Robert Bennett - The Company Man

“Whose place is this?” she asked.

“Mine,” he said.

“How many places like this do you have?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Several.”

Samantha tended to Hayes’s wounds for the next two hours. He had a mild concussion and one finger was broken. He said nothing as she moved his limbs around. She suspected he could not feel them at all. When she was done she went and sat by the door, head leaned back.

“What will happen to him?” she asked finally.

Hayes licked his lips. “I’m not sure. But it’s likely he’ll be suspended.”

“Suspended?”

“Yes. It’s procedure. He’ll be suspended while they consider how to go. There’s a board. I don’t know who’s on it or how big it is or how it works. But they have the choice to prosecute or fire him or do whatever.”

“Lord.”

Hayes nodded. Then his head tilted back and he fell asleep. Samantha slipped out the door and wandered up to the street and found a paperboy on the corner. It was so early he had not even cut open his stack yet. He watched her like she was some ghost, a ragged, filthy woman rising up out of the mist. She bought a paper from him and he handed it to her, eyes wide, and she read it as she walked back to the canal apartment. Hayes woke when she shut the door.

She said, “Be still. It’s nothing. I got a paper, that’s all.”

“You got a paper? Where?”

“From outside. On the street.”

“Were you followed?” he asked quickly.

“Who would follow me?”

“Anyone. Everyone, now. Were you followed?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

Hayes sighed and rolled his head away.

“He’s been arrested, like you said,” she told him. “It says so here.”

“Which paper?”

“ The Freedom.”

“Ignore most of what they say. They’re saying he should be hanged, aren’t they?”

She was silent.

“Yeah,” said Hayes. “Yes. I know.”

“They won’t hang him, will they?”

“I doubt it. The Freedom ’s written by fucking loons. It’s no good that everyone’s gotten ahold of it so fast, though. That means the reaction will be quicker, and stupider.”

“I know,” said Samantha. “I… I wonder where he’s being kept.”

“Probably at the Central’s cells. I bet he’s still being held for questioning, and they’re not dumb enough to put a police in a real prison. They’d kill him overnight.”

Samantha’s hand went to her mouth. She stumbled out the door and gripped the walkway railing, then stared into the waterfall and took some huge, deep breaths. Then when she had calmed herself she returned.

“I’m sorry,” Hayes said, blinking through his matted hair. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I don’t care. I just let my emotions get the better of me.”

Hayes did not answer at first. Then he said, “It’s all right. I understand.”

“Understand what?”

He looked at her as though he was not sure what to say. “About you,” he said finally. “You and Garvey.”

“You don’t have to understand anything,” she said harshly.

“I know. I just thought I’d let you know.”

“It’s none of your business. It never is.” Samantha shut her eyes and ground the heels of her palms into her eye sockets. She quivered, suppressing a scream, and said, “He hasn’t said anything about us.”

“What?”

“In the paper. He hasn’t said anything about us. It makes it sound like he was just wandering through the neighborhood alone, saw someone acting suspicious, and then there was a brief struggle and he shot him. Him, all filthy and crazy-looking. With no witnesses at all. That’s what he’s telling them, it says here.”

“Oh, Christ. They’ll kill him with that story.”

“They say the man he killed was Barney Patrick. That he was a longtime administrative aid in the Dock Assembly. But he wasn’t. You said so. The man said he’d never worked in a factory.”

“Yes.”

“So they’re lying.”

“Oh, yes. A police shoots a union man all by himself in an alley, with no witnesses? If this was any other city he’d probably be dismissed, maybe even jailed. In this city, at this time, with a fucking unioner, it’s going to be madness. It’s his word against what every bastard in the city wants.”

She sat very still, looking at the paper. She reached out and touched the words as though she could rearrange them into something better.

Hayes opened his eyes as though he had heard something. He sat up and looked at her, mouth slightly agape. Then he said, “Don’t do it.”

Samantha turned to him. “Don’t do what?” she asked.

“Don’t go to the police.”

“They’ll kill him with this story. You said so yourself.”

“They’ll kill you, too, if you give yourself to them. You’ll link the company to the police even more.”

“Then the hell with the company!” she spat. “They’re going to throw him in prison, Hayes! That or ruin him!”

“You don’t know that. But he’s going to be the sacrificial lamb either way. You’ll just bring yourself down with him.”

“I don’t care! They need to know the truth! Someone does, just one person!”

“They won’t care. They can’t afford to care.”

“Shut up! Just shut up for once in your damn life!” She stood and went to the wall and leaned her head against it. “I won’t let them do this to him. It isn’t right.”

Hayes did not answer.

“Why couldn’t he have left?” she asked quietly. “Why couldn’t he have just left that man there and come with us?”

“Because Garvey was made for lost causes,” said Hayes. “That’s why he’s stayed in his hometown, after all.”

“He believes he can help,” said Samantha.

“I never doubted that he believes it. He believes it with all his heart. It’s whether he should believe it at all that I wonder about.”

She sat down again on the floor and crossed her arms and pulled her legs up close to her chest.

“Samantha…” Hayes said. “I know what you’re about to do. If you do it, it’ll bring hell down. Hell on everyone.”

“Will it help Donald?” she asked, lifting her face.

“Probably. It very well could. But-”

“Then I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Just be quiet.”

Hayes looked at her a moment longer, then lay back and slept again. She waited, thinking, and then left.

Samantha did not go to her apartment. She knew that would be watched. Instead she walked into the nearest post office, her skirt mud-stained and her face still smudged. The clerk stared at her as she calmly asked for a box of envelopes, some nice paper, a pen, and several bottles of ink. “Doing some letter-writing, ma’am?” he asked nervously.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

When she had gotten her supplies she went to a phone station and called information. A bleary-voiced woman answered the phone. Samantha asked her for the address of a major newspaper.

“Which newspaper?”

“All of them, I should think,” Samantha said.

She wrote them down. Then she went to a nearby shop and purchased some new clothes and cleaned herself up until she looked decent. She found a quiet restaurant and she sat in the back and began to write, first one letter, then two, then three, all the way up to ten, one after the other. Once she was done she walked to the mailbox tubes and slipped the letters in, the pneumatic lines greedily sucking each letter out of her hands.

She sat on a bench then, not certain what to do, vaguely aware that she was putting things in motion that were far beyond her control. She suddenly felt that she had tipped something very large and very heavy over, and it had just passed its equilibrium and now there was no going back. She felt strangely detached. She had never really done a stupid thing in her life, and she’d always been careful about each decision she’d ever made. Normally she wouldn’t even conceive of doing something like this. But whenever she thought of Garvey lying in some cell she knew that it was not a choice at all.