CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

by George Saunders

  I go back to my Verisimilitude Evaluation on the Cimarron Brothel. Everything looks super. As per my recommendations they’ve replaced the young attractive simulated whores with uglier women with a little less on the ball. We were able to move the ex–simulated whores over to the Sweete Shoppe, so everybody’s happy, especially the new simulated whores, who were for the most part middle-aged women we lured away from fast-food places via superior wages.

  When I’ve finished the Evaluation I go back to my office for lunch. I step inside and turn on the fake oil lamp and there’s a damn human hand on my chair, holding a note. All around the hand there’s penny candy. The note says: Sir, another pig disciplined who won’t mess with us anymore and also I need more ammo. It’s signed: Samuel the Rectifier.

  I call Mr. A and he says Jesus. Then he tells me to bury the hand in the marsh behind Refreshments. I say shouldn’t we call the police. He says we let it pass when it was six dead kids, why should we start getting moralistic now over one stinking hand?

  I say: But sir, he killed a high-schooler for stealing candy.

  He says: That so-called high-schooler threatened Fred Moore, a valued old friend of mine, with a knife.

  A butter knife, I say.

  He asks if I’ve seen the droves of unemployed huddled in front of Personnel every morning.

  I ask if that’s a threat and he says no, it’s a reasonable future prognostication.

  “What’s done is done,” he says. “We’re in this together. If I take the fall on this, you’ll eat the wienie as well. Let’s just put this sordid ugliness behind us and get on with the business of providing an enjoyable living for those we love.”

  I hang up and sit looking at the hand. There’s a class ring on it.

  Finally I knock it into a garbage sack with my phone and go out to the marsh.

  As I’m digging, Mr. McKinnon glides up. He gets down on his knees and starts sniffing the sack. He starts talking about bloody wagon wheels and a boy he once saw sitting in a creek slapping the water with his own severed arm. He tells how the dead looked with rain on their faces and of hearing lunatic singing from all corners of the field of battle and of king-sized rodents gorging themselves on the entrails of his friends.

  It occurs to me that the Mr.’s a loon.

  I dig down a couple feet and drop the hand in. Then I backfill and get out of there fast. I look over my shoulder and he’s rocking back and forth over the hole mumbling to himself.

  As I pass a sewer cover the Mrs. rises out of it. Seeing the Mr. enthralled by blood she starts shrieking and howling to beat the band. When she finally calms down she comes to rest in a tree branch. Tears run down her see-through cheeks. She says there’s been a horrid violent seed in him since he came home from the war. She says she can see they’re going to have to go away. Then she blasts over my head elongate and glowing and full of grief and my hat gets sucked off.

  All night I have bad dreams about severed hands. In one I’m eating chili and a hand comes out of my bowl and gives me the thumbs-down. I wake up with a tingling wrist. Evelyn says if I insist on sleeping uneasily would I mind doing it on the couch, since she has a family to care for during the day and this requires a certain amount of rest. I think about confessing to her but then I realize if I do she’ll nail me.

  The nights when she’d fall asleep with her cheek on my thigh are certainly long past.

  I lie there awhile watching her make angry faces in her sleep. Then I go for a walk. As usual Mr. Ebershom’s practicing figure-skating moves in his foyer. I sit down by our subdivision’s fake creek and think. First of all, burying a hand isn’t murder. It doesn’t say anywhere thou shalt not bury some guy’s hand. By the time I got involved the kid was dead. Where his hand ended up is inconsequential.

  Then I think: What am I saying? I did a horrible thing. Even as I sit here I’m an accomplice and an obstructor of justice.

  But then I see myself in the penitentiary and the boys waking up scared in the night without me, and right then and there with my feet in the creek I decide to stay clammed up forever and take my lumps in the afterlife.

  Halloween’s special in the Park. Our brochure says: Lose Yourself in Eerie Autumnal Splendor. We spray cobwebs around the Structures and dress up Staff in ghoul costumes and hand out period-authentic treats. We hide holograph generators in the woods and project images of famous Americans as ghosts. It’s always a confusing time for the McKinnons. Last year the Mr. got in a head-to-head with the image of Jefferson Davis. He stood there in the woods yelling at it for hours while the Mrs. and the girls begged him to come away. Finally I had to cut power to the unit.

  I drive home at lunch and pick the boys up for trick-or-treating. Marcus is a rancher and Howie’s an accountant. He’s wearing thick fake lips and carrying a ledger. The Park’s the only safe place to trick-or-treat anymore. Last year some wacko in a complex near our house laced his Snickers with a virus. I drove by the school and they were CPRing this little girl in a canary suit. So forget it.

  I take them around to the various Structures and they pick up their share of saltwater taffy and hard tasteless frontier candy and wooden whistles and toy soldiers made of soap.

  Then just as we start across the Timeless Green a mob of teens bursts out of the Feinstein Memorial Conifer Grove.

  “Gangs!” I yell to the boys. “Get down!”

  I hear a shot and look up and there’s Samuel standing on a stump at tree line. Thank God, I think. He lets loose another round and one of the teens drops. Marcus is down beside me whimpering with his nose in my armpit. Howie’s always been the slow one. He stands there with his mouth open, one hand in his plastic pumpkin. A second teen drops. Then Howie drops and his pumpkin goes flying.

  I crawl over and beg him to be okay. He says there’s no pain. I check him over and check him over and all that’s wrong is his ledger’s been shot. I’m so relieved I kiss him on the mouth and he yells at me to quit.

  Samuel drops a third teen, then runs yipping into the woods.

  The ambulance shows up and the paramedics load up the wounded teens. They’re all still alive and one’s saying a rosary. I take the boys to City Hall and confront Mr. A. I tell him I’m turning Sam in. He asks if I’ve gone daft and suggests I try putting food on the table from a jail cell while convicts stand in line waiting to have their way with my rear.

  At this point I send the boys out to the foyer.

  “He shot Howie,” I say. “I want him put away.”

  “He shot Howie’s ledger,” Mr. A says. “He shot Howie’s ledger in the process of saving Howie’s life. But whatever. Let’s not mince hairs. If Sam gets put away, we get put away. Does that sound to you like a desirable experience?”

  “No,” I say.

  “What I’m primarily saying,” he says, “is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.”

  He gets out a Bible and says let’s swear on it that we’ll never hire a crazed maniac to perform an important security function again. Then the phone rings. Sylvia’s cross-referenced today’s Admissions data and found that the teens weren’t a gang at all but a bird-watching group who made the mistake of being male and adolescent and wandering too far off the trail.

  “Ouch,” Mr. A says. “This could be a serious negative.”

  In the foyer the kids are trying to get the loaches in the corporate tank to eat bits of Styrofoam. I phone Evelyn and tell her what happened and she calls me a butcher. She wants to know how on earth I could bring the boys to the Park knowing what I knew. She says she doesn’t see how I’m going to live with myself in light of how much they trusted and loved me and how badly I let them down by leaving their fates to chance.

  I say I’m sorry and she seems to be thinking. Then she tells me just get them home without putting them in further jeopardy assuming that
’s within the scope of my mental powers.

  At home she puts them in the tub and sends me out for pizza. I opt for Melvin’s Pasta Lair. Melvin’s a religious zealot who during the Depression worked five jobs at once. Sometimes I tell him my troubles and he says I should stop whining and count my blessings. Tonight I tell him I feel I should take some responsibility for eliminating the Samuel problem but I’m hesitant because of the discrepancy in our relative experience in violence. He says you mean you’re scared. I say not scared, just aware of the likelihood of the possibility of failure. He gives me a look. I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what they are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking and he says case in point.

  He makes me another and urges me to get in touch with my Lord personally. I tell him I will. I always tell him I will.

  When I get home they’re gone.

  Evelyn’s note says: I could never forgive you for putting our sons at risk. Goodbye forever, you passive flake. Don’t try to find us. I’ve told the kids you sent us away in order to marry a floozy.

  Like an idiot I run out to the street. Mrs. Schmidt is prodding her automatic sprinkler system with a rake, trying to detect leaks in advance. She asks how I am and I tell her not now. I sit on the lawn. The stars are very near. The phone rings. I run inside prepared to grovel, but it’s only Mr. A. He says come down to the Park immediately because he’s got big horrific news.

  When I get there he’s sitting in his office half-crocked. He tells me we’re unemployed. The investors have gotten wind of the bird-watcher shootings and withdrawn all support. The Park is no more. I tell him about Evelyn and the kids. He says that’s the least of his worries because he’s got crushing debt. He asks if I have any savings he could have. I say no. He says that just for the record and my own personal development, he’s always found me dull and has kept me around primarily for my yes-man capabilities and because sometimes I’m so cautious I’m a hoot.

  Then he says: Look, get your ass out, I’m torching this shithole for insurance purposes.

  I want to hit or at least insult him, but I need this week’s pay to find my kids. So I jog off through the Park. In front of Information Hoedown I see the McKinnons cavorting. I get closer and see that they’re not cavorting at all, they’ve inadvertently wandered too close to their actual death site and are being compelled to act out again and again the last minutes of their lives. The girls are lying side by side on the ground and the Mr. is whacking at them with an invisible scythe. The Mrs. is belly-up with one arm flailing in what must have been the parlor. The shrieking is mind-boggling. When he’s killed everyone the Mr. walks out to his former field and mimes blowing out his brains. Then he gets up and starts over. It goes on and on, through five cycles. Finally he sits down in the dirt and starts weeping. The Mrs. and the girls backpedal away. He gets up and follows them, pitifully trying to explain.

  Behind us the Visitor Center erupts in flames.

  The McKinnons go off down the hill, passing through bushes and trees. He’s shouting for forgiveness. He’s shouting that he’s just a man. He’s shouting that hatred and war made him nuts. I start running down the hill agreeing with him. The Mrs. gives me a look and puts her hands over Maribeth’s ears. We’re all running. The Mrs. starts screaming about the feel of the scythe as it opened her up. The girls bemoan their unborn kids. We make quite a group. Since I’m still alive I keep clipping trees with my shoulders and falling down.

  At the bottom of the hill they pass through the retaining wall and I run into it. I wake up on my back in the culvert. Blood’s running out of my ears and a transparent boy’s kneeling over me. I can tell he’s no McKinnon because he’s wearing sweatpants.

  “Get up now,” he says in a gentle voice. “Fire’s coming.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m through. I’m done living.”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “You’ve got amends to make.”

  “I screwed up,” I say. “I did bad things.”

  “No joke,” he says, and holds up his stump.

  I roll over into the culvert muck and he grabs me by the collar and sits me up.

  “I steal four jawbreakers and a Slim Jim and your friend kills and mutilates me?” he says.

  “He wasn’t my friend,” I say.

  “He wasn’t your enemy,” the kid says.

  Then he cocks his head. Through his clear skull I see Sam coming out of the woods. The kid cowers behind me. Even dead he’s scared of Sam. He’s so scared he blasts straight up in the air shrieking and vanishes over the retaining wall.

  Sam comes for me with a hunting knife.

  “Don’t take this too personal,” he says, “but you’ve got to go. You know a few things I don’t want broadcast.”

  I’m madly framing calming words in my head as he drives the knife in. I can’t believe it. Never again to see my kids? Never again to sleep and wake to their liquid high voices and sweet breaths?

  Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.

  Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.

  ISABELLE

  The first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter. We were young, ignorant of mercy, and called her Boneless or Balled-Up Gumby for the way her limbs were twisted and useless. She looked like a newborn colt, appendages folded in as she lay on the velour couch protected by guardrails. Leo and I stood outside the window on cinder blocks, watching. She was scared of the tub, so to bathe her Split Lip covered the couch with a tarp and caught the runoff in a bucket. Mrs. Split Lip was long gone, unable to bear the work Boneless required. She found another man and together they made a little blond beauty they dressed in red velvet and paraded up and down the aisle at St. Caspian’s while Split Lip held Boneless against him in the last pew, shushing her whenever the music overcame her and she started making horrible moaning noises trying to sing along.

  Maintaining Boneless cost plenty. Split Lip’s main job was cop but on the side he sold water purifiers. When the neighborhood changed, the purifier business went belly-up. Split Lip said the niggers didn’t care what kind of poison they put in their bodies. Truth was, the purifiers were a scam. Inside was a sponge and an electric motor connected to nothing. But without the purifier money he couldn’t afford the masseuse who eased Boneless’s bad pain and couldn’t afford to have Mrs. Cavendish in. So before leaving for work he’d put Boneless on the floor with a water bottle and her lunch and a picture book. Halfway through his shift he’d call home and she’d jerk the phone to the floor by the cord and make a certain sound that meant she was fine. In her simple way she understood poverty and never asked him to leave work, and time and again he came home to find her shivering on the floor in soiled pants.

  By this time the panic-sell was in full bloom. Old Poles and Czechs were losing their asses and leaving treasured flower gardens behind in a frenzy. Local industries failed left and right. The stockyard downscaled and Dad was reduced to pushing a gutcart for minimum. Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy. Dad resolved to sell. But it was too late. The moment was past. A big loss was in the cards. The realtor came over and said ten thou. Dad sat looking at him.

  “I pour my life’s blood into this place,” he said, “and you offer me half w
hat I paid?”

  “Market forces at work,” the realtor said. “But all right, all right. Call me a saint walking the face of the earth: ten thousand five.”

  “Get out,” Dad said.

  “Fine,” the realtor said. “Live among the savages forever if you want.”

  “What’s happening to me is a goddamned shame,” Dad said, and threw a scratch pad at him.

  “Agreed,” the realtor said. “But don’t blame me. Blame the spades.”

  Then it was spring, and flowers bloomed in the park.

  Then it was summer and the lagoon scummed over and race riots broke out and tear gas blew over the trees as Leo and I fished for carp.

  One day in June, Split Lip came into the clearing leading a black teen by the ear. We squatted in the reeds. Officer Doyle nudged the teen’s little brother with his billy club. We knew the little brother. He was Norris Crane. He played cornet with me in school, in Amazing Marching Falcons. He was an altar boy whose skin tore like paper. The nuns said that because of his affliction he didn’t have to kneel through Stations but he did anyway and offered it up to the Lord whenever he bled through his pants.

  Officer Doyle said let’s interrogate. Split Lip said I’ll show you interrogation. He pushed the teen into the lagoon and held him under. With his club Doyle made Norris watch. The teen’s hands slapped and slapped. Then Split Lip stood up and the dead teen floated.

  Now that’s interrogation, Doyle said.

  Split Lip said to Norris: Tell a soul and I’ll take it out on your fat-butt mom in a heartbeat.

  We ran home crying. Dad said shut our mouths about it forever. Ma said pray continually and try to forget. But who could forget? Every day on the way to school we saw Norris outside Spritzer’s, becoming the world’s youngest wino. Old lady Spritzer sold to anybody. She was a bitter crone with a thick mustache and big arm veins who’d lost two sons to the Koreans and one to an aging Rush Street queen who brought him back by the neighborhood on weekends in a tremendous purple Lincoln. We’d see Norris puking into the sewer while talking nonsense about the blood of the Lamb and vowing in his high-pitched voice to waste Split Lip. Who would have believed him? He was twelve. He was a sweetheart who in biology had hired Earl Dimps to carve up his fetal pig. Every Halloween he came to school an Apostle and proudly placed his papier-mâché staff in the aisle. Dead brother or no dead brother, his was a kind heart that would never allow him to do anyone harm.