Read Online Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood - Free Book Online Page B

hands fluttering loose like a couple of schoolbooks. “Fold your arms,” Barbie tells him, so he does, and there he is on the videotape we’ve got, America’s backbone, my big brother the union prez, arms folded over his scratchy denim shirt, delivering some overcooked spaghetti of an opinion about solidarity and corporate barracudas and the Founding Fathers. I love Roy, but the man can’t string two sentences together. The viewing public must have thought America’s backbone had slipped a disk. Bing didn’t say much, just nodded a lot, looking sort of mean and squinty-eyed, which he is not in real life.
    The night he crossed, Timmy came over to Elaine and Bing’s to confess before the fact. At the time he was living in the apartment on West Main with that dishrag of a cat he had practically on life support. He’d always been like that, sentimental, still wore a shirt my mother gave him in junior high. I’d like to know if he has that shirt now; that, and the rabbit’s foot I gave him for his twelfth birthday. The night he came over to see us at Elaine’s, he kept taking the rabbit’s foot out, rolling it between his palms likea worry stone. We’d just gotten back from a rally and had turned on the late news to find out what the cameras had caught. The florid face of Henry John McCoy, CEO of Atlantic Pulp & Paper, flared onto the screen, his small mouth working as he stood in front of some Manhattan skyscraper after an acrid negotiation session that had lasted exactly nine minutes.
    “The guy has a point,” Timmy said, standing between us and the TV.
    Bing turned down the sound. “What did you say?” he asked Tim, and then we all got up in a confused shuffle, as if we were at a party and it was time to look over the buffet table.
    “Nothing,” Timmy said. “He’s got shareholders to answer to, that’s all.” His face seemed flushed; he’d skipped the rally for a date with one of the dimpled girlfriends he’d been auditioning for the role of his future wife.
    “Shareholders?” I said. In the entire history of our family I don’t believe the word
shareholders
had ever come up in conversation, not even during my father’s nightly vocabulary drills back when we were kids, long before Timmy was born. Out came the rabbit’s foot again, rolling along his palms.
    “I can’t afford to wait around anymore,” he said. “I’m a short-timer.” He’d been in the mill two years, since his high school graduation, a pin-drop of time, and here he was talking to us about waiting. “Danny,” he said, turning to me, which he always did in times of uncertainty; I could feel the heat of his confusion trained on me. “They’re paying me eighteen bucks an hour, Danny,” he said. “How do I explain the strike to some stiff flipping burgers at the mall?” Which is not at all the point, not at all.
    “Talk to him, Danny,” Elaine said just under her breath.Bing said something, too, that I didn’t quite catch. It was so quiet you could hear a rumble of news emanating from the muted television.
    “Union’s like family,” I said finally. “You stick by them even if they’re wrong.”
    “Which they’re not,” Roy added.
    “Which they’re not,” I said.
    Tim has this thing he does, he peers at you from beneath a heavy wave of blondish hair that grazes his eyebrows, as if to remind you that you’re worth looking up to. If he says something that doesn’t square, you hardly notice it because you’re thinking about how if you had a son you’d want it to be him.
    “It’s a business, not a charity,” he said, those gray eyes skimming across us: me, Elaine and Bing, Roy and his wife, Eppy. Sonny was at the union hall manning the phones, and his wife, Jill, was working the food bank with their two boys. The rest of the kids were in bed, either upstairs or next door at Roy’s.
    “This is the kind of crap they teach in high school these days,” Roy snapped. “Like good faith doesn’t count, or