Theodore Wheeler - Bad Faith

“I haven’t been in prison, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“No, no. We will have to run a background check, though. We can’t accept felons.”

“That won’t be a problem,” I told him. Make Things Right had cleansed my record as part of its SOP.

“Let me cut the shit,” Frank said, looking up from his desk. “I have a pretty strong notion why you showed up today. We get a lot of your type in here, wanting to make amends for something horrible they’ve done.”

“Maybe you don’t want me. My past is pretty ugly. The things I’ve done could be shocking to someone like you.”

“Don’t try to gaslight me. I know who you’ve been working for. We’re well aware of MTR and the things they do.” He rocked back in his chair, letting his hands settle on his gut as he stared at me for a moment, biting his lower lip. “You know, the Romans believed the Furies were a self-cursing phenomenon. Whoever summoned them also ended up getting fucked over in the end. It was their way of saying that revenge doesn’t work.”

It must have surprised me, what Frank said, because he motioned that I should stay seated. I didn’t think anyone knew about Make Things Right. Who would really believe there was a company doing what we did? It was easier to conceive of randomness, of teenagers up to no good, than to envision a corporate entity in the business of revenge.

“No,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of work you did before. CAP needs talented people, wherever they come from. If you like to dabble in karma, we can help with that too.” He turned his back to me and walked to the window behind his desk. There wasn’t much of a view beyond the glass. Just a chain-link fence, a parking lot behind it. “I was pretty damn good at shooting people when I was in the Marines, but it didn’t become my life’s work. It only matters what you do from now on. That’s what you’re judged by.”

Frank didn’t need to convince me. I was ready to help. If I wanted to do good in the world, why not take a straight path instead of trying to navigate the inequities of revenge. Things had gone poorly with the old man, but there were plenty of good deeds that could be done in this city. Groceries needed delivering. Gardens needed weeding. Motor oil needed changing. I was the man for the work, so that’s what I told him.

I started the next day, spent six hours trimming back a cancer patient’s overgrown yard. She watched me from the window as her flowering shrubs came back into view after an hour of yanking native grass and milkweed from her garden.

I wasn’t great at gardening, but, with charity work, it was the thought that counted, right? I waved happily to the woman’s neighbors as I walked behind a humming mower, and at the end of the day, it felt good to look back on the progress I’d made. This was something I always loved about revenge work too, the instant gratification of seeing a job well done. The crisp green lines left by a lawn mower, the metallic squiggles etched into a keyed car. The difference was that with charity work, fleeing wasn’t necessary. I could stay and see the satisfied expression of the person whose property I’d altered. We could drink iced tea together.

“It looks so nice,” the woman said as we sat on her porch. Her name was Jill. She was wheelchair-bound, in her early forties, her head wrapped in a blue scarf. To my surprise, she reached for my hand and brought it to her face to kiss my dirt-stained knuckles.

“The weeds will stay away for a while now,” I said, pulling my hand back.

“Till spring.” She slouched in her wheelchair. “Let’s hope I can pull them myself then.”

I did hope that, for the hour we sat on her porch. I was nearly praying, to be honest, contemplating how her life would be better from then on, because of my actions, rather than in spite of them.

Frank sent me to assist all sorts of people in the following weeks. Victims of gang violence who were helpless and alone, living in bad neighborhoods; migrants injured on the job; kids with HIV. I cleared gutters for the elderly and clumsy, weatherproofed windows for the single mothers of thin-blooded children, installed lift chairs for the morbidly obese. I paid bills, delivered meals-on-wheels, cleared basements of sagging boxes. I collected toys for tots and recyclables for the rag-and-can men living in the park. For those first couple months I was a revelation to myself and others. These acts of restitution felt like a blanket over the city.

But things didn’t always go so well. There was the strange case of Jimmy Motts, for instance. His was a nuanced example, someone Frank regarded as his brightest success story, or at least a man who had such potential. Motts had come to CAP as a OxyContin addict years before and progressed through their programs in a drawn-out cycle of relapse and recovery. By the time I met him he was a part-time employee of CAP, driving around doing audits of volunteer work. He still received benefits, however, because he was only partially recovered.

I mowed his lawn and did garden work. Jill had given me high marks for my landscaping efforts, and this would have been an easy job too if it weren’t for Motts sitting on the porch offering a glib critique. He was a boxy man and had a letter-jacket pride he wore in his shoulders and jaw. It was a hot day, and he drank light beer, reclining on his steps to point out spots I’d missed by jabbing his finger toward a stray dandelion or a stubborn patch of crabgrass. Even though Motts was on methadone, he had a live-in girlfriend and a nice truck. I hadn’t had a girl in years, and my truck was a piece of shit. It seemed to me that Motts was running a con on CAP.

When I was about to leave Motts stood and came to offer a final assessment. “You need to pull that,” he said, indicating a plant with a big mustard-yellow bloom that I’d left in the middle of his garden.

“That’s a flower,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured. “Don’t you know anything? It’s ragweed.”

“Ragweed?” I strolled over to nudge the plant stalk with the tip of my shoe. It wasn’t an unattractive flower, but he was apparently right. My nose started to run, as if to spite me.

“Yes,” he started again. “Ragweed. Weed, as in it’s a noxious plant.”

I pulled the plant out by its roots and held it up so he could see the root tendrils sprinkle dirt on his sidewalk. “It’s gone now.”

“You’re Dandrow, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Of course,” he said. “That explains the shit job you did.”

“What did you say?”

“That you being James Dandrow explains the shoddy work.”

I said, “Screw you,” and walked toward my truck. It didn’t matter what this guy said. I was going to leave, but Motts followed.

He was delusional, thinking he could spook me. If he knew what business I was in he wouldn’t have acted like that. What was he going to do to me that I couldn’t do back to him tenfold? It was like a gym teacher trying to sell protection to the mob.

“I can make things rough for you,” I warned him. “You don’t want to mess with me.”

“Fuck that.” He laughed. “I’m not done with you.”

“Then hit me,” I snapped, taking a step toward him. Motts pushed me, but I bucked against him with my chest and yelled again. “Hit me!”

He reared back, loading up for a haymaker, and while I waited for his fist, he lurched forward and struck me square in the chest with his forehead. At that moment I understood this man was not well.

Both of us were dazed — Motts because of the head trauma, me because I was so baffled by what had just happened. His barrage of complaints had made me forget myself. For a moment I’d wanted to take revenge on him, surely I had. In those seconds, a reflex, my brain mapped out his property and calculated an appropriate amount of punishment to mete out.