Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology Read online

  Gary swore at her using colorful words, new to her. At last he said, “Who are you talking about?”

  Ashley hesitated. If she told him, he might figure out who she was. If she didn’t, he might not confess. And then she realized, he probably didn’t even know. He had destroyed her father, and he didn’t even know.

  “One sad old man blows his own head off, shamed beyond redemption because he lost it all on your ‘level playing field’ and you don’t even know who he was.” She cut the mike, and cried until she could control her voice again. “You bargained with a man to buy his company, but you never meant to purchase it. He put himself into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to make the changes you said you’d need in order to buy his little innovation, but the entire time, you were just trying to get another company to lower their price. Admit it, Gary, you never meant to buy Variable Densities.”

  “The VD guys knew the risks in a negotiation like that. It’s not like I reneged on a contract. I’m guessing you’re this guy’s son or something. Well, I still say, grow a pair and build your own company.”

  “How can I, Gary?” Ashley said, savoring the knowledge that he didn’t even know her gender. “It’s not a level playing field. You rig the elections, you rig the tax code, and you rig every deal in your favor. No matter who it kills. Kills.”

  Instead of answering, Gary made a break for the garage. He barreled through the door before Ashley could arm the shock mechanism. He grabbed his laptop out of the Land Rover before she could lock the doors.

  Panicked, she couldn’t remember his laptop network name. She searched frantically, desperate to shut him down. He stood at a shiny new workbench in the garage and typed away. She couldn’t think what he was doing, had no idea how to stop him. She hadn’t expected that he’d know the nuts and bolts of his own company.

  An automated alarm fired a warning message to her. Someone was trying to find her spoofed identity on the network. Gary had gotten close to her in less than sixty seconds. As she worked frantically to log out, retreat, and cover her hacks, his automated detectives rushed through the Internet after her, relentlessly pursuing her. He laughed at her from his garage in St. Lucia, but didn’t take any time to make speeches. They were locked in a life and death struggle.

  Alarms sounded, dashboards flashed red on her computer screens. Ashley’s cave of power was flaming out.

  She deployed a virus toward his laptop. She held her breath, but he didn’t notice as it downloaded itself onto his laptop. He was on the same technology high that they often were, obsessed with finding and fixing a bug in the code.

  “I don’t know who you are yet, but I’ll find you, and I’ll crush you,” he growled.

  She started his Land Rover. The expensive engine was whisper-quiet. Gary didn’t notice, he was too obsessed with finding her in cyberspace.

  She said, “Just admit that you take things that don’t belong to you. That people die because you feel entitled to everything you want. Do that, and I’ll disappear forever.” Ashley was still frantically trying to cut Gary off, block his access to the cloud.

  “I’ve nearly got you, you coward. Whoever you’re moping about having died, he was a loser. He trusted me because he wanted to, and he should have known better. The world is better off without losers like that mucking up the system. A system that reward men with balls, who go after what they want and let the lawyers clean up the mess.”

  “Because it’s a level playing field?”

  “Of course it’s not. It never was. It never will be. From Tea Partiers who don’t know they’ve been bought and sold by the Koch brothers to Liberal Dems who keep voting for Senators who keep voting for war, it’s all about those who have it. If you choose to believe the fantasy of upward mobility, in the face of all reason and evidence, that is hardly my fault. Nor is it my fault that some stupid moron fell for my negotiation tactics. He should have known better.”

  Gary stopped typing when his laptop chimed the announcement of a new email message.

  “I’ve been recording our conversation, Gary. That email is a link to the YouTube video of your more colorful behavior, and your last speech.” It had only taken a few seconds to upload each sequence to the corporate YouTube portal.

  “A fart in a hurricane,” he answered, tossing the laptop aside.

  “The rich stay rich, when there are so many more of us than you, by never admitting that the game is rigged. Hey, we have a few hundred hits already. I think you’re going to go viral, and I think your rich friends are going to cleave unto themselves.”

  For once, Gary seemed empty of epithets. Ashley continued, “Do you want to turn off your engine or let it keep filling your garage with carbon monoxide?”

  “You’ve locked the car doors! Unlock them!”

  “It’s a level playing field. You figure it out.”

  Ashley turned off everything then, and began cleaning the servers. A charity for the aged, her father’s favorite, would pick up the equipment in the morning.

  When she got home, she would send a shocked email to her boss, with a link to the YouTube video, and resign “under the circumstances.” No one would think twice about the quiet geek girl in the aftermath of a technocrat’s meltdown.

  She doubted that Gary would succumb to the fumes. But he would have hell to pay when the corporate auditors found that hundreds of thousands of dollars of money was missing, apparently transferred offshore by Gary himself. She’d been moving the money around for months. It would take them forever to trace it, long enough for the charity recipients to have spent the money. Like Bernie Madoff in reverse. She had been scrupulous about taking none of it herself.

  She smiled at the night watchman as she left the rented office for the last time, thinking of a brief holiday, somewhere tropical, perhaps. The vision of her father’s dead body in his recliner, pistol on the floor beside him, had already started to fade.

  JOHN CALVIN CAN BITE ME, by Michelle Markey Butler

  “Excuse me, miss.” The woman’s hand tapped the library counter, then fluttered away. I leaned forward to watch its flight. It landed over the ear of a small child, joining its fellow clapped against the other. “Do you have any books about Easter that don’t mention D-E-A-T-H?” She glanced down as she spelled, then glared at me, warning me not to say the word.

  What did Easter mean, exactly, without death?

  But I’m the church librarian, so what I said was, “Certainly. Let me help you.” In a few minutes she was checking out three books, vague about what happened to Jesus but trumpeting the Resurrection.

  Sometimes, I loathed Protestants.

  All right, that wasn’t a particularly Christian thought.

  True, though, despite how acknowledging it made my soul squirm. I grew up Catholic. In our Passion Week services, death and suffering were center stage, followed by the glorious burst of the Resurrection. Easter among the Protestants was like preschoolers eating dinner unsupervised, ignoring the broccoli and reaching right for dessert.

  I’d gotten dragged into this church by my boyfriend a year ago. I’d quickly ended up as the church’s librarian. Doug had been introducing me to the Executive Pastor when the prior librarian had come to tell Pastor Bob she needed to step down to care for her elderly mother. Doug said, “I bet Annie could do it.” That was that. But it turned out I liked it.

  Most of the time.

  The Easter-without-Death question wasn’t the strangest I’d gotten. Maybe not even in the top ten. “Excuse me, miss,”—it’s always miss—“where are the books about the myth of evolution?… about feminists destroying the family?…about why God hates gay marriage?” And a personal insulting favorite: “…about how to evangelize Catholics?”

  I’d learned pretty quickly not to talk politics. Or mention my background. “Catholics worship the Pope,” I’d been told. Once a little old lady patted my hand sympathetically. “It’s not your fault you were born into a cult, dear.” Cult? As far as I was concerned, at the core w
e shared a faith, and I liked helping people deepen theirs. It made up for the other stuff I had to deal with.

  Like church politics. As disturbing as the disdain toward my upbringing and secular politics was, finding myself in a smothering web of internal church machinations was even worse. It was ironic how few people here believed in evolution because the situation was decidedly Darwinian. Several bigger fish had their sights on my library.

  One swam in. Pastor Clark, the Facilities Pastor, came by every Sunday to see how many people were using the library. A free market zealot, he’d championed putting in a bookstore and was still angling to replace us. Hence the surveillance, hoping to gather evidence the space was “under-utilized in its current capacity” or some other corporate-efficiency lingo he’d picked up from his father, a Toyota executive. Let yourself get sucked into a conversation with him and you could count on at least one mention of how Toyota’s management principles could be applied to running a modern American church.

  Running a church like a business? God help us.

  I put my head down and typed, trying to look too busy to talk. Not difficult. Running a church library wasn’t for wusses. New materials to process, donations to sort (thanks so much for your decade-old copies of Christianity Today!), returned items to scan and shelve, books to repair, and scratched DVDs to salvage or scrap. Not to mention keeping things tidy, which was harder than it sounded since half the patrons were pint-sized.

  The second service ended. The library filled with kids clutching Veggie Tales DVDs and Angel Wars comic books. Excuse me—graphic novels. Men planted themselves at tables for this week’s installment of “how liberals are ruining America.” Women chased little bodies scattering among the shelves like leaves in a strong wind.

  A woman scooted to the counter before the line got long, Left Behind book #8 in her hand. “I just love this series.”

  “I’m glad you enjoy them, Lisa.”

  “I mean, what a witness.”

  “Some people find them very moving.” I scanned the barcode and gave back the book. She beamed and turned away, tucking it into the bulging bag slung over her shoulder. If the pattern held, she’d be back next Sunday for #9.

  Barcodes. I watched the line grow as I greeted the next person. How many church libraries had barcode-enabled computerized catalogs? I’d installed it.

  As always, when the line was a dozen deep, the head of Children’s Ministry approached the counter. Between second and third service was our busiest time, so naturally that was when she wanted to talk to me. You’d think a woman who worked with children, looked like a fairy, and sounded like a southern belle would be a gentle person. You’d learn better.

  Another thing I’d learned was not to keep her waiting. Throwing an apologetic look down the line, I turned to her. “What can I do for you, Clara?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Suspicion seemed to be her default mode. “The children’s books get very messy during the week,” she said. “Can’t you do something?”

  I swallowed a sigh. She complained about this at least once a month. “I have a job.” Medical data entry wasn’t a great job, true, but I had to pay the bills.

  She looked at me like I was a bug. One she was about to squash, or one already mashed on the bottom of her shoe, I wasn’t sure. “Doing God’s work should be the most important thing,” she said, oozing televangelist-grade fervor. I suppressed a shudder. Religious conviction was fine but Catholics tended to be reserved about it. The first time I’d see someone in church with their hands in the air, swaying to the drum beat, I felt like I’d landed on another planet. “And I’m going back to graduate school.”

  “Oh, my,” she drawled. Which meant, Aren’t you the uppity girl? Evangelicals, I’d learned, distrusted higher education. But volunteering in the church library had shown me what I really wanted to do with my life. I was going to be a real librarian, and grad school was the way to get there. “Does Doug know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh, my,” she repeated, this time with an oily tone that both confused and concerned me. “Why ever not? Shouldn’t a girl’s fiancé hear good news first?”

  “Doug’s in India for three weeks. For the bank.”

  “They don’t have email in India?”

  “He doesn’t like me to bother him when he’s on a business trip. He says he needs to concentrate on the job. I understand. Besides, I want to tell him personally.”

  “I see.” Again the smug tone, like someone watching a skunk about to walk over a cliff. “Yes. That’s definitely the way to do it.”

  Her tone implied the opposite. But Clara liked to mess with my head where Doug was concerned because her younger sister had dated him before me. She always seemed like she was wondering what he saw in me.

  Actually, I wondered the same thing. I pictured his face, his serious expression at odds with his drop-dead looks. Brown hair, sun-streaks making him look more surfer than banker. Ghirardelli-chocolate eyes. Well-muscled shoulders I wished I’d seen more often than at two church pool parties. I was the pudgy geek girl, in the corner at every dance but the front row in every classroom. What was he doing with me?

  Now,” Clara tipped her head, blue eyes fixing me with an icy glare, “about those messy shelves. Couldn’t you just pop in once or twice a week?”

  I lived half an hour away, and her After-School Program made the mess. Did that matter? Apparently not. “I have to work.”

  She waited. I tried not to squirm under her stare.

  It was obvious as the Georgia in her voice that she wanted me to offer to train one of her assistants to handle the library during the After-School Program. I didn’t dare. Once her assistant knew how to run it, gulp! Children’s Ministry would gobble up the library. She’d argued for it four times already in Leadership Meetings.

  “Well,” she stretched the word to six syllables, “if you really can’t do anything.”

  “Not a thing.” I hoped my relief at escaping her scrutiny didn’t show.

  She turned away, striding like a pixie warrior back to her office. I tackled the now-muttering line—typing, swiping, smiling.

  When the last patrons left, I sat back, pulling a deep breath, heart pounding like I’d been running. I got that sense of victory every time I made it through the peak. Books in hands, DVDs in bags, patrons happy. I won again.

  When my heartbeat slowed to normal I dusted my hands on my skirt and left the counter. After the busy time the library looked like a horrid bookish disaster—volumes on every surface, board books land-mining the carpet, emptied displays, DVDs catawampus on the slat wall.

  As I bent to straighten a listing line of books, a finger tapped my shoulder. “Excuse me, miss?”

  I jumped. “Yes?”

  “Oh, sorry,” the tapper said unconvincingly. “There’s a problem I hope you can help me with.”

  Uh-oh. Problems could be anything from “Why don’t we have the new $25 hardback in the Amish fiction series?” to “I demand you remove all books by that heretic Thomas Merton right now!”

  “How can I help you, Brenda?” I tried to call people by name. I read somewhere it calms them.

  No such luck. The frown deepened. “Where have all the evangelism books gone?”

  I hadn’t gotten to that shelf yet. It was around the corner in the Coffee and Conversation area. “Hmm,” I said. “Let’s go see.” Gesturing for her to follow, I headed towards the gleaming chrome beacons of caffeine.

  Sure enough, the shelf that should have been crammed with titles like Sharing Your Faith—and Loving It! and Seven Simple Steps to More Effective Evangelism was bare.

  What the…? It was full when I put half a dozen new books there earlier that morning.

  “What’s happened to them?”

  “I don’t know.” I stepped closer, not quite believing what I was seeing. Seriously, where were they? It was like aliens had beamed every book vaguely connected to the Great Commission into outer space.

  She stopped fro
wning long enough to preen. “I’m head of the Fish Nets.” She tossed her hair. “We donated half a dozen evangelism books both this month and last.”

  The Fish Nets is the Women’s Missions Committee. Did they intend the double meaning? I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine them not realizing it, but on the other hand, this is a gingham-and-plaid crowd, so maybe. It invoked Jesus telling his disciples to be fishers of men rather than fishermen—that’s what Missions was all about. But maybe, like the original punning command, they meant that and more. If so it was a pretty clever, and funny, name for the Women’s Missions Committee. I’d never asked. What if only the gospel reference was intended, and even knowing what fishnet stockings were was a sign of heathenness?

  “So what’s happened to them?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I repeated.

  Hoping to avoid another conversational loop, I started back to the counter. “Let’s check the computer.”

  She tapped her fingernails while I typed. We all know women who look like they iron every piece of clothing they put on—pulled together, but uptight? That’s Brenda. The longer she stood there, the more nervous I felt. It didn’t help that none of the new evangelism books came up as checked out.

  “Anything?” Scorn dripped like an ice cream cone in July.

  I shook my head.

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re supposed to be a librarian.”

  “We’re not the Carnegie Library,” I said. “We don’t have a security system. Sometimes people borrow things without checking them out.”

  I could hear her foot stamp. “It’s your responsibility. My committee was planning to donate more books but if you can’t keep them on the shelves,” she fixed me with a basilisk glare, “we’ll have to go to your supervisor.”

  “I’m a volunteer,” I muttered as she stomped away. But her threat wasn’t an idle one. It wasn’t a job, but I could be fired. Or, rather, “asked to step down.” I’d never led anything before, my day job was torpefying and lonely, and I really did like helping people even if I didn’t always agree with them. I didn’t want to lose this.