Rufus
Rufus
by Conrad Phillips
In an apartment complex, whose name not even the residents can remember, there lived the sort of man who was always rattling off the strange customs of foreign lands. He loved telling coworkers and family members random facts he had found in books, blogs, and the backs of restaurant menus. “If you ever have a conversation with a European, he will always stand too close to you,” he explained. “It’s so cramped there. They’re used to it.” When he was done explaining, the coworker or family member would ask him if he’d ever been to Europe, and the man would say bluntly that in fact he had not and that he really wasn’t the traveling type. He would then go on to explain that the Chicago-style hot dog had been the amalgamation of the culinary habits of early 20th century immigrants.
The man’s name was Rufus. He was in his early fifties, had been divorced once, was appreciated at his workplace, and was relatively happy. On weekdays, he tended to eat one to two meals a day. He could never tolerate breakfast, but was a tremendous fan of soup. At lunchtime, he frequented the sandwich shops and delis around his workplace, and in the evening, if he felt so inclined, he would open up one of the cans he had bought from the local supermarket. His favorites were minestrone, goulash, chili, chicken noodle, and vegetable, so long as it wasn’t too creamy, but above all things he loved potato soup served with an unreasonable amount of bread. On the weekends, it was hard to predict when exactly he would begin to eat, because he never followed much of a pattern and often found himself in taverns. If you have ever seen a man sitting by himself at the end of the bar, quietly sipping a beer or mixed drink and staring intently at local sports on a nearby television set, you might have been watching Rufus and you should’ve said hello. You will not see him there anymore.
Sometimes, on the weekends, he ate dinner with his ex-wife Melinda, her son Thomas, and her second husband William, but when Thomas left for college, Rufus stopped inviting himself over. When he wanted a special treat, Rufus looked through newspapers, picked out a good restaurant review, and invited himself there instead, feeling somewhat excited by the long waits and the bustle of a popular venue. He felt warm inside after eating different food in a different place, but for the most part his body had gotten used to the same meals five times a week. His metabolism knew exactly how to process it. Combined with the mild exercise regimen he had managed to keep up for a number of decades, his diet had made Rufus a thin man, wiry and almost muscular. Rufus had much to be proud of. He had his health, he had his job, he had people who could say they cared about him. He had something resembling a life, and he was happy.
Which made it all the more disconcerting when Rufus began stopping in front of local churches and gazing at the crucifixes perched on top. Whenever he read the newspaper, he found himself poring over the various murder stories which made up the bulk of local events. At work, where he operated as an efficient and respected project manager, he consistently resisted the urge to call his colleagues cocksuckers and to steal their pencils for no apparent reason. Worst of all, from the very beginning Rufus knew he was having a problem and he thought about it. He stayed up late at night and watched commercials for trade schools, all of them telling him to do something with his life. He bought self-help books whenever a title caught his attention, and although he never read the books all the way through, he knew what they were telling him to do. He had to follow his inclinations, to take his strongest attributes until what he wanted to do and what he could do were one and the same. He needed to bring into action the soul of himself.
He thought about his family members, who tolerated him. He thought about Melinda, who humored him. He thought about William, who humored his Melinda, and he thought about Thomas, whom Rufus wanted to think of as a son but couldn’t. Wasn’t Rufus a man, and weren’t men meant to look up at the sky and wonder? Shouldn’t he set out in search of his deep, world-encompassing desires? There were only so many times he could tell himself that at least he had his job, and life was not meant to be spent stealing other people’s pencils. Even with all the years he had spent keeping himself in shape, all he had now in his body was an ultimately unwise investment. He should stop worrying and start living. He should start listening to the deepest, most inward parts of himself. He should follow his soul, which, so far as he knew, could never lead him wrong.
So he went to the supermarket one day in January and bought a bottle of liquor for himself, something Rufus hadn’t done in decades. He got himself roaring drunk, showed up late to work, and quit his job as gallantly as he knew how, by explaining to his immediate supervisor that he respected his employer and his colleagues, but that he needed to find something important right now. A job couldn’t hold him back right now. Rufus went home, continued to drink, and lay on the floor in a daze. There were so many people to call and so many places to go, so many things to collect and so much pent-up energy to use. Rufus had spent most of his life waiting for something to happen to him, but now he decided that he would be the thing he was waiting for. Nothing could stop a man resolutely venturing into the world on behalf of his deepest self.
There were so many things to do.
“I’m . . . I changed, Melinda. I can’t say it just right, but it happened. I didn’t have any say in it.” Melinda didn’t know what to say. Rufus had been talking to her for the past half hour. Nothing that he said was very clear. His voice was slurred and he couldn’t put together a complete thought, but Melinda knew him and knew that somewhere in there Rufus had something to say. She sat in her living room, put the phone to her ear, and tried to get her ex-husband to come to the point. Now and then, William walked in, looked at Melinda, looked at the phone, and walked out. The third time William walked in, Melinda made a gesture at him to let him know she’d hang up soon, the kind of gesture no one but William or maybe Rufus would understand, and when she came back to Rufus, she found that he’d completely changed the subject.
“How’s Tom?” he asked. “I haven’t talked to him for awhile.”
“He’s doing okay . . . He’s excited about graduating.”
“It’s his last year?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he settle on?”
“Accounting . . . Or some sort of accounting and technology thing. Financing Internet startups? Designing accounting software. Running accounting software for big businesses. I’m not sure. A friend of his told him there was money in it.”
“Sounds like a good field. He’s a smart kid. He’ll do good. I know he will. Is he still at the same place? That apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been meaning to call him. Same cell number?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t talked to him in awhile.” William stepped into the room one more time. Melinda put her hand over the receiver as she explained that Rufus sounded like he was wrapping up. As she started listening to the phone again, Rufus explained for the third time that he had been meaning to talk to Tom for awhile now. Then, for no reason Melinda could figure out, Rufus apologized for taking up so much of her time and hung up without saying much of a goodbye.
“What was that about?” William asked.
“I think he quit his job,” Melinda said. “Or was fired.”
They wondered what Rufus was going to do and how long his money would last him. Five days later, Melinda received a call from Thomas.
“Mom?” Thomas said.
“Son?”
“Rufus stopped by.” There was a sound of fear and worry to his voice.
“That’s a four-hour drive.”
“He seemed kinda drunk. Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know. The last time he called here he was asking about you.”
“He wouldn’t stop talking about his soul.”
Melinda couldn’t decide yet if her ex-husband was the sort of person who could be a problem. But if he was a problem, William would probably be able to handle it. “What did he want?”
“I think he wanted to go on a road trip with me.”
“. . . What did you say?”
“I have school. I’m almost done. I can’t afford this kind of . . . stuff. What’s going on with him right now? Some kind of crisis or something?”
“I don’t know. He might’ve lost his job.”
“He told me he quit his job.”
“Yeah, Tom, but . . .” Melinda didn’t really know if there was a difference between Rufus quitting his job and Rufus getting fired. “He’s going through some things.” She paused. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but there are things. Did you agree to go with him?”
“What?”
“On the road trip.”
“No . . . God no . . . I told him I have school to take care of. I’m graduating. I might have a job lined up. Do you know how hard it is to get a job? If I took off now just because he’s going through things . . .”
“No, I know, I know, you did the right thing . . . Could you promise me something, Tom?”
“What?”
“I know you’re busy, and I know you wouldn’t want to be hanging out with him, but I am a little worried about Rufus.”
“I’m not –”
“I’m not asking you to go out of your way, and it’s probably the kind of thing that’s gonna blow over in a couple of weeks, but . . . do you have any plans for spring break?”
“Maybe . . . Some of the guys were thinking of going to Mexico.”
“Oh, that sounds nice . . . Where?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Oh . . . well I don’t want to get in your way, but if you’re available, and if Rufus is still . . . and even if he isn’t, it might be nice if you just, paid him a visit on your break. Checked in on him. He likes you, Tom.”
“I know.”
“Would you think about it?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you. It means a lot to me, Tom.”
“. . . I know.”
It was late at night by now and cold. Rufus drove back to the city down a two-lane stretch of highway surrounded by little more than flat, white snow. He thought he liked these long, open roads, but now it was just depressing. A water-bottle half-filled with vodka rattled in his cup holder. Two more filled bottles rolled around in the trunk, and an empty one was probably still lying somewhere on the university campus. He didn’t know why he had filled up so many, and maybe he was too drunk to drive. It wasn’t all that hard to drive straight, so long as Rufus focused on the dotted yellow line, but if Rufus suddenly came across a situation where he had to make a decision, where he had to brake or turn suddenly, he didn’t know what he was capable of. A nausea had been swelling up within him for the last hour, a result of the fact that he hadn’t had anything to eat since talking to Tom. He wasn’t far enough along to want to vomit, but the feeling in his stomach was just good enough to make him feel sorry for himself.
All at once a self-loathing panic settled in. It hit him in the middle of his chest, so that the only way Rufus could breathe was by wheezing in and out. It was finally all too much and he had to pull over, but he had to be careful about it because with all the snow it was hard to tell where the side of the road fell into a ditch. To be safe, Rufus didn’t pull all the way over. The tires on the driver’s side were still on the road, but at this time of night it probably didn’t matter. Rufus tried to regain his composure, and when he couldn’t do that behind the wheel, he stepped out of the car and paced back and forth.
It was cold and windless. Rufus’s mouth, like a sputtering exhaust pipe, shot out bursts of frozen air violently and irregularly. Rufus waited for the cold to slow him down. Above him, patches of stars hung between the clouds, but he didn’t bother to look. After a few minutes and a brief period of coughing, his body decided it couldn’t afford to panic in this weather. His breathing settled while his shoulders and arms curled around his torso for warmth. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his ears began to hurt. For about a minute or so, Rufus was knocked back into a foggy sobriety. He started thinking again with his common sense, that is to say, he thought with his fear.
He had known up to this point, in a technical sense, that he had quit his job, and he had also known exactly how long his savings would last him if he kept on acting like this, which wasn’t quite long enough, but it hadn’t dawned on him until now that he valued his job not only for the money, but also for the sense of security it gave him, and it hadn’t dawned on him until now that he might want to live a little longer than his current savings would allow him. He didn’t know why he wanted to live so long, but all that mattered was that he wanted to. Maybe he’d thought that having someone like Tom at his side would give him back that sense of security, and Tom was a smart kid and maybe if they were together the money would’ve taken care of itself. It couldn’t happen now. Tom was a smart kid and had done the right thing. Maybe Rufus should follow his example. He stood in the middle of the road and bent down to get a good look at the reflectors on either side of the yellow lines. He’d never taken a good look at them before. It was quiet out here and dark.
Then, for a few seconds, everything was bright lights and noise. A car had been approaching Rufus at sixty miles an hour for the last minute or so. The driver had seen the car that was almost parked on the side of the road and had moved into the middle of the road to be on the safe side, riding directly on top of the yellow line. It hadn’t occurred to the driver that someone would be crouching in the middle of the highway, so he didn’t see Rufus until the last possible moment, braking and swerving to the right into the narrow gap between Rufus and his car. Rufus leaped randomly, not knowing what was happening and narrowly missing the driver’s side mirror as it rushed past. The two cars scraped together briefly before the driver regained control and found himself back in the proper lane. The driver slowed his car down to a crawl, knowing that he had made some kind of contact with the lunatic’s vehicle and that they probably had to exchange insurance information. But it was late at night and there was no telling what kind of trouble he could get into, so the car sped off into the night.
“Fuck you!” Rufus shouted for no particular reason. The car had already disappeared. “I have my rights! Fuck you!” He didn’t feel the cold anymore. His adrenaline took over and he didn’t even have to think anymore. It was time to go home, and because Rufus knew that this temporary rush wouldn’t last very long, he took advantage of it, got back in his car, and drove. There were still a least a couple of hours to go.
The guy had banged up Rufus’s car somehow. It wasn’t handling the same, and all the way home, Rufus’s left headlight blinked erratically. Rufus never stopped, but only stared ahead at the road in a state of mild hypnosis. He was convinced after the first hour that the headlight was sending him a message in a code he didn’t understand. After the second hour, as he pulled up to his apartment, he was pretty sure he had figured out what the message was, even if he couldn’t quite say it aloud.
The Warehouse above the Train Station
The Warehouse above the Train Station
p. 318-321
There is one thing you can’t forget when observing American big business. The well-adjusted person of the future will be absorbed into the requirements of the Speed Boss. There will be no wages, there will be no competition, only an incessantly reasonable cooperation, a single mass of workers operating underneath the dome of Business. Our well-adjusted person of the future is heading towards just such an assimilation.
You have no choice but to stand reverent and astonished in front of these powerful companies, which organize themselves so much according to the laws of nature, that they become in themselves a microcosm of the highest functionality. Not even Plato, Fourier, or Napoleon could have imagined an organization more perfectly.
I am filled with this sort of astonishment when I think of the warehouse of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. I want to describe my visit to this perfectly designed operation, which is one of the most exemplary organizations in modern America.
Five giant buildings, a city in itself, stand in one of the northwest suburbs of Chicago surrounded and framed by enclosed gardens, fountains, clubhouses, and lodgings for employees.
Sears Roebuck operates only in the United States, not in Canada and not in South America. It has no branches, no representatives, no traveling salesmen. It doesn’t accept credit, but only does business in cash. They never come into contact with their customers, and everything is carried out by mail.
In the strong business period from September to May, it employs 9,000 to 9,500 people. In the slack periods, about 7,500. Right now, at the end of November, they are preparing a catalog that should incite the public’s casual lust sometime after Christmas. The newspapers report that Sears Roebuck maintains the largest postage orders in the state for a private company: five million five-cent stamps for this one catalog, which they call a flier. These fliers are sent out twice a year, after Christmas and in the middle of July. The large catalog comes once a year and contains everything a person could want, with the exception of living creatures, vegetables, and fruit. (You can order from Sears Roebuck, among other things, an entire single-family home. All you have to give are the measurements and the number of rooms, and a wagon brings you the entire place, down to the last nail. All you need is a place to put it together.) They even stick sewing patterns into the catalog. I once went to the room where machines cut these patterns down to the stitch all year round. These “cut samples” cost Sears Roebuck one hundred thousand dollars a year.
The division of labor, that is, the arrangement of office rooms, storerooms, and the shutes, the polished slides which stretch for kilometers and shoot the items down to the warehouse on the first floor, is the most elementary that I have ever seen.
In the morning, at nine o’clock, the company, on average, receives 35,000 orders through the mail. Most of them contain mixed orders, orders with about five to ten items, amounting to an average of nine dollars total. (There is no minimum order.) Since every item has a price in the catalog, and Sears Roebuck does not take credit, the money is enclosed with the order. (This means fewer money orders from American Express and fewer checks from banks.)
By four o’clock in the afternoon, all of these orders are filled, and fifty to sixty wagons shoot out to the train station on the first floor, so that all the crates and parcels packed upstairs are sent out to the country in all directions. –
The offices are filled with the sound of metal. Rattling capsules, filled with letters, invoices, and freight notices, fly through copper tubes over the heads of nine thousand male and female clerks who sit in front of machines as they prepare letters, bills, and orders. This network of tubing comes to a total length of eighteen English miles.
An army of young women sits in an auditorium and is given nothing else to do but to place colored stamps on the incoming letters. Each stamp represents a different train line. Since, in the U.S., the railroads are privately owned, freight regulations vary widely from area to area, and a lot of the most complicated work takes place in this auditorium.
But even outside this auditorium, what a terrifying sort of work! Young ladies stick a hundred thousand stamps to a hundred thousand envelopes for the catalogs. The thin sheets fly like fan blades under their fingers. At the printing press, where the parts of the catalog are attached, the workers have to use all of their senses, nerves, and brains to make sure that the yellow sheets sit on top of the blue ones and not underneath. Your feelings well up within you when you walk by a few tables and realize that the only reason people are sitting here is because the company hasn’t yet found machines that can do this sort of work. And yet, these humiliated creatures are luckier than those who have lost their income because the company has managed to find the right machines.
Just think how far we’ve come to get to this wonderful sort of organization, as if we were a bee colony, or a termite hill or an ant hill. Imagine how far away we are from those primitive times, when we followed our impulses, and now we thinking creatures do nothing but obey the strange commands of other human creatures. Think of our evolution, our strong souls and ideas withering away underneath this brilliant organization that has triumphed over the human brain and brought it into action.
This is the “blessing” of peacetime, when commerce is allowed to expand.
Wherever I go in the city, I can still hear the metallic clang of Sears Roebuck in my ears. Above the smell of blood and glue, above the coal dust and the fog of Lake Michigan, this metal clang hovers like the harmony of the spheres, as dreary and cold as the modern world and its civilization, the most grim enemy of the human race. –
The Cat in the Piano Factory
The Cat in the Piano Factory
p. 303-318
Writers who visit America frown upon visiting the Chicago slaughterhouses. The excellent H.G. Wells refused to watch as innocent animals were driven into herds and pushed to their deaths. Other minds, of a lesser caliber, have followed Wells’s example. I suspect that the reason for their restraint isn’t so much any sympathy with the animals as it is the extraordinary and definitive description of the “packing houses” laid out in Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle. I myself don’t understand why you shouldn’t see the beef and pork cut up at ten o’clock which will be served to you at eleven o’clock for lunch in the form of fillets and pork chops. It seems to me, that what’s more important than the fate of the animals being chopped up is the fate of the people who chop them up. For that reason, I took a look for myself into Armour’s slaughterhouses.
A month later, I met Sinclair in New York and talked to him about his book. The Jungle, a work which you cannot praise highly enough and which you can hold up above the tide of contemporary endeavors, is the work of a socialist. He has uncovered the evils of this system for the world to consider. For him, there was more to explain to the world than the pitiful conditions in which these slaughterhouse workers live. He also explained the economic connections which have ruined these people — not to mention the meat, which is prepared here for consumption under the most cockeyed hygenic conditions. When I was alone with him, Sinclair talked about the effect of his book on the American public: “I wanted to hit them in the heart, I hitted them in the stomach!” So now, in the dark, moldy, stench-filled corridor, where the poor, pale young ladies pack cuts of meat into metal tins from seven in the morning until seven at night, a hand-washer sits there imposingly for the sake of the visitors who bustle around her. A sign reads that the cuts of meat are packed into tins by fingers which are washed daily, and there the hand-washer sits in the corridor. Her polished nails glow in the shine of the lightbulbs. She sits there bored to death, a showpiece in the middle of the stench, and as the others work feverishly around her, she reads a well-worn novel. Possibly The Jungle.
Otherwise, everything remains just as it was. Around the colossal fortresses of the slaughterhouses, open wooden stalls stretch on for miles, where the cows, sheep, and pigs await their destiny. Now and again, a door opens and animals stream out, driven through canals and sheds that open up before them, a labyrinth of paths and angled streets that lead to a covered gangway onto a Bridge of Sighs, at whose end the bleating, squealing, and mooing throngs gradually descend to their sharp deaths.
Over there is the round wheel of wood, on which the struggling pigs turn as they hang from their hind feet. A thickset fellow stands in front of the wheel with a sharpened spear. The wheel turns the pig’s stomach at just the right height, so that the fellow can do the pig in with his first short cut from up to down. At this point the struggling victim realizes exactly what’s going on. It forces out a fearful squeal like a hurt child, then sprays the fellow with a thin, hot, red jet into his face. Then it is conveyed by a chain over the hands of the murderer and is transferred to the next butcher, who executes an equally short, elegant, and systematic incision. A hundred incisions later the animal has been prepared according to all the rules of the art. It is blanched, de-haired, broken into its parts, brought into the cooler, and any trace of its days on earth has been erased. It has now taken its final form as human nourishment.
And the wheel turns and the thickset fellow makes his first cut. For thirty years he stands there and makes his first cut surely and confidently, the same way a bank director sets his signature on a document. He earns a lot of money, sixty cents an hour, and is as much a representative figure of modern American as Dowie, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt. He has kept up this pace thirty years long — 25 animals a minute, that makes 1500 an hour, equaling 15,000 for a ten-hour workday. For thirty years he has remained at his post, standing in the rush of America. Millions of pigs have been brought to his spear, right where the people’s carnivore instincts want them. Do I hate this man for his job, for his calm, unconscious, raw naturalness? Do I hate a man who buys the well-being of his family with death throes, thin red streams, and frightened squeals? Not a chance! I admire him for his strength and his speed.
After all, do you think he enjoys being a Not-Person, a Not-Animal, a Not-Thing, some product of Bosch’s hell? He is a standard and measure of human strength, a record-breaker in the sort of efficiency that got him his career in the first place. That is what he is.
He’s an enemy, not of the pigs, but of his coworkers. This is our fellow from Bosch’s hell. It’s his efficiency that makes him his coworkers’ enemy, the same efficiency that keeps up the pace. From the very beginning, it’s a law here that his efficiency is the enemy of anything less efficient. But in this country, a country that has made a religion out of efficiency, a religion whose temple has been raised up next to democracy and has a stronger following, in modern America this law has a small addition, a tiny supplement, which is precisely this: Efficiency is the enemy of efficiency. –
For years, a man named Frederick Taylor worked as an engineer for Bethlehem Steel, which belonged to the Carnegie. On his way from the casters to the office and back, he would stay awhile, standing on top and watching how the coarse lumps of irons, lying around in the open, were loaded onto carts.
A small German, whom he pitifully names Schmidt in his book (“Scientific Management” by F. Taylor, I believe published by Macmillan), steered his way into Taylor’s attention. This small German was a strong lad, who on a daily basis was able to load about 12 1/2 tons of “pig-iron” onto the carts. He did this work for a daily wage of $1.15. Taylor watched the lad and asked his supervisor about the small German’s private life. Schmidt was father to a family and had bought with his wages a small piece of land just outside the city, where, for an hour before he left for work and an hour after he came home in the evening, he built a little house for him and his family to live in.
“This Schmidt is a thief!” Taylor said. “Those two hours of work he does on his house are proof that he has stolen two hours from Bethlehem Steel, a company which has clearly bought his strength for $1.15 a day.”
Taylor got Schmidt to come over and asked him, if he wouldn’t perhaps like to earn $1.85? Schmidt said yes to this strange question, but couldn’t keep from asking Taylor what would be asked of him in return. Taylor called for the supervisor and took the supervisor and Schmidt into the yard to the iron clumps, where he began to show the both of them a number of specific movements and methods.
According to Taylor’s wishes, Schmidt imitated these movements and worked at the same pace as Taylor: One — two — three, then sat down to rest when Taylor ordered, “Now rest,” . . . Schmidt started earning $1.85 a day and was now loading forty-seven and a half tons per day (as opposed to the twelve and a half which he’d performed up to that time) . . . For his multiplied efforts, Schmidt earned one and a half times as much as before. Naturally, he couldn’t continue building his little house, because he was too tired in the evening and too groggy in the morning. However, Taylor’s system was born, the system of “scientific exploitation of human strength in the service of industry”, the system of “speeding up”, or, as I like to call it, the boosting of the straining and consumption of human energy to the furthest boundaries of natural ability.
Others have used this system in different industries, such as Gilbreth with the bricklayers. The American bricklayers don’t lift bricks with both hands anymore, but instead with the right hand, while with the left they put the spatula in the mortar. This way, a brick house will be built at a pace of 350 bricks per hour, instead of the previous pace of 120 bricks per hour.
A new type of overseer (or maybe they’ve been prefigured by Pharoah and the Emperor Carcella) has entered the American workforce. Before the birth of Taylor’s system, the overseer had the duty to make sure the work was done correctly and on time. But the new overseer, the Speed Boss, sets the pace and the number of units which need to be delivered. He is the man who gets on in life by making sure his people are constantly breaking records without cease.
What are the consequences of this murderous pace for the worker and the industry? First of all, efficiency eliminates inefficiency. That goes without saying. But then efficiency eliminates itself. And then, of course, this way of doing things greatly increases the amount of product that the factory needs to lock up, and the factory is going to need to lock it up for a longer time because they don’t know what to do with their piled up, stacked up product. America produces three times as much as it consumes, and the exports can’t keep up with this overproduction. (Keep in mind that Schmidt of Bethlehem Steel is an immediate cause of the Chinese Revolution. If the steel industry had controlled its lust for exporting into the Middle Kingdom, Mr. Sun Jat Sen would have never climbed onto Wall Street and into world history!)
The worker takes time off part of the year, living on his meager savings, if he has any, and finds that his own efficiency has been turned against him.
But this system, this low-down bastard of a system blooms into new variations, conquers factories far and wide across America, one factory after the other, soon stretching its arm over us, coming after our people, our food, our homeland, everywhere . . .
A further consequence of this exploitation is — at least for the time being — the uniquely American institution of the Age Line, the age limit.
For a worker over forty, it is very difficult in America to find a position at a factory or business. But it’s also very difficult to keep a job once you turn forty. On Monday morning at six o’clock, five hundred young men stand in front of the factory door, on which hangs the plaque:
“We don’t employ people over forty!”
The boss has the choice of the strongest and the youngest. –
In New York I was shown workers who dyed their hair. These workers, before they go to their jobs, grease their temples with shoe polish, as part of their daily routine, in order to bring the red out in their skin. Others pay ten dollars a month for “drugs”, as they say, for arsenic mixtures to artificially stimulate the activities of the heart during working hours.
In Chicago, I read a newspaper article with the headline: “What can a forty-year-old worker do who has just lost his job?” Answer: He can, for example, become an usher for a movie theater.
(How the organized trade unions, who have gathered together the best and most efficient workers, put up with this tyranny, I don’t know. I only know that the large companies don’t like hiring organized workers. But in the entire country the “unions” stand in a not unjustified disrepute. More on this later.)
Today I tore up the remains of my references, which I’ve kept in my suitcase the entire trip and which have taken me to all sorts of great business people, factory owners, and Chicago millionaires. At least sixteen times, I have carried on in the same conversation with business people, factory owners, and millionaires. After five minutes, the person sitting across from me begins to grumble about the “labor unions”, after ten we discuss charitable organizations, and when the person across from me stands up to run to the window and show me the skyscrapers on the other side of the street, attempting to prove to me the wonderful growth of his homeland, then I know that the time is coming to take my overcoat from the hanger. What comes next are four new letters of introduction to business people, factory owners, and millionaires, all of which disguise this pious wish: To hell with you, European. –
What happens to the old, the cast-off, the dismissed, who after forty years still haven’t collected enough for a nest egg?
With luck the American worker dies young. — With luck. — Unfortunately America leads in the percentage of suicides, the mentally ill, and crimes of desperation. Madhouses and prisons spring up everywhere and can barely hold their contents. — In industrial cities I have been begged for money after sunset in a way I’ve only seen in Rome and Naples. — Anyone who wants to see a picture of the most hopeless and degraded of human creatures might like to go to the shelters in Kansas City, to South Clark Street in Chicago, to the much-praised Mills Hotel on New York’s East Side. He might like to see for one hour a night the “bread-line” in front of the doors of one of the large foodhouses, the Salvation Army, where two to three thousand sturdy men wait silently and patiently. He might like to see the hungry, the unemployed, the beggars in the night . . .
He might also want to inquire about the “left-behind”, the vagabonds who have set off for the enticing Wild West, their last paycheck in their pockets, never to be seen again.
One of the most difficult problems in America is that of the Landstreicher, the tramp. The wandering Jewish population makes up a frighteningly high percentage of these “jacks-of-all-trades”. The poor Jewish workers, who have already reached the ends of their ropes, beaten before the battle, grown anemic from the pogroms at home, immigrate to the land of freedom and just can’t keep up with the speed.
The man has a choice between suicide, exhaustion, insanity, and crime. He chooses the life of a tramp. Usually in-between 37 and 40, he leaves his wife and children sans adieu, becoming a “bum” and disappearing into the West or the South.
Americans are kind-hearted. They don’t like seeing someone starve to death. The poor don’t hurt the poor. Only the rich hurt the poor. Carnegie himself, the great philanthropist and peacemaker, proves on closer inspection to be the most malicious and most merciless slave driver. In his Pittsburgh Steel Company there is still a 24-hour-shift, the notorious “double lunch”. The intellectuals of America have tried a revolt, running their heads up against the walls of Pittsburgh and winding up with bumps on their heads. If only there wasn’t this business of trading energy and strength for money and food, the poor and rich could return, so they say, to their mutual Inner Being.
What sorts of risks are run by the poor Jewish bum, or the bums of other religions? Even worse than if he were in his tenement, he can’t really go out in the open with the people of the wide wilderness. Even if he’s managed to smash through to the Pacific, he has still only become a Great Beggar or something similar. And if he hasn’t, he sees death always as a comfort, where a mild supervisor beckons in the distance.
You might want to ask the charitable societies about the ones he’s left behind. What about his wife and children? With their need and the way they’ve been abandoned, some society or another will certainly be compelled to help them, almost as if the bum himself had bequeathed it to them. Does the man even think about his wife and children?
Without singling out any of the factories I’ve seen, I have to say that I wasn’t prepared for so many unhygienic, deadly, and criminally neglected “businesses”.
In these places, the transmission belts rush around without any guard rails, boiling mixtures spray about in the open, fuming substances are rubbed on shoe leather without anyone using masks, a thousand violations stand out here and there, and a part of you revolts against all of it. The fact that I came out of these places with my skin intact is solely due to my guardian angel, who has accompanied me faithfully on this entire trip, and I offer him my deep felt thanks.
This democratic country never seems to have heard of accident insurance, old-age pensions, health insurance, or other similarly civilized things. Next to the fairly intact beggars, the mutilated of all categories are embarrassingly conspicuous. Rabelais couldn’t dream up people any more grotesque than these creatures who meet their shameful fates in the bustle of American factories. You can see them in the streets, in bars, and at the controls of elevators.
But it’s not just the bodily mutilation which draws your full sympathy. It is far more aggravating to see what the modern methods of production have done to these working people’s souls. –
The wheel that takes the bright-eyed pigs to the thickset fellows in the Armour Works is set into motion at the instructions of the Speed Boss, and if today it’s turned at a speed of 25 animals a minute, he turns up the speed tomorrow to 30 animals a minute.
If the miserable wretches upstairs in the packing hall wrap 15,000 tin boxes in paper — their hands move at such a pace you can barely see their fingers — then all it takes is a nasty look from the supervisor and tomorrow, by closing time, they will have wrapped 16,000 boxes, and then 17,000, and so on.
Downstairs, on the slaughterhouse floor, the butchers stand in a row. The steaming bodies are brought before them, hanging from chains, still bleeding or having already gone through the soap bath. Each butcher has his own specific motion to carry out. One cuts the upper part of the tail with a short, sharp knife. The next detaches the tail from the spine with a slice. The next tears the intestines out of the animal’s stomach. The next throws them on a cart, which is moved mechanically away from him. The next takes the liver out of the cart of entrails, and so on.
Each one of these men, from seven in the morning until seven at night, has the same small but important task to perform. He must take care to be good at it, because the chain doesn’t know how to stop. Tell me how he can do it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, wiping the blood spraying from the cadaver. He chews tobacco. That is his only break, his release. Why should it matter to him where he spits his tobacco juice or where he blows his nose?
In front of him the animal rides past on an endless chain. Behind him sits the supervisor. All it takes is a single animal passing him by untouched, and the butcher is finished, thoroughly finished.
Work it out for yourself. How long does it take before a person, a creature with so many wonderful mechanisms of the heart, the nervous system, and the astonishing musculature of the heart, with the joints, hands, and fingers, how long does it take for this person performing the exact same movements over and over, before each mechanism, each mystery dies out, so that it can he barely make it through the dark night into the despairing morning.?
3700 people sit in the lovely, shiny rooms of the famous clock factory in Elgin, each of whom has a minuscule task to see to. 2500 clocks are put together there each day. That makes 211 clocks per hour. So imagine what greets you when, thirsty for knowledge, you march by the workers’ tables. Had Dante had such encounters in the pools of the damned? And yet most of them are happy with their jobs. In front of them, the machine they have to serve hisses and thunders and beats. Hair-thin needles drill hair-thin holes into small copper plates. One millimeter too far, and the needle goes right into their flesh and their fingernails, and in that moment all their money disappears.
In many of these factories, warehouses, and so on, many brochures about baseball, tennis, and football teams were handed to me. They discussed what these factory teams did during the free hours after work.
I’ve also seen the “Whisky-Line” on the borders of the slaughterhouses and the city, where the worker pours himself an “eye-opener” in the morning before going to work. It keeps his stomach quiet and holds him over until the midday break. In the evening, though, he drains his happy hour drink to wash down the disgust and desperation of the day’s work, the ten hours that have poisoned his soul.
I am interested in experiencing what the worker does with his free time. What effect does all this drudgery have on him in his off-hours? During these hours, the worries of these workers’ souls are, it seems to me, a far more important problem than any baseball team.
The meticulousness of the industrial work brings the worker ever closer to the level of the lifeless machine, a precise and automatically functioning collection of parts.
The monotonous rhythm of the same gestures and the same noises deadens the intelligence, the instinct for independent action and the impulse towards differentiation, awareness, and synthesis. The functions of the cerebellum cease, and the fullest creation of nature sinks further to the level of animals.
In the technical schools of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan sit people who want to give the machine the last degree of perfection, so that they can push their fellow human beings further down into deepest slavery.
Just this day the dean of the engineering faculty at the University of Cincinatti, Dr. Hermann Schneider, held a lecture for the clubs of business people in Chicago. He talked chiefly about the preservation of that valuable characteristic, the quintessence of industry: the need for stimulation. It should be said, that he dealt less with the soul of the worker than with the soul of speed.
Some women friends from New York have told me about some experiments of this nature, such as the reading of a popular novel in a cigarette factory or some innocent singing among seamstresses. But the experiment which Dr. Schneider reported is so picturesque I have named the entire chapter after it. –
In a piano factory in Ohio, the young ladies employed to make some of the more trivial parts just couldn’t take it anymore. The poor things were pale, tired, and apathetic. Finally, they would just stay away in order to not go crazy from the monotony of it all.
The boss of that particular unit thought of everything he could, trying out pretty decorations in the workrooms and comfortable armchairs, but nothing helped. The young ladies abandoned their posts, held up their unit, and hampered the surrounding units and the entire factory. Finally, the boss came up with the winning idea. He bought himself a nice, large, maltese cat and brought it to the ladies one morning. The cat was immediately the mascot of the department. Every lady brought her something. One would bring a treat, another a little ribbon, yet another a bell.
The cat’s basket was the central point for all the motherly instincts of these ladies, who had never played with a doll and who weren’t allowed to care for children, but who instead were forced to work, to work without restraint and without hope, endlessly . . .
“The employment of the inborn sympathy of women for the cat has raised work performance in this department by about ten percent,” said Dean Schneider. “The overseer’s good idea was used in other departments under his supervision. When using this and other similar stimulants, everything worked out for the best.”
Chicago has made me sick. In this city, I have stared the bloody disgrace of modern civilization in the face. I have seen it and became acquainted with it. Should I leave? Where would I go? Would I escape from hell? How could I? The modern world is hell.
Chicago: An Impression
Chicago: An Impression
p. 293-302
What demon has possessed me? Have I eaten poison? Do I have a fever? Is it because I’ve just crossed west to east over the Mississippi? It’s nothing like that. I’ve just arrived in Chicago, the most terrifying city in the world.
I don’t want to try to give a picture of this city, not even a little map of its discomforts. Only a couple of sounds, smells, sights, a little smoke and restlessness from its atmosphere should leave enough of an imprint on the paper.
Right now it brings me to the wild chicagua onions for which the city is named — they grew in bunches, where now the world-famous warehouses, the world-famous slaughterhouses, the world-famous grain exchange and the world-famous red light districts stand — they bring tears to the eyes. At nine in the morning, as I walk the streets, a cyclone of people rushing around me violate my eyes and ears. They have all the jerky movements of the people in cinematic recordings. My guidebook is seven years old and useless. I push myself forward and turn through the revolving door of a stationary store, where I ask the clerk, one of those pale young men who are already dead tired by the early morning, how a person might find the sights worth seeing in this city.
“There’s nothing worth seeing here,” the tired clerk says. “There’s only business here.”
A low noise rests over the city, a rumbling coming from over or under the earth, a pulsing which sounds like somebody endlessly beating a carpet. Coal dust goes up one nostril, the scent of boiling glue goes up the other. This paste rests on the surface of your brain and behold, the Chicagoan’s consciousness is born.
The people here pursue their business like they’re all desperately running away from each other. Two nuns run by me on Van Buren Street. They run in and out of doors collecting money. Their faces are buried deep in their dirt-colored habits; their faces, which should hold their joy, are strained and distorted from running after money in the streets.
But I will keep myself from making the mistake of confusing all of America for Chicago, whose pace seems to be bred out of a lack of air and cramped conditions.
So far as I can tell, this city, this rapid city, “the windy town”, diese windige Stadt is really more of a caricature of America. At barely seventy years old, it is the second largest city on the continent, in which there live more Germans than in Hamburg, more Swedes than in Stockholm, more Jews than in Palestine. It has undergone the sort of development which frightens and astonishes the rest of the Union. All of America gazes in terror at this city, and the city shouts back, “Just wait, in a few years I’ll be #1 here, and then, in a few years more, #1 in the world.” In three directions it shoots out into the corn fields. In spite of traveling straight ahead on a tram line for half a day, I could not reach its borders. Like the newest of its skyscrapers, this empire of individuals rises quickly to a dizzying height. As it sweeps through the fields, making endless suburbs out of wood and dirt, it spreads the misery and poverty of its people disturbingly far and wide. It produces the irrational splendor and mad power of houses and businesses built like palaces. And it also produces the desperation of darkened souls in factories and tenements. It produces a constant back and forth, a tension, an eternal multiplication of houses and people. It produces a dance of greed, extravagance, burning, belittling, crime, pity, psalm singing, manslaughter, uglification, and shame — But on the graves of four martyrs in the Waldheim Cemetery lay fresh flowers! –
Hopefully it’s not always like this here, in this first week of November 1911, when I arrive in Chicago. But year in, year out, it’s always the same pace, so I really don’t hesitate to say that Chicago is Hell.
In the best area of the city, I wake up in the morning after my arrival. It’s still early, barely five, and there’s an explosion. I leap out to the window and look out at the hotel courtyard, trying to see if anyone has jumped off the roof. Two days later I wake up to the same explosion, but now I stay in bed. By now I know it’s not a suicide, no glorious repetition of the Haymarket Riots, but instead it’s just a neighborhood morning greeting, a small bomb laid before the door of a business competitor.
After the first frost, the newspaper reports seven murders and three attempted rapes on the outskirts of town. The papers are full of poisons, the unexplained sudden falling deaths of influential people, and shootings on busy streets in the middle of the day. (Everyone knows that while in other cities you can have a man murdered starting at upwards of two hundred dollars, you can get one in Chicago for eight.)
In the courts, the state’s attorneys skirmish with the magnates of the meat industry. They’ve tried to break the Sherman Law, so that they can corner the market in meat and tighten their stranglehold on consumers. The courts are full of young lawyers. They come here from all directions to learn how the famous attorney springs his accusation on the hogbutchers. But when a tiny loophole shows up between two letters of the law, the whole prosecution slips away. By now everything has already been done to render the accusation invalid. (The magnates will tell you that the matter has already been decided by the high courts in Washington.)
There have been raids around Armour Square on the institutions of the bordello industry. A couple of streets to the east, Jim O’Leary, the king of gamblers, has tried to render gambling dens bombproof with steel-armored doors. All three industries, meat, bordello, and gambling, have held up all well-meaning attempts at reform. The newspapers don’t mince words. They report about the city in detail: about the politicians, who are in the service of the meat interest, about the police, who are in the service of the bordello interest, and about the orderlies, who have calmly drawn Jim’s odds on their blackboards. (Will there be two days in January with a temperature under zero degrees Fahrenheit or not? Five to one.) Like in nearly every large city, a new mayor takes a stance against corruption in every aspect of public life. I can still hear the reformist and political nicknames buzzing in my ear: Hinky-Dink, Bathhouse John, and others. For the first time on my entire trip, I keep a revolver in my back pocket at all times. As easily as you’ll find a thief or murderer waiting in the small alleys of this city, you’ll also find a policeman or orderly in the corner of a bar.
An old man with a white Vandyke beard sits next to me upstairs in the gallery of the grain exchange in the Board of Trade Building. He’s stretched out his hand, covered in brownish-yellow hair, and explains to me the sights below. He names the names of the howling dervishes who stand around “the Pit” where the golden grain plunges into the world and flutters out to the deceived masses on the wings of imaginary finance.
There are three other pits in this auditorium: the corn pit, the oat pit, and the pork pit. But the wildest howling and the most desperate crowding happens around the wheat pit.
In-between the pits for the wheat and corn brokers, inspectors stand on a high, commanding bridge, carrying long sheets of paper which are the logbooks of the exchange. Gleaming metal capsules shoot over to them on thin steel threads from the hundred telegraph machines at the end of the auditorium. From the chalkboards, where the names of the harvest districts of America are written out, a constant cracking sounds out over the raging voices. On the other side of the hall, the wheat receipts trickle from hundreds of paper sacks into wooden bowls underneath them.
The old man next to me owns four thousand acres of land in Nebraska and is taking a trip to the east, where his children study. So far this year he’s satisfied that the hyenas of “the Pit” have torn neither him nor his children to pieces. A weasel-like, tiny Jew stands on the lower steps of the pit and stares blinking at the roaring jaws around him. This is the same man who for two weeks attempted an “operation” in wheat and failed miserably. He was stopped short, that is, three million bushels sit on his accounts in the grain elevators of Chicago, Madison, and St. Louis, from where he attempts to sell them to millers at an enormous loss.
Pleasant Gretna, the quiet nighttime walkways of Altona up in Manitoba! The gleaming metal capsules shoot here and there and link together the fates of men who don’t even know each other, strange fates . . .
A raging cry shoots up from the howling kennels, where three downward steps lead into a breathing pool. Hundreds of hands stretch up as if in oath. People run into the pit from all corners of the auditorium, arms and elbows swinging as if ready to fight. The inspector bends an ear down from the bridge, then writes a figure onto the paper. A flash shoots from the bridge to the telegraph machines. A hundred thousand tickers tick at one and the same time, hair is mussed up on a hundred thousand heads, and tonight they will be sleepless in a hundred thousand beds, exhausted men poring over the numbers until the dawn of day.
My neighbor takes leave of me smiling. His hairy hand goes barely into my own as we say goodbye to each other with a good handshake.
Downstairs, the roars, the gesticulations, and the witchery continue around the pit. The raised hands now become clenched fists. Everyone showers the next with threats. The good, warm fists of agriculture. Manly, broad, quiet fists calloused like the crust of the earth! –
In the shadow of the corridors leading to the steps, a dark, tall woman sits on a bench. Under her wide-brimmed hat, the veil is pushed away from her face, which is pale and has lovely, grand, and simple features. She can’t be older than 35. She looks straight ahead and not at the passersby. She wears a heavy black fur. Her hands, in black gloves, rest on her lap. She holds a small pencil and a crumpled piece of paper. Whenever the howls from the auditorium penetrate her dark corner, the woman, without looking, mechanically scribbles a drawing or a figure on the paper. What is she writing? What is she listening for?
Two weeks later, I make my way again to the exchange at noon and run into the gallery, where I see the woman sitting in the same place. Pale, she stares ahead into nothing. Her hands, which seem lifeless, hold the pencil and the piece of paper . . .
But downstairs, in front of the house, it looks like St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Thousands of white pigeons flutter around smoke-blackened crates. The seeds scattered from sacks don’t stay on the pavement very long. Many of the howling dervishes, who above all things want to snatch the last piece of grain from their colleagues, stick a handful into their pockets before leaving “the Pit”.
In this fleeting sketch I should say a little something about holy Sunday, when the rabid, feverish city pretends to rest from its work. It’s nothing like the European notion of a restful Sunday, but you do see fewer people on the streets than in large European cities. The people never allow themselves to swing over from Sunday to Monday without losing their speed and poise in the transition, but instead they are prepared at all times to rush in at full speed.
Especially in America, a 24-hour day is a long time. Since the law forbids making business with men on Sunday, the American makes business with his conscience on Sunday and revises his contract with his beloved God, which contract must remain binding seven days long for both parties. –
On a Sunday in Chicago, God has a different name and a different face every five steps. On elegant Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Via del Corso spread out against the shore, you can see seventy-five different worldviews lined up in a row. Everyone runs in a different door, behind each of which stands an auditorium with hundreds of chairs. By ten o’clock, every spot in these auditoriums are taken. Everyone will hold up their God or their conscience or the figments of their imagination, beginning with songs and Bible passages and ending with the ringing of bells. Lying in-between is an extraordinary collection of declarations, religious insanities, Indian mysticism, more or less the business tricks and quackery of the conscience which the world endures and participates in on a Sunday morning in November. Later, I plan to write a chapter on the church in America, but here I’d like to give a report on the final moments of the strongest religious movement America has experienced.
The prophet Elijah, Elijah the Restorer of the New Zion, is dead. In life he went by the name John Alexander Dowie and was one of the greatest business geniuses of the new America. Two hours north of Chicago lies Zion City, the town that was pronounced to become the New Zion. The New Zion with the Holy Tabernacle of Belief in the middle of town, a colossal administrative building erected behind it for the exploitation of human stupidity, and a central office for the dollars of the converted believers of the human race.
Neither the tabernacle nor the buildings behind it were ever built. All that remains of Zion City is the name and a thriving lace factory, Dowies’ only successful venture.
In a rented church in Chicago, there is a last desperate attempt to bring together a handful of Zion’s faithful. The “Overseer of the Christian Catholic Church of Zion over the World” has sat down after his speech. Now one of the faithful stands up and asks for an explanation about some of the unfulfilled promises of the Prophet, namely his flesh rising from the dead and undergoing a transformation. Five years have gone by and he still hasn’t transformed. The questioner has sat for a night at the grave of the Prophet and even put his ear on the stone. No noise. Nothing.
The “Overseer” stands up and announces that the promise is to be interpreted as follows: Christ would appear simultaneously with the Prophet in the City of Zion. Since, however, with the secularization of Zion, asphalt has been laid over the earth of Shiloah, the last hope has faded. Christ’s pierced foot would never rest on the asphalt of a new era . . .
The next Sunday, the 26th of November, the New Zion lay waiting for death. The widow of the Prophet, Mrs. Jane Dowie, a small well-dressed lady who looks like a housekeeper or fortune teller, preaches in a meager little rented room in the Loop District. The thing begins with about twenty diminished old women and small men, who sing along to the songs shivering and trembling.
Then the widow speaks. She has her husband’s robes on, the same ones the Prophet wore for seven years in Madison Square Garden, New York City, as he spoke in front of thirty thousand people. Her speech isn’t Do This and Don’t Do That, but instead a lecture on smatterings of the Bible, some reminiscences of her husband, whom she alternately calls “the Prophet” and “my husband”, and a blunt scolding of those successful widows, whose rooms next to Vanity Fair maintain an extensive clientele. — The widow she refers to is Mrs. Baker Eddie, the proprietress of the faith healers, the Christian Scientists.
“My soul is in need, but Christ takes away my want. I wouldn’t deceive anyone for the world, a world made of lies and deception, a world that grows rich through falsehoods. I know that I can trust my God, but this room costs ten dollars, and if you know a cheaper one, just tell me the address. We will now pray for strength and power, and then comes the small collection. Remember, the room costs ten dollars, a poor weak women such as myself really can’t afford it.”
During the closing psalms, the widow of the Prophet pounds her right hand in rhythm, while with her left she counts the gold in the little basket that the usher of the “New Zion” has stood on the altar next to her.
In dark crowds, excited and hysterical, the Americans stream out of their seventy-five churches along Michigan Avenue. At home, they’ll become afraid of their descent into nothingness, carried along by their galloping speed. It takes effort not to stumble over the unemployed, who are loitering and begging every ten steps on even the most elegant avenues of the city. Miserable and hollow-eyed, they stand there and beg in crowds, and that sort of thing is only customary in Italy, the land of the blue-golden sun and godly laziness.
Pictures from Amerika
A German named Arthur Holitscher wrote a travelogue of America and Canada in the early 20th century. The main reason people know about it is because Franz Kafka used it as a source for his first novel, but it’s a neat book in its own right. You can find it on Google Books. The only problem for us is that there isn’t any English translation of it out there that we can find, so the Editor decided (out of the good of his heart) to translate at least some of his favorite sections using his very limited knowledge of the German language. Below are some pictures, which give you an idea of what the book will be like. The Editor is currently working on the translations.
Page 47: Ten stories . . . fifty . . . a hundred!
Page 118: Uncle Sam taps the Canadian Maple.
Page 119: The bull is the US, Canada is the calf. An incendiary placard from the Conservatives.
Page 201: An authentic cowboy.
Page 211: The tepee and its inhabitants.
Page 312: A tramp on his way.
Page 326: Chicago: People live here!
Page 367: A pastoral scene from Oklahama [sic].
Additions to the Dictionary
The Editor is cooking something up and hasn’t really found anything good to publish this time around. He swears something is around the bend, but for the time being, here are a few additions to the dictionary.
art
(noun)
Ponderous pornography.
lady
(noun)
Someone who pees sitting down.
reliable
(adjective)
An exceedingly polite word one can use to describe a terrible person. The most
terrifying thing about Hitler was that, when it came to down to principles, he
was as good as his word.
renaissance
(noun)
A high-class revival meeting.
sarcasm
(noun)
If used properly, still the best way to say what you mean without badly
hurting anybody’s feelings. Including your own.
The Circle
The Circle
by Martha Rose
They say that the Circle was once a racetrack, or that once a year it was used as a racetrack. It’s hard to get good stories out of them. They’re old men who hijack the corners of grocery stores, where the free newspapers are. It’s gotten to the point where the manager has given up and installed some benches and a coffee machine so that the old men wil be comfortable and won’t swear so much. But they swear just as much as they did before. If you’re stupid enough to ask them a question, they’ll tell you that the whole fucking Circle used to be a racetrack. Or, at least, it’d been a racetrack once a year for those faggots on their fancy bikes. This was fifty years ago, they’d say, before they put in the highway.
By now the Circle is an anomaly. Every other street you know runs straight north or south, or if it wants to be fancy, it runs at an angle or curves now and then. The miracle of The Circle is that it runs in a circle, maybe a little oblong but circular nonetheless. Someone had the bright idea of dividing it into half, one side being the West Circle and the other side the East, as if there could be differences in a circle. What it became instead was its own creation, a neighborhood within a neighborhood, just before the city becomes the suburbs. You only come across it if you’re looking for it, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for you’re already lost and don’t know where you are. It’s just off the main roads, about a square mile of old and expensive houses, trees blocking out the sun, side streets crisscrossing or merging at odd angles, and all the while that single curving road, closing in on itself and throwing into disorder what you used to think of as an orderly, predictable city.
Paul picked up a newspaper and made the mistake of listening, even stopping to listen as the spry old man told the same story for the fourth time. “They used to ride that fucking Circle once a year. For cash. You’d got all these bastard professionals out there, and a bunch of amateurs having a good time. Well, one year they didn’t have enough to pave the road. There were potholes all over the place! One of the big pros fell and broke his arm. Nobody gave a shit. But then we found out some of the locals had fallen too, and all because of those damned potholes. That was the end of that. Never had the race since. This was before the highway came through –”
Another old man, this one fat and immobile, spoke up out of nowhere. “My aunt’s house had to move because of that highway.”
Someone else joined in. “It did?”
“It was right in the way of the on-ramp. So they picked it up and moved it.”
“They wouldn’t do that now. They’d tear the damn thing down and write her a check.”
“You’re right. Things are fucking simple now. I hate it.”
Paul stopped listening, afraid that someone would talk to him, and he left. As he walked down the street, back toward the Circle, he ate the sandwich he had just bought at the deli counter. When he was finished, he let the plastic wrapping fall gently from his left hand down to the sidewalk below. Someone else could clean it up for once. He was on break. He wiped his hands on his jeans, made a right turn, crossed some train tracks and came up to the nursing home where he worked. He avoided the main entrance, which was a long U-shaped driveway where sometimes he’d see an ambulance waiting outside, but instead he had a key to a back door, so he wouldn’t have to shuffle past the clerks, security guards, and miscellaneous residents who seemed to resent the outside world that hung so closely beyond the automatic sliding doors. It was quieter coming through the back way and less dramatic.
Paul made his way to the staff room he shared with the other custodians. It was possible, from the back entrance, to get there using mostly a series of basement passages and restricted areas, so that he could pretty much avoid having to walk through any area where he might run into residents, only occasionally crossing a hallway as he walked from one staff room to another. When he got to his locker, he put on his practical, sterile uniform and proceeded to clean his section.
Over the summer months, the home had gone through a serious renovation, adding a second building to accommodate the ever-growing number of applicants. Where the old building looked like a medical or office facility, straight up and down and tinted windows, the new building was designed to look homier, like a five-story bed and breakfast with windowed gables that may or may not be attached to rooms and a New England style clocktower which seemed a little out of place here in the Midwest. In the end, it probably looked too homey, like it was some sort of trap, but so long as the place didn’t look like a morgue or an insane asylum, it really didn’t matter. What mattered was that the place needed to expand and actually had the resources to do so. No other business in the area, even in this fairly well-to-do neighborhood, had the money to expand. Banks charged extra service fees, libraries hikes up the overdue fines, lousy storefront restaurants shut down and nothing came to replace them, but the nursing home kept on growing. It’s almost as if people wanted to be there. You used to go to nursing homes to die. Now you go to forget that there ever was such a thing as death.
I suppose it helps that the home is right on the Circle, parked on the very edge. It sat at the northeast corner, just before the railroad tracks. At the southwest corner of the Circle, a large Catholic church stands guard. A few blocks to the east, a public high school attracts a lot of kids, even though most of the families in the Circle send their children to private institutions. Finally, a major road to the west makes for a wall of traffic. The people on the outside don’t exactly understand the people on the inside. It’s a foreign country in there, with slightly different rules of etiquette and demeanor. Past the railroad tracks, words behaved differently. It wasn’t any easier or harder to be make people angry in the Circle than it was in the outside world, but you had to know the rules to know the people, and vice versa. Without the rules, it was easy to get confused and angry.
So whenever Paul passed by a window overlooking the Circle, he glanced out and reaffirmed his suspicion that the Circle was populated with nothing but assholes. He got no respect here and didn’t know why. What he did know was that if he were ever going to be arrested, or hit by a car, or stabbed to death by a total stranger, it would happen here, in the Circle, because he just couldn’t figure out the rules.
Most of his cleaning was done away from the residents, in stairwells or staff areas, because his boss felt that Paul wouldn’t get along with the residents. It wasn’t that Paul would pick any fights or even that Paul had a nasty personality. He was just a big, quiet guy who kept to himself, and because of that, everyone who didn’t know him thought he was up to something. It didn’t help matters that he was black. Most of the nursing and custodial staff were black, so it wasn’t like he stood out, but Black meant something in this neighborhood. The Circle was anxiously European, to the point where people distinguished between Swedish, Irish and Polish. Anyone middle-Eastern was simply mistaken for Greek. If you ever pressed anyone on the issue, he’d tell you that race meant nothing to him, but if you used the right language, you could start talking to him about certain neighborhoods on the other side of the city, and then he’d start telling you about how certain people from certain neighborhoods should take better care of their children, should stop blaming the outside world for their problems and should, above all things, cooperate more with police. So when the residents spot a person from a certain neighborhood mopping the floors around them, they can’t help but think. What put everything over the edge was the unavoidable fact that Paul was male. The residents were still chivalrous enough to treat the black women with condescension and kindness, but when it came to men, any black male, from president to pauper, was two steps removed from a thief. And if he was big . . .
It was decided that Paul should stay out of the way. The only public area Paul cleaned was a small alcove with a few chairs and couches facing a TV in the corner. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the larger media rooms on the lower floors, which were all about bringing people together. This was just a convenient spot where some of the less alert or mobile residents could watch something in uninterrupted stillness. The people who came to this spot were the ones who had a hard time getting anywhere else. They hobbled over or were wheeled over. They sat and they watched. The tiled floor made it easier to clean up spills. Paul usually mopped up quietly as the TV droned in the background and various workers shuffled back and forth. There was only one resident who ever spoke to him. His name was Smith. Paul didn’t know if it was his first or last name, but the man had introduced himself as Smith and that was that. Smith was skinny and almost emaciated, with poor enough hearing so that sometimes it didn’t matter what you were saying so long as you were talking. But he was sharp. Sometimes Paul wondered what the old man was doing in the home to begin with, and he was never able to figure out why Smith hung out in the corner instead of all the places that were filled with people who could listen to Smith and talk back reasonably. All they did here was mumble incoherently about long dead relatives that Smith had never heard of to begin with. Paul chalked it up to the Circle and only spoke when he was spoken to.
“Hey Paul,” Smith said.
“How’re you doing?” Paul answered.
“Just fine.” The man could’ve been dying of a bullet wound, but he’d still be just fine. Most of the time the conversation ended there, so that Paul could carefully maintain the area around the wheelchairs and splayed limbs. Paul’s shift started early in the morning, but typically he clean Smith’s alcove last, sometime in the mid-afternoon, when the only thing on the TV were light, harmless talk shows hosted by vaguely mannish women. One day Smith asked, “Do you see her?”
“Who?” Paul asked.
“Her!” Smith yelled. “The host!” He pointed manically at the TV, where the host made random jokes as a celebrity chef stuffed a turkey.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know she’s a dyke?”
Paul couldn’t help but start laughing. Smith didn’t seem to mind. “I kinda know,” Paul said. “I think I read it somewhere.”
“I had no fucking idea!” Smith said. “I had to find out from one of the nurses. I’m not saying I had the hots for her or anything, I’ve got a problem with her nose, but I was disappointed. At this time of day, she’s really all I got.”
Paul remembered a time in-between girlfriends, when he sat up late at night and wished he had access to the Internet. “I know the feeling,” he said. Smith and Paul had been friends ever since.
This particular day, though, Smith wasn’t talking. He shifted in his seat like there was something to say, but nothing came out. Paul washed the floor a couple of times, waiting for Smith to speak up. He knew whatever the man had to say would be good, and he was willing to leave work a little late to be able to hear it. It took awhile, but it came.
“Paul?” Smith said.
“You doing all right?”
“I’m just fine. Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“I, um . . . I have relatives . . . and they’re in a bit of a spot. I don’t know why I should help them but it’s family. It might turn out good for you, too. I really don’t know. But would you be interested in something like that?”
“What is it?”
“I really can’t say. I mean, the people here act like they’re fucked up . . .” He pointed to man who had fallen in his wheelchair, his head resting on his chest. “But you really don’t know what they hear and what they don’t. It might turn out damn well for you, if you get through it, and if anyone can, you can.”
“Are you all right?” Paul asked.
“I’m just fine,” Smith answered. “Let me give you a number. You seem like a good kid. A quiet kid. If you don’t like what you hear, all you have to do is not say a goddamned thing. I don’t want to put you in a spot, but it could be good for you. Are you interested?”
Paul didn’t know what to say.
“Let me give you the number. Do you have a pen on you? And paper?”
“Yeah, sure.” Paul walked to the nearest nurse’s station, which was half-disguised as an office. He took a pen and a Post-It note and brought it back to Smith.
“You’re looking for Joel Robinson,” he said, and he wrote Joel Robinson on the note. Then he wrote the number, which must’ve been for a cell phone, because Paul couldn’t recognize the area code. Joel must move around a lot. If Joel was a relative like Smith said, maybe this made the old man Smith Robinson, a funny sort of name. Or maybe Smith’s daughter married into the Robinsons. Or maybe Joel was a middle man. Or maybe Smith was playing a joke, and when Paul called the number, a pack of elderly women would screech at him and tell him to go fuck himself. Smtih handed Paul the note and smiled uncertainly. “You have a good evening,” Smith said.
“You too,” Paul said. It was time he went home. To get there, Paul wished he could use the railroad that was less than a block away, but instead he had to go to a bus stop clear on the other side of the Circle. From work, he walked down a diagonal street which cut right through the middle of the neighborhood, passing a public grammar school and two small Protestant churches. It always felt like he was trespassing. Everyone was comfortable but him. No matter what time of day it was, someone was walking a dog, and most of the dogs were small and white. Once, Paul came up behind a young man walking two white dogs, and across the street an old man walked a white dog, and when they all got to an intersection, they saw a middle-aged man walking another white dog a kitty corner away. The dog on the opposite corner got all excited and ran into the middle of the intersection, yipping ferociously at all the other little white dogs. The dog’s owner, who at any time could’ve pulled on the leash, followed his dog out onto the street and stood there, complacently, as if there were no way a car could mow down him or his little white dog. And while this all took place, nobody said a word. The only things talking were the dogs. The men just smiled and nodded at each other like they did this every other week. Paul didn’t get it, but he only had to put up with it long enough to get to the bus stop and then to the long road for home.
The next day, approaching the mid-afternoon, Paul cleaned up the TV area and came up to Smith, who stared into nothing and grinned. “I called the number you gave me,” Paul said.
“Good. How did it go?”
“He gave me an address.”
“I knew you’d do all right.”
“Where is it?” Paul took out a piece of paper with an address written on it. Smith looked at the paper and didn’t have to think about it much.
“It’s close by. Just take the Circle away from here . . . when you walk out the front door, make a right until you get to the Circle, then make a left . . . it’ll be one of the first streets you run into. Make a left and follow the numbers.”
“What is this about?”
“I don’t know enough to tell you anything,” Smith said. “All I know is that the Robinsons . . . are looking for a strong, reliable young man. And they’ve got money. That’s all I know.”
“Is this some kind of bullshit?” Paul asked.
“It’s all bullshit,” Smith answered. “The whole family’s bullshit. But it’s not that kind of bullshit. I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re the only guy I trust here, Paul.”
“Well, thank you.” Paul kept on cleaning the place even though it didn’t need cleaning. He wanted more information. “They don’t want to meet until seven o’clock,” he said. “What is there to do around here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to go wandering around. Is there any place I can go?”
“I don’t know, go to the library. It’s right across the tracks.”
“What about something to eat?”
“I hear the grocery store has some good sandwiches.”
“I mean something to eat.”
“Go to the diner. It’s right by the library.”
““Is it good?” Paul asked.
“It’s food,” Smith answered. “Paul?”
“What?”
“What are you worried about?”
“Nobody’s told me what I’m doing tonight. And I don’t like hanging out in this neighborhood unless I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Trust me, Paul,” Smith said. “It’ll work out. If you go tonight and you like what you see, it’ll work out. If you don’t, that’s okay too. Just keep quiet about it, that’s all. I’m sure they’ll be able to find somebody else.”
“Somebody else for what?”
“I really don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Well what did I tell you?” Smith said. “The whole family’s bullshit.”
When Paul got off of work, he crossed the tracks and spent some time in the library. He still felt uncomfortable, but knew that no one could touch him so long as he kept to himself. A few people close to where he sat lazily surfed the Internet on public computers. He could probably kill time quicker on the Internet, but he was willing to bet he needed a card for that. He didn’t want the trouble. Paul flipped through magazines instead and watched the clock. At six thirty, he walked a few doors down to the diner, where he sat right up at the counter because he was by himself and didn’t want a table or a booth. The service was good, the meal decent, so he left an adequate tip and walked away, burping now and then as he tried to remember Smith’s directions. He knew he’d gotten it right when, as he passed house after ornate house, somebody shouted to him from a porch. “Paul?”
Paul stopped. “Yeah?”
“Come on up. We talked on the phone. I’m Joel.” Joel wore a black T-shirt that was tucked into gray trousers. The man smiled broadly and kindly, like he was about to steal Paul’s wallet.
“How are you doing, Paul?”
“I’m doing just fine,” Paul said. He walked up to Joel’s porch and shook Joel’s hand. “My father-in-law told me some good things about you.”
“Well,” Paul said, thinking of the falsest thing he could say. “I hope so.”
“Isn’t that right?” Joel answered. He laughed loudly, opened the front door, put his hand on the small of Paul’s back and pushed Paul into his house. The first thing Paul saw was a skinny, red-headed woman who seemed to have frozen up in the living room. “This is my wife,” Joel said. Everyone nodded at each other. “Let me take you upstairs.”
They went to a room which, in another decade, would’ve been a study, but now it was just an extra room. There were two expensive chairs and needlessly elaborate table. A half-filled bookshelf stuck out from a corner, while random pictures decorated the walls. “Sit down, Paul,” Joel said. “Make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”
“No thanks,” Paul said. “I just had dinner.”
“All right. Sit down, then.”
Paul sat down. It was a comfortable chair. Joel walked to the opposite chair and, instead of sitting, laid his hands on the back of the chair. “I’m glad you came,” Joel said. “This is really about my son. He’s the one who should talk to you. Let me get him for you.”
“ . . . Okay.”
Joel walked out of the room, and the only sound Paul heard was a stern voice yelling, “Rory!” Joel only had to yell it twice before something came stomping in Joel’s direction. There were a few mumblings, then the door opened and a kid about Paul’s age shuffled through the door. Rory wore khaki shorts and a dark blue polo shirt, untucked. He sat down in the chair opposite Paul. “So you’re Paul?”
“I’m Paul.”
“I’m really glad you came, Paul. Pops said you were all right.” Rory wasn’t nearly as good as his father or grandfather, but he had the same deceiving pleasantness. “I’m sorry, do you want something to drink?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re right.” Rory sat down. “You want to know why you’re here. It really is something of a delicate situation, and I just want to make sure we’re both on the same page. Nothing that either of us says here needs to leave here.”
“Okay.” Nothing leaves the Circle.
“Let me tell you where I’m coming from . . . I’m going to the army.” Rory paused to let it sink in. He leaned over and rested his elbows on his knees.
Paul felt obliged to say something. “Oh, well . . . that’s pretty good. I knew a couple of guys who joined the army right out of high school. I never found out what happened to them, but it seems like the kind of place that can really screw your head on straight.”
“If that’s your kind of thing. But Paul . . .” Paul flinched at the mention of his own name. “If it’s not your thing, it doesn’t do anybody any good.”
Behind Rory, the door opened and Joel peeked in. Rory pretended not to notice. Joel disappeared and closed the door. “What do you mean?” Paul asked. “There’s no draft on, is there?”
“No. No draft.”
“Is your family making you?”
“No . . . they’re the reason you’re here.”
They’re the reason you’re here. “What’s going on?” Paul asked.
“I enlisted.”
“So you want to be in the army.”
“No.”
“Why did you enlist?”
“It was . . . just, a thing. Like a joke. Or a dare. I was with friends. Really, my dad would be able to explain this better, but he wanted me to do it myself.”
What the fuck was the matter with these people? Paul could only barely imagine it, this little rich shit enlisting as a joke. Or a dare. Drunk or high off his ass as the sun comes up, surrounded by his asshole friends. Someone sees a recruitment office and dares someone to enlist. For fifty bucks, and fifty bucks was money to Paul but it probably means nothing to them. In-between the vodka, Red Bull, meth and foreign beer, Rory is the man for the job. He walks out of the army office laughing. It only dawns on him later what he did.
“Ysee, I enlisted.” Rory wanted badly to explain himself, but every time he opened his mouth, he realized who he was and what he sounded like. “I mean, I panicked when I remebered what I did, and maybe at that point I could still have gotten out of it, but then I started thinking too much. That maybe this was a good thing. Like you said, maybe it could screw my head on straight. And I’d be doing some good, helping my country, shooting bad guys, saving Third World countries. I’d be like a missionary or something, but with a gun. I’d be a real fucking American, the kind that people ask to march in parades. So I got myself in a little too deep. By the time my family found out, I’d signed too many papers. It was either the army or jail.”
“So why am I here?” Paul asked.
“My family has plans for me. I’m engaged, yknow. She’s a sweet girl. She’ll make a good wife. And I’ve got a job lined which could be a really good career if I don’t fuck it up. The end of it is, I can’t join the army. I’m not allowed.”
Paul waited for the punchline. Rory couldn’t sit anymore. He stood up, walked behind his chair and held it tightly, like a shield.
“I’m at the point where I can’t get off the list – quotas and all that. But I have an uncle who knows a guy. What they can do is take out my paperwork and replace it with someone else’s. Instead of one name, another name. Instead of one person, another person.”
“You want me to join the army.”
“Pops said you were a good guy.”
“I’m sorry, I’m leaving.” Paul stood up and walked for the door. Rory’s eyes widened. He was afraid. “I’m not saying a damn word of this to anybody,” Paul said, “but I’m leaving.” Rory took off for the door so he could block Paul’s way and grab him by the shoulders.
“Whoa, hold on there,” Rory said. Paul was about four inches taller than Rory. Paul looked down for a second and imagined how easy it would be to beat the little shit to a bloody pulp. But then the father would call the cops and say that Paul was a thief gone mad. There was no guarantee that Paul was getting out of here alive. “Whoa,” Rory said, “I’m not asking you to do this for nothing. Sit back down. Hear me out. Let me explain.”
“Why should I sit down?”
“Fifty thousand dollars. Upfront. The second you agree.”
Paul walked away from the door. This had to be a mistake. You’d think that a family with that kind of money could’ve found a better way out of their problem. You’d think that a family with money like that wouldn’t let Smith rot in a nursing home. But if he could see that kind of money, maybe he wouldn’t have to ask so many questions. “Explain it to me.”
“There’s not much to explain. We’ve got the paperwork all ready. You just have to fill out some forms. Someone we know will substitute the records, and you’re good to go. For every year you stay, so long as you don’t go AWOL or shoot your commanding officer, so long as you keep your mouth shut and your head screwed on tight, we are prepared to offer you fifty thousand dollars. Per year. In addition to whatever the government gives you. Tax free. Under the table. Fifty thousand a year.”
“This isn’t the kind of contract,” Paul said, “that’ll hold up in court. What did you say about upfront?”
Rory walked out of the room and came back with an old backpack he laid in Paul’s lap. It was filled with cash. “Fifty thousand dollars,” Rory said. Paul held up the bills, checking for watermarks and other things he wasn’t sure about. It still didn’t sound like the kind of plan that would come from a reasonable person, but Joel might’ve made his son do the planning. Rory acted like the kind of guy who would make a cockeyed plan like this. He had made a mistake and thought he could get out of it with money. Maybe he could. The only thing more ambitiously cruel than going to war was paying someone else to do it for you. And maybe his Pops was in the nursing home for location’s sake, or as some sort of punishment, and Pops had sent Paul over as a good will offering. He was only an in-law in the end. Who knew what kind of wheeling and dealing went on in this family? The only thing Paul knew for certain was the money in his lap, even if he couldn’t quite tell if it was counterfeit. “Well?” Rory said. “What do you think?”
Paul picked up a bill and felt it between his fingers. “What about a hundred?”
“Hundred?”
“A hundred thousand. Fifty’s all right, but I’m getting shot at.”
“We don’t keep that kind of cash in a vault, Paul. We had to move some investments around to get that backpack ready. Let me see what I can do.” Rory stepped out of the room, like a used car salesman checking with his manager. Paul had the suspicion that every time Rory said we, it meant that someone had paid him a favor. If Paul went through with this – which by now didn’t seem so far-fetched – he was sure that Rory would brag to his friends that he’d been in a tight spot but we had made an arrangement and everything would be okay. Paul zipped up the backpack and put it on the side of his chair. He prepared himself, so that when Rory came in, Paul looked like he had already made up his mind. It had such an effect that Rory stammered a little bit.
“It, uh . . . it looks like I could, um, get you seventy-five a year. Not cash. Not right away. All we got is the fifty right now. But we’ll get you another twenty-five for the first year and after that, seventy-five a year. What do you say?”
“It sounds better is what I’ll say.” Paul stood up. “But I’m still going to have to think about it.”
“Of course. You don’t have to –”
“When do you need a decision?”
“By the end of the week.”
“I’d have to be able to make some arrangments.”
“Shit’s gonna start happening by the end of the week.”
“You’ll get your decision tomorrow.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” They shook hands. Paul wondered if he was Rory’s last chance, or if there were other janitors lined up behind him. The negotiations implied that Rory had nowhere else to go, but then again, maybe the negotiations were part of the show. Rory walked Paul down to the front door and followed him onto the porch, where Joel stood quietly and pretended to stare off into nothing.
Paul wanted to make a stand of some kind. Before stepping off the porch, he turned around and pronounced, “I just want to let you know, I mean, you know I haven’t decided yet. But if I say no, I won’t say a word. I won’t want to see you, talk to you, or remember you. And if I say yes, I would still want to keep as far away from you as I can.”
Rory mumbled something in approval. Joel looked at his son and then at Paul. “Paul,” Joel said. “I know where you’re coming from. I appreciate the sentiment. But if you’re going to say shit like that, say it inside and not out here.” They stood for a few seconds. The weather was quite nice, cool but not too breezy. “You have yourself a good night, Paul.”
“Good night, Joel. Good night, Rory. I’ll let you know tomorrow. I got your number.”
Paul walked as fast as he could off the porch and down the street. It was dark out by now, which only made the neighborhood stranger and more foreign. Children wandered the sidewalks by themselves with impunity, crossing the streets at random unafraid. A few people still walked their dogs, but now the dogs were bigger for some reason. No one was afraid to be outside but Paul. He walked as fast as he could to get out of there, but then he slowed down, for fear of looking like he was doing something wrong. He spent most of his time figuring out just the right pace to keep people from noticing him. Nothing much happened in-between the house and the bus stop, but it worried him all the same.
The next day, Paul continued with his daily routine, not letting anyone know what he’d been up to. When he came to the TV area at the end of his shift, he tried to act like nothing had changed. “Hey Paul,” Smith said.
“How’re you doing?”
“Just fine.” The TV kept on playing and Paul kept on cleaning. “Yknow, Paul?” Smith said. “What have you been thinking about lately?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Paul said, and he paused for a while, coming up with something to say. “I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am. To live in a country like this. With all my . . .” He spotted a large, unidentified brown spot on the floor. He mopped it up. “With all my freedom. And my rights. And luxuries. I figure, there’s got to be a way I can give back. A way that I can come to the service of my country. Do you know what I mean?”
Smith laughed loudly, with pride. It wasn’t something you heard very much in the home. “I know what you mean, Paul. I knew you were a good man. It’s just a feeling I got, but I think you’ll do well.”
Paul stopped to look at all the invalids, who had barely registered the conversation going on around them. “I hope I will,” Paul said. His shift was almost done.
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
by Edward Grim
Mario Vasquez wished he had bought a convertible, a white one that reflected everything. If he couldn’t have a convertible, he wanted something with air conditioning and tight windows, anything to keep out the heat. He liked to keep his dark hair slicked back like his dad had done, but something with the gel and the hot air made it stick up in the back and on the sides and kinda everywhere. In weather like this he looked like a hotshot computer programmer, dressing beyond his ability, and Mario couldn’t do a thing about it. His old car had been shot up. Now all he had was Oscar’s car, which was every color except for the one that he wanted. The fan didn’t work and the guy who owned it probably didn’t notice because his skin was three layers of thick. Mario wished he still had his Lexus. Sometimes he just felt helpless.
He had a broad face, high cheekbones, and an ambiguous tan which allowed him to be mistaken for any number of ethnicities. His hands were just large enough so he could grab somebody’s arm or pat him on the back like he meant every word he was saying. He took care of his teeth and made sure his smile was white. Every morning, he woke up early and worked out meticulously, to make sure he could look at least three quarters as imposing as the people who worked for him. He didn’t necessarily enjoy intimidating people, but he put a lot of stock in being respected.
Which made this car ride through the desert all the more annoying. It was an embarrassment and should never have had to have happened. There were better things he could be doing, but he’d told himself ever since he’d gotten into business that there were certain things he could not delegate. Mario would not be Mr. Vasquez if he allowed other people to carry out the worst consequences of his own decisions. In a strictly legal sense, it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but somehow it made what he did ethical.
Mario turned onto a dirt road. The car wasn’t made for the bumps and the uneven terrain, so Mario swore quietly at the dashboard to see if he couldn’t make the car more cooperative. Turning around an outcropping of red rock which conveniently blocked all sight lines from the already distant road, he stopped the car about ten feet away from Wallace and his pickup truck, both of which looked silently over a man who sat on the ground, cross-legged and sullen, his arms tied behind his back but his legs left free for an unexplained reason. As he approached, Mario checked the man’s face for any sign of fear or worry, but the man kept up a poker face of grudging acceptance. The man was going out of his way to make it look like he was scheming.
“Hey, boss,” Wallace said. His sweatpants and baggy T-shirt did little to hide the walrus fat that had been growing on him since he started working for Mario about a decade ago. Ordinarily, he was dressed a little better than that, but under the circumstances, the sweatpants were forgivable, and also a little incomprehensible in this heat. His pale skin turned red as he sweat.
“Did you bring him here all the way in the truck?” Mario didn’t look at Wallace while he talked, only at the man on the ground, who looked up briefly, almost meekly, up at Mario before returning back to the ground. He had a long face, almost like a horse’s or like the face of a ten foot tall circus freak whose limbs are all strangely out of proportion. But this guy couldn’t be more than 5’9”. An ugly sonofabitch.
“He was knocked out. I put him in the back.”
“Did you cover him up?”
“There was nobody out there.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“Out, um, at the . . .”
“The yard?”
“The yard.”
“Find anything?”
“Don’t think so. I searched him.”
“Wallet?”
“No ID, no cards or nothing.”
“Money?”
“Twelve bucks.”
Mario noticed a patch of dried blood on the back of the guy’s head. His hair was dark and cut short, which was why it had taken Mario so long to notice.
“Did he put up a fight?”
“Didn’t hear me coming. One good knock to the back of the head.”
“The hired type?”
“Hasn’t said a thing ever since he came to.”
“Hired type. Or he’s mad about something . . . Shit.” Mario breathed in, looked around, then walked back to his car. He took out a pistol from the glove compartment and walked back to the man who, even though his legs weren’t bound, wouldn’t run. Instead he softly closed his eyes in expectation. Swiftly and professionally, with a certain degree of reverence, Mario stepped up to the man, pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger, telling himself all the while it was something that needed to be done.
The pistol let out an empty click.
“Well what the fuck,” Mario said. He pulled the trigger a few more times, not really aiming. If the gun had actually fired, one bullet would have landed in the dirt two inches behind the base of the man’s spine, another would’ve hit him in his left hamstring, another would’ve hit Wallace in the right shin, and the last would’ve landed in the man’s kidney, which might’ve been good enough to do the job given enough time. But the gun didn’t fire at all. Mario checked the clip. “It must be jammed or something.”
“It’s dusty out here,” Wallace said.
“What’s that have to do with it?” Mario turned away from the man so he could look angrily out at the dry rock and the blue sky. “I never even use this one.” He thought about chucking the thing out into the desert, but throwing around evidence wasn’t going to help. Mario walked back to the car, then thought about it again and chucked the gun out into the desert. “Piece of shit.” Then he walked back to the man on the ground, whose mood didn’t seem to have changed. Mario stood across from him and crouched, looking the snoop bastard in the eye.
“What’s your name?” Mario asked.
“Mitch,” the guy said, not looking up.
“Mitch?”
“Yeah. Mitch.” The ugly sonofabitch was acting tough. Sorta. Just tough enough. “Mitch, Mickey, Michael . . . Just don’t call me Mario Vasquez.”
“Why not?” Mario asked.
“Because Mario Vasquez is in over his head.” Mitch flinched at what he was saying, as if his body hadn’t yet figured out there wasn’t much it could do in the middle of a desert.
“Who do you work for?” Mario continued.
“You work with the cops?” Wallace stepped in.
“I serve my client’s interests,” Mitch said.
“And who is your client?”
“My client is the person who pays me.”
“Cute,” Mario said. “Where does your client come from? What is your client paying you to do?”
“My client pays me to go for long walks.”
Wallace stepped in again. “Do you want me to see what he knows?”
Mario turned around. “Did you see his car?”
“I got the keys right here.” Wallace’s sweatpants had no pockets, but by reaching underneath the waistband, he was miraculously able to produce a rather full keychain. Mario took it from him reluctantly, regrading a stray piece of lint with suspicion before flipping one by one through each of the many keys.
“Did anyone come to get it?”
“I wanted to call you first.”
“Is it still out there?”
“Yeah. But I got the keys.”
Mario flushed with a sudden wave of sweat as his glands decided it was getting too hot to be polite. Feigning careful thought, he wiped his brow, took off his suit jacket, removed his tie, loosened the top button of his shirt, and laid both the jacket and the tie on the ground with the utmost grace, as if being cautious about it would keep his clothes from getting covered in dust. Wallace couldn’t remove either his T-shirt or his sweatpants and still keep his dignity, so he looked at the seated Mitch in doubt and growing confusion. Mitch wore slacks and an ancient plaid shirt and couldn’t do a thing about either.
“We’ll have to call someone for the car,” Mario said. “Go call Steph. Tell her where the car is.” Wallace hustled to his truck to get his cellphone. Mario watched him. Wallace was large, but usually he was faster than this. He had been at it for a long time. When Wallace came back, Mario was staring helplessly at Mitch. “Wallace?” Mario said.
“Yeah?”
“Shoot him.”
Wallace stood there helplessly. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t? The gun’s sticking out of your sweatpants.”
“Well –”
“If you can’t shoot him, give it to me. I’ll do it.”
“It’s not loaded.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not loaded.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous!”
Mario looked Wallace up and down in disbelief, wondering at the use of unloaded guns and glancing unavoidably at Wallace’s giant ass. “Do you ever load your gun?”
“Sometimes.”
“When?”
“Sometimes.”
“When was the last time you loaded your gun?”
“Robert Trenet. That time on the pier.”
“That was six months ago.”
“That ain’t my thing. All that shit you got out in the yard was someone else.”
“I take care of that myself.”
Mitch coughed absentmindedly, because of the dust. He wasn’t going away. He couldn’t. It would take a long time to walk somewhere from here, and running would take longer. Mario sat down next to Mitch, figuring it was a good idea to save his energy. But he couldn’t keep from yelling. “Two days ago someone shoots up my Lexus, and you don’t load your gun.”
“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” Wallace said.
“It doesn’t matter what you don’t believe in. The things you don’t believe in are out to get you.”
Wallace didn’t respond because he didn’t quite know what Mario was saying, and Mario didn’t respond to Wallace’s silence. There wasn’t much point. Mario couldn’t figure out what had just been said.
Mitch interrupted, “Is Robert Trenet in the yard?”
“Fuck you,” Wallace said.
“Fair enough.”
“What do you care about Robert Trenet?” Mario asked, turning his head from his spot on the ground so he could look Mitch in the face.
Mitch looked back. “Did he owe you money?”
“Bobby didn’t owe me shit.”
“Oh,” Mitch said, “that’s a problem. You ain’t worth nothing until you owe something to Mario Vasquez.”
“What the fuck are you doing out here?”
“Because I had something to do.”
“What else is new . . .” Mario was tired of sitting next to Mitch and stood up. “Can’t you just bash his head in with a rock?” he told Wallace.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What, are you gonna shoot me?” Wallace took a step back. “I just found the guy . . . The only reason I was out there in the first place was because Oscar was sick and someone had to check on the place. I don’t know what the fuck is going on. There’s always trouble out here. I used to work for UPS.”
Mitch looked at Wallace. “Can I see your gun?”
“Fuck you,” Wallace answered. “You’re pushing your luck.” The heat was bothersome. It made everyone angry, like they just had to lash out at something, but lashing out made them tired, which then made them angry again. “He’s a busy man. You shouldn’t get in his way. What are you doing out here anyway?”
“Nothing much. Not anymore.”
“You’re lucky is what you are.”
“You’d know better than me.”
Mario by then had walked back to Oscar’s car. He sat inside the car for awhile, but it was hot and all the surfaces were burning at the touch. He told himself he would sit there and take the heat, but he couldn’t. Maybe on some other day he’d be able to, but not today. Getting back out, he tried to sit on the hood but resorted to pacing in a circular pattern around the car. The only thing to do was add up numbers in his head and wait. Maybe something would happen. In time to get back and review the paperwork. How the quarterly report could balance out. Make the legal transactions a little messy to distract from the transactions he wanted to look legal. The people who paid back their loans. The ones who didn’t. The yard. All at once it came to him. “They’re the same fucking gun!” he yelled, walking swiftly back to Wallace.
“What?” Wallace asked.
“There are bullets in my gun. Now where the fuck is it?” He walked past Wallace and started pacing around the desert. He couldn’t have thrown it that far, and you’d think it would stick out on all this flat, dry ground, but it took a few minutes before Mario picked it up. He even waved it around like a little kid. “Now give me yours.” Wallace took it out of his sweatpants and handed it over. Realizing he couldn’t do much holding both guns, Mario handed Wallace the gun back, unloaded his own, then they switched guns. He loaded Wallace’s gun, lifted it to the sky, and squeezed the trigger. It let out a loud shot which justified the entire day. Mario walked up to Mitch, whose expression had not changed.
“You’re here on a job,” Mario said, not expecting a response right away, not even knowing if what he had said was true. “Somebody paid you.” He pointed the gun straight at Mitch’s head. “If I pay you, can I trust you?”
Mitch paused, then looked up to the gun and spoke to it. “If you pay me, how could you possibly trust me?”
Mario lowered the gun and shot Mitch in the leg. Mitch refused to scream, but rolled over and let out a painfully long grunt from between his closed lips. Mario took a wad of bills from his wallet and dropped them on the ground in front of Mitch. “Wallace,” he said, “go see if Steph did what she was supposed to.” Wallace went to his car, Mario went back to his car (but still it wasn’t his), and they drove off, leaving Mitch with a bad wound in one leg sitting in the middle of nowhere, tied up. Mario thought he might be able to get back somehow and contact the police. Or maybe Mitch would track him down and shoot him personally. Or someone would find the dried-up body on the side of the road and slowly unravel the whole story. Mario liked thinking about it. It made what he was doing sound romantic.
But then he thought better of it. Mitch’s dead body would rot away, because if anyone found it collapsed on the road, they’d know better than to do anything about it. They were a long way from home. Out here, there’s never any business but your own.
Give My Love
Give My Love
by Ernie Pylar
I was driving south on 13. I had gone down to Medford early in the morning, trying to get a job with that window manufacturer. I thought I’d be moving boxes around but it turns out they wanted someone who could operate heavy machinery and I don’t know any of that shit. I was a little pissed and was just driving away. I had no business going south but I was just driving, with my windows down. To go all that way and wake up a lot earlier than you’ve been waking up lately only to find out that you read the damn ad wrong . . . the day hadn’t started yet and I was already a failure.
It was a wonder I saw the guy at all. I must have been just north of Stetsonville when I spotted somebody on the side of the road. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but this guy didn’t look like a hitchhiker. He wasn’t sticking his thumb out or walking slowly or looking sad at the cars. He really wasn’t doing much of anything at all. He was just sorta lying there face down on the ground. Maybe something was wrong, so I pulled over about fifty feet ahead of him and got out of the car. It felt good to stop driving, because I was still upset about the job thing and couldn’t exactly drive straight because my arms were still frustrated and rubbery. But then I looked over at him and didn’t want to deal with someone else’s problems.
“He’s just a bum asleep on the side of the road,” I said to myself. “Leave him alone. Or a thief waiting for you to get close. Then he’ll slit your throat and take your money.” The two dollars and the maxed-out credit card in my wallet. The twelve cents in my right front pocket. The expired coupon for cereal that must’ve been washed in the laundry with these jeans about seven or eight times. I wasn’t about to take it out now. It was part of the jeans. And the twenty dollar bill I kept in my glove compartment in case of emergency. “Leave him alone.”
So I walked closer. His clothes didn’t look all that ratty: dark blue, fairly new jeans and a brown leather jacket, something like a pilot’s jacket. I imagined that under the jacket he wore a black T-shirt. “Hey man, you okay?” I got so close that I bent over and shook him by the shoulders. “Wake up! Somebody’s gonna run you over if you stay here like this.” I thought I saw him twitch, but he didn’t wake up. Then I stared at him for a long while and decided that he wasn’t breathing. Then I felt around as best I could for a pulse. After about fifteen seconds of feeling vaguely around his neck and wrist, my body leaped back in horror before I could even convince myself he was dead.
From my new position about a foot away from the corpse, I bent over so I could look at his torso from a side angle, in case he actually was breathing or would suddenly take a giant gulp of air and let me leave. I froze up, the same way I froze up when I was eight and my fish died. I knew that it was dead and it couldn’t move or anything, but that made it worse. If it was dead it was dangerous and could hurt me more than if it were alive. I was terrified and didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to touch him. But now he was my responsibility. I found him first.
I wished I had a phone so I could call it in, and I wanted to drive to the police station to report it, but I didn’t want to just leave him. His right arm was stretched along the ground, while his left was curled up underneath his chest. “Heart attack. And he’s a lefty.” With his last dying motion, he must’ve clutched his chest in agony with his left hand while his right hand reached out for something he thought he saw in the sky.
I trembled all over. My balls shrunk. It was hard to breathe, so I opened my mouth and stared ahead slack-jawed. Without thinking, I shuffled over and kicked at his shoulders, trying to flip the dead guy over with one foot. It’s harder than you think, and he had a bit of a gut on him. All I managed to do was push him a few inches closer to the ditch on the side of the road. As I thought about pushing him all the way over and letting someone else deal with him, I heard a car speeding by behind me. I immediately spun around and began inventing reasons why I wouldn’t have killed him. “I didn’t kill him, I don’t know him! Why would I kill someone I wouldn’t know! I mean, other than for the fun of it, but I’m not that kind of guy. Just look at my car. Does that look like the car of a serial murderer? Of course not. I know what a serial murderer’s car would look like, and it would have to be much neater than that piece of shit.” I would’ve been in jail before I knew it, but the car didn’t bother to slow down. By the time I spotted it on the road it was already a football field away and I could barely make out what kind of car it was.
His hair was brown and wavy. He seemed about middle-aged, or a young man who had run himself ragged. The stubble on his face suggested he could grow a full beard, and if it grew out all the way, he would look like Jeremiah Johnson or Charles Manson. Reluctantly, I bent down and lifted him onto his back with my hands. I’d been wrong about him. His shirt was green. I averted my eyes from his face, imagining spiders or something crawling out of his nose, so all I saw was that he didn’t seem that dead. I noticed when I’d lifted him that he was still a little flexible, so he must’ve just died and rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet. A piece of paper, with some sort of logo on it, hung loosely from his partially closed left hand. It had been pinned underneath the man’s body, but now that I’d flipped him over, the first gust of wind blew the paper away. It skittered down the road. Feeling it was an important clue, I chased after it. The pesky little thing gave me a hard time, spinning out of my way twice before I put all my effort into it and finally snagged the thing. I lifted it up in triumph and realized that I had chased it right into the highway. If there’d been a car coming my way I’d have been deader than the dead man, but there are never many cars out here. It’s not a busy road.
The paper was thick and a little greasy. On one side a note was written in terrible handwriting, and on the other was a Popeye’s Chicken logo. It looked like one side of a Popeye’s bag had been ripped out to make a single, wrinkly page, and the rest of the bag was nowhere to be found. It was probably the only stationary the guy could find, which was especially odd because I never remembered seeing a Popeye’s in this area, or even in the county and possibly the state. I didn’t venture to guess why he’d been carrying the pen. He must’ve written it in the early morning, sitting up or lying on the road, trying to find a good way to write but really just failing as the occasional car blew right by him without a care in the world. The further the letter went, the harder it was to make out the handwriting.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
After that the handwriting trailed off. Either he was trying to write and couldn’t anymore, or he got bored or desperate and scribbled meaninglessly on the torn-up bag. I don’t think he was taking himself seriously, and I’m pretty sure he never really thought he was going to die. His stomach was just kicking the shit out of him, and the morning sun was coming up. He had a pen, who knows where he got it, and he had an empty bag, and he tore it up and sat down on the side of the road and wrote. I wish I could have more nights like that, but once I hit about one or two o’clock, it doesn’t matter what I’m on, my body wants to sleep. He thought it would all pass in a couple of hours, and if he was the kind of asshole who would write a letter like that as a joke, he probably became furious when he finally realized what was coming, and his wife was a bigger cunt and his son was a shithead and the last thing he thought of before dying was strangling that cocksucking dog. He died in a rage.
Now he was mine. I crumpled up the note and put it in my pocket. I thought that maybe he had a phone, but I still didn’t want to search a dead man. And it would look bad once the police found out I’d called him in using his own cell phone. He probably didn’t have one anyways. If he did he would’ve called someone to pick him up, and if he was too out of it to dial the numbers, I would’ve found him lying on the side of the road clutching his phone, angling his mouth to the receiver like he believed in God, begging for help from the stranger on the other end of some random number. I thought about him praying into his phone and felt bad for him. I didn’t want to leave him there, and it would look bad if I left him there. Someone else would find him, and they’d see my tire tracks on the road. It would only be a matter of time before they found me. They’d ask if anyone had seen anything suspicious on that stretch of 13 just north of Stetsonville, and even though the car that had passed me by didn’t seem to give a shit, I’m sure that once it came to the police, they’d remember everything: my weight, my license plate number, the names of the girls I’d kissed or tried to kiss in high school, everything. I couldn’t leave him there.
I opened the door to my backseat and dragged Pete Williams into my car. It took such a long time. I couldn’t just fling him in there. I had to drag him the fifty feet to my car, then open the passenger side back door, then pull him onto the seat, which meant that I had to get in the car to pull him in, then I had to crawl over the corpse to get back outside and push his legs in. The more I worried about details, the more I forgot about the terror, but not the dread. My plan, which I was still coming up with from moment to moment, was to drive the body back to Medford and drop it off somewhere. Maybe I could dump it in front of the police station and take off, or better yet, the fire station, because they wouldn’t be expecting it at the fire station. He was a little too tall for my back seat, and I thought a little while about putting him in the trunk, but it seemed that if I were pulled over, it would look too suspicious to have a dead body in the trunk. Pete was still fresh enough to be limber, so I folded him up into something of a fetal position, then I grabbed an old, plaid blanket I would lay down on the seats if I was moving around something dirty or wet. I covered him up with it as best I could. Nothing stuck out from underneath the blanket, but he made for an awfully suspicious looking lump in my backseat. It wouldn’t take much for the blanket to fall to the side and show off a finger or a lock of his growing hair. I rolled up the windows.
When I started up the car, I turned on the A/C. It hadn’t been used in years, so it made funny noises at me. I turned it as cold as it would go. It felt more appropriate that way, but I realized that I’d been sweating a lot, and now my sweat ran cold. The rubbery feeling came back to my arms. I used up a lot of effort pushing on the gas and turning the steering wheel all the way to the left so I could make a u-turn and head back to Medford. It’s no fun driving with a dead body in your car. It’s like driving with a woman who won’t talk to you. You know she’s there, but all you can hear are the things she’s not saying to you. Accusations and nasty remarks. All I could do was drive straight. When the road turned slightly to the left, I remembered old nightmares I thought I’d forgotten.
It dawned on me then that I was only making things worse for myself. It always dawns on you too late. I had been so worried about looking suspicious that I stopped thinking. If there was something wrong with leaving the body there to report it, then moving the body was probably criminal. I was acting like a guilty man, and I couldn’t just explain to the cops that I always acted like a guilty man. “I’m not saying I never do anything wrong,” I tell the cops, “but I’d cover up a stranger’s horrible crimes to make up for some small embarrassing thing I’d done the night before. I get in a fight with my mother, and the next day, I stick up for an elderly lady at work. Even though she doesn’t want my help. And I defend her too much and curse out my boss. And I get fired. And to make up for the fact I get fired, I try to grow a garden. But I plant at the wrong time and everything dies after a frost. And to make up for it I apply for every job I can find.” And when I can’t figure out how to read a classified ad, I pick up dead men on the side of the road. I make up for trouble with more trouble.
It doesn’t help that the country roads out here aren’t really empty. There’s always some building or something just within sight no matter where you go. If something’s gone wrong, and people have a mind to watch out for it, there’s no hope for you. Once your stretch of highway hits a village, and there was at least one in-between Stetsonville and Medford, everyone will know what to look for. People are like that. They make a point of noticing things. I couldn’t imagine how the guy in my backseat he got so far into the middle of nowhere without anybody taking an interest, at least enough of an interest to call the police. He might’ve gone to a bar outside of the towns and crawled his way up through the fields, but he didn’t really look like he had trekked his way through the middle of a forest. But it all happened at night. Maybe he was the kind of guy who slipped in and out of the shadows. It might’ve been a lonely night.
My panic ebbed and flowed the closer I got to Medford. I never noticed the scenery before, the trees behind the little shit town I passed through and the houses in front of the forest on the stretches of open highway. The closer I came to people, the more I knew I was doing something wrong. At this point I owed the something to the dead man. I’d taken on the responsibility of the dead, of moving them where they needed to go, and I wasn’t doing that at all. It wasn’t right to dump him in front of the fire station or the police station or a hospital. At any point I’d be spotted, and when I was, I’d have utterly failed, again. I needed some answers. I needed a way out.
I needed a drink. I thought about taking a sharp left or right at one of the smaller intersections before Medford and trying to find a bar somewhere in the outskirts, but if I went that far out of my way, I’d probably never come back. I knew that Medford had a bunch of bars on Main Street, which wasn’t really a main street but a road alongside the railways and the river. It wouldn’t hurt anybody to stop in for a drink or two. I could barely drive with my nerves the way that they were, so as I came into the town, instead of veering towards the fire station, I went to Main Street and parked my car right on the side of the road. I thought that maybe it would’ve been better if I’d found an alley a few blocks down and parked there, but I looked back and saw that the body was still covered up. If I was caught, I was caught no matter what I did. I parked on the side of the road where everybody could see and played it cool. Or as cool as I could while I dropped my keys twice getting out of the car, and one more time walking down the sidewalk. The best place within sight was called Lounge Around. The outside was made of aluminum siding, a door, and two windows large enough to hold neon signs. There was a second floor, but it didn’t seem to be of any consequence to me.
I didn’t know if it would be open this early, but times were tough, so now it opened early. When I stepped inside, it had the atmosphere I was looking for, the kind that made you forget what time it was or even that there was such a thing as time. Like a casino or a church. I was in there for five seconds and I thought I had been there for millions of years. I sat at the bar and thought, and realized that I only had two dollars in my pocket. When the bartender asked what I wanted, I said, “Wait,” and ran out to my car to get the emergency twenty in my glove compartment, then I ran back in and suddenly felt like ordering something special. Beer wouldn’t leave the right taste in my mouth. Not with a dead man in my car. “I’ll have a whiskey and coke,” I said, after I’d sat down at the bar and stared the man in the face. “No, wait, a rum and coke.”
“What kind of rum?” He was in his thirties or maybe forties. His hair was cut so short he may as well have shaved it all off.
“. . . Whatever.” I put the twenty on the bar and the man looked at it knowingly, figuring that I was here to spend as much of that twenty as I could. Which wasn’t what I’d planned but it was a damn good idea now that I’d started thinking about it.
“What are you here for?”
I looked around and realized no one had come in yet, not even the barflies. It looked like they opened up early to get ready for a lunch crowd. Just by the front door, a few sparse meals were advertised on a chalkboard. A meal sounded good right now, but I didn’t have the time, or the money.
“Job hunting,” I said.
“Probably shouldn’t have come here, then.” He gave me my drink and laid the change on the table. It was a stiff drink and made me happy. I don’t drink rum very often.
“Oh . . . I’m done for the day.”
“Pretty quick, then.”
“Yeah. Not what I was hoping for.”
He let me have my first drink in silence. I want to say that it took away the unsteady feeling and made me stronger, but all it really did was help me forget that my muscles were twitching in constant anticipation of dead men walking through the door, followed by police and then a lynch mob. There were these surges in my chest, trying to pull me up off my stool and into the street, where I’d beg for help from strangers. I’d beg for someone to take me away from here, to somewhere where I didn’t know where I was. I finished my drink and felt better about it. I started laughing at nothing and myself.
“Could I get another drink?” At first I shouted it like the place was crowded, but at about the middle of the sentence I remembered I was alone. By the time I got to drink I was mumbling.
“Sure.” The change was still on the bar, a ten and some singles. He took the ten and came back with more singles. Altogether it looked like enough for one more. Then he brought the drink.
“Where were you applying?” the man asked. “I haven’t heard of anything opening up in the area.”
“Up by that window place.”
“We got a couple of those.”
“It could’ve been . . . Hurd or Weather Shield or Ameriframe. I can’t even remember now. Sounded like a warehouse job. Moving boxes around. But the interview was in a little office place so I guess the warehouse was somewhere else. I thought it would’ve been about moving stuff around, but I had to know how to use these machines, and for some reason I just didn’t want to lie. So they asked me to leave . . . They don’t appreciate honesty, is what.”
“What was the ad for?”
“Forklift operator.”
The bartender laughed. “Yknow, if the job title has forklift in it, don’t you think they’d expect you to know how to use a forklift?”
“Yeah . . . I guess.” The bartender laughed some more, which made me feel bad about myself, but I deserved it and didn’t hold it against him. “I really don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking job, that’s what you were thinking. I’ve seen people come in here so desperate for a job they’d run for President.”
“Yeah . . .” I said. Now I laughed. I still felt like a stupid shit, but now I didn’t feel so bad about it.
“I don’t blame you. I mean, you look like a forklift operator. I can see you behind a forklift. It’s a wonder they didn’t hire you right off the bat.”
“You should’ve seen how many people were there.”
“Those sonofabitches. Showing up to get your job. I bet some of them even knew how to work a forklift.”
“They had credentials.”
“Ah, fuck credentials. You looked the part. That should’ve been the only thing that mattered.”
At least I was entertaining the guy. He walked back and forth behind the bar, getting the place ready for the rest of the day. He was on the other side of the room when he asked, “Where did you work before?”
“Over at this Greek take-out place in Merrill. Working the counter. Mopping the floors. Shit like that.”
“Merrill?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where you live, then?”
“In the area.”
“It’s a hell of a ride from Merrill.”
“There ain’t no jobs. I’ve tried. It’s getting to the point where I’d drive to Denver if it meant I’d get a job.”
“How did you lose your old one?”
“Fired.”
“Well, no shit. Were you laid off?”
“No, the place is still doing pretty good.”
“What is it, then?”
“I called my boss a cocksucker.”
The bartender laughed again. I was making his day. I was almost proud of myself.
“Why did you call him a cocksucker?”
“ . . . Cuz he’s a cocksucker.”
“That’s good . . . I wish I could afford to call my boss a cocksucker.”
“Yeah, well, so do I.” I raised my glass as if I were making a toast, but he was on the job and couldn’t drink. He nodded, though, and that was good enough. “You mean you don’t own the place?”
“Oh, no . . . I just work here.”
“Can I gave you some advice?”
“What?”
“Don’t call the owner a cocksucker.”
“Really?” he said, smiling wider. “Why not?”
“I don’t think he’ll like it.”
“It’s good advice.” We’d run out of things to say. “I learn something new every day.”
In the silence I finished my second drink. Now I was at the point where I felt reflective. If I were alone I’d look at the mirror and talk to myself. Instead, I took the note out of my pocket and looked at it again.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
The bartender came over and saw the logo on the back of the paper. “Popeye’s? Where did you get that?”
“Side of the road. Somebody had written a note on it. Weird.”
“What does it say?”
“Oh . . .” I folded the paper back up. “Nothing. It was just weird. The whole thing.”
“I guess. You want another?”
“Yeah, one more. If you wouldn’t mind.” He picked up the singles, counted out what he needed, and left the rest. Good enough for a tip or the cheapest beer they had. As he brought the last drink, a guy walked in wearing khakis and a tucked-in polo shirt. The first of the lunch crowd. He asked if he could get a BLT.
“Sorry, the cook’s not in yet. It shouldn’t be too long now. Did you want a drink?”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh, I’m on my break . . . so yes, yes I do.” He ordered a beer I’d never heard of. I didn’t like him.
When the bartender came back with the beer, he slapped the guy on the shoulder and said, “Hey, do you see that sorry sonofabitch on the other side of the bar? That man right there is the best goddamned forklift operator in the county. And you know what? He can’t get a job. No one will take him. I’m just saying, I know times are tough, but if you know anybody who needs someone to operate their forklift, that’s your man.” He laughed and shouted, “Hey, what’s your name, then?”
I looked over slowly and said, “My name’s Pete. Peter Williams.”
The bartender turned back to the asshole in the polo shirt. “Tell everybody you know. Pete Williams is your man.” As he walked to my side of the bar, he mumbled in my direction, “Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“Oh, of course. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I downed the rest of my drink. This was about all I could take. I left the change on the bar and started to walk away, but before I did, I turned around and yelled at the bartender, “Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“How do I get to Gilman from here?”
“They got jobs in Gilman?”
“. . . It couldn’t hurt to check.”
“There are a lot of towns closer than Gilman.”
“It couldn’t hurt to check.”
“All right, then . . . just take 64 west. It’ll turn on you every now and then, but just stick to 64. It’ll take you about an hour, if you’re driving the speed limit.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck to you.”
I would’ve wished him good luck back, but I was already out the door. And the light that burst in on me once I stepped out of the door gave me hope. I was ready to go.
It took me a couple of seconds to remember where I’d parked my car. Turned out it was fifteen feet to the right of me, and a twelve-year-old kid was looking into my back window. I panicked a little, but I was in the kind of mood where nothing could touch me. I strolled up behind him, stumbling once, and looked over his shoulder. One leg stuck out from under the blanket. Either his body was stiffening up and changing position, or something had pushed the blanket to the side. The kid just stared. No one else was around, and he didn’t seem to know I was there.
So I punched him in the shoulder from behind. He jumped about a foot in the air and spun around. He thought he was a dead man. “Hey,” I said to him, and I pointed straight between his eyes, then I started laughing and I had to start again. “Hey,” I said, then I laughed and clammed myself up. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I put my index finger on my lips. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I put it on his lips. “SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” I moved my index finger back and forth between us. “If you tell anybody, I’m gonna do to you what I did to him.” I laughed again and started walking past him. I slapped him on the shoulder. “Now get out of here, you little cunt.” He ran off, the good little kid that he was, leaving me alone with my car. It took me too long to put the key in the driver’s side door, but it didn’t bother me much. Once you got out to the highway, it was easy to drive drunk. And I wasn’t really that drunk, it was just that I wasn’t used to rum. By the time I got to Gilman I’d probably have a nasty headache, but that would keep me in place while I was talking to the wife.
Because that’s what I was going to do. I was taking the body back to the family, where it belonged. Not a firehouse or police station or hospital. The man was mine. His dignity was mine. I felt like I had just found a cowboy scalped in the middle of the prairie. It was my job to take the body back to his wife and break the bad news. And to comfort her and tell her how to get on with the rest of her life. This makes so much sense on rum.
It was a little dicey getting out into the country, because at first I couldn’t find 64, but I was able to get to 13, and then when I realized I was taking 13 outside of Medford, I pulled over to the side of the road and thought. I didn’t know if which way I was pointing, but I knew that 13 went north and south and 64 went east and west, and that the two met somewhere towards the middle of Medford. So if I was at the outskirts of town, all I had to do was turn around and watch the signs carefully. When I got to 64, some arrow or another would tell me how to go east or west. And I was going west. Easy. It worked like a charm, without a cop car in sight. The only problem was that I knew I was driving further west than I think I ever had in a single day. I’d gone further when I’d been on vacation, but now I didn’t know when I’d get back home. Which meant that I’d hit one of those little points of no return, where I couldn’t turn back because turning back would be a bigger pain in the ass than going on. So I went on, past the town and out into the middle of nowhere again, with my cowboy in the back seat and vindication waiting for me in a house that used to be yellow.
All that time out on the road gave me time to think about how I was driving. I was disappointed that I drove just as drunk as everything said I would. Whenever I had to stop, I stopped too late and floated into the intersection. If a deer or a child had leaped into the road, I would’ve hit it, and because I was drunk, I would’ve just driven away, with all the dents and blood still on my car. Who would care? Not the people around me. Anytime I came across another car on the road, they knew everything about me. The cars behind me slowed down to make sure they stayed behind me. The cars ahead of me turned at the next intersection to get out of my way. It was a little embarrassing, but it also felt like a red carpet had been laid out for me. So long as nobody I passed called the cops, I was riding the golden road to Gilman.
The highway made a sharp right turn to the north which almost confused me, but I managed it alright and pretty soon I saw a big grey water tower announcing my arrival. GILMAN, it said. The paint-chipped GILMAN clung to its rusty tower over my shitty little car. The strangest part was that I never really got close to it. The tower hung over me, but it was somewhere in the middle of the town. So I never actually got close to it, but as I was driving through, looking for 2nd Avenue, it was always there, and I was always passing it up. But I never saw exactly where it was placed. It was over the entire town, like it could collapse and take everyone with it. I started feeling a general throbbing just behind my forehead, which meant I was dehydrated and well on the way to a hangover. There must’ve been a bar somewhere in town, but all I had was the two bucks in my wallet. Maybe I could sell the car to some local, body and all, and run off to live off with the wife. I was Pete Williams. The dope-smoking son was mine. I wanted the cunt of a wife. For a few minutes I would’ve done anything for her. I saw her as something that used to be voluptuous, but now there was a bit of fat hanging from her thighs and the sides of her ass and the front of her stomach. And her tits sagged, but all of it meant that she still had a figure and still swayed when she walked. Swayed like a woman does when she carries an infant from her hips, holding it tired, low and out of sight, an appendage of her body. Life giving.
The streets were numbered, but there weren’t that many of them. Coming from the east like I was, they started at 9th and worked their way down. It didn’t take long to get to 2nd Avenue, but I made a left turn and it must’ve been wrong. There weren’t any houses in that direction, just broken down buildings and a dead end. The dead end was a fancy bridge over a small creek. I think it led to a park, but it wasn’t where I wanted to go, so I turned back and went the other way up 2nd Avenue, passing the intersection where I’d made the wrong turn. Now I had a chance to look around. The grocery store looked like it was about to go out of business. The gas station looked like it had already been closed, but maybe it wasn’t. It was a beautiful town and beautiful because it was dying or already dead, carried along by the people who refused to leave. I knew all this because by then I knew everything. I was far enough away from home so that I couldn’t let the details hold me back.
It was only about a block past the intersection when I saw what had to be a house that used to be yellow. Nobody was outside, but there was a red dirt driveway leading to a garage that used to be yellow. I parked in the driveway and got out of the car. I looked my car up and down and remembered the body in the back seat. Not that I hadn’t known that it was there but it wasn’t as important as getting to the house. Things were missing. The corpse should’ve smelled by now, but I didn’t smell it. And where was the woman tending vegetables in the garden that wasn’t there? Why wasn’t she hanging everyone’s clothes on a clothesline stretched from the garage to the house? Why wasn’t she hanging my clothes on the line? Where were the children running in circles around an oak tree and playing in the street because cars never came down that street? Where were the people to greet me with a cautious smile?
It was so empty. I walked up the porch and rang the bell and knocked on the door and rang and knocked some more. A small woman opened the door, skinny and petite, smoking a cigarette. She wasn’t what I wanted, but the cigarette gave her character and it seemed to match her frame. Spare, but efficient. There wasn’t an ounce on her that was wasted. When a man made love to her, he made love to her whole body, the tear ducts and the tips of her ears. Pete was a lucky man.
“Mrs. Williams? . . . Um, Miss . . . Are you the husband of Peter Williams?”
“. . . Yeah . . . He’s not in right now. Are you looking for him?”
“Um, miss . . . Mrs. Will . . . I, I don’t know how . . . it’s not about him . . . it is about him . . . I have to show you something . . . just . . . just come with me.”
I knew right then I had to back up. I was too close to her.
“I’m sorry, it’s just, I don’t mean any harm, it’s just, it’s about your husband, you have to come with me, no, I have to show you, no, just . . . I’m sorry. Give me a minute here.”
She was worried now, and one of her children walked up behind her. Or maybe it was her only child, there was no way for me to be sure. He was tall, taller than her, but he looked lanky and young, unsure of how to move his body. The shit could still probably take me in a fight, so I started to tell myself I needed to be careful. Which I knew wouldn’t help, so I told myself to be careful about being careful.
“I’m sorry if I startled you . . . or confused you or whatever . . . but something’s happened. I wouldn’t feel right just telling you. Could I show you? It would be right if I showed you. The car’s in the driveway, I hope you don’t mind I parked in your driveway, I don’t like parking in the street and getting in people’s way, it’s not my thing. Would you mind coming? I can’t just . . .” I gestured towards my car, then I saw the look on her face and stepped back. I moved backwards off the porch, almost falling down the two or three stairs leading from the porch to the lawn, but I was standing once I got down there. “I mean, I know, you don’t know me, this doesn’t sound right, come to my car and all that, but this is important to you. I know it. You’re Pete William’s wife, right?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You’re Pete Williams wife, right?”
“Yes, I’m Pete’s wife.”
“You’re not just saying that, right? Because if you’re not this isn’t for you. If you’re not his wife, this would, this would just hurt you.”
“What is it?”
“You have to come with me, it’s just, it’s just my car. You just have to come to my car. I know that this, this is, just . . . trust me. I mean, no, just . . . there’s something you need to see.”
She had a vague idea of what was going on, that something bad had happened to her husband. She leaned back to her big son and did a bad job of keeping her voice down. “Tom? Come on out to the porch. Keep an eye out.”
“Something’s happened,” I said.
“I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.” Tom came out first and stood on the porch and looked at me. The wife walked off the porch and waited for me to do something. I trotted to her driveway, to the rear window of my car, and I gestured at her to come over. She did, slowly. When she got by my car, all she could see in the back seat was a blanket covering a lump. And part of a leg sticking out from underneath.
“It’s . . .” I said. “It’s just . . .”
“What is this?” She said it with urgency, a kind of urgency that had nothing to do with me. “What . . . I don’t . . .”
I opened the door and took the blanket off the dead man’s head. His face had slumped down on my cushion. It looked like it would be that way forever, his lips and cheeks permanently skewed to the left because of the way I’d laid him on the seat. I knew for certain I’d come to the right house, because she’d raised her hand to her mouth and didn’t know what to do. “Tom?” she yelled. “Tom?”
Her son got off the porch and started walking towards us.
“Stay where you are, Tom!” she yelled. “Tom don’t come here!” She looked at me with her hand over her mouth. “What the fuck is the matter with you!”
“I didn’t, I just . . .”
“What the fuck is the matter with you!”
“I didn’t kill him! I didn’t kill him . . . I just found him.”
“Why did you –”
“He was on the side of the –”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He was on the side of the road!”
She walked away and walked back and walked away and walked back. “Out! Fucking! Out!” She burst past me to the open door and looked in close at her dead husband but she didn’t want to touch it. She ran off again. Tom walked in closer. “Tom stay there! Stay there Tom! Tom!”
I wanted to hold her, because she was a wreck and I wanted to comfort her. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know. I found him.”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He told me to.”
“He . . .”
“He had a note. I saw him on the side of the road. He had a note. He told me where he lived.” I dug around in my pocket and pulled out the note. “I mean, I saw him and I saw the note, and I couldn’t just get the cops after I saw the note. These were last wishes.”
“How did he die?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It was in the morning. It must’ve been a long night.”
She didn’t say anything. It meant that my story made sense. “What does the note say?” She reached for it.
“No,” I said, and I pulled away.
“Can I see it?”
“Can I read it? I mean, I know that you want . . . but can I tell you what it says? If I read it, you’ll know why I came here. Better than if you read it yourself. It was . . . you don’t go to a hospital after you’ve read it.”
“ . . . Popeye’s?”
“I . . . I don’t know. But everything was right up here. Just let me read it.”
She quieted down and was fidgeting. What I was about to say was probably the furthest thing from her mind. But I still had to deliver.
“He . . . I was driving down from Medford when I see him, I see somebody on the side of the road, lying on the side of the road. I stopped. And it turns out he was . . . yknow. And there’s this letter pinned underneath him. I don’t know where he got the paper or the pen, I didn’t search him, I wouldn’t do that, but it says, yknow:
My name is Pete Williams. I come from Gilman. I live on 2nd Avenue in a big, yellow house. I have a beautiful wife and a strong, healthy son. Tell my son that I’m proud of him. I know he’ll do good no matter what he does. Tell him to take care of his mother.
“It goes on, do you want me to keep on reading? This was important. I mean, I couldn’t read this note and not bring him here. I couldn’t spend half the day in a fucking hospital when he had this message on him. I don’t know how he died, but he must’ve seen it coming and he wrote this letter and when I read it I had to . . . I had to bring him here. Do you understand?” She looked at me and didn’t know what to say. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Tell them that I’m sorry. I wanted to be with them. Give my love to my beautiful wife. Tell her that she’s always been there for me. Tell her that I wish I could be with her. Tell her
I ran out of things to say. “I’m sorry,” he said. “His handwriting got kind of bad. Tell her . . . um . . .”
“Let me see it.”
“No, it’s just not readable. It gets kinda . . .”
Tell my wife that she shouldn’t be afraid . . .
“Your husband wanted you to know that you shouldn’t be afraid . . . to love another man.” I gave up all pretense and put the note back in my pocket. “He knows, it’s not right to live alone. Your boy there, he’ll need a father. That’s what he was trying to say . . . in the handwriting . . . I don’t know, do you need any money or something?”
“I don’t know . . .” She’d gone numb. “I’m just going to go inside now. I just, um, can you wait out here?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I sat by my car and Pete Williams while the wife went inside the house. As she opened the door, the dog came out. Tom stayed on the porch and stared at me. But the dog took off down the stairs and ran around the lawn like an idiot. It was a little Shih Tzu, the kind of dog you really couldn’t kick without feeling like an asshole afterwards. It ran up to me and sniffed my foot, then it ran around and pissed on my car. Then it ran back by Tom. It couldn’t stop running until it decided to rest in the shade of a tree. I really didn’t know what to do. I thought about walking up to Tom and striking up a conversation, but the way he was looking at me, I think he wanted to kick my ass. He measured me up and was pretty sure that he could. All he needed was a signal from his mother and I was a dead man.
He seemed a little disappointed when the police SUV pulled up. The local cops. I wasn’t really surprised, but somehow I was sad about it. God only knows what she’d told them. She didn’t come out of the house, but she must’ve been behind the front door, because Tom would look at the door as he stood on the porch and sometimes he would say something at the door. The cop played it cool, but he didn’t know what to do. He’d probably never dealt with something like this. Instinctively I backed away from my car, to give the cop room to walk around and survey the scene. He saw the open door and looked in. He stopped and looked, without a change of expression, just confirming what he’d heard on the phone. Then he straightened up and looked at me. Seemed like a nice guy.
“So you’re the . . .”
“I didn’t call.”
“You’re the . . .”
“I’m the one who –”
“Right.”
“And that’s the . . .”
“The husband. Yes.” He didn’t want to move. Neither did I.
“I’m going to have to get some more people here.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re gonna have to come with me.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want my keys?” I asked him.
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all.”
I dug through my pockets and handed him my keys. It was strange how natural I treated it. I was just glad that I didn’t have to talk to the wife anymore. It hadn’t been as moving an experience as I thought it would’ve been. Maybe I thought she would’ve been stoic about it like the cop had to be. She would’ve nodded her head and thanked me as I drove off into the sunset at one in the afternoon. As things were, she stood on the porch and gave me dirty looks from behind her son. Tom still looked clueless, but he seemed concerned. In a few minutes it would dawn on him, or his mother would tell him what had happened.
I asked the cop when he thought anybody would get here. He said it wouldn’t be for awhile, because the sheriff’s office was in Medford and that was quite a drive away. “I know that,” I said. I found him just north of Stetsonville. Just lying there, and –”
“We can talk about that later.”
“ . . . Would you mind if you got me out of here now? It would probably make the wife feel better.”
“I guess we could. I’d have to take you to the station, and it doesn’t have much of a holding cell.”
“That’s fine. Will you take care of my car for me?”
“Oh, yeah, usually in cases like these we tow the car to a lot, but . . . but I don’t know what’s going on here.”
“I’m a little lost myself.”
“Have you been drinking, sir?”
I didn’t say anything, then I asked again if he could get me out of here.
“Let’s just go,” he said.
“Could you make it look like you’re arresting me?”
“Why?”
“I think it would make her feel better.”
“ . . . Sure.” He didn’t have any real handcuffs on him, so instead he put those plastic handcuffs on me that they used on drunks and suspected terrorists at the airport. I’m not even sure he put them on right, because it felt like I could just slip them off, but he did a good job of holding my head as I got into the back seat of the squad car, even though the squad car was an SUV and I had to step up into it. By the time I was in, he had to get on his tiptoes to make sure that his hand was still on the top of my head.
The ride to the station took about a minute and a half. The building itself was a long, rectangular storage bin whose outer walls were made of pale green siding. The officer got my handcuffs off and escorted me into the building, which was little more than an office.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“I’ve got nowhere to go.”
“We don’t exactly have the facilities, but I’ll put you in our drunk tank.”
“Well I’m still kinda drunk right now so that’ll be all right.”
He laughed at me. “You shouldn’t have said that to me.”
“Right.”
“I’ll take you to the tank and I’ll head on back, then we’ll all come down to ask you some questions. My name’s Jim.”
“I understand. Jim.” I reached out to shake his hand, but he wouldn’t take it. We walked to the back, to their makeshift drunk tank. I was the only one there. It was still early. He guided me in and stood by the door.
“You sit tight now.”
“I’ll be waiting for you. You’re bringing me car here, right?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
He closed the door and left me to myself. It was a solid metal door, but every other wall in the room seemed to be made of a light plaster that a determined drunk could punch right through at a moment’s notice. But then he’d have to contend with the aluminum siding, or an officer wondering why a hand was sticking out of his wall. There were a few curious dents in the wall. They looked a little patched. I ran my hand along the dents and wondered about how calm I was. When the cop car had pulled up, I had suddenly drifted to a place where I couldn’t worry anymore, because I’d already lost control over the situation. I’d used up all control and worry hours ago. Besides, the walls were pink and soothing. The room had a toilet in one corner and a cot covered in mysterious stains. I would’ve preferred to stay away from both, so I sat down in the corner and nearly took a nap. My body had used itself up on the room.
When I was just about to nod off, somebody burst in the room who wasn’t Jim. He was about the same height as Jim but fatter. “Okay, what is this?”
A voice piped up from somewhere where I couldn’t see. “He found it.”
The man looked me in the eye. “Yeah.” There was a thin, gold name tag on the man’s uniform, high on his left breast. From what I could read of it, his last name was Leacook. Mr. Leacook strolled on up to my corner. “Can I ask you a few questions? Sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on out and I’ll ask you a few questions.”
They took me to the office area, where Mr. Leacook and two other officers stood around a desk. Mr. Leacook got a chair. So did I. Everyone else stood.
“So . . . you just found him?” he asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Tell us what happened.”
It should’ve dawned on me that the smallest wrong word could lead to murder charges, but I wasn’t thinking about it that way. I treated it like a job interview. Even if I failed it, they’d let me go away.
I told them what happened. About not being able to find a job and finding a dead body on the side of the road. I showed them the note and insisted they give it back. Then I told them that I dragged Pete into my car. Because it wasn’t right to leave him there, I said. And I couldn’t call it in because I didn’t have a cell phone. It all made perfect sense. When I got back to Medford, I was so out of sorts about the whole thing that I had a few drinks. There wasn’t any point to lying about it now. They already had me figured out now. I had a few drinks, and the note told me to take the guy to Gilman. I took the guy to Gilman and gave his wife my love. That was what I was supposed to do.
Mr. Leacook asked to see my ID. I gave it to him. He handed it back. “Merrill? What are you doing over here?”
“Job hunting.”
“There aren’t any jobs in Gilman.”
“Well, but I said Medford. I was in Medford at the time.”
“You said you were just north of Stetsonville.”
“That was after I fucked up the job interview.”
“Shouldn’t you have been heading back east, to Merrill?”
“I . . . fucked up the job interview. I was mad. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“What was the job?”
“ . . . Forklift operator.”
“Why didn’t you get it?”
“I didn’t know how to operate a forklift.”
“Yknow, there’s a kid in Medford who said he saw a body in the back seat of a car. Said that a guy came up behind him and said he’d killed him and said he’d do the same to him if he told anyone about it.”
The little cunt. “I had just come out of the bar . . . I was in a good mood. A funny mood.”
“Do you usually threaten children when you’re in a good mood?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Mr. Leacook stopped and stared. He looked right at me and saw nothing but fuckup. “See . . .We believe you. We saw the body and don’t know how you could’ve killed him. Unless you drank the fucker to death. You could’ve found him on the road, you could’ve been out bumming with him all night and didn’t know what to do when he dropped dead at sunrise.”
“I told you that I found him –”
“We believe you. What I’m saying is we don’t care. You didn’t murder the shithead, we’re pretty damn sure of it, and everything else, as far as I’m concerned, is just an embarrassment. It’s an embarrassment that you’re unemployed and found a dead man and dragged him halfway across the county drunk off your ass just because you thought that’s what he wanted. It was an embarrassment for his wife. An embarrassment that she had her dead husband carted out in front of her by an unlicensed stranger. An embarrassment for him, wherever he is now, the drunk fuck. This ain’t the first time we saw him. Thank God it’s the last. It had better be the last. An embarrassment for us. We don’t need this story getting out. The news loves that shit, and as far as I’m concerned, all of my people are good, law-abiding people, and the shit that Pete Williams just pulled and the shit that you just pulled does not happen in Taylor County.”
He stopped to catch his breath and look at me some more. “Times are tough,” I said.
“He died of a stroke,” Mr Leacook continued. “His car had broken down, his cell phone was dead, and he was walking to the next town when boom, God strikes him down. You, as you’re job hunting, come across the body on the highway, and you, being the Good Samaritan and fine, sensible human being that you are, you call 911 and an ambulance comes to take him away. His wife identifies the body in the morgue, like a loving wife should. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. You’re staying here for the night. We’ll let you go in the morning. Is there anyone who needs to know?”
“They won’t worry.”
“Good. Your job hunt didn’t go well. You were out drinking all night, enjoying yourself. As best you know how. You crashed at a friend’s place or spent the night in the tank. If you ever have to explain yourself, tell different versions to different people. It’ll mean it’s not important what you did. Go and get yourself a job and a girl. Buy some better looking clothes. Clean your car once in awhile, for fuck’s sake. And never pick up strangers on the side of the road, dead or alive or neither. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you.”
“Good. Someone will let you out in the morning. Jim?”
“Yes, sir.” Without having to receive an actual order, Jim escorted me back to the room and closed the door. Judging from the small cube glass window placed high on the wall furthest from the door, it was still light out. I had a long ways to go. I still wasn’t sleeping on that cot. I was starting to get hungry, no one was coming, and the pleasant drunkenness was wearing off. I was in it for the long haul.
Sitting back down in my corner, I nodded off again, sleeping and waking up again at odd intervals. When I dreamed, they were strange dreams, all about the girls I’d try to kiss in high school. They’d all gotten tremendously fat, tall, or magical. I only really woke up by the time it was dark. The door opened up and someone I didn’t see pushed in another drunk. He had a big, grey beard like he’d been mining gold for centuries. As he walked in, he muttered various obscenities about the police and his rights. A cop shouted from the outside, “Do you need another cot in there?”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure!”
“You’re all a bunch of cocksuckers!” the old man said. “What about my fucking America!” The door was already closed. “You cunt! You cunt! You black bastard!” Then he sat down on the cot and cried for a little while. Eventually he lay down, facing his back to me and looking at the wall. It was quiet again.
“Why did they have to keep me overnight?” I said to myself. The old man didn’t hear. They wanted to keep the story under control. They wanted to let me know who’s boss. They wanted to let me know what an embarrassment was. I was too sober for this. I needed a drink.
All at once — but this could’ve been hours later, at any time of the night — the man in the cot, still lying down, raised up his free arm and punched it clear through the wall. It snapped me out of whatever I thought I was thinking.
His arm hung in the hole he’d made for about twenty seconds, then he took his arm out and shifted around on the cot like he was about to wake up. I didn’t want to have to talk to him right now, so I dug around for the note in my pocket so I could make it look I was doing something important. I read it absentmindedly in silence.
I don’t know if it was the booze or the food but I can’t go on and I’m scared. That some sonofabitch is going to find me dead on the side of the road.
Dear sonofabitch:
My name is Pete Williams. I live in Gilman on 2nd Avenue in a big house that used to be bright yellow. Show my bloated body to that cunt of a wife of mine and give her all my love. Tell my boy I know where he gets his dope and he should knock it off before he turns into me. Kick my dog for me. You’re such a stupid sonofabitch you just
“God, I could go for some of that,” the old man said. He must’ve seen the logo on the back. “Is there one of those around here?”
“I don’t know. I found this on the ground.”
“Oh . . . too bad. It smells good.”
I lifted it to my nose and couldn’t smell a thing. “Yes it does,” I said.
“Wish I could be there instead of here. There are so many places I’d rather be than here.” I nodded at him. “Oh . . . better here than sleeping with my wife.” He watched something behind me and took on the look of a thoughtful alcoholic. “Cuz my wife is dead.” He almost laughed.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Ain’t your fault.”
“When did it happen?”
“Years ago . . .” We sat around and thought about the dead. And how good they are. Not the best way to spend an evening. Soon enough, he laid back down, turned his back to me, and slept. He was an old pro. I wasn’t nearly so lucky. I spent the rest of the night trying to fall asleep. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time I listened to the old man breathe. Sitting there and listening for the whole night. By the time the sun came up, he was still asleep and I couldn’t hear a thing without hearing the silence around it. I was starving. I snapped my fingers just to hear the sound. At some point the door opened and Jim looked in.
“You’re free to go,” he said.
“How long have you been here?”
“I just got in. I got off my shift right after your little meeting yesterday.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t like waking him up.”
I got out of my corner. My back and neck had cramped up. I couldn’t stand up straight. “Do you know any good restaurants in the area?”
“I guess you could buy something at the grocery store. If you’re hungry.”
He gave me my car keys. I thanked him and got out. My car was waiting outside. Jim was a good guy. I looked around to see if anything had changed. Maybe there would be a foreign hair on my back seat, but I couldn’t find anything. When they took Pete out of the car, he must have frozen up by then. And they must’ve had a hard time of it, because the passenger rear door had a few odd scratches, and I couldn’t roll the window down. I don’t know what they had to do to get the body out, but it must’ve stiffened up by then. The whole place smelled like death, and all I could think of was that I couldn’t afford a new car.
I get my keys out of my pocket. There’s not much gas left in my car, I don’t have a job, my car smells like death, and I make poor decisions. I have two dollars in my wallet.
Just for now, just so I can get home, I’m looking up. I’m rolling down all my windows, or at least the ones that work. My engine is going to get me home on fumes. Two dollars is all I am ever going to need. I’m getting a job and buying a dog I can kick. And knocking up a woman that I can call my wife. When I die, I’m giving her all my love.
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