Smoke Break

by David L. Ulin

I’m just starting to lay the PVC pipe into the ditch when Bugler comes around the side of the outhouse buttoning up his pants, that big belly popping out over his belt, a whiskery half sneer cut across his open wound of a face. The sun is hot, high in the sky and glaring, but across the plains I can see rain clouds gathering, picking up speed.

“You almost done yet?” Bugler whines, fitting a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. “Christ, you Northern boys are so damn slow. When I was your age, I’da had this thing dug and fitted and covered up again in all the time it’s taken you . . .”

I don’t look up, just keep fitting lengths of tubing together and laying them into the ground. Bugler is the boss, but he’s never got anything to say, just the same shit spilling out of his mouth like the spare tire spilling over the top of his pants. He’s a man of excess, is Bugler, and he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t even expect me to listen, just prattles to get on my nerves, and mostly I ignore him. Although every now and then I nod or make some small response, to keep him off his guard.

“You don’t seem to have the knack for laying pipe,” he’s saying now. “’Course, it’s a man’s job. Only reason I give it to you is I thought you was a man.”

He takes a step toward me and sticks his full-moon face into mine, leer cracked wide. “You know what I mean by laying pipe, don’t you?” he asks now, breath hot, an assault, smelling of stale coffee and Winston cigarettes, lips stretched nasty and thin.

“Yes,” I say.

“Didn’t know if they still did that stuff up north. Thought they might have some kind of machine for it by now . . .”

It’d be nice if they had some kind of machine for this, I think, screwing another piece of plastic pipe together and laying it into the ground. I’ve been out here all day, and my back is coated with sweat that runs in rivulets down my pants and plasters them to the skin of my legs. There used to be a work crew to do this stuff, me and four other people, but, one by one, Bugler has transferred the others during the last few weeks, until now there is only me. And, of course, him, standing around and picking at me while I do whatever dirty work he can think up. Yesterday, I dug out the foundation for a concrete platform—twelve feet square and two feet deep—and today . . .

Well, today, I’m hoping, it’s going to rain before I get done putting this pipe together, before I have to cover up this ditch. Even in the couple of minutes that Bugler’s been standing here, the horizon has moved several miles closer, and I can see the first long lashes of water lacing the ground in the distance. I slow up on the pipe just a fraction, working the weather like a tired baseball pitcher who’s lost his best stuff, trying to weasel a delay.

The rain is the only thing I like about Texas, the way it looks as it moves across the brown, scrubbed plains. Out here, you really get a sense of the force of nature, the way the sky can change so suddenly, the way a storm will come on out of nowhere and sweep past you in a matter of minutes, with a strength that can sometimes level houses. It’s because there’s nothing to stop it, no points of resistance. The plains are so wide, so empty, and anything that gets thrown up in their way is so damn small . . .

No wonder Bugler’s who he is. Me, I’m from Manhattan, where nature has ceased to be a factor anymore.

Bugler keeps chattering, toothpick bouncing in his mouth like a taxi dancer, face a shifting storm of moods. The only constant is the beady black pinpricks of his piggish eyes, like buttons encased in dough then baked beneath the heat of the Texas sun. He’s about forty, his skin lined like old leather, and although I’ve never touched him, my guess is that it feels that way too.

“You know what?” he says. “Let me give you some advice. You know what I was doing last night?”

This time, I don’t nod, just thread some more of the pipe through my hands and slide it along the length of the ditch. A wind picks up and blows against my back, drying it in spots. The air is heavy now, smells like water, but the sun is still high and undeterred.

Bugler stops for a second, as if he is waiting for a response. He spits the toothpick at my feet, fishes a Winston from the soft pack in his breast pocket, and lights it. I watch him, calculating, before pulling out a Marlboro.

Smoke break. Most days, this is just about the only rest I get. When I first started, we would smoke together, all of us on the crew. Once an hour, once every forty-five minutes, whenever we could work it in. It’s not that we were friends, or had anything to say to one another. But the work is mindless and relentless, almost as mindless and relentless as Bugler’s voice. And smoking, it breaks the tedium, it divvies up the day. Those times, they are as close as I have felt here to fitting in.

For a moment, we stand in silence, pulling on our cigarettes. I feel the aching in my muscles, the tension in my lower back. Then it’s like Bugler gets tired of waiting. He’s a man who needs to hear the sound of his own voice.

“I was with a woman,” he says, and takes another drag. I can see him leer, the hot stench of his breath filling the air like he’s an animal stalking prey. Every week or so, he tells me about some new sexual conquest, dressing it up like a story from Penthouse when you can tell just from looking at him that it was probably a frantic little fuck at best, him huffing and puffing like a rabbit, scared to lose his hard-on before it came time to jam.

“She was fine,” he goes on. “Couldn’t have been much more than nineteen. One of them little girls, real pretty—looked like she’d hardly know how to do it. But she did.” His cowboy-style snap-button shirt fits him kind of tight, and it’s come untucked at the bottom so that a patch of hairy belly peeks out like a kid playing hide-and-seek. “She was married too,” he says, grinning though the smoke.

A lot of people marry young in Texas. Not like in New York. Here, everyone I meet seems to be nineteen and matched for life, with a kid and a late-model car, and a twenty-eight-year mortgage on a brand-new tract house with a view of the setting sun. Even Bugler, ugly as he is, has a wife somewhere, although no one I know has ever seen her, and he isn’t exactly what you’d call young.

Bugler exhales a cloud and scratches the ground with the toe of his boot. As he does, his smile starts to fade. I watch him while I finish my cigarette, squash it underneath the sole of my boot. In the ditch, the PVC pipe is almost all in place, and pretty soon I’ll have to get to work connecting it, unless the rain arrives before then. I check the horizon, slow my work to a crawl. Bugler’ll never notice anyway.

Now the wind picks up again, a pushing wind that whistles all around us. It’s not a friendly sound. Underneath it, Bugler coughs, starts to talk again. His voice is soft, and although I don’t want to, there’s something in his tone—an edge, an insistence—that makes me strain to hear him through the rushing air.

“I got a lot more than I bargained for with this one,” he says. “You want to know what happened?”

No.

“I got shot at last night.” He takes a last drag on his Winston and flicks the butt. For a moment, we just stand there, while the wind takes hold of the cigarette and rips it apart, casting shards of glowing ember everywhere. Then he continues.

“We were at her place. It was just as cozy as you please. But when we get down to it, right in the middle, I hear this screeching sound, like a door on rusty hinges. I stop for a second, ask her where’s her husband. She tells me not to worry, he’s working the night shift, won’t be home for hours, and I say unh-hunh, and then the bedroom door slams open and what do I see but the barrel of a gun . . .”

Bugler’s got me interested now, I hate to admit it, but I’m looking at him pretty hard, waiting for the next part of the story. The rain keeps advancing, and now I’m hoping it’ll hold off for a while so he can get to the end. He’s not even noticing me, those hard eyes gone all dreamy now, as if he’s trying to see something that’s not really there, something that if he could just concentrate hard enough he might be able to conjure, but which he’ll never be able to reach out and touch.

“The gun goes off,” he goes on, “and the whole side wall of the room explodes. And I’m moving—I ain’t never moved that fast, not even when I was a boy. I’m reaching down to the floor for my pants, gathering up my boots, my shirt, whatever I can get ahold of, ’cause there’s no time to be choosy, and meantime, this guy’s standing in the door yelling what the hell is going on here, and the girl is in the bed, hiding under the covers, and screaming. The funniest part, too, is I’m still thinking about that girl . . .

“But her husband is blocking the door. He raises the gun again, and I know this is it. Then I see that his first shot has really taken out that wall—I mean, you can see moonlight through the holes, all it is is Sheetrock and plywood, one of these home-construction jobs—so I put my shoulder down and plow right into it, and the gun goes off . . .

“I hear that shell whistle by my ear, except I’m already outside. Then another shot when I’m getting in my truck. As I drive away, I can see him in the rear-view, waving that gun like he knew how to use it. But look”—and his eyes return to focus, his lips twisting back into their cynical sneer—“not a mark on me.” He turns a slow, ponderous pirouette, arms extended and belly jiggling beneath the taut fabric of his shirt. “What a hero, huh? Shoots his own house to kingdom come, and I get away without a scratch.”

Bugler laughs: a short, yapping bark like that of a lapdog. He reaches for another Winston, and I wonder how that hulk of a body managed to evade the shots.

“Gotcha interested that time, huh?” he says. “Betcha that kind of shit don’t happen much up in New York.”

“Not to me,” I say.

“Yeah, well,” he drawls, “you ain’t even heard the kicker yet.”

The dust starts to swirl now, all around the construction site, and in the distance I can see the first work crew heading in toward the makeshift lean-to structure of the tool shop. It’s a huge space, supported by an array of tree trunk braces. On the side nearest the impending storm, a carpenter is unfurling a canvas tarp and securing the corners, tying everything down.

And on Bugler’s face, the leer is back, all traces of his former reticence brushed clear by the wind. It’s as if, now that he’s told someone, the bullets are really gone, no more a threat to him than a dream. Now it can be just a story to tell, now he can laugh . . .

Which is exactly what he does, laughs again and exhales a burst of smoke that gets caught in the tangle of the wind. It moves like a ghost, not quite shapeless but not quite formed either, swept back over Bugler’s shoulder toward the lean-to in a pattern of movements like an underwater dance. I’m starting to feel submerged too, not from the water in the air but because I can’t escape, because he’s got me now, I gave him an opening, and he knows I’m his, and he can draw his moment out.

At the same time, work has stopped, suspended not by weather but by this strange and loaded dance that we are doing, as if there were anything between us, as if we weren’t adversaries. I light another Marlboro, not asking, just trying to take hold of my own small piece of the moment, the way the wind is taking hold of the smoke.

“See,” Bugler tells me, “it was early, and I didn’t have nowhere to go. So I drive around for a while, and then I go home. But when I get there, the house is dark. There’s no one around. I come inside—nothing. No noise, nothing. And now I’m starting to get a little angry, you know what I mean?”

Bugler peers in close again, and I get another whiff of his deadly breath. I want to pull away, but he’s speaking so softly that his words flee across the angry air.

“I don’t say anything. I don’t make a sound. Then I see a sliver of light coming out under the bedroom door.”

The rain is close enough now that I can hear it, like the patter of hooves, of the cavalry.

“And low voices,” Bugler adds. “Coming from inside.”

A little smile starts to twitch around the edges of my lips. Bugler waits, and the moment expands between us like the coming storm.

“So I creep up to the door. There’s a man’s voice, and I can hear my wife laughing, and . . .”

Now I start to laugh. It’s not a good thing to do, I know that: Bugler’s opening up here, and this is serious business. But with the storm brewing and all, there’s little else to do. The situation is so absurd. Bugler looks at me funny, his cheeks balled like dough and his eyes almost obscured behind the massive roiling of his cheeks. And as he does, I get a flash, as if lightning had lit up the sky.

“The husband, right?” I ask, and strike a casual pose over my shovel, cigarette in my mouth like I belong here, like we’re just two good old boys shooting the shit.

What that question does is it takes the space between us and bursts it, just as the first stripes of rain begin to cut the earth at our feet. I can almost hear the bang, can see it in the way Bugler’s face blows from confusion to rage in the time it takes for the words to come out of my mouth.

“What?” he asks. “What’d you just say?”

I don’t utter a word.

“You think you’re being smart? Well, let me tell you something, boy, you’re one dumb piece of shit.”

Bugler’s right hand shoots out, the hand with the Winston in it. It’s a thick, meaty hand, scarred and stubby, and it grabs me by the collar of my T-shirt and pulls me in until my face is no more than two inches from his. My cigarette falls to the dirt between us as the tip of his darts dangerously close to my left eye. Water sweeps across the work site, falling in thin, sharp drops. Already, the lean-to is getting hard to see.

“You don’t never want to talk back to a man about his wife,” Bugler growls. “You take my meaning?”

I hold my ground. The deluge blots out both our cigarettes; his disintegrates in his hand. Water streams down our faces. In the distance, a roll of thunder explodes like timpani.

“Hey,” someone yells from somewhere, “y’all better get under cover!”

All around the site, people are running for shelter. Bugler looks once at the horizon, then back at me.

“I don’t know what it is with you, boy,” he hisses, releasing me. “You came down here, not the other way around.” He spits into the wet ground, steps back.

The thunder sounds again, closer, and the air fills with the smell of ozone. And Bugler turns away.

“I’ll tell you something, though,” he says, looking back over his shoulder. The rain is falling so hard that he has to yell to be heard. “You’re just trying to rile me up, but you’re too damn dumb to do it right. ’Cause you know what? That wasn’t no man in the room with my wife.” He snorts, cracks a thin, venal little smile. “It was the TV. And let me tell you, she was glad to see me.”

It takes a moment for his meaning to come clear through the tumult. Then I understand. Bugler must see it on my face, because he spits that harsh yap of a laugh and curls his lip even more, belly jiggling like he’s some out-of-work Santa Claus waiting for the rain to turn to snow.

He waits a second, to see if I have anything to say. When I don’t, he chuckles to himself, then steps away from me and through the storm. I stand there and let the rain fall, washing off the ditch-digger’s sweat. It’s cold, but not too bad, and it’s such a relief to be alone. In the ditch, the PVC pipe lies half-submerged in rising water, and I know I’m going to have to do the whole thing again tomorrow, but for now, it’s okay. I just want to stand here, feel the weather blow by.

I don’t move until the storm has passed.