FOUR: ENTER THE LEG

I recognized the grip – not vise-like so much as the expert pinch of a jumbo binder clip. I turned to face its owner, 6’3” of pure predatory benevolence, from his receding hairline (much of which seemed to have migrated to his upper back), Rollie Fingers mustache (which, it’s said, he got at a ridiculously low price at an estate sale), gap-toothed smile and camo business suit. He radiated good cheer and dark intensions, like the murderously unctuous host of the most dangerous game show. Hell, you could even hear the announcer shouting out his introduction, with all the bonhomie of a skilled voice artist who just happens to have a gun to his head to ensure that certain vowels are drawn out and certain syllables punched – Ladies and gentlemen, Leeeeeegggg TA-blewooooood!

“I should have guessed I’d find you here,” he said. “If you’re gonna wait for your ship to come in, it’s pretty wise to stick to the coast.”

“And I suppose you came here just to quip.”

He laughed. Oh, what a sickening, mirthless laugh he had. “Not exactly, no. Here, walk with me.”

“Sorry, I’m on my way to work.”

“Ah yes, work. Still teaching retards how to knit, are you?”

I bristled. “We don’t use that word,” I said coolly. “We call it crochet.”

“Come on, there should be enough shiny objects to keep them distracted for a while. I’ve got something to show you.”

“No conversation I’ve ever had which included that sentence ever ended well.”

“Don’t make me change my mind here. There are opportunities that await you, and from the looks of you, those are getting fewer and farther between. Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, as they say. We won’t be going nearly that far, so your journey will begin with me slapping you in the back of the head and pushing you so you’ll start walking and cease pissing me off.”

Leg Tablewood was, as always, a difficult man to argue with. Like many of the best predators, he had a way of sneaking up on you and inducing intellectual paralysis with a single dart of his tongue. And like many of the best predators he knew how to blend into the scenery while doing so. He knew how to sell, and he knew how to acquire; but he knew not to make such a big fucking deal out of any of his big fucking deals. Below the radar, that’s him. And where better to stay off of whatever grid was available than Port Winestain? His all-copper condo was the envy of all who gazed upon it, except, of course, during thunderstorms and the quarterly tsunamis the state government had approved as a population control measure. But the man himself was rarely to be seen, never photographed, and given to the most sporadic of public appearances – this last was where I had first encountered him, nursing a Dying Etruscan (one part beer to two parts schnapps to three parts crème de menthe, then poured out and replaced with straight whiskey) at last summer’s Let’s Mock a Few Gimps charity event. Why he gravitated to me, in a room filled with dignitaries and prostitutes from all over the Turmeric Beach Peninsula, I’ll never understand, but he sidled up to me with a grand smirk that seemed to hide all the secrets of the ages and proceeded to mumble at drunken length about how many islands he’d bought and bombed (using his personal flotilla of missile carriers and nuclear canoes), and would I be interested in investing and would you mind not breathing on me since people were looking? I wish I could say I was strong enough to resist such rancid charisma, but alas, I was enthralled. Perhaps the thing that impressed me the most about him was that, unlike nearly everyone else I’d ever meant, he was a real listener when he finally ceased talking. My unfortunate history, my dreams, my fears, my shrieks when he put his cigarette out on my neck – he took them all in, nodding with real-seeming interest, studying me with more intensity than anyone I had ever encountered who was not being paid by the state to do so. At the end of the evening, having spent the bulk of it in my presence alone, he gave me a friendly tap on the forehead and said, “Don’t go far, kid. I may be able to put you to use some day.”

And that he did. I can’t claim to have cleaned his gutters better than any who came before me, but having lettered in leaf gathering back in high school finally paid off ($10 and a glass of what he claimed was lemonade but reminded me of the time I got hit by that Ciera and the panicked driver shot a heavy stream of wiper fluid straight up my nose). But even then he strongly implied there was more to come, a big payoff beyond my wildest imaginings. That didn’t mean much, considering that my imagination was so weak and ill-defined that the women in my sexual fantasies had a tendency to get sudden headaches or phone calls about their dying grandmothers in the middle of everything, but he gave me encouragement just the same. Had that day he promised finally come? Perhaps I would find out in succeeding paragraphs.

We walked for some time along what we euphemistically referred to as city planners euphemistically referred to as Main Street, past the Anal Bead Emporium, the retroactive psychic’s storefront, the dealership that supplies over 70% of the stripped cars on blocks for the town’s front yards, Madame Ky’s Chinese Restaurant… and into the largest of Port Winestain’s abandoned buildings, the place that served as Tablewood’s in-town HQ. “C’mon in,” he said, slapping me on the back hard enough for me to expectorate blood. “There’s some people in here I think you should meet.”

The enormous hall that once served as conference room for the militant order of Shriners that used to rent the place seemed empty at first. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, an array of shadowy figures made themselves manifest. Familiar-seeming figures in a variety of shapes and sizes. “Sorry about this,” Tablewood said. “They’ve gotten used to the dark. Here, let me shed some light on the situation.” He knocked out several of the boards on the windows. Shafts of light broke through and illuminated the room just enough for me to make the people out.

I recognized them all. There was the tall, skinny deaf guy who wandered all over town, handing out hand-drawn pictures of himself grasping the buttocks of anthropomorphized bears. And the woman who staggered around, screaming “FUCK YOU!” at the top of her lungs to unseen agitators, and “GO SUCK OFF YOUR DOG!” when she came across actual people. And the morbidly-obese woman I was convinced never left her house, shrieking at her coterie of in-home caregivers when she wasn’t on the phone, reporting everyone she knew to the Postmaster General. And the guy with the leisure suit, clown shoes and watchcap who walked into the middle of traffic every day at five to perform what he called the “Serbo-Croatian Lizard Dance.” And several more, all of them the most irritating, nerve-wracking and frightening people in all of Port Winestain, which rendered them a most elite group indeed.
I turned to Tablewood. Though his face was hidden in the darkness, I could feel the waves of smug pride radiating from him. “Why are – what have – who…”

“Let me stop you before you cycle through the rest of the journalistic w’s, pal.” He opened his arms wide. “This is my street team!”

“Okay… please to explain.” (I should note that, in times of extreme stress and/or bewilderment, I have a tendency to lapse into a stereotyped Pakistani dialect. It all goes back to when I was abandoned at a young age in a gas-station convenience mart, but that’s a story for another hastily-written novel.)

“With the money I made from my wildly successful chain of second-hand smoke shops throughout the Midwest, I commissioned a study of every city, borough, township, municipal district, rural route and ghetto in the entire continental United States. Over a period of seven years, we studied and charted every aspect of every one of them – median family income, unemployment figures, divorce rates, trailer parks per square mile, number of individuals who enjoy Tyler Perry pictures, number of teeth per-capita… eventually, my associates and I found it. The most depressed, most depressing place in the whole of the Lower 48. Can you guess where it is?”

“Here?”

“No, actually it was Fort Swayback, South Dakota. Sadly, it was destroyed in a devastating tobacco-juice flood sixteen months ago – ironically started at one of my Ash & Filter franchises – so we had to settle for second place.”

“Port Winestain.”

“Correct. The perfect location for my long-term project. So I moved in. The problem, however, was that, even in the absolute worst places on earth, there are always a few stragglers who spoil it for everybody else – people with college educations, subscriptions to The Nation, people who couldn’t pick Bill Engvall out of a lineup. Decent, upstanding people who, by quirk of fate and bad real-estate tips, end up calling this place home. So I recruited my street team here, some of them naturals plucked from the stinkweed bouquet which sprouts endlessly throughout this burg, others merely promising irritants given extensive training by the top dogs from the Federal Bureau of Discomfort. They stay here most of the time, but I send them out at strategic intervals throughout the day, at the precise moments when some of those decent people are out in public – I send them out to stand too close when they’re shopping for copper fittings at the hardware store, to accost them while they’re crossing the street to the cappuccino stand, to start screaming when they walk past the bus stop. Little by little, they make their lives so intolerable, so unpleasant beyond their capacity for shrugging it off, that the town’s finest citizens will abandon their mortgaged abodes, turn tail and flee to places even slightly more amenable to their respective ways of life. It’s been working like a charm so far, but there still remain a few non-troublemakers within the city limits. But, now that I am about to institute Phase Two, all that is about to change. And that, my friend, is where you come in.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you have nothing to lose. And besides, I understand you’re in the middle of writing a semi-autobiographical novel. A good promotional tool.”

“Hey, easy on the name-calling, buddy.”

“Come along, my youngish friend. There’s a debriefing back at the office in twenty minutes. You won’t want to miss this. There’s free pastry. Say goodbye to our newest colleague, everybody!”

“GO SUCK OFF YOUR DOG!”

“Sorry about that,” Leg said, leading me to the door. “Some of them are always rehearsing.”

(11/8/09 – 8:44 PM)