Greenfield

This story was the entry which won a Milwaukee County Individual Arts Fellowship for Fiction for me several years ago. It relies upon – and embellishes greatly – experiences I had when I served as editor of the West Allis Star in the mid-1980s. There are some characters in this piece that really intrigue me - and that I will likely return to one day. I hope you enjoy it.

Please feel free to send any comments you may have.

The weekly
Malcolm McDowell Woods
4640 words

Dear editor:
Thank you for printing the crime report in the Star. I am an elderly woman living alone and I like to keep up on what crime is happening around me.
I wonder why you don’t also publish the truth about aliens from outer space and the Central Intelligence Agency? They have been working on me for years. I just lined my ceilings with aluminum foil to keep out their brain waves. Otherwise they keep me up all night. Print the truth!
Rae Schmidt

I folded the letter back up and tossed it in the mail basket. Rae had included her phone number but I wasn’t in the mood to call her. Wednesday afternoon was my dead time. The Star went to press Wednesday mornings, leaving me to pick up the pieces from the previous week. Around me in the offices of the Suburban Press the activity was a bit more intense. My paper was first on the print run - the other editors were still working feverishly on that week’s editions.
The Greenfield Star had quite a history. The paper had been started 104 years ago and was once quite a big deal. Of course, Greenfield was once a big deal, too. The town was little more than a dying main street surrounded by miles of manicured lawns now, your typical older suburb. But once, Greenfield had been home to Greenfield Tractor (“When You Need a Greenfield, You Need a Tractor”), the biggest farm implement manufacturer in the midwest. Twenty thousand people had worked there from the late ‘30s to the ‘50s.
The global market had been unkind to Greenfield Tractor, however, and now just a couple dozen folk still worked at the gargantuan factory, trying to guide the company through bankruptcy court while stuffing their own pockets with as much dough as was left.
I had written the story, three years ago, when Greenfield officials announced they were closing up shop. I think some 3,000 people still worked there then. The lot along 70th St. was packed with big family cars and all sorts of American Motors products. The AMC plant was in southeastern Wisconsin, too, and folk here took a sort of hometown pride in AMC cars. That evening, when the workers drove home and the last Matador and the last Gremlin and the last Hornet had left Greenfield Tractor, I had walked across the street to the Plow Bar. Owner Wimpy Warnicke was up on the bar as I walked in, writing over an old Greenfield Tractor sign hanging from the ceiling.
WHAT IF NO ONE NEEDS A GODDAMN TRACTOR? he wrote.
I had a couple of beers with Wimpy that night and listened to him talk about the good times. Like the time early in the ‘60s, when the factory went to three shifts, and Wimpy kept the Plow Bar open nearly around the clock, closing for five minutes in the middle of the night so as not to break local laws. The place would get packed at 6 a.m., when the night shift let out, Wimpy said. Packed.
“I think the gravy train is running out of steam,” Wimpy told me that night, and I had led my story with his quote. That piece won me a second place in the state newspaper competition for spot news reporting, but looking back on it now, I don’t think it should have won anything. It was wrong.
In actuality, Wimpy, the gravy train had fucking derailed.


* * *

The Plow Bar is still around, but it isn’t a place anybody goes. If you do, by mistake or something, you’ll find a lightless, piss-smelling place, with Wimpy and a few other old men, sitting at the bar, every now and then burrowing into bags of stale popcorn, waiting for death.
Which, outside of the popcorn, is a pretty good description of Greenfield, come to think of it.
The Star had been reborn, however, made into another link in the chain of suburban newspapers owned by Roger Lane that circled Milwaukee (“The Lane Chain Covers Milwaukee’s Suburbs”).
Lane himself was history. The Lane Chain had been purchased one year ago by an international media concern, The Forester Group. They immediately bestowed a new name on the papers: The Suburban Press, the sort of witless moniker you’d expect from a conference table full of ass-kissing accountants.
And the Greenfield Star, once the proud paper of Milwaukee’s bicep (as Greenfield was once known, which I figured placed our paper somewhere in the vicinity of an underarm), continues to lose readers steadily, their names filling now two full pages of obituaries every week.
So how the hell did I end up here?
I always thought of myself as magazine material, although I hadn’t yet found anybody in a position of authority at a magazine who agreed strongly enough to offer me a job. Which, I guess, is why I’m still at the Greenfield Star.
I was desperate, twenty years ago, when I finally finished college. I had sent out dozens of resumes, each one more puffed-up and padded than the one before it, until I was damn near bestowing the Pulitzer prize on myself.
I was offered two jobs. I could cover the Greenfield Board of Public Works for the Star or I could sell veal to local restaurants and grocery stores for the Bogart Veal Corporation (Real Veal for Real People).
I never liked veal.

***

Rae might have worked at Greenfield. Might have been a receptionist. Or a secretary. Or maybe a bookkeeper. Plenty of women were employed by the Greenfield Tractor Co., where they worked mostly in the tie building. The company headquarters was called the tie building because the men who worked in it all wore ties, in contrast to the men who worked out on the factory floor.
The few men left working at the company now all wore ties, knotted tightly, pinching corpulent necks and severing brain from heart. The bright, flowery silk ties would have drawn all sorts of hoots and hollers if they’d ever been shown on the factory floor. The men rolled up each morning in a flock of Mercedes Benz automobiles and galloped into the office building, spending less than a minute each day outside, in the stagnant air of Greenfield.
There were quite a few people like Rae around Greenfield these days. Old women who would order pizzas and then answer the door buck naked. Old men who walked up and down Greenfield Avenue loudly reciting filthy limericks. The town was full of people who had lived longer than they were supposed to, or longer, at any rate, than society had any need for them to live, and who were left to spend their remaining time on this planet desperately seeking to make a noise or cause a commotion, anything to let them know they were still alive.

Greenfield does that to you. Hell, I’ve begun to wonder when I’ll show up for work sans pants. Forty-six. Editor of a suburban weekly. Far off the beaten path trod by Pulitzer judges and media headhunters. Run out of steam, out of ambition, listless, slumped over an ancient computer here in America’s underarm.
The paper would be on newsstands tomorrow morning, although the only folks who regularly waited at the newsstands for the first copies were rummage sale shoppers looking for the classifieds. This week’s top story again came out of the Greenfield Tractor factory, now known as GTC Holdings. Seems the corporate bean counters had just discovered a serious shortfall in the employee pension fund. Serious. Like it was broke.
When the company began its financial freefall more than a decade ago, it attempted to slow its decline by getting rid of its highest paid factory workers. So, the men and women who had worked at Greenfield all their adult lives were talked into early retirements by company officials. “You’ve earned this rest. It’s time to enjoy your golden years.”
Except now the pensions they’d expected to live on during those golden years were gone.

The news had come to us via a press release from GTC. That’s how all news came to us from GTC. That was the only way the men in the Mercedes Benz parade ever communicated with us. Still, I had dialed their offices to get some comment from the company about the press release. Quotes in press releases are never to be used in a news story, I had been taught long ago, because they are suspect. People make up quotes for press releases. Better to call and get somebody at the company to tell you something - anything. Somehow, that always seemed more legitimate, even though in my experience they usually repeated whatever was in the release.
I called GTC. Mark Leyland, director of corporate communications.
“Does GTC have anything to say to its former employees?” I asked.
“It’s all in the release.”
“How will these people live, pay their mortgages...”
“It’s unfortunate, but the economic climate hasn’t been kind to companies like GTC.”
“Somehow I think the climate’s going to be a little harsher for the retirees,” I said. “GTC must have some money it can free up. How are you being paid?”
“Unfortunately, the pension fund is depleted. I can assure you the company is being operated in a legal manner under federal and state laws...”
I interrupted. “Irregardless of that, you must realize that this leaves...”
“There is no such word,” he said, in his smooth voice.
“What?”
“It’s regardless. Irregardless isn’t a real word. It’s regardless.”
“It’s irrelevant,” you smug little bastard. Note to myself to look it up later.
“No, it’s not irrelevant. You seem to think being an editor makes you some moral authority, but you don’t even know goddamn grammar. You’d better stick to the press release - at least it’s grammatically correct.”

That was yesterday. Today is Wednesday and the story is being printed. No quotes. Tomorrow, the worn out little people of Greenfield will wake up and find that the latest pension check they cashed will be the last. It should make for an interesting day, and before I left the office, I made plans to meet with a reporter and photographer at the Plow Bar. Cover the reaction. Another cliché story.

***

Linda was young and earnest, wrote good leads and wore short skirts. Brown hair shorter than mine. Thin fingers. I thought about her a lot. Reporters like her flew through here like geese. The Suburban Press was just part of their migration. College, here for a while until they had some decent clips, and then on to a small daily.
Linda had decided late in college, after seeing All the President’s Men, that she wanted to be a reporter. She had an English degree and eyes the color of Guinness stout. I had decided to be a reporter after seeing All the President’s Men, too, although I had seen it in a first-run theater, not on video. During the two months that she had worked for me, I had begun to think maybe we were soulmates, that maybe we somehow belonged together. That she would be standing next to my desk someday and take my hand and place it on her leg, leading my spread fingers across her flesh, toward where her skin was hottest.
“Nobody’s coming.” Linda’s voice brought me back, to the corner table at the Plow Bar. She sat across from me, twirling a straw in her soda and fiddling absently with her tape recorder. “It’s just as well Eddie hasn’t shown up. There’s no one to take pictures of. Shit, I hate ending sentences with prepositions.”
The bar was dark and dreary - no news flash there. Wimpy worked behind the bar, wiping glasses and emptying last night’s butts from the ashtrays. Linda had already talked to him, had already gotten a good lead from him. “Guess I should’ve gotten folks to pay up their tabs last week,” he had said.
No one else had showed up, though. I’d been figuring on finding the usual half-dozen old farts sitting along the bar bitching and moaning and belching, but Wimpy was by himself when we arrived.
“We’ll give it another couple minutes,” I said. “You like pizza?” Christ, I’m twice her age. I told her about the pizza we used to get at a place called Joey’s. The little old Italian guy who ran the place with his wife, a huge Norwegian woman. Place decorated like some little troll village or something. Ate there all the time. The best pizza.
One night, when they were closing the place up, a guy came in, said he had a gun and needed money. Joey, trying to trick the guy, shut off the lights and told his wife to run for it.
But she wore clogs. Always wore clogs. So she clumped, clumped, clumped across the dark restaurant and the guy with the gun aims at the noise and shoots, three times. Killed her. Joey closed the place after that.
“God, that’s sad.”
“Yeah. It was the best pizza I ever ate.” Her eyes are dark and moist and I can see them staring at me from across a pillow some drowsy morning, can feel her hand run over my bare chest. “Maybe some time we could go out for pizza...”
But before she can answer Eddie has burst into the bar, streams of bright light shattering the gloom. “Guys, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened.”

Eddie Jordan is a photojournalist. Thinks he is anyway. Shoots a hundred photos a week and ninety-five are total shit. People’s backsides. Distant crowd shots. Empty, desolate scenes of neighborhood fairs and school plays.
He’s shy. Afraid of people. Can’t look them in the eye, which makes taking close-up photos of people pretty much out of the question. Still, Eddie says it’s in his blood to be a photojournalist. He’s just part time at the paper. Spends most of his time shooting for insurance claims. Broken windshields. Bent, crumpled fenders. Every now and then a body. Dead people he’s able to photograph.

We gathered up our things and followed Eddie back out of the bar and into the daylight, me blinking like nuts in the sun, waiting for my photo-gray glasses to darken up. Poor Eddie was breathless from the block-long run to the bar and he had a hard time spitting out what had happened. He had been on his way to meet us at the bar when he saw a bunch of people milling around an accident scene just down the street from us. I was about to joke that maybe Eddie could earn some money from both of his jobs when we came up on the wreck.
Stopped sideways on the street was an old tractor. An ancient Greenfield Tractor, surrounding by people.
At the front end of the tractor, sitting up on its side, was a light gold Mercedes-Benz.
“Know who’s car that is?” asked Eddie.
Yeah. It belonged to Herbert Chester Briard, CEO of GTC Holdings. Or, more likely, it was leased by Briard. We were a block from the plant entrance.
“Where’s Briard? Who was in the tractor and where the hell did it come from?” I asked.
“It’s Lester’s.” An old guy in overalls and baseball cap answered me. His gaze stayed on the tractor. “Fuck me, we knew how to build ‘em, eh? Not even a dent.” He let out a whistle and then turned and laughed at the small, bald man next to him.
“You Lester?” I asked, looking at him. Tiny, slight guy, with dark brown polyester pants and a red American Motors windbreaker.
“Lester’s over there,” said Eddie, still panting, and pointing further down the street. Half a block down another group of people were standing in front of a small bungalow. “He chased Briard to that house.”
Linda was flipping pages in her notebook, scribbling furiously.
The guy in the cap again: “Les was after Briard after what he read in the Star. I saw him at Hardees this morning and he was madder than I’ve ever seen him before. Said those German sonbitches oughta pay.” I thought, but didn’t say: Briard sounds French to me.
We hurried down the street. Lester was easy to spot. A big guy at the front of the crowd. Red face. Veins popping everywhere - forehead, neck, arms. I think even his veins had veins.
“If we torch the house, the little fucker’s gonna have to come out,” he shouted. “Get some gas.”
He’s nuts, I thought. The guy’s flipped. But then an old geezer in a bowling shirt shouts that he’ll get the gas and runs off. And it dawns on me that these people are behind Lester. They mean it. They want Briard’s head.
“I’m running out of pages. Shit.” Linda’s still scribbling away.
“Lester,” I shout. “The Greenfield Star. Can you tell me what happened?”
“What happened,” says Lester, glancing at me and then back at the small white house before him. “What happened is that this little peckerwood and his boys drove into town in their luxury sedans and fucked us in the ass one time too many.”
The mob - what else to call it? - shouts in agreement.
“I tried to call him this morning to ask why he’s driving around in his Mercedes when I don’t even have a goddamned pension. Wouldn’t talk to me. Fucker on the phone says I’m being abusive and they’re going to have to report me.”
Linda has her microphone up now, getting Lester’s speech.
“A 1958 Farmboy,” continues Lester, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about the tractor down the street.
“Took the parts home one by one, and when I retired six years ago, set about putting it together.”
“Looks brand new, Les,” says the man in the cap.
“Irv helped,” says Lester, and the tiny bald man nods his head slightly, as if to take a bow. “So I decided maybe I should drive this down here, maybe he doesn’t even know what we built in this factory. I worked here all my life, since I was 16. Always proud to be building such a fine machine. You knew every night when you went home that you’d accomplished something.” Lester is facing me as he talks now, and I notice for the first time that his right eye is cock-eyed, looking off uselessly over my left shoulder. “You knew farmers around the world would use Greenfield tractors. Dependable and durable...I really just wanted to show him.” Again, Lester turns to face the house.
“I waited outside the gate, but when he comes driving out and sees me, he says to leave him alone, says he’s going to call the cops. Then he takes off down Wilson that way,” says Lester, pointing south.
“Fuckin’ high-roller’s been coming here every day for two years now and doesn’t even know Wilson dead ends. So I wait, and he turns and comes screeching back up the road, really fast, so I turns toward him, like playing chicken, and he locks up his brakes.”
Someone in the mob shouts that the German doesn’t have anti-lock brakes and there’s laughter.
“His car hit the tractor and flipped onto its side. I fell outta my seat. By the time I got up, he’s crawled out his sunroof and he’s standing there, brushing himself off. Then he sees me and goes nuts. Holds up a gun and shoots at me. Then he turns and runs into this house.”
Why the hell does this happen on a Thursday, I’m thinking. The dailies will have done this story to death by the time my next issue goes to press.
“He’s got a hostage in there,” says Eddie. “And he wants to talk to the press.”
“He does?” I turn to look at the house. White aluminum siding. Black fake shutters. Plastic over the windows, the kind people use to winterize their homes. In there, behind the drawn shades, is Herbert Chester Briard, CEO of GTC Holdings. With a gun. And a hostage.
This is what it takes to get an interview with the guy?

Ten minutes later, it’s arranged. I have clipped Linda’s tape recorder onto my belt and given her my coat. I start to turn, but she stops me, has her hand on my arm. “When we’re done with this story,” she says, “maybe we can have that pizza.”
It straightens me up and I walk toward the house, thinking of Pulitzer prizes - of wild sex - of wrestling with her on the rug of my living room, the Pulitzer trophy beside us. I reach the door wondering if there is such a thing as a Pulitzer trophy.

“Mr. Briard? It’s the Greenfield Star. Can I come in?”
From inside. “Slowly.”
Sure. I turn the handle, push the door forward, and step into an amusement park. A house of mirrors.
Every wall, every inch of ceiling that I can see, is silver. It covers the pictures on the wall, covers the window shades, covers the backside of the door, covers everything. I am transfixed, staring at all this, trying to take it all in, and don’t at first notice Briard and the woman in the corner of the room.
He is a slight man, with thin black hair and a sharp face. I was expecting a suit but he is dressed instead for exercise. Turquoise stretch lycra jogging pants and a silver and blue warm-up jacket. His left hand rests on the shoulder of an old, plump woman in a threadbare housedress. Her face is pasty white, oily, slicked in cold cream. Tired breasts dangle just above her belly forming a flattened triangle pressed against the fabric. Another darker, smaller triangle is visible below the first. She looks uneasily at me and then back at Briard, at the pistol in his right hand, aimed at her head.
That’s when I notice the hat. When she turns to him, I see the back of her head, and it is covered in something shiny.
I quickly look around the room again. The silver walls. The silver ceiling. Aluminum foil everywhere. I take a hard swallow. Herbert Briard has taken Rae Schmidt hostage.

“I don’t think you need the gun. The folks out there are calming down and the police ought to be here anytime,” I tell him, once we sit down, he and Rae on the couch, me on the Lazy Boy across from them. I am wondering though, if the cops have been called. “They’re upset about their pensions. Surely you can understand.”
But I don’t know how well he even understands me. Briard has an accent, a pretty thick one, and he seems to have trouble finding the right words now and then.
“Why do you even have a gun?”
“Why? Because I am in the US. Where they have drive-by shootings, car-jackings. Where they kill tourists and try to run you over with tractors.”
“It was one of your own tractors...”
“You think I didn’t know that?”
Not a word from Rae. Whimpers every now and then, but not a word. Her expression, whenever I glanced at her, oscillated between wild-eyed fright and near sleep.
“Lester, I think, just wanted to show you the sort of thing they used to build here. Yeah, maybe he wanted to frighten you, too. But you’ve got to understand, he’s at the end of his rope.”
“He should have waited. Next week, we were going to announce something good.”
“What, you were reopening the plant?”
“Of course not.” He looked down, at the aluminum briefcase he kept by his feet. “We are going to convert it into a zhoppping plaza.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “Oh man, maybe you’re better off this week. You’ve taken away their jobs, their pensions, and instead they’ll get to shop! With what? Will old Lester comb back his hair and put on one of those security officer uniforms for four bucks an hour?”
He waved the gun wildly. “Listen, there are millions of people in Korea and Taiwan and in countries you haven’t even heard of yet who will build tractors for $4 a day.” He looked back at the window. “You know, it isn’t me that spent their pensions. The factory should have been closed years ago. But they kept it open, and they had to use more and more of that money every year to make it look like it was still making a profit.”
We were quiet for a minute or an hour, I’m not sure.
And then there was an explosion in the room.

In truth, it was an unlikely combination of events that did in Herbert Chester Briard.
Poor old Rae Schmidt’s feeble mind had been fumbling to sort out the afternoon’s events. Beneath her tin foil beanie, synapses fired and whirred, neurons bleated and croaked, struggling to comprehend.
She had done all she could to thwart the aliens. Lined the house, but still the voices came. Constructed a hat from Reynold’s Heavy Duty and hairpins, but still the voices spoke to her. She had long known that it was only a matter of time before they came to her in person, to do all the horrible things the voices had threatened.
And now here he was.
Looked human enough. But his eyes seemed so cold. And there was the uniform.

Briard relaxed a bit. Felt the weight of the gun in his hand. Loosened his grip, leaving the barrel pointed sloppily at the floor, at the polished aluminum briefcase.
“You know,” he says, “I grew up in Belgium, in a small village. My father farmed all his life and I remember how happy he was when he bought a Greenfield Tractor. A used 1947 Farmboy. Said it would never let...”
He never finished the sentence.
His briefcase chirped. Once. Twice. Out of habit, Briard stooped forward, snapped open the metal case and pulled out a cellular phone.

Which was at precisely the same moment the mob outside, grown restless and edgy from the wait and the silence in the house, decided to act.
From the yard next door, two men hoisted a small concrete deer, ran at the house and heaved it at the picture window.
The deer crashed the plastic, the window, an inside layer of plastic and brought down the light-blocking shade.

Shards of glass spiraled through the room, bursting in the brilliance of the late afternoon sunlight which now flooded the room, banging off the walls, bouncing off the ceiling, blindingly bright.

It was the diversion Rae Schmidt needed and she knew she had to act quickly, before the alien on the couch next to her answered the call from his mother ship.
As I struggled to adjust my eyes to the light - Damn photograys –-- Rae dug her right hand down between the seat cushion and the armrest and found her knitting needles.
She quickly clasped both hands around them and lunged at Briard.

The police had arrived and flooded the room by the time my eyes had finally adjusted. I was better off blind.

A growing semicircle of blood soaked the carpet in front of the couch. Rae’s needles had ripped through Briard’s throat, severing an artery - the big one. He was dead in seconds.
Rae was slumped back in the couch, trembling, open-mouthed. Whiter even than before.
“It’s all right, Rae, you’re okay.”
She looked at me, quizzically. “You know my name?”
“Yeah. I read your letters all the time.”
She glanced at the wall, at the cops, at Eddie, clicking away at Briard’s body - his backside, of course.
“The foil didn’t work,” she said. “But the needles...”

Comments

[Autumn Amateur]

The man who ain't got an enemy is really poor.