Blind switch

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.