“Everyone has a past. Some worse than others. I have a past I can be proud of. One that’s pretty normal. One I’d change if I could. The one that’s taught me the most, seems to have been the hardest one. By chance, it was one of the best times of my life.” Gus Green
Meeting the guys started with a job Gus never thought she’d get.
Go back about six months. Her mornings started in the dog days of summer. August of 1994 was warmer for people who had to work outside, eighty degrees at seven a.m. Her job started at six a.m. Which meant her mornings started at 4:30 a.m., every day. Monday through Thursday and the days lasted until six p.m. Ten-hour days, four days a week, known in the blue-collar world as “four tens”. Augusta, known to everyone as Gus, traded rides to work with Toker. They were always quiet as they rode to work. Too early to talk.
They went way back. Gus dated his brother in an “earlier life”, another period of time in her life. Another bad decision of sorts, but she’d stayed friends with the family. Toker’s brother, Jerry is a fine, handsome man who knows he’s a good-looking man. To make things worse for Gus, Jerry’s a big flirt, no matter who is with him. Gus wasn’t going to just sit there and put up with it. She didn’t care how good the sex was, she wasn’t staying with a redneck that thinks he’s John-fucking-Travolta. The last time they went out dancing he was busy shaking his stuff in front of his fans and happened to forget that he was there with Gus, so she whispered in his ear,
“Baby, remember the last time we had sex?”
“Yeah, and you felt so good, delicious baby.”
“Yeah, I’m glad you remember.”
“How could I forget?”
“Good. Don’t forget it, ‘cause it was the last time we’ll ever have sex!”
She left him standing there on the dance floor with his arms in the dancing position.
Men! Cain’t live with’em and ya’ cain’t shoot’em! Anyway, she’d stayed friends with Toker’s family, that’s the only good thing that came from his wanna- be-player brother Jerry. Actually, most folks like to stay on their good side, ‘cause Toker’s mama made the best pork tamales and his daddy raised the best smoke this side of the Mississippi. Hence, Toker’s name. So Gus was pretty comfortable around Toker.
Gus and Toker got outta’ the car and started walking from the parking lot into the mill, which as about a fourth of a mile. Even though it was always before daylight, basically night, as they got closer to the gate it got a little brighter from the orange lights that were all over the mill and the surrounding fence. No one really talked, still too early, even for her.
Looks like at least 400 men. What a place to find a man, Gus thought. Look at 'em, all different sizes, shapes, colors, tints, attitudes, married, single, newly divorced. Man, Oh, man, looky-here at all the men!
As they got closer, they started to hearing low voices, to almost whispers, talking about the up- coming day. Above the sound of the low comforting voices of men talking, you could hear belt buckles and tools clacking together along with the heaviness of four hundred sets of steel toed work boots scooting on the white limestone road, stepping on small rocks or kicking the larger ones out of the way. A soft cloud of white dust lingered about knee high. It felt like her father was somewhere close by with the smell of black coffee and fresh heavy starched Carhart and denim shirts. The smell the homemade bacon and egg sandwiches being eaten as they walked thru the project gate; it was soothing smell, every morning. Especially to Gus, it was another smell she was familiar with, the smell of a man going to work. Yes, the smell of a man. The slow gentle walk into the project they were on was a fourth of a mile behind the main paper mill was just enough to wake them up.
Come first break, she ate her apple with Toker. They usually took their morning breaks on top of a huge cement block the size of a Jacked-up Toyota four by four. This block was going to be used to brace, part of a leg for the paper machine they were building. Toker and Gus would mostly talk about the projects we were working on or catch up on family gossip; you know just the normal stuff. Some mornings it was hard to eat, because the paper mills always smell bad. Like rotten eggs on a good day. Just so happens, that this paper mill is in a little town named Evadale. So, everyone in this area says Evadale Evil-smell if the breeze blows from the east! And hot, Lord, that place is hotter than a wet hornet during the summertime, with the thick cement foundations and heat from the paper making machines and chemical running through the pipes of the near-by working machines. Lord, have mercy, it was hot. And the wind almost never blows in plants. After three months out there, Gus decided to cut her hair short, very short. The hair has to go.
*note to my readers: This was page one for my manuscript (MS), but I decided to put it in Gus’ backstory. What do you think?