“I’m just hoping for the best,” she said.

Eighty-Eight
Sweet Pete

Pete had never felt so far from home. Not in all his life. He stood in a single-file line of men who waited on the docks outside the foreman’s office. Each man, Pete noticed, had the same sorts of characteristics. They were all young, they all wore drab colors, and they all had hopeful looks on their faces. And Pete wondered if he had the same pathetic look on his face. He had been looking for a job for the last three days and found nothing.

The excitement of this city had been lost. He felt nothing except its cruelty.

He could tell that half the men in this work line were more qualified than he was, and older, probably with more experience.

The man ahead of him had scars on his face, as though he’d been burned. Pete could see hairless patches on his head showing beneath the man’s cap. The man was friendly. They conversed. Pete tried very hard to look the man in the eye when they talked, not at his scars.

The man was self-conscious about them, Pete could tell. He touched them and said, “Yeah, I know these look pretty bad, but they look worse than they really are.”

The man’s burns were smooth and marbled with swatches of pink skin and ropy scars. They had contorted his eyelid so that when he blinked, it didn’t close all the way.

“How’d it happen?” Pete asked.

The man sighed. “We were searching for explosives. The dogs started barking, we ran as fast as we could, but it was too late. Four guys got away in time, one man died, and I got burned.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pete.

“Don’t be. It coulda been a lot worse for me. I might not be here.”

“Yeah.”

Pete had been applying at different places in town to no avail all morning. He’d been greeted by frowns and managers shaking their heads who said, “Sorry, son, I’d like to help you, but I can’t.”

There were too many people in this city. There was a frantic feeling in the air. There was more poverty here, and there were dangerous people who stood on street corners with bloodshot eyes. They watched people walk by, and Pete felt uneasy when their glares fell on him.

He’d made a mistake, coming here. He was a rural person who knew rural things. He knew dogs. He knew how to fix metal roofs and how to plant. He knew how to pick tobacco and how to shuck corn and how to fill a ten-foot sack with cotton. In the country, they had little, but at least they had it. Here, these people had nothing, and even that was about to be taken away from them.