Beauty

by Frederick Dillen

  “At the end of the summer, you pinned a big piece of paper on my back that said ‘Beast.’ That’s the second thing you owe me for.”

  “Nope.”

  “Not you?”

  “No.”

  Baxter wasn’t sure she believed him, and it had been such a rotten name for her to get stuck with that he felt guilty even though he hadn’t been the one to give it. After their driver’s-license test of a final exam, he and his buddies had picked Carol up under the arms and walked her over the bridge and bought her shorts and a summer top and espadrilles and sat her down to drink pitchers of beer outside across from the revered brick. Then they walked to the river and shouted something and walked back and had ice cream. They finished up in a bar that might have been in a basement where Carol told them in insufficient detail about her alley and her career selling parts, and when Baxter and his pals talked about a destroyer, she identified, from inside, by the sound of a passing muffler, the kind of muffler, the model and year of car, and in astonishing detail what had been done to its engine and almost certainly to its suspension. When they got her back to her dorm, she went down to her knees to throw up, and one of his buddies said, “Beauty down.” Baxter bent to the eternal crouch, holding back the hair and steadying the head, and the other asshole said, “No, it’s a beast down.” There was never any paper pinned on her, but that “beast down” asshole saw one of the salesmen the next day and told the story to try to make friends across the class divide. From there, history.

  Baxter had never said it until Carol’s last visit to the offices, when he tried to tell her she was out, and he hadn’t liked saying it even then.

  He wasn’t going to go through all of that now. He said, “Carol, you occupy a unique and blessedly bright place in my universe of ambivalences. I like you. I value you, and I always have, and I would not lie about something like this. It’s not a lie I’d want to carry around.”

  “Okay,” she said. “The first thing is still enough.”

  “The first thing is enough,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Also, Carol, I appreciate you not kicking me in the nuts over my promise of a company. I would have done it if I could.”

  A laugh here would have been fair, but silence again. “Good-bye” would have been a disappointing understatement, but after all, she’d gotten what she came for. She stayed silent on the phone.

  It was going on three o’clock.

  He said, “Carol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Blume is trying not to die, and he’s got so many pills to take it’s hard to tell which one has ruined him. But he liked you. There’s nobody home now, but he liked you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s more, this is the best thing that could happen to you. You’re ready, and killing all those picked-over orphan companies was about to eat you up. This is the nick of time. You should have a company to run.”

  She asked, and here was maybe what she’d been waiting to say. He should have said it first, but maybe it was better she asked so it didn’t come from him gratuitously. He could be gratuitous.

  She said, “Can I do it?”

  He put spine and fire in his voice and said, “Of course you can do it. You’ve been able to do it for years. I’ve been hanging on to you because I run a good deal until I can’t run it anymore. All it needed was you getting canned and deciding you wanted to grab a company for yourself. If I weren’t getting old and soft, I would steal it back from you, because it’s probably a good company.”

  “It’s way too small for you.”

  It was an awkward conversation, and he was glad to have gotten it out of the way. He wasn’t sure about going back to bed. He knew that he was going to miss Carol. He told her, “It is way too small. I wish you luck with your fish. Be happy, Carol. Have fun. You’ve got a company.”

  Management

  Baxter was a manager, among other things. He found people like Carol and got them to do what he needed done. Carol would have to be a manager now, and she needed to find her people. Dave Parks was solid. Annette seemed like a solid person, but she was still finding her way out of her old responsibilities into her new and much larger ones.

  There was no way Carol was getting back to sleep. She needed to get Annette in motion. She felt badly about waking her and called anyway.

  Annette answered on the third ring, and Carol said, “I’m sorry it’s so early, but Baxter Blume’s sending a guy up to replace me and another guy to organize our stock offering. We need to do as much digging as we can before they get here. The fat boys’ straw buyer made a supposedly reasonable offer based on the cursory price projections you got up. What I’m hoping is that there are other footprints in the snow surrounding those projections. I mean any facts, however far removed, that are relevant to the projections. If there are, and they undermine the projections, we need to know. Any supporting evidence lost in corners, well, wouldn’t that be nice. Okay?”

  “I have it all, Ms. MacLean.”

  “Carol’s fine.”

  “No, I have it all.”

  “You have it all?”

  “I built that price for the plant, using asset and operation summaries, but Mr. Mathews didn’t want anything too detailed. The odd thing was that some information seemed to be missing, which was part of why I said figures went in circles. I’ve never been in charge of the overall financial picture. I manage accounts and I’ve been around a long time, but I’ve never seen everything. My price projection was as much of everything as I’d ever seen at one time. Then Dave and I found the sales agreement, answering my pricing, in Mr. Mathews’s private file cabinet. But tonight, after we left the old plant, I went back to the new plant, and in Mr. Mathews’s file cabinet found evidence that, like you’re asking, the plant is worth more than my projections or the purchase offer.”

  Annette is coming right along, Carol thought.

  Even though it was the middle of the night, she was working at full speed. “First, there was important work done on the lines that made them more reliable, so more product could be put through. The work was done as soon as we moved out, and it was charged to the new plant. Neither the work nor the cost showed up in the material I had to work with. Mathews was hiding it. And he was hiding the cost of Canadian blocks of fish and using the cost of the Asian blocks for everything. There isn’t a lot of the Canadian fish, but over a year it adds up, and since it doesn’t have to travel any distance, it comes in a little cheaper.”

  Carol said, “In other words, there is solid evidence that it makes better sense than we knew to buy the old plant.”

  “It almost does.”

  “But?”

  Carol wondered how much of this kind of thing Baxter had done. She said, trying it out on Annette and herself and Baxter, “I’m thinking Mathews wanted the old plant to look just efficient enough to justify a sale, should anyone bother to check, not that his fake buyer was going to check. Through his fake buyer he wanted to be able to buy the old plant as cheaply as possible. Once he had it, as a little bonus along with everything else, he’d be able to sell the improved lines for more than the value of the old lines that supposedly he’d gotten with his purchase.”

  “Except he didn’t get the old plant.” Annette had put it all together without quite knowing.

  Carol said, “Annette, you’ve nailed it.”

  “Yes, but, and I know you explained this. You really didn’t already know all this?” Annette giggled nervously into the phone and asked, “Is it all right to be having fun?”

  “It’s supposed to be fun. I’m having fun, too. So what do we need now?”

  “Everything we can get about customers. Everything about suppliers. Everything about production at the old plant. And competitor pricing.”

  “Perfect. Garcia, the engineer, should bring production news down to
the old plant at eight thirty. You get the customers and suppliers and pricing. I want to think about the brand.”

  “I don’t have to come down to the old plant this morning. I know it runs.”

  “I’d like you to come, Annette. You’re too important, and you’d be missed. And bring copies of the pricing you built against the offer on the old plant, along with the stuff on the line ­improvements and the Canadian fish, and if you want to escape having to talk about it all, some one-page summaries of ­everything. After that, call whoever works in finance, and anybody else useful, get them into the new plant and looking for the information about customers and suppliers. Let’s pretend we’re going to have all we need by the time Baxter Blume gets here. The lead Baxter Blume guy will be a friend, but even so, it’ll be his baby when he gets here, and I don’t want to be stepping on his toes to get this or that possibly helpful file. Also, it might be helpful to know whether the fat boys were padding their salaries.”

  “They gave themselves bonuses at each milestone toward completion of the new plant.”

  “Good. That’ll give my friend Remy another stick for keeping them off our backs.” Carol said that.

  And then she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What about Dave Parks?”

  Annette said, “Was Dave a crook, too? Is that what you’re asking?”

  This was one question she didn’t want to ask without a lot of preparation. It certainly wasn’t a question Annette should have to answer. Carol said, “We’re working with him, regardless.”

  Annette said, “He did not take the bonuses. Do you want to know if I’m a crook, too?”

  Carol didn’t say a word.

  Annette said, “Well, I’m not.”

  Since her first burials, if Carol couldn’t be sure about somebody, and she needed them too much to get rid of them, she kept an eye on them and focused their work as tightly as she could. You learned that it never helped wheels go around when you asked people if they were rats, whether they were rats or not.

  Annette said, “None of us liked being sold to the Germans and then the Japanese. After that happens a couple of times, you don’t care as much about the company. Some people are going to say the hell with it. Dave didn’t, and neither did I.”

  Annette sounded hurt and angry, and frankly, the last thing Carol wanted was to lose Annette, or Dave Parks. She sensed another punch coming from Annette, and she waited for it.

  “Can I ask you something, Carol?”

  Here it came. Carol said, “Sure.”

  “Are you a crook, Carol?”

  Carol was relieved that Annette had asked. She hoped it would clear the air. She said, “Thank you for asking, Annette. No. I haven’t always gotten it right, but, no. I’m a pretty straight businessman, like you, like Dave.”

  Annette said, the hurt and anger gone from her voice, “Except you and I are women. And you know, there won’t be windows to the outside at the old plant, when we move the offices downstairs. There may not be electricity either, if we can’t figure out where that’s going.”

  “Let’s worry about the electricity. But can we have fun without windows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the hell with the windows.”

  Carol hung up with Annette feeling, surprisingly, that they had done all kinds of useful work, even if she wasn’t sure what all the kinds were.

  She called Parks to set up a midday meeting with everybody at the new plant, after they’d gone through things at the old plant.

  She also told him about what else Annette had found in Mathews’s separate file cabinet during the night.

  He said, “Far freaking out.”

  Carol said, “Absolutely. And Annette is good.”

  “Annette is good,” Parks said. “Also, you know, we won’t have windows downstairs, which means we’ll all smell like fish sticks.”

  “If that’s the least of it, I want to smell like a fish stick.”

  Carol was feeling satisfied herself. She had her team, the heart of her organization, in place. She’d gotten extra leverage on the fat boys if she needed it, and she’d gotten a free upgrade on the lines in the plant along with the possible benefit of Canadian fish. She’d also gotten Baxter to send her people to bury the new plant and set up an offering for the old one. That she’d gotten his blessing was not a practical thing, but it mattered to her.

  She hung up with Parks and went into her laptop. She set up a document with her last 1040 and a summary of her net worth. She didn’t dwell on how pitiful the Baxters of the world would find her net. She didn’t dwell on what the line workers would think. She didn’t dwell on how much of it she’d have to risk to open the wallets of the once and future employees of Elizabeth’s Fish and the citizens of Elizabeth Island. She wanted everybody who invested to be able to know that she was putting herself at serious risk.

  She got in the car and drove down to the harbor.

  It was four o’clock in the morning. The rain was done. She was not the least bit tired, and it was not the old plant she wanted to see. She was feeling as if anything could happen and all of it would be good, and she went to the other side of the harbor, to where Easy Parsons’s boat was tied up.

  The tide must have been higher, and she came along the common pier and between the buildings to face the superstructure of his boat. His bright deck lights weren’t on, and she turned off her own headlights. There were security lights on the pier, but she was parked in shadow.

  She got out of the car and walked to the edge of the pier and looked into the working deck. It was a big boat, but it wouldn’t be big out of sight of land. It didn’t look like Easy was around. She could have gone on board, but in the steps it had taken her to walk from her car, all her confidence had evaporated. She didn’t know if she was more shy about going on his boat when he wasn’t there or when he was. She went back to her car and closed the door and sat for a minute. She took off the jacket to her suit and folded it on the seat beside her and closed her eyes.

  She heard the gulls and knew she had been sleeping. It was light but not yet bright.

  Her first thought was that she had her own company, and for an instant she didn’t believe it and was frightened and pissed off and missing her dad, and then just as quick it was all real and everything was terrific.

  On the hood of the car was a red and white canister of Quaker Oats.

  Easy sat on a rubber tub beside her window. He wore jeans and the kind of worked-in chambray shirt that the shark at the town meeting last night would never own. His arms reached over his knees. He was studying his boat and he looked happy.

  She tried to put down her window, but the car wasn’t running. She started the car, and Easy waved as if she were leaving. Carol laughed.

  She put down the window and turned off the car, and behind him the pier ran out a hundred yards lined with cold-storage sheds and small, shuttered seafood outfits.

  She smiled and said, “What’s with the oatmeal?”

  From a paper bag, he took a banana and an apple and a green paper carton of strawberries and put them on the hood beside the oats.

  There out her windshield, everything looked as brightly pretty and surprising as she could imagine. She guessed he’d heard she wanted oatmeal and fruit at St. Peter’s Breakfast. She said, “Small world.”

  “When we go out on my boat, you won’t think small world.”

  She wasn’t sure if he was inviting her onto his boat right now, but she realized that if she left the car here, people would see it and think she’d spent the night on Easy’s boat. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted anyone to think that, though she had come all the way down here.

  Easy said, “You kissed me last night.”

  That sounded like another invitation. She wanted to kiss him again. That was why she’d come down here. But she wasn’t ready. She said, as if it
were a conversation she had all the time, “I haven’t brushed my teeth.”

  He let her off the hook. “Then let’s walk to breakfast at St. Pete’s,” he said.

  She got out of the car and closed her door, and he leaned back in her window and, like he’d spent his whole life knowing to do it, got her jacket.

  Water Line

  He didn’t jump up and down, didn’t want to scare her off, but Easy had himself a date.

  St. Peter was so interested in doing Carol the giant favor of making oatmeal and cutting up fruit and checking with Carol that he was getting it right, that there wasn’t time for Carol and Easy to talk. Next came the old-timers who crawled in every morning to see if anybody’d died, and they figured out Carol was the one who had spoken at Town Hall the night before. Which made it a responsibility they tell her what it had been like in their day, when you could walk across the harbor on fishing boats. And that was true, but again no conversation between Easy and Carol. Still, it was sweet to see her relax into being accepted in this harbor breakfast dive. Had to be nicer for her than going from one town to the next, year after year, without ever belonging. Today she belonged.

  As they walked on down to the old plant, Easy thought about holding her hand and didn’t. He didn’t want to distract her if she was getting into her business frame of mind. Either that or he was afraid. He wondered if she was nervous around him. She had kissed him. For him, it had been a while since he’d touched a woman, and since Mississippi, since Angie died, Carol was the first woman he’d wanted to care about. Last night he was all there for kissing her. This morning, after being so proud about getting a date with a nice-looking woman, he was afraid to hold her hand, and he figured if he got past that, he would probably make both of them unhappy. He wanted to run home to the boat.

  As the two of them approached the plant, it wasn’t hard to pick up that they were the center of attention for Parks and Buddy and Annette Novato and Anna Rose, which killed what was left of the date thing for Easy. Ben Garcia was there, too, and Easy didn’t know him more than to nod hello, but he was the engineer for the old plant, and looked like he was fifteen.