The Little Guy Read online

  Copyright 2011 by David Bain

  and a/a Productions

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  The Little Guy

  by

  David Bain

  It was Hud, the pale, pimply-faced beanpole kid from the mailroom somewhere in the dark bowels of the building – all the sun and fluorescent lights up here on the 142nd floor gave him a radioactive glow – who floated, literally in passing, the question that got Dean rushing to Guy’s office. The hell with Taiwan! Lowest on the totem pole but always the first to know, this skinny delinquent, his iPod beatboxing away in his earphones, was the secret CEO of the corporation. How Hud could hear, much less deliver all his semi-rhyming rumors with Ludacris and Li’l Wayne funking up his head was light-years beyond Dean.

  Hud’s Adam’s apple, which loomed about the size of Oklahoma – no, Texas, with a twang to match – bobbed along like a hyperactive cockatoo as the kid expertly flicked a stack of envelopes onto Dean’s desk, drawl-rapping:

  “Dean-o! Y’all know

  Guy got the ax this mo-

  nin’? Wassup with that, yo?

  No mail for Guy, no!

  Do not pass Go!

  No severance, just blow!

  Tha’ss what he was told!

  No mo’ cash flow!

  Man, that’s cold! Woah!

  And then Hud was gone, his bombshell dropped, his cart rhythmically be-bop-creaking on to the next cubicle in the seemingly endless cue.

  The Asian daysleeper still chittering away like an insect in his earpiece, Dean’s eyebrows scrunched. Had he heard Hud correctly?

  Guy? Fired?

  No. Some sort of mistake there. Texan hip-hop and Asian accents getting crossed in his wires.

  Still, when had Hud ever been wrong?

  Dean rolled his swivel-seat backwards almost to his cubicle wall, sprung up to his feet – almost a gymnastic move – and promptly dropped Taiwan, the headset receiver bouncing and clattering on the thin carpet. He turned in the direction of Guy’s glassed-off office walls. The blinds, these white, vertical, slim plastic hanging strips, were pulled, brilliant sunlight peeking through the slats.

  Guy rarely closed the blinds, wanting all his floor to know that he, too, worked constantly, worked his ass off, sweat as much or even more than they did. He was paid for 40 hours, just like any schlub, but any given hour, 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., you could glance in and see Guy scribbling, phoning, faxing, e-mailing, chatting up a client, type-type-typing – he wasn’t allowed a secretary – doing the books, struggling and slogging away for the powers that be. His one non-glass wall and his desk were covered by pictures of his chubby, ever-grinning wife and four kids, something hopeful and naïve and perhaps even desperate in the way their moist eyes gleamed out at the big, wonderful world.

  Guy? Fired?

  Dean was suddenly pounding at Guy’s door when it struck him that perhaps Guy wanted to be alone just now – perhaps Guy wasn’t even in his office anymore, maybe he’d already slunk out in undeserved shame.

  Guy had been … well, a great guy. Of course, Dean and Guy’s relationship had gone far beyond work – Dean’s family along with Guy’s co-owned a boat and a time-share at an upstate lake – but everyone on the floor would be outraged when they learned Guy’d been fired. And no one would be fooled about what the deciding factor was – it abso-fucking-lutely had nothing to do with Guy’s job performance.

  Fully half the pictures on Guy’s wall were of Dody. Guy’s Tiny Tim. Dean felt his nostrils flare and his temples warm and his teeth grit just thinking about this half-inevitability. Dody’d been born with basically no diaphragm, which meant tons of breathing and other problems and about a dozen surgeries in the three years of Dody’s young life. It had cost the company about a zillion bucks in insurance – they’d surely paid out in insurance a minimum of three times what they paid Guy annually – but whose fault was that? The company’s – that’s who! The idiots had chosen to bet against the odds and paid on an individual and not a group basis. So Holdhouser and the board (surely at Holdhouser’s recommendation) had elected to can Guy, excise the dollar drain.

  Dean was ready to throttle the door handle. Hell, he’d kick in the motherfreaking door to get to his friend, but surprisingly the knob – it’s handle was cool metal despite his hot rage – turned easily and the door swung open.

  He was briefly blinded as his eyes adjusted to the brilliant sunlight pouring in and glittering off the glass of all the other business district skyscrapers outside Guy’s view - he hadn’t closed the blinds on that side.

  But even through his half-blind eyes, Dean could see Guy wasn’t there.

  Dean sighed with … was it disappointment or relief?

  He was still trying to decide when he heard the distant keening.

  It was thin sound, barely an octave higher than a mere ringing in the ears. Except it couldn’t be distant because it was coming from somewhere inside Guy’s office.

  Dody, Guy’s family, staring him in the face, smiling, hopeful, desperate.

  Was it an insect making the sound? It sounded like a miniaturized version of the Asian who was probably still trilling away on the phone back in his cubicle a million miles away.

  Dean caught a movement in the corner of his eye. Something about the size of his once-upon-a-time Star Wars action figures was creeping (doubled over?) on Guy’s desk, looking like a teeny Muslim bowing toward Mecca, except it was keening and pounding a foreleg (a fist?) on Guy’s doodle-covered blotter.

  It was Dean’s praying mantis from when he was nine years old.

  No, it was Guy.

  “Guy?”

  It was Guy, somehow the size of a G.I. Joe, wearing a tiny green sports jacket, a tiny olive pair of slacks, an apparent blade of grass for a necktie. Guy’s neck swiveled now like a bug’s, like that of a praying mantis (praying for Dody?) and looked up at his buddy Dean-o.

  “Guy? What … what the hell?”

  Thin, high-pitched, barely audible – like Dody’s cry when she was first born – “Dean! It’s me! Guy!”

  The little figure reaching up with its twig-thin stalk-like arms, as if Dean were supposed to pick him up.

  “I know. I can see that. Guy, what happened?”

  “I cried, Dean-o. I cried and I looked up and I was like this.” Guy patted his hands urgently up and sown his torso, as if Dean hadn’t yet noticed how he’d shrunk.

  Dean put his hands on the edge of Guy’s desk, feeling the edge of the cut glass sheet on top. He leaned in close. It was guy all right, shorter than a can of beer, like they shared at the Bennigan’s downstairs in the building after work every Thursday.

  “Guy, what did they do to you? Hey – you could sue! You could sue them for something like this!”

  Guy looked like he was about to say something, when from behind Dean someone said: “Lawsuit, my ass!”

  It was Holdhouser, barging in through the open door, swaggering, swinging his fat gut back and forth and, as he did almost constantly, hitching up his pants despite his belt and expensive, showy leather suspenders.

  Without even thinking, Dean covered Guy with the slightly cupped palm of his right hand and, with a smooth, fluid motion, swept him as casually as possible behind his back, rocking on his heels now, as if he’d only been casually contemplating the scattered minutia of Guy’s desk even as he spouted about a lawsuit.

  Dean had often held his pet praying mantis, feeding it hamburger chunks and aphids. Holding the now three-inch tall Guy in his palm – hadn’t Guy been taller only seconds ago?
– felt much the same, all stiff, skinny, wiggly, fidgeting limbs. Except this little bug wore hard, miniscule wingtips, digging into the pads at the bottoms of his hands.

  ***

  Holdhouser’s booming voice thrumming through his body, Guy in his terror didn’t resist at all when Dean-o palmed him up. In fact, he helped – he burrowed his head into the hollow between the middle and ring finger, thrust the sharp heels of his wingtips into the soft, thick pads where Dean’s hands met the wrists, locking his leg muscles, bracing himself, palming his own miniscule palms against Dean-o’s for leverage.

  But the angle at which Dean was holding his hand behind his back made Guy almost perpendicular to the ground, and gravity was working against him. Furthermore, as Holdhouser continued his tirade, Dean-o began sweating, the lines of his hands turning into little rivulets of salt-smelling, liquor-thick liquid, already dampening Guy’s hair and loosening his head- and footholds.

  Desperately, Guy looked up and saw Dean-o’s wedding ring looming like a golden rainbow in a fleshy sky. The soles of his wingtips suddenly slippery with his best friend’s sweat, Guy scrabbled, slippy-sliding his way across the damp, pulpy, print-whorled millimeters of Dean’s slick skin to the dull, glowing solidity of the ring. He grabbed the ring and swung and swayed over Dean’s little finger, hanging on for dear life.

  But wait, Guy thought, two minutes ago I wouldn’t have been able to swing like this from Dean-o’s ring.

  Small as they were, Guy’s guts began to roil as he realized he was shrinking more and more with every derogatory word of anti-Guy rhetoric Holdhouser spouted. He swung hard and managed to hook a wingtip over the top knuckle of Dean’s little finger and catch his breath for a moment.

  ***

  “Lawsuit, my ass!” Holdhouser raged again, red-faced. “You’d best pretend you never said that, Dean-o! It’s all documented, dots over every ‘I’. Guy’s record has been quite poor recently. Your ‘lawsuit’ wouldn’t have a prayer.”

  “What? How? Guy was an excellent floor manager! What could there have possibly been to document?”

  “Higher echelon stuff you weren’t in on, Dean-o. Managerial stuff. Lackadaisical supervision. Paperwork errors. Ignoring SOPs. And a general lack of effort. You name it. Guy couldn’t manage a floor if it was filled with dog turds! I mean, he couldn’t even follow our final directive.” Holdhouser gestured at the office as a whole. “I told him to pack up his things and leave within the hour. But all his stuff’s still here.”

  Dean felt a darkness, a gloom sinking into his chest. He felt his palms and underarms break out with sweat. His hands were still cupped behind his back and Guy was, for some reason, tugging at his ring now.

  “I … Guy always said he got glowing reviews.”

  “Sure he did. Until this year. You might not have noticed, but his performance really fell off this spring.”

  This spring, when the bills for Dody’s latest operation came in, Dean was about to say, when Holdhouser asked him what he was holding behind his back.

  “Huh?” Dean said. “Oh. Nothing.”

  “Something of Guy’s?”

  “No, I’m just, you know…” He brought his free hand around and flexed his shoulders and rolled his head. “Stretching.”

  Holdhouser chuckled. “It’s not a gun. You’re not going postal on me over firing Guy, eh Dean-o?”

  “What? Heck, no.” He stretched some more, feeling Guy swinging free from his ring finger, a bug-sized Tarzan. Guy seemed to have shrunk considerably since Holdhouser came in.

  “Good,” Holdhouser said. “That’s good. Because I came down here after you, not Guy.”

  A stone fell from Dean’s throat and into his stomach.

  “You’re going to be Guy’s replacement.”

  Dean stopped in mid-stretch, his face stunned and suddenly slack. Dean literally felt Guy shrink from the size of a cricket to an ant. Then he felt Guy slip from the ring – he was probably too small now to get a decent grip – and, feather-light, half-crawling, half-swimming through sweat, sequester himself in one of the deep lines of his palm. Guy was now little more than a tickle, the memory of a kiss lingering on the skin.

  “If you’re taking something from Guy’s desk and don’t want me to know about it, think again. I say it’s all yours if he doesn’t claim it by the end of the day. My final orders to him were very clear. The hell with him. The office is yours now anyway.”

  “Mine?” Dean said. “This office, this floor, are mine?”

  Holdhouser grinned. “Unless there’s going to be a lawsuit….”

  “No! Not at all! I mean, I was just, you know, musing out loud about what Guy might do, wondering if he would –“

  “Good. Hey buddy, let me be the first to shake your hand.”

  Without thinking – at least that’s what he told himself later – Dean brought his hand around and shook.

  Holdhouser’s grip, sealing the deal, was firm.

  As their hands parted, Holdhouser, wiping his on the butt of his pants, said, “Hey, Dean-o, why so pale? Why’s your hand feel like a dead fish today? You better learn to shake better than that in the world you’re entering. You should be thrilled. You’re not one of the little guys anymore.”

  Dean felt himself cringe, maybe even shrink a little, as Holdhouser clapped him on the shoulder, then turned and left him alone in the big glass office.

  Guy’s family smiled out at him from the wall, hopeful, naïve, desperate.

  The End

  ***

  Connect with David Bain

  Website: http://bit.ly/bainbooks

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidbainaa

  Amazon Page: http://bit.ly/davidbainkindle

  Newsletter: http://bit.ly/davidbainnewsletter

  Other Amazon Kindle e-books by David Bain

  Novel

  Gray Lake: A Novel of Crime and Supernatural Horror

  Double Ebooks with Wayne Allen Sallee

  Two Killers

  Double Dare (Available December ’11)

  Will Castleton Paranormal/Psychic Detective Adventures

  Island Ghosts

  Samantha

  The Bridge

  Nighteyes (Available in December ’11)

  From The Chronicles of Shin and Skulk

  The Pit of Cormair: A Shin & Skulk Epic High Fantasy Adventure

  Shin’s Silent Quest

  The Tsan (Available in January ’12)

  Short Story Collections

  David Bain’s Grindhouse Quintuple Feature!!!

  While the City Sleeps: Eight Gritty Tales from Green River

  Four Stories

  Streetlights Filled with Flowers: Three Tales of Urban Fantasy

  Novelettes

  Cauldron Car: A High-Octane Horror Grindhouse Novelette

  The Cowboys of Cthulhu: A Weird Western Grindhouse Novelette

  Brujas Behind Bars: A Chicks in Prison Grindhouse Novelette

  Weed: A Green River Crime Novella (Available in December ’11)

  Selected Short Stories

  A Pleasure to Burn

  Those Who Can, Help

  GRAY LAKE: A NOVEL OF

  CRIME AND SUPERNATURAL HORROR

  Teenage friends Brian Henderson and Scott "Iggy" Ignatowski suddenly find themselves living the ghost stories and urban legends they so love one night as they watch a car drive across the moonlit surface of GRAY LAKE. At the same moment, in the marshes to the north, the battle for dominance over a troubled gang of small town meth dealers begins.

  For Iggy, the car’s arrival heralds a downward spiral as he dreams of its sometimes lovely, sometimes ghastly occupants chauffering him into murky depths. For Brian, it issues in a season of dark love in the form of Maya, a devastatingly beautiful but strangely enigmatic girl he meets on the lakeshore.

  Soon the mysteries of the ghost car, coupled with the unstable gang members’ obsessions, will drive Scott, Iggy and others toward fateful choices, hurtling headlong into a violent and
deadly showdown on the spectral shores of Gray Lake.

  Gray Lake is available at Amazon

  ---

  Read an excerpt here!

  Gray Lake

  by

  David Bain

  “Because Gray Lake is haunted,” Brian said. “I mean think about it. I know at least fifteen Gray Lake ghost stories just off the top of my head.”

  “Fifteen?” Iggy lifted his back from the windshield of Brian’s Jeep and propped himself up on his bony elbows, the tendrils of his curly hair twisting about the shoulders of his t-shirt, the ends long enough to still be brushing the glass. The Jeep sat on the skinny ribbon of public access, which was little more than a wide berm. Iggy began counting on his fingers. “Let’s see – Hatchet Man, Little Lost Lucy, crazy Dr. Sallee – who may even have been Hatchet Man – the ghost girl made of fog over in the marsh, what other ones?”

  Brian and Iggy were facing Deadman’s Hill, which was infamously steep and high. After descending Deadman’s, Lakeview curved around the contour of the lake. There was a good deal of shallow water and leafy shore shrubbery between them and the hill, which loomed about a football field and a half away.

  Brian remained lying on the hood. His athletic frame, white tennis shorts, red polo shirt and close-cropped blonde hair stood in stark contrast to Iggy’s spindly, spider-like body, cut-off jeans, black Misfits skull t-shirt and long, dark, shaggy locks.

  “Well, okay, what I’m saying, Ig, is whenever anyone from Green River tells one of those ghost stories – urban legends, I mean - like even the old one about the killer with the hook hand scratching to get into the car where the kids are making out, ever since I was a little kid, people have set that one right here at this spot. Right where we are now. This little strip of sand along the road. You know it didn’t really happen here - as if it really happened anywhere - but there must be three dozen lakes around Green River. So why do they choose this one if it isn’t really haunted?”