The Rise and Fall of a Plastic Bag. A short story

The Rise and Fall of a Plastic Bag

A short story

By

John William Tuohy

      The long day was over and Elysia was temporarily released from the confines of the cubicle walls that is her office to be paroled to the claustrophobic cabin of her economy car, the newly released tin box called The Charon, that now sat motionless in a traffic jam on route 95 at 179th Street on the north end of Manhattan. She could almost see her efficiency apartment at the Asphofdel, on the other side Bridge. It was less than a mile away, but on this night, like every other night, it would take her an hour and a half to cross over the Hudson River. It was as if the world known world converged there.

     The setting sun blinded her and baked one side of her face, yet its imminent departure from the days stage did nothing to lower the ceaseless, suffocating humidity that gripped the city, the realm of Hades, that mid summers evening. She thought, again, that maybe she should have taught English. What happen to that plan, she wondered? She stuck. Even her car was gridlocked. It hadn’t moved one inch in one hour. Releasing her warm palms from the wheel, she resigned herself to her motionless fate and slowly sat back and turned her face from the sun and eyed the cement and concrete valley that surrounded her in a labyrinth of worn roads and colossal apartment buildings that Daedalus would envy.

     For lack of anything else to do, she watched a tall man appear at the doorway of the Tartarus Brothers Convenience Store whose window signs pronounced proudly in bold red that it sold Ouzo by the case. Once on the street, the tall man reached inside a small ivory colored plastic bag and pulled out a long brown bottle of beer, opened it and took a long, quenching swallow and then tossed the bottle cap and bag to the hot cement of the city streets. She watched the bottle cap make a valiant effort for Jersey but sadden when it was only able to roll a few inches before it expired. Another fallen Hephestus of Manhattan.

     This was no ordinary bag. Lifting itself up a few hundred feet it swayed softly along a jet stream and then smoothly lowering its altitude it bounced playfully on a soft breeze. This bag with the wings of wax was Sinatra in the forties, it was The Beatles on Sullivan, it was Fitzgerald sober and writing, it was the Yankees from the summer of 63, it was the son of Zeus and Hera gliding elegantly towards its rightful home on Mount Olympus or over to the Jersey shore, which ever was closer and it was then that she heard these words float down from the skies above her “Nous sommes libres le moment ou nous etre libres!”

     “We are free the moment we wish to be free”

     Not only had the bag quoted Voltaire, completely out of context, but still, you know, it quoted Voltaire! In French! It spoke French! with a slight Bronx accent, but still....I mean, you know, it’s a bag. And, although, like most Americans, she preferred Locke over Voltaire and the other enlightenment figures...well, she did have a liking towards Rousseau but sometimes he struck her as morally irresponsible but she wondered if her Catholic education just made him seem that way...but, anyway, moved by the moment, she leaped from her car...okay, she didn’t actually leap, but she rushed from the car only to have the seat belt part that goes over your shoulder get caught in hair and nearly choke her to death but after that she more or less leaped from the car and still on fire with the passion of freedom she raised a fist to the sky and yelled at the very top of her voice to the bag

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark nor even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

     Hearing the deep passion of her words and seeing the bag fly its course; a homeless man on the corner adjusted his aluminum foil hat, snapped his heals and standing at full attention raised his hand to his forehead in salute and watched it fly overhead. He stood erect...in several ways...as he watched it rise up and up to the heavens escaping the surly bonds of Earth and the lonely grey caverns of Manhattan.

     It choose to fly towards Jersey, although she thought that personally she would have chosen Connecticut, but, she reasoned in defense of her new idol, perhaps the bag was thinking shorter commute, who knows, but southward it flew over the Hudson.....but then she thought that if she could fly what would a shorter commute matter anyway?

      As she pondered that thought and realized it was a pointless waste of time she turned attention back to the bag and saw now that it was sinking from sky. Perhaps the sun was melting it or maybe the wet air of the nearby Atlantic had dampened it or maybe, exhilarated by the thrill of flight and unrestrained freedom. Downwards and downwards, it spiraled, descending from the heaven to icy grave below...but then she thought, well, okay, the Hudson probably wasn’t icy cold in mid-August but like, still, it was probably pretty cold.

     Rolling her hands into fists that she rose to the sky, rolled her head back to face the heaven, closed her eyes and cried

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aero planes circle moaning overhead

     “Lady, get in your car and move it!” The voice boomed from a police helicopter which was moaning in circles overhead. “Your blocking traffic”.

     The road before her was empty all the way to New jersey. Turning completely around she eyed a traffic jam further than her eyes could see. She lowered her gaze to the man in the car directly behind her. His license plate claimed he was from Georgia, or at least his car was. he was staring at her. His lips were tightly closed and his eyes were wide as saucers and when she looked at him he very quickly diverted his eyes to the floor. It was now official, she was the crazy cat lady. She lowered her head, returned to her car and drove away.

...this is one of my favorite stories. I wrote in my car when I was stuck in traffic in Brooklyn NY. I hope you enjoyed it.

The Winter years. A short story

The Winter years

a Short Story by 

John William Tuohy

He was reading the newspaper while he waited for his order to arrive.  He never read the newspaper before she was gone.  Now he read it because it was something to do.  He was reading an article in the newspaper about the young mother of four children who lived in town and had died of pneumonia.  She was 22 years old and had worked as a security guard down in New Haven and now her children would be sent to live with their grandmother who was also of that city and was reported to be thirty-eight-years old.    

   He put the paper down and thought that life is unfair.  He remembered that she closed the door tightly and locked it but she did not want to go.  She adored her home.  She paused to wonder what it would be like to wake up and have no breasts.  She pushed that thought out of her mind and remembered that the doctor said he wanted to talk to her.  There were other developments, he said.  She told him that she would see him after the operation.  It was just too much to deal with.  She knew, anyway.

   She looked out into the day and it was beautiful.  It smelled cold.  The sun was bursting brilliantly in the deep blue sky.  The New England snow slowed things, and in the early morning hours, when the snow was untouched and pristine, it blanketed the Valley with a pleasant sense of peace and calm.  Beautiful winter days like this were a part of the reason she loved this place and why she had never left.

   She held the thin black iron rail and stepped carefully down the slate and cement steps.  Watching her, he said across the freshly fallen snow, “Ice is gone.  I got it.”  And he had.  In fact, it was gone before the sun had risen over his Valley’s hills.  He took shoveling seriously.

   She went over the mental list of food she had left prepared for him.  There was Golabki, stuffed cabbage and Chlopski Posilek, bacon and cabbage, Rosoz kurczaka and golden chicken consommé with noodles.  There was Placki kartoflane, potato pancakes, and Klopsiki, meatloaf stuffed with eggs.  There was Kotlet schabowy and breaded pork cutlet.  She left Faworki, pastry twists, and Makowiec, sweet poppy cake for dessert.

    “I left you a few things inside the frig-er-rater,” she said and went over the working of the mysterious microwave with him, again, although they both knew its intricacies would elude him anyway and he would nuke the food so long that smoke would billow out of its every crevice.

   He let the engine idle and turned on the heater to warm the protective vinyl coverings on the seat.  A slight steam of blue grey smoke from the exhaust floated ghost like over the open trunk where he had carefully placed her white Naugahyde covered luggage over an old quilt in the unlikely event that there was dirt on the trunk floor.  She had packed only the clothes she knew she would need, her nightgowns, slippers, her best dress, shoes, and her good jewelry.

   He smelled the cold too and he liked it.  He liked the way it felt on his cheeks and on the tip of his nose.  He liked outside because you were alone outside.  Years ago, he had worked inside the shop for a few months but he didn’t like it.  He did not like the way some of the guys talked dirty talk about girls.  Some of them even had dirty magazines with naked pictures of girls jammed inside their lockers.  They would show him and he would say, “I go to mass, you know,” and they stopped doing that.  That was why he took the driver’s job, hauling loads from Ansonia up to Springfield and back again.

   Twenty-four years behind the wheel of a big rig had left him with enormous flat hands, thick wrists and a flabby rear end that was distinctly disproportionate to the rest of his wide muscular body.  Decades of handmade kielbasa, and potato cheese pierogis topped with bacon, and fried onions had left him with an enormous belly.  And those were the only things about him that were memorable or unique except that he was a kind man, a benign gentle man.  She always said that the crew cut on his still blonde but thinning hair made him look like a Polish prison guard and men who didn’t know him stepped out of his way.  But children liked him instantly and he had that aura of men who would rather listen than speak.

   He did not speak about this hospital situation.  He didn’t understand it and sitting there on the edge of his thoughts was how he would take care of himself after she was gone.  He worried about the laundry the most.  Those machines were a mystery to him.  When she was in the hospital that time with the baby, he had fought it out with the laundry machine and the laundry machine won by shrinking everything to half its size.  He wondered if she would feel pain.  There were a lot of times over these past few weeks that he closed his eyes and talked to the Virgin Mary.  He said to her that if there had to be pain involved, let him feel it instead of her, because he could take it and he was not sure she could.  She was a small woman he thought, and God must have made him this big for a reason.

   He did not want to think about any of that now.  In a half hour, he would be alone and then he would have no choice but to think about it, because there would be no one else to talk too.  He turned his attention to the slate wall and noted that roots had pushed their way into the tiny porous holes in the cement and pushed apart and severed the gravel that kept the wall together.

   She slowly made her way over to him and stared at the crumbling wall as well.

   “It’s gotta come down,” he said, “before it falls down on its own.  You don’t want that.”

   “I remember you and the boys built that.”  She pointed to the patch of wood in back of the house. “Took the rocks from the back.  Remember?  We took the Easter pictures here with yous in your red suit coats.”

   The memory brought a wonderful smile to his face.

   “Yous were so handsome,” she said with pride that lifted her chin.  “Oh honest to God though.”

   He pulled a large rock from the top of the wall and placed in on the lawn. “Well, it’s gotta come down now while we can still save it.”

   He turned to see her eyes had welled up.  “Hell, woman, it’s just a damn wall,” he said trying his best to sound gruff but coming nowhere close to the effect he wanted.  She locked her short soft arm into his and he turned and embraced his bride for a long moment because he loved her and because he missed her already and because hospitals upset him and he held her to keep out the world, if only for another moment.

    They walked silently to the car, arm in arm.  The snow was tapering off into rain, a rain that unlike the snow, seemed to come as an assault, an attack that would somehow, alter things forever.  He opened the door.  She slid in.  He shut her door, and he drove his bride to the hospital.

   He ate alone these days.  He arrived to the Diner at six every evening and sat at the same place at the counter and thought of her often while he waited to see her again.

.......this is a story about the people who lived across the street from me when I was a boy, I hope you enjoyed  it. Here' here's a picture of a great ice cream cone because it's nice to look at happy stuff

Anna Belle Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade. A short story

Anna Belle Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade

A short story by John William Tuohy

     Jimmy Doyle stepped lively into the Diner, passing the stopped clock on the wall and sat at the counter to order his breakfast of one egg-no yoke, a slice of fruit and a glass of water.  It was the same breakfast he ordered every morning, or at least every morning since the heart attack.  

      He was late this morning because he had felt good enough to do another lap around the track at Nolan field.  He hadn’t been jogging, not exactly.  Nor was he walking, not exactly.  He was doing something in the middle for which there is no known name.  But, he was wearing sneakers and white athletic socks and sweat pants and a tee shirt and as far as he was concerned, it was jogging.  Besides nothing is ever what we think it is.    

        He didn’t think his heart attack three years ago was a heart attack.  He remembered that he thought it was a snake because suddenly, he had this otherworldly sensation that a massive boa constrictor had wrapped itself around his rib cage and was squeezing the life out of him.  He looked down in terror to watch the creature devour him, but it was not there.  It was just a sensation.  That scared him more because he could not see what had him.  It squeezed tighter.  He could not breathe.  His eyes opened wide in a sort of fright he had not felt since childhood.  He looked around frantically for someone, anyone to help him.  Then it stopped.  It released him.   His breath returned.                  

     He looked around to ask somebody, anybody what happened but before he could speak, an unbelievably sharp pain in the left side of his throat caused him to twist his head down and raise his shoulder to his ear.  At the same time, the snake returned and began to crush the breath out of him.  He fought back.  He was outmatched by its brute strength.  It forced him, slowly, to one knee.  He fought back.  He tried to stand but there was no air.  He did not understand what was happening. 

     “Why doesn’t somebody help me?” he screamed to himself in a panic.  “Don’t they see what’s happening?”  Then he was on his back and the pain was gone.  The serpent had released him and that God-awful once-in-a-lifetime-pain in his neck was gone.  He gasped for air and his arms, spread out beside him, were shaking. 

     From out of nowhere he thinks, there was a woman talking to him.  She has an accent.  Accents always surprise him.  Hers is deep, refined, and southern.  Why is she in the Valley?  Then he remembers.  He is in Memphis.  Then he remembers that Elvis died in Memphis.  Of course, he died while sitting on a toilet bowl reading pulp fiction.  He takes some pride in the fact that, by comparison, his pending death in this dirty, hot, black-tarred parking lot is a monument to dignity. 

     The woman’s silky smooth voice tells him she is a nurse and that he has had a heart attack and she is calling for help.  He grabs the rear bumper of a car with his right arm and drags himself up to the sitting position and fumbles around in his coat pockets until he finds his cigarettes.  He lights one up.  He thinks that after a thousand cigarettes this year, one more won’t kill him.  He’s just tired.  So tired.  He slowly drops his head back on the car’s bumper, closes his eyes and waits for the ambulance.
   He remembered the three of them in bed watching a flickering image of the President making the State of the Union address.  The sound and lights are off so the baby will fall asleep.  But the baby doesn’t sleep.  He is wide-awake, staring at him, mouth open, mesmerized by his profile.  He isn’t home much and he thinks he frightens the child so he gives him a wink.  The boy smiles up at him.
   His wife has fallen asleep.  He wishes she would wake up because he needs to talk to her.  If he takes that sales job, he will be on the road constantly but the money is good and now that’s all that matters.  The mortgage, the car payment, and then there’s insurance and gas and utilities and the baby needs new everything.

   He’ll tell them tomorrow that he’ll take the job.  He doesn’t want it but he doesn’t have a choice.  He let out a long tired sigh through his lips, “phhhfffffff”.  A few seconds later the baby lets out a long tired sigh through his lips, “phhhfffffff”.
     In the hospital, he closes his eyes to sleep because the attack exhausted him.  Maybe he was asleep and he was waking up because he could not remember changing into a hospital issued sleeping gown.  Nor did he remember climbing into the hospital bed and he could not explain who this man in the suit was or why he was sitting on his hospital bed.  Apparently, the man in the suit has been talking for a long time.
   “Who the hell are you?”
    “I am your heart surgeon,” the man replies with a distinct clipped British accent.   “You have suffered a major heart attack, Mister Doyle,” he answers, still using the distinct clipped British accent.  “I am your heart surgeon.  I operated on you.”
    Regardless, he didn’t like him sitting on his bed.  It’s intrusive.  He looked around for the baby and the television and his wife but they were not there and he tells himself that it was a dream.  This guy on the bed is real.  And he is annoying as well, telling me in great detail, how he drilled a hole in my upper thigh and ran a tube through my body and placed plastic stints in my heart and I wish he would stop talking about this but before he does, he asks, “Do you have any questions?”
     He thinks about it.  There was absolutely nothing more he wanted to know about heart attacks, or tubes or drilling holes in various body parts.  He reasoned that a heart attack is what it is.  There was not much he could do about it.  He wanted to change the subject anyway.  Since he had determined the Doctor on his bed to be an Indian guy he wanted to ask him if he’s ever seen The Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn and if so, what was the Indian point of view on that?  And aren’t those British just grabby little bastards?  And isn’t that the way to go out?  Charging, charging, half a league, half a league on and not like this, with tubes in your nose?  Isn’t that the way you always thought it would be in the end, or something like that?  But he thinks better of it and he doesn’t ask because he is too tired to listen to the answer. 
     He has another question.  What happened to his life?  When did he start living out of a suitcase?  Why does every hotel in America look, feel, and smell the same?  Would McDonalds go broke without him?  He pondered the late night dinners with clients whose names he could never remember, and drinking way, way, too many vodka martinis.  All the other nights it was cold pizza eaten on the hotel bed watching old movies on TV. 
     “Why do I live like this?” he asked himself.  He decides that he is an old man in a young man’s game.  An old man.  He rolled the thought around in his head for a while.  He isn’t old, but he isn’t young either.  He thinks he is but he isn’t.  It’s a guy thing.  He decides that men don’t comprehend that they are getting older.  Women understand they are getting older because their bodies tell them, but life has made no such provisions for men, so flaunting imagery in the face of reality, the species stroll through life thinking they are always 18 and impossibly strong, handsome and viral.
     He wants a cigarette and a coffee.  How long has he been here, in this bed?  A week?  Is it that long?  He gives serious consideration to the fact that he has gone that long without smoking.  He looks over to the somber nurse’s aide standing by his bedside.  She is an enormous woman with an equally imposing southern name, Annabelle.  He is fairly certain that’s her name.  It is what is written on her name tag.  He is not sure because she hasn’t introduced herself and he doesn’t ask because she wears an uninviting scowl, and on the rare occasion she does speak at all, she won’t look at him.  She exams the wound on his thigh from the surgery and changes the bandage and an uncomfortable silence falls between us. 
   “You realize,” he tells her, “that in some cultures this would make us married?”
     Her breasts, which are each the size of a small child, begin to heave with a buried chuckle as she fights a losing battle not to smile.  Now he has her. 
   “I’ll tell you what there Annabelle.  When you finish, how about you hop up on the bed here, and let me examine your thigh?”
     Her wonderfully round chocolate body giggles and produces a deep throaty laugh, the kind he likes to hear. 
   “What!” she exclaims in mock indignation and deeply rooted Trinidadian accent. “You have a heart attack.”
   “Well you know what they say, right?”
   “No.  What they say?”
    “Once you go heart attack you’ll never go back.”
   “Who says that?”
   “Guys with heart attacks.”
     He awoke in the middle of the night and was surprised that the room was almost completely dark.  He told her it was all right to turn the light on, if she wanted it on and she said she didn’t.  She was fine in the shadows, she said.  He was impressed she would travel all the way from Connecticut to Tennessee, especially after all the meanness and the pettiness and the hurt that had gone on between them.  But she’s here, sitting bedside in that God-awful chair with the horrible yellow vinyl covering.
   He must have been asleep when she came in.  He nodded to assure himself that was what happened.  He was asleep from all these drugs they gave him and he fell asleep and she came in.

    Their son is with her.  He’s inherited her dark Latin looks and although he’s the size of a mountain, he stares at his father, wide eyed and scared.  He gives the boy a wink to let him know it looks worse than it is.  A quick, relieved smile sweeps across the young man’s handsome face.

   He looks over to her and she is smiling her best pirate smile and he reaches over and they lightly hook fingers.  She saw the wink he gave to his son and she likes it when he’s kind and mellow and reassuring. 
   “You like it when I’m kind and mellow, don’t you?” he asks her.
   “Yes,” she smiles, “because it’s you being the real you, not some high powered macho nut.”
     He nods in a kind and reassuring manner and says, “I’ll have to have more heart attacks to stay better in touch with myself.”
   “I told you to stop smoking,” she says as she pulls the blanket up to cover his chest. 
   “I know.  You were right,” he says once again, looking for hairs on his chest that have never arrived and once again he vows, that in his next life he will come back dark and hairy.
     “And the junk food,” she says and stops short and leaves out his other vices, the ones he used to hurt and humiliate her.  She may not have spoken the words but he heard them anyway.  Guilt has a way of having itself heard.  He looks away from them and whispers, “I’m sorry.”
   He wanted to say more and once again, he searched for that magic and illusive summation that would explain what he’s sorry for and what he is not sorry for and how they got like this and why they can’t go back and why his beloved son would have to grow up with a weekend father.  But, once again, the words don’t come.  They never do.  All he can say, once again is, “I’m sorry.”
   She tells him it’s okay.  She says it because she is a decent person, a good person.  The words rain down on him softly and sweetly and he feels like the world’s been lifted off of his shoulders.  He is so tired.  He tells her that he’ll sleep for a second, just a second.  She says she understands.  He smiles at them and tells them he’ll be right back.
   Annabelle wakes him up to take his sleeping pill.  His eyes open happily.  “Listen Annabelle,” he whispers and the smile is already breaking out across her wonderfully large face.
   “Lets you and me run off to Vegas,” he tells her with a wink. “We’ll live on love but when the money runs out, it’s every man for himself.”
     “Ohhhhhh,” she wails too loudly. “You a terrible man!  I’m a Christian woman!”
   He is awake now.  He looks around the sun-filled room and asks, “Where’d they go?  To the cafeteria?”
    “Who is that, Baby?” she asks and he points to the empty ugly chairs by the bed, “My wife, and my son.”
    Annabelle looks at the cold empty chairs and then back at him.
     “They were sitting here,” he says but he is not sure he believes his own words. 
   Annabelle stares at him for a second and sadness falls over her happy soul because she knows the truth.  He has not seen them in years.  She took the boy and moved to Florida and with time, they had drifted out of each other’s lives until they were only increasingly and sadly vague memories of each other. 
   “I must have fallen asleep and she went out,” he said to the floor. 
   The great sadness left Annabelle’s soul and she was overpowered by compassion for him and she took his hand and said softly, “You were having a dream, baby boy.”
   She released his hand and gave his needle-bruised arm a pat.  “Do you want me to call your wife for you?”
   “They were here.  I touched her.” But now, fully awake, he understands that it was that dream again. 
     Later that morning, the doctor came into the room looking very somber.  He did not sit on the bed this time but declares that there is blockage in the veins, which he missed, and he has to operate again. 
     He held his chin high and trying to look as much like Errol Flynn as one can while wearing blue scrubs with no zipper, he proclaimed that if Jimmy wished to file a complaint against him he would not object, and if he wanted another doctor he would not only understand, he would understand completely.
     They stared at each other for a few seconds.  The doctor expecting the worse and Jimmy, not having listened to anything beyond “another operation” which was the worst, as far as he was concerned, was contemplating the fact that they had no Indians of any type back home in the Valley.  The doctor tried nobly, to remain Errol Flynn cool while Jimmy took time to ponder another thought.  He had never actually had a conversation with an Indian guy.  So wondering if it was polite to ask the question he intended to ask anyway, he ventured, “Hey, you ever see Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn?”
   The room was dark when he woke up.  She was whispering.  “Did you ever really love me?”  He was too tired to argue with her, especially that argument.   “This is the wrong time to ask me something like that.”  He answered anyway. “I did love you, but now it’s hard to remember that.  You threw a lot of crap my way.”
   “You did the same,” she accused quickly pointing a finger at him.
   “You brought in the lawyers, not me,” he countered outwardly bored but with his blood and voice rising, causing their sleeping son to stir in the chair with the horrible yellow vinyl covering.
   “Are we gonna beat that horse again?” she says with a tired contempt with that voice and that look that he had learned to despise. 
   “You just couldn’t let us handle it between us….”  He would have continued but was interrupted.
    “You need to wake up.”
    “Who are you?” he demanded angrily as he pushed the hand from his chest.
    “It’s Miss Annabelle, Baby Boy, you got to wake up now, time for your sleeping pill.”
      He spent a lot of time in that hospital and having a sincere interest in the lives of others he interviewed everyone who entered his room and with time, they got to know each other and the staff looked forward to visiting the happy amiable Irishman at the end of the hall, the one with the heartache.  He grew to like these southerners.  Rare for a New Englander.  He liked them because for them, rules are suggestions.  They laugh hard and live large and the nurses, who should have known better, brought him barbecue sandwiches the size of his head with collard green and vinegar and onions and a plop of orange something with brown sugar on it. 
    The dietician came into the room during mid-meal one afternoon to preach to him about how he had to change the way he ate or, she warned with all the hellfire, brimstone, and high drama of any respectable southern preacher, he would die.  When she finished her oration, a silence fell between them.  He held the massive pork barbecue sandwich in mid bite, sauce dripping off it’s sides, terrified that even the slightest movement of his hands would lead to another sermon. 
    Her eyes narrowed as she focused her full attention on the pork and she asked, “Is that hospital regulation food?”
   “ Yes,” he lied straight faced, “yes it is.”
    Another frozen silence fell between them and stayed there until finally she asked a second question.

   “Are you gonna do any of these things I’m telling ya all about?”
   “Truthfully?” he answered truthfully, “probably not.”
   “Is that pork barbecue from the Public Eye?” she purrs.
   He told her he did not know but that it is damn good and did she want some?
   Sitting on the bed beside him, she declared between bites, “Lord Jesus take me now!”  He liked that Southerners invoke the name of Jesus in everything.  It made him feel religious by proxy.  He had fallen away from the church mostly because he had a problem with the church’s problem with divorce.  Maybe when he healed, he would put that behind him or overlook it and go to mass now and then.
     He never learned the Indian physician’s name, largely because he felt he didn’t have to.
   Now, ensconced safely in his Valley, he walks more than he used to.  Annabelle sends him hand drawn pictures of angels with notes that assure him that, “Jesus is watching over you.”  He thinks to himself, “if that is true, it is embarrassing for Jesus and me.”  At Christmas, he sends Annabelle enormous baskets filled mostly with the junk foods he knows she’ll like and he sends her a piece of the loud colored jewelry she fancies. 
    They hired him to teach business marketing at the junior college up in Waterbury and he spends most of his free time, and he has a lot of free time now, trying to reestablish himself in the community.  Walking off the last few yards of the last lap around the field, he understands that there are two unchangeable truths in life.  One is that the heart mends itself and the other is that lost love is still love.  It is softened and tempered by time but only if we allow it to be. 
   Lunch at the Valley Diner.   A few years ago, when the divorce just happened, he had talked to that waitress from the Diner.  She was short and thin and pretty, and if he hadn’t been such a mess at the time, they probably could have gone out or something, maybe gotten to know each other.  Maybe he’d ask about her today while he was there for lunch.  Maybe she was still there.

The Well-Meaning Mister Carlson.A short story

The Well-Meaning Mister Carlson.

A

Short story by John William Tuohy

    

     With the company’s blessing, they met once a month for a five mile stroll around Georgetown. He and the Old Man. He was called the Old Man, behind his back, because it was how the Old Man referred to virtually everyone. “Now listen here, Old Man.”  

The Old Man knew about the title and didn’t dislike it. The moniker appealed to the large streak of snob in him.  

     The Company is what the agency, the CIA, is called, although the newer breed prefers to call it “The Farm”, a reference to the Virginia apple orchard that once occupied the massive plot of land on the banks of the Potomac where the company sits.

 

    The Old Man had been a power in the company once until his fall from grace after the

Operation Corrective Vision fiasco.  The plan was to overthrow Leonidas Trujillo, AKA El Jefe, the president for life of the Dominican Republic, who was insane.  Truly a madman. It was also agreed by the powers that be, from the White House to the Kremlin, that El Jefe would die in a coup. It was just better that way.

     On the day of the coup, the Old Man leaked news of the assassination through a series of reporters the company owned who reported that Trujillo had been assassinated by his own military at 4:30 in the afternoon on May 30, a Tuesday, as he was driven from the capital to his beach home. Junior officers had shot him twice through the head. That was how the story ran.

     Unfortunately for the Old Man, due to a series of mishaps, the assassination actually took place two hours later.  Upon learning of his impending death, Trujillo barricaded himself in his office in the Presidential Palace with a machine gun. A well placed hand grenade killed him.

  

     Critics, the Latin and European press and eventually the US Congress, demanded to know how the media was able to predict the assassination two hours in advance. The American media, a mechanism designed to exonerate itself from all culpability and faced with the choice of blaming itself or hanging the Old Boy in the public square chose the latter.

     As a courtesy, for there were many in the company who felt the Old Man had done no wrong, he was placed on the payroll of a company owned sugar export company and

 unofficially kept in the loop.  This was why he and the Admiral took their five mile stroll around Georgetown once a month, although the frequency of their walks depended on many factors.  The route was always the same. They met on the corner of M and 28^th Street and walked west up 28^th,   stopping at the corner market at P and 28^th for a carry out coffee.

  

     The Admiral disliked The Old Man. He found him to be a boor and when allowed, a subtle bully. There was rarely any small talk between them as they strolled the rain soaked streets looking like two older, well dressed gentlemen engaged in civil conversation.

     “So,” the Old Man began, “what’s the word from the front lines?”

     “Henrik Carlson?” the Admiral said. “Henrik Carlson is news from the front lines.”

     “One of ours?” the Old Man asked.

     “No,” he answered quickly. He always answered quickly. “A civilian. Dirty business”

     “So what of Mister Carlson?” the Old Man asked.

     “Mr.  Carlson” the Admiral began slowly, “made a fortune.  Three times.  And with every fortune he made the less interested he became in being wealthy. We took care of his money concerns.   We spent it for him.”

     “Background?” The Old Man asked without looking at him.

     “He was 64 years old when he came onto our radar,” the Admiral answered. “Native of Edina, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Private school education.  He referred to himself as ‘an imperfectly socialized person’ and he was right, he was.  Stood 6-feet-2 and walked with a forward tilt.  Had a light, nasally voice.  Brilliant in many ways but his train of thought was lost on a regular basis. Wore his hair long, giving him that aging-hippie-with money look.  His shirt pockets were stuffed with pens, most of which did not work apparently. When he wore ties, they were distinct in their ugliness.”

   They passed under a leafy elm towards the top of the hill.    

  “Political leanings?” the Old Man asked.

   “We know that he served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua when he was an undergraduate.”

   “Left of center,” the Old Man dismissively said. It was an opinion not shared by the Admiral. “Where did he study?”

   “MIT,” the Admiral answered.  The Old Man stuck out his lower lip and tilted his head. MIT was safe.  The company recruited from MIT. The company funds MIT projects.

    “His area?” the Old Man asked.

    “R and D,” he answered. “He held several well-paying jobs as an engineer, but had a habit of getting himself fired from each place he ever worked. Then he struck it rich, about 50 million dollars. The first fortune came from inventing an early word-processing system and then made an even bigger bundle, about 100 million from the stock he got for selling his software company, which had developed a system for connecting phone networks to the Internet.  With those funds he formed an investment firm called Paperboy Investments.”

   “Significance?”

   “So named because he delivered newspapers as a child,” the Admiral answered as they topped the hill and looked past the high black Victorian style fence into the Oak Hill cemetery where the city’s leading citizens were laid to rest.

    “He made his third fortune on a company called Aimlin Pharmaceuticals,” the Admiral continued. “It was a tiny, struggling firm that caught his eye while he was evaluating drug treatments for his wife, who has diabetes. Aimlin had been dong innovative diabetes research. Carlson poured $6.2 million into Aimlin’s research office, patented several new drugs and made two hundred million in two years. The wife died a year later. Heart attack.”

     “Net worth?” the Old Man asked. Mention of the wife had no effect on him.

     “At that point, $300 million. Almost all of it available cash” he answered. “His money and willingness to foot the bill for far left causes allowed him to globetrot with celebrities, although he was, truly, oblivious to pop culture. He just wasn’t in the universe with the rest of us. He didn’t care.  He drove badly, a 15-year-old black Honda Accord with a coat hanger for an antenna. He never owned a television. In as far as we could tell he owned one pair of shoes. Loafers. Anyway, he and his money eventually stumbled their way into Honduras.” 

    They continued their stroll up R Street, past the Dumbarton Oaks Mansion that sat gracefully on a finely manicured lawn. It was here in 1944, that the delegation from the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States drew up the plan that decided how a post-war world would look and then conceived and chartered the UN.

     “And what motivated this stumbling into Honduras?” the Old Man asked.

   “Our ambassador at the time motivated it,” the Admiral replied.

   “Who was he? Remind me,” the Old Man asked curtly.

    “White,” the Admiral answered. “Nathan White.”

    “Oh God help us all,” the Old Man moaned.  

    “Carlson met him at a fundraiser of some sort and told White essentially, 'I'm immensely rich, and I want to spend my money fighting poverty in Central America.  Over a three year period, our Mr. Anderson poured tens of millions of dollars into building libraries and underwriting reading programs for the poor throughout the country.  The Pope wrote him letters of encouragement. The UN named a day in his honor. There was talk of building a statue to him in the capitol city. It would have been fine if he had left it at that but Ambassador White changed Mr. Carlson’s agenda. He refocused him on bringing democracy to Honduras.”

    “Well that’s not good,” the Old Man injected. “We can’t have that. Can’t have that at all.”

     A light rain started in as they rounded Wisconsin Avenue. 

     “Didn’t we own a man down there?” the Old Man asked.

     “We did” the Admiral replied. “Pepe. Remember Pepe?

      “Ah yes” he said with a smile. “Pepe Lobo.”

      “Right,” the Admiral replied. “Pepe the wolf.  Reliably corrupt, wonderfully greedy, brutal and completely ignorant. Basically everything the company needs in a dictator. Henrik Carlson’s problem with Pepe the wolf was that Henrik was a tree hugger and Pepe, being Pepe, had raped the country’s precious hardwood mahogany forest through illegal logging operators who handed him a ten percent cut of everything. In the process, the chopping decimated indigenous communities and when the locals rose up, he used the military to put them back down.  In the meantime, the well-meaning Mister Carlson, with the urging of Ambassador White, was using his millions to search for a candidate to run against Pepe the Wolf.”

     “Did he find one?” the Old Man asked as they stopped on the corner of R and Wisconsin. The Old Man pointed his black umbrella to the left side of the street and they crossed. A light drizzle was starting.  

     “He did,” he answered. “Actually, the meddling Ambassador White found him.  A man named Zela, Manny Zela. A longtime member of the National Senate. Zela billed himself ‘A man of the people.’”

    “Oh God help us,” the Old Man said. “Not another man of the people.”

    “The problem was,” the Admiral continued “that Manny Zela was competent. With Anderson’s millions behind him he ran one hell of a campaign against our man Pepe. Zela spoke publically about the country being owned and managed by multinational corporations.  He promised to do away with a class based educational system and raise the minimum wage. He promised that if elected he would crack down on illegal logging and would improve human rights and generally, as they say, spoke with the voice of the people.  Even those who didn’t agree with his politics liked him because he said things they knew were true but that no other presidential candidate had said before.”

     The rain increased and both men opened their identical black umbrella with maple handles and continued their walk.

     “Carlson was everywhere during the election,” he said. “He didn't trust the local media because he said it was almost completely controlled by various oligarchs, which is true enough of course.  So, he took over a small newspaper, El Libertador, and encouraged the reporters to write tough stories about Pepe the Wolf.”

     An attractive young woman in a black business suit and trench coat approached them and he stopped talking. When she passed, he continued speaking. “Then Anderson funded an investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international organization that had ferreted out illegal loggers in Asia and other places.

     “Let me ask the obvious,” the Old Man said, “why do we, the company, why do we give a damn about this?”

     “We were partners with Pepe the Wolf in the logging operation. The money from that operation funds the peasant revolt in Tibet. I think it’s Tibet.”

     They crossed at R Street and crossed over 34^th and then 35^th Street as the rain increased.

     “This watchdog group, the Environmental Investigation Agency, the EIA” he continued “had one of its investigators posing as a lumber buyer secretly videotape a meeting in Miami with a Honduran congressional candidate who told the investigator that to ensure the steady flow of lumber they would have to kick back to Pepe the Wolf.”

     They turned right onto 38^th Street.

     “Carlson got the tape and pounded the illegal logging story on the front pages of his newspaper and booked $200,000 of advertising time on the Nicaraguan television networks. He saturated the air waves with the tape, and even had operatives show it on screens set up in parks.  Carlson estimated he had spent $2 million trying to influence the outcome. His boy Zela won, by a squeak, but he won and our boy Pepe the wolf was out.”

     “And our skeletons were left hanging in the closets?” the Old Boy asked.

     “They were,” the Admiral said as they turned left on S Street. “Zela alienated the Honduran elite by cultivating leftist allies in Central and South America. He enacted some of his reforms which resulted in the country becoming even more profoundly polarized between. There was tension in the air. Then he made a speech in which he called for ‘an insurrection’.  A poor choice of words in a nation where seven of 10 people live in poverty. That same day the company heard from all of our friends, the conglomerates that own hydroelectric plants, coffee interests, and the fast-food market, and they were not happy. The problem was that Zela still had Carlson’s mountain of cash behind him and they were using it to popularize their programs. So we had no choice but to drain his bank accounts.

      They turned left on 39 Street.

      “How much?” the Old Man asked with interest. 

     “250 million.”

    “Where was it reinvested?”

     They turned right on to Reservoir Road where tall trees protected them from the persistent drizzle.

     “That is out of my area but I understand the company put the bulk of it in an oil drilling project in Iran, I think. I don’t know for sure, or maybe it was a shoe factory in China.  You hear things. Anyway, in a wonderful little bloodless coup the Honduran Army ousted Zela -- in his pajamas – and we had our boy Pepe the Wolf back in office the next day. The Honduran army backed the move.”

     “And the well-meaning Mr. Carlson?” the Old Man asked. “What of him?”

     “Our people in the Army took him as well. He was living in his own suit in the Presidential palace. Apparently he slept in the nude. They took them both out to the jungle and executed them, buried them under a rubber tree or a coconut tree or something.”

     “Our involvement?” the Old Man asked.

    “Minimal,” he said. “We handled the PR on Zela as being alive and well and living in Miami on the fortunes he stole from the people of Honduras.”

     “And Carlson?”

     “No one asked about Carlson. He had no family. No friends. He was an odd duck. Almost no one knew about the role he played in the national election and how he almost single handedly elected Manny Zela President.”

     “Well good,” the Old Man said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

     At 35^th Street they took a right and the rain started to fall harder.  They fell into silence for a few seconds. This was the end of the stroll. They would part company now.

     “It’s a shame really,”  the Admiral said.

     “Shame?” the Old Man asked as he turned to look at him for the first time.

      “The whole mess,” the Admiral answered. “It’s too bad.”

        The Old Man stopped walking, looked at him and asked, “Why?”  

     “Well,” the Admiral replied searching for his car keys, “were Carlson not planted under a coconut tree he would have spent a fortune for higher causes like making the world a better place.  The Honduran poor would have a slightly better life and the Honduran rich would be slightly less rich.”

     “And how do you know that?” the Old Man asked. “You can’t answer that because you don’t know.  And that was why we had to make his money evaporate.  Because we don’t know either.  What we do in the world is to ensure that there are no unknown factors. We iron out the risks. And it is a damn good thing we do.  What if Zela had succeeded in his plans? Then what? The price of coffee goes up by a nickel or a dime? Maybe, maybe not. Fast food chains increase the price of a burger because Honduran lettuce cost more? Maybe, maybe not.  This Henrik Carlson fellow, yes, he could have changed things. But he had to be a kingmaker. All you see is a man without greed, and all I see is a man drunk with power. We didn’t kill Henrik Carlson. Henrik Carlson killed himself.  He doesn’t make kings. We do. That is our job in the world. That’s what we do when we must do it. Because if we don’t others, far worse than your beloved Henrik Carlson, will.” Realizing that he had become emotional the Old Man cleared his throat, paused and then continued, “The problem was that your Mister Carlson actually succeeded at it and he succeeded at it without us. We just can’t have that. As for the rest, well, it’s human nature, the oppression of the poor. I don’t like it any more than you do but it’s a tradition as old as the earth. It’s wrong of course, but for the time being, in the way the world is now, at this moment, it is often in our interest to stand on the side of the oppressor. Have a good day Admiral. Please see that you are not here for the next briefing. Have them send someone else.”