Salt of The Earth, Part 3

We meet again, Mike Russ

As we leave, I say hello to a tall athletic American who had sat on the other side of the aisle. We introduce each other. He does not have to tell me his name; I know him: he is Mike Russ, and here we meet again in Patong Beach, of all places, on Phuket Island.

He is six feet tall, almost exactly, square shouldered and lean, with a trimmed waistline. He sports straight-fitting summer slacks and a well-worn short sleeve shirt – an intricate white patterned check with a hint of an elegant intent, suitable for a Sunday. Two gold chains, a wide one and a thin one, show at his open collar. He stands erect, legs slightly apart, feet firmly planted – he wears plain black loafers. His dark blond hair is graying slightly, slicked back on top, cut rather short on the sides. He looks at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. He is a throwback to another era. He does not need to give me his age, as he will, a moment later, while we drink a cup of coffee at a hotel’s terrace: he is 50. Of course, I knew: he was 25 in 1980.

He lives in Indiana, Burns Harbour to be precise – between Gary and Chicago – the rust of the rust belt. A die and cast technician, a welder at times, as I also knew, he had to retrain, retool as steel mills have closed and jobs been moved to places where labor is cheaper. Huge restructuring is going on in the industry; companies are bought and sold wholesale. There is the current takeover bid by the Indian Mittal over the French and European Arcelor. Mittal is offering its own stock in exchange for Arcelor’s. Who would accept such an offer, instead of hard cash, we wonder. Not us, we decide as if we had tall orders to wire to our stockbrokers, right at this minute.

As a matter of fact, Mike found himself US$150,000 short of capital to be able to start his own specialty workshop, although he had already some of the best machine tools available. Instead, he has gone into air conditioning. His company sent him back to school: he enrolled into an engineering programme at Indiana University. There is a future in air conditioning, plenty of room for more efficient, more environment conscious systems. He lists the various areas of expertise needed for configuration of today’s technology, particularly electronics, and the services to be provided to maintain the equipment: recovering the spent fluids, recycling and reclaiming them.

Now, wait a minute, I think. Mike would not talk as much; he would not offer his opinion as freely, let alone mention his future plans. He would remain silent as others stated their beliefs, outlined their projects, bantering and laughing and bragging good naturedly. But he was 24-25, then. The years have added a layer of self confidence, a quiet sense of his own worth. Not that he has become rich, but he can afford an Easter vacation here in Thailand, using his discretionary money. As for the gas station attendants, the car mechanics he started his life with, they are nowhere to be seen.

The affluent crowd he later mixed with in Port Shelby has disappeared for the most part. I do not ask Mike whether he still thinks of the late D. Dulles, the owner of the Machine Tool Company, who had hired him then as a 285 dollars a week welder. Having left Michigan’s Upper Peninsula some time earlier, Mike was driving South on US 31, going from town to town, looking for a job in the depressed economy of the 1970’s. He had reached Port Shelby as he was nearing the end of his luck, down to his last dollars. Yes, remember D. Dulles who had turned him into his protégé, had made him his assistant in his project of designing and building a light low cost transport plane and whose daughter, Eva, he might have married. I am certain that Mike thinks of D. Dulles everyday as he has not forgotten his set phrases, bits of wisdom from an era going back to World War II and the Navy contracts which made his company and his fortune.

He remembers also the late evenings at D. Dulles’ cottage, as he was watching him play bridge with his cronies: the four old men on the back porch, around a card table, with their hats still on, sipping bourbon and water, the women on the front part of the house, a distant chatter. A red line reflected in the windows was all that was left of the sunset. One could hear the waves leaping onto the beach, smell the drying pine needles on the sandy banks. Twenty five years from now, I may be one of the few people able to say how things were on those summer evenings. Mike is younger, of course: he might keep the record somewhat longer, if he wishes.

The Machine Tool Company has long ceased to exist, its buildings leveled to make room for a condominium complex with a view over Lake Michigan. D. Dulles’ country club friends survived him for a while but they have died by now except some of the women: they are neither seen nor heard in their sterile, climate controlled nursing homes.

As for Mike’s own generation, Eva, whom he did not marry, is still around. She was not a heiress after all; her father had remained a free spender at a time when his company’s profits had dwindled and his aeronautic venture had more than dented his assets. Eva’s long time escort, Phil, the philosopher, as D. Dulles used to call him, who, I am sure also, did not marry her either, is probably teaching in a conflict fraught two bit state university where the people from the Chicano awareness forum, the black caucus, the gay and lesbian center, the women’s studies do not like each other very much. Just as he did when he was dating Eva, he is still juggling concepts for an audience. I would not bet a dime on either of them.

Mike has no regrets. Just like Dorothy, the Kansas farm girl at the end of The Wizard of Oz, he has long discovered that everybody has a brain, everybody has a heart, everybody has courage. Just like everybody also, he has seen the 1939 MGM musical with Judy Garland playing Dorothy, as it is shown so often on television that it is impossible to have missed it over the years.

He may not know, however, that the story was written by L. Frank Baum in the next town, just south of Port Shelby, another summer resort where his family had a cottage. Baum imagined his fairy tale on those hot August afternoons as he sat on another back porch, dreaming as if stoned from marijuana smoke, the way his characters are overcome by the powerful scent of the poppy field they were walking through, his eyes fixed on the yellow brick road which curlicues around the cottages of that owner’s association.

Mike did not marry Dorothy, “Dottie”, the waitress, who had a heart but no brain, nor did he marry Eva, a brain and no heart. In fact, he never married at all, he says. He mentions that his girlfriend is waiting for him at their hotel. Is she an American, but then neither a Catholic nor a churchgoer, or a local girl, a “joiner” in local parlance, providing her comforting company to lonely western visitors? I do not ask. There are things which need to be kept quiet, even among the most intimate friends. I prefer to go on watching Mike, sitting straight in the rattan armchair, his face in the shade of the table’s umbrella. We are finishing our cup of coffee: weak, somewhat bitter, truly American in taste.

I do not ask him either how he survived the airplane crash I sent him to for an ending to my story. After D. Dulles’ early death from heart failure, Mike, having left Port Shelby and moving again from odd job to odd job, had found his way to Florida. In Miami, he had worked briefly as a mechanic in an aviation maintenance service and he was asked to go along on a Miami to Caracas flight – an aging Super Constellation with a cargo of packed Christmas trees – which crashed on take-off.

The records concerning that old cargo plane were so imprecise, so poorly kept, that neither its ownership nor its crew were properly identified. How many people were actually on board that day? Mike had worked on the worn out piston engines of that Super Constellation the day before and this is only the least questionable fact of the whole episode. Did Mike escape the fiery crash, walking away unscathed, or did he just not board that fateful flight? Either way he survived.

Now, the tropical sun is beating on the tiles of the hotel’s terrace, on the narrow, brick like concrete blocks of the sidewalk. The air is heavy, humid from the early morning’s rain. The day is in full swing. “Tuk tuks” move up and down the boulevard, honking at every potential client; tourists are going about their business. Young men in groups of two or three are heading for the beach, older couples are checking menus in front of open air restaurants, the women clinging to their ancient husbands, while looking askance at the young Thai girls, in shorts or tight skirts, “joiners” leading their aging “farangs” by the hand.

“It has been a pleasure,” I say to Mike.

“For me too, really.”

That's a gripping high quality story .

The Transit Cafe should publish more of this promising author!