Martin Misunderstood Read Free

Camry was parked by
the mailbox, the 'twat' scratched into the
passenger's side door glinting with morning dew.
The insurance adjuster had said the paperwork
for repairing the paint would take time to
process. Ben Sabatini, the adjuster, had been one
of Martin's chief tormentors in high school.
Martin was under the impression that the man
was deliberately taking his time.
    The vandalism had occurred last week. Martin
had left the house, much as he was doing this
morning, only to find his car had been defiled.
Evie's laughter still gurgled in his ear as he
thought about the incident.
    The policeman who took the report had stated,
'Obviously, this was done by someone who
knows you.'
    Martin switched his briefcase to his other hand
as he walked down the driveway. A light rain
started to fall, tickling the end of his nose. He
looked at the flowers in the yard – strangely, Evie
was an excellent gardener. The front lawn was
bordered by all kinds of exotic blooms. Before
the gardening club had asked her to leave, then
kicked her out, Evie had been the top ribbonholder
in the state for her colorful peonies.
    Martin used his key to unlock the Camry by
hand (he had read somewhere that remote-key
unlocking caused testicular cancer) and tossed
his briefcase into the back seat. He was halfway
in the car when he noticed that something was
wrong with the front end. Slowly, he walked
round and saw that the bumper had practically
been ripped off.
    'Damn,' he mumbled. He glanced back at the
house and saw the curtain twitch in the front
room. Unbidden, Evie's laughter filled his ears.
'Of course it was done by someone who knows
him,' she had told the cop who had taken the
report. 'Have you ever seen a bigger twat in your
life?'
    He was not up for another humiliating police
report and Ben Sabatini had stopped returning
his calls on the 'twat'. There was no reason to
believe this time would be any different. With
both hands, Martin pulled on the plastic bumper,
bending the hanging piece back and forth until it
snapped in two. He did not notice the blood on
his hands until he put the damaged bumper in the
trunk. Thin lines, almost like paper cuts, crisscrossed
his palms. Martin took his handkerchief
out of his pocket and wiped his hands. He did not
need to look at the house to know that his
mother was watching.
    Had he not read Tom Clancy shortly after rereading Fatal Vision , the blood on Martin's
hands might have triggered the memory that
Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of that true-crime
classic, had been convicted of massacring his
entire family based on the blood evidence found
at the scene of the crime. Instead, his mind was
filled with visions of Clancy hero Jack Ryan
assassinating the more than likely drunken hood
who had slammed into the front bumper of
Martin's Camry.
    Glancing over his shoulder for snipers, Martin
opened the door and got into the car.

We Meet Martin's Co-Workers, or the Hell
That is Martin's Working Life
    Southern Toilet Supply had started as a family
business almost sixty years ago. Over the years,
the Southern compound had spread from a single
metal building to a large, modern factory. In the
late nineties, a German company had bought the
plant. Spreckels Reinigungsmittel und Papier was
also a family-owned company, though they
treated their new families about as well as Evie
treated Martin, which was to say they fired half
the staff the day after the papers were signed. The
Germans seldom showed up in person, but they
sent daily missives to Norton Shaw, demanding
higher results in broken English.
    'Why is it so that the 2300 cannot reach with
the higher levels of salesmanship?'
    It had to be said that industrial-sized toilet
paper rolls were not a hard sell, but the standards
of the Southern Superroll 2300 were not the same
as a Scott 500 or, the gold standard in public
toilet supply, the Georgia Pacific 2-92. Users of
the 2300 often reported early breakage in the
first wipe, followed by catastrophic breakdowns
in