Sir Percival
For a noble friend
“There is nothing between you and hell but the air; tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds you up.”
— Jonathan Edwards
I don’t often believe in the Christians’ God, and when I do, I spit in His face. Even at His most endearing, I find him — as the cool kids say — suss. I find him suss.
Give me your life, he says, kill your son on the mountain, slay your daughter when she runs out of the house. It’ll be okay, he says. I promise.
But I’ll tell you one thing. If God’s rolling the world around like a marble in his palm, making up his mind about us, there’s only one man that stops Him from letting us drop.
That man is Percival.
We’ll call him what his friends did, Percy. Or what everyone else did, that fat fuck.
Percy worked at Sweet Endings, the cheapskate old folks’ home with locations all around Chattanooga. First he worked in Collegedale and then he worked in Hixson and finally he settled in East Ridge down near the Georgia line.
Over 20 years he had mastered three positions: maintenance, housekeeping and laundry. He knew how to perform every task belonging to each position and he’d encountered just about every unexpected event that might crop up, too, from an exploding washing machine to a resident poking a necklace into an electrical outlet for safe keeping. He knew what should be done in what order and what jobs took precedence when there weren’t enough staff — and there were never enough staff. He knew how to muster people and get things taken care of when several emergencies were happening at once.
But because Percy had gone to a residential job-training high school and obtained his job through a special placement service, he stood no chance of a raise or a promotion. They never even made him shift supervisor. He was merely a worker, merely a floater, forever paid four-and-a-quarter an hour. Retard wage, one of the other workers from the placement agency called it. Cos we’re retards to take it. That had been in the middle of a fight, and then there had been another fight about the word retard and who was allowed to use it about whom. A terrible, insulting word for a terrible, insulting position — a man of skill and judgment treated forever as an infant.
Percy rarely thought about that. He was too busy. Picture him rolling down the carpeted hall at Sweet Endings of East Ridge, calling a greeting to one old person after another. He was a handsome man of just less than average height. He wore his furry thatch of golden hair cut short in a high-and-tight. His broad feet carried him silently everywhere at a pace that surprised folks who did not understand how nimble and athletic fat folks can be. He had a wide, generous forehead, a straight nose and smiling red lips.
And he did smile. He smiled while he did his work and all the work the other staff let side. He smiled while he did little tasks that were no one’s work at all — fixing one old person’s VCR, repairing the delicate chain of another’s necklace.
His colleagues called him lazy bastard — Percy, who spent most of his 10-hour shifts in motion.
His colleagues — but I can’t type that twice, imagine reading it twice, it chokes me — the other maintenance workers and laundry workers and housekeepers stayed back from him and treated him like he was catching. Not any one of his health conditions, you understand, but him altogether. As if his retard wage or his 500 pounds or perhaps his bright spirit was in danger of infecting them.
Percy’s health conditions, in fact, were numerous. Besides a heart problem for which he took warfarin, he wore braces to support each ankle and had skin breakdowns on many parts of his body, some visible when he wore his work uniform. He was at that time not yet 40 years old.
The old people — the guests, they’re called, though few were visiting by choice and none had any hope of leaving other than feet-first — had a different opinion. They opened their arms to Percy whenever they saw him. All the staff was overworked, of course, but Percy had a way of doing the little extra for you as if it was a privilege to serve. The nursing assistants loved him, too, because he was always on hand to clean up shit, even if the particular shit in question wasn’t part of his job.
His colleagues, meanwhile, were conspiring to get that fat fuck fired.
They resented the fact that while they made seven or eight bucks an hour, Percy with his four-and-a-quarter knew more than they did. They hated how he never stopped moving when they took regular breaks. The despised that, while they might be called team leader or even shift supervisor, they had to ask Percy how to deal with difficult or unusual things. They swooned when the manager gave Percy a big bundle of keys.
One day after Percy had eaten a particularly hard lunch in the break room — seasoned with comments on his food choice, his girth, his intellect and his probable lack of a girlfriend — Zeke Faulkner, the first shift team leader for maintenance, started in about those keys. First he complained to Percy, who said nothing. Then he went to the boss, whose office opened onto the break room.
“I don’t know why Percy has the keys, he’s too dumb to know when to open the chemical cabinet. We’re always late with our work because we have to justify to Percy why we need to get into anything, and half the time the fat idiot doesn’t understand half what we’re saying.”
It was in fact rare that Zeke and Percy were at work for many hours together; very often, Percy was the only person on maintenance and housekeeping together.
The manager was about to explain in words of one syllable that Percy’s good stewardship, professional expertise and general common sense made him the exact person to hold the keys, when Percy himself stuck his head around the doorframe.
He held out the keys.
“You’d better keep them yourself, boss, I’m just slowing everyone up.”
This was very inconvenient for the boss, who now had to dress down Percy for insubordination when he actually believed Percy should be given back the keys plus a raise for his troubles. Furthermore, without the keys, Percy would be unable to do his work when everyone else jumped ship. This was not something that was supposed to happen, but it often did happen — and Percy’s surrender of the keys would make the fact obvious. Someone else would now have to always be on shift to open doors and cabinets for Percy, the most reliable worker in the place. The boss knew good and well that would never happen.
But Percy refused to take back the keys. Again the boss almost offered Percy a raise, then shut his mouth. They both knew the retard placement agency would make sure no raise made it into Percy’s hands.
While the boss tried through one argument and another to make Percy take back the keys, Zeke ducked out and set the other part of his plan in motion.
He got the keys to Percy’s old Ford Explorer out of Percy’s locker and passed them along to Chassity, who worked in the laundry. Chassity, in turn, ran outside with the keys and drove Percy’s car out of the staff lot, around the corner and right into the driveway where families came to pick up their old folks. She left the car blocking the way, scampered off around through the holly hedge, and returned through the back door, dropping Percy’s keys in the men’s room toilet on her way.
Don, the off-duty cop who sat at the front desk to watch the cameras, fit to died laughing.
Sweet Endings had a winding driveway that ran a few dozen yards through a little copse of dogwood and cedar trees before you reached the turnaround where people dropped their old folks off. Chassity left Percy’s truck just out of site of the porch on the first bend, letting her sneak off without anyone seeing except Don at his camera.
As a result, no one knew Percy’s SUV was blocking the drive until a neurologist drove up to see a few of his patients. He honked and hollered, and finally had to get out of his car, walk around the truck on the frost-muddy shoulder, and stomp up to the front desk with his pants splattered.
The next thing Percy knew, old Mrs. Judith was following him down the hall with her walker. “Percy, isn’t that you’re truck on the PA?”
Percy turned off the vacuum cleaner and listened. Sure enough, Don was on the PA announcing that a truck was going to be towed. His truck. An older-model green Ford Explorer, license plate so-and-so, with a Meddle Not With Dragons, for You Are Crunchy and Taste Good With Ketchup bumper sticker.
Percy didn’t know what had happened. Mercedes, the activities tech, came by with a big stack of construction paper. “They moved your truck to block the front drive!” she exclaimed. “Don’s calling the tow truck. You better hurry.”
Percy hurried to his locker. No keys. No keys, no keys — no time to keep looking. He rushed out to his truck.
From the front porch, despite the cold, quite a few old folks and all the laundry, maintenance and housekeeping staff on shift watched as Percy rounded the corner in his truck.
He had sat halfway into the truck with his right hand on the wheel, his left hand looped up around the frame of the half-open door. He dropped the floor shift into neutral. With his right foot he eased gently up on the brake and with his left foot he propelled the SUV forward steadily as a kid pushes a scooter.
Mouths fell open as Percy one-footed his truck down the driveway, up the sharp turn toward the staff driveway, and back around the building toward the staff lot.
Zeke, foiled at the main game, had only one trick left in his pocket.
“Oh, man, did you know you dropped your keys in the toilet? Must be hard for you to see what’s back there, I guess.”
For that reason Percy arrived late to his Dungeons&Dragons game. Three or four guys played, plus Patti, who always played a troll. These were older gamers, calm folk. One hippie from back in the day, you know, and an electrical engineer who read the big D&D books to Percy when he needed to know something. Michael didn’t have to read to Percy often, because Percy had most of the information in the player’s handbook memorized — tables of statistics, charts of attributes, a nine-square grid of moral alignment — a whole cosmology, physical and ethical, between two covers.
The Dungeon Master, a slim Indigenous guy with long graying hair, had updated Percy’s character while he was away. A true knight during the day, Percy played right villains at night — big bruisers who smote where they willed.
The party had just finished an unfortunate encounter with a mimic disguised as an outhouse — imagine sitting down on those big teeth and that tongue, eager to pull an adventurer into a man-sized gullet — when Percy, who was rather tired, stood up to get some water.
His head spun. He swayed a moment. He fell flat on the floor on his back, grazing his hip on the china cabinet. The house shook, soundlessly but profoundly. Everyone stepped away, except the Dungeon Master, who was almost instantly kneeling beside the big man.
Percy lay on his back. He could not turn or rise. He moved his arms and legs, seeking purchase. “I’m all right,” he stammered, more angry than anything. With himself, his stupid self, he thought. The Dungeon Master instantly saw what was up.
“Take a few breaths, that must have been a surprise … Now, Percy, can you give Mike your left hand? And give Jammer your right hand.”
Mike and Jammer, glad to be given a way to help, instantly stepped up. The Dungeon Master positioned himself behind Percy and, working hard, the three men set him on his feet.
“Are you all right?” they asked. Percy said that he was. The Dungeon Master gave him a little frowning smile. “Just come with me.”
The Dungeon Master nodded his head at the back room and Percy followed him and in a minute the Dungeon Master’s kind hands and kind eyes inspected Percy’s back and hip. He was bruised, but lightly, mere scuffs. Much worse were the mottled places where blood pooled. However, the corner of the china cabinet had broken the skin at his hip.
The Dungeon Master cleaned the torn skin with peroxide and bandaged it using long strings of tape that Percy’s fingers could easily find and pull off. While he was doing this, he talked to Percy about the game — how funny when Jammer sat on that mimic!
Because it was Christmas Eve the gamers ended the evening with spice cake and a fruit tray from Walmart. They watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit together. They were all single folks, though the Dungeon Master was a widower with grown daughters somewhere. Percy did not think, Well, this is a secondhand Christmas. Instead he thought about Jesus and his disciples feasting together. He ate lots of watermelon and his heart swelled with joy.
Later that night Percy went to his other job — unpaid. He ran the sound board at his church, an aspiring megachurch that seated 500 for the midnight Christmas eve service. Then he went home, where his stepfather asked for his paycheck. The house had belonged to Percy’s mother and stepfather together, and now his mom was dead, his stepfather rented Percy the room he’d grown up in. Percy handed over what he owed, so he was told, for rent, keeping back a little pocket money for gas and so on, and went to bed.
Christmas Day kept the staff at Sweet Endings busy. All those families picking up their old folks and dropping them off, plus the Christmas meal in the dining hall. Percy tended to spilled drinks, blocked-up toilets, and traffic jams.
He was directing traffic, I think, when a middle-aged man in a cornflower blue tie hurried up to him. “Do you work here?”
Percy, in uniform with a “Sweet Endings” badge sewn to his shirt, said that he did.
“Can you get a nurse for my mother? She’s had an accident in the car and she’s ashamed to get out and walk inside.”
Percy fetched a nurse’s assistant. He guided the other cars around while she helped Mrs. Connie out of the car, wrapped a blanket around her, and led her inside. Then he stepped forward. “Can you hang on a minute?” he asked Mrs. Connie’s son, the Man With the Cornflower Tie.
The man had little choice; his wife had followed Mrs. Dot and the nurse’s assistant into the building. Percy, who had brought a bucket cleaning supplies and a big handful of rags outside with him, lowered himself to one knee at the open back door of the car.
Mrs. Dot had been sick with liquid diarrhea.
Percy began to clean out the car.
It took him 30 minutes. His boss came out to hustle him back to work, but did not know how to do so in front of the Man With the Cornflower Tie, who was praising Percy’s bent back to high heaven.
Head inside the car, nose and lungs full of the vilest shit, Percy did not hear him. He was getting the details done now — he was just cleaning the piping on the upholstery.
Back inside, the boss gave Percy his dressing down. “We were slammed today; what were you thinking to waste all that time? It isn’t your job to clean families’ cars.”
“I couldn’t let them leave like that, boss,” Percy said. “And on Christmas!”
If Percy’s four-and-a-quarter wage couldn’t be raised, neither could it be docked. He raised his hand in good night and rolled silently out of the office.
Percival lived for longer than anyone expected, perhaps to 50, perhaps older. I want to tell you something special happened, but nothing did. He didn’t get a girlfriend or win the lottery. He cleaned toilets and played Dungeons&Dragons and his life was like most of our lives: shadows and light.
Such dark shadows, and such fearful light.
When at last Percy’s mighty heart broke, something lifted from him — no glowy drift of gossamer — a golden river flowing upward to high heaven, taking at last the form of the fairest and most holy knight.
There above the firmament children ran to the casements and the ghosts of all the old folks who needed diapers no more crowded the portico.
And the rest of the earth — me too, you too, if God is just — He ground to splinters in His palm and flung away into the fiery dark.