Last of the Dixie Heroes

by Peter Abrahams

  “Rhett,” she said, reaching out, drawing him to her. He went stiff, but didn’t stop her. Over Rhett’s shoulder, she held out a hand to Roy. “Sorry about your father, Roy. How did he…”

  “Liver,” said Roy.

  She nodded. Her hand was cold. “Coffee?” she said.

  “If it’s ready,” Roy said. “Can’t be late-big day today.” He almost told her about the promotion, the salary, the bonus, might have spilled it all the next second, but somewhere in the house there was a thump, like a book falling, or a shoe. Marcia’s eyes shifted.

  He drank his coffee in the kitchen, standing up.

  “Look what I brought you, Rhett,” Marcia said.

  “What is it?”

  “Never seen one of these snow globes?” she said. “This here’s Manhattan-that’s the fancy part. Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, I forget the name of this one, and Trump Tower. Turn it upside down to watch the snow.”

  Rhett turned it upside down, but lost interest before the snow had done falling.

  “A good trip?” Roy said.

  “All right.”

  “Did you like New York?” Roy had never been; neither, until now, had Marcia.

  “I had to get away for a day or two.”

  Roy understood: Barry. “After work today, let’s have that dinner,” Roy said.

  “What dinner?”

  “From the other night. Why don’t you come by around six?”

  Marcia bit her lip. Roy didn’t remember her doing that before; was it the start of a new habit that came with the implant, or injections, or whatever they were? “I’ll try,” she said.

  “But-” But what did it depend on? Work, most likely, Roy decided: she’d have to make up for the missed time. “Doesn’t have to be six,” he said. “Whenever you can make it is fine.”

  “I said I’ll try.”

  For the drive to work, Roy selected the tape that followed Jerry’s promotion.

  A promotion is one of life’s big changes, Jerry, and business these days is about change. Any concerns?

  I’m worried about the attitude of my old colleagues, Carol, the men and women on the floor.

  That says a lot about you, Jerry, but don’t overdo it. There may be some resentment at first, but it usually passes. After all, Jerry, everyone understands this is a business.

  Were there snow globes of Atlanta? Would the Globax building be included if there were? It seemed especially tall today, its color a few shades darker than the brassy sky, the blue Globax sign a brilliant blue, and as he watched it, Roy realized they’d added a new feature: a sparkling image of the planet that somehow spun back and forth between the G and the X. Roy laughed out loud, it was so dazzling, the kind of effect that would get a building into the snow globes for sure. At that moment, it hit: a company this good, this important, believed in him, Roy Hill; a stamp of approval from the big time. He realized he was doing all right, even felt a bit of pride.

  Roy turned into the garage. The attendant was in his booth, chewing on a sugar donut, the new bronze Globax hat tilted back on his head, his feet up on the counter. He looked up at Roy in surprise. Roy checked the clock: 6:55. On time, nothing to be surprised about. Then Roy figured it out: Curtis parked in the upper garage, S2, with the guys from the seventeenth floor. The attendant had already been told that Roy would be parking there too, as of today. This was his last day down in S5. He found a space right by the elevator, which never happened after 6:45. In fact, there were lots of spaces. His lucky day.

  6:57. Roy got in the elevator, pressed S1. He rode up alone, watching his reflection on the inside of the bronze door. He thought he looked the same as always-except for the tie; the tie really was special, an anniversary present from Marcia, not the last anniversary, but the last one that they’d still been together. No one looking at his reflection could have seen how he felt inside, so ready.

  The doors opened at S2, the executive parking level. No one got on, but Roy saw a man in a dark suit walking toward an SUV, one of the really big ones. The man started to unlock it, then suddenly bent forward and vomited all over the cement floor, his gleaming shoes, the cuffs of his pants. As he straightened back up, Roy got a good look at his face. It was Mr. Pegram. The elevator closed.

  6:58. The doors opened. Roy got out. Left to receiving, right to shipping. Roy turned right, toward the cubicle grid, laid out like a vast silicon motherboard, with U.S.A. first, divided into sections A1, A2, B, C, D1, and D2; Canada and Caribbean; European Union (excluding U.K.); U.K.; Eastern Europe (excluding Russia); Russia; Mexico; Central/South America (excluding Mexico); on down to the end, Asia/Oceania. The problem was the cubicles were gone. The cubicles, the desks, the chairs, the monitors, the phones, the framed family pictures, the Far Side cartoons, P.J.’s slippers: all gone. And the people. Roy must have made some kind of sound, because it came echoing back to him across the empty space, a startled little cry you might hear in the night woods.

  Roy looked closely at his watch to make sure of what it said. 6:59. He turned back to the elevators. Surely in the next minute the shipping guys would come swarming out, and a team from maintenance to make everything right, install the new cubicles, computers, T-1 connections, phone system, whatever it was. Maybe they’d decided to redo everything in Globax colors, bronze and blue. But the next minute came and nothing happened.

  What day was it?

  He checked his watch: Wed. The right day.

  You can take this one to the bank. See you the day after tomorrow?

  Seven sharp.

  He checked his watch: seven sharp.

  Roy had a crazy idea. Someone had found out about his promotion yesterday, there’d been a riot, everyone had walked off the job. Ludicrous, but nothing else occurred to him. Then he noticed that he wasn’t quite alone. Someone was standing in the glass office, very still. Roy couldn’t make him out because for the first time in his memory the lights weren’t on in the glass office. It rose like a dark island in the center of all that empty bright space.

  Roy crossed the floor, climbed the stairs, went in. The glass office had been stripped of everything, but Curtis looked the same, dressed in a perfectly fitting dark suit, and wearing a tie, Roy saw, exactly like his, with the same blue diamonds.

  “I knew I forgot something,” Curtis said.

  “What are you talking about? Where is everybody?”

  One of Curtis’s eyelids did that fluttering thing. “You being away. It slipped my mind.” He noticed Roy’s tie, went silent.

  “What slipped your mind?”

  “Informing you, Roy.”

  “Informing me what?”

  “They let them all go,” he said, making a panoramic gesture with his hand. “The whole department.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Globax,” said Curtis. “Fired every single shipper on the floor. Plus receiving. Did it by email from New York at 4:25 yesterday afternoon. At 4:30 every screen went dark. When I came in this morning it was like this.”

  “Impossible,” Roy said. “How can there be no more shipping?”

  “Of course there’s shipping, Roy, for God’s sake. As of this minute it’s all being done out of Miami, that’s all.”

  Cesar must have heard rumors: Roy understood those emailed questions now. “P.J.?” he said. “DeLoach?”

  “Every single one.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes.”

  Roy felt sick. “Survivor guilt,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Now I know what it means.”

  Curtis looked puzzled; maybe he’d never heard the term. Roy had been to Miami twice, once for football, years later on a long weekend with Marcia. They’d had a good time. Miami would be all right, might even help them make a fresh start. He could handle it. This was a business, after all, and change was a big part of it, as Carol had just finished pointing out. He pulled himself together.

  “When do we start?” he said.
/>   “Start?” said Curtis.

  “In Miami. When do we have to be there?”

  “We?”

  Roy got it. “You’re staying here?”

  Curtis nodded.

  “For that Eastern Europe thing.”

  “That job’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “As part of the rightsizing.”

  “What rightsizing?”

  “That’s what this is all about, Roy. They even let Bill Pegram go this morning.”

  Roy felt a tiny nauseous uprising deep in his throat. “That’s why you’re staying?”

  Curtis’s eyelid fluttered.

  “You got his job?”

  Curtis’s eyelid fluttered again, almost stayed closed this time.

  Roy held out his hand. “Congratulations.” Curtis’s handshake was strangely weak; he’d have to do something about that, up on seventeen. “So when do I go?”

  “Go where, Roy?”

  “Why, Miami, of course.”

  “To do what?”

  “My new job,” Roy said. “Regional supervising, area managing.” The titles made him laugh. “There’s still shipping, Curtis, like you said. What’s a global chemical company without shipping? There’s no virtual chemicals yet.” Roy surprised himself with that last observation; he got the feeling it might be the kind of remark that would land him on a seventeenth floor of his own someday.

  “Almighty God, Roy. Don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “You’re not included.”

  Roy started to have trouble connecting the words in his mind. “Meaning?”

  “They let you go too.”

  “Me?”

  “I did everything I could. You’re the one I fought for.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “How else can I put it?”

  “Say it again.”

  “They let you go.”

  “Again.”

  “Please, Roy.”

  “Again.”

  Curtis said it again.

  No air. No air at all. Roy barely got a word out. “But what about the area supervision, the regional…”

  Curtis shook his head. “Miami’s handling that. Cesar got the job.”

  Roy’s hand was in his pocket, clutching the inhaler. It took a lot of strength not to pull it out.

  “They did throw me one little bone,” Curtis said. “There’s an opening on the shipping floor up in New York. They said you could try for that.”

  Roy had a vision of smashing the glass office to smithereens, but all he did was say, “Fuck New York,” and even that not forcefully, what with the lack of air.

  “There’s nothing personal, Roy. It’s a business.”

  But there had to be something personal, because Curtis couldn’t look him in the eye, couldn’t get his gaze any higher than the knot on Roy’s tie with the blue diamonds.

  FOURTEEN

  7:17. Roy drove out of the parking garage under the Globax building. The day was still young; a fresh springtime breeze was blowing the brassiness out of the sky, turning it blue. Carol and Jerry were talking about Jerry’s promotion, and how to apply the vision statement in his new job.

  In your memo, you asked me to develop a new perspective, Carol. What did you mean by that?

  Roy tore the tape out of the deck, rolled down the window, almost threw it out. But not quite. Throwing the tape away would be tantamount to… what? Roy didn’t know, didn’t even know exactly what tantamount meant, only knew that whatever the statement was, he didn’t want to make it.

  But he wanted to do something. All that readiness inside him, all that eagerness, was still there. Not in its original form: what remained was the revved-up energy, like some animal force with the head cut off. What he wanted to do was make everything right immediately, to get to his desk, his new desk or his old desk, or some other one, to get back to work. How? His first thought was to turn around, to march up to the seventeenth floor, to say the right thing to the right person. But what was the right thing, who was the right person? He knew no one on the seventeenth floor, not even casually, now that Mr. Pegram was gone. And the decision hadn’t even come from the seventeenth floor; it had come from New York, from headquarters, about which Roy knew nothing.

  Miami? Rightsizing? What did it mean? Did it have anything to do with the name change? What had DeLoach said the very day chemerica had come down and globax had gone up? Roy couldn’t remember. All he remembered was his own reply: it’s just a name change. He should have asked Curtis more questions. The reasons for what had happened were already slipping away from him, threatening to leave him stranded in some meaningless place. He couldn’t live like that, like one of those people with a “Shit Happens” bumper sticker, or their unknowing counterparts with the “Grace Happens” reply. Roy’s life had meaning, made sense. You worked all day, put good food on the table, sat down together, drank a little wine, the kid said something that made you smile at each other over his head, you relaxed, body and soul. That thought, coming back, made him squirm inside. Marcia was coming for dinner that night. He was going to tell her all about the promotion, the seventy-two seven, the bonus on top of that. Roy threw the tape out the window.

  At that moment, the tape still in midair, he realized something important: under all this pressure, the worst pressure he had ever felt, he was thinking on a new level, deeper, smarter. Had his brain ever come up with connections like that shit-grace thing before? No. But now it was racing, and in this racing mode maybe reaching some potential that was always there. They were right to promote him. He could do the job.

  Could have done the job. This firing had nothing to do with him. Maybe it made sense on one level-although Roy couldn’t see how anything that put all those men out of work and left a big empty space in the building could make sense-but it didn’t make sense in terms of him. He had the goods-some goods, at least-and someone somewhere would want him. He stopped at a red light, looked around, saw he was lost.

  Not lost, because he’d lived in the city so long, but in the kind of neighborhood he normally would avoid, somewhere south of Abernathy. A big black guy came lurching toward him, the kind of black guy people would still be leery of if he were white, just not as much. Roy didn’t roll up the window: he hated the way car windows went up in this kind of situation.

  “Lose somethin’, chief?” said the black guy, bending down, his face in the open window, a sweet alcohol smell already wafting in.

  “No,” Roy said.

  “Then what’s this?” said the black guy, holding up the tape.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t look like nothin’. Looks like music.” He tried to bring the label into focus with his red and blurry eyes, failed. “I’m guessin’ Perry Como, maybe, or Engelbert Humperdinck.”

  “It’s not music.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Advice.”

  “Valuable advice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The black guy stuck his head in, glanced around. “Don’t know what’s valuable?” he said.

  “Everything has some value,” Roy said.

  “Who tol’ you that, chief?”

  “Listen to it,” Roy said. “You decide.”

  “Sure will, on my shiny new sixty-three speaker Bose built-in system wit’ the woofer under the floor, you just give me a little help on the down payment.”

  The light turned green. Roy had a few one-dollar bills in the ashtray, could have handed over one of those, but fell for another idea. He took out his wallet, found more ones, a five, and a ten. He gave the ten: a bet on the future.

  “My lucky day,” said the black guy. “Runnin’ into Mr. Big at last.” He shambled away without another word. Roy went home to work on his resume. The leftover energy dissipated. He emptied the inhaler on the way.

  Roy wrote down his name: Roy Hill. The resume form asked for his middle name. He wrote: Roy Singleton Hill. And stopped right there. Maybe thi
s wouldn’t be necessary. He’d played high school football with the shipping manager at Georgia Chemical in Marietta. Roy reached for the phone, his hand trembling slightly in the light coming through the window, as though he’d suddenly developed Parkinson’s or aged in a hurry.

  “Don’t tell me, Roy,” said the shipping manager at Georgia Chemical, a ferocious five-foot-five, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound nose tackle who’d screamed his head off for sixty minutes every game, then lain inert on the locker room floor, “not you too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your guys have been calling all morning, twenty or thirty of them by now. Just got off the phone with a real asshole. DeLoach, maybe? You know him?”

  “And?”

  “And I told him what I’ll tell you, only I don’t feel good telling you. There’s no jobs here, Roy. We’re hiring nobody. Fact is, although word’s not out yet, we’re licensing Globax’s software next month, the V-trak, meaning better efficiency, meaning layoffs of our own. Otherwise I’d take you on in a minute.”

  Roy didn’t know what to say. He just stood there with the phone to his ear. A crow flew past the window with something shiny in its talons.

  “How’s your boy?” said the shipping manager.

  “Good.”

  “Playing football?”

  “Pop Warner.”

  “I’ve got a daughter.”

  “I know.”

  “Looks just like me,” said the shipping manager. “Same body type. Ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

  Roy got back to work on the resume. He filled it out, wrote a list of possible employers in north Georgia, addressed envelopes, hit Kinko’s and the post office. Then what? It was barely noon on a working weekday. He could go home. Home, where the pile of bills waited on the kitchen table, almost a living thing, stacked up against him. He could go to a diner, a bar, the gym. He could curl up in a ball. He could look in on Rhett.

  He looked in on Rhett. Roy had his reasons, good-an eleven-year-old shouldn’t be home alone on a school day, or home alone with someone like Barry-and not as good-seeing Rhett might be a comfort, not to Rhett, but to Roy, might calm him down. Was that using Rhett in some way, or just the kind of thing that happened in good families? Roy hadn’t made up his mind about that by the time he pulled into Marcia’s driveway, and parked beside another car already there, not Marcia’s or Barry’s, but a black Porsche with New York plates; New York plates with MD before the numbers. He pictured Barry and his doctor friend huddled over Barry’s screen upstairs, trading stocks. But the only car he saw through the window of the closed garage door was Marcia’s.