Donald Westlake - The Ax

A few years ago, it seems, Arcadia's management came to the conclusion it was no longer a good idea to be tied so closely to the fortunes of the tobacco industry, and so they looked for another area in which to diversify. The area they found, I read to my astonishment, was just the polymer paper specialty that I'd been working on the last sixteen years!

The article writer went on to say that, rather than compete with mills that had already been in that business, and feeling they had a superior product with a new manufacturing method (wrong about that; it was precisely the system we'd installed at Halcyon back in '91), they'd gone offshore for their customers. Aided by NAFTA, they'd found Mexican manufacturers who were delighted by their products and could afford to buy them. With Mexican customers already in hand, they'd spread their sales force farther south, and now had customers all through South America as well.

It was a true success story, one of the few around these days, and there was something very bittersweet about reading it. But one part of the piece really snagged my attention, and that was the brief description of and interview with one Upton Fallon, production line manager. Fallon, who was known by his middle name, Ralph, answered questions from the writer about the production process and about his own background; he'd been there all along, starting almost thirty years ago on the tobacco-paper machine, apparently straight from high school.

Upton "Ralph" Fallon had my job. I read the piece, and I read it again, and there was no doubt in my mind. He had my job, and in a fair contest I'd get it, not him. Of course, there wasn't as much information about him in the article as there would be in his resumé — he didn't need a resume, the bastard, he already had my job — but there was enough stated and implied so I could get a good solid reading on the guy, and I was better than him. I knew I was. It was obvious. And yet, he had my job.

I couldn't help it, I couldn't help daydreaming about it. If he were to be fired, for getting drunk or having an adulterous affair with a girl on the shop floor, say. If he were to come down sick, with some wasting disease like multiple sclerosis, and have to leave the job. If he were to die…

Yes, why not? People die all the time. Automobile accidents, heart attacks, kerosene heater fires, strokes…

What if he were to die, then, or just become too sick to stay on the job? Wouldn't they be glad to see me, so much more qualified for exactly the same position?

I could kill him, if that's what it took.

I thought that, mostly as hyperbole, in the daydream. But then I thought it again, and I wondered if I meant it. I mean, really meant it. I knew how bad my situation was, I knew how unlikely things were to improve, I knew how surely things were going to get even more desperate, I knew how expensive Betsy was in college and Billy would be, graduating this year from high school. I knew what my expenses were, my outgo, and I knew my income had stopped, and now I saw the one man who stood between me and safety. Upton "Ralph" Fallon.

Couldn't I kill him? I mean, seriously. In self-defense, really, in defense of my family, my life, my mortgage, my future, myself, my life. That's self-defense. I don't know this man, he's nothing to me. He sounds like a jerk, to tell the truth, in this interview here. If the alternative is despair and defeat and grinding misery and growing horror for Marjorie and Betsy and Billy and me, why shouldn't I kill him, the son of a bitch? How could I not kill him, given what's at stake here?

Arcadia. Arcadia, New York. I looked it up in the road atlas, and it was so close. It was like an omen. Arcadia was probably no more than fifty miles from here, just across the state line, barely in New York at all, maybe ten miles in. Commuting distance, I wouldn't even have to relocate.

Pulp magazine and the road atlas open on my desk. Silence in the house, the kids at school and that being a day when Marjorie was at Dr. Carney's office. Daydreaming.

That's when I thought first of the Luger, remembered it at the bottom of my father's trunk. That's when I first imagined myself pointing that gun at a human being, pulling the trigger.

Could I do it? Could I kill a man? But people do that, too, every day, for far less. Why wouldn't I be able to, with the stakes so high? My life; the stakes don't get higher than that.

Daydream. I'd drive over to Arcadia, New York, the Luger beside me in the car. Find the mill, find Fallon — don't have his picture, not printed in Pulp, but that can be solved somehow, we're only daydreaming here — find him, and follow him, and wait for the opportunity, and kill him. And apply for his job.

Which is where the daydream broke down, and came crashing down at my feet. That's where I went again from pleasure to misery. Because I knew what would happen next, if reality were to follow my daydream this far, if Upton "Ralph" Fallon were actually gone from that job, through his own actions or mine.

Of course I'm better than he is, in any contest between us for that job it would be my job, no question. But the contest isn't between us, and never can be. The contest, once Fallon is out of the way, is between me and that stack of resumes over there.

Somebody else would get my job.

I went down through the stack again, winnowing them, picking out the ones I feared, and that first time I was so pessimistic that I pulled out over fifty resumes as being people with a better shot at that job than I had. Which was wrong, of course, overstating them and underestimating me, that was merely the despondency doing my thinking for me. But the problem was still overwhelming. And real.

I was so blue by then I couldn't stand to be in the office any more. I left the room, and killed some time cleaning out some old trash in the garage — once we'd sold the Civic, the space it used to take up began immediately to fill with junk — and my mind kept circling back to Upton "Ralph" Fallon, fat and happy, smug and secure. In my job.

I couldn't sleep that night. I lay in bed, beside Marjorie, thinking, mourning, frustrated, miserable, and it wasn't till first light outlined the bedroom windows that I at last fell into fitful sleep, full of troubled dreams, nightmares out of Hieronymus Bosch. I'm glad I don't remember my dreams; their echoes are bad enough.

But I finally did fall away into that restless sleep, and when I rose to cold consciousness three hours later, I knew what to do.

Thursday. I'm on the road by eight-fifteen a.m., telling Marjorie I have some follow-up to do on Tuesday's job interview in Albany, and that I might be late this evening, coming home.

The interview. Well, of course I didn't get that job, I won't be learning the intricacies of tin can labels after all, so here I am once again, on the way to Longholme.

I didn't get that job, and I didn't expect to get it. Just another failed interview. But this time, there was a bit more to it. This was the first interview I've gone on since I've added this second string to my bow, the plan (if I can make it work, make the whole complicated thing work, and not lose my determination), and as a result of that, I guess, I somehow saw Tuesday's interview differently from the ones before it. I saw it more dispassionately, is what it was. I saw it from outside.

And what I saw only increased my desperation. I saw that Burke Devore, this Burke Devore, this man I've become in half a century of life, is not friendly.

I don't mean I'm unfriendly, I don't mean I'm some snarling sort of misanthrope. I simply mean not friendly enough. Back in my young days, in school and then in the Army, I could always build up enough enthusiasm to be a part of the gang, part of the group, but it was never really natural to me. The four years I spent as a salesman, on the road for Green Valley, selling their industrial papers, I did learn how to be a salesman, grinning, cheery, shaking hands, slapping backs, making people feel I was glad to see them, but it was always hard.