Divining

The New Yorker, February 12, 2001 – Up until the time Mingala West, a Burmese restaurant at 325 Amsterdam Avenue, near seventy-fifth Street, closed, a year and a half ago, a pigeon would walk up to the place almost every evening, right before sunset. It came to the door, sometimes gently tapping its beak on the glass, sometimes waiting patiently on the sidewalk. In most respects, the pigeon was unremarkable. But, because it so often lingered outside, the staff at the restaurant, most of them exiles from Burma, began letting it in. Without hesitation the pigeon would head for the stairwell at the back and descend, one stair at a time, until it reached a landing, where it would rest its head against the wall and close its eyes. Its expression was so pained that patrons on the way to the rest rooms often thought that it was dying. Sometimes they would say something. “No, it’s okay,” the waiters would reply; they were used to it. In the morning, the pigeon waited by the door, ready to go back outside.

When Pendle found mucus hanging out of his nose and running onto his pillow, he realized that he was no longer a pigeon. He woke in a sweat…soaking. He threw his pillow on the floor and sat up in bed to look in the mirror on the wall next to his bunk bed.

“What a fucking slob you are,” he said aloud, trying to get the dream out of his head.

His nose was sort of beaky and he often felt like a bird brain, but he was his own scrawny self. The dream had been so real…detailed. He could see every character in the restaurant, even though he didn’t think he had ever been to the place. He even remembered how the dream had started in a laundromat when he had gone to get quarters from the machine in the corner with the big word “CHANGE” written diagonally across the face. It was an actual face where he was to put the dollar in its mouth. But when he inserted the dollar, the machine laughed and changed him into a bird…a pigeon.

“You are coo coo,” he said, in self-abasement and just to make sure that he was awake. He never had depressing dreams like this when he was with someone; living alone always brought out his negative side…usually about four in the morning.

He supposed that his apartment did resemble a bird’s nest, not because it was cozy, but because it was a mess. His mother certainly wouldn’t visit him here, but his kids didn’t mind. After all, they were guys, too, and teenagers…no, oh, my god, almost twenty. But his guilt was strong enough that he would pick up and vacuum the place before they came to visit. The apartment was so small that he had to install bunk beds to allow his boys to sleep over. When they did, he slept on the couch ten feet away. But it made for lots of intimacy and laughter.

Even though he wasn’t missing mowing the grass, he still missed his old house from way back, eleven or twelve years now, on which he felt he had put his fingers, on every surface…from the roofing, the walls, the doors, to the flooring. After that he would never live surrounded by his handiwork. This little apartment was his fourth move since leaving that house, but that house was where his children lived and grew up and had been the only place in which he ever put any common labor. And his ex-wife Martha hated it just because it reminded her of him. He hurt, just a little, picturing how she would sell it once the boys were gone, to rid herself of the memories. He, on the other hand, had no plans of staying in this sterile little place, but it was all he could find for the moment. He knew logically he should not feel sorry for himself; it had all been his doing.

He wondered what his new place smelled like. Every place he had ever visited smelled like something…gas, body odor, cigarettes, plastic, dust…always something. Probably dirt, he figured. But he could never smell his own place. He chose the place because of the concrete walls, his biggest fear being the lack of seclusion caused by the sounds of others arguing, children screaming, the thudding bass of somebody’s music, or dogs barking. Like the horrible place he had moved after leaving Martha. Or maybe he had hated that place because he was so miserable with himself. But this place had cement walls and he couldn’t hear a thing, except maybe a water pipe somewhere. So Pendle could fart, sneeze, play music, talk to himself and swear as loud as he wanted, and that made him a little happy…about as happy has he could be, he supposed…alone.

Right now, right at this moment, the picture of his old house, the picture of Bette’s apartment, and the picture of his old house with Meesha all intruded on his mind because of the decisions he had once made…choices which caused a lot of pain, starting with his first move, now suppressed.

#

Pendle had been thirty-four years old and in the prime of his sales career with 3M, and bored, when he had literally walked out of the marriage to Martha, who was a good mother to his two boys. He was bored and scared…scared that it was all there was. He cried and felt guilty and hated himself for walking out, but he felt he had to escape…creep out from under something. Growing up, he had dreamed of this life he had created…two children, a wife, a house in suburbia, but then at thirty-four, it all seemed boring…frighteningly so. The fogginess of what he wanted didn’t deter his fear of dying “ordinary,” as he called it. So he left.

With attempted humor, he repeatedly told his acquaintances, “I’m looking for Nirvana, whoever she is. Do you know where she is?” He moved into a nondescript rental unit not too far away from his house and his children, but far away from any knowledge of why.
Then on one of his European sales training trips, Pendle met Bette at a Stockholm night club. She had literally chased him down on the dance floor and seduced him. She took him home to her apartment in Ostermalm, a swank section of Stockholm, kept him awake most of that Wednesday night, and sent him to his hotel with a note with her phone number in his shirt pocket. He had never felt so flattered by such a whirlwind of intense adoration, and by a woman of such seeming class. She made him feel handsome and desirable and he wasn’t going to let it get away. He loved her lack of American false morality. Swedish women were definitely equal to men sexually. Women were no more sluts than men if a Swedish woman “laid” a man. Her experience only made him prouder that she had chosen him. The problem was he was flying home to New York City. She was definitely “Geographically Undesirable” as he called it, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her all night Thursday on the plane.

“I’m coming to see you,” he said on the phone on Friday. It was not a question; he just was going to see her. He was sure she wanted to see him. So he spent hours planning a side trip to Sweden in connection with one of his other international road trips. He had to make up a good story which had a good reason for visiting Sweden again at company expense. But he did it. He was in Stockholm within a month.

He got a hint of the future on that very first visit when, after they agreed to meet at her place at 11:00 on a Saturday morning, Bette wasn’t home. He had traveled one hell of a distance to be stood up. He stood baffled on the street, suitcase in hand. Could she have forgotten? Maybe she was out shopping or on an errand. He waited, sitting on his suitcase and then on the curb. At least the weather wasn’t soaking or freezing him. Only one car passed by in the first hour. He began to doubt himself. He began to feel the fool. When finally she did show up at 12:30, he was so glad to see her he didn’t register that she was carrying nothing…that there had been no errand. He didn’t notice her haggard appearance. He did notice that she didn’t seem too glad to see him. She barely made any conciliation for her being late…simply that she was visiting a friend. But Pendle was just happy to see her, and relieved. Years later it had sunk in that the “friend” she said she had visited was a man she met the night before.

Bette loved to travel. She arranged a honeymoon for them in Zell am See in the Austrian Alps. She had skied downhill before; he had not. He bought all the right ski clothes, and rented skis at the resort. Stepping off the lift-chair for the first time high in the Alps, Pendle was ejected as one might picture a flailing clown from a canon shooting straight through a crowd of people, hitting no one. It was their skill which saved the situation. Pendle was tall and lanky, but he had always felt himself to be agile, coordinated, and well-balanced until now. A snow bank was the only reason that he did not fly right off the edge of a mountain cliff. After digging himself out of the deep snow, it took close to fifteen minutes to find his skis, which, after safely releasing from his boots, had plowed in under the snow. In fact, it took him the whole day, mostly crashing and falling, to descend the mountain as Bette coaxed him down with some impatience, and no pride.

That night she wanted to go bar hopping in the small ski village. After a few drinks, Bette remembered that she had forgotten her credit card back in her room. She asked Pendle if he would get it for her. He acquiesced. It took him over thirty minutes to make the walk and, when finally he walked back in the bar, he found Bette dancing tightly with some man. She spoke German with the man and they laughed together while looking at Pendle. Saying nothing, Pendle handed her the card, turned, and walked out.

“Hey, Pendle, where are you going?” he heard her say behind him. He turned to see her shuffling rapidly toward him slipping on the snow-paved street. He said nothing. She spoke again, somewhat slurred. “You’re nod going back to de room, are you?”

“I believe so.”

“But the evening has barely started.”

“No, the evening is over. You may go back to dancing, if you wish. However, this was the last time you will ever make a fool of me. ”

She walked beside him for a few steps and then said, “I don’ know whachew mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

Without another word, she followed him back to their room, and she never made a dupe of him again. Never again did she flirt or show interest in another man in his presence. From then on, when she was good, she was very, very good. When she was good, Pendle was happier than he had been in his whole life, and she actually thanked him for “keeping her in line.”

But “keeping her in line” did not include her bad temper. On a trip to Weisbaden, Germany, together, Bette came stomping out of the ladies’ room and said, “I hate Germans. Bitches. You know those stupid hot-air dryers for your hands? Well, I can’t wait for them, so I grabbed some toilet paper. The German bitch made a asshole comment about my hygiene for using toilet paper to dry my hands. She wasn’t smart enough to think I could understand German. I told her to stick the whole roll up her ass.” Pendle felt some amusement at the time when he thought what was just her red-hair-trigger temper was directed toward others. But he felt a foreboding.

After a Stockholm City Hall wedding, he had moved into her apartment in Ostermalm. She couldn’t think of living anywhere else, as she had inherited this desirable and seldom-found condominium. One Sunday afternoon as they walked along an Ostermalm street of grey stone buildings with boutiques and art galleries, he received his first lesson in appearances.

“Did you see the movie American Gigolo?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

“See it again and watch how Richard Gere walks.”

“Yeah?”

“That is a sexy walk.” Before he could comment, she said, “Do you see that guy over there loading groceries in the trunk?”

“Somebody you know?”

“Right in front of the underground market entrance. Look at him!” Again before he could answer, “People like that drive me crazy. How does he get through life? It takes him ten minutes just to move two bags of groceries from a grocery cart to his car. I just can’t stand people who are that slow…who dottle…who piddle.”

Pendle said, “How did you learn that vocabulary?”

But she ignored him and said, “Let’s take a look in this gallery.”

Her need for appearances appealed to his snobbery and her intensity excited him. She was alive and made him feel more alive. Against all logic, he had moved to Sweden. Against his feelings for his children. Against his fear of not knowing the language or the customs. But he moved because he loved her. He managed to get a “temporary” staff job at a Dow Chemical office, but within two weeks he was promoted to international sales when the present rep was sent to Burma. He had never known such elation.

Then Pendle began to notice another side of Bette. When she was bad, she was manic. One Saturday afternoon, a month into their marriage, Bette said she had to pick up some clothes at Galleriaet, Stockholm’s largest downtown mall. She asked him to run across the street to the liquor store to pick up some wine for dinner. Dreading that he would have to stand in the long Friday line at the Systembolaget liquor monopoly, he stood by their car for a moment to enjoy the good weather and watch the people. Pendle spotted a vagrant checking each car door along the street as he walked up the block toward Pendle. When the derelict lucked out finding a rear car door open, he reached in and took out a package from the back seat and stuck it under his arm.

“Hey, buddy, I saw you take that out of the car down there,” Pendle said, as the wino weaved passed.

“Fuck you,” said the bum in perfect English and who, close up, looked considerably more threatening than Pendle had expected. The bum crossed the street entering the liquor store. Soon he reappeared and walk back down the block teleporting menacing looks across the street at Pendle and then disappeared around the corner. By chance, a police car got stuck in the traffic immediately in front of Pendle. He ran over to the car and said, “I don’t know if you care, but I watched a guy steal something out of a car over there.”

He led the police, who finding the guy in the market circle, handcuffed him and hauled him off to jail. An hour later, just as Pendle returned to his car, the wine shop closed for the night…and the weekend…and Bette finished shopping. When he told her the story with a bit of pride, she went into a rage.

“You didn’t get the wine?” she yelled. “You had all this time…all this time, and you didn’t manage to get any wine? Now we have to go without wine the whole weekend because of your heroics. What the fuck were you doing? Sticking your nose in others people’s business? You don’t stick your nose in other people’s business in Stockholm. Maybe in Hicksville, but not here. No wonder you haven’t gotten a better position at work. No idea of prioritizing. Sticking your nose where you shouldn’t. What’s the word in English? Fucking doody-two-shoes.”

“Goody,” he said, but she ignored him…for the rest of a ruined evening. Although he would easily shame her for her comments, it was a cut into his heartstrings.

She cut more strings when she, in a tantrum mysterious to Pendle, locked him out of the hotel room during a trip to Gothenburg together. He learned then to carry his own key for every door. And when she complained about his spending time with his children, he simply said that he could get rid of her, but not his children. But each time severed a heartstring. He could only wonder how many he had. As the year progressed, he felt he still loved the “good” time with her. He loved the excitement of living in Europe. It was a time of which he felt he had always dreamed. The boredom of his previous life was gone. Besides, where would he go? He had committed to her. He had moved here from the United States. So he asked her to change…to seek help for her temper. He asked her to see a “shrink.” Her response was to rage for seventeen days, which he marked off on the kitchen calendar as days wasted in their lives.

#

It was hot in Colorado…really hot…even with the thunderstorm throwing lightning around them. Pendle wanted to huddle in the tent with his boys to air his emotion…his stupidity. He ached. How do you explain emotional pain to children? He knew his boys would be on his side no matter what, since it didn’t involve their mother. He just needed to try to reason it out…to use them as ears...just ears. They were too young to give advice. But then did he really know what they thought or would think?

“My suggestion is that you wait in the tent. I’ve heard of people getting electrocuted swimming in a thunder storm.” He felt stupid for saying it. Since when was he an expert at anything? Where had he heard that? From his mother? What the hell did she know about camping by a beautiful lake in the rain?

“Oh, Dad. That’s silly,” said Ted, his ten-year-old. “It can strike tents and burn them to a crisp. I heard about a couple of Boy Scouts that got toasted.”

John, the eight-year-old, looked wide-eyed. “Like toast?”

Ted gave a sneer and said, “No, actually like marshmallows.”

“That’s enough, Ted,” Pendle said softly. He was feeling sorry that he even mentioned it. Once again, since when had he become an expert in anything but emotions…sexual emotions. He was obviously led by his…divining rod. Pendle sighed. He loved being with his boys for these two weeks and no one else. They loved him anyway.

His boys had the time of their lives camping with Dad. For Dad, the Colorado trip was definitely an experience. After visiting his mother in New Hampshire, he had taken the boys for the two weeks to Colorado Springs. The weather had never been so hot. In one-hundred-degree weather, they had bicycled up the hills to the forest area, just to have Ted’s bicycle chain break. So Pendle had to ride back to town to find the bicycle rental shop and then repump his way up the hills. As the day was getting short, finding a camping area was paramount. They found a lake where they quickly dug a latrine and a “fridge” and then pitched the tent. It was cozy until four in the morning when they awoke in sloppy wet sleeping bags, soaked from sinking into the lake. They had pitched the tent, dug a fridge and latrine all on a thick platform of water plants, which, through the night, had slowly given way to the weight. Their latrine had no doubt “influenced” their refrigerator. None of it influence their humor. They were together. They laughed, joked, and played as they moved on to find another lake.

He made his decision as he was sitting naked on a rock, watching his boys swim across the new lake toward where some otters had been playing. The slow rain helped cool him off and he decided Ted was right about the lightning. It could strike them anywhere they were, so forget about it. The wind was quiet and the deer flies were not biting for once. Pendle smiled to himself as he decided to see if the boys could hear him fart across the lake, so he made it as loud and long as he could, pressing his body against the wet rock. Just then a couple in a canoe appeared from behind some trees about fifty feet away. He couldn’t see their faces so Pendle wasn’t sure whether they had heard it through the rain or maybe had mistaken it for thunder. He smiled and waved, a little embarrassed by his nakedness. But just then and there he decided that he would stay with Bette.

That late afternoon the rain stopped. Before the sun set, as Pendle and his sons sat around the little cook stove, Pendle said, “I want you guys to know that I have been thinking hard about leaving Bette.” So why did he bring it up? “She has a terrible temper and, sometimes she even talks against you guys as my children…jealous of the time I spend with you.” He paused, not sure what to tell them. He had not told them about his moving to another apartment, yet. They always called his cell phone anyway, if they ever called. “I have met the sweetest young woman who has no temper and who would never speak poorly of you.” He waited to see if there were any reaction from the boys. They kept whittling sticks down to nothing with their pocketknives.

Then Ted said, “Okay, Dad,” and flicked an ant off his shoe.

Pendle couldn’t read what that meant, so he continued. “However, since Bette is so good when she is good and because I know what I have with her, I have decided to stay with her.” He looked at both his boys hoping that his pronouncement would please them.

Ted whittled and said, “Okay, Dad.”

Pendle didn’t know what to make of this, so he sat quietly for a while. Then he said, “I love you both no matter what.”

Ted said, “We know, Dad. What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The new one.”

“Oh.” Pendle paused, a little taken aback by the question. “Meesha.”

The boys were silent and went on whittling.

“So it wouldn’t make any difference to you what I chose to do?” asked Pendle. A silence. “Whether I stayed with Bette or not?”

Both boys showed their palms and shrugged, looking Pendle in the eye. He saw they really meant it. A previously unperceived weight on Pendle lifted and he smiled. Then he jumped on the boys for a wrestle. “No, stop! Don’t kill me,” he yelled. They all laughed.

As he flew back to Stockholm, he made up his mind even more to go back to Bette. It was completely irrational and futureless…featherbrained…to hook up with a woman twenty years younger. He had met Meesha at work, sort of. It was the company Christmas party.

She had walked up to him and had asked him for a dance, saying, “You have to dance with me to save me from a couple of goons who won’t leave me alone.”

So he did. They had danced the rest of the night. He had found himself trying to impress her. He had watched her walk through the office many times previously because she was the prettiest, sexiest woman in the place. But she was young…only twenty-one. He was almost forty. Then he asked her out (and lied to Bette). Meesha told him how she never dreamed that he would ever ask her out; she had only hoped that he would. By the third time they were together, he felt he loved her. He was almost sure he did. She was kind, even-tempered, and…submissive. He felt a peace with her. Then again, his feelings worried him. She was so young. She would want children one day, even if she said she wouldn’t. She was a different generation. It just couldn’t last.

So as he drove from the airport, he called Bette from his car. “I’m coming back.” He gave her a small pause, but she was silent. “ I thought it through while I was with my boys in Colorado.”
Bette said, “I knew you would.” There was no softness, no joy.

He had moved out of her apartment two months ago, but it seemed years. “I need to get my things from my place.” He felt funny saying, “And I will come home tonight.”

“Yeah, you should,” was all she said.

He felt relieved about his decision, but how he dreaded telling Meesha good-bye. That it was over. He was going home. He knew he had to do it face-to-face with her. She was, after all, pretty-much living with him. He called to tell her he was on his way, but got the answering machine. He immediately had a glimpt of hope that she wouldn’t be there. He could sneak in, get his stuff, leave and call her later. But when he drove up to the building, there she was, glowing like an angel in the dim light. She ran to him and rapped her arms around his neck and cried with joy that he was home.

She said, with tears in her eyes, “I missed you every minute and never want to be alone again. I don’t want to ever be without you. It was terrible that you were gone for two weeks without a word.” She paused and said, “I screamed…really screamed…with happiness when I heard your message on the machine.”

Pendle called Bette. “I am not coming home,” is all he said and hung up. It had been just a year since he had married and moved in with Bette.

#

Meesha and he had sat on a stone wall next to the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island, one January afternoon. The wind off the water made it seem even colder and bleaker. She had just returned from a visit to her family for Christmas in Stockholm.

Shortly after they had met, she had said she wanted to move to the United States; it was exciting to her. It would be an adventure. She had said she was happy to get away from her mother and father. Pendle, on his part, was happy to return to the U.S., to be closer to his children. So they did. He found a position as a sales agent for a small chip manufacturing firm in Salem, Massachusetts, and they found an antique house. Now it had been five years since they moved.

“I’m pregnant.” She looked at him with a sadness in her eyes, or was it fear?

“You know for sure?” he asked, watching her eyes, afraid of what they would tell him.

“Yes, I went to the doctor over Christmas in Stockholm. The timing is such that I think it was when we took our trip to Maine.”

They sat quietly in silence like two new statues on the foundation. Then he said without looking at her, “You know what I told you when we got married…that I didn’t want any more children.”
Again silence.

“But I do,” she said. “I told my mother and my sister that I wanted to keep this child.”

He looked into her eyes. “I don’t. I told you that.”

“What if I keep it?”

Since it was a cold blustery day, they were alone by the shore. He was silent as countless waves brushed in a rhythmic static against the dock pilings. He rubbed the flats of his hands on his lap in the same slow tempo. Tears came welling into his eyes, but he hid them, even from himself, hoping it was just the cold wind burning his eyes.

“Then I am gone. You will have to raise it alone.” He felt a qualm dizziness. He didn’t know how he could say such a thing, and he wasn’t so sure he meant it, but he needed to act certain. He could not see himself as a sixty-year-old father to a teenager. He pictured himself bound and tied the way a parent needs to be tied to his child. He knew what it meant to have children; she did not. The guilt of being away from his two boys and the attention that he owed them bolstered his act of certainty. He looked at her as the innocent thing he had met the first evening at the company party. He thought of her as sweetness and kindness. Meesha could not know what it was like to have children, and he couldn’t let her know that he wouldn’t abandon her. Not right now. He needed her to decide to have an abortion.

And she did. She didn’t tell him when. He knew he would have been there to help support her, past the hecklers, the humiliation, and the cold table. But she didn’t tell him a thing…not when, not where, not how.

#

Ghosts were not his thing, but he had experienced one about as well as could be expected. He lived alone for a while in the old house in Salem, Massachusetts, built back when George Washington was President…after Meesha ran off with her lover. When he was upstairs, he was sure that the chills he felt in his spine were just his imagination because he felt sorry for himself. He was tired from all the crying, so he was probably just cold. But it was always the same room.

The footsteps in the stairwell sounded like his cat, but she lay sleeping beside him…hearing nothing. In addition, the Persian had started waking him exactly at four in the morning by saying “Pendle” loudly and clearly. One evening, as he was watching television, bells began ringing in the same room, then downstairs, and then in the basement pretty well convincing him that something was “happening.” The final conviction sunk in when an antique dealer, visiting to buy some of Pendle’s European furniture too big to move to a tiny apartment, let out a yell right at the top of the stairs.

“You’ve got a presence here!”

“What do you mean?” Pendle asked, trying to avoid coyness.

“You have some sort of presence here in this room. A strong one.” Pendle tried to look incredulous, but the guy went on. “I know these things. I study them. I have even written a book about it, Salem Specters. It’s in the library.”

And that was it. Pendle just accepted that he had a ghost…a friendly one or, at least, harmless. However, when he sold his house to move into this little apartment…this nest, he didn’t declare the ghost on the sales documents. The old house deserved a ghost.

He moved…had to move…to erase Meesha; to try to help rub out the memories of their new life in America. Martha had said, “I wish you were dead; it would be much easier.” He understood now. He understood what he had done to Martha, the mother of his children, many years ago. And to Bette.

Sitting on his sofa-bed on the first night in the new little apartment, he logged onto the Internet to find a dating service. He did not want to be alone. As the page slowly crept onto the screen in small pieces, each piece stabbed him with memories. It seemed that the presence from the old house followed him to the new place, making Pendle a little leary about his prospects of ridding himself of whatever it was. He felt a chill and he heard noises in the wall …a tapping behind him. He wanted very much to flap his wings, to fly away.

The phone made him jump with its unexpected ring. As soon as Pendle picked up the phone, he heard it was an old acquaintance from Stockholm.

“Hi, Peter.”

“Hi, Pendle. How’s it going, Buddy?” Peter’s voice was its usual over-enthusiastic tone, which used to make Pendle smile.

“Not so good.”

“Hey, what’s wrong, Buddy?”

Pendle paused. “Meesha left me.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not joking. She found somebody else.”

There was a silence, and then Peter said, “But, if anybody were happy and perfect for each other, it was you two. I’ve never seen such happy people.”

“I bored her by getting old.”

Again silence. Peter said, “Well, I was thinking about coming to visit, but….”

“You’re welcome any time, but I won’t be the best of company.” Pendle held onto his tears.

After another lengthy pause, Peter said, “I’ll call back sometime.”

“Sure.” Pendle knew Peter wouldn’t. Peter was her friend.

When he hung up, he felt tired. Maybe he could find that Burmese restaurant again. Or was it really no longer in existence? He would have to keep looking, but now he was so tired it didn’t matter what shadows there were or how cold he was, he would fall asleep right there on the stairs.

The Perfect Crime

Henry can’t see the importance of having ever existed. He leans his back up against a large tree in the ninth-hole rough of Albuquerque’s Tanoan golf course, and with great pain in a swelling ankle, awaits to be executed. He doesn’t really know if he will be killed, but something serious is certain to happen and all he can do…is doing…is waiting for it. He smiled sardonically, thinking it is the end of his golf game…and probably his life. His mind runs like diarrhea. He is so fucking stupid that he can’t believe it. He could have taken the golf cart, but he panicked. He could have left the country. In this predicament, how could he doze off or, for that matter, sweat from a nightmare? Then again, it doesn’t matter any more. Nine months ago he had committed the perfect crime. It makes him ill just to think about it. It makes him want to puke. It also keeps him bracing up this tree full of shitting birds, grinning like a fucking idiot.

In Boston Henry had been eking out a living cleaning toilets daytime and working as a night watchman for a security company.

“Hey, Henry, you want to guard a bank?” The SercuiTrust dispatcher had called him Saturday morning before the job. “It’ll be an all-nighter for about a week probably…maybe longer.”
Henry had been puzzled and thought maybe he was just tired. “What do they need to guard a bank at night for?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” the dispatcher had said, “but they’re digging some kind of hole in the street and you gotta stand in it.”

“What the fuck?”

“Hey, you want it or not? I got plenty of people, but you’re up. So you want it?”

He had taken it, and the first night his mind had started working. It turned out some kind of foundation damage had been done to one of the Fleet bank buildings during street repair. The foundation had to be replaced and was now wide open to the street with all the safety deposit boxes exposed. He was told to keep it quiet since attracting attention to the situation could attract the “wrong element.”

His response had been, “I guess we know who they think my friends are.”

The first night was Monday on a not-so-busy-at-night street in the financial district. Since he had a day job, having to stay awake all night was going to be impossible. So Henry had figured that, if he climbed in through the hole, he could nap. If anybody else tried to sneak in, he would wake up and scare them from his dark vantage point. As it was, there wasn’t any good place to sleep except the floor, which was coated with dirt and rocks from the digging. So he hadn’t slept very well. On the other hand, he did have time to think…while, with his flashlight, he studied the walls of safe deposit boxes.

“How can I have a son who cleans bathrooms?” Professor Smith huffed on the phone. It was one of many times.

“Nothing that sophisticated, Pop. I don’t clean bathrooms. I just clean toilets.” Henry waited until his dad was about to hang up and then said, “Tell them I’m a night watchman.”

“Why can’t you just get a real job?”

“Or tell them I’m a headmaster. Remember, Pop, the wise old saying ‘Life is like a toilet. You only get out of it what you put into it.’”

After a few similar phone conversations, his father had died of a heart attack.

Born in Lawrence, Kansas, on a Monday in 1945, Henry grew up in several college towns as his father advanced his career in academia by switching schools. Settling in Worcester, Massachusetts, to become professor and dean at Worcester Polytech, Henry’s father, Dr. Robert Henry Smith, Senior, expected Henry to be something similar. So Henry probably contributed to his father’s death by annoyance. His mother had died when he was so young that all he remembered was that she had taught him how to pee without splashing. So Henry figured that by professionally cleaning toilets he must be pleasing his dead mother and killing his father.

It is fourteen hundred hours on a summer Monday afternoon on this New Mexican golf course and Henry is starting to wonder if he should or could crawl to safety. Although he has done some serious damage to his leg, he should be able to limp his way out. But he isn’t sure just where that safety is. So he waits.

Arid Albuquerque is relatively elevated and, therefore, cool. This afternoon is warm, and the grackles, in oscillating swarms, are socializing, so loudly that Henry cannot hear if the golf course maintenance machines are around. He knows they have to be out on the course, and one of the workers must come rolling by on a mowing machine or something, any time now.

At the end of his year’s stint in Vietnam, Henry was discharged with a plane ticket to Boston. Having moved so many times in his life, he had no great feelings for Boston or anywhere else, but he had no better place to go. Staying with one of his Cavalry and golf buddies until he could find a place to live, he had been introduced to the guy’s sister, Rita Adobe. “The sunbaked brick,” Henry called her. “Built like an adobe shit house.” She was slight and very Mexican…dark skin, dark eyes, and perfectly beautiful to Henry. So slender, smooth skinned, sexy and full of sex, it just had to be “that Mexican blood.” And she had said his hard body turned her on. And that his blue eyes turned her on. And his thick brown hair combed back was “the best.” She would sit for hours to pluck his eyebrows and check his face for unshaven hair.

And one winter evening, nestled in the sofa at his house in Malden, Massachusetts, he told her his story. “You know I used to could speak Spanish, Rita.”

“Oh, yeah?” She cuddled tighter against him, smiling doubtfully.

“Yeah, Spanish was one of my favorite subjects in college.”

“You never went to college.”

“No, I did. But I got a real asshole, jerkface teacher my sophomore year at Boston College and he tried to flunk me ‘cause my dad was a professor.”

“You’re foolin’ with me.”

“No, really, the asshole even said it out loud, just when he handed me my second flunking exam. ‘Just because your father’s a professor doesn’t mean you are.’”

“Did he really?” She was always animated and now a very serious look came over her face.

“Yeah, he did.” Henry paused. “And so instead of reporting the bastard, I ran over to the ROTC office and joined the army to go to Vietnam.”

“So that’s why you became a soldier, ‘cause you flunked a test?”

“No, actually I think the pukehead was right. I didn’t want to become a professor…probably just ‘cause my dad wanted me to. And I’m glad.”

Big question-mark face. “Glad about what?”

“I never felt so happy, like I belonged, as when I was in the army.”

Now she had her concerned look and gave an extra push up against his body. “But you belong with me. Aren’t you happy with that?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course, you make me happy as hell.” In fact, he wondered if he didn’t love her...from the very first minute. She was his first serious lover. All he knew before was Army talk, guy bravado, and chasing whores, which he hated. “But I’m talking about another kind of belonging. Having friends who mean something. Who work with you. Whose life depends on you and the other way around.”

“Like how?”

“They put me in the Cavalry. Just like in the movies, we were supposed to ride in and save the day. Instead of horses, we were a helicopter team, so highly trained that we seldom lost a man or a battle. We minimized exposure to ground fire by flying at high speed, perpendicular to the terrain features. You know what I mean?”

She frowned, but nodded.

“We intimidated enemy fire with a wagon-wheel retaliatory formation of helicopters…two lead ‘Loach’ scouts and, overhead, two orbiting ‘Cobra’ gunships or ‘snakes,’ as we called them, leaving the Viet Cong no choice but to lay low, hoping not to be seen…or to suffer the consequences.”

Wrinkles in her young face. “Like how?”

“Well, if a neophyte VC were stupid enough to think he could shoot down the low-flying lead scout, that little yellow bastard found hell on earth as the ten-pound rockets, forty millimeter cannons, and 3,000 rounds-per-minute gunfire from two higher-flying ‘snakes’ would stream in like a chain of light and destroy the earth around him. If he (or any of his companions) lived to tell the tale, the tale was to lay low.”

“That’s scary stuff,” she said, sitting up straight in the sofa. A frightened look.

He said, “The exact Vietnamese word was ‘Dontfuckwiththem.’”

She laughed her nervous, cute laugh, which to Henry meant she really didn’t understand.
She said, “Didn’t you get scared or anything?”

“Only once. And after that I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to get out of there.” He got quiet. And serious. She leaned back over to him to encourage him, her big brown eyes staring close into his blue ones. She wove her fingers into the hair on the back of his head.

He said, “I had become a Cavalry ‘Slick’ pilot whose job was to follow the gunships as a rescue ship for extracting soldiers from danger. We all worked, ate, and slept together, so we would feel responsible for each other. That was part of the deal to make sure everybody cared. I didn’t know what I felt about that until after my last mission. Until then, I didn’t know enough to be scared.”

She got impatient. “Yeah, well, tell me. What happened?”

“An emergency call came in from some ground troops, who, having misjudged the situation completely, mistakenly landed in a nest of VC. They were now fighting off Charlie on all sides. It was ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ and the Cavalry needed to ride in. I volunteered to help get them out.”

“You volunteered? You didn’t have to go?”

“Well, somebody had to, and so I volunteered. Anyway, as our team approached the hill, the flanking Cobras lay heavy ground fire on all sides of the trapped Americans. Another ‘Slick’ and I went in for the rescue. For the first time ever, the “wopping” of the helicopter rotors was drown out by the roar of machine guns and exploding rockets within feet…oh, I don’t know, everywhere. In the thirty seconds I was on the ground…and that’s all the longer I was there, I saw the scrambling Americans, who were leaping into my ship, throwing grenades over an immediate ridge just to keep ‘Charlie’ away. The enemy had never been so close. It was even hard to breathe from all the smoke. And, as we took off, the companion ‘Slick’ went up in flames and my co-pilot was shot through the legs. I had never been so close to death. I knew what it was like to be afraid. I was very glad to be alive. Fear made me not re-enlist, but I knew I cared about my buddies. I loved them. I belonged…for once.”

Henry would have told his father…wanted to tell him. But his father was busy protesting the war.

As the grackles flood over to more distant trees, Henry can hear some mowing machines in the area. He tries yelling, “Help,” but he feels silly as his voice carries nowhere among the trees and grass, the birds and vegetation acting as an effective sound deadener. And the yelling makes him all the more aware of his throbbing pain. And of his inability to act. Then the returning bird hoard drowns out everything again.

After his honorable discharge from the Army, Henry needed work. One Monday afternoon, as he stopped for a pee break at a gas station, while he was out looking for employment in Boston, he met a huge, handsome black man dressed in an all-white overall coming out of the rest room. Henry quickly discovered that the man had been given a car and $300 a week to clean toilets in gas stations, restaurants, and schools. The cleaning company sold a service nobody wanted to do…clean toilets…and the black man cleaned. Henry went to a job interview wondering if they, like in the Army, only wanted black men to clean.

Smitty, the proud owner of Santi-Do, asked Henry, “So wha’d you wanna do this for?”

Henry couldn’t help but smell that sweaty Smitty could use a little sanitizing himself. “For the money,” Henry said. “What are you doing it for?”

“Don’t give me no lip and we’ll do just fine.”

Henry could see the manager wanting Henry to say, “Yes, massa.” Instead, Henry said, “Give me the job and I’ll never give you lip.”

“Sez here that your name’s Robert. Why you call yourself Henry?”

Thinking it was none of Smitty’s business and, not wanting to explain his relationship with his father, Henry almost said, “Why don’t you take a swim in a toilet to improve your hygiene?” But he kept his clapper shut for once. He needed the job. He said, “My dad’s name is Robert, so we use ‘Henry’ to tell the difference. It’s hard to tell the difference between us otherwise. It’s only people who don’t know me that call me Bob or Robert. You can call me ‘dorkhead’, if you want, but not Bob.”

As an aptitude test, Smitty had Henry copy a paragraph from the front page of the Boston Globe. This was sent to a handwriting specialist, who, Henry figured, must have made…after deep analysis…an extensive, seven-word report saying, “Robert Henry Smith, Jr. can clean toilets.” After a rigorous ten-minute training course (that Henry loudly titled “Toilet Cleaning Technique in the Twentieth Century”) by the daily crew manager Schmoo (or something that sounded like that), Henry was given his first job as a certified “toilet engineer.” As the day wore on, Henry was sent place to place where, sometimes, out of nowhere, Schmoo, an ex-marine sergeant, would show up and yell at him.

“You’re too fucking slow. Use toilet paper to dry it off after you clean. You’re leaving spots.” Or “You’re leaving pieces of toilet paper stuck to the toilet. Hurry your ass up.”

Henry wryly smiled at the thought that Schmoo was always seeing Henry’s “ass up,” as Schmoo always sneaked up behind. So Henry asked, “What are you gonna do to it, if I hurry it up?”

The sergeant didn’t get it and just went on yelling like a cartoon character. So, as the days and weeks passed, Henry realized that yelling was the fulfillment of the “sergeant’s” life purpose. In Henry’s mind Schmoo was a target for ridicule, if for nothing else than just because Schmoo always wore a flap-eared hunting cap with duct tape edging the bill. But mostly he was a target because Henry’s previous commanders, in order to protect their men, had a reason to yell. The memory of his “cav” buddies contrasted in his mind. Here, bent over toilets, there was no pride, no affinity. Just a lot of yelling.

By Friday, after four nights in the street ditch, Henry had figured out how to break into as many of the Fleet bank boxes as he could and how to get away without leaving a trail. He was, however, especially surprised by the amount of cash he had found in one box. When he counted it later, he gave up after a million dollars.

“One fucking million in your secret box. You must be somebody special.”

He didn’t touch any other valuables or jewelry that he would have the trouble to fence, and, besides, since these valuables might be legal, he could be charged with robbery. But the illegal cash stashed in these bank boxes, he figured, no one would or could claim. If he got caught later, he felt his only official crime could be property damage to the bank, and he could get a dock in salary for not staying all night on Friday. He knew that he couldn’t tell anybody about his plan, including Rita. Everyone would try to stop him.

But he did leave a “do not want you involved” note for her and, right now for these moments, under the tree, his heart aches more than his ankle, just thinking about her. He is realizing just how strong his feelings are for her. The sun’s heat has dissipated in the thin, high-altitude air causing the grackles to slow down and then dissolve into thin air. Now the whole golf course is silent, with the maintenance crew having left for the day, leaving Henry undiscovered. And missing Rita.

“You are so handsome, I am jealous to share you with the world,” Rita had said. “You do not touch another woman or I will slam your penis in the window.”

“Ow! Ow! Ow! You mean bitch. You wouldn’t.” Even though he could laugh at her possessiveness, having never before experienced anything close to such adoration, he was overwhelmed by her intense feelings. Thus mentally he had held her at an arm’s length. So when Henry had found a house to rent in Malden, north of Boston, and, although Rita practically moved in with him and often stayed over in his bedroom upstairs during the weekend, Henry had never let her move in completely…mentally or physically.

Now he wonders why he has been such a shit. He has thought of her a hundred times since, and, as the day is turning into night, just now…under the tree, it is the most painful. He needs her to tend him…his ankle and…Christ…his heart. When has he ever thought of that? Why hasn’t he?

He says out loud, “Your mind is turning into mush out here, needle brain. But you could have treated her better. You weren’t brave enough to accept her feelings. You are a mental defect.” Referring to all the bird droppings, he says, “You got what you deserved today, a fucking rain of shit.”

Not wanting the welling feelings of regret to take his mind where it has never been, he fights to change the subject. As the day darkens, as his leg gnaws at him, as the silence surrounds him, the solitude creeps up to him. He even starts fearing some wild animal might start lurking in the shadows. Maybe he had better not talk out loud as the darkness increases.

And then he says aloud, “Hey, buddy, you’re in the city. Get your mind straight. Let’s get going.” But he doesn’t. A warm, light breeze strokes the grass around him. The throb of pain in his lower leg tries to capture his mind. Looking out over the course in the dimming light, he strives to replay one of his golf games. Golf, the perfect sport, has always brought him peace-of-mind. But instead his mind puts him right in front of Olga, the pro shop clerk.

Olga. Weird old Olga. Olga claimed to be eighty, but she looked fifty. He always figured she could use a good foot massage to get the pained look off her face. Repeatedly, as if they had not had this conversation eighty-seven times before, she would ask, “You know how old I am?”

“Why are you still working, Olga?” he would ask her every time.

“Oh, I am poor woman. Back in Russia, I lose husband, my children, and all money. I escape.”

“So you were some kind of royalty or czar or something?” he asked.

“My mother teach me how to play piano. I know all good music…Brahms, Beethoven, Verdi…whoever. And ballet…she take me to all ballet. You have no ballet here. In Russia we learn good things.”

“So go back.”

She got louder. “Oh, I can never go back…no, no. You get me green card here? You know somebody who can help?”

As he shopped, the conversation was always the same. As he tried on a shirt or paid for pants, it didn’t matter if he wanted to listen or not, it was always Russia here, Russia there. Russia always the best. But he could never discover why she left, or, for that matter, why she was here. Nor could he figure out his fascination with her loyalty and patriotism to a country that had rejected her. But somehow she had that feeling she belonged…or should belong to her country. A feeling foreign to Henry.

The long afternoon shadows are faded; it is nineteen hundred hours. The only sounds are the warm breeze rustling the leaves and a few indistinguishable animal sounds. Henry is sweating from the pain. The diarrhea of his mind has turned to sludge as his head is sympathizing with an ache of its own. And the sludge is in every joint of his body not letting him move enough to scratch his nose. The only thing that is moving in his mind is Rita.

Since the robbery, alone in his condo all he had done was make up imaginary risky sex scenarios with her. Over and over he had pictured her naked as a taco walking down the stairs of his Malden house entering a party, letting everyone fawn over her body. He had imagined how each individual he knew would react to her nudity. But what could they do? She would be smiling, chatting, naked among them, calmly holding a glass of champagne. It was his only sex now, imagining her. It was how he had ever treated her and used her. He never gave back to her…not even in his made-up stories. Then alone in his apartment, his climaxes started depressing him. The last time only emptied him and made him hollow…and ashamed. That was when he made up his mind to rent a car.

But the real reason he had to get out of his apartment was that, in all the time he had been here in Albuquerque, under a fictitious name, he had increasingly felt caged in this apartment he rented, across from the Tanoan golf course. Either he was in the apartment, or he had golfed alone, eaten alone at the greasy spoon close by, or sat alone at the library checking the newspapers. How long had it been since he pulled off the “heist?” Six months? He wasn’t sure. The police surely must still be looking for him. He just needed to keep a low profile until the police forgot him or closed the case. But how much longer? He had not seen the case mentioned in the Boston Globe microfiche at the library for a long while. He had found that he needed to do something else…break out of this confinement…or he’d go nuts. So the idea of renting a car had actually been creeping up on him.

He had never rented a car before, and, not knowing which car company to choose, he picked Avis because they came first in the phone book. It took him an hour by bus just to get to the rental office and then they started asking him questions.

“What kind of car? I don’t know. Something normal.”

“How about a Chevy Nova?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You want extra liability insurance?” asked the man behind the counter, who seemed to think Henry was as dumb as they come. “You probably should.”

“Okay.”

“Let me see your license.”

When Henry “escaped” Boston, he had felt he had been clever buying a train ticket to Chicago in his real name, but using a false one for the real train ride to Kansas City, Missouri. And then buses to New Mexico, and always buses in the city, so as not to be remembered by any taxi driver. But he had kept his driver’s license. Now he felt smart and relieved because, otherwise, he could not have rented a car.

As he drove through the northeast side of the city, the uncontrolled sprawl of Albuquerque, which spread wide and low, made him think of chunky peanut butter, smeared out on a huge cracker. The city never seemed to end. It made him nervous, as he was sure he was going to run a stop sign or foul up enough to attract the attention of some ever-present patrolman. No, sir, Mr. Policeman, sir, I am not the guy who robbed the bank in Boston. Then, as he followed Interstate 25 north toward Santa Fe, the open spaces tried to pull the tension out of him. He drove past Santa Fe on the bypass figuring he could stop there on the way back.

He knew he was just being paranoid, but over and over as he drove, he had a feeling of terror that someone had a gun sight on him. And, if they did…if someone did shoot him right now, “Who cares?” he said aloud. He turned up the radio and tried to sing with music that he had never heard before. It didn’t help. He felt someone watching him. It was his first day of feeling freedom since the “extraction” of money from the bank boxes.

“No wonder I’m paranoid.” He started wondering if he should worry about all the cash in the duffel bag at the apartment. Was that being paranoid? And now, although it was priority one not to draw the attention of any law enforcement, he kept catching himself speeding. Then, as he drove past the steep, red sandstone cliffs halfway between Santa Fe and Taos, he saw his father. A stone profile stuck out from the cliff as clear as day; it was his father’s face. It sent chills from the bridge of his nose to the end of his spine.

The most terrifying day in his youth had been with his father at the kitchen table. His father held Henry's piggy bank, a transparent plastic jar half filled with small change and one huge five-dollar bill.

"Where did you get this?" his father had asked, holding the jar in both hands at Henry's eye level. "I have never given you five dollars."

Henry sat petrified, hoping his father would keep talking to give Henry more time to think, but his dad had shut up and just stared at Henry. There was not a sound in the house. Henry could hear himself breathe; he could hear his father breathe. Henry was in a situation he, as a nine-year-old, had never experienced. He could lie and get into trouble or tell the truth and get into trouble. He did not cry; he shook. He felt the sharp edges of the Formica table as he clung to it to steady his hands. One did not cry in the Smith family. No soothing strokes from a father’s hand. In this family there were no hugs, just handshakes. And his father’s punishing silence. Henry needed more time to think. But he couldn’t think with his father giving him no mercy by just waiting for an answer. Finding no way out, Henry finally said, "I got it…from the Thompsons next door."

"Got it?" his father said.

"Yes."

"You mean they gave it to you?"

Henry’s hands shook. "I took it."

"Where did you find it?"

"In their kitchen pantry." Henry’s whole body shook. "They have a jar in there...." He couldn’t speak any more. He couldn’t control his voice. He tasted the tears he did not want.

His father then had looked at him for what seemed like hours, and finally said, "As a punishment, I will escort you to the neighbor's house and you will knock on their door, apologize, and return their money."

Which is what they did immediately that same Monday evening. The walk next door was a walk to an execution as far as Henry was concerned. The bugs in the porch light punished him even more, hitting him in the face and buzzing his ears. When Mr. Thompson came to the door, Henry held out the five-dollar bill and closed his eyes. Quietly he said, “I took this from your kitchen.”

Mr. Thompson said, “Yes, we knew you had. Thank you for bringing it back.”

When it was over and the door was shut, it had caused an adrenaline drain so strong and fast that Henry had fainted on their doorstep.

And now, as an adult, far out in nowhere, Henry's father was looking at him again...from the edge of a cliff. Henry could smell his father’s aftershave. He felt each trembling of his body that he had felt sixteen years ago when his cold father caught him stealing from the neighbors. Which was worse? The silence of his father…or the deafening roar of war? When Henry suddenly realized that it was the little Nova that was shaking at 110 miles per hour, and that he was fast approaching Taos, it was enough to calm him down. But he needed to stop.
He drove slowly through Taos almost without seeing…still stunned by the profile on the cliff side. Almost automatically, he drove into the Taos Pueblo. He had never been on an Indian reservation, and had seen only a few cartoons with Indians. The parking lot, the path in, and the whole reservation was dirt…lots of dirt…with no grass, weeds, or other plant life anywhere in this village…made of dirt. It even smelled like dirt.

“Fucking depressing,” Henry thought.

The barrenness of the place made it seem hot, even though Henry had not noticed the temperature before. The village was comprised of one large adobe structure with some dreary, dilapidated storefronts with wrinkled Indian women selling mouth-sticking, pasty bread; a church; and a graveyard with the remains of another church. Feeling there must be something more to this place, Henry hired a guide.

The young Tiwa Indian man explained, “The large adobe structure has held off the raids and sieges of a two-thousand-year past. The structure is essentially invincible. Once the ladders were pulled up onto the roof and the people had climbed into the roof entrance, no one was ever able to enter or to burn down the fortress.”

Henry said, referring to the ruined church remains, “But the church seems to have taken the brunt.”

The guide pointed at the whole, newer adobe church, and said, “The Christianity part, shown by the adobe church, arose from the Spanish Conquistadors who would not leave the Tiwa alone. Finally we found it more practical to adopt the religion than suffer the sword of the Spanish.”

“Mighty Christian of them Spanish,” Henry said, thinking the guide would agree with his sarcasm.

Stonily, the guide said, “The Tiwa are still highly religious with their own version of Catholicism.”

Henry fell silent. What the fuck? The dissonance of the situation flew at him. Why would anybody take on the beliefs of some brutal hoard who were showing behavior contradictory to their intended beliefs? It was a case of my make-believe character is more important than your make-believe character.

The remnants of the other, destroyed church (obviously destroyed by some other “true believers”) were now just a tourist attraction and a reminder of a previous siege. However, the enclosed graveyard surrounding the destroyed church was still used, and, although the guide never explained, Henry understood that the plots were rotated, with newer burials being put where old ones had been. The older bodies now had become just part of the dirt. And Henry thought, “Our human destiny…all in one beat-up tiny little grave yard.”

The self-assured nature of the guide made Henry begin asking the guide about himself.

"Why are you doing this guide thing?" Henry asked.

"To help the Tiwa, my people."

“Yeah, but it doesn’t seem like you’d be earning much…or enough from it."

"The tribe doesn't pay me, if that’s what you mean, but, if you tip me, I will earn something. It will help my education."

“What are you studying?" Henry asked.

"Law."

“And what will you do with it?"

“Come back and help my people."

“But there is almost nothing here," Henry said, pointing at the structure.

Henry felt the indignation from the cold answer. "You have seen nothing. Nor will you, or any tourist. Our home continues deep underground and our land continues far over the mountain. We are at peace with the earth and with the universe above us…to which we belong. I belong here with the Tiwa, as do all our people."

With a jerk of his head, Henry suddenly becomes aware that he had dozed off, but it takes him a while to figure out that he is sitting in the rough of a New Mexican golf course. He has again dreamed the nightmare that had awakened him this morning. He dreamed that he was in a cafeteria line, waiting to pay for his food. One person was ahead of him and one behind. When he saw that the person behind was just holding a chicken wing, Henry’s grocery-store instincts kicked in, saying, “If that’s all you’ve got, why don’t you go ahead of me?” When the person had accepted, the next thing Henry knew, everyone had walked away, leaving Henry alone in a vast, empty room holding his tray. The loneliness woke him…in a sweat.

Henry's headache is gone, but his whole leg has gone numb. Bitterly, he says aloud, “Come on, rats or squirrels or somebody. Chew it off and then I won’t have to amputate the sucker.” Unlike the Tiwa or Olga, he doesn’t belong any fucking place. He sneers. Maybe he belongs in the rough of a golf course…like a weed. Where can he crawl except down a hole? He feels an envy for the Indians with a dirt mansion. Henry can’t go back…to Boston, to his friends, to Rita. Unlike Olga, he doesn’t know where he is supposed to belong. And he can’t even get up to leave the spot he is in. Where’s the fucking cavalry when you need them?

The darkness is only held at bay by Albuquerque’s city glow. It begins to strike Henry as a bit eerie that no one has come looking for him, but, then again, who would? He knows no one. There is no one at home in his apartment. Or there better not be. Could a burglar find the fortune up in the ceiling by the heating unit? Henry's mind sneers. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Somebody steals the stolen money Henry stole. At least, he isn’t cold. He is hungry, but he can last until morning. Some Tuesday golfer will be along. He doesn’t have to worry. He will be just fine. He will be just ducky!

Now he begins to wonder if all his worrying is his imagination. Did he run away for nothing? It had started just as Monday golf…. Actually, now that he thinks about it more, it started with that stupid dream which woke him up at five this morning. A nightmare about a grocery store? That makes you sweat, Henry?

Even as he “lay low,” he had tried to keep a routine of getting up at seven every morning. But, as the weeks dribbled past, the purpose of any routine began to fade and he slept later each day, getting up at ten and ten-thirty. He had stopped shaving, too, rationalizing that the beard would disguise him.

But this morning he was out of bed like a shot at 5:05, scared and sweating. He remembered that he still had his regular Monday tee time across the street at 11:00. After showering and dressing in his green “Dockers” and green and white vertically striped polo shirt, all bought from Olga, he still had five hours to kill. He fiddled with his face in the mirror looking for ingrown beard hairs and, after digging at several with a pin, said, “Fuck it” aloud, and shaved off his beard. Inspecting his face, he wondered why he ever grew the damn thing.

All through breakfast at the greasy spoon he tasted nothing. He kept wondering why he had never “succeeded” in life like his father, and why he couldn’t just restart his life here or somewhere else. It was all connected in some way, but there was an invisible, blank crevasse that kept him from leaping to the solution. It was as if a section of his brain were missing.

“I think you have graduated to the pinnacle of stupid,” he said out loud. “Just the opposite of your fucking father who had ‘intellectual’ solutions and opinions about everything.”

Some people at the tables around him stared and others tried to ignore him. Although, or because, he had nothing else to do but think recently, he was aware now that he had never thought about much before; not like this. He just got things done. Or maybe just done things. In the military he had followed orders...done things. But he never seemed to “think things through” or develop an opinion.

“You’ve got no brains, peckerhead. You’ve got a black hole…a fucking black hole.”

The waitress said, “Hey, Honey, you’re sort of scaring the other people around here.”

And then there were Mondays. He felt now that he only lived one-seventh of a life. His life seemed to only “occur” on that day. Always Mondays. What was it with Mondays? Who knows what he did the rest of the week.

Henry looked right at the waitress and said, “Man, oh, man. I’m alive one day a week. Now that’s a great existence.”

Henry had liked Mondays. Mondays were big days for golf course maintenance and slow days for golf (or fast, depending on how you looked at it). Henry had always played alone on Mondays and that made for a fast eighteen holes, or even twenty-seven. But he started to realize that he had never felt anger at a bad shot or disappointment at a bad game, because he had no one to whom he could express those emotions. No one to care if he made a bad shot. And, just as bad, no one to whom he could brag about a good game. In fact, no one who would care if he thought anything.

The diner owner came over to his table and, probably afraid Henry was about to pull a gun and massacre everyone, gingerly asked him to leave. Henry obliged and, instead, killed time, up to tee-time, walking…and thinking…berating himself.

At 11:00, on the first tee, a married couple asked, “Hey, you want to play on your own, or join us?”

He shrugged and nodded. Why not? It had been a long time. He could risk it. He needed human companionship. Then seemingly out of nowhere, another man introduced himself as Ed and asked if he could make a foursome out of it. He would even share a cart with Henry. Henry thought Ed smelled a little oily…not hair oil, machine oil.

Trying to be friendly to Ed, Henry asked, “So where are you from?”

Henry’s uneasiness began to climb immediately when, in a raspy voice, Ed answered, “Oh, up north. New England.” But Ed didn’t return the question, nor did he speak much at all. Henry noticed that Ed’s golf clothes didn’t seem to fit and still had tags on them from Olga’s pro shop. And at the tee on the third hole, when Ed casually said, “You’re up, Bob,” Henry panicked.
Bob! Henry knew he had definitely introduced himself as “Henry.” Henry took off walking, mumbling, “I’ll be right back. I forgot my putter.”

And, when he was out of sight, he started running. That is when it happened. Henry stepped in a hole…a large gopher hole...or something. A fucking stupid hole. He had broken something. He felt something snap. He couldn’t walk, so he crawled and pulled himself up to a tree to wait.

Did he also snap something in the ol’ coconut? Has he been imagining something that isn’t there? Shouldn’t they have come looking for him, otherwise? And still he is waiting. For what?
“What did you expect, you fucking idiot? Sirens? Helicopter evacuation? Toilet cleaners’ fire brigade? Hey, it’s still Monday. They’re probably just around the corner.” With increasing volume, Henry says, “But why should anybody come looking for a pile of shit? I really think you thought you were going to make your father proud. And have money. But, instead, you’ve just blown every little piece of your life, shit-for-brains. Anything that means anything… anything!” As much as he repeates his words, his voice carries nowhere outside the rough.

The night is perfectly clear so that, through the branches, Henry can see the universe with its fifty billion galaxies, or was it one hundred and fifty billion? And what had he read? It stretches out fifteen billion light years? Each galaxy has billions of stars. Tears began streaming off his nose and chin. Saline.

And dirt. The smell of helicopters. The roar of death. Ballet. The Tiwa. Olga. Lost buddies. His father. Lost Rita. His insignificance. The isolation…as a child. And now the separation from humanity. And the whining. A whining interruption. Not suddenly. He just becomes aware of it…or has he fallen asleep and is dreaming?

No, he heard the hum of an approaching electric golf cart and sees a flashlight beam about to find him. A pinch of joy leaps through him. When it shines in his face, the cart stops whining, and he hears footsteps sliding through the tall grass. When the golfer’s raspy voice says, “We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Bobby,” a cold chill runs down Henry’s spine. He hears what he thinks is the click of a gun and the glimpse of a gun barrel. And he smells the oil.

In a voice so apathetic and detached that he isn't sure it is his own, “How did you find me?”

“You rented a car.”

“Are you the police?”

The golfer’s voice creeps out from behind the light. “No, Bobby, I am a messenger from a very angry bank box owner. However, he will be pleased, since we did find this in your ceiling today.”
And, as his green duffle bag comes into view, Henry says, “Perfect. Just perfect.” Henry feels a peacefulness. He senses no loneliness. He stops feeling fear. Just dirt.

And then, he suffers nothing at all. Not even the birds picking at him before he is found.

The Cub Scout

The Cub Scout

It was Summer now, but school was gonna be soon. My big brother was gonna be in sixth grade and I was gonna be in third. We were taking our last fishing trip to Blosser’s pond, and, even if we got lotsa chigger bites and a lotta scratches, it turned out to be the most best day ever. I can’t stop remembering Leon Duprey’s cuss words.

"Wowee gee! Look it, Richard. Is that the new Chevy?"

"No, dummy, that's last year's model. The new fifty-ones are already up at Busby Motors," Richard said. My brother knew everything. He was really smart in school, too, with A’s all over his report card.

This morning Mommy had said, “Richard, you take Tommy fishing.”

Richard always said, “Aw, Mom, do I have to?” He never wanted me around.

It was sort of a long walk along Highway 81 and my arm was hurting from carrying everything. And it was hot. I said, “I bet it’s a hundred miles there.”

“Quit whining, birdbrain. You’ve done this before. It’s only two miles.”

“How do you know?”

“Father told me.”

I said, "My arm is hurting. Can you carry this?" I held up the lunch bag Mommy had fixed.

Richard said, "Are you nuts? I got tons of stuff to carry. Look. I'm carrying the pole, the tackle box with all the sinkers and floats and hooks, and I got the worms with all the dirt. What do you have? Your pole and the snacks. And then you brought that stupid creel. We don't need a creel. The fish in that pond are too small to keep. You’ve got the stupid creel around your waist; so put the food in it."

I would of, but I couldn’t do that. I knew we didn’t really need it for fish, but I wanted something to carry my gizmo in. I couldn't tell him that. He would of made fun of me. I lied, "Yeah, but it's already full. It's got the Thermos in it." It didn’t really. The Thermos was in the bag. He thought my gizmo was stupid. I don't know what it was really. I found it on Jail Hill behind our house. My friend Ronny Ballard next door said it was part of a clock and he would trade me some marbles for it. It had little gears and wheels and stuff like a little machine. I found all kinds of stuff, all the time…like marbles and things, that I kept in my dresser at home. I had some marbles with me now. Maybe I would throw them in the water. The “plooping” sound would be neat. Ploop! I wasn’t gonna tell Richard. He wouldn’t of let me. “But my arm really hurts.”

"Just shut up and walk," he said.

I shut up for a little bit, and then I said, "Why is Eugene Holmes so mean to me?" Eugene was in seventh grade…even older than Richard…and Eugene was always picking on me. He called me “Tommy, the tummy.” He said I had a watermelon in my stomach. Richard was always skinny as a bean pole.

"’Cause he wants to. We got things to do and you're in the way. And besides, he doesn’t always pick on you."

“Yes, he does.” Just then, a big semi whooshed by and almost knocked me over with the wind.
When Richard’s hat blew off too, he yelled at me, "You're walking too close to the road. Mother said be careful!"

I knew why he was mad. The truck blew off his Yankee's hat. I didn't have a Yankee’s hat. Mommy said we had so little hair ‘cause of our “flat tops” that our brains would cook like eggs. So she made us wear hats. I had my Cub Scout hat on. I said, "The Yankees are best, huh?"
"Of course, they're the greatest."

"Who's the best one?"

"Oh, that’s easy. Mickey Mantle."

"Why?"

"He hits home runs all the time."

"Wow! Can we go see him?"

"He's in New York, stupid."

"So?"

"Don't you know where New York is?"

"Yeah, sure I do."

"I bet you don't."

"I do, too." I knew it was a big city, but I didn't really know. "How do you know he’s so good?"

"’Cause Casey Stengel says he is. Eugene and I hear it on the radio all the time. They always win."

"Wow! Is he coming here?"

"God, you’re dumb. They only play in big cities. All we got is a softball field out at the fairgrounds. You know, where the Cloud Ceramics play. You've even seen the circus there. They ain’t comin’ to Concordia, Kansas. You ain't gonna see no major league baseball here."

“You’re not supposed to say ‘ain’t.’” My arm was still hurting. I had to change hands. "How come fat people talk so loud?"

He laughed and laughed. "Cause they're fat!" And ‘cause he laughed, I laughed. I was glad he laughed. I liked it when he thought I was funny.

Then I saw the trees where the pond was. Out at Blosser’s. It was close now. It was called Blosser’s Lake really…the big pond anyway. We were going to the little pond. I don’t think it had a name, ‘cept “little pond.” It was sort of secret and more fun, ‘cause it was cooler with the trees and everything. And maybe nobody else would be there. "Do you think there’ll be mosquitoes?"

"Not so many. It's too hot."

"Do you think there'll be chiggers?"

"Of course, stupid."

"You got stuff for ‘em?" He looked at me like I shouldn't of asked. But I wanted to know. "Do ya?"

"Can't you shut up for a while. We got stuff for chiggers."

There were two paths to the ponds, but one of them was more fun ‘cause you had to tunnel through all the sunflowers and stuff to get to the little pond. So I knew we'd go that way, but I asked anyway. "Which path are we going?"

"We're gonna take this one. The other one goes around the back of the little pond, and then we’d have to climb through a bunch of sting weed and stuff to get to the side we wanna be on."

I knew he was gonna say that. It was fun just knowing. I was glad he was with me, ‘cause, even if it was more fun on this path, it was scary. I was afraid somebody'd jump out on us…maybe a monster or something. Well, maybe not a monster, but something. But with Richard it was okay. The path was so small and the sunflowers so big that you had to watch out or you'd get scratched, or the bugs would get on you. Richard stopped and put his stuff down and took out his pocketknife. Mommy let him have a knife ‘cause he was a Boy Scout. I could hardly wait ‘til I was as old like Richard. Then I’d get a knife with a can opener and everything.

I said, “Shouldn’t we put the chigger stuff on?”

"I'm gonna get some sunflower seeds first," he said. He pulled over a stem to get at one of the hugest flowers and sawed it off. He picked off all the petals and then broke open the big brown thing in the middle and started picking out the seeds.

"Can I have some?" I said.

He handed me the brown thing, so I had to put everything down. Just when I was trying to get a seed, he picked up his stuff and started walking. I had to hurry. I threw away the flower and grabbed my stuff to catch up.

"Hey, wa'd you do with the seeds?"

"I threw it away."

"You what?" He looked like he was gonna try to hit me, but he had too much stuff. Then he said, "You gotta be quiet at the pond or you'll scare the fish."

"Okay." I could hear the cicadas singing in the trees…really loud. "Mommy told me you could tell how hot it was by how fast the cicadas sing," I said.

"I know," he said. He knew all that kind of stuff, his being a real Boy Scout with shirt patches and everything.

"How do you tell how hot it is?"

"I can't explain it to you. You’d never get it," he said.

Just then a huge, gigantic grasshopper jumped on my arm and scared the jeepers out of me. I screamed.

"Shut up!" my brother said. "You're gonna bring the whole neighborhood over here and scare the fish. It's just a grasshopper. Grab it. We can use it for bait."

I sort of tried to grab it, but it got away…luckily. I really liked this pond. There were big trees for shade and it didn’t blow all the time, like everywhere else in the world. And, when the cicadas were quiet a little bit, you could hear the crickets and the grasshoppers and the frogs. I used to think the frogs’ croaks were cows mooing, but Richard said it was the bullfrogs. They really sound like big bulls. Richard and I caught one once…well, he did…and fried its legs. I didn’t get any. He said he was saving it for Eugene. But, anyway, there were lots of weeds around the pond that sort of smelled like spinach, and nobody could see you ‘cept when they came in real close. So it was like we were all alone together. It was sort of spooky. I would of been sort of scared if Richard wasn’t with me.

Richard put down all his stuff by the tree. So did I. But I kept the creel on. My arm stopped hurting. He started putting a hook on his line. “Can you put one on mine, too?” I asked.

“Yeah, hold on. Lemme get finished.”

After he put on the hook, he went ahead and put on a sinker and a bobber without even helping me put on the hook. I could of put on the bobber and stuff if he’d just put on the hook, but I was afraid to say anything, ‘cause he might not help me. He grabbed a big night crawler out of the can, stuck the hook through it really good, and dropped it in the water. He didn’t care what the worm thought.

“Can you put my hook on now?” I asked. I was looking at the can of night crawlers, thinking how I was gonna have to pick one out of there.

“Yeah, okay. But stop bugging me. You gotta put on the rest. And you gotta be quiet or I’ll throw you in the sting weed.”

Once he’d put the hook on, I put the float on. I wasn’t sure how to put on the sinker, so I didn’t. Then I had to put a big fat worm on. I pulled one out of the can that was big as a snake, almost. They sort of squished when you stuck ‘em, so I only stuck it once.

Richard said, “You’ll lose it if you don’t stick it on better.”

I didn’t care; I just didn’t want to stick the worm so much. But Richard grabbed it and stuck it on better. He was nicer to me when Eugene wasn’t around. I let the worm down in the water and then I put my pole on the edge of the little cliff and lay down to look over the edge down in the water. The water wasn’t too far down. You could see the little fish making rings in the water…I thought. Or maybe it was just bugs.

“Are those fish or bugs?” I asked.

“Shut up!”

We lay around for a long time. I was getting thirsty, so I was gonna get the Thermos, but then I heard somebody. Somebody was coming over to the pond from the big pond. I didn’t want them to. They’d make it all crowded and everything. And they’d make noise and scare the fish. I could hear them talking already and making all kinds of noise. Then I got really scared. It was Leon Duprey and his friend. Leon Duprey! He was the biggest, worst bully in the whole world. He was from “the other side of the tracks.” He was always getting in trouble…with everybody. He’d try to beat me up and take my gizmo and snacks and stuff.

I said, as quiet as I could, “It’s Leon Duprey and that other guy. Tell them to go away.”

Richard said, “I can’t tell them to go away.”

“Why not? You’re older than them.”

“There’s two of them.”

“I’m getting out of here.” And I started going.

Richard said, “Wait up. Pick up the stuff.”

They were too close. I just knew they'd get me, but I couldn't make my legs go.

Leon said to his friend, "Well, looky here. Big fishermen and all their fishing stuff." And he picked up my pole. He said, "Any reason I shouldn't throw this in the water?"

"Yeah," I said, but I hoped he didn’t hear me.

"Oh, yeah, smarty pants, why not?" He had a sort of smile.

I said, really quiet, "'Cause it's mine."

He really laughed and so did his friend. "So what are you going to give me for it, Cub Scout?"

"I don't know." I couldn’t almost make my mouth work.

"Well, you better find something quick, 'cause it's going in the water after I count to ten. One...two.…"

I held out my hand with the gizmo. I was afraid to say anything, but he stopped counting. He kept looking at my hand with the gizmo like he didn't know what it was.

"What's that?" he said.

I was afraid to answer, so I just held it out in front of me. He started to come over at me. I got so scared he would hit me, so I threw the gizmo underhand. But I didn’t throw too good. I really wanted to throw it so he would catch it, but it went high up in the air and it got stuck in the tree.

"What the hell is that thing?" his friend said.

They kept looking up in the tree and they weren't looking at us. Leon Duprey was standing right on the edge of the pond. I was so scared they were gonna get me and I was really mad ‘cause they were gonna take my gizmo. They even made my brother look scared. They’d probably even take his Yankee’s hat. So, while they looked up in the air, I ran over quick and pushed Leon Duprey over the edge into the water. My fishing pole plooped with him. His friend got scared and ran away, I guess, 'cause my brother was bigger than him and Richard was gonna whip him with his fishing pole. We grabbed our stuff really fast. Leon Duprey yelled really, really, really bad words at us and said he was gonna get us, but he couldn’t get out so fast. And we were running away with all our stuff. We ran so fast and scared, I didn't know ‘til later I was getting all scratched up on the sunflowers and weeds and stuff. And I lost my Cub Scout hat someplace. When we got to the highway, my brother stopped and looked back. I was afraid to look. I stood on the other side of Richard right up next to him.

He said, "It's okay, Tommy. We're safe."

He was breathing so hard he could hardly talk. I know I couldn’t. Then we started walking. It seemed like we didn't say anything for ages. I just kept thinking Leon Duprey was coming to get us, so I had to keep looking back.

Finally, Richard said, "You did it. You were great. You did great!" I started looking around to see who he was talking to, but then he said, "Here, let me carry your stuff."

The Bonus

“Do you have to keep any secrets, Martha?” Bob asked.

“What do you mean?” Martha gave him a grimace that she knew could be taken for a grin.

“You know, my girl friend says she smells smoke on my clothes.”

Bob and Martha stood under the “Smoking Area” sign in the building’s parking garage and looked out at the trees that lined the industrial park just north of Boston. The morning sun made them squint.

“I just blame it on you, because you keep giving me cigarettes,” he said chuckling. “Then I distract her by telling her stories about…pompous Karl.”

Martha’s nature was to avoid looking anyone in the eye. As she snuffed her cigarette, showing that she was ready to return to the office upstairs, she said, “He really is nice. He’s just so cerebral.”

“I believe I’ve heard you say that before,” he said to her back. “Wha’d he do? Plant a recording in you?” As she continued to walk away, Bob said, “On that note…” and followed her up the stairs.

Later, at 11:30 Martha was in a trance, making a long study of the deli take-out menu while she chewed on the leftovers she had brought from home. Karl startled her by plopping a multi-bloom flower arrangement on her desk right next to the menu. She smiled and cooed a thank you, but her eyes flashed a negative message, which Karl would not read. She humored him, as Karl, clothed in this best attempt at personality, lectured her on the reasons for exactly this horticultural arrangement. He ended with, “Have a nice lunch,” and quickly strutted hen-like into his office, shutting the door behind him.

Having grown up in north central Kansas, Martha recalled the phrase the native Kansans would use to describe Karl’s pelvis-forward strut: “He’s got a cob up his ass.” And she knew he was an ass. She could see that Karl was completely oblivious to the irritation he caused twenty-eight other people in the brokerage office with the continual noise of his rapid-fire foot-shuffle up and down the halls. His inability to understand humor endeared him even less. Because she worked for several brokers, Martha could see how Karl attempted to blind her to his faults with weekly flower arrangements, thereby hoping to attain more than his share of her time. She had to admit to herself it worked pretty well. But his scorn for the rest of the crowd was apparent when he used Kleenex to open his office door. And he kept that door shut day and night to fend off the germs. The few invisible diseases that might have leapt in at the opening of his door were quickly gobbled up by the HEPA filter in the large air-purifying unit planted in the middle of his office floor.

His tall, thin stature, pure Aryan features, wire-rimmed glasses, blond hair, extreme self-discipline, and his discrete, right-wing political views reinforced Martha’s belief that he would have thrived under Hitler. Although most stockbrokers are independent and self-reliant by nature, Martha found Karl’s secretiveness exceptional, if not unique. His aloofness grew with his financial success…reaped by cultivating rich, eccentric widows at teas in the Ritz Carlton Boston. He had sworn Martha to secrecy about what he was doing, as if someone would steal his idea. As he shuffled down the hall, Karl would only greet those whom he felt could contribute to his success...actively snubbing the rest.

While on the phone in his flawlessly arranged, diploma-lined office, Karl would sit with only one piece of seemingly unused paper at a time on an uncluttered desk. The fastidiously sharpened pencil arrangements indicated little use. Martha concluded that perhaps he was so brilliant that all his notes were in his head… where no one could steal them.

Yes, she thought he was an ass, but what did she win by talking with anyone about it? Martha discovered long ago that, when she kept silent, others felt they needed to fill the void...and she learned a lot. Maybe it was a farmer thing, but one thing she had learned from her father was “keep to yourself,” and she found that keeping to herself also increased her work capacity. Not only did she not gossip, but neither did she offer any of her private life to her peers in the coffee/copy room. Martha had learned that her silence seemed to put her at a controlling advantage to others. As opposed to all other staff, she even fought to keep her birthday uncelebrated in the office. She knew her general appearance was haute-Wal-Mart and that her frumpy hair-do didn’t match the more fashionable women brokers. But they had money. It was amazing what money could do. With a good hairdresser, she was sure her mousy, thin hair could be reverted to health. Some tastefully applied, luxurious makeup would make her sexy instead of “Kansas wholesome,” as some called her. Or they said, “Hey, Dorothy, where’s Toto?” Jesus, it churned her insides.

How often she had stood in front of the mirror and said to herself, “Come on, you are better than that!” But, in fact, she felt that she had let herself go, gaining her pear shape in the last two years, since she had found and moved in with a boy friend. With her children in their twenties and out of the nest, she was trying to devise a way she could make a life for herself with someone. As a food mart manager, her boy friend hardly earned enough. He was kind to her, but he had a dark side matching her own…which strangely excited her.

“Now look, Martha, it’s just an old man carrying the money down the back stairs. We don’t even have to hurt him. Just scare him enough and then run out the back through the loading ramp.”

Martha said, “And how do you propose to not be recognized by anyone who just happens to be behind the building? They’re not going to take note of some crazy running out the back door carrying a sack…a heavy one, at that?”

Even though she never took him seriously, she helped him keep perfecting his plan for a robbery. When they were at home together planning and plotting, they not only smoked up the room, but also many nights drank themselves into a stupor. In the no-smoking office, she felt anyone and everyone who was near her must smell her habits, but no one could say anything as long as she continued to be the most efficient.

Being most efficient wasn’t so tough. Martha knew that the young girls who normally took these jobs could have earned more at Burger King, but they wanted the status. Status lost its glamour soon enough, which caused a turnover in staff so fast that Martha was the most senior assistant within five years. In fact, Martha was the guru of the staff. Being the only assistant in the office bright enough to get a broker’s license made her even more valuable, and required her to be the only sales assistant at the weekly broker sales meetings. The only thing that kept Martha above water financially was that her brokers increased their bonus payments to her each year. But she never felt too secure about the bonuses. As she put it to her boy friend, “My dad would have said, if any of the brokers farts instead of paying me, I’m left with the stink.”

Because she was also Bob’s shared assistant and smoking confidant, Martha had learned more about Bob than she cared to know. Bob was somewhat newer to the office than Karl. Bob, in all his fifty-two years, had never met anyone he disliked so much instantaneously as Karl. Their personalities were at polar ends of life. In Vietnam, Bob had been a helicopter pilot. He continued piloting part time in the National Guard, until he became the “old man,” discovering that there was no further excitement as the new, no-war-experience pilots disappointed him with their lack of knowledge.

“Hell,” he had said, “I found I was putting the bird right over the tree tops just to scare the crew. Then I woke up one morning in a sweat and said ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” He retired. But he admitted to Martha that he missed his flying “big time.”

Martha presumed that Bob’s “yachty” hair, youthfulness, and excruciating good looks attracted the twenty-year younger female crewman, who developed into his roommate, and more recently into his fiancée. Further, Martha figured that the nubile’s inheritance and otherwise-undemanding life made Bob her window to something she couldn’t experience. He was probably her trophy-catch whom she loved to swaddle in campy nautical clothes. Martha could see that Bob’s age and poor finances allowed him to tolerate his young thing’s aggressive and daily criticism, as much as he complained about it to Martha. For the time being, his cynicism and quick tongue were reserved for others.

“Hey, Martha, you got a minute?” Bob’s voice ground at her headache through her intercom. With Martha’s watch showing twelve-noon, Martha knew this had to be a panic meeting about the approaching seminar. Bob, along with his friend Pudgy John, never missed a lunch. And sure enough, just as she sat down in Bob’s office, Pudgy John, sucking on his ever-present lollipop, stuck in his head and, with no hesitation, interrupted.

“Tell me, Bob. Do you have a million-dollar prospect coming in for lunch so that I don’t have to invite you to the deli.”

Bob didn’t look away from his computer screen flashing colored rows of stock quotes. “Yes, I do. They asked me to go to the Eastern Yacht Club with them, but since you asked, I will cancel that appointment just to be with you.”

Pudgy John pulled the lollipop out of his mouth and said, “Hurry up. I’m hungry.”

"How can you possibly be hungry when you suck on those things all day?” Bob slammed his pen down in mock disgust and rose to leave. “Come on, Martha, I’ll buy you lunch. I’m sure I owe you a ton for cigarettes. Can you tolerate the suspense of delaying our office tryst ‘til after our faces are fed?”

Martha lowered her eyes and nodded. A free lunch could make any headache go away as far as she was concerned. And it was about time. As they left the reception, she caught Pudgy John wrinkling his nose upon seeing Karl, who was standing erect and looking down at Martha’s desk. As the three took the elevator down two floors to the exit, Pudgy John ruminated, “Hey, did you notice Karl didn’t come to the last sales meeting?”

“Maybe he was out,” Bob responded. “Was he out, Martha?”

Before she could answer, Pudgy John said, “You slept as usual. He walked right by the room several times. Didn’t you see the look on our magnificent manager’s face? Karl isn’t in the big leagues with the others who don’t have to attend…yet. The asshole’s supposed to be there sitting obediently at the table with the rest of us peons.”

They had moved outdoors onto the sidewalk of the office park’s suburban roadway. As the Fall breezes shifted with the ocean and land temperature differences and rustled in the tree branches that lined the parkway, Bob, the consummate sailor, commented, “Man, oh, man. It’s September, the best racing month of the year, and I have to think about an asshole.”

Pudgy John went on. “I think it was your remark at the last meeting that did it.”

“Hey, I can’t suffer kiss asses,” Bob said. “To begin with, our for-lack-of-a-better-word-manager had asked for constructive criticism, and then Speed-Shuffle-Karl just raves about what a great manager Stubby-Brain is. You know damn well everybody else thought the same thing I did. I’m the only one who’s got the guts to put the asshole in place.”

“Okay, he’s a dork,” said Pudgy John. “I’m just saying Karl’s pissed and doesn’t like our company. And he’s willing to stand up to Stubby-Brain’s wrath.”

“Do you think I give a shit?” Bob asked. “He doesn’t like being with us mortals anyway.” Bob went back to studying the air currents. Martha, not feeling part of the conversation, took her lunch to go.

Back in the office, the lunch exodus left Martha and Karl alone. The office was standard brokerage plush with small private offices for the brokers surrounding central pools of secretarial desks. The dark wood and deep pile, money-green carpet were to convey wealth while, at the same time, dampening sound and allowing for privacy. Clients needed the feel of confidentiality.

She spread out her lunch on her desk with great anticipation. Having to always brown-bag it otherwise, she felt a rare deli lunch needed to be consumed slowly. She would even savor the pickle. Then Martha cringed at the sound of Karl’s office door. Without greeting, Karl stepped up to her desk and said in a whisper tone, “I’ve got something for your eyes only.” Then he started giving Martha an off-hand lecture on the effects of the Euro on the dollar. Martha tried to look interested. She wished she had stayed at the deli.

She was being handed a confidence. That wouldn’t require much effort. She had been keeping secrets a long time. Daytime TV scandal shows would have paid good money for Martha’s story. Her mother had died at Martha’s birth. It may have made her grow up faster, but in growing up, she had no role model for how to be with a man. She was a sophomore at Kansas State when she dropped out because her father’s farm failed and he committed suicide gruesomely in the baler to make it look like an accident. She married an older man who made her feel safe with his money, and the two moved East for his job. But, after six years, the job failed along with the marriage and she was left to raise two young boys. When she felt the boys were old enough and because she loved English literature and history, she enrolled in night classes. But she had to drop out and pay a lawyer when her boys were caught shoplifting. She never went back.

Besides, she had met somebody who grabbed her heart and then tore it out. Out of embarrassment and for fear of breaking into tears, she told no one about her second husband smooth-talking her insecure heart, scamming her into signing over everything she owned, and then forcing her to move into a neighbor’s house with her two boys…all within a year. Before she could take him to court, the ex died suddenly of heart failure. She was left with nothing except a scar on her soul and a dark, vengeful determination to make up for her mistake.

As he glanced around, Karl continued, “And with the Euro losing its current value against the dollar, bond prices are bound to rise caused by the demand from Germany and France for safety.” He took a pause, seemingly recognizing that Martha’s eyes had glazed over. He must have noticed the cigarette smell of her clothes because he tried not to breathe. In a low voice, more nasal than usual, he said, “I just want you to understand the workings of the market. You are going to find it important and I think you will understand why, once you have read my note here.” He handed Martha an envelope. “As you know, it is annual bonus time. Rather than give you the normal annual monetary compensation, I’ve written some out-of-the-ordinary, meritorious information about the possible future. I’ve noticed that you are the only trustworthy person around here. Just keep it undisclosed. I don’t know when, if ever, it may come to fruition. Things may just stay status quo. I don’t know. I’m sure you will appreciate what I am doing for you. For now, it is imperative that you tell no one, okay?”

Feeling apprehensive and hugely puzzled, Martha said, “Sure.”

“I trust you,” he said and strode off in his normal hurry, exhaling and inhaling deeply once he was a few feet away from her in his office.

She sat staring at the envelope while she reveled in her lunch. She measured whether she could wait until she got home to open and read it. It amazed her that keeping to herself supposedly made her “trustworthy.”

At the next Monday AM sales meeting, the manager felt something had to be said. “I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but Karl is furious.” Looking right past the other eight in the room at Pudgy John and Bob, the manager said, “Please, guys, leave Karl alone.”

Martha watched as the others in the room looked from one to the other in puzzlement. The air in the room was always stuffy from poor ventilation, but it became stiflingly apparent as the brokers waited in silence.

The manager continued his opening statement. “You know Karl is a little strange about clean. Well, one of you…somebody, put gooey, sticky stuff on his office door-handle.”

A chuckle went around the room. Bob said with a big grin, “You mean his Kleenex got all stuck?” More chuckles.

Martha noticed that the manager couldn’t help but smile as he said, “Okay, enough.” But controlling the room, he said, “Let’s get on with business.” The subject was changed with the obligatory operational and legal announcements, boring everyone in the room. As Martha doodled on her pad, she drew a bunch of smiley-faces and a knife sticking in Karl’s back.

A week later, it seemed like an indoor tornado blew past Martha through the hall as Karl made a beeline for the manager’s office while emoting, “Enough’s enough! Damnit! Somebody’s going to pay!”

It didn’t take long before Bob got a call on the intercom, interrupting his seminar preparation with Martha, requesting his presence in the manager’s office. After slowly and deliberately pressing the computer print button to get a copy of the text he wanted Martha to duplicate, Bob frowned and said, “Follow me in. You need to witness this.” He strolled down three doors to the manager’s office with Martha five feet behind.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?” the manager asked.

Martha watched Bob ignore the question, shift his weight from his left foot to his right, and stand silently with his hands in his pockets. Martha, a little nervous, leaned on the doorframe for support.

Ignoring Martha, the manager said, “Listen, Bob, I don’t know who did it, but you might.” He paused.

“What’s that?” Bob asked.

“Well, you see, Karl came tearing in here a few minutes ago and said somebody has been in his office and messed things up.”

Bob smiled and asked incredulously, “You’re serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Again, his door handle was sticky, but somebody also opened one of his desk drawers and jumbled up his stuff.”

“Oh, dear,” Bob said with great sarcasm.

The manager glared at Bob and said, “Listen, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but the guy’s a neat freak and you know it. I think we should just leave him alone.”

“We?” said Bob, raising both eyebrows. “Is that French?”

The manager looked Bob in the eye and said, “I think you might know who. I don’t know. But, if you do, tell ‘em to stop. It’s causing unnecessary disruption in the office.” He paused and, looking at Martha, said, “See if you can get Karl to cool it. Now get out of here, both of you. Get to work.”

Bob didn’t seem sure what to say, so he shook his head, turned, and brushed past Martha, scratching the back of his head without messing up his hair. Martha felt like a naughty little sister tagging along.

In the week that followed, Bob could never get Martha to join him in a smoke. She had to keep herself busy. So she would just hand him a cigarette from her purse and make an excuse. Once Bob told her that, since nobody else in the office smoked, “maybe I should get a patch on my ass and feel like an inner tube.”

When Karl produced his weekly flower arrangement in the middle of Monday morning, he did his attempted smile and said, “How are you, Martha? How was your weekend?”
Martha actually shuddered at the fraudulent grind of his words. “Oh, fine.”

“Martha, you sit right in front of my office. Do you have any clue as to whom it could be that is entering my office?” Before Martha could answer, he continued. “No, of course nobody would mess with my office while your were watching, but you just can’t believe how this messes me up. It doesn’t make me want to stay here and contribute to the office. It is so low class. I just can’t work under these circumstances. You wouldn’t think there were such people in this office. Do you have any suspicions?”

She gave him a short glance to read his eyes. They were not accusatory. “No, Karl, there’s no one I could imagine.” As coolly as possible, she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

That same week passed without further incident and without Karl at the next Monday sales meeting. When the manager exclaimed that he was sorry “some people couldn’t take time to show up,” Bob couldn’t help himself and said, “Did you ever notice how much less bullshit flies around the room?” A couple of guffaws followed, but there wasn’t much of a laugh since most of the others in the room, Martha could tell, weren’t sure they should. Martha’s doodling intensified. There was no further comment and the meeting proceeded normally through the hour.

On Friday, the mutual fund seminar hosted by Bob and Putnam Investments was being held at lunchtime. Martha and the switchboard operator had worked all morning setting up extra tables for food and robbing the offices of chairs to increase the seating in the conference room. When the switchboard operator remarked to Martha, “My, oh, my. I’ve never seen you so tense before a seminar,” Martha tried harder to calm herself.

“I’m fine,” she said.

The food was catered in and attractively laid out buffet style. The thirty-some expected attendees had begun to arrive, most of whom were elderly expert seminar-goers looking for that free lunch, which isn’t supposed to exist. Because the conference room was too small, the crowd flowed out into the reception area. The guests spoke in low, muffled tones to each other, while Bob loudly oozed greetings of cheerful enthusiasm around the room. The rest of the brokers and staff, who gained nothing from this seminar, stayed politely away at their desks and in their offices, so as to give room to Bob and to avoid the general distraction.

Martha noticed that Karl came in about 11:30, after most of the crowd had arrived. He had scuttled down the back hall to his office, she supposed, in order to avoid the bad air of crowded human exhalation. Then suddenly above the general din of the crowd, a squeal was heard in the direction of Karl’s office. The squeal was described later by Bob as sounding much like a pig he had seen slaughtered in Vietnam. Then a loud crash of a door slam was heard quite clearly by the hushed crowd. The thud of quick footsteps caught everyone’s attention. As Karl triple-stepped into the crowd, he stopped, his eyes and skin color broadcasting his anger. He said in his most disdainful, quaking voice, “You don’t want to deal with this company. You should go home. It is not a good place to be.” He then shoved his way through the crowd into the manager’s office.

With all eyes in the direction of Karl’s exit, twenty-six people, with plastic drink cups and half-eaten tuna sandwiches, stood in silence. Bob, making a recovery, said loudly, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry about the interruption. You would never guess the strange people that wander into this office. I’m not sure who that was, but I’m sure we will find out and we can tell you later. In the meantime, we can get started if you care to move in here.” He made animated gestures herding them into the conference room.

Karl’s loud voice in the manager’s office and the traffic of the curious office personnel streaming down the hall past the conference room distracted the audience. Someone had placed human excrement on top of Karl’s HEPA filter, and some would guess, by the “used” paper from Karl’s desk strewn on the floor, that someone had done “it” right there. Once Karl had opened the door, the odor had been horrendous. If fact, everyone evacuated that end of the office and, with the approval of the manager, went home for the afternoon. Martha felt tension in every muscle and was glad to get out of there.

The meeting called on the following Monday morning was fully attended by all nineteen brokers. Even the other four brokers’ assistants and four staff members were invited to this meeting. A clarification was expected. Martha acted calm and scribbled on her pad as she took it all in. The casual sports banter, which usually preceded the meeting agenda, was missing. Instead, each person sat in thought as a shelter from the tension of the awaited tidings. Because of the rising temperature and stale air in the room, Bob couldn’t keep quiet and said, “It smells like jet exhaust in here.” But no one responded.

Martha watched everyone focus on the manager’s facial expression as he entered the room. He looked around the room, glared at Bob, and only paused for a moment. “Karl has left us,” the manager announced. “He has become the junior analyst for the Fidelity European fund group. I don’t know how he managed to fix this job so fast; he must have had it in his back pocket from before. I don’t know which of you was doing this to Karl, but now it is academic. He’s gone, and perhaps he got his revenge. Karl had built quite an impressive book of clients in the short period he was with us, which normally we would have split up among you brokers here.” He paused. “However, at his request, and I could not talk him out of this, he has given all his clients over to Martha, his assistant.”

With raised eyebrows, all eyes turned on Martha. She looked down at the conference table without acknowledging she had heard a word. Can they see my heart pumping? The manager continued, “Since she is licensed and knows all the clients quite well, Karl felt that it would give her a new start in life and be best for his clients. I would ask you all to congratulate Martha and to give her all the assistance you can.” Martha grimaced a look around the room. There were a few congratulatory comments from around the room, but most of the voices did not sound elated. “We’ll have to look at how we need to restructure the office, but I think that is enough news for the day,” said the manager. “Let’s get out there and bring in the business. The distraction is over.”

In stunned, disappointed amazement, the brokers trickled out of the conference room, some gathering in offices to discuss the developments, but none with any answers.
Martha, feeling tense, needed to get out and was just exiting to the back hall when she heard Pudgy John say in Bob’s office, “I can’t believe Martha got all of his clients. That’s not the way things work. And we still don’t know who was doing that to Karl.”

Bob said, “Who gives a shit?”

Pudgy John said, “Somebody did.” He strained a laugh at the play on words, but with nothing left to say, Pudgy John moved on to his office.

Martha quickly descended the stairs to the parking garage. She reached in her pocket and took out Karl’s letter. She re-read the note telling her that, if ever Karl left the business, he would leave his clients to her. As she put the note back in her pocket, she realized that she had forgotten her purse upstairs with both her flask and her cigarettes. She looked west over the trees, shading her eyes with her hands, and for the first time in years, she broke out into a smile.