He asked about my arm

My daughter's boy got picked up last month on the twelfth, out on Rosedale by the Walmart, sitting in the passenger seat of a car with plates that came off a different car. He's nineteen. They kept him about thirty hours and then his mom went down and got him, and now there's a date in November.

That Sunday we were all over at my sister's for a baptism and everybody's talking about it like it's a parking ticket. My son-in-law says county's nothing, you do your days and you come home. He's never been anywhere. My sister came out with more beans and said at least it wasn't state.

My daughter says her boy's got a good head on him. He does. I sat there with a paper plate on my knee and I didn't say one word.

I did seven months out at Lerdo in 1984. Nobody at that table knows that.

It was a truck. A '76 Ford, three-quarter ton. Had primer all over the hood. Belonged to a guy in Oildale who worked out on a lease.

I didn't take it. I got into it on Beardsley and I drove it maybe eleven miles down to a house on Brundage and left it at the curb and walked to my cousin's from there. I didn't take it. That's all of what I did.

They came for me January ninth at six in the morning, at my mother's place off Niles. She had to be at the carrot shed in Lamont by seven and she went. My uncle Chuy got me a lawyer named Gorman. Gorman said it would've been nothing if I hadn't been the one driving it. I went in at the end of March.

Chuy had been at the shop since '68 and he's the one who got me on there in '82. When this happened he went in and talked to Dale himself and my name stayed up on the board the entire time I was gone. I never paid him back. He died in 2006.

Anything I caught in there would've cost me the job. So I did the kitchen and I did the dayroom.

First six weeks they had me in D on the old side, sixty-some guys and a swamp cooler up on the roof that ran all night and didn't do one thing. Then I got on the kitchen and they moved me up to the tier where they kept the kitchen workers, because you're up at three-forty and they don't want you walking the building at that hour.

The guy on the bunk across from mine came in the middle of May, under the window that was painted shut. He'd roofed in Delano, and before that he was out in Taft doing something with pumps. Thirty-four, thirty-five, in there. He had a bad tooth on the bottom and wouldn't let them pull it.

Second day he's sitting on the end of his bunk and he looks over and says, what happened to that. Meaning my arm.

I got that the March before, at the shop. Somebody cut a piece on the torch table and set it down on the bench and walked off, and I came around the corner carrying a box of clips and laid my forearm right across it. Took the skin off from about here to here. Dale drove me to Mercy in his own truck and stayed until they were done.

Nobody at the shop ever said anything about it after that first week. You get burned, you get burned. So I told him the whole thing, which took about a minute, and then he wanted to know what a torch table even was, and I told him that too.

We ran the dish machine together for five months. Up at three-forty, and the trays start coming back at six and don't really stop. He read westerns with the covers torn off, because that's how they came around. He got a letter most Tuesdays from a woman out in Shafter and he'd read me parts of it out loud and skip over parts, and I never asked him about the parts he skipped.

It happened twice, in the dry storage off the kitchen, in July, before the trays went out. After the second time we went back and ran the machine same as always, and he told me about a dog he had as a kid that got hit out on 99. He'd take my wrist sometimes and turn my arm over and look at the burn.

They called my name at four in the morning on October twenty-second. You don't get to walk around and tell people anything. I'd said see you later to him the night before at the sinks. I don't know what he had left to do.

I've been married thirty-four years in May. I met her in 1990 at the swap meet out on Edison Highway and she was there with her sister. She's never once asked me about those months.

The story on me is that I went to Arizona in '84 with Chuy's brother-in-law and worked a job down in Yuma and came back. My brothers got told that. One of them's been gone since 2011.

In '97 I was on a job up in Fresno, staying at a place on Blackstone, and there was a phone book in the drawer. I looked. It wasn't in there. I put the book back in the drawer and there was a ballgame on. I never went and looked again after that.

Court's November fourth at eight-thirty. I told my daughter I'd take him, and she said he could ride with me instead of her.

She's asleep in the other room. The knees hurt worse at night than they do in the day. I've got the back door open because it finally cooled off out there.