The Ax (5 page)

I have taken that message to heart, perhaps more than she intended. And I have seen the resumés written by the people who did not have the benefit of her breed of advice, the people who still think like that benighted engineer: The world owes me a salary.

Maybe a quarter of the resumés stink of that self-importance, that aggrieved sense that things
ought
to work out right. But the problem with most of the resumés is a simpler one than that; their aim is wrong.

I wrote an ad that
I
could respond to, that was absolutely appropriate to my experience, without being overly specific and narrow. There is such desperation out there, however, that people don’t limit themselves to the job openings where they might stand some chance. Clearly, they’re sending out the resumés wholesale, in hopes that lightning will strike. And maybe sometimes it does.

But not in the paper business. Not in the specialized kind of industrial use of paper in which
I’m
the expert. These people are amateurs, when it comes to my field, and they don’t worry me.

But some of the others do. People whose qualifications are very like mine, perhaps even a touch better than mine. People with a background like mine, but an education that looks in the resumé just a little more distinguished. The people that I would be second best to, if my ad had been real and I’d sent my own resumé in response.

People like Edward George Ricks.

My name is Edward G. Ricks. I was born in Bridgeport, Conn., on April 17, 1946. I was educated in Bridgeport schools and took a degree in Chemical Engineering at Henley Technical College, Broome, Conn., in 1967.

In my Navy service—1968 to 1971—I performed as a printing technician on the fleet aircraft carrier
Wilkes-Barre
, where I was responsible for putting out the ship’s daily newspaper as well as producing all orders and other printed material on the ship, and where I first combined my chemical background with an interest in specialized forms of paper.

Subsequent to the Navy, I was hired by Northern Pine Pulp Mills, where I worked in product development from 1971 until 1978. When Northern Pine merged with Gray-lock Paper, I was promoted to management, where I held responsibility for a number of product lines.

From 1991 until spring of 1996, I was in charge of the polymer paper film product line at Graylock, where the customers were almost entirely defense contractors. With the recent military cutbacks, Graylock dropped that product line.

I am now at liberty to present my experience and expertise to another forward-looking company in the specialized paper industry. I have been based in Massachusetts since 1978, but have no objection to relocation. I am married, and my three daughters are at this writing (1997) all at university.

Edward G. Ricks

7911 Berkshire Way, Longholme, MA 05889

413 555-2699

I
would hire him, before I hired me. That degree in chemical engineering is a real bone in my throat.

And the self-assurance of the man.
And
he was twenty-five years with the same employer, so he must be a good and faithful employee (just as they, of course, are a bad and faithless employer, which doesn’t matter).

The form of his resumé is the only thing against him, and it isn’t enough. That to-whom-it-may-concern business is just too artificial, and so’s the restrained chattiness. The pomposity grates, his being “at liberty to present” himself, and having three daughters “at university,” as though they’re all at Oxford and not some community college. The man is undoubtedly a prig and a bore, but he’s perfect for any job that I would be very good for, and because of that I hate him.

Monday, May 12th. Over breakfast I tell Marjorie I’ll be doing library research today, a thing I actually do spend time at occasionally, searching through recent magazines and newspapers for leads to jobs that might be opening up but that aren’t yet in the help wanted columns.

Mondays and Wednesdays are when Marjorie has one of her two part-time jobs. We sold the Honda Civic last year, so I’ll have to drive her to Dr. Carney’s office and then pick her up again at the end of the day. She is our dentist’s receptionist now, two days a week, and is paid a hundred dollars a week off the books. On Saturday afternoons she’s cashier at the New Variety, our local movie house, her other part-time job, where she’s paid minimum wage on the books, taxes are deducted, and she brings home nothing. But she feels better getting out of the house, doing something, and the perk is that we get to go to the movies for free.

Today, though, is Dr. Carney. I drive Marjorie to the mall where his office is located, and leave her there at ten. Now I have eight hours to drive to Massachusetts, see what the situation is with EGR, and get back to the mall to pick up Marjorie at six.

But first I have to return to the house, since I didn’t dare carry the Luger with me while Marjorie was in the car. At home, I put the gun in a plastic bag from the drugstore, carry it out to the car, and put it on the passenger seat beside me. Then I drive north.

It’s forty-five minutes northbound, up into Massachusetts, then a right turn at Great Barrington, and another thirty minute drive to Longholme. Along the way, I keep remembering last week’s event with Everly, which now seems to me about as clean and perfect as such an experience could ever be. Will I be that lucky again today? Can I merely once again follow the mail carrier, and have EGR delivered into my lap?

(I have no idea, of course, what happened after I left Everly last week, and I think it would be dangerous to try to find out. The shooting was not important enough to be written up in the
New York Times
, and the only other paper I normally read, the
Journal
, our local weekly, does not extend its reach as far as Fall City. Our cable service doesn’t carry local channels, but I doubt Everly made the TV news.)

My Massachusetts road atlas shows Longholme about twenty miles west of Springfield and north of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Berkshire Way is another wiggly black line—suggesting hills again—extending out of the town proper, this time northward. It’s a long sweep around for me to avoid the town and stay on country roads, but I think it’s worth the time and trouble. Still, it’s almost twelve o’clock when I finally make the turn onto Berkshire Way.

This is decidedly more rural, with a few actual farms along the way. The private homes are mostly large but unpretentious, as though the residents don’t feel they have anything to prove to their neighbors. The countryside is more open, with cleared fields and wide valleys rather than the tumbled woodsiness of Connecticut. It doesn’t feel suburban, probably because it’s just a little too far from New York and Boston and Albany and every other northeastern urban center.

7911 Berkshire Way turns out to be a modern house on a traditional plan, on the right side of the road as I come along. Probably built after World War II, when the boys came home to create us baby boomers, so that fifty years later we could all be shunted off the social order.

I’m a bit surprised at the house and disappointed with EGR, with his daughters “at university,” which does not imply yellow aluminum siding and green fake shutters and a TV satellite dish as prominent as an erection right next to the house. There are scrubby plantings around the base of the building and a few small specimen fruit trees haphazardly placed, but nothing has been planted along the line between scraggly lawn and roadside.

The wide door of the two-car garage is lifted open as I drive by, and there are no cars in there. Nobody home. Damn.

I drive on. A quarter mile farther, a convent school provides a handy parking area in which to turn around. I drive back, looking for an inconspicuous place to park. Unlike the last time, the mailbox is on the same side of the road as the house, so I’ll have less warning when EGR comes out to get his mail. If he’s home. If he comes out to get his mail. If the mail hasn’t already been delivered.

Next beyond the Ricks house, back the way I’m now going, is an empty field, strewn with shrubs and low pines, with a For Sale sign—white letters on red, phone number added in black Magic Marker—on a post near the road. Next beyond that is another house similar to EGR’s, built around the same time, probably by the same builder, onto which a few additional rooms were pasted over the years. Stucco was applied at some point, instead of aluminum, and painted the color of squash. A large metal For Sale sign from a local real estate agent stands on the unmowed lawn, and the place has an abandoned air to it, as though the family has gone away to live somewhere smaller, less expensive, closer to the Welfare office.

I turn at this decamped home, enter the driveway, stop, and back turning out of it, so that I’m parked off the road in front of the house, with a clear view beyond the offered field to the front of EGR’s place. I’ve been careful not to block the view of the For Sale sign with my Voyager, because I want the occasional passerby to assume I’m waiting for the agent.

I’m getting hungry, but I don’t want to give up my vigil, lose my opportunity to finish the day’s work. In my mind’s eye, a car pulls in at the driveway over there, a man gets out of it, he crosses to the mailbox, I drive forward, and it’s all over.

Does he get his mail while still in his car? And then does he drive into the garage before getting out of the car? And does he close the garage door immediately? And do I follow him, the Luger in my hand, or under my jacket?

I can only guess at any of these things. I can only wait to see what happens, and see what I do in response.

Three hours go by, and nothing happens, and I’m getting very hungry indeed. I may be out of work and desperate, but I’m still not used to missing meals. Still, the thought remains, that if I leave my post, EGR will appear immediately, and will be safely inside his house before I return.

Twenty past three. A Windstar minivan, gray, very like my Voyager, drives slowly past me, and what attracts my attention is that the heavyset middle-aged woman at the wheel of it is glaring at me. Glaring. I blink at her, not understanding her hostility. She drives on by, and then she stops at that mailbox just up ahead, in front of EGR’s place. Would this be Mrs. Ricks?

Apparently. I see her slide over to the right side of the Windstar, open the mailbox, pull out the mail. Then she drives on into the garage, and the door slides down.

So. It could be that she wasn’t exactly showing hostility, after all, but merely close observation. If she did make the assumption I’m hoping for, that I’m a prospective buyer waiting for the Realtor, maybe she was just frowning at me, studying me, as a potential neighbor.

But the question is, where’s her husband? She closed the garage door, so she’s not expecting him to drive in any time soon. Was he at home all this time? Maybe he’s sick today, got a spring cold.

Or maybe he’s out on a job interview, won’t be back for a couple of days.

It’s getting late. I’m very hungry, and I also have to get back to the mall to pick up Marjorie at six. I can see now that nothing is going to happen here today. A wasted day.

I can’t have too many wasted days. This whole operation has to be done as quickly and cleanly as possible, without sloppiness or unnecessary risk, to get it over with before the equations change. Still, nothing is going to happen here today.

Now what? Tomorrow, oddly enough, I have a job interview of my own, in Albany, with a man from a package and label manufacturer, an outfit that specializes in the labels that wrap around tin cans. I don’t have much hope, since labels are really some distance out of my line, and surely there are label experts who’ve been downsized in the last few years, but you never know. Lightning might strike.

Well, if it does, I won’t be back here on Berkshire Way any more, will I? And EGR will never know what a lucky man he is.

But if lightning doesn’t strike, what then? I can’t come back up here on Wednesday, that’s Marjorie’s other day with Dr. Carney, and the next time I come here I’d better leave home a lot earlier. Clearly the mail had already been delivered when I first got here today.

Thursday, then. I’ll be back here Thursday. Unless, of course, by Thursday I’m becoming an expert in tin can labels.

When I first got my hands on that great pile of resumés, with more coming in, and still more, what I felt, I now realize, looking back on it, was a kind of gleeful power. I’d put something over on these people, the competition, I’d learned their secrets and they didn’t even know I was there, in the darkness, in the shadows, in the corner, in the box number, watching them. I was like a miser with his gold, hunched over the file folders of resumés in my office, secret even from Marjorie, no one knowing the power I had, no one knowing the coup I’d accomplished.

But that first euphoria had to wear off, and it did, leaving only questions in its wake. What would I
do
with these things? How, after all, could the resumés help me? Or would they merely serve to discourage me, as when I would look at this sheet or that sheet and see someone just slightly better-looking for the job than I am.
Look
at all these people out here, all of them worthy, all of them accomplished, all of them willing. Look how many there are, and look how few the berths they’re all steering toward.