fiction

Political Operative II

STEVE BIERSDORF

A pink While You Were Out slip is on your keyboard when you return from lunch, Jen’s oddly masculine handwriting, Ray Sears and Ray’s cell number, no elaboration. In your business people rarely leave voicemails. Ray is calling to let you know he contributed $7,500 to the Midwestern governor’s presidential campaign per your arrangement. The governor has just announced, so from this point on campaign contributions are a matter of public record.

Four years prior, the Midwestern governor established a state-run economic development corporation to provide loans and tax credits to small businesses, appointing himself chairman. Under the charter, in exchange for financial assistance, these businesses must provide payroll records as evidence of job creation for any tax credits or loans they receive. Any going concern could get bank financing, so the businesses coming hat-in-hand to the governor’s economic development corporation tended to be sketchy. The tax credits issued would be a pittance compared to the economic development corporation’s loan portfolio, the risk management side of the portfolio. 

Ray Sears Construction had been on the verge of bankruptcy. It was easy to get him to agree to everything. Ray Sears Construction received a back-channeled $200,000 infusion from the Lease On America Superpac backing one of the Midwestern governor’s rivals. Seed money that enabled Ray Sears Construction to procure a $2.5 million loan from the Midwestern governor’s economic development corporation. To get this money, Ray Sears signed an agreement to do the following, failure to do so resulting in revocation of the $200,000 infusion: a) neglect to pay the origination fee to the economic development corporation, which would be discovered in a Legislative Audit Bureau audit of the economic development corporation, b) neglect to provide payroll records so the economic development corporation could demonstrate that the money it lent created jobs, and c) contribute $7,500 (the max allowable) to the Midwestern governor’s campaign after the governor formally announced his intention to run for president. You were confident the economic development corporation would not press for the origination fee, or bother Ray Sears Construction for their payroll records. The previous year’s audit cited several instances where the economic development corporation neglected to charge an origination fee or obtain payroll records.

Ray wanted to celebrate when he was approved for the loan from the economic development corporation. You remember his almost desperate gratitude, insisting on paying for drinks. If he knew he was a pawn in high-stakes political subterfuge he didn’t care. 

When the Ray Sears card is played there will be documented evidence that a) Ray Sears Construction never paid a loan origination fee, b) Ray Sears Construction never provided payroll records, and c) Ray Sears contributed $7,500 to the governor’s presidential campaign. So the Midwestern governor’s job-creating economic development corporation looks like a slush fund, using taxpayer money to forward the governor’s political ambitions while failing to comply with its charter.

Political Operative I

STEVE BIERSDORF

What you remember best about Representative Bender, before he was Rep. Bender, were his expressions. Easy to know when Rep. Bender was in full disdain, haughty contempt or mocking disapproval, his go-to’s. Big eyes that hid nothing, small head, hawk’s beak of a nose, and a high-pitched, stinging laugh. Rep. Bender, informed, heartless, over-qualified, looking to eviscerate you in the public domain, to make you fear sharing your views if they conflicted with his. Your carefully researched positions made you a worthy opponent, and you had common decency on your side, which in retrospect may have been a disadvantage. You didn’t engage him as often as you disagreed with him because it was too despairing, chimeric scenes of first-strike violence crisscrossing your impetus. Rep. Bender would want to go for cocktails after work, as if taking every opportunity to refute any contention you made was routine in the course of any day. Nothing personal, just Rep. Bender doing Rep. Bender. For the first two or three drinks he’d be personable, even amiable. You knew to be gone by the third drink, before the magma buildup inside him became irrepressible.  

You’d forgotten about him when there he is one day, on the home page of the local daily newspaper, rumored to be the next assembly majority leader. From the pictures on his Facebook page he’s proportionally larger, as though inflated via compressor and intake valve. Same round predatory bird face with tired, gilded eyes, cataracts of excess. Pics with a cocktail in his mitt, from fundraisers at Nice Ash. You know Nice Ash, a popular and relatively new cigar bar, part of the downtown reclamation, probably something Rep. Bender helped engineer. Old brick buildings rediscovered, gutted, repiped and resewered, stone mullion windows, ceilings torn out and rafters painted over, refinished woodwork and inadequate ventilation.

You wander in on a Saturday evening, making your way to the far end of the bar with the other solo acts. Fight night on pay-per-view, one of the undercards about to begin, faces along the bar upturned to the flat screens bolted high on the walls. Two women in an octagonal chain-link cage, disrobing, walking to the center of the cage, close-ups of both women glaring death at each other (you try to spot fear or determination in their eyes as if this might portend anything). Referee imparting instructions, both women nodding, bumping gloves, back to their corners, the bell, and it’s on. The fight is over in less than a minute, one woman with a vicious roundhouse kick to the head of the other, knocking her unconscious. “Ho!” From several guys around you, shouted in unison more or less, another laughing like this, “who-who-who-who,” loud falsetto.  

You’re more of a cigarette guy, so you ask the bartender for a cigar recommendation. He comes back with a pressed Nicaraguan Viaje Robusto, ten dollars a stick, clipping it, presenting it to you with solemn reverence, lighting it, and you herf away on that slow-cooking monstrosity for what seems like half the night, inhaling sometimes.

Nice Ash fills up with resort-casual, above-average wage earners. Rep. Bender in the hizzy, you didn’t see him come in but you hear the laugh powering through the din. Loud and ridiculing as ever, emboldened. You didn’t expect him to have found an off-switch from then to now. Self-restraint was never one of his talents. You spy him through the cigar smoke and cluster of people, he’s nearer the entrance, centermost of a cluster of local A-listers, holding forth, throwing his head back and laughing, his laughter like a rider’s whip or sharp spurs to your flank.

Creeping up on last call and the crowd is thinning. You’re hoping he won’t see you. He’ll want to buy you a cocktail or a stogie, introduce you to his, what, associates? Sycophants? Hangers on? Groupies? If he has friendships they’re transactional, if or when he screws up they’ll lay claim to any spoils. Grab a shovel and throw some dirt on the box before the body’s stiff. And serial vetters they’ll be, wanting to know what you do to see if you’re worth the bother.

When your eyes are watering, they open the front door to let the backlog of smoke escape into the bitter night. Rep. Bender’s up from his bar chair, pulling a topcoat over his shoulders, putting his gloves on, throwing his head back and laughing, parting salutations, patting each other on the shoulder, and there he goes. The moment you’ve waited for. You’re up, slowly, studying your I-phone as you saunter out, brushing by someone. When you’re outside, you see his car isn’t far, you watch him get in and pull away and call 911, providing the make and model and plate number, eastbound on Sunset about a half mile west of 164. Driving erratically.

Avoiding as best I can the inherent danger of invisible, microscopic spittle

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m on one of my walks through the Lighthouse Pointe subdivision, down to the Santa Rosa Sound and back. Past brick ranch houses, slab houses, some with screened-in pools in the back. A nondescript stroll until I get to the Sound, where the waterfront houses are to be quietly envied with aching restraint. 

Ordinarily not many people are about, landscaping crews leaf-blowing or cutting grass or edging, or sitting in their trucks smoking. It being trash pickup day, my biggest concern are the receptacles. A pair, their lids hanging open, twin receptacles as inseparable as their long-together proprietors, sometimes and often lying on their sides courtesy of a rambunctious wind, scavenging black bears, or petulant sanitation workers. I pass these lidless receptacles with at least six feet of distance between me and their openings, hoping to avoid an unseeable puff of rogue droplets, hovering in wait of their next host.

I’ve gotten an early start this particular morning, off at a brisk pace when I come upon a broken liquor bottle and glopping of dried vomit infiltrating my six-foot perimeter. I feel a surge of anger as I step away, rushing by, turning my head, holding my breath as if that does any good (it may, I’m just not aware that it does). People believing themselves immune and immortal, hovering indefinitely in their physical primes, out and about, driving around and getting hammered. Wantonly spreading contagion. Further on I step over a green placker I’d have maneuvered around if I’d had advanced notice, irritated that people are driving around picking their teeth and leaving the rest of us with the fallout. When I get home I’ll take my clothes off, put them in the washing machine and help myself to a scalding hot shower. I’ll leave my shoes outside on the welcome mat, wipe down my sunglasses, phone, reading glasses, reading glasses case, keys, the inner and outer knobs on the front door and the deadbolt switch with disinfectant wipes.

I make it to the manhole cover in the cul-de-sac at the end of Winding Shore Drive, halfway, and I’m on my way back when I spot three bogies at twelve o’clock. Three women brightly dressed, gesticulating, engaged in lively conversation, headed right at me. I cringe as they laugh loudly and musically in unison, thinking of the ample bursts of invisible droplets their laughter has just emitted.

They’re on the left side of Winding Shore Drive, my left, their right. I cross to my right, their left. We’re outside, sure, and it’s breezier here by the water, but there’s three of them and their combined invisible wake of microscopic spittle. One woman notices me getting out of the way and thanks me, presumably for keeping my droplets out of their harm’s way, waving and smiling. She’s tall, with an unusually long, stringy arm and kite-like hand. I smile convivially, “no problem,” as if I’m being magnanimous. 

Hindsight and 2020

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m twenty-five pounds overweight. I have a stomach. Not a belly or potbelly. Not basketball-ish, more like sloppy-distended. Neglected, toneless. Harder to obscure or diminish by sucking in if I’m shirtless. 

I plan to attack the problem at some point. Before turning sixty. A lot of things I plan on starting or being consistent with by the time I’m sixty. Sixty seems like a crossroads between I’m over it, and dying before my term policy runs out makes better economic sense, or fuck my heirs, I’m going to run this thing out as long as I can, eventually rotting away forgotten in a nursing home that accepts Medicaid.

What I’ve done so far, I’ve cut out the occasional key lime pie, quit the blueberry muffins, and I’ve saved several posts on Facebook for various abs or core exercises I’ll get around to. The effect of ten thousand steps a day has been negligible, other than a distressed spine and hip joint and intermittent back spasms. My pants and shorts are still difficult to fasten, even though I averaged four point eight miles per day last week, four point five the week before.

There’s a floor to ceiling mirror I pass on my way to my office. I watch myself. I move like the upper and lower portions of me are articulated. My upper body looks relaxed, my lower body looks jolting and distressed, like I’m walking with a prosthetic leg to my hip joint and I’m only now getting the hang of it.  

***

I mall-walk around the outside of the Viejo Mall. Late winter, in the fifties, not much wind, blue skies, so I’ll get a little sun on my face. A pinkish hue that will become ruddier in a day or two. Anything but pale. We white people, we hate being pale. 

As I’m walking I see my shadow, diagonally and slightly ahead of me. I wonder if I’ve seen this shadow in my dreams, when I was younger. I feel like I have. The shadow I see as I walk around the Viejo Mall is herky-jerky and misshapen. I have on a jacket that’s zipped, and protrudes more than does my protruding stomach, so the shadow looks neglectfully overweight. 

If I’d seen this shadow in dream when I was young, I’d have refused to believe this was me. And what if, in this predictive dream, I’d been able to infiltrate the body and mind of this man in his fifties? It would have seemed worse than it is, to a young man. The hip pain, the tweaked back, shortness of breath, enervation, I’m accustomed to it, I make it work. As a young man I would have been horrified to know this was my fate. Or destiny. 

Which leads me to wonder. Why not allow this to happen? If I’d been able to see this cartoonish shadow when I was young, or temporarily inhabit this fifty-something body, long enough to internalize its afflictions, maybe I’d have become obsessed with my health. Maybe I’d be better off these days. Just a thought. A suggestion for anyone listening.  

***

Her latest apothegm: “I’m going to stab myself in the neck with a fork.” Examples of its application: Trying to schedule an appointment with the workman’s comp doctor; attempting to get AT&T Uverse fixed remotely (‘have you tried unplugging the modem?’); toilet paper and mask scams on Facebook. The empty aisle at Walmart where anything to wipe your ass is normally stocked, Huggies or the local newspaper your best remaining options. Or a bottle of Fantastik 409, hold it under you and spray upwards, a kind of do-it-yourself bidet, if you can live with the burning sensation.   

Talladega it ain’t, but still

STEVE BIERSDORF

Because I’m less of a social animal these days, interaction with the itinerant masses is confined to my morning commute. I don’t count social media. The last guy I got into an argument with on Twitter, I’m pretty sure was Russian, or a Russian bot if there’s a difference. Unable to refute me intellectually, he (it?) called me a traitor for positing that China was winning the trade war.  

Most of my commute is nineteen miles east on 98. If you look at it from a satellite shot, 98 looks like a cool throughway near water. In patches between trees and subdivisions, it is. You can see across the Sound, to hilly dunes with green vegetation, white sand like scoops of vanilla ice cream, the vegetation like candied syrup ladled atop. Or depending on the zoom, a long, thin, grainy line of blow.

Once I pass the causeway to the beach I know to be in the right lane, during heavy traffic season, which is the school year less holidays and summer vacay. Kids here get way more time off than I ever got. Christmas vacation is a month. They get the entire week off for Thanksgiving.

In the faster moving right lane I feel better about being mired in traffic. The left lane is intended to be faster, and yet it moves slower, reliably. If pressed to explain this phenomenon, I’d say we’re creatures of habit, slaves to our routines. Clinging to the way things were when we formed our habits, always struggling to adapt to change. The left lane is for faster moving traffic. When there isn’t congestion, it normally is. What this tells me is that many of the drivers battling rush hour traffic are my peers. Millennial or Gen Z drivers have no such preconceptions about the left lane. 

I’ll settle on a vehicle in the left lane and watch it in my side-view mirror, to validate that the left lane is the slower, reveling in this knowledge. Today I choose a Honda Element ahead of me. A tannish color, but not tan or khaki. Verve-less, primer beige. I pass it, I’m ahead of it now, watching it recede in the driver’s side mirror, disappearing behind a growing line of vehicles.

I’m east of the Tom Thumb light, where traffic thins out. From here the left lane can be, and often is, the faster of the two. We’re east of the Hurlburt Field overpass, old, overgrown trees with Spanish moss hanging over the road. On the north side of 98 are houses almost anyone can afford. On the right, behind the old trees or interwoven with them are houses on the Sound, big houses with an old Southern feel that almost no one can afford.

In the right lane, I consider changing lanes then don’t, figuring a truck ahead of me in the left lane will clot the lane. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. I move ahead of the truck. The truck moves ahead of me. It’s a big truck, with a four-poster bed, a Pod truck. They’ve dropped off a Pod, and free of this burden are anxious to rejoin the traffic flow. Pass other vehicles. A shackle removed, a burden unshouldered, free and easy down the road they go. It speeds up close to the vehicle in front of it, tailgating, so if I wanted to change lanes there would be no room for me. Not in front of the Pod truck. 

We’re coming up on the Doolittle light. To get to work, I can turn left at this light or proceed through the light and take the next left on San Cristobal. The Pod truck gets in the left turn lane, to turn onto Doolittle, I get in the left lane it just vacated, where the Pod truck would have been. Through the light, take the next left on San Cristobal, no impediment. I glance back, the Pod truck stuck in line, waiting for the green arrow granting permission to turn left. I win.  

***

In traffic. Trucks pulling enclosed trailers for Quality Plumbing, Clean Dog LLC (portable dog grooming). Plumbers keep their wares under wraps, unlike landscapers or home improvement contractors. A tacit understanding exists, that all things plumbing are best kept unseen and not contemplated. Like what happens to all the excrement. When Tropical Storm Nathan passed through the local wastewater treatment facility dumped one hundred thousand gallons of ‘partially treated’ sewage into the Sound, where there are now relatively high levels of enterococci, bacteria that inhabits the intestinal tracts of humans and animals. Which sparks an idea for a sci-fi novel: The waste management division of NASA blasts so much shit into space that a more technologically- and morally-advanced species is deeply offended, collecting our septic rockets, prying them open, and raining all the shit back down on us. Shit Storm is the working title.

***

Commuting, early on, still west of the Navarre Beach causeway. A white truck passes me on the right. A white Dodge Ram, and on the sides right behind the cab and on the tailgate it says Power Wagon. In front of me is a silver pickup, Super Duty across the tailgate. 

I find the hyperbole to be patronizing. Wagon I associate with station wagon, a fake-wood paneled family transport from back in the day, littered with wrappers and discarded toys, children screaming at each other, parents slumped dejectedly in the front seats. Or a little red wagon for pulling your toddlers and their toys around. Power and wagon are dissociative. And Super Duty, your seventy-thousand-dollar employee capable of pulling something twice its weight.  

There’s no way I’m letting Power Wagon get where it’s going sooner than I get where I’m going. I move to the right lane, and sure enough, as dependable as the sun rising in the east, the right lane moves faster. As I’m closer to the Tom Thumb light, about two-thirds of the way, I get left. Power Wagon is lost behind me. I sleep on my advantage, remaining in the left lane as the right lane moves faster again, and there it is. Power Wagon is a tenth of a mile ahead, two-tenths. I stay left, and sure enough, the right lane bogs down. But then Power Wagon gets in the left lane, four or five vehicles ahead of me. We climb the Hurlburt Field overpass, and I get in the right lane, the ‘slower moving’ lane. Soon the left lane will bog down, as we get closer to the Doolittle turnoff. It always does. Sure enough, I pass Power Wagon. It’s a tenth of a mile back, two-tenths.

I turn left, off of 98, and it’s over.

King of the road, yo.

Usherette

STEVE BIERSDORF

Pulling up to a double wide, parked in a clearing inside a mangrove thicket. An old maroon pickup truck on tires nearly flat, you might make it to the nearest service station to put air in those tires, might, depending on how close the service station is. Walking to the door, knocking. Knocking again. Greeted with the sound of vehement hacking from behind the door, “just a minute,” managed between hacks. Entering the trailer, a deteriorated woman accessorizing with a portable oxygen tank and clear tube to her nostrils. 

“Hi dearie. Come in.” Hack, hack, hack. Full-body wracking. Tears in her rheumy eyes. Kasha thinks about asking “how are you,” but she can’t be doing well, Mrs. Ackerman.

Inside is dark, red drapes over the windows like oversized doilies defraying sunlight. Cigarette smoke has infiltrated everything. When she leaves, wherever she goes the rest of this day, her patients will think she’s been smoking. Chain smoking. Mrs. Ackerman sits in a tartan plaid recliner. Kasha assumes it reclines because there’s a wood lever on the lower left side of it. She sits on the matching sofa that smells like eight thousand smoked cigarettes.  

“How’ve you been?” Mrs. Ackerman asks Kasha with her incinerated voice. On the phone, people mistake her for a man.

“I’m good. What can I do for you today, Mrs. Ackerman? How about a shower?” Mrs. Ackerman smells worse than normal, her hair grease-flattened, split-endy. She’s the only person willing to help Mrs. Ackerman with that shower. Alicia the nurse won’t, her kids, son and daughter, no chance.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Mrs. Ackerman glances longingly at a pack of Virginia Slims on the battered-antique round end table next to her. The ashtray’s been emptied in anticipation of Kasha’s arrival. A glass of something clear, stagnate, probably room-temperature water with a dash of dust particles.

There’s really nothing Kasha can do for her other than to try to make her more comfortable.

“It’d make you feel better. Let’s get you all nice and clean.”

“Can I have a cigarette first?”

Kasha mock frowns at her.

“Will you at least smoke outside?”

She stands, holding out her arms.

“Come on, I’ll help you. It’s a beautiful day. Come outside and enjoy it some.”

***

The Kellers are new. Kasha’s given the address, and instructions from Clemenza, her supervisor and de facto dispatcher for in-home hospice care CNAs and nurses, to “see the Kellers.” She pulls into a middle class neighborhood of ranch homes on slabs, fenced-in patios and enriched-soil backyards, some with screened-in pools. She parks at the curb, goes to the door and rings the bell.

The Kellers answer the door together. Neither looks deathly ill, or anything other than lamé in their golden years. 

“Hi, I’m Kasha.” She takes a step forward but they don’t part and let her through, or invite her in.

“Nice to meet you,” says Mrs. Keller. Mrs. Keller locks on to her eyes and studies her. 

“Let me ask, you…Kasha did you say?”

“Yes, Kasha.”

“Have you been saved?”

“I hope so.”

Mrs. and Mr. Keller exchange a look.

“This is for you.” Mrs. Keller hands her a brochure. “I don’t think we’ll be needing you today. I thank you for stopping by, though, and God bless you. Find Jesus before it’s too late. He’s waiting, but frankly he’s losing patience.”

***

Into the brightly tiled Florida room, Mrs. Calpysa smiling at her as she enters. Mrs. Calpysa sees herself as a younger woman when she sees Kasha, or similarities. Kasha is older than she may realize.

“Kasha! Come here.” She’s lying on the indoor-outdoor sofa, propped up with pillows. She holds out her arm. Kasha hastens. She bends when she gets to her, Mrs. Calpysa taking her some of her hair between thumb and forefinger.

“My. Such beautiful curly blonde hair,” she says, as if seeing it for the first time.   

***

Dani’s out back by the screened-in pool. Kasha lets herself in. Dani’s Lhasa apso, Tammy, hopping up on her hind legs, yapping excitedly, clawing Kasha’s shins. Dani’s in her wheelchair, in the shade of eaves. A glass pitcher with a pale green concoction, almost empty, on a round, mottled-glass table beside her.

“I thought you’d never get here.” She says this like a single, long word. She holds up the glass pitcher.

“Replenish, my Lady.”

Kasha takes the pitcher, heads off to the kitchen.

“And when you’re done with that, please run to Mariachi’s, I’m completely famished. Shrimp quesadilla with black beans and Spanish rice, please. Here.”

Kasha, halfway to the kitchen, pitcher in hand, stops. Dani is holding up her Amex, waving it in the air over her head.

Over the clinking of the ice as she stirs in lime juice, she hears, “Oh, and Tammy needs a bath. She stinks. I’d have thrown her in the pool if I knew she could swim.”

***

Mrs. Young isn’t responsive when she gets there. She knocks on the door, no answer, rings the bell, nothing, so she tries it, it’s open. She lets herself in as she’s done before. The TV is blaring from the bedroom. The View. The women are worked up and shouting over one another.

Mrs. Young is lying in her king-sized bed, propped by several pillows, eyes open, with an open-mouthed amused look.

“Good morning,” Kasha says brightly. Mrs. Young doesn’t respond. Kasha looks for the remote, to turn the sound down. She’s forever turning the sound down. She hates loud TV, commercials especially.

“Mrs. Young?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Young,” she says loudly, although loud is relative with the ladies on The View in background. “Shit.”

No pulse. She pinches Mrs. Young’s nostrils shut, no reaction.

Mrs. Young’s late husband founded a resort town to the east where they filmed The Truman Show. They’re wealthy. People will be keenly interested to know Mrs. Young has passed. Significant assets will transfer. 

***

His house smells of him, old man, unwashed clothes, accentually of urine. She opens the windows and turns on the ceiling fan. He lives in Florida and he has the windows shut and no A/C. She’s there long enough to get the clothes washed and into the dryer or hung. He has a skin allergy he attributes to electromagnetic hypersensitivity. She washes his clothes with an organic detergent that fails to leave his clothes smelling clean and fresh. 

She knows what Pastor Adams should look like, or did, from his pictures. Him in the Marines, crew cut, big ears and proboscis, toothy grin, calm blue eyes. A black and white of his wedding, in a white jacket tuxedo, feeding his new bride wedding cake. She imagines When I Fall In Love as background music (the Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole sound-mixed duet). It’s the distance from then to now, how optimistic they were about the life ahead of them, coming to this at last.     

First order of business is toiletry. He’ll have soiled his adult diapers. Get those off, get him in the shower if she can, restore a little dignity, make him tolerable to be around. She can see gratitude in his eyes, in his expression, when he’s attended to and settled in, resting on the old sofa near the front window. She can tell he resents the lack of autonomy, and sometimes he resents her because she does these things for him, as if he could do them for himself if it wasn’t for her. His pride is less of a glimmer by now, still flickering. 

With each visit she becomes like a bartender for his thirsty conscience, a repository for his regret. His voice is a hard whisper. Sometimes he’ll exhale as he talks and his words burst forth in what must have been his normal voice.

“When they’re little you just don’t know what they’ll become.” When she next comes, “he never read my books. Not one of them.” His hand rifles through his hair, an old habit, a faint echo of youthful vanity. 

“We haven’t spoken in five years, other than when he calls me on my birthday. Once he called and it wasn’t my birthday. Why are you calling? I asked him. Is it my birthday?” 

“What did you talk about?”

The Pastor turns his head to the side, toward the window, not answering. Something gnawing at him and he’s near the end. Kasha ushering him to eternity’s doorstep. She might be someone to relay these last few messages, as if from the beyond, to whoever they’re intended for. 

The next time he has more to say.

“I wanted them to find their own way. To be their own people. Learning from example. My father never explained things to me, I figured it out for myself. I found my calling. I would say none of them did. They found vocations.” A pause. “They work a lot. One thing I’ll say about them, all three of them, they’re hard workers.” 

When next she arrives, an ambulance is there. Parked in the driveway, lights off, back doors open. Everyone is inside the house. The EMTs have Pastor Adams on a bariatric gurney, ready to wheel him away. Wearing an oxygen mask, he sees Kasha and pulls the mask away from his face so she can hear him. She leans in to hear, turns her head and throws her hair to a side, holding it away from her ear, her other hand lightly on his forearm. Looking imploringly at her, wide-eyed, “tell them to read my books. Do that for me, please. Please.”

First responder

STEVE BIERSDORF

When the non-dairy creamer plant explodes in the Valley Hulk is quickly on scene, walking through a crowd of onlookers on the outskirts and safely at a distance, the crowd parting to let him through, comments at his back as he passes:

“I guess it’s time to drink my coffee black.”

“I’d say. Imagine what that stuff does to your innards.”

“Look, there’s Hulk.”

“What’s he think he’s going to do?”

The Valley is a bad place for this explosion and resulting fire, other industrial facilities in proximity, a developer’s idea of tony, assisted-living apartments that have to be evacuated, one resident expiring from the commotion.

To any of the firefighters or first responders on the scene, no amount of damage from a miscalculated leap can overshadow what they see that day, and they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. No one sees what the Hulk does beyond the first responders, and the things he does are what make him the ever-loving Hulk. Things he does and does gruffly, that no one else can do, never responding to praise or thanks with anything more than a harrumph, his gruffness taken for modesty, part of the Big Lug mystique.

He controls the fire as it tears across a dry plain of neck-high weeds toward an acetylene production facility, this done by hopping around the front perimeter of the fire and blowing it to a standstill, Hulk able to generate 30-40 MPH gusts of breath, holding up the blaze as firefighters attack it from both flanks.

He lifts a collapsed cinderblock wall, still relatively intact, a wall only a crane could lift, beneath which are several people badly injured though still alive, Hulk carrying each of them to safety. He works through the rubble, casting aside blocks and girders and other decimated sections of the plant until he finds each of the fourteen people killed in the explosion, and carrying out their corpses, holding the corpses limply in his arms, almost reverently, carrying them out one at a time.

The shame of it is no one gets pictures. Of Hulk facing down the angry blaze, hopping frenetically from spot to spot wherever the fire attempts further incursions across the empty field of weeds. Of Hulk lifting the huge wall, maneuvering beneath it, balancing it on his hands, walking with it until it’s clear of the site, negotiating the imbalance of rubble from the decimated plant, uneven mounds of cinder blocks and steel girders with the huge wall aloft, tossing it out of the way. Of sooty Hulk carrying out the injured, of Hulk carrying the corpses, of Hulk going back into the mess time after time until no one alive or dead is left behind. The firefighters and first responders have their stories, and great stories they are. How legends are made. 

For the media, the Hulk angle doesn’t have legs. The patchwork, decades-old plant standards, regulations of volatile chemicals that don’t stack up against those of other countries, lax inspections, testimony in a Senate chamber about how this could have happened in the first place more compelling news.

H

STEVE BIERSDORF

Dr. Banner is aware he’s a whale to his fanged prick of a business manager, H. H will never have a higher net worth client, and he lives more extravagantly than Dr. Banner, Dr. Banner wondering if he’s paying H too much, half-jokingly, half passive-aggressively. H understands and respects and even appreciates passive-aggressiveness. H is worth it, H with his PhD in the shitty and petty and amoral things people will do to get at Dr. Banner’s various holdings.

Dr. Banner sits across a desk from H as H is talking with an attorney representing the center Hulk dispatched at the Jets scrimmage, the center in traction for three weeks, with a dislocated hip forced to sit out the entire season, losing his starting job to someone younger and bigger. 

“Not our concern,” H says into the phone, glancing confidently at Dr. Banner. “Football players get hurt…you should anticipate that…with more guaranteed money…if I played in the NFL I would never hire you or your firm.”

Pause, as the attorney on the other end of the line rebuts.

“Did you read the waiver? The Jets signed it…again, not our problem…the waiver is ironclad,” pause, H listening, “go ahead, the firm that drew up that document will shred you.”

H grabs a piece of paper from his desk and slides it into a crosscut shredder behind him, holding the phone to the humming grind.

“Like that.”

It was smart, the waiver, the Jets waiving any recourse against the Hulk or Dr. Banner, waiving recourse on behalf of the organization and any of its employees. H thinks of everything. He might be a rabid attack dog, but he’s Dr. Banner’s rabid attack dog and Dr. Banner’s yard he’s protecting. Dr. Banner privately wishes people like H weren’t necessary, but they are, unfortunately, as he knows all too well.

“Not our problem,” pause, H listening, “iron clad, my man. It makes no difference if he didn’t sign it, the Jets did and he’s an employee of the New York Jets football organization,” pause, H listening, “then sue the Jets if you want but I expect this to be our last conversation on the matter.” 

H hangs up, happy with himself, cocky. Dr. Banner knows this is a prelude to something else, a performance meant to impress or distract, or to lessen the impact of not so great news to follow. H could have handled this without Dr. Banner’s involvement. Normally he would have. 

“We won’t be hearing from them again.”

“What else is there?”

“Just this. I’m not sure what the hell this is. What are they talking about?”

H tosses an opened envelope on the desk in front of Dr. Banner, from the United States Department of Defense, swallowing hard.

“Chamomile tea?”

There is always the risk of a Hulk tirade if something pisses off Dr. Banner. A Hulk tirade means H’s expensive office accoutrements are at risk. No doubt they’re insured. 

Dr. Banner reads the information and smiles and he can sense H smiling too, relieved and leaning back in his chair. Dr. Banner says nothing, only smiling, H, not sure what to make of the smile, commenting cavalierly, “that’s a lot of money,” easy for him to say. Dr. Banner could still get angry. Smiles can be angry. 

An invoice for $485,365 addressed to Dr. Bruce Banner from the U.S. Department of Defense, for the destruction of four Nano-Hummingbird Spy Drones, payable upon receipt of the invoice. Failure to remit payment immediately can result in IRS liens on property or other of his financial holdings. 

He could complain about the selective memory. When he’d been on contract with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a consultant came his exposure to drone technology, his input into the creation of harvester drones with the ability to detect airborne radiation, used to inspect nuclear facilities for fallout. The harvester drones could see and hear and go places people couldn’t or shouldn’t, but what the harvester drones couldn’t do was detect anything, and so Dr. Banner’s contribution was the equivalent of developing an olfactory sense in these harvester drones, converting them into mechanized bloodhounds hot on the scent of airborne radiation.

He didn’t collaborate to make money. He collaborated, performing his duties to the utmost of his capabilities, for the safety of humankind. He’d rather have left it at that. Someone is selling the harvester drones to someone else. The regulatory commission may have and probably has mandated that any sanctioned nuclear facility must use these harvester drones, so someone is profiting from this idea, an idea that wouldn’t have been possible if not for Dr. Banner’s collaboration.  

He could tell H about the harvester drones. H would want to sue for patent infringement or royalties or something. He’s not sure he’s up to that fight at the moment, the entanglement of it, bureaucratic tedium that will result in meeting in the middle somewhere. The back and forth, posturing, measuring of penises, where the middle is and whose side the middle is closer to. That’s what they’re counting on, that he doesn’t want the fight. What they’re not counting on is H, his well-compensated Rottweiler. 

Hulk and the drones

STEVE BIERSDORF

It’s first thing in the morning lucidity, unadulterated logic of a refreshed mind, reset-button clarity before the obfuscation of another day.

Hummingbirds are not indigenous, their migratory patterns are relatively provincial and they prefer humid subtropical. Not that seeing a hummingbird here is out of the question. And it’s the height of summer. Seeing four of them hovering around a red maple tree is unusual, nothing flowering there, no nectar to drink. If they were availing themselves of a flower bed they would be less conspicuous. They look enough like hummingbirds, though their bills are too short and their movements not fluid and the slightest bit too herky-jerky.

Regarding his reflection in the mirror, his face sleep-bloated, hair pushed from both sides of his head toward the center and pointed upward like a buzz saw, an inexplicable vertical crease beneath his left cheekbone. Downloading the grid map would have been a red flag, Dr. Banner accessing the grid map, and Hulk capable of breathtaking devastation, whatever his motives might be, and the appearance of the hummingbirds. He wonders what they know about what he knows about drones. If they’re insightful, they’ll assume correctly that the answer is plenty, but then they have four hummingbird drones hovering around a red maple and not flowers, betraying the level of competence with which he is dealing. He’s aware everything he does is under surveillance and has been, from the days of windowless vans and thumbnail-sized microphones in the receiver of his handset to now, every email read, every website visited like a muddy footprint, every inbound or outbound call or any text sent or received listened to, read, stored. Something about the drones makes him angry. Maybe it’s the unwarranted suspicion. Maybe it’s that they think he won’t know. 

Jade and Daley Hueman are bitmap images watching from behind a window screen, seeing Hulk backpedaling, lurching, dancing to some fractured beat, swatting at, what, huge flies? Giant mosquitoes?

“What on God’s green earth is he doing?”

“What are those?”

“Birds? Hummingbirds?”

“Why is he attacking them?”

“Maybe they’re attacking him.”

“Where’s my camera?”

Hulk wonders why the hummingbird drones don’t fly away under duress. Maybe the protocol for recalling the drones or overriding a command is more bureaucratic than it should be, or maybe the program’s too new for contingencies. Maybe no one has attacked these drones before and there isn’t precedence. It’s an algorithm missing from the program, making these drones better able to think on their feet. Not that they aren’t quick, impressively so. They dodge his slaps deftly, but they don’t fly away; they dart around him like giant bees, but they don’t attack. They’re half ingenious, prototypes, first or second generation in their evolution. It takes longer than it should, and Hulk feels like he’s waving at holograms. The first one rent into several semi-intact pieces, the next one ricocheting off his open hand and slamming into the wall of his apartment building, embedded in the aluminum siding almost intact. He catches one flush, looks it directly in its peephole, “film this,” and when he crushes it into bits, its guts explode from within his grasp like pulp from ripe fruit.

Hulk and the NFL

STEVE BIERSDORF

Sports talkers fixated on Hulk for a time, which is to say they obsessed about him. Which is to say that all day and late into the evening, turn on the TV and Hulk’s prospects as a professional football player were being contemplated, conjectured, mulled, kneaded, pulverized, tenderized, or bitterly disputed. To intrigued and fascinated conjecturers the subject of Hulk ranging from “good stuff” to “great stuff, compelling stuff, outstanding stuff,” even “amazing stuff,” any kind of stuff putting a capper on the segment before going to commercial. When Hulk became part of the daily sports lexicon he was hard to quit, a nagging, ringing addiction, Hulk the equivalent of two or three packs of cigarettes a day, the subject of Hulk chain-smoked from pre-dawn until late into the night on sports talk programs.

A rumor began, more than likely started by a producer of one of these sports talk programs, out of fresh material, nothing new or breaking, in the dead zone following the previous scandal with nothing probative on the horizon, the middle of baseball season and not far along enough yet for pennant races, past the conclusions of the NBA and NHL seasons and weeks after the NFL draft, weeks before training camp. Everyone in agreement Hulk would make an amazing football player, the conjecture centering on where Hulk would play. Quarterback was out of the question. Or was it? He might have a cannon for an arm, and he could nullify any team’s pass rush. Imagine, you might not even need blockers with Hulk at QB, line up with a center and nine receivers. Hulk would set the West Coast Offense back a hundred years. Why not Hulk as fullback, who couldn’t he block? Opening holes for the team’s tailback to run through, but then why not give the football to Hulk and let him run over anyone foolish enough to try and bring him down? Or Hulk on defense. How about at nose tackle? Forget about running the football against any defense with Hulk anchoring the nose. And how much salary could he command? Imagine the signing bonus, the guaranteed money. Worthy of Croesus, or that modern-day Croesus, Jeff Bezos.

Turn on ESPN and it was Hulk all the time. It got so sports bars began sponsoring drinking games, turn on ESPN and drink whenever they say Hulk, beers served with shot glasses for these occasions and Hulk to thank for brisk bar sales, Hulk also to thank for a spike in summer OWIs.

And how it snowballed from there, someone in player personnel from one team assuming these sports talkers had gotten the rumor from someone in player personnel from another team, possibly a division rival. The focus turned to which team would take the plunge, NFL insiders probing the front offices of various teams and the New York Jets was to be the consensus “best fit,” ample room under the salary cap, a major media market, holes along their defensive front, no running game to speak of, and question marks at the quarterback position. The rumor propagating like snails in a fish tank, after the requisite no comment from the team’s coach and front office, from the general manager and director of pro player personnel on down to the PR flaks, nobody confirming or denying the rumor, by not denying it confirming it in the minds of the many.

Until early on into training camp, a late July morning and the Jets arranging a scrimmage to see exactly what Hulk could do, how he’d fit in, a closed scrimmage with no media until the Jets could get a handle on what they were dealing with.

Hulk lined up at nose tackle, Hulk the only player on the field not in helmet and pads. Hulk shirtless and barefoot in stretch pants past the knee like culottes from a big-and-tall men’s store, Hulk like a big green cartoon in the middle of the defensive front, a man playing with puffy children. Hulk down in a three-point stance, the quarterback barking signals, the ball snapped, the center surging into Hulk as though to move him off the line of scrimmage.

With his large right hand Hulk grabbing a handful of the center’s jersey and front of his pads, pivoting on his back foot as he tossed the center effortlessly behind him, the 300-pound center like a missile fired diagonally across the field and crashing into several tubs of Gatorade, a Gatorade explosion, a tsunami of red Gatorade.

A few holy shits, a Jesus, and several players doubled over, gasping, unable to inhale enough to maintain laughing so hard. They would recall the sound of the big center projectile whistling by, speculating that if he hadn’t been obstructed he might have broken the sound barrier. Said one player: “From when he turned and flung him, when Hulk released the guy from his hand to when the guy slammed into the Gatorade seemed like it was instantaneous. And we’re talking about a distance of 30 to 40 yards and a 300-pound offensive lineman.” 

Before he could say it was fun while it lasted it was over, Hulk’s professional football career relegated to a single play in a training camp scrimmage. The NFL needed a legitimate reason why Hulk couldn’t play other than he was too powerful, and so gamma radiation was quickly added to the league’s list of banned substances.