Floyd & Mayfield, Part 1

 In the late seventies, I was the after watch guy in the engine room on the Valley Transporter. For part of my trip, I would end up working for an engineer called Juel Mayfield. To say that Mayfield was a difficult person would be understating things considerably. The man was overbearing, shifty, underhanded and vindictive, and he didn't limit this to just me, no, the whole crew was fair game, and he was universally hated by everybody on board.

For example, he would work on something in the engine room, and leave tools and rags wherever he dropped them, and tell me to clean up. Not a big deal, it was my job after all, but he would deliberately hide tools. I wouldn't find these, of course, and the next time I came on watch, I'd get ripped to shreds for not putting all the tools away. Another part of my job was to learn how to work on the equipment. Heh, not with Mayfield around. As Richard McKenna, the author of “The Sand Pebbles”, stated it in one of his short stories, “King's Horsemen”, Mayfield would sit on a nickel's worth of knowledge like it was the Great Inca Treasure. Anytime something had to be worked on while I was around, he made damn sure that I had a nice hot corner to clean up, far away from what he was doing.

I had originally had the misfortune to work for Mayfield on the A. M. Thompson, on the Illinois River. Realizing pretty quickly that I wasn't going to learn much on there, when the chance to transfer to the Valley Transporter came along, I jumped at the opportunity. I had about a little more than a year of peace and quiet, working for two good engineers, when it all came crashing down. I got a call from the crew dispatcher three days before I was due to go back to work, asking if I was willing to come back early. I agreed, but he said that I would have to meet the boat at Greenville, Mississippi. I was instantly on alert, as Greenville was not a regular crew change point. I asked why there, and he said that they had fired the striker, and needed someone right away. “Who's the engineer?”, I asked. “Mayfield.”, came the answer. “OK, I said, “I'll go, but you know my history with him. I may well get off at Memphis.” The dispatcher said, “That's OK, you'll be helping me out big time even if you do. Just let me know as soon as you can if you have to.” Turned out that the good times were over; Chief Bill had retired, and Mayfield had taken his place as one of the regulars. Damn... So that was how I ended up saddled with Mayfield again, after running away to the Lower Mississippi to get away from him

But anyway, on to our other main character in this little drama. Floyd was, in no uncertain terms, quite a rounder. Funny and obscene when sober, and many orders of magnitude worse when drunk, which he was pretty regularly when off the boat. Floyd and Mayfield had a real hate for each other, and it was always on display, by Mayfield with his nasty comments, and by Floyd mainly by his actions. Witness the following vignette...

As I've said, I worked the back watch then, from noon till six, and from midnight till six, so I would get up late in the morning, have lunch, and head back to the engine room. We had a nice little tool crib on the Transporter. Henry (the other chief, a great guy) and I had built it from angle iron and expanded metal because we laid the boat up in New Orleans fairly frequently, and tool theft was a problem. With the crib, everything valuable was already in there, so all we had to do was slap a lock on it for layup, and all was safe.

Well, as I walked past this on my way from the galley to the booth, it was immediately on the right as you stepped in through the port aft engine room door. On this particular morning, when I stepped in, there was Mayfield in the tool crib, beet red in the face and soaked in sweat, with the door locked! What the hell?!? He frantically motioned to me to unlock the door, so I got the keys from the booth, and let him out, and we headed back to the booth.

He was madder than a half drowned cat!

The story was that he was puttering around in the tool crib at about 0700 with his back to the door, and turned around to find himself locked in! He didn't see who did it, but he was cussing Floyd up one side and down the other. I said something about how it could have been anybody (and it truly could have been!), but no, he wasn't having any of that! “IT WAS THAT SONOFABITCH FLOYD HEATH! THAT'S WHO IT WAS! I DIDN'T HAVE TO SEE IT HAPPEN TO KNOW!!!”

Wow!

At that point I was simply reduced to listening until he ran out of steam and stomped off to lunch.

I filled out the engine room log and did my rounds, chuckling to myself about this all the while. A little later, when the deckhands were back off of the tow, I found Floyd in the lounge.

“Hey, did you lock Mayfield in the tool crib?”, I asked, grinning.

The wolfish grin through the thick mustache, over the mug of coffee was all the answer that was necessary.

“Hope he was in there long enough that he wet himself.”. Floyd said.