CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

The collection’s title story takes place in a theme park, CivilWarLand. The story’s unnamed male protagonist, a yes-man to the park’s owner, is showing the park’s “transplanted Eerie Canal Lock”(3) to a potential investor, Mr. Haberstrom. Haberstrom is the “founder of Burn’n’Learn,” which is “national” and has “a fully-stocked library on the premises and as you tan you can call out the name of any book you want to these high-school girls on roller skates” (3). Haberstrom is “hot to spend to spend some reflective moments at the Canal because his -great-grandfather was a barge guider way back when who got killed by a donkey” (4). However, area gangs have defaced the theme park’s Eerie Canal Lock, and Haberstrom storms off, unwilling to invest.

Alone, the protagonist considers quitting but knows he can’t; the resumés he’s sent out have brought nothing, and the protagonist thinks this is due to being at his current position—that of Verisimilitude Inspector for the park—for nine years. He considers “his car payment” and his sons, Marcus and Howie, and “how much [they] love the little playhouse [the protagonist] is still paying off,” so the protagonist decides to “eat [his] pride and sit tight” (4).

The protagonist next meets with his boss, Mr. Alsuga, who goes by “Mr. A.” The protagonist identifies Mr. A as a “self-made man,” who “started out with just a settler’s shack and one Union costume and now has considerable influence in Rotary,” as well as an “office in City Hall” (4).

Mr. A and the protagonist discuss the gangs vandalizing park. In only the past month, the gangs “have wounded three Visitors and killed a dray horse,” in addition to harassing an employee while she “was taking her fresh-baked over to the simulated Towne Meeting” (5). The protagonist offers: “Mr. Alsuga thinks the solution to the gang problem is Teen Groups. I tell him that’s basically what a gang is, a Teen Group” (5). Mr. A has tried offering seminars at which these gangmembers could learn a skill, but few people have attended. The protagonist then segues to his wife, Evelyn, and her denigration of the low amount of money the protagonist brings home. After Evelyn threw out a wooden duck the protagonist had whittled, he needed to “step into the closet and perform [his] Hatred Abatement Breathing” (5).

CivilWarLand is in “the worst attendance decline in ten years” and layoffs are occurring in “droves” (5). Mr. A needs to fire more people and asks the protagonist to figure out who should be let go next. The protagonist goes to Sylvia Loomis, “an S&M buff in training,” for help. Sylvia offers to help if the protagonist buys her lunch, which he does. They eat “in-Park,” at “Nate’s Saloon” (6). Sylvia offers up park employee Ned Quinn as a possible person to fire. Quinn is an “Adjunct Thespian” and “world-class worry wart” who is “ugly as sin” and “dirt-poor with six kids” (6, 7). He works at the park because “[h]e’s a failed actor who won’t stop trying” and “this is the only job that would allow him to continue to develop his craft” (6).

Mr. A and the protagonist consider the option of putting live rounds in Quinn’s gun to keep the gangs at bay. Quinn’s new role at the Civil War reenactment park would be as part of the “Desperate Patrol”:

The Desperate Patrol limps along under the floodlights as the night’s crowning event. We’ve costumed them to resemble troops who’ve been in the field too long. We used actual Gettysburg photos. The climax of the Patrol is a re-enacted partial rebellion, quelled by a rousing speech (7).

The protagonist “look[s] up the Thespian Center’s Speed Dial extension and a few minutes later Quinn’s bounding up the steps in the Wounded Grizzly suit” (7). Mr. A offers Quinn “an additional two bills a week” to “shoot at [the] feet” of “an unsavory intruder” (8). Quinn agrees.

The next night, Mr. A tells the protagonist to fire Mr. Grayson, “Staff Ornithologist,” which the protagonist does: “I call Grayson back in and let him go, and hand him Kleenexes and fend off a few blows and almost before I know it he’s reeling out the door and I go grab a pita” (9). The protagonist then adds:

Is this the life I envisioned for myself? My God no. I wanted to be a high jumper. But I have two of the sweetest children ever born. I go in at night and look at them in their fairly expensive sleepers and think: There are a couple of kids who don’t need to worry about freezing to death or being cast out to wolves. You should see their little eyes light up when I bring home a treat. They may not know the value of a dollar, but it’s my intention to see that they never do (9).

The protagonist is filling out the fired Grayson’s “Employee Retrospective” when he “hear[s] gunshots from the perimeter” (9). The protagonist leaves his office to find “Quinn and a few of his men tied to the cannon. The gang guys took Quinn’s pants and put some tiny notches in [Quinn’s] penis with their knives” (9). Quinn is given time off and the police aren’t called.

The protagonist next describes the entrance to the theme park, where visitors “sit in this kind of spaceship and travel faster than the speed of light and end up in 1865” (10). Period costumes are then passed out to visitors: “We try not to offend anyone, liability law being what it is. We distribute the slave and Native American roles equitably among racial groups. Anyone is free to request a different identity at any time” (10).

Mr. A calls in the protagonist to say the gangs have done more damage to the park. Further, a park visitor, traumatized by his role as “hangman,” has sued the park and won. As the two talk, they learn the gangs have “set fire to the Anglican Church” (11) inside the park.

The protagonist leaves work for the night, “keep[ing] an eye out for the ghostly McKinnon family” (10). The McKinnon family owned the lands in the “actual 1860s,” that the theme park sits on; their “homestead […] was located near present-day Information Hoedown” (11-12). The protagonist says that the family, who are ghosts, are unaware of the change in time, and instead believe it to still be the 1860s, and that “the valley’s prospering” (12). The McKinnons have two daughters; one of them, Maribeth, is “a homely sincere girl who glides around mooning and pining and reading bad poetry chapbooks” (12). A boy who visited the park was attracted to her but learned she was a ghost and went mad. The protagonist offers: “I should have come forward but they probably would have nut-hutted me, and then where would my family be?” (12).

Mr. McKinnon follows the protagonist to his car. The protagonist has locked his keys in his car and has to wait for his wife to come with the spare set. Mr. McKinnon asks the protagonist “did [he] see the fire and [does he] realize it was divine retribution for the protagonist’s slovenly moral state” (13). Evelyn arrives with the boys, Marcus and Howie; she calls the protagonist “a thoughtless oaf and sticks [him] in the gut with the car keys” (14).

The next day, the park makes a new hire. Samuel is “so completely Civil War they immediately hire him” (14). Sylvia Loomis “runs a routine check” on Samuel and learns that Samuel was “kicked out of Vietnam for participating in a bloodbath,” which she “claims […] is oxymoronic” (14). Mr. A calls in the protagonist to say that the park is close to closing due to lack of revenue. They hire Samuel to keep the gangs away, arming him with a gun that has live ammunition. The following week, a baptism takes place at the park’s Worship Center. The Foleys, the family renting the center for the baptism, “are an overweight crew. The room’s full of crying sincere large people wishing the best for a baby” (15).

As the baptism is taking place, the doors to the Worship Center open “and in comes a racially mixed gang. They stroll up the aisle tousling hair and requisition a Foley niece, a cute redhead of about sixteen” (16). The niece’s dad protests and is blackjacked. The gang leaves with the niece and the protagonist runs to find Mr. A, telling Mr. A what’s happened. Mr. A calls the police and the duo return “to the churchyard,” where “the Foleys are kicking and upbraiding six gang corpses” (16). These deaths are the work of new-hire Samuel. Police sirens sound in the distance, and Samuel tells Mr. A and the protagonist he’s “going into the woods,” to which Mr. A responds, “We never saw you, big guy” (17). The scene concludes with the protagonist saying “[t]he police arrive and we all lie like rugs” (17).

Samuel gains a reputation as guardian of the park and the gangs stay away for a couple of months. Park revenue goes up, but “[t]hen some high-school kid pulls a butter knife on Fred Moore and steals a handful of penny candy from the General Store. As per specs, Fred alerts Mr. A of a Revenue-Impacting Event” (17). This leads to Samuel killing the high-schooler and leaving the boy’s hand on the protagonist’s office chair: “All around the hand there’s penny candy” (18).

Mr. A convinces the protagonist to stay silent about the killing of the high-schooler by threatening termination; the protagonist puts the hand in a garbage bag and takes it “out to the marsh” (19) to dispose of it. Mr. McKinnon, the patriarch of the CivilWar-era ghost family, shows up while the protagonist is doing this and speaks of violence and death that he saw when alive:

He starts talking about bloody wagon wheels and a boy he once saw sitting in a creek slapping the water with his own severed arm. He tells how the dead looked with rain on their faces and of hearing lunatic singing from all corners of the field of battle and of king-sized rodents gorging themselves on the entrails of his friends (19).

The protagonist declares Mr. McKinnon a “loon” (19). At home that night, the protagonist considers his act of disposing of the hand, thinking that he “did a horrible thing” and that he’s “an accomplice and an obstructor [sic] of justice” (20). After this, however, he considers himself in jail and his sons not having a father, and he decides “to stay clammed up forever and take [his] lumps in the afterlife” (20).

It’s Halloween and the theme park and decorations are put up. Park staff “hide[s] holograph generators in the woods and project images of famous Americans as ghosts” (21), which confuses the McKinnon family. The protagonist’s sons’ costumes are, respectively, “rancher” and “accountant” (21), and they head to the theme park to go trick-or-treating. A “mob of teens” (21) enters the park, and gunshots follow—this is Samuel shooting at the teens. The boys are caught in the crossfire, but neither are shot. The teens, who were believed to be a gang, are actually “a bird-watching group” (22). Mr. A convinces the protagonist to again stay silent about Samuel, who has disappeared into the woods after shooting the teens.

The protagonist takes his sons home and goes out to get pizza for the family at “Melvin’s Pasta Lair” (23). When he returns home, Evelyn and the boys are gone, saying they’ve left him forever. Mr. A calls and tells the protagonist to return to the park because he has some “big horrific news” (24). This news is that the park is closing due to investors learning about the shootings. Mr. A tells the protagonist to “get his ass out” and that he’s “torching this shithole for insurance purposes” (24).

The protagonist leaves and happens upon the McKinnons, who “have inadvertently wandered too close to their actual death site and are being compelled to act out again and again the last minutes of their lives” (24). The protagonist learns that it was Mr. McKinnon who slaughtered his family with a scythe before shooting himself in the head. As the rest of family flees Mr. McKinnon, the park’s Visitor Center “erupts in flames” (25).

The protagonist, along with the McKinnons, flee the fire; the protagonist runs into a retaining wall that the ghostly McKinnons simply pass through. When he wakes up, a ghostly boy is kneeling over him. This is the ghost of the boy Samuel killed for stealing penny candy. The boy tells the protagonist to “get up now,” to which the protagonist responds that he’s “done living” (25). The boy counters by saying that the protagonist can’t die because he’s “got amends to make” (25). Samuel comes out of the woods and kills the protagonist with a hunting knife.