I was upset, most of the time, I realize now. I almost never spoke a word to anyone except my father then, and am still quiet compared to most. People mention this when they meet me. I shrug, unable to explain.
I knew they’d bury her body with others, if something happened. They’d drop her lifeless in the sand. If she died there. I’d seen it happen on the news my father watched. The shows on cable he fell asleep to on the couch.
If she died so far from home, I wondered, would she go to Heaven? If she did go to Heaven, would she remember me?
24
He was out by the bonfire later, dragging over a tree limb to segment and burn. I went to help him pull the limb across the dirt and he let me. He let me hold a branch as he sawed. It flopped up and down with the blade of the handsaw otherwise and he couldn’t get it.
He talked to the fire. He didn’t look at me.
“She sends e-mails all the time. Your mom. Tells me what life’s going to be like once she gets back from Iraq. The three of us going to live as vagabonds, she says. Hitchhiking, living on the road. Gypsies. Going to see everything worth a damn that can be seen for free. We’ll get a TV show and move to Hollywood, she says. Then she changes her mind. She’s going to be a waitress in New York. No. We’ll rent out paddle boats to tourists in Pensacola. She’s come up with at least a dozen of them. Army jobs in Germany. Resorts in Costa Rica.”
I never saw this side of my mom. She was practical and tough in front of me. But I don’t doubt such impulses existed within her.
“I don’t know,” my father said. “What would possess a woman to think like that?”
He spit in the fire and waited.
“What’s so wrong with what we got here?” he said. “We live and live. Nothing will change. That’s what I tell her. We had a good life when she left.”
25
The McDonald’s was next to a gas station by the highway, across from the Walmart. There were mostly old farmers there for breakfast, who were there every morning in their patched jeans and Carhartts, their freebie seed company hats, to joke around and drink coffee and hassle the lady who managed the McDonald’s, who took their teasing in good nature. Some of the farmers chatted up my father after we ordered. They knew my family. Some had probably volunteered on the rescue squad that responded to the crash that killed my grandparents. The farmers asked my father how the house was holding up, if he had enough work to keep him busy.
26
We sat in the truck in the daycare driveway. Kids were playing in the yard. The same kids as before, that had been eating the watermelon. We’d been here enough, sitting in the truck watching, that I recognized them.
They watched to see what would happen. I suppose they recognized us too, my father’s truck at least. Maybe it was confusing for them when he got out and came to my side to open the door and lifted me with his good arm and set me on the blacktop. How we stopped at the gate and waited to see what would happen next, because we didn’t know how drop-off was supposed to be done. Who my father should talk to. If he needed to sign a book or what.
A woman came to meet us. Her name was Miss Stephanie. She asked if I was Oscar, and my father said I was. Perfect, she said. They’d been waiting for me, she said.
(Kim Boettcher)
The sports bar waitress was named Kim Boettcher. She was a blonde and had a soft round stomach she liked to show off. She wore her jeans low on her hips. Aaron met her outside a grocery store, where her bank was. They were parked next to each other and she rapped on his window to complain after he took her photo. She had on the apron she kept her tips in at work.
“You can’t do that,” Kim told him. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist and enlightened him on consent laws. Aaron was happy to listen.
She lived with a couple friends in a south Omaha duplex. It was a single-story house with four garage doors on the street side. Her room was in the back, with a washer and dryer in the closet. Aaron slept there for three days.
Kim lay facedown while he massaged her with baby oil every morning, her eyes closed. When he put his weight on her body, Aaron could smell fryer grease in the sheets.
The Current State of the Universe
It may seem funny to you, if you have a sense of justice, that someone in the etiquette-revenge business has had such a hard time in life — that so much has gone wrong for a man who’s merely tried to make things right. I can’t apologize for my career choice, however. It’s simply what I’m good at.
This job is not taken in any conventional way, but, since you’re here training now, you probably know that already. Our recruitment officers operate in county jail cells and detox tanks, seeking out petty vandals of government property and adventurous drunks. The point of our business is to make the ill-mannered aware of how it feels to be treated poorly. It’s the little guy — the overweight, retarded, crippled, or flat-chested — that we protect with our work. What we do is teach people lessons on karma by fucking up their property.
If you’ve ever heard of something similar to the following, trust me, we’re already operating in your city.
Maybe they told you all this in orientation, maybe they didn’t. I’m going to tell you anyway. First, maybe you yell something out your car window at a guy on the sidewalk. Keep walking, fatty or Screw you, asshole. Or maybe just some filthy words to a beautiful young woman, something that seems innocent enough. Well, this person may be one of our clients or, even worse for you, one of our employees. Getting revenge is a simple process for them, merely a matter of writing down your license plate number and calling in a request for reparations. Through our contacts in the DMV we find out where you live. The next morning your taillights have been smashed out and half-inch lag screws have been drilled into your tires. It’s simple. You cut someone off in traffic, flip them the bird, and in the morning the gate is open and your dog has run away. It isn’t a coincidence. It’s us. We’re the Furies of the modern world — the vengeance of a god gone corporate.
This can be a nasty profession, don’t get me wrong, but we do try to be cordial — breaking out the big windows when possible, which tend to be cheaper to replace, and doing pro bono work for low-income clients during the holiday season. Having a sense of propriety is important to our overall success. Even so, things haven’t worked out for me as well as a man in the karma industry would hope. A big part of this job is having faith that the world is better because of us, that we must sometimes act against humanity in order to preserve a state of equilibrium. But occasionally a case goes so obviously wrong that it calls the whole system into question.
It gets me thinking, if karma is a real force, then maybe this line of work has been responsible for much of the misfortune that surrounds my life, for the accidents that mar my existence. After all, there’s a history of others paying for my mistakes.
My era of uncertainty began with a typical case. A client was nearly run over as she crossed the street. The driver saw her, made eye contact, but the car kept moving. The Big Man (the CEO of Make Things Right Inc.) called me personally from corporate headquarters in White Plains because this woman was an important client. “We need this done right,” he said. “You’re our number one guy in the Midwest, the dark prince of the Plains, and no one takes a dump in that city of yours without asking us first. Make it happen!”
The Big Man was a motivational speaker from New Jersey in his former life and tended to err on the side of exaggeration, but I understood he demanded results. Having toiled in the hospitality industry for fifteen years prior to working for MTR, I knew all about the expectations upper management has for its mercenaries.