Zodiac Pets, page 19
I pointed out how Pennies would live in dumpsters and their new jobs (which were guaranteed) would all involve serving the resort. By raking sludge or mixing mint julips. By the endless laundering of barely used towels.
“Care to guess the buyer’s name on all these parcels?”
“The ones Archie was looking into?”
“Chaeronea.”
“Your company,” Denise added.
“But this can’t be. It just can’t. We’ll never agree. Pennies won’t swallow it.”
“ ‘Never’? After this pack of lies?”
I tore the broadsheet from Delmore’s hands and threw it at him. It bent around his head. He looked so pathetic, masked by his paper like that. Part of me felt: enough already, let’s bring him into the fold now. Maybe he could come with us, confess his crimes before Town Meeting, and then his conversion story could help turn the tables on Phil. That’s sort of how it always went in the Nibblers, and nearly every book I’d read. Though not in Moby-Dick (I’d skipped to the end), which had everybody dying and spiraling undersea, except the narrator, clutching his life-saving coffin, who seemed only to have lived to tell the tale. This had truth’s consolation. Life had already instructed that it was not going to be so sweet or legible as my Nibblers would have it (they wouldn’t hold my attention much longer). At this moment, something in Melville’s dark light steeled me.
“We can’t trust you,” I said. I pinched the broadsheet and lifted it away.
He looked down. “I know.”
With a nod, I dismissed Sally to start in on the copy, then turned back to Delmore and Denise.
“Delmore: tape him. We’re mounting a reverse strike.”
Graham smiled crookedly. After all these years, it seemed that he, too, remembered Mr. Susco’s lesson.
Mr. Susco had described the reverse strike as a little-used technique in labor-management struggles. In a regular strike, the workers walk out and refuse to work. In a reverse strike, the workers lock out management and keep the place running, including by doing management’s jobs. On the rare occasions that workers have tried it, they did well enough on their own. For a lot of different things, it turns out, people can manage themselves.
“Reverse strikes” was part of a highly disorganized grab-bag unit on democratic forms. It’s where he teased out anthropological leads on places like Tlaxcalla (a possible sort-of Athens of ancient Mexico, before the Spanish toppled it). He told us, too, of the Bari Corporation, a coop that made workers partners, fixed salary ratios, and rotated jobs and salaries. So everyone had a chance to pull the ropes. “It might not work for every company,” Mr. Susco acknowledged, regarding the Bari Corporation’s specific model. “But democracy isn’t a plan. It’s a way.”
The duct tape squawked as Delmore wrapped it twice around Graham’s head, pinning his hair curtains down and sealing his mouth. He poked a breathing hole (third-degree murder wasn’t the object). As Denise held him down, Delmore taped his legs to the chair while Sally wrapped the torso.
“Mmm,” Graham said.
“What,” I said.
I put a pen in his free hand. He jotted “Athena” and an e-mail address and number. I pulled down the tape.
“Call her. Can you please just call her. She’s my main conduit to Phil—his granddaughter! And, well, I can’t prove it, but she’s one of the good guys, you see? She might be able to help you—us. Or at least imprison me safely, if that’s what you need her to do. Please, you can’t just leave me here all al—”
blub blub blub blub
I sealed him back up and streaked another layer over that to retighten things (and punctured a new blow-hole), then we dragged him to the break room, where we added some rope to cinch up his portly middle, and I mulled his request to call this Athena. As I took one last look at him, my workmanlike focus on securing his restraints shifted to disdain at him for what brought us to this.
“What good are you? You can’t even stand up to some old suit.”
By now it was four, and the other Bobcats and Sharon were filtering in.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s write.”
Spring Break: South Beach and the Georgia Information Center in Port Wentworth, off I-95S
Miami was brief and is quickly disposed of (no conflict, no story). Sally Boone met us at Puerto Sagua Restaurant in South Beach. I ordered a Cuban coffee with my Cuban sandwich—again breaking for the meat option—and she chuckled. “That’s for after,” she said, so I cancelled the coffee. Lena ordered three appetizers for her meal (“uh, fried yuca, fried . . . squid, and your fried pork chunks!”), and Sally filled us in on her life.
She has gone into science as we’d hoped, on a path more practical than her Science Corner scribblings may have suggested. She finished UCF in three years (marine bio) and is an apprentice of sorts to a rogue ecologist who goes by Dr. Dave. Each Sunday, Sally and Dr. Dave paddle a tricked-out canoe-lab through miles of gators and toxic-algae blooms to record the damage that the state and huge corporate farms are causing to a major lake by back-pumping foul water into it. Then they zip-file their data to the J.D.s at Earthlaw Tallahassee, who are suing to slap a permit on those pumps and stop them. Dr. Dave is well over six feet tall and sports a Civil War beard and granny glasses, and when the time comes for depos or court, he appears in jeans and a grubby V-neck T-shirt. The stance disarms Florida juries (he’d make a great spy in the League of Dixie) and accounts for untold millions in recovered damages. During the week, Sally stores the boat behind a bungalow off Calle Ocho that she splits with four traveling AME choristers. In her free time, she cooks, goes clubbing with the choristers, and in-line skates. A rich life, for a girl of twenty-three!
“You make me feel like a kid, going to school still.”
“Living in a dorm,” Lena said.
“Yes.”
“Eating in cafeterias.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Plunking your tray on a conveyor belt that whisks it away for someone else to wash.”
I smacked her hand.
We had the coffees, pre-sweetened espresso, at the end as preferred. I slurped mine down in seconds (another faux pas), then paid up while Sally was in the bathroom. Back on the street, we bought a loaf of Portuguese sweet bread from a Venezuelan-Portuguese bakery-cart and took turns ripping off hunks and stuffing them in our faces as we strolled out to South Beach. Climate change has thoroughly canalized some blocks à la Pennacook as the region’s longstanding quarrel between water and land grows ever more animated, threatening to render pumps of any sort (permitted or not) either vitally important or hopelessly quaint. The sloshing ankle-water and Sally Boone’s gait made the Beat seem close. Sally’s thoughts had also turned back.
“It’s a bummer Graham died.”
“What?” I halted.
Where are you, I texted.
Hanging with Jim. Golf-club and windmill emojis.
“He’s not dead. He’s playing mini-golf.”
“Close enough. It seemed like he’d die. Those Penny wackadoodles seem so far away now. I thought you of all people would have moved beyond that.”
“I did, too.”
I wondered if this was common, that the one who was most eager to flee later looked back with the greatest ache at the launchpad, remaking it as stories, while others would rather leave it behind in an untroubled and definitive way.
If that was Sally’s disposition, I’d say she underestimated the past. I think of all my old Beat colleagues now, how good they’ve turned out. Delmore back there compounding with his mortar and pestle. Denise, beautifying Charleston with her fashion sense while campaigning for equal rights. And now Sally with her environmental work. The strange mixture of practicality and idealism had to come from somewhere. One source, no doubt, was the fiery trial of our anti-dome campaign, coupled with some shared Penny grit. But—this may surprise you, as it does me as I write it—I ascribe a fair portion to that unlikely demi-hero Graham, lax partisan of misfits and dreamers, who never underplayed our mission or even missed a deadline. His moral hemorrhage for Phil Marconi might have negated it all. We were right not to trust him, and a bad deed can do that to a legacy, if not a whole life (wreck it). But it doesn’t always and in Graham’s case didn’t. A hypocrite’s ideals are still ideals, contagious for the young.
We set out our towels.
“Topless is okay,” Sally said, unhooking.
“I have nothing,” I said. (I once shrieked the exact sentence at my mother, as if she’d picked my flat chest.)
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I like your nothing,” Lena said.
I crossed my arms.
They removed their tops and did a little cheering dance, and we all splashed in. The sea was bath-like, warmer than the Cape in high summer. Once Sally realized what my girlfriend thought water was for, she gave her a wide berth. I interviewed Sally as we bobbed.
I had a minor revelation during our return trip north, a long drive, with one short interruption, from Miami to Lumberton, N.C., then all the way back to Worcester the next day, for the final sprint to my thesis deadline, followed by Senior Week and Commencement. We took turns on those last legs, and my goodness it’s depressing to watch the seasons run in reverse very quickly like that, as they do in late March.
To explain the minor revelation requires me to clear up one more screening fiction. My hirsuteness, dear reader, was French, not Italian. My father was a Larcher, not a Fardy or “Fardello” (that ridiculous name I made up while maligning our mustachioed Ellis Island staffers). The Larchers of Massachusetts are somewhat famous in an academic corner. Suicide among us is prolific, on a Hemingway scale. Or as Graham might point out, on the scale of the Hoopers, the family of Clover Adams, whose potassium cyanide made Henry a widower, igniting his fertile “posthumous life,” not long before her mother and brother killed themselves, too. In my own family, Dad’s mother did it, as did her father, and his sister and two uncles. You can google it because a Brandeis professor researched the family, among other similar ones, in an effort to trace the genes at work in this acute suicidal tendency (she didn’t find them).
I’ve feared this history. I ascribe it to some spandrel mutant strain that broke out from the Jura vineyards of my Euro-peasant ancestors. The Larchers must have noted it in their own way as they plucked, uncharmed, their Gouet Blanc down the dew-glistening alleys, or gathered grim-mouthed about the banqueting table for a grand feast. You can see their Flemish counterparts in Bruegel (who would’ve had a field day with Pennies). This fear—my wish to protect myself, not my poor Larcher father—is why I wrote I’m half Italian and switched my last name A.D.D. to Zhou. Now the Chinese just sounds better (the single-syllabic sharpness) and ties me to my living mom.
The minor revelation was this: I say I’ve feared it, but I don’t anymore. It’s only now that I’m pinning this down, but I first felt it rising, half-expressed, like a mild analgesic, on our trip back north.
We’d made good progress but after a reversal of fortune we stopped for a break at Georgia’s temple-like welcome center (soaring two-storied atrium, parking for 160, seventy flushing fixtures) in the town of Port Wentworth. A minor confusion landed us there, back on I-95 South. Lena had made a wrong turn at the last pit stop, and we found ourselves in reverse, heading back out of South Carolina and into Georgia again. Then I had to go and asked her to pull into the Georgia Welcome Center. Then once we got there, I decided we’d linger: “I want to write.”
A light rain sent us racing for a pavilion, where Lena put her head down and I worked on the climax of my college thesis (which unconvincingly valorized me, while casting all others as fiends or adoring friends). She began to softly weep. I don’t know if it was her driving mistake that had gotten to her or something even less this time. The light rain. My bossy insistence. The essential if unimportant soullessness, given the transiency of our moments in them, of even the best rest areas. Or nothing at all. When I saw that, I thought again, this is not working, we’ll have to break up.
“You want to just go?”
“No, you write.”
“Okay, but I’m driving.”
“Fine.”
“I can’t,” I said, meaning I couldn’t write
As a child, I had seen it up close with Dad. Now I was seeing it, and not for the first time, in Lena, and right at that moment its surpassing strangeness struck me. Whatever that is, I don’t have it, I thought and noted in my diary. Then I forgot it, and only stumbled on it now and remembered that it’s true.
Town Meeting
We moored the Empress Josephine to a stilted shanty, and Delmore passed an armload of the bundles to Denise, who handed them to Sally, who forked them over to me. Sharon dropped to all fours and a kind of shelf popped open on her back and I stacked them in high and then took my share from Sally. Then we humans started heaving our way up the hill while Sharon sprinted like a leopard to the top and waited.
“I bet that has a military use,” Delmore mused. “That pounce?”
“Shut up and move,” I said. “This isn’t the time for chit-chat.”
Delmore snorted. I’d lost some cachet by ordering charge on a pump blade.
When we finally reached Sharon, we paused to catch our breath.
“I hope they’ll recognize it,” I confided to Sally. Both of us were bent over, panting beside our stacks. “I mean, as ‘the paper.’ ”
“You did good,” Sally said.
Sharon cooed. “Cool beans, Wendy: congrats!”
I found her cute but when she said something off like this I was reminded that she was not alive and her words were as mindless as the weather.
Penny canal-craft tooted along and air-horned the canal that ringed Town Hall. Hundreds of clammy Pennies had packed into Town Hall (AC, telecast), but many more had gathered on the hillside and the grassy patch at the bottom, forming a great crowd. The town had set up a long speaker’s platform with a podium on the grassy patch and a long wire snaked through the crowd to where a mic had been planted for public comment.
The crowd was oddly festive. Broderick Bateman, Pennacook’s leading eighties cover band, played a late-eighties-Aerosmith medley that was like one bad song that went on forever. After that, the drummer riffed on the beat from “Straight Outta Compton” (1988) and for a moment it seemed a new energy had been infused. But they set that aside for an early hit from Poison.
Vendors from competing Chinese restaurants, shouldering bamboo carrying poles (“milkmaid’s yolks,” in oldspeak), traipsed up and down the aisles, selling pu pu platter elements at numbing prices (eight bucks for a baby’s fist of boneless spare-ribs). Gravy Poole hawked wieners he had heated over his coal-fired jalopy. He otherwise surprised me by being totally detached. (I think he had turned against Phil’s plans because they offered no rebates.)
They even had a screen up for the crowd to see the speaker and sundry entertainment. At the moment, it featured One Crazy Summer (1986), a lesser Cusack marred by excessive eighties zaniness. Ominously, someone had fed perhaps a dozen giant beach domes (beach balls, but shaped like domes) to the crowd, which delightedly smacked and poked them.
The other Bobcats came by balance bike, private boat, and foot. Even lofty Niles Corbyn, who was always kissing up to Graham and hadn’t written diddley-squat for the special edition but just sat around looking amused, had descended from his mid-teens to join us. Brent Tanner, the mean Bobcat, didn’t show. (I think he had quit.) When a critical mass had gathered by the flagpole, I broke them into groups.
“There, there, there, and there,” I pointed, sending the Bobcats out to distribute the special-edition paper to the factions. “Go for solids. Anything but purple.”
The Penny factions had agreed to wear blank, color-coded T-shirts. The TBNers had embraced this with gusto and chose purple. As a kind of HQ, they had set up a stall—a yellow-and-white-striped tent—on the hill. Its sides bulged, and every minute or so a little purple-T-shirted blob, bearing a machine gun or leashed boar (or both), slipped from the tent flaps. I could tell from their weaponry and pulsating-fist salutes that these men were MGOPers. Just outside the tent, a long line of those homburg-hatted henchmen awaited. They’d peel off in pairs to escort the emerging MGOP blobs into the crowd. Once in the crowd (according to my anonymous source), the little three-person thug-cells sought out Pennies whom they’d tagged as potential dissenters and stomped on their toes and elbowed them to drive them off.
The other side was in total disarray. In Archie’s absence, they didn’t know what they stood for, or if they were one faction, two, or three. So they hadn’t even picked team colors.
We streamed into the crowd with our papers. Sharon rolled alongside me on her feet-wheels, scaring little kids and xenophobic parents (“Momyyy: what’s that?” “Mind your chicken, Cheryl. We don’t need more trouble from no Greeks”).
A man pointed. “Hey, look: balloon rides.”
A small hot-air balloon was tied to a stake behind Town Hall. “$800 a pop!” the banner read.
For a long time after we abandoned him, Graham was content to soak in self-pity. Why had this happened to him? What had he ever done that was so bad, except being a fool who got tricked? He knew there was more to it. He had betrayed the mission and—worse—set a bad example. It wasn’t just the shady deal with Phil. It was the relentless dissipation, which he’d made little effort to conceal and even theatrically presented: nodding off drunk on the smelly yellow couch during office-hours while the kids carried his water; snapping at those who challenged him, including—God help him—the new kid (me), the lonely stranger whom you were always supposed to welcome.
