Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [73]
"They have a new racket around here," he said, twirling the match between his finger and thumb. There was a note of insinuation in his voice, and I looked up from tying my shoe, breathing with conscious evenness.
"What kind of racket?" I said.
"Oh, you know. The wise guys firing the regular guys and putting on you colored college boys. Pretty smart," he said. "That way they don't have to pay union wages."
"How did you know I went to college?" I said.
"Oh, there're about six of you guys out here already. Some up in the testing lab. Everybody knows about that."
"But I had no idea that was why I was hired," I said.
"Forget it, Mac," he said. "It's not your fault. You new guys don't know the score. Just like the union says, it's the wise guys in the office. They're the ones who make scabs out of you -- Hey! we better hurry."
We entered a long, shed-like room in which I saw a series of overhead doors along one side and a row of small offices on the other. I followed the boy down an aisle between endless cans, buckets and drums labeled with the company's trademark, a screaming eagle. The paint was stacked in neatly pyramided lots along the concrete floor. Then, starting into one of the offices, the boy stopped short and grinned.
"Listen to that!"
Someone inside the office was swearing violently over a telephone.
"Who's that?" I asked.
He grinned. "Your boss, the terrible Mr. Kimbro. We call him 'Colonel,' but don't let him catch you."
I didn't like it. The voice was raving about some failure of the laboratory and I felt a swift uneasiness. I didn't like the idea of starting to work for a man who was in such a nasty mood. Perhaps he was angry at one of the men from the school, and that wouldn't make him feel too friendly toward me.
"Let's go in," the boy said. "I've got to get back."
As we entered, the man slammed down the phone and picked up some papers.
"Mr. MacDuffy wants to know if you can use this new man," the boy said.
"You damn right I can use him and . . ." the voice trailed off, the eyes above the stiff military mustache going hard.
"Well, can you use him?" the boy said. "I got to go make out his card."
"Okay," the man said finally. "I can use him. I gotta. What's his name?"
The boy read my name off a card.
"All right," he said, "you go right to work. And you," he said to the boy, "get the hell out of here before I give you a chance to earn some of the money wasted on you every payday!"
"Aw, gwan, you slave driver," the boy said, dashing from the room.
Reddening, Kimbro turned to me, "Come along, let's get going."
I followed him into the long room where the lots of paint were stacked along the floor beneath numbered markers that hung from the ceiling. Toward the rear I could see two men unloading heavy buckets from a truck, stacking them neatly on a low loading platform.
"Now get this straight," Kimbro said gruffly. "This is a busy department and I don't have time to repeat things. You have to follow instructions and you're going to be doing things you don't understand, so get your orders the first time and get them right! I won't have time to stop and explain everything. You have to catch on by doing exactly what I tell you. You got that?"
I nodded, noting that his voice became louder when the men across the floor stopped to listen.
"All right," he said, picking up several tools. "Now come over here."
"He's Kimbro," one of the men said.
I watched him kneel and open one of the buckets, stirring a milky brown substance. A nauseating stench arose. I wanted to step away. But he stirred it vigorously until it became glossy white, holding the spatula like a delicate instrument and studying the paint as it laced off the blade, back into the bucket. Kimbro frowned.
"Damn those laboratory blubberheads to hell! There's got to be dope put in every single sonofabitching bucket. And that's what you're going to do, and it's got to be put in so it can be trucked out of here before 11:30." He handed me a white enamel graduate and what looked like a battery hydrometer.
"The idea is to open each bucket and put in ten drops of this stuff," he said. "Then you stir it 'til it disappears. After it's mixed you take this brush and paint out a sample on one of these." He produced a number of small rectangular boards and a small brush from his jacket pocket. "You understand?"