CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella (8 page)

Just after seven I hear him shout: “You, darling, will rot in hell, with the help of a swift push to the grave from me!” At first I think he’s pillow-talking with Freeda by phone. Then I look out the window and see the animal rights girl at the lip of our pit with a camcorder.

Admirable dedication, I think, wonderful clarity of vision.

Tim runs out the door with his blackjack unsheathed.

What to do? Clearly he means her harm. I follow him, leaving behind my loafers to minimize noise. I keep to the shadows and scurry in my socks from tiny berm to tiny berm. I heave in an unattractive manner. My heart rate’s in the ionosphere. To my credit I’m able to keep up with him. Meanwhile she’s struggling up the slope with her hair in sweet disarray, backlit by a moon the color of honey, camcorder on her head like some kind of Kenyan water jug.

“Harlot,” Tim hisses, “attempted defiler of my dream,” and whips his blackjack down. Am I quick? I am so quick. I lunge up and take it on the wrist. My arm bone goes to mush, and my head starts to spin, and I wrap Tim up in a hug the size of Tulsa.

“Run,” I gasp to the girl, and see in the moonlight the affluent white soles of her fleeing boat-type shoes.

I hug hard. I tell him drop the jack and to my surprise he does. Do I then release him? To my shame, no. So much sick rage is stored up in me. I never knew. And out it comes in one mondo squeeze, and something breaks, and he goes limp, and I lay him gently down in the dirt.

I CPR like anything. I beg him to rise up and thrash me. I do a crazy little dance of grief. But it’s no good.

I’ve killed Tim.

I sprint across 209 and ineffectually drag my bulk around Industrial Grotto, weeping and banging on locked corporate doors. United Knee Wrap’s having a gala. Their top brass are drunkenly lip-synching hits of the fifties en masse and their foot soldiers are laughing like subservient fools, so no one hears my frantic knocking. I prepare to heave a fake boulder through the plate glass. But then I stop. By now Tim’s beyond help. What do I gain by turning myself in? Did I or did I not save an innocent girl’s life? Was he or was he not a cruel monster? What’s done is done. My peace of mind is gone forever. Why spend the remainder of my life in jail for the crime of eliminating a piece of filth?

And standing there outside the gala I learn something vital about myself: when push comes to shove, I could care less about lofty ideals. It’s me I love. It’s me I want to protect.

Me.

I hustle back to the office for the burial gear. I roll Tim into the pit. I sprinkle on lime and cover him with dirt. I forge a letter in which he claims to be going to Mexico to clarify his relationship with God via silent meditation in a rugged desert setting.

“My friends,” I write through tears in his childish scrawl, “you slave away for minimal rewards! Freedom can be yours if you open yourself to the eternal! Good health and happiness to you all. I’m truly sorry for any offense I may have given. Especially to you, Freeda, who deserved a better man than the swine I was. I am a new man now, and Freeda dear, I suggest counseling. Also: I have thought long and hard on this, and have decided to turn
over the reins to Jeffrey, whom I have always wrongly maligned. I see now that he is a man of considerable gifts, and ask you all to defer to him as you would to me.”

I leave the letter on Claude’s chair and go out to sleep in my car. I dream of Tim wearing a white robe in a Mexican cantina. A mangy dog sits on his lap explaining the rules of the dead. No weeping. No pushing the other dead. Don’t bore everyone with tales of how great you were. Tim smiles sweetly and rubs the dog behind the ears. He sees me and says no hard feelings and thanks for speeding him on to the realm of bliss.

I wake with a start. The sun comes up, driving sparrows before it, turning the corporate reflective windows wild with orange. I roll out of my car and brush my teeth with my finger.

My first day as a killer.

I walk to the pit in the light of fresh day, hoping it was all a dream. But no. There’s our scuffling footprints. There’s the mound of fresh dirt, under which lies Tim. I sit on a paint can in a patch of waving weeds and watch my colleagues arrive. I weep. I think sadly of the kindly humbler I used to be, bleary-eyed in the morning, guiltless and looking forward to coffee.

When I finally go in, everyone’s gathered stunned around the microwave.

“El Presidente,” Claude says disgustedly.

“Sorry?” I say.

I make a big show of shaking my head in shock as I read and reread the note I wrote. I ask if this means I’m in charge. Claude says with that kind of conceptual grasp we’re not exactly in for salad days. He asks Freeda if she had an inkling. She says she always knew Tim had certain
unplumbed depths but this is ridiculous. Claude says he smells a rat. He says Tim never had a religious bone in his body and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. My face gets red. Thank God Blamphin, that toady, pipes up.

“I say in terms of giving Jeffrey a chance, we should give Jeffrey a chance, inasmuch as Tim was a good manager but a kind of a mean guy,” he says.

“Well put,” Claude says cynically. “And I say this fattie knows something he’s not telling.”

I praise Tim to the skies and admit I could never fill his shoes. I demean my organizational skills and leadership abilities but vow to work hard for the good of all. Then I humbly propose a vote: Do I assume leadership or not? Claude says he’ll honor a quorum, and then via show of hands I achieve a nice one.

I move my things into Tim’s office. Because he’d always perceived me as a hefty milquetoast with no personal aspirations, he trusted me implicitly. So I’m able to access the corporate safe. I’m able to cater in prime rib and a trio of mustachioed violinists, who stroll from cubicle to cubicle hoping for tips. Claude’s outraged. Standing on his chair, he demands to know whatever happened to the profit motive. Everyone ignores him while munching on my prime rib and enjoying my musicians. He says one can’t run a corporation on good intentions and blatant naïveté. He pleads that the staff fire me and appoint him CEO. Finally Blamphin proposes I can him. Torson from Personnel seconds the motion. I shrug my shoulders and we vote, and Claude’s axed. He kicks the watercooler. He gives me the finger. But out he goes, leaving us to our chocolate mousse and cocktails.

By nightfall the party’s kicked into high gear. I bring in
jugglers and a comedian and drinks, drinks, drinks. My staff swears their undying loyalty. We make drunken toasts to my health and theirs. I tell them we’ll kill no more. I tell them we’ll come clean with the appropriate agencies and pay all relevant fines. Henceforth we’ll relocate the captured raccoons as we’ve always claimed to be doing. The company will be owned by us, the employees, who will come and go as we please. Beverages and snacks will be continually on hand. Insurance will be gratis. Day care will be available on-site.

Freeda brightens and sits on the arm of my chair.

Muzak will give way to personal steros in each cubicle. We will support righteous charities, take troubled children under our collective wing, enjoy afternoons off when the sun is high and the air sweet with the smell of mown grass, treat one another as family, send one another fond regards on a newly installed electronic mail system, and, when one of us finally has to die, we will have the consolation of knowing that, aided by corporate largesse, our departed colleague has known his or her full measure of power, love, and beauty, and arm in arm we will all march to the graveyard, singing sad hymns.

Just then the cops break in, led by Claude, who’s holding one of Tim’s shoes.

“If you went to Mexico,” he shouts triumphantly, “wouldn’t you take your Porsche? Would you be so stupid as to turn your life’s work over to this tub of lard? Things started to add up. I did some literal digging. And there I found my friend Tim, with a crushed rib cage that broke my heart, and a look of total surprise on his face.”

“My Timmy,” Freeda says, rising from my chair. “This disgusting pig killed my beautiful boy.”

They cuff me and lead me away.

In court I tell the truth. The animal rights girl comes out of the woodwork and corroborates my story. The judge says he appreciates my honesty and the fact that I saved a life. He wonders why, having saved the life, I didn’t simply release Tim and reap the laurels of my courage. I tell him I lost control. I tell him a lifetime of scorn boiled over. He says he empathizes completely. He says he had a weight problem himself when a lad.

Then he gives me fifty, as opposed to life without parole.

So now I know misery. I know the acute discomfort of a gray jail suit pieced together from two garments of normal size. I know the body odor of Vic, a Chicago kingpin who’s claimed me for his own and compels me to wear a feminine hat with fruit on the brim for nightly interludes. Do my ex-colleagues write? No. Does Freeda? Ha. Have I achieved serenity? No. Have I transcended my horrid surroundings and thereby won the begrudging admiration of my fellow cons? No. They exult in hooting at me nude during group showers. They steal my allotted food portions. Do I have a meaningful hobby that makes the days fly by like minutes? No. I have a wild desire to smell the ocean. I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly un-likable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

This is how I feel. These things seem to me true. But what’s there to do but behave with dignity? Keep a nice cell. Be polite but firm when Vic asks me to shimmy while wearing the hat. Say a kind word when I can to the legless man doing life, who’s perennially on toilet duty. Join in at the top of my lungs when the geriatric murderer from Baton Rouge begins his nightly spiritual.

Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there’s a God above this subGod, who’s busy for a few Godminutes with something else, and will be right back, and when he gets back will take the subGod by the ear and say, “Now look. Look at that fat man. What did he ever do to you? Wasn’t he humble enough? Didn’t he endure enough abuse for a thousand men? Weren’t the simplest tasks hard? Didn’t you sense him craving affection? Were you unaware that his days unraveled as one long bad dream?” And maybe as the subGod slinks away, the true God will sweep me up in his arms, saying: My sincere apologies, a mistake has been made. Accept a new birth, as token of my esteem.

And I will emerge again from between the legs of my mother, a slighter and more beautiful baby, destined for a different life, in which I am masterful, sleek as a deer, a winner.

E
lizabeth always thought the fake stream running through our complex was tacky. Whenever I’d sit brooding beside it after one of our fights she’d hoot down at me from the balcony. Then I’d come in and we’d make up. Oh would we. I think of it. I think of it and think of it. Finally in despair I call GuiltMasters. GuiltMasters are Jean and Bob Fleen, a brother/sister psychiatric practice. In their late-night TV ads they wear cowls and capes and stand on either side of a sobbing neurotic woman in sweater and slacks. By the end of the bit she’s romping through a field of daisies. I get Jean Fleen. I tell her I’ve done a bad thing I can’t live with. She says I’ve called the right place. She says there’s nothing so shameful it can’t be addressed by GuiltMasters. I take a deep breath and spill my guts. There’s a silence from Jean’s end. Then she asks can I hold. Upbeat Muzak comes on. Several minutes later
Bob comes on and asks can they call me back. I wait by the phone. One hour, two hours, all night. Nothing. The sun comes up. Brad from Complex Grounds turns on the bubbler and the whitewater begins to flow. I don’t shower. I don’t shave. I put on the same pants I had on before. It’s too much. Three years since her death and still I’m a wreck. I think of fleeing the city. I think of working on a shrimper, or setting myself on fire downtown.

Instead I go to work.

In spite of my problems, personal interactive holography marches on.

All morning I hopefully dust. Nobody comes in. At noon I work out a little tension by running amok in one of my modules. I choose Bowling with the Pros. A holographic smoothie in a blazer greets me and affably asks if I’m as tired as he is of perennially overhooking the ball when what I really need is to consistently throw strikes. I tell him fuck off. In a more sophisticated module he’d ask why the hostility, but my equipment is outdated and instead he looks confused and tries to shake my hand. What crappy verisimilitude. No wonder I’m in the red. No wonder my rent’s overdue. He asks isn’t bowling a lovely recreation? I tell him I’m in mourning. He says the hours spent in a bowling alley with friends certainly make for some fantastic memories years down the line. I tell him my life’s in the crapper. He grins and says let’s bowl, let’s go in and bowl, let’s go in and bowl a few frames—with the Pros! I take him by the throat. Of course he Dysfunctions. Of course I’m automatically unbooted. I doff my headset and dismount the treadmill. Once again it’s just me and my failing shop. Once again the air reeks of microwaved popcorn. Once again I am only who I am.

Wonderful, I think, you’ve fouled your own four-hundred-dollar module. And I have. So I trash it. I write it off to grief management. I go to lunch. I opt for an autodispensed FreightFurter. Of course I overmicrowave and the paper cowcatcher melds with the bun and the little engineer’s face runs down his overalls. It’s even more inedible than usual. I chuck it. I can’t afford another. I chuck it and go wait for my regulars.

At two Mr. Bomphil comes in looking guilty and as always requests Violated Prom Queen, then puts on high heels and selects Treadmill Three. Treadmill Three is behind a beam, so he’s free to get as worked up as he likes, which is very. I try not to hear him moan. I try not to hear him call each football-team member by name. He’s followed by Theo Kiley, an appliance salesman who lays down a ream of Frigidaire specs and asks for Legendary American Killers Stalk You. I strap on his headset. I insert his module. For twenty minutes he hems and haws with Clyde Barrow. Finally he slips up and succumbs to a burst of machine-gun fire, then treats himself to a Sprite. “Whew,” he says. “Next time I’ll know to avoid the topic of his mom.” I remind him he’s got an outstanding bill. He says thanks. He says his bill and his ability to match wits with great criminals are the only outstanding things he’s got. We laugh. We laugh some more. He shakes his head and leaves. I curse him under my breath, then close up early and return to my lonely home.