SAVAGE
SATURDAY
13) Monday, January 27th
– “Free Enterprise – it’s Never Free!”
The blizzard that had paralyzed the Midwest, causing
postponement of the Packers – Football Team Divisional Playoffs, blew into
Washington overnight, blanketing the metroplex with blowing, drifting snow by
Monday morning; snow which briefly… as afternoon temperatures rose into the
mid-30s… changed over into biting sheets of sleet and ice, laying down a
crusty, glittering, crystalline carpet before more snow arrived, burdening
trees, buildings and souls; snapping power lines and tempers. David Lee had affixed chains to the wheels of
his Dodge Dakota, veering and swerving five miles in to work, only to find
himself alone on the ninth floor of the FCC compound.
Well, almost
alone. No sooner had he entered the
empty maze of cubicles on the ninth floor and begun sloughing off wet, winter
clothing than Quentin Sills, Elaine Ford’s replacement, thrust a finger at him.
“Miz Chaine – she want you, pronto…”
“I haven’t even got my reports together…” David waved him off.
“Now! Chop, chop!” Sills added, fingers lifting his
eyelids in a grotesque parody of a cartoon Chinaman.
Nose in the air,
Quentin departed cubicle alley as if departing an unwholesome, underdeveloped
nation and David swore, tossed a wet boot out into the corridor… his socks
after… and marched to the Manager’s office in bare feet.
“You needed
something…”
“Don’t sit down,”
Kristi recoiled. The overthrow of Goblin
had had a consequent effect of the removal of Jack’s venerable naugahyde furniture to the sidewalk. In its place reposed French… stuff…
flimsy-looking assemblages of silk and sticks David wouldn’t have sat in even
if he was dry. “You’re a disgrace,” the
boss seconded his own self–loathing, “I ought to send you home but, then, there
is this…”
And she held up a
thin folder.
“Nice to know you
finally got around to it…” David said.
“I’m taking it into account that your immediate supervisor was
that poor, sick troll, so that containment was not necessarily a priority at
the time that you submitted… this…”
“Containment?”
David asked, speaking of a policy, and not a physical entity…
“Exactly what is your
agenda, Mr. Lee?” the Manager waved David’s document back at him. “Frightening the public? Shilling for the goddamn liberal media, or
the President and Vice Presidents-elect, God rest their souls? You seem intelligent enough to understand
that the Commission has been committed to a seamless and graceful interim
transition process, even under the auspices of the late, unlamented Messrs.
Meyers and Gobelman, so I am at a loss to comprehend
your motive, unless you are one of those sad, little obsolete people who stir
up trouble for its own sake…”
“You haven’t even
considered the implications… excuse me,” he sneezed, “… of fifty million
Americans going cold turkey from their plug-in drug?”
Kristi Chaine sat back in her own executive throne, a formidable
edifice of maroon leather, black oak and brass tacks reposing on thousands of dollars
worth of new carpeting hastily commissioned… if not quite as imposing as Miz
Lottie’s regal perch in Purley, all the more robust
in comparison to the flighty vanities on the other side of her desk… and
sneered: “Forgive me for not saying ‘God bless’, as it might imply an
endorsement of your findings. By the
way, are you recording us? One of those
cellphone augmentations, perhaps, an earphone jack or fountain pen like the one
somebody used to post our removal of Mr. Gobelman on
the Internet? Cufflinks?”
“Wasn’t me. Hey, I’m clean,” David spread his arms,
dripping on the ice queen’s new Berber carpet, “…search me, if you must. Strip-search me, even… I’d like nothing
better than to get out of these wet clothes…”
“No thank
you. I’ll take my chances,” the Manager
replied with all the gusto of a tired housewife removing a dead mouse from the
trap. “But wouldn’t you consider your
estimate of fifty million to be rather excessive, compared to the Transition
Partnership’s concurrence with the Nielsen findings that only fourteen to an
outside extreme of thirty million persons in less than eight million households
will face cutoff after, of course, the inevitable transition process? Alarmist, even…”
“No,” David
replied, flatly. “I presume, also, that
you have read our findings that refute the industry’s rosy scenario… the
escalating rate of satellite and cable disconnects, the retailers’ excessive
markups on cheap Chinese-made televisions, not to mention the converters…”
“Attributable to
fuel costs, and excise taxes imposed with the support of both political
parties…” Kristi slapped her desk with David’s report.
“…which account
for less than twenty percent of the price hikes.”
Kristi slammed
the report on her desk again, as if determined to murder a murder of flies that
had somehow defied the season by finding safe, warm hiding places during Gobelman’s siege and still penetrated the hermetically
sealed Research complex. “You even go so
far as to heap disrespect all over our voucher program…
Disdaining the
flimsy French chairs, David leaned over, resting his elbows on Kristi’s
desk. “Maybe forty dollars off when all
the experts were swearing on Bibles that those converter boxes would start
selling at eighty bucks… with other informed sources even saying they’d go down
to sixty… made sense. Then they started
hitting the market a couple of weeks before Christmas, I remember seeing
Samsung asking a hundred seventy
nine…”
Kristi shook her head.
“We have a free enterprise system,” she admonished.
“Until they started catching fire. Last I checked, Giga-Plex wanted two-nineteen
for a basic box. Some other transition
partners were asking even more’n that, up to four freakin’ hundred for converters full of all these useless
accessories that don’t work on most old analog sets. To ask people living from paycheck to
paycheck… if they even have paychecks… to shell out four hundred or, even, two
hundred bucks to salvage a set worth, what… twenty? I know, like the President’s guy said,
Americans are stupid,” he sighed, “but not that
stupid. Not to mention that the voucher
program could’ve been handled by FEMA…”
“It was
outsourced to a reputable private firm…” the Manager pointed out…
“Which tossed
coupons hither and thither the way we flooded Baghdad with cash for services
that never got performed, or stuff that got blown up by criminals knowing we’d
pay for roads and bridges that’d get blown up again, so we’d pay to build
again. Last spring, down in the hood,
those coupons were being traded for a six-pack or two for a rock of crack… so
we run out in September, way before legitimate parties get around to asking for
theirs. And then, well, I’m not even
going to go into the Russian counterfeiting scandal…”
“Belarussian, not Russian. The President and Mister Putin are in accord
on the necessity of protecting intellectual property…”
“Intellectual
property?” David shook his head. “Coupons?
Russian, Prussian, Belarussian… Bela friggin’
Lugosi,” he chortled, “speakin’ of those funky giant
Transylvanian turds at Giga-Plex… we blew it, C-lady, alright? Can there be any other interpretation? Transition day’s a big wall of crap, ready to
fall all over us… and the Mexicans ain’t payin’ for this, either.”
“Well, I guess
you just are one of those
troublemakers,” the Research Manager sniffed, “…you and that bunch of socialist
greenie-weenies who probably would’ve litigated against the automobile on
behalf of the horse and buggy lobby…”
“My weenie ain’t green…” David protested.
And Kristi
rewarded him with a wicked, unexpected smile.
“You been porkin’ Boris Malone and that
nutcase Reverend in the ghetto?” she pointed across the desk. “Sounds so…”
And the first
fourteen notes of “Satisfaction” silenced the both of them…
“In fact… hold
it, I’ve got a call… just an ordinary call on an ordinary cell,” he held up the
device for the boss to see. “I’ll even
point it out the window…”
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
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