Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (11 page)

“Huh,” said Paul.

“You know what else is funny about those three?” Nolene’s voice dropped so low that Paul had to lean over the partition to hear her. “As far as I can tell, they never do . . .”

She broke off and nailed her gaze to the computer screen again. Paul looked up and saw the Colonel loitering by the fax machine, idly fingering the buttons. Nolene slowly shook her head.

“Right,” Paul said, raising his voice. “So, uh, when can I expect my first check at the new rate?”

“I dunno, hon.” Nolene clattered away at her keyboard. “That’s up to your temp agency, not the great state of Texas.”

“Okeydoke,” Paul said. “Thanks.” He started briskly up the aisle. Just ahead of him, the Colonel stepped back into his cube and turned in his doorway. He winked at Paul. “Professor,” he said.

“Colonel,” replied Paul, hurrying past.

Back in his cube, he almost e-mailed Nolene. They never do what? he wanted to know, his hands hovering over his keyboard. But he doubted that Nolene was so indiscreet as to commit gossip to cyberspace. He’d have to catch her alone again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it was nearly quitting time, and he began to shut down his computer and tidy his desk. He swept a couple of pencils into his top drawer and let the drawer slide shut. After a moment he opened the drawer again and peered in at the
litter of pens, pencils, paper clips, and pushpins. Something’s missing, he thought. He bit his lip and stared harder at the clutter in the drawer. Something
was
here that isn’t now, he thought. But what? To hell with it, he decided, and he let the drawer slide shut, glimpsing the mild yellow of a Post-it pad.

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.

I’m supposed to believe all that? he wondered. A busful of sacked state employees washed into a sinkhole? Stanley Tulendij clinging for dear life to a juniper bush? All of them in business attire?

“They died with their boots on,” Paul murmured, and smiled to himself. He started his engine, and the car shook itself like an old dog. Through the windshield glare he squinted over the embankment and across the river. Some of his coworkers’ vehicles were already lumbering across the Travis Street Bridge in a haze of heat and exhaust, past insane Texas joggers pounding along the pedestrian walkway during the worst heat of the day. One pedestrian, however, had stopped on the bridge. He was not a stalled jogger: He wore trousers, a shirt and tie, and glasses, and he seemed to be looking this way. His features were hard to make out with the sun behind him, but the shape was unmistakable—a small oval atop a larger oval. It’s the homeless guy from yesterday, realized Paul, the egg-shaped man, Señor Huevo, what was his name? Boy G—that was it! Mr. Are We Not Men himself! Paul leaned forward and tilted his hand against the glare. Is he looking at me? he thought, and just then the figure on the bridge lifted his hand and waved.

Paul snapped back in his seat as if he’d been struck across the face. Another movement caught his eye through the driver’s side window, and he turned to see Stanley Tulendij step out from behind the tree. Without a glance back, the old man spidered up the embankment on his long legs, and in a moment he had crested the rise and disappeared down the other side.

Paul fumbled at the latch and heaved his door open on its whining hinges. He hesitated, then dashed through the heat up the slope. At the top of the embankment Paul was halted by the sour reek of the river. On the far side of the sluggish water lay the unfashionable end of Lamar’s hike-and-bike trail, but on this side, the yellowed grass sloped directly into the weeds at the water’s edge, with no interruption but the humped concrete
back of a storm drain that emptied into the river. Paul looked both ways; to his left, the embankment curved away around a bend in the river, to his right, it ran unbroken to the bridge. Stanley Tulendij was nowhere to be seen in either direction. Paul turned and looked back down at the nearly empty parking lot. His own car trembled below him, motor running, door open. He turned towards the bridge and shaded his eyes with his palm. The figure at the railing, the oval-on-oval silhouette, was gone. All Paul saw were candy-colored SUVs, nose to tail along the bridge, and the lean silhouettes of joggers, pounding through the Texas glare.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, surveying the crowded lunchroom for an empty table, Paul was about to turn away and take his sandwich up to his cube again when the Colonel beckoned to him from the far corner. Paul pretended he hadn’t noticed and swung his gaze round the room once more—he’d never seen Callie here during lunch, but then he’d never really looked. Then his gaze drifted back to the Colonel, who sat with his chin lifted and his wattles pulled tight, and he lifted his hand over his head, as if signaling a waiter. Before Paul could make up his mind, he was halfway across the room. Bob Wier gave him a sad smile and pushed back the empty chair. Paul took the seat with a shrug.

“Glad you could join us, Professor.” The Colonel’s eyes twinkled.

“Carrot stick?” said Bob Wier, proffering a Tupperware dish of crudités.

“Thanks, no.” Paul emptied his lunch bag one item at a time—cheese sandwich, no-brand chips, pickle.

J.J. worked a burger into his mouth with both hands. “Mmmph,” he said.

“We were just discussing the life and work of Marion Morrison.” With his chopsticks the Colonel skillfully plucked a crumbling bit of sushi from his beautifully enameled Japanese lunch box.

“The Duke!” said Bob Wier. “The Big Guy!”

“Fuckin’ A,” said J.J., plucking a soggy bit of lettuce off his lower lip.

“Ah.” Paul peeled the baggie off his sandwich. Was he supposed to know who Marion Morrison was? Was he another decrepit, downsized TxDoGS legend like Stanley Tulendij?

The Colonel gave Paul a wry smile across the table. “No doubt you’re familiar with Morrison’s œuvre.”
Oove
, he pronounced it.

“I don’t think so,” Paul said. “He must have been before my time.”

Bob Wier and the Colonel burst out laughing. J.J. gagged on his burger and thumped his fist against his sternum. Through a full mouth, he said, “John Wayne, dickhead.”