by Ed Hurst
***
No one would mistake him for a movie star. He was handsome enough, but it was more a matter of how he carried himself. It was self-confidence on a different level. Without domineering or demanding, it seemed as if he could have commanded any whim crossing his mind and people would jump. It was the presence he projected when he walked into the room.
He was the new guy, officially an unimportant nobody, hired on a peripheral contract. He had no office, nor was there any requirement, so no one had to make room for him. For that matter, his office was in his backpack, an aging but durable laptop. Someone back in the States had hired him to conduct surveys and write the reports no one else had time to do, reports that would be read by some oversight committee at some regulatory agency. The few in the admin offices who knew about his contract spoke as if he was simply a friend of someone important, carrying out a make work mission. But this was hardly a choice assignment.
He flashed his badge to the head-count at the doorway, signed the register, and then strolled nonchalantly down the serving line, picking out some of this and that. The food was always decent, adequate, but nothing to write home about. The cafeteria was the largest single open room on the installation, almost geographically dead center. Perhaps you could have dug through the facility archives and found out what it was originally, but it probably wasn’t any kind of dining facility, more like an industrial assembly line. Current operations never seemed to justify budgeting for refurbishing the place, not even so much as painting the bare concrete floor. But the staff kept it clean, the kitchen always smelled okay, so no one felt the need to pick through their food looking for inedible debris.
The place was used as an ad hoc meeting room when someone’s cramped office wouldn’t hold the bodies for a conference, so there were always extra tables. As he passed, a few of the friendlier workers greeted and welcomed him. He declined offers to join any of the groups, but took up one of the empty tables off to one side.
Among the folks at lunch today were some of the more socially active women you could find in any bunch of paper pushers working for the various government agencies sponsoring facilities like this. We’ve all seen the type: some divorced, some never married and all hungry for fresh meat. Three in particular tried to flirt with him. His expression was mild, almost friendly, but he never quite smiled at them. He answered with precious few words when he deemed it appropriate, but was largely uncommunicative. What he said suggested he really needed to spend time getting things set up for his work.
So at the small table alone, his food was on one side and the laptop was placed on the other. He divided his time between eating, drinking and poking at the computer. His eyes seldom left the screen or his food tray.
2
Coming to work at a government installation of this sort always required everyone to pass through a selection of offices so the proper support system could be engaged. His contract required precious little, but bureaucratic procedures seldom varied. There was at first a struggle by the various bureaucrats trying to understand just how little they were required to do for him. Aside from basic life support and computer network access, there really wasn’t anything he needed. He still had to report to the community management for the sake of his human existence and presence on the facility, but he was otherwise entirely independent. He was not a community asset aside from bearing his share of the load for using what he needed. Since there were almost no military personnel there, just about everything was by contract. So all he had to actually do was appear at a couple of monthly functions and clean his own quarters.
There had been a pretty poor response from the host nation locals on the janitorial contracts, so not every building was properly covered. He seemed to take that in stride. The only space left was on the upper floor of what had been a military barracks long ago. They convinced facilities management to clear the stored junk from the old floor commander room next to the stairwell for him. This way he had a private toilet and shower, plus enough space to secure the one odd item on his contract: a bicycle.
Motor vehicles would always be at a premium and it seemed he had known this before shipping over from the States. So there was a provision in his contract to ship a bicycle he owned. This simply contributed to his already very high degree of independence.
The whole image of a man whose age was hard to guess, but obviously mature, striking but entirely private, friendly even as he was standoffish, was just a bit much for the humdrum world of government bureaucrats. There was endless speculation about how much of these oddball provisions were part of some kind of spying mission. Was it really all just some silly make work project with no real work, or was he part of the numerous clandestine agencies in the government? The few representatives of such agencies on the installation denied it, but that was their job, wasn’t it?
As anyone might expect, this served only to fuel greater interest from the bored flirty women working there.
3
Rebecca wasn’t one of those bored flirty women.
She might have been, but it would have taken entirely too much effort to be somebody she wasn’t. Growing up in rural Tennessee, she did what most country girls did, but wasn’t pretty enough to get that many dates. Not homely, just no sparkle. On a whim, when a public school exam pegged her as talented in whatever incomprehensible skills and character traits government bureaucracies were seeking, she took a job offer at some big welfare office off in the city as mail clerk. That led to data entry, then some advancement courses, and so forth. When other jobs opened up, if one seemed half-way interesting, she grabbed it. She moved across the country several times and never saw much of her home state again, though she carried that rural Tennessee drawl wherever she went.
She was never really ambitious, never really qualified for big promotions, always hitting that solid middle level of management everywhere she went. Somehow, she found herself assigned some nebulous job as Community Coordinator on this God-forsaken installation. She laughingly called her office Gossip Central, since it seemed little more than that in terms of how it actually operated. In the typical fulfillment of bureaucratic requirements, written by a string of people who had never done any similar work at any time in their lives, and approved by officials who didn’t in the least care what it was really all about, she had all the hassles of any other bureaucrat in any other office and really didn’t have to do a darn thing that mattered.
But that would have been against her conscience, so she did what little she could to bless people with some sense of community and belonging informally. All the other stuff associated with her job was simply justification for paying her. Everyone liked her but no one really loved her.
It’s not as if she never dated anyone; she was no virgin. She had been burned enough times in romance to be very cautious because she knew she had none of the assets and talents as the flirty bunch. Like most women, she worked out in the gym out of sheer boredom, so had to listen to a lot of the sort of women’s locker-room gossip she found wholly distasteful. Her reaction wasn’t prudish and she sometimes wished she had some tales of her own. Not that she would ever tell anyone if she did. Maybe a couple of pals, but this was during a time in the natural bureaucratic rhythm of life when she had no close friends, no confidants.
Completely by accident she was the one person on the installation who actually knew something about the new guy. It was simply her job. In the routine procedures of taking his place on the installation, he had to visit her office so she could run through her official spiel. Perhaps it was entirely random, but in the long list of offices he had to visit during in-processing, he came to hers almost last.
4
His name was Sherrod Franklin. He told her it was typically shortened to Rod and that’s how he signed most things. She asked him to call her Becky. It was painfully obvious he was a military veteran; that much was in the paperwork attached to the contract they all got to see. Everything else was a mystery.
If anyone arou
nd there knew that gossip was mostly baloney, it was Becky. Still, she found herself quite surprised when his personality seemed nothing like the chatter she heard from the other women. By now, a trio in particular had managed to foist themselves into his company at one or another of the mealtimes. Despite all their best efforts, it seemed he never revealed much of anything. One of the flirts remarked he had a way of turning the conversation away from himself after repeated blunt questions. He used little references from literature, history and the typical movies and music. Their pooled knowledge drew an image of a most mysterious gentleman who seemed to know something about everything, yet said almost nothing which wasn’t somehow an echo of what they had revealed already. He showed no interest in correcting a blatant lie about him, leaving them in some confusion as to what was true.
To Becky, he seemed completely open and honest. True, he was in no hurry to tell his tale, but there was no evasion. Instead, the answers were simply far out of the normal band of expectations. You would never have guessed any significant portion of the truth about him. Rod could not be characterized easily because he simply didn’t fit into any of the standard categories. Still, within the