The fact is, these vast waves of dismissal move through industries, one after another. A swath is cut through the auto industry, and then everything is calm there for a while. A bloodletting among the phone companies is followed by peace. The computer industry will sacrifice its thousands, and then rest.
Well, the paper industry had its most recent downsizing two years ago, when I got the chop. All of these resumés in my files come from people laid off at just around the same time, in a period from six or seven months before me to a period six or seven months after me. This is the group, this is the labor pool, these are the people I have to concern myself with.
But the reductions are cyclical, and eventually return. If I don’t move ahead briskly, rid myself of the competition, rid myself of Fallon, and get established in that job, I may suddenly find a whole new wave of resumés flooding the mails. And there they’ll be, a whole new batch of people after my job, and some of them will be real competition, too. Fresh competition.
Six is a lot, but six I think I can handle. Seven, if you count Fallon. But a dozen? Two dozen? Impossible.
No, I have to do it now, move forward, choose the next one, go out there, get him, keep the momentum alive.
And here’s another thought. What if Fallon dies ahead of time, without my help, before I’m ready? If that happens, and one of these four still on my list gets that job, what then?
And yet, I remain immobile. Discouraged. I just sit here, at my desk, not even looking at the file cabinet. I keep seeing, in my mind’s eye, that woman struggle ahead of me, across the lawn, the two of us plodding like a couple of cows, the Luger bobbing in the air behind her head, at the end of my arm.
Marjorie calls, “Dinner!”
I turn off the light, and leave the office, and shut the door.
10
For a while, before the beginning, even when I knew absolutely and positively what I should do, I did nothing. For a while, even though I theoretically and intellectually understood that my plan was my only possible hope, I did nothing. I thought it, I planned it, I prepared for it, but I didn’t yet believe it.
I did the make-work stuff instead. I studied the Luger. I bought a book to help me understand it, and I read the book cover to cover. I cleaned and oiled the gun. I bought it bullets. I took it into a field and shot trees.
I even saw Ralph Fallon one time, though I don’t believe he would have noticed me. What I did, back before I was actually in motion on this thing, as a part of my make-work, my fakery, my stalling, I drove one day over to Arcadia, just to look it over. That’s how it happened.
There are no large highways between our part of Connecticut and that part of New York. I took my time, studying the road atlas, wanting to find the best route because I intended this someday to be my commute to work. The roads went through little suburban towns and even smaller farm villages, past dairy herds grazing and cornfields being plowed for this spring’s crop, and I thought how nice it would be to make this drive, routinely, roundtrip, five times a week. Not much traffic, beautiful countryside. And at the far end, a job I could love.
Arcadia itself turned out to be a sweet old town, very small, a cluster of twenty or so clapboard homes on the slopes flanking a small but lively stream called the Jandrow, a tributary of the Hudson. Mills are built along streams, because they need a lot of water, and the bustling Jandrow clearly provided all the water this mill could want. There was a dam, just upriver from the mill buildings. The main road through town, east-west, dipping down one slope on its way in, crossed over that dam and then climbed up the far slope and away.
Other than the mill, there was little commercial activity in Arcadia. Up the western slope, overlooking the mill, there was a luncheonette where you could also buy newspapers and cigarettes and a few minor grocery items. Farther up the slope, at the edge of town, was a Getty gas station. That was it.
I got to Arcadia around noon, and decided to eat something in Betty’s, the luncheonette. It was only after I was seated at the counter, the only person there not with others at a table, and after I’d ordered a BLT and coffee, that I realized from the conversations behind me that the twenty or so people at the tables were all from the mill.
Had I made a stupid mistake coming here? Would these people remember me, much later, after everything was finished and I had Upton “Ralph” Fallon’s job? Would they suspect what I’d done? Had I ruined my chance to put the plan into effect, even before I’d started?
(I think, during this period of time, I was probably unconsciously trying to find some excuse not to go forward with the plan, even though there was no other plan. There was no other plan, and there still is no other plan.)
But there I was, I’d already placed my order, and the one sure way to be conspicuous was to run out now, before my food arrived. So I sat hunched between my shoulders, looking at nothing but the array of items on the counter along the wall ahead of me, and from time to time I heard bits of conversation from the tables behind me. Shoptalk, some of it, shoptalk I recognized. Shoptalk I could easily, gladly, have joined. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much I’d missed being around that world. Oh, how I would have liked to sit at one of those tables and just let the shoptalk wash over me.
Well, I couldn’t. I sat where I was, at the counter, and the buxom waitress brought my BLT, and doggedly I ate. While behind me, from time to time, people would call in a joshing way to somebody called Ralph, and Ralph would answer, with that kind of hillbilly cracker voice that’s more rural than regional. Not an accent, exactly, but something twanging in the mouth that makes them sound as though they have false teeth even if they don’t.
I snuck a look around my shoulder at one point, and this Ralph was at a table by the window, and he was a rawboned rangy guy of about my age, but thinner. He looked like that oldtime singer/songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael. His voice, though, with that cracker twang, wasn’t as musical.
Their lunch break was finished. All at once they all needed their checks, and the waitress was very busy for a few minutes, writing out the checks, ringing up totals on the cash register. The groups all left, and walked in little clumps downhill, and I turned to watch them through the windows, talking together, having a last cigarette (there wouldn’t be smoking allowed inside the mill).
The waitress moved around between me and the windows, clearing tables, and I said to her, “That fellow that was sitting over there. Was that Ralph Fallon?”
“Oh, sure,” she said.
“I thought so,” I said. “I met him years ago, but I just wasn’t sure. Doesn’t matter. I’ll take my check, when you’ve got the chance.”
Driving home that day, through the pretty countryside, the memory of those lunchtime conversations circling in my head, I knew I had to do it. I had to go forward. I couldn’t live without my life any longer.
That was the day, when I got home, I took out Herbert Everly’s resumé, and looked at his address, and turned to my road atlas.
11
Lew Ringer has killed himself! Who would have guessed?
It’s Monday now, four days since my terrible experience at the Ricks house, and Marjorie and I are watching the six o’clock news, and this has just been announced. Lew Ringer hanged himself in his garage, sometime last night. Lew Ringer is dead.
The police are saying this pretty well wraps up the case. They’d been just about certain Lew Ringer was their man, right from the beginning, but they hadn’t had enough solid physical evidence to pin it on him, and without that solid physical evidence they’d had no choice but to let Ringer go on Saturday afternoon, when his lawyer demanded it.
The principal piece of physical evidence they still didn’t have was the gun Ringer had used. It was a nine millimeter, they knew that much, but they hadn’t yet found the gun nor the dealer from whom Ringer must have bought it. The assumption now among the authorities was that he’d picked it up some time ago, probably in some southern state using false identification, and that he’d
thrown it away, after he’d done the double killing, in a nearby river or lake.
In any event, without the gun or any other evidence tying Ringer to the crime, and with Ringer’s lawyer making such a fuss, eventually on Saturday the police had had to let him go, though they did keep a very close eye on him, including a police car parked twenty-four hours a day in front of his house. (That was partly also to keep at bay the crowds of the curious.)
His empty house, as it turned out. When Ringer got there Saturday afternoon, his wife had already left that morning, having announced to the media in a tearful press conference Friday evening that she was returning to her parents in Ohio, where she would begin divorce proceedings.
The police theory was that, with the departure of his wife, with June Ricks having so clearly turned against him (she’d told several reporters that she thought Ringer had killed her parents for love of her, and that she believed he really did love her but had gone too far), with the police so strongly on his trail, and with the awful knowledge of the crimes he’d committed, he simply had not been able to face the world any longer, and that’s why he’d hanged himself, in his garage, in the space where his wife’s car used to be, sometime last night.
Watching this news item, looking at the faces, listening to the words, it seems to me nobody’s sorry Lew Ringer is dead. Everybody’s pleased it ended this way, I think, because it makes less work for everybody and less doubt in anybody’s mind. He was accused of killing Mr. and Mrs. Ricks, his inamorata’s parents, and then he killed himself. QED.
The last four days, I’ve continued to do nothing, not even to think about anything. My despondency and discouragement have held me in a tight and smothering grip. Here I’ve come this far, and yet I just haven’t been able to take one single step farther. The wind has been knocked out of me.
But there’s something about Ringer’s suicide that’s making a change in me, I can feel it. Something about the glee and relief of everybody connected with that case, from the police spokesman to the blonde woman reporter, from the furtive and cunning Junie to the anchorman at his desk. The Ricks case is over, and everybody is pleased. No investigation any more, no search for the gun, no hunt for witnesses, no consideration of any other motive. Turns out, I didn’t kill them!
After the news, while Marjorie goes to the kitchen to ready dinner, I return to my office for the first time since Thursday. I sit at my desk, I open the file drawer, I take out the folder with the remaining resumés I study them, and it seems to me the best thing for me to do now is move my activity as far away physically as possible from the first two incidents.
Here he is, in north central New York State. Good, a different state again, though I won’t be able to do that every time.
Lichgate, New York, according to my road atlas, is north of Utica, probably three hundred miles from here. That would put him two hundred fifty miles from Arcadia, too far to commute, but a relocation within New York State wouldn’t be complex. He remains a threat.
I could drive there this Thursday morning. Five or six hours to get there. Stay overnight. See what happens.
12
When I was a boy, I was for a while a science fiction fan. A lot of us were, until Sputnik. I was twelve when Sputnik flew. All the science fiction magazines I’d read before then, and the movies and TV shows I saw, assumed that outer space belonged by natural right to Americans. Explorers and settlers and daredevils of space were all Americans, in story after story. And then, out of nowhere, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first space vehicle. The Russians!
We all stopped reading science fiction, then, and turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows. I don’t know about anybody else, but, as I remember it, I turned my interest after that to the western. In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.
But before Sputnik turned my whole generation away from science fiction, we had read a lot of stories that talked about something called “automation.” Automation was going to take the place of unintelligent labor, though I don’t think it was ever phrased quite like that. But simple assembly line stuff is what they meant, the kind of dull deadening repetitive labor that everybody agreed was bad for the human brain and paralyzing to the human spirit. All that work would be taken over by machines.
This automated future was always presented as a good thing, a boon to mankind, but I remember, even as a child, wondering what was supposed to happen to the people who didn’t work at the dull stupefying jobs any more. They’d have to work somewhere, wouldn’t they? Or how would they eat? If the machines took all their jobs, what would they do to support themselves?
I remember the first time I saw news footage of a robot assembly line in a Japanese auto factory, a machine that looked like the X-ray machine in the dentist’s office, jerking around all by itself, this way and that, welding automobile pieces together. This was automation. It was fast, and although it looked clumsy the announcer said it was much more precise and efficient than any human being.
So automation did arrive, and it did have a hard effect on the workers. In the fifties and sixties, blue-collar workers were laid off in their thousands, all because of automation. But most of those workers were unionized, and most of the unions had grown strong over the previous thirty years, and so there were great long strikes, in the steel mills, and in the mines, and in the auto factories, and at the end of it all the pain of the transition was somewhat eased.
Well, that was long ago, and the toll that automation was going to take on the American worker has long since been absorbed. These days, the factory workers are only hit sporadically, when a company moves to Asia or somewhere, looking for cheaper labor and easier environment laws. These days, it’s the child of automation that has risen among us, and the child of automation hits higher in the work force.
The child of automation is the computer, and the computer is taking the place of the white-collar worker, the manager, the supervisor, just as surely as those assembly line robots took the place of the lunch-bucket crowd. Middle management, that’s what’s being winnowed now. And none of us are unionized.
In any large company, there are three levels of staff. At the top are the bosses, the executives, the representatives of the stockholders, who count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions. At the bottom are the workers on the line, the people who actually make whatever is being made. And between the two, until now, has been middle management.
It is middle management’s job to interpret the bosses for the workers and the workers for the bosses. The middle manager passes information: downward, he passes the orders and requirements, while upward he passes the record of accomplishment, of what has actually happened. To the suppliers he passes the information of what raw material is needed, and to the distributors he passes the information of what finished product is available. He’s the conduit, and until now he has been an absolutely necessary part of the process.
Once you bring in the computer, you no longer need middle management. Of course, you still need a few people at that level, to serve the computer, to run specific tasks, but you no longer need the hundreds and thousands of managers that were still needed only yesterday.
People like me.
As the computer takes our jobs, most people don’t even seem to realize why it’s happening. Why was I fired, they want to know, when the company’s in the black and doing better than ever? And the answer is, we were fired because the computer made us unnecessary and made mergers possible and our absence makes the company even stronger, and the dividends even larger, the return on investment even more generous.
They still need some of us. This is a transition we’re in now, where middle management will shrink like a slug when you pour salt on it, but middle management won’t completely disappear. There will just be fewer jobs, that’s all, far fewer jobs.
But my job, the one Upton “Ralph” Fallon is holding for me, that one still exists. A human being or two is still needed to run the production line,
to be above the working stiffs but capable of communication with them, so the bosses won’t have to deal directly with people who play country music on their car radios.
Fallon is my competition, all right. And the six resumés I’ve pulled out of the stack are my competition. But this is a sea change taking place in our civilization right now, and all of middle management is my competition. A million hungry faces will be at the window soon, peering in. Well educated, middle-aged, middle class.
I have to be firmly in place, before the flood becomes overwhelming. So I have to be strong, and I have to be determined, and I have to be quick. Thursday, I have to drive into New York State and find Everett Boyd Dynes.
EVERETT B. DYNES
264 Nether St.
Lichgate, NY 14597
315 890-7711
EDUCATION: BA (Hist) Champlain College, Plattsburgh, NY
WORK HISTORY
I have worked in the paper industry for 22 years, in sales, design, customer relations and management. I have worked in the area of polymer paper specialized applications for 9 years, during which time I have dealt with customers and designers, and have also run a product line, where my responsibilities have included interfacing with design and production teams and being in charge of a 27-person production line crew.
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
1986–present—Production line manager, Patriot Paper Corp.
1982–1986—Customer relations and some design, Green Valley Paper
1977–1982—Salesman, all product lines, Whitaker Paper Specialties
1973–1977—Salesman, industrial product lines, Patriot Paper Corp.
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