Bears
by Conor Kelley
"Bears" previously appeared in Tenth Muse
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: All this happened,
more or less.
This story is for Susanne and Bo.
-
“Did y’all need anything?” Kim asked in her
Southern drawl as she poked her big fat head into our office.
The three of us looked up at her from our
rolling chairs clustered in the center of the office. I tried to give her my
most genuine smile. Kim, the office secretary, was a round pink woman. I’d
describe her as hefty. She had glasses, a couple chins and wore lots of scarves
and shawls. She looked like an antique Midwestern Mrs. Potato Head.
“No, no, we’re just fine,” Bo said. “Thank
you.”
“Well awlright. Now, Jackie’s gone today, so
y’all just let
me know if you
need anything. Okay?”
“Sounds good!” I said, too enthusiastically.
Kim shot me a sharp look, then softened it quickly enough that I wasn’t sure if
I saw it at all.
“Oh, bless your hearts,” she said, with
something like a smile and walked out.
“Buh-bye,” Susanne said after her.
The three of us looked at each other. Susanne
quickly put a finger to her lips. She pointed at me and pointed to the open
door. Then she pointed two fingers at her eyes and pointed those two fingers
toward the hallway. I nodded and crept to the doorway. After taking a deep
breath, I poked my head out and looked up and down the hall.
“Clear. God, she’s so creepy,” I said to them
as I sat down again in my chair.
“I wonder how much of that she heard,” Bo
said.
“You know, that ‘bless your hearts’ thing….”
Susanne said.
“Her and Jackie are like a two-headed
monster….”
“…that ‘bless your hearts’ thing is, like, the
Southern way of saying ‘fuck you.’”
“Really?!” Bo and I asked.
“Yeah!”
“Remember that party we had to celebrate her
20 years with the company?” Bo said. “I almost felt bad for her, 20 years and no
promotion. Every couple years, watching a new idiot like Jackie become her new
boss. I almost felt bad for her, I
almost
did!”
“Yeah,” I said loudly, getting excited now.
“She startled me coming around a corner last week, and I almost shit my pants!”
Susanne and Bo stopped talking. Susanne shook
her head. Bo chuckled.
“Okay, so what were you guys gonna tell me?” I
asked.
“Let’s start here, Casey—how much do you know
about this situation?” Bo asked.
I waved my hands in front of my face and made
a motorboating sound. “Zero things. I’m a blank slate.”
“And that’s how we like you,” Bo said with a
laugh.
“’Kay, so you know how Jackie’s gone today?
It’s because her husband,” Susanne said as she looked around and leaned forward,
“her
husband died.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“Oh yes,” Bo said.
“He was
found dead this morning,” Susanne
whispered.
I was silent for a few seconds. They studied
my expression.
“How?”
“Poisoned.”
“No.”
“Ohhhh yes,” Bo said.
“So,” Susanne started, “I’m not sure how much
you know about Jackie…how much do you know about Jackie? Right, blank slate.
Okay, so Jackie and her husband have been separated for a while. They just
started the divorce process. Now, you know how crazy Jackie is around the
office.”
Jackie, our boss in the editorial division of
that textbook company, was an honest-to-God sociopath. She was threatened by
everybody in the office so she took credit for other people’s work and turned
people against each other. She used to bring baked goods in for everybody but
kept them in her office so she could corner one of us in a weakened state of
hunger. What exactly would have happened in there is a mystery, but nobody ever
got desperate enough to go for a snack.
Jackie dressed her three kids up in costumes a
month before and after Halloween. We pitied her kids. They were mostly silent
and looked at their shoes a lot. Her oldest, Damien, looked just like her
husband. We all felt bad for Damien. He was a sweet kid, too.
“So, apparently Jackie hasn’t been letting her
husband see the kids since he moved out. I feel so bad for those kids.
Especially the one that looks like him. God, the one that looks like him!”
Susanne tipped her coffee cup all the way
back, then took it away from her lips and shook it.
“Wanna go down to the café?” she asked me.
“I’ll buy you a coffee.”
As we walked down the stairs to the café, I
couldn’t speak.
The previous week, Jackie had gone on a
low-cut shirt craze. Now, Jackie was an attractive woman. She was tall with long
legs, blondish/brownish hair—dirty blonde, if people say that. But you know the
saying among guys: “You don’t put your dick in crazy.” I’m sure there’s a saying
like that among women.
Anyways, so one day she dressed like she was
giving a seminar on the distracting power of boobs. She was just bending over
for everything, trying to catch somebody looking—really inappropriate stuff. So,
on a little whiteboard in our office we wrote “BEARS.”
Bears
was our code word for boobs, because you can’t write BOOBS on a whiteboard in
your office and because direct eye contact with either boobs or bears is
dangerous.
That afternoon, we were all working, heads
down, door open, when a voice behind me asked me about the whiteboard.
“Well, bears….” I said as I swiveled in my
chair and found myself staring directly into Jackie’s cleavage. I couldn’t have
been six inches away.
Somebody in the office took a quick breath. It
wasn’t me. I was too scared to breathe.
“Bears?” Jackie asked me with a cruel smile.
“Yeah,” I said to Jackie’s shoes as I felt my
face got hot. “Bears. Are. Aggressive? And…rrr…ruthless animals
who…ah…quickly…move in for the kill, which is…something. We. Strive to be? But
with spelling mistakes.”
I looked up at Jackie’s face. She seemed
pleased.
“Is that so?” she asked.
“It’s like a motivational thing,” I said as
casually as I could.
“Interesting,” she said, turned, and walked
out.
Bo put his head in his hands.
“She’s
got the fucking place bugged,” Susanne
whispered.
Now, I don’t know what you call that. Not
sexual harassment, but something.
But this was more serious than anything else
she had done. This was murder. It usually doesn’t get more serious than murder.
“Remember our code word BEARS?” Susanne asked
as we reached the café counter. To the barista: “Two coffees, medium, black,
room for creamer.”
“Yeah, actually, I was just thinking about
that.”
“You were just thinking about boobs, huh?”
“I was thinking about the whole situation, not
just boobs, thank you very much.”
“Okay, so remember how well you executed that
secret BEARS mission?
“I mean, I was thinking about boobs a little
bit.”
“Focus, Casey. Okay, this situation needs,
like, three times the effort you showed with the BEARS mission. Four times more.
Because there’s more…thank you, no, no, keep the change, thanks…because there’s
more to this situation.”
We took our conversation to the creamer
station, and as I poured hazelnut creamer in my coffee, I asked, “How much
more?”
“We’re talkin’ motives here.”
I looked around. “You mean, beyond custody?”
“Those supervisor evaluation forms we trashed
her on?
Her bosses set
up a meeting with her about them. Looks like she’s gonna get canned. But if
she’s bereaved….”
“Sympathy.”
“Exactly.”
We were almost to the top of the stairs by
now.
“None of this gets talked about in the office,
though. Too much risk. Especially with Kim lurking around. Kim’s just as
dangerous as Jackie. Plus she’s been here for about a century. She knows all the
secrets around here.”
“Yeah, what’s her deal today?” I asked.
“Um, she’s the devil, Casey. Try to keep up.”
We all got an email later that day saying
Jackie would be gone the rest of the week. We looked at each other wide-eyed,
then put away our work and began a discussion of grunge music that took us right
up to closing time. At one point, Susanne said her soulmate was Eddie Vedder, so
we talked about that for a while. We discussed whether Kurt Cobain killed
himself or if he was murdered. It was established that there was something awful
about Nirvana shirts being sold at Target.
The next day, we took a two-hour lunch, walked
down to a little sub sandwich shop downtown, and discussed all the possible
outcomes. The most obvious one was Jackie would be convicted, sent away, and her
children would be put up for adoption. We agreed that would be in everybody’s
best interest. We talked about plea-bargains, witnesses, and all sorts of things
we had seen cops discuss on TV shows.
The three of us finished our food pretty
quickly. Afterwards, as we sat there with balled-up napkins and wax paper in
front of us, Bo slurped the ice at the bottom of his Styrofoam cup and solemnly
said:
“What if she gets away with it.”
Susanne and I looked at each other, then back
at Bo.
“Bo, come on,” I said. “She’ll get caught.
She’s got all the motive in the world, and she’s a nut. The cops will see all
that.”
“That’s not enough, though. What if she
planned it out right, didn’t leave a shred of evidence. I bet she had Kim help
her, like some twisted little assistant, like her fat little Igor. Think about
how crazy Jackie is already. Now picture that same psychopath with the added
confidence of GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER.”
He said it with a little smirk on his face. It
was all a little unbelievable for us to take too seriously. Still, though, my
sandwich wasn’t settling well.
When we arrived back at the office, the lights
were a little dimmed. It was quieter, like some people went home early. The
reception desk was empty. Kim’s voice was coming from somewhere, though.
Giving Susanne and Bo the five-finger stop
sign, I followed the voice. It was coming from Jackie’s office.
“Yes, of course I’ll tell ‘em, honey,” she
said. “An ex…ten…ded… leave of aaaab…sence. Okay, got it. Uh huh…uh huh?…well,
he sounds like a fine lawyer…of course, of course…God bless your little heart.
Bye now.”
As I heard the phone cradled, I crept a little
closer and peered around the corner. Cardboard boxes were lined up just outside
the office. I bent down to take a better look. Poking out of one of the boxes
were sheets of paper and the nameplate from the office door:
MANAGER OF PROOFREADING DIVISION
JACKIE HENDERSON
I looked up and craned my head to read the
frame on the opened door. The piece of paper, in neat handwriting, read:
INTERIM MANAGER OF PROOFREADING DIVISION
KIM LIND
And there in the office was Kim, reclined in
Jackie’s chair with her feet crossed on the desk, holding a folded newspaper
open to the crossword puzzle, tapping a pencil to one of her chins. She looked
like she had moved in.
The next week, a professionally printed plaque
replaced that paper. So, a couple weeks later, I hugged Susanne and Bo, and they
wished me good luck at my next job and told me to stay in touch and that they
meant it.
On my way out, I stopped by Kim’s office to
say goodbye. Kim had baked chocolate-chip cookies for my last day and made me
take one as I left.
“Oh, I insist,” she said.
But as I walked out the door, I dropped the
cookie in the garbage.
I hoped wherever I ended up, there wouldn’t be
more bears.
Conor Kelley writes from Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in literary magazines and newspapers across the United States and Ireland, most recently Hippocampus Magazine, Word Riot, and Tenth Muse. His first book, a baseball instructional book titled The Catcher's Handbook, will be released by McFarland Books in 2014.