The Messenger

Jack Steele                                                                                                            3340 wds.

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

508-280-8645

jacksteele1@comcast.net

The Messenger

     Cecil opened his eyes and found himself as usual curled up on his side in a fetal position.  Back when he smoked he would sit up on the edge of the bed and think about things as he smoked the first cigarette of the day.  He’d usually smoke about half of it before getting up to turn on the coffee and return to his position on the bed.  Even before the coffee was ready, he was feeling pretty good, ready to face the day, but he still needed coffee to bring him around all the way and make him feel just right.  Made in a Mr. Coffee, black, no sugar, in a white mug that said nothing on the sides.  The rim of the cup was narrower than the base, so it kept the coffee warm longer than most cups.  For years in motel rooms he drank instant coffee, heated up the water with a coil that he plugged into the wall.  This was before motels routinely put coffee makers in the rooms.  Then his wife got him a Mr. Coffee for Christmas one year.  He was skeptical at first, even though they both used a Mr. Coffee at home.  Over the years he’d developed a taste for, or at least no longer minded, instant coffee on the road.  He hadn’t been sure he wanted to change, but he didn’t have the heart to not try it out, and now of course he wondered how he’d stood the instant for so long.    

     After he turned on the coffee, peed and splashed cold water on his face, he sat back down and waited.  He almost turned on the TV, which he almost never did, to distract himself from what he had to do that day, but in the end decided he preferred the silence and his own thoughts, no matter how unpleasant.  He got up to get his first cup and resumed his seat.  He would not be the most popular man in town today, but most people would realize that it was not his fault.  It was more like he was the messenger delivering bad news.  In a way it wasn’t even him.  He was an employee, doing his duty.      

     After his coffee, he took a shower, then had a second cup as he brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and shaved.  He looked at himself in the mirror after putting on khaki pants and a sports shirt.  He made sure his shirt buttons were aligned with his fly, then reached back and pulled on his shirt so that it wouldn’t stick out so much on the sides.  Before leaving the room he patted himself all over to make sure he had his wallet, cigarettes, car keys, money, room key.  He’d come in late and left his traveling bag, a big leather satchel stuffed with everything he’d ever need for work, in the trunk of the car.  He was all set.

     As he pulled out on the highway, he debated with himself, as he always did, whether to get one or two sausage-with-biscuits at the convenience store.  If he got one, he could get something else later, maybe a doughnut around ten.  If he got two, he’d have to do without anything until noon or else feel guilty.  Or he could get two and no milk.  After his heart attack, he’d learned how many calories everything had, more or less, and the effect it would have on his waistline.  He’d always had a belly and probably always would, but the doctor seemed to think he was okay now at around thirty pounds lighter than before and not smoking.  Of course the doctor didn’t recommend sausage or doughnuts, but giving that up was going too far.  He’d rather take his chances and die with the taste of something he loved in his mouth, a remark his wife hadn’t found amusing.  It wasn’t the possible sexual allusion that bothered her.  She usually at least grinned slightly at those, so long as they weren’t in too bad a taste.  No.  She didn’t grin because any reference to his mortality upset her.     

     There were already a dozen or more cars and trucks around the convenience store.  It had been a popular place for a long time, but he still thought of it as new.  When he’d first started on the road, everyone in the little towns in his territory went to the cafés downtown.  Now the cafés were closed, like nearly everything else around the squares.  Here, as in most places, the men sat on benches outside the convenience store and gathered around the beds of pickups in the parking lot, and if the girl working the register was especially cute and friendly, there might be a gang of them in there too.  He always took his breakfast back to his car and glanced at the morning paper while he ate.  Some of the men looked familiar, but he didn’t really know any of them.  He never had.  He was not naturally gregarious, and coming into town once a week at most had not been enough.        

     He got to the dealership a little after eight.  Oscar’s son was out back with a mechanic.  The parts man, Tommy, was reading the paper, and Alice, the bookkeeper, was in her office on the phone.  He waved at her, said “hi” to Tommy, and went outside to count machinery.  As he’d feared, expected really, the hay baler that had been missing last week, the one Oscar, Jr. said was “out on demo,” was still missing.  He should have reported it immediately, but he’d bent the rules.  Why, he wasn’t sure.  He’d known for a long time that it would come to this.  Oscar, Jr. was a pitiful case, no two ways about it, and maybe that was why.  He’d never seemed to care or know much about the business, but, and this was his one redeeming feature, he’d always seemed to know that about himself and regret it.  If he’d been arrogant, a sorry ass no account bastard, full of hot air, Oscar’s son or not, that would have been one thing.  But he wasn’t.  He’d had a pitiful whipped-dog look since he was six years old.    

     The bookkeeper probably felt the same way, but she was loyal to the boy not so much from pity, but because it was the same as being loyal to Oscar.  “Maybe I’m just like her,” he thought as he headed towards her office, “but his old man, or his old man’s friends now that Oscar’s dead, can’t be saving his ass forever.”  He liked Alice, she was a good bookkeeper, easy to look at, usually friendly, and he didn’t blame her for being a mother hen, but it won’t help now.  “I’ve got to do it,” he’d told himself over and over again.  “I can’t lose my job over this.  As it is, I’ll get yelled at if they find out I already knew about it for a week.  That alone would get me fired if I hadn’t been around so long.  This is serious business, Alice, which you already know.”  He didn’t have to tell her anything, and he didn’t.  He just rehearsed it, in case she said something, but she didn’t.  She looked worried.  She frowned.  She even looked sad.  He’d sat down with a cup of coffee, and after the necessary pleasantries, had said, “Do you know where the baler is?”  As he recited the model number for her, he was afraid for a minute that she was going to cry.  There were definitely tears in her eyes, but after only a short time of it, she blew her nose and put on her game face.  Man to man, so to speak, or person to person in this case.  She didn’t say anything that counted as an argument or a plea.  She didn’t say he’s been through a lot lately.  The banker is a prick.  His wife’s a whore.  He’s got a sick kid.  Or even, I think he’s changed.  Nothing like that.  She simply said, “You’ll have to talk to him,” and that’s all there was to it.

     He brought him into Alice’s office and tried to make it as quick and painless as possible, but it was neither.  The boy tried to give him a post-dated check, then broke down and cried when he wouldn’t take it, in full view of Alice and anyone else who wanted to look into her office.  Finally, after making all sorts of promises he knew he couldn’t keep and wouldn’t matter anyway if he could, it was way too late for that, he went to his own office, closed the door and sat there staring out the window for the rest of the day.  The look on his face was like that poor guy in Li’l Abner who walked around all day with a black cloud over his head.  He wouldn’t talk to anyone.  Wouldn’t even answer questions.  Alice went in.  Cecil went in.  They went in together, but the boy was unresponsive.  The instructions from Dallas, as he expected, were to stay put and wait for the credit manager, who couldn’t be there until early the next morning.  Meanwhile, they were sending another territory manager over to confirm the whole goods count, and God knows who else would show up.  The more the better from their viewpoint, and by the next morning it might be a circus.  They’d never say it, but more people decreased the likelihood of any soft-heartedness or dishonesty.  And besides, this was a tedious and complicated process.  It would take a while.  Even the parts had to be counted.  He knew the drill.  He’d seen it before.  He knew that the first thing they’d do, the first thing the credit manager would do, even before he sat down, was try one last time to get the money, even though everyone knew it was too late.  If by some miracle the boy choked up five thousand dollars, he’d still lose the contract with the company, and without it he had no business.

     Cecil’s job, until the credit manager arrived, was to make sure that nothing left the yard.  The other territory manager showed up right after lunch, confirmed the whole goods inventory and went home.  It was a long afternoon.  Everyone knew.  Everyone’s head was hanging, even the mechanics, who normally didn’t give a shit about anything, even losing their jobs.  At closing time the boy hadn’t left, and he was afraid for a while he was going to have to spend the night with him in his office.  But finally, after Cecil had put forward every argument he could think of for going home, the boy, without a word, locked up and drove away.

     As always, Cecil called his wife while he was having a drink in his room.  Two drinks, two double shots of bourbon with ice in the motel glass, also as always.  He was a man of habit.  No home cooking place was open anymore for supper, just a Holiday Inn buffet for lunch, and there was only one non-chain take-out fried chicken joint in town.  As a bonus, though, it gave you honey, so that’s where he went for supper whenever he was in town.  Two breasts, fries, coleslaw, rolls and honey.  With chicken he liked honey on his fries.  He stayed overnight out of town now only once or twice a week, and he figured that breaking the rules for supper only that often wouldn’t hurt anything.  He sat up in bed and watched re-runs of Adam-12 while he ate, but that didn’t distract him completely.  His wife hadn’t known Oscar very well, had met him only once or twice.  He was a little too “country” for her, but she knew how Cecil felt about him, and about protecting his no-good son, and on the phone she adopted the right tone and said the right things.  A piece of pie would be good, he thought, when he’d finished eating, but not a good idea.

     He tried to stay interested in the television, but he was restless.  Maybe a magazine at a convenience store would take his mind off things.  Usually he dreaded going out after eating, was usually about ready to fall asleep, but this was different.  He doubted if he’d stop worrying about the boy, but maybe it would go down easier if he drove around a little.  He started out in the direction of the convenience store, but then changed his mind and drove to the courthouse square.  The railroad tracks were two blocks away, and the hotel he’d always stayed in when he first got the territory had been right on the tracks.  Many a night he’d walked up to the square to eat supper and go to a movie.  There had been a place for a while that had good rolls and peach cobbler.  Sometimes he’d sit on one of the benches in the dark and smoke a cigarette before going back to the room.  Teenagers drove around and around the square in those days, the same as he’d done back in his hometown.  Where were they now?  When he got out of the car, you could hear a pin drop.

     Oscar had gotten into trouble too, more than once, but Oscar was Oscar.  It was different.  He might float a check for a day or two on his parts bill, you could do that back then if you were lucky, or borrow a little more from the bank than a piece of used equipment was really worth, everyone had cash flow problems, and he knew he could count on Cecil to look away for a short time, but this, what Oscar, Jr. did, was more like stealing, not just fudging.  He’d never be able to pay for that baler, and he was stealing from a place, a company, you didn’t want to fuck with.  They’ll yank the props out from under you in the blink of an eye and have men with deeper pockets falling all over themselves to take your place.  They might even have done that to Oscar if they’d found out about the fudging.  But Oscar knew how to be lucky, plus things were a little more personal back then.  Not so much by the book.  He’d told the boy and Alice that more than once, even though they already knew it.  The news had probably already spread far and wide.  He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Dallas had already got calls from men who wanted in. 

     He’d almost done that himself, gone in once, with Oscar.  The plan was fifty-fifty at a nearby dealership that he’d known would be available soon.  Oscar’s idea.  Even though neither of them had much money, and the ante had gone way up since Oscar first got his dealership, their history with the company might have made the difference.  He’d wanted to and hadn’t wanted to, couldn’t make up his mind, so his wife, obligingly, said no.  She didn’t want to move, partly on account of the kids, which was actually more of a relief to him at the time than a disappointment.  But he’d never given Oscar a reason, and didn’t have to.  Nothing changed between them.  It was never held against him, never mentioned again.

     When he broke the news to Oscar, he’d thought about lightening up the mood a little by saying of his wife, “she lets me have her way all the time,” but in the end he decided it might fall flat, might sound like he really blamed her.  Which wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t true that he resented her opinion.  In fact, he’d rolled over so easy, it was wrong to say it was entirely her decision.  She was often right, especially about things that required settling him down when he got a wild hair up his ass.  And besides, Oscar could be funny about wives.  His manners in general might be “country,” a little rough, but he had a courtly streak that mostly made up for it with women.  He treated his own wife like a queen, which she deserved.  She was one of the sweetest women you could ever know.  And whenever he’d had supper over there, he always thought she and Oscar were a perfect match.  So here was the question:  how’d their boy turn out like he did?

     He’d given this some thought.  He’d talked about it with his wife.  He’d known all along that the boy wouldn’t make it.  It had been painful to watch from the beginning.  Five years now since Oscar’s funeral, three years since the boy’s mother’s, and he tried not to be thankful that he didn’t have to face her over this.  Not that she wouldn’t know it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t even him doing it, but still.  He’d decided, and it didn’t take a genius to see this, that the boy naturally had his mother’s sweet disposition and that Oscar was too hard on him, mainly because it wasn’t attractive in a boy to be so sweet and shy.  Oscar had thought of him, though he never said so, as a mama’s boy.  Even a sissy.  No sign that he’d abused the boy physically, and it seemed unlikely, but that might actually have been less cruel than beating him down mentally, always belittling him, never finding anything to praise, and Cecil thanked his lucky stars that he’d only ever had girls.  It was easy to be good to a girl.  Too good sometimes, his wife said.  You spoil them.  But he might have been like Oscar with a boy, too rough on him.  With girls all he had to worry about was their no account boyfriends and husbands.

     How would he handle it if the boy killed himself?  Pretty extreme, he knew, but he couldn’t help thinking about it, from how he’d looked today.  Or worse, what if he really went off his rocker and killed the wife and kid too?  They were only rumors about the wife’s running around, and he had no opinion about it himself, but he knew people believed it, and the kid for sure had some sort of rare cancer.  But even so, depressing as all that was, you never expected the worst, especially the family thing.  It was going too far.  Too far to understand.  He’d been depressed himself.  Maybe not clinically, but certainly mad, sad, no reason to live.  Fuck the world and all its fixtures, and for no good reason.  Not really, certainly not compared to this. 

     But bad as it could be, and he figured everybody had low periods sooner or later, it couldn’t possibly be the same as how those men feel who kill their families.  Don’t they know that you just keep telling yourself that time will pass, and more or less believing it, and it does?  And why anyway would a man want to take his wife and kids with him?  Pity?  Or just spite?  You want to shake the living daylights out of a guy like that and say, listen here, it’s not their fault.  And besides, that’s the sort of thing they ought to decide for themselves, don’t you think?  What gets into those men?  What are they thinking? 

     He hadn’t been downtown at night since the square had become so dead, and he decided he didn’t like it.  On the way back to the motel, he bought a Time magazine and a Hershey bar with almonds at the convenience store.  The clerk was a girl with two rings in her bottom lip who never looked at him, but sullen teenagers were a dime a dozen these days, and he didn’t take it personally.  Back in his room, he closed the drapes first thing, then put on the dead bolt and the chain.  He hung up his pants and shirt and pushed the shirt to the side.  He didn’t like to wear a shirt twice, but he’d make sure it didn’t wrinkle just in case for some reason he needed it.  If he had to stay more than two days, and he might, he’d have to go to the laundromat or the cleaners.  The company would probably pay for the cleaners, but they might be too slow.  What would he have tomorrow night for supper?  He couldn’t eat fried chicken two nights in a row, and he didn’t care for hamburgers for supper.  Probably too many calories anyway.  There was a decent catfish joint about half an hour away, but no take-out and he didn’t like to eat in restaurants by himself.  And eating there with someone from Dallas wouldn’t be much better.

     He sat down on the bed to take off his socks and shoes.  Maybe the buffet for lunch and then just a snack, cheese crackers, for supper.  He put on a baggy t-shirt and brushed his teeth.  He pulled back the covers and lay down with the Time and the Hershey bar.  “The boy wouldn’t talk to me.  He wouldn’t talk to anybody, but what he needed to learn was this: so what if it’s not your fault, so what if your whore wife runs off for a while with who knows who, and so what if the sick kid needs care the insurance won’t pay for?  Worse things have happened than that, and than losing a business, even if it was your father’s and had been for thirty years.  It’s still fixable.  Just show a little nerve.  Move to Dallas.  Find a job.  It’s not the end of the world, or doesn’t have to be.  Suck it up, boy.  Easy for me to say, I know, since none of that ever happened to me, but at least you’re young.  I’ve had a pretty easy life.  Fairly easy time in the war.  Flyboy, no fox holes.  Scared shitless at times, but not even a close call.  And I may be fixed for life now, house paid for, one kid in college and the other one more or less happily married, but I could tell you a lot of things you don’t have to worry about, not least of which, now that we’re on the subject, is another heart attack.  And what about my wife?  Nothing wrong with her yet, but like me, she’s not getting any younger.  Just wait until you’re my age.

     Cecil had been having very bad and realistic dreams lately, but only when he was out of town, and therefore alone.  He wasn’t sure for a few moments after he woke up which it was, real or dreams, apparently just amazingly realistic dreams, because he always woke up in bed in the same position, and the door was always bolted.  He never did anything in the dreams, but he was always walking around looking for someone to stab.  He carried a very expensive switch blade knife, heavy and spring loaded, nice work in silver on the handle, and he could never find a trace of it, the phantom knife, the next morning, but it was something he’d always wanted as a kid and his parents wouldn’t let him have.  Too expensive.  Too dangerous.  But he'd bought one anyway, and hid it from them, and he would sometimes walk around with it in his pocket.  As a kid, real stabbing never occurred to him.  The knife was just for having, holding, and likewise, in the adultdreams, he never did anything.  Whenever he saw a potential victim, he’d shy away, and run off, and before long, he’d get tired and curl up in a field or a door way and fall asleep.  He always woke up in bed, no sign of the knife, no trace of having been outside, but it was so real that he had to wonder if they could arrest you for something you dreamed.  Of course not, but it would still be like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some other side of him he promptly put aside when he woke up.  That’s what intrigued him:  having a side like that, so different from himself. 

     He read the first few paragraphs of several articles.  A movie review.  The state of the stock market.  Money for NATO.  Congressional hearings.  He knew he should tell his wife about the dreams, but it was embarrassing, and it might scare her, and he kept thinking it would go away.  Finally, he realized he hadn’t understood a word of the paragraph he’d just read.  He finished the Hershey bar, settled down comfortably on his back, and turned off the light.