All-Day Breakfast Read online

  “Okay, all right. I like the panda sweater, by the way.”

  “It’s worth fifty bucks on eBay!” She smoothed it down over her belly. “And the best coaches are in the stands, my dad says. His raunchy ideas are culinary. Be that as it may, Gillbrick, you could use a little shaking up.”

  “It’s not really Mr. Gillbrick, is it?” Mrs. Avery asked Megan.

  “I say Gill-brick,” Franny announced, “because the guy is solid.”

  “Sorry to interrupt. It’s like almost nine.” This was blond Harv Saunders, an up-and-comer on the varsity basketball team. “Is the trip definitely today?”

  Wide-eyed Mrs. Avery tilted her head like she was deciding which puppy she wanted, though she was only reading her watch. Then like Zeus’s cloud mercifully descending in some old Greek play—I’d read half a dozen at UC Denver, after all—a long yellow rectangle flashed past on the other side of the shrubs.

  “Okey-dokey.” Mrs. Avery nimbly clapped her hands. “Let’s get a line started right here, everybody!”

  With a hiss of pneumatics the bus’s door flopped open and the driver scowled down—a skinny guy in blue coveralls, his red beard trimmed into a gigantic rectangle. I let the kids climb on, putting yet another pencil mark beside each name as its owner hunched by. Skater kids at the back of the line crushed cigarette butts under their sneakers. I waved a hand in front of my nose at the nicotine stink, and Harv, headphones around his neck, must’ve thought I’d meant it for him.

  “Oh, I just smell like that,” he said, putting his nose to the shoulder of his blue hoodie. “Our whole house smells ’cause of my dad.”

  “Climb aboard, Harv,” I said. “My dad was the same.”

  Amber and Grace flashed me slick fake smiles as they filed by. They wore the same skull-patterned hoodies but blond Amber had scooped on more eyeliner. The Avery women hung back by the trash can—they formed an interesting contrast, scientifically speaking, in that the mom possessed a wizened sort of Disney cuteness while Megan was homely as a shelving unit.

  “My dad’s running late but he said he’d be here for sure,” said Shawn, pushing long bangs out of his eyes as he climbed up.

  “It would’ve been great to have him,” I said, “but we can’t wait.”

  “His dad’s got problems.” Eric arched his brows and ran fingers through his prodigious mullet. “Gets stuck taking these huge dumps.”

  “Shut up, man,” said Shawn.

  “Okay, now go ahead,” Mrs. Avery said, nudging Megan forward.

  “You go first! I don’t want you to look at my bum.”

  “You’d rather look at mine?”

  Megan nodded earnestly. “It’s nice!”

  Her mother kissed her cheek before sashaying up the steps. Moms of the world are universally adored while the dads sit home on the toilet.

  The inside of the bus smelled like bubble gum and feet. The Averys had taken the first bench on the left so I swung in behind the driver.

  “What time’s your tour?” he rasped over his shoulder.

  “Ten o’clock,” I said. “It’s an hour to Velouria?”

  “I’ll vaporize some fuel,” he said, slamming the door shut even as the bus lurched over the first speed bump.

  “It’ll be so nice if we get there on time,” said Mrs. Avery. “It is so tough to schedule around two jobs, but it’s so worth it when you have a child, sir, you’ll see.”

  “Why would you think I don’t have kids?”

  “Did you sub here last year? I don’t remember.”

  We took the last speed bump before squealing onto Casement toward Highway 33. I twisted in my seat and took yet another head count. Three seats back Grace reached around the cloud of staticky hair to tug out Franny’s earbuds, trying to be funny, but one of the cords snapped in two—Franny’s face went red, her bracelets clanking.

  “Well, Mrs. Avery,” I muttered, “last year I was teaching in Wahoo.”

  “Please. Colleen.” A hand to her heart. “And my nieces are in Wahoo! Oh, but the youngest graduated the year before last. You would’ve remembered her, she’s big.”

  “That’s so sweet!” called one of the girls, with an enthusiasm so rare for an eleventh-grader that I had to turn and see who it’d been: Franny blinked back a grateful mistiness while she clamped blue headphones to either side of her head. Their owner, Harv, slid back into his seat behind the Averys.

  An asymmetrical grin cut across Mama Colleen’s cheek. “Mind if I ask why you left Wahoo?”

  “Well, the sub lists aren’t too extensive in either place, but here there’s an extra dollar an hour.”

  Which was bullshit—Hoover actually paid worse. But we’d needed the change, and there’d been a cop named Holt in Wahoo who liked to walk down North Chestnut with his fists on his hips, and his ten-year-old son liked to knock kids onto the schoolyard gravel and say, “Aw, sorry,” and I said the son ought to be suspended but the administrators just stared from behind their potted spider plants. I’d been covering the tail end of a mat leave. I caught the tough kid passing a note that said jason is a faggit and told him to stay after school, then once he was alone in the classroom I deadbolted him in and went to the staff room to pour myself a coffee. By the time the custodian let him out the tough kid had peed himself for dramatic effect, but it turned out the administrators must’ve been on my side all along because they said they wouldn’t even phone the district provided I took my name off the sub list. I got things done by myself, see that? My Lydia had been dead a month so my thinking at the time had been crystal clear, forever sliding coins into the wrong parking meter.

  “Oh, I see,” Colleen said. “I’m only picking your brain because my sister always complains how Wahoo smells like a sewage plant. Their house is right next to the sewage plant.”

  Anyone who says pick your brain can’t really be visualizing it.

  “No, smell never bothered us, though I have to wonder with any of those operations what the discharge is going to do in the long run.”

  “Oh, my,” she said, massaging her temples. “I worry what it’s doing right now.”

  “Harv, hey!” Eric yelled from the back. “Isn’t that your dad?”

  Where Casement joined the highway, a blond man in a dress shirt was stapling a sheet of magenta paper to a telephone pole. The bus blew by him, ruffling his hair.

  “Yeah,” said Harv, “he, uh—”

  “Is he, like, looking for work?” Eric asked.

  “Shut it, Eric!” Franny yelled, holding a blue headphone out from her ear.

  Harv looked across at me and smiled sheepishly.

  Five years before I was born, Pvt. William R. Giller waded through the gray mud of the Mekong Delta—8,500 miles, the atlas says, from Nebraska—trying to flush Communist insurgents in cone-shaped hats and indigo pyjamas out from villages of supposedly democratically inclined farmers who also wore cone-shaped hats and indigo pyjamas. Discharged back to Knudsen, NE, Dad pushed a broom in the flour mill until I came along, when Aggregate Grains of Pawnee County burnt to the ground in ten minutes and he subsisted on the disability payments he received for his smoke-damaged lungs.

  The Knudsen Lutheran church proposed building swank baseball diamonds so we could host county-wide tournaments—simple, right? But Dad, in his sweated-through golf shirt, stapled fliers to telephone poles, declaring out-of-towners bring in unwanted elements. This might’ve been a hard-won lesson from the swampy Mekong, but every kid just thought he was a jackass. Out-of-towners, like from Lewiston and Pawnee City? Knudsen couldn’t join the little league without diamonds, so we couldn’t even pretend there was such a thing as a baseball scholarship unless we had a parent who’d drive us up to Burchard—and who had a parent like that?

  “We could make our own league,” we said. “The Shit-hole League.”

  The Lutherans got too busy ar
guing about Dad to get the diamonds built.

  “You could look right at them,” he told me, teetering on the edge of my bed, “and never know what they really were.”

  Keister the dog had been backed over by then. As I got older I was able to fight back more effectively on the living room floor, and Dad seemed to like that even better. His expanding gut stayed hard as a rock.

  In twelfth grade, Mom started taking me into Lincoln on Saturdays, showing me art galleries and even a play. She hadn’t turned chubby like other guy’s moms, and her legs got looks.

  “I don’t care if you even get married,” she said in the middle of the sunken gardens, solid hands on my shoulders, “but I want to teach grandkids to canter. I see buck-toothed girls on palominos. Leave ’em with me, then go to Europe if you want.”

  “But I don’t want a buck-toothed wife,” I said.

  “There are worse things,” she whispered, retying her chiffon scarf over her head.

  I told Dad I was making hunting knives at Buck’s apartment but instead pimply Buck and I were studying like maniacs for scholarship exams. “Giller,” he’d whisper whenever I dozed off. “Your mom’s totally Alanis Morissette.”

  And after midnight I was calling modestly toothed Lydia in MacArthur while we simultaneously filled out applications to the same dozen schools.

  Then from my eventual dorm at UC Denver I’d call Mom when I knew Dad would still be asleep—not to worry, I won’t be talking about the guy much longer—and one morning she told me that after fifteen years his lungs had somehow recovered so the doctor had said he was no longer eligible for disability. They went to Pawnee City where Dad started as an apprentice millwright. So, yeah, once I was long gone they actually moved away from Knudsen.

  The Pawnee Republican of November 18, 1996:

  A 41-year-old Pawnee City man, formerly of Knudsen, was killed when he was ejected from a 1991 Buick Skylark that flipped multiple times before colliding with the Sit-Stay Dog Food warehouse on the northeast corner of Broadway and Sheridan.

  State police reported William R. Giller was pronounced dead at the scene by Pawnee County coroner following the 10:45 p.m. crash. One witness reports the Skylark traveling in excess of 90 miles an hour as it turned south off Western. Giller, the sole occupant of the car, was not wearing a seatbelt.

  Pawnee City fire and ambulance personnel assisted at the scene. An investigation into the crash is continuing.

  Even at four sentences it seemed long-winded. The investigation found cocaine in his system. The symptoms of Mom’s disease were still in our future and every morning she was bicycling to the accident site to look for more windshield glass to keep in her purse—I couldn’t understand her grief at the passing of an asshole, so we weren’t talking much. And what did I insist to the minister, beside the cooler at the after-service potluck?

  “Families are shit, Your Worship,” I said, waving the wasp away from my beer, “and I’m not going to have no part of ’em.”

  Yet years later, I’d set Josie up on the change table, unbutton her sleeper and put my nose under her drool-slick chin—that sour scent of pure baby.

  “Hey,” I’d say in a goofy voice. “Dat smells pretty good!”

  And she’d give a deep-throated chuckle before gazing across the room at her mother, who’d be on the couch asleep, or folding laundry, or embroidering daisies onto a curtain. Her auburn braids curled down onto her T-shirt, her sinewy shoulders creaking with strength.

  So while we were in Hoover my kids’ Grandma Jackie sat waiting in Pawnee City, with doctors, acupuncturists, massage therapists and her rattle-brained son all unable to end her latest ordeal. Their grandpa was in heaven, apparently, stapling flyers to the Pearly Gates and eyed nervously by St Peter.

  “Just think about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and all the wonderful happenings at that factory!” Rob Aiken shouted over the machines’ roar. “When people hear there are tours at our factory, they all jump!”

  We stood in the loading dock between a parked forklift and towers of cardboard boxes stacked on pallets. The kids shuffled their sneakers on the pebbly concrete and blinked up at the black rafters, as though the wonderment might put them to sleep. Rob had a yellow collared shirt tucked into his jeans and close-cropped white hair. He laced his fingers in front of his crotch like he was about to hoist someone over a fence.

  “Is there really going to be lunch?” asked Colleen. “I brought a little burrito just in case!”

  “Yeah, oh, hot dogs!” Rob said. “Now, just through here, let’s get started. We’re going to see the pumps we use to load the res—uh, the additive with.”

  A loose-limbed guy in orange coveralls rolled up a handcart and stacked it with boxes, wagging his elbows like he had a Run-DMC song playing in his head. Rob skipped over to him, put a wide hand on his shoulder.

  “Ah, no, pal!” Rob hollered. “Latches for the bins won’t go on until next week! If it’s ball bearings just take a box at a time, things weigh a hundred pounds!”

  The guy unloaded his boxes without a break in rhythm, and Rob turned back to us with a watery smile.

  “Lot of guys off sick this week but we’ve got good people filling in!”

  We ambled after him through a pair of tall steel gates into the main room of the factory, smelling of machine oil and garden hoses. It was the dimensions of a football stadium. I’d done construction work during summers in college, and I wondered how many guys it had taken to build the operation in the first place, much less to keep it running. Brown and green machines filled the floor, each with white dials, blinking red numbers and ten or fifteen greased and whirring axles winding up spools of plastic two and three feet wide. If they’d replaced the banks of fluourescents and the guys in orange with gas lamps and half-starved ten-year-olds, Dockside Synthetics could’ve been an Industrial Revolution cotton mill. A few eleventh-graders looked up but mostly they just kicked their toes against the concrete or tried to give each other wedgies. Pierced-lip Willow, in jean shorts, held hands with black-clad Craig, an inch shorter than herself. Rob turned to us, chin raised amicably, hands still a hammock in front of his crotch.

  “So to start, here’s a machine that measures the amount of additive that’s going into the plastic for garbage bags.”

  A mile of light-green plastic film, stretched taut between one set of rollers and another, climbed the wall next to us in four-foot increments, then over and under the rafters fifty feet above our heads. There were too many machines cluttering the place to see where the film came down exactly. It was cold and my shirt chafed my nipples.

  “Now, through here,” Rob yelled, “the guys are running extrusion moulds!”

  Brace-faced Lydia performed ballet turns. Her orthodonture was so severe that confusing her with my Lydia was not possible.

  “Which chemicals exactly are going into the garbage bags?” asked Megan.

  “Well!” Rob raised his hands to his chest as if to catch a basketball. “For these bags we’re using polyethylene terephthalate, and we’re taking a chance on that because it’s a lot sturdier than you’ll usually find for a domestic trash bag.”

  “It’s a wonderland!” said Colleen. “Your father would love this, wouldn’t he?”

  “Any of this could be on a quiz,” I announced.

  “And what’s its molecular breakdown?” Megan asked.

  I stood taller in my shoes at that. Harv clicked a ballpoint and prepared to write on his hand—he could not miss this.

  “Terephthalate is C₁₀H₈O₄.” Rob thrust a hand out for each element, like he was pat-a-caking the periodic table.

  “H₈O₄,” Megan echoed. “That’s a lot of gas for a plastic bag.”

  “No, dude,” Amber hissed out the side of her mouth, “don’t ask that!”

  “Do the bags contain coltan?” asked Grace.

  “Coltan? I
don’t know it,” said Rob.

  “They dig for it in the Congo. It’s in lots of things, people don’t even know.”

  “Now, not to get off on the wrong foot, Rob,” I called, “but is there anything really beneficial to the environment that your operation might be putting out?”

  Colleen looked back to show me her lopsided smile and oversized Bambi eyes.

  “Oh, good question, you’d be surprised! For sure there is.” Rob intertwined his fingers again, bounced them against his groin. “Our new Split-Proof line is fifty percent less likely to lose its integrity at curbside, and that keeps waste out of our groundwater.”

  “Sorry,” said Harv, half-raising his hand, “but fifty percent less likely than what?”

  “Well.” Rob nodded earnestly. “Than our popular line.”

  He led us around for another forty-five minutes, explaining what various read-outs meant and introducing us to a dozen different guys who grimaced at us from behind their safety goggles while brandishing aerosol cans of lubricant.

  “Oh!” Rob clapped his big hands. “I called you Walt ’cause you’re wearing Walt’s coveralls!”

  The substitute valve-tightener rubbed the freckles on his nose and tried to look cheerful. I didn’t have to wear George Reid’s coveralls, true enough, but his name was on my classroom door and his framed photo, for some research citation he’d won, watched me from across the hall—he wore a blue-and-pink checked shirt in the picture, in front of a blue and pink backdrop, so it looked like his bodiless head was just floating there, all forehead and beard. I imagined him hovering behind us like the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones.

  “Dockside’s travel bin is the only one in the industry that’s TSA approved,” Rob announced. “Hundreds of companies manufacturing travel bins across the country, but ours is the only one that has that, uh, approval, so we think that’s pretty neat.”

  Behind us a set of double doors yawned open to reveal a loading bay and a gleaming white semi-trailer with a tangle of tubes emerging from a hub in its roof. Stenciled on its side:

  do not use steam