short story

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.”

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.   

Hulk and the bank manager

STEVE BIERSDORF

At seven feet tall and a thousand pounds, entrances to most dwellings are a problem, the notable exception being bay doors. Hulk makes the effort when the mood strikes him, stooping, bending, contorting, shimmying. With his umbrella insurance policy, patience isn’t necessarily required of him, as long as he can stomach the escalating premium. What impatience looks like: steel or wood doors torn from their hinges and tossed aside like sheets of cardboard, plowed-through door frames. shoulder-contoured sections of missing wall, scattered glass fragments. 

Hulk isn’t happy with his bank when they EFT the funds from his account to cover the damages. For how much they assess his account for he’s paid up for future demolition. He doesn’t find out until he’s at the branch checking his balance, the teller nervously rifling her keyboard, a mad plastic scramble, pause, mad plastic scramble, circular mouse glide, mouse click, mouse glide, mouse click, mad plastic scramble, mouse glide, mouse click, mouse click, mouse click, mad plastic scramble, mouse glide, mouse click. He’s huge and full of muscles and he’s green for God’s sake, he’s gruff, none of the usual spry quips or weather-related banter, Hulk’s an economist of the language. The waterline rises perceptibly when Hulk’s in the pond and the fish are perfectly still, when Hulk arrives to the sound of shattering glass.  

The bank could have let him know. It would have seemed less like they were helping themselves to his funds, as if as stewards of his money the bank is entitled to some of it, or any of it, at their discretion. He has enough of it that they can’t resist, not offering him the opportunity to negotiate the amount or compare repair estimates.  

“Excuse me, Dave, the Hulk’s out here and he’d like a word with you.”

Dave the Branch Manager smiling absurdly, at how emaciated, how atrophied he is by comparison, as he introduces himself to Hulk. Dave apologizing, Hulk absolutely should have been notified, Dave politely denying Hulk’s request to transfer the funds back to his account, theoretically, numbers electronically transferred out, numbers transferred back in, a little 10-key action and a couple of mouse clicks to determine how much money he does or doesn’t have.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that.”

The words hang echoless and still in the air. People are listening and pretending not to, anxious to see how Hulk will respond, but he doesn’t, instead lumbering back toward the compromised entrance. Dave following hesitantly, not sure if he needs to, wondering if Hulk is leaving, hoping so, wishing it would be that easy even if it never is. Hulk pauses at the entrance, surveying the damage, looking over the twisted metal frame and jagged shards of glass, Hulk pointing out that there is no structural damage to the wall, yet. Though he refers to himself in the third person and speaks monosyllabically, eschewing adjectives or prepositions and disdaining conjunctions, he has Dr. Banner’s nuclear physicist brain. 

If this isn’t enough to sway Dave, Hulk gives him something else to consider.

“Hulk could make big stink.”

Ah, yes. Hulk the celebrity, a case to be made for the too-small twin doors as discriminatory toward people of stature. There has to be a would-be civil rights attorney ready to take up the cause, soliciting other Americans of stature to join a class action with Hulk as high-profile fellow plaintiff. 

Hulk isn’t just another customer, Hulk is one the bank’s highest net-worth depositors, with his paid appearances at poker runs and ultimate fights and MMA main events and tractor pulls, the endorsements, royalties from sales of Hulk-trademarked paraphernalia like beach towels, Christmas cards with Hulk depicted in Santa regalia, Hasbro Marvel The Incredible Hulk Talking Smash Bash Fists™, Hulk hands beer holders.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Dave knows if he promises to see what he can do he’s committed to doing something, as far as the customer is concerned, and it gets worse if he sees what he can do and it turns out he can’t do anything. Consulting Lisa the District Manager seems wise, Lisa as cover, let Lisa make the call, but then he picks up the phone and thinks a few moves ahead. Knowing exactly what call she’ll make, and who she’ll let deliver the bad news, Hulk a hulking mass of human capable of breathtaking devastation. 

Nearby in the lobby, on opposing sides of a desk too out in the open, the branch mortgage specialist trying to close a loan, the customer sitting back, arms folded.

“If you can’t tell me what the work gap fee is for, I’m out. Seems kind of outrageous that you don’t even know what you’re charging me for.”

“I understand, sir, I wish I could tell you, I don’t determine the closing costs. I have nothing to do with that.”

“You represent the bank and the bank determines the closing costs, so in my eyes you’re the bank.”

“We’re talking about a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

They’re both looking down at a long list of closing costs and avoiding eye contact, the branch mortgage specialist referencing the hundred twenty-five by pointing to it with his bank-logo pen. 

“Okay, if you think that’s an insignificant amount, why don’t you waive it?”

“I meant in relation to the amount of your mortgage, or what you’ll save in interest with the lower rate we’re, I’m, offering you, or…”

Hulk wanders over and stands near and facing them and their negotiation suspends, both men turning to him, watching him from their sitting positions without a word. Where ordinarily they might wonder if they can help him, implying that he’s inserting himself into their private business. It’s the ever-loving Hulk, though, and Jesus he’s big up close. Hulk harrumphs like a buffalo about to charge. 

Dave knows, Lisa the DM will say, “DO NOT put the funds back in his account.” Hulk could react one of several ways and none of them good. Taking out the entire wall around the entranceway, charges of discrimination/negative media attention, taking his high net worth to a competitor, tanking the branch’s P & L and costing everyone their bonus, his included. If he isn’t fired. And always that threat, the unspoken possibility force-placing any directive no matter how poorly conceived, or for failing to meet assigned quotas for opening new checking or savings accounts or CD’s. 

“How are your numbers?” 

Always the first thing out of Lisa’s mouth when she sees him, when she calls, and she calls two or three times a day if she doesn’t visit. She calls between meetings, on her way in, at lunch, driving to her next meeting, on her way home, if she’s away at training. Checking accounts, savings accounts, CD’s, referrals to the investment guy or the mortgage specialist, more, more, more, more this month than last, more next month than this, grow or die, make the numbers go up or lose your job. Open more CD’s, when the branch pays less than one percent interest for balances of less than $25,000 with maturities under three years. Terrify then mollify them, tell them how risky the stock market is, the older they are the more risk averse they need to be, and CD’s are FDIC insured. As if that works.

“From now on, Dr. Ban…Hulk…I’d ask you to please approach at the drive-thru window rather than coming inside, that way we can avoid this situation,” his voice tailing away. Telling Hulk to do anything is absurd. Hulk ignores him, waiting on the teller to print a slip showing the credit back to his account, the teller fat-fingering the keyboard, oops, backspace, retype, “here you are sir,” the receipt tiny in his hand. 

Hulk ambles back through the open entranceway, squeezing daylight into corners as he passes through, ducking slightly, out into the parking lot and into a deep knee bend, disappearing into the air like falling up. Inadvertently destroying a section of parking lot where he pushes off, depressing the pavement and leaving a pothole that would bend any axle or snap any CV joint, ruin any expensive rim, flatten a tire, initiate a small claims action if not immediately repaired. 

Dave sighing as he surveys the damage, wondering what he’ll put for his reason for leaving this position on the application for his next one. They always want to know. 

As much as he does it Hulk enjoys leaping, launching himself, airborne bull soaring over a world of china, quickly being somewhere else from where he just was, sometimes as far as a zip code away. In much the same way as firing a bullet up into the sky, knowing the bullet will land, but where? As inconsequential as where the bullet might land, where Hulk might land surely isn’t. At half a ton, anywhere Hulk lands he leaves a mark. Dr. Banner calculates Hulk’s velocity at over a thousand pounds freefalling from an estimated height of three thousand feet, and the PSI when he lands is off the charts, registering at the lowest end of a base-10 logarithmic scale. 

Hulk knows where the parks are within the metropolitan area or the open spaces in the suburbs or outlying areas, cabbage fields, manicured lawns surrounding office buildings, golf courses, and he catapults himself to these places. To minimize the potential damage, wherever he lands is wherever he lands, no amount of flailing mid-air will change that. Hulk crashing into an OBGYN clinic at the edge of a park once, slamming down in front of a woman with her legs up in stirrups waiting to be examined.  

When he lands on soft ground, he leaves deep foot prints like tree stumps ripped from the earth, more than once on a golf course, the grounds crews opting to create bunkers wherever the Hulk may have landed, by digging out the impacted grounds and filling in the excavated area with imported sand, a finer grain. 

Quite the sight for the golfers, the green speck in the sky growing quickly in size and landing suddenly and with enough impact to deliver a tremor throughout most of the eighteen-hole course, leaves trembling like astonished murmurs, water hazards rippling like visible echoes from his abrupt arrival. 

He lands in an outlying area near the freeway and runs south on the freeway into the downtown area, crumpling the freeway like a mishandled bag of potato chips spilled in his wake. It takes forever to fix the freeway, an important artery to the downtown business district, traffic snarls at all hours and particularly suffocating during rush hour. 

Fuckin’ Hulk.

Man Tits En Bronze

STEVE BIERSDORF

This is the statue coronation speech I wanted to use, wrote and considered giving, but decided against in the end. There’s a good chance they’d have taken it the wrong way. It’s lovely that they do these things for me, and if I’d given this speech, well, they might not have appreciated the humor and I might’ve come across as ungrateful.

That’s why they love me. I wasn’t a great player and that’s my shtick, lovable loser, the self-deprecating quips, and I’ve been doing the radio play-by-play for thirty-plus years. That’s why they’ve made this hideous bronze statue that looks nothing like me. The other statues in front of the stadium are of great players, home run hitters, ace pitchers, heroes for what they did on the field, and so I’m different that way. I made my bones off the field, that’s why my statue will be the only one in front of the stadium not wearing a baseball uniform but a crewneck sweater and knit slacks depicted in bronze.

My name appears on the base of the statue and that’s the only way you’d know it was me because it’s a shitty likeness, a big, shitty-likeness statue of the team’s self-deprecating radio announcer who played briefly in this city, and not even for this team but for another franchise that used to play here until it relocated to a larger metropolitan area. And because I was on the Tonight Show and had a recurring role on a short-lived prime-time sitcom with a laugh track:

“Thank you, thanks (here I turn to my right and ponder the statue for a few seconds). First and foremost, I’d like to say that if you think I posed for this statue, you’d be mistaken. Does anyone know who did? Whoever he is, he needs to lay off the estrogen pills. Kidding, seriously, if I’m not mistaken this likeness was created from a surprise picture taken of me fresh from the men’s room. I’d just taken care of my business and my hands were still wet so I had ‘em in my pockets in case someone insisted on shaking hands with me, which happens often. People see me, they want to meet me and shake my hand, so this explains the pocket billiards.

“Yeah, so I’m just out of the men’s room and someone insists on taking my picture. I have to say it’s always a little intrusive, but especially fresh from the men’s room. This also explains the shit-eating, please-get-away-from-me grin, which in bronze makes me look like I don’t take very good care of my teeth. In fact, looking at this statue, I look like I might have lived in medieval times and some think I’m old enough. I’d suggest for future bronze statues with closed mouths only, otherwise shit-eating grin lends itself to a literal interpretation.

(Again I turn to the statue and ponder it)

“I’m glad I didn’t forget to zip up.

(More pondering)

“What struck me when I first saw this statue are the man tits.

(Here I’d expect mostly a silent, taken-aback reaction where a few people would laugh insanely, possibly some current players they’ve ‘invited’ to the ceremony. There’s a chance their laughter would be infectious, though I couldn’t be sure, and it’s largely because of this uncertainty that I scrapped this speech.)

“I can see it now. People approaching the stadium from the outer edge of the parking lot and they see me from afar, there by the stadium they’ll see my statue and they’ll know it’s me because of the man tits, which are prominent enough to see from that far away, and possibly from space. On a statue that size, those are some ample man tits. I’m really stacked. Fortunately for me, I’m a happily married man. Maybe some little boy a generation or two removed from now will look up at this father and ask, ‘daddy, who’s the guy with no hands and man tits?’

“‘Son, I do believe that was the first handicapped hermaphrodite to play in the major leagues.’

“At my age, man tits are inevitable. How many men over seventy have tight pecs? In fairness to the artist, the man tits are at least pushed up like I’m wearing a sports bra. So I appreciate that, firm man tits are preferable to unrestrained, droopy ones. I can’t help but think, generations from now, as being referred to as the man tits guy, ‘daddy, who’s the man tits guy again? What did he do?’

“And honestly, folks, I didn’t do very much. I have the best job in the world, the best seats in the house. Thank you for the tribute.”

Rackheads

STEVE BIERSDORF

Hunting licenses are down again, despite the DNR’s insistence that the whitetail population is as robust as ever. They release data to the local newspapers and media outlets, and there are articles to spur the harvest. Whitetail deer have been migrating to the suburbs to avoid the harvest and traffic accidents are on the upswing.

Mr. Dixon is back for two more snowmobiles. He writes a check, the idea that he would need to finance the purchase is comedic, never mention financing options to him unless zero percent is available. When Mr. Dixon arrives for his new Ski-Doos, the owner is there for the occasion and the GM, they make sure he feels sufficiently fawned over, Mr. Dixon magnanimous enough to spare them a few moments. It’s a sign of respect if Mr. Dixon takes the time to jaw with you on the showroom floor, in full view of everyone. The GM gives Mr. Dixon our very best price and checks on the prep of his machines. We make very little money when Mr. Dixon buys something. When he grinds us on price, we appreciate this firsthand opportunity to negotiate with a fabulously wealthy, highly successful businessman and cheap fuck that he is, he’ll take his business elsewhere if we don’t meet his price. Where he spends his money and who he does business with is an exclusive club. We always comment on how “down to earth” or “cool” he is when he blows through and graces us with his unprofitable business. Mr. Dixon isn’t a person who likes to “fiddle-fuck around,” like the GM says, and he appreciates that we respect how valuable his time is, because he is the sun and we are blades of grass.       

Deer farms stocked with genetically enhanced male deer, bucks with freakish racks of antlers, if you hunt deer this is the ultimate prestige that you stuff and mount for posterity. Used to be if you shot an 8-point buck people were impressed. If you buy a genetically-enhanced deer you can set it loose somewhere, shoot it and have yourself a 16- or 20-pointer, mount that shit over your fireplace and invite your homies over to ooh and ah. The better the deer farm’s product the more points per rack, farms with the pricier deer buying semen, ova and embryos from Mr. Dixon who sits atop this food chain, the unrivaled king of deer eugenics. Mr. Dixon uses only the best bloodlines of whitetail doe or buck, including superstars in whitetail breeder lore like Rumpelstiltskin (23-pointer), Superseed (28-pointer), Goldeneye, 747, Deerstar, legends all, residents of Mr. Dixon’s own deer farm. The big money is in their semen.

The success of his eugenics business spawned a subsidiary manufacturing mechanical deer, robot decoys. His sole customer is the DNR and he is their sole supplier. The DNR places these robot decoys in the woods along country trunk highways to northern woods hunting destinations, to coax hunters driving by into taking a shot, which is a big fine. As the company slogan asks, who can resist a trophy buck? The deer are available in different poses and are lifelike (although only their ears and tails move), encased in actual deer hides with a dry preservative, tanning to make the hide last longer is an extra $200.

Knowing Mr. Dixon, having him as a customer gives us a glimpse from the penthouse. It’s as close as we’ll get, unless we win the lottery, which we don’t expect to but don’t entirely rule out. Even if we don’t make any money on him, and I mean any, not a red cent or copper one. He’s royalty here in whitetail country, where it’s all about the rack.

Because imagining the absolute worst-case scenario is my default setting

STEVE BIERSDORF

Beach and the Gulf of Mexico on this side of the island, waterways on the other, walled off by an impenetrable mangrove thicket infested with things that bite and constrict, uncompromising, vicious, camouflaged things. I see how the island could be taken, overrun then fortified with only the beach side to defend. Not much potential for resistance or insurgency here, where aggression is getting up at sunrise to find the good shells before anyone else does. The local police cruise the beach in jeeps, looking for open containers or enough nudity to offend public decency statutes.

In quick succession take out the local cell tower wherever it is, inland somewhere, easy to find because its exact location can be googled, detonate the concrete stanchions that prop up the causeway so it buckles and keels over into the bay. There aren’t two, the only way on or off the island if you’re driving. An amphibious assault from the ocean in the new moon cycle, storm the condos and resorts, evacuate the residents top floor to lobby, set up MANPADS with SAMs on the roofs of the taller complexes, heat-seekers.

I’m well acquainted with the view from the balcony, the beach and ocean and our building’s identical twin across the way, its pool, green tennis courts and driveway on the grounds in between. Almost straight down to the crown of a several-stories-tall royal palm, with its full head of yellowish fronds and branchless beneath, fronds like dying plants in a pottered vase, its trunk like a cylindrical sculpture hewn by the elements, steady inbound breeze, torrential downpours, rain delivered sideways, glazed by the tropical sun. I estimate the top of this royal palm to be slightly more than halfway to the ground from the tenth story balcony I peer down on it from. I wonder if it could be possible to land atop the crown, but suspect only with a running start. It looks like a step off the rail and I’d be able to hit the mark. What I can’t know is if the crown is substantial enough to impede my fall or if I would tear through it, two hundred pounds hurtling down and the fronds a matador’s cape.  

The invasion force overrunning the twin tower to our north, lining up on opposite balconies and systematically clearing the condos in this building by unleashing automatic weapons fire covering every square inch of visibility into these condo apartments in the southern tower. These condos are glass-walled facing out but there are two obstructed views, on the other side of the kitchen and the full bathroom by the guest bedroom and not the master. Everything else is in the line of fire. Behind the kitchen wall as the torrent of automatic weapons fire swarms every inch, shredding glass, chewing up the plaster walls, splintering wood, devouring furniture and creating flurries of lighter material, foam rubber, feathers, dust, dismembered bits of cloth, pieces of everything scattered under a deafening rain of hellfire. Systematic shock and awe, floor by floor, so by the time the invasion force moves in behind the covering fire, any resistance has been obliterated.

When the unleashing ends my ears ring with it, what’s left of a cabinet door dropping to the floor, a piece of glass table falling and breaking in half. I make a break for it, straight out and over the balcony, bits of glass crunching under every step, jumping the rail, realizing I’ve overestimated how far out the royal palm is, I won’t land dead center in the crown, crashing through the fronds and I grab desperately as I come ripping past, I feel a sharp pain in my upper chest and my arm feels like something’s tried to remove it from its socket with a violent tug. The momentum of my fall disrupted enough to blunt the impact. Landing in a blink. One of my arms is useless. I slither. It feels like something’s been threaded through my pelvis so I can stand properly only with the assistance of fishing line at the behest of a manipulating hand. I spit out teeth. My jaw barely opens so that when I spit blood and broken teeth tumble reluctantly out, blood, saliva and teeth fragments coating my chin. On the left side of my mouth are gums or broken teeth, same side as the useless arm. I blink blood from my eyes, drops on my eyelashes. I make for the nearby dumpster, not walking but partially erect, dragging what doesn’t work and over-relying on what does, lean over and fall in and close the lid over me with a hollow, metallic boom, hoping no one saw.  

At the Ballpark

STEVE BIERSDORF

The ballpark has a retractable roof with a giant glass greenhouse façade, giving it the look of a massive, self-contained biosphere. Our team is in the early stages of a rebuild, so if they lose today we can chalk it up to better days ahead. Every twenty seconds or so they play a short blurb of a song, “Wild Thing,” “Let’s Get It Started,” “Plush.” “Day-O,” daylight come and me want to go home. Turns out (google search) they have a forty-song playlist.  

Between innings a group of young men and women down on the field shimmy laterally to centerfield with a huge inflated sombrero upside down, with writing on it, presumably some local restaurant or restaurant chain. The inflatable sombrero and the sideways-moving legs of those carrying it resemble an immense and deformed crustacean scrambling desperately in search of a return to the sea, stuck and enclosed by the walls around the field and the leering, hollering masses.

Beneath mammoth ads for Southwest Airlines, Bud Light and Larry’s Shoes, above the Target bullseye logo plastered to the outfield wall, someone walks to the edge of the outfield stands with a much smaller inflated object I take for a replica of a pillow-sized taco, throws it in the general direction of the upside-down sombrero, the taco bounding off the brim of the sombrero and falling to the outfield grass, to the collective, unconvincing “awwww” of the stadium crowd. The leftfielder jogs out to his position, observing it all, pounding his glove with his fist with what can only be disdain.

A left-handed batter stands in and swings at a pitch like a blur, redirecting the blur, slower-moving and looping and askew and high into the glowing stadium lights. The ball is a small darkening object, a tiny pin-prick eclipse of the candlepower, rising impossibly high and on its descent angled straight for where we’re sitting. A man in the team regalia stands and the ball falls to him as if hit to him intentionally, or at him. He lifts his hands together to catch it, but it bounces off his hands with a meat-slap and skips to the row directly in front of us. As if the baseball is a priceless trinket dropped from the sky, something that if procured would inexorably alter the life of its new possessor, as one body and then another and another hurtle directly over us, diving headfirst, knocking us from our seats to our knees, spilling beverages. A pile of bodies in the row in front of us, a scrum, a compilation of legs and arms and torsos and grunts and jostling, and a woman walks up to the scrum, reaches in and magically produces the fouled-off baseball, holding it aloft, triumphantly, and the entire section erupts, as she turns and curtsies to the rows higher up.

Phone Scammers

STEVE BIERSDORF

They were working an old IRS scam. Googling phone scams you could find out what people were hip to, so he invented his own messages. The women quickly copied him when they saw his results.  

“You are hereby notified that we need to speak with you or your attorney immediately regarding an ongoing investigation. In the event we do not speak with you in our office today, we will document that you waived your rights to counsel and submit your file to the state.”

“This telephone number is linked to a questionable financial transaction that is now under investigation. It is possible that your name and social security number could be involved. I need you to call me or one of my associates immediately.”

He would make two hundred calls by lunch. Rarely, if ever, talking with anyone on the initial call. The calls were local but came from scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes. He’d eat lunch, take a solid forty-five minutes and peruse shit on the Internet. The women hammered the phones nonstop trying to get someone, skipping lunch or eating at their cubicles between calls. You had to scare people with the messages you left. They had to call you.

Early afternoon the callbacks started in earnest. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up, the women gladly handling his overflow. Mary Stewart took the inbound calls. From the number on caller ID she would know which agent had placed the call, confirm the caller’s name and social security number and transfer the call to him if it was his, or if he wasn’t on another call. He’d reconfirm the social security number with the caller. Knowing their social security numbers was like holding their babies out a window ten stories over a sidewalk.

They purchased call lists from payday lenders, storefront or online. It was the afraid callers with sketchy credit histories who gave up their card numbers. The standard charge was payback of the fictitious loan for $400 and a $35 processing fee. He went for more. Sometimes he’d say the loan was for $1,500 or $2,000 and they’d want to mail him a check, he’d tell them if they gave him a credit card number he would waive the processing fee and come down $300 to settle. Sometimes with the bigger amounts the card number wouldn’t go through, and Mary Stewart or Mr. Anderson would send it through for less, whatever they could get.

The women were using his scripts, but they didn’t have his deep, resonant voice. They had weird accents. Sometimes they would go out into the empty warehouse together, Denise Meyers, Susan Jones, Ann Johnson and Mary Stewart. Susan Jones and Ann Johnson smoked. They would converse in a foreign language. After five minutes of his standing there awkwardly with his hands buried in his pockets, Mary Stewart smiled apologetically and gave abridged translations. When Mary would translate, the other women would stop talking in the strange language, looking at him by turns. The next time he followed them out into the empty warehouse they spoke English.     

They could hear each other. They had earbuds and weren’t right on top of each other, but the offices were tight, formerly the administrative offices of a defunct propane gas concern. The women would threaten the callers if the callers weren’t taking the bait or were confrontational, “get a good lawyer,” “I’m forwarding this information to the three credit reporting agencies.” They took the confrontational calls personally. You couldn’t. If there wasn’t any money in it get off the call quickly, hang up if necessary.  

Denise Meyers was the most egregious. If Denise Meyers called a blocked number, she would continue to call using all twenty-nine scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes and leave her message, or her version of one of his messages. She would call the same cell number from all thirty scrambled lines until she was completely blocked, each time leaving increasingly menacing versions of the original message. If she knew where the owner of the blocked cell phone number worked she would call that person’s work and leave messages with a receptionist that the owner of the blocked cell number was facing a grand jury indictment for embezzlement. She would look up family members and call them, telling the family members their brother, sister, son or daughter was facing fraud charges. He would listen to her being awful in her weird accent and disaffected tone. He’d listen to her and want to fuck her. Fuck her hard.