Epistemology

by Barry Rachin

Epistemology

  by

  Barry Rachin

  * * * * *

  Published by:

  Epistemology

  Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin

  This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * * *

  Epistemology

  Ronda Wickford, assistant manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart, located Scotty Bergeron over by the leafy green vegetables filling a bin of baby carrots. “I need someone to run produce.” Scotty continued to spread the individual packages in the refrigerated case. A stocky middle-aged man, his dirty brown hair was still thick but fading to gray at the temples. “There’s a generous bump in salary plus benefits,” Rhonda added.

  What she didn’t bother mentioning was that, choking back a fistful of tears, the current produce manager’s wife called the previous afternoon to say her husband had been on a bender since the third week in November. Soused. Blotto. Bombed. Plastered. Four sheets to the wind. A distraught family was trying to coax Donovan O’Brien into rehab. Was it rehab or detox? Ronda couldn’t recall. And this wasn’t the first time; the hard-drinking employee had fallen off the wagon twice before.

  Scotty stared at her with a blank expression. “Dewey’s next in line for the job. He’s got seniority and – ”

  “Dewey Epstein’s a halfwit who couldn’t tie his shoelaces without a training manual much less manage a produce department.” Rhonda lowered her voice a handful of decibels. “More to the point, since Donovan hit the skids, you’ve been doing three-quarters of his work and all of your own. Anyone with half a brain can see that.”

  After Supersaver went union in the early nineteen sixties, it was harder to get rid of troublesome employees like Donovan O’Brien. Worse yet, the change sometimes afforded habitually lazy or unqualified workers leverage when a plum position came available. But Ronda possessed considerable leverage of her own in this particular instance. She wanted to sack Donovan over a month earlier, but the union representative begged her to hold off. He was going to straighten things out with the irascible Irishman, help him put his pathetic life back together. Think wonders. Shit blunders.

  Pulling a box cutter out of a back pocket, Scotty slit the tape on a second carton of carrots. He glanced up but only for a split second without bothering to make eye contact. “Yes, I’ll take the job. When do I start?”

  “Yesterday morning. I’m making it retroactive to the beginning of the week,” she replied and walked off.

  Back in the main office Rhonda told Marna, who handled personnel, to upgrade Scotty to the new position. “Something funny?”

  “A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. That’s got to be a first for the market.”

  “I thought he worked maintenance at some community college in Minnesota,” Ronda replied. She slid into a swivel chair and fired up the Windows Vista program. “He was a custodian. Twenty-six years.”

  “I cleared the references when Scotty applied,” Marna replied, “the man was chairman of the philosophy department at Rutland Community College.”

  Ronda watched the computer screen come to life, fleshing itself out with a dozen colorful program icons. Clicking on the Microsoft Excel tab, the circular bluish mouse symbol pulsated, waiting for the spreadsheet to load.

  A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. Something had gone haywire. A stickler for details, Ronda would never just assume Scotty was a blue collar stiff. She brought up the accounts receivable invoices and started analyzing expenditures by departments.

  Wait a minute! Now she remembered - a trivial incident. The day before Thanksgiving Ronda ran into the new produce manager sipping coffee in the employee lounge. “What a waste,” Scotty muttered.

  “Excuse me?” She hadn’t spoken and had no idea what he was referring to. The man gestured toward an electrician in blue coveralls removing a fluorescent light fixture from the dropped ceiling grid. “If it was just a dead bulb, we’d replaced it,” Ronda replied, “but the whole unit’s shot.”

  “Yes, but do you see the round compartment in the center of the fixture?” Ronda squinted at the light just as the workman pulled the aluminum housing free of the ceiling, lowering the bulky unit to a second worker standing beside the ladder. “There’s a small ballast resistor that controls the individual lights behind that plate. All the electrician had to do was replace the part, rewire a handful of connections and the light would operate good as new.” Scotty broke a piece off an apple Danish and washed the sticky dough down with a mouthful of coffee. “Now the store has to junk all that perfectly good metal and spend additional money on a replacement.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Ronda mused. What she opted not to mention was how many thousands of dollars corporate bigwigs routinely threw away on lavish perks and sublime foolishness. She considered herself fairly thick-skinned, but some of the extravagance made her want to retch.

  That brief conversation in the employee lounge - yes, that was where she got the cockamamie notion Scotty was the hands-on type rather than an academic. Half an hour later, Marna left to deliver a box of gift cards to customer service. When she was gone, Ronda hurried over to the file cabinet. Fishing through a stack of manila folders, she found what she was looking for:

  Scott B. Bergeron age 58.

  Chairman of the philosophy department

  Rutland Community College, Rutland Minnesota.

  Marital Status: widowed.

  Children: two.

  Ronda skimmed through the references, all glowing tributes to a dedicated academic and educator.

  A young Hispanic woman with a spidery hairnet covering her black curls knocked lightly and stuck her head in the door. Ronda crammed the file back in the drawer and slammed the cabinet shut. “Yes, Miriam?”

  *****

  Later that night at home Ronda tried to make sense out of fragments of reliable information, hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo she had puzzled together over the previous year regarding the taciturn enigma she had just promoted.

  Widowed with two children. The wife was dead. Was it an accident, chronic illness, stroke or fatal heart attack? No one at the market had any right asking what happened. There but for the grace of God… Of course the children would be young adults now. And that business with the ballast resistor – if the man was previously married and paying a mortgage on his own place, he probably took more than just a passing interest in home repairs.

  But why would a well-educated person moved half way across the country to end up at an entry level position in a supermarket? A college professor no less! The Supersaver routinely employed retirees to bag groceries, run down errant shopping carts in the parking lot and fulfill other menial positions, but this guy didn’t fit the mold. At fifty-eight he was far too young – too young by a dozen years – to be working for a few lousy bucks over minimum wage, padding a monthly social security check.

  And his body language was all wrong. The tight-lipped fellow with the limpid hazel eyes that never quite settled on you for more than a fleeting millisecond, was infuriatingly disengaged. Detached from all the incestuous intrigues and petty bickering endemic to such workplaces. Case in point: in November Adrian Peters, a divorcée from bookkeeping with a stunning figure, invited Scotty over to her place for dinner. The guy thanked Adrian profusely but noted a prior commitment. Perhaps he did have some other pressing engagement, but Scotty never bothered to follow up on the hospitality by asking for a rain check.

  And regarding their brief exchange earlier in the day, Scotty seem
ed inconvenienced! The serendipitous promotion to produce manager - it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. If Ronda had suggested, “Why don’t you take my job for the next five years and I’ll price baby carrots and unload tractor trailers full of vegetables,” he might have just grinned foolishly and stared serenely into space. Like some middle-aged Hindu ascetic who renounces all worldly possessions, abandons wife and family to sit lotus style in a mountain cave contemplating his navel, Scotty Bergeron floated through his twilight years in a bland state of cosmic indifference.

  The phone rang. “Hello mother.” Ronda slumped down on the living room couch and teased a scrap of lint from her rayon skirt. “That’s very sweet of you, but I’m spending the holidays with friends,” she lied. “Yes, people I know from the market. Thanks for the invite.” She chatted a few minutes longer and lowered the phone back onto the cradle.

  Two weeks to Christmas. She had no plans other than to hunker down with a bottle of white wine and the latest Debbie Macomber novel. Ronda was addicted to the knitting series. They were holding the book, which had been out of circulation for weeks, at the front desk of the Brandenberg Public Library.

  Last Christmas she was dating someone. That ended badly. Now she was alone and probably better off emotionally. Over the summer, Rhonda had come to the dour conclusion that ‘romance’ was highly overrated. When things turned ugly, people wielded human affection like a lethal weapon. Cupid’s curse – it was an emotion entanglement with potentially homicidal tendencies. What people really needed wasn’t love with all its messy excess baggage but common decency. Better they should skip romance altogether and simply be kind to one another.

  What to eat? Ronda shuffled to the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator. As store manager she could purchase the freshest vegetables and prime meat cuts on a daily basis. Instead she bought odds and ends from the deli. A quarter pound of Finlandia cheese. Another quarter pound of Boarshead roast beef. A couple of torpedo rolls from the self-serve bins near the bakery. “Will that be all?” The young girl behind the deli counter flashed Ronda a sick smile. What sort of stingy slob buys their meals in such meager quantities? Answer: dirt-poor loners and romantic losers.

  Last Christmas when she was hopelessly enthralled by Mr. Wrong, Ronda cooked a teriyaki pork roast tenderloin. She used the pan drippings for marinade which she brushed over the succulent carrots and potatoes. As a side dish she sliced butternut squash together with baking apples– for tantalizing flavor she always bought braeburn, northern or empire—which she heaped together with brown sugar, cinnamon and cranberries. The aromatic concoction went in the oven along side the pork.

  For the piece de resistance, Ronda made a special trip five miles across town to an Italian specialty store where she bought a round loaf of panettone, which she cut up in bite-size chunks. She mixed the sweetbread with raisins and vanilla pudding. Scooping the sticky batter into a Teflon cupcake pan, she set the timer for twenty minutes. When the desert came out of the oven Ronda sprinkled rum over the toasted crust and finished the culinary masterpiece with a dollop of whipped cream - the homemade variety, not from an aerosol can.

  That’s how a woman cooked when she was in love. Or imagined she was before the balmy emotions soured, atrophied, shriveled up and blew away in the chilling late December wind, and she was reduced to a quarter-pound of cheese and roast beef.

  Drip. Drip. Drip. Later that night in the bathroom the hot water refused to shut completely. Even when she twisted the knob firmly to the left a thin trickle of water dribbled out of the spout. Prying the plastic cap off the top of the knob with a Phillips screwdriver, she loosened the set screw, lifting the handle away altogether.

  No luck! Only the metal stem protruded from the chrome housing. The defective washer was buried on the underside of the unit with no apparent access. Replacing the handle, she went to bed.

  *****

  Friday morning Ronda found a message on her answering machine.

  This is the last day we can hold

  the Debbie Macomber book you

  requested before making it readily

  available to our general readership.

  Respectfully,

  The circulation desk

  Brandenberg Public Library

  At eleven o’clock an elderly lady slipped on a patch of black ice in the Supersaver parking lot. An ambulance had to be called and accident report filled out. After lunch, Ronda sat down – an impromptu meeting – with the New England regional buyer regarding a new distributor for cosmetics. Certain hair care products were being discontinued and a line of new items required shelf space.

  The Debbie Macomber book. She made a mental note to swing by the library on her way home. Otherwise, the new release would go back on the shelves. At two in the afternoon, Dwight Epstein stuck his head in the door. “Got a minute?”

  Ronda shoved a pile of invoices aside and stared frigidly at the youth. Even his appearance was offensive. Overly tall and disjointed, he seemed ill at ease in his ungainly body. The blond hair sat like a bushy mop on his massive head. Ronda doubted he owned a toothbrush much less a comb.

  “Yes, Dwight?”

  “I was pretty upset when you promoted Scotty. Not that he ain’t a nice enough guy, but, properly understood, I got seniority. What’s fair is fair.”

  What’s fair is that you possess the maturity and innate intelligence to perform the entry-level job we originally hired you for. The previous week Dwight forgot to change the setting on his labeling machine and priced kiwi fruit at half the normal cost. Five hundred kiwi flew out the door before one of the girls at the checkout counter realized what was happening.

  “As other management openings come available we will keep your name in the mix,” Ronda said. She didn’t bother to explain that placing someone’s name in the running didn’t mean the person received special consideration.

  “When do you think that’ll be?”

  “Don’t know, Dwight. But you have got to understand that promotions are based on merit. You have to bring certain personal skills to the workplace or it’s just the Peter Principle.”

  His rheumy eyes clouded over. “Peter what?”

  An unfortunate slip of the tongue. She wasn’t about to explain the facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. “When we find a job that’s more suited to your particular talents,” Ronda parried the question, “we can sit down and talk.”

  “Yeah, well I hope it ain’t too long. I sure as heck like produce, but I’m not gonna wait around twiddling my thumbs.” The youth shambled out the door. After Dwight was gone Ronda continued to stare morosely at the open doorway for a good half a minute longer.

  No other employee at the Supersaver market would have dared talk to her in that tone. Ronda had slogged away ten solid years in the trenches before the promotion to assistant manager. And for that she was eternally grateful. Humbled! What was it with these addle-brained kids? They expected—no, demanded—a standing ovation for arriving to work on time. No need to serve apprenticeships, to work as journeymen perfecting skills. No, it was Dwight Epstein’s manifest destiny to start at the top!

  The facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At a Supersaver management seminar held the previous year in Boca Raton, the guest speaker discussed long term costs to businesses when key employees quit and went elsewhere. The company frittered away skill, talent, intelligence, leadership. Intangible assets to be sure, but ones that could mean the difference between a good store and a truly great place to work.

  Democracy was the great equalizer. It leveled the playing field for dolts like Dwight Epstein threatening to dumb everyone down to a uniformed mediocrity. But that would never happen while Ronda was assistant manager. She viewed herself as a benevolent autocrat. Fair. Dispassionate. An unbiased decision maker. The Peter Principle be damned! She would make
sure, that Dwight Epstein’s long-term future at Supersaver reflected the man’s intrinsic worth to the company.

  *****

  A scheduling glitch in the deli department kept Ronda at work till past seven. She drove straight for the library A massive building constructed of granite blocks, the Brandenberg Library was originally built in eighteen sixty-five. When it was renovated a few years back, the architect cleverly arranged to retain many of the building’s original features. The vestibule in the entryway sported an elaborate mosaic design, the tile imported from Genoa. Mahogany wainscoting wrapped around the walls with a matching gingerbread trim nearer the ceiling.

  Only a few yards from the circulation desk, she pulled up dead in her tracks. In a reading room off the periodical section, Scotty Bergeron was hunkered down at an oak table. A hardcover book lay open in front of him. Half a minute passed. Reaching up with his right hand he flipped to the next page but only briefly before lowering it back where it originally lay.

  Moving quietly forward, Ronda went directly to the circulation desk. “You’re holding a book for me.”

  “Name please.” Before she could reply the front door flew open as though smashed by a battering ram and a bearded man in his early sixties staggered into the library. Disheveled with matted hair and glassy eyes, he spun about unsteadily. Almost from the moment the fellow appeared, the air reeked of cheap booze and rancid body odor.

  “Excuse me.” The librarian stepped out from behind the counter. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.” She spoke in a papery-thin officious tone.

  “That so?” The man’s mouth sagged open and his eyes gawked about the room without focusing on any particular object.

  “You’re obviously drunk,” her voice rose to a strained falsetto, “and this is totally unacceptable.”