David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

The only truly fat person Gestine Hurd had ever known had been a Special Examination GS-9 in the Oneida Post who’d spent the entire two years Hurd knew of him back-auditing an Oneida firm so tiny and specialized that it made nothing but the corrugated dividers that went into the cardboard boxes used to ship a very particular kind of tiny lightbulb that went into tiny brass lamps that clicked onto the top of frames that display-quality paintings in historical homes and country restaurants often hang in.

‘Which should have alerted us to trouble, plus the fact that Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist seemed already awake when we boomed the door and didn’t sit up or yelp or rub his eyes or thrash around or struggle when we all came booming in and each grabbed us an extremity and Fat Marcus the Moneylender got up on the bed and commenced to lowering his gargantuan white ass down to his face; he just laid there very still with his eyes glittering with Latin cunning and all-around craziness. You didn’t even want to know the decor, what-all was on the walls; if the operation’s total surreal speed had allowed it, if we’d paid one bit of attention to the room or the expression on the kid’s face on the mattress we could of stopped and reconnoitered and saved us all a lot of trouble and got to stay in school and not have to spend a fucking year in Saigon learning requisition-write-up accounting. Which I wouldn’t wish on a dog.’

The spools turned slowly with a slight triple hiss. The IRS agents’ expressions were those of Cub Scouts around a Storytime fire. A quick bob in the entry’s mike’s tape went unremarked.

‘Waited until Fat Marcus the Moneylender’s ass was right down next to him, touching his face but not with the full weight of the ass on him yet, and jerked up and bit into Fat Marcus’s ass. And I’m not talking a lover-nip here, I’m talking a full front Doberman-type sinking of his whole frontal set of teeth into the buttock arc of Marcus’s ass, so that even down by his ankle I could see blood going down the Surrealist’s chin and see Fat Marcus the Moneylender’s ass flexing as he reared back and let out a scream that made the windows shiver and knocked the two guys holding Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist’s shoulders back against the row of no-eye masks the spic’s got on his wall that all fell and made a racket and could see the horrible thing of this unbelievably obese guy rearing back and up and trying with all his weight to get his ass out of the teeth of Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, who gentlemen just let me say wasn’t letting go, the kid was a Gila monster, even as Fat Marcus had both hands hooked in the kid’s nose’s nostrils trying to peel him off his ass and Fat Marcus’s main stooge Marvin “the Stooge” Flotkoetter actually bent in and was biting Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist’s ear and cheek, trying to make him let go, and both him and Diablo were growling and Diablo was shaking his head trying to tear the mouthful of ass clear out of Fat Marcus’s ass and his nose and ear were bleeding and blood was just shooting I mean arterially shooting in all directions out of Marcus’s ass and into the mattress and his pants and Fat Marcus took a shit in fear and pain and his screams brought everybody in pajamas and underwear and pimple cream and retainers to the still-open door, looking in at what looked of course later though none of us realized it at the time like a prison-type gang-type sexual assault gone wrong.’

‘The Deputy DD’s a man-of-the-people type. But very much Glendenning’s boy. 907313433, a full CPA, Sheehan is, a GS-13, nine years in. He was auditing out of District 10 in Chicago before he got the degree. Came over with Glendenning. Kind of Glendenning’s hatchet man, very hail-fellow, let’s all be friends, all smiles but the eyes go right through you. Liaisons with Internal. Not well-liked. Plus a fashion-plate. Looks like the original seventies hipster almost. Very if you know what I mean mod.’

There were sounds of Reynolds doing something unrelated.

‘Meaning you got the sideburns, the bell-bottoms, the pale blue workshirt. The little leather thong thing around the neck. The whole package.’

‘Spare us the Mr. Blackwell, Claude.’

‘Totally Glendenning’s boy. But a serious 3-D in his own right. Performance Reviews all 8-plus. Nary a 7. Made GS-11 in ’77 on an independent Promotion Board bid; Glendenning had nothing to do with it. But Glendenning’s boy.’

‘So he’ll fight it?’

‘He’s an implementer. Admin was his choice; he applied. If things come down through channels he won’t fight you. But he won’t help you. He implements.’

‘Glendenning’s got a lot of boys in 047, from what you’re saying.’ The slight rise and rounding of Reynolds’s voice indicated he was knotting his tie.

‘Glendenning’s got a high level of Group Manager support. Rosebury and Danmeyer in Exams and Quarterlies might have come with him, their periods in Syracuse overlapped, but the rest were here before Glendenning got the kick. Not yet clear how much of the support is political versus sincere, which would indicate how much of an operator Glendenning’s been at 047. I haven’t been able to squeeze even a private bad word on him out of anybody. Of course that could mean several things.’

‘You don’t have to tell us what things mean,’ without heat. Reynolds’s big gray Motorola had a violin’s chin-cup welded on so he could hold it with his neck alone and free his hands, which whenever Sylvanshine tried this with his own he either forgot and moved his head wrong and the thing fell on the floor and broke and he had to spend time figuring out how to requisition his fourth field phone of the year or else it gave him a stabbing pain somewhere near his shoulder blade. He held a regular touch-tone phone with one hand and bit dead skin from the edge of his thumbnail while he turned sheets on the clipboard.

‘Chaney has a picture of her and Glendenning up on her office wall if you can believe it.’

‘Chaney.’

‘Julia Drutt Chaney, forty-four, GS-10, 952678315, Administrative Supervisor for 047B across the complex. Big, big woman. Large. Stanton-sized in Philly if you recall her. As in muumuus. As in when you see her coming across the quad thing it looks like several women all cohabiting in just one garment. Big red cheeks. But nobody’s fool, Performance—’

‘We’re only interested in 047B for Audits, and that’s collateral.’ Sylvanshine was trying to recall the name of his second-grade teacher, who stood at the terminus of a long chain of idle thought whose medial steps he’d already forgotten but which had started with the maneuvers by which Reynolds had arranged to stay in DC and Martinsburg for several weeks and to keep Mel Lehrl’s ear by offering to analyze Sylvanshine’s initial field reports and reduce them to relevant fact-patterns for Lehrl before eventually joining Claude in this horrible place after all his usual strategies were exhausted. ‘Let’s concentrate on the steak and not the peas here Claudie boy what do you say.’ Jocularity was a tone Reynolds often used with subordinates or those of lower GS rank, and both he and Claude knew that Sylvanshine would be looking for a way to repay the insult. ‘The steak is Examination.’

‘ADD for Exams is Rosebury, Eugene E., forty, GS-13, 907313433, sandy hair, tall, a little stooped, glasses don’t quite fit or else his ears aren’t symmetrical, looks somehow scholarly but that might be the pipe, smokes a pipe, Glendenning’s boy right down the spine. Don’t like his hair, something about his hair. Implementer. Wind-sniffer. Neither help nor impede.’

‘Second AD is Yeagle? Yagle?’

‘Is Gary NMI Yeagle. Just-call-me-Gary type. Strange-looking specimen. Big heavy slabbish face, but a long jaw, but soft, the jaw, hanging with fat, which together with the lantern jaw makes you feel like somebody’s hitting you with a melting fist when you look at him. Thirty-nine no, sorry, — eight, glad-hander but in a different way from Sheehan because Sheehan’s glad-handing is professional and strategic whereas with Yeagle you feel it’s that he’s just insecure and needs everyone to like him or the world explodes or something.’