by Jon Methven
“I’m excited, Whitman,” I say, clapping my hands. “Let’s really shake things up.”
Here Comes The Fan Club
I enjoy checking the mail, the domestic coordination of a synchronized world knowing where I exist and conjuring the mechanics to communicate my participation in global debt and retail discounts. Today is an exception. There are several bills, including a past due notice from Devin Brenner who is charging me to oversee the Cooperative Marriage, along with an informal letter from Duffy O’Neal letting me know a formal letter is due to arrive. The informal letter is meant to be friendly. The formal letter will contain the same language and will be signed by my neighbors. This is the homeowners association’s first step in ousting my family from Slancy’s gated inclusion. It could go the other way, the friendly letter points out, if I maintain a low profile, make amends for my transgressions, and get rid of the feral cat.
In the past few days, Clint Eastwood has widened his patrol staking out the Jays’ yard to the north, the Hendersons to the south, and making a sand trap on the seventh fairway its official litter box. He attacked a female golfer who landed her second shot in his shithole. He scratched up a foursome of bankers. He went after the Murphys’ nanny who doused the cat with pepper spray she was saving to ward off perverts. I owe the Murphys a canister of rape spray, which comes in a convenient package of four at VillageShop. Overall, the chipmunk epidemic has improved, though I fished two bodies out earlier this week and one of the light fixtures was destroyed.
Laura wants to fight about the informal letter along with a comment I made that I am halting use of toiletries, specifically shampoo and deodorant. I convince her that we should hold off on the fight, outlying a three-point plan for how this disagreement should proceed. Otherwise, we will duplicate our squabble—once for the informal letter, again for the formal letter. She is furious with this agenda and initiates a fight about my miscomprehension of the letter’s importance. Technically, we are fighting about my approach to the impending fight, though I think it is all the same fight, and for good measure I let fly Penelope Garcia and Lustfizzle and whether or not I will have a job to pay for the lawyers if our homeowner dispute continues. This turns into an argument about responsibility and marriage, and eventually bickering over what we are fighting about, which proves my point—that we should have waited to have one, defining fight.
Laura, exasperated, retires to the bedroom with a glass of wine. I take the bottle to the backyard, light a fire, and shake out one of the last six Luderica that I wash down with the Bordeaux. I am aware there is someone sitting in my chilly yard near the shed, watching me work the fire pit. Once settled, I discover Josey Mateo, the Gopa secretary with the inked out skin who volunteers with the drama department. It takes a moment to click. My VillageShop representative, Angela, who threatened to visit this evening.
Josey holds my cat and strokes the mangy fur. “Tug.”
“Angela.”
She carries her chair closer to the fire. Josey is Dominican, her brown skin speckled with ink drawings of animal totems she composes in bathroom mirrors. Rumor from the nannies and theater parents is that she has a mental tic that incites the animal drawings when she experiences anxiety. Despite the hobby, she is known as an organized and digitally sophisticated employee, and a sufficient addition to Gopa’s administration, which is forever floundering under the caustic expectations of private school parents. As an afterschool volunteer, she has been a strong supporter of Our Town, especially Iliza who has relied on Josey’s feedback this spring. It does not hurt that Josey has a crush on me, which has permitted me stray conversations to learn the things my daughter refuses to relay.
She sneezes. “Just a cold going around school.”
“I already had it.”
“You’re lucky the cat is alive. If you harmed it, I would have handled you differently.” She extends a hand. I offer the bottle. “So what did happen to your nanny, Mister Pistilini?”
“I didn’t kill her. Don’t believe the rumors.”
“I heard she was stealing from you.”
“She might have been.”
“So you killed her.”
“I didn’t kill her,” I say, snatching the bottle. “At least, not that I remember.”
She rubs the cat. “A white, yuppie, private school shithead like you—if there was even a chance you did it, the police would have nailed you for sure. Dealing with rapists and meth heads all day, you’d be a white whale. The fact you are not in prison proves your innocence.”
“How can you be sure?”
The ink drawings climb across her skin to pursue my eyes, her animals staring into my own primitive chambers. “Because you’re a good person. A good father. You want to do the right thing, even when the right thing seems impossible. The best weatherman in the whole city, nearly forty days perfect.”
“Thank you.”
“I know everything.” She shifts closer until I smell the rank of my unwashed cat, myself, Josey’s illness. “I know about your shopping habits. I know about your marriage. I know about Moveable Museums.” She reaches for the bottle. “We have some things to discuss, Mister Pistilini.”
“Call me Tom.”
I should not trust her. I signed a confidentiality agreement. The way the nannies would spread the gossip and distort even the unforgiveable aspects make it a necessity our news does not get out before it is time. But as I sit near her, the inky specks of morphed animation, there is a symbiosis, her inscriptions and my chemical tribe. I am certain I will tell Josey Mateo everything I know about Moveable Museums, about my marriage and children, about the cat and the chipmunks and Ray McClutchen’s tricycle, which I do not recall tinkering with but probably did.
She rubs the fur, cat fast asleep. “What’s the cat’s real name?”
“Clint Eastwood. Like I told you.”
Josey’s attention drifts into the trees. “Clint Eastwood is pregnant.”
Part
Two
A Walk Down Murder Lane
On June 23, 1986, Kenneth William Walls walked into his place of employment, the US post office in Mirth, New Jersey, and gunned down seventeen employees before turning the weapon on himself. Known as pleasant and soft-spoken Kenny to his colleagues, he was the furthest thing from a madman, right up until the shooting. Afterward, news shows dispatched reporters to Mirth to speak to the townsfolk, each time another neighbor or colleague or long lost cousin coming forward with innuendo that the signs were there all along.
Forgotten in the annals of mass shootings in the United States, “Going Postal” was the phrase that office workers feared in the late eighties. It was not the angry, bossy, irreverent colleagues that were the concern, rather, the quiet ones, the heartbroken, the slump-shouldered weaklings who came to work each morning for thirty years, going about their routines, allowing the rage to build until it exploded in irrational whodunit.
Mirth is a landlocked town of 2,500 residents, fourteen miles to the nearest lake, and twenty-two miles from Slancy. People never leave Mirth. They are born there and live out their days remembering the massacre of Eighty-Six. Three decades later, everyone has a story. Everyone is connected to someone who was there, or knew someone who was there, or can relay a lucid account of what contributed to Kenny Walls’ uprising.
Harry suggested at least one member of each family should attend. I take off the day, as does Jackson, and we load a bus along with the Sedlocks and Olivia and head for Mirth. A young man who looks like a miniature version of Tom Petty is our tour guide. He pops up as the bus rolls across the town line and does not stop talking for two hours. We visit the old post office, now a fenced-off memorial that gets mowed weekly and painted every five years. We wander the property, blood and gore removed. The guide talks us through how Walls entered that day, his cubbyhole, where each victim met their end. He points out scratch marks at the base of a door that th
e carpenters neglected to conceal. We drive to the high school Kenny attended. We meet old neighbors. We ask unrehearsed questions to Vernon Shaw, who probably has a career and family and identity, but is known in Mirth as Kenny Walls’ bowling partner, and that is who he is. Vernon answers kindly, thoughtfully, telling stories about Kenny that make him seem so human even thirty years later we cannot believe he was capable of the crime. “Used to buy chips and grape soda from the vending machine on bowling night. Not much of a drinker, Kenny.”
We load the bus and drive to 17 Hickory Lane, Kenny Walls’ home, where his widow still resides. She invites us in for a look at his room, his “stuff” still in the basement that brings to mind the hoarded junk of a teenager—baseball cards, train sets, a poster of Elvira, a mild fascination with outer space. Tina, the widow, sits with us for thirty minutes and snaps off one-liners about her notoriety that was never sought but now has become her retirement fund. I believe Harry paid her just enough to keep her hands from shaking for a day, a back counter littered with empties. Jackson slips a few bills onto the counter when we leave.
On the bus back, we contemplate the hell we just toured. Harry is on his feet, fidgeting, calling for feedback. Olivia’s accent has grown hazy from the excitement. Allie sits next to me rubbing my thigh, not any sexual attraction but a diverse hysteria that she does not know what to do with her hands. It really was an intriguing tour and we can all sense the good fortune coming our way. This is how we pay for colleges and mortgages. This is how we expand our pancake business. This is how we make marriage work.
“What do we think?” Harry says. “The widow? Too much, or does she play.”
“I thought she was excellent,” Olivia says. “So believable.”
“That’s because she’s the real widow,” Harry says. “And now an employee of Moveable Enterprises. And the length? We need to trim it back to ninety minutes. Was Stephen too long?” Stephen is the Tom Petty doppelganger who is sound asleep.
“Stephen displayed such energy,” Olivia says. “The length was excellent.”
“I believe it could use a shortening,” Jackson says. “Especially for older clients. Can’t be on their feet that long. But otherwise excellent.”
“Excellent point,” Harry says. This is called workshopping, he explains.
Everything is excellent, Allie is talking so quickly I am slightly aroused at how pleasant it must be to live with someone like this, a bus ride summoning the emotions of a wet, horny teenager. I am certain the Sedlocks will return to Slancy and disappear into their perfect house to fuck like life-sentenced felons before the kids arrive from school, and then Harry will whiteboard our feedback over a bottle of Chardonnay. I pop a Luderica to extinguish the mental sadness, a cathartic eclipse that something dark and perplexing has passed between my neighbors and me.
There are various tours and price points. Harry explains the complicated algorithm. Moveable will begin the regional expedition at a hardware store in Midtown, where four people lost their lives, stopping at a shopping mall in Staten Island, the post office in Mirth, New Jersey, and capping the day with the crown jewel, the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty-seven people died. We will run six tours a day for starters. In the first year, a second route will be added, the Premier Route, which will cover mass shootings along the Eastern seaboard—from Binghamton, New York, to Sandy Hook, to the intriguing murder of five Amish girls in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, to Virginia Tech where thirty-two people were killed. There are three-, five-, and seven-day options, with stopovers at great shopping and food. There will also be a national tour for diehards who can afford to spend eight weeks on the road, crossing the United States, visiting sights, drinking craft beers, stopping by places like Columbine, Orlando, Parkland, Las Vegas, and Oklahoma City, and snapping selfies of our national conscience.
How To Create A Standcake
Place the nonallergenic, gluten-free ingredients in a bowl. Mix thoroughly. Cook the pancakes. Let them cool. Place one on a flat surface. Roll loosely until it is about an inch in diameter. The little pancake person should not be too fat, thus disrespectful to obese customers, or too thin, in which case it will not stand properly. The proper thickness is roughly the distance of the top half of the thumb.
Once rolled, place the pancake into a Standcake holder, which come in two, six, and twelve hole sizes. Push the pancake person in firmly so it does not unravel, but not so hard that it crushes the pancake “legs.” Pancakes can be decorated in one of 1,400 possible scenarios (see the Standcake manual for instructions) using the fruit-based frosting (see manual for recipe).
Do not deviate from the instructions. Even a small misstep will result in listless pancake people, hunched over so they cannot be decorated. This process was developed by a man and wife over the course of two years, during which they sacrificed social lives and marital commitments to transform the basic element of a comfort food breakfast into a trendy, edgy snack that can be consumed at any time of the day by children, ensuring parents will not feel guilty about feeding their kids junk food. Also great for birthdays, weddings, and bar/bat mitzvahs.
Some Kind Of Record
A courier arrives at the Channel Fourteen newsroom with a package. Inside is a lone lacrosse ball. This follows a similar incident from a week earlier in which a parcel was left incorrectly at the Hendersons, and again at the Jays, Jackson opening it to reveal another of the round projectiles. He delivered it to my backyard to find my Jacuzzi littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts, issuing me a terse lecture about responsibility and feuds and how I need to get my pill consumption under control, which I have cut back on, mostly because my stock is running low. I suppose I did not expect Toby Dalton to go away quietly after I strangled him in the bathroom. It feels like an organized assault as opposed to lone intimidation by one insignificant teenaged miscreant. Perhaps he has engaged the entire lacrosse team in our dispute, taking away from valuable practice time, and that I, Tom Pistilini, might be the most fearsome competition the Gopa Worthy face all season. I contemplate the complexity of youth athletics on the Sunday morning I arrive from the backyard to find the letter on the counter, the homeowners association having made good on its promise.
Laura has read the first of what will be ten official letters, a legal technicality, signed by our neighbors and fellow barbecue patrons, detailing my offenses. The feral cat. The backyard landscaping for which I did not ask for, or receive, approval from the homeowners association planning board. The designer chipmunks native to Slancy, their nut allergies, and my purposely poisoning them with gallon-sized jugs from VillageShop. For each chipmunk corpse found near my property going forward, I will be fined $1,000. The association is sending Head of Security Bill Chuck to confiscate the BB gun, which is not illegal though I was seen brandishing it at a nearby residence by several witnesses. The letter does not mention the crossbow, the power saw, or the arsenal of BB guns still in the packaging I have hidden in the shed. It does not point out that I have been wandering my neighbors’ yards at night, awakening mid-blackout on strange porches, fairways, the East Bridge. Nor does it reference the savages clawing their way into all of our futures. It is my task to remove the cat within thirty days. After that it will be removed by force.
“Don’t you see, Laura?” I am guilty of every infraction the letter outlines. My only defense is to make Laura feel she is not seeing the big picture, not understanding the conspiracy afoot.
“We could lose the house, Tom.”
“We’re not going to lose the house.”
“We could lose the business.”
“We’ll hire a lawyer,” I say. “We’ll fight these accusations.”
She swings the letter around until it gets caught in a gust of exhaustion. The edges make crackling noises that trigger my playful button, and I suppress a painful smile. My indictment is a paper airplane zooming through our kitchen; the only thing missing
is the sound of a pretend engine from Laura’s mouth.
“Everything in the letter is true. We don’t have money for a nanny. How can we afford a lawyer?”
Laura is right, of course. We own the land and pay the mortgage, but at any time the homeowners association can vote to rescind our access to the gated community. We would be paying for property we are not permitted to use, a situation we could fight, but it would be expensive. It happened to the Parkers two years earlier. Regardless that his yard was not zoned for it, Tim Parker was building a helicopter landing in his backyard to improve his commute into the city. They voted out the Parkers and turned the property into a driving range. I know there are plans to expand the golf course, and the positioning of my land would give them an eighth hole, one away from relevancy. Everyone on this island, including Laura and myself, adore regulation, the idea that while we cannot control the world, we can regulate our slice of it in Slancy.
The bigger concern is Standcake, our ethical pancake business that has blossomed into the trendy dessert—“disruptive dessert,” Laura calls it. Everyone loves the pancakes and that they are made from ethical ingredients, by ethical parents, decorated with smoothie syrups and frosting made with real fruit that customers adore. Lawsuits cost money that we need for pancake batter.
“An organized, systematic attack,” I say.
“Who is attacking us besides you, Tom?”
“Everyone.”
“Who is everyone?”
“You just don’t get it, Laura.” I rattle off our enemies. “The homeowners. The lacrosse fathers.” I grab the letter to show her a name. “Even the McClutchens.”
“Don’t bring Ray into this.” Laura is brilliant, smarter than me. If there were a conspiracy she would sniff it out early. She walks close and looks over my shoulder, guilty in our own home. She’s in a ragey whisper that summons an animalistic scurry through my ganglia. I want to tear off her panties with my teeth and let them dangle from a fang while we argue. “I heard a rumor the other day,” she whispers.