By Steven Krolak
It was Monday. Royce Prouty was up with the chickens. Nay, up he was, with the loons, ere the sticky springtime mist had lifted from the plateglass skin of Wickham Lake.
From habit it was, this early rising, the habit of labor. But today he lay back for a moment, beside his Molly, who smelled in sleep like pears and apricots, and let the morn’s first orange rays steal through the fog and the chinks and sparkle on the fur throw that bundled their bodies. Finally, with his bladder nigh to burst, he rolled out of bed, slipped across the planks to the door at the cabin back, and hopping from one foot to the other as though on coals, hitched up his calico night shirt and steamingly pissed off the end of the dock.
A damp morning this, and damp in the bones was Prouty. He turned inside and stoked the fire, then set to dress. He first pulled on his leather breeches and wool leggings. He traded the night shirt for a linen tunic, tucked in and covered with a rough broadcloth waistcoat, and the heavy blue smock, reaching to his the tip of his knees and cinched with his favorite finger-woven sash of deepest kidney red. The moccasins he found near the hearth-fire. Sitting on the cold dark stones, he worked his feet into the deer hide, then laced them, bottom to top.
He moved across the main room, parted the blanket used for a paravent, and for a time stood watching Molly sleep. Her copper curls lay at ease across her face, resembling a gentle lattice over her eyes. With a finger he swept them aside, and the pearly gloaming light pooled upon her soft translucent lids. She awoke with a start, as if from a portentous dream.
“What time is it?” said Molly now, blinking and pulling aside the bedclothes.
“First light,” Prouty said. Then taking her by the shoulders, he pressed her back into the pillows. “Sleep awhile,” he whispered.
But Molly was roused, and blinking herself toward a more complete wakefulness, scrutinized his habitus. “Aren’t you going to work?” she asked.
“Work indeed,” said he, eyes a-glint. “But before the sun can cast a shadow, I shall shoot the wild turkey.” He leaned across to place a kiss upon her cheeks so golden sweet and fuzzed like a sugary peach. Then he rose, as if to the rafters, and straightened his belt.
“You’ll take care?” she whispered, nestling deep into the bedclothes.
He nodded aye, and wrapped the green silk turban around his head, finishing it off with an ostrich feather he had purchased from a gentleman for a bevvy of quail. In the looking glass he took stock. For all the world a coureur de bois, sinewy and self-reliant, with eyes that nonetheless betrayed a certain sad resolve.
While Molly departed the shores of the waking, Prouty ate breakfast: a boiled egg with paprika, some smoked trout, and a crust of good linseed bread smeared with tart preserves of autumn fruit, washed down with a coarse Scottish tea.
His repast complete, he reached onto a shelf and pulled down a small buckskin bag containing his calls, a potpourri of little pipes of reed and cane. ‘Tis no small thing, to shoot the wild turkey, Prouty thought. The turkey be not innately clever, nor a creature of polish and sophistication, but for that, all the more resourceful. Over the years, he had seen the wild turkey give the slip to many a worthy marksman who faltered at the wonder of its opalescent plumage. He selected the longest call, simply made of two turkey bones, hollowed out and fitted one into the other, as in a telescope, the joint sealed with a lick of pine pitch. And he tucked it deep within one of the smock’s ample pockets.
Standing now he strode across to the hearth, and lifted from its hooks above the fireplace a fine flintlock musket of German construction, its brass sideplate and ramrod thimbles flashing in the light. He smiled at the pleasant familiarity of its heft, and ran his fingers along the aged blue-brown barrel. It was a fine piece, and had cost him dearly at auction in the town, but more than once it had proven its worth in the woods. He reached across to a tin box, and extracted a pouch of flints, a leather pea-pod of musket balls, and his bag of black powder. He placed these in a burlap sling bag which he tossed as quickly over his shoulder. Finally, he plucked from the table a clutch of correspondences for the postal courier.
Before setting off, he regarded once more the cabin by the lake, built by his own hand these six years by. ‘Tis not unusual for men in Prouty’s circumstance to feel remorse at such a juncture. But he remained light of heart. It was as if the resolve to hunt the wild turkey itself sufficed to rout the grim and torporific broodings, that had lately enveloped his disposition. And so in place of regret there stole upon him the honeyed warmth of nostalgia for the log and clay-chinked dwelling, and the sweet unalloyed woman who dreamed within.
He moved off silently along the trace, where the dew now sparkled on raspberry leaves, and the hollows flashed with bleeding hearts and wild roses beneath a canopy of larch and beech and chestnut trees. Ferns and brackens obscured the path, and dampness slickened the roots and rocks that lay beneath his feet. But he knew the way as if by heart, and was not slowed, and after a few minutes’ walk, he reached the curing shed.
He leaned the musket against the mossy battens and lifted the split rail bar and swung open the creaking barn-like doors. Inside, the walls were hung with the pelts of squirrel and raccoon and fox. There were cider barrels and nets and a cedar-bark canoe. And in the center of the room, there stood the gleaming champagne-tinted Nissan Murano, an able phaeton of meticulous oriental manufacture, and the fruit of several months’ remunerative indenture.
He lifted the rear cargo hatch and stowed his musket and sling bag inside. He climbed aboard through the driver’s port, careful not to close his sash or shirt tail in the door as he pulled it shut. At the turn of a key, the carriage roared to life with a multifarious cacophony of beeps and bells. Gingerly he reversed it out of the shed, taking care not to mar the black-lacquered hind of Molly’s Korean hack, or to sideswipe the cast cement grindstone or to tangle the bumper in the unmanaged coil of barrel hoops that he would one day fashion into quail snares.
Traffic was light along the turnpike for a Monday morn. In only twenty minutes’ time, Prouty reached the Main Street of East Wickham. He guided the carriage into the right-hand spur, and stopped in front of the postal station, or more precisely, the blue steel boxes standing at the curb, ready to receive parcels. With a whirring of cogs and sprockets, he lowered the passenger window, and leaned out to deposit his mail: the property tithe to the revenue, the annual dues to the Valley Forge Society, complete with his application for a tent space at the upcoming Ticonderoga Reenactment. And a letter to Molly, written in a quavering hand—for his were not accustomed to the vagaries of quill and paper—containing insights and perceptions no less unkiltered, for all the fervency of their expression, that he hoped would render unclouded the necessitous nature of his present pursuit.
Then he lashed himself once more into the driver’s seat, and set course for the Wildwood Industrial Park, south of town. Once arrived, he turned into the lot of Orbitronix, and brought his carriage to rest against a concrete curblet ornamented with his name in yellow paint. As he walked towards the building, he was one of many drawn to the entrance as though they were but grains of rice sliding down a funnel. But he walked unhurried, his moccasins soaking up the cold from the asphalt, and the good sturdy flintlock resting at ease in the crook of his elbow. The others, trotting past with attaches or armloads of files, regarded him oddly, and some shook their heads. But he was unaffected by their untoward curiosity. By the arc of the sun it was now half eight.
“Good morning, Royce,” said the receptionist, as he approached the front desk. “Getting a jump on Thanksgiving?”
“Well observed, young Mary Pringle,” he said, scanning the office beyond her shoulder. It was a familiar scene. As the concourses with their innumerable cubicles faded into the distance, they resembled nothing so much as a well-tended English garden maze.
She laughed, and shook her head. Then she leaned forward, as if to share a confidence. “One thing’s for sure,” she whispered. “You’ll always be an original.”
“Peace be with thee, Mary,” he said, bowing humbly. She struggled to stifle a titter.
He walked down the familiar main corridor, between bulwarks of fabric-covered laminations that separated the cubicles one from the other. Some of the clerks and scribes were already at their work stations, hair clinched in headphones, eyes riveted to the glimmering screens, and the numbers scrolling past. Prouty made out Wally Hull, an apprentice regional sales coordinator, approaching from the galley with a mug of coffee and a paper plate piled high with powdered donuts. Upon seeing Prouty, Hull stopped, agape. He called over his shoulder to one unseen. “Hey Chris,” he said. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Christopher Sage, of similar rank and stature, with a wag’s repute, popped his head out of the galley door and ogled the anomalous figure before him. “Daniel Boone—the new face of networking software!” cried he, and the two juniors shook with mirth.
“Hey wait,” said Hull, flummoxed anew, to Prouty. “Wasn’t Friday your big sayonara?”
“Aye, Friday last,” Prouty replied. “But I’ve a few tasks yet left undone.”
With that, he strode on down the concourse, leaving the two men to ponder his design.
He passed a row of dark and deserted offices, including that which had until lately been his own. But his goal was further on. At the far end of the concourse, he knew, were the offices of the upper echelons, including that of Harlan Tasker, the lord of this fluorescent-lit fiefdom. But even from here, with the instincts of the seasoned hunter, he could sense Tasker’s vicinity. He pictured him at his desk, face reddened to the folds of his aged neck.
Prouty turned to the right, into a corridor that led to warehouse B, which held a trove of components often demanded by engineers working late, but seldom opened at this hour, given over as it was, to those engaged more with selling than creating the company’s products. It was a long, dimly-lit and forgotten corner of the office, perhaps eighteen or twenty paces deep, its walls devoid of distraction, unlike those in the main concourse, which were hung with awards, images, and framed editions of Orbitronix advances. Prouty proceeded to the very end of the corridor, stopped, and turned about. This will do, he thought.
He now reached into his smock for the powder bag. He bit off the lid, and poured a thimble of the black powder into the barrel, and another smidgen into the pan. The bag, he noted as it brushed his face, smelled a little damp. Perhaps he should have kept it in the car. Perhaps. But he had hunted with damp powder before, and to no ill effect. He tamped the powder down with the ramrod, and dropped one of the freshly poured musket balls into the barrel. He replaced the rod, knelt down, and wrapped the sling about his left arm, taut as a tourniquet.
By now, he thought, Wally Hull is halfway through his plate of donuts. It will occur to him that something is amiss. He will walk to the reception desk and engage Mary in a conversation about the altogether altered apparition traipsing through the office. He will suggest that she call for a sentry. And she will do this, albeit reluctantly, by using a string of letters tapped into her keypad. I have, perhaps, three or four minutes, he thought.
It was time enough for him to ruminate briefly upon the pith of his visit. For more than a year, he had directed two gifted mathematicians from Orbitronix, Joshua Fergin and Zachary McNalley. Working nights at young Fergin’s home, the team had cobbled together a most unique contrivance, which they named SimScape. This device provided a high degree of security against worms, Trojan horses and cookies during the use of real-time internet virtual-reality game applications. To be sure, the holds of the market were already choked to the mizzens with security systems for larger matrices, but theirs was intended for the yeomanry, to be distributed without recompense, like unto loaves and fishes—a revolutionary conceit.
Last week their labors were at an end. All they required to bring the widget to market was the confidence of financial backers. As a courtesy, they took their invention to Tasker, giving him a leg up on other prospective bidders. But instead of offering his support under advantageous conditions, Tasker drew their attention to a little-minded condition of their fealty. Title fourteen, paragraph nine of their employment contract contained a provision whereby any product to emerge from research involving assets of Orbitronix—meaning them—must needs remain the sole property of Obitronix. He puffed out his chest, festooned it was with a golden necktie and matching kerchief, and savored his paltry but no less decisive triumph.
The men left Tasker’s office shortly thereafter, and made undiverted for the legal department, where Miss Cecelia Dowd manifested their employment contracts on her high-resolution LED monitor, one by one, and to the men’s dismay, verified Tasker’s assertion. Without delay, the men departed the building and reconvened at The Handbasket, a nearby tavern frequented by the employees of Orbitronix and other tenants of Wildwood Industrial Park. Fueled by spirits, their discourse became bold and heated. They vowed to secure their own legal representation, and to pursue redress before the appropriate magistrates. But this prospect did not satisfy Prouty. He had, after all, devoted an entire year of his life to the devising of SimScape. He had yielded time with his beloved Molly, and forfeited his tent space at last summer’s Ticonderoga Reenactment. But beyond all that, there was something in Tasker’s self-assurance that caused him an almost spiritual perturbation. Something foreign, odious, and threatening. It suggested a disposition so wholly at odds with his own as to be incompatible with all he knew to be real, and true, and virtuous. He perceived, if one might be permitted the comparison, an opposition of near Newtonian consequence, for it was as if his own moral cosmos and that of his incorporated paterfamilias could not both exist in the same place at the same time. With his breast still stoked with indignation and heaving from his recent discomfiture, Prouty stalked once more into the office of his liege.
“I quit,” he said with sullen defiance.
But Tasker was unruffled. With a sigh he roused himself from his magisterial chair, walked ‘round to the front of his desk, and sat upon the corner. “Look, Prouty,” he said. “Nobody likes to take it in the keester. But you know the game. Besides, you’re pulling six figures already, not counting stock options. Here’s what I’ll do. When SimScape comes out, you get a bonus.”
“But I invented it,” Prouty protested.
“That’s your job,” Tasker intoned. “You’re a software engineer. But now it’s about making money. And that’s my job.”
Tasker sat before him revealed, the agent of a new enclosure. Not of the commons, but of the private and inalienable soul.
Prouty’s riposte was crisp and well-shafted as an arrow. “Shove it,” he said. And he strode gallantly down to his station on Concourse D of the main floor, and emptied the contents of his desk into a paperboard box amid general perplexity. In the receiving hall, he was accosted by Fergin and McNalley, bright-eyed and breathless.
“They’re giving us a bonus!” cried Fergin.
But McNalley was chastened and abashed at the sight of the box and Prouty’s demeanor overall. He pulled at Fergin’s arm, and Prouty walked silently from them, and out the door.
He and Molly spent the weekend at their cabin on the lake. But it provided no sanctuary. For his occupational grievance had bored its way through the normally impenetrable battlements that separated the world of Orbitronix from this, his world of conviction. He related to Molly the gist of what had transpired in the office park, but her reaction was so warm with indignance that he felt it opportune to leave the matter of his termination undisclosed for the nonce. This only volumined his sense of isolation. As he prepared rabbit snares for the annual Valley Forge Society bazaar, he fell further into a universal moroseness. Not even a midnight romp with Molly beneath the fur throw sufficed to restore his good humor. His rage against Tasker possessed him now, as if it were a fever.
“I understand now how they felt,” he had said to Molly, as they had lain together afterward, tangled like vines and slickened with lovemaking.
“Who?” she had asked.
“Those settlers whose children were taken in raids, and raised as Huron or Iroquois.”
He had arisen in the night, to fix his thoughts on paper, hoping one last time to dispel his anger. But instead, the declaration had become a letter of farewell to Molly, and to the peace he had found in her embrace.
Now Prouty took the turkey call and put it to his pursed lips, and sucked. A soft yelp blew through the office. Everything else went silent. He yelped a dozen times, the signature sound of the lone lost turkey, searching for its flock. Calling them out. He sucked again.
Murmurs now echoed from the main hall. And a moment later, the working folk meandered past the corridor’s end, and Prouty marveled at their plumage. Jeff Robinson in a grey suit machine-tailored in faraway Macau. Masako Watanabe in a short blue angora dress from the subterranean vaults of the Nordstrom Rack. Prouty nuzzled his face against the cheekpiece, and squinted down the polished 28-inch octagonal barrel through the two-leaf rear sight. His heart pounded against the buttstock as Jamie Edgerton walked past in a Missoni pullover. Then Bill Olds, dubbed The Man From Planet Haggar. Patience, he told himself.
Finally Harlan Tasker strode into his field of fire. In heroic profile. Wearing the familiar cream colored suit, blue shirt and blazing yellow tie—the same regalia he had displayed last week, when he had so sorely tormented the three inventors, and set in motion the events of this day. He stove his beak aloft now as then, vain, arrogant, remorseless.
For a moment, Prouty let himself be mesmerized by the pomp of proprietorship. Then, fighting off the trance, he squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped forward. The agate flint clipped the frizzen, the spark ignited the powder in the pan. Prouty heard the twinge of the frizzen spring, the click of the tumbler, the sizzle of powder. And after the sizzle, a long swish—too long, he feared, as the spark fought its way through the vent hole into the chamber.
In that fraction of an instant’s delay, created by the damp spring mists of Wickham Lake, Harlan Tasker turned to the left, followed his peripheral vision down the side hall, and glimpsed Royce Prouty, his erstwhile Assistant Director of Product Engineering and Alternate Master Technician for ISO 14001 compliance monitoring, crouched on one knee gripping a musket aimed at his head. With instincts no less aboriginal than those of his persecutor, Tasker launched himself backwards, into his flock, just as the flintlock finally fired. The ball whistled past, not an inch before his face. It passed instead through a framed holographic reproduction of the original proprietary Orbitronix floppy, to lodge in a wall of reconstituted gypsum.
Still shrouded in smoke, Prouty turned to the door, and began tapping a series of numbers into the keypad to secure his egress. But the light blinked red, and the digital readout flashed the words, NOT A VALID ACCESS CODE. As the blue pall dissipated, and the silence in the hall gave way to shouts and pounding footsteps, there burst upon him a turbid flood of tableaux most poignant to recount: of his parents, notified of this ignominy via cell phone in their RV, somewhere beyond the Alleghenies; of Molly, erasing blackboards in her second-grade homeroom at James Ensor Elementary School, amid the finger-paintings and fraying construction-paper Easter baskets, ruminating over his epistle injured and dismayed; so that Prouty had occasion to think again, now in the full grasp of this most uncongenial denouement, ‘Tis no small thing, to shoot the wild turkey.
