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May 20, 2008
Batesville Installment Two
Vinnie Harris’ day started off just like every other day started off for just about his whole working life. His alarm clock went off, and Vinnie got out of the bed he sleeps alone in to walk across the room to turn it off. He has it across the room so that it forces him to get out of bed, something he picked up on during his hard-drinking late teens. He took his shower, washing his short balding hair and soaping down his beer belly, then shaved around his goatee, deciding not to trim it this morning as he really wasn’t in the damn mood to do that. He picked out one of his pressed dress shirts, a royal blue one today since that goes well with his favorite tie, matched them up with black dress pants and black suit jacket and headed on his way. Down the street he notices that movers are putting some boxes on the lawn of the old Campbell house while the cop’s nosy wife across the street watches, arms crossed. Vinnie just laughs, turns up M.I.A.’a Kala album and heads onto the highway.
It’s a bit of a drive from Batesville to the bank he works at in Kansas City’s Waldo area, and if you were to ask Vinnie why he makes the drive instead of moving or finding somewhere closer to work he couldn’t really tell you. It’s just that he works at that bank and he lives in Batesville and that’s it so mind your own business, buddy. Anyway, going through Blue Springs is fine but then it gets the normal amount of congested as he enters Independence and becomes a full-on mess by the time 70 intersects with 291. He stays on through and exits onto I-435 South and gets off on Bannister, heading west into Waldo. It’s the same route he takes every morning and most days he has absolutely no memory of the drive unless traffic is particularly piss-poor.
Vinnie pulls into the bank’s parking lot, taking one of the back spots and walks on in to start his eight hour shift. The old guard, Harold, holds the door open for him like he does every other day, and they have the same conversation they do every day.
Vinnie nods at the guard, an ironic smile on his face, “Thank ya, sir.”
“Sir, you’re welcome, sir,” the old man says in the best grandpa voice you’ll ever hear, a warm smile brightening up his face. The two men nod their heads again and Vinnie walks back to the time clock to punch in.
The bank’s an older one and is set in its ways, right down to its old style time punch system and the typewriters on everyone’s desks. This suits everyone who works there just fine. Sure, they have computers and all sorts of fancy gadgets, but the history of the place reminds them of what worked first and what worked best, and if someone wants to open an account the old-fashioned way they’re more than welcome to do so. Vinnie might be young in years, clocking in at only twenty-seven, but he’s got an old soul and loves the traditions of this institution.
He stops in the break room to get his coffee, having grabbed his mug off his desk on the way in, always thinking of efficiency, and stops to talk with one of the ladies who works in the proof department.
“Mornin’, Vinnie!” the rosy-cheeked woman says, looking up from her breakfast.
“Mornin’, ma’am. How’s things?” Another conversation Vinnie has every morning.
“Things are good. How’s it going with you?”
“It’s goin’,” Vinnie laughs, now finished pouring his coffee. The proof operator laughs at the joke, even though it’s the same one he’s told her every morning for the last eight years. When Vinnie started with the bank she was the woman who first trained him and he’s always felt a debt of gratitude to her since then. Plus, she’s a sweet old lady and gives him candy.
He heads back to his desk as the guard unlocks the door, allowing customers to enter the building. There’s always four or five senior citizens waiting for the doors to be unlocked at 9:00AM sharp, every now and then some of them rather impatiently, until Harold lets them know that their watches are off. They’re all members of the bank’s “Coffee Club”, which is a corner of the lobby that has cushy chairs and a coffee pot. For a long time Vinnie didn’t get why they come in every day and drink the bank’s cheap-ass coffee, but he sees the rhyme in their reason now. What else are they going to do, sit around the house and waste away?
This particular morning, one of Vinnie’s favorites is in, Mister Fulks, who makes a line to the desk. “Mornin’ sir,” greets Vinnie.
“Good mornin’, young man. Hopin’ you can help me out with one of my CD’s?”
Vinnie shrugs as the old man sits at his desk, “Sorry Mister Fulks, but CD day was yesterday.”
“Oh?” replies Fulks, his eyebrows rising above his thick glasses.
“Yeah, yeah. You gotta come in on Tuesdays now.”
The old man leans forward, looking at Vinnie’s daily “Learn Mandarin Chinese” calendar, then looks at the banker. “Calendar says it’s Tuesday.”
The two smile at each other slyly and then let out a small laugh. The ladies sitting at the desks around Vinnie roll their eyes, tired of the same old jokes. “Ya got me again. Alright, let’s get this here CD taken care of, huh?”
Vinnie gets to work on the certificate of deposit’s renewal process, rolling the interest over into the new term while old man Fulks inspects one of the pitiful plants on the desk. “So what’s new, young man?”
“Oh, last night a buddy brought over some DVD’s and we watched ‘em. Really cool show.”
“Yeah? I like movies. Harriet and I,” Harriet being Misses Fulks, another of Vinnie’s favorite customers, “We like to rent a lot.”
“Actually, this was a TV show on cable that was in a set of DVD’s.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Pretty cool. It was about the Hundred and First in World War Two, from the start of the war through the Eagle’s Nest and liberating Auschwitz. Really fascinating. Worth checking out, if you like stuff like that. War stuff.”
“Not really, no.” Mister Fulks starts to look a little reserved, his eyes looking a little distant. “I don’t really find the enjoyment in that.”
“Oh, uhm, I’m,” Vinnie stutters, afraid he’s inadvertently offended one of his favorite customers.
“Nah, Vinnie, don’t worry. I was there, you know.”
Vinnie slips from speaking in a professional tone and lets out, “No shit?”
“No shit. I was in the Hundred and First.”
The young banker leans forward, Fulks holding his interest. “You know, they were interviewing guys from the Hundred and First, having them tell the stories and then there’d be the part with the actors. Maybe you could contact them.”
The old man leans back in his chair, not comfortable. “They called me when they were making the show. I didn’t want nothin’ to do with it.”
“You didn’t want your story getting out there, so that people know?”
The old man looks at Vinnie, eyes creasing, the wrinkles suddenly aging his normally happy face. He looks around the lobby, then leans toward his favorite banker, opens his mouth, pauses, then says, “I was there, when we were rolling into Auschwitz. We knew the Germans were done for, but there were still pockets of resistance as we went. Anyway, some of the towns, as we came close, they’d start cooking big feasts for us, the officers saying it was to celebrate us liberating them, but I always thought it was so that we wouldn’t shell their towns. Anyway, we’re coming up on this little village and we smell barbeque. Vinnie, I was hungry for some good food. I’d been eating crap rations for months, and my stomach started grumbling, reminding how long it’d been since I’d had some honest-to-God good food. I started salivating, the barbeque smelled so good. We pull into the town, and there’s no feast,” Mister Fulks pauses again, unsure if he wants to continue. Vinnie gives him a sympathetic look, letting him know he can stop if he wants. “The people there, they’re scared of us. More scared than we’d ever seen any villagers look, and then we notice the smoke coming from just past the town. We rush up there and find the camp, the concentration camp, and find that they were trying to burn up all of the evidence. The people. They were burning up as many Jews as they could, and I just started vomiting. The scene itself, it’d make any man throw up, but that’s not why I got sick. I got sick because I was hungry for the smell of cooking human flesh. Do you know what smelling is, Vinnie? It’s inhaling particles into your nose. I inhaled a burning man’s flesh and it made me salivate. I haven’t slept a full night since then. So, no, I didn’t really want to share that story. I’ve only ever told Harriet about it, and now you. You know, the villagers, they were scared, because of what they thought we’d do to them once we found the camp. They knew that we’d know they had people working there. We went back to that damned village and made those bastards cook for the prisoners we’d liberated, give them their clothes, and clean up that awful, that awful…”
The two stare at each other, Vinnie simply unable to function, having never really run into any situation remotely like this, unsure of what to say to this man he considers to be a friend. All that he can do is hand the updated certificate to Mister Fulks and ask, “Is there anything else I can help you out with today, sir?”
Fulks looks at him, a really gentle smile coming across his face, and offers his hand, then firmly shakes the banker’s hand. He keeps his grip and wraps his free left hand around the young man’s, and very sincerely and warmly says, “No, Vin, you’ve helped me out more than I could have imagined. You have a good day now, young man.”
Vinnie, relieved but still a little shaky, says, “You have a better one, Mister Fulks.”
Posted by Schamberger at May 20, 2008 08:30 PM