Peter Abrahams - Last of the Dixie Heroes

“No.”

“Not a good idea, right? Never call them at home unless it’s a big bang somewhere.” Gordo made a big bang sound, but soft. “Don’t you wish sometimes?”

Roy kept quiet.

The truck ahead of them took the next exit, opening a sudden view to the northwest, and there was the building, brass-coated in the distance, the Globax sign fully in place now, the word bigger and brighter than Chemerica had been.

“I wanted to know,” Gordo said. “Is that so terrible? Course I’d had a couple pops, bad idea again, right? But I can’t stand the way they make you hang, hanging all the time. Next thing my finger was on his number in the company directory. Guess what I heard in the background.”

“Background?”

“At Pegram’s house, while I was waiting for him to come to the phone.”

“I don’t know.” Roy didn’t want to know, just wanted to be at his desk, plugged into the monitor, but there was construction ahead and they’d come to a stop.

“Tinkling.”

“Tinkling?”

“Or clinking. The sounds in one of those movies where rich people are eating supper? Like that. How was I supposed to know they were eating supper-it was after eight. Should have hung up right then.”

“But you’d already said your name.”

Gordo turned to him. “Going psychic on me, Roy?”

Traffic started moving but Gordo, eyes still on Roy, didn’t notice. An angry cop waved him ahead.

“You know when everything’s all set and then you get the feeling that something’s going wrong?” Gordo said.

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t get that feeling,” Roy said. “The going wrong part always takes me by surprise.”

Gordo laughed, then said, “Didn’t mean to laugh. Meaning Marcia, of course.”

“Yeah,” Roy said, “although funnily enough…”

“Funnily enough what?”

Roy wished he hadn’t started, didn’t want to go on, didn’t want to jinx anything. “Things are looking up a bit in that department.”

“The new guy’s not working out?”

“Maybe not.”

“Give you some advice, Roy. Don’t make it easy for her.”

“Why?”

They wound down the ramp under the building, out of the sunlight. “You don’t understand women too good, do you, Roy?”

The garage attendant stopped them, which he never did, and checked them off the list. He wasn’t wearing his Braves cap; they’d given him a brass-colored uniform that looked uncomfortable and a police-style hat that said Globax.

Roy and Gordo got in the elevator at sublevel five. Gordo hit the button, took a deep breath. He didn’t let it out till they stopped at sublevel one: Roy was watching.

“Thanks, good buddy,” Gordo said as the doors slid open.

“For what?”

“Not asking any questions.”

6:59. Roy sat down at his place in B27, Asia/Oceania, under the irregulars banner. He logged on, saw what was ahead. First, he tackled the phosphates problem. That meant exchanging emails with Kumi in Lahore. Kumi had his own way-or her own way-with the language. “What does dispotentialities mean?” Roy said.

He heard someone-P.J. or DeLoach-over the padded wall: “That fuckin’ Kumi.”

Roy thought: The promotion is great but I’ll miss some things. Then he had another thought, an unusual, complicated thought for him: the very fact that he’d had that first thought, about missing some things, meant in some way that he was probably ready. What had Curtis said? Bill doesn’t think you’re ready, but I do. Was Curtis right? Was Roy growing in some way? Was he about to move to a new stage in life? Were things going to get easier? Was it already starting-Marcia coming back, the promotion? Was this what it was to be on a roll? If so, I’m going to make them happy, Marcia and Rhett, I swear.

Then he heard Gordo in the next cubicle: “Yes, sir, I’m on my way.” Gordo’s head appeared over the wall, a smile spreading across his face. “Hey, Roy,” he said.

“Hey,” said Roy.

“You’re a good buddy, man,” he said, fixing the knot on his tie, a green one with yellow stripes. “Sorry for dumping all that paranoid shit on you before.”

“Hey,” said Roy again.

Gordo tapped the top of the wall a couple times, pumped his fist, a little half pump, and started across the floor, walking fast. Roy’s gaze ran on ahead to the square dais with its raised glass-walled office, where Curtis and Mr. Pegram were waiting.

Gordo climbed the stairs, knocked on the door, which was kind of strange since Roy could see they were looking at Gordo and he was looking at them. Gordo went inside, started extending his arm for handshaking-Roy could sense Gordo’s energy all the way from his cubicle-but no handshaking actually happened. Curtis’s lips moved and the three of them sat down: Curtis in his chair, Mr. Pegram on the edge of the desk, Gordo in the chair on the other side, his back to Roy. Curtis’s lips kept moving. Suddenly Gordo’s head tilted up, than snapped in the direction of Mr. Pegram. Mr. Pegram’s lips moved. Gordo half rose. Mr. Pegram’s lips kept moving. Gordo raised both hands, palms out like a supplicant. Mr. Pegram held up one of his, palm up like a traffic cop. Gordo subsided in his chair.

Roy lowered his gaze. He heard P.J.’s half whisper: “What’s going on?”

And DeLoach: “Didn’t I fuckin’ tell you?”

Roy checked his screen. Messages were piling up. Two from Kumi, the first only three lines long but incomprehensible, with routing codes Roy had never seen and the word prioricity underlined, the second an incomprehensible correction of the first. Roy opened messages from Cesar in Miami, the Osaka subsidiary, customers in Singapore, Bangkok, Santiago-how did that get there? — someone else in Lahore, not Kumi, the tariff office on the seventeenth floor: all of them more or less routine, all suddenly as incomprehensible as the worst gibberish Kumi ever sent. Roy was thinking: How can she deny Jerry and at the same time keep him a happy and productive member of the team? He hadn’t heard the answer.

Something made him take another look at the Miami message. Cesar sent email almost every day, but this one ended with: “How’s everything up there?” Had Cesar ever asked a question like that before, ever written anything personal at all? Roy was thinking of examining past communications in the mailbox when another message popped up, this one from someone he didn’t recognize-lbridges at an edu address. Roy didn’t know lbridges, never got messages from any edus, began to get the strange feeling that his screen was spinning out of control; and then Gordo was back.

Gordo’s face was red; bright red, as though lit from within. He turned it on P.J., DeLoach, and finally Roy, a glowing red thing in the vast muted space of pastels, beiges, and grays.

“What’s wrong?” Roy said. Gordo glared at him, or maybe unseeingly right through. “Is it about the promotion?”

Gordo’s glare intensified, became ferocious, and there was no doubt he saw Roy now. “Promotion?” he said, his voice rising. “They gave me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“The boot, Roy, you dumb fucking cracker.” His voice rose and rose. Roy thought Gordo might vault the partition and attack him. “Canned, fired, sacked.”

“But-”

“Canned, fired, sacked.” Gordo was shouting now; his triple-bladed cut opened up and blood dripped off his chin. “I’m the dumbest fucking cracker of them all.” Gordo in his cubicle, kicking something: first, the partition went down, a whole L-shaped section, then another, and Roy saw that P.J.’s feet, under his desk two cubicles away but very close in distance, were clad in bedroom slippers. Then Gordo’s monitor was in midair-it went right over Roy’s head-and the mouse, trailing after like a kite tail, caught the irregulars banner and tore it from the strip lights. A crash on the open floor beyond the cubicles-some of the strip lights going down too-loud in a place where crashes never happened, and then security guards moved in, two from the receiving end, more from the elevator bank. Gordo whipped around, saw them coming from both directions, said, “Just try it,” screamed it at the top of his lungs, in fact, cords standing out white as bone under the stretched skin of his red neck, and reached in his pocket, as though for a gun, as though he thought he had a gun in there. But of course he didn’t. Then Roy was on his feet, had his arm around Gordo, turned Gordo away from the guards, started walking him toward the elevators, at the same time saying something soothing, he didn’t know what.