a small room with vending machines and a couple of formica tables. Elmer took out a handful of change and insisted we get ourselves something out of the machines. Jim said we had our own money, but Elmer insisted. It seemed to be important to him to give us something and for us to accept it. We sat down with our coffee and chips. It was good to have something to do with my hands. It was good to feel the jolt of caffeine.
Elmer asked where I was from and why I came to Atlanta. It was a sensitive question, and I took care how I answered. I was a radical activist in those days, hoping and planning and working for a mass uprising to tear down society. That was the theory, anyway. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I was beginning to suspect it might not turn out as Marx prophesied.
I didn’t want to drag Elmer into all that, so I gave brief answers and steered the conversation toward where Jim and I lived. Our roommate’s tempestuous love life. Crazy stories we overheard from other patrons at Waffle House, where we went for coffee most nights. A fist fight at Tenneco when Jim stepped in and bearhugged a boy who was beating an old man and held him till the police came.
Elmer listened and chuckled over these stories, but he didn’t say anything back till I we got to the story about the old man at Tenneco.
“Jimmy’s a good boy,” he said after we’d had a moment to let that sink in. “He worked hard and graduated high school and went straight into the Navy. That’s one thing I can say about Jim. Even if you got to wait awhile sometimes, you can be pretty sure he’s going to do the right thing.”
Jim looked down at the cup in his hands. Elmer and I waited. Would he accept the compliment? Would he pick up on the dig about having to “wait awhile sometimes”? Could the fact that Elmer said it to me rather than directly to Jim have taken some of the sting out of it?
“After they took Jimmy away I didn’t know what to do,” said Elmer. “Mother didn’t have no one else. Who would take care of her if I didn’t? Charlie, I’m glad Jimmy has you for a friend.”
“Charlie’s more than a friend,” Jim retorted. “He’s a brother.”
Elmer blinked and swallowed. He took his time before answering. I’m sure it was hard hearing that. Jim’s actual brothers were institutionalized. Foster homes notwithstanding, Jim was the least damaged of all of the children.
“I’m sorry, Jim. I know you needed one.”
He was looking at me. Ever so slightly, Jim nodded. I could only imagine what it must have cost Elmer to say that, but Jim needed to hear it. So did I. Ever so slowly, I was starting to understand the role I was cast in, and why Elmer and Jim both needed me there.
Having survived that exchange without major acrimony, Elmer seemed to relax just a little. Since the rounds were done and we’d had our break, he needed to get back to the office. Jim said it was late and we’d better be going. I thought Elmer might try to get us to stay longer, but he seemed to be ready for us to go. He was probably relieved to have gotten through the visit without a major confrontation. I know I was. He walked with us to the front of the building, making Jim promise to come again and bring me along.
Alone again in the darkness, we drove in silence until Jim found the main road.
“I don’t know what all got into him, thinking I got time to go back there and see him again,” he said at last. I didn’t believe that, but I didn’t say anything. His tone told a different story. The antagonism seemed to have drained out of him.
“Charlie, it’s pitiful. Look at him, what kind of a life has he got? She ain’t ever going to get no better. Is he going to take care of her till she dies?”
I agreed he probably would. It looked like Elmer was well and truly stuck for the rest of his life with an unstable woman, a woman he couldn’t trust alone with a dog, a woman who had ruined the lives of two of his children and forced a third out of the house at age 7. It was a terrible thought, a terrible life. And yet, if you looked from a different angle, it was also a story of incredible loyalty. As Elmer had said, who else was there to take care of her if he didn’t?
“Charlie, I been in 5 foster homes. Nobody wanted me till I came to the Harmons. But tell me now, whose life turned out better, his or mine?”
Food for thought. It was the first time I’d ever heard him compare his life favorably to anyone else’s. To be honest, this felt like the beginning of something rather than the end of something. The question was, what? Would Jim go back and see his father again, contrary to what he’d just said? If he did, would I go with him? Or would something else happen in my life? Would the revolutionary mass movement finally catch fire? Would I find something else better to do with my evenings than watch this slow dance of reconciliation between a son and a father he’d barely known?
It was all too much for me to think about any longer. The tension of the night had exhausted me, and now that it was gone I felt dazed and disoriented. We turned onto the boulevard that led back toward the apartments. I leaned back in the seat and enjoyed not having to say anything. I probably would have slept if I trusted Jim’s driving.
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