Termination Man: a novel (22 page)

“Shawn,” Kurt said neutrally. As Shawn had half-expected, Kurt’s face did not betray much surprise. Kurt paused and scanned the hall in both directions. Father and son were alone.

“In here,” he said, motioning to an empty meeting room.

Shawn followed his father inside the meeting room and Kurt closed and locked the door.

Kurt issued his instructions without preamble, as if he were talking to one of his many subordinates in the company.

“Listen to me good, Shawn, because I will brook no argument. You will seek out Tom Galloway today,” he said. “And you will personally apologize for what you did this morning. You embarrassed him today. You embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed me.”

“I will not apologize to that prick!” Shawn said. A moment ago—fresh from the catharsis of destroying the accountant’s car—Shawn had been on the verge of feeling contrite. But now he found the thought of apologizing to Tom Galloway to be more than he could bear. What his father was suggesting was unthinkable.

Kurt sighed and gave his son a long, venomous stare. Then he darted forward and grabbed both lapels of Shawn’s blazer. In an instant Shawn was on the ground, staring at his father’s feet.

Kurt kicked him once in the stomach. Shawn, incredulous and suddenly quite humiliated, let out a loud cry.
I sound like child
, he thought.
The old man has reduced me to this!

He rolled over onto his back and tried to stand, but he suddenly found one of Kurt’s loafers planted squarely on his chest.

“Stay down!” Kurt commanded. Shawn struggled in vain for a moment, then resigned himself to submission. 

Kurt was surprisingly strong and agile for a man who would never again see the age of sixty. He still prided himself on his record as a college football player. He hit the gym with regularity, thereby assuring that the physique of his youthful prime would remain recognizable. Though no longer a serious athlete, he could hold his own in the weight room or on the basketball court. More than a few thirtysomething managers had been humiliated after accepting Kurt’s challenge to a game of one-on-one on the basketball court in the company’s fitness center.

He looked down at his son, lying on the ground like a little boy.

“Do you realize the limb I had to go out on today?
Because you screwed up
?”

“I told you, Dad! It’s those two shitheads back at UP&S! Alan and Lucy!”

“Don’t give me that!” Kurt hissed. “I read that report myself. It’s no different than any other inventory report from any other TP Automotive plant. In fact, it’s
better
than many of the ones I’ve seen recently. The problem is that
you can’t
interpret
it.
You don’t understand the basic concepts behind it, do you?”

Shawn looked up at his father, suddenly defiant again. Kurt gave his son another kick—this time in the ribs. Shawn winced in pain.

“No, Dad, I don’t understand it.”

“And why is that?”

Shawn let out a long breath of air.
“I don’t know! Jesus, Dad. I don’t fucking know!”

“I’ll tell you why,” Kurt said. “It’s because you’ve spent your entire life up until now drinking, chasing tail, and getting into trouble. And I’ve been forced to follow you around, cleaning up after your messes. Well, from now on, you’re going to turn over a new leaf. You’re going to get serious about important matters, starting with the inventory report. The next monthly meeting is in January; and by the time that meeting rolls around, you’re going to be an expert on the inventory report. You’re going to be able to talk about it like it's the most important thing in the world to you, which it
is
at this point in your career, given that your failure to understand it has embarrassed us both. Is that clear?”

Shawn was now completely defeated. He stretched out his arms in a gesture of submission, the sole of his father’s loafer still planted on his chest.

“I’ll do better, Dad,” he said. And both men were surprised by the tears that suddenly welled in Shawn’s eyes. “I promise you: just get rid of Alan and Lucy, and everything will be better. I swear!”

The day after the monthly meeting debacle, Shawn Myers faced a decidedly easier audience.

He hadn’t known that he would be giving at talk at New Hastings High School until 8:00 a.m., when Beth Fisk “reminded” him about it. She stopped by his desk at the head of the open office area, and casually asked him how his preparations for the “high school talk” were going.

“What talk?” Shawn asked. “I don’t know anything about a talk.”

“Didn’t you see my email?” Beth replied with forced sweetness. “I sent you an email two weeks ago. We received an invitation from the principal at New Hastings High, and your father—er, Kurt—decided that you would be a good choice to give a talk to the local kids.”

“But I haven’t prepared!” Shawn said angrily. He scanned down through the emails in his inbox, and sure enough, there was an unopened email from Beth Fisk, dated almost a month ago. The subject header was “New Hastings High School Career Week.”

“All you need to do is give them a brief introduction to UP&S,” she said. “Tell them about what we do, what sort of employment opportunities we provide to the community. That sort of thing. This is just a standard PR speech, really.”

“It would be if I was friggin’ prepared!” Shawn shot back. He was reading through Beth’s email when he heard his father speak up.

“Go. Those kids don’t understand the inventory report either. You won’t get any questions from them that you can’t answer.”

Shawn stifled a gasp. He hadn’t even realized that the old man had been present and listening. He turned in his chair and saw his father standing behind him.

“Dad.”

Beth Fisk, apparently sensing that a father-and-son moment was imminent, began to ease away.

“Thanks, Shawn.” she said. “I apologize if you didn’t know about it before today; but I really don’t think it will be all that difficult, even if you only have a few hours to prepare.”

“You don’t need to apologize, Beth,” Kurt said. “A manager needs to read his emails.”

Thanks for humiliating me in front of Beth, Dad
, Shawn thought but did not say.
And Beth, thanks for making me look like an ass in front of my father. Again.

He wondered if the news of his meltdown at the monthly meeting had already traveled throughout the company. Had Beth heard about it, too? Was it possible that even Alan and Lucy knew? And wouldn’t they love to know that their boss had looked like a total idiot in front of all the other managers?

“Go,” Kurt said again, once Beth was out of earshot. “I’m not going to cover for you on this one.”

“You won’t have to,” Shawn said. “I can handle it.” And he thought:
A bunch of high school kids. How hard can it be?

He spent the next hour making abortive attempts at typing out a script, and then abandoned the effort. He looked at the clock on the adjacent wall: He was running out time.

Fuck it
, he thought.
I’ll just wing it
.

As Shawn started up the Audi, another realization dawned on him: Half of his audience would be female
. A whole room full of teenaged girls who were just waiting to be corrupted by an older man.
(
Not that you really needed to corrupt these girls nowadays
, he silently added.)

Would Alyssa be among the audience? She should be a student at New Hastings High School, shouldn’t she? Even so, for her to be in his audience today would be too much to ask for.

Upon his arrival at the high school, Shawn presented himself at the principal’s office. During the five minutes he spent with the principal, he learned that he was not the only Career Week speaker. There were many of them: Dave Bruner, the police chief of New Hastings, would be speaking to several groups of students. A local attorney had also been invited, as well as a firefighter, a physician, a dentist, and a score of others.

“We’ve slated you to speak to the junior American Civics students, if that’s okay,” the principal said.

Shawn stated that this was okay. He was escorted to the classroom of a Mrs. Martinez, who taught American Civics to the juniors.

Once inside the classroom, Shawn knew that he was going to make it through this: the relatively small audience was a relief. He still had no prepared speech; and that would be awkward in a large auditorium full of students, who would be eager to see an adult fumble around and make a fool of himself. In a more informal classroom environment, though, he would be able to interact with the students and engage them in a two-way exchange. This way, they would end up doing half of the work.

Mrs. Martinez was perhaps thirty-five years old, a tall woman with dark brown eyes. She greeted Shawn effusively when he entered the room.

“Oh, thank you for coming, Mr. Myers,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to take some time out of your busy day to talk with our students.”

“Think nothing of it,” Shawn said. He involuntarily glanced at Mrs. Martinez’s considerable cleavage. Then he looked up and stared into her eyes for a few seconds.
She wants it
, Shawn thought.
She wants
me
.

But then she demonstrated otherwise, giving him the subtlest of frowns and looking away.

Mrs. Martinez turned to the roughly thirty students in the room before her. “Today we’re going to hear a talk from Mr. Shawn Myers, Vice President of Operations at UP&S, the largest private-sector employer in New Hastings. Mr. Myers, why don't tell the students about the sort of work you do at UP&S?”

Shawn noted that as Mrs. Martinez walked back to her teacher’s desk, she put her hand over the top two buttons of her blouse, as if attempting to shield the cleft of her breasts from roving eyes. It was likely an involuntary gesture; but for Shawn it only confirmed a new realization that had occurred to him a moment ago: Mrs. Martinez was nothing but a tease.

He began with a classic conversation starter. “How many of you kids have ever thought about working in a factory?” he asked. None of them raised their hands, of course. Probably no kid in the state of Ohio would ever think about working in a boring place like UP&S. These kids all wanted to be computer programmers, professional athletes, or rap musicians, naturally. He couldn’t blame them for that.

“Well,” Shawn said. “It looks like I need to tell you all about the exciting world of automotive components manufacturing.” This remark got an obligatory laugh from a handful of them. He noted that even prim and proper Mrs. Martinez gave him a smile, though she was probably still worried about him looking at her chest. And his opening gambit had been witty, if he did say so himself. This was the sort of line that one of the big players at TP Automotive would have used to break the ice with an unfamiliar crowd. It was the kind of opener that his father would have employed in such a situation.

He spoke for the next fifteen minutes or so, all the while scanning the room for the Alyssa. She wasn’t present; and this didn’t disappoint him too much. He would have many other chances to see her. After all, she joined her mother at the UP&S factory almost every night.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of other young girls to look at from his vantage point at the front of the room. (
He was careful, however; Mrs. Martinez was almost certainly watching him now
.) The sixteen- and seventeen-year-old coeds seated before him in their miniature pupil’s desks wore makeup and jewelry that belied the implied innocence of their ages and the academic setting.
It was all a big tease, wasn't it?
The girls made him think of that subscription website, with its over-the-hill “barely legal” models. Well, here was something just as offensive: obviously worldly young girls who made a pretense of being innocent and unsullied.

He noticed one particularly attractive girl who was seated in the front row. Her permed, dark blonde hair was swept back into a ponytail. A black tattoo in the form of a Chinese ideogram poked up from the otherwise unblemished pale skin beneath her blouse collar. Lean and sinewy, she was obviously tall as well: one of her long legs was crossed over the other; and she was bouncing the suspended foot in the air.
Was that restlessness, or an attempt to attract his attention?
He forced himself to look away before his lingering glance showed up on Mrs. Martinez’s radar.

The kids laughed at several more jokes that he made. None of these quips were cutting-edge humor, but rather the sort of cynical, self-deprecating remarks that play so well to adolescent ears. This was the sort of presentation that he could definitely handle. It had turned out to be
nothing
like the disaster that had taken place at the TP Automotive headquarters. There was no Tom Galloway here, and no other executives to analyze his every word and sneer at every little mistake. 

Finally it was over. The classroom full of high school juniors gave him a hearty round of applause. Moreover, one or two of the young ladies in the audience seemed to be actively checking him out as he concluded his talk.