In Persuasion Nation (21 page)

I follow him back to CommComm. Which still stinks. I follow him into
the copier closet, which stinks even worse.

In the closet is something big, in bubble wrap.

"Note to self," he says. "Bubble wrap? Not
smell-preventing."

He slits open the bubble wrap. Inside is this giant dirt clod.
Sticking out of the clod is a shoe. In the shoe is a foot, a rotted
foot, in a rotted sock.

"I don't get it," I say.

"Found down in the Dirksen excavation," he says. "Thought
I could stash them in here a few days, but phew. Can you believe it?"

He slits open a second bubble-wrap package. There's another guy, not
enclodded, cringed up, in shredded pants, looking like he's been
dipped in mustard. This one's small, like a jockey.

"They look old-timey to me," Rimney says.

They do look old-timey. Their shoes are big crude shoes with big
crude nails.

"So you see our issue," he says. "Dirksen-wise."

I don't. But then I do.

The Racquetball Facility was scrapped due to someone found an Oneida
nosering portion on the site. Likewise the proposed Motor Pool
Improvement, on account of a shard of Colonial crockery.

If a pottery shard or partial nose ring can scrap a project, think
what a couple of Potentially Historical corpses/mummies will do.

"Who else knows?" I say.

"The contractor," Rimney says. "Rick Granis. You know
Rick?"

I've known Rick since kindergarten. I remember how mad he'd get if
anyone called his blanket anything but his binkie. Now he's got an
Escalade and a summer house on Otissic Lake.

"But Rick's cool with it," he says. "He'll do
whatever."

He shows me Rick's Daily Historical-Resource Assessment Worksheet.
Under "Non-Historical Detritus," Rick's written, "Two
contemp soda bottles, one contemp flange." Under "Evidence
of Pre-Existing Historical/Cultural Presence," he's written,
"Not that I know of."

Rimney says that a guy like me, master of the public-presentation
aspect, could be a great fit at the Dirksen. As I may know, he knows
somebody who knows somebody. Do I find the idea of Terror work at all
compelling?

I say sure, yes, of course.

He says, thing is, they're just bodies. The earth is full of bodies.
Under every building in the world, if you dig deep enough, is
probably a body. From the looks of it, someone just dumped these poor
guys into a mass grave. They're not dressed up, no coffins, no dusty
flower remains, no prayer cards.

I say I'm not sure I totally follow.

He says he's thinking a respectful reburial, somewhere they won't be
found, that won't fuck up the Dirksen.

"And tell the truth," he says, "I could use some
help."

I think of Tape 4,
Living the Now
. What is the Now Situation?
How can I pull the pearl from the burning oyster? How can the
"drowning boy" be saved? I do an Actual Harm Analysis. Who
would a reburial hurt? The mummy guys? They're past hurt. Who would
it help? Rimney, Val Rimney, all future Dirksen employees.

Me.

Mom, Dad.

Dad worked thirty years at Gallup Chain, with his dad. Then they
discontinued Automotive. Only Bike remained. A week after his layoff,
Grandpa died. Day of the wake, Dad got laid off too. Month later, we
found out Jean was sick. Jean was my sister, who died at eight. Her
last wish was Disneyland. But money was tight. Toward the end, Dad
borrowed money from Leo, the brother he hated. But Jean was too sick
to travel. So Dad had an Army friend from Barstow film all of Disney
on a Super-8. The guy walked the whole place. Jean watched it and
watched it. Dad was one of these auto-optimists. To hear him tell it,
we'd won an incredible last-minute victory. Hadn't we? Wasn't it
something, that we could give Jeanie such a wonderful opportunity?

But Jean had been distilled down to like pure honesty.

"I do wish I could have gone, though," she said.

"Well, we practically did," Dad said, looking panicked.

"No, but I wish we really did," she said.

After Jean died, we kept her room intact, did a birthday thing for
her every year, started constantly expecting the worst. I'd come home
from a high-school party and Mom would be sitting there with her
rosary, mumbling, praying for my safe return. Even a dropped shopping
bag, a broken jar of Prego, would send them into a funk, like: Doom,
doom, of course, isn't this the way it always goes for us?

Eight years later came the night of the Latvians.

So a little decent luck for Mom and Dad doesn't seem like too much to
ask.

"About this job thing," I say.

"I will absolutely make it happen," he says.

The way we do it is we carry them one at a time out to his special
van. He's got a lift in there for Val. Not that we need the lift.
These guys are super-light. Then we drive out to the forest behind
Missions. We dig a hole, which is not easy, due to roots. I go in, he
hands them down very gentle. They're so stiff and dry it's hard to
believe they can still smell.

We backfill, kick some leaves around, drag over a small fallen tree.

"You O.K.?" he says. "You look a little freaked."

I ask should we maybe say a prayer.

"Go ahead," he says. "My feeling is, these guys have
been gone so long they're either with Him or not. If there even is a
Him. Might be real, might not. To me? What's real? Val. When I get
home tonight, there she'll be, waiting. Hasn't eaten yet, needs her
bath. Been by herself the whole day. That, to me? Is real."

I say a prayer, lift my head when done.

"I thank you, Val thanks you," he says.

In the van, I do a Bad Feelings Acknowledgment re the reburial. I
visualize my Useless Guilt as a pack of black dogs. I open the gate,
throw out the Acknowledgment Meat. Pursuing the Meat, the black dogs
disappear over a cliff, turning into crows (i.e., Neutral/Non-Guilty
Energy), which then fly away, feeling Assuaged.

Back
at CommComm, we wash off the shovels, Pine-Sol the copier closet,
throw open the windows, check e-mail while the place airs out.

Next
morning, the stink is gone. The office just smells massively like
Pine-Sol. Giff comes in around eleven, big bandage on his humongous
underchin.

"Hey, smells super in here today," he says. "Praise
the Lord for that, right? And all things."

"What happened to your chin?" says Rimney. "Zonk it on
a pew while speaking in tongues?"

"We don't speak in tongues," says Giff. "I was just
shaving."

"Interesting," Rimney says. "Goodbye."

"Not goodbye," says Giff. "I have to do my Situational
Follow-Up. What in your view is the reason for the discontinued
nature of that crappo smell you all previously had?"

"A miracle," says Rimney. "Christ came down with some
Pine-Sol."

"I don't really go for that kind of talk," says Giff.

"Why not pray I stop?" says Rimney. "See if it works."

"Let me tell you a like parable," Giff says. "This one
girl in our church? Had this like perma-smile? Due to something? And
her husband, who was non-church, was always having to explain that
she wasn't really super-happy, it was just her malady. It was like
the happier she looked, the madder he got. Then he came to our
church, guess what happened?"

"She was miraculously cured and he was miraculously suddenly not
angry," says Rimney. "God reached down and fixed them both,
while all over the world people who didn't come to your church
remained in misery, weeping."

"Well, no," says Giff.

"And that's not technically a parable," says Verblin.

"See, but you're what happens when man stays merely on his own
plane," says Giff. "Man is made bitter. Look, I'm not
claiming I'm not human and don't struggle. Heck, I'm as human as you.
Only I struggle, when I struggle, with the help of Him that knows no
struggle. Which is why sometimes I maybe seem so composed or, you
might say, together. Everyone in our church has that same calm. It's
not just me. It's just Him, is how we say it."

"How calm would you stay if I broke your neck?" says
Rimney.

"Ron, honestly," Jonkins says.

"Quiet, Tim," Rimney says to Jonkins. "If we listen
closely, we may hear the call of the North American extremist loony."

"Maybe you're the extremist due to you think you somehow created
your own self," says Giff.

"Enough, this is a place of business," says Rimney.

Then Milton Gelton comes in. Gelton's a GS-5 in Manual Site
Aesthetics Improvement. He roams the base picking up trash with a
sharp stick. When he finds a dead animal, he calls Animals. When he
finds a car battery, he calls Environmental.

"Want to see something freaky?" he says, holding out his
bucket. "Found behind Missions?"

In the bucket is a yellow-black human hand.

"Is that a real actual hand of someone?" says Amber.

"At first I thought glove," Gelton says. "But no. See?
No hand-hole. Just solid."

He pokes the hand with a pen to demonstrate the absence of a
hand-hole.

"You know what else I'm noting as weird?" Giff says. "In
terms of that former smell? I can all of a sudden smell it again."

He sniffs his way down to the bucket.

"Yoinks, similar," he says.

"I doubt this is a Safety issue," says Rimney.

"I disagree," says Giff. "This hand seems like it
might be the key to our Possible Source of your Negative Odor.
Milton, can you show me the exact locale where you found this at?"

Out they go. Rimney calls me in. How the hell did we drop that
fucker? Jesus, what else did we drop? This is not funny, he says, do
I realize we could go to jail for this? We knowingly altered a
Probable Historical Site. At the very least, we'll catch hell in the
press. As for the Dirksen, this gets out, goodbye Dirksen.

I eat lunch in the Eating Area. Little Bill's telling about his trip
to Omaha. He stayed at a MinTel. The rooms are closet-size. They like
slide you in. You're allowed two Slide-Outs a night. After that it's
three dollars a Slide-Out.

Rimney comes out, says he's got to run home. Val's having leg cramps.
When she has leg cramps, the only thing that works is hot washrags.
He's got a special pasta pot and two sets of washrags, one blue, one
white. One set goes on her legs, while the other set heats.

With Rimney gone, discipline erodes. Out the window I see Verblin
sort of mincing to his car. A yardstick slides out of his pants. When
he stoops to get the yardstick, a print cartridge drops out of his
coat. When he bends to pick up the cartridge, his hat falls off,
revealing a box of staples.

At three, Ms. Durrell from Environmental calls. Do we have any more
of those dioxin coloring books? Do I know what she means? It's not a
new spill, just reawakened concern over an old spill. I know what she
means. She means
Donnie Dioxin: Badly Misunderstood But Actually
Quite Useful Under Correct Usage Conditions.

I'm in Storage looking for the books when my cell rings.

"Glad I caught you," Rimney says stiffly. "Can you
come out to Missions? I swung by on the way back and, boy, oh boy,
did Elliot ever find something amazing."

"Is he standing right there?" I say.

"O.K.,
see you soon," he says, and hangs up.

I
park by the Sputnik-era jet-on-a-pedestal. The fake pilot's head is
facing backward and a twig's been driven up his nose. Across the
fuselage some kid's painted, "This thing looks like my pennis if
my pennis has wings."

It starts to flurry. Giff's been at the grave with a shovel. So far,
it's just the top of the jockey's head sticking out, and part of the
enclodded guy's foot.

"Wow," I say.

"Wow is correct," Rimney says.

"Thanks be to Scouts," Giff says. "See? Footprints
galore. Plus tire tracks. To me? It's like a mystery or one of those
deals where there's more than meeting the eyes. Because where did
these fellows come from? Who put them here? Why did your office smell
so bad, in an off way similar to that gross way that hand smelled? In
my logic? I ask, Where locally is somewhere deep that's recently been
unearthed or dug into? What I realized? The Dirksen. That is deep,
that is new. What do you think? I'll get with Historical tomorrow,
see what used to be where the Dirksen is at now."

I helped Rimney get Val home from the hospital after the stroke,
watched the two of them burst into tears at the sight of her
mechanical bed.

He looks worse than that now.

"Fuck it. I'm going to tell him, trust him. What do you think?"
he says.

My feeling is no, no, no. Giff's not exactly the King of Sense of
Humor. Last year, I was the only non-church person at his Christmas
party. The big issue was, somebody on Giff's wife's side had sent
their baby a stuffed DevilChild from Hell from the cartoon
"HellHood." The DevilChild starts each episode as a kindly
angel with a lisp. Then something makes him mad and he morphs into a
demon and starts speaking with an Eastern European accent while
running around stabbing uptight people in the butt with a red-hot
prod.

"As for me and my house, this little guy has no place here,"
Giff had said. "Although Cyndi apparently feels otherwise."

Cyndi I would describe as pretty but flinchy.

"Andy doesn't see it as the Devil," she said. "He just
likes it."

"Well, I do see it as the Devil," Giff said. "And I
don't like it. And here in this house a certain book tells us the
role of the father/husband. Am I right?"

"I guess so," she said.

"You guessing so, like Pastor Mike says, is sympromatic of your
having an imperfect understanding of what the Lord has in mind for
our family, though," he said. "Right? Right, Pastor Mike?"

"Well, it's certainly true that a family can only have one
head," said a guy in a Snoopy sweater who I guessed was Pastor
Mike.