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“I don’t care for that,” Maynes said. “MacTierney’s been calling him ‘Hickory’; says he’s solid as a walking stick. How about we call him King Hickory?”
“He answers to a lot of names.” The instructor smiled. “Ape. Stoop. Dickface.”
Maynes grimaced. “I’d say you’re lucky he didn’t pop your head off like a milk cap.”
“Dunno. He might be fixed. They fix Grogs in Ohio, right, to keep them calm?”
“I wouldn’t know. But he looks like he might be interesting, or at least fun,” Maynes said. He held up his hand, palm out, and I returned the gesture, smelling alcohol-sweat under his arm. “See you on the bus.”
Maynes was small for a human; most of his family was a little undersized.
In appearance Maynes was what my people would term “wild,” what we call someone so fleshless, his bones are exaggerated. He had high, prominent cheeks, a broad forehead, and a heavy brow; yet he had a smallish, drawn-in chin, and had he been born with a larger nose, some say he would have looked very much like the American president Abraham Lincoln. I only rarely could see the resemblance, as I am not particularly attuned to human physiognomy. He had black hair, a little grizzled about the temples and very curly, like much of his family.
He was frequently dirty out of unavoidable circumstance, being on the road constantly while making his rounds of Maynes holdings under the Conglomerate emblem—the coal mines in particular. He shaved every three or four days unless he was spending a few days lazing around the palace and seemed to believe that a bed-rumpled and road-worn appearance suited him, but I’ve found that the odder the features on a human, the more important it is that he dress neatly with hair growth controlled. He almost always wore a whitish straw hat with a rather broad brim and black band—I am told the style is often called a “Panama.”
His dietary habits were also strange. Like many of his habits, there was an internal logic to it. He ate only whole items: whole tomatoes, whole apples including the core, whole fish (he preferred smallish smelt-sized varieties). He would scrape corn off its cob with a knife and then have the cob ground into powder and placed in his drink. He put either horseradish or vinegar on everything he ate, including hard-boiled eggs still in their shells. He never suffered a bowel complaint.
My employer must have been something of a disappointment to his parents, or perhaps his grandfather, for despite being named for the organizational juggernaut that was his grandsire, he developed into some mixture of health and temperament that made him unsuitable for a dominant role in the Maynes palace. I’m told the brother who followed him and his sister, she being the fourth of seven, are the true heads of the Maynes household now.
So as not to openly disgrace the family, they gave him what you could call a sinecure. He held the title of “appellate judge” at a court of last appeal for those who ran afoul of the Kurian Order as it existed in the Coal Country at the time. His powers seemed chiefly reserved for functionaries of the Maynes empire, but this may have been unavoidable since the Maynes clan had a finger, if not both scooping hands, in every important business in the Coal Country.
My first time out with Maynes was a run to a lumberyard. The two other members of his security team, my “wrasslin’” partners Home and MacTierney, rode with Maynes between them in the cab of a heavy-duty truck. I rode in the back on an old, partly deframed love seat attached to the back of the cab.
Home drove and managed to strike every pothole and rut on the way to the lumberyard. To test me, they had me open the chain-link gate before driving into the wood-filled lot. I managed to swing the gate without knocking myself unconscious or scraping the truck, so MacTierney offered a “Thanks, King” out of the rolled-down truck window.
I grinned and did a quick back-and-forth hop, hoping I wasn’t overplaying the “happy helpful Grog” bit.
Piles of plywood paneling and two-bys and posts filled the gravel-covered lot. Half of the supply was just sitting on the ground, rotting from the bottom up. One would think that the owners of a business calling itself Renaissance Lumber would know better.
The workers came out to greet us, tucking in their pants and rolling down their sleeves to look presentable. Most of them eyed me. A boy still in his teens who was playing with a tape measure gaped openly.
Every business in the Coal Country has a “director,” and at Renaissance Lumber he was a firmly fat pencil chewer and spoke with Maynes as they reviewed a folder full of papers on the hood of the truck. Home leaned against the driver’s-side door, hand on his gun belt like a movie-Western tough. (The White Palace had several television-viewing rooms and its own “channel” I suppose you should call it. They showed movies from a century ago alternating wi
th New Universal Church educational programming—and Noonside Passions, of course.)
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Maynes,” the director said. “We have a lot of spare wood and scraps around. I let everyone help themselves to scrap. Fick and Nathaniel are good men. They both support families. They just got carried away with the lumber duels—and, well, Hammy being knocked out and getting his neck broke was an accident. No bad blood, not here, sir. I get rid of troublemakers right away. It was an accident, not murder. Don’t I have a clean record? Never lost a man to an accident before, and when you think about all the saws around here and the shape they’re in and what we have to do to keep them running, it’s practically a miracle.”
Maynes waved him off. “I understand accidents, Jorge. That time that radial blade took off on you and cut off that long-haired guy’s hand—”
“Despre, his name was,” the director cut in.
“It’s making weapons that’s more the problem than anything.”
“You could . . . You could think of them as sporting gear.”
Maynes chucked for a moment and scratched the day’s growth on his chin. I would prefer someone holding decisions about my life in his hands to look clean and not hung over, but if there was one thing I learned quickly in the Coal Country, it was that you made do and found happiness where you could. Maynes was infinitely preferable to a Reaper. “I suppose I could.”
He looked over the faces of the other workers. They were standing, hats in hands. He walked around the circle of workers. A few tried to put in a good word for their coworkers, currently absent somewhere in jeopardy of their lives, I supposed. “We’re really sorry, Mr. Maynes.” “The stick fighting got carried away.” “We weren’t betting or nothing, just a few pals having some fun after work.” “We thought it was no big deal—a couple of the firemen liked to come to the fights.”
Maynes finished his circuit of the employees and glanced at MacTierney and Home. Home was still modeling as a waiting gunfighter still life. MacTierney shrugged and smiled.
“Right, Jorge,” Maynes finally said. “I’ll get your men out of the cage.”
The lumberyard broke into applause and cheers. Maynes and MacTierney looked pleased; Home simply rested his hand on his holstered pistol.
The Maynes clan was shrewd to choose this specimen of humanity for the task. He had a sentimental streak that made him outright pardon roughly a third of those who came before him. Personal stories brimming with pathos brought tears to his eyes. I have seen him dash off a pardon and reach into his own wallet to hand over currency for clothes to replace prison uniforms, purchase a half steer to feed a hungry family, or otherwise provide comfort to those affected by what Maynes determined to be an injustice.
In another Kurian Zone, newspapers and church bulletins would place the charitable nature of the collaborators just under the masthead. But the Maynes family knew its locals. Those pardoned by Maynes were quietly released back to their loved ones. They knew word that spread across backyard laundry lines and in corner taverns would be much more convincing—and perhaps even be exaggerated.
