Fun Reads by Rich Schram

Kevin Solter leaned against the pickup’s side panel and gave its rear tire a half-hearted kick. “Dude, it’s not working out. Probation’s only ninety days, and if I don’t get good evals, I’m gone. They’ll can my ass. Know they will.”   At the driver’s side of the truck, his friend Darrell Buckner slugged down the remainder of a soda and tossed the empty can into the truck bed. It settled among a collection of toolboxes and spooled wire. “C’mon, buddy. What are friends for? You get on my crew, we’ll help you out. You know that.” He patted the truck bed’s rear panel with the same reassuring nonchalance as his promise. Solter’s face tightened and he dug at a bit of dirt with the toe of his boot. He said, “What about your foreman? Heard he’s tough.” Buckner said something unintelligible and spread his open palms in front of his chest. “All foremen are SOBs. You gotta know how to handle ‘em. Quit worrying. I’ll take care of you.” He was three or four years older than So...

It was a scene from years past. The toddler was fearless, and I saw no impropriety as he slipped onto Andreas Bauernsohn ’s lap. Although in his late eighties , he remained big-boned after decades of heavy labor, clutching the arms of his chair with fingers as round as hammer handles. His fingernails, trimmed with a jack-knife, were nicotine stained and thick as a leather belt. I appreciated his sturdy plainness. As a great-grandfather to the little boy among that gathering of children, parents, and grandparents, he smelled of kindness, bath soap, and . . . mothballs. Mothballs! By the gods of the ages. I was there to judge his worth and he assaulted me with mothballs. Holy oracles with stone tablets! Other than house flies and mosquitoes, mothballs were one of my few failures; they pained my ethereal nose so much I wanted to go old-testament and smite the old man dead. Hellfire and damnation! Sometimes my job was tougher than being a Presidential spokesperson. Smite? Don’t smite?...