Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  She was on the phone when I came by. She was always on the phone. She wore a headset and was smiling. All the Entronics offices have narrow windows on either side of the doors so everyone can always see inside. There’s really no privacy.

  Joan finally noticed me standing outside her office, and she held up a finger. I waited outside until she beckoned me in with a flick of her left hand.

  “You talked to Lockwood Hotels this morning?” Joan said. She had short, curly, mouse brown hair with wisps of gray near the temple. She never wore any makeup.

  I nodded as I sat.

  “Nothing yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You think maybe it’s time to call in some reinforcements?”

  “Maybe. I can’t seem to get to score with them.” I immediately regretted the sexual metaphor until I remembered that it was actually a sports term.

  “We need that deal. If there’s anything I can do.” I noticed she looked unusually weary, almost beaten down. She had reddish brown circles under her eyes. She took a long sip of coffee from a cat mug. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

  “No, something else,” I said. “You have a couple of minutes now?”

  She glanced at her tiny wristwatch. “I’ve got a lunch any minute, but we could talk until my lunch date shows up.”

  “Thanks. So, Crawford’s out of here,” I said.

  She blinked, not helping me at all.

  “And his whole posse,” I went on. “You’re probably moving up to the DVP job, right?”

  She blinked, hesitated. “Bear in mind that, with the Meister acquisition, we’re going to be cutting back. Anyone who isn’t a top performer.”

  As I thought, I bit my lower lip. “Should I start packing up my desk?”

  “You don’t have to worry, Jason. You’ve made club four years in a row.” “Club,” or Club 101, was made up of those reps who’d outperformed, made 101 percent of their revenue numbers. “You’ve even been salesman of the year.”

  “Not last year,” I pointed out. Last year the oily Trevor Allard got it and won a trip to Italy. He took his wife and then proceeded to cheat on her with some Italian chick he met at Harry’s Bar in Venice.

  “You had a bad fourth quarter. Everyone misses a quarter now and then. Bottom line is, people buy from people they like, and everyone likes you. But that’s not what you came in to talk about.”

  “Joan, do I have a chance at the area manager slot?”

  She looked at me with surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Trevor’s already put in for that, you know. And he’s lobbying pretty hard.”

  Some of the guys called him Teflon Trevor, because he always got away with everything. He kind of reminded me of the unctuous Eddie Haskell in the old Leave It to Beaver TV show. I guess you can tell I waste a lot of time watching old reruns on TV Land.

  “Trevor would be good. But so would I. Do I have your support?”

  “I—I don’t take sides, Jason,” she said unhappily. “If you want me to put in a word for you with Gordy, I’m happy to do so; but I don’t know how much he listens to my recommendations.”

  “That’s all I ask. Just put in a word for me. Tell him I want to be interviewed.”

  “I will. But Trevor is—maybe more Gordy’s type.”

  “More aggressive?”

  “I guess he’s what Gordy calls a meat-eater.”

  Some people called him other things that weren’t so nice. “I eat steak.”

  “I’ll put in a word for you. But I’m not going to take sides. I’m staying completely neutral on this.”

  There was a knock at her door. She made her little beckoning sign with her fingers.

  The door opened, and a tall, handsome guy with tousled brown hair and sleepy brown eyes stood there and flashed her a perfect grin. Trevor Allard was long and lean and muscled and arrogant, and he still looked like the crew jock at St. Lawrence he’d been not too long ago. “Ready for lunch, Joan?” he said. “Oh, hey, Jason. I didn’t see you.”

  5

  Kate was already home from work when I got in. She was lying on Grammy Spencer’s rock-hard couch reading a collection of Alice Adams stories. She was reading it for her book group, nine women she’d gone to school and college with who got together once a month to discuss “literary” novels written by female authors only.

  “I’ve got a game tonight,” I told her after we’d kissed.

  “Oh, right. It’s Tuesday. I was going to try this tofu recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, but I guess you don’t have time, right?”

  “I’ll just grab something on the way to the field,” I said quickly.

  “How about a Boca Burger?”

  “No, I’m fine. Really. Don’t bother.”

  Kate wasn’t a great cook, and this new tofu kick was really bad news, but I admired her for cooking at all. Her late mother didn’t even know how. They’d had a full-time cook on staff until the money disappeared. My mom would come home from a long day working as a clerk-receptionist at a doctor’s office and make a big meal for Dad and me—usually “American chop suey,” which was macaroni and hamburger meat and tomato sauce. I’d never even heard of anyone who had a cook, outside of the movies.

  “So I told Joan that I want to be interviewed for the job,” I said.

  “Oh, honey, that’s terrific. When’s the interview?”

  “Well, I don’t even know if Gordy will interview me for it. I’m sure he wants to give it to Trevor.”

  “He has to at least interview you, doesn’t he?”

  “Gordy doesn’t have to do anything.”

  “He’ll interview you,” she said firmly. “And then you’ll let him know how much you want the job and how good you’ll be at it.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I am starting to want it. If for no other reason than to keep Trevor from becoming my boss.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best reason, sweetie. Can I show you something?”

  “Sure.” I knew what it was. It had to be some painting she’d discovered at work done by some impoverished “outsider” artist in some totally primitive style. This happened at least once a month. She would rave about it, and I wouldn’t get it.

  She went to the entrance hall and came back with a big cardboard package out of which she pulled a square of cloth. She held it up, beaming, her eyes wide. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  It seemed to be a painting of a huge black tenement building with tiny people being crushed beneath it. One of the tiny people was turning into a ball of blue flame. Another one had a bubble coming out of his mouth that said, “I am oppressed by the debt of the capitalist society.” There were oversized hundred-dollar bills with wings floating against a baby blue sky and on top of everything the words, “God Bless America.”

  “Do you see how brilliant this is? That ironic ‘God Bless America’? That phallic building representing debt, crushing all the little people?”

  “That looks like a phallus to you?”

  “Come on, Jase. That massive physical presence, the engineering prowess.”

  “Okay, I see that,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

  “This is a painted story quilt by a Haitian artist named Marie Bastien. She was a really big deal in Haiti, and she’s just moved to Dorchester with her five kids. She’s a single mom. I think she could be the next Faith Ringgold.”

  “That right?” I said. I had no idea who she was talking about.

  “The luminosity of her colors reminds me of Bonnard. But with the raw, simple Modernism of a Jacob Lawrence.”

  “Hmm,” I said, glancing at my watch. I picked up the American Express bill from the coffee table and opened it. “Very nice,” I said. I looked at the bill, and my eyes widened. “Jesus.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said.

  “I am oppressed by the debt of the capitalist society,” I said.

  “How bad?” Kate said.

  “Bad,” I
said. “But you don’t see me turning into a ball of blue flame.”

  6

  You could hardly collect a more competitive bunch of guys than the sales team of Entronics USA. We were all recruited for our competitiveness, the way certain species of pit bulls are bred to be vicious. The company didn’t care if its sales reps were particularly smart—there sure weren’t any Phi Beta Kappas among us. They liked to hire athletes, figuring that jocks were persistent and thrived on competition. Maybe used to punishment and abuse too. Those of us who weren’t jocks were the outgoing, naturally affable types, the social chairman in college, frat guys. That was me. Guilty on all counts. I was on the Happy Hour Committee at U. Mass, which we called Zoo-Mass.

  So you’d think that, for all the jocks on the sales force, our softball team would be formidable.

  Actually, we sucked.

  Most of us were in lousy shape. We took clients out to lunch or dinner all the time, ate well, drank a lot of beer, and didn’t have time to exercise. The only guys who’d stayed in shape were Trevor Allard, our pitcher, and Brett Gleason, our shortstop, who was your classic big dumb jock. Allard and Gleason were good buddies who hung out together a lot, played basketball together every Thursday night.

  It was considered uncool to be too serious about our softball games. We had no uniforms, unless you count the ENTRONICS—BAND OF BROTHERS T-shirts that someone had made and that hardly anyone ever remembered to wear. We all chipped in to pay an umpire fifty bucks, whenever he was available. There’d be occasional arguments over whether someone was safe, or whether a ball was foul, but the disputes ended pretty quickly, and we got on with playing.

  Still, no one likes to lose, especially dog-eat-dog types like us.

  Tonight’s game was against the reigning champions of our corporate league, Charles River Financial, the behemoth mutual fund company. Their team was almost all traders, right out of college, and they were all twenty-two years old and over six feet tall, and most of them had played on the baseball team at some Ivy League college. Charles River hired them young, chewed them up and spit them out, and by the time they hit thirty they were gone. But in the meantime, they fielded one hell of a softball team.

  The question wasn’t whether we’d lose. It was how badly they’d mop up the floor with us.

  We played every Tuesday evening at the Stonington College field, which was carefully maintained, far better than we needed or deserved. It looked like Fenway. The outfield grass was turquoise and lush, perfectly mowed; the red infield dirt, some kind of clay and sand mix, was well raked; the foul lines were crisp and white.

  The young studs from Charles River arrived all at the same time, driving their Porsches and BMWs and Mercedes convertibles. They wore real uniforms, white jerseys with pinstripes like the New York Yankees, with CHARLES RIVER FINANCIAL stitched across the front in looping script, and they each had numbers on their backs. They had matching Vexxum-3 Long Barrel aluminum-and-composite bats, Wilson gloves, even matching DeMarini gear bags. They looked like pros. We hated them the way a Sox fan hates the Yankees, deeply and irrevocably and irrationally.

  By the time the game got under way, I’d forgotten all about the tow truck driver. Apparently he’d forgotten too.

  It got ugly fast. Allard allowed seven runs—four of them a grand slam by Charles River’s team captain, a bond trader named Mike Welch who was a Derek Jeter look-alike. Our guys were visibly uptight, trying too hard, so instead of aiming for base hits they kept swinging for home runs and inevitably got pop-ups instead. Plus there was the usual parade of errors—Festino collided with a fielder, which was an out, and a couple of Allard’s pitches were ruled illegal because he didn’t have his foot on the rubber.

  According to our rules, if a team is ten runs ahead after four complete innings, they win. At the end of the third inning, the Charles River studs were ahead, 10-0. We were discouraged and pissed off.

  Our manager, Cal Taylor, sat there drinking from a small flask of Jack Daniel’s poorly concealed in a well-used paper bag and smoking Marlboros and shaking his head. I think he served as manager only to have company while he drank. There was the roar of a motorcycle nearby, coming closer, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

  Then I noticed, in the waning light, a tall guy in a leather jacket with a mullet walk onto the field. It took me a few seconds to recognize the tow truck driver from last night. He stood there for a few minutes, watching us lose, and then during the break I went up to him.

  “Hey, Kurt,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “You here to play?”

  “Looks like you guys could use another player.”

  Everyone was cool with it except, of course, Trevor Allard. We called a time-out, and we all huddled around Cal Taylor while Kurt hung back a respectful distance.

  “He’s not an Entronics employee,” Trevor said. “You can’t play if you don’t have a valid employee number. That’s the rules.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Trevor was just being his usual priggish self, or he’d heard that I’d put in for the promotion that he probably figured had his name on it.

  Festino, who enjoyed twitting Trevor, said, “So? If they challenge him, he just says he’s a contract employee and didn’t know he wasn’t eligible.” He took advantage of the break to furtively slip the little bottle of Purell out of his pocket and clean his hands.

  “A contract employee?” Trevor said with disgust. “Him?” As if a bum had just wandered onto the field from the street, reeking of cheap booze and six months of body odor. Trevor wore long cargo shorts and a faded Red Sox cap, the kind that comes prefaded, which he wore backwards, of course. He had a pukka shell necklace and a Rolex, the same kind of Rolex as Gordy had, and a T-shirt that said LIFE IS GOOD.

  “You ever ask the Charles River guys for their photo IDs?” said Festino. “How do we know they don’t have their own ringers, from the Yankees farm team?”

  “Or some guy named Vinny from the mailroom,” said Taminek, a tall, scrawny guy who did inside sales. “Anyway, Hewlett-Packard uses ringers all the time.”

  “Yo, Trevor, you’re not objecting because this guy’s a pitcher, are you, dude?” Gleason razzed his buddy. He was an overdeveloped lunk with Dumbo ears, a lantern jaw, a blond crew cut, and bright white choppers that were way too big for his mouth. He’d recently grown a bristly goatee that looked like pubic hair.

  Trevor scowled and shook his head, but before he could say anything further, Cal Taylor said, “Put him in. Trevor, you go to second.” And he took a swig from his paper bag.

  All anyone had to say was “new hire,” and there were no questions asked. Kurt didn’t look like a member of the Band of Brothers, but he could have been a software engineer or something, as far as the Charles River team knew. Or a mailroom guy.

  Kurt was assigned to bat third in the lineup—not fourth, like in a real baseball team, but third, because even in his Jack Daniel’s stupor, Cal Taylor understood that three batters would probably mean three outs, and we wanted to give the new guy a chance to show his stuff. And maybe save our asses.

  Taminek was on first, and there was one out, when it was Kurt’s turn at bat. I noticed he hadn’t been warming up but had instead been standing there quietly, watching the Charles River pitcher and captain, Mike Welch, pitch. As if he were watching tapes in the clubhouse.

  He stepped up to the plate, took a few practice swings with his battered old aluminum bat, and hammered a shot to left-center. The ball sailed over the back fence. As Taminek, and then Kurt, ran home, the guys cheered.

  Kurt’s homer was like an electric shock from those ER paddles. All of a sudden we started scoring runs. By the top of the fourth, we had five runs. Then Kurt took the mound to pitch to a big, beefy Charles River guy named Jarvis who was one of their sluggers. Kurt let loose with a wicked, blistering fastball, and Jarvis swung and missed, his eyes wide. You’d never think a softball could travel so fast.

  Kurt threw an amazing rise ball, then
a change up, and Jarvis had struck out.

  Festino caught my eye. He was grinning.

  Kurt proceeded to strike out two more guys with a bewildering and unhittable assortment of drop curves and rise balls.

  In the fifth inning, we managed to load the bases, and then it was Kurt’s turn at bat. He swung lefty this time, and once again drove the ball somewhere into the next town, trimming the Charles River lead to one.

  Kurt struck them out, one two three, in the sixth, and then it was our turn at bat. I noticed that Trevor Allard was no longer complaining about our ringer. He hit a double, Festino singled, and by the time I struck out, we were up by two. Finally, in the bottom of the seventh, Kurt had struck out their first batter and allowed two hits—only because of our lousy fielding—when their guy Welch hit a slow grounder. Kurt scooped it up, fired to second, where Allard caught it, stepped, and threw to first. Taminek caught it and held it high for the third out. A double play, and we’d actually won our first game since prehistoric times.

  All the guys thronged around Kurt, who shrugged modestly and gave his easy smile and didn’t say too much. Everyone was talking and laughing loudly, exuberantly, narrating instant replays, reliving the double play that ended the game.

  The inviolable tradition after each game was for our opponents to join us for food and beer and tequila shots at a nearby bar or restaurant. But we noticed that the young studs from Charles River were heading sullenly for their German cars. I called out to them, but Welch, without turning around, said, “We’re going to pass.”

  “I think they’re bummed out,” said Taminek.

  “I think they’re in a state of shock,” said Festino.

  “Shock and awe,” said Cal Taylor. “Where’s our MVP?”

  I looked around and saw Kurt slipping out to the parking lot. I chased up to him and invited him to join us.

  “Nah, you guys probably want to hang by yourselves,” he said. I could see Trevor, standing at his silver Porsche, talking to Gleason, who was sitting in his Jeep Wrangler Sahara, top down.