Ronnie MacKenzie

Tuesday colder than a witch's tit. "I told that son of a bitch Lester to kiss my ass," Ronnie MacKenzie told Ferreira and the other two as he walked into the break room, tossing his muddy gloves in the middle of the table. Joey leapt to his feet, brushing past two other groundsmen and darting across the room with surprising quickness for his bulk.

"Jesus Christ, watch out for my donuts, man," Joey grabbed the cellophane box off the table and retreated to his corner, glaring. "That's my lunch." He merged back down into the tattered beige couch and the whole pile sighed and burped, picking crumbs off the top of its belly. The others went back to pouring coffee and unwrapping sandwiches, trying not to bump into each other. Half hour for lunch, then back out in the snow. Joey had not even taken off his boots and snow pants, just stretched out with the big white headphones clamped on.

"It's fucking age discrimination," Ronnie Mack said, "I told Lester he'd be in front of the labor board and the EEOC and the fucking Herald. He looked like he shit himself."

"Shit his bag you mean," chortled Ferreira. "That motherfucker hasn't taken a honest shit in years now, I wish he'd just kick it and get it over."

Ronnie Mack slumped over the table. He had the sandwich Leenie made him but he needed to sit a while, working his neck and fingers to get the numbness out, while the younger guys chomped on their food like dogs, staring at porn on magazines or the desktop. You guys'll see how it feels someday, he thought, to drag your sorry ass out of bed to do this shit every day. Or else you won't. He squinted at the massage advertisement on the back of Norm's Hustler, trying to figure out if that was a woman or a man in a fucking leotard, and then his knees and shoulders started complaining and he felt like he had to piss, but he knew he really didn't because nothing goddamn works anymore.

"It's a raw deal, though," Ferreira said. "You gave them what? Twenty some years? Snow days, heat waves, commencement, you name it. We make this place run and then they toss us in the trash."

"Twenty six actually," Ronnie Mack said. "Lester said it wasn't his call, it came from upstairs." The others snorted.

"It always does," Ferreira said. "Shit rolling downhill."

"Not for nothing," Eddie Junior said, "My dad said that Lester was the biggest fuck off on grounds crew until he made supervisor. Didn't work three hours in a day."

"That guy had more beds around campus than a MASH unit," Ronnie Mack said. Norm's crew-cut head, small and square atop a neck like a four-by-four from weightlifting and steroids, swiveled from Ronnie Mack and back to Eddie Junior. The whole conversation would be back in Lester's office by the end of the day, they knew, and the supervisor would bring it up again when they went in to ask for vacation. Eddie Junior and Ronnie Mack glanced at each other: fuck 'em.

"Can't you guys relax and eat for once!" shouted Joey suddenly, lifting his head slightly like he was waking from a dream, then plopping down, blunt features screwed up in a scowl.

"Poor bastard," muttered Ferreira. The men eyed the couch, which Joey had dragged in from an alley one overtime night, while the thumping bass from his headphones reverberated softly. There was talk about throwing the thing into the river so he couldn't find it and drag it back in, because its air of mold and piss mixed in the close room with the vapors of coffee, sweat, cigarettes, mud, mulch, oil, farts and antifreeze, not in a good way; one day soon they would do it.

He groaned, lurching to his feet. Joey sitting there like mickey the dunce. Ronnie Mack slapped Joey's boot sole and the kid's eyes snapped open again, watery and feral.

"Gotta piss like a racehorse," he said, "meet us at the bobcat in fifteen minutes." Ronnie Mack straightened his hunched shoulders, wrapped in two layers of carhart. Although the the new hires were required to wear university overcoats, he didn't care to; he was grandfathered. For the most part they're good kids, Ronnie thought, just don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. Joey was the weakest link, likely to dump a tub of fertilizer, or to grab his nearest co-worker for a rambling, self-pitying story that took a half hour if you let it, but the others weren't far off. Their worry's not me, he thought, it's that one of them's going to get stuck driving with Joey. Mostly good kids; Norm though, Ronnie Mack wouldn't piss on if the guy was on fire.

In the break room, Norm lowered his magazine and turned to Ferreira. "Did he really tell the old man to fuck himself?"

"The hell do I know, I wasn't there," Ferreira snapped. He fished a clot of tobacco out of its bag and tucked it under his drooping gray moustache, his dark eyes a blank.

Norm jerked his head toward the snoozing Joey. "Who gets him?" Ferreira shrugged. The crew filed out quietly, careful not to wake the kid; he would sleep until he was pushed outside by Lester, who would hunt him out and yell until the old man's face glowed red.

Everyone knew about the voluntary buy out offers going around to the older guys. Supervisors muttered that taking the buyout was strongly encouraged; that next would come the involuntary buy-outs for less money, like they did us in 89. The witch of the west is swinging the axe, not my fault it's your turn for an ass fucking. The university's endowment dropped fifteen percent mil thanks to Bernie Madoff etcetera, they said. Not that he would mind leaving so much, hasn't been too bad though actually. The people than the job. Working the system.

The grounds crew had only twenty-two members left, to clear snow and landscape and maintain the athletic fields and lawns on the sprawling campus, which used to be done by fifty or so way back when, by Ronnie Mack and Lester and a few other geezers who worked when the monks ran the place. A lot of the work was done nowadays by crews of Mexicans and Laotians who hopped off a truck in shirt sleeves and gym shoes to shovel mulch or pressure wash bird shit off the steps; now the college was buying out even more of the crew. Fucking immigrants gonna wreck this country, said Ferreira, who came from the Azores in 1971. Back then we got in line, he carped to Andres, a two-year man from someplace else they don't speak English, and the two new hires, Tibetans or Sherpas or wherever the hell they came from, who never talked to anybody and worked double time, didn't even fucking wear gloves. So you want I kiss your ass? asked Andres.

Like I said, Ferreira told him, get in line.

Eddie Junior was waiting for Ronnie Mack at the clock, shifting on his feet. Looks like the old man, who took the buyout before last, only bald and four inches taller; he's too fucking smart for that place, Ed Senior had said to Ronnie Mack up at the Eagles, but just try and tell a kid anything. You and me, growing up around here we thought we died and went to heaven when we got in at Saint Francis. Set for life.

"You gonna ask me to dance?" Ronnie Mack said.

"Sorry to hear you're on the list," said Eddie Junior. "Are you taking the money?"

"I don't know, to be honest. My ass is in a crack but what are you gonna do?"

"Well," the kid glanced around, lowering his voice. Ed was right, he kind of doesn't talk right for the place, precise and quiet, but the kid works hard anyway. Doesn't kiss anybody's ass. "Me and Ferreira were talking, and I was talking to my cousin with the union. My dad said you guys were against that before..."

"Long time ago."

"Well, maybe we could do something," Eddie Junior shrugged. "I don't want to go through the same thing in five years, nobody does."

"I don't think so, kid," Ronnie Mack said, "I'll work something out on my own, thanks."

That's something new anyway, he thought on the drive home. When I started here we didn't speak unless somebody asked a question. Which they didn't. Lester who was drunk half the time, even then, but knew how to brown-nose drunk or sober; Mike the mechanic, who must have showered once a month; and the big white-haired quiet guy whose brother was a state assemblyman, what was his name, he'd served fifteen years out west for gunning down two Italians in a truck hijacking. Like to see what would've happened if I talked to that guy about a fucking union.

"OK day?" Leenie called from the living room. His heart lifted a little to hear her out bed, talking instead of getting up to slam the door. Nobody could blame her for any of it; like to see somebody try. His daughter is on a reclining chair in front of the TV with a blue blanket pulled up to her chin, watching the doorway he pokes his head through.

"How's the cold hun?"

"Won't kill me, how's work?" She has this new, clipped way of speaking, like she picked it up on some cop show; for all he knows it's how all the ninth-graders in Saugus talk. "Everybody still busting balls?"

"Hey, language!"

Leenie giggles. "It's such a gender normative phrase."

"In English?"

"Nothing, dad. Can we get Chinese, I don't want any more spaghetti. We eat too much wheat, did you know it contributes to global warming? I mean, that wheat cultivation is like the second biggest contributor or something to global climate change, actually crisis, to global climate crisis?"

"Don't I have to drive the car to Mandarin Kitchen, how does that help save the planet?" She's a sharp kid, reading all the time, watching TV all the time but at least it's history, science, lions hunting water buffalo; the cruel beauty of nature or whatever.

"I'll drive. That work?"

"You're sick, remember?"

"Dad, for real. I'm tired of it."

"Yeah OK OK, you wore me down." The thing is she's taking sick days all the time now, one or two days a week in the fall. After her mother died she was out of school the rest of that year but the past two were more or less OK, the usual shit, not a big surprise when the a kid has to move from the Cape to the North Shore, down the street from bowling alleys and tiki bars, to live with her dad who she'd heard practically her whole life wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Other choice stories too, no doubt, some true.

"Laugh about it if you want, it's really a problem," she said later with her mouth full of chow mein. "An ice shelf the size of Rhode Island just fell off of Antarctica, melted and fell off into the ocean. It's moving so much faster than anyone predicted five years ago, by the time I'm your age the weather is going to be completely unrecognizable. The political irresponsibility is really unforgiveable." She looked like a little kid, cheeks bulged chomping out of her heart-shaped face, long hair pulled back so he couldn't see the bleached streaks. Christ Almighty, it goes fast.

"Ah hun, there's nothing we can do about that sitting here. They're not gonna let Boston and New York go under water, they'll figure something out."

"Or else they won't," she shot back, his own snappy answer to her complaints about not getting the car, the shoes she wanted, about his curfew; I'm not going to have any friends left! My social development will be impaired! Sharp kid. Gifted they said. By who?

Wednesday a hard freeze, the kind where your snot and breath form a mat of ice on the front of your jacket collar and the students in the coffee shop stare like fucking sasquatch just lumbered in after chopping the ice off their driveways and sidewalks for two hours. A group of the groundsmen retreated to the loading dock to drink coffee and wait for the supervisors to figure out where they were, and cajole and drive them back them back outside to put antifreeze down on the stairways.

"I never saw Joey move as fast as he did yesterday," Ferreira said to Andres and Ronnie Mack, "Rescuing his donuts."

"I did once," Ronnie Mack said. "So one day last August Lester's up in the office, fucking shit faced, and he thinks it'd be funny to call me on the radio and put me and Joey in the number six loader. 'RacKenzie! Ru rutherfuckers rop the road a rand on the riamond!' Three thirty in the afternoon. And I already put in like five work orders on the number six truck and he threw them all in the trash."

"Bad brakes, right?" Ferreira said.

"Bad? That piece of shit had no fucking brakes at all. So he busts my balls by assigning me drive it on the field at three thirty, he knows I park in the east lot so I got to go all the way back to the garage, walk across campus, and hit rush hour by the time I get out."

"Why he always fuck around you like that?" Andres asked.

"He's gotta prove, I don't know, something. He sits up in that office all fucking day watching the weather channel, drinking," Ronnie Mack said, "So by that time of day, he's shit faced. So I say OK, boss, and tell Joey, hey kid, whyn't you give it a try. 'Me?' he's like, 'I ain't supposed to drive on account a my medication.' I tell him, just back it up, slow and easy. That poor bastard jumps in, fucking guns the engine, rams it into reverse, and BOOM."

"The fence?"

"The fucking pitching machine. That motherfucker cost eighty grand, and he just levels it, doesn't even try to stop. But Joey's got his headphones on so he doesn't hear it, runs over the machine and THEN hits the fence, then he tries to brake but he can't, because number six has no brakes, so he runs over the fire hydrant."

"It a flood, man," Andres's shoulders shook with laughter. "I run to the truck and Joe is looking, what? what? Lester run out and start scream at Joe. The baseball coach run to Lester and tear a new asshole."

Ronnie Mack shook his head. "So I go on over and say to them, I was afraid something like this would happen with those brakes, I'm pretty sure there's a couple work orders in already. I mean, Joey's not gonna get in trouble anyway, right?"

"Who cousin is he?" Andres asked.

"Nephew," said Ferreira. "The witch of the east."

The university is a thirty minute drive, on a good day; if you get on the road at rush hour, it could be three hours. Ronnie Mack hired on when the place almost doubled in size, buying a piece of industrial land from a shuttered company to put up a medical school. It was a good job at the time, when his friends were all re-enlisting, or driving truck or unemployed. He should have gone for his plumbing or electrical license, he knows; should have gone to school on the GI Bill, should have given it a shot down south maybe. But there were his parents, sick and aging, there his wife, who'd fucked his brains out for a while in a two-story, with a yard, not too bad a deal there for a while; there Leenie.

"Getting warmer out there," he said to Leenie that evening. "Maybe a nice day for school tomorrow."

"Wow, great," she said with fake cheer. Like her mom, that time, sarcastic; she had known it bothered him and would usually catch herself and give him a little sideways look, a conspiratorial pale-eyed smile: you and me.

"It's been a cold winter though." He hated this feeling, when she mumbled, didn't meet his eyes, poked dully at food; looking at a wall. "So this global warming thing," he said, "You see any chance of it kicking in any time soon?"

"It's not a joke, OK? I couldn't even sleep last night. It could happen like that, you know? Everybody talks about it like it's going to take fifty years, or a hundred or whatever and a little hotter each year, but the climate is a mystery and your industries are just like messing around with it."

"Whoa, my industries?"

"The stuff you all built, the power plants and like cars or whatever, I didn't do it. Everything might change all of a sudden, in like a month or whatever. Did you ever think of that?" He hadn't. Leenie shut the door to her room, not slamming it at least, and turned on music. Emo, she'd said when he'd asked her. Crybaby music, Norm had said one day in front of the campus center, as black-clad students walked by; oh poor me, my life is sooo hard, I have to sing all about it in my Emo band. I don't see how they can sing at all with their pierced tongues and lips and shit.

Same way you can talk so much to Lester with his prick in your mouth maybe, Ronnie Mack had said, which got a laugh. Ferreira told him later, I believe you're off that boy Norm's Christmas list this year.

Weather broke Thursday. By ten water dripped off the eaves of the buildings and at noon a storm sewer backed up, flooding the street. The crew cleared ice around the sewer for an hour before the city crew came in to snake it, while lab assistants in white coats stared down from the building's windows. They're cloning people up there, said Joey, jerking his head toward the windows; people. By the time they got back to the garage everybody was clustered by the clock, poised to punch out.

Ever since the buyout offers came around, he'd avoided the sympathetic looks and the questions and waited for the others to leave, strolling around back to smoke instead. He nodded to a tall, stooped man already dragging on a cigarette outside the garage's back door.

"When are you going to quit that shit?" Ronnie Mack said. Without turning, the creased, ragged face focused one bright eye, and the claw not clutching the cigarette jabbed its middle finger upward. "I thought you were gonna get the patch."

"Oh, I got the goddamn patch," said Lester, exhaling a column of smoke. "Makes me dizzy when I smoke is all."

"Bad for you."

"No fucking shit, what isn't. I'm sure they got a pill for it, I'm already taking one for my cholesterol you know, one for my ass, one for my prick, one for my depression. A couple others I can't even remember what for. What's another pill."

"Nice day." The western sky was streaked with purple, orange, and bright blue, another storm on the way probably. From back here you could see the tops of the old textile buildings by the river, where Lester's and Ronnie's and everybody else's dad worked, and the university mostly uses now to store files, heavy equipment out of season, and all kinds of useless crap. They had all lived jammed up by the plant's fenceline, Lester around the corner from him, Ed three blocks away.

"That Canadian system's coming in this weekend you know, we're gonna get dumped on," Lester said. "So I heard you told me to go fuck myself."

"That didn't take long."

"Norm couldn't wait to run back up here and let the cat outta the bag."

"Did your stoolie get the conversation more or less right at least?" Ronnie Mack asked.

"Pretty much." Lester shook his head. "Every department's getting fucked now you know. Take the money, MacKenzie, that's my advice. We're all just standing around with our dicks in our hands, hoping the witch of the west isn't gonna come and chop 'em off." Lester shuffled off and after a minute Ronnie Mack followed. The damp day had left his clothes sodden and heavy. He couldn't even get warm in the car and sat there shivering in the parking lot, staring at the foggy dash. What would he do next month? Hokanson, who Ronnie Mack ran into sometimes at Dunkin Donuts, went out in the last round of buyouts and now he played golf, took computer classes at the community college, and drained out his 401-k. Playing out the string, Hokie said, but what are you gonna do? Some of them did contract work, he knew, for shit money; one sold dope out of his house in Revere. Ferreira pulled his truck up alongside and beeped.

"Everything OK there?"

Ronnie Mack cleared his throat. "Too fucking old is all," he said. They squinted at each other for a moment. "Eddie Junior talk to you?" he asked Ferreira.

"Yeah. That union shit don't got such a great reputation where I come from, but. Seems like, I dunno." Ferreira peered at him, like always with that half-smile. "Kinda your call."

"Lemme sleep on it," Ronnie Mack said. But that night he sweated and rolled, grinding his teeth. He half-dreamed that the house was filled with men in suits and police, shuffling through stacks of his papers. I paid my bills, he told them. But you didn't pay your wife's bills, a cop said, did you deadbeat?

Friday dawned bright and clear. High up you could see the lines of wispy clouds moving in, ahead of the front that was predicted late that night, accumulations of six to eight inches. Ronnie Mack would make a pot of coffee that night and stay up watching TV with Leenie, watching the first snowflakes swirl into the backyard light and settle on the crabapple tree, and waiting for the phone call telling him to get his ass in to work and get on a plow.

He coasted through the morning, letting Joey do the lifting, taking a lot of smoke breaks. They picked trash around the administration buildings, the modern glass tower where sat the president and the VP for administration and finance, the wicked witch of the west, counting up the college's losses and hunting for non-essential personnel. One day soon they would summon the VP for facilities from his east campus bunker, he knew, and the witch of the west and the witch of the east would declare, bring me the head of Ronald J. MacKenzie. See if you can't get him to carry it over here himself.

"Fuck 'em," he told Joey. The kid pushed his outsized headphones out of place, so it looked like he was wearing a cockeyed beanie, a confused cartoon kid with a question mark for a mouth. "All of 'em," Ronnie Mack added. He told Joey to go play video games in the campus center and called in a page to Ferreira, Andres, Eddie Junior and a couple of others: lunch at Surdyk's.

"You buying?" Ferreira asked when he walked into the steamy little diner. The five men around the table eyed him curiously, Ferreira, one of the Tibetans, Eddie like an altar boy, the new kid with the glass eye, blank-faced Andres, who once told him he'd quit school when he was twelve; cut sugar cane sunrise to sundown; lost half his family in a hurricane. Well now they're going to laugh at you, Ronnie Mack thought, or tell you to fuck yourself, or give you some happy horseshit about how they're with you all the way, or just turn away and feel bad for the guy who bet all his money on the wrong dog. Or else they're not.

"What up, poppa?" Andres said.

“So I wanted to talk to you guys,” Ronnie Mack said, "You know, or else everybody has to piss in the soup to say it tastes good." What has he not talked to them about, and they talked to him, almost every goddamn day, and everybody knew pretty much what was going to get said next. But still listened basically. After his wife, and now Leenie, didn't want to hear about it any more. His dad, a tight lipped old bastard who always got the last word, had the same conversations in the old days. Not for nothing, thought Ronnie MacKenzie, the old man, sitting here right now, would shit a brick.