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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

 

Davin has long joked about the invitation to others—friends, family, even sometimes, nearly complete strangers, depending on his mood or stage of mania—to move into the rather-too-large house on the hill he and Gwen had bought in the Berkshires, in Housatonic.

Davin stands before the 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden in the back of his property, seeing the first sprouting of weeds in this spring light. He knows he’ll somehow have to keep up or risk having the garden overrun. So far Chaplin has been pitching in with the garden work, liking the rent-reduction-for- labor offer Davin made to him.

Well, the joke has become the master, Davin tells himself with a mix of feelings he decides not to look at too closely.

But the feelings are there, insistent.

I’m feeling pretty fucking bummed, Davin admits, and then he pushes this away.

The joke he had been thinking about was almost always unvaried, as unvaried as it was frequent back when Gwen was still around. “We’re accepting applications for serfs…ur, associates,” Davin would intone, pretty much always to the same nonreaction. He had been willing to entertain the notion that performing the same bit too often might seem an oddity to many but he didn’t see much point in trying to change something so inconsequential. This joke, and too many others, was more symptom than cause of the growing discomfort between him and Gwen, their conversations increasingly scripted, removed, desperate.

With his time spent in his studio, money was tight and he had suggested they take in people, for rent, sharing the big house with them.

Whether a straightforward proposal or a repeating joke, Gwen was not amused. It hadn’t helped that the pandemic hit and a big chunk of that year and more kept the two of them in the same house.

Just another Covid divorcee, he thinks, a punchline he doesn’t find funny at all.

Just like Trump getting reelected wasn’t funny, not after that one Biden term and the progress made then, and then all the shit of Trump’s chaos.

Trump Redux, that’s his shorthand for the ongoing clusterfuck.

At the start of Biden’s term, the world had already seemed upside down, what with Gwen and he were doing. They were considerate of each other with the exceptions of occasional blowups until, of course, there were no more conversations at all, Gwen going off to claim a new life as soon as the pandemic was declared dead, or dead enough, a declaration that took surprisingly longer than expected. After that, the only discussions and communication between them were practical matters of the proceedings and property. Davin still thinks he’s never heard her reasons for the divorce, not any real ones.

Like depression, he tells himself. He has long struggled with depression, although he’s done well in the fight according to his several therapists over the years. He’s certainly never far from thinking about it or feeling some tendril or twist of it snaking through his mind. For the most part he knows he does okay and he sees this reflected in his general effectiveness in the world and in his ability to usually avoid the most crushing aspects of depression. He long ago came to accept that the antidepressants would take care of the darkest turns, staying the too-far-down drop to where self-annihilation seemed a reasonable option.

Better life through chemistry, he tells himself as he looks around the property. He suspects he’s managed to remain good at his work over the years largely because the edges of the depression were blunted by the pills, and the rest, well, because he’s a stubborn son of a bitch.

It certainly is a beautiful day today, although yet another oddly warm one for the late-May date. Still, what passes for normal weather has been shifting rather wildly over the last decade or so as the consequences of climate change have begun to hit closer to home.

His son, Jimmy, lives in Chicago and the upper Midwest is socked in some super-inversion system and it’s actually hot there, August hot, worse than August hot. Hotter than hot and something to do with the extended La Niña, he’s read, although he is always getting La Niña and El Niño mixed up.

Climate change, Davin muses, and yet there are still deniers.

And this thought gets him thinking about something he’s been trying to better understand, something Davin has come to call “magical thinking,” an exercised belief in actions that are not, on further consideration and rational analysis, warranted. He has come to understand the error of magical thinking in his and Gwen’s move out of the city and his expenditure of considerable time and too much currency to turn the old Greek Revival duplex into a reasonably weather-tight and energy- efficient country retreat. A country retreat that wasn’t really a retreat, of course, but their primary residence with no secondary abode anywhere in view.

And this thought gets Davin back to his serf gibe, which he thinks is a funny joke, if a bit hyper-ironic. He knows this joke—like many of his other favorites—resides on the “whiteboard” side of the humor ledger where, in this instance, the only way the joke could be seen as humorous by anyone is to follow the line of thinking. His serf joke depends on an understanding that the current state of western culture is one of income inequality, the drop of the middle class, and with political polarization pointing the way to feudalism, and thus the rejection of the Myth of Progress once so dear to him.

Now that’s funny, right? he tells himself.

On some sort of molecular level Davin still believes in the Myth of Progress despite the resurgent power of moneyed interests with big corporations growing bigger. He remains hard-pressed to reframe the world to account for banks and other financial institutions taking on an ever enlarging part of the economy even while producing little more than paper and digital money mostly for themselves along with a bewildering number of bubbles and collapse cycles for everyone else. He knows that the Myth of Progress is shared by so many others born after the World War and well before Reagan, the Antichrist, when the American Dream’s overthrow seemed inexorable, and it proves harder and harder day by day to maintain the Myth of Progress.

Neo-liberalism at its finest, he thinks. He had been increasingly finding himself thinking this even when he still lived in Cambridge.

Costs go up, wages go down. Options disappear.

There have been some positive steps in his personal economics lately, he considers, but still, the concept of serf seems evermore relevant. There is the danger in the ever-growing income inequality where the rich keep staving off taxes, despite the obvious and crushing needs of the country and the world. He sees the extreme rich playing with politics and paying for politics. He sees the ongoing fall in real wages despite the occasional efforts to address minimum wages. He knows inflation and cost increases means that such would-be corrective measures will play the fool.

Davin is relieved his kids seem to be doing all right. His daughter is in Spain working on a PhD, and his son is only recently out of college but has found a paying gig in his field, or had, until the recession, or whatever the economics professors de jour call things these days, but whatever describes the economy, his son has recently told him he’d been laid off.

He doesn’t appreciate the lastest election, one that turned out about as opposite from his hope for an uptick in progressive voting trends. With the White House and Congress back in Trump’s hands, the extreme rich remain largely untouched and in control. And the bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court makes it all worse.

Plus ça fucking change.

Davin is well aware he and Gwen, with their two-income work in high tech and medicine in the city, had brushed up against the ten percenters, at least in several of their best years of work, even though such unseem income exuberance had been all too easily offset by the cost of living with which they struggled, including all they could do with college costs, socking away whatever possible in 529 plans. Jimmy couldn’t escape some student loans even with all their planning.

He steps toward the garden fence to check on the three blueberry bushes inside, near the front gate. The signs of budding are there, he’s relieved to see.

He turns back toward the house, knowing he needs to get to work on a report for his client at South County Interactive, but he lets himself dawdle, again looking around his backyard, enjoying the light and warmth of the morning.

He closes his eyes, letting the sun cresting over the rise of Monument Mountain warm his face, but his hoped-for moment of stillness washes away in his torrent of thoughts. These days, he’s fixated on costs and how anxious he too often feels about his own economic situation.

It had been in part the rising cost of living he had tried to remove himself not so long ago along with Gwen and their youngest, Jimmy, who had been halfway through high school at the time. They had moved to Housatonic from their small Cambridge Greek Revival where they’d raised their two kids. A Greek Revivallette as Davin had long joked about this former worker’s cottage he’d fully renovated. One or another Mideast oil conflict flare-ups and fuel cost spikes in the last two years they’d lived there had become a problem, even when he and Gwen had kept the average thermostat setting low. Energy price jumps were nothing new, but the credit line balance built up, and cost-cutting was a top priority.

Just like today, Davin thinks.

And mulling this over has him thinking about how the current political whores have long been hard at work killing the sort of public budgets Davin and Gwen and most other middle- class liberal Cantabridgians had always reflexively supported— education, infrastructure, basic research, clean energy, and the other long-term investments that seemed so obviously merited, and ever increasingly so.

And what do I do about it? I cash out of Cambridge and move to the Berkshires to be an artist.

Magical thinking.

He and Gwen had found out the hard way that living in the country wasn’t really any cheaper, especially with the profits from the hot-market Cambridge house sale getting eaten by the country house rehab project, which turned out to be more expensive than he’d assumed it would be and made worse by their buying a house sized to overcompensate for their first tiny place. And then too, for Gwen especially, there were the much lower salaries the hill country offered compared to what city jobs had paid. It hadn’t helped, he knows, that he’d spent too much time on the homestead effort and then in the studio with only modest breaks for the income-generating work from which he had been trying to move away.

Literally, he reminds himself. Changing his work was the other main reason for his wanting out of the city. He had worked in book publishing and then electronic publishing from its early days. He had been an editor and later an analyst and consultant to digital publishing vendors and their publishing customers.

Davin wants to think of himself as an artist these days, a sculptor. He’s got three unfinished pieces in the studio, but the studio is still cluttered by the tools and materials he uses for working on the house and yard and garden. He cannot help but think of O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, and the money spent building his studio into the side of his sloping property, and how that had guaranteed his continuing to work as a content management consultant more than working in his studio, bills needing paying.

The divorce, now well over a year done, had made for one hell of a financial hit too, with the shift to two one-income households away from one two-incomes household. And Covid was still being felt economically, almost six years from its start.

Davin finds himself thinking about income and costs all the time, and he still tries to make sense of Gwen’s decision that she simply didn’t want to remain married to him. There had been no affairs, he wasn’t a drunk or drug abuser, nor wife-beater, nor gambler, or the perpetrator of mental cruelty.

Well, as best I can figure, he tells himself.

It had seemed, from all angles, that Gwen was somehow, for some reason, just done. Period. Full stop. That’s all she wrote, he thinks for the millionth time, right along with his suspicion that perhaps his own struggles simply exhausted her.

At sixty-four he is a good-enough-looking man, although he’s always happy to find fault, and as he gets older he’s well aware there are more faults to be found. Faults such as carrying around an extra fifteen to twenty pounds, which he thinks really doesn’t look so bad, although clearly there’s more than enough fat building up in belly and kidney pads.

Bend and stretch, reach for the stars, he half sings to himself, looking again at the neat rows of dark earth, trying to make out which tiny sprouts are good and which are weeds. He knows he’ll be doing a lot of bending down with close work. Bend down and reach for the Tums, he adds, remembering all too well his recent seed planting and the acid reflux his extra weight causes in that stooped-over posture.

Fuck me, he tells himself, brushing hair back over his forehead, the thinning wisps wind mussed and annoying. His hair is receding, especially along the front and top, a common enough pattern among men his age. The hair at the top of his head has grown thin, but there’s still more than enough up front to continue to comb his hair back, although he now has to instruct his barber to reduce the volume of hair that still grows thick on the sides and back to offset what he thinks of as the Larry-look, the Larry of The Three Stooges with hair sprouting from the sides, not unlike, too, the style of Bozo the Clown.

Vanity, vanity, sayeth the preacher.

He shakes those thoughts away and turns back toward the house.

He knows his joke about accepting serf applications is at heart a reflection of his ever-growing anxiety about the ongoing rise in costs, apparently without limits, including for food, especially the sort of food—organic, fresh, whole—Gwen had long ago deemed the only acceptable type. He keeps finding higher and higher food costs, even now with Gwen no longer here. Food is just expensive. The ongoing droughts in the West don’t help, nor do the high transport costs to get the food products to market.

He hasn’t seen his daughter for almost four years, although her being in Spain might be a good excuse, airline tickets being high. His daughter is an ocean away and Jimmy in his post-college life in the City of Broad Shoulders, only comes home for Christmas, if that.

Energy prices are always in flux, but always, it seems, ending up ever higher after any momentary price dip. He has to pay a lot for the oil heating his big house through cold winter days and nights, and while the much- tightened house needs fewer gallons per year, the reduction in volume hasn’t offset the ever-higher prices. And then there are automobile fuel, insurance, and maintenance costs, and while he drives as little as possible, it’s impossible not to drive in the country. Electric cars are becoming ubiquitous, but replacing his old Kia is currently a cost beyond consideration. And even then, electricity bills have jumped rather vigorously, despite his and Gwen’s religious use of CFL and LED bulbs and their increasingly regular energy efficient behavior. Behavior, to his surprise, that had included Gwen’s decision to turn off the hot tub they’d inherited when they bought the house.

Of course, you were on your way out, right? he once again wonders.

Don’t be bitter, be better, he chides himself with an out loud snort that has him looking around to see if there are any witnesses.

He steps toward the apple and peach trees near the garden and looks closely. He lost the whole peach crop last year to a ground fungus that was a new arrival from the South. He’ll have to get the antifungal supplies soon and spray the solution around the root area beneath the peach tree or face another lost crop.

The micro orchard is another task and another expense, and throw in high property taxes, surprisingly expensive telecommunication costs for cell phones and the Internet, and, of course, the many thousands of dollars paid for the health insurance policy he’d taken after the divorce decree was official, and the driving dream of reducing costs by moving to the country has been proven a fool’s illusion. Not that it would have been cheaper to stay in town, he knows, but in Housatonic, his costs keep going up even while his income drops.

He’s considered doing more of his professional work, although he’s old enough to be suspect to the young CTOs and CEOs and COOs and directors and managers, most of whom now seem uncomfortable with older colleagues. But he suspects it isn’t ageism that’s the main problem, even though that’s not to be dismissed. His main problem is his lack of motivation to beat the bushes for the kind of work upon which he’d built his career, now seemingly so long ago. His antipathy to the work could well be palpable to others.

The South County Interactive contract might prove the exception, but little money has yet been produced from those efforts. He likes working with Alicia Soares, the owner and publisher of the recently established local online newspaper, and while he isn’t getting big billings, he’s finding the work more satisfying. A step or two closer to offering actual societal value is his theory.

Still, the middle-class status he had so easily dismissed as bourgeois in his younger days is slipping, and badly, and not without concern and discomfort on his part.

And this is despite the Airbnb apartment they—now he— rents out, a small two-bedroom that takes up the north half of the first floor, its front entrance mirroring the one for the rest of the house at the other end of the sunny, many-windowed front porch. The short-term rental income adds up and is a big help. He had bought out Gwen’s interest in the house during the process of the divorce. He is still leaking debt.

And the apartment is currently offline because of an actual leak, some water damage from a very heavy rainstorm the past November that managed, with the house built into the slope, to have water seep into the apartment’s below-grade back wall. He still has the to-do item of hiring out a carpenter to replace part of the lower wall in the smaller bedroom, but he hasn’t yet sorted that out and is still considering doing the repair work himself. He is afraid that putting in a claim will raise his house insurance even higher.

I really do want some serfs to help out, Davin thinks, looking back at the 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden where good sun exposure and good compost made for good yields, assuming Mother Nature behaves.

He looks to the edge of the back property where lawn gives way to woods past a low stone wall, and farther on, hidden by branches just starting to leaf, are powerlines, and then beyond that the western slope of the small mountain named Monument. And then, standing there, back to looking over the just-planted rows of kale and the rows prepped for tomatoes, corn, and other crops, through his mind comes unbidden and almost unnoticed a nearly automatic mantra: Will work for food.