Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (21 page)

This time he was trying to order flapper valves from
etoilets.com.
He just hung up. And that wasn’t getting the work done.

Praxis was a corporate buyer for PlumbKit, the West Coast branch of a plumbing services center representing “23,000 independent contractors nationwide”—or at least that part of the nation represented by two separated coasts. His job was to maintain a virtual warehouse that provided just-in-time delivery of everything from copper pipe to septic tanks and whatever came in between: faucets, valves, sinks, toilet bowls, urinals, shower stalls, and sidelines in the new electrostatic precipitation systems and composting closets that used no water at all.

Once he had been personally responsible for building huge dams and power plants, freeway and transit systems, commercial and residential skyscrapers, and mechanized facilities covering acres of land that designed and built automobiles, airplanes, and all the other necessities of modern life. Those were the new turnkey factories, which took raw materials and commoditized components like screws and ball bearings in at one loading dock and spit out finished goods in your choice of model, features, and colors at the other. But in the ninth long year of war between the United States of America and the upstart Federated Republic of America, nobody wanted that kind of infrastructure anymore. Correction: everybody wanted and needed it badly, but nobody had the money to pay for it.

But, so far, and as bad as things got, everybody still needed a toilet that flushed or did whatever the local ordinances allowed. So John Praxis had gone where he could be useful … at least until this morning.

Bernie Gutierrez, head of Praxis’s department, stopped by his desk. “How’s it going?”

“I just got another carrier signal. Sounded like an old modem.”

“Like a what?” The younger man looked blank.

“Or dialing into a fax machine.”

“That’s okay, John.”

Gutierrez was somewhere in his thirties. Praxis suddenly realized he was talking about technology that had been dead before this man’s childhood. He could read
silly old geezer
in Bernie’s facial expression.

“Anyway …” Gutierrez lifted his head above the angular partition that separated Praxis’s section of desktop from the buyer next to him in line. “People?” he said, raising his voice. “Meet in the conference room in five minutes? Let’s go team!” And he actually clapped like a cheerleader.

On all sides people broke off conversations, shed headsets, and stood up. Praxis followed them down the hall. When they were all seated around the table, Gutierrez stood up and applauded them.

“I want to tell you personally what a fine team you have been. We could not have achieved our success without each and every one of you.”

Around Praxis people exchanged nervous glances.
Business used to be honest, too,
he thought.

“However,” Gutierrez went on, “word has come down from Corporate in Philadelphia. In two weeks we will be rolling out OSMA—the Order and Stock Management Analyst.” Praxis could hear his voice emphasizing the capitals. The man sounded positively giddy. As if he didn’t know that without a team of buyers, Gutierrez himself would have nothing to supervise. The supervision of his own department would become an Information Technology function.

“We will be keeping a number of you on board for the transition period. Your job will be to teach OSMA everything you know. For the rest, you’ll be getting severance packages with extended benefits commensurate with your years of service.” Which would average about six weeks, Praxis knew, because PlumbKit believed in new blood and promoted rapid staff turnover.

“So everyone keep up the good work during these exciting times.”

It was a dismissal, and the team took it as such. They filed out of the room to go back to their desk sections and headsets. All but Praxis, whom Gutierrez took aside.

“You know, John, there’s a company policy on overage employees.”

“I didn’t know that,” Praxis said. “What’s the policy?”

“Since you’re already hooked into Social Security and Medicare, the company automatically waives your severance and extended benefits.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

In fact, although he had paid the maximum amount into the federal Social Security system all of his life, Praxis never actually applied for benefits when he became eligible at sixty-two, or any year after that. He had never told Gutierrez nor anyone else at PlumbKit how, once upon a time, he had been an extremely wealthy man. Once, he could have bought their little plumbing supply business—all the franchises, on both coasts—with just pocket money from a month of his average income.

Praxis had salvaged as much as possible from the wreckage of a family business that had taken four generations to build and a single year of economic chaos to destroy. He had tried to manage wisely the wealth that remained to him, investing it in the stocks and bonds of companies which made necessary goods and offered necessary services like food, housing, clothing, and military supplies. He invested in productive land that bore good harvests and supported people. And when the government had appropriated those enterprises for technical violations of its ever more complex regulations—basically, for the good of society—Praxis had shown better sense than to try and fight those actions. And he still had resources, held in bank accounts and other assets, that amounted to many millions, for the family fortune had been huge before it went mostly away. Those resources were meant to provide for his old age and for the future of his children and grandchildren.

Still, the government in his half of the country yearned to redistribute such wealth. It had long ago found a way to tax literally everything that moved, throve, and made a profit. But the federal government had no history, no legislative provision, allowing it to simply expropriate private property without a public reason and suitable compensation under eminent domain. Bank accounts, assets held in trust, and private capital were still protected by the “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment. So, much as the government needed Praxis’s money and that of other wealthy men to survive, it could not just appropriate it. Besides, that looked bad. It left a sour taste in the mouths of citizens who still placed sentimental value on notions of “freedom” and “independence.”

But the U.S. could offer Praxis and others like him the deal of a lifetime. In the fourth year of the war, under the pretext of a public emergency, the federal government held a sale of national assets. Monuments, national parks, reclamation areas, disused military reservations, and other public property held in trust for the people were all put on the block. The deal was that men like Praxis would donate their unattached wealth to support these public treasures, thereby freeing the government to win the war. In return, the man who accepted the deal was granted a one-time, nontransferable right to acquire the asset at the end of a specified time—usually thirty-five years—unless the government had repaid its obligation in full before then. In the meantime, the asset would continue as public property, and the grantee agreed to support it as a public service.

The deal that was offered to John Praxis involved the Stanislaus National Forest. It comprised almost 900,000 acres centered on the Stanislaus River in the Sierra Nevada, just north of Yosemite National Park. Out of curiosity, Praxis had asked about acquiring Yosemite itself, but it had already gone to a branch of the Buffett family. Still, the Stanislaus was a prize worth far more than the amount Praxis would pay for it. The value of the timber rights was a prime consideration, even after a third of the acreage had been burned over and virtually destroyed in the Rim Fire a decade earlier. That land would not be worthwhile as forest for another generation or more. But the mining prospects—for gold had once been found there, and much was still believed to be locked in the granite bedrock—would compensate him richly, not to mention the land’s worth when developed for housing and resorts. All of this value was prospective, of course, as he could not touch it for another thirty years yet.

It was a cunning wager to dangle before a man who had just turned seventy. He would, in all probability—given the advances of modern medicine and the care he was taking with his body since the heart replacement—live to somewhat beyond one hundred and five. And then title to the land would be his, unless the government chose to pay him off and reclaim it first. He could hope to live long enough after that to secure possession and develop its riches for his family and heirs.

It was an attractive deal, despite the numerous downsides. First, and most obviously, he might succumb to accident or illness in the intervening years. Second, because his pre-contract income and assets had by now indexed him out of the Social Security system, he would remain ineligible for the term of the Stanislaus National Forest contract. Third, and finally, the bulk of his remaining assets was pledged to the annual expenses of maintaining the land, which included advancing the reforestation effort, repairing fire roads and trails, clearing brush season by season, dredging silt-clogged lakes, and paying the salaries and administrative costs of on-site foresters, park rangers, and firefighters.

The remainder left him just enough to live on, if he watched his pennies, same as everyone else. But because he liked to keep busy, he had taken the job at PlumbKit as a “supernumerary worker.”

“Sure, Bernie,” Praxis said with a shrug. “The government’s taking good care of me.”

* * *

On Monday and Thursday nights, Antigone Wells drove to the First Presbyterian Church in the central part of Oklahoma City. It offered a big fellowship hall in the basement, and at six o’clock the brown and black belts went in to move chairs and tables up against the wall and mop the grime of foot traffic off the linoleum floor. They also brought out and hung an oil painting that one of the students had made of the
Megami,
the Goddess of Isshinryu: a beautiful Asian woman in a black leotard rising from the sea, her right hand raised in a fist to strike and her left held low to offer peace and protection; a dragon flew in the sky above her head and another swam in the sea around her waist. It was all based on a dream that had come to Master Tatsuo Shimabuku, the style’s founder. The Presbyterian church fathers agreed to regard this painting as a cultural icon, and the Oklahoma Okinawan Martial Arts Association agreed to call her the “spirit of karate.”

Once the chores were done, Wells changed in the ladies room. She still wore what had become her trademark pink leotard under the white
gi.
But now, in addition to the uniform, she carried to and from class a collapsible
bo
staff made of black fiberglass, which screwed together in the middle like a pool cue, and a pair of stainless steel short swords called
sai,
whose handles were wrapped in purple cord. After almost ten years of training she had learned all the forms associated with the style, including the weapons
kata
s, and had achieved the rank of third degree black belt through testing with
Sensei
Peter Greenwood up in Kansas City.

At seven o’clock sharp, Wells stepped barefoot onto the
dojo
floor, performed the traditional bow to honor the teaching space, looked around to make sure she was still the ranking belt for the evening, and shouted “
Hajime!
” to call the students to order.

The ninety-minute class took the usual form: half an hour of basic exercises as a group, half an hour of individual technique with the students lined up facing each other, and half an hour devoted to various forms of advanced instruction.

During the basics, led by a budding green belt, Wells walked around and corrected the students one by one: angle of a foot here, alignment of an elbow there. During the technique session, she usually worked with one student each night trading punches and blocks, holds and breaks. And during the advanced session she divided her time between teaching a
kata
to one or more students and a small group doing
kumite,
or sparring.

This evening she was sparring with a white belt, a young man named Brian, a college student not yet twenty who stood a head and a half taller than Wells. He was all elbows and knees, with puppy-dog hands and feet. He was nervous, and it obviously bothered him to trade blows with a woman—especially one old enough to be his grandmother. Also, he couldn’t keep his eyes where they belonged, which was over her shoulder, gazing passively past her body, using only his peripheral vision to detect and track her slightest movement. Mammals had developed that kind of seeing-but-not-looking to protect themselves out in the open. But this boy’s eyes kept moving to the fold of her
gi
jacket, seeking a glimpse of the pink nylon across her chest.

The distraction made him slow and stupid. It was time to teach him a lesson. And a number of other students were standing in a polite circle, watching. All to the good.

She and Brian took their ready stances. She was in a sideways
seisan
with her right fist on guard at shoulder level, left fist held low in front of her groin. He was in a
seiunchin,
the straddle stance, with his hands hanging loosely somewhere near his chest. Again, he was looking down at her cleavage.

In one fluid motion, she opened her right fist, curled her fingers back, plucked at the lapel of her
gi,
and pulled it open, exposing a firm breast held taut by the nylon. His eyes went wide. At the same time she made a small step-slide, lifted her forward foot, cocked her hips, and kicked him lightly in the ribs. His mouth was still hanging open as she completed the move.

“Eyes above my clavicles, Brian,” Wells said.

“Your
what,
ma’am?” he asked blankly.

For answer, she hop-stepped and planted the toes of her rear foot in his unprotected solar plexus, hitting him just hard enough to trigger a muscle spasm in his diaphragm. He gasped and sank to his knees.

The women in the circle shrieked with laughter.

“Ladies, help him to the sidelines, please.” Wells straightened her jacket, then called out, “Next!”