JOYCE CAROL OATES
373
since he was fifteen, sixteen years old, he'd been a wise guy then and
had actually told one of the priests at the high school to go screw, his
buddies remembered that to this day. The priests had expelled him
for a month, his father'd had to plead with them to take him back.
Now he tried not to think about religion at all. He'd be angry if he
did so he tried not to think about it, stayed away from arguing with
his family or his in-laws. He had a bad temper and the thing about a
bad temper, his father always said, the dangerous thing, is that you
lose it at the wrong time, you get the wrong people.
His wife Marian went to mass most Sundays, low mass at
10
A.M.
said by an older priest who never took more than a half–
hour. Harvey made remarks, Harvey made jokes, why the hell did
she bother when she didn't believe in most of that crap, and Marian
said, flaring up at once, "A human being has got to believe in some–
thing, so keep your mouth to yourself." He thought it was funny,
that's all. He just had to laugh, that's all, people believing crap being
shoved at them year after year, it'd been going on for thousands of
years in fact, he was only making the observation.
Still, he went along with the family, wanted to have his kids
baptized, you never could tell about things like that - it was a way of
betting after all. He didn't, he told his buddies, want to fuck up
things for his kids if the Church was maybe right.
These past few months he'd been coiled tight as a spring, dis–
tracted, irritable, not really himself. He'd light a cigarette and put it
down somewhere and forget it, then light another, coughing in a new
harsh way that sounded angry, his little boy ducked away with his
hands over his ears which Harvey didn't like to see. Marian com–
plained that he had a habit of working his mouth like he was arguing
with someone, she wished he'd cut it out. It's really weird, she said,
you should see yourself. He wasn't arguing with anybody, he knew
that, but he did a lot of thinking, how it was time for his luck to
change, he'd been laid off at the plant and rehired and laid off again
and again rehired and these days you only knew from week to week
how long you'd be working, it burnt his ass, he said, no overtime for
anybody not even the guys with thirty years seniority. There was a
rumor also that the plant itself might close and relocate in Kentucky,
or was it Tennessee, one of those shithead states, another rumor that
the owners were stockpiling, keeping it all quiet, in case of a strike.
What's the point of a strike, Harvey went around saying in a
voice heavy with sarcasm, why not fire bomb the dump instead?–
it'd add up to the same thing.
