Robert Bennett - The Company Man

“Is that it up ahead?” asked Samantha.

Hayes peered up the street. He saw a soaking wreck of a building, four stories tall with broken windows dotting every floor and uneven streams of smoke pouring out of the roof. Men in stained shirtsleeves loitered on the front walk and they eyeballed Hayes and Samantha as they approached.

“Hey, Princeling!” called someone across the street. “Hey! Hey, it’s Princeling!” They laughed.

“Who’s Princeling?” said Samantha.

“I have no idea,” Hayes said calmly.

They came to the front door of the tenements. Inside children cried and moaned by the dozens. The wallpaper drooped down around them like petals of a dying flower, its folds stained coffee-brown by the leaky ceiling. Hayes and Samantha stepped around the dripping spots and walked up the stairs to the second floor. Some doors to the rooms were open, others were missing entirely. One couple argued in the hall in some garbled patois, throwing their hands up in the air and sometimes making to strike one another, but never doing so. Hayes smelled shit somewhere, not the scent of rot or stagnation but genuine human shit.

They walked to the next flight of stairs. As they passed by the rooms the people within took no notice. Inside one room a man lay asleep on a pile of newspapers and dishrags, cigarette butts trailing across his chest like droppings. In another a dog watched them from the shadows of a broken kitchen cabinet and whined piteously but did not emerge. And in another room five children lived in unadultered squalor, none of them older than six, their mouths toothless and their eyes bright and their clothes stained with shit and sick. In the corner were three wooden buckets full of excrement, and above them a forest of flies twitched and shuddered. One child pounded on a back door, calling for someone. Her head was covered in flies, blue-black backsides crawling around her ears. She brushed them away absentmindedly as though they were barely there.

“My God,” whispered Samantha. “My God, Hayes, they’re just children.”

“Come on,” he said gently. “Come on. Up the stairs we go.”

“No, we… we can’t leave them here. There’s got to be something we can do. Someone we can call. An orphanage. Something.”

“Yes.”

Samantha shook her head. “We have to call them, Mr. Hayes. Have them come and take care of this.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice still gentle and soothing. “Yes, we will. Of course we will. Now come.” Then he padded up the stairs. He waited at the top and watched as Samantha stared into the room. He needed no special talent to understand she was trying to reconcile her life in Newton with a place such as this. How could people live this way with machines performing marvels only miles away? But as he watched a queer sense of unease grew in him. It had been a long time since he’d ever looked at anything as sadly as Samantha did now. He could not remember the last time he’d matched her sorrow, or her horror. He often forgot how young she was. She had to be several years shy of thirty, he remembered, and as he did he felt terribly old. Eventually she turned and made her way up the stairs, shoving tears away from her eyes as she did.

“Are you ready?” he said. “It’s possible it may get worse.”

She shook her head, thought, then nodded.

“All right.”

Near the top of the building cold drafts ran through the rooms in invisible rivulets and they clutched their coats about them. Hayes searched among the room numbers and found Skiller’s at the end. He knocked, waited, knocked again, then tried the knob. It was unlocked and he pushed the door open a crack.

“What are you doing? You can’t just walk in!” Samantha whispered to him.

“Keep a lookout,” he said.

“What? I can’t-”

“Keep a lookout. I don’t think anyone will notice or care, but keep a lookout.”

She stood down the hall from him, clutching her hands and fretting. He opened the door, motioned for her to stay there, and walked in.

The room was not like the rest of the tenement. Although shabby, it was well kept, with clean floors and scrubbed walls. A hole in the glass of the far window was carefully sealed with newspaper and chewing gum. There were two beds, one large, one small. Nightstand between them. An oil lamp with plenty of fuel. An opened envelope lay on the floor, its flap clumsily torn open. A wooden car sat next to it, paint completely peeled off.

Hayes returned to the door and gestured to Samantha to come in. She was speaking to an ancient old woman, her head bowed and her back stooped, muttering to Samantha through thin lips. Samantha nodded along and hastily bid her goodbye.

“Who was that?” asked Hayes.

“Some old woman,” she said. “She’s senile.”

“What was she saying?”

“Something about how she was a messenger, and machines making lights in her head. Was there anyone in the room?”

Hayes shook his head and they entered together. “Check the closets and drawers,” he said. “Check under the beds. Look everywhere.”

“For what?”

“Anything.”

There was not much in the drawers. Trinkets and small knickknacks. Several candle ends, the tallow soft and greasy. The cabinets contained moldering bread and rotting potatoes. More flies whined out of the shadows as Samantha opened them and interrupted their meal. Hanging on the wall cabinets was a calendar. The year was wrong. Above it was a yellowed picture of Christ riding a donkey, with faded, ragged peasants laying palms on the road before him.

Below the smaller bed Hayes found a tattered box full of newspapers, each of them covered in a child’s drawings done in coal. Drawings of the moon and of the city and of mountains. Men with swords, faces bright and clean. And the sun. Nearly all pictures featured the sun. It was an enormous thing, floating above the small Earth the child had scrawled out, full of promise. Hayes leafed through them, his fingers tracing their folds. It seemed wrong to handle them, to take the dreams of the dead or missing and treat them like no more than articles in a case. When he was done he put them back in the box and replaced it under the bed.

“What was that?” asked Samantha.

“Nothing.” He smoothed the bedsheet down. “Look for a letter.”

“What?”

“A letter. Something. There’s an envelope open, look for a letter.”

“What if they took it with them?”

“Then they took it with them.”

After searching for a bit they found it furiously crumpled and tossed into the corner, hidden behind a chair. Samantha opened it up and read it, then shut her eyes and turned away.

“What is it?” asked Hayes.

She didn’t speak at first. “It’s a goodbye,” she said after a while. “A goodbye to his son. If he doesn’t return. My Lord.”

Hayes took it from her and sat down on the bed and began trying to work around the misspellings and the clumsy grammar.

“To my darling Jack,” he began. “You are a good boy. A very good boy. I know that. I hope you know that. And I hope you know that there are things I must do so you can be a good boy. I love you. Very much. That is so. If you have this then I have not come back and that is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. You must go to Auntie Margaret’s by the sweetshop with the big red sweets and stay there and you must wait for me. I hope I will see you. But I may not. That is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. I love you. You are a good boy. A very good boy. I love you. I love you. Daddy.”

Then Hayes put the letter down and they both sat in the little empty room and did not speak.

“Where is the boy?” asked Samantha hoarsely.

Hayes shrugged and folded the letter up and put it in his pocket. Then he thought and took it out and held it out to Samantha. She withdrew from it as though it were poison.