Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  It sounded like a death sentence to Lyle, who had never asked himself any of the large questions Jimmy not only asked, but seemed to have an answer for. But once the idea of a promotion had occurred to him, it was like standing on a cliff looking down at a swimming hole. The only way to shut the cycle of indecision down was to jump.

  Finally, Lyle could stand it no longer, and he made his way to MacBride’s office just so the imaginary harangue would stop. He reminded himself not to demand anything, only to ask politely, but first he washed his hands carefully with grease-cutting soap so he wouldn’t leave black smudges on any of the papers that always littered MacBride’s desk. He waited until most of the men had gone home for the day before knocking gently at the office door.

  MacBride sat Lyle down and gave him his choice of a Dr Pepper or a Sprite. Then he went through the various job openings with him. It was a shock to Lyle to find out that all of the positions were paired with complex personality profiles. Managers were supposed to be highly self-reliant and strongly pragmatic by nature. They should emphasize realistic goals in the development of workable plans. They should be assertive and forceful and persistent in the face of frustration. None of the listed attributes were ones Lyle possessed, but Jimmy’s voice was in the back of his head, egging him on. “I think I can be indispensable to the accomplishment of your goals,” he told MacBride.

  “And you are, Rayburn. You have a spotless record. On time every day. No accidents with the equipment.”

  Lyle rubbed the place where the metal filings had gone in, but thought it better not to mention it.

  “All this tells me that you’re right where you need to be,” said MacBride, who rambled on a little longer before telling Lyle he could take the rest of his Dr Pepper with him.

  “He said I wasn’t a visionary,” Lyle told Jimmy the next day.

  “That shows how much he knows,” scoffed Jimmy. “Being a visionary is only important for goal-setters and strategists.”

  The next day Jimmy gave Lyle a dog-eared book. “This here is the bible on this sort of thing,” he said.

  “What sort of thing?” asked Lyle.

  “Getting what you want.”

  “I thought it was about MacBride getting what he wants.”

  “Jeezus, Lyle,” said Jimmy. “That’s only what you want MacBride to think.”

  It was the first book Lyle had read in years. The table of contents wasn’t too bad—short phrases, one per line. But the rest of the book was a different story. Even though he read the first chapter over and over again, he couldn’t understand the point of it. The author told some amusing stories about gangsters who couldn’t see how all the terrible things they had done were wrong, but Lyle wasn’t a gangster. And he didn’t see what gangsters had to do with becoming a supervisor on the floor. The book said, The only reason you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. And it said a person usually had two reasons for doing something, one that sounds good and the real one. And it said to smile and talk about the other person’s interests and to let the boss think the idea of the promotion was his and also that it was Lyle’s job to keep MacBride from saying “no” because no was hard to overcome. Okay, Lyle told himself. I guess I can do that.

  The next day he went back to MacBride and chatted with him about fishing and about MacBride’s grandson while MacBride showed him a few photographs he had taken at the lake. When the time seemed right, Lyle said, “About that promotion,” but MacBride, who had never been anything but friendly to Lyle, hardly looked at him as he said, “We’re in a holding pattern, Rayburn—especially considering the economy is in the tank. Not to mention that business with your wife.”

  “What business?” asked Lyle.

  “All that talk about how what we do here is harmful got some of the other employees upset, and now I hear she’s causing trouble up at the prison.”

  “How is she causing trouble?” asked Lyle. Maggie had promised him that the prisoner records were only copies and no one knew she had taken them.

  But MacBride just said, “That’s probably something you should ask her yourself.”

  Lyle tried to find out what MacBride meant, but whenever he asked about work, Maggie said things were fine, and when he asked her about making a difference in the world, she said she wasn’t thinking about innocent prisoners or freaks of nature anymore. He wanted to believe her, but something about the way she was whacking at the lawn worried him.

  “The trick is to get the clover without pulling up all of the grass,” Maggie told him.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier just to poison it?”

  “Easier for me,” said Maggie, “but lethal for the insects.”

  Fall was coming, and soon Will would be back at school. The leaves on the Japanese maple were already tinged with orange, and the beautyberry bush was covered with fat purple berries. Maggie showed Lyle how to water the petunias she had planted in pots by the back door. “Just in case,” she said.

  “Just in case of what?” Lyle wanted to know.

  “Just in case I’m hit by a truck,” said Maggie. “Just in case I run off with the mailman.”

  “The mailman?” asked Lyle.

  “Remember what the pastor told us. One crazy thing, no questions asked.”

  They had a good laugh, and then she showed him the drawer in the desk where she kept the passwords for the checking account and the health insurance card.

  “Just in case you’re appointed ambassador to Japan?” asked Lyle.

  “Yes,” said Maggie. “Just in case of that.” But Lyle could tell she wasn’t really listening. An army of sugar ants was making its way from the windowsill to a blob of goo that had been spilled by the kitchen sink. “Sugar is really bad for you,” said Maggie. “It’s worse for you than fat. And mostly it isn’t even sugar. It’s high fructose corn syrup, which is subsidized and overproduced, so they have to come up with more and more ways to use it. They put it in everything and then they make the portions bigger, which leads to obesity and diabetes. I don’t think any of us should eat it anymore.”

  After dinner, Maggie sat at her desk to sort the mail while Will and Tula cleared the table and washed up. Lyle smiled to recall how he and Maggie had washed the dishes together all those years ago. He walked over to where she was bent over her papers in a warm pool of light from the desk lamp. He wanted to touch her that way again. He wanted to be young, with everything before him. He wanted to sit down beside her and ask her advice on how to handle MacBride, but when he stooped down to look over her shoulder, she said, “This is where I keep the checkbook, Lyle. Right here in the top drawer. And this is where I keep the stamps.”

  Lyle backed away. He could see how the little pool of lamplight was just big enough to contain Maggie and the desktop and how there wasn’t any room in it for him.

  7.3 Maggie

  One day while Valerie was out of the room on an errand, Maggie answered the telephone to find a Mr. Pickering calling to speak with the director. “Please hold while I see if he’s available,” she said, but she was thinking, Pickering! Wasn’t he the author of the report called Prisons and Profits she had found on Valerie’s desk? When DC came on the phone, she disconnected her extension, and then, as quietly as she could, she pressed the button to connect again, ready with an excuse in case either of the men could hear her muffled breathing. But the two men were talking excitedly, and if the open line whooshed or echoed, they didn’t seem to notice. The ACLU woman had been right about the sense of urgency and importance. Right about the adrenaline rush. Right that the line was not wide and heavily patrolled but thin and alluring, as much a mirage as an identifiable boundary between what was acceptable and what was not.

  “There’s a precedent for using prison labor if the business serves a public purpose,” Pickering was saying. “And what’s more important to the public than a safe supply of inexpensive food? What’s more important than keeping jobs right here in Oklahoma?”

  DC so
unded unsure. “I don’t know. The munitions factory is a government facility. We’re authorized to provide labor to government entities and even to some private businesses, but not to farms. How would we keep the prisoners from escaping? I don’t think chain gangs are a modern-day solution. I’d like to help you out, but my hands are tied.”

  “What are they tied by?” asked Pickering. “Realistically, I mean.”

  “Laws, for one thing,” said DC.

  “And who makes the laws?”

  When DC didn’t answer, Pickering said, “We’re not talking about Moses and the stone tablets, here. We’re talking about laws made and changed by human beings. Human beings who are a lot like us. Who could actually be us if you think about it. A few persuasive arguments are all we need—that and a tiny bit of access to the people in charge. That’s what the draft legislation group is all about.”

  DC promised to keep an open mind.

  “Just so you know,” said Pickering, “it’s projected that soon one out of every three African American men will go to prison at some point in his lifetime, and seventy percent of all released inmates will be re-arrested within three years. But it can’t just be the African Americans who are breaking the laws, even if they’re the ones getting caught. My point is that the industry needs to adopt a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, we need stricter laws and sentencing; on the other, we need better enforcement. Yours is a growth industry, anyway you slice it.”

  “Hmm,” said DC. “Growth is good.”

  “My firm leverages your clout with the movers and shakers. We place people in think tanks that draw up model laws. We help sell those laws to the public. That’s what I can do for you. What you can do for me is to review that draft legislation I sent you. The material is highly sensitive, so your eyes only and all that. And if you can provide some relevant statistics or any other supporting information, I’d be very grateful. I promised my clients I’d get it to some influential members of the state legislature next month, and time is running short.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look,” said DC. “I guess I can do that for you.”

  As soon as Valerie stepped back in the office, DC stuck his head out of the door and asked, “Did that missing document ever show up?”

  “No,” said Valerie. “It never did.”

  “Damn it,” said DC. “Damn it all to hell.”

  “DC seems awfully grumpy lately,” Maggie remarked in an attempt to elicit information, but Valerie merely grunted and said, “You would be too.”

  “I would be when?”

  “DC is under a lot of pressure. The rest of us assume it’s all wine and roses for the people with the important jobs, but they take on a lot of responsibility. We’re lucky they’re the ones making the decisions so we don’t have to.”

  “What decisions?” asked Maggie.

  “Important ones,” replied Valerie. “Decisions that benefit everybody else.”

  Maggie tried not to let Valerie’s air of superiority bother her, but more and more she found herself thinking, Why should I always take a back seat to Valerie? But then she told herself, My job is only a means for accomplishing my real work, anyway. What Valerie and DC do on their own time isn’t my affair. Then she laughed at the word “affair,” and then she stopped laughing. Nothing was as it seemed!

  During her last days at the munitions plant, Maggie had become progressively certain that Mr. Winslow was monitoring her movements, and now she had the same feeling about Valerie, who would quickly avert her eyes when Maggie looked up from her desk. And sometimes Maggie heard strange patterings in the hallway, as if she was being followed by someone wearing soft shoes. She knew from the movies that a guilty mind could play tricks on a person, but should a person feel guilty for defying convention or even breaking a few laws in order to do right? The sense of being watched was exacerbated by Hugo, who leered at her when she walked by the security desk and who had started to loiter in the hallway outside the director’s office at lunchtime or when he was on his break. Even when he was safely on duty, Maggie couldn’t help feeling he was lurking around the next corner about to burst into sight, which set her nerves on edge. “There you are!” she would cry whenever she saw him.

  “Waiting for me again,” Hugo would reply, and even though she did her best to avoid him, Maggie found herself saying, “There you are!” several times each day.

  Once, soon after she had given her notice at the munitions plant, Winslow had passed Maggie in the hallway and said, “I’ve got my eye on you,” but he had said it so quietly that Maggie wondered if she had only imagined it. Now it occurred to her to turn the tables on Hugo by making him think she was the one watching him. She found her opportunity the next day, when she happened to be walking back from the restroom just when Hugo was starting his lunchtime patrol. She fixed her eyes on the waxed linoleum floor tiles and tried to appear preoccupied with her own thoughts. As the hard soles of his boots clipped toward her, she almost lost her nerve, but at the last second she whispered, “I’ve got my eye on you,” very quietly, under her breath.

  “What? What?” asked Hugo, stopping in his tracks and giving her a piercing glare.

  Maggie raised her eyes and smiled as brightly as she could. “I didn’t say anything,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re hearing things now!”

  This little act of aggression came seemingly out of nowhere. It gave Maggie confidence, but it also worried her, as if she had taken a step closer to the line the PATH woman had talked about. The trick was to use Hugo’s stubbornness to her advantage, for he was too big and too smart for her to make him go against his nature. Still, she could feel events gathering momentum, and when she approached the exit that evening, she looked at Hugo in a new way—not so much as an adversary, but as a tool. He might have a shiny badge pinned to his uniform and muscle-bound shoulders and a gun strapped to his hip and a savage glint in his smiling eyes, but she had the element of surprise. I know what you are, she thought, but what do you really know about me?

  7.4 Maggie

  Every year, DC took his family on a camping trip at the end of the summer, and as the date approached, Valerie became more and more irritable. She huffed and moaned and made cryptic gestures in the direction of the office where DC sat with his hands clasped together and his head bowed over his work. When Maggie asked what was wrong, Valerie said, “I’m going to be ill. I’m going to be physically ill.” Once DC left for his vacation, she started to miss work—first it was a broken alternator and then it was a summer cold.

  With the director away and Valerie in and out, the office echoed with absence. Maggie’s eyes strayed to the bank of locked files in DC’s office, and when a bumblebee lit on the tall steel cabinet, it seemed an invitation to search for Valerie’s keys, which were easily found in her desk drawer, to stand on a chair, and to crush the brittle body in a scrap of paper from the waste bin—and, while she was at it, to slip the key into the lock on DC’s personal file cabinet and slide open one of the heavy drawers. She was so preoccupied she didn’t remember until too late that bees were dying left and right and that if people wanted fruit crops to exist in the world of the future, they needed to protect pollinators and not annihilate them. She rushed to the waste bin, but the bee was a smear of body parts. It was impossible to think of everything at once!

  Maggie’s heart was thumping in her chest as she climbed back up on the chair. She had let the bee distract her, and she knew that lack of focus could lead to fateful mistakes. The hair on her arms stood on end as she opened the second-to-top file drawer and finally the top one. The air was buzzing as if it were full of bees or as if a warning bell was warming up for a full alarm. She knew Valerie wasn’t really sick and might show up at any moment. She even imagined DC might hear his own buzzing, leave his family zipped in their tent beside the Red River, and come rushing back to the office to catch her in the act. When someone dropped a stapler in the copy alcove, Maggie froze on the chair, swaying slightly and cocking
her head toward the door, but no one appeared. Footsteps clumped down the hallway. Someone laughed. A minute later, the copy machine chugged to life.

  The topmost drawer was the one she had seen Valerie open the day she had worn the inappropriate blouse and Maggie had watched her from the hallway. Right at the front of the drawer was a training brochure on prison discipline and a pamphlet called “You and STDs,” both of which she skimmed before slipping them into the waistband of her skirt. The PATH woman had been right about solitary confinement: among other things, prisoners had no right to question their confinement and the term of such confinement should not exceed ten years, although that was not a hard-and-fast rule. Ten years! thought Maggie. The idea of it was enough to break a person’s heart.

  At the very back of the drawer was an unmarked accordion folder, and in the folder was a heart-shaped card from DC to Valerie that said, “Be good while I’m away.” Scrawled beneath the message was the address of the River Motel. And there, fallen down behind the unmarked folder, was the missing draft legislation.

  A printout of a series of emails was tucked inside the cover, with a subject line saying THE SAFE NEIGHBORHOODS ACT: DRAFT 3.2. The email exchange started off:

  The fact that spending on prisons has now surpassed spending on education has directed an unfortunate spotlight on our entire industry, but should community safety be sacrificed for budget constraints?

  Maggie’s hands were trembling as she put the document into the top drawer of her desk. More people stuck to the flypaper, she thought. More money lining the pockets of the people in charge!

  She spent the rest of the day devising ways to smuggle the draft legislation and her other files out of the prison and shuddering to imagine what would happen if she was caught. All personnel were subject to random searches, and there was never any telling how thoroughly the exit guards would search an employee’s purse and bags. She decided to start with something small, so as a trial run, she tucked the pamphlet on STDs into the bottom of her purse. Then she zipped the one on prison discipline into the side pouch where she kept her sunglasses.