Anger

24 July 2009

“Lumpy J. if you’re nasty!” Maxx called it out as Lumpy stepped into the office. I’d been gone on R&R for the previous two weeks and so the inside joke was wasted on me. Lumpy laughed a goofy laugh and began his report. “I checked on da Tank Wash and everything looked OK dere. I checked da bus stop and everything looked OK dere.” Lumpy habitually changed his TH’s into D’s—dis, dat, dose, dese, dem, dere. “I’m gonna go down to Fuels and take care a’ da report fer dem.” Lumpy’s large, round face had a serious look on it, full of concentration, as if he were trying not to let his feelings show. He turned without any further comments and walked out of the office. I thought it was pretty uncharacteristic of Lumpy to keep his words from spilling out. He’s never been able to do that before. In fact, one day Maxx and I watched him driving the white pickup truck past us on the road. He was alone in the cab of the truck but he was chatting away with some unseen rider. He’s never been able to hold his words in before.

A month and a half before this, Lumpy came in to the office one morning with a hand that was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. “What happened to your hand!” Dawg was dumbfounded at the sight. “I must a’ hit it in da shower or somethin’. I don’t know.” Maxx was right on Dawg’s tail. “What the hell happened to your hand!” Lumpy chuckled as he swooped his hands in a wide, circling gesture. “I don’t know. I must a’ hit it in da shower or somethin’.” He was examined by the medic and then by the military doctor. The Army doctor was fresh out of medical school and a first deployment soldier. He was the only real doctor on the base, but he’d received all of the required training in treating trauma victims and he’d spent his residency working in the emergency room. “Are you certain that you weren’t stung by a scorpion? Are you allergic to anything? You’re going to need to go home for treatment. We can’t help you here. This is going to require some sophisticated tests to determine what’s happened.” Lumpy was sent home for several weeks.

I left to go back home for R&R while Lumpy was out of the country and so I wasn’t in on the big inside joke about his new nickname, “Lumpy J. if you’re nasty,” but I used my own imagination to come up with the possibilities. It was an inside joke between Maxx and Lumpy, but Lumpy was only laughing on the outside. It became apparent later that his true feelings were slowly smoldering on the inside.

Lumpy returned from his state-side medical treatment after a month away from the camp and the first thing he did upon his return was to walk into Maxx’s office and ask for his next R&R! Maxx was wondering if Lumpy had just lost his mind. “Do you mean to tell me that after a full month in the United States of America you want to go back for another three week vacation!” “Well, uh, yeah. It’s time for my R&R and I want to go back home.” Maxx sat in his office after Lumpy had left and stared at the ceiling. “What kind of idiot would come back to work after a month away and then want to turn around and take another three weeks!” It was outside of Maxx’s frame of reference. He’d never witnessed anyone so brazenly lazy before. “If Lumpy can be gone for two months, then why do we even need him here?” That was a question that Maxx would ask himself many times over the next few months. “Why do we even need him here?”

Lumpy had been sent to our department from the headquarters base. He’d worked in the Fuel Department there and it was hoped that he could fill in and lend a hand in our Fuel Department where Scalawag had constantly complained about how overworked he was and how understaffed his department was. Scalawag was another character in the department, a supervisor of Fuels who didn’t have a driver’s license and who couldn’t even drive his own fuel trucks. “He’s absolutely worthless to me as a foreman,” Maxx would say. “How does a company hire a foreman who can’t even drive his own vehicles? When they need a new driver trained, he can’t do the training. It’s left to me to get the training done. He’s worthless.”

The Fuels supervisor on the headquarters base had finally reached his limit of trying to work with Lumpy. “He likes to hide during his shift. Nobody can find him. He’s a lazy man who likes to disappear,” he warned Maxx. “That won’t happen on this base. My people check in with me on a regular basis or they don’t work for me.” That was the truth. Maxx kept a close eye on his people. They didn’t sleep on the job, they didn’t go to the gym on the job, and they didn’t just disappear on the job. “I’m a firm believer in President Reagan’s philosophy of ‘trust but verify’,” he told me on several occasions. He expected all of the Americans to follow his lead with their people, and I took it to heart with the bus drivers. I was always kind when I caught them goofing off, but they knew that they’d been caught and I let them know that my expectations were much higher and it didn’t take long to teach them where the limits were.

In May, just before Maxx left for his much-needed vacation, Lumpy came into the office one afternoon and reported to Maxx that the hose that had needed a clamp at the Brine Pond was still unclamped. “Why hasn’t that been done?” Maxx inquired. “Uh, Grumpy left a note for me to have Indika saw de hose off and den to clamp it over a new fitting and Indika never got around to it.” Maxx was suddenly in a rare angry mood. “I have three foremen in this department and they all want Indika to do their work for them! You are a foreman! Get out there and get that hose clamped off!” Lumpy had been looking for a way to get out of doing the actual physical labor. The Brine Pond was a hot place and the temperature was edging over 100 degrees each day. Indika was a translator in the office, but he was willing to do anything for his American bosses and Grumpy and Lumpy both liked to take advantage of him.

It was still May, just after Maxx had left for his R&R, when Lumpy walked into the office one morning and announced, “I ain’t getting’ into dem discussions at de Dee-fack at night. Uh-uh. Dey ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’ good down dere. I ain’t even gettin’ involved. It’s some bad stuff dat dey’re talkin’ ‘bout. I don’t even want to be around it. Uh-uh. Dat Rabbit likes to talk ‘bout some bad stuff.” It was a typical conversation with Lumpy. No one ever had to respond because it just rolled out of his mouth. I knew that Rabbit was a trouble maker. I’d already heard about how he liked to stir up discontent and then sit back and watch it roil. I didn’t jump in on Lumpy’s conversation because it was so typical and I was seriously tired of encouraging him. A question could have kept the verbal waterfall tumbling for another two hours so I let the words slip off of my ears like a drop of water on an oil slicked slope. In another couple of weeks I’d add that to my growing list of regrets.