In Persuasion Nation (20 page)

Then
we were quiet again.

"That
lady?" she finally said. "She like to lie. Maybe you don't
know. She say she is come from where I come from?"

"Yes,"
I said.

"She
is lie," she said. "She act so sweet and everything but she
lie. She been born in Skokie. Live here all her life, in America. Why
you think she talk so good?"

All
week, Poltoi made sausage, noodles, potato pancakes; we ate like
pigs. She had tea and cakes ready when I came home from school. At
night, if necessary, she dried me off, moved me to her bed, changed
the sheets, put me back, with never an unkind word.

"Will
pass, will pass," she'd hum.

Mom
and Dad came home tanned, with a sailor cap for me, and, in a burst
of post-vacation honesty, confirmed it: Mrs. H. was a liar. A liar
and a kook. Nothing she said was true. She'd been a cashier at
Goldblatt's but had been caught stealing. When caught stealing, she'd
claimed to be with the Main Office. When a guy from the Main Office
came down, she'd claimed to be with the F.B.I. Then she'd produced a
letter from Lady Bird Johnson, but in her own handwriting, with
"Johnson" spelled "Jonsen."

I
told the other kids what I knew, and in time they came to believe it,
even the Kletzes.

And,
once we believed it, we couldn't imagine we hadn't seen it all along.

Another spring came,
once again birds nested in bushes on the sides of the quarry. A
thrown rock excited a thrilling upward explosion. Thin rivers
originated in our swampy back yards, and we sailed boats made of
flattened shoeboxes, Twinkie wrappers, crimped tinfoil. Raccoon glued
together three balsa-wood planes and placed on this boat a turd from
her dog, Svengooli, and, as Svengooli's turd went over a little
waterfall and disappeared into the quarry, we cheered.

Tuesday
morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named
Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don't kill
beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our
Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of
our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing
beavers.

"That makes sense," Jillian says, and hangs up.

The press has a field day. "air force kills beavers to save
beavers," says one headline. "murdered beavers speak of air
force cruelty," says another.

"We may want to pids this," Mr. Rimney says.

I check the files: There's a circa-1984 tortoise-related pids from a
base in Oklahoma. There's a wild-horse-related pids from North
Dakota. Also useful is a Clinton-era pids concerning the inadvertent
destruction of a dove breeding ground.

From these I glean an approach: I
admit
we harvested the
beavers. I
concede
the innocence and creativity of beavers. I
explain
the harvesting as a regrettable part of an ongoing
effort to prevent Pollution Events from impacting the Ottowattamie.
Finally I
pledge
we'll find a way to preserve our PIDs
without, in the future, harming beavers. We are, I say, considering
transplanting the beaver population to an innovative Beaver Habitat,
to be installed upstream of the Retention Area.

I put it into PowerPoint. Rimney comes back from break and reads it.

"All hail to the king of pids," he says.

I call Ed at the paper; Jason, Heather, and Randall at NewsTen,
ActionSeven, and NewsTeamTwo, respectively; then Larry from
Facilities. I have him reserve the Farragut Auditorium for Wednesday
night, and just like that I've got a fully executable pids and can go
joyfully home to my wife and our crazy energized loving kids.

Just kidding.

I
wish.

I
walk between Mom and Dad into the kitchen, make those frozen
mini-steaks called SmallCows. You microwave them or pull out their
ThermoTab. When you pull the ThermoTab, something chemical happens
and the SmallCows heat up. I microwave. Unfortunately, the ThermoTab
erupts and when I take the SmallCows out they're coated with a green,
fibrous liquid. So I make Ramen.

"You don't hate the Latvians, do you?" Dad says to me.

"It was not all Latvians done it," Mom says.

I turn on Tape 9,
Omission/Partial Omission
. When
sadness-inducing events occur, the guy says, invoke your Designated
Substitute Thoughtstream. Your DST might be a man falling off a cliff
but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of
steaming soup, if one likes soup. It might be something as
distractive/mechanical as walking along a row of cans, kicking them
down.

"And don't even hate them two," Mom says. "They was
just babies."

"They did not do that because they was Latvian," says Dad.
"They did it because of they had poverty and anger."

"What the hell," says Mom. "Everything turned out
good."

My DST is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall
cracks, there's another underneath. When that wall cracks, there's
another underneath.

"You hungry?" Mom says to Dad.

"Never hungry anymore," he says.

"Me too," she says. "Plus I never pee."

"Something's off but I don't know what," Dad says.

When that wall cracks, there's another underneath.

"Almost time," Mom says to me, her voice suddenly nervous.
"Go upstairs."

I go to my room, watch some World Series, practice my pids in front
of the mirror.

What's going on down there I don't watch anymore: Mom's on the
landing in her pajamas, calling Dad's name, a little testy. Then she
takes a bullet in the neck, her hands fly up, she rolls the rest of
the way down, my poor round Ma. Dad comes up from the basement in his
gimpy comic trot, concerned, takes a bullet in the chest, drops to
his knees, takes one in the head, and that's that.

Then they do it again, over and over, all night long.

Finally it's morning. I go down, have a bagel.

Our house has this turret you can't get into from inside. You have to
go outside and use a ladder. There's nothing up there but bird
droppings and a Nixon-era plastic Santa with a peace sign scratched
into his toy bag. That's where they go during the day. I climbed up
there once, then never again: jaws hanging open, blank stares, the
two of them sitting against the wall, insulation in their hair,
holding hands.

"Have
a good one," I shout at the turret as I leave for work.

Which
I know is dumb, but still.

When
I get to work, Elliot Giff from Safety's standing in the Outer Hall.
Giff's a GS-9 with pink glasses and an immense underchin that makes
up a good third of the length of his face.

"Got this smell-related call?" he says.

We step in. There's definitely a smell. Like a
mildew/dirt/decomposition thing.

"We have a ventilation problem," Rimney says stiffly.

"No lie," Giff says. "Smells like something crawled
inside the wall and died. That happened to my aunt."

"Your aunt crawled inside a wall and died," Rimney says.

"No, a rat," says Giff. "Finally she had to hire a
Puerto Rican fellow to drill a hole in her wall. Maybe you should do
that."

"Hire a Puerto Rican fellow to drill a hole in your aunt's
wall," Rimney says.

"I like how you're funny," Giff says. "There's joy in
that."

Giff's in the ChristLife Reënactors. During the reënactments,
they eat only dates and drink only grape juice out of
period-authentic flasks. He says that this weekend's reënactment
was on the hill determined to be the most topographically similar to
Calvary in the entire Northeast. I ask who he did. He says the guy
who lent Christ his mule on Palm Sunday. Rimney says it's just like
Giff to let an unemployed Jew borrow his ass.

"You're certainly not hurting me with that kind of talk,"
Giff says.

"I suppose I'm hurting Christ," says Rimney.

"Not hardly," says Giff.

On Rimney's desk is a photo of Mrs. Rimney before the stroke: braless
in a tank top, hair to her waist, holding a walking stick. In the
photo, Rimney's wearing a bandanna, pretending to toke something.
Since the stroke, he works his nine or ten, gets groceries, goes
home, cooks, bathes Val, does the dishes, goes to bed.

My feeling is, no wonder he's mean.

Giff starts to leave, then doubles back.

"You and your wife are in the prayers of me and our church,"
he says to Rimney. "Despite of what you may think of me."

"You're in my prayers, too," says Rimney. "I'm always
praying you stop being so sanctimonious and miraculously get less
full of shit."

Giff leaves, not doubling back this time.

Rimney hasn't liked Giff since the day he suggested that Rimney could
cure Mrs. Rimney if only he'd elevate his prayerfulness.

"All right," Rimney says. "Who called him?"

Mrs. Gregg bursts into tears and runs to the Ladies'.

"I don't get why all the drama," says Rimney.

"Hello, the base is closing in six months," says Jonkins.

"Older individuals like Mrs. G. are less amenable to quick
abrupt changes," says Verblin.

When Closure was announced, I found Mrs. G. crying in the Outer Hall.
What about Little Bill? she said. Little Bill had just bought a
house. What about Amber, pregnant with twins, and her husband, Goose,
drunk every night at the Twit? What about Nancy and Vendra? What
about Jonkins and Al? There's not a job to be had in town, she said.
Where are all these sweet people supposed to go?

I've sent out more than thirty résumés, been store to
store, chatted up Dad's old friends. Even our grocery's half-closed.
What used to be Produce is walled off with plywood. On the plywood is
a sign: "If We Don't Have It, Sorry."

CommComm's been offered a group transfer to naivac Omaha. But Mom and
Dad aren't allowed into the yard, much less to Omaha. And when I'm
not around they get agitated. I went to Albany last March for a
seminar and they basically trashed the place. Which couldn't have
been easy. To even disturb a drape for them is a big deal. I walked
in and Mom was trying to tip over the coffee table by flying through
it on her knees and Dad was inside the couch, trying to weaken the
springs via repetitive fast spinning. They didn't mean to but were
compelled. Even as they were flying/spinning they were apologizing
profusely.

"Plus it really does stink in here," Little Bill says.

"Who all is getting a headache raise your hand," says
Jonkins.

"Oh, all right," Rimney says, then goes into my cubicle and
calls Odors. He asks why they can't get over immediately. How many
odors do they have exactly? Has the entire base suddenly gone smelly?

I walk in and he's not talking into the phone, just tapping it
against his leg.

He winks at me and asks loudly how Odors would like to try
coordinating Community Communications while developing a splitting
headache in a room that smells like ass.

All afternoon it stinks. At five, Rimney says let's hope for the best
overnight and wear scuba gear in tomorrow, except for Jonkins, who,
as far as Jonkins, they probably don't make scuba gear that
humongous.

"I cannot believe you just said that," says Jonkins.

"Learn to take a joke," Rimney says, and slams into his
office.

I walk out with Jonkins and Mrs. Gregg. The big flag over the Dirksen
excavation is snapping in the wind, bright-yellow leaves zipping past
as if weighted.

"I hate him," says Jonkins.

"I feel so bad for his wife," says Mrs. Gregg.

"First you have to live with him, then you have a stroke?"
says Jonkins.

"And then you still have to live with him?" says Mrs.
Gregg.

The Dirksen Center for Terror is the town's great hope. If
transferred to the Dirksen, you keep your benefits and years accrued
and your salary goes up, because you're Homeland Security instead of
Air Force. We've all submitted our Requests-for-Transfer and our
Self-Assessment Worksheets and now we're just waiting to hear.

Except Rimney. Rimney heard right away. Rimney knows somebody who
knows somebody. He was immediately certified Highly Proficient and is
Dirksen-bound, which, possibly, is another reason everybody hates
him.

My feeling is, good for him. If he went to Omaha, imagine the work.
He and Val have a routine here, contacts, a special van, a custom
mechanical bed. Imagine having to pick up and start over somewhere
else.

"Home, home, home," says Mrs. Gregg.

"pids, pids, pids," I say.

"Oh, you poor thing," says Mrs. Gregg.

"If I had to stand up in front of all those people," says
Jonkins, "I'd put a bullet in my head."

Then there's a long silence.

"Shit,
man, sorry," he says to me.

The
Farragut's full.
I
admit
,
concede
,
explain
,
and
pledge
. During the Q&A, somebody says if the base is
closing, why spend big bucks on a Beaver Habitat? I say because the
Air Force is committed to insuring that, post-Closure, all Air Force
sites remain environmentally viable, prioritizing both species health
and a diverse life-form mix.

Afterward Rimney's back by the snacks. He says is there anything I
can't pids? I say probably not. I've pidsed sexual-harassment cases,
a cracked hazardous-waste incinerator, half a dozen jet-fuel spills.
I pidsed it when General Lemaster admitted being gay, retracted his
admission, then retracted his retraction, all in the same day, before
vanishing for a week with one of his high-school daughter's
girlfriends.

"You might have noticed earlier that I was not actually calling
Odors," Rimney says.

"I did notice that," I say.

"Thing I like about you, you're a guy who understands life gets
complicated," he says. "Got a minute? I need to show you
something."