Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [79]
I was worried, since I had used Emerson's name without his permission, but when I found my way to the personnel office it worked like magic. I was interviewed by a little droopy-eyed man named Mr. MacDuffy and sent to work for a Mr. Kimbro. An office boy came along to direct me.
"If Kimbro needs him," MacDuffy told the boy, "come back and have his name entered on the shipping department's payroll."
"It's tremendous," I said as we left the building. "It looks like a small city."
"It's big all right," he said. "We're one of the biggest outfits in the business. Make a lot of paint for the government."
We entered one of the buildings now and started down a pure white hall.
"You better leave your things in the locker room," he said, opening a door through which I saw a room with low wooden benches and rows of green lockers. There were keys in several of the locks, and he selected one for me. "Put your stuff in there and take the key," he said. Dressing, I felt nervous. He sprawled with one foot on a bench, watching me closely as he chewed on a match stem. Did he suspect that Emerson hadn't sent me?
"They have a new racket around here," he said, twirling the match between his finger and thumb. There was a note of insinuation in his voice, and I looked up from tying my shoe, breathing with conscious evenness.
"What kind of racket?" I said.
"Oh, you know. The wise guys firing the regular guys and putting on you colored college boys. Pretty smart," he said. "That way they don't have to pay union wages."
"How did you know I went to college?" I said.
"Oh, there're about six of you guys out here already. Some up in the testing lab. Everybody knows about that."
"But I had no idea that was why I was hired," I said.
"Forget it, Mac," he said. "It's not your fault. You new guys don't know the score. Just like the union says, it's the wise guys in the office. They're the ones who make scabs out of you -- Hey! we better hurry."
We entered a long, shed-like room in which I saw a series of overhead doors along one side and a row of small offices on the other. I followed the boy down an aisle between endless cans, buckets and drums labeled with the company's trademark, a screaming eagle. The paint was stacked in neatly pyramided lots along the concrete floor. Then, starting into one of the offices, the boy stopped short and grinned.
"Listen to that!"
Someone inside the office was swearing violently over a telephone.
"Who's that?" I asked.
He grinned. "Your boss, the terrible Mr. Kimbro. We call him 'Colonel,' but don't let him catch you."
I didn't like it. The voice was raving about some failure of the laboratory and I felt a swift uneasiness. I didn't like the idea of starting to work for a man who was in such a nasty mood. Perhaps he was angry at one of the men from the school, and that wouldn't make him feel too friendly toward me.
"Let's go in," the boy said. "I've got to get back."
As we entered, the man slammed down the phone and picked up some papers.
"Mr. MacDuffy wants to know if you can use this new man," the boy said.
"You damn right I can use him and . . ." the voice trailed off, the eyes above the stiff military mustache going hard.
"Well, can you use him?" the boy said. "I got to go make out his card."
"Okay," the man said finally. "I can use him. I gotta. What's his name?"
The boy read my name off a card.
"All right," he said, "you go right to work. And you," he said to the boy, "get the hell out of here before I give you a chance to earn some of the money wasted on you every payday!"
"Aw, gwan, you slave driver," the boy said, dashing from the room.
Reddening, Kimbro turned to me, "Come along, let's get going."
I followed him into the long room where the lots of paint were stacked along the floor beneath numbered markers that hung from the ceiling. Toward the rear I could see two men unloading heavy buckets from a truck, stacking them neatly on a low loading platform.
"Now get this straight," Kimbro said gruffly. "This is a busy department and I don't have time to