Tough Day for the Army (15 page)

The mother watches her child drift and claps and shouts over and over:
My boy! my boy! my boy!

People point and murmur as the boy passes just overhead. Some jump and try to grab his feet. They fail. The Visiting Dignitary grips his scissors like a dagger and gauges the figure's approach, evaluates the potential threat. Zoo Director Watkins looks from the boy to the Visiting Dignitary clutching the scissors and simultaneously ducks (successfully) and tries (in vain) to grab the Visiting Dignitary's arm.

All the while the talented penguin swims and swims, and finally zooms toward the glass and touches where Walter and Jane press their hands. The talented penguin then jumps from the water, dances a quick jig from foot to foot, and extends a wing toward Walter and Jane, bowing its head just a bit.

Walter and Jane applaud until their hands hurt while behind them, the Zoo Custodian whistles to himself in low tones as he wheels the ibex by on a handcart, one hoof poking out from beneath a canvas shroud.

This is how the day ends at the bad zoo.

In his small apartment, the Visiting Dignitary stares at the gravy from his TV turkey dinner as it sloshes over into the applesauce compartment. The phone is unplugged; his suit sits balled in the corner.

Zoo Director Watkins rolls his head around his shoulders, shaking off this particular awful day, from a string of awful days; then, locked and loaded, but with safety on, he begins to climb Ibex Mountain.

Wielding the bolt cutters, Walter chews through the chain-link fence at the penguin compound. Jane carries the blanket stuffed beneath her jacket. Nearby, the custodian wheels his trash bin down the path, pausing to turn up the soft strains of mariachi music coming from his transistor radio. Jane leans over to check Walter's progress, causing her hair to fall across her shoulders and into Walter's face.

Unable to stem the gravy tide with his fork, the Visiting Dignitary eats the applesauce out of order and quickly, before it is ruined completely.

Oh, sorry
, Jane says, fingering the hair back behind an ear.
I'm cursed with this fine hair, just like my mother and her mother before that. If they live long enough, the women in our family wind up practically bald. I remember this one aunt who couldn't go out in the summer without a hat on for fear of burning…

It's OK
, Walter says.
I'm nervous too.

Arm splinted to his chest, soothed by the narcotics, the boy sleeps in his hospital room, mouth open and snoring. In a chair beside the bed, the boy's mother sleeps as well. Her hand rests across the child's middle. The television shows a program where a man takes pies in the face over and over again.

I was fired
, Walter says as he holds the clipped fencing back for Jane.

Don't worry, I make a good wage
, Jane says softly in return, slipping carefully through the opening.

The Visiting Dignitary brings the TV dinner tray to his face and licks each compartment—turkey with gravy, lima beans mixed with corn, applesauce, and finally peach brown betty—clean, and mutters to himself over and over:
These are the fruits of our labor, these are the fruits of our labor. I shall not want. These are the fruits of our labor.

Out of breath, the Zoo Director straddles the peak of Ibex Mountain and swings the shoulder-mounted launcher into place. The night sky has been wiped free of stars by the bright city lights, and as he flips the scope down, he has little difficulty sighting the red and green blinkers of the 10:21. Late as usual, he thinks. The plane nearly fills the crosshairs as the Zoo Director tries to control his breathing.

As a boy, the Zoo Director had a slingshot, a good one given him by a young uncle who admonished his nephew not to tell his mother as he slipped it into the back pocket of the boy's jeans. For weeks, the Zoo Director sneaked from the house to plunk bottles and cans from stumps and ledges with whizzing shots of carefully chosen pebbles. His aim was very good. Deadeye, he called himself.

The talented penguin is waiting for them as Walter cuts the cage lock and Jane swings the door open. Jane bends down and holds the blanket wide, and the talented penguin hops into her arms.

Walter smiles broadly as he wipes the bolt cutters clean of prints and drops them to the floor.
OK then
, he says.

With a broom for his partner, the custodian clicks his heels in time to the mariachi music and dances as he sweeps into a small mound rubber shards that once were animal balloons.

Heads swiveling, senses alert, Walter and Jane hustle from the grounds. The penguin is swaddled in the blanket, clutched to Jane's chest.

Jane says,
He's so warm—feel.

She stops, and Walter touches the bundle.

Whoa!
he says, pulling his hand back and then touching again.

Yes. We must go. But where must we go?
Walter asks. Jane hands the bundled penguin to Walter.

Follow.

When the Zoo Director was a boy, a large crow lived atop a bowed phone wire in the alley behind his home. The crow terrified the young Zoo Director, shrieking and beating its wings every time he would pass the garbage cans that served as the crow's well-stocked cupboard. Daily, as the Zoo Director tried a shortcut through the alley on the way to school, or the ball field, or to chase the chime of the ice cream wagon, the crow would swoop down, forcing the Zoo Director to turn back and take the long way around, causing him to be late, to miss important things.

Walter, Jane, and the penguin sit in the diner, cupping warm mugs of cocoa in their hands or flippers. The penguin looks from Walter to Jane and back again with his dark, unblinking eyes.

Where shall we start?
Walter wonders.

Jane looks at the penguin and says:
Always stick to the crosswalks and look both ways first, and when the light's yellow, you must hurry to the other side. Green means go; red means stop. After preparing uncooked chicken, wipe down surfaces thoroughly, and do not reuse utensils without first washing. For meat, use a good thermometer to check for doneness. In a close game, with a runner on third and less than two outs, you must bring the infield in.

The penguin keeps its eyes on Jane as it dips its beak to the cocoa.

The crow took tiny, mincing steps across the phone wire and weaved its head as the Zoo Director, one eye shut, took his aim. He had selected a largish stone with one rounded and one jagged edge. It looked lethal to him. He fitted the stone in the slingshot's pouch, pulled his arm back, and released in a single motion, and just like that, the crow fell from the wire and spiraled to the ground.

And when going downtown
, Walter says, gesturing with his hands,
take the #9, except late at night, when you should take the #2 and transfer to the #4. And sometimes, short catnaps can be just as good as long, uninterrupted sleep…

At the hospital, in the hallway, doctors and nurses hold their stethoscopes to their chests to keep them from bouncing as they rush toward an emergency. On the television, a man gets yet another pie in the face.

The Visiting Dignitary half-sleeps crookedly in his easy chair, muttering,
But I want I want I want…

The crow lay on its side and flexed its talons. Already crying, the Zoo Director scooped the crow from the ground and ran into the house, screaming.

What have I done?
he cried as he held the stiffening crow out to his mother. She took the crow and placed it on the table and told her son to touch the crow and give it ease as it passed.

We are defined by our mercy
, she told her son.

As the crow died, the Zoo Director stroked its black wing while his mother wiped the tears from his eyes with a dishtowel.

It would be wrong to say, necessarily, that the Zoo Director thinks of this incident as the 10:21 moves toward him, because it happened so long ago, but even so, as a soft beep indicates the target is in range, the Zoo Director drops the launcher from his shoulder and moves the safety back to on.

Before doing anything, turn off the circuit-breaker and attach the ground
, Jane tells the penguin.
Beware of compound interest loans and strangers bearing gifts. Measure twice to cut once.

To all this, Walter nods as his love reaches forth and seals the three of them—Jane, the penguin, himself—in its grip. He signals the waitress for another round of cocoa, and perhaps they could share just a taste of the cream pie too.

Finished with, the Zoo Custodian looks both ways before raising his arms and jogging toward the uncut red ribbon. As he runs through the tape, the Zoo Custodian blows kisses to the imaginary crowd. His ears ring with cheering.

At the hospital, the child shifts in sleep and groans softly from the pain of the broken arm. Tomorrow he will have surgery; they will insert screws and pins for the bones to grow around to repair the damage. At school, he will show his arm to the other children and chop the air and claim superpowers. But for now the child turns and drapes his good arm across his mother and touches his fingers at her forehead in a gesture of blessing.

(Attachments Enclosed)

It is important that certain things be cleared up. What I did was not a protest, and I am not nor ever have been affiliated with any anti-government, citizen militia group. I am not an Islamist or anything like that. I'm not entirely sure what an Islamist is. What I did should not—and I cannot emphasize this enough—be compared to the tragedy at Oklahoma City or, God forbid, the attacks on 9/11. I am not a gun-and-explosive-toting madman seeking to overthrow Western civilization. What I am is an economist.

I have a B.A. from Rice and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. My studies surrounding what I did were sound in concept and executed with the utmost thoroughness, as befits my background and experience. I have been cataloguing the economic health of Lake Charles, Louisiana, for close to eleven years now, which is to say I did what I did only after much difficult deliberation. Economics is a science, and it was with this in mind that I finally decided to do what I did. If there were another way to achieve the desired result, I would have found it. But there was no other way; the numbers simply don't lie. And while a few casualties were necessary for the ultimate success of the project, I deeply regret there were so many.

Six hundred forty-two people injured is a most unfortunate number, but I think it's important to remember—now that the forensic report on Mr. James T. May indicates that he had suffered a fatal myocardial infarction prior to the first explosion—that my actions resulted in no deaths. I also maintain that many of these injuries could have been avoided if the crew did not panic. Let's face it, the boat was sinking very, very slowly. Because of the crew's slipshod service, I have drafted a letter to Congress (Attachment 1), urging them to examine the training programs, if indeed there are any in place for these people. Yes, their primary jobs are to deal blackjack and schlep watered-down drinks to customers flushing their final pennies down a bottomless well of stupidity, but let's remember, this is all happening upon a ship in navigable waters. Rather than training their attention on the engine of capitalism, our financial services industry, perhaps our government regulators should look this-a-ways. In addition, contrary to published reports, my actions were not predicated on a grudge against Mr. Merv Griffin or his legacy. I did, in fact, very much enjoy his television show when it was a daytime staple. And while I am a Christian and believe gambling to be a sin, I am also a pragmatist; therefore I am the first to acknowledge the beneficial effect that Mr. Merv Griffin and his consortium have had on the greater Lake Charles area with the introduction of their riverboat casinos.

Bringing gambling to Lake Charles lowered unemployment, increased the tax base, raised the number of housing starts, and stimulated the regeneration of a downtown nearly destroyed by the invasion of the Walmart out on Highway 14 (Attachments 2–5. Also, see my article in the June issue of the
Journal of Business and Economics
, “Here Comes Walmart, There Goes the Neighborhood”).

However, as has been well established, we are in the midst of a historically bad economic downturn, and the numbers make it clear that we are in dire need of additional economic stimulus in order to maintain a viable and at least semi-prosperous community (Attachment 6). If you'll pardon the metaphor, in the current competition for the discretionary dollar, Lake Charles is armed with a slingshot in an automatic-weapons world.

As a staunch believer that free markets make free people, I felt it was both impractical and immoral to turn to government to bail us out. If loving Ayn Rand is wrong, I don't want to be right, and so I resolved to go Galt on behalf of the Interstate 10 corridor between Vinton and Lafayette.

The key to meeting the challenges of a twenty-first-century economy was to transition Lake Charles from a semi-failed postindustrial city known for its chemical processing plants into a tourist paradise. After some initial investigations, it became clear that Hawaii was the perfect model.

I have never been to Hawaii, though I have seen it on TV shows such as
Magnum P.I.
, and that one episode of
The Brady Bunch
, as well as in films such as
Blue Crush
and
Lilo and Stitch.
By all accounts it is a lovely place. And while
I
have not been to Hawaii, many others have, which is reflected in the fact that Hawaii derives more of its income from tourism than any other state in the union (Attachment 7). There are, in fact, many, many things to do in Hawaii (Attachment 8): swim, surf, helicopter rides, parasailing, hiking, volcano tours, luaus, along with all kinds of other things I can't think of right now, and with all these different activities, you would think no solid, single theory as to the incredible lure of Hawaii could be formulated, but my findings were most surprising and quite conclusive.