The Office Manager

by Neal Donohue

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  by Neal Donohue

  copyright@Donohue,2013

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  Messiah

  Neal Donohue

  I won’t make excuses. I killed him. It seems odd to confess, but you should know I am not a murderer. How do I draw such a conclusion? Words escape me, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Bill Guthrie is finally gone.

  I concede he wasn’t evil, not threatening nor intimidating, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It’s hard to describe exactly what he was. I doubt he knew what he was. An aberration, I suppose. I never met such a man as Guthrie. I had reached a point where I didn’t even see him as a man. He was souless, like a drone. A drone, you may know, is a male bee cared for by the hive for one singular purpose, to inseminate the Queen bee in an otherwise unproductive life; after which all the worker-bees hustle him out of the hive to starve to death. Bill Guthrie was like that...simply a temporary worker.

  Why did I kill him? Well, first of all he was boring. Maybe that’s not a sound reason for killing a man. Perhaps irrational. But you didn’t know him. You couldn’t understand what I went through. He was unbearable.

  It began about six months ago when Guthrie showed up for work at our East Los Angeles warehouse. To the best of my recollection it was the first Monday in May. He worked half a day, left, then returned the following morning. From then on in he was expected to begin work at eight, and quit at five each evening. But he showed up the following day at six in the morning. I should have sensed something was odd, right then. At first, I assumed he was worried about being late or losing his job, but I was wrong. He kept showing up each morning without a complaint at exactly six, but without any good reason for being here. So, I was left to endure this strange behavior from that day forward.

  We didn’t get along, but he didn’t know it. I kept my thoughts to myself. It wasn’t my nature to talk much. Wasn’t brought up that way. He talked, and I listened. Fact was, he talked a lot, and I didn’t talk at all. As office manager for Stewpack Electronic Distributors I worked, had my set routine, listened to the same music each day, Beethoven and Handel, and enjoyed the solitude I had each morning. But he was, as I had mentioned, a talker. He always talked. There wasn’t a minute when he ever stopped talking.

  While pouring over purchasing orders, business accounts, inventories and commercial transactions, Guthrie would sit in the adjoining room alone, talking out loud, as if I were listening.

  As a temporary helper he did his fair share of work when he had to, but the rest of time he made people nervous. Even with his gabbing he seemed a hollow fellow, almost like a vampire I suppose. He could suck life right out of you with his rambling if you weren’t careful. He jacked his jaws like a parrot. Guthrie would get to talking and he’d spin a web about you like a spider. He spewed this thread on any person he came into contact with, putting workers into a trance if they couldn’t get away. Most of the time it was me.

  As I mentioned he seemed harmless, but slowly I grew to fear Guthrie. Each day I became more sensitive, especially when I heard him opening the front door. I could hear him shuffle down the hallway which led to my office. It got to a point where I would grow fearful whenever I heard the front door creak open.

  He said he was from Montana. I imagine that’s why he always wore western clothes, including a cowboy hat, an odd thing to wear in Los Angeles. Actually made him look gay. But he didn’t know it. He was a hick.

  Each morning it was the same routine, the same noise, the same skinny old man. I’d hear the door rattle, the footsteps grow louder, and by the time I turned around from my computer, he’d be standing there, hovering over my counter, glaring down at me like some zombie. He never smiled. He’d just stand and stare, waiting for permission to sit. You can do that to a man for a few days and get by with it. But Bill Guthrie did this for months. It wasn’t natural.

  If that wasn’t enough, Guthrie never changed clothes, at least not his outside clothes. He’d always show up wearing the same red and white checkered cowboy shirt. You may have seen that cheap crap at one of those box stores, made by Asian children in some third world country for a bowl of rice. The shirt had plastic buttons which were suppose to look like brass. And he wore the cheapest cowboy boots I had ever seen, so old and dried out from lack of polish they were cracked. It was an unpleasant sight. So much so, I began to feel sorry for him.

  Added to all that he wore soiled jeans which he never washed. How could I tell, you might ask. Because I spotted a ketchup stain on the bottom of his left pant leg which never disappeared. How does a ketchup stain stay glued to your pants for six months? Because he never washed them, that’s why.

  It took a long time before I made my decision, and I did it with great reluctance. I’m not an animal. I tried to tolerate him. I expected him to quit, or get fired. But it never happened. I still remember that terrible day, as I drove down the Los Angeles freeway, going to work. In case you don’t know, driving in Los Angeles is brutal. All highways have at least six lanes, coming and going, and all of them are full, bumper to bumper, all day long. It’s hard to commute on these road-jams from day to day, and the routine of driving in the dark each morning wore me down. It would wear anyone down, but after my divorce it was especially hard. Then it became a nightmare when Bill was hired.

  Nobody asked for my approval when they hired him. I was the last person anyone consulted. Not that I really cared. Bill seemed harmless enough at the time. But on the other hand I was the first to notice his odd behavior. I guess one couldn’t call it behavior at all. It was an attitude. He was like a dead man.

  I don’t know the where, when, or even how the final decision came to get rid of him. It entered my mind gradually like an oil leak in an old car, I suppose. Maybe the whole idea was building for a long while. Maybe it wasn’t even an idea, but an impulse that ignited a flame, and the flame became a fire. I can’t rightly say.

  All I know is when I finally hit him with my tire iron, it didn’t seem like an act of violence. You have to understand, I could never finish my first coffee in the morning before Bill would be sitting in a wicker chair talking at me. Then he wouldn’t stop. He didn’t care that I never responded. There was nothing normal about that.

  I was the only person in our warehouse at six, doing the book work. But I always arrived at five-thirty. It was my responsibility to open up. It was the same routine and the same paper work each day. They could have hired a chimpanzee to do it. I did it without complaining for a long time, even after my wife skipped out with both kids. Hardly one serious mistake in my bookkeeping during that time. Then by the second month after Bill’s arrival I started making mistakes. I knew it was on account of him.

  First I paid for it with a reprimand from the regional manager, then I lost my annual raise on Christmas. It was unexpected. There was no one else who could do this tedious work for my pay, and there was no one else in that warehouse who arrived that early, just me and Bill Guthrie, and Guthrie was not suppose to be there. But he was. It was hard listening to that bastard at times. I couldn’t concentrate knowing he was sitting in the other room, or even when he was silent. Especially when he was silent. Why anyone would sit in the dark of a waiting room without turning on a light beats me, but he did. He should have turned on that light, but he said it was a waste of money. So he talked in the dark. Occasionally, I’d poke
my head out and see a motionless silhouette, sitting straight as an arrow, long and lanky, hardly a skeleton of a man, talking about himself in a low mumbling voice.

  Bill spoke about every topic that popped into his head, including the worst possible memories a man could reveal to another man, all about sex problems he had with his ex-wife. You hear it once, it was embarrassing. You hear it twice and you’d cringed. But after days I wanted to holler at him. In hindsight I see I wasn’t handling the situation well.

  Like I said he was an old man, a broken man, without a purpose, without a reason to live, who sat in the corner of our waiting room completely in the dark. When he arrived each morning he’d sit for twenty minutes staring blankly up at the ceiling as he began muttering. He drank one cup of coffee with five spoons of sugar, and slurped it so loud I could hear it from inside the men’s room. That gets to you after awhile.

  He didn’t care. He did it without thinking. And all of this would go on before any real workers staggered in. Day after day, it was the same routine. He wasn’t married any more, he had no family except a brother in a Texas prison who held up a Seven-Eleven store. A Texas judge gave him a