This job is not taken in any conventional way, but, since you’re here training now, you probably know that already. Our recruitment officers operate in county jail cells and detox tanks, seeking out petty vandals of government property and adventurous drunks. The point of our business is to make the ill-mannered aware of how it feels to be treated poorly. It’s the little guy—the overweight, retarded, crippled, or flat-chested—that we protect with our work. What we do is teach people lessons on karma by fucking up their property.
If you’ve ever heard of something similar to the following, trust me, we’re already operating in your city.
Maybe they told you all this in orientation, maybe they didn’t. I’m going to tell you anyway. First, maybe you yell something out your car window at a guy on the sidewalk. Keep walking, fatty or Screw you, asshole. Or maybe just some filthy words to a beautiful young woman, something that seems innocent enough. Well, this person may be one of our clients or, even worse for you, one of our employees. Getting revenge is a simple process for them, merely a matter of writing down your license plate number and calling in a request for reparations. Through our contacts in the DMV we find out where you live. The next morning your taillights have been smashed out and half-inch lag screws have been drilled into your tires. It’s simple. You cut someone off in traffic, flip them the bird, and in the morning the gate is open and your dog has run away. It isn’t a coincidence. It’s us. We’re the Furies of the modern world—the vengeance of a god gone corporate.
This can be a nasty profession, don’t get me wrong, but we do try to be cordial—breaking out the big windows when possible, which tend to be cheaper to replace, and doing pro bono work for low-income clients during the holiday season. Having a sense of propriety is important to our overall success. Even so, things haven’t worked out for me as well as a man in the karma industry would hope. A big part of this job is having faith that the world is better because of us, that we must sometimes act against humanity in order to preserve a state of equilibrium. But occasionally a case goes so obviously wrong that it calls the whole system into question.
It gets me thinking, if karma is a real force, then maybe this line of work has been responsible for much of the misfortune that surrounds my life, for the accidents that mar my existence. After all, there’s a history of others paying for my mistakes.
My era of uncertainty began with a typical case. A client was nearly run over as she crossed the street. The driver saw her, made eye contact, but the car kept moving. The Big Man (the CEO of Make Things Right Inc.) called me personally from corporate headquarters in White Plains because this woman was an important client. “We need this done right,” he said. “You’re our number one guy in the Midwest, the dark prince of the Plains, and no one takes a dump in that city of yours without asking us first. Make it happen!”
The Big Man was a motivational speaker from New Jersey in his former life and tended to err on the side of exaggeration, but I understood he demanded results. Having toiled in the hospitality industry for fifteen years prior to working for MTR, I knew all about the expectations upper management has for its mercenaries.
This is why I performed a thorough job on the car. I parked nearly a mile away, under a ponderosa pine, positioning my vehicle with an escape route in mind. Ponderosas are one of the best trees to hide a car under because their low branches are rarely trimmed and their needles grow in large, thick bursts. Weeping willows are good too, but are seldom planted near a curb. In this line of work it’s important to notice these things. Like anything you love, the job allows you to really see the world around you, to look for every advantage, because you want to be the best there is.
This assignment was easy though. A car parked in a garage. Suburbanites are psychologically incapable of locking the back and side doors of their garages—as if that would be the final proof society had gone down the tubes. Once inside, I slashed his tires—a rasp probe jammed and withdrawn four times in a quick hissing minute—shattered his windows near silently with a spring-loaded pin designed by EMTs, and, finally, rubbed dog shit into the upholstery. This may seem harsh, but it’s a shock-and-awe kind of thing. Our clients demand results and we do our utmost to satisfy them.
The problem in this case was that the car I vandalized didn’t belong to the punk we were supposed to get. Whether the car was borrowed or the paperwork botched I don’t know for sure, but the car belonged to a nice old man—a veteran of foreign wars active in the community and his church. After I messed up the car a local news station ran a story on his pathetic condition, this diabetic widower living on a fixed income. He couldn’t make it to the doctor’s office or to Sunday services. It was depressing to think about an old man stuck at home, waiting for a church mother to pick him up, because his late-model Pontiac had been vandalized.
This was a major error, something that wouldn’t be forgotten within the company. And what’s worse, in the coming weeks it seemed that this mistake was part of a bigger system, a network of checks and balances working to cut me down to size because of everything I’d done. In this line of work it’s impossible to believe in coincidences. Even more than that, it’s against company policy.
A week later, arms loaded with cleaning supplies, I arrived at the old man’s house to make amends. It was morning, a mid-August day. The Big Man had called me earlier, spitting vitriol. It was my assignment to arrange a cleanup. In a bigger city, a crew with professional grease monkeys would have been called in, but the operation in Nebraska was streamlined. I often pulled double-duty.
The Pontiac was pretty much as I’d left it, although it had been rolled into the driveway by then, like the old man had tried to drive it to the shop himself, flat tires be damned, then thought better of it mid-act. Slumped in front of his split-level, vinyl-sided house, the car had garbage bags taped over its windows. It was easy to peel off the plastic and reach inside to flip the lock. I scrubbed his seats with a soapy brush to free the same dog shit I’d so enthusiastically smeared in a week before. A glass guy met me there and began work on the windows, pulled off the door consoles to vacuum out the green squares of shattered glass.
The old man scrutinized us from behind his screen door but didn’t come outside. His finger was on the lock, his skinny legs peeking through a yellow robe. The squinty look reminded me of my own father, a small-town minister who never trusted me. I waved to the old man from the driveway. I had muscular arms and dirty-blond hair with an untamed cowlick spiking at the hairline. But I wasn’t a frightening figure by any means.
“How do you do?” I offered my hand on the outer side of the screen door but he didn’t budge. The old man was bald on top, with feathery white hair horseshoed from big ear to big ear. His blue eyes narrowed behind silver-rimmed glasses.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I smiled. “A mutual acquaintance said someone messed up your car. I’m here to fix it.”
“You’re from the church?”
“Not exactly.”
The old man looked me up and down before rattling open the lock. “You’re welcome to coffee, if you want it.”
It took most of the morning to get the car into shape. The glass man was finished in an hour, but it was a bigger job to put the car on blocks, lever off his flat tires and shuttle them to the nearest auto shop to be patched. Lamb’s-wool seat covers would obscure the stains, and three shampoo and rinse cycles eliminated the smell. It felt good to engage in this kind of labor, honestly, working in the sunshine instead of lurking in the damp hours of early morning.
Around lunchtime the old man came outside to inspect the work. He kicked the wet-black tires and leaned into the car to sniff the Armor All’d dashboard.
“Still don’t know who sent you,” he said, “but may God bless you for coming.”
“It’s no trouble, mister. Really. Just something that had to be done.”
He looked me in the eyes, pained resignation on his face, like he had something to tell me that couldn’t be
said politely.
“I wonder if you’d let me know who did this,” he said.
“That wouldn’t be right,” I tried to explain, packing my supplies. “But you should know that they’re sorry. It wasn’t personal.”
“Does that make it better? That it wasn’t personal?”
I told myself that this was just my job, these things I did. Make Things Right was a corporation like any other.
“No,” I said, splashing a bucket of dirty water toward his grass. “I don’t think it does make it any better.”
After loading the gear into the back of my truck I shook the old man’s hand. He was so affable—wrinkled and saggy in his cardigan. I’d known dozens of men like him in my father’s church, growing up. Men I sometimes felt nostalgic for, even though I’d done nothing but terrorize them when I was young.
“If you need anything, let me know.”
“I will,” the old man said. He hung around my truck, hands in his pockets. “If you’re looking for more of this kind of work, I know a group that helps people.”
“A charity?”
I must have sounded dubious, or offended, because he reassured me it wasn’t a church.
“They help out those who can’t help themselves. People who have no one else.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
Maybe it sounds strange, but I’d never really considered nonprofit work before. Several of our agents had quit during that time to go into the charity industry, but the work we did was just as good as any NPO’s as far as I was concerned.
“Call this number.” The old man handed me a business card. “Frank is a friend.”
“Sure.” I slid the card into my shirt pocket without looking at it. “If you need anything. Dinner? Groceries? I can get it for you.”
“Call the number,” he said, then he turned to his house.
It wasn’t even three weeks later that the old man died. The lug nuts weren’t torqued tight enough, or were too tight, and had come free. A wheel wiggled loose while he drove and shot from the car; there was nothing the old man could do to stop from hitting a light pole. This too was on the news, a good Samaritan’s act of kindness gone wrong because the idiot didn’t know how to tighten a lug nut. Nothing special, really, if I wasn’t the idiot in this particular instance.
It didn’t take long, after hearing of his demise, to call the number the old man had given me. I was uneasy with the knowledge that my negligence had killed someone. I feared that my mere presence in the world was toxic. (My parents had also been killed in a car accident, I should let you know, although their deaths had nothing in common with the old man’s. This was six years earlier. Their car was run off a county highway by a semi loaded with sugar beets. These things happen. There was nothing weird in the way they died, except that they were my parents, for one, and that I was a lifelong fuckup, for another. But maybe there’s nothing weird about that either. Maybe that’s exactly the way it was supposed to happen.)
They called themselves the Coalition Against Poverty, Citizens dedicated to improving the experience of the poverty-stricken and destitute. It seemed meaningful that the old man had given me this card. Like maybe this could be free-range karma at work, the universe struggling to repair itself. This guy Frank answered my call and we set up a meeting.
CAP’s office was near downtown, in a decimated corridor off Zero Street that housed other charities and liquor stores. The area was familiar to me, a district of last vestiges, of architectural relics and human remnants. Their office was nice though. The interior was newly apportioned and restored, with shined furniture and red brick walls that looked original. It smelled like carpet adhesive, the way most offices do. In my past life as a corporate slob I’d been made to wait in a hundred lobbies like this one—in fluorescent mini-malls, in downtown skyscrapers, in reapportioned warehouses.
After filling out a packet of information I was shown to Frank’s office in the back of the building. Taking a seat, I apologized for calling on a Saturday.
“Not a problem.” Frank was a large man, thick through the shoulders and chest. He wore a worn-out shirt and tie. “As you can imagine, Saturday is a busy day for volunteers.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yours is an intriguing résumé,” Frank said. He flipped through my papers. “Impressive business credentials. Management training. Bachelor’s degree.” Frank sat at his desk in a catcher’s stance, his chair low to the ground, his knees up, hands open in front of his chest, ready to block any junk I could throw at him. “But nothing in the last five years,” he noted. “Did you win the lottery, Mr. Dandrow?”
“I haven’t been in prison, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“No, no. We will have to run a background check, though. We can’t accept felons.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I told him. Make Things Right had cleansed my record as part of its SOP.
“Let me cut the shit,” Frank said, looking up from his desk. “I have a pretty strong notion why you showed up today. We get a lot of your type in here, wanting to make amends for something horrible they’ve done.”
“Maybe you don’t want me. My past is pretty ugly. The things I’ve done could be shocking to someone like you.”
“Don’t try to gaslight me. I know who you’ve been working for. We’re well aware of MTR and the things they do.” He rocked back in his chair, letting his hands settle on his gut as he stared at me for a moment, biting his lower lip. “You know, the Romans believed the Furies were a self-cursing phenomenon. Whoever summoned them also ended up getting fucked over in the end. It was their way of saying that revenge doesn’t work.”
It must have surprised me, what Frank said, because he motioned that I should stay seated. I didn’t think anyone knew about Make Things Right. Who would really believe there was a company doing what we did? It was easier to conceive of randomness, of teenagers up to no good, than to envision a corporate entity in the business of revenge.
“No,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of work you did before. CAP needs talented people, wherever they come from. If you like to dabble in karma, we can help with that too.” He turned his back to me and walked to the window behind his desk. There wasn’t much of a view beyond the glass. Just a chain-link fence, a parking lot behind it. “I was pretty damn good at shooting people when I was in the Marines, but it didn’t become my life’s work. It only matters what you do from now on. That’s what you’re judged by.”
Frank didn’t need to convince me. I was ready to help. If I wanted to do good in the world, why not take a straight path instead of trying to navigate the inequities of revenge. Things had gone poorly with the old man, but there were plenty of good deeds that could be done in this city. Groceries needed delivering. Gardens needed weeding. Motor oil needed changing. I was the man for the work, so that’s what I told him.
I started the next day, spent six hours trimming back a cancer patient’s overgrown yard. She watched me from the window as her flowering shrubs came back into view after an hour of yanking native grass and milkweed from her garden.
I wasn’t great at gardening, but, with charity work, it was the thought that counted, right? I waved happily to the woman’s neighbors as I walked behind a humming mower, and at the end of the day, it felt good to look back on the progress I’d made. This was something I always loved about revenge work too, the instant gratification of seeing a job well done. The crisp green lines left by a lawn mower, the metallic squiggles etched into a keyed car. The difference was that with charity work, fleeing wasn’t necessary. I could stay and see the satisfied expression of the person whose property I’d altered. We could drink iced tea together.
“It looks so nice,” the woman said as we sat on her porch. Her name was Jill. She was wheelchair-bound, in her early forties, her head wrapped in a blue scarf. To my surprise, she reached for my hand and brought it to her face to kiss my dirt-stained knuckles.
“The weeds will stay away for a while n
ow,” I said, pulling my hand back.
“Till spring.” She slouched in her wheelchair. “Let’s hope I can pull them myself then.”
I did hope that, for the hour we sat on her porch. I was nearly praying, to be honest, contemplating how her life would be better from then on, because of my actions, rather than in spite of them.
Frank sent me to assist all sorts of people in the following weeks. Victims of gang violence who were helpless and alone, living in bad neighborhoods; migrants injured on the job; kids with HIV. I cleared gutters for the elderly and clumsy, weatherproofed windows for the single mothers of thin-blooded children, installed lift chairs for the morbidly obese. I paid bills, delivered meals-on-wheels, cleared basements of sagging boxes. I collected toys for tots and recyclables for the rag-and-can men living in the park. For those first couple months I was a revelation to myself and others. These acts of restitution felt like a blanket over the city.
But things didn’t always go so well. There was the strange case of Jimmy Motts, for instance. His was a nuanced example, someone Frank regarded as his brightest success story, or at least a man who had such potential. Motts had come to CAP as a OxyContin addict years before and progressed through their programs in a drawn-out cycle of relapse and recovery. By the time I met him he was a part-time employee of CAP, driving around doing audits of volunteer work. He still received benefits, however, because he was only partially recovered.
I mowed his lawn and did garden work. Jill had given me high marks for my landscaping efforts, and this would have been an easy job too if it weren’t for Motts sitting on the porch offering a glib critique. He was a boxy man and had a letter-jacket pride he wore in his shoulders and jaw. It was a hot day, and he drank light beer, reclining on his steps to point out spots I’d missed by jabbing his finger toward a stray dandelion or a stubborn patch of crabgrass. Even though Motts was on methadone, he had a live-in girlfriend and a nice truck. I hadn’t had a girl in years, and my truck was a piece of shit. It seemed to me that Motts was running a con on CAP.
Bad Faith Page 9
