Chapter 12

Bud sat in the far corner of the back row and took notes furiously, seldom looking up to see the professor. He had learned to outline in the sixth grade as part of the school's efforts to improve his reading and now those skills came back to him in a rush. He labeled the top of the page "Causes of the Civil War" and was now on his third row of indentations as the teacher discussed economic factors.

Bud nodded; sure he was not missing any of the main points and wrote very rapidly, using abbreviations wherever he could. When the teacher was well into his description of the railroad systems of the North and the South, Bud raised his hand.

The lecturer stopped talking and looked down at his seating chart. "Mr. Williams? Is that right?"

"Yes sir," Bud said, "would you explain again about which way the railroads ran? I think I missed something there."

"Certainly," the teacher said and he pulled down a big wall map. "In fact I was just about to show you the causes of that problem." He pointed to the railroad lines marked in red. "You see here, all these line running east and west, most of them through Chicago?"

Bud nodded and drew a sketch map into his notes.

Shortly after Jeanne threw him out, Bud lost his job at Ryan's Bodyshop and also stopped working as an assistant coach at the high school. He took a civil service exam and accepted the first job he was offered, a GS 2 temporary appointment as a clerk for the Veteran's Administration.

The job at Ryan's ended with a drunken brawl about a month after the blow up with Jeanne. One or more of his fellow workers had found out that Bud and his clothes had been thrown out of his home and through a slip of the tongue Bud had discovered that a part time worker had told Jeanne about Darlene Winsor. One thing led to another, name calling escalated to shoving and then to punches being thrown and men wrestling about on the floor. In the process, a windshield that was standing on end was knocked to the floor and broken.

Ray Ryan hauled Bud to his messy office, paid him what he was owed and told him to get off the premises. Bud wiped his bloody nose, tried to say something, shook his head and left with his tongue probing at a loosened tooth. Later he found out that the young man he had been punching was the boss's nephew.

The high school coaching work vanished after Bud showed up drunk for the second time in a week.

The VA job was tedious and nearly mindless work in the vast rows of file cabinets under the flat roof of the Munitions Building on the Mall, one of the "temporaries" built during the First World War. Almost all of Bud's fellow employees were young black men and women although the supervisors were white.

Bud's day ended there at 4:30 and he caught a bus to the District Line at Georgia and Alaska, grabbed a bag of Little Tavern hamburgers, the ones the high school kids called "death burgers," got a Coke at the nearby Sunoco station and went to classes at the old Bliss Electrical School from six until 10 PM. The junior college had moved to Takoma Park in the summer of 1950. After hitch-hiking across East West Highway for several months, Bud gave up his room over the grocery store in Bethesda, moved to Silver Spring and found another dollar-a-day place to sleep. Once he got rid of the bed bugs with Flit, it wasn't so bad.

His pay at VA was about the same as he had been earning at the body shop, but the government paid every two weeks instead of weekly and since they paid by check Bud opened an account at Suburban Trust. Jeanne was still using what had been their joint account at the Bank of Bethesda. At her insistence, he deposited every other paycheck to that account and learned to live on about a hundred dollars a month.

He paid $35 on the first of each month for his one-room flat above a tailor shop, bought clothes at Salvation Army store, and packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for his lunch. He had ruefully accepted his father's offer to lend him money to register and pay the college for the courses he took. He bought textbooks second or third hand and lived as frugally as possible except for the nickel bets he made in lunchtime card games down at VA. That habit seldom cost him more than twenty cents once her figured out how to play Tonk.