Among the numerous targets of RexCom’s recent cost-cutting program was Thaddeus “Red” Marchik, a thirty-year veteran of racing journalism who had been in RexCom’s employ for nearly five years, and fully expected to remain therein until the arrival of what he deemed to be his well-earned retirement.
The “well-earned,” however, was not an assessment shared by Marchik’s immediate supervisor, managing editor Paul Lipscomb. When Lipscomb had received the most recent staff reduction order from RexCom corporate headquarters, he began to compile a list of potential firees. Marchik’s name led off.
As Lipscomb told one of his assistants, “I don’t know why in hell we’ve kept him as long as we have. Marchik has been dogging it since Lassie was a pup. No matter where we assign him, he finds a way to slow down the pace, all the while complaining about how he’s overworked and underpaid. We used to have a summer intern take care of all the racing commission rulings that we publish in two hours a day. Marchik has somehow managed to turn this function-an almost mindless function, I might add-into a full-time operation requiring overtime, for Chrissakes! ”
He drew breath. “Marchik has got to go.”
Co-workers who heard the howl that erupted from Marchik upon being informed of his firing cowered in their cubicles. “You can’t treat a Navy veteran like this,” Marchik shouted, pounding a large fist on Lipscomb’s desk. A broad-shouldered six-footer, Marchik, even at age fifty-nine, made for a formidable sight with his sweaty face as bright as his full head of red hair.
“Red, face the facts here,” Lipscomb advised. “You just haven’t worked out for us. I couldn’t do anything to save you if I wanted to,” Lipscomb lied. “These are orders from the top.”
Marchik looked at him incredulously. “You mean Mr. Rexroth himself?”
In an attempt to mollify Marchik by making him feel important enough to be a personal concern of the media kingpin, and also anxious to get Marchik out of his office, Lipscomb nodded his head affirmatively. “He just felt it would be best for all concerned if you took your talents elsewhere.” Lipscomb struggled to keep a straight face.
Red Marchik rose to his full height. “That tub of guts will regret the day he decided that. He’ll learn you can’t fuck over a Navy veteran.” He then stormed out of Lipscomb’s office.
“Send in the next sheep for slaughter,” Lipscomb said into the intercom on his desk.
Red Marchik came from an extended family of occupational malingerers, one dotted by union officials with phony jobs, ghost payrollers on the municipal side, and a couple of cousins whose careers had been devoted to winning phony accident lawsuits against insurance companies.
Those members of the Marchik family who, like Red, actually held real jobs, usually considered these positions to be either “beneath them,” or “too much for them,” or flagrantly ill-paying. Their working lives were replete with indignation at what they considered to be slights or insults suffered at the hands of supervisors who had no business giving orders.
Someone once said of the late television announcer Howard Cosell that, if he were a sport, “he’d be roller derby.” Similarly, if the Marchiks were considered as an historical entity, they’d be seen as a continually pissed-off but immobilized peasantry.
Later on the day he’d been dismissed by Lipscomb, while sitting at the poker table in the basement recreation room of his modest ranch home on Louisville’s west side, Red Marchik pondered his fate as he tossed down a succession of shots of Jim Beam followed by gulps of Pabst Blue Ribbon. His berating of his former employer become increasingly embittered as the afternoon, and the alcohol, wore on. But no matter how loudly he decried his fate, Red’s wife, Wanda, maintained her composure. She sat across from Red at the felt-covered table, rolling and smoking one marijuana joint after another and nodding her head in agreement at her irate husband.
The recreation room, refinished by Wanda years ago, was the Marchiks’ pride and joy. On shelves dotting the fake knotty-pine paneled walls sat an amazing array of stuffed carcasses-raccoons, coyotes, various other mammals-along with the head of a small deer.
The prized trophy, an albino squirrel with a strikingly malicious look in its eyes, held center stage between a huge National Rifle Association poster and a blown-up photo of one-time Nixon henchman Charles Colson, whom the Marchiks were convinced had been railroaded to prison where he became a born-again Christian.
Red peered blearily at Wanda. “They’re not gonna get away with doing this to me, Wanda. They’re going to pay for this.” He again recounted to her his meeting earlier that day with a member of RexCom’s Human Resources Department. “They ripped me off on severance pay, insurance, pension-the whole eleven yards, the bastards.
“Human Resources, hah! What a fuckin’ name for what they do! Their motto should be Bend Over and Spread Those Cheeks.”
Wanda Marchik was used to hearing such tirades from her husband of twenty-three years, and paid them no heed. She looked upon Red as a delightfully harmless, terribly attractive man, one she had been crazy about since literally bumping into him one night between beer frames at JJ’s Bowling Lanes many years earlier. Wanda didn’t spend time analyzing why she adored her lazy, perpetually put-upon husband. “There’s no explaining it,” she often told her girl friends. “He’s just a beautiful hunk of man, isn’t he?”
Wanda, a diminutive brunette, had wide-ranging interests that Red would have been hard put to explain, had he been asked. He just accepted them. In addition to owning and operating a thriving carpet-cleaning business, one that employed a battalion of industrious Polish immigrants, Wanda was an active member of the NRA, the Sierra Club, the Coalition for the Retention of the Death Penalty, Planned Parenthood-the Marchiks themselves were childless, the result of what Red openly admitted was his “shooting blanks in the sperm division”-and the National Association to Legalize Marijuana.
Such a diverse dossier of memberships never struck either of the Marchiks as unusual; this undoubtedly explained the theme of mutual content that permeated their marriage. Some people are indeed “just made for each other,” and the Marchiks-Red, a lifelong malingerer and discontent, and the ambitious Wanda-qualified on these counts.
Wanda rolled up the sleeves of her Chicago Bears sweatshirt. She then started rolling another joint. “Honey, you really don’t have to work anymore. My business is going great. You’re getting close to retirement anyway. Why not just sit back and enjoy this? Why are you making this so, you know, personal with Mr. Rexroth?
“Those big companies dump people all the time. Good people like you,” Wanda quickly added.
“That tubby turd is going to pay for this,” Red vowed. “Stay out of my way on this one, Wanda.” Red lurched to his feet and stumbled toward the plastic-covered white couch that faced the forty-two-inch color television set. After flopping down, he quickly went to sleep, still muttering.
Wanda smiled fondly at the love of her life. She had heard Red promise punishment to a variety of employers, or foremen, or co-workers, over the course of his career spent performing the simplest tasks in a variety of small-time journalistic jobs. Frankly, she had been surprised when Red had landed-through the help of a friend of his, Chester Langenbach-a position on the Horse Racing Journal, part of the Rexroth empire. Wanda was further surprised that Red had lasted in the job so long, considering what she tolerantly accepted to be his combination of semi-ineptitude and bilious attitude toward work.
“Oh, you’ll get over this, too, honey,” Wanda whispered to her hubby as he rested peacefully beneath a haze of marijuana smoke and a small cloud of beer and bourbon fumes.
Ordinarily an accurate assessor of her mate’s moods and intentions, Wanda Marchik proved to be way off the mark this time.
As the weeks following his firing by RexCom went by, and his severance pay dwindled, Red Marchik’s fury lingered. Predictably, his half-hearted attempts to find another job produced nothing, and Red appeared to be home free with his twenty-six weeks of unemployment checks. Wanda’s business continued to thrive, so the Marchiks were not confronted by financial worries. It was the bitterness billowing from what he considered to be the huge personal insult that was his firing that stoked Red’s anger. Try as he might, he could discern no reason why he should have been found wanting at this stage of his working life. “I wasn’t doing any better-or any worse-than I ever did,” he repeatedly complained to Wanda.
In the second month of his forced retirement, Red began to soothe his ego with the theory that his firing had been “a goddam hate crime by that fucking Rexroth.” The more he thought about it, the more sense it made to him. Over the course of several days one week, Red struggled to compose a letter to his former employer.
“You will soon hear from my attorney regarding charges of age discrimination and ethnic prejudice that I intend to bring against you,” the letter began. It continued:
If you think that you can operate your evil conglomerate without fear of reprisal, think again. Understand that fighting evil is nothing new to me. I am a U.S. Navy veteran.
After my years of dedicated service to RexCom, I was abruptly terminated. The only reason I can think of for my firing is that you have carried too far your hatred of Lithuanian Americans. I proudly happen to be one. It was not lost on me that another employee fired, Mr. Harry Lopke, has a widowed mother he supports, she, too, being of Lithuanian-American heritage.
If you think you can get away with your cancerous practices, think again. Your prejudicial perpertrations are comparable to those fostered in years past in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and today in sinkholes like Chile and China. I will show that your vicious actions have caused me to suffer a near heart attack, tremendous emotional and mental stress, and a condition of semi-impotency. I shall prove that my wife and I were almost hospitalized as a result.
I shall have my counsel subpoena you and your clique which have employed Nazified tactics for years, and which vicious activities you vermin have approved of and encouraged. I will produce documental evidence.
A copy of this letter has been sent to every member of Congress, and the Secretary of Labor, and the President of the U.S. himself, for bigotry and hate such as you spew embroils all races and all religions and all must be warned. A copy of this letter has been sent to newspaper editors, to columnists, to television and radio talk show hosts throughout this country and parts of Canada.
If you think you can smirk behind the walls of your house of hate, think again. There are some people who are dedicated to wipe out evil wherever it exists.
Best Regards,
Thaddeus “Red” Marchik
Three days later a messenger service delivered an envelope to the Marchik house. It contained Red’s letter to Rexroth, across the top of which in large writing scrawled the following reply: “I will be happy to pay for the psychiatric help you so sorely need, you raving asshole.” It was signed with the initials HR.
With his vicious hiring and firing practices, Rexroth was used to being occasionally harassed. Among the most irritating of his ex-employees had been a business department clerk named Matthew Dow. For weeks after he was let go Dow would telephone the publisher in the middle of the night and drunkenly sing A Letter Edged in Black. This ceased only after Randy Kauffman had been dispatched to talk things over during some of Dow’s rare sober moments. Dow had gotten the point, as all of them did. Rexroth didn’t give another thought to Marchik or his letter.
Soon after his letter to Rexroth was so rudely returned, Red began to lay plans for a different kind of revenge. He knew he stood little chance with the courts, and financing a lawsuit claiming age and ethnic discrimination would be expensive. Furthermore, bloodless justice was really not what he sought. Red’s plans came to fruition on a summer night, at Willowdale Farm, not long after the death of the horse Uncle Francis.
The previous month, Wanda Marchik had spotted an item in the Louisville paper about an upcoming charity fund raiser to be hosted by Rexroth at Willowdale. She had innocently mentioned this to her husband, almost immediately wishing that she hadn’t-because Red seized upon this event as an ideal opportunity for his promised act of fatal revenge.
The fund raiser didn’t promise to be as exciting as memorable Kentucky Derby week debauches thrown by one of the Blue Grass area’s most flamboyant hostesses, events featuring semi-nude dancers, high octane cocaine, and blow jobs in the bushes. But it nevertheless seemed certain to draw a large crowd and guarantee its host’s appearance-in public, on a designated date. The fact that Rexroth was obviously spending a huge chunk of money to sponsor this event served to further infuriate Red. “Some of that money came out of my hide, Wanda,” Red said. “He’s going to pay for that.”
In preparation for the charity dinner-dance, Red retrieved his old Ruger deer-hunting rifle from the Tuck-Away Storage bin west of town. The weapon had been willed to him by his father. Red and his dad, Walter, had spent many autumns in fruitless quest of deer. Walter Marchik was a terrible marksman. Red was worse.
Fortunately for him, the only shots he had been required to produce in the U. S. Navy were as a medical assistant.
With the old rifle, now cleaned and oiled, in hand, Red spent several mornings on a public shooting range near Nicholasville, blazing away at a relatively nearby stationary target. For the most part the targets, like the deer of his past, remained unscathed. Gus Potros, proprietor of the shooting range, warned his assistant to keep an eye on “that red-headed fella out there. He’s liable to drop his rifle and then hit something for the first time,” Potros said, adding, “If there’s a worse marksman in Kentucky than that man, he’s walking the streets behind a seeing-eye dog.”
One evening Red brought home a rental from the video store that he insisted Wanda watch with him. It was the movie The Day of the Jackal.
“The real one,” Red emphasized, “not the puny remake with the Die Hard guy.”
The next weekend, he and Wanda signed up for an open-to-the-public tour of Willowdale Farm. Red described this as an opportunity to “examine the layout.” He took “mental notes about the terrain,” he whispered to his wife, who had twice been asked by the tour leader not to deposit her cigarette butts in the water trough near the broodmare barn.
On the eve of the Rexroth charity gala, Red declared himself completely satisfied with their preparations. “The Tubby Tycoon is a dead man walking,” he announced as he and Wanda shared a homemade burgoo pizza in their recreation room. Wanda just nodded. Long, long ago she had concluded that Red didn’t need a whole lot of encouragement in order to carry out his various loony schemes. The natural buoyancy of the classically bile-ridden malcontent was enough to carry him along. And the best part, as far as Wanda was concerned, was that she could usually count on Red to somehow screw up and emerge, if unfulfilled, at least unscathed.
Red parked their car well clear of the wide circle of light that marked the Willowdale entrance to the charity bash. Red had borrowed camouflage uniforms for both of them from his neighbor and fellow NRA member Oscar Belliard, now in his twenty-seventh year of unsuccessful attempts to recruit a powerful local militia aimed at the overthrow of the Kentucky Senate, which he considered a “cancer on the liver of the Commonwealth.” Belliard had managed to round up far more uniforms than bodies to fill them.
“These are brand-new uniforms,” Red proudly told Wanda as he tenderly applied face-black to her broad forehead.
With Red in the lead, deer rifle in hand, they skulked through the first field of the farm, then a second, and reached a knoll overlooking the Willowdale swimming pool, which tonight was flanked by two large tents, one with a band and dance floor, one with a lengthy buffet line.
“Hand me the binoculars, honey.” After Wanda had done so, Red-prostrate on the ground, peering intently just as the Jackal would have-suddenly yelped with excitement. “There’s Rexroth,” he whispered. Red took the safety off the rifle.
As he did so, Wanda began to hear noises in the night, noises that grew increasingly louder somewhere behind them. It was a rumbling, muffled sound, at the same time both new to her and somehow strangely familiar. Suddenly, Wanda thought of movie Westerns she had seen, where the scout holds an ear to the ground before announcing, “I hear horses.”
“I hear horses, Red,” Wanda said. They both turned. Approaching was a large group of Willowdale broodmares, a collection of convivial equines spurred on by curiosity to inspect these intruders in their pasture.
The Marchiks did not know, of course, that they had nothing to fear from these mares. The Marchiks’ joint knowledge of horse behavior was extremely minimal. But their unease was at the maximum, for in the dark of the night the approaching horses looked as big as boxcars, especially to Red. He leapt to his feet and frantically led their retreat, beating Wanda over the fence and to the car by thirty widening feet. Red threw the rifle into the backseat, the car into gear, and away they sped, Wanda fumbling to pull her door shut.
As he drove home Red fulminated about the “goddam bad luck” that had served to bring “those goddam beasts right up on us.” Wanda noticed how her husband’s hands trembled on the steering wheel. Rexroth, she realized, to both her relief and satisfaction, was safe from any Red Marchik rifle shot, tonight or any other night.
Then Wanda heard heard her husband announce, “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat as fat as that. Rexroth’ll pay, oh yes, he’ll pay. Shooting may not be the answer.”
Red took a sharp exit off the Circle Beltway. He continued talking, but Wanda wasn’t really listening. She was concentrating on two questions: which frozen casserole she would take from the freezer once they reached home, and whether the comforting toast they would share would be libations of Pabst Blue Ribbon or of the pear brandy she kept under the kitchen sink for special occasions.
She had another question, too, one that made her smile as she rode: how long would it take her designated driver and fledgling assassin to cool off from this night’s intense excitement and fall asleep in her loving arms.