Joseph Cirelli

Attack from behind

CHAPTER ONE

"I'm as sorry as you are, honey, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Some of the other guys checked with the front office and they said the same thing… Red's the last word on who gets laid off. Until business picks up again after the energy crunch, I'm just out of luck!"

Don Willard had tried to break it to his wife Diane as easily as he could, but there just wasn't any way to camouflage the truth… he was going to be out of a job in thirteen days. The company had suffered from the gas shortage and they were taking the easy way out. Like most businesses, they were laying off people who needed their jobs the most. None of the executives were feeling the pinch, nor the foremen like Red Collins; they were all cozy and secure in their homes out in Forest Acres, not over here on the east side of town worried about where the rent money was going to come from.

He had thought about not telling her, taking the time that the company owed him for leave to look for something else. But what was there in this one-company town? Nothing.

Diane kept a stiff upper lip until Don had finished with the bad news and gone on to work; then, and only then, did she allow herself the luxury of a good cry.

Why now? Oh, God, why now? she sobbed woefully, her pillow already stained with tears. And tonight was supposed to be my big surprise… I was going to tell him I might be pregnant! Pregnant and without a job. Some surprise!

Through sheer force of will, she managed to clean the house and do the laundry and be at the warehouse dock when Don got off at four. He had a ride in the morning, but in the afternoons she always came for him in their five-year-old Chevy. Sometimes they would stop for dinner at one of the town's five eating places. They weren't classy enough to be called restaurants, but the two of them had figured it out that they could eat about as cheaply as cooking at home, as long as they stayed dear of the expensive meats and stuck with chicken and pork.

She was a little early arriving at the dock and Red was outside at the tiny podiumlike desk that he kept, checking over the day's worksheets and manifests.

Red was a coarse looking man, the kind of man, she imagined, that would be a tough sergeant in the Marines. With his short-sleeve shirt on, she could see the Korean War vintage tattoos on his muscled, upper arms. He even wore his hair like they did then, in an antiquated crew-cut that everyone laughed about – behind his back, of course, for Red wasn't the kind of man to take kidding. He lived alone since his wife had left him three years before. Some of the old-timers said that she ran away with a salesman from up north, anxious for a shot at a better life somewhere away from this forgotten, decaying town in the Carolina coastal plain.

Evansboro was, no different from a thousand other towns just like it. Once thriving and on the junction of two rail lines, with its own railway passenger station, it bore the promise of growth and prosperity. That is, until both lines cut out their passenger traffic and, finally, pared their shipping along this spur line to the bone. Talk of a boom-town faded quickly, and the younger people started moving west or north, anywhere that offered the hope of a good-paying job and a better life.