Max and Charley

by Gary Carter

(An excerpt)

. . . This is not to say that Max and Charley never disagreed.

One morning in late September when the sun was beginning to drift off to the south with the season, the angle of the light across the wide arm of Max’s chair caused him to focus on a glue-joint he had never noticed before; a gray line in the dark brown wood. Summoning Charley’s attention with a downward nod, he ran his finger along the line.

“Lousy glue job.”

Charley squinted and leaned a few degrees closer. “Looks okay from here.”

“It’s lousy,” Max insisted. “Not enough clamp. You shouldn’t be able to see the glue line. You can see the goddamned glue holding the boards apart.”

Charley adjusted his feet, pulled out a pair of reading glasses, and took another look. Max’s finger still rested on one end of the line. “Seems to me like it’s the glue that’s holding the boards together.”

Max sat back for a minute, thinking. “No,” he decided, “If they was together they’d be touching each other. That’s the problem. The goddamned glue’s holding ‘em apart.”
Charley looked up and out at the green across the road. Spinning red dust jumped up behind a truck as it rattled past. The driver waved. When quiet had settled in again, Charley looked back down at the problem, frowning. A schoolteacher-emphasis crept into his voice. “Without the glue, the boards wouldn’t stay together now, would they?” Max hesitated for a moment so Charley pressed on. “So it must be the goddamned glue that’s holding them together!”

“No, if they was together, there wouldn’t be anything between ‘em,” Max countered.

“You’re saying,” Charley asked, striving for clarity, “that the boards have to be touching to be together?”

“Damn right.” The woodworker had spoken.

BACK