by Kim Oh
“I don’t remember saying anything like that.” He shrugs. “And if I did – like you said, that was a promise. And this is business. I need that guy.”
“Why? Why him and not me?”
“Come on.” McIntyre spreads his arms apart. “Be reasonable. It’s different now. From what it was even a year ago. Look around you – this isn’t some two-bit racket anymore. Some front operation. It’s bigger than that now; I’ve got to have people around me who look right. Who look like him.”
She doesn’t say anything, but her expression reveals sudden understanding.
“That didn’t come out right,” says McIntyre. “What I meant was that I need somebody who looks like a Harvard MBA. You can practically smell Harvard on that guy.”
“Really?” Her voice is very small and quiet. “And what do I smell like?”
“Look, you’re taking this all the wrong way. It’s not like I’m firing you; you’re just not the CFO. You don’t even have to work for the guy; maybe we can send you out to Pomeroy’s operation, you can do his accounts –”
“Sure. Or maybe I could park cars down in the garage.”
That irritates him. “If you think you could handle it.”
And then something happens in that movie I’m telling you, that I’m still amazed about. That I would never have expected from that girl I used to be.
Something snaps in her, and all of a sudden she’s up out of that chair, and all 100-whatever pounds of her, in her pathetic little businesswoman getup, are launched across the desk, her hands reaching for McIntyre’s throat.
It takes him by surprise as well. He topples backward in his chair, with Little Nerd Accountant Girl on top of him. But it’s a pretty uneven fight – soon as he’s able to react, all he has to do is backhand her across the face. Then she’s down on her knees in front of the desk, sobbing, one hand up to her bloodied mouth. Both of McIntyre’s secretaries appear in the doorway and stare wide-eyed at the scene.
He looks over at them. “Get Michael up here.”
Michael is the company’s head of security. Actually, just a thug who does McIntyre’s everyday dirty work, not the hard stuff that Cole takes care of. He’s one of those big guys who develop a gut to match their overgrown muscles, and lose their necks in the badly shaved jowls that roll up from their shoulders. He’s more than enough to drag Little Nerd Accountant Girl out of the building. Half of him would’ve been more than enough.
She’s still bleeding when Michael tosses her out into the alley behind the building, where the trash dumpsters are lined up.
He squats down on his haunches to look into her bruised face.
“You screwed up big-time, sweetheart.” His voice is like tobacco-stained gravel. “And this company doesn’t have room for even little screwups. Like you.”
He’s brought her purse with him. He stands up and tosses it beside her.
“Go home,” he tells her.
He turns on his heel and heads back inside the office building, leaving her lying there in the alley . . .
NINE
Big deal, I know. People get fired. I got fired. It happens. Plus – what was I expecting? I was dreaming if I thought that McIntyre was going to make me CFO of his operation. He probably didn’t promise it to me; I must’ve imagined it, dreamed it up in my little schoolgirl head. Even an outfit like that, a total barrel of crooked scams – the only reason he’d had me keeping his books was because he needed some little twit who was so impressed with him that he could push her around, tell her to do things that if I’d been a real accountant, I wouldn’t have gone along with in a million years.
I’d known exactly what was going on – I was the one who’d cut the checks to pay his pet hit man. I didn’t exactly think Cole was out there selling magazine subscriptions for him. That was why McIntyre had kept me there, crunching his numbers, doing his books. Anybody with any brains – real brains – would’ve scooted out of there like a shot. But then things changed, and McIntyre had gotten to the point where he could start taking the company legit. That’s what smart guys like him do, soon as they get the chance. And then he didn’t need somebody like me. He needed a real numbers guy. So he went out and got one. That’s all.
Yeah, I had been calling myself an accountant, but I really wasn’t one. Not at that age. You have to have qualifications to be one of those – pass tests, get certified and all. I didn’t have any of that. I knew how to keep a set of books because a couple of the foster parents that got stuck with me owned a convenience store in Saginaw, Michigan, and the mom showed me how. And I was good at it. Kind of. That’s all. Doesn’t make me a real accountant. If I was McIntyre, I would’ve fired my ass, too. Besides . . .
It’s not like there weren’t other people getting fired.
* * *
Michael, my former boss’s chief in-house thug, goes for a drive with Cole, the highly valued freelancer who takes care of the tough jobs that a bullethead like Michael can’t be trusted doing. Not in the blazing yellow ’57 Bel Air, but one of the company cars. There’s a little errand that McIntyre has asked Cole to help Michael out with.
Of course, Cole’s happy to oblige. He liked getting under Michael’s skin. He told me as much, later on.
Michael’s driving, obviously stewing about life in general and how unfair it is for even a bruised-knuckles side-of-beef like himself. His eyes are just two little slits in his scowling face. The relationship between him and Cole is a constant irritation, not the least because he knows that Cole could kill him in about a minute, if he wanted to. So the only thing keeping him alive, Michael knows, is that his boss McIntyre finds him useful around the company building.
Which they’re heading away from at the moment. This would probably be a couple of hours after Michael, big strong man that he is, tossed out into the alley the Little Nerd Accountant Girl who had thought she was going to be the new CFO. Real tough guy, all right; give him a 100-pound girl to bring the hammer down on, and he’s in his element.
“Heard you had some excitement today.” Cole needles him about exactly that. “With our little number-cruncher.”
Michael shrugs his beefy shoulders as he drives. “No big deal.” Yeah, for him.
“Kind of a shame.” Cole leans his elbow on the passenger’s side window sill and watches the office buildings slide by. “She wasn’t a bad kid. I kinda liked her.”
That was something else he told me later. I’d had no idea. I was so terrified and repulsed by him back then.
Michael keeps driving, doesn’t say anything except one of his trademark monosyllabic grunts.
“So now who do we get paid by?”
“New system,” says Michael. “Because of the company getting all reorganized.”
“Yeah?” Cole glances over at him. “What new system?”
“Direct deposit into your bank account. The money just shows up. You’ll love it.”
“Yeah, right.” Cole is unimpressed. “Next you’ll tell me we’ve got dental and a 401(k) now.”
“Not for you,” says Michael. “You’re an independent contractor, remember?”
Cole just shakes his head in disgust and looks away again.
Michael finally pulls the company car up outside a liquor store in one of the city’s shabbier neighborhoods. The kind of neighborhood where all the businesses, what few there are, have security ironwork over the windows, including this one. Behind the wheel, Michael nods toward the building. The car stops outside the store.
“No biggie,” says Michael. “Just put a scare in him. So he’ll know it’s not a good idea to be late making his payments.”
“Are you kidding?” Cole looks even more disgusted. “This is a waste of my time. Even you could scare this guy.”
“McIntyre wanted you to do it.” The flame under Michael’s simmering scowl gets turned up a notch. “So just take care of it, all right?”
Cole shrugs. “You’re the boss.” He pushes open the car door.
Michael stays i
n the company car and watches, leaning his head down, as Cole goes inside the store. Cole starts out easy with the elderly store-owner behind the counter, but the old guy knows what he’s there for. The store-owner starts to wave his hands around, all agitated. Cole just shakes his head, then reaches inside his jacket and pulls out the big ugly .357, which he points at the guy.
Out in the car, Michael sees what Cole doesn’t. There’s a teenage kid, wearing an apron, who’s come out of the back of the store, carrying a shotgun. He sneaks down an aisle toward the cash register counter.
Instinctively, Michael’s hand moves toward the steering wheel, to honk the horn and warn Cole. But his hand stops an inch short; then he slowly pulls it back.
Inside the liquor store, Cole suddenly glances over his shoulder, but too late. The teenager blasts away, hitting Cole in the small of the back. He collapses right there on the floor.
Everything goes all distorted and weird-angled, the way movies do when somebody’s been badly hurt, but somehow they’re still conscious. Or at least a little bit.
Through a blurring haze, Cole looks up at the store-owner and the teenager. The echo of the shotgun blast seems to roll on and on. He rolls over on his chest and starts crawling toward the door, his legs dragging behind him.
He gets as far as the sidewalk. Lying in a widening pool of blood, Cole rolls over on his back and sees Michael standing above him. Michael sadly shakes his head.
“You screwed up, man.” Michael’s voice is all echoey and faint, coming from a million miles away. “Big time.”
The movie fades to black as Cole loses it, letting go of everything . . .
TEN
I wasn’t thinking about Cole – at least not back then. I had my own problems to take care of. Of course, some of them were problems I was making for myself.
That’s what sucks about having your head in a bad place – which is what happens when something really crappy happens to you, out of the blue. You got a long way to go before you’re out of that bad zone. And you might not make it out; some people don’t. They just die there. That’s something you want to try and avoid.
I wasn’t doing a good job of that, after McIntyre fired me, and his pet thug Michael threw me out in the alley behind the office building like I was a sack of garbage. Sure, maybe I hadn’t gotten set up to get blown away with a shotgun, the way Michael was going to do to Cole, but I was still seriously screwed up. I didn’t know exactly who I was more pissed at – McIntyre for not giving me the CFO job, or myself for having ever imagined that he would. In my wordless, seething rage, with the whole world spinning around me as I picked myself up and walked away from the office building, it finally came down to me. That’s who I was furious at. You can hate somebody who screws you over, but there’s nobody you want to rip the head off like that fool wearing your face, who answers to your name.
That’s probably why I did what I did next. Because I just didn’t care what happened to me after that. That’s the really bad place you don’t want to be in. Because if you want the world to punish you for your sins – believe me, the world will oblige. Happily.
You don’t have to take those kinds of sleeping pills – the ones with the TV commercials where they warn you that you might wind up naked, peeing on yourself at the side of the interstate, and getting into a fight with a couple of Highway Patrol officers – to have a blackout and find yourself doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Just get your head in that spot and, boom, it happens. Or at least it did for me.
Somehow, after I got tossed out in the alley, I started walking, just walking, not even looking where I was going, bumping into people in a daze – or maybe I got on the bus, any bus; I don’t remember. But I wound up someplace I’d been to only one time before, right after I passed the motorcycle course. There’s a Kawasaki dealership out on the side of the city, right where the interstate veers off. I’d gone out there and sat on the motorcycle I wanted, a Ninja 250R just like the one I’d learned to ride on, except for it being all new and shiny instead of scuffed up from klutzes like me dropping it on its side. The sales guys probably thought I looked cute – well maybe a little, at least – sitting on top of a zippy little sportbike like that. And they all had agreed that yeah, a half-pint like me was better off with something light and maneuverable, rather than some monster Harley or Goldwing. I’d come home with every color brochure they had, and Donnie and I had spent a happy evening looking at them spread out on top of his bed.
That’s where I wound up, in my post-firing fugue state. At the motorcycle dealership. My head was still in that bad space, where I just didn’t care. I must’ve been walking and talking like a normal human being, or close to, but really – I was just along for the ride at that point. Worse luck for me, they had a used 250R that had just shown up as a trade-in. Less than a year old, low miles, perfect condition. And priced right at two-and-a-half grand, which was just about what I had in the money market account that was all the savings Donnie and I had in the world.
As a general rule, you’ll find the sales guys at motorcycle stores to be very helpful about impulse purchases. It’s their job.
A call to my bank to verify the check I wrote, and I was the new owner of the 250R plus a plain white, full-face HJC helmet, the cheapest one they had in the shop that fit me. Good guys – they wouldn’t let me ride the bike off the lot without the helmet.
Which was the only piece of luck I had that day. Because I went down. Hard.
Not actually my fault, but that doesn’t matter. I got off to a wobbling start, heading away from the dealership. Missed the first couple of upshifts, almost killed the engine, then whatever muscle memory remained in my body from the rider course kicked in, and I was able to keep rolling. Keeping up with traffic, the skirt of what was supposed to have been my climbing-the-corporate-ladder CFO outfit climbing up my thighs, the two-inch heels hooked over the bike’s pegs, my right hand rolling on the throttle. Nobody can see me crying behind the helmet’s silvery visor . . .
Here’s my advice. If you take nothing else away from this movie, take this much. Don’t ride emotional. Don’t ride happy, don’t ride sad, don’t ride with anything else going on inside your head. Don’t even think. Just ride. Then you have at least a fighting chance against all those morons on the road.
Things aren’t going bad enough for me already, some idiot in a Celica decides to change two lanes in one swoop – not right in front of me, but in front of the panel truck ahead. The driver of which has no choice but to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting the schmuck. All of a sudden, I’m seeing a pair of double doors heading straight into the Ninja’s abbreviated windshield. My reflexes kick in without thinking, I’m piling on both the front and rear brakes, I’m good, I’m going to pull it out with maybe a foot to spare between me and the panel truck’s rear bumper –
Then my rear wheel hits an oil patch on the asphalt, and I’m not so good.
I can feel a little shudder coming up through the bike seat and into the base of my spine. Somehow, without this ever having happened to me before, I know what this means. My fists tighten on the handlebar grips. A second later, and the rear wheel loses it and comes slewing around toward the front. The only lucky break I get is that instead of taking a high-sider over the bars, I get whipped around low, the bike going in one direction and me going in another.
Let me tell you what happens when you hit the road at about forty miles per hour –
You bounce.
This might not count as one of the action parts of the movie playing on the screen inside your head. I mean yeah, a motorcycle accident and a body flying through the air – that would be me – and slamming into the asphalt. Because it all seemed strangely . . . tranquil . . . when it happened. Like it really was just happening in a movie, one that I was watching rather than living. One moment I’m on the bike, grabbing a handful of brakes, then I’m flying, and then I’m piling into the ground shoulder-first. I don’t even feel anything; it’s all strangely
painless. Then I’m up in the air again. I’m looking at the sky, and it’s so intensely blue, even through the helmet’s tinted visor, that it’s a revelation.
I’m glad I got to see that. Though I still don’t know exactly what it means.
Then I’m on my back, and I’m aware of cars stopped around me and my motorcycle lying on its side a couple of yards away. The driver of the car that had been behind me, who was gracious enough not to run over me when I went down, is bending over me and asking if I’m all right.
If they weren’t before, by this time the pantyhose are definitely goners. I’ve got a scraped knee oozing blood, but I’m able to sit up and pull off my helmet.
“I’m fine –” A strange exhilaration fills me, maybe just because I’m still alive. “It’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” I nod. I’ve managed to get to my feet. Everything seems to be working, and the world tilts back to level. “My Ninja –”
The car driver peers at me. “Your what?” The other driver, the moron who caused the accident, is long gone by now.
“My motorcycle –” I’m more concerned about it than myself. “Over there –”
He helps me pick it up and roll it over to the side of the road. Now that I’m out of the way instead of lying in the middle of the lane like a doormat, traffic resumes rolling by.
He watches me try to brush myself off. “You need to go to the hospital.”
Yeah, right. Like I’ve got insurance. That’s just one more thing I was hoping to get with my promotion to CFO.
“I’m fine.” There’s blood on one of my palms as well, where I had scraped my hand on the asphalt. “Seriously.”
“Seriously, my butt.” He’s really concerned. He picks up my helmet from where I had set it down on the curb. “Look at this.” He shows me the side of the helmet, where it’s all crumpled and dented, like a hard-boiled egg that’s been dropped on the kitchen floor. “You need to go in and have X-rays done.”
