James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

He jerked the drawer open again. The note he’d found on his monitor this morning was gone, the Post-it that read, “Are we not men?” He pulled the drawer all the way out and peered into the shadows in the back; he ran his fingertips through the litter in the sharp corners of the drawer — gingerly, in case of a stray pushpin — and came up only with a steel letter opener he hadn’t known was there and a smudgy three-by-five card. He pushed through the paper clips, the soggy heap of rubber bands, the tangle of clenched binder clips. But the note was gone. With both hands in the drawer, Paul lifted his gaze to the ceiling tiles above him. “They’re up there,” the dying tech writer had said. He listened for his neighbor’s wheeze and heard nothing; he must have left already. He jerked his hands out of the drawer and stood. Go ahead, he thought. Play games with me, asshole, whoever you are.

He heard a sharp hiss and glanced over his shoulder. Maybe the tech writer hadn’t left yet. Then he heard it again, a little louder. He caught his breath and thought, I hope that’s not coming from the ceiling.

“Ssss! Paul!” Olivia Haddock peered wide-eyed at him around the partition of her cube. “Did you see him?” she whispered.

Paul sighed. “See who?”

Olivia shushed him, then beckoned him sharply, and Paul sighed again and crossed the aisle. Olivia backed into the deepest corner of her cube, glancing past him at her doorway. “Did you meet Stanley Tulendij?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Paul shrugged.

“How was he?” Olivia’s eyes shone as though she were a cheerleader asking him if he’d met the star quarterback.

“Well,” said Paul, “I hear he was a titan in fleet management.”

“What they did to him, you shouldn’t do to a dog.” Olivia clutched her elbows; her mouth was puckered with distress. “They tossed him away like he was just trash.”

“I heard he was fired for. .”

She shushed him again, sharply. “Listen,” she began, and she told him that Stanley Tulendij had been a TxDoGS legend for thirty years, twenty-five of them as fleet manager. He had been personally responsible for the modernization of the state of Texas’s fleet of official vehicles in the mid-seventies, skillfully negotiating the prerogatives of the legislature, the bureaucratic inertia of the agency, and the greed of contractors. “That man never, and I mean never , put a foot wrong.” Olivia shuddered, her hand at her throat. Stanley Tulendij, she continued, had been a shoo-in to be chief of the whole division—“Eli’s job,” she added, in case Paul was not clear on the hierarchy — and probably the head of the agency, if it hadn’t been for. .

She lifted herself on tiptoe and glanced around again, then lowered her voice a fraction and continued telegraphically. “Five years ago. Budget cuts. Statewide, hundreds, and I mean hundreds , of people lost their jobs. Twenty-year veterans. And Stanley? Out of all those managers? The only one who said no. Not my people.” In the end the man who had accomplished miracles in state government for years without ticking off anybody — which was in itself a miracle — managed to tick everybody off all at once. “Suddenly he couldn’t do anything right,” Olivia said, “and one day he was just gone . He was on the job on Tuesday, and on Wednesday it was like he’d never even existed.”

All around him, Paul could see the tops of people’s heads as they glided up the aisle on their way home. “Nolene told me,” he said, “that they fired him for. .”

“That’s a lie!” hissed Olivia. “Don’t you believe it! They just made that up.” She widened her eyes at Paul. “The next week Rick was in Stanley’s old office, and the first thing he did — the first thing— was shitcan thirty guys.” She only mouthed the word shitcan . “And those thirty guys? Most of them had been around for years . It was like Rick just pulled a lever and whoosh! They dropped right out of the bottoms of their cubes. Like trash . Which only made it worse when. .”

Olivia shuddered again, and Paul, in spite of himself, felt a little of the chill. She glanced wildly past him, and he turned to glimpse Renee hustling by, clutching her oversized purse. Olivia stooped and snatched her own purse from under her desk and held it before her. She looked like she might flee before she finished the story, so Paul put his arm across the doorway.

“When what?” he whispered.

“The bus!” Olivia gasped. “Don’t tell me you never heard about the tragedy at Lonesome Knob! That fateful bus ride? The sinkhole?”

“Well, no?” said Paul, tentatively.

Olivia dropped her voice even lower so that Paul had to lean in, close enough to smell her shampoo — something fruity — and to see through the tree line of her scalp to the hint of darkness at her roots. Oh, my God, thought Paul, Olivia dyes her hair!

But she was too wrapped up in her story to notice where he was looking. Even in disgrace, she was saying, Stanley Tulendij had refused to let his men lose their jobs without ceremony, so he had chartered a bus — at his own expense! Out of his retirement money! — to treat the thirty cashiered TexDogs to a final, unofficial outing at Lonesome Knob State Park, just outside the Lamar city limits. The signal feature of the park (Paul knew) was Lonesome Knob itself, a great, bald dome of ancient granite, under which ran a warren of caves, largely unexplored; no one knew how far they went. Stanley Tulendij called his outing a “retirement party” and insisted that his men wear their coats and ties. Likewise out of his own pocket, he ponied up for barbecued brisket and hot sausage and a big steel tub full of beer on ice.

“That day there was a terrible storm,” whispered Olivia, and for a moment Paul had the same childish thrill he used to get from campfire ghost stories. Olivia clutched her purse and dropped her voice so low that Paul caught only snatches of what she said. He wasn’t even sure they were the important snatches: a sudden Texas thunderstorm — the men took refuge in the bus — a flash flood — the bus carried away — that awful sinkhole — the bus swept clean—

“What?” said Paul.

Olivia narrowed her eyes at Paul. “The force of the water busted out the windows of the bus, and just scoured it out . All those men. .” She blinked back tears. All those men, it seemed, had been washed away into the caves without a trace. Only Stanley Tulendij was ever found, clinging to a juniper bush at the lip of the sinkhole, still in his coat and tie, soaked to the skin, nearly drowned.

“And he’s never been the same man since,” suggested Paul, trying not to smile. He didn’t believe a word of this. It had the almost pornographic allure of an urban legend or some mournful, minor-key folk song about a train wreck or a mining disaster. “So now he haunts the halls of TxDoGS, looking in vain for the faces of his missing men. .”

Olivia’s face hardened, and she slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “I suppose you think losing your job is funny,” she snapped, and Paul was stung to silence.

“Not really,” he managed to say.

“You think because you’ve got a pee aitch dee,” she spat, “you’re too good for this job.”

“Not really,” Paul said again, hoarsely.

“Excuse me.” Olivia snapped her purse strap between her breasts and pushed past Paul, sailing out the door of her cube and up the aisle.

Paul sighed, then stepped across the aisle into his own cube long enough to switch off his light. He took the rear stairs and passed the mail room, hoping for a glimpse of Callie, but he didn’t see her. He signed out and deposited his visitor’s pass at the front desk, then threaded his way through the parking lot to his lucky spot under the tree, along the river embankment. He rolled down the windows and opened the creaking hatchback to let out the day’s accumulated heat; he took off his dress shirt and tossed it on the passenger seat. Behind him, the departing column of SUVs and pickups rumbled out of the lot; Paul slammed the hatchback shut and lowered himself behind the wheel.