“Not on your life,” said Strode. “My folks lost all they had back in the Depression by trusting banks.”
“We’ve heard that story a few times before,” Gardner reminded him. “And how, by the time you came along, they couldn’t afford to send you to school, and you were making your living selling chickens when you were nine.”
“Shoes. When I was thirteen. I’m not ashamed of that. I wouldn’t trade my work record with anybody at this table.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. I never had a disciplinary suspension in my life. Never even had a bad performance evaluation. And never any trouble with the police, either. More than I can say for some folks. And it’s all a matter of record.” He laid particular emphasis on the last word.
“But hardly public record,” asserted Drebbel, with something tentative and even interrogative in his tone.
Boyd Bland let his mashed potatoes get cold while following this exchange of thinly veiled hostilities. He seldom had much to say at the table, but he didn’t miss a word of what the others said.
“Records can get public in a hurry when there’s a reorganization, or a reduction in force,” said Strode. “The dead wood goes first.”
“Who’re you calling dead wood?” countered Gardner, his voice raised now in anger. “Getting pretty big for your britches, aren’t you?”
At this point Mrs. Helm saw fit to intervene. “Don’t let’s argue at the table, gentlemen,” she chided in a sharp tone that effectively put an end to the conversation. “It’s bad for your digestion, if you know what I mean.”
All of Mrs. Helm’s current boarders worked for the same company, a manufacturer of medium-priced traditional furniture whose factory was situated five minutes’ walk from the house. Since each of them worked in a different department, they didn’t ordinarily talk shop at the table.
That had changed since Frank Strode’s recent advancement, abrupt and unforeseen, to the position of personnel director. Over the years Strode had struggled steadily upward despite the lack of a formal education and a regrettable habit of often speaking out of turn and without due reflection.
When the sudden death of a supervisor had led to his promotion, the increase in salary, prestige, and power had gone to his head. Access to a roomful of confidential records gave him the whip hand over people with more education and skill than he, to whom he had been yielding and deferring for years. With Gardner and Drebbel, who had long ago fallen into the habit of baiting and bullying him, he had lately become condescending, demanding, and sarcastic.
After the six o’clock news when Gardner and Drebbel sat down to their nightly chess game the hostilities resumed. Strode turned on his favorite quiz program and pushed the volume up a couple of notches.
The chess players had no intention of standing for this distraction. “They make headphones for the benefit of the deaf,” shouted Gardner, cupping his hands around his mouth.
“And they show the questions on the screen,” added Drebbel with savage sarcasm, “for the benefit of those who can read.”
Strode turned from his program, his controlled manner giving no indication of the rage that churned within him. “And I guess people who can’t read push little statues around on a board, is that it, Hans?”
“Impudence is the first recourse of stunted minds,” announced Gardner, who had once been a high school teacher.
“You know what you can do with your big words,” snapped Strode, his voice rising suddenly to such unaccustomed loudness that Mrs. Helm came in from the kitchen to see what was the matter. She stood in the dining room doorway clutching a dish towel and regarding Strode with brows knitted in disapproval.
But Strode had gone too far to stop now.
“If you two don’t get off my back,” he went on darkly with an ominous tremor in his voice, “you’re going to wish you’d never laid eyes on me. I’ve got enough dirt on both of you to get you fired tomorrow morning. You might even be hearing from the police.”
He switched off the television with a violent snap of the wrist. He got up and went to the closet for his hat. “I need some air. You coming, Bland?”
“It walks by night,” droned Gardner in sepulchral tones, but there was cold sweat on his forehead.
Mrs. Helm bustled into the parlor. “Here, Mr. Strode, Mr. Bland, don’t you think of going out there tonight. It’s going to storm any minute. They just said so on the weather. Plus my operation hurts.”
“Well just go as far as the tracks into the plant,” said Strode.
Without further ado he and Bland trudged out of the house and started along the dark reaches of Ninth Avenue. The wind muttered in the leafless trees and squawked around the old houses. For a time they walked in silence, but at length Strode’s wrath boiled over into speech.
“Sharks and vultures. That’s all there is out there. It’s all a question of survival of the fist.” Bland vaguely remembered having heard his friend use this odd phrase before. Strode ranted on in the same vein, vowing revenge on his enemies but assuring Bland that he himself had nothing to fear in the coming purge, and perhaps something to gain. Bland tagged along wordlessly at his side, his doglike loyalty spiced with a dash of fear.
“Nothing out there but sharks and vultures. You forget that and you’re a lost man.” About the time the walkers reached the railroad crossing, the threatened storm broke, with the result that they returned home drenched, shivering, and out of breath.
Frank Strode’s fatal decline dated from that night. For a day or two he thought it was only a cold, and maybe it was at first, but then matters grew graver. He took to his bed and stayed there. No longer was Hugh Gardner’s sleep disturbed by dusk-to-dawn film festivals on television. No longer did Hans Drebbel fumble at chess while listening with half an ear to one of Strode’s quiz programs.
Mrs. Helm turned nurse as was her custom in such circumstances, and Boyd Bland took to sitting at Strode’s bedside for hours in the evening. The sick man would touch nothing but soup and juice.
A week passed, during which he seemed to go steadily downhill.
One evening when the dinner dishes were done, Boyd Bland tapped at the half-open door to Mrs. Helm’s private domain, which opened off the kitchen. In the parlor the chess players hunched in sober and contemplative silence over their board.
Mrs. Helm was taking advantage of a spell of leisure to black her shoes while watching a sitcom on her own television set.
“Is he awake?” she asked Bland.
“Yes, but he says he doesn’t want anything to eat. Says nothing tastes right to him.” Bland hovered indecisively in the doorway, the picture of a man chronically overwhelmed by the choices that life presents. “He seems awful weak.”
“You just take him some broth. I’ve got it on simmer.” She put aside the bottle of blacking and padded to the stove in her stocking feet. “That’s pretty full now, Mr. Bland. Don’t you spill it.” She watched him totter up the back stairs before returning to her sanctum.
Next morning Mrs. Helm was measuring the breakfast coffee into the twenty-five-cup urn (its contents would serve for lunch and dinner as well) when Hugh Gardner came into the kitchen looking pale and disheveled. “Well,” he announced with forced nonchalance, “old Strode won’t be drinking any more coffee. He’s dead.”
Mrs. Helm dropped the scoop into the coffee can and began wringing her hands. “Oh, are you sure, Mr. Gardner? Are you sure?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“Oh, the poor dear soul! Mr. Schell! I have to call Mr. Schell.” She bustled distractedly into her room to find the phone directory.
In the course of the morning Mr. Schell of Boone and Schell, Funeral Directors, called with an assistant, conferred briefly with Mrs. Helm, and removed the late Frank Strode from the premises.