They called themselves the Coalition Against Poverty, Citizens dedicated to improving the experience of the poverty-stricken and destitute. It seemed meaningful that the old man had given me this card. Like maybe this could be free-range karma at work, the universe struggling to repair itself. This guy Frank answered my call and we set up a meeting.
CAP’s office was near downtown, in a decimated corridor off Zero Street that housed other charities and liquor stores. The area was familiar to me, a district of last vestiges, of architectural relics and human remnants. Their office was nice though. The interior was newly apportioned and restored, with shined furniture and red brick walls that looked original. It smelled like carpet adhesive, the way most offices do. In my past life as a corporate slob I’d been made to wait in a hundred lobbies like this one — in fluorescent mini-malls, in downtown skyscrapers, in reapportioned warehouses.
After filling out a packet of information I was shown to Frank’s office in the back of the building. Taking a seat, I apologized for calling on a Saturday.
“Not a problem.” Frank was a large man, thick through the shoulders and chest. He wore a worn-out shirt and tie. “As you can imagine, Saturday is a busy day for volunteers.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yours is an intriguing résumé,” Frank said. He flipped through my papers. “Impressive business credentials. Management training. Bachelor’s degree.” Frank sat at his desk in a catcher’s stance, his chair low to the ground, his knees up, hands open in front of his chest, ready to block any junk I could throw at him. “But nothing in the last five years,” he noted. “Did you win the lottery, Mr. Dandrow?”
“I haven’t been in prison, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“No, no. We will have to run a background check, though. We can’t accept felons.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I told him. Make Things Right had cleansed my record as part of its SOP.
“Let me cut the shit,” Frank said, looking up from his desk. “I have a pretty strong notion why you showed up today. We get a lot of your type in here, wanting to make amends for something horrible they’ve done.”
“Maybe you don’t want me. My past is pretty ugly. The things I’ve done could be shocking to someone like you.”
“Don’t try to gaslight me. I know who you’ve been working for. We’re well aware of MTR and the things they do.” He rocked back in his chair, letting his hands settle on his gut as he stared at me for a moment, biting his lower lip. “You know, the Romans believed the Furies were a self-cursing phenomenon. Whoever summoned them also ended up getting fucked over in the end. It was their way of saying that revenge doesn’t work.”
It must have surprised me, what Frank said, because he motioned that I should stay seated. I didn’t think anyone knew about Make Things Right. Who would really believe there was a company doing what we did? It was easier to conceive of randomness, of teenagers up to no good, than to envision a corporate entity in the business of revenge.
“No,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of work you did before. CAP needs talented people, wherever they come from. If you like to dabble in karma, we can help with that too.” He turned his back to me and walked to the window behind his desk. There wasn’t much of a view beyond the glass. Just a chain-link fence, a parking lot behind it. “I was pretty damn good at shooting people when I was in the Marines, but it didn’t become my life’s work. It only matters what you do from now on. That’s what you’re judged by.”
Frank didn’t need to convince me. I was ready to help. If I wanted to do good in the world, why not take a straight path instead of trying to navigate the inequities of revenge. Things had gone poorly with the old man, but there were plenty of good deeds that could be done in this city. Groceries needed delivering. Gardens needed weeding. Motor oil needed changing. I was the man for the work, so that’s what I told him.
I started the next day, spent six hours trimming back a cancer patient’s overgrown yard. She watched me from the window as her flowering shrubs came back into view after an hour of yanking native grass and milkweed from her garden.
I wasn’t great at gardening, but, with charity work, it was the thought that counted, right? I waved happily to the woman’s neighbors as I walked behind a humming mower, and at the end of the day, it felt good to look back on the progress I’d made. This was something I always loved about revenge work too, the instant gratification of seeing a job well done. The crisp green lines left by a lawn mower, the metallic squiggles etched into a keyed car. The difference was that with charity work, fleeing wasn’t necessary. I could stay and see the satisfied expression of the person whose property I’d altered. We could drink iced tea together.
“It looks so nice,” the woman said as we sat on her porch. Her name was Jill. She was wheelchair-bound, in her early forties, her head wrapped in a blue scarf. To my surprise, she reached for my hand and brought it to her face to kiss my dirt-stained knuckles.
“The weeds will stay away for a while now,” I said, pulling my hand back.
“Till spring.” She slouched in her wheelchair. “Let’s hope I can pull them myself then.”
I did hope that, for the hour we sat on her porch. I was nearly praying, to be honest, contemplating how her life would be better from then on, because of my actions, rather than in spite of them.
Frank sent me to assist all sorts of people in the following weeks. Victims of gang violence who were helpless and alone, living in bad neighborhoods; migrants injured on the job; kids with HIV. I cleared gutters for the elderly and clumsy, weatherproofed windows for the single mothers of thin-blooded children, installed lift chairs for the morbidly obese. I paid bills, delivered meals-on-wheels, cleared basements of sagging boxes. I collected toys for tots and recyclables for the rag-and-can men living in the park. For those first couple months I was a revelation to myself and others. These acts of restitution felt like a blanket over the city.
But things didn’t always go so well. There was the strange case of Jimmy Motts, for instance. His was a nuanced example, someone Frank regarded as his brightest success story, or at least a man who had such potential. Motts had come to CAP as a OxyContin addict years before and progressed through their programs in a drawn-out cycle of relapse and recovery. By the time I met him he was a part-time employee of CAP, driving around doing audits of volunteer work. He still received benefits, however, because he was only partially recovered.
I mowed his lawn and did garden work. Jill had given me high marks for my landscaping efforts, and this would have been an easy job too if it weren’t for Motts sitting on the porch offering a glib critique. He was a boxy man and had a letter-jacket pride he wore in his shoulders and jaw. It was a hot day, and he drank light beer, reclining on his steps to point out spots I’d missed by jabbing his finger toward a stray dandelion or a stubborn patch of crabgrass. Even though Motts was on methadone, he had a live-in girlfriend and a nice truck. I hadn’t had a girl in years, and my truck was a piece of shit. It seemed to me that Motts was running a con on CAP.
When I was about to leave Motts stood and came to offer a final assessment. “You need to pull that,” he said, indicating a plant with a big mustard-yellow bloom that I’d left in the middle of his garden.
“That’s a flower,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. “Don’t you know anything? It’s ragweed.”