Termination Man: a novel (26 page)

Shawn gave me a crooked, dismissive smile.
Run along, now
, his smile seemed to say.

But I wasn't going to run along. I’d seen men try too hard to press their cases with women before. It happens in all sorts of environments—from factories to the upscale bars and restaurants where I often conducted business with my corporate clients. Some men simply can’t take no for an answer.

And I’d never been even remotely tempted to intervene. The male ego is as fragile as it is self-assertive. The average pushy man can be devastated by a subtle and well-timed insult, or a rolling of female eyes. With these tools at their disposal, most women are more than capable of taking care of themselves.

But this was something entirely different, a situation that made my skin crawl. This was a thirty-something man practically forcing himself on a timid teenager.

The girl looked positively terrified. She shrank back against the wall, literally too afraid to move.

Shawn leaned within an inch of the girl’s face.

“I said—” Shawn began.

I cut him off. “
I
said you should leave her alone.” I took a few steps closer. The girl was watching me. Shawn was watching me.

Shawn sighed. “Why don’t you just fuck off, Walker?”

And then something inside me snapped. There were multiple factors behind the anger that exploded within me at that moment. First there was the enormity of the situation itself: I couldn't believe that Shawn Myers was sexually bullying this teenaged girl. Then there was Shawn’s attitude—his obvious assumption that the rules of civil conduct did not apply to him.

And then there was the fact that Shawn had used my real last name,
Walker
. This could potentially blow my cover if the wrong person overheard it.

In a single fluid motion, I seized Shawn by the tie and collar and whirled him around. Then I slammed him against the adjacent wall. His body made a gratifying sound when it struck the painted concrete.

I could smell the alcohol on Shawn’s breath. I knew what had happened: He had been viewing porn and furtively drinking at his desk, then he had decided to see if he could make one of his online fantasies come true with this teenaged girl.

The girl herself was shocked. She dropped her mop, and the handle clattered to the floor. She backed away from Shawn and me.

Shawn was momentarily incapacitated. I had knocked the wind out of him. But he was a big man and I had seriously hurt his pride. Within a few seconds he would regain his composure and his strength. Then he would demand my full attention.

I didn't want this young girl to witness what might come next: An all-out fistfight between two adult men.

“You might want to take a walk,” I told her, still holding Shawn against the wall.

She walked away, but not before she turned back to me and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

I didn’t have time to tell her that she was welcome. I had done what I had to do, done what I believed to be right.
But
why
had I done it?

Even as I grabbed Shawn by the collar and pressed him against the wall, I had reason to question my own motives. For the first time since founding Craig Walker Consulting, I had been feeling uneasy about my role in the process of maintaining corporate order. Something about the work I had been doing for TP Automotive made me feel uncomfortable. This uneasiness had begun with the firing of Kevin Lang; and it had been made worse by my knowledge of what awaited Alan Ferguson and Lucy Browning in the coming days.

Was this little gesture of chivalry nothing more than an attempt to redeem myself
in my own eyes? To convince my
self that Craig Walker was still a “good guy”?—The same working-class boy from Dayton who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps?

No time for subtle thoughts like that now.

When he had hit the wall, Shawn had been stunned by my unexpected assault. Now his shock was giving way to the inevitable rage. He tried to push me backward, and I shoved right back at him, slamming him up against the wall again.

Shawn was intoxicated and I had his tie and collar in my hands. He must have realized that the physical advantage was mine—at least for now.

“You’re finished here, Walker,” he said, gasping for breath. “Is that how you usually treat the hand that feeds you?”

“You aren’t feeding me anything, chump,” I said. “I was hired by your father and Beth Fisk.”

“And wait until they find out that you’ve physically assaulted a member of the TP Automotive management team.” 

Shawn knew how important the TP Automotive account was to me. He knew my vulnerable spot.

But I also knew his. I recalled my earlier conversation with Kurt, how the two of us had talked in Cleveland right after we fired Kevin Lang. Kurt had mentioned some “trouble” that Shawn had gotten himself into during his college years. Based on what I had just witnessed, this must have been more than a simple youthful indiscretion. Shawn had done something bad while at OSU; and it had likely involved women.

“Go ahead and tell them,” I said. “And I’ll tell Daddy and Beth that you’ve been sexually harassing a girl young enough to be your daughter.”

“She’s not—”

“Yeah, Shawn, she’s young enough to be your daughter. Why don’t you think about that while you decide what you’re going to do?”

I released him—but not before shoving him up against the wall one final time. For a second I believed that he was going to take a swing at me. Then he thought better of it. Shawn Myers straightened his tie and did his best to assume the posture that one would take in a corporate boardroom meeting. His anger and wounded pride wouldn't let him, though. He leaned close to me. Our noses were only inches apart.

“
If I wasn't drunk now—
”

“Then you’d do what? You’re a grown man who picks on little girls.” I was surprised that Shawn would make such an admission. But on the other hand, what was a little on-the-job drinking, compared to the behavior I had just observed?

“You don’t know jack shit,” Shawn resumed.

“I know what I saw.”

But Shawn didn’t want to talk about what I had seen. I would have expected as much. Instead he resorted to the sort of threats that most men have left behind by the time they reach adulthood.

“I ought to kick your ass.”

“You want to take a swing at me?” I asked. “I’m right here.”

And in that instant, I really did want Shawn Myers to throw a punch at me. This was irrational, of course. But something about Shawn Myers—and everything he stood for—made me want to thrash him to a bloody pulp.

A long time would pass before I would realize that part of my hatred could be traced to self-loathing. I might not sexually harass teenaged girls; but I made my living as the tool of privileged men and women who treated publicly owned corporations as their private fiefdoms. These were men and women who would throw Alan, Lucy, and Kevin Lang out on the street in the name of maintaining organizational harmony, while they simultaneously tolerated a Shawn Myers in their midst.

The truth is all about interpretation—and who is involved…

I took a step backward. Shawn wasn't going to take a swing at me, and I wasn't going to take a swing at him. It was time for this standoff to end.

Shawn stepped around me and walked back toward his desk.

“This isn’t over,” he finally said. “This isn’t over by a long shot.”

And about that much, Shawn Myers was right. 

I left the UP&S plant full of rage. I felt like I often had back in high school, when my team had lost an important game, and it was too late to take out my aggressions on the opposing team. When a healthy young man is filled with rage, that excess energy tends to channel itself one of several predictable
directions
.

My first option was to pummel Shawn Myers until he fell unconscious; that wasn't really an option. Failing that, I would have liked to hit the weights; but there was no fitness room in my hotel.

What I decided upon, therefore, was a third but by no means inferior option. I wanted to feel Claire’s fingernails digging into the skin of my chest and back. I wanted to feel her bite my shoulder hard enough to draw blood, as she sometimes did in the throes of passion. I wanted to let her to vent her unquenchable hunger and fury against my own.

I called her and told her that I wanted to visit her in her room. She was staying in one of those extended-stay motels, under an assumed name, of course. We had both rented rooms some twenty miles from the UP&S plant, and in opposite directions. I was staying on the north side of Columbus. Claire was staying south of the city, just beyond the I-270 beltway loop. As I drove toward Claire’s hotel, I cracked the window, even though the December air was frigid. I tuned the radio to a hard rock station and cranked up the volume.

I was still full of hostile energy when I arrived in the parking lot of Claire’s motel. She had rented a first-floor room, so her door opened directly onto the parking lot. I rapped twice on the door.

She greeted me in a pair of gym shorts and a sleeveless blouse that was completely inappropriate for the first week of December in Ohio. I kissed her in the doorway, pushing her up against the frame of the open door. The early winter sun had set hours ago, and the parking lot was dimly lit; but anyone could have seen us, silhouetted as we were by the light in her room.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” she asked, barely breaking the kiss. She began to unbutton my shirt. I could feel the cold air rush against my skin. “Something’s up with you,” she said.

She could always read me, because we were so much alike—as much as I hated to admit it.

“Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not a real employee at UP&S.”

“Well,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t think that either one of us is cut out for the typical corporate gig.”

As she took my hand and guided me inside her room, I took a moment to reflect on what she had just said: Although I had become an expert in the fields of management science and organizational strategy, I would not last a day as an Alan Ferguson or a Lucy Browning. There was no way that I could nod my head politely and take orders from a Shawn Myers—or a Kurt Myers, for that matter. Ditto for Bernie Chapman and Beth Fisk. I dealt with corporate managers as an outsider, always on an ad hoc basis, secure in the knowledge that while they might be renting me, they had not purchased me. There is a difference between these two states.

Claire closed the door behind us and killed the lights. We were both undressed in a matter of seconds. I pulled her clothes off with what was left of that rage from the confrontation with Shawn; and she responded in kind.

Afterward, as we lay together on the queen-sized motel bed, our bodies pleasantly sheened with sweat, I happened to glance over at her handbag. Her $400 Coach purse was propped on the nightstand, the kind that hotels always stock with local phone directories and copies of the New Testament. (
I suspected that Claire would not have much use for either of these.
)

I happened to notice the grip of a pistol protruding from her open purse. I had known that Claire always carried a gun with her. Another remnant from her irregular, disjointed youth. But it was a subject that we had never really talked about before.

“I didn’t notice any suspicious characters lurking around the parking lot,” I said, gesturing toward the purse. “But I see that you’re prepared in the event of a break-in.”

“You know that I always carry a gun with me,” she said. She leaned across me and removed the pistol from her purse. A snub-nosed revolver. “It’s a .38 special,” she said, cradling the gun in her hands.

“Just like the old rock band,” I observed, in reference to a Southern rock band that had been popular in the 1980s.

“Yeah, just like the rock band. Do you want to hold it?”

“No thanks.”

Claire leaned across me again and put the gun back into her purse.

“I’ve been carrying that gun since I was around twenty,” she said. I hadn’t asked for an explanation; but I didn’t interrupt her. Claire rarely opened up about her past, or her feelings.

“I think you already know that I went through a rough patch. Well, my entire childhood was a rough patch.”

“Yeah, that’s what you’ve told me. In so many words.”

“I got good grades in high school,” she said. “But growing up in this little blue-collar town, thirty miles west of Detroit…Well, I’d always planned on going to college. But those plans got derailed.”

“By a guy,” I interjected. Needless to say. What else would it have been but a guy?

“That’s right. His name was Jamie Watkins. And he was one of the big football jocks in our graduating class in high school. He also sold drugs.”

Having grown up in a lower middle-class, blue-collar setting myself, I didn’t necessarily see the contradiction here. Strictly speaking, athletes should stay away from drinking, drugs—or anything else that could harm their bodies or get them into trouble. But that injunction is most strictly observed in the wealthy suburbs, where overly attentive parents hover over their budding progeny, writing checks for expensive prep schools and personal trainers.