The Ax (3 page)

The Windhull’s.

Cabett.

Marsdon.

The Elyot Family.

William Way does T at Churchwarden Lane, as the map shows. I turn left. The mailboxes are all on the left side of the road, and the first one I see is numbered 1117. The next three have names instead of numbers, and then there’s 1112, so I know I’m moving in the right direction.

I’m also coming closer to the town. The road is mostly downhill now, the houses becoming less grand, the indicators now more middle class than upper middle. More appropriate for Herbert and me, after all. What neither of us wants to lose, because it’s all we’ve got.

The nine hundreds, and at last the eight hundreds, and there’s 835, identified only by number, HCE apparently being the modest sort, who doesn’t flaunt his name at the brim of his property. The mailboxes are still all on the left, but Everly’s house is surely that one on the right, with an arbor vitae hedge along the verge of the road, a blacktop driveway, a neat lawn with two graceful trees on it, and a modest white clapboard house surrounded by low evergreen plantings and set well back; probably late-nineteenth century, with the attached two-car garage and the enclosed wraparound porch added later.

A red Jeep is behind me. I continue on, not too fast, not too slow, and about a quarter mile farther down the road I see the mailman coming up. Mail woman, actually, in a small white station wagon plastered with US MAIL decals. She sits in the middle of the front seat, so she can steer and drive with left hand and foot, and still lean over to reach out the right side window to the mailboxes along her route.

These days, I am almost always home when the mail is delivered, because these days I have a more than casual interest in the possibility of good news. Had there been good news in my mailbox last month or last week or even yesterday, I wouldn’t be here now, on Church-warden Lane, in pursuit of Herbert Coleman Everly.

Isn’t he likely to be at home as well, watching out the front window, waiting for the mail? Not good news today, I’m afraid. Bad news today.

The reason I’ve given this full overnight trip to the Everly project is because I had no idea how long it would take me to find and identify him, what opportunities I might have to get at him, how much time would be spent tracking him, waiting for him, pursuing him, before the chance of action would present itself. But now, it seems to me, the likelihood is very good that I’ll be able to deal with Everly almost at once.

That’s good. The waiting, the tension, the second thoughts; I hadn’t been looking forward to all that.

I turn in at a driveway to let the Jeep go by, then back out onto the road and head uphill once more, back the way I’d come. I pass the mailperson, and continue on. I pass 835, and continue on. I come to an intersection and turn right, and then make a U-turn, and come back to the Stop sign at Churchwarden. There I open my road atlas, lean it against the steering wheel, and consult it while watching for the appearance of the mailperson’s white station wagon. There is almost no traffic on Churchwarden, and none on this side road.

The dirty white car; coming this way, with stops and starts. I close the road atlas and put it on the seat behind me, then make the left turn onto Churchwarden.

My heart is pounding. I feel rattled, as though all my nerves are unstrung. Simple movements like acceleration, braking, small adjustments of the steering wheel, are suddenly very hard to do. I keep overcompensating, I can’t fine-tune my movements.

Ahead, a man crosses the road from right to left.

I’m panting, like a dog. The other symptoms I don’t object to, I half expect them, but to pant? I’m disgusting myself. Animal behavior…

The man reaches the mailbox marked 835. I tap the brakes. There’s no traffic visible, either ahead or behind. I depress the button, and my driver’s side window silently rolls down. I angle across the empty road, hearing the crunch of tire on roadway now that the window is open, feeling the cool spring air on my cheek and temple and hollowly inside my ear.

The man has withdrawn letters, bills, catalogues, magazines; the usual handful. As he’s closing the front lid of the mailbox, he becomes aware of my approach and turns, eyebrows lifted in query.

I know him to be forty-nine years old, but to me he looks older. These past two years of unemployment, perhaps, have taken their toll. His mustache, too bushy for my taste, is pepper and salt with too much salt. His skin is pale and drab, without highlights, though he has a high forehead that should reflect the sky. His hair is black, receding, thin, straight, limp, gray at the sides. He wears glasses with dark rims—tortoise?—that look too large for his face. Or maybe his face is too small for the glasses. He wears one of his office shirts, a blue and white stripe, under a gray cardigan with the buttons open. His khaki pants are baggy, with grass stains, so he’s perhaps a gardener, or helps his wife around the place, now that he has so much free time. The hands holding his mail are surprisingly thick, big-knuckled, as though he’s a farmer and not a white-collar worker after all. Is this the wrong man?

I pull to a stop next to him, smiling out of the open window. I say, “Mr. Everly?”

“Yes?”

I want to be sure; this could be a brother, a cousin: “Herbert Everly?”

“Yes? I’m sorry, I—”

… don’t know me, I think, finishing the sentence for him in my mind. No, you don’t know me, and you never will. And I will never know you, either, because if I knew you I might not be able to kill you, and I’m sorry, but I really do need to kill you. I mean, one or the other of us must die, and I’m the one who thought of it first, so that leaves you.

I slide the Luger out from under the raincoat and extend it partway through the open window, saying, “You see this?”

He looks at it, expecting no doubt that I want to sell it to him or tell him I just found it and ask if it’s his, or whatever happens to be the last thought that crosses his brain. He looks at it, and I squeeze the trigger, and the Luger jumps up in the window space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes a mineshaft, running deep into the center of the earth.

He drops backward. Just down and back, no fuss, no lunging, just down and back. His mail frets away from him in the breeze.

I make a sound in the back of my throat like someone trying to pronounce that Vietnamese name. You know the one: Ng. I put the Luger on top of the raincoat and drive on down Churchwarden, my trembling finger on the window button until the window completely shuts. I turn left, and then left again, and two miles later I finally think to put the Luger under the raincoat.

My route is now planned out. A few miles farther on, I’ll find Interstate 91, which I’ll take north through Hartford and on up into Massachusetts at Springfield. A little north of that I’ll turn west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, heading once again for New York State. Tonight I’ll stay in an inexpensive motel near Albany, paying cash, and tomorrow afternoon I will return home jobless from my interview in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Well. It seems I can do it.

I did it their way for eleven months. Or sixteen, if you count the final five months at the mill, after I got the yellow slip but before my job, as they said, ceased to go forward, the period of time when the counseling was done, and the training in resumé writing and the “consideration” of “options.” This entire charade as though we were all, the company and its representatives and the specialists and the counselors and yours truly, as though we were all working together on some difficult but worthy task, the end result of which was supposed to be my personal contentment. Sense of fulfillment. Happiness.

Don’t go away mad; just go away.

Earlier, for a year or two, there had been rumors of the downsizing to come, and in fact two smaller winnowings of staff had taken place, but they’d merely been the preliminaries, and everyone knew it. So, when the yellow slip was presented to me with my paycheck in October of 1995, I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been, and I wasn’t even at first all that unhappy. Everything seemed so businesslike, so well-thought-out, so professional, that it was more like being nurtured than weaned. But I was being weaned.

And I had plenty of company, God knows. The twenty-one hundred people at the Belial mill of Halcyon Mills was reduced to fifteen hundred seventy-five; a reduction of about one-fourth. My product line was dropped entirely, good old Machine No. 11 sold for scrap, the work absorbed by the company’s Canadian affiliate. And the long lead-time—or so it seemed, then—of five months not only gave me plenty of time to look for another job but meant I would still be on salary through the Christmas season; nice of them.

The severance package was certainly generous enough, I suppose, within what is considered generous and rational at the moment. We discontinued employees received a lump sum equal to one month of salary for every two years of employment, at the present wage for that employment. In my case, since I’d been with the company twenty years, four as sales director and sixteen as product manager, I received ten months’ pay, two of them at a somewhat lower rate. In addition, the company offered to maintain our medical insurance—we pay twenty percent of our medical costs, but no insurance premiums—for one year for every five years of employment, which means four years in my case. Full coverage for Marjorie and me, plus coverage for Billy for two and a half years until he’s nineteen; Betsy’s already nineteen, and so is uninsured, another worry. Then, five months from now, with Billy’s nineteenth birthday, he’s also without insurance.

But that isn’t all we got when we were severed. There was also a single flat payment to cover vacation time, sick time and who knows what; it was figured out using a madly complex formula that I’m sure was scrupulously fair, and my check came to four thousand, seven hundred sixteen dollars and twenty-two cents. To tell the truth, if it had been nineteen cents, I doubt I would have known the difference.

I think most of us, when we get the chop, see our coming unemployment as merely an unexpected vacation, and assume we’ll be back at work with some other company almost immediately. But that isn’t how it happens now. The layoffs are too extensive, and are in every industry across the board, and the number of companies firing is much larger than the number of companies hiring. More and more of us are out here now, another thousand or so every day, and we’re chasing fewer and fewer jobs.

You put together your resumé, your education and job history, your life, on a page. You buy manila folders and a roll of first-class postage stamps. You carry your resumé down to the drugstore with the copying machine, and run off thirty copies at a nickel each. You start circling in red ink the likeliest help wanted ads in the
New York Times
.

You also subscribe on your own to your trade journals, the magazines your employer used to subscribe to for you. But the magazine subscriptions are not part of the severance package.
Pulp
and
The Paperman
; those are the journals of my trade, both of them monthly, both rather expensive. When they were free, I rarely read them, but now I study them cover to cover. After all, I have to keep up. I can’t let the industry move on without me.

Both of these magazines carry help wanted ads, and both carry position wanted ads. In both of them, more positions than help are wanted.

At least I was never fool enough to spend money on a position wanted ad.

Over the years of my employment, I became quite specialized in one kind of paper and one method of manufacture. That was a subject I really knew—and still know—all about. But back at the beginning, twenty-five years ago, when I started out as a salesman for Green Valley, before I switched over to Halcyon, I was marketing all kinds of industrial paper, and I learned them all. I learned
paper
; the whole wild complex subject.

I know many people think paper is boring, so I won’t go on about it, but in fact paper is far from boring. The way it’s made, the million uses…

We even eat paper, did you know that? A special kind of paper-source cardboard is used in many commercial ice creams, as a binder.

The point is, I do know paper, and I could take over almost any managerial job within the paper industry, with only minimal training in a particular specialty. But there’s so many of us out here, the companies don’t feel the need to do even the slightest training. They don’t have to hire somebody who’s merely good, and then fine-tune him to their requirements. They can find somebody who already knows their precise function, was trained in it by some other employer, and is eager to come to work for
you
, at lower pay and fewer benefits, just so it’s a
job
.

I studied the ads, I sent out my resumés, and most of the time nothing at all happened. No response. No answer to all the questions you naturally ask: Is my salary request too high? Did I phrase something poorly in the resumé? Did I leave something out I should have mentioned?

Here’s my own resumé. I decided to go for absolute simplicity and truth and clarity. No fudging my age, and no unnecessary crowing about my skills and training. But I included my college interests, because I think it’s good to suggest you’re well rounded. I think so. Who knows?

BURKE DEVORE

62 Pennery Woods Road

Fairbourne, CT 06668