Easy and Hard Ways Out Read online

“I’ve got to go,” said Blevin. “Visiting inspector from Lockheed. I take him out for some drinks, some nookie, and he blinks his eyes during certain tests.”

  Brank shook his head. The secretary made a hairy-legged stocking adjustment.

  “Nothing is the way it looks,” said Blevin, beginning to walk away. “Believe nothing. Trust no one. You think Kennedy isn’t still alive there in Parkland Hospital? Yeah, yeah, don’t look at me that way. They bring the family in for secret visits. The autopsy report has never been available. It’s obvious. The man’s a vegetable. Believe nothing. Nothing.”

  He paused at the door. “You think Helen Keller was really blind?”

  SECRET MEETING IN AN UNDESIRABLE PLACE

  End of work Tuesday: Brank strode through the parking lot in the fading light, shoulders hunched against the chilling wind. He’d forgotten his gloves, and his hands were beginning to go numb. He remembered something he’d read in Jack London: if your spittle froze before it hit the ground, the temperature was less than fifty-five below zero. On impulse, Brank spit down. The glob of saliva landed on his shoe. He spotted his car in the distance, faithful old black slave Chrysler. Got to carry de massa home, thought Brank. And then, I hope the pig starts in this cold. He tried to think of warmth and warm things, the IRT in July, uteruses, forest fires. He remembered a public-school composition he’d once had to write, Why is fire our friend? He thought of how wonderfully he’d do now on that essay, his sudden appreciation of the subject. He wished he were back again in school, a little boy, away from work with its endless, insoluble problems, away from Joan, recessed back into his own closed and inaccessible past, locked away, secure. He snuggled his hands in the fur lining of his coat pockets, felt his Spauldine nestled among some crumpled, hardened tissues. He tried to wiggle his toes, heard someone say, “I typed it last night,” and saw a half-bearded, one-eyebrowed man behind him and slightly to his left.

  “Mario,” said Brank. “Hey, Mario.”

  “I was looking for you this afternoon,” said LoParino. He wore a quilted blue coat with attached hood.

  A demented monk, thought Brank. “I had some people to see,” he said.

  “I typed that petition,” said LoParino. “I did it at lunchtime, so there’s pot roast stains on it.”

  Brank’s ears were two lobes of frozen pain, openings for the wind to blow into his cerebrum. “Let’s go to my car,” he said.

  They walked in silence to the Chrysler. Brank clawed at his keys, found them, labored for nearly a minute, managed to unlock the door. He let LoParino slide in ahead of him.

  “So you wanna read it?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Brank. “Didn’t we say we’d first give Pat a chance?” He turned the key in the starter.

  “We told her Monday morning,” said LoParino. “That’s two days now and she hasn’t done shit.”

  The car went ahruhruhruhruhruhruhruh. Ahruhruhruhruhruhruhruh.

  LoParino removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Besides, we’ll need at least tomorrow and Thursday to take it around. Have you checked to see if what’s-his-name’s office is open?”

  “Schnerr,” said Brank. “I spoke to a tape recording.”

  Ahruhruhruhruhruhruhruh.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’ll only be there Thursday. In the evening.”

  “See?”

  Ahruhruhruhruhruhruh.

  “Fucking pig machine.”

  Brank got out and opened the hood. He reached in under the air cleaner housing, found a rod near the carburetor, and closed the butterfly choke valve. He slammed the hood and slid back in next to LoParino.

  The undersigned employees of Auerbach Laboratories [pot roast stain] hereby request an investigation into the Air Force Acceptance tests of the F24BZ ECM module. In particular, it is maintained that the [clear grease] Yig filter will not meet environmental specifications, and that data indicating the contrary have been falsified.

  Ahruhruhmmmmmmmmmzhzhzh.

  “About time, you stupid mechanical disaster.”

  “Wha?”

  “Talking to the car.”

  “So?” said LoParino. “What do you think?”

  Brank reached over and pushed LoParino’s cowl back from his head. A looker under hoods, thought Brank. Only this mechanism was not so easily unstuck. “Lo, why are we doing this? Tell me, I forgot.”

  “Oh,” said LoParino, his crew-cut side facing Brank. “Here, it’s simple and quite logical. It’s because we want to annihilate those incompetent zombie assholes who steal the prime of our lives, bask in luxury derived from our brainpower and inspiration, and fire us when we’re wrung out. We want to fix them forever for the good of the world because they’re subhuman, capitalist, degenerate, Nazi, creep, cocksucking, leech, homo, Commie, pimp perverts. Who’d be perfectly okay and no different from any other good Americans if only they paid us something near what we deserve, for chrissake. Anyway, that’s basically why.”

  Brank nodded slowly. “Seems valid,” he said carefully, and thought: he’s not smiling, I wonder if he’s kidding.

  “You seem to be wavering,” said LoParino, turning toward him for the first time.

  “No. I just thought—I spoke to Blevin today—maybe if instead we went directly to A …”

  “Your mind,” said LoParino, “is on a collision course with a strait jacket. The big man is obviously in this up to his eyebrows. Wizer told me about Steinberg’s asking you to fake the data. Which means forget Blevin. Which means it goes all the way up. Obvious to anyone with the intelligence of a ‘No Parking’ sign. Except you.”

  “All right, all right,” said Brank, irritated, tired of LoParino’s insistence. He knew LoParino often unleashed clouds of words that decomposed almost as the listener heard them, that the passion behind them was fabricated to convince, and that the convincing was not the means to an end but the end itself. “We’ll get the signatures in the next two days.”

  LoParino replaced his hood and opened the car door. “Don’t forget to tell Joan you won’t be home Thursday evening.”

  Brank watched him walk across the parking lot, then headed out toward the highway. At that moment it seemed clear: if he himself were the only one involved, he’d just forget everything. Take the easiest path, that was his philosophy. Why meet a challenge head on when you could sneak around it? But there was LoParino now. Impossible to know LoParino. Was he really a maniacally solid, committed ally? After all, clearly, there was some kind of definite instability there. Need to fail, to be fired. Or was Brank projecting his own needs? Whatever it was, it was no longer fun. And LoParino’s reasons were different from his own, and he did not know his own, only that they had nothing to do with pride in workmanship, or engineering ethics, or the safety of some anonymous fliers.

  He drove up the highway entrance ramp, blended into the line of streaming metal hulks. Once, years ago, in a schoolyard stickball game, he’d been pitching and his team losing rather badly when his father had appeared holding a brown paper bag on the other side of the chain-link fence. “Your mother made you a fried egg sandwich, and you have to have it right now,” his father had yelled, and Brank had shrugged and left the game, embarrassed, but also grateful to be saved from losing by an irresistible outside force. He thought about it now as he drove, and wished that it might happen again, that during the inspection his father could miraculously appear with a tuna-on-white, nullifying somehow the forged data and saving him once more.

  AUERBACH LABORATORIES

  Inter-Office Memorandum 12/4/66

  From: W. Murphy

  To: S. Brine

  cc: ——

  Subject: Money spent on paper towels and toilet paper

  Listen Brine I am sick and tired of getting these letters from that machine about the shit-house stock I have to buy. If some son of a bitch is stealing the above-mentioned it is your job to find the bastard so why does that light-blinking mother send me the memos instead of you. I’m not stealing the god
damn towels, for Christ’s sake! If that machine keeps it up I will order my staff (a) not to requisition toilet paper—we’ll see how the bigshots like that—and (b) not to clean the computer room.

  Very truly yours,

  William Murphy,

  Supervisor, Maintenance

  WM:wm

  TO EACH HIS OWN, PLUS A LITTLE EXTRA

  a. A Beautiful Painting

  “He made a beautiful painting today,” said Joan.

  “Oh,” said Brank, looking up from the charred skin of his baked potato. “Good, Bruce. Very nice. You’ll show it to Daddy after supper.”

  Bruce said nothing.

  “He also threw a screwdriver in the toilet bowl.”

  Brank collapsed his gaze back into his plate. “Oh, balls. Did it go down? Did you get it?”

  “It went all the way down,” said Bruce brightly.

  Brank scowled. “Another ten bucks for the plumber. I’ll win ‘Man of the Year’ award from their union.”

  “That’s not even the worst,” said Joan. “I called Fleckner today.”

  “What?”

  “The doctor. Fleckner. Cooperman’s partner. He actually came to the house. I had a pain in my lower back, but as soon as he got here it went away. Isn’t that something?”

  Brank looked up again. “Joan, only terrible doctors come to the house. Why did you have to call him so fast? What did he get you for, fifteen?”

  He pushed away his plate.

  “It was a terrific pain,” said Joan. “Which is why I did the worst thing a human being can do. I called a doctor when I didn’t really need one. So hang me in effigy.”

  Brank stood up.

  “You didn’t eat your string beans,” said Joan.

  “Look, forget the beans,” said Brank. “They’re asking me to fake the data now at work. That’s my bad news, and it’s worse than any screwdriver in the toilet bowl or psychosomatic back pain. I’m taking around a petition, so I won’t be home Thursday night.”

  He watched her slim shoulders rise and fall with her breathing. She stared at him, her eyes suddenly tumid and liquid, and he began to be afraid. “I never meant to stifle you, Harvey,” she said, and he knew his fear was justified. She’d used his name, and she was going to say something deep and meaningful on which they disagreed, and he, who orchestrated his life so carefully on the surface, was going to be exposed to something unpleasant. “You have certain needs to express yourself, and you’re unhappy at what you’re doing, and I’ve tried to understand that, I really have. Only whatever it was that you had to prove has been proved a thousand times over to a thousand different people, and now it’s gone way beyond that into some sick, irresponsible, childish thing that I can’t understand, and will never understand.”

  “Daddy, could you bring me home orange ices?” said Bruce.

  “I’m sure you have your good reasons,” continued Joan, and he could hear her strangle back the crying deep in her throat. He watched her put a hand to her face. He sympathized, felt helpless, felt like crying with her. “You always do. Each year, each job, you have your good reasons. So you go ahead. You take around your petition and get yourself fired. And you will, you will. And you’ll see, no one will even sign it because they’re all too smart. No one. Only you.”

  She got up from her seat and left the room. Brank sat heavily back down in the chair. Unable to respond to or comfort his wife, he temporarily dismissed the situation from his consciousness. He thought instead of when he’d graduated from high school, remembered particularly the weekend after, a lazy, sunny pair of days on which he’d slept till one in the afternoon, gone to movies both nights. The Times had had eight pages of engineering ads that week. He nibbled idly at the now cold string beans. Later, just before bedtime, Brucie showed him his painting.

  Naturally, it was torn to shreds.

  b. Empty Gesture

  “Look, I have this petition. It’s on the Yig filter for the F24. I’m the engineer who designed it, and it doesn’t meet the spec and they’re going to fake the inspection data. All the petition asks is for an investigation. It’ll be given to Congressman Schnerr. Would you want to sign?”

  He started in his own lab on Wednesday, carefully placing his body between Steinberg and whoever was being asked for his signature.

  Klein: Not present.

  Dorfman: “Petitions are very Old World and bourgeois, Harvey. Although I’m not surprised. Semper Neanderthalis. Sorry, I choose not to. By the way, I do twenty one-legged knee bends now.”

  Dubrowolski: “Yeah. Sure. I’ll, you know … yeah. Hey, I lost my pen, can I borrow yours? Hey, aren’t you, you know, gonna be in trouble from this?”

  Wizer: (Pained. Nearly physically writhing.) “What for? Ah mean, you cain’t possibly succeed. It’s just a empty gesture you’re makin’ here.”

  “Sure, Ah know it’s true, everythin’ you say, of course it is. Ah ran the tests mahself. But so what?”

  “Why should it bother me? Ah’m a company man. They want me to shit in mah hat, Ah run out for a Fedora. They want a fairy tale instead of data, Ah say ‘Once upon a time.’ No big deal. Ah jus’ work here.”

  “The pilots? ‘So what,’ again. Ah don’t know any of ’em, they’re strangers to me. Ah don’t have any principles. Ah left ’em at the door the first mornin’ Ah came here an’ never picked ’em up. Oh, look, Ah know you’re probably all hepped up about this. Lemme think about it a couple of days.”

  One signature. He made his way through the halls to the Electronics lab. LoParino was to cover Sales, Legal, and the Shop, Brank was to canvass Engineering. They agreed that they needed the name of at least one section head, obviously Pat or Brundage, to really give the petition any weight and have it taken seriously.

  Pat: Not present. No one had seen her since Tuesday morning when she’d hurriedly left the building.

  LoParino: Signed early Wednesday morning. First name neatly printed, second name scrawled.

  Coletti: “Sign? I can’ even see. I listened to the Cincinnati game last night. Took the portable ta bed with me under the covers. Didn’ end till after two an’ it kept fadin’. That’s one of my biggest problems, these stations that fade. Yeah, so where do I sign?”

  Mills: (Smiling.) “Only if you help me wid’ dis physics problem. Wid Pat out, I got no consultant.”

  “Yeah, she just took off like a shot yesterday morning. Maybe she was sick or somethin’, or got her period.”

  “I’ll sign, but not near Coletti, okay?” (Looks at Coletti, laughs.)

  Wong: (Immediately turning fan in Brank’s direction.) “No, what for I sign? How I know this true? It could be trick. No, I not sign.”

  Lubell: “No, and my advice is to tear it up and forget it. Have some appreciation of what you’re getting here. These people are decent enough to give you a job, pay you, give you benefits, and you turn around and stab them in the back.”

  “What do you mean they make a profit on you? That’s business. What if they do make a little something? Without them, you’d be in the streets, on unemployment. I see there’s no talking to you because you’re pigheaded and a shmuck.”

  “What do you mean, ‘But will I sign’?”

  Two signatures, not counting LoParino’s. No engineers. He headed for the Drafting area, heard LoParino paged as he walked through the halls. “Mario LoParino, Mario LoParino. Please report to Mr. Rupp. Mario LoParino, report to Mr. Rupp.” Brank stopped, felt shaken. Did they know already? Of course, they must know. They were going to stop it before it started. They were probably firing LoParino right now, pressuring him to reveal his accomplices. Of course, he’d never crack, too crazy to crack, cracked already. Poor Mario. Brank stopped by a phone, dialed “O.” “Page, uh … Mr. L. Greco for Sprays and Paint. Thanks.”

  Brennan: “It’s nothing personal, Harv, but, uh, I, uh …” (Shakes head.) “It took me sixteen years to become Drafting supervisor. It’s just, it’s been too long, too long. It’s really nothing personal.�
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  Plotsky: “Sure. I’ll sign anything, but it won’t do any good. I wrote to a free-love society last month. ‘Please send me your brochure,’ I said. No good. I got nothing. If my name is on it, it’s ignored.”

  Potamos: “Did Dorfman sign? No? Then I’ll sign.”

  Two signatures. Head toward Precision Assembly.

  Rocco: (Momentarily stopping tile scrubbing in hall.) “I don’t really understand this engineering, see; this is something for you younger fellas. But if you want the Rock’s signature—now I don’t really understand what I’m signing here, see—if you want the Rock’s signature—I signed in the wrong place? See, I know you young fellas, you got—I think my pen isn’t wor—Oh, here it is. I figure you must know what yer doin’, see.” Sussman-Smollen: (Sitting in padmasana yoga position.) “I’m into yoga fairly heavily at this point. You know, I say ‘clean mind, clean body … take your pick.’ The asanas come too quickly up your spine, you launch into one of these”—he presses palms together behind his back, bends his head to the floor—“fucking modras to hold the bastards down.”

  “Oh, the petition? I don’t think so. What for? It’ll just get you fired, that’s all.”

  “The dream has nothing to do with it. You mean it’s saying I consider women only as sexual outlet mechanisms? It means I’m afraid of them? That seems crazy; you’ve probably projected your own warpage onto it. Not that I mind, of course. To each his own, plus a little extra. But I’m still not signing.”

  A disappointment. Brank extended the vision of himself drowning and Sussman-Smollen on the beach to include Joan. She appears somehow in a low-haltered bikini, standing next to Sussman-Smollen on the sand. He points out Brank struggling desperately in the water; they both laugh wistfully, then amble casually away, arm in arm. As the waves wash over him, Brank catches a last glimpse of Joan taking a bite of Sussman-Smollen’s Fudgsicle. They will live off Brank’s insurance, a tempestuous life of ups and downs, manic and depressive dreams, modras and asanas.

  Thursday: Brank had called LoParino the night before, gotten no answer. He wanted to know why Rupp had paged him, what went on, how many signatures Lo had gathered. He tried looking in Pat’s lab in the morning, but neither Pat nor Lo was there, though Coletti thought he had seen LoParino walk out with some books. Brank would have to wait till they met at the end of the day before he could question him. In the meantime, he headed for the Accounting men’s room.