The Resort (28 page)

What was your father’s name before it was Brown
?
Braunstein?

If you Jews are always in trouble, there must be something about you that causes trouble, don’t you think?

I think one must not get paranoid. I must give my will strength. Remember, there are Gentiles out there who try to compensate for history, who like Jews too much. They have a taste for worriers? Are they at
tracted
to the Jewish intellectuals, sprinkled
everywhere, who think by talking, who are forever on the trail of solutions for the insoluble? Bullshit. They are attracted to Jews out of guilt!

Henry, you’re going too far. It isn’t always this way.
From time to time every Jew looks over his shoulder and finds that there’s no one following him.

Henry laughed. He felt his body coming to life. He stretched again.

Time to act. Carefully, Henry raised himself so that he might see over the low parapet. At a great distance some of the guests were meandering slowly down to the dining hall for breakfast. He wondered if any of them had kept kosher at home. What did they do here?

They ate what they were given.

At home, if you were hungry you went to the refrigerator. If you were not at home, you stopped in a restaurant, or picked up something at a takeout place. He smiled at the thought of the credit cards in his pocket. Margaret called them his plastic security blankets. Not they, not all the money in the world would get him food without his surrendering. Would a hundred dollars get him a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a cup of water? What was that 1930s book by Michael Gold,
Jews Without Money
? This place was filled with them.

Looking carefully over the parapet again, Henry saw stragglers heading for the dining hall. If Margaret was among them, he could not see her. If she were here, she would say
be logical. Homo sapiens, use your brain.

He remembered when she had said those exact words. Two years after he had started his business, the fulfillment center was a round-the-clock worry. Some days the incoming customer complaints were more numerous than the orders. There were cash-flow problems, and the personnel turnover created the endless process of training many new people who would soon leave. It was like trying to fill a leaky pail with a teacup, and so he brought his worries to Margaret’s dissecting table.

Homo sapiens,
she said,
use your brain.
“What do people want from your so-called fulfillment center?”

“They want what they ordered, not something else.”

“And?”

“They want it quickly, but what can I do? The least able, lowest-paid clerks are the pickers. They are dull. They don’t even respond to incentives.”

“Yes, they do,” Margaret said. “Negative incentives. They don’t get into trouble if there’s a policeman watching.”

That got them started. It was an exciting evening, starting from scratch as if the business did not yet exist. Knowing what you know now, how would you set it up? they asked themselves.

To avoid wrong shipments your order pickers had to fill hundreds of orders a day, each one perfectly. Yet it was one of the lowest-paid jobs in the plant. They were the unskilled—no previous experience, the ads said. You couldn’t have highly skilled people as pickers, the cost per order would be prohibitive. Moreover, it’s the kind of job that would drive most people bananas. People who could pick four hundred orders a day of miscellaneous items without getting
some
of
them screwed
up didn’t want to do that kind of work. So you had to surround those who did with a system that would police them.

Negative incentives, she had said.

He could hire two inspectors to sit at the end of the collection points where the baskets were brought, and have them double-check the orders. If they caught only five or six mistakes in a day, was it worth their salaries? The point was, the order pickers would be more careful, knowing that their baskets would be checked. It was like the presence of a policeman, worth his salary as a preventer of crimes that wouldn’t happen.

His highest-paid clerks were in the customer correspondence section. Their work would be cut enormously if the orders were picked right in the first place and shipped out promptly. Promptly. He’d set up a system where every day the people who opened the incoming orders would be the first on the job, then the order processors, then the pickers, then the packers. The order openers, first to arrive, would be first to leave, but only when every order in the day’s mail had been okayed and passed on to the order processors. When the pickers had received the last incoming order, the order processors would leave. The pickers would leave when the last basket successfully passed the check-out point. The packers, last to arrive, were the last to leave. On Monday everybody would work long hours to take care of three days’ worth of mail. On Friday everybody could get away by noon or one o’clock to take an extra half-day holiday each weekend.

It took six weeks for Henry to put the new plan into effect. The workers loved it, especially the new hours. The good people stayed. The task of teaching newcomers almost disappeared. The fulfillment center could guarantee same-day shipment. The customers got their orders filled promptly and correctly.

The customer service department with the highest-paid help got cut down to one person, who sometimes had idle time. And all of it shaped the business into the success it became out of an evening’s thought.

On hands and knees Henry crawled around the perimeter of the roof, checking the activity in each direction.
Use your brain.
What interested him suddenly was the view in the direction from which he had come: the nearest wooded area.

To escape from jail is one thing. To escape from a jail that has no right to exist is another. The solution is not escape but the destruction of the jail. Peering over the parapet at the woods, Henry, as if stimulated by Margaret’s absent collaboration, had an epiphany, an illumination of how one person, if lucky, could liberate all the inmates of Cliffhaven and expose the place to the glare of the outside world.

He felt the high excitement of possibility. Could he recruit anyone else to help? Who? What if they proved to be unreliable? The beauty of the plan was that he could pull it off, if necessary, all by himself!

Henry heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps on gravel. Quickly, he crabbed himself over to the other side of the roof and peered carefully over the parapet.

He couldn’t see anyone.

Taking a chance, he raised himself enough to look over the parapet and down. Almost immediately below him, two stories down, was a resident wearing the trusty armband. The man had set down a bucket and
mop, and was opening the
door
with
a key. Suddenly, the man looked up and Henry jerked his head back just in time.

He hoped it had been just in time.

The trusty was an older man, past sixty, frail-looking. There was no way Henry could get off the roof safely. If he jumped, he chanced breaking a leg or worse from that height. If he got hurt now, his plan was doomed.

He was about to look down again and attract the man’s attention when he heard the door slam. The man was inside.

Henry surveyed the roof, squinting his eyes against the reflection of the now-bright sun. He could see a slightly raised rectangle in the center. He crawled closer to it, realized it was a kind of flat skylight that had been painted over. He could try to break it with his fist, but he might cut himself. The noise might attract somebody outside the building. He could stomp it with his foot. No need to, it had a catch, caked over with paint, and some roofing material with aluminum in it. Lucky; the beginning of luck. He scraped the catch with a fingernail. No good. He scraped it with one of his keys. That did it. He got the catch free enough to lift it, and then with all of his strength yanked at the skylight, lifting it away from the roof. As soon as it was open, he was on his knees peering down.

The trusty holding the mop was looking up, petrified. Henry held a finger to his lips.

The man was saying something in a voice too thin to hear.

“I can’t hear you,” Henry said, raising his whisper to an audible level.

“You’re the man they’re looking for,” the trusty said.

Henry saw the old man put the mop down and glance toward the door.

“What is your name?” Henry asked.

The trusty hesitated. Henry had to keep the old man from betraying him.

“My name is Henry Brown. My wife is a prisoner here, too.”

“You’re not supposed to use words like prisoner,” said the trusty.

“What is your name?”

The old man put his fingers to his lips, then spoke. “Morton Blaustein. My wife is here.” He jerked his thumb at the wall.

“I don’t understand. Mr. Blaustein, listen, I want to come down and talk to you. There’s a metal ladder outside along the wall that could reach up here.”

“They’ll kill me.”

“Nobody will know.”

“They always find out everything.”

“Not anymore. I want to tell you my plan. Please, Mr. Blaustein.”

The old man shook his head.

“You have to do it,” Henry shouted. “Our lives depend on it!”

“I don’t want any trouble, mister.”

If life is trouble to this man, is freedom too much trouble? Had he resigned himself to mopping floors forever?

“Listen, I can give you more trouble than they can, Blaustein.”

The old man looked up at him. Was that a look of fear?

“Get the ladder!” Henry ordered, his voice demanding obedience.

The old man headed toward the door. Would he run for it? And squeal?

“Blaustein!” Henry shouted, his fist a gesture at the man.

Blaustein glanced up for just a second. Was that a derisive look? Or frightened?

The old man went out the door. Henry listened for his footsteps in the gravel. He was heading around the building, not away from it.

It seemed to take an eternity, then the old man came back in the door, empty-handed.

“It’s too heavy,” he said. “I can’t lift it.”

Henry wanted to throttle him, for being a coward, for not being strong enough. They both heard footsteps from outside at the same moment.

God, thought Henry, there isn’t time to close the skylight gently. If he closed it quickly, the clatter would attract attention.
Don’t do it.

Henry lay down as quietly as he could so he could look past the edge of the skylight. He saw the orange-and-blue-uniformed Cliffhaven man shove a younger man, no more than twenty, through the door. “I’ve got a new helper for you, Mr. Blaustein. Teach him to be polite.”

“Fuck you,” the young man said.

The Cliffhaven person laughed and shut the door behind him. Henry listened to him walk away. When he looked down into the building again, Blaustein was pointing up at the skylight. Henry recognized the young man.

“Hey!” Henry said. “You’re the fellow in the Mercedes they got last night.”

“That’s right,” the young fellow said.

“I’m the guy on the road who tried to warn you.”

“No shit?”

“How come they’ve got you on clean-up duty the first day?”

“That guy Clete said I was a wiseass. What are you doing up there?”

“I can’t get down. It’s too far to jump. Listen, I’ve got a plan for getting out of here. I’ll take you with me if you’ll get the ladder that’s outside and get me down.”

“Sure thing.”

“I’m not supposed to let you out of the building,” Mr. Blaustein said.

The young man laughed. “Try and stop me.”

He went out the door, glanced around to be sure he wasn’t observed, then went around the building, found the ladder, got a grip on its middle, lifted it off the ground, and carried it into the building.

“Shut the door,” he told the trusty.

“You’re going to get us killed.”

“Just shut up and do as I said,” the young man said.

Henry liked that. He’s fresh from the outside, not like some of the others around here. He hasn’t been worked over yet.

The young man put the ladder on the floor, and moved it so that one end was just under the skylight. Then he went to the other end, put one foot on the bottom rung.

“Okay,” he said to Blaustein, “lift the other end.”

“I can’t,” Blaustein said.

“Then come here and do what I’m doing.”

Blaustein obeyed. The young man went to the other end, lifted up a bit, then higher, then over his head, and started walking the ladder into a vertical position. Henry could see it wasn’t easy. He was able to reach down and grab the end. It barely touched the rim of the skylight.

“A bit higher,” he said.

The young man nodded. He motioned the old man away, got hold of the fourth rung from the bottom, jerk-pulled it toward him, moving its position the requisite few inches.

“Okay,” Henry said. “I think it’s safe.” He started down, with the young man holding onto the ladder, steadying it.

When he got to the bottom, relieved, he stuck his hand out. “Thanks. My name’s Henry Brown.”

“Jacob Fetterman,” the young man said. “Jake is okay.”

“The trusty’s name is Blaustein,” Henry said.