The Ax (4 page)

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EDUCATION

BA, Northwest Connecticut State University, 1967. American history major. Debate team. Track.

Occasionally, that resumé draws a response, and briefly my heart lifts. I get a phone call or a letter, usually a phone call, and an appointment is made. It’s usually somewhere in the northeast, though once it was Wisconsin and once it was Kentucky. Wherever it is, you pay your own transportation costs. You want to get to that meeting.

You shower thoroughly, you dress carefully, you try to find the balance between self-assurance and easy geniality. You don’t want to be full of yourself, but you don’t want to be a toady either. You meet and chat and discuss. You might even tour the plant with the interviewer, showing your familiarity with the machine, the line, the work. Then you go home, and you never hear another word.

From time to time there would be a small news item in
Pulp
or
The Paperman
, when a mill announced hiring so-and-so for such and such a management position; with that usual smirking headshot of the lucky bastard. And I’d read it, and realize it was a position I’d interviewed for, and I couldn’t help it, I’d have to study and study that guy’s face, his eyes, his smile, the tie he wore. Why him? Why not me?

Sometimes it would be a woman’s picture there, or a black man’s picture, and I’d decide it was quota time, they were hiring politically and not commercially, and in a strange way that would make me feel better. Because it wasn’t
my
failure then. If it was a woman or a black man they wanted, and they were just going through the motions with people like me, there was nothing I could do about it, was there? No blame, then.

But other times I did feel the blame. Why him, why that guy with the sloppy grin or the huge ears or the rotten haircut? Why not me? What did he do or say? What was on his resumé, that wasn’t on mine?

That was what started me, that was the first question. What do they have on those resumés? What edge do they have? That’s what led me to take out my ad.

Yesterday I killed Herbert Coleman Everly, and today I come home from my interview in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and when I walk into my house at four in the afternoon Marjorie is waiting for me in the living room. She’s pretending to read a novel—she borrows novels from the library, now that we have fewer magazines and less television—but she’s really waiting for me. It’s true she doesn’t know the full extent of our trouble, but she does know there’s trouble, and she realizes I’m worried.

Before she can ask, I shake my head. “Not a chance,” I say.

“Burke?” She gets to her feet, dropping the novel behind her in the chair. “You can’t be sure,” she says, to encourage me.

“Oh, yes, I can,” I say, and shrug. I don’t like lying to Marjorie, but there’s no other choice. “I’m getting to know the interviewers by now,” I tell her. “This one just didn’t like me.”

“Oh, Burke.” She puts her arms around me, and we kiss. I feel a certain stirring, but it doesn’t last, it’s like an underwater echo. Not a submarine, but a submarine’s refraction.

I said, “Any mail?” Thinking of Everly.

“Nothing… nothing that mattered,” she says.

“Well.”

There are a lot of men now, in my position, who take out their frustrations on their families, particularly on their wives. A lot of wife-beating going on these days, among the middle-class unemployed. I admit I’ve felt that nasty urge myself, the urge to destroy, to release the frustration by just lashing out at the nearest target.

But I love Marjorie, and she loves me, and we’ve always had a good marriage, so why should I let this external thing tear us apart? If I’m going to lash out, if I’m going to destroy, I should make my violence more productive than that. And I will.

In doing what I did yesterday, apart from any other benefits to be derived (I hope, in time), I made it even more certain that I would never attack my girl. Never.

“Well,” I say again, and we share a companionable and rueful smile, and I carry my suitcase away to the bedroom, as Marjorie returns to her novel.

Knowing she’ll stay put in the living room with her book, I carry the Luger and Everly’s resumé to my office and stow them in my filing cabinet. Then I go back to the bedroom, unpack, strip and take a long shower, my second of the day. In the shower, I permit myself at last to think about Herbert Everly.

A man, a decent man, a nice man, rather like me. Except he’s unlikely to have killed anyone. I feel terrible about him, and about his family. I had trouble sleeping last night, I was racked with guilt much of the day, I thought seriously about giving the whole thing up, abandoning the entire project with it barely begun.

But what choice do I have? I stand in the hot water, clean and cleaner, and go over it all again in my mind. The equation is hard and real and ruthless. We’re running out of money, Marjorie and I and the kids, and we’re running out of time. I have to be employed, that’s all. I’m no self-starter, I’m not going to invent a new widget, I’m not going to found my own paper mill on a shoestring. I need a job.

There are too many of us out here, and I have to face the fact that I am never going to be anybody’s first choice. If it were just the job, just the knowledge and experience, just the capacity and the expertise, just the willingness and the proficiency, no problem. But there are too many of us going after too few jobs, and there are other guys out there just as experienced and willing and capable as I am, and then it comes down to the nuances, the ineffables.

Amiability. Sound of voice. Smile. Whether or not you and your interviewer are fans of the same sport. What he thinks of your choice of necktie.

There is always always
always
going to be somebody just that tiny bit closer to the ideal than I am. In this job market, they don’t have to take second best, and I have to either accept that fact or I’m going to be very unhappy for a very long time, and drag my family down with me. So I have to accept it, and I have to learn to work within it.

I finish my shower, and dress, and go into my office. I look at my list, and I think it would probably be best not to kill two people in the same state within just a few days of each other. I don’t want the authorities to start looking for patterns.

On the other hand, I don’t have much time. I’ve started the operation now, and I have to move briskly to the end of it, before something happens to spoil it all.

Here’s one, in Massachusetts. Next Monday, I’ll drive north.

Technically the computer belongs to the whole family, but it’s really Billy’s, and a year ago it moved into his room in acknowledgment of that truth. I’d made it a gift to the family at Christmas, 1994, the year before I was downsized, when we were still financially okay. The money was going out, in mortgage and taxes and schooling and food and gasoline and clothing, plus all of those things we hardly thought about but no longer spend money on, like rental tapes of movies, but the money was also coming in, adequately to cover expenses, the ebb and flow nicely attuned, like the inhale and exhale of a healthy body. So buying a computer for the family was extravagant, but not
that
extravagant.

Charles Dickens said it, in
David Copperfield
: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” He didn’t say what the result was when you dropped annual income to zero, but he didn’t have to.

The point is, the computer entered our lives when we thought we could afford our lives, and is still with us, in Billy’s room, on the wheeled metal table purchased for it at the same time. His room is small, and crammed chock-a-block, as teenage boys’ rooms tend to be, but oddly enough it’s neater now that the computer and its table have been inserted there. Or maybe he just hasn’t been able to buy so many things recently, hasn’t been able to add to the pile of his possessions.

Well. When all this began, in February, almost three months ago, my second step, even before I had any idea what the plan was or that there would be a plan, was to go into Billy’s room and sit down in front of the family computer and, from the wealth of available typefaces and sizes, create letterhead stationery. (My first step had been to take a post office box in a town twenty-some miles from home.)

B. D. INDUSTRIAL PAPERS

P.O. BOX 2900

WILDBURY, CT 06899

The post office box was actually 29, but I added the zeroes to make both the local post office and, by extension, B. D. Industrial Papers, seem more imposing. I made a joke of it with the clerk in the post office, who found the idea amusing and said she’d have no trouble putting 2900 mail into box 29, since in fact there were only sixty-eight boxes in the entire branch.

My next step was to write my ad, basing it on the ads I’d been circling in the help wanted sections for over a year:

MANUFACTURING

LINE MANAGER

Northeast paper mill w/specialty in polymers, capacitor tissue & film require individual w/strong specialty paper bkgrnd to head new product line mnfctring on rebuilt electrolytic capacitor paper machine. Minimum 5 yrs mill exp. Competitive salary, benefits. Send resume & salary history to Box 2900, Wildbury, CT 06899

Then I phoned the classified ad department of
The Paperman
, which it seemed to me usually carried more such advertising than
Pulp
, and arranged for them to run my ad, which would cost forty-five dollars to appear in three consecutive monthly issues. The woman I spoke to said there would be no problem if I paid with a money order rather than a company check, after I explained we were a small mill with little experience of hiring outside our own geographic area and would be paying for this ad from petty cash.

Then I went back to the Wildbury post office and bought the money order and signed it Benj Dockery III, with a very sloppy handwriting unlike my own. The copy machine at the drugstore gave me fine letterhead stationery from the original I’d put together at the computer, and I used it to send the wording of the ad plus the money order to
The Paperman
. Benj Dockery III signed the letter as well.

The ad ran first in the March issue, out the last week in February, and by the first Monday in March, when I drove up to check, box 2900 had received ninety-seven replies. “Those zeroes sure attract a lot of mail!” the postal clerk said, and we laughed about it together, and I explained that I was trying to start up a trade journal about trade journals. This was the response to an ad I’d run in selected magazines.

(I didn’t want anyone to suspect I might be engaged in some sort of mail fraud, and start an inspector after me. What I was doing was probably not illegal, but it could be extremely embarrassing, and harmful to my employment chances, if it got out.)

“Well, I wish you luck with it,” she said, and I thanked her, and she said, “More and more people are becoming their own boss these days, have you noticed?” and I agreed.

That first flush of mail soon dropped off to a steady trickle, kicking up again in the few days after each issue of
The Paperman
was published. The May issue, the last one with my ad, is still current, and I’ve had two hundred thirty-one responses so far. I’m guessing there’ll be another ten to fifteen, and that will be the end of it.

It was fascinating to study those resumés, to see how much fear was in them, and how much gallantry, and how much grim determination. And also how much cocksure bloated self-important ignorance;
those
people are not competition, not for anybody, not until they’ve been roughened up by life a bit more.

Back in the transition period at Halcyon, when part of my workday was to sit through ongoing training in how to be unemployed, one of our advisors, a stern but hearty woman whose job it was to give us pep talks laced with harsh reality, told us a story, which she swore was true. “Some years ago,” she said, “there was a downturn in the aerospace industry, and a lot of bright engineers found themselves unemployed. A group of five of them in Seattle decided to come up with some innovation of their own, something marketable, and after a lot of brainstorming and memos they did create a new variant on a kind of game, something that had real potential. But the idea needed seed money, and they didn’t have any. Already in Seattle they’d learned that, when everybody is trying to sell the second car, nobody wants to buy one. They tried every contact they could think of, relatives, friends, former co-workers, and finally they were put together with a group of venture capitalists based in Germany. These financiers liked the engineers’ idea, and were very close to agreement on funding them. All that was left was a face-to-face meeting. The financiers, three of them, flew from Munich to New York, and the engineers flew from Seattle to New York, and they met in a hotel suite there, where everyone got along very well. It looked as though the engineers were going to get the money and start their company and be saved. And then one of the financiers said, ‘Let me just get the schedule clear. When we give you this money, what are you going to do to begin with?’ And one of the engineers said, ‘Well, the
first
thing we’re going to do is pay our back salary.’ And that was the end of it. The engineers went back to Seattle empty-handed, as well as empty-headed. Because,” this counselor told us, “they didn’t know the one thing you have to know if you’re going to survive and prosper. And that one thing is: Nobody invited you. Nobody owes you a thing. A job and a salary and a nice middle-class life are not a
right
, they’re a prize, and you have to fight for them. You have to keep reminding yourself, ‘They don’t need me, I need them.’ You have no demands. You have your skills, and you have your willingness to work, and you have the brains and the talents and the personality God gave you, and it’s up to
you
to make it happen.”