Termination Man: a novel (65 page)

Donna, however, did want to see me—wanted to see me very much, in fact. We had remained together, even after that day in which three men were fatally wounded in her home.

It was to Donna’s house in New Hastings that I drove after my meeting with Kevin Lang. She greeted me at the front door with a discreet embrace: It turned out that Alyssa had a gentleman caller of her own
that day
.

The boy’s name was Noah and from what I gathered, he was shaping up to be Alyssa’s first real boyfriend. He was dark-haired and gangly, almost as tall as me. The young man didn't know quite how to act around his girlfriend’s mother and her apparent boyfriend. I could tell that Noah wanted to put his arm around Alyssa; but that level of daring was beyond him as yet. I figured that he might do so later, however, when the two of them were alone. The pair chatted politely with us for a while, then excused themselves for a date at the New Hastings Bowl, eager to be free of the stodgy adults, I imagined.

To my surprise, both Donna and Alyssa had decided that they would remain in their home. Their insurance paid for them to stay in a motel room for a week while a crime scene cleaning company removed every trace of the bloodshed that had occurred within these walls.

“This is our house,” Donna said. “To run would be—well, that would be letting the bad guys win. You know?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But aren’t you afraid of—”

She gave me a nervous, unconvincing laugh. “Of ghosts?”

“For lack of better word,” I said. “I don’t know, some people wouldn't feel comfortable staying in a place where—” I looked over to the spot where Alan had been shot. There was no sign of the doomed corporate employee who had died while helping the man who had betrayed him. It was as if Alan had never entered the home to begin with.

“Your friend Alan,” Donna said. “I don't think he would come back as a ghost—I mean if that were possible. Not based on what you’ve told me about him.”

“No, that’s true,” I said. I wasn’t so sure about Shawn. But I wasn't going to verbalize this thought in front of Donna. If she wanted to stay in her house, then that was her business.

“What about you, Craig? I know that all of this has been on your mind. Have you reached any conclusions?”

During the previous weeks, Donna and I had rarely discussed my clandestine identity as the Termination Man. But a few days ago, the time had finally arrived for us to talk about it.

“We failed them,” I said. “That’s all I can really tell you, at least right now.”

“Do you mean to say that
you
failed them—or that TP Automotive’s management team failed them? It’s one or the other, Craig. You can’t have it both ways.”

I understood what she was getting at. She wanted me to disconnect my work from the self-serving schemes of men like Kurt Myers and Shawn Myers. But that wasn't possible.

“We both did,” I said. “For all these years I told myself that I was making American companies more competitive—weeding out the bad apples. And who knows—in some cases, I probably was. But I failed to understand that sometimes the men and women who are running these large companies are the very ones who are ruining them.”

“What are you getting at, Craig?”

You’ve heard these stories in the news—about the CEO who makes ten million a year. Tell me: Do you think that a man who makes ten million a year likes to be questioned? Do you think that the men and women around him will question him? A corporate manager is subject to relatively few checks and balances. It's the cult of the man on horseback. There is no such thing as democracy inside those corporate halls.”

“Do you think that’s ever going to change?” she asked.

“No,” I said—because it
wouldn’t
ever change.

I wouldn't have had a problem with that if those managers were the same visionaries who had started those companies. Look at all of the Fortune 500 firms out there: Procter & Gamble, GM, IBM, you name the organization. They are no longer managed by the men who built them, or even by the sons and daughters of the men who built them. They’re run by professional managers—self-serving political players who have taken them over.

“So I should get out of all this,” I said. “I should get out of this and go become a teacher or a priest or an airplane pilot.”

“Don’t become a priest,” she said, smiling gently and squeezing my hand. “That would be a bummer for me.”

“No, I won’t pick that one. But I see now that corporate consulting is the wrong place for me to be—for anyone to be. That entire world is corrupt. TP Automotive, the big automakers, all of them.”

Donna didn’t respond.  Her silence eventually prompted me to ask: “What?”

“Aren’t those the same big companies that build the cars we drive, and that create all of the other things we use?” She swept her arm in a wide arc, indicating her entire house. “Those are the same companies that paid for this house, aren’t they? I mean all the work that
my
company does. If they didn't exist, my little cleaning company wouldn't exist.”

“I didn’t realize that you were an aspiring economics professor,” I said. Donna was right, though. In my desire to distance myself from the evils that I had been a part of, I had overcompensated, erring in the opposite direction.

“What I’m saying, Craig, is that if you leave, if you take away everything that you know, it’s kind of a cop-out. I mean what about…” her voice trailed off. We both sensed that she had grasped an important idea, but she couldn't quite make it crystallize.

“What about those people out on the plant floor—the ones who don’t have access to boardroom influence or MBAs? Is that what you’re asking?”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

What Donna had said made a lot of sense. She proved that common sense, at least, isn’t limited to people who have MBAs. But how was I going to apply this new realization I had? That was the difficult question.

I drove home to Dayton to see my family. By now they had heard about the events in New Hastings, of course.

In the wake of the murders and the scandal, I hadn’t wanted to face my father. I couldn't escape that lingering feeling that despite my material success, I had managed to betray every value that he stood for as a member of the working class. My father had for so many years been a simple man; he had labored honestly and used his hands to make a living. Would he now spurn the son who had become a manipulator and a charlatan?

The two of us were seated on the front porch of my parents’ decaying house—him with his oxygen tank and me with a glass of my mother’s lemonade. It was uncharacteristically warm for early April, a sunny day that hinted of the shirtsleeve weather that was soon to come.

I told my father everything—all about Alan, Lucy, Claire, Shawn, Kurt, and everyone else. Then I sat quietly and waited for his judgment.

“I think I understand everything you’ve told me,” he said. “Now let me tell you a story, son. You know that I belonged to a union, but here’s something you don’t know. In 1985 some employees started a union decertification drive. They wanted to throw the union out. They should have known better—should have known that a majority of the plant’s employees would be against it. But they persisted, and went through the process of gaining the necessary signatures, so the matter would be put to a vote.

“One of those men was especially vocal. His name was Jake. Jake became known as the face of the anti-union drive, and that turned a lot of people against him. There were a lot of us who didn't want to lose the union, didn't want to take our chances alone. We believed that management would roll over us if there wasn't a union.

“Anyway, one day I saw one of my friends slash Jake’s tires in the parking lot. He didn't even try to be discreet. There was a large group of people standing around him, cheering and egging him on. He just pulled a box cutter out of his pocket, then squatted down and slashed every one of Jake’s tires, like it was the most natural thing to do.”

“And what did you do?” I asked.

“That’s the point, son. I didn't do
anything
. I knew that it was wrong—what they were all doing—but I never said a word. I figured that if Jake wanted to stand against the union, then he got what was coming to him. He’d made his choice.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. I sensed that there was more to this story. My father finally gathered his thoughts and went on, his voice subdued.

“Then one day, this fella—Jake, the one who hated the union so badly—a bunch of other employees were giving him a hard time. There were some harsh words exchanged, and some physical threats, too. By now Jake was the black sheep of the entire factory. So Jake walks up to me in the company cafeteria, because the two of us had sometimes talked before; and I guess he thought that I might be sympathetic to what he was trying to do. Jake said,
‘How you doin’ Walker? Been a long time since we talked, hadn’t it?’
And I could see that Jake was so upset about what was going on that he wanted to cry. And do you know what I did, Craig?”

“No,” I said, though I feared that I did, more or less.

“I turned away. I didn't want to be known as the one who befriended Jake. I didn't want to take his heat. Like I said, I figured that Jake had made his own choices.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“The union decertification drive failed. There was a vote, and the result was that the union stayed.”

“What about Jake?”

My father nodded. I could sense that what he was about to tell me would be difficult for him; but both of us wanted him to say it. Somehow we both instinctively knew that the telling of this final part of the tale was necessary.

“Jake quit within a few weeks. His life at work had become a living hell. Even with the decertification vote over and the union still in place, everyone hated him—called him a traitor and much worse. A few years after that, I heard that Jake had killed himself. Killed himself with a pistol just like this Lucy did. And since then, I’ve always wondered: Would things have turned out differently for Jake if I’d simply acknowledged him that day in the company cafeteria—if I’d had the courage to stand against the crowd?”

“I don’t know what to say,” I said, taken aback by the gravity of my father’s revelation. I had not known—and would never have suspected—that demons such as these lingered in my father’s conscience.

“There is nothing that can be said, not now, that Jake is long dead. Nothing that can bring him back. It’s true to say that I should have stood up for Jake, that day in the cafeteria and many times before. It’s also true to say that Jake knew what he was getting into when he decided to stand against everyone else and fight the union.

“From what you’ve told me, Craig, you didn't kill any of those people. You didn't tell any of them to do what they did. If I understand what you’re telling me, you tried to stop them before it was too late. That was more than I did.”

My father turned around in his chair and looked at me, and a moment of wordless understanding passed between us. This was a secret part of himself that he would never have revealed to me if not for the tragic events that had occurred in New Hastings—and my shameful part in them. He turned away from me, and looked back at the street. I knew that we would say no more about the man named Jake and his failed union decertification drive—not today, nor at any point in the future. I also knew what it had cost my father to lay bare this private shame of his. This unnecessary death, and the unanswered request for kindness that preceded it, likely still haunted the uneasy sleep of an old man who was slowly dying from emphysema.

After dinner, I sought out Laurie in her bedroom. In the light from the lamp beside her bed, I could see the shadowy lines of age creeping in around the sharp angles of her face. She knew what I wanted to talk about; and it was she who broached the subject.

“I followed it all in the papers,” she said. “For all those weeks. But now it’s dying down,” Laurie said. “They are already moving on to other things.”

Laurie was no doubt thinking about the fifteen minutes of fame that her shooting had brought her all those years ago, how the city of Dayton and its media outlets had rallied around her cause for one brief summer. She was right: The press had already milked the events in New Hastings for most of what they were worth. As a story, it didn’t have much more to give.

My name had mostly stayed out of the papers and news reports. I was mentioned once in an article in the
Detroit Free Press
, and another time in the
Dayton Daily News
, but only in passing. From the media’s perspective, I was a peripheral player, outside the real drama that had taken place.
The journalists were fascinated with the sensational aspects of the case: They wanted to write and expound about the beautiful woman who had become a killer. They were also interested in her lover, the corporate manager who had attempted to molest an unnamed fifteen-year-old girl, and then arranged the failed murder attempt of her and her mother. That was the story. Craig Walker Consulting, and the real nature of its work, were too mundane as topics for the general readership. The journalistic circles of the Midwest weren’t interested in unraveling and expatiating upon these matters. Nearly every large company employed management consultants, after all. Management consultants weren’t news.