The Ax (21 page)

Well, there’s nothing for them to find. I did a lot of clean-up last night, even more than Marjorie knows. When we got back from that distant mall, she helped me pull the bookcase out of Billy’s closet—back in there, empty, it was too suggestive—and we lugged it into the garage, where I piled it with some paint cans and old rags, so it looks as though it’s been there for years. Then, while Marjorie was in the bathroom before going back to bed, I got the Luger out from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and put it under the backseat in the Voyager; that is, inside the seat. Under Billy, as we drove home.

And now we wait, in our living room, as the taciturn police go through our house. There’s nothing for them to find. They can even paw through the folder of resumés in my office, if they want. What could it tell them? Nothing.

Sitting here, waiting, I start to think about this downsizing business again, how it affects the families, and how smug and blind I was to assume it would never affect
my
family. First Marjorie, and now Billy; it’s bending our lives out of shape.

Betsy isn’t with us, and now for the first time I have to think about her, too. She seems like such a good kid, so normal, so accepting of the change in our lives, so unaltered by it; but is that so?

We told her this morning, of course, what had happened to Billy, and she wanted to stay with us, come with us to the court, but I didn’t want her along. I didn’t want her to have that kind of memory of Billy in her mind, the rest of her life.

Betsy attends a community college about forty miles from here. She should drive there, but we can’t afford a second car, so another student, a girl she’s known since elementary school, gives her a lift every day. She’d been scheduled to go with that girl to a Drama Society meeting this afternoon. She wanted to beg off, but Marjorie and I insisted she go, and I’m glad we did. She shouldn’t be here to see the police pawing through her possessions, looking for stolen goods.

All at once I remember Edward Ricks, my resumé from Massachusetts. I remember how his daughter, Junie, had taken up with a much older man, a professor at her college, and how that had caused the confusion that led to me having to kill her mother as well. I felt so superior to those people at the time, with
their
daughter in such contrast to
my
daughter. I’d simply taken Junie to be an ordinary tramp, sly and vixenish.

But now I wonder. Was Junie a victim, too? If Daddy hadn’t lost his job, would Junie have taken up with that other fellow, that unacceptable father substitute? What was his name… Ringer.

Was Ringer a victim, too, of downsizing?

How it spreads. And now the police, without a word, depart. May they rot in hell.

It’s after dinner, Sunday evening, the very first of June. Billy is definitely at home, in the living room, watching television with Marjorie and Betsy, while I am here in my office. It’s time to get back to the operation, lose no more days. But I’m sitting here instead, for a minute, to look at a little 3x5 card I push-pinned to the wall over the desk a few months ago, when I first began to realize that doing it their way wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

The card refers to a bit of history, in the Scottish Highlands. Until the late eighteenth century, the Highlands were populated mainly by tenant farmers, poor families in little stone huts eking out a small living from the soil and paying a small rent to the landlord. Then the landlord—or whoever acted as the landlord’s accountant, in those days—discovered there was more money to be made if the human beings on all that land were replaced by sheep.

So, for the next seventy years, more or less, there was in the Highlands what came to be called the Clearances, in which families, clans, villages, everything was cleared from the land, which was then given to the sheep. The tenant farmers had lived there for generations, built the houses and barns and corrals, worked the soil; but it wasn’t theirs. No one had lived on it but them, but it wasn’t theirs, so what were they to do?

They left, not willingly. Some went to Ireland, some went to North America, some went to hell. Some died of cold or starvation. Some resisted, and were given the chop right there, on their own land. Well, no; not their own land.

I learned about the Clearances in college. I always enjoyed the history courses, because they were simply stories, so I did well in them, bringing my whole grade average up.

One year, another guy and I did a term paper on the Clearances, and in the course of it my partner looked up the word in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the big one. I so loved the definition that I never forgot it, and after I got the chop, during one of my days of legitimate library research, I looked it up again, to be sure I had the phrasing exactly right. I wrote it on this 3x5 card and put it up on the wall here, in front of me.

You’ll never see a clearer proof that history is written by the winners. Just think; one comma less, and the inhabitants would have fallen into the etc.

It’s the descendants of those landlords that are doing the clearances called downsizing now. The literal descendants, sometimes, and the spiritual descendants always.

You like that desk where you are? You say you’ve given the company your life, your loyalty, your best efforts, and you think the company owes you something in return? You say all you really want is to stay at your desk?

Well, it isn’t your desk. Clear it. The owner has realized he can make more money if he replaces you with another sheep.

Here’s the resumé want. The address. I’ll visit Mr. Garrett Roger Blackstone tomorrow, after I drop off Marjorie at Dr. Carney’s office.

Garrett Blackstone

PO Box 217, Scantic River Rd.

Erebus, CT 06397

Tel: 203 522-1201

Born Marysville, NJ August 18, 1947

Loyola Elementary School, Marysville, NJ - St. Ignatius Combined Middle School, Smithers, NJ - St. Ignatius High School, Smithers, NJ - Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, receiving BA, art history 1968

United States Army, 1968-1971 - stationed in Texas, Vietnam, Okinawa

Married 1971, Louise Magnusson - four sons

Salesman, Rutherford Paper Box Co., Rutherford, MN 1971-1978

Manager, product line, Rutherford Paper Box Co., 1978-1983

Manager, product line, Patriot Paper Corp., Nashua, NH 1983-1984

Plant Manager, Green Valley Paper, Housatonic, CT 1984-present

Twenty-six years’ experience in the paper industry.

Eighteen years’ experience with a broad variety of paper manufacture as manager in charge of all product lines for a broad-base papermaker.

Experience includes consumer paper products, industrial paper products (including polymer paper applications) and defense-related paper products.

I am a willing worker, and am prepared to devote whatever part of my experience and expertise is of use in the new work situation.

At the mall, I stop in front of the entrance to Dr. Carney’s office. Before she gets out of the Voyager, Marjorie leans over and kisses me, lightly, on the cheek. I look at her in surprise, and her eyes are shining. “It’s over,” she whispers. Then, seeming to be embarrassed, she slides out of the car, waves behind herself without looking back, and hurries into the building.

I know what she means, of course. The other man, the guy, the boyfriend, that’s what’s over. She won’t be unfaithful to me any more.

As I drive east across northern Connecticut toward Erebus, I think about what she said, and what it means, and why she said it. I’ve believed the affair happened in the first place because of the general despondency around our house as my unemployment has lengthened from months into years, and I’ve believed that she finally told me about it
because
she wanted it to end, but she also wanted me to know what she’d been going through, what had made it necessary. And she wanted somebody neutral around, a counselor, our Longus Quinlan, to help us find our way out of this morass. If there is a way.

So the affair was a battering ram, that’s all. And now the door is open, and she doesn’t need the battering ram any more. And she wants me to know that, too.

But now, driving along on these little roads from little town to little town, I wonder if there isn’t a second reason as well. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better, make myself believe that
I
had something to do with it, too, but I can’t help wonder if another factor in her change toward me is the way I handled the Billy emergency.

I handled it well, I know I did. But I also handled it differently from the way I would have a couple of years ago, back when I was a regularly employed person in what I thought of as a normal and changeless life. In that time, when I was the person I was before I got the chop, I would have been much more passive in this situation. I would have trusted the law, or society, or somebody, to do right by Billy. And the result would have been, they’d have gotten him for four burglaries instead of one, and he’d be looking at jail time. They might not even have set bail.

I did the right thing with Billy, and the reason I did the right thing, and could even
think
about the problem the right way, is because I don’t trust them anymore. None of them. Now I know it; nobody will take care of me and mine but me.

Erebus is a village in the hills of north central Connecticut, between Bald Mountain and Rattlesnake Hill, just across the state line from Springfield, Massachusetts. Scantic River Road doesn’t go through the actual village itself, but wanders the nearby hills, southward from the state line. I actually drive up into Massachusetts briefly, to pick up Scantic River Road at its northern end, and then I drive slowly southward, looking for PO Box 217.

This is suburbia along in through here, but a more relaxed suburbia than the areas closer to New York City. This country around here is a bedroom for Hartford and Springfield, so there’s less visible money thrown around and less visible effort at high style. The basketball hoops above the garage doors look as though they’re actually used from time to time. There are more pools above the ground than in it. The cars are less showy, and so are the gardens.

217 is a bit of a problem, being in the middle of a blind curve, with signs in both directions warning of their hidden driveway. It’s on the west side of the road, on the right as I drive south, and while the road itself is mostly level along here the land climbs steeply to the right and falls away to a fast narrow stream on the left. A stone wall retains GRB’s land around this curve, with a narrow driveway chopped into it, leading upward toward a house I can barely glimpse.

This is going to be a very difficult place to watch. Can I do the mailbox again? It’s on the same side of the road as the house, built into the stone retaining wall next to the driveway. I haven’t seen a mail deliverer in my travels today, so I decide to head on south, just to see if luck is with me.

It isn’t. I take Scantic River Road all the way south to the Wilbur Cross Parkway, by which time I’m surely in some other mail delivery route, so I turn around at the Parkway and drive north again, and when I’m near Erebus here comes the mail delivery, southbound.

Damn! GRB’s house is still north of me, the mail’s already been delivered. Is he out there now, picking up his mail?

The Luger is still inside the backseat. I keep driving, not too fast, reaching behind myself, trying to find that slit in the bottom front of the seat cover, trying to extend my arm way back and down inside there to get hold of the Luger by touch alone.

Metal, metal… Got it. I pull it out by the barrel, put it on top of the raincoat, then turn it so it doesn’t point toward me.

The curve. HIDDEN DRIVEWAY. And here it is, on the left, with a person at the mailbox, head bowed, studying the mail. For just a second I’m very excited, staring at GRB, not looking away from him as my right hand claws for the Luger—but then I realize it isn’t him. It’s a woman. It’s the wife, no doubt, in corduroy pants and a dark green cardigan and a dark blue billed cap with writing on the front.