CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella, Page 2

  We decide to eat in-Park. We go over to Nate’s Saloon. Sylvia says don’t spread it around but two of the nine can-can girls are knocked up. Then she pulls out her folder and says that according to her review of the data, we have a pretty tame bunch on our hands. The best she can do is Ned Quinn. His records indicate that while in high school he once burned down a storage shed. I almost die laughing. Quinn’s an Adjunct Thespian and a world-class worry-wart. I can’t count the times I’ve come upon him in Costuming, dwelling on the gory details of his Dread Disease Rider. He’s a failed actor who won’t stop trying. He says this is the only job he could find that would allow him to continue to develop his craft. Because he’s ugly as sin he specializes in roles that require masks, such as Humpty-Dumpty during Mother Goose Days.

  I report back to Mr. Alsuga and he says Quinn may not be much but he’s all we’ve got. Quinn’s dirt-poor with six kids and Mr. A says that’s a plus, as we’ll need someone between a rock and a hard place. What he suggests we do is equip the Desperate Patrol with live ammo and put Quinn in charge. The Desperate Patrol limps along under floodlights as the night’s crowning event. We’ve costumed them to resemble troops who’ve been in the field too long. We used actual Gettysburg photos. The climax of the Patrol is a re-enacted partial rebellion, quelled by a rousing speech. After the speech the boys take off their hats and put their arms around each other and sing “I Was Born Under a Wandering Star.” Then there’s fireworks and the Parade of Old-Fashioned Conveyance. Then we clear the place out and go home.

  “Why not confab with Quinn?” Mr. A says. “Get his input and feelings.”

  “I was going to say that,” I say.

  I look up the Thespian Center’s SpeedDial extension and a few minutes later Quinn’s bounding up the steps in the Wounded Grizzly suit.

  “Desperate Patrol?” Mr. A says as Quinn sits down. “Any interest on your part?”

  “Love it,” Quinn says. “Excellent.” He’s been trying to get on Desperate Patrol for years. It’s considered the pinnacle by the Thespians because of the wealth of speaking parts. He’s so excited he’s shifting around in his seat and getting some of his paw blood on Mr. A’s nice cane chair.

  “The gangs in our park are a damn blight,” Mr. A says. “I’m talking about meeting force with force. Something in it for you? Oh yes.”

  “I’d like to see Quinn give the rousing speech myself,” I say.

  “Societal order,” Mr. A says. “Sustaining the lifeblood of this goddamned park we’ve all put so much of our hearts into.”

  “He’s not just free-associating,” I say.

  “I’m not sure I get it,” Quinn says.

  “What I’m suggesting is live ammo in your weapon only,” Mr. A says. “Fire at your discretion. You see an unsavory intruder, you shoot at his feet. Just give him a scare. Nobody gets hurt. An additional two bills a week is what I’m talking.”

  “I’m an actor,” Quinn says.

  “Quinn’s got kids,” I say. “He knows the value of a buck.”

  “This is acting of the highest stripe,” Mr. A says. “Act like a mercenary.”

  “Go for it on a trial basis,” I say.

  “I’m not sure I get it,” Quinn says. “But jeez, that’s good money.”

  “Superfantastic,” says Mr. A.

  Next evening Mr. A and I go over the Verisimilitude Irregularities List. We’ve been having some heated discussions about our bird-species percentages. Mr. Grayson, Staff Ornithologist, has recently recalculated and estimates that to accurately approximate the 1865 bird population we’ll need to eliminate a couple hundred orioles or so. He suggests using air guns or poison. Mr. A says that, in his eyes, in fiscally troubled times, an ornithologist is a luxury, and this may be the perfect time to send Grayson packing. I like Grayson. He went way overboard on Howie’s baseball candy. But I’ve got me and mine to think of. So I call Grayson in. Mr. A says did you botch the initial calculation or were you privy to new info. Mr. Grayson admits it was a botch. Mr. A sends him out into the hall and we confab.

  “You’ll do the telling,” Mr. A says. “I’m getting too old for cruelty.”

  He takes his walking stick and beeper and says he’ll be in the Great Forest if I need him.

  I call Grayson back in and let him go, and hand him Kleenexes and fend off a few blows and almost before I know it he’s reeling out the door and I go grab a pita.

  Is this the life I envisioned for myself? My God no. I wanted to be a high jumper. But I have two of the sweetest children ever born. I go in at night and look at them in their fairly expensive sleepers and think: There are a couple of kids who don’t need to worry about freezing to death or being cast out to the wolves. You should see their little eyes light up when I bring home a treat. They may not know the value of a dollar, but it’s my intention to see that they never need to.

  I’m filling out Grayson’s Employee Retrospective when I hear gunshots from the perimeter. I run out and there’s Quinn and a few of his men tied to the cannon. The gang guys took Quinn’s pants and put some tiny notches in his penis with their knives. I free Quinn and tell him to get over to the Infirmary to guard against infection. He’s absolutely shaking and can hardly walk, so I wrap him up in a Confederate flag and call over a hay cart and load him in.

  When I tell Mr. A he says: Garbage in, garbage out, and that we were idiots for expecting a milquetoast to save our rears.

  We decide to leave the police out of it because of the possible bad PR. So we give Quinn the rest of the week off and promise to let him play Grant now and then, and that’s that.

  When Visitors first come in there’s this cornball part where they sit in this kind of spaceship and supposedly get blasted into space and travel faster than the speed of light and end up in 1865. The unit’s dated. The helmets we distribute look like bowls and all the paint’s peeling off. I’ve argued and argued that we need to update. But in the midst of a budget crunch one can’t necessarily hang the moon. When the tape of space sounds is over and the walls stop shaking, we pass out the period costumes. We try not to offend anyone, liability law being what it is. We distribute the slave and Native American roles equitably among racial groups. Anyone is free to request a different identity at any time. In spite of our precautions, there’s a Herlicher in every crowd. He’s the guy who sued us last fall for making him hangman. He claimed that for weeks afterwards he had nightmares and because he wasn’t getting enough sleep botched a big contract by sending an important government buyer a load of torn pool liners. Big deal, is my feeling. But he’s suing us for fifty grand for emotional stress because the buyer ridiculed him in front of his co-workers. Whenever he comes in we make him sheriff but he won’t back down an inch.

  Mr. A calls me into his office and says he’s got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news. First off, he says, the gangs have spraypainted a picture of Quinn’s notched penis on the side of the Everly Mansion. Second, last Friday’s simulated frontier hunt has got us in hot water, because apparently some of the beef we toughen up to resemble buffalo meat was tainted, and the story’s going in the Sunday supplement. And finally, the verdict’s come in on the Herlicher case and we owe that goofball a hundred grand instead of fifty because the pinko judge empathized.

  I wait for him to say I’m fired but instead he breaks down in tears. I pat his back and mix him a drink. He says why don’t I join him. So I join him.

  “It doesn’t look good,” he says, “for men like you and I.”

  “No it doesn’t,” I say.

  “All I wanted to do,” he says, “was to give the public a meaningful perspective on a historical niche I’ve always found personally fascinating.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say.

  At eleven the phone rings. It’s Maurer in Refuse Control calling to say that the gangs have set fire to the Anglican Church. That structure cost upwards of ninety thousand to transport from Clydesville and refurbish. We can see the flames f
rom Mr. A’s window.

  “Oh Christ!” Mr. A says. “If I could kill those kids I would kill those kids. One shouldn’t desecrate the dream of another individual in the fashion in which they have mine.”

  “I know it,” I say.

  We drink and drink and finally he falls asleep on his office couch.

  On the way to my car I keep an eye out for the ghostly McKinnon family. Back in the actual 1860s all this land was theirs. Their homestead’s long gone but our records indicate that it was located near present-day Information Hoedown. They probably never saw this many buildings in their entire lives. They don’t realize we’re chronically slumming, they just think the valley’s prospering. Something bad must have happened to them because their spirits are always wandering around at night looking dismayed.

  Tonight I find the Mrs. doing wash by the creek. She sees me coming and asks if she can buy my boots. Machine stitching amazes her. I ask how are the girls. She says Maribeth has been sad because no appropriate boy ever died in the valley so she’s doomed to loneliness forever. Maribeth is a homely sincere girl who glides around mooning and pining and reading bad poetry chapbooks. Whenever we keep the Park open late for high-school parties, she’s in her glory. There was one kid who was able to see her and even got a crush on her, but when he finally tried to kiss her near Hostelry and found out she was spectral it just about killed him. I slipped him a fifty and told him to keep it under wraps. As far as I know he’s still in therapy. I realize I should have come forward but they probably would have nut-hutted me, and then where would my family be?

  The Mrs. says what Maribeth needs is choir practice followed by a nice quilting bee. In better times I would have taken the quilting-bee idea and run with it. But now there’s no budget. That’s basically how I finally moved up from Verisimilitude Inspector to Special Assistant, by lifting ideas from the McKinnons. The Mrs. likes me because after she taught me a few obscure 1800s ballads and I parlayed them into Individual Achievement Awards, I bought her a Rubik’s Cube. To her, colored plastic is like something from Venus. The Mr. has kind of warned me away from her a couple of times. He doesn’t trust me. He thinks the Rubik’s Cube is the devil’s work. I’ve brought him lighters and Playboys and once I even dragged out Howie’s little synth and the mobile battery pak. I set the synth for carillon and played it from behind a bush. I could tell he was tickled, but he stonewalled. It’s too bad I can’t make an inroad because he was at Antietam and could be a gold mine of war info. He came back from the war and a year later died in his cornfield, which is now Parking. So he spends most of his time out there calling the cars Beelzebubs and kicking their tires.

  Tonight he’s walking silently up and down the rows. I get out to my KCar and think oh jeez, I’ve locked the keys in. The Mr. sits down at the base of the A3 lightpole and asks did I see the fire and do I realize it was divine retribution for my slovenly moral state. I say thank you very much. No way I’m telling him about the gangs. He can barely handle the concept of women wearing trousers. Finally I give up on prying the window down and go call Evelyn for the spare set. While I wait for her I sit on the hood and watch the stars. The Mr. watches them too. He says there are fewer than when he was a boy. He says that even the heavens have fallen into disrepair. I think about explaining smog to him but then Evelyn pulls up.

  She’s wearing her bathrobe and as soon as she gets out starts with the lip. Howie and Marcus are asleep in the back. The Mr. says it’s part and parcel of my fallen state that I allow a woman to speak to me in such a tone. He suggests I throttle her and lock her in the woodshed. Meanwhile she’s going on and on so much about my irresponsibility that the kids are waking up. I want to get out before the gangs come swooping down on us. The Parking Area’s easy pickings. She calls me a thoughtless oaf and sticks me in the gut with the car keys.

  Marcus wakes up all groggy and says: Hey, our daddy.

  Evelyn says: Yes, unfortunately he is.

  Just after lunch next day a guy shows up at Personnel looking so completely Civil War they immediately hire him and send him out to sit on the porch of the old Kriegal place with a butter churn. His name’s Samuel and he doesn’t say a word going through Costuming and at the end of the day leaves on a bike. I do the normal clandestine New Employee Observation from the O’Toole gazebo and I like what I see. He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter. At one point he makes the mistake of departing from the list of Then-Current Events to discuss the World Series with a Visitor, but my feeling is, we can work with that. All in all he presents a positive and convincing appearance, and I say so in my review.

  Sylvia runs her routine check on him and calls me at home that night and says boy do we have a hot prospect on our hands if fucking with the gangs is still on our agenda. She talks like that. I’ve got her on speakerphone in the rec room and Marcus starts running around the room saying fuck. Evelyn stands there with her arms crossed, giving me a drop-dead look. I wave her off and she flips me the bird.

  Sylvia’s federal sources indicate that Samuel got kicked out of Vietnam for participating in a bloodbath. Sylvia claims this is oxymoronic. She sounds excited. She suggests I take a nice long look at his marksmanship scores. She says his special combat course listing goes on for pages.

  I call Mr. A and he says it sounds like Sam’s our man. I express reservations at arming an alleged war criminal and giving him free rein in a family-oriented facility. Mr. A says if we don’t get our act together there won’t be any family-oriented facility left in a month. Revenues have hit rock bottom and his investors are frothing at the mouth. There’s talk of outright closure and liquidation of assets.

  He says: Now get off your indefensible high horse and give me Sam’s home phone.

  So I get off my indefensible high horse and give him Sam’s home phone.

  Thursday after we’ve armed Samuel and sent him and the Patrol out, I stop by the Worship Center to check on the Foley baptism. Baptisms are an excellent revenue source. We charge three hundred dollars to rent the Center, which is the former lodge of the Siala utopian free-love community. We trucked it in from downstate, a redbrick building with a nice gold dome. In the old days if one of the Sialians was overeating to the exclusion of others or excessively masturbating, he or she would be publicly dressed down for hours on end in the lodge. Now we put up white draperies and pipe in Stephen Foster and provide at no charge a list of preachers of various denominations.

  The Foleys are an overweight crew. The room’s full of crying sincere large people wishing the best for a baby. It makes me remember our own sweet beaners in their little frocks. I sit down near the wood-burning heater in the Invalid area and see that Justin in Prep has forgotten to remove the mannequin elderly couple clutching rosaries. Hopefully the Foleys won’t notice and withhold payment.

  The priest dips the baby’s head into the fake marble basin and the door flies open and in comes a racially mixed gang. They stroll up the aisle tousling hair and requisition a Foley niece, a cute redhead of about sixteen. Her dad stands up and gets a blackjack in the head. One of the gang guys pushes her down the aisle with his hands on her breasts. As she passes she looks right at me. The gang guy spits on my shoe and I make my face neutral so he won’t get hacked off and drag me into it.

  The door slams and the Foleys sit there stunned. Then the baby starts crying and everyone runs shouting outside in time to see the gang dragging the niece into the woods. I panic. I try to think of where the nearest pay phone is. I’m weighing the efficiency of running to Administration and making the call from my cubicle when six fast shots come from the woods. Several of the oldest Foleys assume the worst and drop weeping to their knees in the churchyard.

  I don’t know the first thing about counseling survivors, so I run for Mr. A.

  He’s drinking and watching his bigscreen. I tell him what happened and he jumps up and calls the police. Then he says let’s go do whatever little we can for these poor people who entrusted us with thei
r sacred family occasion only to have us drop the ball by failing to adequately protect them.

  When we get back to the churchyard the Foleys are kicking and upbraiding six gang corpses. Samuel’s having a glass of punch with the niece. The niece’s dad is hanging all over Sam trying to confirm his daughter’s virginity. Sam says it wasn’t even close and goes on and on about the precision of his scope.

  Then we hear sirens.

  Sam says: I’m going into the woods.

  Mr. A says: We never saw you, big guy.

  The niece’s dad says: Bless you, sir.

  Sam says: Adios.

  Mr. A stands on the hitching post and makes a little speech, the gist of which is, let’s blame another gang for killing these dirtbags so Sam can get on with his important work.

  The Foleys agree.

  The police arrive and we all lie like rugs.

  The word spreads on Sam and the gangs leave us alone. For two months the Park is quiet and revenues start upscaling. Then some high-school kid pulls a butter knife on Fred Moore and steals a handful of penny candy from the General Store. As per specs, Fred alerts Mr. A of a Revenue-Impacting Event. Mr. A calls Security and we perform Exit Sealage. We look everywhere, but the kid’s gone. Mr. A says what the hell, Unseal, it’s just candy, profit loss is minimal. Sam hears the Unseal Tone on the PA and comes out of the woods all mad with his face painted and says that once the word gets out we’ve gone soft the gangs will be back in a heartbeat. I ask since when do gangs use butter knives. Sam says a properly trained individual can kill a wild boar with a butter knife. Mr. A gives me a look and says why don’t we let Sam run this aspect of the operation since he possesses the necessary expertise. Then Mr. A offers to buy him lunch and Sam says no, he’ll eat raw weeds and berries as usual.