Meet Delacroix

I think I promised never to write fiction again. I lied. Yes down below you will find the first part of a three installment story. I wouldn’t read it if I were you. Read the next installment, it has a killer joke.

Blog stuff:
Game of the Day: Bookworm I love word games. This one is basically boggle but it lasts forever. My goal is to find profane words to see if the game accepts them.

Cool Story: I’ve got Chris Rock’s number. If that ever happens to me I’m going to work on a celeb imitation and go ballistic on anyone who calls.

TV pick: No pick, I’m pissed that I missed the season ender of Monk. Tony Shaloub rocks.

Story I warned you not to read:

Meet Delacroix

In my hand I held a lucrative offer for a small bit of artwork. Forty G’s to draw something called ‘hellbender salamander.’ I assumed it was some sort of mythic thing, like a Molly Hatchet album cover. Pure cheese. I lack the hand skill required to complete these projects so I generally turn out Todd like some artistic pimp. I figured I’d pay Todd five and keep thirty-five, after all I found the work. The only bugger was the deadline, fuckin’ Monday. It was Friday now and Todd would need a few hours to get the piece done. I had tried to contact Todd with no luck, he was killing pigs in the mountains.

This requires some explanation: Several years ago Todd had stumbled across a trap designed to capture the feral pigs of the Smokies. This is not unusual. The mountains are dotted with pig traps in a vain attempt to rid the Smokies of the foul swine. The pigs, you see, are not native and are in dire need of eradication. The traps are live capture because some non target animals share the rough dimensions of the porcine interlopers, rather than kill anything that wanders into the trap the pigs wait for their doom. While hiking through the woods several years earlier Todd had stumbled onto one of the live capture affairs. The unusual thing about this trap was the very green ranger attempting to dispatch the pig with a 22 short pistol. This was the wrong tool for the job and the ranger’s repeated shots had only managed to bloody and enrage the beast. Todd offered to help, explaining that he had an excellent way with these things. The ranger loaned him the pistol for a mere moment. Todd dispatched the animal with a carefully aimed shot that severed the jugular. The ranger, it was later learned, had mistakenly grabbed the weapon normally reserved for killing much smaller annoyances by overlooking the sign that said ‘PIGKILLER’ above a 357 magnum. His rationale was that the PIGKILLER gun looked hideously overpowered and thus he assumed it was a joke in case ‘the man’ came down on them. When it is was pointed out that he, in fact, was THE MAN he became very depressed and quit his job to sell copiers. Before he left he gave Todd the trap checking map and schedule while he noted that no one cared how many pigs were killed as long as he stuck to pigs, an eagle or a bear would net him jail time, but a pig was just a hooved weed, akin to kudzu.

Todd was intrigued by this and had spent much of his free time killing the nuisance pigs in their traps. The traps were one way circular pens and Todd fancied himself a latter day gladiator. In that vein he had climbed into the pen with the beasts for a duel many times, though each time he used a less deadly weapon. The first encounter merited death by kitana, ten encounters later and the pig was dispatched using a stout mace. By this stage Todd would be climbing into the pen with little more than a sharpened toenail in an attempt gauge his true measure. I suspected he would return with stitches and stories and wondered when the handicapping would start for his next outing.

Todd’s bloodlust explains why I called Delacroix. I am not an outdoorsman, I find a few steps off the deck to be as far away from electricity as I care to be, but I needed to find Todd and Delacroix was the only person I knew who could lead me to him. I hesitated to call Delacroix for the simple reason that Delacroix was a square peg in search of an absolute void. It wasn’t so much that Delacroix didn’t fit in, it was that he didn’t want be. I offer this behavior by way of example: Delacroix had a job, but no one was sure what he did. His few friends would occasionally ask him about work but Delacroix was a master of obfuscation and either gave an answer so terse as to be meaningless or an answer so tangential that it was impossible to glean any real information.

I was finally able to make some sense of Delacroix’s work when dire financial circumstances forced me to take a rather unpleasant temp job for a manufacturer of scientific instrumentation. I was charged with the task of making sure all the Macintoshes were Y2K compliant. (Side note: they were) I spent my days trying to look busy. I began to hear talk about an odd fellow who worked in the sub basement. Absolutely nobody ever saw this mystery person and many chalked the whole thing up as mere rumor. Others were not so dismissive, managers argued that the person certainly existed and performed massive amounts of work. The person, they intimated, came in excruciatingly early and left very late. I was of the opinion the whole thing was a ruse by upper management to stick the regulars when annual reviews rolled around and forgot the entire matter. Then, one Tuesday, my windows counterpart (who actually had something to do) arrived at four in the morning. He had fallen horribly behind and was hoping to meet a deadline of some sort. Around 9:30 he stepped outside for a smoke and found a note addressed to the building. It simply said:

Can’t come to work today, infection has spread. Delacroix.

The guy found the note disconcerting and didn’t know what to do with it. Being the only other temp he showed it to me. I felt like I had grabbed a trunk line when the revelation hit, I should’ve known: only Delacroix would go to such extremes to avoid human interaction.

I drug myself down to Delacroix’s office the next day, a bit of a surprise for my old college friend. After a few minutes of verbal parrying, verifying my identity I suppose, Delacroix granted me admission to his office. Delacroix was dressed in a wife beater t-shirt, shorts and sandals. I could tell Delacroix’s physical conditioning hadn’t slipped since college, he had the ropey muscles most often associated with prolonged heavy exertion. His hair was a disheveled mess of medium length blond strands that covered a pair of oddly challenging blue eyes. I began to scan the office. Clothes were strewn everywhere, as if they had been released from some giant saltshaker. In the middle of a large desk was a nondescript laptop and a cell phone. A pointed stick was the only other non-clothing item. No chair, no trash can. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get some info out of the mysterious Delacroix so I started asking questions:

‘Hey, Del! Long time no see! What’s up?’
Delacroix had put on an oxford and was working on the buttons
‘Ah, well, yes. That’s the question of the moment.’ He said.
‘This is a pretty ideal setup for you, you like it Del?
‘Well, it serves a purpose. Freedom from, uh, distractions’
‘How’d you get such a sweet deal, your own office, man you’ve must have gotten a great promotion.’
‘I don’t think any corporate chicanery was involved, I earnestly believe that my position has remained the same. I simply requested more privacy. My request was granted.’
‘Del, c’mon, managers like to watch people, heck that’s why they get paid. They don’t do this for just anyone.’
At this point Delacroix was pulling on a sport coat of some sort.
‘I concede your point, there is a voyeuristic dimension to management I had not before considered. I speculate that the management measured my value to the company against whatever utility they received by directly observing my actions and opted for the greatest cash benefit’
‘Del, you want to come over Friday for dinner, we’re going to have spare ribs, slaw, the whole southern barbecue deal’
By this point Delacroix had donned a St. Louis cardinal’s baseball hat and sunglasses.
‘ You live in that, that subdivision still, yes? The sightlines do not match your cooking. I would undoubtedly enjoy the ribs but any number of people may be watching us for any amount of time. Not a dare I wish to take. You may come by my house if you wish. Of course you’ll have to bring the ribs’
‘Sorry Del, can’t do it. The kid and all. When I get a chance I’ll stop by. Hey, what’s the stick for?’
‘Ah, glad you asked! It’s semi representational. Imagine if you will a stick in topology, it differs not from a pizza. To a topologist the stick is but a surface and a surface should intersect with another surface. A cursory scan of surfaces is often misleading, as expected, but deeper probing, a contra positive ideal reserved with the intention yields only a tenuous flailing manner of didactic language’¦’
By now Delacroix had a pair of jeans on over his shorts, had traded his sandals for a pair of steel-toed Doc martens that were knee high and involved yards of laces. I cut him off by saying I had to get back to work. His last words to me were. ‘Fixing a problem that doesn’t exist? A vexing task.’

I left the job about a week later. I think we had cake to celebrate, I never was sure if the celebration was due to the fact the Macs were Y2K compliant (certified by me) or the fact that I was leaving.

You can see why I hesitated to call Delacroix, but the need was thirty-seven thousand dollars great ( I bumped my end up when I realized I was going to have to deal with Delacroix) so I picked up the phone. Delacroix answered and said he would be happy to take me to Todd and opined that it would take 2 hrs and 33 minutes of fairly strenuous hiking. When I inquired how he could possibly know which trap Todd was at and precisely how long it would take reach it Delacroix laughed. He explained that he had memorized the traps Todd frequented from occasional encounters at bars. He had also noted the trap checking schedule. This being the third week of March there was only one trap Todd could possibly using to harangue a pig. He said it in a way that left me feeling like I had asked what the third letter of the alphabet was. My pride hurt, I pressed on about the precise hiking time. Delacroix related that he had noted my weight gain from college during our last encounter, extrapolated that to the present and had adjusted the hike time accordingly. Before I could change the subject Delacroix informed me he had added fifty-two minutes to his usual hike time.

As I drove to Delacroix’s house I reflected on our introduction. We were in a lab class, a class that required partners. After everyone else paired up we were the only two people left. I don’t share the same aversion to other humans that Delacroix does but I do have a fairly strong fear of introducing myself. So there we sat staring at the tables in front of us, neither of us willing to move. We maintained this illogical position for an hour until the instructor, bemused, told us we should work together. We became fairly good friends while working together in the lab and I think I owe most of my grade to Delacroix. He would never build what the instructor assigned, an analog to digital converter for example, instead he would build something completely different but undeniably mind bending. Our first project involved a series of resistors and capacitors, to teach us the basics. My breadboard functioned as promised but Delacroix’s looked like multi colored spaghetti. I asked him what it did and he said ‘Calculus.’ I got home that night to find my Hewlett Packard calculator gutted. With that memory I pulled into Delacroix’s driveway. I thought momentarily about getting out and ringing the bell, it would be the civil thing to do, but instead I just leaned on the horn. That bastard owed me a calculator.