The Crash of Hennington (3 page)

So it should surprise no one that Luther Pickett was desperately unhappy. Really, just look at his desk. A notepad, a file, a few papers, neatly stacked. A blotter, a telephone with intercom, a computer to one side. Barely anything else. No personal photos, no mementos from company milestones, no sample Banyon Enterprises products. Even the coffee mug was black and unmarked by logo or design. Most definitely
not
the outward reflection of an unfettered soul.

The minimalism (some would say sterility) reached to the gray carpet and on up the undecorated walls. After three years in this office, the intended inoffensive-yet-very-expensive abstract expressionist paintings were still packed in crates thirty stories below, waiting futilely for the day when Luther would finally allow them to breathe fresh air. And there was the silence, too. No bustle, no music, not even a hum from the air conditioning, just Luther’s pen scratching across a paper or the fading click of typing on the keyboard. Yet the atmosphere was not cold but melancholic, a funeral parlor’s viewing room rather than a prison cell, Luther the grieving relative and not the angry inmate. Luther at thirty-eight (grapevine verdict: ‘looks younger, seems older') appeared at once tense and exhausted. His tanned, handsome face rarely smiled, his broad chest rarely expanded into laughter, his step never betrayed any lightness. His secretaries worried frantically about him.

The intercom lit up.

—Yes, Lois?

—You’re going to be late for your 9.30.

Luther glanced at the clock.

—Shit. Call Jules, please, and tell him I’m on my way.

—I already have.

Archie Banyon and Luther Pickett had a thrice-weekly tennis match, played on the grass court Archie had installed
on the uppermost floor of his own office. It was meant as a friendly game between friendly rivals, father-son in intent, if not perhaps in genuine feeling; still, it was not the corporate death-saga it might have been. Luther was strapping, tall, muscular. He was bald across the top and kept the rest of his hair cropped extremely short, a
trompe l’oeil
that made his head seem like a single sleek muscle as well. His tightly compacted litheness paired with a set of small silver-rimmed spectacles to make Luther look for all the world like a terrifically strong man trying not to appear so. In spite of this – and spite definitely entered into the equation – Archie Banyon had an impressive game and a more impressive tenacity. Luther usually lost two out of three, even given Archie’s extra five decades.

What the matches amounted to were three opportunities a week to speak with Archie. Three times a week to deliver the prepared speech that Luther had written and rewritten, the prepared speech that laid it all in the open at last and forever, the prepared speech that would probably kill Archie Banyon, not merely because of what it meant for Luther, but because of what it meant for Archie’s biological son, Thomas, a distasteful little caveat that helped matters not at all.

Luther gathered his tennis clothes and bolted to the elevators. He shot up through eighteen floors of computer banks and safes, film libraries and records, corporate histories and hidden crimes, eighteen floors of valuable information that Archie had placed between himself and Luther because he only felt comfortable if he was on one end and Luther on the other. —To protect it, Archie said, like sentinels. The elevator doors snapped open. Luther spotted Jules, Archie’s assistant, arranging Archie’s equipment off to the side of the court. Jules flashed Luther a wan, impish smile.

—Piss off, Jules.

—Is that any way to greet your umpire?

—Where’s Archie?

—Here!

Archie called from the far end of the court, behind Luther. Luther turned. One week. One week, and there would be no turning back. He would either give the speech or he wouldn’t. In one week, if he hadn’t said no, his silence would have answered yes.

5. Maggerty.

Maggerty the Rhinoherd was not the rhinoherd, but the misnomer served a humane purpose. Though the resolute, quiet and massive Crash needed no tending, the presence of Maggerty could only otherwise be explained by madness, an explanation with which the polite citizens of Hennington privately agreed but publicly tended away. The Crash offered no product, neither meat nor milk nor leather; their eating patterns were too erratic and wandering to be a real benefit to agriculture (there were no farms in the city anyway, which was where The Crash wandered more than half the time); and the individual animals were impossible to tame, ignoring Henningtonians with a determination that would have seemed like arrogance had The Crash not also asked so little in return: a few hay bales during drier times and the right to free range. The Rhinoherd did nothing but follow. He was more disciple than caretaker. Hennington sensibilities to the side, it was an occupation for a fanatic or an imbecile. Fortunately, Maggerty was both.

He was born in the farmland to the south of Hennington, the only son of middle class rent-farmers. Odd from the beginning, his destiny was set at six years old when he was
kicked between two ribs under his left armpit by a goat he tried to suckle. This – the attempted suckling – was not done out of hunger but out of simple entrancement with the goat and its wheaty, dirty, shitty goat-smell. Crawling past the small, electric dairy works; past the Rumour farm-maidens tending to the hens and the sheep; under the nose of the giant Rumour overseer asleep in his chair, head cocked towards a computer terminal, one hand somnolently gripping the erection that raged in his pants as he (the overseer) dreamed; moving quietly through the gate, held fast so the latch didn’t clatter; literally following his nose to the furthest pen, Maggerty came face to face with the bored she-goat, munching her hay, distracted and oblivious.

Trailing his fingers on the wall, Maggerty circled the goat slowly. She took no notice of him after her initial sizing-up, exuding the offhand confidence so peculiar to farm animals who weren’t also sheep. She was a greenish brown with white bony legs and sharp – Maggerty was soon to discover – hooves. With caution, or rather, with
reverence
Maggerty placed a hand on the goat’s hide. The goat jumped a little, but it seemed to Maggerty to be more out of surprise than abhorrence. When he touched her again, she didn’t move.

He began to stroke her, slowly, like a pet. She had birthed a litter less than three weeks before, but her kids had already been taken from her. Her udder, plump to the point of hardness, glistened with a liquid Maggerty assumed to be sweat. He knew, as all farm children knew, that udders issued milk, and he was deliriously overcome with a desire to drink, to sup rich sustenance from the goat, to bring the pulsing, thrumming warmth of another existing aliveness into himself. A contempt was there, too, for the goat’s refusal to regard him, to notice his need, but that did not stop his desire for the milk.

He knelt. Heat buzzed in the air. He felt his heartbeat in his temples. A tingling spread over his body along with a sort of ecstasy, if he had known the word at six, but it was like the ecstasy of those screaming streetcorner preachers who haunted Hennington’s desolate east side and who would shit right out in the open and leave it stinking in the sun for want of interrupting their sermons. Maggerty leaned in and put his lips to one of the long teats. He had not even properly gotten his mouth around the nipple when the goat kicked him, slicing a deep, precise cut between two ribs just below his left armpit, leaving a wound that never healed. Never.

This was the unacceptable thing. A child ridiculously exploring a goat could be explained, heaven knew such things and worse had happened on southern Hennington farms since time immemorial, but a child with a wound that never stopped bleeding, never scabbed nor scarred, now
this
was a thing to be wary of. The expected ostracism and isolation followed ruthlessly in the farming community, ringing outwards from friends to schoolmates to teachers and onward, until finally Maggerty’s own mother regarded him only grudgingly on the rare occasions when she regarded him at all.

As he stumbled down the road after The Crash, Maggerty distractedly put his hand to the wound. Years and years and years had passed. The wound never got worse, but it never got better either. It also never stopped hurting, and it was this, the never-ending pain coupled with the oddity of the never-healing wound, that had driven Maggerty irretrievably into madness sometime in the teenagedom when he had picked up with The Crash, still accompanying them all these many long years later.

He ate grass and roots with them. He drank from the streams and canals and lakes as they did. He rarely approached them – the experience with the goat had taught him not to
meddle with an animal that weighed one hundred times as much – but he also never left them, nesting with them through winters and storms, famines and droughts. He began to be called Maggerty the Rhinoherd not long after taking up his patronage. At first, municipal thought considered forcibly separating him from The Crash, but as he apparently did no harm to the animals and as they did not seem to mind or indeed acknowledge his presence, he was left alone.

And so it stood. Maggerty the Rhinoherd. Before the year was out, he would have a second never-healing wound, but only because it would first take his life.

6. The Mayor’s Office and its Discontents.

The speakerphone on Cora’s desk crackled.

—Mayor?

—What can I do for you, Adam?

—The Arboretum just called.

—Let me guess. The Crash bruised a blade of grass and molested a squirrel.

—More like trampled a rare species of terrestrial phalaenopsis. The botanists are screaming about irreplaceability.

—Adam?

—Yes, Mayor.

—'Terrestrial phalaenopsis'?

—That’s what they said.

—They couldn’t say ‘orchid', like normal folk?

—I guess they figured you’d know.

—On the basis of nothing.

—What should I tell them?

—That they shouldn’t have planted terrestrial phalaenopsi where one hundred rhinoceros could tread on them.

—Well, they are
terrestrial
phalaenopsis.

—And it is an equally terrestrial Crash. Surely there are paths The Crash doesn’t take. The botanists can plant their orchids there.

—I think all they want is a fence.

—In whose lifetime do they see that happening? The Arboretum’s been an open park for ninety years. That’s not going to change on my watch just because a bunch of botanists are crying over orchids.

—I like orchids.

—I have another call, Adam. Issue settled.

She released his line and pressed another flashing light.

—Yes?

—Deputy Mayor Latham on the line.

—Put him through. Max? Make me happy.

—Unlikely, I’m afraid.

—You can’t make the fundraiser.

—I can’t make the fundraiser.

—This is my thought, right this second: ‘Why do I even bother?’

—Talon is sick.

—Oh. Well, all right then. What’s wrong with her?

—Battery Pox.

—Poor thing. Started the shots?

—We’re driving home from the doctor’s office right now. She’ll be fine. She’s just throwing up all over everything.

—And a sitter is out of the question?

—Cora …

—All right, all right, all right, I’m civilized. I’ll just have to work myself up for a sparring match with Archie Banyon.

—He can’t be too upset if I have a sick daughter.

—He won’t be upset at you. He’ll be upset at
me.

—You can handle Archie Banyon.

—I know I can handle Archie Banyon. Doesn’t mean I look forward to it. Where are you now?

—Driving down Eighth. Just about to cross Medford.

—Look out for The Crash. They’re around there somewhere.

—The Arboretum called, didn’t they?

—I don’t want to talk about it.

—Sorry about tonight.

—I don’t want to talk about it.

But she did.

—How can you expect to be elected if I do all your campaigning for you?

—You got elected four times. Why fix something that’s not broke?

—Don’t be cavalier. They’re not going to make you Mayor just because I tell them to.

—They might.

—Well, yes, they might, but still, Max—

—I’ll make it up to you.

—So you say. Are you even going to
vote?

—Mercer Tunnel. Breaking up. Gotta go.

—Liar.

She cut him off and pressed a private speed dial.

—We’re flying solo tonight.

—Hi, sweetest. Max pulled out again?

—Yep.

—How does he expect to get your job if he never shows up to anything? Politics is nasty and brutish, but you at least have to play at it.

—Talon’s got Battery Pox. Apparently, she’s vomiting everywhere.

—How vivid. All right, whatever, we’ll pull in the dough for him once more.

—He says thanks.

—No, he doesn’t, but at least he means it.

As was his wont, Albert disconnected without saying goodbye. Cora dialed her secretary.

—Angie, get me Archie Banyon on the phone, please.

—Max canceled again, didn’t he?

—Just get Archie on the phone and let me out of my misery.

She clicked off and saw lines lighting up as Angie tracked down Archie Banyon. Cora steeled herself. He would let her off, but he wouldn’t do it without making her pay.

7. Father and Daughter.

Max Latham was trying to become Mayor of Hennington, but he wasn’t trying very hard. He still wasn’t sure if his heart was in it, which he often thought should have been proof enough that his heart
most definitely
was not in it. There was the sticky question of destiny, though. He had worked for Cora nearly thirteen years, since he was fresh out of law school, first as an intern with a brilliant mind for policy – if a little less so for politics – then as an advisor, then as Chief of Parks, until his current position as Deputy Mayor, the youngest person ever to have held such a post. Now, with Cora retiring after twenty adored years in office, everything had crystalized, just at this moment, for him to fulfill an awaiting slot in history, to step forward and seize the waiting gold ring, to set so many records atumble.