MENTORING
It was time to find a new protégé. Bob’s rebuke and rebuffs sobered David. There was never going to be a male-to-male romance between the two. Acceptance followed denial, but slowly and angrily. Loathing of self and despairing exasperation followed. Where had he gone so terribly wrong? Had he not given Bob everything? A career path with security, a showering of gifts and perks, a paid-for arrangement with the greatest sexpot whore in Colorado, the trips, the executive prestige, the cars, the lavish compensation, the extravagantly appointed office and secretarial help—all these things he’d given freely to Bob, and what little had he asked in return? A blow job now and then, a hug or two, some soft word of love for an older man who adored him. Was that too much to ask? Did Bob have to humiliate him so badly that he had to cry and beg for love?
The loathing and despair gave way slowly, and he began to find little faults here and there. A sales call forgotten, a stock analysis that seemed too hurried and inconsequential to the creator indicating there was something else besides the firm vying for attention. Then the pressures, the demands to do more sales calls per day, per week, to take more flights, to run faster. All these things revealed David’s prima donna sales executive was a mere mortal, not a god. He had faults that showed under greater and greater pressure, like a quarterback feels when down three scores with six minutes to play. The more pressures applied, the more likely the man will make mistakes. A hurried throw, an incomplete pass; a forced throw, an interception. Another firm got the salesman away from us; a linebacker ran a pick in for a touchdown. The other team got the big sales. Not good enough. Never mind the defense. Let the other teams run up huge competitive advantages; can’t be defense’s fault. Must be sales aren’t good enough. That’s it! Imperfection causes the waters of patience to boil.
Time to groom a new quarterback, but frustration makes it tough. In his heart of hearts, David knew lousy performance, lousy defense, caused money to walk and made getting new sales muscle very difficult and expensive. Stuck, more frustration, boiling over furiously with it, David turned to an inner self looking for new direction and purpose. It would be hard to get rid of Bob. The business would suffer and backslide. I must mentor a new protégé. But where will I find one? Who will he be? There’s so much on my mind, so many things to keep track of. There’s the business and there’s the secret business. Who could succeed me? Who would want to think about all this? It’s getting so maddening!
“Dolly, I’m going to have a big fight night tonight. The new big blue scorpion will take on my number-two-ranked tarantula to see who gets a shot at the title. I won’t be with you tonight, sweetheart. I’ll be watching the fight with Andy, my new best friend.”
Dolly just stood there chewing her grass.
That night, in the green room, David took down the fetus jar and placed it on the chair next to his. Then he opened the dividers between the tarantula and the scorpion. David and Andy had the best seats in the house. Now the two mortal enemies were in the same enlarged glass cage. Only one of the combatants could survive this encounter.
“Andy, I think it’s time you and I had some serious discussions about your future,” David began, addressing the fetus in the formaldehyde jar. “You see, you and I actually have a great deal in common. Nobody loves either of us. Mom and Dad didn’t love me, and your mom and dad didn’t love you either,” he lied to his imaginary protégé.
The fetus in the formaldehyde jar said nothing. It was forever preserved and dead, but it didn’t give David any back talk. It had a chance of succession.
“No, they did not love you, Andy. Don’t try to tell me they did. I know they didn’t. Your dad just loved your mom’s pussy, not you. He didn’t even know you were conceived, so he couldn’t possibly love you. I’m never going to tell him either. You’re too good for him. He will never know you were alive, so he can’t possibly ever love you. And your mother, Andy. Your mother was more interested in getting fucked than what the effect of her whoring was going to have on you. She might have hurt you, Andy. You might have been born with a disease, or some penis might have dented your brain and you could have been born mentally disabled. So you see, Andy, I saved you by killing your mother and taking you from her.
“Now you belong to me. Now we can both share our feelings that our mom and dad didn’t love us. But we do have each other, Andy. We’ll always have each other. I’m going to tell you how the world works, and how to live and how to think about things, and I want you to pay close attention to everything I say. Remember, Andy, just do as I say. Always do as I say and never as I do.”
Of course, Andy said nothing.
“Well, I’ll tell you why I say that, Andy. It’s because sometimes I can be a very bad boy and I can do terrible things to people. I don’t want you to grow up to be like me that way. I want you to grow up to be a wonderful man. Maybe you’ll become very wealthy or possibly even become a senator or the governor. You’ll go far if you listen to me, Andy.
“People are the most important factor to be managed in business. Most executives look at people and categorize them by their talent areas, like mathematical aptitude for analysis, conversational abilities for salesmanship training, attention to details for bookkeeping, neatness for secretarial work, things like that. But that’s the wrong way to think about people, Andy. The correct way is to categorize them into only two categories. There are smart people and there are stupid people. Smart people should never be hired in the first place because all they want to do is take advantage of you and squeeze you for money. They ask too many questions. They want to know what’s going on all the time, and generally they are just a nuisance. What you want working for you at UGGA is stupid people. These are people you can make promises to and get them to work for a promise. They assume they are going to be treated fairly, so you can tell them just about anything and then screw them later after you’ve gotten the work out of them.
“Unfortunately, Andy, your mother and father come from the stupid crowd. Marty believed I’d give her the moon and she screwed her ass off for good old UGGA. But now she’s gone. The beauty of her deal was that we have the assets she brought in and none of the residual costs. The men she fucked can’t come to us and blackmail us or turn us in to the regulators because she’s dead. You always need to think ahead, Andy. Pick dummies to work for you, promise them what they need to hear, and then get the work out of them before you screw them. But always be thinking about how to screw them in the end before you even hire them in the first place.
“Your dad still works for us, Andy, but it won’t be for long. I have a plan to screw him also. I’ve had it for a long time. All I need to do is get him to sign a simple piece of paper and we’ll be rid of him. Don’t get upset with me, Andy. Remember, he never loved you in the first place. He was only interested in Marty’s pussy.
“I’ll be honest with you. There’s one employee who presents an enigma to me. It’s the Indian woman, Barbara. I’m not sure I figured her out correctly when we hired her. I thought she’d just be a dull person who did as she was told. I even researched her background before I hired her. It was sketchy. She lived on an Indian reservation, then went to college. There was no information about her parents, but how much could a couple Indians know about business? I researched Indian women who were beautiful, because she is very beautiful, and guess what? I found this article about beautiful Indian women and it had pictures of about twenty of the most beautiful ones in the country. They were scantily clad in bikinis and very sexy outfits. And there she was!
“Barbara posed for her photo in that article. So I thought, naturally enough, that someday she could work as a beautiful whore fucking her brains out for sales and making great money doing it, right alongside your mother. But that didn’t interest her, Andy. Something about her job interviews really threw me. She said she wanted to start working not in sales but in clerical staff. She said she wanted to do all the menial jobs that no one else wanted to do. I didn’t figure it at all.
Here’s this knockout beauty trying to work in the most inconspicuous job possible. Well, I figured she was trying to hide from a boyfriend or she felt guilty about being beautiful, so I told Susan I voted to hire her. All women are nuts anyway. It was Susan’s call, but if I had strenuously objected she might not have hired her.
“Now I’m not so sure hiring her was a smart move. See, Andy, the Barbara woman always studies the business. She reads regulations, learns all sorts of things about how the firm works. She also studies investing. Why she does that, I’ll never know. She doesn’t make enough to invest. We barely pay her enough to live on. I think she knows more than she lets on, but she keeps quiet about it. She never asks for a pay raise. It’s almost like she doesn’t want money. Maybe she’s afraid if she doesn’t know everything, she’ll get fired.
“I don’t understand her. I felt her up one day not too long ago and she gave me a look like she was going to kill me. That’s just weird, Andy. Most women kind of giggle when I feel them up. I think they all secretly like it but are afraid to admit it. But not Barbara. She was angry with me, like hostile angry! That’s just part of my concern about her. She’s also sweet on Bob, your dad. I can tell. They try to hide their interest, but I see how they look at each other. It’s like they have a secret code or something. I just don’t like it when I’m not sure I know what’s going on. But you just watch how I handle this situation, Andy. I’m sure there will be a lesson in it for you. I’m going to make you into the best executive UGGA ever had. You’re learning from the master. Just trust me and believe in me. Remember that I always have your best interests at heart. You have a brilliant future at UGGA.
“Look, Andy, the arachnid just parried the direct thrust from the scorpion. Now the tarantula has two legs pinning the scorpion’s stinger. This is exciting stuff. The scorpion can’t use his stinger. If the scorpion can’t pivot around, the spider will soon find a chink in his armor and put its bite beak into the soft flesh.”
The excitement of the delicate dance of death between the archrivals in the arena gave David an erection. In the presence of his protégé guest at ringside, he unzipped his trousers and began to masturbate. The heightened sensory pleasures of his childhood were still with him, just as they were when, years earlier, he’d discovered the joys of tearing wings from hapless flies.
And so began a series of conversations between David and his imaginary friend and protégé, the fetus in the formaldehyde. And the spiders and scorpions went on about their age-old rivalry, oblivious to David’s mentoring of his fetus protégé, mindlessly tearing each other from limb to limb, with the winner killing and systematically devouring the loser. And the whole experience, the generosity and goodness of healthy male fellowship, the kindheartedness that comes from taking the time to help a fellow troubled soul, and the shared camaraderie of the thrills only the best of friends could experience together at ringside satisfied David’s deeply seated need for love.
REYNARD THE RED
When Bob was a young child in Milltown, he spent a lot of time at his uncle’s farm. Uncle Eddie understood people from his years running a pool hall. For relaxation, Eddie liked to observe animals and acquired a learned understanding of them over the years. Most animals found Eddie’s favor. He even loved skunks and raccoons, regarded by most people as pests. The only animals he didn’t care for were crows, ravens, and starlings. Eddie, thinking nature somehow erred by having blackbirds of any kind, nurtured a deep hatred toward them. Blackbirds killed young songbirds and the babies of squirrels and rabbits, all creatures that pleased him to watch, even though they ate his produce. Not a man content to allow nature to take her course, Eddie devised a trap for the pesky blackbirds.
The trap first involved the capture of a red fox. To catch the fox, Eddie built a chicken coup. It was a magnificent chicken coup, with a trapdoor in the floor with another floor below. In the coup, Eddie placed a few chickens and waited. Sure enough, in a few days a fox showed up. He was a big handsome red fox with beautiful full fur, and Eddie soon referred to him as Reynard. The fox enjoyed his evening chicken feasts so much that he got a bit too bold about raiding this unprotected chicken coup. Eddie had the door propped wide open for the fox. The prop was a simple clothesline prop stick with a notch carved into the top to hold the line up. One evening Eddie had the coup propped open for the fox and old Reynard went inside for his meal of chicken. The prop was attached to a long line with Eddie waiting on the other end. He pulled the string, the door swung shut, and Reynard was caught.
Eddie made the fox his pet, as much as anyone can make a pet out of a fox. He fed the thing, brought it fresh water, and talked with it daily. He fed Reynard so well it was doubtful the animal would try to get away if given the chance. It had comfortable quarters under the coup, with a warm wooden floor and straw bedding up off the ground. Eddie and the fox developed a routine; one could say they had a friendship and an understanding.
Each day Eddie set out a trail of corn near the coup. Like he did for the fox, he held the door open with a clothes prop. The blackbirds ate the corn trail right up to and into Eddie’s chicken coup. There were no longer any chickens; the coup was now the blackbird coup. When the coup filled with blackbirds, Eddie pulled the door prop out and captured the birds. He’d devised a floor trap that he opened by pulling on a second line, giving Reynard access to the upper floor. Each day Reynard ate five to ten blackbirds, then returned to his quarters on the lower floor. Reynard became a very fat fox. The other animals and songbirds approved of Eddie’s arrangement with Reynard. Songbirds, squirrels, and rabbits multiplied profusely on the farm. Eddie was also a good shot with his 20-gauge shotgun, and Florence’s table fare often featured squirrel or rabbit.
It so happened that Bob was selling in Roanoke, Virginia, when he saw a beautiful print of a red fox. It reminded him of his late uncle Eddie and his farm with the pet fox. Bob bought the print and took it with him to be framed. On the day he was going to take it to the framer’s, he remembered the little plug of fox hair he’d found in David’s barn. It would make for a nice touch, he thought, to have the gallery slip the plug of fox hair into the picture in the lower left corner of the frame, opposite the artist’s signature.
Bob hung the framed print in his office. As many times as David was in the office, he never once looked closely at the fox print. David was, other than his sexual preferences, wired the same as most straight men, and men generally paid less attention to the details in a picture frame than women did. If something was out of place in a picture, many women would notice it right away, whereas most men were oblivious to the very existence of the picture itself, let alone the details within its frame.
Judith studied the picture closely and slowly the story behind the picture filtered out to the other women in the office. The picture on Bob’s wall was different than the other office decor of animal heads, mountain scenes, and portraits of dead people. It even had an actual piece of the animal itself in the picture. There was speculation amongst the office staff that Bob shot the fox after he took its picture. He related the story of Eddie’s fox to Judith, and how that memory attracted him to the picture. Somehow the office grapevine story became that the little hair plug was from Eddie’s fox, and Bob shot his uncle’s fox.
Barbara inspected the picture very closely and deciphered its telling clue. She’d seen many fox pelts on the reservation and this hair was not from a fox, nor a coyote. It was too fine, too silky. It was human hair.
She learned from Bob that he’d picked up the hair plug in David’s barn. Her tracking skills told her that David had something to do with Marty’s disappearance, and she believed the skin was likely Marty’s. The head being cleaned in the ant and silverfish compartment was also probably hers. Likely David murdered Marty, but somehow the reddish-streaked portion of Marty’s hair, escaped the insect room. And there it was!
Barbara craftily kept this information to herself. If there was to be retribution against David, it was not her rightful place t
o settle things. He could not be her kill, nor did she wish to reveal all she knew and suspected by turning the matter over to the police. David would merely lawyer up and prolong matters, and justice for Marty might never be served. Instead she went to Susan and told her about the wonderful picture in Bob’s office. She made the point of telling Susan to look very carefully at the beautiful hair plug, urging the woman to ask herself if she’d ever seen hair as beautiful as what was attached to that plug. Then Barbara patiently waited and observed the movements of the human animals in the UGGA offices as nature took its course.
Eventually, Susan made a point of visiting with Bob while he was in his office. She admired his fox picture. It was beautiful artwork, she opined. She carefully inspected the hair plug, staring at it for a long time before she asked Bob why he’d kept the patch of hair from his uncle’s fox.
“Oh, that’s not from Uncle Eddie’s fox. That was something I picked up in David’s barn. Apparently a fox got in there and somehow it got torn from the fox’s fur.”
“It seems like a long patch of hair. Must’ve been a fox with pretty long hair.” She again complemented the picture and left Bob’s office.
The human senses constantly acquire data inputs. The acquired data finds a location to repose itself in the brain someplace, and there it waits and sleeps as if it has no importance in this world, was simply put there to be stored away for safekeeping. Sometimes a mind will repress what it sees for good reason. It was easier for Susan to believe Marty was alive somewhere than to objectively receive evidence to the contrary. Yet her subconscious knew something about that hair plug didn’t fit that picture. It fit some other picture that was being concealed from her.
Months, even years, could pass and the data point slept undisturbed. But then one distant future day, another data point finds lodging in the noggin and thenceforth two dot points slumber, isolated and unaware of each other. Then a small miracle happens. Somewhere in the mind, usually when the mind’s owner is in a relaxed, unhurried state, a spark of neural electricity leaps through the brain’s synaptic nodes and neural pathways from one dot to the other. Miraculously, the sleeping dots awaken and become dancing partners, like former high school sweethearts tripping down memory lane together.
When The Butterflies Come Page 34
