The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  “I’ll tell her you have a big dick.”

  “She already knows. I’m going to text her right now about you.”

  Tim stood to pull his phone out and then went around to Mike’s side so he could see the text.

  Hon, Mike our driver wants to meet you. He saves our butts every day and is the bravest of the team, next to me

  “Next to you?” Mike elbowed him.

  “Write something.” Tim proudly slid his cell over and watched Mike type.

  Hi, Blondie, Mike here. This is gonna be fun.

  DAVIS

  He could hear the murmurings of his wife and daughter upstairs, while he stared at the white screen of his laptop. “Selma Richardson was born,” Davis finally wrote, and then he realized that, while he knew the year of his aunt’s birth because she was one year older than his mother, he didn’t know the month or day, and he didn’t know anyone still alive who would know it. “Selma Richardson (1933-2017) passed away peacefully on Monday, September 29, at her home in Sunnyside Village. She was the daughter of…” And he filled in all of the dead relations and himself. What he remembered of her was all of the weird stuff that kids focus on, like that she grew corn in her front yard, that she forced a second helping of everything on all children, that she was blind as a bat in a swimming pool and would glom onto you as you swam by, not much that belonged in her obituary. He recalled that she attended Marymount College, because his mother used to say it in a mocking, singsongy voice, so he wrote that down. People should write their own obits and keep them with their wills. In his, he would list some of the journals in which he had published and the fact that he was a loving husband and father, and perhaps a grandfather if Megan had children by then and kept them alive. And what if it said that he’d discovered the reappearance of the hyena in North America? That’s New York Times obit-worthy, my friend. And he would select as its companion the photo of him standing in the drifty snow of Mt. Rainier in a fur-lined hood with an ice pick in one mitt and a .357 in the other, the very photo he looked at now in its bold frame on his desk.

  Mexico? He thought he heard them talking about Mexico up there. Megan had clearly squealed the word. This was upsetting because hadn’t he told Jenny that they could not afford a vacation? Not when he might be soon out of work?

  # # #

  “Permission to come aboard?” he said from the hall outside his daughter’s bedroom door.

  “Come in!” Jenny called out.

  No room for him on the bed with them, so he perched on a corner of Megan’s vanity, having to sweep away some of the clunky iron-forged puzzles that Megan collected—those curling, twisting, interlocking pieces that she loved to discover how to separate. “I’ve been writing Aunt Selma’s obit.”

  Both women frowned. “Was she the sister Grandma hated?” Megan asked.

  “Grandma didn’t hate anyone,” Jenny told her.

  “She wasn’t in love with Selma,” Davis allowed. “I’m finding it hard to figure what would be important to her, which events and accomplishments. It would be best if everyone wrote their own obituaries.”

  “I know what I would say,” Megan said, overloudly.

  “Let’s find out what Mom would say first,” said Davis.

  Jenny covered her mouth for a moment, looking right and left, and then removed her hand and began: “Jennifer Beardsley died making squid pomodoro and smoking a cigarillo in her tiny kitchen overlooking the turquoise sea…at the age of a hundred and one.” She squeezed Megan’s thigh. It was nice to see them connecting in the way Jenny had always wanted.

  “Sounds delicious,” he said. Maybe they should all go to Mexico once he got tenure, spend his inheritance on a fun memory before Megan left them. “And what about your major accomplishments?” he asked Jenny.

  “That would be the major accomplishment.”

  Megan then stood, hugged herself, and beamed up at the star-stickered ceiling. “Megan—” she said of herself. “Wait, what’s Prince Harry’s last name?” she asked her mother.

  “Windsor?” Jenny guessed.

  Looking up again. “Megan Windsor—”

  “So she likes a redhead!” Davis said, fitting himself into the family moment.

  “Megan Windsor”—Megan swept up both arms—“died while riding a camel naked through a coconut grove.” And the arms floated back down.

  “A coconut bonked her on the head?” laughed Jenny.

  “No…” The word was drawn out by Megan while she imagined more. “She was shot by her father with a three-fifty-seven.”

  “Now, wait.” Davis pushed his hands out to stop this.

  “Which was always loaded. Everyone knew he always wanted to do it.” She and Davis dead-eyed each other until Jenny said, “She doesn’t mean it.”

  “I thought I asked you not to wear that sweatshirt,” Davis finally said. Megan was wearing the pullover with the University of Vermont logo on it—a V with the allegedly extinct catamount leaping through it. That cat had cost him tenure. He wished he’d never seen it in that empty lot by the Citgo, the long, switching tail moving slowly through the tall grass. “Give it to me,” he said. He held out a hand to her.

  “Okay, but I don’t have anything on underneath. You still want it?” She grasped the bottom of the sweatshirt, ready for the reveal.

  “I’ll get it.” Jenny shooed him out. “You go on now.”

  But he stayed another moment, there on the vanity, shifting a few of the iron puzzles about and remaining in control.

  # # #

  His Taurus Tracker .357 was still there, holstered in the desk drawer, which Davis had just unlocked and opened in order to release the worry that Megan had taken it. She knew how to fire it. Seven years earlier he had let her shoot this gun while they were visiting the cabin of some friends. They were all shooting it, the adults and some teenagers. A row of bottles had been set up, and while the hosts’ children took shots at them, Megan began to ask, then beg, to be given a try. Davis had been showing the other kids how to aim and shoot, and he finally called Megan over—“Come on, Eagle Eye, let’s show ’em what you got”—while everyone else returned to the porch. He wrapped her fingers around the grip and explained how the hammer and trigger worked and then cocked it and aimed with her before letting go and stepping back. She stood with the gun straight-armed and squinted mightily, then turned and pointed the gun at the porched watchers, wailing, “I’m afraid! I can’t do this!”

  Everyone shrieked, “Point the gun down!” “Drop the gun!” All of them ducking behind the railing. Davis lurched up from behind and grabbed her arms, forced them down. “Okay, we’re done.”

  “No, I want to,” she whined. “Help me, Daddy! Help me!”

  He grinned sheepishly at the audience and shrugged, and again he helped her get into position, and he had just let go of her when she swung the gun once more toward the terrified group.

  After prying the revolver from her hands, Davis coolly said, “Okay, you did what you wanted to do.” People always blamed them, Davis and Jenny. Their emotionless attempts to redirect Megan were forever met with raised eyebrows, with people pulling on their lips and shaking their heads.

  Davis shut the drawer and locked it. He’d become a globster, a seemingly unknowable creature that was really a common animal whittled away, a swollen, battered, hairless raccoon.

  TIM

  The M16 was lighter than Tim thought it would be. The gun plus the thirty-round magazine weighed in at just under nine pounds, the instructor said. Tim looped the sling over his shoulder to feel it hanging. “I could carry this on a long hump,” he said to the guide, a rangy old man, loose limbed, seeming more relaxed than anyone Tim had ever met. They stood under a canopy at the firing line of a gun range strewn with junk: old swing sets with frying pans hanging off them, rusty propane tanks, pumpkins on stumps. Stop signs had been planted and painted over with their distance from the firing line.

  “This is the select-fire version, the military version,” the gui
de said of the M16. “It’ll fire semi and full auto. It requires special licensing and is pretty darn expensive.” The man laughed after each phrase, a scratchy heh-heh.

  “I know all about this gun.” Tim nodded, as he inserted his earplugs. Into the Lion’s Mouth had spelled it all out: Marines must pass the marksman test with this weapon in all positions: lying down, sitting, kneeling, and standing, at ranges of two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred yards. Tim snatched it off his back and let one ping off the two-hundred-yard metal sign. The kick had hardly moved him.

  “Nice,” the instructor yelled.

  “Wow, Dad!” shouted Miles, who was still walking along the row of rifles, trying to make a choice.

  Then Tim scoped and pinged the three-hundred-yard sign. He’d been shooting bots in Red Horizon for hours every night. “Can we attack the pumpkins?”

  “Everything out there’s for you.” Which at a hundred and twenty-five bucks per person seemed only right. The M16 ripped the top off a pumpkin, spewing a glob of seedy pulp from the jagged hole.

  “Flip it over to the fun switch,” the man said, and Tim flipped the switch to full auto. He raked a row of plastic liter bottles, which exploded and sloshed up colored water like a fountain getting started.

  “Awesome!” Miles whispered after the echo drifted away.

  “You try something,” Tim told him, and then turned to the instructor. “Kid’s a well-practiced sniper.”

  “Oh, is he now? I think the most fun gun I have is the Glock nine-millimeter automatic, here, Miles. Want to give that a try?” He slid a clip into the handgun and showed Miles the proper stance.

  “You’re an inspiration to men everywhere,” Tim told the guy. “Right up there with guys running a dive shop on a beach.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody’s gotta do it, heh-heh.”

  Then Miles drilled holes into a propane tank, which shot out flames.

  “Woo!” Tim hollered. Miles giggled and kept giggling while a stack of pumpkins became orange, pulpy carnage.

  Tim crossed his arms. “You can empty a magazine in no time, huh?” The price included twenty rounds in each of three guns.

  “Sure can. Want to try the Uzi, Tim?”

  “No, I’m just doing Marine guns. You said you have the M two-forty-nine?”

  “Yep, it’s a very light machine gun with a bipod attached. You can lay on this cardboard here. The linked rounds are a hundred dollars for fifty. I told you linked rounds are extra.”

  “Right.” Tim set his stomach down on the cardboard and snugged up to the gun, with the ammo belt trailing off to the left.

  “Rotate your selector switch from safe to fire and engage your targets.” Tim flipped the switch and smiled up at Miles. The rounds cackled and casings flipped into a pile on the right while glass blasted all over the field. After the last round came a thunder crack and a long, hanging echo. Tim’s arms felt tingly.

  “That’s awesome!” Miles said, hugging his ribs and jumping.

  “I’ll be surprised if that hemlock’s still alive next year,” the man said, staring at the lone tree on the range.

  “Aw, did I rake it?”

  “Shouldn’t have been hanging out on a battlefield, heh-heh.”

  Miles bent his long legs into a crouch and, holding the Uzi chest high, practiced pivoting side to side. Then Tim watched him ding up a bunch of hanging steel plates that rang long afterwards. “There’s a sight on that thing, Miles,” said Tim. The kid had just sprayed. If he wasn’t learning how to shoot from that game, what the hell was the point?

  “The Secret Service used to carry Uzis right underneath their jackets,” the instructor said. “There was a holster that located the gun right under their left arm, out of sight. When you have the stock folded, it becomes a very small gun.” The guy had these tidbits about all of the guns, which made what would have been a very expensive fifteen-minute session stretch out a bit.

  The last gun Tim tried was the M9 Beretta, the standard Marine sidearm for use in close, defensive situations. Mona’s dad had one and had shown it to him when he and Mona were dating.

  “How’s that feel in your hand?” the instructor asked him.

  “Fits it like a glove. Really feels good.”

  “Nice grip there.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Now this is a double-action pistol, so the first trigger pull is harder because it pulls the hammer back. The rest are single-action shots with an easier trigger pull. Take the safety off.”

  Tim arranged his stance and held the gun as the instructor showed him. In that instant, sighting the heart of a man-shaped paper target, he felt changed. He held his breath and thought he could slow his heartbeat until he was stone, moving just the one finger, ZOT! right in the heart.

  “You’re made for this,” the guy told him. “See those gongs hanging on the rod? You can play a song with those.”

  “No way,” said Miles.

  Tim shot each one of the five cast-iron frying pans so they could hear what the gong notes were. “Miles, you hit the one on the right twice after every note I hit.” They took their stances. Plang plang-plang, plang plang-plang rang out like the oompah-pah of a tuba until Tim depleted his ammo. “Our first duet,” he told the guy.

  “I got something else for you, Miles,” the man said and grabbed a folding chair on his way out toward a stump with another pumpkin on it. “Sit here and hold this Glock.” Miles put himself in the chair, about eight feet from the pumpkin, grinning like a kid on his birthday. “Now try to carve a face into it.”

  “No way!” he brayed.

  “Go ahead. Maybe start with the eyes.”

  Tim watched his son straight-arm the gun and punch holes into the pumpkin, drumming his boots on the ground between shots, whipping his hair over his shoulder. The gun’s nose leapt with each shot, then the ahh!—the pop and then the bawl, over and over, as the pumpkin’s features ripped into place.

  # # #

  “That was outstanding.” Miles inspected the sneering pumpkin on his lap in the truck cab. “I’m gonna set this out on the stoop with a candle. Scary as crap.”

  “Looks like that pumpkin had a stroke,” Tim said. “I’m surprised you didn’t have more control given all the hours you practice.”

  “It’s just a video game.”

  “Bingo.” Tim was angry about the money he’d just spent. Highway robbery. Guy sold bullets at jewelry store prices. “Why don’t you learn how to program those games, ruin other boy’s lives?”

  “Way to kill the buzz, Dad.”

  “Look, Miles—are you listening to me?” The truck swerved a bit in Tim’s effort to stare the boy down. “I need you to take on more responsibility, for you and for your mother. You turn sixteen in a month, I want you to have a job.”

  “What’s Mum got to do with it?”

  “If something happens to me, you should be ready to help out.”

  Miles fingered one of the chewed-up pumpkin eyes. “Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m not sick, but what the hell’s the matter with you, Miles? When I was your age, I had dreams. I wanted to improve myself. You lie around like a walnut! Don’t you have any dreams?”

  “I’m not you!” Miles flashed him a look of disgust. “I don’t know what I want to be, okay? At least I won’t be disappointed.” The last sentence fogged up the closed window, an aside to himself.

  “You think I’m a disappointment?” Tim stomped on the brake, shoving the pumpkin into the dashboard as they skidded to a stop on the gravel road. “I’m a fucking disappointment to you?” Miles avoided eye contact as with a growling dog. Tim dropped both meaty hands into his lap. “All I wanted today was to have a little fun. Hey, be a hero to my son, and now you wanna take me down, too?”

  “All’s I’m saying is—”

  “Aw, screw off. You think you’re telling me something new?” Tim opened his door and started it dinging. “I know what shit this all is. My whole life is shit, Miles! You wanna try workin
g for a woman who’s got your balls in her desk drawer? You wanna wreck yourself hauling enough pianos to buy something your wife harps about for ages and then have her tell you she never wanted that house? Never wanted it! You wanna have a—a son who resents you because there’s never any money, and then you take him to have this impossibly expensive fifteen fucking minutes and he says you’re a goddamn disappointment? Gimme that thing!” Tim snatched the pumpkin, swung it over, and dropped it out onto the road. Then he slammed his door, backed up twenty yards to the sound of the engine’s high revving, rammed the truck into drive, and peeled out, blasting through the treasure. As he eased up on the gas and settled in for the drive, he said, “Take that, you big creep.”

  # # #

  Today I painted the snack king in his apron, inside his casa whch is ruin of an old bakry, 100s years old. He stood for me, behind his cart topped with paper sacks rolled down at the neck holdng nuts and seeds that he sells in the Jardin and serves in even tinier paper bags topped w/hot sauce. Red and blue finches in cages behind him. Baby Jesus in a glass box. I hadn’t seen his wife in a while. “Better to be alone than in bad company.” YES YES! Have to sit to paint or left hip howls in torment. Señor smiley will get gobs of money from the Govt if I sign his form. He now has world-class health insurance! Addition to agreement: PHYLLIS MUST BE ON WORLD CLASS HEATH INSURANCE.

  P.S. Saw falcons riding thermals over your future property yesterday. WONDERFLL VIEW LOT WITH POWER! 26K!

  # # #

  Tim’s mother didn’t answer his calls, even as he moved farther back into her apartment, her dogs trying to swim up his legs. He wasn’t so unhappy to be here, for once; it was good to be out of his own house, crowded with angst. “Knock it off!” he told the dogs as he tried to wade through them to the kitchen. God, that was some awful, acrid smell in there. An upturned plate covered one of the electric stove burners. He raised it to find that the coil had melted. How is it possible to melt a burner coil? On the table lay a note:

  Tim,