Monday, April 24, 2023

Two Stories: Waterslide and Train

 Intuition



Zeros and eights floated down the Lazy River.  From the height of the water-slide tower, Justin saw the numbers bobbing on the water.  Sometimes, he thought that the zeros were “O”-shaped (letters in other words) and the eights rotated sideways were infinity signs.  But, for some reason, zeros and eights made more sense to him.


The morning was cool for Phoenix and, from the tower, Justin saw streaks of snow on the mountains surrounding the valley. He could see very clearly from his perch: freeways where metal glinted under rippling yellow blankets of smog, the skyscrapers downtown squat and helpless in the sun, the suburbs and the brown Camelback mountain at Scottsdale, a stadium dome in the distance and planes ceaselessly rising and falling over the airport.  There were three levels to the tower and its walls and supports were the color of vinyl siding and, at the top, where Justin was stationed the flattened gable of the roof shielded him from the sun.  The chute of the water-slide, a tilted tunnel with an oblong opening, dropped steeply down to the plunge-pool below.  Another less sheer slide spiraled down to the pool from the tower’s second level.  The lower “granny” slide, as it was called, was open during the height of the season, when it was very hot and the water-park was thronged with guests.  But it wasn’t hot this time of year and, so, the “granny” slide was closed.  A film of water flowed over the surface of the slide and Justin could see the plunge-pool rippling placidly at the base of the tower.  No one was around yet, but he was on-duty and so he engaged the sound system, powering the music played from a speaker shaped like a bull-horn atop the tower and emerging, as well, from other smaller speakers posted among the cabanas, along the channel of the Lazy River, near the wading pool and the adult facility, a quarter of the size of an Olympic pool someone had told him, where an elderly woman was now swimming laps.  Across from the tower, a shallow lagoon could be stirred to surf, but there was no one at that pool and so the waters were calm.  At a bend in the glazed blue channel of the Lazy River, a metal shed stored the flotation tubes, some for one occupant and shaped like a zero and others for two swimmers and, therefore, taking the form of a figure eight (or infinity sign).  The zeros and eights were stacked up in unsteady piles, a bit like tires at an auto salvage lot, but, already, a dozen of the floats were drifting along the shallow concrete canal, unmanned, abstract messages signaling to the blue sky.  A few long-tailed birds were singing in the locust and willow trees transplanted into the water park and shading the Lazy River.


Cold Play’s song, “Clocks” sounded overhead and from the hidden speakers below.  The Lazy River water feature where the tubes were floating looped and Justin wondered how the current in the artificial stream was maintained: didn’t water have to flow from higher to lower?  So how could there be a closed level loop, but, nonetheless, enough current to float the tubes down the stream?  Perhaps, there was some ingenious mechanism concealed from the eye powering the current. A family below was lugging several tubes to the water, dragging them across the concrete from the stacks beside the metal shed.  (This was a waste of energy – the swimmers could have simply stepped into the Lazy River and seized the tubes that were floating by.)  Everything looped here – the water was recycled through secret tubes and hidden siphons; the Lazy River flowed in an irregular circle; the Cold Play songs looped after about 90 minutes, repeating tunes earlier broadcast; the birds in the trees sang short melodies that they energetically reproduced exactly again and again until the heat of the day silenced them. 


Jobs followed a strict division of labor at the resort’s water park.  Justin was assigned to the top level of the tower where he was supposed to supervise the line of people queued up to use the water-slide.  (For him, this was a bit of a promotion – the year before he was stationed at the line, usually longer and more contentious, attending the granny slide on the tower’s second level.)  Three Hispanic maids with lawn-blowers and black plastic sacks for rubbish were grooming the slick-looking artificial turf where there were rows of lounge chairs for sunbathing.  Another Hispanic man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap was skimming beetles and leaves out of the Lazy River, dipping a metal ladle into the bright water.  Two lifeguards, skinny girls holding noodle-shaped floats across their bellies, were ambling along the edges of empty quarter-sized Olympic pool.  The boss of the water-park crew was nursing his hangover in the shadow of the shed where the flotation tubes were kept.  He sat on a stool and was sipping something from a tall plastic “Big Gulp” cup, a drink (most likely Gator-Ade) purchased at a C-Store.  The girl at the concession kiosk near the arched bridge crossing the Lazy River was adjusting carbonation canisters in her soda system.  Justin liked her and waved from his platform.  She looked up and gave him a thumb’s up.  Sometimes, he watched her with the binoculars that he kept danging across his chest.  Another family strolled along the sidewalk from the condominiums and time-shares.  A maintenance man piloted his golf cart along the narrow lane between the four-story banks of rooms.  The old lady had completed her laps and stood, now, at the edge of the pool, shivering a little in the breeze.  


Justin had gone to the Catholic Academy in Mattapan, a neighborhood in Boston.  A couple years earlier, his parents had sold their business and retired to Tempe.  Justin had plans to enroll at Boston University, but he needed to earn some money to supplement the scholarship for tuition and student loans which he had been offered.  So he was taking classes at the local Junior College, not a full load, but a few courses that were required at the University in Massachusetts and working as many hours possible at the resort.  He had been on the swim team at the Academy and, for this reason, was qualified as an attendant at the water park, although his station, high on the water-slide tower, didn’t involve any swimming.  Indeed, it would be difficult for him to even reach the water from the top of the tower.  Justin surveyed the park with his binoculars.  The girl at the food kiosk unwrapped a cake donut and ate it.  Two of the gardeners had slipped through the fence into the construction site next to the water park.  Tennis courts were being built there, but very slowly, and the gardeners stood between two parked graders, where they thought they were unobserved, passing a joint back and forth.  Three more families with small children had entered the water-park, flashing their ID bracelets to the hungover boss sitting in the shade of the float shed.  Justin glanced at the digital clock installed in the console from which he operated the rotation of Cold Play songs.  He had a microphone and could access the sound system.  Every hour he called a ten minute time-out ordering everyone out of the water for that period.


He heard a couple of little boys bickering on the platform below.  They were daring one another to go down the big slide.  A bit reluctantly, they emerged, one after the other, on the tower’s upper level.  Justin’s job was to explain how to slide down into the plunge-pool.  You were supposed to point your toes and cross your arms over your chest as you slid down the tube.  One boy pushed the other forward.  They were small, brown and scrawny kids with bony, brittle looking knees and elbows.  


“Have you gone before?” Justin asked.


The two boys both shook their heads.  Fear made them tongue-tied.


Justin could see that they were tall enough to use the water slide.


He told them to point their toes when they reclined in the slide and keep their legs together, ankles touching.  Then, he folded his hands as if praying under his chin, pressing palm to palm.  


“Keep you hands together like you’re praying, right over your chest,” Justin said.


The two boys nodded.  


“Can we go together?” one of the kids asked.


“No,” Justin said.  “Of course not.  I’ll watch.  When you hit the water below and get out of the way of the slide bottom, I’ll let the other kid go.  That’s how it’s done.”


The boys nodded again.


One of the kids paused, peering into the dark wet chute dropping through the vinyl railings on the platform.  Then, he muttered something to himself, clutched his hands in front of his breast, and stretched out in the tube.  At first, nothing happened but, then, the film of flowing water dislodged him and he slid out of sight.  


“See,” Justin said.


The remaining boy looked at Justin as if puzzled.


“You can go,” Justin said, looking down to see the first kid dog-paddling to the side of the pool.


The kid didn’t move.


“It’s okay,” Justin said.  “Go ahead.”


The boy took a tentative step toward the chute opening.  


“I don’t know,” he said.  Then: “I’m not going.  Too scary.”


But, even, as he said those words, he rolled himself into the dark tube, clutched at his heart, and dropped out of sight. 


Justin wondered if whether showing the kids how to pray as they descended the slide earned him merit with God.  God eyes were always open and He saw everything – not a sparrow perished without the Father taking note.  


2.

It was a little before two-o-clock.  Justin had just broadcast the all-clear so that the people in the water park could return to the pools and Lazy River.  The Cold Play loop had just begun its third repetition for the day.   


The sky was overcast and a breeze stammered in the tops of the locusts and willows.  It wasn’t crowded below – sometimes, to pass the time Justin counted the guests in the water park: 23, he thought, sometimes, 24, but when one group left another arrived and so the population below, open and available to his eye, was 23.  A man with two kids entered the park and turned the back of his hand to show the wrist bands there.  He had all ID’s on his forearm, a row of them like wrist watches, and this wasn’t allowed - the boss should have made the man put the bands on each of the kids, but it was hard to remove the ID bracelets without ruining them and the boss just gestured that the group could enter.  Now, there were 26 – to his eye, the census below showed “26-ness”.  Justin wasn’t sure as to the qualities of “26-ness” but he felt the count vividly in a part of his brain adjacent to vision.  Perhaps, “26-ness” had to do with the overcast skies, the hum of the air conditioners in the condominiums, the bubbles glinting between tubers on the Lazy River, the short line at the concession kiosk where the girl that he admired was lifting hot dogs with her plastic tongs and putting them on opened buns.  Some guy had been bothering the concession girl, a middle-aged man with a bare chest grizzly with grey and black hair where a gold chain shone when the sun peeped out of the clouds and explored the lanes at the Resort, eroding the shadows a bit and brightening the flags on the golf course rippling in the breeze, catching the concentric rings catching rays of light on the quarter-sized Olympic pool where someone had dived into the water.  The people comprising the 26-ness were either grandparents or small children and none of them showed any interest in the water-slide.  The plunge pool shimmered where the flow scrolling from the bottom of the slide disturbed the surface of the water where the sky and the tower wrapped in its chutes were reflected.


Justin knew that the girl at the Concession Kiosk didn’t like him watching her with the binoculars.  But he was concerned about the hairy man with the gold chain, standing just to the side of roller-grill where the hot dogs were cooking.  He wasn’t in line, had already been served, and sometimes his face was half obscured by the puff of pink cotton candy that he was eating.  Justin focused on the girl’s face.  She was wearing a sweat-shirt (people down here thought that 75 degrees was chilly) and, suddenly, a worried look passed over her face.  Her brow briefly furrowed and she looked up from wrapping a hot dog in napkins, turning her head as if to see something that she had heard.  At first, Justin thought the obnoxious man had said something insulting to her, but her expression was different and told another story. She was attending to some sound that concerned her.  A woman was walking toward where the Lazy River passed under arched bridge.  The woman turned to her right and left as if looking for help.  Then, she trotted toward the shadowy alcove under the bridge.  Eights and zeros drifted unmanned down the stream.


Justin scanned the crowd – “26-ness” was no longer apparent.  Something was off.  A man back-floating in the adult pool rolled over on his belly and began to swim rapidly toward the aluminum ladder at the edge of the pool.  The two teenage life guards with the float-noodles at their bellies were heedless, talking to a young man in a Speed-o.  The numbers weren’t right: “26-ness” wasn’t visible.


Justin flipped off the Cold Play song and lifted the microphone.  If he was wrong, there would be consequences: he had just declared a ten-minute break and, then, told everyone that it was all clear, but this was some sort of emergency, what kind he didn’t know, but an emergency, nonetheless, and so Justin shouted “Out of the water!  Everyone out of the water!  Take a break now, right now!”  He could see people splashing around below, turning their eyes up to him, irritated, perhaps, and the boy in the Speed-o gave him the finger, flashing it at the tower where Justin was stationed.  The two teenage life-guards looked confused.  One of them dropped her float noodle and ran into the wading pool, plowing through the hip-deep water.  The other girl stumbled over her noodle – it was hitched around her neck – and fell over.  


People were hauling themselves out of the water, shaking drops off their shoulders like wet dogs.  Justin called the name of the boss: “Bill! Bill!” he shouted.  Bill stood up, disoriented as if he had been asleep.  Justin looked at the shadow under the arched bridge over the Lazy River.  He couldn’t see anything there, but, for some reason, the smooth flow of the water emerging from the gloom was grooved and irregular. 


“Bill!” Justin cried.  “Under the bridge.  Go under the bridge.”


Justin put down the microphone and hurried down the steps in the tower.  At ground level, the clear and abstractly schematic aspects of the water-park were concealed, no longer apparent at all.  People stood in little sodden groups muttering.  Others were darting to and fro.  Justin ran on the slippery tile between the wading pool and the adult water, a quarter of the size of a full Olympic Pool.  He almost fell on slick edge of the wading pool.  


Bill was kneeling over a small body, blowing into its mouth.  (Justin recoiled with the thought of Bill’s booze-tainted breath.)  The little body was motionless.  Several people approached tentatively and a woman was wailing.  Other parents dragged their children away, putting their wet bodies between the scene with the drowned child and their own kids.  One of the lifeguard girls was  scrambling to find her phone in a back pack where she kept sunscreen and lotions and her combs.  


The child twitched and gagged.  Bill raised his head with a froth of the child’s vomit on his lips and beard.  He turned the small girl over and she vomited some more.


A siren sounded in the distance. 


A little later, Bill was sitting next to Justin on a chair made from aluminum and rubbery bands of vinyl.  The water park was closed for the day.


“How did you know, dude?”  Bill asked.


“I don’t know.  Intuition, maybe,” Justin said.  “But I just knew.”


3.

The Amtrak train arrived from Washington.  Justin planned to board for his return to Boston.  It was midday and he had been waiting at the Philadelphia 30th Street Station for an hour.  The Express was slightly delayed but would depart at 12:08 according to the display in the terminal.


Marble halls echoed with voices.  The great columns on the portico overlooking the river cast shadows across the broad floor where people sat, or sprawled, on wooden pews around the stone wells leading down to the platforms.  The air buzzed with announcements.  Justin finished his hot dog and, then, threw away the wrapper and napkin.  He took out his phone and checked the ticket displayed on the screen.  


An African-American man in a resplendent uniform used a key card to open the gate above the steps descending the well to the platform.  Cold air rose from the stair-well.  It was still winter in this part of the world and would be colder in Boston.  Down the stair, the trains hummed like great dynamos.


Justin sent a text message to his girlfriend.  She attended Temple and he had been visiting her over the weekend.  She texted back thanking him for his nice message.  He picked up his duffle bag and made his way to the open gate.  Train station security varied from place to place.  Here, the man in the uniform was checking peoples’ tickets before letting them through the gate where the marble steps led to the trains.


On a catwalk between the columns, a couple of people surveyed the station.  Their shadows also were published by the winter sun and cast across the floor.  A woman at the head of the line was pushing a cart on which luggage was stacked.  Two small children, frightened it seemed, were clutching at her waist.  The cart couldn’t be maneuvered down the steps and, so, the Amtrak employee gestured that she should go around the stairwell to an elevator marked by some stanchions linked together by a black band.  Justin felt a sudden surge of disquiet.  Perhaps, the hot dog was upsetting his stomach.  A spasm clenched at his belly and he felt nauseated.  


The woman with the children and the cart piled with luggage pushed back through the people waiting in the line.  Justin was reminded of the water-park slide.  You always felt a quiver of fear, something agitated in your belly, before plunging into the dark opening and sliding on the water so sleek and cold under your spine and buttocks, pitching downward around the black corners and, then, emerging into the Arizona sunshine to plow feet-first into the plunge pool.  An old woman searched her pockets for a paper ticket.  She was carrying a small plastic box in which Justin saw a tiny dog with great bulging eyes.  The dog was whining.


Something was wrong.  Justin sensed catastrophe and felt faint.  The sensation reminded him of the day at the resort when the child nearly drowned.  He backed-up and let a man behind him take his place in the line.  The man must have come from a cold climate because he was wearing a heavy coat with mittens peeping out of his pockets.  The man showed a paper ticket to the train employee.  For some reason, he balanced on one leg as he displayed his ticket.   


It was Justin’s turn.  But he couldn’t make himself move forward toward the hole in the station floor and the steps there that dropped through shadow onto the platforms where the trains were waiting.  He shrugged and turned away from the gate.  Cold came up from the pit and brushed against his shoulders and the hairs on his neck stood up.  


“What now?” he thought.  The situation was embarrassing.  


Justin carried his duffle bag back to the ticket office.  There was a fee for the change but it wasn’t too much and, after the new ticket was issued, he felt relieved.  The next train to New York and Providence and, then, Boston was scheduled to depart at 6:12 that evening.  


He put his bag in a locker and went outside.  The sun was shining on the river.  Buses pulled up under the big columns, stopped, and people came and went.  SEPTA trains on elevated tracks curved into the station.  


Later, Justin learned that there was a disturbance in the route.  The tracks were closed.  He boarded a bus with the other travelers and rode to Grand Central Station where service resumed to Boston.  



  


Lost Car Keys



1.

The airport hotel was beyond the freeway, south of the runways and terminal.  Vacant land remained between warehouses and office buildings.  Guests at the hotel could leave their vehicles in remote parking for ten dollars a night and ride a shuttle to the terminal.  Parked cars occupied a lot about two-hundred yards from the hotel, a flat expanse of pot-holed asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence.  The vehicles were under surveillance by cameras mounted on nearby utility poles.   In a room behind the hotel lobby, a half-dozen screens showed parked cars gradually covered by snow in this cold climate and, then, thawed by sun glinting on chrome during the bright days, tires moistened by melt-water puddles that froze to ice at night. On the hour and half-hour, the hotel van prowled the lot, ferrying people to and from their cars.  Sometimes, particularly when it was cold and gusty, hotel guests seemed disoriented; after a long flight, it is no easy matter to remember where your vehicle is parked after a week in the sun or business meetings three time-zones away.  Hotel staff charged with looking, now and then, at the parking lot surveillance, sometimes saw men or women lugging suitcases across the snow-heaped aisles between the cars, apparently lost.  Hotel employees perused the surveillance monitors at intervals, when they knew that the shuttle van was making drop-offs at the lot. A few years earlier, someone drunk from cocktails in the first-class cabin, slipped and fell in the remote lot, was not discovered for a couple of hours during a blizzard, and suffered serious frost-bite injuries, the subject of litigation in federal court.  No one wanted that to happen again.


The cars waiting for their drivers in the remote lot had a forlorn aspect.  They were exposed to the weather and, in March in this climate, there were snow squalls and ice storms and, even, sometimes prolonged blizzards that buried the vehicles in stuff that seemed blue-grey on the monitors in the room behind the lobby.  Sometimes, it rained on top of the snow and melted it away.  The nights were long and the halogen lights lit the lot without making it bright – there was a dull, muted quality about the images on screen.  People who were supposed to periodically check the screens felt that,if they were required to watch intently, measuring the increase or decrease of snow in windrows, the slow rotation of shadows around motionless vehicles when it was day, the progress of dazed passengers dragging roller-luggage over the potholes and through the puddles, cars leaving and other vehicles arriving and, sometimes, the shadow of plane landing or taking off falling like a black avalanche over remote lot – if you were really required to attend to such things minute-by-minute and day-by-day, you would go mad, you would despair and kill yourself or, perhaps, run amok.  


But no one had to actually watch the surveillance images.  In good weather, at least, a glance every half-hour was sufficient.  And so it was that at 10:00 pm, one windy and cold night, Omodt, one of the night clerks at the hotel, observed a figure, probably a man, walking up a lane between parked cars, paying no regard to puddles that he stumbled through somehow without getting his trousers wet, then, standing next to a SUV, a black Honda CRT with an odd lesion of orange rust across its passenger side. It was odd that the solitary traveler had no luggage.  Omodt saw the man fumble in his pockets, stand on one leg like a stork for a moment, brooding it seemed, and, then, grope in the pockets of his heavy coat.  He couldn’t find his car keys and stood on one leg again for an instant, an angular figure, before digging in his pants pockets and, then, opening his overcoat to slip his hands into his jacket.  Omodt had seen this dance before: the traveler had lost his car keys and, after a few minutes, would turn away from the parked vehicle and, then, start his hike back to the hotel lobby, a distance of two football fields, but without any direct route because of the chain-link fence enclosing the lot.  In the icy wind, travelers might get disoriented and the gate to the lot, activated by the van drivers, was difficult to navigate and, so, the situation of lost keys was perilous – the traveler might slip and fall on the ice, or, disoriented on the frontage road, turn in the wrong direction and trek to another hotel down the street (all airport hotels look alike) and this mistake in turn could lead to other problems.  So Omodt decided it would be prudent to communicate with the van driver who had left the man in the lot, and, contrary to policy, driven away before verifying that the traveler had safely reached (and entered) his vehicle.  


The van driver, Jason, was partly disabled.  He had lost a foot to diabetes and used a prosthetic, but Omodt knew that he was capable and conscientious and, so, he wondered at the strange image on the surveillance monitors, actually visible from several perspectives: the frustrated traveler searching for his lost car keys.  Jason answered the radio call.  He said that he wasn’t on the premises and not, even near the hotel.  In fact, he was picking up several guests at the charter terminal three miles away. 


“You didn’t just drop off some guy near a Honda CRT in the second lane on the west side in the remote lot?” Omodt asked.


“Negative,” Jason said.  


“I’m seeing this guy on the monitors and – “


Jason said that he had to sign-off because guests were waiting with their luggage and he had to load it into the van.


Omodt looked at the monitor.  The man who had lost his car keys had vanished.  He studied several of the screens.  There was no trace of the solitary traveler.  He didn’t seem to be located anywhere within the field of the cameras.  This troubled Omodt; perhaps, the traveler had fallen between the vehicles and dropped out of the camera’s vantage.  He called for the night maintenance man and asked him to drive out to the remote lot to see if anyone was wandering around out there.


After a half-hour, the night maintenance man, Mehmet, came to the front desk, shivering a little and shaking his head.  


“There’s no one out there,” Mehmet said.  “It’s windy and very cold, but I drove all the aisles and didn’t see anyone.”


An elderly lady wearing coat, tennis shoes, and pajamas, it seemed, was waiting behind Mehmet.  She complained about a noisy party in the room next door.  Omodt attended to her and forgot about the incident in the remote parking lot.


Omodt was off-duty the next day.  The hotel was short-staffed; there weren’t enough chambermaids to provide service to all rooms and guests staying for more than one night were left to their own devices.  During his evening shift, Omodt was training an intern, LaKeisha.  He told her to monitor the surveillance monitors while he manned the front desk.  Some Canadians in town for a hockey tournament were drinking at the small bar on the other side of the lobby.  They were watching the flat-screen TV on which a basketball game was playing.  Sometimes, they shouted and cheered.


LaKeisha came from the office behind the lobby and said that there was a guest lost in the remote parking lot.


“It seems that he can’t find his car keys,” she said.


“The weather isn’t too bad this evening,” Omodt said.  But he explained to her that it was important to monitor the surveillance images when the van picked up or dropped-off customers in the remote lot.  “You don’t want anyone abandoned out there.”  He mentioned the lawsuit still pending in Federal Court.  LaKeisha nodded.


“You have to send someone out to check on this guy,” Omodt told her.  He went back into the room where the monitors showed the parked cars.  


“Can you see the guy?” Omodt said.


LaKeisha peered at the monitors.  “I don’t see him now,” she said.


“I wonder where he went,” Omodt replied.  “I hope he didn’t fall down somewhere.  People come off planes drunk sometimes.”


LaKeisha nodded.


“I thought the vans came on the hour and half-hour,” LaKeisha said.  “I think the van is out at the terminal.”


Omodt looked at his watch: “It’s 10:20,” he said.


He radioed for the night maintenance men.


Mehmet walked across the lobby and approached the desk.


“Another wild goose chase, boss?” Mehmet asked.


Then, Omodt remember his last shift and the man fumbling for his car keys next to the black Honda CRT with the scar of rust across its side.


A chill ran down his spine.  “What the fuck?” Omodt said.


“Robert sent me out there a little after 10:00 last night,” Mehmet said.  Robert was the other night clerk who was on-duty when Omodt wasn’t working.  


“What happened?”


“Same thing,” Mehmet said.  “Some guy was supposedly lost in the parking lot.  But when I went out there, I couldn’t find anyone.”


“Well, just wait,” Omodt told him.  He beckoned to LaKeisha and they went into the dim room with glowing screens.  Omodt showed her how to rewind the surveillance monitor on which she had seen the man.  It was a good opportunity to demonstrate to her how the system worked.  


“Sometimes, we need to preserve the video,” Omodt said.  He pressed the button to re-wind the footage digitally stored on the server.


The pictures tracked back to footage showing a man fumbling for his keys, groping in the pockets of his heavy coat and, then, standing on one leg for a moment like a stork, brooding it seemed.  The man stood next to a Honda CRT scarred with rust.  


“There’s something wrong here,” Omodt said.  He checked the time-stamp on the digital images:  Thirty seconds past 10:00 pm this night.


“Do you want me to go out there?” Mehmet asked.  LaKeisha looked a little bewildered.


“This is happening every night,” Omodt said.  “I don’t know what’s going on.”


2.

Jackson saw that Tony had a stricken look on his face.  He couldn’t see much of Tony’s face because of the mask and shield, but Jackson recognized the panic in his colleague’s eyes.  Sometimes, people couldn’t handle it (it was too much) and they just darted away, vanishing, perhaps, to vomit, but, then, never returning.  Jackson had known this to happen.  


The Recovery Team consisted of eight workers, laboring in couples in the meadow where the derailed cars had come to rest.  Several big craters were gouged in the muddy field and the grass was scuffed and, where the EMTs had worked, Jackson saw rubber gloves strewn across the ground, dropped syringes, plastic sacks in which medical gauze had been packed.  The ambulances had made ruts in the soft turf.  Remains were marked with small orange flags, flocks of them close to the tracks in the area charred by the explosion.  There was a bad smell, diesel and decomposition.  Birds had to be kept at bay.


Jackson and Tony were combing the debris field for personal belongings.  This would aid in identification.  Several hundred feet away, at the point of impact, some lights were mounted on tall stanchions so that the crash scene looked like a movie set.  The forensic teams with surveyors were mapping the place where the two trains had collided.  Nearby, the recovery workers took photographs.  Jackson supposed that it would be years before anyone understood exactly why this catastrophe had occurred.  A baby would be at the breast when an investigation commenced and, then, playing Little League or soccer when the findings were finally released.  


Tony muttered something.  He stooped to photograph a wallet lying next to a tuft of seared thistle.  After taking the picture, Tony removed a numbered plastic sack from the pocket in his Haz-Mat suit and carefully placed the wallet, now tagged, in the baggy.  Then, he carried the baggy back to the tote centrally located in the debris field.  Jackson watched Tony to see if he would return to where they were searching the meadow.  Black birds in flocks sat in the trees along the railroad right-of-way.


Tony paused for a moment, sighed, and, then, squared-up his shoulders to come back to where they were searching.  Near one of the fluttering orange flags, Jackson found an electric razor, a toothbrush, and a crumpled tube of toothpaste.  He tagged the find and put it in a baggy, walking back to the tote as well.  The plastic box was half-full of numbered sacks.  There were singed photographs, a small Moleskin notebook, a vial of prescription medication, a bottle of contact lens fluid, a little plastic case for carrying an animal that was (thankfully) empty.  


Tony said: “Here’s something.”  Jackson returned to where they were working.  A small black object was lying in the crushed weeds.  “What is it?” Jackson asked.


“It’s a key-fob for a car,” Tony said.


3.

There were questions as to whether the man wearing the baseball cap really represented the next-of-kin.  Some phone calls had to be made.  But LaKeisha was able to verify the man’s credentials.


The man told her that the hotel’s guest had left his vehicle in the parking lot, boarded an early flight to LaGuardia and, then, later taken the Amtrak train to Washington D. C. where he had some additional business. The guest rented a car in D.C., drove to Philadelphia and, then, boarded the Acela Express to Grand Central Station in New York.  This was the Amtrak train that collided head-on with a southbound locomotive hauling freight near Trenton.  Of course, it was a terrible tragedy and there were many casualties.  


LaKeisha said that the shuttle van driver would be arriving momentarily.  She excused herself and went to the manager’s office.  Her boss was on the phone confirming details for a wedding reception in the hotel.  LaKeisha didn’t want to interrupt and so she wrote a note on a card: “Dead guy’s rep is here to get car.  What do I charge?”  


The car had been in the lot for almost fifteen days. 


“Nothing,” the boss wrote on the note-pad.


The van was waiting outside the front door.  Jason got out, limping a little on his artificial foot.  The weather was changing and this made his stump hurt.  LaKeisha told Jason that the man in the baseball cap needed a ride to the Honda CRT in the parking lot, the vehicle with the flare of rust across its side.


She decided not to mention anything about the figure on the surveillance monitor.  They hadn’t seen him for about six days and LaKeisha didn’t think it would be helpful to say anything about the apparition.  


The man in the baseball cap seemed to be in a hurry and he didn’t offer to pay the parking charges.


 

Monday, February 20, 2023

Geeks who Drink

 



Posted above the urinal: Geeks Who Drink.  Trivia competition every Tuesday night!  Prizes and Fun!


The “Geeks” were pictured as cartoon caricatures: a girl with horn-rimmed glasses and ugly bangs; a couple of guys with the same sort of glasses and bad skin and buck-teeth, one overweight and the other emaciated.  


Who doesn’t want to show-off?  With a couple buddies, I attended.  The emcee was one of the regular bartenders, a good-looking guy who had dabbled, apparently, in some stand-up, because he was witty, quick with a retort when heckled, improvising jokes on the material but not so insistently as to obstruct the free-flow of the Q and A.  The girl-geeks were passable.  It was all in good fun, a diverting couple of hours and what else do you have to do on a Tuesday night?  The emcee projected questions on the TV screens above the bar in the upstairs room, a place called “The Red Monk” at The Royal Mile pub: all dark wood and signs supporting British soccer teams interspersed with travel posters of castles and old WWII placards admonishing folks to KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, red letters under a red royal crown. Lager was on tap and pints of Guinness also on offer and, above the urinals, taped to the tiles, adverts for Geeks who Drink.


The emcee, Colin, had the authorized answers to the questions on his laptop and everything went well.  Of course, I didn’t win, but the game was amusing and the girls seemed happy to be mingling with the Geeks and, when I left, I thought that I would definitely return next week with my mates and that, possibly, I might win a prize – a gift certificate for drinks and a meal at the Royal Mile or, even, a little cash.  Trivia isn’t exactly my thing but I’m pretty knowledgeable, if I do say so myself, the sort of fellow who reads Wikipedia for fun and studies dictionaries and keeps informed as to current events, although, perhaps, not as assiduously as I should since I’m weak on popular entertainment and sports.  My problem has always been that I don’t think knowledge is “trivial”, at least, in general terms, although I might subscribe to that view as to Lifetime network actors or hip-hop stars or most sports.  No, as far as I’m concerned, most things worth knowing aren’t trivial – it’s knowledge and knowledge is, as they say, power and power...well, power is everything.


On the next Tuesday, it was team play and, a couple of the guys got pretty drunk, and, so, they were useless and the girl’s team, on which the competitors were mostly sober, did well and beat us.  But it was all good fun and, after the competition, we had a few more drinks and Alyesha, one of the more attractive girls, said that she knew someone who was very good with information, a master of trivia, but very shy.  Alyesha made us promise to be nice to this person and said that she would try to bring them to the Geeks who Drink games.  Then, the emcee cut off Jason, a buddy of mine, whispering that he was drunk and should be escorted home and not allowed to drive under any circumstances and a couple of us felt obliged to protest, although it was true that Jason was, in fact, pretty inebriated, and Alyesha pointed to the red and white sign on the wall and said: “Keep calm and carry on.”  


Tuesday, the next week, Alyesha came up the steps to “The Red Monk” with her friend Rubin, a heavy-set figure in shapeless clothes with a big, fat, squashed-looking face studded with piercings, blue eyes so bleached that they seemed almost white from lid to lid, a mish-mash of races, it seemed, and both genders with broad soft shoulders and tiny feet and a mincing sort of gait.  Rubin didn’t participate in the pre-game chitchat instead staring at their phone and, when they spoke, their voice was higher than you might expect and a little tremulous.


The game began and Rubin didn’t say much of anything and this wasn’t team play but each man for himself and, so, I took an early lead.  Alyesha brought Rubin a 16 ounce glass of Strongbow cider and, then, Rubin warmed to the game and began calling out answers and it was clear that they were well-informed and quick to answer the trivia questions.


Six out of ten:


Mount Parnassus – ? – Snoop Dog – President George H. W. Bush – ? – Lake Baikal – ? – ? – Jackie Robinson – Dallas, Texas 


The moon hovered over the freeway exit and the traffic on the concrete stilts hummed along.  An unaccustomed bite in the air made the cold cling to our hands and faces.  The neighborhood where The Royal Mile was located had been truncated by the freeway and its various ramps and access lanes.  The streets were mostly amputated at the elbow or knee, blocked by concrete barriers.  A small office building with blue turquoise tiles on its facade was gouged-out underneath with a subterranean parking lot.  The Asian Fusion place shared a common wall with an up-scale Taqueria (it’s food truck was parked across the street on the edge of a vacant lot covered with weeds that hid enigmatic stone-walled pits.)  A branch library with squat brushed-metal pillars and a hidden entrance was cantilevered over a small, round fountain that seemed to have run dry.  A few out-of-place looking stick-built houses completed the suite of mis-matched buildings.  Because of the surrounding freeways and their concrete ramparts, the intersections and structures around The Royal Mile seemed to occupy a strange, isolated crater.  We stood outside the Pub arguing a little about the game.  Timbo said that, at least, one of the answers provided on Colin’s laptop was inarguably wrong.  But, perhaps, it was a matter of interpretations  Alyesha stood next to Rubin.  Alyesha said that there was no doubt that they had done well.  I agreed.    


“Well played... my friend,” I told Rubin.


They nodded very slightly.  Then, they walked down the sidewalk toward where their car was parked.  The vehicle was junk, strapped together with bungee cords, and so old and jury-rigged that you half- expected a smoke-stack to protrude from its engine.


Alyesha told me that Rubin was high-strung and nervous by nature and that they wanted to be unobtrusive.


“They were holding back,” Alyesha said.


“Why?”  


“Out of consideration for the others,” she replied.


Timbo said: “Well tell it not to hold back,”


“It ?”  Alyesha asked.


Timbo and George and Ron and I also swivelled our heads a little to confirm that Rubin was out of ear-shot.  


Down the street, the junker was fired-up and jerked into gear.


“You know what I mean,” Timbo said.

 

Next Tuesday, Rubin and Alyesha were at The Royal Mile with a couple other coders from where they worked.  


It was team play.  Rubin was on fire.  No one else on their team had a chance to answer any of the questions since their responses were so swift and accurate.  And, of course, we were soundly defeated.


Tiresias – All Saint’s Day – Vince Lombardi – Promontory Summit (but will accept “Promontory Point”) – The Carpenters – Mike Tyson – 1789 – Malaria – Roger Federer – Cuelebra Cut: Ten out of ten.


Rubin was unerring.  I tried to buy them a drink but they declined.   


“You don’t seem to have any blind spots: sports, personalities, geography, great battles of the world – how do you know all this stuff?”  I asked.


“It just...comes to me,” Rubin said.


“That’s unfair,” I said.  “The rest of us have to think.”


“It’s sort of different for me,” Rubin replied.


Outside, mist had gathered.  The neon at the Asian fusion place bled into the light from Taqueria’s sign.  The red marquee at The Royal Mile was blurred and dripped color onto the sidewalk.  The zinc pillars on the library reflected the scarlet smear.  The air seemed full of cool particles.  


Rubin attended Geeks who Drink on the next Tuesday alone, without Alyesha or the others from the job.  They performed flawlessly.  Colin was baffled.  


“Have you hacked into my laptop?” he asked.


It was a joke, but some of the players were a little bit annoyed.


“It’s not fun if someone always has all of the answers,” Timbo said.  George and Ron nodded.


Battle of New Orleans – calcium carbonate – The Moonstone – Rocky IV – Archibald Leach – Black Friday (October 25, 1929) – Charles Gounod – Thermopylae – Deborah Harry – “Gin and Juice”


“How do you do it?” I asked Rubin.  Their pale blue eyes were blank. 


“Are you some kind of computer?” I asked.


“Unfortunately not,” Rubin said.


It was drizzling outside.  Rain isn’t common in this city.  The water was cold and we pulled our collars up around our ears.  Timbo said: “This isn’t fair.”


“The game is for ordinary people,” George said.  “Not for freaks.”


Ron said: “Yeah, it’s a freak.  It’s spoiling everything.”


The next Tuesday: perfect.  Ten out of ten: “Sesquipedalian” – Thor – Convergent Evolution – “Ode to a Greek Urn” – James Arness – Summer solstice – Megan Thee Stallion – “Old Hickory” – Toussaint Louverture – 2015 World Cup...


Then: 100 out of 100.  


The rain was drumming on the roof of The Royal Mile and the skylight was smeared with running water.  


Ron said: “We know you’re cheating.”


“I’m not cheating,” Rubin said.  


“You’ve got an ear bud or something that’s feeding you the answers,” Timbo said.


Collin heard the exchange.  “Boys, boys, boys,” he said.  Then, he made a “tsk” sound.  Alyesha, who had come with Rubin but wasn’t playing, added: “Stay calm and carry on.”


“I can’t help it,” Rubin said.


“Yes, you can,” George replied.  


We scurried to our cars in the pelting rain.  The gutters were backed up and the intersections were ponds of water.  The fountain’s basin at the library was half-full and raindrops decorated the surface of the pool with a blur of mist.


The next Tuesday:  Rubin sat in the center of “The Red Monk” protected by Ayesha and the two other coders from where they worked.  Lightning flared on the glass overhead and more rain fell.


Rubin’s answers were flawless during the first four or five rounds.  Then, they began to fumble, stuttering out the wrong answer, or pausing so that someone else could respond.


For the first time in several weeks, someone else won the Geeks who Drink trivia contest.  Collin seemed relieved but he offered to buy Rubin a drink.


“It’s forbearance, right?” Collin said.


Timbo said: “No one can win every time.”


The storm had paused.  But thunder sounded in the mountains and sirens wailed.  A landslide had blocked one of the freeway in the hills.  There were orange cones and yellow barricades blocking entry into the garage under the turquoise tile tower – apparently, the parking place was flooded.


Rubin looked a little dazed.  He stood close to Alyesha by the Taqueria. 


“Come on, dude,” I said.  “The treaty that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648?  The Peace of Westphalia.  You knew that.”


“Maybe,” Rubin said.


“And ‘Posh” Spice – spouse of David Beckham?  You knew that.”


“So what’s it to you,” Rubin said.  


A few drops of rain fell.  The storm was gathering energy and would begin again soon.


“Prince Amerigo and Maggie Verver – the main characters of Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl.  Of course, I would never know that.  But you would know that, Rubin, you would have that answer on the tip of your tongue.”


“Maybe,” Rubin said.


“Keep calm and carry on,” Ayesha said.


Then, the rain began again in earnest.


The next Tuesday, the streets were all flooded and the crater where the The Royal Mile was located was half full of black, filthy water.  Sheets of rain were blown aslant.  The pits in the vacant lot were muddy cisterns and the fountain at the branch public library was overflowing.  No one had seen a succession of storms like this – it was unprecedented.


Collin couldn’t make it.  The highway near his apartment was drowned and foreign import cars were bobbing around there like toys in a bathtub.  One of the waitresses opened up the laptop and began the game.  


Rubin sat in a corner, alone, nursing a soda.  They didn’t answer any questions at all.  But I saw their lips moving silently with each answer spoken by others in “The Red Monk.”  


Leland Stanford – the Magna Carta – “The Pit and the Pendulum” – Super Bowl 1996 – Damn Yankees – Teotihuacan – November 11, 1918 – Erich von Stroheim – Mary Jane Blige – Chartres Cathedral


It looked to me that Rubin mouthed the answers to every question, accurately, but not speaking so that anyone could hear.  


Collin would have encouraged them to respond out loud.  But Collin knew the game and its history.  The waitress was cute and spunky but she didn’t have a clue.  


I waited for Rubin to rise, find their coat on the rack near the toilet, and, then, venture out onto the submerged sidewalk.  I followed them down the steps and caught up with Rubin on the street.  I pulled them under an awning over the bright window of the Asian Fusion place.  The awning above us looked pregnant, bulging with water trapped overhead.  


“The guys wanted to beat you up tonight,” I said.


“People always want to beat me up,” Rubin said.


“We saw you knew all the answers.  You were showing-off by moving your lips but not saying anything out loud.”


“What if I was?” Rubin asked.


“It’s offensive.  It’s offensive to us ordinary mortals.”


“Well, I’m sorry about that,” Rubin replied.


“If you aren’t going to participate, why did you come?” I asked.


“Whatever you might think, I’m not a pussy,” Rubin said.


“You know everything don’t you?”


“Of course,” Rubin said.  “It’s unavoidable.”


“When will man walk on Mars?”


“April 22, 2045.”


“When will cancer be cured?”


“Never, but it will be fully treatable by about 2061.”


“Who will win the Super Bowl in 2033?”


“The Tempe Arrows.”


“When will I die?”


“I know both when and how, but I’m not telling,” Rubin said.


I reached out and took their coat by the lapels and shook them.  Rubin was surprisingly light, puffed up like a balloon, and their head and shoulders trembled.


“Tell me,” I demanded.


“You don’t want to know,” Rubin said.


I felt ashamed and let go of Rubin’s coat.


“The freeway underpass down that way is flooded,” I told Rubin.  “Don’t go that way, the water will scoop up your junker and wash you away.”


I paused: “But I guess you knew that already.”


“Yes,” Rubin said.


They marched off in the direction of their car.  Ron and George and Timbo came out of the pub.  Down the street, Rubin’s car showed red tail-lights and bluish puff of exhaust under the street lamp.  Then, the car pulled out from its parking place and breasted the water splashing up around its hub cap.  


“He can’t go that way,” Timbo said.  “It’s eight feet deep under the overpass.”


But the car turned and, leaving a greyish, white wake, aimed for the underpass from which a veil of water was cascading off the bridge deck like some waterfall plunging through a gorge in the high mountains.  The name of the waterfall occurred to me and, for a moment, I knew its height and volume.


Rubin’s empty car was found in a ravine a couple miles away.  The storm ended and the floodwaters receded. Their body was discovered in a culvert naked and entangled in an obstruction of eucalpytus leaves, sage brush, and shingles and timber washed down from a construction site.  


I don’t know if Geeks who Drink trivia is still a thing at The Royal Mile Pub.  In any event, I don’t go anymore.


Friday, October 28, 2022

Estate Planning

 








1.

When she was in her forties, someone asked Loretta about her major in college.  Loretta replied: “Sexual intercourse.”  Then, she said: “I’m still that gal.”


2.

Billings was a young hard-driving exec at the Company.  He had an attractive wife and two small children.  Billings told his lawyer that he wanted an estate plan that protected his children if he and his wife died.  He said that he wanted a guardian for his kids who “shared their values.”  Then, he mentioned Roundway, another hard-driving exec with the Company who was not his manager, but his manager’s manager, and a member of his church.  The lawyer understood the motivation.


3.

Lea had a troubled life.  When she was a little girl, a flood destroyed the house in which she lived.  Then, her sister was killed in a car accident.  But, approaching seventy, she found happiness.  She re-connected with a high school sweetheart and lived with that man until she became very ill with a kind of blood cancer.  


4. 

Mr. Bentley didn’t think he needed a Last Will and Testament.  He was healthy and ran half-marathons.  Everyone he knew was strong, vigorous and optimistic.


5.

Elisabeth flew into Des Moines on the red-eye from LA.  Her bachelor uncle had died a few months earlier.  Elisabeth couldn’t make time for the funeral but she sent a card and wired flowers.  Six weeks later, in the mail, she found a letter from her uncle’s lawyer advising her that she was the beneficiary of a business trust that the deceased had established and that she should arrange to discuss the details with the attorney.  A ZOOM call could be arranged, but Elisabeth hadn’t been home for almost five years and, so, she took the opportunity to fly into town, visit some old friends, and confer with the lawyer.


6.

The lung cancer had shrunk her to skin and bones.  Karen could no longer drive and, so, her sisters brought her to the lawyer and helped her maneuver her walker up the ramp and into the office.  There were a number of details to which the lawyer had to attend.  


7.

Mr. Lawcort, Esq. said to his associate that estate planning was like looking into the sun.  You couldn’t do it very long without becoming blind.


8.

Karen was frail and her skin looked grey.  Mr. Lawcort wondered if she would survive the conference.  Her sisters were robust and talkative.  After taking notes about her situation, Mr. Lawcort said that he would prepare a Last Will & Testament for Karen, an Advanced Health Care Directive, sometimes called a Living Will, and a Transfer on Death Deed with respect to Karen’s house out-of-state in Bullhead City, Arizona.  The Transfer on Death Deed would have to be approved by an attorney in Arizona.  


9.

Karen was concerned that her two nephews and nieces in Sacramento were spendthrifts.  Nonetheless, they were blood-kin, the children of her deceased brother and, because they were always poor and in need of money, Karen told the lawyer that she wanted them to share in the inheritance but on the basis of a trust that paid them $500 a month as their share of the bequest.  After the meeting with lawyer, Karen felt better about things and, outside the office, lit up a cigarette as she stood in the bright sun on the wheelchair ramp.  Her sisters made disapproving noises about the cigarette and pursed their lips.


10.

There was no buy-sell and, so, Morton’s shares in Loch Ness Holding LLC passed directly to his sole heir, Emily, a collateral relative in Montana.  Loch Ness Holding LLC was the company through which Morton had operated his life’s work, LUST Anodizing, an electro-plating company in a suburb near Minneapolis.


11.

When Mr. Lawcort saw Karen puffing on her cigarette on the ramp outside his office, he told his secretary that they had better make haste in drawing up the estate documents for this client.  Lawcort was shocked when he wrote down Karen’s date of birth and reckoned that she was almost ten years younger than him.  


12.

Approaching 80, Loretta lived alone except for her family of three cats.  She didn’t have much of anything but the fate of her cats after her death bothered her.  She made an appointment with a lawyer so that some arrangements could be made for her pets.  She felt that something was wrong with her and had been feeling odd twinges of pain in her belly for a few months.  She didn’t go to the doctor.  Sometimes, she took her cats to the veterinarian.  One of the old animals was diabetic.


13.  

Lea had lived on an Indian reservation with her second husband.  Her son was a celebrated “Fancy Dancer” on the pow-wow circuit and had won many cash prizes.  Shane, Lea’s half-Lakota son, didn’t approve of his mother’s new boyfriend, a man who had been Lea’s high school sweetheart and, later, briefly famous as the drummer in a rock-and-roll band.  When Lea went into hospice care, there was a quarrel about her car.  The drummer had been using the car as if it were his own and he wasn’t inclined to surrender it to Shane or his half-sister, Bekka.


14.

When Billings said that he wanted his boss’s boss, Roundway, appointed as the guardian for his children in the event that he and his wife died at the same time (for instance in a car- or plane-crash), he again stated that he desired that his son and daughter be protected by someone who “shared his values.”  But the lawyer had another file in his office concerning Roundway.  It was a divorce file and some of the allegations pending between the spouses were troubling.  Of course, the lawyer was bound by attorney-client confidentiality and couldn’t say anything to Billings about what he knew, or at least, had been alleged, about Roundway’s “values.”  


15.

Lea went into a coma, lingered for a couple weeks, and, then, died.  Among her effects in the hospital, Shane found a handwritten note signed by his mother and witnessed by two nurses.  The note said Shane’s half-sister, Bekka, should be given several boxes of Barbie dolls that Lea had accumulated during her lifetime.  The dolls were at the apartment that Lea had shared with her boyfriend, the elderly rock and roll drummer.  Because his relationship with Lea’s boyfriend was poor, Shane didn’t know how he would be able to retrieve the dolls and deliver them to Bekka.  She lived in a Chicago suburb, five hours away.  


16.

Loretta made an inventory of some suitable past lovers, writing their names on a sheet of paper.  She considered the list, looking at it carefully.  Would one of these men be willing to serve as the Personal Representative of her estate?  The lawyer told her that she had to nominate someone willing to serve in that capacity.  Some of the men were dead, others married, divorced, and re-married again.  She had parted with some on bad terms.  Finally, she settled on four possible candidates for the position.  Using the internet, Loretta compiled contact information.  


17. 

Mr. Bentley was Lea’s cousin.  He was the CEO of an asbestos-removal firm, Asbestroless.  Lea was buried in a rural cemetery in the farm country where she had lived as a little girl.  Mr. Bentley stood by her grave as words were spoken.  The old country church, with its unflinching white steeple (crowned by a cross-shaped lightning rod) and grassy graveyard with eroded stones inscribed with fading Norwegian words, was “pretty as a picture” – or, so, Mr. Bentley.  After the Lutheran pastor had retreated to a larger, more modern church in town, Shane put a small deer-skin pouch containing some objects in the grave and, then, distributed Pendleton blankets after the custom of his father’s people.  Mr. Bentley observed these ceremonies with interest and thought that they were also “picturesque.”  Cars lined up on the dirt track between the graves and, then, departed for town where a luncheon was being served in the other church’s basement.


18.

In the fields, combines were harvesting corn and beans.  The Summer and Fall had been dry and the big farm implements were enveloped in mournful shrouds of dust.  Behind the combines, big black birds swooped into the field and gleaned the stubble.  Mr. Bentley said that Lea’s only worldly possession of any value was the collection of Barbies.  Mr. Bentley’s wife snorted and said that the whole situation was “sad and pathetic.”


19.

In the church basement, ham on buttered buns was served by church ladies.  There were bowls of potato salad, baked beans, and Jello with fruit embedded in it.  Mr. Bentley talked to Ted, Lea’s boyfriend.  Ted had not attended the graveside ceremony to avoid an encounter with Shane.  By mutual, if tacit, agreement, Shane had not come to the luncheon at the church.  Ted smelled of cigarettes and there was a faint whiff of booze on his breath.  Mr. Bentley said that he would pick up the Barbie dolls at Ted’s apartment and, then, drive them to Bekka in Chicago.  Bekka was poor and couldn’t afford the gas money to drive to the graveside.  She had spent four days at her mother’s bedside two weeks earlier and was all tapped-out with respect to finances.  Mr. Bentley said that it was not an inconvenience to make this trip because his company, Asbestroloss, had a client in Calumet City, near where Bekka lived and he needed to meet with that customer.


20.

Mr. Lawcort directed his paralegal to prepare papers necessary to implement Karen’s estate plan.  Then, he went on a cruise departing from Miami and touring the Caribbean.  He expected to be back at his office in two weeks when he would finalize the documents, get them approved by Karen, and, then, have local counsel in Arizona also endorse the legal instruments that his office had drafted.  Mr. Lawcort’s paralegal was involved in a car crash about four days after the lawyer left for his vacation.  She wasn’t hurt too badly, but suffered a broken ankle and, of course, her car had been totaled.  She couldn’t return to work for about three weeks and had not yet dictated the estate planning documents for Karen.


21.

The night after her “red-eye” flight to Des Moines, Elisabeth went for drinks and pizza with an old friend from college.  The two women met at a restaurant a couple blocks from her hotel near the airport.  Elisabeth’s friend had small children and, also, worked as an administrator at a hospital.  Although Elisabeth didn’t say anything about her friend’s appearance, she was surprised to see that the young woman looked care-worn and that there were lines on her face around her eyes.  Elisabeth’s friend said that she couldn’t make a long night of it, because she had to get up early to take her children to day-care before driving to work.   “It’s not like college any more,” Elisabeth’s friend said.  “Early to bed early to rise...”  Elisabeth replied: “Remember, it was like we were majoring in sex when we were in school.”  “Speak for yourself,” Elisabeth’s friend said with a laugh.  


22.

The appointment with the lawyer was at 9:30.  Elisabeth sat in a conference room with a window overlooking a small pond between the freeway and its off-ramp.  The pond was lined with grey-brown reeds.  The lawyer greeted her and they chatted a little about the unseasonably dry and warm autumn weather.  The lawyer was an old man, dressed informally in blue blazer and a polo shirt open at the neck.  He told her that she had inherited a profitable business called Greenway Eco-Services.  The enterprise had a recycling plant located about four hours from Des Moines in the northwest corner of the State.  “It’s was on the market a couple years ago and several large businesses were very interested,” the attorney told her.   He added that her uncle wasn’t willing to part with the enterprise at that time. “I can contact those firms,” the lawyer said, “And I’m confident that someone will make a very strong offer on the business.”  Elisabeth said: “I think I should take a look at the property before we commit to anything.”       


23.

Loretta had testamentary documents prepared by her attorney.  But the designation of Personal Representative for the care of her cats was left blank.  She sent an email to the man who was first on her list.  She inquired about his health and arranged to meet him.  His wife had recently died.  Mr. X– was old, frail, and sad.  He told Loretta that he had recently been diagnosed with something quite serious and, so, he didn’t think he could help her.  “My memories of you are fond and warm,” he told Loretta.  She nodded but didn’t reciprocate the sentiment.


24.

The Des Moines lawyer told Elisabeth that it was a long and tedious drive to the small town where the Greenway Eco-Services facility was located.  “If your uncle hadn’t been so stubborn,” the old attorney said, “he would have sold the shop years ago.”  Elisabeth said that she had some experience appraising businesses and that she planned to drive up to the Northwest corner of the state to see the place.  “You know, I don’t really recommend that,” the lawyer said.  “It sounds mysterious,” Elisabeth replied.  “Now, I am really intrigued.”


25.

Once, LUST Anodizing had been on the outskirts of a suburb that was itself on the far outskirts of the City.  The electroplating business was built on land zoned industrial, but as the suburb had grown and expanded, the factory was absorbed into residential and commercial neighborhoods.  Emily was surprised to see that small houses with even smaller detached garages and lawns with mature shade trees entirely surrounded the two-acre tract where the plant was located.  The commercial real estate agent told her that the electroplating plant was “grandfathered” by the city zoning committee but that no additions or significant capital improvements could be made on the site.  “This is a problem,” the broker told her.


26.

Emily possessed a controlling interest in LUST but there were two Persian brothers, Behrouz and Kamran, who each had 15% stock ownership in the firm.  Morton had borrowed money from them and repaid the loan with equity in the company.  They were now operating the plant.  When Emily called the anodizing firm, Kamran was officious but said that they were very busy with production, filling a large order for the Department of Defense, and that outsiders were excluded from the plant for security reasons.  Kamran said she could tour the facility in a couple of months and that he would send her a message when the time was right.  Emily said that she operated a ski resort in Montana and that it would be inconvenient to return in the Winter to see the place.  “Well, there is nothing to be done,” Kamran said.


27.

After Lea’s death, her three siblings set up a meeting with a lawyer to discuss ownership of the family’s lake cabin in the north woods near the Canadian border.  Title to the cabin remained in the surviving sibling’s mother.  The old woman was in a nursing home and had been unwell for several months.  At the conference with the lawyer, the eldest sister suggested that the cabin and lake-front property be sold at auction and that the proceeds be divided four-ways with equal shares payable to each child with Lea’s proceeds distributed to her offspring.  The old woman was participating in the meeting by a Zoom link on her laptop computer.  She vetoed this plan: “Your father would not want the cabin sold to someone outside of the family.  He put in the dock.  He built the driveway and the shed and the boat-house.  It was his pride and joy.”


28.

Mr. Bentley parked his car at the rear entry to the old drummer’s apartment building.  It was unseasonably warm and some of the grills on the balconies precariously adhering to the rear of the structure were fired-up so that the air smelled of burnt meat, propane and charcoal.  When Mr. Bentley rang the bell, Ted buzzed him in.  He lived in a cluttered basement apartment.  Apparently, he had been working on his pickup, but was afraid to leave anything in the lot by the disabled truck (it might be stolen) and, so, the small, dark rooms were full of car-repair tools and auto-parts in boxes.  Everything was impregnated with the stench of cigarettes and the Barbie dolls in their cardboard containers smelled like an ash-tray.  Ted said that he had emphysema and that he was too weak to help carry the dolls out of Mr. Bentley’s SUV.  Although they smelled bad, the dolls in the two boxes were very light.


29.

Mr. Y– said that he would consider serving as Loretta’s PR.  He asked her to visit him in his condominium by the lake side.  Not surprisingly, the place was called “Lakeview Estates”.  Mr. Y– was drunk when he met Loretta at the door leading to his place and his gait on the steps was unsteady.  His rooms were filthy and Loretta was happy she had used the toilet at the Kwik Trip down the block before coming to see him because his bathroom horrified her.  Mr. Y– had several cats himself but it appeared that he had not cleaned their litter box for several weeks.  The animals had rheumy eyes and matted fur.  Mr. Y– was very fat and his clothing was dirty.  When he tried to kiss her with his wet, slobbering lips, Loretta pushed him aside and fled.


30.

Mr. Lawcort became ill when he was on the cruise.  He feared that he had COVID, but concealed his symptoms in the hope that he could board the plane and fly home.  But he collapsed in the airport and had at to be taken to the hospital where, after several days, he was intubated and put on a respirator.  


31.

The electro-plating plant had cement-block walls painted white.  A disheveled copse of trees extended along the building’s flanks and there was a tiny lagoon the color of rust with a red sign posted NO SWIMMING.  A couple of semi-truck were parked against the shattered masonry of the loading docks. The place made an unearthly humming sound as Emily approached the office from where the realtor had parked and was waiting for her in a space marked by a battered VISITOR sign.  Behrouz met her in the small suite of rooms at the front of the building.  In the office, there was a dead rubber tree shedding fibrous strips of bark on the floor.  The air smelled of acid.  Behrouz said that he couldn’t let her into the plant because of Defense Contractor regulations.  He offered to show her the government documents.  “But I’m the majority owner,” Emily said.  “We didn’t ask to be your partner,” Behrouz said.  Kamran stood in front of the inside entry to the plant next to the restrooms in the corridor.  “I didn’t ask to be your partner either,” Emily said.  “We will have to work this out in court,” Kamran said in a loud voice.  “Indeed,” Emily replied.


32.

The country in NW Iowa was rolling with small round hollows beneath tree-lined ridges.  Corn fields slanted up and down the hillsides.  The road passed through many small villages that seemed either impoverished or abandoned.  It was warm and the air conditioner freshened the inside of the rental car and Elisabeth saw that the woodlots had turned yellow and gold between brown fields of row-crop.


33.

Billings got into a fight with Mr. Roundway at the country club.  Roundway accused him of cheating during their round of golf and Billings had ignored the slight so long as they were on the golf course.  But, at the country club grill, he couldn’t restrain himself and began to badger Roundway.  The two men went out to the parking lot to fight but cooler heads prevailed.  The next day, Billings called his lawyer and made an appointment to change the guardianship provisions on his Will to remove Roundway as the person appointed to protect his children in the event that he and his wife died.  “I need someone who aligns better with my values,” Billings said.  


34.

Mr. Bentley exited the freeway at Calumet City.  The roads were all ripped-up for construction and he drove along an endless line of orange cones next to a sheer drop-off down to yellow sand strewn with river-rock where the adjacent lane had been removed.  The old elementary school from which asbestos insulation was being extracted stood on an acre-and-a-half of asphalt.  The place looked like a giant burnt-red brick that had been hollowed out.  The contractor’s men were standing in sockets of the doors to the building, wearing hooded Tyvek coveralls with respirators.  Mr. Bentley put on a face-mask.  He thought that he knew some of the workers but they were hard to recognize in their white suits, masks, and safety glasses.  Near the openings in the building, fans powered by sputtering generators were sucking air into the structure.        


35.

Calumet City was full of burned out houses half-hidden by unkempt, drooping trees.  Sidewalks led to nowhere.  The project was going as well as could be expected, but Mr. Bentley thought some of the roll-off dumpsters were overfilled and might draw a fine.  He mentioned this to the project foreman.  The man was a little evasive about the recycling site to which the asbestos insulation was being hauled.  The world was full of the toxic stuff and Mr. Bentley expected to spend the rest of working life profiting from it.  Someone had to clean up the mess.


36.

Loretta contacted Mr. Z–.  He was enthusiastic about serving as her Personal Representative.  They met for breakfast at a Perkins Restaurant near the freeway.  He said that he had become successful selling Amway products and that she could achieve all her dreams by working in sales with him.  Loretta said:  “I’m 77.  It’s a little too late to chase after my dreams.”  “Oh my goodness,” Mr. Z– said, “It’s never too late.  “I don’t have any dreams left any more,” Loretta told him.  They talked about old times as they ate.  Mr. Z– paid the bill and left a large tip.  When Loretta mentioned her cats, Mr. Z– changed the subject.  They shook hands and he drove off in his shiny black BMW.  Loretta suspected that Mr. Z–‘s vehicle was leased and that he was not as prosperous as he claimed.  From the days of their romance, she remembered him as charismatic, irresponsible and a charming liar. 


37.

Mr. Lawcort was still a little foggy when he returned to work at his law office.  It seemed to him that he had forgotten something, but, try as he might, he couldn’t remember what it was.  After his hospitalization, the world looked spectral to him, half-dissolved in its own toxins.


38.

He suspected corruption with respect to the asbestos remediation, bribes to city officials, perhaps, and kickbacks.  But, it was best not to inquire too closely into the situation.  Mr. Bentley thought that what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.  The cigarette smell in his car made him a little dizzy.  He should have stopped at a Walmart along the highway and bought a box of baking soda.  He texted Bekka’s address into his phone and followed a zigzagging course through the ruinous city to a quadrangle of bleak-looking townhomes, subsidized housing where children were playing in the parking lot and some women shrouded from head-to-toe in black burkas sat at a picnic table next to the complex’s rental office.  Probably, the women were watching him suspiciously, but, of course, their eyes were not visible.


39.

Elisabeth’s cell-phone rang, startling her as pulled into Quimby, a hapless village surrounded by the old round pillars of grain elevators.  A stream ran through the town, spanned by several narrow iron bridges that seemed haphazardly welded together.  Some greenish water leaked over the top of a small, algae-stained dam.  On the phone, the lawyer in Des Moines asked about her progress.  Elisabeth said that she had just reached the town where Greenway Eco-Systems was headquartered.  “The offices are right across from the courthouse square,” the lawyer said.  “The plant is out in the country about five miles but there’s no need to visit that place.  I’ve talked to the manager and he’s looking forward to meeting you in the office uptown.”  Elisabeth said that she wanted to see the physical plant.  “I don’t recommend that,” the lawyer replied.  “But suit yourself,” he said. 


40.

When the call was transferred to his office by his secretary, Mr. Lawcort recalled what he had forgotten.  The woman on the line asked about the legal documents that Mr. Lawcort had agreed to draft for her sister, Karen.  Mr. Lawcort apologized and said that he had been very ill.  “Well, Karen died sometime last month,” the woman said.  “They had to break into her house here in Bullhead City.  She was dead in her recliner with the TV still running.  Apparently, it was a mess and they aren’t sure when she died.”  Mr. Lawcort said: “She didn’t look too good when I saw her in my office.  I bet she passed right after she got back to Bullhead City.”  The woman said she was disappointed that nothing had been drafted and that the estate plan couldn’t be implemented.  “These things are unpredictable,” Mr. Lawcort said.  “I’m so disappointed,” the woman told him.


41.

Emily looked at the tract index at the County Courthouse.  Apparently, there were consent decrees recorded on the property’s title arising out of environmental litigation involving LUST Anodizing.  The pollution control agency was supervising groundwater contamination remediation measures underway with respect to leaking underground storage tanks containing solvents and electrolyzing agents.  There were also claims that the firm had improperly disposed of electroplating byproducts.  Emily called her Montana lawyer and had her draft a quit-claim deed on the property.  Even though it was unclear whether divesting herself of all legal interest in the premises would exculpate her from liability, nonetheless, she thought it prudent to make the attempt.  Her lawyer was skeptical: “by recording the quit claim deeds, you’re just highlighting that you once had a legal interest in the place.”  Emily said that she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.


42.

The offices for Greenway Eco-systems were on the second floor of a downtown building that housed a cafĂ© and tavern at street-level.  The steps leading to the suite of rooms were long, steep, and arduous.  The offices were not handicapped-accessible and Elisabeth wondered about local ordinances, making a mental note to address this subject once her control over the corporation was confirmed.  The manager was a haggard-looking man casually dressed.  He said he could show her the profit and loss statements and customer lists but that there was no need for her to drive out into the country to see the plant.  “It is what it is,” the manager said, sighing a little.  Above the reception desk, the company logo showed an open hand with the tendrils of several small green trees growing out of palm and from between fingers.  “I don’t recommend you go out there,” the manager told her.  “You must understand that we are environmentally conscious. Our business, you know, is history’s first recycling enterprise.”  “This business?” Elisabeth asked skeptically.  “No this kind of business in general.”  The offices were brightly lit with spotless white walls.


43. 

Bekka came to the door wearing a track suit.  She had a broad flat face framed by dull, blonde hair.  In the kitchen, Mr. Bentley could see several small children eating macaroni and cheese from microwaveable plastic cups.  The TV was playing and, on the flat screen, two monsters were clumsily battling one another.  Mr. Bentley brought the boxes of Barbie dolls to the front door.  Bekka sniffed at them.  “I think we should put them in the garage.”  They carried the cardboard containers from the townhouse threshold to the garage door that Bekka raised by tapping a code into the controls on the wall panel.  The veiled women across the parking lot tilted their shrouded heads to watch Mr. Bentley and Bekka piling up the boxes along the garage wall.


44.

Mr. Bentley was relieved to get the dolls out of his car.  He drove back to the freeway with his car windows rolled-down.  The weather was mild although the trees were shedding their leaves.  He pulled into the drive-through of a Jimmie Johns’ sub sandwich place and bought something to eat in his car: a Hunter Club with turkey, bacon, and roast beef, a diet Coke, and a big dill pickle.    


45.

Karen’s two sisters met with Mr. Lawcort.  It was a contentious meeting.  One of the sisters wept.  The other shouted at Mr. Lawcort and said that he had neglected his duties.  Mr. Lawcort accepted the criticism stoically.  He subscribed to the view, confirmed by the Bible, that “a soft answer turns away wrath but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  (When he was a young man, his senior partner had told him to abide by this rule.)  The angry sister said that the spendthrift nieces and nephews in Sacramento would now receive a windfall.  They would have to hire an Arizona lawyer to probate the house in Bullhead City.  There would be expense and delay.  Mr. Lawcort had no response to these assertions.  He said that, if sisters desired, he would find them a lawyer in Bullhead City who could handle transactions involving the house.  “We can’t trust you to do anything right,” the angry sister said.  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Mr. Lawcort replied.


46.

“One approach to the cabin is that the person who will make the most use of it, borrows money, and cashes out the other heirs at fair market value.”  No one responded to the lawyer’s suggestion.  The old woman, participating by Zoom, tried to speak.  But she had muted her microphone.  The lawyer and the siblings in his conference room looking at the computer saw her lips move but didn’t hear her words.  Finally, a nurse leaned into the picture on the laptop and, unmuted the computer; then, she said: “She tried to tell you that she doesn’t want anyone to borrow money to purchase the cabin.  Their father would not have wanted any of the kids to go into debt over the lake cabin.”  The lawyer shrugged.  “Then, she will have to make a transfer-on-death to one of you,” he said. “Or several, but past practice shows that a group of people can’t manage property like this equitably.”  “So what are you suggesting?” one of the sisters in the conference room asked.  “Well, it’s often the case in estate planning that there are winners and losers,” the lawyer said.  


47.

Emily drove out to LUST Anodizing.  Again, Behrouz and Kamran met her in the office.  They told her again that Defense Department regulations prohibited them from taking her among the barrels of chemicals and energized cathodes where the parts were electroplated.  Emily said that she didn’t need to see the process since she was quit-claiming the plant to the corporation and canceling any shares of stock in the enterprise that she had inherited.  Behrouz said that there were certain liabilities that ran with the property that she couldn’t simply sign away.  “We can discuss this in more detail when your ownership in the corporation is confirmed,” Behrouz said.  Emily was quiet.  There was no point in arguing with the Persian brothers.  She shrugged and went out to her car.  Then, she called a friend in Kalispell who had a friend who knew someone working as security for a First Nations casinos near Edmonton.  


48. 

Billlings met with Kettering, the manager at the company who was Mr. Roundway’s boss.  Ostensibly, the conference was about supply-chain issues.  But, then, Billings said that he had always admired Mr. Kettering’s business acumen.  He knew Kettering was on the church council of the congregation of which he was a member.  “I would like someone with values that align with mine to serve as godfather to my children,” Billings said.  To his surprise, Kettering seemed flattered and said that he would consider such an appointment if Billings would draw up the proper legal documents. “But is your wife on board,” Mr. Kettering asked.  “Very much so,” Billings replied.


49.

Billings drove home, excited to tell his wife that Kettering had agreed to serve as the contingent guardian for their children in the event that some catastrophe eliminated the two of them.  But his wife and children were nowhere to be found.  An orange moving van was pulled up to the driveway and two Hispanic men were carrying children’s clothing and boxes of shoes out to the vehicle.  A tall man who looked like a retired cop stood sentinel over the moving operation.  The tall man apologized to Mr. Billings when he handed him the divorce papers.  


50.

The last name on Loretta’s list was Ted, a retired rock and roll drummer.  Loretta recalled him as an exciting lover, but, also, a heavy drinker with a drug habit.  She had not seen him for twenty years or more and was surprised that he was still alive and, in fact, living a few hours from her home.  She sent Ted a few emails and asked him to consider agreeing to be her Personal Representative.  Ted responded with interest and so she agreed to visit him at his apartment.  He told her that his girlfriend had just died and that he was a bit lonely.


51.

A pre-dawn fire destroyed LUST Anodizing.  The city police went from house-to-house in the neighborhood urging people to evacuate.  The plume of smoke from the blaze was poisonous with industrial chemicals.  When the sun rose, a tower of orangish smoke stood over the ruined plant and streams of green vitriol flowed down the driveway and hillsides coloring the little pond near the electroplating facility.  Kamnen said that Behrouz had gone to the Anodizing plant early in the morning, before the fire was reported.  His body was never found.  Authorities speculated that he had fallen into one of the acid baths and been dissolved, skin, hair, and bone.  


52.

Construction closed two of the four lanes on the expressway skirting Chicago.  Traffic was congested but moving at about forty miles per hour.  Mr. Bentley was eating his Hunter Club sandwich wrapped in white paper that had unraveled under the bun.  The wrapping was in the way so that he bit down on the edge of paper.  This wasn’t acceptable and so Mr. Bentley rotated the sandwich turning it over.  The loose paper wrapping beneath the Hunter Club was now in front of his eyes, blocking his view of the road.  Momentarily blinded, he lost control of his car, braking so that he fishtailed.  When he flung the sandwich aside, he saw that a truck ahead of him had slowed, brake lights flaring.  Mr. Bentley pumped on the brakes and skidded sideways onto the shoulder of the freeway, narrowly missing the back of the truck, now rolling to a stop ahead of him.  Horns blasted from the column of cars.  Mr. Bentley took a deep breath.  He looked at the sandwich lying open on the seat next to him.  The roast beef and turkey and bacon looked up at him with a vaguely apologetic expression.  His car was mostly off the road and it was hard to merge back into traffic.


53.

Mr. Bentley pulled off at the first rest stop past the state line.  He sat in the car for awhile.  He was panting as if the wind had been knocked out of him.  On the sidewalk leading to the toilets, an old woman was laboring up the slight incline, pushing her walker a head of her.  Mr. Bentley watched her shuffle toward the rest rooms.  Death is all around us.  Best to plan for the end.  You never know when your time will come.  Leaves slipped from trees and glided down on the pavement.


54.

Ted’s apartment was dim with wan light coming through basement windows.  He apologized for the odor, telling Loretta that the place sometimes flooded.  She didn’t smell anything but the stink of cigarettes.  Ted sat in a recliner connected to a green yard-long oxygen tank.  Loretta noticed an ashtray full of cigarettes on the small end-table next to the recliner.  She made small talk about the weather and they remembered bars where Ted had played in the long twilight of his career.  Loretta asked about the others in band – all of them were dead or dying.  When she talked about her cats, Ted showed no interest.  He was more intrigued by the money in her bank account and some real estate that she owned.  “Do you even like cats?” Loretta asked him.  “No, I think they’re sneaky little critters,” Ted replied.


55.

Bekka sprayed the Barbie dolls with Febreeze.  She put several of the dolls naked in the bathtub and ran water on them.  Later, her kids sat in front of the Tv eating peanut butter sandwiches and playing with the Barbies.  They rubbed the naked Barbies together and said that they were kissing.  


56.

During her efforts to locate a Personal Representative for her estate, two of Loretta’s three cats died.  The oldest cat, Angel, suffered from feline diabetes.  Loretta asked the lawyer what she could do if no one was willing (or able) to be her P. R. The lawyer said that he could appoint someone from a Trusts and Estates department in a bank to serve in that capacity.  “That’s expensive though,” the lawyer said.

Loretta was in better health than her old cat and, so, she resolved to outlive the animal.


57.

Mr. Lawcort received an indignant letter from one of Karen’s sisters.  She accused Mr. Lawcort of neglect and malpractice and said that, unless he corrected the problems that he had created, she would hire an attorney to sue him for malpractice.  Mr. Lawcort sent the letter to his malpractice carrier.  A claims attorney called him.  “She can’t sue you,” the claims attorney said.  “Your client is dead.  You weren’t representing the heirs.  There is no attorney-client relationship with the heirs and the dead don’t have standing to sue.”  Mr. Lawcort was glad to hear this.  


58.

It was warm and Elisabeth rolled down her windows.  The two-lane county road wound over the rolling hills, inscribing big S-shaped curves in the landscape.  Elisabeth saw the Greenway Eco-systems plant on a tumulus of loess, a pyramid-shaped knoll with clay banks exposed above a small pond enclosed in hedges of red sumac.  Through the brush, Elisabeth saw that the pond was covered in a yellowish foam, greasy stuff the color of tallow.  The air darkened with a bad smell that intensified until Elisabeth was choking.  Some vats on rusting iron stilts stood next the concrete block walls of the facility.  Brownish fluid was oozing through cracks in the walls and there were chest-high heaps of dead animals next to the driveway.  The animals had melted into one another and so it was hard to identify them but she saw several cows on their backs, huge taut balloons with upright legs, a few dogs and cats on the edge of blackened pile and a dozen rotting pigs with deer carcasses among them.  Closer to the building there was a dark irregular mass.  When the flies lifted from the mass, hovering in a great throbbing cloud, Elisabeth saw the pile was comprised of putrefying offal.    


59.

A man wearing hip-waders came from a shadowy alcove where there was a greasy-looking loading dock.  The man wore rubber gloves and a rubber apron.  He approached the car and politely asked Elisabeth if he could help her.  “No,” she gasped.  “Do you need us to make a pick-up?” the man said.  He pointed to a corroded truck with two dumpster-like bins on its back.  Elisabeth saw a some feathers in one bin, pale like hydrangea blossoms, apparently dead chickens, and a small, green poodle was visible in the other black compartment.  “No pick-up,” Elisabeth said.  Her impulse was to roll up the window, but this would trap the stench in her car.  “So how can I help you?” the man with the rubber apron and gloves asked.  “You can’t,” Elisabeth said.  She put the car in reverse, turned around, and drove away from the rendering plant.


60.

The room in the nursing home was steamy and smelled bad.  An old woman rested on a hospital bed that had been inclined upward so that she could sign the documents transferring the lake cabin on her death.  The lawyer had brought a newly hired associate with him so that he could learn practical aspects of the trade.  A nursing assistant with tattoos on her wrists and pony tail stood next to the bed.  The senior lawyer set the documents on a sort of plastic tray slanted across the old woman’s chest.  “What is this?” the woman in the hospital bed asked.  “It’s the documents about the cabin we discussed in the meeting?” the lawyer said.  “What meeting?” the old woman said.  She seemed very drowsy and her eyelids kept closing.


61,

The lawyer asked: “Do you understand what you are signing?”  “No,” the old woman said.  The lawyer handed her a pen with the name of his law firm printed along its side.  “Do you know what you are signing?” he asked again.  “I think so,” the old woman said and, with shaking hand, she wrote her name on the paper.  The nursing assistant wrote and, then, printed her name as a witness.  The junior associate hesitated for a moment, but, then, he wrote and printed his name also.  The transfer-on-death-deed required two competent witnesses.


62.

In the car on the way back to the office, the associate asked if the old woman had the mental capacity to execute the deed.  “Of course,” the senior lawyer said.  “Otherwise the deed would be unenforceable.”  The associate ran his teeth over his lower lip.  “It’s for the greater good,” the senior lawyer added.


63.

Elisabeth stopped in a Burger King near the freeway that led to Des Moines.  She couldn’t eat but ordered a Diet Coke.  In the toilet, she washed her hands for a long time.


64.

The senior lawyer told the young man that, when someone died, assets secreted money.  “You find it in the mattresses, under the floor boards, in the attic, it bubbles up out of the drains like sewage.  It’s just there for the taking, money for nothing.  So make sure you get paid for your work.”


65.

The old man used a walker to ascend the handicap-ramp at Mr. Lawcort’s office.  He had bushy eyebrows and the beard of a Civil War general.  He was only a few years older than Mr. Lawcort and had been in college with him.  “You know, I majored in drinking beer and smoking dope,” the old man said.  “It seems like just yesterday.  The heart doesn’t grow old.  The body ages but the heart stays young.”  Mr. Lawcort agreed with him. 


66.

In the mountains of Montana, the first snow fell, powdery, white and clean.  Emily’s crew inspected the ski-lift.  It was in good order.  


67.

The dock was solidly built and had outlived its maker.  It was early in the morning and mist rose over the cold, motionless water.  A loon warbled, hidden in the distance.  The people in the cabin were still sound asleep.  They didn’t see a bright fish gulp at the surface of the lake a couple yards from the end of the plank dock.  Concentric ripples spread across the water, softening as they expanded.