Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen

  “You had to tell them how you’d classify objectives for setting up a research committee and digging up material and take the appropriate action, et cetera blah blah.”

  Rod picked up a swatch of fried spinach. “Anticipated results.”

  I watched him. “Why do you keep on saying anticipated results?”

  “That was the argotic—as you put it—key phrase answer to that question.”

  “What? You mean I didn’t have to go on and on about program analysis and resource allocation and all that kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah, you had to do that too but you had to work in the phrase ‘anticipated results’ somewhere along the line or, as I understand it, almost the whole answer doesn’t count.”

  I rolled my eyes and knew that the teppan on my plate would not be good enough to wash away the taste that was developing in my mouth. “What?”

  “Didn’t you read the preamble?”

  “Which one?”

  “If you read the preamble to that big book they just put out about revised methodology you’d have noticed it right there. It said that the spirit of contemporary management philosophy resides in the notion of acknowledged aims and reasoned means to an identified goal …” Rod ate as he spoke. “And the common expression of goals and values depends on an agreed upon and practicable set of illustrative terms. Or some such. Anyway, the ironclad patented label to that particular abstraction is …” He took a bite.

  “Anticipated results.”

  “They practically can’t even hear you talking unless you say those magic words.”

  “Jeez.”

  Rod’s brow furrowed. “At least that’s what I think is the deal.”

  “It sounds revoltingly credible to me. Especially the revolting part.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the deal.”

  “So I might as well have been telling them a bedtime story.”

  “Oh, come on.” Rod attacked his plate yet again. “You’re a seasoned pro. I’m sure you covered fine.”

  My sake arrived. I drank some, but Rod was right; drinking at lunch tasted like trouble. It certainly didn’t take my mind off the misery of being uncertain. We ate.

  “I’ll tell you what’s for sure, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m getting to be a darn good shot.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing. An ox like me.”

  “Finally, you’re willing to admit it.”

  “You’re right.” He gesticulated dangerously, chopsticks in hand. “I’m a threat with a three-hole punch. But the instructors are careful, careful people. And you study safety in a classroom for hours before you do any firing. So far, I wouldn’t even consider touching the thing off the shooting range.”

  “But you’re a regular Deadeye Dick when you’re there, huh?”

  “You bet.”

  “Well.” I held up a thimble of rice wine and toasted him. “Here’s to accuracy.” I belted the drink and it tasted worse than ever.

  •

  A week went by and then at the quarterly staff conference the word came down: Rodney was the new boss-in-training. They sent him out of the room and handed us our turndown letters personally. I was not surprised or particularly disappointed. If it wasn’t going to be me I was happy Rod had got it over the others.

  I fell into step beside him after the meeting. “I suppose you think you’re pretty special now.”

  “Actually, I was feeling pretty special to begin with.” Rod smiled. Then strode away.

  •

  It was about a month later—after Rod had been to admin orientation—that there was real change. I passed by his office and watched him for a moment, poring over papers.

  “Hey, Boss. How are you?”

  He looked up. “What’s that?”

  “How the heck are ya, hotshot?”

  “Fine.” His expression did not change. “How’re you?”

  “Good.”

  Rod said nothing.

  The verbal hiatus became instantly awkward. I said: “How’s the wife?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Good. Does she like being married to an important man?”

  Rod smiled only faintly. “She feels …”

  “Corporate?”

  He frowned. “No.”

  “Serene?”

  “I suppose, but …”

  “Saintly?”

  Rod’s expression did not change.

  I leaned casually inside the door and tried chuckling to grease the joke a little. Rod barely grinned before slacking back to impassivity. Then he pursed his lips in a funny way and I knew he was about to try to say something careful and considered.

  He leaned back in his chair. “She feels clear.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Rod nodded, silent, looking at me.

  “Clear, you say.”

  “Yes. She does. She has clarity.” He paused. Lightly rocked in his chair. “And so do I.”

  “Oh.” The word hung long enough to create awkwardness. I straightened from my tilt against the doorjamb. “That’s great.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He went back to his work.

  Shuffling away, I knew I too had clarity now. More than I could remember.

  Qualicum Beach

  Don’t get me wrong … he was a good man.

  I completely believe that.

  With what I’ve seen of life, I came to know he was a good man indeed. But not all good men have happy lives, and even good people can’t help letting bitterness sometimes infect the hearts of those close to them. It might even be impossible.

  Whatever. Almost since I can remember, we got on each other’s nerves. He and my mother met when they were in their early twenties. They waited four years to get married and then another year to have me, so it wasn’t a situation of accidental indenturing or anything like that. It was before the birth control pill, so you had to have your wits about you. My dad had that. In spades, you might say. Mom says he was uneasy during the pregnancy but perked up after I was born. I can only remember my father when he was angry about something—and it was usually aimed at me. I don’t remember him yelling at Mom. The other children came much later on, so for a time there was only me.

  As I grew up and went to school I had to adjust to changes in venue because we moved around a lot. Dad kept getting laid off or changing jobs. Things were not so good, even though this was a time in western Canada when you could make out fine with minimal education because of all the resource jobs that we’re famous for in this country. My dad never went back to school to see if he could get something better. I guess he felt obligated to provide for the family, no matter what, and he was a traditional type. Once you were of a certain age, as far as he was concerned, you worked, you didn’t go to school.

  During my twelve years of public education, we changed addresses something like eight times. I was always an outsider; got used to it. Schoolyard bullies had me in their sights. I dealt with it internally, never got as physical as I might have. I certainly never told my folks about it because I had utterly no confidence in their ability to handle it. No sophistication. I just got tough inside. My dad was struggling, and I didn’t want to add to that. Neither one of us could do anything about our respective predicaments. It felt equal in some weird way, a thing we had in common. But generally I just had to deal all through childhood with my dad’s angry ways. Although he wasn’t a typical post-war work-beast who ruled his family with an iron fist, and there wasn’t a lot of physical terror that I recall … I mean, there was some, but nothing like what truly abused children go through.

  If I had to identify any incident during my growing-up years that defined what may or may not have troubled me, it would have to be the infamous wiener stick incident of 1962. I was nine. We were living, for a couple of years, over on the Island, Qualicum Beach. Dad had a job with the railroad as a telegraphy clerk, and we actually lived right there in the trai
n station. Qualicum was and still is a resort town—in those days, it was tiny, a population of maybe 700, but the number tripled during the summer. My best pal, Randy, was a son of the local cop. We did great outdoor stuff. It was summer, and we were planning to camp overnight in the woods of the gully a little ways down the tracks. Randy got the idea that we should customize our wiener-roasting sticks by straightening out wire coat hangers and making neat handles and hooks on the ends. We worked all day on them. I was amazed how cool you could make a piece of wire look if you had tools—bench vices, pliers, steel wool.

  I was late getting home for supper. Mom and Dad had just started eating, and I could sense there was tension, whether it was between them or just peevishness at my being late. I noticed the redness in my dad’s eyes, though, and it almost stopped me from showing them my treasure, my personal wiener-roasting holder, which I proudly presented to them at the table before I sat down. Dad gave out a nasty laugh and stood and grabbed the thing before I could react. He said something like, “You never heard of a sharpened twig?,” then took both ends of the wire and wrapped the thing in a couple of tight turns around my neck. He did it so fast I was out of breath. I started crying before I could talk. I remember his eyes, I keep coming back to that in my memory. I’d seen him angry before, all the time. But there was something else in there this time. A meanness. An evil, though I hesitate to use the word.

  But you have to understand the times. Ask anybody from that era about small-town life in the 1950s. Sterility. Boredom. Up to this point, I’d suffered the standard kid’s tension and emotional repression. I was used to an austere landscape, lack of colour in almost all aspects. I mean, the fifties lasted until at least 1968 on Vancouver Island. We barely had television. I have a photograph from that era—Mom, Dad, and me in front of the station—taken by a trainman with a box camera. It’s in black and white. I’ve got a striped shirt on and a soup-bowl haircut, I swear, just like Dennis the Menace. Mom and Dad are standing together. I’m a little off to the side. I remember Dad rearranging us just before the guy snapped the picture. He pushed me away, now I recall, so that I would be standing apart. From Mom. That was what was up. As Dad was wrapping that wire around my neck, he was like a jealous man. For years, we’d been competing for Mom’s attention.

  Years later, I had some understanding of the wiener-stick incident. But on that particular night, I ran out of the house without saying anything. I didn’t want Dad to see my sobbing. While he was hurting me, Mom just sat there looking distressed. I’m sure she didn’t want Dad to do what he did, but she never contradicted him in anything. Not that he was overly controlling with her, but I guess there wasn’t any such thing as time-outs in those days or mediation or whatever else it is that makes life more liveable these days. It just felt like I was living in a cultural desert and an emotional dust-bowl.

  Anyway, to keep to the saga, without saying anything, I just ran out of there and down into the woods where Randy and I had earlier planned to spend the night. Randy was having dinner at his place, so I had time to sit in our campsite and cry to myself. I unwound the coat hanger from about my neck. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. With no tools around to straighten the wire, it remained a crippled, nasty reminder of my situation. Flinging it into the bush helped me stop crying. I sat back down and just contemplated what had happened while the sun sank low. Mostly, I was seized up by anger. In the history of my uneasy life with Dad, this incident was unprecedented. I couldn’t imagine going back home. When it got dark, I rolled myself in a groundsheet and huddled under a cedar bow.

  Randy never did show up. Later on, I found out he had begun to sniffle during dinner, and his mother wouldn’t let him out. I would have liked some food, though the hunger did not hurt greatly, compared to what had happened. I just didn’t know if I would ever be ready to go home. I wondered if they’d come looking for me; I wouldn’t have been hard to find. I was ambivalent about whether or not I wanted them to. So I just sat there and quivered, nearly oblivious to the woodsy sounds around me.

  Then, as my anger cooled and it got dark, I became more than aware of the sounds. Birds flitting by. Bats. Strange rustles in the bush. It got spookier as the gloom intensified. I felt myself slipping over into fear, a new emotion that day, and I didn’t like it. I pressed my knees into my chest and clenched my fists until they hurt. Then I found a strength in resentment, remembering what Dad had done to me, how the wire had burned as it was wound around my neck. The image conjured up a powerful animus in my chest, a palpable thing, and I wasn’t scared anymore. In fact, I laughed out loud. When I think of it, I’ve seldom been scared since. Not in any kind of visceral sense, anyway.

  So eventually, I faded into sleep and woke up when the midnight freight train rumbled through. I was used to it when I was in my bed, right above the tracks, but sleeping out there under the stars it woke me up and reminded me of where I was and what had happened. But I still wasn’t scared. I woke again with the bird racket around five in the morning. Even though it was clear, not wet, I shivered and had to stamp around the camp to warm up. I was hungry as hell. The bushes in the gully had a few early blackberries. I spent part of the morning on those, then as the sun rose higher, I wandered farther away, down the tracks, past the point of familiarity, across a rural road, and down it for a ways. After a while, I spotted a house through the trees, a place I’d maybe driven past in Dad’s car, but it looked different on foot. I noticed things about it, like the slightly open windows and the full milk bottle sitting on the porch. We still had dairy delivery in those days. I walked on a little further and found a culvert with a stream of cold water. I drank deep, dipped my head under, and shook the water off like a dog. It felt good. Then I decided I had to do something about that bottle of milk.

  When I got to the house, it was maybe nine in the morning. I was almost surprised to see the bottle still there. The weather was warm enough for milk to spoil if it didn’t get into a refrigerator. I watched the house for a good half-hour. There was nobody around. My stomach growled louder than I’d ever heard it. I wondered if I shouldn’t just go home, but the burn of that coat hanger around my neck stung too much. Still, when I started across the lawn toward the porch I begged myself to peel off, run back home, and get Mom to make me something to eat. It was a weekday, I reasoned, and Dad would be in the office. I wouldn’t have to deal with him, at least not right away.

  When I stepped onto the porch, there was the creak of weathered boards under my feet. I froze, fearing someone in the house hearing me. But no. I went to the bottle and put my hand on it. Still no alarm, no stirring from inside at all. A whiff of breeze brushed my hair, and the skin on my back prickled. I lifted the bottle, knowing I was crossing now into a primal realm of human existence.

  I was so frightened at that moment that I surprised myself by laughing. Aloud. I guess it was panic, a nervous reaction. But I was truly entertained by the comedy of my thoughts. Even as a child, I was hip to symbolic significance.

  Part of the problem was that I’d been happy being a good kid. Aside from the usual childhood antics—exasperating my mother, peeving my father—I’d never grossly misbehaved. But here I was running from a strange house with my ill-gotten gains. I was an outlaw now. I found a lair and sucked down the whole quart in minutes. As soon as I tasted the milk, the sustenance of it, I knew how right it had been for me to take a hand in my own survival. I felt no responsibility other than to myself. I have to say it was a terrific feeling.

  In the afternoon, I sat in a tree and watched my mother walk around the camp and through the blackberry bushes looking for me. She called my name. I weighed the idea of surrender. The idea of returning to a state of boyhood was attractive, but now that my stomach wasn’t growling I could think more clearly. I decided I liked my state of non-grace and the liberating notion that somebody else had sent me here, somebody else had alienated me from ethics and responsibility. A free agent I was, rambling and impulsive. It was one of the few times I ever fe
lt cool.

  I let Mom wander for a while, and then she was gone. I knew there would be others coming around, and I would have to move. I climbed down from the tree and wandered through the gully, ducking into the shrubs when the up-Island passenger train streaked by on the tracks above. I didn’t want anybody seeing me. I was badgered by thoughts of the house where I’d stolen the milk. There was a detail there, an element I sensed was important if I could only settle enough in my mind and calculate. I gravitated back toward the place and crept to a vantage point. I looked carefully at the porch and the surrounding grounds. I saw what I had thought I had remembered, a scrap of paper caught in a clump of weeds by the walk. I loped over, grabbed the paper, and slipped back into the trees.

  The note said what I’d expected: No milk today. The breeze had swept it off the porch, the milkman had delivered inadvertently, and now I knew for sure that the house was empty and might continue to be for a reasonable time yet. It was entirely feasible for the windows to be open a crack. It was warm weather. This was a small town where everybody knew each other. People would normally go to town and leave their houses unlocked all day. I sprinted over the grass and stepped onto the porch. The front door was locked. That meant the occupants were gone for at least the day, likely the night, too. Or maybe they’d been away all night and were returning today; there was no way to be sure. The possibilities scraped through my mind and bothered me. I stood still and listened hard. Up the road, a car was approaching. I leapt behind a hedge. The car drew close but did not slow. It continued down the road. In the quiet, I scoped out the side of the house, the ground-floor windows, the porch furniture. I figured it all out. I was surprised at how good it felt, once I saw my way.

  I let the scene unwind in my mind a few times before I made the move. Then it was like I was machinery; dragging over the Cape Cod chair, jumping onto the sill, pulling myself through the window, swinging my feet onto the living-room carpet. The weird silent sensation inside—the contrast from outside to in, a new world velvety smooth and startlingly different for such a familiar-type place—nearly unnerved me. I hadn’t expected to so completely lose the sound of the birds, the ruffling breeze through the dogwood leaves in the yard. It occurred to me that in less than twenty-four hours I’d become a creature of the forest. That made things even more exotic, even more intoxicating, to prowl about a stranger’s civilized place.