Killshot

all A’s in school. You could go on to college and become a computer programmer. You keep seeing that ironworker he’ll talk you into doing things you’ll be sorry for. You’ll get pregnant sure as hell and then you’ll have to get married.”

Wayne said, “I would never make you do anything you don’t want to,” giving Carmen a wink.

Lenore said, “A girl as attractive as you, with your cute figure, can do better than an ironworker, believe me. You know what’s going to happen? You’ll be stuck in a house full of babies while he’s out having a good time with the boys. Once you’re married you’ll never see him.”

Wayne said, “What do I do? I go fishing once in a while, deer hunting in November. I’m in a softball league but you come to the games, and I bowl, yeah, but that’s all. No more than what other guys do.”

Lenore said, “At least live in Port Huron, so I can be nearby when you need company, ’cause you’re gonna.”

Carmen had taken a course in handwriting analysis, A Guide to Character and Personality, at the Y when she was a senior in high school. One evening in a bar, just to double-check her own judgment, she asked Wayne to write something, for instance about the job he was working on, and she’d analyze it. He didn’t even hesitate. She watched as he wrote fairly fast with a moderate right-handed slant, forming large letters of uniform size. Carmen was relieved to tell him his writing showed he was reliable, enthusiastic and sociable—Wayne nodding—and that his big middle zone indicated the size of his ego, but was probably necessary for anyone who did structural work. She told him she liked his upper-zone dynamics, the way he crossed his t, putting the bar above the stem, pretty sure it meant he was witty in a satirical kind of way. The even pressure of his writing showed he had a strong will and that when he was told what to do it had better make sense. She said uneven pressure meant emotional instability. Wayne said, “Or your pen’s running out of ink.”

Carmen told her mom, see? He was not only reliable, he was funny. Lenore said, “How come I keep asking, but you never do my handwriting?” The reason was because Carmen knew her mom’s hand and had not seen anything good to say about it. Her uneven spaces and lack of style values showed indecision plus an inability to think clearly. She couldn’t tell her mom that, because her wide-spaced t stem showed she was easily hurt and would take offense.

Carmen and Wayne were married in Port Huron at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in May 1968. They moved into a two-bedroom ranch in Sterling Heights and Matthew was born the following March.

Within the next few years Carmen had a series of miscarriages due to what the doctor called endometriosis and finally had to have a hysterectomy. She was quiet for months, let her housework slip and watched TV thinking about the two boys and two girls she and Wayne had talked about having. Wayne told her Matthew was a handful and a half, that boy was plenty. Twice during her depression Wayne drove the three of them to Florida to see Carmen’s dad. Maybe getting out helped a little.

But Carmen brought herself back to life. She remembered her book on handwriting analysis saying that if you weren’t happy or lacked confidence in yourself you should examine your handwriting, paying particular attention to the way you wrote the personal pronoun I. As soon as Carmen got into it she said, “Holy shit.” Her handwriting was okay for the most part, but there was more of a backward slant to it now, it was light, weak, and look at the way she was making her I, like a small

2. That became the starting point, changing her capital I to a printed letter with no frills, like an l; that showed insight, an ability to analyze her own feelings. She devised a clear, straight up-and-down script, one that said she lived in the present, was self-reliant, somewhat reserved, a person whose intellect and reasoning power influenced emotions. It seemed so natural to write this way, making that I a bit taller as she practiced, keeping her letters squarely in the center of her Emotional Expression chart, that finally she had the confidence to write in her new script, “What are you moping around for? Get up off your butt and do something.”

Her mom retired from Michigan Bell but couldn’t stay away from the telephone. She’d call Carmen every day to give her recipes Carmen never used, or to talk about the weather in detail, the arrogance of doctors who made her wait knowing she was suffering excruciating back pain, eventually getting around to Wayne. “What time did the man of the house get home last night? If it was before seven you’re lucky, depending how you look at it. If you don’t mind that booze on his breath when he comes in and gives you a kiss then you’re different than I am, I won’t say another word.”

Wayne said, “You’d have to wire her jaw shut.”

He knew Lenore was talkative without ever having seen the way she left her vowels open at the top when she wrote. Her small d and g also.

Wayne would list different reasons why ironworkers stopped off after. It was too goddamn noisy to talk on the job and it sure wasn’t anyplace to get in an argument. Raising iron, it was best to extend a certain amount of courtesy to others and settle any differences you have on the ground. Also, structural work was stressful; you come down off a job you needed to unwind. Like walking a horse after a race.

Yeah, but why couldn’t he unwind at home? Carmen said she’d walk with him. Then sit down and have a beer and he could help Matthew with his homework for a change. Wayne said what was wrong with eating a little later? Carmen said yeah, eight or nine being the fashionable hour to dine in Sterling Heights.

She didn’t pout, whine or nag him. What Carmen did, once Matthew was in junior high, busy with sports after school, she got a job at Warren Truck Assembly on the chassis line. Wayne said if it was what she felt like doing, fine. What he said when she got home later than he did, Wayne in the kitchen frying hamburger for their starving boy, was, “What happened, you have car trouble?”

Carmen said, “I work a whole shift with that air wrench, eight hours bolting on drag links and steering arms in all that noise, I need to unwind after.”

Wayne said, “See? If you feel that way working on the line, imagine coming off a structure after ten hours.”

Carmen said, “I like to be with you.” She did, he was a nice guy and she loved him. What he drank never changed his personality, it made him horny if anything. “Isn’t there something we can do together?”

Wayne said, “Outside of visit your mom and pretend we’re as dumb as she is?”

“I mean some kind of work or business we could both get into,” Carmen said, “and be together more.”

“Wear matching outfits,” Wayne said, “and enter ballroom-dancing contests. Tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t doing laundry and dusting and making pies. I don’t even know how to make pies.”

“I noticed that.”

“And I don’t care to learn, either.”

“You’re sorry now you didn’t become a computer programmer.”

“That must be it,” Carmen said. “I love machines that talk back to you, cars that tell you the door isn’t closed or you don’t have your seat belt on.”

“You want to be independent. Like me.”

Carmen said, “You guys are individualists all doing the same thing. Remember hippies? You’re like hippies only you work.” Wayne had to think about that one. She said, “I could stay at Warren Truck and work on the line. I think I can do anything I put my mind to. I could even go to apprentice school and become an ironworker.” She said, “You have women now—how does that sound to you?” knowing it would embarrass him, just the idea of it.

“We have one woman journeyman, I mean journey-person, and a half dozen apprentices out of twenty-two hundred in the local.” He told her you had to be a certain type to be an ironworker, man or woman. “You’re too sweet and nice and . . . girlish.”

She said, “Thanks a lot.”

They moved into the farmhouse and it kept her busy, Carmen doing more of the fixing up than Wayne, who was handier with a thirty-five-pound impact wrench than a hammer and saw. He borrowed a tractor with a brush- hog twice a year to keep the field cut and have a clear view of the tree line. Carmen, thinking of moneymaking ideas, got him to clean out the chickenhouse, believing someday it could be made into a bed-and-breakfast place; cater to duck hunters and boaters who came up from Detroit and got too smashed to drive home. Wayne said, “We’ll call it the Chickenshit Inn. I never seen so much chickenshit in my life as out there.” Carmen planted a vegetable garden in the backyard. Every spring Wayne put in a row of corn out by the woods and let the deer help themselves to it in August.