The Second Occupation
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“Now maybe you shouldn’t have to defend what you already own, and maybe we shouldn’t be trying to take it away from you. I’m not here to argue morality, or even common decency. We left all that behind the minute we stepped onto your property, just as Congress did when it passed this law. The thing is, Sir and Ma’am, you’re looking through your binoculars at desperate people. We may not fit your image of desperation, but take my word for it: we’re at the end of our rope.
“Our story is so common it’s hardly worth telling: I was a middle manager for a sporting goods company, and had been with them for sixteen years. We lived in a nice house in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not as nice as yours, but all we needed. Good salary, decent benefits, until the day I was laid off in favor of someone half my age and with half my salary needs, who’d work for no benefits.
“Like I said, boilerplate stuff. I won’t bore you with how long I looked for another job, how many résumés I sent out that never came back. There was unemployment compensation, until that ran out, then all of our savings. We lost the house to foreclosure. Rock bottom was finding out I was too old even for a burger-flipping job. I hated applying for an Occupation license, but then I thought of my wife, my kids, what they’ve been through in the last five years because I couldn’t provide. In that light, the choice wasn’t a hard one to make.
“You’d do the same, I think. By the way, I prefer conversations to monologues, and would be happy to give you my cell phone number, but all I have at the moment is a bag full of burner phones, each one with a certain number of pre-purchased minutes, so there’s not much point in it. But please feel free to pick up any time and talk to me. I’d like to get to know you, as odd as that may sound. Anyway, goodbye for now.”
Jens turned off his phone, and for a long time they stood there in silence. Alva sat down and picked up her novel, but didn’t open it. Tracing the title with her fingernail, she looked up and asked, “Do you believe any of that?”
Jens shook his head, not in a definitive “no” so much as taking a pass on replying, and sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter. “I suppose I could look up ‘Carl Walden Flynn’ on the Internet. Everyone leaves a vapor trail these days.”
“Does it matter whether he’s a creep or not? This thing we’re in, it’s real. I don’t think I really believed that until he started talking.”
“You’re right,” he replied. “You’re always right. It doesn’t matter. But I’m still going to Google him.”
“Are you keeping your phone turned off?” Alva asked.
He spanned his temples with his thumb and index finger. “Haven’t decided yet. He’s an amusing monster, don’t you think?”
“Hilarious. My phone’s staying off for the next three days.”
He laughed. “You know, it very briefly crossed my mind that he might be open to a reasonable offer of a, uh, contribution — ‘investment’ sounds better — in the future welfare of the Flynn family. But then I thought, hell no, what would make me even consider paying a nickel to get these assholes off our property?”
“What, indeed? You do see what he’s doing, right?”
“Of course. Intimidation by pity. The kids, the woman: for all we know, they’re just props, hired for the occasion. I see the way this thing’s going now. No crude stuff, no banging on the windows, square dancing on the roof or parading around naked. They might not even bother trying the doors and windows. Why risk breaking your neck, when the chances of homeowner carelessness are practically nil? No, this is a con artist, who knows that his only way in here is through his voice. He has to establish a relationship with us, then probe for weaknesses. Of course he wants a dialogue. Why else would he bring a bagful of burner phones? Arrogant son of a bitch thinks he can talk us out of our house.”
“So if we keep our phones off, we can’t lose, right? This little ‘family’ has no chance?”
“Only if we give them one. When he realizes he can’t reach us by phone, he’ll probably send the troops up here, keep them talking, crying, pleading at the doors and windows, which, if you get close enough to listen, could be risky. Don’t give them any access to you, not even eye contact. Go to another room. Then they’ve got nothing. This’ll be over before we know it.”
“Then why am I so scared?”
“You’re not the only one. It’s unsettling as hell. Okay, my phone’s off. How about yours?”
“Since just after breakfast. What did Joel have to say?”
“Most of it I already knew: film everything, stay inside, don’t engage with the occupiers at all. One thing I didn’t know: apparently, there are occupation scam artists out there. They’re like the Travelers, entire families of grifters. They go around the country with a trunkful of fake IDs, staging occupations in every state, then move on. If they get inside, they offer the displaced owners a chance to buy their house back. By the time the homeowners realize they’ve been had and report it, the Occupros — that’s what the cops call them — are long gone.”
“So even if everything Flynn said is true, we have to assume he’s a criminal.”
“With this law, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Saints or sinners, they want our home. And we aren’t giving it away. End of story.”
“Okay, then. Shall we have lunch? I’ll prepare a stew out of what’s left of our good intentions.”
He shot her a concerned look, then smiled and said, “Sounds delicious.” He opened a drawer and tossed in his phone. “Guess I’ll go down to the weight room, try to work up an appetite. Call me when lunch is ready.”
She’d finished making a chicken salad and was slicing up cucumbers and tomatoes when the land line rang. She flinched, then went on working, but just before the prerecorded message in her voice had finished, she hurried to the phone and unplugged the jack. Better to be in complete radio silence for the next three days, she told herself, than risk even the possibility that it might be him.
Alva wasn’t sure why, beyond agreeing with Jens’s sound advice to close every door of possibility to Carl Walden Flynn, she was so afraid of hearing his voice. Was it something in the way he spoke, not just his smooth tonal shifts from self-pity to soft-spoken threat, but the odd feeling she’d had while listening to his phone call that he was speaking directly to her, as if he had schooled himself in her history of giving, or failing to give, to all the right charities?
Or was it the moral chaos implicit in the rules of Occupation that she found so upsetting, that whether this was a real family badly used by corporate Darwinism, or a band of hardened criminals greedily eyeing her home, had somehow become irrelevant? Maybe, she thought, as she rubbed her sweaty palms on her pants, she was most afraid of her own selfishness.
Alva and Jens had spent their entire careers working at government jobs they hadn’t loved, decades of saving, investing, and settling for less in order to finally gain the immeasurable more of this quietly lovely house in the piedmont, their patient ants to others’ debt-ridden grasshoppers, only to face this assault on their reward for a lifetime’s adherence to the rules.
Carl Flynn had said, in his own defense at having applied for an Occupation license, that were their situations reversed, she and Jens would have done the same thing. Her reply to him, were she so foolish as to respond directly to his goad, might be: Would you, in our place, have acted any differently? Of course not. Like them, he would burrow more deeply into his den, live on nuts garnered up for the lean season, and wait until the famished coyotes grew discouraged and moved on. How modern we’ve become, she thought, as she finished making the sandwiches. Because of this law and others surely to follow, kindness and decency have become casualties of the new virtue, which is no longer an unbending allegiance to what’s right, only to one’s desire to have, or to keep, property.
When they sat down to eat, Jens said, “I couldn’t find a single entry for a Carl Walden Flynn of Kenosha, Wisconsin. What does that do for you?”
Ignoring the question, she said, “I thought you were lifting weights.”
“Got side-tracked.”
“Did you hear the land line ring?”
He nodded. “You were right to disconnect it. We can always turn on our phones if we need to make a call.”
Her gaze kept returning to the window. “I wonder what they’ll do next.”
“Get up close and personal. That’s what I’d do. The deck is their best bet for a full court press, since we built it for 360 access, from here, the bedrooms, the living room, the downstairs den. He can station each family member at a window, keep them staring at us day and night, like starving zombies. Like I said, his hand is pretty weak. We can always draw the curtains on all the windows with deck access, and may have to, much as I’d rather not. What do you think?”
“I guess we can suffer with artificial light for three days. And they’ll be out of sight and mind. Theoretically.”
“Good sandwich. Thanks for making it.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you for being such an enthusiastic disciple of Sun Tzu. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re enjoying this.”
“Can’t say I’m loving your tone, but I understand where it’s coming from.”
“Oh? Please enlighten me.”
“Runs in your family.”
“What does?”
“Fathomless liberal guilt.”
She laughed. “You just can’t get past my Quaker upbringing, can you? Christ, you’d think I came from a family of snake handlers. Well, stop worrying about any lurking charity toward Team Flynn. If I were even a good lapsed Quaker, I’d be living in a hovel and working in a soup kitchen, not in a designer house on ten choice acres atop Sentry Hill.”
He put down his sandwich. “Why are we fighting?”
“Why not? It’ll help pass the time in the bunker.”
“I’m not the enemy, Alva. The enemy isn’t even those people out there; it’s the feudal system that created the conditions under which this idiotic law passed both houses of Congress. Remember why we moved out here? To escape the rising din, resign, retire, subtract ourselves from the whole fucking mess. Well, the fucking mess just found us. But in three days, if we stick together, it’ll all be over. There can’t be a second Occupation. That’s the law.”
She had stood up to clear the dishes, when her startled yelp brought Jens to his feet. The woman, ‘Mrs. Flynn,’ partner in crime, whatever she was, who might have stepped out of the frame of “The Grapes of Wrath,” was standing on the deck, her boot-clad feet planted in a wide stance as she stared expressionlessly at them. This close, they could see the griminess of her dress, her skin, her hair, the kind of layered dirt that would blacken tub water. Without taking her eyes off them, she tried the sliding door, giving it a couple good tugs, then turned and tramped loudly up the deck stairs to the bedroom level. At the same time they heard doorknobs and windows being tried, then scrabbling noises as someone climbed onto the roof from the one accessible point, the railing of the top tier of the deck.
They looked at each other for a moment, then resumed clearing the dishes. Jens cleaned up the kitchen while Alva took her book and went down to the TV room, which didn’t have deck access. After a few minutes the riffling sounds stopped, and then the whole bunch appeared outside the kitchen, milling about, enjoying the view, sitting in the deck chairs, much like a family looking over a home they were interested in buying.
Jens was swabbing the counters, glancing occasionally at the group on his deck, but mostly keeping his eyes on his work. Carl Walden Flynn, as ripe with road dirt as the rest of the family, appeared briefly at the window, peering inward, and when he caught Jens’s eye, gave a broad shrug and mouthed the words, “You can’t blame me for trying,” then joined his family, plopping himself down in one of the Adirondack chairs.
Jens forced himself to go to his office, where he worked, or tried to, for the next two hours on an essay he’d been struggling to write on his seasonal observations of the den of red foxes living on their property. But he couldn’t concentrate and gave it up. He was at once resentful, curious, enraged and alarmed by the proximity of these strangers enjoying his deck without an invitation. His territoriality had never been so blatantly challenged before, and he found himself having to resist the strong impulse to open the sliding door and order them off his property.
Which was no doubt exactly what Carl Flynn was hoping he’d do. He understood now that losing one’s house to Occupiers was possible only if one were either careless or unduly emotional. Jens knew their house was locked up tight, and he was reasonably sure that he could control his anger. What worried him at the moment was Alva, who seemed more conflicted. He heard singing from the deck and laughed nervously. Oh dear God, he thought, are they really having a family sing-a-long of “Bringing in the Sheaves?” He thought he’d better go check on Alva.
As it got warmer, the Occupiers moved around the deck with the shade. In late afternoon, they went back to the tent for what apparently was a group siesta. At around six, while Mrs. Flynn prepared dinner, Mr. Flynn and the children brought out gloves and a softball and had a game of catch. As a pantomime of a family on a weekend outing, it was convincing, and it began to seem possible, even likely, to Jens, that this was an actual family, with the usual miseries, conflicts and unseen traumas, portraying with practiced finesse the kind of 1950s sitcom family that no one had believed in for decades: “The Flynn Family.”
But why? Jens asked himself. Does he think we’re that gullible or, worse, so stricken with remorse over our modest success that we would actually donate our home to his paltry fiction of a Dust Bowl family? The odds of success were so vanishingly small, it seemed a waste of time better spent looking for jobs, government assistance, whatever.
Carl Walden Flynn, examined in this light, might be his own worst enemy, lacking the temperament to hold a job long enough to save anything, or the patience to learn a trade, that familiar type of base-metal dreamer who plays the lottery, invests in long-shot real estate deals and can’t-miss stocks, dragging his hapless family along from one debacle to the next. This was probably the latest in a long series of failed moonshots. Could Flynn be so naïve, Jens wondered, as to think the owners of the property he’d chosen to occupy were rich enough to indulge themselves in an impulsive act of charity, then just walk away and buy another house in an even better location? If that were so, he had badly miscalculated, and was destined to continue his losing streak. One might even begin to feel sorry for him.
It may have been coincidence, or perhaps was motivated by some vaguely guilty gesture of solidarity with the family camped out in the yard, eating their canned dinner by the light of a Coleman lantern, but that night Alva served a pot of vegetable barley soup with a sliced baguette thawed from the freezer. She also turned the dining room light off and lit candles for the table. Beyond praising the food and her choice of wine, Jens didn’t talk much, finding her silence inhibiting. Usually he put on soft music during dinner, but she’d requested quiet tonight, and throughout the meal had seemed to be watching and listening for something other than the wall of insect noise pervasive even with the windows closed. The house was quite spacious for two people, almost four thousand square feet, but it was hard to deny a slowly increasing sense of confinement.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
