Alien Accounts (6 page)

He shook his wattles wistfully. ‘Yes, sir, ten cents an hour. And they were
loyal
, mind you. I had men staying on ten, fifteen years. It was the war ruined all that. I have always been against war, and if you talk at me until you are blue in the face, I’ll not change my opinion. War destroys stability. Nowadays, the young men only work for you a year or so, then they run off to get drafted, with not a care for the future of the firm.’

Section VI: Masterson on Tour

Shortly after lunch was the time when Mr. Masterson made his afternoon tour. He paced the aisle, holding his fat, hairless hands carefully away from his sides, fingers together and slightly cupped, thumbs braced, as though he were gripping the wheels of a wheelchair. In the watery glass panels on his face, two pale creatures darted back and forth.

Masterson’s finger suddenly stabbed the table of one draughtsman with a sound like a thrown knife. He screamed. ‘Arrowheads! I said no arrowheads! Take them out! I distinctly said no arrowheads! When I come back here in an hour, I don’t want to see a single arrowhead! No arrowheads! Can’t you understand plain English?’

The man did not understand a word he was saying, but he realized erasures were in order, and nodded. He bent lower over his board, and the electric eraser trembled in his hand.

Masterson passed on to the next man. ‘What’s
that
number?’ Stab. ‘It looks like a three, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It is a three, sir.’

‘Well, it don’t look enough like a three, then. Take it out and do it over.’

Smiling, the man obeyed. Masterson’s doughy features began to glow. ‘Take out
all
your numbers and do them over. Make them all look like threes.’

He came at last to a deaf-mute, Hrothgar.

‘What do you call this? A centreline? And this? If these are centrelines, let’s make them look like centrelines, huh?’

Hrothgar looked hurt, but moved to obey.

‘And I told you before I wanted more space in there and there. Why don’t you
listen
when I’m talking to you?’

‘Nggyah-ngg!’ protested the victim.

‘Don’t you talk back to me that way!’

Section VII: Questions

From the office came the sound of a knife being thrown with great force and apparent hate. Perhaps it was as Ed said, that arbitrary power corrupts arbitrarily.

Masterson screamed at the draughtsmen continually, but never at the clerks. He never asked the clerks what it was they were doing because he didn’t know what they were doing. It did not suit him to ask a question unless he already knew the answer. Nothing infuriated him more than discovering that someone else knew the answer, too.

‘How fast does light travel?’ he asked Henry casually one day. Henry did not know.

‘I know, naturally. In our measurement system, 186,000 miles per second,’ said Karl.

‘Who asked you?’ said Masterson’s right eye.

Somewhere inside Karl another eye was closed forever by a foot squashing it; it spewed forth a grapey eye-seed.

The unpleasant marsupiality of Karl’s eyes was worsened when he smiled. Little sharp shrew-teeth glittered at the ends of big dead-pale gums, and one knew his tongue would also be black. He looked like someone Henry had met before, somewhere, and Karl had changed. He was a spoiled bear, a bear gone finicky – yet how had he got those teeth?

Section VIII: More Questions

Masterson slapped Harold on the shoulder and asked if he could borrow ten till payday. ‘I’m a little short, heh heh.’ Assuming the boss was joking,
Harold began to chuckle.

‘No, I’m serious. Had a big weekend with a doll in Boston. I’m flat broke. You know how it is. I could always pay myself my own salary early, but I hate to screw up the book-keeping, see?’ Reluctantly Harold saw. He loaned the ten.

‘You’ll never see that again,
^4'
whispered Big Ed, his face a complete blank. Harold pretended to be unaware of the old man’s existence.

Henry noticed how blank Ed was actually becoming, as if someone were slowly erasing him. He was not just blurry, like Clark (who was growing a great mouth-devouring beard), but less definitely there at all.

On the following payday when Art passed around the pay envelopes, Harold did not get his ten. He tried to catch the flickering eye of Masterson when he stalked through the room, but the boss pretended to be unaware of Harold’s existence.

‘In the good old days,’ Art said to Henry, ‘I never had to take crap from anybody. Good feeling, being your own boss.

‘Why, I used to walk down that aisle and I never even looked at what was on their boards. I just stared real hard at the back of each draughtsman’s neck, stared until he thought he was going to get hit. If he flinched, my rule was, I got to hit him twenty times on the arm. Hee hee, they nearly always flinched.’

The two men sat in the warm diner speaking to one another through pale yellow clouds of steam from the french fryer: mists of the distant present. On the previous day, window cleaners had appeared at the office and wiped away the winter’s grime. An hour after they had left, a dirty rain began.

‘I notice everyone smokes around the office,’ Art said. ‘Not in my day. I never let anyone smoke, and I’d walk around the office all day puffing fifty-cent cigars and blowing the smoke at them. Drove ‘em crazy, especially when I’d dump hot ashes on their drawings. Yes, sir, I ran a tight office in those days.

‘If anyone ever sneaked off to the can for a smoke, I’d lock him in there for the rest of the day, then fire him. “Enjoy your smoke,” I’d say as I turned the key. “You got all day, bright boy.”

‘Whee, one time a new kid ran in there for a smoke at about nine in the morning. I locked him in till six. Hee hee, the rest of them didn’t like that, I can tell you, working all day without a biff.

‘Well, came six o’clock and I opened to let him out, and what do you think that young bastard had done? Hanged himself! Yep, he had that old chain right around his neck and he was stone cold, and the toilet running gallons and gallons. You should have seen my water bill that month.’

His eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘Yes, sir, that’s the only time anyone ever put anything over on old Art. Hee hee.’ He hugged his new coat around him gleefully, while some of his coffee dribbled off the point of his chin.

Section IX: The Theological Virtues

Division A: Faith

It soon became apparent to all that Harold was going to get the shitty end of the stick.

‘Did you even ask him for the money?’ asked Ed.

‘Well – no. How can I? He’ll think I don’t trust him.’

‘Do you trust him?’

‘Of course I do. Heck, he’s the
boss
. Our lives are in his keeping, so to speak. Our names are in his book. He gives us each payday our wages. How can we turn against him? The pen is mightier than the sword.’

‘But if you trust him, what have you got to gripe about?’

Harold, descended of a flawed monk, pondered this point of faith. ‘It isn’t the money, you understand. Heck, I don’t care if I never see that ten again.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s just that I trust him, and now he’s going to betray that trust. He’s going to welsh on me.’

‘Maybe he just forgot,’ Karl purred, showing his little nasty teeth.

‘Oh sure. He forgets, and I never see my money again. You can be sure
he
wouldn’t forget it if
I
owed
him
ten dollars.’

Clark made a diplomatic suggestion. ‘Look, just ask him if you can borrow ten from him. If he’s forgotten about the loan, it’ll remind him of it, and if he’s planned on welshing, he’ll be caught out ashamed. Besides, this way he’ll know you need the money right away.’

Division B: Hope

Harold accosted Mr. Masterson. ‘Sir, could I borrow ten from you till payday? Heh, heh, I’m a little short, at the moment.’

The bulging figure turned slowly with the dignity of a wagon train, and faced him. For over a minute, Masterson subjected Harold to an intense stare of scorn and disbelief. Then he sighed and pulled out his billfold. Harold sighed, too.

‘I wish you’d learn to live within your means, Kelmscott. I’m not a loan company. Now I’m going to loan you this, but it’s the last time, understand?’ The hinged glasses beetled over him.

‘But I do live within my means, sir,’ Harold stammered. ‘It’s not me who has weekends in Boston with a girl.’

The pale eyes did not register anything. Masterson sighed again, heaving his big, flabby shoulders. ‘I’m not interested in nasty details of your personal life, Kelmscott. If you can’t live on what I pay you, maybe you’d better look elsewhere for a job.’ With a snort of disgust, he peeled a ten from his thick bundle of large bills and slapped it on Harold’s desk. Then he stalked off to his office to throw, presumably, knives.

Division C: Charity

Every time an object hit the wall, Willard jumped. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.
‘I just know he’s got some big, mean-lookin’ knives in there.’

From time to time, Willard got out his own knife and tested the action. It was never fast enough to suit him.

At lunch, Henry asked Art about the pink slips. Did he ever warn anyone they were about to be fired?

The old man stopped masticating. ‘Sir, watch your tongue. The job of firing is a sacred trust. My son, Mr. Masterson, has entrusted me with the care of and disbursement of those pink slips, and of the persons they represent. Do you think I could let him down? My own son?’

Drawing himself up, Art for the moment resembled a famous general, and his thin chest seemed even to fill out the folds of his new coat.

‘Besides,’ he added with a wheeze. ‘I like to watch a man’s face when he opens his envelope. Boy, he sees those streets, those employment offices, even soup lines, hee hee hee …’ His laughter turned to a fit of dry coughing.

Section X: A High Office

That afternoon, Mr. Masterson called Henry into his office. None of the clerks but Art had ever been there before, and Art had forgotten what it was like. Rod and Bob looked envious of Henry, but Karl smirkingly assumed he was being
given the axe
.

‘If you want my opinion,’ he said, ‘I think you’re going to be quietly
axed
to leave. Ha!’

Willard drew him aside and said, ‘Play it cool, boy. If he pulls a knife, just you give me a holler.’

Henry pushed open the door with the placard and entered a plain, drab room. On one wall was a peculiar dart board, and on the floor beneath it a huge pile of darts with plastic fins. Near the opposite wall was a long desk behind which was visible the upper half of Mr. Masterson. In his hands was a dart with green plastic fins. Nothing else in the room was describable.

The boss half-rose, turned and hurled the dart; it hit a spot near the baseboard with a sound like a thrown knife, hung for an instant, then fell to the heap.

‘So it goes,’ sighed Masterson, or maybe, ‘How would you like a raise?’

‘Fine, sir.’

‘Here’s the set-up. We may have a new contract or two. Already we have a new contact or two. It’s the big chance. All the candy companies on the coast are changing over to dynamometers. They’ll need a lot of records and stuff switched over, too, and that’s where we come in. If we can handle the changeover for one company, we can do good. Then all the other companies will want us to do good for them, too. Get it? Then later on, when the armed forces change from telephones to radios, we’ll be set, see?

‘But we’ll need some extra help, and I’ll need your help. You could be
my right hand, and it’ll mean a lot of extra money for the company, o.k.?’

Section XI: The Mysterious Motto

Henry remembered his motto, the words spoken to him by the boss the day he’d hired him. As they had occurred to him. Henry had added interpretations, until now the sheet was covered; but which had the boss actually said?

If you work good, we’ll do good by you.

If few work good, we’ll do good by you.

If you were good, we’ll do good by you.

If few were good, we’ll do good by you.

If you work good weal, do good by you.

If few work good weal, do good by you.

If you were good weal, do good by you.

If few were good weal, do good by you.

In addition to these, there were the 24 combinations possible by replacing ‘good by you’ by ‘good buy you’, ‘goodbye, you’, and finally ‘good bayou’. Though it was unlikely that he said ‘If few were good weal, do good bayou,’ that possibility could not be overlooked, Henry thought as he shook hands and prepared to leave.

‘One thing, though,’ said Masterson, counting that thing on his forefinger. ‘Of course you’ll make a lot of dough eventually, after our contacts become contracts, but you’ll have to take a little pay cut for now, o.k.?’

They shook hands once more, and Henry started to leave. The boss held up two fingers. ‘Secondly, now that you’re a boss, you’ll have to do a little informing on your pals. Remember, a boss has no real pals, and the great are always lonely.