http://literaryorphans.org/ttl/pax-americana-kurt-baumeister/
Cambridge, Boston’s cross-river sister, home to Harvard, MIT, and the vast, resulting acreage of rundown real estate. Behind the wheel of a rented, blue Epic, Tuck was angling for the last space on the block, one directly in front of what looked like an old foundry. Built of red brick and ashen mortar, this was Symmetra HQ.
“That’s it?” asked Clarion, looking up from his nap.
“Must be. That’s the address.”
Darkened with pollution and faded with age the resulting shade of a building rose in four, thick, Dickensian stories. Taking up at least half its block, it dominated the squat Fifties brownstones that surrounded it. Their basements turned into Guitar Shacks, Koko Curry’s, and thrift stores masquerading as boutiques, who knew what lurked above? People? Squalor? Nothing? Whatever it was, the reality lay in the signs that defined it.
This was what had become of the post-war building boom and its architecture of triumph, and it was a sad thing to look at. Tuck never understood why they kept this stuff around, why they didn’t just tear it down and build something else. History was about preserving the past’s beauty, not maintaining some tired record of what had really happened. If he’d been running things, the entire block would have been bulldozed and rebuilt in glass—made into something shiny and splendid, something worth remembering.
“Doesn’t look much like a cutting-edge research facility.”
“Guess not,” Tuck responded, shaking the ice in his Mega-Sized Turbo-Coke from Righteous Burger.
He’d been surprised when he’d seen an RB along the highway—Here, in liberal Taxachusetts!—amazed when Clarion said they could stop and get something. Sure, Tuck hadn’t liked the fact that Clarion had refused to go in, that they’d missed out on sitting in a booth and getting an actual sermon from Timmy; but just getting to go to RB still felt like a little bit of heaven. It always did.
“In fact, it looks sort of like a—”
“Dump?” Tuck finished.
“Not exact—”
“Pit?”
Clarion laughed. “Not that either.”
“Haunted factory?”
“I thought you guys didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“Guys?”
“Christians.”
“Of course I don’t believe in ghosts, Clarion. What the flip?”
Clarion quirked another smile. “I was thinking it looks like a war zone but I guess haunted factory will do, sport.”
Tuck smiled, too. He knew he was wearing Clarion down by that point. That was how Tuck’s charm worked with atheists. His good humor and jokes always got to them eventually. That was his gift. But he would have been a poor Christian to court favor and use it for nothing but personal gain.
“If you ask me, Clarion, this only points out how bogus these corporate corruption claims are. Look at how bad business has gotten it in America. It’s like Christian Consumerism never even happened.” Tuck shook his cup as punctuation, took another long drag on the soda—the gravel and shake, the slurp, slurp, slurp.
He was speaking specifically of the House Commerce committee hearings, their time-wasting witch hunt against simple salt-of-the-Earth job creators who longed only to do their jobs, creating jobs. His Uncle Wadsworth, for example, DamberCorp’s COO, had been hauled up in the net of supposed corrupticans and abusicrats. He’d been exonerated of course. But poor, nervous Wadsworth was so shaken by the whole affair he’d fled to his island in the Maldives. No one had heard from him in weeks.
“If you say so, Squires. Just remember to let me do the talking once we get inside,” Clarion offered as they got out of the car.
“All of it?”
“Not all of it, kid. Just at first. I know these people, how they think.” He tapped his temple.
“You make them sound like some sort of mutant subspecies.”
“Have you been listening to my stories at all?”
“I’m trying not to,” Tuck said, though the truth was he had been listening the whole time—from the plane to the Quickie Rental counter to the hour-long traffic-intensive drive—his interest increasing as the day wore on.
Post So-Zu, Clarion had spent a year up in Boston trying to figure out what had happened. He’d been back many times since—some on business, some for murkier personal reasons. Tuck suspected this was code for a geriatric bimbo or two he had stashed in the liberal hinterlands. By that point, Tuck was convinced Clarion was a serious player. The way the flight attendants had catered to him, fawned over him. Tuck had wanted to say, “But look at him: he’s old!” more than once.
From Romney-Logan to the Ted Williams Tunnel to instructing Tuck on how to skirt some seemingly endless construction project Clarion kept referring to as the Big Shit, he obviously knew his way around the city. Worse than all that, Tuck was getting used to his cursing. Sure, the first few times Tuck had corrected him, but Clarion had just laughed and kept cussing. Ultimately after a couple “shits,” several “fucks” and countless “pussies,” “tits,” and “dicks” Tuck had given up, counted himself lucky that Clarion was, at least for now, avoiding taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“Place looks like a reform school,” Tuck said, looking up as he stepped onto the cracked concrete walk.
“Make up your mind, Squires.”
With Tuck a couple of feet back, Clarion moved towards the high, smoked doubles that made up the lobby entrance. They parted with a thwuck-ing sound as he drew close, echoed the thwuck as seconds later they closed behind Tuck. Inside, the ceilings were high, the walls painted a yolky yellow that had been big a few years earlier. Across the ceiling lay a spider-webbed network of wires and spotlights, the kind you’d expect in an InterTel studio. In the center of it all sat a little man at a low, octagonal desk. With clean-cut, graying hair and a jaw that was too big for the rest of his face, he looked like the sort of size-complex sufferer/faux do-gooder who’d take a job as a keeper of wayward boys, then beat up the kids when no one was looking.
“Guess you finally hit it on the head, Squires. It does look like a reform school in here,” Clarion said, adding, “But remember. I lead, you follow.”
Tuck nodded. For now, he thought.
Kurt Baumeister 