Dark Water - Laura McNeal [3]
“They’re probably bad workers or they drink too much. If they were good workers,” Hoyt said, “their friends and relatives would recommend them and they’d have jobs.”
“What if you don’t have any friends or relatives here?”
“They all do, Pearl.”
“But how? Somebody has to be first, right?”
Hoyt just looked at me. “Technically, yeah. But everyone I hire is recommended by a cousin, a brother, an uncle, or a friend. It works better that way.”
It reminded me of the riddles my dad used to ask me at dinner:
What can you catch but not throw?
A cold.
What goes around the world but stays in the corner?
A stamp.
If nobody knows you, how do you ever get a job?
To this I had no answer.
Five
Sometimes on Saturdays, if Hoyt had errands to run in town, he’d talk Robby and me into going with him in exchange for a donut, and that’s what he did the next morning.
It was late spring, meaning April, and the look of everything just about made you happy even if your father was a louse. The wild grass that had sprouted after the winter rains (my favorite two months of the whole year) had not yet turned to evil poky foxtails that drill into your socks and shoelaces. Most of the hills were a heartbreaking velvety green, and the others, where fruit trees had been stumped and painted white, looked like brown quilts knotted with white yarn.
I would have gone with Hoyt even if no donuts were involved. I loved riding in his truck because it was an old Ford with bench seats. It smelled like dirt, coffee, grease, and the scratchy wool Indian blanket that covered the front seat. Robby and I called it the Ford Packrat because the foot wells were filled with irrigation tubing, receipts dating to 1985, hamburger wrappers, and rusty iron tools. We had plans to market something called the Ford Packrat XC80 if Robby pursued his planned career in industrial design.
My cousin Robby no longer speaks to me and is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting his second year at MIT.
On the day in question, though, that beautiful, green-grass day, I sat in the middle and angled my knees toward Robby. Robby at sixteen was tall and ethereal-looking, like his mother, my aunt Agnès, pronounced Aun-yez, not the American way. She was born and raised in France, a point of superiority to her way of thinking that made it hard for all of us, except Robby and Hoyt, to do anything but tolerate her. Robby played the clarinet and scored outrageously high on college tests and ran track and collected these cute but obscure figurines no one in America had ever heard of, which depicted the comic-book adventures of a bald-headed kid named Tintin and his white terrier, Snowy. I scored pretty high in English because, thanks to my mom, I read all the time, but Robby was the acknowledged genius in our family.
First we drove to Miller Pipe and hung around while my uncle picked out whatever pipe fittings he needed for the grove, and then we rode in all that sunshine to the Donut Palace, a tiny store lacquered in yellow Formica that was owned and ferociously sanitized by a Taiwanese family. I always got a chocolate-glazed, Robby always got a jelly-filled, and Uncle Hoyt always got a sugar twist. Hoyt could take or leave the sugar twist, to be honest, but he hated to go anywhere by himself.
I was still nibbling on my chocolate-glazed when we rolled up to the four-way stop at Alvarado and Stage Coach, and Amiel was in his usual spot, juggling nothing and looking depressed. “That’s him!” I told my uncle. “The mime I told you about!”
“Keep driving,” Robby said with his usual semi-irritating authority. “We should close the borders to all mimes. And clowns. And folk dancers.”
Amiel, so graceful and brown and lean, was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, so he didn’t exactly have that I’m-a-mime look about him. To my surprise, Hoyt slowly swung the Packrat onto the dirt. Five men swarmed the truck right away, clapping their chests, gripping the doors, and shouting in English and Spanish until you