David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘But meanwhile increasing taxpayers’ hatred of the Service.’

‘Which paradoxically, a Reagan would need. The Service’s more aggressive treatment of TPs, especially if it’s high-profile, would seem to keep in the electorate’s mind a fresh and eminently disposable image of Big Government that the Rebel Outsider President could continue to define himself against and decry as just the sort of government intrusion into the private lives and wallets of hardworking Americans he ran for the office to fight against.’

‘You’re saying the next president will be able to continue to define himself as an Outsider and Renegade when he’s actually in the White House?’

‘You’re still underestimating the taxpayers’ need for the lie, for the surface rhetoric they can keep telling themselves while deep down they can rest assured that Daddy’s in control and everyone’s still safe. The way adolescents make a big deal of rebelling against parental authority while they borrow the keys to Daddy’s car and use Daddy’s credit card to fill it with gas. The new leader won’t lie to the people; he’ll do what corporate pioneers have discovered works far better: He’ll adopt the persona and rhetoric that let the people lie to themselves. ’

‘Let’s get back to how a Bush or Reagan would triple the Service budget for a second? Is this good for us on a District level? What are the implications for a Peoria or a Creve Coeur?’

‘Of course the marvelous double irony of the Reduce Government candidate is that he’s financed by the corporations that are the backs government tends to be the most oppressively on the back of. Corporations, as DeWitt pointed out, whose beady little brains are lit by nothing but net profit and expansion, and who we deep-down expect government to keep in check because we’re not equipped to resist their consumerist seductions by the strength of our own character, and whose appeal to the faux rebel is the modern rhetoric that’s going to get Bush-Reagan elected in the first place, and who are going to benefit enormously from the laissez-faire deregulation Bush-Reagan will enable the electorate to believe will be undertaken in their own populist interests — in other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified — they’re small and going to die, after all—’

‘Christ, the death thing again.’

‘—and whose terror of not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’

The quiet, pleasant family two houses down from Lotwis (who was retired after thirty years of service in the County Recorder of Deeds) and his wife were then replaced by a single female of unknown background and occupation who had two large dogs that tended to make a lot of noise. That was all right. Lotwis had a dog of his own that barked a lot sometimes, and so did some of the other people in the neighborhood. The neighborhood was one where people’s dogs were going to bark behind their fences and people were sometimes going to burn their trash or keep junked cars in their yards. The neighborhood was now classed Semirural in the Recorder’s office, but in the Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson years it had been classed Subd. Class 2, a development class, in fact the city’s first recorded subdivision. It hadn’t taken off and gone upscale and spread like Hawthorne 1 and 2 or Yankee Ridge, built out in the seventies on repossessed farmland out east of town. It was twenty-eight houses on two perpendicular blacktop roads and had stayed that way, and the part of the city that spread out south to approach it was not upscale, it was light industry and some warehouses and seed concerns, and the only developments in terms of your basic housing out anywhere near were one large trailer park and one smaller one that hemmed the old subdivision in on the north and west; to the south was the interstate and serious farmland all the way to the pleasant little grain-town of Funk’s Grove thirteen miles south on 51. But so. Within sight if Lotwis was up on his roof tending to gutters or the screen on his chimney was an auto wrecker’s yard and Southtown Wholesale and Custom Meats, which was, when you cut through all the fancy language, a butcher’s. But so the folks that lived out here that the Lotwises had watched slowly move in and settle the neighborhood were folks with an independent streak that were willing to live out near trailer parks and a slaughterhouse and have a rural mailman who brought the mail in his own private car and leaned way over to get it in the boxes out by the street, all in return for the benefits of living in a Class 2 zone without hemmed-in houses and subheaded ordinances on burning your trash or having your washer’s outflow pipe empty into the gulley by the road or dogs with some spirit that were protective and barked up a storm at night.

‘I’m glad you said this,’ she said. Her name was Toni; she’d introduced herself when he came to her door. ‘Now I’ll know. If anything happens to these dogs. If they run off, or limp, or anything — I’ll kill you, your family, burn your house down, and sow salt. I have nothing to live for but these dogs. If they want to run they’re going to run. If you don’t like it you can take it up with me. But if anything gets done to these dogs I’ll decide it was you and I’ll sacrifice my life and freedom to destroy you and everyone you love.’

So Lotwis just let her alone.

Rubbing his eyes wearily. ‘So let me get this straight. On $218,000 of gross billing on your Schedule C you realize $37,000 net.’

‘It’s all documented. I’ve supplied all receipts and W-2s.’

‘Yes, the W-2s. We’ve got $175,471 in W-2s on sixteen employees — investigators, support personnel, research aides.’

‘It’s all right there. You’ve got copies of their returns.’

‘Except what I found striking is they’re all in terribly low marginal brackets. Terribly low-paid. Why not four or five employees highly paid?’

‘The logistics of my business are complex. Much of the work is low-paid but time-consuming.’

‘Except I dropped in on one of your researchers — a Mrs. Thelma Purler.’

‘Ulp.’

‘At the Oakhaven Assisted Living Center, where she resides.’

‘Ulp.’

‘In a wheelchair, with one of those old-fashioned ear horns even to hear your questions, and to which she replied — let me see’—checking his notes—‘Roodle, roodle roodle roodle.’

‘I um er.’

Turning off his recorder, which has no tape in it.

‘So we’re looking at potential criminal fraud, which is CID and not my department. We could go talk to — or dig up — these other employees. You’ll go to jail. So here’s what we can do. You have a one-hour opportunity to fill out an amended 1040 for last year. On which you omit the employee salary deductions. You pay real tax due, plus penalties for underpayment and late filing. You proceed with an employee of this department to your bank, where you cut a cashier’s check for the total. At which time I destroy your original return, and the CID receives no referral.’