Les Greenleaf and my dad, Ben Austin, had served in the same outfit during the Vietnam War, and twenty-five years later they could spend whole afternoons swapping war stories. They both grew up in Everett, a town thirty miles north of Seattle. And they both worked at the same place, since my dad was a sawyer at Greenleaf Sash and Door, Inc.

Aside from that, they couldn’t have been much more opposite. Les Greenleaf was a Catholic, a Republican, and a member of the National Association of Manufacturers. My dad was a Methodist, a Democrat, and a member of the AFL-CIO. Les Greenleaf had investments, and Ben Austin lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were on opposite sides of just about any fence you could think of.

“Buddyship,” though, tends to jump over all kinds of fences. I guess that when people are shooting at you, you get attached to the guy who’s covering your butt.

Back during the late sixties, staying out of the army and the war in ‘Nam had been every young man’s major goal in life. Rich kids could get a student deferment if they were smart enough to get into college, but working-class kids had to take their chances.

Les and my dad both graduated from high school in 1967. My dad promptly married pretty Pauline Baker, his high-school sweetheart and went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door.

Les Greenleaf enrolled in the University of Washington, joined a fraternity, and majored in parties. He flunked out at the end of his sophomore year.

My dad had evidently had a little spat with mom, and just to show her how independent he was, he enlisted in the army—something he might not have done if he’d been completely sober. He
was
, however, sober enough to sign on for only
two
years rather than the customary six.

As it turned out, Les Greenleaf was inducted on the same day, so they started out together. My mom had been pregnant—with me—during her little argument with dad, which might have explained why she’d been so grouchy.

Anyway, Ben and Les went off to war, and mom stayed home and sulked.

I was about a year and a half old when they got out of the army, and I was among the guests at the wedding of Mr. Lester Greenleaf and Miss Inga Wurzberger. I was the one who slept through the whole ceremony. Inga was obviously of German extraction—Bavarian, I think—and she’d been a sorority girl at U.W. while Les was concentrating on cutting classes. The wedding had taken place in a Catholic church, and I guess my dad had been a little uncomfortable about that—but buddyship prevailed.

Inga and my mom got along well together, and starting back when I was still a toddler, we often visited the Greenleafs in their fancy home in a posh district of Everett. Since I was absolutely adorable in those days, I was always the center of attention during those visits, and I thought that was sort of nice.

My time in the limelight came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Inga blossomed and bore fruit—a pair of twin girls, Regina and Renata, who definitely outclassed me on the adorability front. As I remember, I was fairly sullen about the whole thing.

Regina and Renata were identical twins—so identical that not even Inga could tell them apart—and when they first started talking, it wasn’t English they were speaking. I’m told it’s not uncommon for twins to have a private language, but “twin-speak” is supposed to fade out before the pair get into kindergarten. Regina and Renata kept their private dialect fully operational all the way into high school.

There was a whacko social theory at that time to the effect that twins would grow up psychotic if they were dressed alike. Inga blithely ignored it and followed the ancient custom of putting the girls in identical dresses every morning, the sole difference being a red hair ribbon for Regina and a blue one for Renata. She carefully checked their little gold name bracelets every morning to be certain she wasn’t getting them mixed up. I think it was those hair ribbons that set the girls off on what the Greenleafs called the twin-game. Regina and Renata swapped ribbons three or four times a day, and as soon as they learned how to undo the clasps on their name bracelets, all hope of certainty went out the window.

Those two had all sorts of fun with that twin-game, but now when I think back, maybe they were trying to tell us something. The pretty little blond girls had no real sense of individual identity. I don’t think either one ever used the word “I.” It was always “we” with Regina and Renata. They’d even answer to either name.

That bugged their parents, but it didn’t particularly bother me.
My
solution to the “identification crisis” was to simply address them indiscriminately as Twinkie and to refer to them collectively as the Twinkie Twins. That made the girls a little grumpy right at first, but after a while it seemed to fit into their conception of themselves, and they stopped using their given names and began to address each other as either Twinkie or Twink—even when they were using their private language.

In a peculiar way, that got me included in their private group. Our families were close to begin with, and because I was seven years older than they were, the chubby, golden-haired twins looked upon me as a big brother. I had to tie their shoes, wipe their noses, and put the wheels back on their tricycles when they came off. Every time they broke something they’d assure each other that “Markie can fix it.” Every now and then, one of them would slip and say something to me in twin-speak, and they always seemed a little disappointed and even sad when I didn’t understand what they were saying.

As their official surrogate brother, I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the company of the Twinkie Twins, and I learned to ignore their cutesy-poo habit of whispering to each other, casting sly looks at me, and giggling. By the time I moved up into high-school—an event most adolescents view as something akin to a religious experience—I was more or less immune to their antics.

In May of my sophomore year, I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. My dad firmly advised me that the family car was
not
available, but he promised to check at the union hall for job opportunities for young fellows in need of a summer job. I wasn’t too hopeful, but he came home with an evil sort of grin on his face. “You’ve got a job at a sawmill, Mark,” he told me.

“No kidding?” I was a little startled.

“Nope. You go to work on the Monday after school lets out.”

“What am I going to be doing?”

“Pulling chain.”

“What’s ‘pulling chain’?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

I found out why I wouldn’t after I’d joined the union and reported to work. I also found out why there were
always
job openings in sawmills when the job involves the green chain. Sawmills convert logs from the woods into planks. After a green hemlock log has spent six or eight weeks in the millpond soaking up salt water, it gets
very
heavy, and it’s so waterlogged that it sends out a spray when it goes through the saw. The planks come slithering out of the mill on a wide bed of rollers called the green chain. They’re rough, covered with splinters, and almost as heavy as iron. “Pulling chain” involves hauling those rough-sawed planks off the rollers and stacking them in piles. It’s a moderately un-fun job. More-modern sawmills have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and stacking, but the sawmill where I worked that summer hadn’t changed very much since the 1920s, so we did things the old-fashioned way. I didn’t like the job very much, but I really,
really
wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.

I’d been an indifferent student at best up until then, but after the summer of ’86, my attitude changed. There might just be a doctoral dissertation in psychology there—
The Motivational Impact of the Green Chain
maybe. I became a much more serious student after that summer, let me tell you.

Pulling chain
did
earn me enough money to buy my own car, of course, and that’s very important to red-blooded sixteen-year-olds, since it’s widely known in that group that “You ain’t nothin’ if you ain’t got wheels.” The Twinkie Twins weren’t very impressed by my not-very-shiny black ’74 Dodge, but I didn’t buy it to impress
them
. They were only third graders and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were blond, still chubby with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the tomboy stage of development.

Time rushed on in the endless noon of my adolescence, and it seemed that before I’d turned around twice, graduation day was staring me in the face. The gloomy prospect of pulling chain loomed in front of me, but good old Les Greenleaf stepped in at that point. I’m sure there was a certain amount of collusion involved when right after my high-school graduation an opening “just happened” to show up at the door factory, and my dad presented me with my reactivated union card. The Monday after graduation I went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door. I was now a worker. I even went to union meetings.

I think the highlight of my first year at the door factory came on the day when all the kids in Everett had to go back to school, but I didn’t. My delight lasted for almost a whole week. Then it gradually dawned on me that I actually missed going to school. That green-chain scare in the summer of my sophomore year had turned me into a semiserious student during my last two years at school, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. The door factory only filled forty hours a week, and my dad had our television set permanently locked on the sports channels. I’ve always been fairly certain that the world won’t come to an end if the Seattle Seahawks don’t make it into the Super Bowl. I took to reading to fill up the empty hours, and by the summer of 1990, I’d plowed my way through a sizable chunk of the Everett Public Library.

Just for kicks, I took an evening course at the local community college in the autumn quarter of that year, and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how easy it’d been.

I took another course during the winter quarter, and that one was even easier.

I latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community college that winter, and we both skipped the spring quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I started taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn’t really have any kind of academic goal; you might just say I was majoring in everything.

Wouldn’t Everything 101 be an interesting course title?

That went on for a couple years, and by then I’d racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My dad didn’t say anything about my snooping around the edges of the world of learning, but he
was
keeping track of my progress.

There was another strong odor of collusion about what happened in late November of 1992. We’d been invited to the Greenleafs’ for Thanksgiving dinner, and after we’d all eaten too much, my dad and the boss got involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only four saws, and orders were starting to back up because each saw could only cut so much door stock in eight hours. This meant that the boss had to pay a lot of overtime, which was great for the sawyers right at first, but after it got to be a habit, there was a lot of grumbling about ten- or twelve-hour days. The solution was fairly simple. It’s called swing shift. One sawyer would have to work from four in the afternoon until half past midnight. There’d now be five sawyers instead of four, and the boss wouldn’t have to buy a new saw or pay overtime.

Guess who got elected for swing shift. And guess who’d now have all kinds of free time during the normal daytime hours at Everett Community College. And guess who was coerced into taking a full course load. And guess who was the only one in the room who didn’t know this was coming.

You guessed ’er, Chester.

I think the Twinkie Twins got more entertainment out of this elaborate scam than anybody else did. They were high-school freshmen now, but they’d reverted to whispering in twin-speak, giving me those sickeningly cute smirks, and giggling.

I carried a full course load in both the winter and spring quarters in 1993, and that satisfied the requirements for graduation. It’d taken me four years to reach the point that a full-time student achieves in two, but I was now an Associate in Arts and Sciences—with honors, no less. And I had a major in English, but with a lot of those “everything” courses that didn’t apply.

I went through the cap and gown ceremony with the Austins and Greenleafs in the audience, and after the ceremony we all went back to Greenleaf Manor for another of those “let’s steer Mark in the right direction” sessions at which I was usually outnumbered six to one.

Inga Greenleaf led the assault. “What in the world were you thinking of, Mark?” she demanded, waving a copy of my transcript at me. “Your grades are very good, but half the courses you took weren’t even remotely connected to your major.”

“I didn’t
have
a major when I started, Inga,” I explained. “I was just browsing. It was only after a year or so that I finally settled on English.”

“There are some definite holes in this,” she told me, still brandishing my transcript. “I’ve checked with the University of Washington, and you’ll have to take a couple of courses this summer to fill in the gaps. Les has contacts with some local banks, and your grades are good enough to qualify you for a student loan.”

I threw a quick look at my dad. We’d already discussed
that
at some length. He shook his head slightly.

“I’m sorry, Inga,” I said flatly. “Let’s just forget that student loan business. Sooner or later, I’m going to have a mortgage on a house biting chunks out of my paychecks, and probably car payments as well—that ol’ Dodge can’t run forever. I’m not going to add a student loan on top of that. I
won’t
hand three-quarters of my paycheck to the Last National Bank to pay interest. I’ll look for a part-time job, but no jobbee, no schoolie, and that’s final.”

“Oh, goodie!” one of the twins said, clapping her hands together. “We get to keep him!”

“Shush, Twink,” her mother snapped. I don’t think she even realized that my Twinkie invention had crept into her vocabulary.

BOOK: Regina's Song

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