Short Story Part II

2003-11-09 - 7:54 p.m.

Walking Man Part II

Dinner at the Harpers’ house felt like two hours in a sauna for Mark the wanderer. Mr. Harper, obviously displeased with his trusting daughter, subjected him to a thorough interrogation, which for some reason reminded Mark of a job interview. Immediately, he began to evaluate Mr. Harper’s personality in order to get an idea of what type of answers would be most useful. A profile soon emerged in his mind: Protestant, upper-middle class, politically conservative for sure, probably feels considerably superior to his mostly agrarian neighbors. Mark rarely made an error creating these mental sketches of people, and Mr. Harper was easier to read then most. As he spoke, Mark slipped a few tinted expressions into his answers. After one Clinton joke, two anti-welfare comments, and an expression of gratitude at finding “a family with some class” lubricated the conversation, the businessman slid into a tirade he’d clearly delivered on many other occasions. It was nothing less than Mark had expected. Gina’s father outlined an itemized list of his grievances with America, usually attributing the problems to traitorous liberals, immigrants, and welfare bums. What Mark heard was pieces of politicians’ rhetoric mixed with Fox News statistics and a healthy dose of barely hidden racism. The climax of the oratory came with an angry question.

“How can they justify hiring hundreds of Mexicans when decent, college educated Americans,” he gestured at Mark, “are forced to go all over the country looking for work? It’s not as if someone as intelligent as you would spend the time and money to go to college and then waste it! You need a job, son, and I’ll give one to you. You can start next week.”

Mark wanted to explain to him, like he had to Gina, that he didn’t want a job, couldn’t survive with a job. He wanted to scream to Mr. Harper and the whole damn system, “I’ve tried everything you have to offer, and none of it interests me. You sent me to school for years where you told me I can’t live without a job, but you taught me no job skills! You paid for college, where I learned amazing things, none of which helped me get anywhere in your make-things-to-get-things society! When I rejected the your holy grail of ambition, you called me a bum! I can accomplish any task you set before me, but I’ll never be a part of your world! Your work-a-day prison will kill me!” Instead, he hung his head and muttered thanks.

Mark was saying his goodnights and thank-you-very-muches to the Harpers before retiring to the basement air mattress they’d offered him. He only paused when he saw a tear escape onto Gina’s cheek. She ran to him, embraced him, and put her lips to his ear.

“I know you didn’t mean what you said at the table,” she whispered, “but now you’re stuck here. My father doesn’t ever back down and he’d be furious if he found out I’d brought home a slacker and a liar. I just wanted you to be happy and secure for a little while. I just know that what you really want, what you really need, is a home.” With that, she turned away to rest and dream.

* * *

The walking man’s mind is a storm of questions, and death clouds every horizon of his thoughts. The rope’s power of suggestion has overcome any trace of logic or reasoning that might have remained to shine through. His mind and his entire body are dominated by images that never would have appeared in his normal world, even at the farthest end of a dark and strange road. He pictures himself walking dimly through a maze of trees, searching for an outlet, but no path gives him any hope; at the end of every corridor stands death, holding his rope in outstretched hand. In his altered state, the man begins to think that maybe death is not a destination, but the beginning of a new journey. But where would this new journey lead? Would he find himself a different person, beginning his walk anew, or would he merely become void, with none of Descartes’ thought to prove his own existence? Surely he would not merely take a place in Dante’s bleeding grove. Remembering to keep two quivering hands between the loop and his throat, he slips it over his tormented head. Stray bits of twine chafe behind, but the feeling of the rope on his skin fills the man with an ironic feeling of security. “I’m not so far from home,” he says to himself.

* * *

As he rose from his air mattress for the sixth morning, Mark imagined he saw a robed, wigged judge sit on his enormous bench to pronounce Mark’s sentence: nine to five. Prison metaphors had come easily to him throughout the week because that is where he felt he was during First National of Dalton’s business hours. Trying his best to prove to Mr. Harper (and himself) that he could manage to succeed at the bank, Friday’s Mark was nervous, claustrophobic, and his hands were dirty with other people’s money. Every night he had scrubbed and scrubbed his greasy hands to wash the stink of wealth from his fingers. Twice the day before, Mr. Harper inquired about his health, noting that Mark always looked ill and seemed to be watching for someone. In truth, Mark did feel as if someone was always behind him, watching for him to fail or show weakness. He constantly looked over his shoulder and could swear that the walls of his already small cubicle were closing in, as if the office had been designed by Edgar Allen Poe. Often, he wondered if he would be able to breathe when he left the air conditioned building, his lungs having adapted to breathing in nothing but tedium and releasing only monotony.

Mark felt numb all over. Just five days had taken far more than their share of his allotted threescore years and ten, and of his love for people. He saw hundreds enter and leave through the clearly marked doors and longed to hear their stories. He looked up their personal information, credit history, and bank books, and gobbled up their numbers, crunched them, and spit them out onto his spreadsheets. A whole buffet of information was set before him, but it all tasted like the same bland mashed potatoes with no butter or gravy. His coworkers and bosses looked in manila folders and felt that they knew a person at their core, and only Mark seemed to know that you cannot paint a portrait of a man by looking in his wallet.

He learned more about Dalton from his hours of conversation with Gina than from any confidential record he found at the bank. The girl was constantly surprised and astonished by the intimacy with which Mark knew her town. He did not tell her that he had already learned all the lessons of her seventeen years there in the first hour of his stay. He only told her that each subsequent hour in her father’s world was excruciating and slow, like some 16th century machine designed to correct heresy against the corporate gods. Though he took a little pride in his endurance, he knew that he really had only lasted through the week because of her constant encouragement and frequent begging.

Mr. Harper beamed as he handed Mark the fruits of his torture, saying “Perk up, son. It’s everyone’s favorite holiday: payday! Now, doesn’t that just make you feel so good you could just gobble it up.” Mark wanted to vomit. He felt a lead weight around his neck for every dollar printed on the check, which meant that he was almost dragged to the floor by 205.56 of them. All he could see was the pain of Jeb McClintock of Pikesville, Kentucky, who broke his back and tore his lungs shoveling coal 14 hours a day for 27 years. When Jeb got his monthly stipend from the government for disability benefits, it had almost the same number printed on the right. Jeb was one of Mr. Harper’s welfare bums, but Mark was a good, working American.

Mark’s thoughts swirled strangely as he tried to force a smile, failed, and walked the gauntlet out to his Sable. Not wanting to go back to the Harpers’ right away, he headed south out of town, the way he had come. Strange images from an undiscovered country flew past him at the 75 mph that indicated by the rising yellow needle in front of him.

“If a car traveling east at 75 mph collides with a stationary object,” he heard his high school physics teacher ask, “what is the force, in Newtons, of its deceleration?” Mark could not calculate the answer, but in every blurred tree or telephone pole he saw a split-second escape.

A calm intruder in his mind cautioned, “Too messy.” Mark was appalled by his own macabre logic, wishing that the thought had come from somewhere else. A storm raged around him; the thunder of all the lessons of his life shook him at the center of his being and self-deprecating lightning zapped him from all directions. All at once he heard teachers, friends, bosses, and his own voice shouting the same questions to which his only answer was spelled out on a sign: “Bear Creek Public Access Next Right.”

Doubts flash through the walking man’s mind. He pulls back in hesitation and freezes with rope touching his ears, between freedom and life.

Mark’s feet took him out of the car and thirty yards to the shoreline before he knew he had arrived. His mind was a thousand miles away in Indiana, and his eyes saw only a confusing kaleidoscope of water, corn, and sky. He was a train, barreling down a fixed track, his course predetermined. He felt helpless, unable to control the feet who led him toward calming waves. Though he was a mass of indecision, he was comforted by the certainty that choices were no longer his own.

Inexorable gravity pulls his hands away and the rope down to rest on his shoulders.

Mark didn’t blame anyone, not even society or himself. He abdicated that decision, too. In fact, he didn’t think of anything as his feet entered the cold water for the first time. Two willow trees swayed on the opposite bank in the wind, and Mark’s exposed ankles were chilled by Acheron’s touch. He stepped forward again with nothing in his mind except the strains of one sad psalm that now felt joyful. He could not even tell if a word of it escaped his lips.

“On the willows there, we hung up our lives for our captors there required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth.”

Two sounds echo from the four walls of an isolated cabin: the sharp creak of a rope pulled taught and the clatter of a stool against the wooden floor.

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