A Shadow of Death in The Woods (9 page)

Chapter 11

Cardboard Man

Nights were tough. I was tired but could not sleep. I felt wound up tighter than a seven-day clock. I thought about having a drink to relax but I didn’t like the idea. I liked to drink alcohol only when I wanted the enjoyment not when “I needed it.” Drinking because I “needed one” was a step onto a slippery slope.

I often went up to my study to read but had a hard time concentrating. The events of the previous weeks crowded into my mind. It was like having an unwanted video continuously playing in my head with no beginning and no end, just scene after scene where people were killed with lots of blood. If I dozed off, the tape switched to a video of my execution. I saw Mike with an emotionless smile on his face as he cocked a pistol in preparation to kill me. I would wake with a start, hearing my name being called. It would be Kat wanting to go to bed.

We used to sleep together in a king-size bed, which was extra-long. I could sleep in a standard bed but I didn’t like it. If I didn’t get myself positioned just right, either my feet hung off the end or my head hit something.

I slept like a baby, waking up every two hours or less. I just couldn’t sleep. Kat was not in bed with me. She slept in another bedroom, letting me keep the longer bed. She said I was tossing and turning so much she couldn’t sleep. The nightmares were bad. I got up early. Why not? I couldn’t sleep.

This had gone on for weeks. Kat quizzed me on what was wrong. I gave her platitudes for responses. This couldn’t go on forever. Something had to change but I didn’t know how to make it change.

The tension between Kat and me grew day by day. She wanted me to see a counselor as in a psychiatrist. She knew many because she worked in that field as a psychologist. I couldn’t do that nor could I tell Kat why I couldn’t. My life was coming apart at the seams. It was no better at work.

I was a bean counter (accountant) for a medium-size company. I remember seeing a skit on Monty Python’s Flying Circus where the actors pretended to be members of a professional society for stacking things on top of other things. It struck me as being hilarious because it reminded me of my job. My job was to take spreadsheets from other people and roll them up into one spreadsheet and make sure it all balanced. Of course there was value in the spreadsheets but still it didn’t strike me as something grownups should be doing all day.

My boss was a jerk in the best of times but lately he had really been on my case. He kept pointing out that if I wanted to move up in management, I had to act like a management team member, i.e. I shouldn’t be riding around on a motorcycle. I compromised by not riding my bike to work. I wasn’t giving up much since I didn’t like riding short distances. I didn’t ride unless I was fully dressed for it. That meant a helmet with a full face shield, leather jacket, heavy pants, riding boots, and leather gloves. By the time I could get all of that equipment on along with ear plugs, I could have walked to work, which I did sometimes. So it wasn’t a big sacrifice for me not to ride the bike to work but it irritated me.

He also didn’t like my weight lifting. He said it made me look like an ape. From his demeanor I was confident that he didn’t mean this as a compliment. I was pretty sure that this came under the heading of harassment but you don’t get anywhere accusing your boss of harassment. My boss irritated me.

Recently, he started saying that he was getting complaints about me. People were saying that I would get a faraway look in my eyes and ignore people in meetings. It looked to other people like there was no one home at my place.

Today he wanted to go over these salient points with me. I hadn’t slept in weeks and wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep. He went blah, blah, blah. I thought that this could not go on much longer but I muddled through.

At home that night after the kids were put to bed, Kat wanted to have a “serious talk.” I guess that would be opposed to a flippant talk but I wasn’t sure. We sat down in the den. She had a drink in her hand. I had cut down on my drinking. It wasn’t helping me.

Kat accused me of being shallow and unresponsive. She got really upset and called me a cardboard man. A cardboard man is a two-dimensional man with no depth. We hadn’t slept in the same bed in weeks or was it months? I was obviously having lots of problems but couldn’t talk with anyone about it.

Kat gave me an ultimatum: I needed to see a shrink or she was not going to be able to live with me, me being a cardboard man. I could see her point but I was a man with no support. My life was unraveling. It was like watching a puppy pulling yarn, unraveling a sweater. I couldn’t catch the puppy and it was unraveling my life in a macabre video that wouldn’t stop.

I should find a shrink and then not talk to the shrink? How was that going to work? Gee, Doc, I have a problem bothering me but I can’t tell you about it. My flashbacks were not getting better. Something somewhere had to give. I had to work the next day. Some more good news.

It was our annual budget time. Various entities submitted their budgets to me on spreadsheets and then I rolled them up into a master spreadsheet. I then extracted key figures and wrote a summary memo to be submitted to upper management. Wonderful. I had no input to the numbers. I only made sure everything balanced. If something was out of whack, I took it back to the submitter and asked them to redo it. Of course they would beg, plead and threaten. They had submitted their best budget the first time. How could they reduce it?

The engineers called it funny money because it was company internal funds for the most part. It was mostly an allocation process and the game was to see who got the most toys. There were three categories of funds: people power (headcount), capital funds and expense funds. Headcount was fixed if no one had hiring authority so that part was actually the allocation of the employees. Capital was defined by the IRS and had to follow certain rules. Expense and capital were the only funds that were manageable without hiring or firing. Boring? You bet. My job was driving me nuts.

Job driving me nuts. Nightmares. Couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t slept well since coming back from West Virginia. People following me. Marriage on the rocks. I was going to have to make a list so I could organize my problems. One thing for sure, I didn’t need any more problems.

What was cardboard man to do?

Chapter 12

Woody

I got to work the next day with a splitting headache. I was popping analgesics like they were M&M candies. It didn’t seem to help but there was hope. It was a bad habit that I didn’t indulge in much. Too many Americans died of kidney failure by overdoing analgesics. I usually didn’t take them but today the pain was especially bad.

I had gotten through the morning by ducking my boss. I was starting to have very real images in my head where I would throw the guy through a wall. I could do it, too. It was the best feeling that I had had in weeks except for the postcard. I was sitting musing this over when my phone rang. It was Woody.

Woody was a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen much lately. He never called me during working hours so I knew something must be up.

He owned a bar in town. It was the kind of bar that my in-laws would like to see closed. That is if they even knew Woody’s bar existed. It was on the wrong side of town. I went there sometimes to unwind with a beer or two. Local bikers hung out there.

Woody and I went back a long time. During college I worked for Woody as a bouncer. It didn’t pay a lot but I earned some money. As part of the gig, Woody gave me room and board. We became good friends. I like his wife a lot, too.

Woody liked me as a bouncer because I generally could throw miscreants out without a fuss. Very few patrons were large enough to even think about challenging me. I had no ego issues so I had no need to show off or outdo any of the patrons. If they didn’t behave, without embarrassing them I merely asked them to leave. That usually worked. If not, I threw them out, often by grabbing them by the seat of the pants and shirt collar and picking them up. It is amazing how helpless you are when your feet are not on the ground.

I listened to his sad story.

*   *   *

Woody was in a stew. He had worked all his life to get what he had. He owned a bar and a nice house. Well, nice in his opinion. It wasn’t like the Simpson place across town or Jack’s house.

He wanted to run a nice bar but the fact was that if you wanted to sell a lot of booze, you had to cater to the drinking crowd and the drinking crowd could get boisterous. The rich people had bars at home.

He hired bouncers to keep the peace. That is where he had met Jack. Jack bounced for him for a few years while he was going to college. He was perfect for a bouncer. He was big, athletic, knew how to box and had no ego problems. He threw guys out of the bar because they needed throwing out, not because Jack felt challenged.

No smart guy would challenge Jack. He could knock your block off without raising a sweat. The manager in the local gym tried to talk Jack in boxing professionally. Jack had the size, the reach, the strength, the stamina, the speed and the skill for professional boxing. What he didn’t have was heart; he just didn’t like beating a man into submission. To survive as a professional boxer, you have to want to tear your opponent’s head off every night. Some guys like to do that. Jack didn’t, no heart.

Woody didn’t have boxing skills but he knew how to handle himself in a bar fight. He had heart. He wasn’t very big but he had an edge. He had a club under the bar. It was his wood and it was why he was called Woody. If things got rough, he got the wood out. He knew how to rap the wood on the bar so it sounded like a shotgun going off. That halted a lot of trouble in its tracks. If it went beyond that, he could take a man down in no time with the wood. His favorite move was a straight jab to the abdomen. That usually took the fight out of a guy and it was hard to block such a blow. If more convincing was needed, Woody would hit the guy on the leg and take him down. That usually ended it. Woody could be mean. If someone really got on his case, Woody would take the guy’s knee out. This didn’t happen much because Woody didn’t want to lose customers. It usually only took the knowledge that Woody could and would do this for most guys to back off.

All of this was fine and dandy but a few nights ago a man came into the bar drunk. Woody refused to serve him because he was drunk. You have to watch out for liability. If one of your customers was in a car wreck, you could be held accountable. The guy went bananas. They threw the guy out but he was mad and threatened to get his brother-in-law and come back. In fact, he specified that he was coming tonight and Woody had verified through the grapevine that he was coming with his brother-in-law and a third guy.

Woody had seen the brother-in-law. He was huge. The other two guys were smaller and Woody could handle them but the brother-in-law worried him. The only guy he knew that could handle the big guy was Jack. On top of this his regular bouncer was out sick. He had to get Jack to help him or he was dead, maybe literally.

Woody had no leverage with Jack except friendship. Woody didn’t have enough money to make a difference because Jack had a well-paying job and he didn’t need extra dough. Woody had it all figured out. He was going to beg.

*   *   *

After they got the catch-up out of the way, Woody got down to brass tacks and laid out his request for help that night about nine o’clock. It was insane for me to even listen to him. I was a manager in a company and it wasn’t seemly for me to be knocking heads in a bar. But Woody was an old friend who had done a lot for me when I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. If you turn your back on a guy like that, what kind of a person are you? What are your values in life? So I listened.

Woody wanted me to confront the big guy. While he was doing that, Woody would “take out” the other two. At least that was Woody’s idea. Woody said that more guys wouldn’t help because they would only get in the way. I wasn’t so sure.

Woody said that they had to take these three guys out before they knew what happened. I agreed with that part.

Surprisingly, Woody was aware that this would be a delicate situation for me and had thought of a plan. He would have a guy, who he called Kid, pick me up near my house that night. Kid would bring me to the bar. After the action, Kid would drop me off where he had picked me up while Woody dealt with the inevitable cops. That way no one would see my pickup at the bar. I could go in through the kitchen and back out through the kitchen. His plan called for me to make my exit before the cops came in the front door. This way I wouldn’t be there when the cops showed up. What could go wrong?

He said if I didn’t help him, these guys were going to put him in the hospital, which he couldn’t afford and who would run his bar while he was in the hospital?

He said the brother-in-law was as big as me, maybe bigger, and no one else could handle him. He said that he hated to ask me but he had no one else to turn to.

I figured I could go home, eat, help put the kids to bed, go up to my study and then sneak down the back stairs like a teenager and meet Kid in the street up a few houses. If I was lucky, Kat would be busy and not check my study. She rarely bothered me when I was up there so that part had a chance of working. Now that we weren’t getting along so well there was even less chance of her checking my study.

The part about taking care of these three guys in the bar was less convincing but I couldn’t think of a good way of telling Woody no. So I told him to have Kid pick me up.

I thought about wearing my motorcycle jacket but I decided it was best not to wear any kind of jacket in the bar because it could restrict my movements. I’d leave it in Kid’s truck. I would regret this decision later because a thick jacket or a heavy one like a motorcycle jacket would have helped. Well, if you are going to make one really bad decision, why not make a few more?

That night Kid was right where Woody said he would be. I jumped in an old beater pickup truck and off we went to Woody’s Bar and Grill. Woody actually had a grill and he could cook a great hamburger if he wasn’t busy at the bar.

We pulled in behind Woody’s and went in through the kitchen. I found Woody behind the bar and I could see he was nervous. So was I. I still couldn’t figure out for sure why I had involved myself except Woody was a friend.

Woody offered me a drink. I told him to give me a ginger ale with three slices of lime. I didn’t want to have any alcohol in my system this night.

Nine o’clock came and went and no big guy came in. But around nine thirty three guys came stomping in and one was huge. He was almost as tall as I am and he must have had fifty pounds on me.

I was seated at the bar so my height didn’t show. The big guy asked for Woody, using many unnecessary words, all of them being words that belonged in the gutter. I could see Woody out of the corner of my eye, sliding his wood out of its hiding place.

I stood up and faced the big guy. I told him I knew a Woody. The big guy turned to me and in foul language asked who I was. I told him I was his worst nightmare. I don’t know why I said that. I hadn’t plan on anything like that. This wasn’t a movie.

I could see in the guy’s eyes that he was going to swing on me. He must have watched too many movies because he came at me with a Hollywood round house. They work only in the movies and probably then only after several takes.

His giant fist came around in what to me seemed like slow motion. Anticipating such a move, I had made sure that my back was not to the bar, trapping me. I had room to step outside of the round house and watched it go by. If it had connected, it could have ripped my head off or at least it would have seemed like it.

As his right fist moved past me his right side was open to me. Only an amateur would do this. I routinely work on large, heavy punching bags and have a powerful punch. I hit him in his right ribs with a blow that had all of my weight and strength behind it. I could see the pain go across his face mixed with surprise. He was not used to this happening. Being a big guy, he did not go down. I was worried about the two small guys but at a glance I saw Woody taking down the one on my right. The other guy was loose and I saw him in the corner of my left eye. When I pulled my left fist out of the big guy’s ribs, I pulled it back and hit the small guy to my left in the bridge of his nose with my elbow. I was being careful and not hitting anyone in the face with my fist.

You can break your hand that way. A little known factoid is that boxing gloves were invented not to protect a boxer’s head but to protect his hands. After boxing gloves were introduced, boxing actually became a much more dangerous sport, if you want to call it a sport, because the boxers could hit so much harder without breaking their hands.

The small guy went down when I hit him but at the same time I felt a sharp sting in my left side. Too busy to worry about it now.

I turned back to the big guy just in time to see him try to hit me with a left. I let it fly by and hit him just as hard as I could in his left ribs. I felt his ribs break. He was still on his feet when Woody took him out with his wood. He made sure it was permanent. I heard the guy’s knee crack. The guy screamed and went down. He was done.

I turned back to the small guy on my left where Woody couldn’t get to him. He was back on his feet and I saw a knife in his right hand. He made a parry and caught me on my left arm but I was able to grab his arm with my right hand. The guy wouldn’t drop his knife so I twisted his arm around and jabbed the knife in his leg. He screamed but didn’t go down. This gave Woody time to come around with his wood and Woody viciously smashed the guy’s knee. He wouldn’t walk for a long time, if ever.

Woody asked me if I was okay. I told him that I had a couple of knife cuts. My left arm was cut and my left side on my ribs was cut. He swore and kicked the knife guy in the face. I didn’t like being party to such violence or viciousness but that was Woody. He was the nicest guy in the world but a mean man in a bar fight.

Woody grabbed me and said that I had to get out of there fast because the cops were on their way. It would wreck my reputation to be caught in a bar fight. He took me to the kitchen where he wrapped towels around my left arm and stuffed some inside my shirt on my left. He took my belt off and put it around my body to hold the towels on my ribs in place.

Woody was swearing and saying that I couldn’t go to the emergency room. I quickly thought of an ex-girlfriend who had become a local doctor. I told Woody I had a friend that could help me. I wasn’t sure if she would or not. It was a touchy situation.

I made my way out the back with Kid. I phoned Ann, the doctor, and asked for help. She asked me why I couldn’t go to the emergency room like normal people. I explained and finally she agreed to meet me at her office but she didn’t like it. It would be a cash deal with no records.

I hadn’t mentioned her name on the phone so Kid didn’t know what doctor it was. I called her doc on the phone. She wanted to know why I wasn’t using her name. I told her I would explain when I saw her. I had Kid drop me off a couple of blocks away from her office so he wouldn’t see the office or her name. Besides I knew I was going to have to wait for her to get to her office and I might as well be walking up the street. I told Kid to take off.

Kid about had a fit. He said Woody told him that he had to get me home or Woody would kill him. Maybe literally. I calmed Kid down and told him I had it under control. The doctor was a friend of mine and the doctor could take me home after he had stitched me up or whatever he had to do. Kid bought this and left with the idea that the doctor was a man.

Ann arrived just a few minutes behind me.
I could tell right away that she was very angry. I felt bad because I was abusing our friendship. I was desperate though. The blood was beginning to soak through the towels both on my side and on my left arm. The guy had cut me good but I had the use of my arm and fingers so I figured it was only a flesh wound.