Five Hundred Poor

by Milligan, Noah;

  THE NICKNAMES BEGAN ALMOST AS soon as he’d unpacked his last box: Boomerang Boy, The Renter, Maxy the Moocher. He tried to laugh alongside his father—he was, after all, trying to make the best of the situation. Economics degree in hand, he’d been unable to find work for six months after graduating and had, embarrassingly enough, been evicted from his one-bedroom apartment, forced to return to his parents’ home to sleep in his childhood bedroom. It was humiliating. When he thought about it, which was most of the time, he couldn’t help but want to hide indefinitely.

  It became worse during his father’s monthly barbecue, where the old man would invite his schmoozer friends over to eat pulled pork, drink beer, and place wagers on his manicured putting green tucked away in the corner of their backyard. His father was a commercial lender at a privately held bank specializing in real estate development, so there was a lot of the proverbial influential class of Oklahoma City present, semi-drunk and one-upping each other. They should be able to get Max a job, but that would, his father maintained, be unethical, not to mention nepotistic. They were his clients after all. Not friends. Max couldn’t help but notice, however, how they drank his father’s beers like friends.

  Max was expected to schmooze alongside his father anyway, drinking American lager and missing short putts on purpose. At this moment, he was holding the pin for his father, who’d wagered over $300 on a game of LAFFER, a take on basketball’s HORSE but named after the notorious economist, Arthur Laffer. Laffer devised the Laffer curve, a hypothetical representation of the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues, arguing that the higher the rate, the less the government would reap. Basically, one contestant in the game would putt from a spot of his choice, and if he sank it, then his challenger would have to sink the same putt. If the challenger missed, then he obtained a letter in LAFFER. The first one whose letters spelled Mr. Laffer’s surname in its entirety lost. Max’s father, Aubrey, led Mr. Dillard, a used-car salesman turned real estate developer, E to second F. Max had recently turned in resumes to both Mr. Dillard’s finance company, which funded his buy-here, pay-here car dealership, and to the development company. He hadn’t received a call back on either.

  It was Mr. Dillard’s shot. He lined up an eight-footer on the east side of the green, which faced an uphill grade with a right-to-left slant of approximately four degrees, a relatively easy shot for a sober person. He took a few practice swings and then inched up to the ball. Except for the occasional sip from a beer, the backyard was quiet. Mr. Dillard’s tongue hung limply from his lips in concentration. He swung. The ball followed the grade beautifully, curving slightly towards the pin. Max raised it, but the ball lipped out and swung eight inches or so from the cup.

  “Always hung a little to the left, hasn’t it, Pickle?” Aubrey said, a bad nickname he had for Mr. Dillard. Dill pickle. Get it?

  “Long and lanky,” Mr. Dillard said. “As always.”

  It was now Aubrey’s shot. He circled the cup, trying to find the most difficult shot he could make. Max’s father had always been a golfer, a passion he’d tried to pass down to Max, though it never really took. Max remembered many nights out here practicing, his father crouched like a catcher as he coached Max on how to keep his shoulders square, how to keep his line of vision straight down the club, and how to minimize motion in the putting stroke. Max never thought his father was living vicariously through him, goading him into youth tournaments in order to fulfill his own PGA fantasies. Mostly, Max considered his pushing as a means to build a connection, find some hobby that bonded them together, a thing just their own. By the time Max reached his teenage years, though, he informed his father he no longer wished to golf. It wasn’t that he hated golfing per se, but he got tired of losing week in and week out, routinely missing the cut and having to stay home on Sundays and listen to his father’s condolences. You’ll get ’em next time. Just keep your head up. You’re due for a win. He was absolutely sure of it. That weekend, the clubs went up into the attic, not to come down again until his fraternity brothers and he would get drunk on the front nine when they should’ve been studying for midterms. Now, at the barbecue, Aubrey focused on his own shot, a snaking fourteen-footer, as Max fought back the urge to tell him to square up his shoulders and quit wobbling so much. It wasn’t needed, though. He sank it with a satisfying plunk into the bottom of the cup.

  “You always wait until I get a good buzz going,” Mr. Dillard said. “It’s the only way you can win.” Mr. Dillard lined up the same shot as Aubrey’d made. If he missed, he would lose. Unhappy with how it looked, he crouched and shut one eye, trying to discern the grade and angle needed. “Got any tips?” he asked Max.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “Tips. I’m sure you know this green. Got any advice so I don’t lose to your old man?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “None at all?”

  “Don’t miss?”

  “I see.” Mr. Dillard twirled the putter and then dropped it accidentally on the green, moving the ball. After fumbling it a few times, he placed it back where it needed to go and picked up the putter. “Perhaps you just don’t have enough vested in the shot. Here.” He held the handle out for Max to take. “You shoot.”

  “I don’t think that would be wise, sir.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “I’m not very good.”

  “Okay. Okay. Let’s make it a little interesting, then. You sink the putt, and I’ll hire you on.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Max checked the others’ faces, Aubrey’s especially, to see if they believed Mr. Dillard. They all looked on, interested in the outcome, none with a look of uncertainty.

  “I sink the putt, and you’ll give me a job?”

  “Why not?”

  Max had a multitude of why nots. Fiscal responsibility. Efficient operations. Profit maximization theory. Marginal cost equals marginal revenue. They were in a recession, for Christ’s sake, or at least GDP growth was minimal enough to stall the recovery. Offering jobs on a drunken whim didn’t seem prudent. Downright foolish actually.

  “Okay. Sure. I’ll shoot.”

  Mr. Dillard rubbed his hands together in excitement. “Good. Great. Now things are getting interesting.”

  Max took the putter and lined up the shot the best he could. He could feel his father and his friends watching him. It was funny—he considered himself an adult now, despite his living conditions, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was a child again, performing under his father’s scrutiny. With it came the unshakeable desire to please him. It made Max ashamed in a way, and he hoped they were too drunk to notice his cheeks turning red.

  With a smooth motion he reared back the head, his arms and shoulders still, allowing his torso to do the work, and struck the ball. It was a clean shot. The ball moved well at a good speed and followed the sloping green toward the cup. It looked like it was going to go in. It really did. In a collective hush, he could hear all his father’s friends suck in one large breath, but then release it in a plume of hot wind as the ball lipped the edge and rolled mere inches from the cup.

  HE SAW HER EVERY MORNING afterward. She would wait in the park opposite Apex BioClean’s offices, and she would be there when he returned the van in the evening. She wasn’t trying to hide by any means—she sat on a park bench clearly facing the front of the building. She looked out of place there. Despite the triple-digit heat, she wore an oversized sweatshirt and picked dandelion fuzz from her hair. A bicycle lay on its side at her feet. Books were stacked neatly next to her, though Max never saw her actually read one. It was like she was on a stakeout but wanted the suspect to know she was onto him. She obviously wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t for a while. The other guys began to notice and make snide comments. Probably a Goth girl. A necrophile. A necromancer. Finally, after a week, she approached.

  It was awkward for sure. She hugged a book to her chest, some paperback, her hands hidden underneath her sl
eeves.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.” Max didn’t know what to do or say. He still had her father’s tooth. He kept it with him actually, for reasons he couldn’t articulate. A memento from his first job, he supposed, something that made him uncomfortable but that he couldn’t bring himself to dispose of either. It fascinated him in a way, like how a sore on the inside of a cheek could, tonguing it despite the pain. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  She motioned toward Max’s coworkers. “In private?”

  Max led her to his van, opened the door for her, and helped her climb in. She was shorter than he remembered. Her feet barely touched the floor.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Those guys were kind of giving me the creeps.”

  Max nodded. “They tend to do that,” he said, although he wasn’t sure why. She was the one who’d been stalking their office. “What can I do for you?”

  She leafed through the pages of the book she had brought with her. It was a tattered copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. An odd choice for a teenage girl, Max thought.

  “I want you to take me with you.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “On your next job. I want to go with you.”

  “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “I’ll stay out of your way. I promise. I just want to see.”

  She had a pensive quality to her. It gave her the air of a much older woman, perhaps the result of her father’s death. He’d looked at pictures of her when he’d been alone in her house. He would’ve described her as baby faced. She still had the chubby cheeks and glittering eyes. She was the type of person who smiled with her entire body. But now she brooded. Her once-smooth features had been etched with lines of concern. Her posture had deteriorated into a slump.

  “No, I mean, it’s not up to me. It’s against company policy.”

  “It won’t be a big deal. I promise.”

  “I could lose my job.”

  “How about this,” she said. “Take me with you, and I won’t tell anybody that you took my father’s tooth.”

  There it was. Blackmail. What else could he do?

  The first job was on the northwestern side of town, not far from Max’s house. In this part of the city, affluent neighborhoods abutted more blue-collar ones. Expansive green lawns gave way to Oklahoma’s trademark red clay. When he’d been assigned the job, Max had assumed it would be in the more working-class neighborhood, but it wasn’t. It was in Nichols Hills, one of the more prominent divisions in the city. Oilmen lived there. Bankers and attorneys and entrepreneurs. The house in question was owned by a doctor. Apparently, he’d snapped and was found cradling his lifeless son in his arms. He’d stabbed the boy thirty-four times in the torso, neck, and face. When the police found him, he kept repeating that the devil was in the boy, that he had to do it, he didn’t have any other choice. The news had already gone national. Backgrounds and histories were dug up. The doctor had had psychological problems in the past. Twice he’d been institutionalized for depression and suicidal tendencies, once while in medical school and again during the first year of his residency. Lately he’d been under a lot of stress, his wife had said, due to an IRS audit of his practice. He went off his medication apparently, thinking he might sleep better.

  It had happened in the kitchen. Blood stained the tile floor. It hadn’t stained the way spilt barbecue sauce would, just a slight film that could be scraped off. The blood had coagulated into a hard rubbery substance like the texture of a petri dish. Handprints painted cupboards. Small footprints inked the baseboard where the little boy had fought for survival. It was the most difficult thing Max had ever had to do, clean the site where a child had been murdered.

  Alice did as she’d said she would; she stayed out of his way. While he scrubbed grout, she stayed in the breakfast nook, sitting with a paper pad in her lap, drawing the scene. Every once in a while she would ask Max to hold that spot for a second, she liked how the light caught the red and soap together. She showed him her work as she progressed. It wasn’t very good. She tried a surrealistic approach, reminiscent of a Dali. Proportions were hyperbolic. Max appeared much larger than the stain he cleaned, the refraction of the light shot into a hinged rainbow like on the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. It gave the whole scene a comic quality to it, trivializing what had happened.

  They continued on this way for the remainder of the day and for several days thereafter. She would wait in the park for him every morning, and he would pick her up a little ways down the street. He would clean, and she would draw. They would engage in small talk. It was almost like they were an old married couple, sentenced to talk about the trivial because they’d exhausted all that they had to say to one another. Soon Max became comfortable with this arrangement. He even started to look forward to it, the way an old married man might. He had his routine. He had his morning coffee, his newspaper, his work, and his wife. He had it all while he cleaned up the bloodied messes left by those around him.

  HE STILL WENT ON INTERVIEWS. They were all for entry-level jobs. Some were in the oil and gas industry as a project analyst, scouring over geological surveys and cash-flow projections. Others were at Boeing where he would crunch raw material and labor costs. Still more at banks in operations departments, doing data entry and document prep. Entry level had a different meaning, he found out, than he’d been told at the career services department at school. Entry level now meant a minimum of two years’ experience. This was a troubling thought. He needed experience to get an entry-level position. He needed the entry-level position to get experience.

  It was supposed to be getting easier, wasn’t it? The unemployment rate was falling, after all.

  That didn’t mean anything, though. The unemployment rate was calculated by dividing the number of unemployed over all potential workers. People who were no longer looking for work, however, and people like Max, recent graduates who weren’t in education and had not previously held a professional job, were not considered either employed or unemployed. He was a non-person. He was, as the government deemed him, status zero. Ultimately, when it came right down to it, he felt lied to.

  The woman interviewing him seemed to be lying to him, too. She had an office in the back of Coppermark Bank whose walls were made of glass and whose desk had business cards on it emblazoned with the words “Assistant Vice President.” Her skin had grayed and looked weathered. It appeared she had drunk too much coffee; her eyebrow twitched as if being shocked by a low amount of electricity.

  She asked questions that seemed scripted. Where do you see yourself in five years? What are your greatest strengths? Your weaknesses? What type of experience do you have? What type of loan documentation knowledge do you possess? What are you currently doing? Do you like that? Do you have reliable transportation? The job requires long periods of sitting and staring at a computer monitor, would that interest you? How fast is your tenkey? What days would you be available to work?

  He took a personality test and an aptitude test. He performed basic algebra and answered logical questions such as if all As are Bs and all Bs are Cs but not all Cs are Bs, are all Cs As?

  No, he answered. No, they are not.

  After her questioning, she opened herself up to interrogation. Max himself relied upon a script given to him by a counselor at school. Base salary? Reasonable. Bonuses? Based on profits. Annually? Yes. Vacation time? Two weeks. Student loan reimbursement? No. These were mere formalities. He wouldn’t get the job. He could tell by her dry, monotone voice and clipped answers, the way she sat on the edge of her seat, as if waiting to show him the door.

  She thanked him for his time, and he for hers. They shook hands. She smiled and so did he. He took a card although he knew it to be worthless and placed it into his pocket. He kept his hand there as he exited and only took it out again after he heard the click of her door latching into place.

  THEY WENT TO A REDHAWKS baseball
game, the AAA affiliate of the Houston Astros. His father ordered a beer and a hot dog with sauerkraut, and Max a beer and peanuts. It was fall, and the team was sixteen games out of first, no chance of making the playoffs. The players didn’t even care anymore. They lobbed the ball to one another and jogged to first. After a long and grueling season, Max couldn’t blame them. They were hurt and tired and the games didn’t mean anything. All they wanted was to earn their paychecks and go home. A sentiment Max could relate to.

  Max listened to his father explain the game as if he’d never been to a baseball game before. He demystified the importance of the rosin bag in pitch control, the shift bunt defense, and the puzzling infield fly rule. Stalling tactics. Max could always tell when his father was about to broach a subject he didn’t wish to. He looked like a pizza boy standing on a stoop, awaiting a tip that wouldn’t come. Then he said, without the slightest bit of confidence, “You know, your mother and I have been talking.”

  “Uh-huh,” Max said, a piece of peanut skin annoyingly stuck to his bottom lip.

  “Let me predicate this by saying that we’re glad you’re living with us. We are. It’s like old times.”

  Max didn’t say anything. He and his father sat behind the third base dugout, and a group of teenagers behind them berated the third base coach. “MahOOoooooney,” they yelled. “You’re full of balOOOoooney.” They slurred their words and smelled of cheap beer. High school kids, more than likely, who had a former classmate working the beer stand or had fake IDs. They laughed and high-fived and cajoled. Max remembered having that sort of fun. He remembered right before graduation, he and his fraternity brothers had stolen a goat at a local petting zoo and got it drunk on Pabst and let it loose in the student union. It shat everywhere. It was the last time Max remembered laughing so hard he could hardly breathe.