Tuesday, December 7 (cont'd)

At Christmas, Owen, Jean, and Ella Blue came down, to visit. They rented a condominium in Blue Mountain Beach with another couple and their kids for a week.

The other couple decided they needed more privacy. Owen and Jean had too many relatives, and friends. So they moved out, sticking Owen and Jean with the full week's condo rent.

They spent time with Brew and Brenda in Parker, and let Brew and Brenda keep the baby overnight, and bring her to them in the morning.

Brew worked, but Brenda did things with them, and Brew had a long weekend at Christmas, when they all cooked and ate meals and cleaned up in the kitchen together.

I get this visit confused with another one, in the Spring, when I went to work for Suzette, writing a grant, as a temp-to-perm, after I left Actaeon, and slept over at their condo one night. Gerald and Del were staying there, too. Owen caught some mahi mahi out of a canoe, out beyond the green reef.

He could see sharks underneath him.

Brew ran into Don Parsons at the mall. He said hello to him.

Parsons said, "I hope you're treating my little girl all right."

Brew said, "Why wouldn't I be--I work for her."

Parsons said, "Because you're bent. And once a thief, always a thief."

"It takes one to know one," Brew said.

Parsons said, "What does that mean?"

"It means," Brew said, "the site manager who sacked you for falsifying documents told me if he was still in charge out there, he wouldn't have hired your daughter just in case the fruit doesn't fall too far from the tree."

"That was his interpretation," Parsons said. That was selective enforcement. It goes on all the time. Those goddamned West Pointers. I hate a West Pointer."

"He doesn't think much of you, either, Parsons," Brew said. "And nor do I."

Parsons turned on his heel and stalked off.

It was the new calendar year.

Money is appropriated at the new fiscal year. October 1.

But sometimes, at the beginning of a new quarter--not usually the second quarter--money that was supposed to be forthcoming does not come forth.

Money Actaeon was depending on getting dried up.

Money that had been promised to them disappeared.

Maybe it went to Halliburton, or Enron, instead. The War in Iraq wasn't going well, and neither was the War on Energy.

Like the money for senior citizens going to the pharmaceutical companies.

Plus, every time Bush pushed a new program through, he didn't have enough money to pay for it, so he would take it from the programs he had pushed through last year. Let them find the extra money where they could. From faith-based-coalition partners, say. From volunteers. Get people to volunteer their labor.

Rob Peter to pay Paul.

Squirt out ink, like a cuttlefish. Stir up the silt, the ashes. Use smoke and mirrors.

If you can't dazzle them with footwork, baffle them with bullshit.

This could have been one reason Brew was let go.

There wasn't any money in the pot. There were fewer pots to shuffle the money around in. Pots of money disappeared in clouds of empty promises and bad faith.

Traci had hired him permanent, not for one five-month project. Maybe he had to be made the scapegoat, to save face for Traci.

People were paranoid about money being tight.

A shop foreman was let go.

One day he was there, the next day he wasn't. His name tag had been stripped from his office door.

The colonel was upset. He and the shop foreman had served together in the 8th Army in Korea. Some army.

They put two people in the shop foreman's office.

They put another person in Del's office--Del had been reassigned to a hot new project, a Mobile Command and Control Center (MC3), for military commanders to use for communications in case of terrorist attack, and his new office-mate would work with him on that.

They moved Brew into Lucy Diamond's office. He and she were both working on the rewind machine.

When Brew changed offices, they took his computer and scanner away and gave it to someone else. They gave Brew a new, stripped-down computer. About the height of a toaster.

His computer had a hard drive, and a CD-ROM drive, but it didn't have a floppy disk drive, so he couldn't carry HCDs back and forth to work from home.

This made Brew paranoid.

Did they suspect him of doing personal work on company time?

Was this whole game of musical chairs designed to prevent him from being able to carry an HCD back and forth to work?

There was a USB port on the front of the computer, to plug his digital camera into.

Brew had a USB port on his computer at home, for his digital camera. He would just by God buy a USB flash-drive storage device. 128MB. A Lexar JumpDrive. He could put photographs on that. That would work. It would work better than a 1.44M floppy disk.

But Brew was suspicious, now.

He suspected they suspected him. Someone.

The IT guy? Who was also the Security guy? Whose job it was to be suspicious?

So there were two reasons to let Brew go, right there.

One, the money to keep paying him ran out.

And two, someone resented Brew's extracurricular activities. It rankled someone that Brew was using company equipment, and company time, to do his own work.

A third reason was Brew fucked up. He hadn't done this yet. They were giving him enough rope to hang himself.

What would he do then? Say, "Mistakes were made." Instead of, "I fucked up."

If Brew did fuck up he would blame himself. He would fall on his sword, like a good soldier. He would take responsibility for something that might not have been entirely his fault.

It's true, Traci bore some responsibility, for not keeping a closer watch.

If Brew had had to report his activities, weekly, or show examples of the progress he was making, she'd have seen he was not on track in time for him to mend his ways, correct himself, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Indeed, he did that. After it was too late.

But it wasn't only Brew's fault he fiddled while Rome burned.

He was poorly managed.

That made it doubly necessary to blame the fiasco entirely on Brew.

Lucy Diamond had been there and back.

She was jaded. She was self-protective.

Her favorite expression was, "Whiskey tango foxtrot, Chief?"

What the fuck?

She was an old Hubert Humphrey Minnesota liberal.

She despised the politics of most of her co-workers, but had been outnumbered so long she could get along with them, because there was no choice. You had to.

She took things with a grain of salt.

She tilted at windmills.

She was moody. Sometimes she brooded.

You never knew which Lucy you would get.

She liked Brew a lot.

She knew what his JumpDrive was.

Brew liked Lucy. He could make jokes Del didn't get.

Edward Sapir wrote an essay once called "Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls in the Business of Getting a Living."

The thrust of it was that working for a living drives you crazy. Or turns you into a sneak, a bricoleur, or marginal man, cutting corners and looking over his shoulder.

Brew was a bricoleur.