CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella Read Online Free

Awards, I bought her a Rubik’s Cube. To her, colored plastic is like somethingfrom Venus. The Mr. has kind of warned me away from her a couple of times. He doesn’t trust me. He thinks the Rubik’s Cube is the devil’s work. I’ve brought him lighters and
Playboy
s and once I even dragged out Howie’s little synth and the mobile battery pak. I set the synth for carillon and played it from behind a bush. I could tell he was tickled, but he stonewalled. It’s too bad I can’t make an inroad because he was at Antietam and could be a gold mine of war info. He came back from the war and a year later died in his cornfield, which is now Parking. So he spends most of his time out there calling the cars Beelzebubs and kicking their tires.
    Tonight he’s walking silently up and down the rows. I get out to my KCar and think oh jeez, I’ve locked the keys in. The Mr. sits down at the base of the A3 lightpole and asks did I see the fire and do I realize it was divine retribution for my slovenly moral state. I say thank you very much. No way I’m telling him about the gangs. He can barely handle the concept of women wearing trousers. Finally I give up on prying the window down and go call Evelyn for the spare set. While I wait for her I sit on the hood and watch the stars. The Mr. watches them too. He says there are fewer than when he was a boy. He says that even the heavens have fallen into disrepair. I think about explaining smog to him but then Evelyn pulls up.
    She’s wearing her bathrobe and as soon as she gets out starts with the lip. Howie and Marcus are asleep in the back. The Mr. says it’s part and parcel of my fallen state that I allow a woman to speak to me in such a tone. He suggests I throttle her and lock her in the woodshed. Meanwhile she’s going on and on so much about myirresponsibility that the kids are waking up. I want to get out before the gangs come swooping down on us. The Parking Area’s easy pickings. She calls me a thoughtless oaf and sticks me in the gut with the car keys.
    Marcus wakes up all groggy and says: Hey, our daddy.
    Evelyn says: Yes, unfortunately he is.
    Just after lunch next day a guy shows up at Personnel looking so completely Civil War they immediately hire him and send him out to sit on the porch of the old Kriegal place with a butter churn. His name’s Samuel and he doesn’t say a word going through Costuming and at the end of the day leaves on a bike. I do the normal clandestine New Employee Observation from the O’Toole gazebo and I like what I see. He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter. At one point he makes the mistake of departing from the list of Then-Current Events to discuss the World Series with a Visitor, but my feeling is, we can work with that. All in all he presents a positive and convincing appearance, and I say so in my review.
    Sylvia runs her routine check on him and calls me at home that night and says boy do we have a hot prospect on our hands if fucking with the gangs is still on our agenda. She talks like that. I’ve got her on speakerphone in the rec room and Marcus starts running around the room saying fuck. Evelyn stands there with her arms crossed, giving me a drop-dead look. I wave her off and she flips me the bird.
    Sylvia’s federal sources indicate that Samuel got kicked out of Vietnam for participating in a bloodbath. Sylvia claims this is oxymoronic. She sounds excited. She suggestsI take a nice long look at his marksmanship scores. She says his special combat course listing goes on for pages.
    I call Mr. A and he says it sounds like Sam’s our man. I express reservations at arming an alleged war criminal and giving him free rein in a family-oriented facility. Mr. A says if we don’t get our act together there won’t be any family-oriented facility left in a month. Revenues have hit rock bottom and his investors are frothing at the mouth. There’s talk of outright closure and liquidation of assets.
    He