He pulls forward and angles the Harley into a spot between two cars. The front tire rams the curb, but he is able to control it this time. No wipeouts today, so far. He’s finding his confidence. This backwards world is starting to make sense.
He steps off the bike and shakes the vibration out of his bones. It feels good to be free of his steed. He takes in the smells of Beak: hope, the promise of simplicity and the pungent punch of cow shit. After three deep inhalations, he swaggers into the unemployment office. He wanders the empty space, peeking over the tops of fabric-lined cubicles, and sees no signs of life other than a lone woman stationed at a solitary desk. An oil painting of a never-ending cornfield—much like the field owned by Daddy, young Elias’s father—hangs on the wall behind her. A cigarette smolders in an ashtray next to a silent telephone.
“Oh, you must be joking,” she says upon seeing him.
“I’d like a job,” he says, exuberant.
“Of course this happens to me today,” she says. “Of course it does. Just my luck.”
He deflates. Why, he thinks, must everyone go out of his or her way to make him uncomfortable? At least this woman hasn’t tried to stab or shoot him—yet. He figures her assaults will come in the form of inquiries and explanations, minutiae. If this is the human condition, he must endure it all. His stomach grumbles. Although the pain in his gut has subsided, his insides feel scoured.
“Well,” she says, pausing for effect, “I take it you’re here to—”
“Build a better Beak, just like the sign says.”
“That would have been my second guess. Have a seat, please. That chair’s been cold for more than a week.”
“What do I need to do?”
“Run away now, screaming bloody hell,” she says, laughing.
He pulls a hand to his face and touches the skin of his forehead. An ache builds in the space behind his eyes.
“I’m kidding you, sweetheart. It’s just that … well, you could say I don’t get to meet too many people like you every day, any day. I guess that’s one of the good things about the great wide world, the fact that people like you are out there, wandering around, just waiting to be found by someone like me. Maybe not the best thing about living in a place like Beak, but I guess I can’t say that on a day like today, now can I?”
She’s a broken toy, Basil concludes after just thirty seconds of interaction. He likes her brokenness. He likes her, in fact, and he tells her so, simply, “I like you”—he reads the name etched into the dusty placard hanging halfway off the edge of her desk—“Mary Jane Pix.”
He introduces himself, offers a mitt of a hand for her to shake. She smiles subtly and drops her head toward the face of a desk strewn with loose papers.
“So, on a gorgeous day like today,” she says, “where the two of us are stuck inside looking at each other like a couple of idiots, let’s find you a job. Do you have any skills?”
He suddenly realizes he should have given this more thought, some thought, any thought. He should have practiced his approach. Even so, such unpreparedness feels like an act of liberation. He quickly spins a narrative he thinks she might like.
“I ruled a subterranean kingdom, brutalizing more beings than any mortal human would want to count,” he says, his eyes looking upward for words to pluck from the air. He coughs before adding, “If someone challenged me, I dispatched them. If someone disparaged me, they paid the penalty with their limbs, or their lives. If any demons were foolish enough to band together, thinking they might somehow wrest power from my hand, I set my ghouls to butcher them and their families. I took what I wanted, when I wanted it. I gave little, but things ran smoothly in my kingdom—Our Fiery Home, it’s called. It wasn’t such a terrible place, for a time.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, looking up from her black-and-white form to peer over the frame of her oversized eyeglasses. “And the reason for leaving?”
“Boredom. Or burnout.”
“I can work with that. Don’t you worry, hon. Someone like you? You’re far from hopeless. Far from it. Okay, so how can we spin this into something … workable? Well, let’s just say you’re a bold, assertive leader, with years of experience, in search of a daring new challenge. Up until now you’ve focused your career in, ah … let’s say workforce management, site planning and organizational dynamics. We can say you have an unblemished record of leading teams well equipped to, ah, execute. How does that sound? It sounds mighty fine to me, if I do say so myself. I think it will resonate.”
“Just fine, sure, but all that history is just that—part of a long-dead past. What I want most of all is to roam and observe and write poetry. Put a quill in my hand and an ink bottle on my desk and I will write this world alive.”
“Ah,” she says, her voice going soft. “You’re one of those.”
“Those?”
“A romantic! My boyfriend in high school wrote the sweetest, most tender poems you ever did hear. Wrote a new one for me just about every day we were together. He had this way about him, this wonderful power over words, a deep love for the world and everything in it—a real gift. The beautiful things he wrote would make me look at the world in a way no one else could, like he saw something just off to the side—something hidden that a simple girl like me just didn’t see, at least not without being shown. I always felt like he was trying to open my eyes to something important that everybody else but him was missing. It was an inside joke that just kept on going, only sad more than funny.”
She fills the space between them with a heavy sigh.
“That gift of his went to waste, let me tell you, but I guess most of them do, don’t they?” she adds. “He died in a farming accident two weeks before he was supposed to leave here to study at Drake. English major. He was out in the fields with his daddy, got his leg caught in that damned machine. All those churning blades got him good. Just chewed him up and spat him out the other side. What a gruesome mess.”
She pauses, as if sinking back into the pain of a distant past. Basil indulges her.
“I think he could have done something really neat if he had gotten out of here, away from Beak,” she continues. “Instead he wound up as fertilizer, his blood cursed to feed Nebraska soil forever. If you ask me, that’s just cruel.”
Basil wants to say he’s sorry for her loss but chooses not to. By the looks of her—hair graying at the temples, wrinkles at the corner of each eye, the creased skin of her neck starting to sag—her high school years ended decades earlier, and he wonders if she deserves condolences over her lost love so long after the fact.
“In your case, hon, I’m afraid I don’t have any fresh listings for ‘Demon Poet.’”
“Well, what do you have?”
The chair creaks beneath him.
“Do you mind standing up, dear?” she says. “You’ll bust that chair and, knowing these sons of bitches the way I do, they’ll try to take the cost of replacing it out of my paycheck even though I had nothing to do with it.”
She scrolls through a well-worn printout, maybe fifteen pages long. Her eyes follow her index finger down one page, then another, shaking her head and frowning at each dot-matrix listing. The boxy computer terminal behind her goes unused, the beige exterior cracked, the screen a blank gray sheet.
“Okay, here’s something: The Crete Bee has an opening at its office in Honey Grove. That’s about an hour from here, maybe ninety minutes. Looks like they need an agriculture reporter. Full time, salary is negotiable, based on experience.”
“Would I have a seat by the window?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“What would I be doing?”
“My best guess? Talking to people about corn and millet. Writing news stories about corn and millet, about people who grow or sow or harvest corn and millet.”
“That sounds like another prison sentence. Where’s the artfulness in a job like that?”
“If you’re looking for art, you probably came to the wrong dang place, now
didn’t you, deary? But let’s not give up hope just yet. Let’s just see now.” She studies each listing with care. “No. … Definitely not. … Not for you. … Not for anyone. … Hmm, this might be something. On second thought, no. … Okay, here’s one: Christian Plattekill’s company in Ellicott is looking for a part-time painter.”
“Ooh. That sounds wonderful!”
“A house painter.”
His shoulders droop.
“All right. Forget that. Now this one here—now this one just feels right. It’s not poetry or anything, but there’s an advertising agency in town looking for a copywriter.”
“What does a copywriter do?”
“Use your imagination.”
He closes his eyes, trying to picture it.
“I can see the wheels churning up there, but don’t hurt yourself, hon,” she says. She reaches across the table to pat his ghoulish hand. “In advertising, a copywriter is someone who figures out how to get other people to buy crap they don’t need, usually in ten words or less.”
“Mind control through verse?”
“That’s one way to put it, sure.”
“I’ll take it!”
“I’m afraid it’s not my decision, dear. But someone like you, looking the way you do … let’s just say I don’t think you’ll have any trouble making friends with the right people. Let me make a call and see if I can set up an interview for you. Is your schedule flexible?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Setting down roots in Beak, of all places? Color me surprised.”
“This seems like the kind of place where bad things don’t happen.”
“Just you wait, hon. You got the wrong kind of luck, the Black Hand of Doom’s going to track you down no matter how far you run.”
Chapter 6
In One Hand Poison, the Other a Cure
Basil works his hooves into the plush carpet, and he likes how the ratty fabric fills the cleft of each hoof. Before now, he never realized he was ticklish. The feeling makes him happy but uneasy, somehow fitting as he prepares for the discomfort he assumes will itch his hide soon enough.
His eyes roam the office lobby and settle on the squat end table next to his chair. He riffles a stack of torn and dog-eared magazines and chooses the one he deems the least offensive. Mindlessly thumbing through a weathered issue of Intrepid Sportsman, he turns page after page of glossy pictures of heavyset men in camouflage posing next to their fresh kills—first, the captions suggest, a black leopard, a monstrous grizzly bear and a ten-foot-long alligator, followed by a wild boar with its yellowed tusks painted red, a lion with an arrow poking from a wet patch in its black mane and the feathery remains of an obliterated grouse. His eyes move from the red splotches on the page to the same blazing hue in the “Savage Communications” sign tacked to the wall across from him. The chair at the end of the row is askew. Basil wants to bring it to order, align it with the others, but he fights the urge. A deep brown mark in the shape of a lightning bolt streaks the wall behind the sign’s middle, likely made by the same source that left a kidney-shaped water stain spanning three panels in the neglected drop ceiling.
So far he is unimpressed. He notices the depth of the office’s quietude, thinks too much quiet serves no one. Too much quiet precedes the prowl of death and the infinite nothingness of the dreamless sleep that must follow.
Then, suddenly, the din of voices.
He sits a little straighter in his chair. The wood groans beneath him.
A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and a fat, too-short necktie enters the office lobby. He looks up from a single piece of paper and stops in his tracks. He steps toward Basil, extends an open hand in salutation, retracts it for a second, and then extends the hand again.
“Mary Jane wasn’t so full of shit after all,” he says.
Basil introduces himself and accepts the handshake. His clawed mitt dwarfs the man’s hand. The pink flesh of his palm feels soft and untested.
“Name’s Robert Bulcavage. But I suppose you knew that already. Call me Bob. Come on back.”
Basil follows his host through the darkened hallways, the blinds on each window lowered, each nook subdued. The whole suite seems funereal. He passes three offices—lights out in one, doors inched to a close in the other two—as he follows Bulcavage toward the only cheery space in the entire office: the conference room. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer unobstructed views of the cornfields, roadways and pastures carving up sleepy Beak. From his vantage point on the second floor, the landscape seems alive, verdant and starkly different from this cheerless interior. He takes a seat at the far end of the table, opposite Bulcavage—a good twenty feet between them—wanting to hurl something through one of the windows so he can feel and taste the air. He hopes for a quick end to the meeting.
“So you’re interested in the job,” Bulcavage says. “Why?”
“Why, sir?”
“Standard question.”
“I think I’d do well here.”
“Of course you would. You would do well anywhere. So why here?”
“I’m not sure I follow, sir.”
Bulcavage sighs and lights a cigarette.
“Would you mind not doing that, sir?” Basil asks. “The smell
… it, uh, angers me.”
Bulcavage dabs the cigarette’s tip into an orange ashtray.
“We’ll just save that for later,” he says. “Look, I’ll tell you something, honest as Abe. I don’t think an environment like ours—Savage Communications, I mean—I don’t think it would suit you.”
“Oh, no?”
“Not by a long shot.” Bulcavage softens his booming voice. “This place here, this place is for loners and losers. The people I have working for me? They’re here for a reason, and it’s not a good one. People don’t come to Savage because they’re at the top of their game. They come here because they screwed up, because they’re afraid or because they ran away and are hiding from something they don’t want to find, or someone they don’t want to find them. I know that. I’m fine with that. Frankly, I couldn’t afford them if they were whole and perfect people. Truth is, I don’t care why they’re here. They don’t get much from me—they don’t expect much—but I stay out of their hair, so they enjoy their freedom, more or less. The way I see it, you do what I tell you to, when I tell you to, how I tell you to, and it tends to work out all right. Has so far, anyway.”
“Okay.”
“So. Based on the bundle of shit I just dropped in your lap, you think you could resign yourself to playing by those rules?”
“I’ve thrived in harsher climes, under worse conditions, against impossible odds.”
Bulcavage smiles and nods his head, fiddles with the cigarette in its ashtray.
Basil is unsure how to proceed, unsure whether he has the job, or whether he wants it at all. The arrangement seems too simple, too straightforward. He waits for clarity.
Bulcavage just sits there, his eyes on the ashtray. The rim scrapes cold ash from the cigarette’s tip.
“It’s very quiet here,” Basil offers.
“Too quiet!”
“That’s what I mean.”
“They like it quiet. My employees—the ones I have left, I mean. They think if they’re quiet they can hide. They’re wrong.”
“It wouldn’t be so quiet with someone like me here.”
“I bet it wouldn’t, a big boy like you.” He laughs, his whole body shaking. “I bet like hell it wouldn’t.”
“So,” Basil says. “Does my office have a window?”
Bulcavage tilts his head, leans into the cushion of his leather chair. Then he gives an approving laugh, softer this time.
“Why? You planning on jumping out of it?”
“I like the light.”
Something loosens in Basil’s gut. He stiffens to restrain a determined fart.
“Ain’t that just the sweetest thing I ever heard,” Bulcavage says.
“I’ve spent too long in
the darkness.”
“Sure, sure,” Bulcavage interjects. “Look, forgive me for being direct, but I think you’re someone who appreciates hearing what’s on someone’s mind. What is it you hope to do here?”
To understand how the world works, Basil thinks. To learn. Maybe to figure out how to stop hating himself so he can return to Our Fiery Home a kinder, more capable leader. He knows he should say anything but the truth.
“I hope to make you happy,” he chooses to say. An uneasy feeling builds in his chest, this false subservience, one step removed from begging.
Bulcavage places both hands on his belly.
“And why should I believe you’re the person to do that?” Mary Jane Pix’s words echo in Basil’s head.
“You won’t find anyone with a skill set quite like mine.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“I’ve seen things. I know things. And my words have the power to transform the world.”
“Through black magic?”
“Through beauty and grace.”
“Okay. You have my attention. Wow me.”
Basil recalls a poem he composed not long ago, while making the rounds of Our Fiery Home, wondering if he would ever see anyplace else, if he would ever discover the places he imagined when he closed his eyes. He stands and recites the verse.
A warning, O wanderer
Bore, as a beetle, as a worm
To bring down the mossy wall
Brick by brick
Reach, climb, stretch thy legs
Grow wings and seek the wind
Walk into the waves and leave a wake
The shore a speck of ragged rock
Then sink
Among skeletons, broken ships, a second sea of lost riches
Drown thy self in the depths of memory, then
Breathe deep and rise anew
Burn, Beautiful Soul Page 7
