The Good Boss

A mountain man saves the day. Also featured: a sacrificial goat and an awed vegetarian.

         His beard intimidated me at first.  Probably because it was so bushy that it masked the expression on his face, which was probably a huge grin, probably there because he’d found a lost chunk of last night’s steak, daubed in A1 sauce, somewhere in the infinite crevasses of that yellow beard.  It’s as big a feature of his identity as his homemade Shit Happens When You Party Naked t-shirt.  He changes it according to mood or current woodsman fashions, but it’s always there and it’s absolutely the first thing you’ll notice about him.

         The second thing you’ll notice is his Lincoln-esque height and stature.  Like Abe, he’s not vain and he believes there’s more to life than looking sharp.  His favorite outfit is knee-length cutoff corduroys, rainbow flip flops he found on a beach in Hawaii, and—if he feels like wearing a shirt—a self-designed tee.  He loathes labels of any sort, but he makes an exception for his heavy Miller Beer flannel ‘man jacket’ that he pulls on in cold weather.

         He speaks with a quick accented twang, sometimes losing vowels, sometimes entire syllables in his excitement.  Anyone who asks him where he's from is received with a blank stare.  He's not trying to be rude.  A self-proclaimed "army brat," he moved around from state to state with his soldier parents, never spending more than two of his early years in any one place.  He learned to relish the lifestyle of a nomad, the adventure and promise attached to each new move.  Even after he was old enough to settle down somewhere, get a job, buy a house, he continued to pick up and go whenever it suited him, mostly following warm weather to a progression of trail construction jobs in a staggering number of places. 

         He currently works as the trails supervisor for a nonprofit organization in the New York Adirondacks.  He's happy on a $5,000 a year salary or less, as long as he can afford an occasional pack of cigarettes and a freshly churned ice cream from the farmstand up the road.  Besides trail work, the only other jobs I’ve ever heard him speak of were stints selling ice cream and Christmas trees out of his VW bus.  I can only imagine the sight he was, leaning out of his rig with its Jesus Shaves bumper sticker, passing out treats to kids convinced that he was a strapping young Santa with that bushy yellow beard. 

         Someone tried to film him once on one of his adventures but he flatly refused.  He’s wary of publicity and would sooner bury his thoughts in the forest duff than have them nakedly displayed for the world to see.  So if you ever see a jovial and gangly blonde bearded guy on TV condemning luggage wheels or anything that’s made our lives easier than those of our agrarian ancestors and think it might be him, his media pseudonym is Dirty Dubois and that’s the only way to know for sure.

         He’s refreshingly inappropriate.  I joined his trail crew last summer after two years of learning the hard way that forty hours a week spent entering data into a computer in the bowels of a building was no way to live life.  After so many months of blindly following a dress code, of wearing black dress pants even though I rarely left my desk, of calling my superiors "Sir" and "Ma'am," it was a shock to witness this new boss in his Miller Beer jacket, a clump of mustard clinging to his beard, warning a flatulating high school volunteer of the “asshole talking shit behind her back.” 

         He lives in a rent-free apartment with his girlfriend.  It's really a one-room shed on the property of some farmer who exchanges room and board in return for menial labor.  The pair owns two pieces of furniture: a chair and a table.  Sometimes, during quiet moments when my thoughts are my own, I wonder who is sitting in the chair, what’s on the table and what on earth the other person could be doing.

         One day last fall, I stepped into his office and found him pacing back and forth in the eight square foot space.  He had a half-crazed, excited glint in his eyes and was drumming his fingers together and occasionally making light punches at the air, humming something indiscernible but undeniably happy.  The moment he saw me, it was as if he’d been hiding a secret for too long and needed to let it explode off his chest immediately, regardless of who was there to listen.

         “We’re having an end-of-season party.  And we’re getting a goat!”
         “A goat? As a pet?”  Visions of a fluffy friend to chew our grass for us and provide us with delicious cheese raced through my head.
         “Heck, no.  We’re eating it.  Slitting its gall-danged neck, draining it and eating every usable part of its body.  You guys have worked so well.  You deserve a feast!”
         “Sounds delicious.  You know I’m a vegetarian…?”

But he hadn’t heard my question.  He was already on the phone, speed-dialing goat owners in the area and figuring out logistics.  In the weeks that followed, a sort of electric charge followed my boss wherever he went.  He seemed to have a new sense of purpose.  He’d always had ideals that involved living off the fat of the land, and somehow the prospect of killing and cooking flesh by hand moved him closer to his goals.  One morning during that time, I came into work after my days off and noticed the two La-Z-boys in the office were missing.  A coworker filled me in:

         “We had a bonfire here last night.  They burned.”
         “No way.  Aren’t you guys going to get in trouble?”
         “We didn’t do it.  It was the boss man.”

According to the story—which might be more appropriately regarded as legend—that followed, he’d actually ridden one of the chairs like a cowboy as it was burning and leapt off only moments before it blew up into ashes.  You’ve got to respect a man crazy enough to pull something like that off.  The strange thing is, though, he’s so real he’s actually less crazy than anyone else I know.  In spite of myself I began to long to sink my teeth into the muscle and sinew of a bloodied goat.  It would certainly be a free-range goat, I reasoned.  I’d try it, at least, if only for the sake of hospitality.

         The day arrived on which my boss was supposed to adopt and carry the sacrificial goat back to the office for slaughter.  I couldn’t help but get carried away in the mob mentality breeding among the trail crew members, and I brought a camera in hopes of bagging a picture of someone holding the severed head by the ears.

         But when he returned from his mission, something was different.  He had the chosen goat as promised and was grinning from ear to ear as usual, but something about the excited glint in his eyes had shifted.  As soon as he passed off the goat to us, he ran to his bicycle and, peddling away, shouted at us to begin slaughtering the creature in whatever way we liked.

         “I found a bald eagle!  Side of the road!  Musta been ‘lectrocuted—all black, poor thing.  I’m gonna fix it.  You all go on…”

He was still shouting at us indiscernibly as we watched him disappear into a speck on the horizon.  When he was completely gone, we turned wordlessly back to each other and then to the goat.  A few people offered suggestions on how to kill it: tie it up on a makeshift spit and roast it alive; shoot it with a nonexistent gun, throw a large rock at its head.  In the end, though, none of us had the guts to follow through with a single plan.  We remained where we were for hours, munching on corn chips, fashioning a makeshift pen for the goat and waiting for our boss who never returned to the party that night.

         The next day, we all showed up at the office to pack up tools, clean up and close shop for the season.  As we were performing inventories, sharpening pick mattocks and trying to look busy climbing up and down ladders, a dark shadow appeared in the doorway and we saw that it was him, noticeably dirtier and more ragged but mostly the same as ever with that famous grin shining through his beard. 

         “Couldn’t save the bird.  Sold my damn bike.  Hey! What’s that goat doing still alive?  Shoot, I’ll clean up the office.  I’ve got all winter with nothin’ but budgets to balance.  It’ll do me some good.  Let’s celebrate a little, why don’t we?”

         Before we could interject, he began delegating tasks and setting up a quiet spot nearby on which to make the goat as comfortable as possible before killing it.

         “Ryan, run to the kitchen and get me a knife.  Greg, go and find some kindling for the fire pit.  Meg, you run and grab a long piece of rope.  Leslie, why dontcha get me… wait… you’re a vegetarian, right?” fumbling in the pocket of his man jacket, he pulled out a pack of Smart Dogs and tossed them to me.  “You might want to start roasting those over the fire, although you might as well eat them raw, since no amount of cooking will make them taste any better.”

         “Well, I thought I might try your goat.  You know, just this once.  I’d like to help, too, if I can.”

         “I’ll be darned.  Ok, grab a knife and start shaving the thing once I get him bled.”

            Within a half hour, the goat was stabbed in as peaceful manner as possible, bled, shaved, and gutted.  My boss moved with an incredible deftness, as if he’d been butchering his whole life.  Although I’d been voicing moral opposition to animal killing and meat eating for the better part of my life, something about the way he handled the operation made it all seem natural and right. 

         Later that evening, as I was sucking on tender flesh, I pondered about this strange man who seemed a throwback from a time when it was all right to kill beasts as long as they were guaranteed to return to earth, when happiness and integrity were worthy goals to strive for and money wasn’t a concept.  Suddenly I was overwhelmed by his simple purity.  The broken day, with its mysterious loss of a stricken eagle and a bicycle, wouldn’t affect his mad and merry spirit.  In his own way, he took care of all of us with the understanding that things don’t always go as planned and with the readiness to sacrifice time and material possessions for the greater good.
 
         When the party finally wound down after midnight, I watched him begin the long walk back to his apartment, searching his beard for remnant scraps of goat and kicking a Pabst Blue Ribbon can from one side of the street to another.  I hoped his girlfriend would let him sit on the chair when he returned home.