CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella Read Free Page B

request a different identity at any time. In spite of our precautions, there’s a Herlicher in every crowd. He’s the guy who sued us last fall for making him hangman. He claimed that for weeks afterwards he had nightmares and because he wasn’t getting enough sleep botched a big contract by sending an important government buyer a load of torn pool liners. Big deal, is my feeling. But he’s suing us for fifty grand for emotional stress because the buyer ridiculed him in front of his co-workers. Whenever he comes in we make him sheriff but he won’t back down an inch.
    Mr. A calls me into his office and says he’s got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news. First off, he says, the gangs have spraypainted a picture of Quinn’s notched penis on the side of the EverlyMansion. Second, last Friday’s simulated frontier hunt has got us in hot water, because apparently some of the beef we toughen up to resemble buffalo meat was tainted, and the story’s going in the Sunday supplement. And finally, the verdict’s come in on the Herlicher case and we owe that goofball a hundred grand instead of fifty because the pinko judge empathized.
    I wait for him to say I’m fired but instead he breaks down in tears. I pat his back and mix him a drink. He says why don’t I join him. So I join him.
    “It doesn’t look good,” he says, “for men like you and I.”
    “No it doesn’t,” I say.
    “All I wanted to do,” he says, “was to give the public a meaningful perspective on a historical niche I’ve always found personally fascinating.”
    “I know what you mean,” I say.
    At eleven the phone rings. It’s Maurer in Refuse Control calling to say that the gangs have set fire to the Anglican Church. That structure cost upwards of ninety thousand to transport from Clydesville and refurbish. We can see the flames from Mr. A’s window.
    “Oh Christ!” Mr. A says. “If I could kill those kids I would kill those kids. One shouldn’t desecrate the dream of another individual in the fashion in which they have mine.”
    “I know it,” I say.
    We drink and drink and finally he falls asleep on his office couch.
    On the way to my car I keep an eye out for the ghostly McKinnon family. Back in the actual 1860s all this land was theirs. Their homestead’s long gone but our records indicatethat it was located near present-day Information Hoedown. They probably never saw this many buildings in their entire lives. They don’t realize we’re chronically slumming, they just think the valley’s prospering. Something bad must have happened to them because their spirits are always wandering around at night looking dismayed.
    Tonight I find the Mrs. doing wash by the creek. She sees me coming and asks if she can buy my boots. Machine stitching amazes her. I ask how are the girls. She says Maribeth has been sad because no appropriate boy ever died in the valley so she’s doomed to loneliness forever. Maribeth is a homely sincere girl who glides around mooning and pining and reading bad poetry chapbooks. Whenever we keep the Park open late for high-school parties, she’s in her glory. There was one kid who was able to see her and even got a crush on her, but when he finally tried to kiss her near Hostelry and found out she was spectral it just about killed him. I slipped him a fifty and told him to keep it under wraps. As far as I know he’s still in therapy. I realize I should have come forward but they probably would have nut-hutted me, and then where would my family be?
    The Mrs. says what Maribeth needs is choir practice followed by a nice quilting bee. In better times I would have taken the quilting-bee idea and run with it. But now there’s no budget. That’s basically how I finally moved up from Verisimilitude Inspector to Special Assistant, by lifting ideas from the McKinnons. The Mrs. likes me because after she taught me a few obscure 1800s ballads and I parlayed them into Individual Achievement