Michael Loderstedt

Red Man

I hated visiting the men on payday, not they weren’t nice to me, they always were. But I hated hearing the things that my stepfather might say, or do. I’d slink down low in his Cadillac, hoping no one would see me, clutching the envelopes of cash. Each had a name written in my mother’s best ballpoint cursive––Junior, Charles and Emmet - Foreman.

We were the crew of H. M. Johnson Road Paving Company. Together, we bulldozed roads through the thick forest of the island, piled up the brush and poured kerosene on it as it burned in tall plumes of black smoke. Then we paved over it so folks could drive to the front door of their new oceanfront cottages. The work was brutal, indescribably hot, and we did all in jeans, long sleeve shirts and heavy work boots. Anything else would leave your skin burned from hot asphalt. I was sixteen, wiry as a hunting dog, and just as hungry.

Hallie spun the tires into the gravel parking lot of the convenience store, “Get three packets of Red Man,” and handed me a twenty. I stuffed the envelopes back in the glovebox, on top of a half-fifth of Black Velvet, next to Hallie’s snub-nosed .38 revolver. I pointed to the shelf behind the counter with white foil packets of chewing tobacco with the bright red Indian head.

When we pulled up to the cider block motel, the men were sitting outside in fold-up lawn chairs, smoking and carrying on. There was no AC in the beach motels back then, but later in the evening, a cool ocean breeze blew across the island. I handed each man his money, without a word they folded them in half and stuck it in their pockets.

Hallie yelled out in his giggly laugh, “Ya’ll {n—} better come back to work on Monday.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Johnson,” mumbled Emmet.

Hallie tossed each worker a pack of Red Man. Emmet tore open his and put a big plug in his cheek. I slowly walked back to the car when Hallie turned to me, “Michael, bring my whiskey from the glovebox.”

I think down under it all, Hallie really loved his men, surely the money they made him. They were more alike than not––barely literate, laughing at his foul-mouthed jokes, loving his cheap whiskey. But Hallie was white, red-faced really from the sun. The bottle got passed around, I took a sip, after wiping off the tobacco slobber from the last man. Hallie once told me he loved the smell of asphalt, that “it smelled like new money.” I imagined hell would be like those vapors rising from the hopper of a Cedar Rapids paver. Road paving over that island’s pure white sand earned me a little money that summer of 1974, but I’d never go back. I don’t talk about those times much, they were God-awful, doing the devil’s bidding.

END

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Michael Loderstedt has received Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in literature in 2020 and 2026. Recent writings have been published in Tar River Poetry, Naugatuck River Review, Muleskinner Journal, Kakalak, Pinesong (Bruce Lader Prize in 2025) and the NC Literary Review (James Applewhite Prize for Poetry). His debut book of poems Why We Fished, published in 2023, received the silver medal from the UK Poetry Book Awards. www.instagram/m_loderstedt