Two years ago he’d thought this was a vacation job, something to keep him out of the hellhole of a summer kitchen at the Lucky Eight restaurant in downtown Irving. Two years ago he’d enjoyed the irony of the fact (or what he’d believed then would be the fact) that he was working security at the plant where soon he hoped to be making a living as an aeronautical engineer.
That first summer he’d made his beat a constant one. While Jeff and Lyle huddled together and played gin rummy with their backs to the security screens, Chuck had walked every inch of the place, soaking up every aspect of the first aircraft-engineering plant he’d ever be a part of – even if he was just security for now. Soon he’d be part of it for real, testing, improving, hypothesizing, showing them all how good he could be.
He wanted so badly to show everyone how good he was, and graduating top of his class in aeronautical engineering at the age of twenty-three was no bad way to start. Chuck was the first person in his family to go to university, and he was already the biggest success in his particular branch of Zhong family history. That was what his parents always said anyway, not wanting to disrespect their ancestors by setting Chuck up as the evolutionary pinnacle of the entire Zhong dynasty.
But, hell, thought Chuck, to find someone who’d done better you’d have to go back to goddamn Genghis Khan or some such shit. If he discovered that a Zhong had built the Great Wall single-handed, then maybe – just maybe – he’d concede defeat.
But that success was two years ago.
For the thousandth time since he’d got the job, Chuck ran his flashlight across the rows of parts waiting to be packed and shipped, each with an FAA Form 8130-3 attached – its own birth certificate, a white docket of authentication that allowed airlines to trust a million lives to each tiny part.
That was the pinnacle, as far as he was concerned. These gleaming, virgin pieces of metal, tooled and machined and filed and polished until their surfaces were jewels, precious gems in reverse, which had begun pristine and priceless and would be buried in the innards of an engine for the rest of their lives, fated for their beauty to be hidden from all eyes but those of common grease-monkeys. Their appreciation could never match his, of course, but they would at least treat those metal jewels with respect every time they were exposed to the light of maintenance.
Chuck Zhong sighed heavily. The production line was starting to turn from a thrill to a taunt and – not for the first time – he laid the blame for everything that had gone wrong in his life at the door of his parents.
They had been in Texas for forty-seven years, transported as children to a new world from an ancient one in the wake of the war, with no expectations other than avoiding starvation. They had met in Irving, married in Irving and – apart from a single trip to China – Chuck couldn’t remember the last time they’d been outside Irving. Maybe they never had. They hardly went outside the Lucky Eight.
Neither Ling nor Tong Zhong could speak English, and Chuck’s Cantonese was so rusty that he barely spoke to his parents any more. He hardly saw them, now that he’d chosen not to sweat himself into a pork-scented grave in the restaurant kitchen. They had brought up three children and had named them Chuck, Billy and Mary-Lou, as if their names alone would earn them a welcome in a place where at best they would never feel accepted, and where at worst they’d suffer lifelong discrimination.
Chuck felt a familiar hot anger rise in him at his parents’ ignorance. He always tried to suppress it but he never could. If they’d meant so well, why not move to a city that had a decent Chinese-American population, where they wouldn’t stick out like sore thumbs? If they were so keen on integrating, why had they never bothered learning English? Then maybe Chuck wouldn’t have had to spend his childhood interrupting his homework to translate from drunken Texan to Cantonese, and watching rednecks laugh at his father’s mangled greeting at the door of the Lucky Eight, or see them pull their own eyes into slits and mimic his mother’s smiles as she asked them to say the number of their orders off the arduous menu. Chuck’s parents could count to 125 in English. He knew, because that was the greatest number of dishes the Lucky Eight menu had ever offered to the rude, loud populace of Irving, Texas.
He knew his parents had made every conceivable sacrifice to keep the three of them in school, let alone Chuck’s four years at Texas State. But he still hated them, and it was a hate they, and he, could do nothing about, because he hated what they were and what they would always be.
Texas State had finally sprung him from the Lucky Eight, and from his own heritage. There were other Chinese kids there. Not many, but some, although Chuck steered clear of them. And Mexicans too – so many Mexican students that the white boys were less likely to be overtly racist, simply out of self-preservation. Chuck was pleased to discover that the white students hated the Mexicans so much that a Chinese classmate was almost a relief. For the first time in his life he didn’t feel like the bottom rung of the ladder, and it was heady stuff.
He excelled at his studies and went out for the baseball team until his final year, when he did nothing but work.
He even got a white girlfriend, Verity, although he never told his parents about her. He knew they wanted him to marry someone from the old country – from the old village, preferably.
Chuck had been to the old village once on a trip it had taken his parents six years to save for. It had made him sick to his stomach. The mud was made of shit and the extended Zhong family had cut the throat of a small white dog for the homecoming feast. Chuck had cried and his father had slapped his face in embarrassment. Years later when Chuck had graduated, his father had wept loudly through the ceremony, drawing sniggers from the other students, and Chuck had wanted to slap him back.
When he’d made his application for one of three entry-level WAE engineering vacancies, he’d pointed out with some pride that he’d taken this summer job in order to be close to the action. Or, at least, closer to the action than he’d have been at the Lucky Eight or at McDonald’s. Chuck liked to think he had a sense of humour, and that other people appreciated it. And he liked to think that the humility he’d shown in pointing out his own humble beginnings at WAE would translate into the sort of paternal admiration that would lead to a job offer.
Chuck had been wrong.
He had waited three weeks for an invitation to an interview that never came. Then, on 13 September, alone in the human-resources department, he’d found a letter addressed to himself in the out-tray. Chuck thought he’d save them time and a stamp.
Inside were three impersonal lines saying his application had been unsuccessful.
Chuck had almost fainted. He actually felt the room swim around him, like something from a movie-of-the-week melodrama.
He didn’t tell his parents. He didn’t tell anybody; he could barely acknowledge the shame himself. He kept going to work, kept hoping that someone somewhere had made a terrible mistake, that it would all be okay in the end.
It wasn’t.
Over the next month he noticed a change in three of the desks in Engineering. New people had taken up residence – three new engineers fresh out of college, who left little clues to who they might be. A photo of a WASPy girlfriend and a teddy-bear clutching a heart that read ‘Congratulations’ on one desk. On the second, a hefty gilt trophy declaring Neil Abbotsham to be the 2007 Northwest Collegiate backstroke champion.
But it was the third newly occupied desk that cut Chuck to the quick. First he noticed there was a footstool in front of the chair. Then a few nights later he found a box of tampons in the not-yet-cluttered drawer.
A woman.
A woman had taken his job.
There had been two women on his aeronautical-engineering course. One had dropped out after getting pregnant in her sophomore year. The other was a willowy, spot-ridden girl called Fern Lipschitz. Fern wouldn’t have needed a footstool: she was taller than Chuck.
He didn’t know who this woman was, but he hated her anyway. In his mind, he knew he must have been bumped because of some ridiculous quota to be filled, whatever the quality of the applicant.
Chuck took the tampons with him, then tipped the whole box into the single, little-used ladies’ toilet. They swelled in an instant and clogged the pan. When he flushed, only half of them disappeared. There was an ominous gurgling sound and the returning water crept high up the sides of the bowl. Maintenance would have to be alerted before the toilet could be used. He hoped it would cause the woman inconvenience and embarrassment. But, even if she got sacked for blocking the toilet, and bled to death on the way home for want of a tampon, she would not suffer one-tenth of what he was suffering right now.
He stayed in the security job out of a self-destructive need to show he could take the rejection. And from fear of being dragged back to the Lucky Eight if he was unemployed for more than about twenty-five minutes.
Once he saw the woman who had stolen his job working late. She was a girl, really, early twenties; small and pretty. Maybe Vietnamese. She’d looked up and said, ‘Hi,’ as he stuck his head round the office door. He didn’t say anything, just started strolling round the small office as if it was part of his beat. He knew she was uncomfortable – a woman alone in a deserted building at night, with some creepy, silent security guard prowling around her – and it gave him a thrill. After that he always looked forward to checking her office, but she didn’t work late again. Or she took her work home.
The work he should’ve been taking home with him.
*
Just as Chuck was coming to the slow conclusion that being a security guard for ever was possibly not the way to make the world pay for appointing the quota bitch in his place, Lyle got fired from the WAE plant for blowing Jeff in the engineers’ office.
Chuck was surprised by every aspect of the sordid episode.
He was surprised that they swung that way; surprised they could be so stupid; surprised that the day staff had bothered reviewing the night tapes, which showed the deed in grainy black-and-white; surprised that Jeff somehow didn’t get fired; surprised because he’d never seen Lyle or Jeff anywhere but the security office; and most surprised of all by how hard Lyle fought to keep his job. Chuck heard he’d actually cried when they’d told him he was canned. You’d have sworn the guy was pulling down a hundred grand per annum, instead of a lousy twenty-one and a half before taxes.
Come to think of it – and Chuck eventually did come to think of it – Chuck was also surprised by how Lyle managed to be driving a neat, two-year-old Suzuki 4 × 4 instead of the piles of rusted steel he and Jeff drove.
Now it was just him and Jeff, alone in the security office at night, until they could replace Lyle. Jeff was older than Chuck and a lot bigger; the two of them stepped warily around each other and Chuck made even more rounds than normal. They didn’t speak about Lyle.
But somebody else did.
