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

says a properly trained individual can kill a wild boar with a butter knife. Mr. A gives me a look and says why don’t we let Sam run this aspect of the operation since he possesses the necessary expertise.Then Mr. A offers to buy him lunch and Sam says no, he’ll eat raw weeds and berries as usual.
    I go back to my Verisimilitude Evaluation on the Cimarron Brothel. Everything looks super. As per my recommendations they’ve replaced the young attractive simulated whores with uglier women with a little less on the ball. We were able to move the ex–simulated whores over to the Sweete Shoppe, so everybody’s happy, especially the new simulated whores, who were for the most part middle-aged women we lured away from fast-food places via superior wages.
    When I’ve finished the Evaluation I go back to my office for lunch. I step inside and turn on the fake oil lamp and there’s a damn human hand on my chair, holding a note. All around the hand there’s penny candy. The note says: Sir, another pig disciplined who won’t mess with us anymore and also I need more ammo. It’s signed: Samuel the Rectifier.
    I call Mr. A and he says Jesus. Then he tells me to bury the hand in the marsh behind Refreshments. I say shouldn’t we call the police. He says we let it pass when it was six dead kids, why should we start getting moralistic now over one stinking hand?
    I say: But sir, he killed a high-schooler for stealing candy.
    He says: That so-called high-schooler threatened Fred Moore, a valued old friend of mine, with a knife.
    A butter knife, I say.
    He asks if I’ve seen the droves of unemployed huddled in front of Personnel every morning.
    I ask if that’s a threat and he says no, it’s a reasonable future prognostication.
    “What’s done is done,” he says. “We’re in this together. If I take the fall on this, you’ll eat the wienie as well. Let’s just put this sordid ugliness behind us and get on with the business of providing an enjoyable living for those we love.”
    I hang up and sit looking at the hand. There’s a class ring on it.
    Finally I knock it into a garbage sack with my phone and go out to the marsh.
    As I’m digging, Mr. McKinnon glides up. He gets down on his knees and starts sniffing the sack. He starts talking about bloody wagon wheels and a boy he once saw sitting in a creek slapping the water with his own severed arm. He tells how the dead looked with rain on their faces and of hearing lunatic singing from all corners of the field of battle and of king-sized rodents gorging themselves on the entrails of his friends.
    It occurs to me that the Mr.’s a loon.
    I dig down a couple feet and drop the hand in. Then I backfill and get out of there fast. I look over my shoulder and he’s rocking back and forth over the hole mumbling to himself.
    As I pass a sewer cover the Mrs. rises out of it. Seeing the Mr. enthralled by blood she starts shrieking and howling to beat the band. When she finally calms down she comes to rest in a tree branch. Tears run down her see-through cheeks. She says there’s been a horrid violent seed in him since he came home from the war. She says she can see they’re going to have to go away. Then she blasts over my head elongate and glowing and full of grief and my hat gets sucked off.
    All night I have bad dreams about severed hands. In oneI’m eating chili and a hand comes out of my bowl and gives me the thumbs-down. I wake up with a tingling wrist. Evelyn says if I insist on sleeping uneasily would I mind doing it on the couch, since she has a family to care for during the day and this requires a certain amount of rest. I think about confessing to her but then I realize if I do she’ll nail me.
    The nights when she’d fall asleep with her cheek on my thigh are certainly long past.
    I lie there awhile watching her make angry faces in her sleep. Then I go for a walk. As usual Mr. Ebershom’s practicing figure-skating moves in his foyer. I sit down by our