Donald Westlake: The Ax

I pull to a stop next to him, smiling out of the open window. I say, "Mr. Everly?"

"Yes?"

I want to be sure; this could be a brother, a cousin: "Herbert Everly?"

"Yes? I'm sorry, I—"

…don't know me, I think, finishing the sentence for him in my mind. No, you don't know me, and you never will. And I will never know you, either, because if I knew you I might not be able to kill you, and I'm sorry, but I really do need to kill you. I mean, one or the other of us must die, and I'm the one who thought of it first, so that leaves you.

I slide the Luger out from under the raincoat and extend it partway through the open window, saying, "You see this?"

He looks at it, expecting no doubt that I want to sell it to him or tell him I just found it and ask if it's his, or whatever happens to be the last thought that crosses his brain. He looks at it, and I squeeze the trigger, and the Luger jumps up in the window space and the left lens of his glasses shatters and his left eye becomes a mine-shaft, running deep into the center of the earth.

He drops backward. Just down and back, no fuss, no lunging, just down and back. His mail frets away from him in the breeze.

I make a sound in the back of my throat like someone trying to pronounce that Vietnamese name. You know the one: Ng. I put the Luger on top of the raincoat and drive on down Churchwarden, my trembling finger on the window button until the window completely shuts. I turn left, and then left again, and two miles later I finally think to put the Luger under the raincoat.

My route is now planned out. A few miles farther on, I'll find Interstate 91, which I'll take north through Hartford and on up into Massachusetts at Springfield. A little north of that I'll turn west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, heading once again for New York State. Tonight I'll stay in an inexpensive motel near Albany, paying cash, and tomorrow afternoon I will return home jobless from my interview in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Well. It seems I can do it.

I did it their way for eleven months. Or sixteen, if you count the final five months at the mill, after I got the yellow slip but before my job, as they said, ceased to go forward, the period of time when the counseling was done, and the training in resume writing and the "consideration" of "options." This entire charade as though we were all, the company and its representatives and the specialists and the counselors and yours truly, as though we were all working together on some difficult but worthy task, the end result of which was supposed to be my personal contentment. Sense of fulfillment. Happiness.

Don't go away mad; just go away.

Earlier, for a year or two, there had been rumors of the downsizing to come, and in fact two smaller winnowings of staff had taken place, but they'd merely been the preliminaries, and everyone knew it. So, when the yellow slip was presented to me with my paycheck in October of 1995, I wasn't as shocked as I might have been, and I wasn't even at first all that unhappy. Everything seemed so businesslike, so well-thought-out, so professional, that it was more like being nurtured than weaned. But I was being weaned.

And I had plenty of company, God knows. The twenty-one hundred people at the Belial mill of Halcyon Mills was reduced to fifteen hundred seventy-five; a reduction of about one-fourth. My product line was dropped entirely, good old Machine No. 11 sold for scrap, the work absorbed by the company's Canadian affiliate. And the long lead-time — or so it seemed, then — of five months not only gave me plenty of time to look for another job but meant I would still be on salary through the Christmas season; nice of them.

The severance package was certainly generous enough, I suppose, within what is considered generous and rational at the moment. We discontinued employees received a lump sum equal to one month of salary for every two years of employment, at the present wage for that employment. In my case, since I'd been with the company twenty years, four as sales director and sixteen as product manager, I received ten months' pay, two of them at a somewhat lower rate. In addition, the company offered to maintain our medical insurance — we pay twenty percent of our medical costs, but no insurance premiums — for one year for every five years of employment, which means four years in my case. Full coverage for Marjorie and me, plus coverage for Billy for two and a half years until he's nineteen; Betsy's already nineteen, and so is uninsured, another worry. Then, five months from now, with Billy's nineteenth birthday, he's also without insurance.

But that isn't all we got when we were severed. There was also a single flat payment to cover vacation time, sick time and who knows what; it was figured out using a madly complex formula that I'm sure was scrupulously fair, and my check came to four thousand, seven hundred sixteen dollars and twenty-two cents. To tell the truth, if it had been nineteen cents, I doubt I would have known the difference.

I think most of us, when we get the chop, see our coming unemployment as merely an unexpected vacation, and assume we'll be back at work with some other company almost immediately. But that isn't how it happens now. The layoffs are too extensive, and are in every industry across the board, and the number of companies firing is much larger than the number of companies hiring. More and more of us are out here now, another thousand or so every day, and we're chasing fewer and fewer jobs.

You put together your resume, your education and job history, your life, on a page. You buy manila folders and a roll of first-class postage stamps. You carry your resume down to the drugstore with the copying machine, and run off thirty copies at a nickel each. You start circling in red ink the likeliest help wanted ads in the New York Times.

You also subscribe on your own to your trade journals, the magazines your employer used to subscribe to for you. But the magazine subscriptions are not part of the severance package. Pulp and The Paperman; those are the journals of my trade, both of them monthly, both rather expensive. When they were free, I rarely read them, but now I study them cover to cover. After all, I have to keep up. I can't let the industry move on without me.

Both of these magazines carry help wanted ads, and both carry position wanted ads. In both of them, more positions than help are wanted.

At least I was never fool enough to spend money on a position wanted ad.

Over the years of my employment, I became quite specialized in one kind of paper and one method of manufacture. That was a subject I really knew — and still know — all about. But back at the beginning, twenty-five years ago, when I started out as a salesman for Green Valley, before I switched over to Halcyon, I was marketing all kinds of industrial paper, and I learned them all. I learned paper, the whole wild complex subject.

I know many people think paper is boring, so I won't go on about it, but in fact paper is far from boring. The way it's made, the million uses…

We even eat paper, did you know that? A special kind of paper-source cardboard is used in many commercial ice creams, as a binder.

The point is, I do know paper, and I could take over almost any managerial job within the paper industry, with only minimal training in a particular specialty. But there's so many of us out here, the companies don't feel the need to do even the slightest training. They don't have to hire somebody who's merely good, and then fine-tune him to their requirements. They can find somebody who already knows their precise function, was trained in it by some other employer, and is eager to come to work for you, at lower pay and fewer benefits, just so it's a job.