gan was right, of course. Sooner or later he was going to run out of
money. Things weren't going well. He wasn't satisfied with the cat
burglar story, and he was lonely. He decided to write a story about
Alphonse and the cannery.

Alphonse was a slim, dark, middle aged Filipino with a thin straight
mustache. He had watched Joe stack empty pallets with a yellow Hyster
and then he'd motioned Joe out of the seat. The forklift engine roared;
his hands blurred; pallets leaped into perfect piles, ten feet high.
Alphonse cut the engine and climbed down, eyes bright. He was somewhere
between ten and a hundred times faster than Joe. The cannery whistle
blew. Coffee break. Alphonse smiled, nodded, and turned for the
cafeteria. Joe followed.

Alphonse was Joe's trainer. Wherever they went in the cannery, people
called to him. He lifted a hand, smiled, and kept going. He was
universally popular, but he rarely spoke to anyone; he focused on the
work--how to do it better, how to do it faster. Joe was in a welfare
job training program. He hated the whistle that told them when they
could stop and when they must start. He hated the gray industrial paint
and the numbing future--less work for someone else's profit.

Alphonse had no future. Not only that, he was twenty years older than
Joe. He worked Joe into the ground every day, and when he waved with a
small smile and walked away at the end of the shift, his head was high
and he seemed untouched. Alphonse had his own standards, his own
integrity, and somehow he was stronger than the whole gray clanking
cannery. Stronger than profit, stronger than loss, Joe wrote.

But the story wasn't any good. It was true, as far as it went, but it
wasn't--a story. What is a story, anyway?

Joe realized that he didn't know.

When Maxie was about fifteen, Joe used to quiz him on "Joe's Maxims."

Joe: "Women?"

Maxie: "Uh, women, women . . . All women are pear shaped!"

Joe (handing Maxie a quarter): "Very good, very good. And now, for a
dollar, grand prize--an educated man?"

Maxie: "Damn. An educated man--umm--knows what he doesn't know."

Joe: "Right!"

Joe's position was that educated people know at least one subject well
enough so that they realize (by comparison) when they don't know
another. This was heavy for fifteen, but Max was game. "The idea is to
know when you don't know what you're doing; then you can go ask someone
or buy a good book and find out," Joe explained. Maxie nodded