The Ax Read Free Page B

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.

2
     
    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