New Fiction from Mike Freedman: KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI

The shine and swagger of a new day.

Great Recession? Not Hous­ton. And yet, and
yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been
assessed and corrected; and now the city of Brock Wharton seceded further from
the rest of the flatlined coun­try in the first week of September 2014. As
Wharton was considering whether to rearrange his weekend schedule to pencil in
sex with his wife, one of the strangest men he had ever laid eyes on breached
the space of his open doorway. Of average height, the boyish, sun-cooked man
appeared taller than he was as his askew brown hair lashed out in every
direction. His rangy build (accentuated by the too-small, off-the-rack, navy
double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that
Wharton would never enter) seemed pulled at the sinews’ seams. It was the sort
of flawed build that none of the South Texas ranching families would ever
breed. If not for the inten­sity of the blue eyes—divided by a comic eagle nose
that dived toward raggedly chapped lips—so nakedly sizing him up in return,
Wharton would have dismissed the figure as an apparition too absurd to be real.

Unnerved by the fixed eyes that looked through him
to some burning skyscraper or falling zeppelin outside the window, Wharton
twisted around anticipating to be hit by a tornado. But the downtown skyline
was undisturbed. Annoyed by this intrusion and humiliated that he had been
tricked into a search beyond his window, Wharton spun around in his chair to
regain the initiative. “Who—”

“You’re the man to beat?” A smile the size of the intruder’s
face tore through the puffy lips and exposed a series of swollen red gums
congregated around two monstrous white tusks for front teeth, which, if not
fake, the hospital-white fangs had avoided the yellow staining of the other
teeth and clearly swam in their own current in the man’s mouth. A muddy five
o’clock shadow surrounded the giant mouth, which surely, upon closer inspection
of this dark facial sandpaper, would be attributed to not shaving than some
celebrated regeneration of stubble.

His piney, log-cutting aftershave sprayed Wharton’s
office with his scent. A hand slithered in the air above his desk toward
Wharton. He stood and asked in a harsh tone that betrayed the mask of imper­turbability
he wished to project, “Who are you and what is the nature of your business in
my office?”

“I’m Mike Fink,” the man said in a mysterious
dialect, a dialect hailing from a region that Wharton could only place as from
the land of the lower class while his limp hand was grabbed by Fink. His fla­grant
confidence-man grin expressed an expectation that Wharton knew the name, if not
the reputation. “I’m here for the leadership position.”

I, Wharton declared to himself, will personally see
to it that that never happens. This was a case that needed no analysis. Wharton
pulled his hand from Fink’s clasp and came around from his desk. “Be that as it
may, I have never heard of you. I am sure we can resolve this misunderstanding
in no time if you would please . . .” But Wharton trailed off, watching in
horror as Fink plopped down unasked in the chair across from Wharton’s desk and
wriggled his lanky body to find an incorrect posture. This creature’s
cheekiness apparently knew no bounds. Wharton found himself slightly behind
Fink and facing his back; Fink tapped his right foot, waiting on the start of
an interview.
Wharton was not about to give
such an entitled lout. Leadership posi­tion? Papers rustled behind where
Wharton stood, but he could not take his eyes off the hunched back of Fink.

“I see that you used your Special Forces
navigational skills to find Brock’s office, Mike,” a squeaky voice said behind
Wharton.

“Too easy, Carissa. Didn’t even have to consult the
compass.”

“Consult,” Carissa repeated in a higher pitch that
no doubt carried a waving of a finger at clever schoolboy Fink for his
introduction of an unimaginative punning attempt to their colloquial exchange.
“A good consultant never consults a compass.”

“Miss Barnett, what is going on?” Wharton asked, as
he swung around to see the top-heavy recruiter giggling and swaying her head to
the savage’s tapping beat. Was she blushing? Her lips certainly now bore the
mark of lipstick, adorned in a Valentine’s Day red to match a pair of six-inch
stiletto heels that had magically sprouted up from her earlier flats like weeds
in a trailer park. She was without her jacket, and it appeared that—was it
possible, even amid the other illusions?—she had lost three or four buttons,
too, judging by the excessively gratu­itous amount of breast on exhibit. All at
once, Wharton felt the butt of a joke, a weary traveler who had stumbled into
some rustic country inn for shelter only to be mocked by the randy bar maiden
and the regular patrons.

“Oh, Brock, I’m so sorry. I guess you hadn’t been
notified that Mike would be interviewing this afternoon. He was traveling from
New Orleans and wasn’t able to make it for the morning block of inter­views.”
She ruffled through the stack of papers in her hand and pulled a badly mauled
page out and passed it to Wharton. “Here’s a copy of his résumé. Like I told
Mike, you are the only one left to interview him before the meeting in the
conference room in half an hour to decide on who the new hires are.”

Wharton waved her on before she disclosed any more
details of the hiring process. Oblivious to the intent of his wave, she leaned
over to Wharton with the bright eyes of a much younger child, a mercurial
silver sparkle that screamed antidepressants, and whispered audibly for Fink to
hear, “He’s a Green Beret.”

“I don’t care if he’s the pope, Carissa, as I have
only a half hour
to give an intensive
interview,” Wharton said truthfully, for despite his conservative Christian
upbringing, he now cared little for religious figures. Indeed, besides possibly
salvation, little reward stemmed from religious fervor beyond the required
Christian affiliation among his strategic-friends crowd. Wharton thought even
less of people in the military, despite the nauseating resurgence of post-9/11
glorification of a segment who’d been the frequent subject of derision prior to
that day. In Wharton’s youth, the military was the last stop for the talentless
who could not do anything else in life. It usually wasn’t even much of a
choice: You can go to prison, or be all you can be in the Army. Now
everyone was expected to shake their hands, pick up their checks in
restaurants, turn over their first-class seats on airplanes, and worst yet,
stand up and clap for them at sporting events while nodding that the only
reason the sport is even being played is because of heroes like them fighting
in some country with cities no one can pronounce. An inane rah-rah
yellow-ribbon patriotism, a shared ritual offering peace between the jingoes,
Middle America, and pinkos where everyone emerged feel­ing good about their
participation. Doubtless this explained how this Fink character was granted a
CCG interview.

“Well,” Wharton said to Fink, shutting the door on
Carissa, “it ap­pears I am to interview you. I’m going to take a minute to scan
through your résumé.”

“Take your time,” the applicant advised the
interviewer. “There’s a lot there.”

There, Wharton quickly realized, was not a lot
there: current em­ployment listed as none, no work experience (unless
ten years in the military counted), a 2.9 GPA, and a bachelor of arts in
English litera­ture (was that not the easy major?) from Tulane University (a
bottom first-tier university that CCG did not even review applications from)
the same year Wharton graduated. Lo and behold, Fink’s résumé was actually a
mirror out of a fable, in that if you held it up, your exact op­posite looked
back at you.

“An English literature major?” Wharton murmured,
bringing the CV closer to his eyes.

“With a minor in theater. I read
somewhere that English majors make the best consultants. Stands to reason.”

Had recruiting seriously thought the special forces
bullet in bold letters at the top alone merited an interview? Special Forces
could not be that special if Fink lacked the cognition to apprehend that he did
not belong at CCG. That his presence, an interloper squandering his time, was
offensive to a Brock Wharton, who had conducted a life cultivating a résumé.
Fink was a great example of a candidate not hav­ing researched CCG; how had he
passed the first-round interview? In fact, Wharton assessed it to be the most
heinous résumé ever submit­ted for his review: not even the oversized font or
alignment from sec­tion to section was consistent in what amounted to only a
stretched half page of largely questionable achievements (high school senior
class president?). Wharton looked up at Fink in time to see him fon­dling his
Texans football!

“Put that down!” Wharton pointed at the ball holder
on the wall next to Fink, who on his orders positioned the ball upside down on
its seam.

“I apologize. I had forgotten that you were drafted
in the last round after playing for UT.”

Wharton searched the blue eyes sunk back in the
triangular face for an intended slight in the usage of “last” to describe the
still-prestigious seventh round. What it seemed Fink hadn’t forgotten was the
chatter of sports columnists, recruiters, superfans, and boosters who had once
ranked Wharton the top high school quarterback in the South and proclaimed him
the next UT football savior. He in turn ranked this same mindless mob number
one in cowardice after four years of enduring their catcalls every time he was
injured and being denounced by them for betrayal when their impossible
expectations for their fair-haired boy were not met on the field. “Were you
drafted as well after graduating college?”

“Drafted by our country,” Fink said, startling
Wharton with a belly laugh loud enough to be heard down the hall.

Wharton avoided Fink’s face to conceal the anger he
was sure must be reddening his own cheeks. He found refuge in Fink’s résumé. A
review of it demonstrated that the undereducated Fink knew abso­lutely nothing
beyond the art of exploiting some tax credit for busi­nesses that interviewed
veterans. Another bending of the laws, no less egregious than allowing veterans a pass in public
with their PTSD service dogs while their pit bulls created anxiety for everyone
else. Wharton pushed aside the flash of resentment that made him want to
physically kick Fink from his office. He settled on an approach he was
convinced would inflict far more damage to this impertinent CCG im­postor’s
candidacy: cede the stage to an unwitting Fink and allow the veteran to shoot
himself, hailing as he did from a demographic statisti­cally known for its high
suicide rates.

“Thank you for your service. Now why don’t you walk
me through your academic accomplishments?” Wharton began anew, chumming the
waters of that pesky foe of Delusion: Fact. “I see here that you had a
two-point-nine grade point average at Tulane.”

“Two point nine four five to be exact, but if you
round that up it is a two point nine five, and if you’re really telling a tale,
you could round that to a three point zero.”

“CCG, almost as a rule, requires its applicants to
have a GPA of three point six or above from a top-ranked college. You are
applying for the position of consultant with an undergraduate GPA of two point
nine against a field of applicants that all have MBAs, and, in some cases, two
advanced graduate degrees. Have you done any graduate-level course work at
all?”

“The Special Forces Qualification Course.”

Fink was making this easy for Wharton. “I don’t
think I follow,” Wharton said, baiting him to continue his charm offensive and
ram­bling lack of reflection, which conformed ideally to Wharton’s plan of
wrestling back control of the interview. “Can you elaborate specifically on how
this course qualifies as graduate school and how it relates to a career in
consulting?”

Fink straightened up in his chair. His arrowhead
chip of a face leaned in over the desk. Was he applying for a job or auditioning
for a small part in a play?

“De Oppresso Liber,” Fink said, enunciating
each Latin word for Wharton’s appreciation.

Wharton stared dramatically at the now confirmed
lunatic and awaited a further terse three-or-four-word inadequate explanation that was not forthcoming. It
was not as if Wharton lacked experience playing a part; he knew full well what
was expected of him in life’s star­ring role. Finally, Wharton asked, “Excuse
me?”

“Motto of the Green Berets.” Fink thumped his chest
with his fist (in the spot where the handkerchief, which could have been the
only item to make his costume more ridiculous to Wharton, was missing). “It
means ‘To Liberate the Oppressed.’ ”

“What does this have to do with consulting?”

“For a decade I trained not only on how to
operationally liber­ate the oppressed, but also how to free my mind from the
oppression of conventional thinking. A consultant referencing unconventional
thinking in a plush CCG office and actually being unconventional when the
stakes are high are as different as a yellowbelly catfish is from a bullhead
catfish,” Fink exclaimed. He had also managed to concur­rently use his hands to
grotesquely elucidate the contrasting courage of each subspecies by forming
what Wharton interpreted as human female and male genitalia. “Like consulting,
it’s about being adaptable. Who is the most adaptable? Ain’t that America? Now,
I’m not a big war story guy, but you asked me to describe a situation where I
had to lead a group of people and convince them that an unconventional solu­tion
was the right way and to that I say: how about every day in Iraq! If
that—”

“Two alphas battle to be top dog at a global consultancy in this amusing satire on business, ambition, and entitlement…. A solid entertainment from a writer of considerable talent and promise.”

– Kirkus, Starred Review

“I didn’t ask you anything of the sort. You are
barking up the wrong tree.”

“I once stared the bark off a tree I was so riled
up,” Fink offered as further qualification. He laughed and winked at Wharton.
“Too much time overseas in the sandbox dodging death this past decade will do
that to you. The relevance of my graduate work in the Special Forces
Qualification Course is that I have unique professional training and a record
of success in solving and analyzing complex problems. As I explained to the
senior partners, and this perhaps fails to come across in a limited reading of
a CV, there is a value in being able to establish networks of influence—”

“Influence,” Wharton repeated. “You are claiming to
have ac­quired this from the military?” Here was a hick who could not influence the next banjo number at a
hoedown—could Wharton get a witness among the kinfolk (because they’re all
related) messing around on the hay bales?—and yet Fink thought himself up to
CCG snuff. The true tragedy of these small-town military applicants not being
that bright was that they were unaware of it. Seeing how everyone else was
afraid of the possibility of veterans returning to the office and shooting up
the place, Wharton saw it as his duty not to coddle military candi­dates, but
rather to use the interview as a teaching moment to direct them to their
intellectual rung below dieticians. He did not doubt that they probably thought
his posture that of a cheese dick. But comport­ing yourself as such was part of
the game, be it assimilation of the fit­test douches. In Wharton’s CCG class,
there had been an ex–Naval Academy nuclear submariner who had lasted a year out
of the Houston office with his conventional mind-set, his pervasive logical
staleness onsite incapable of turning the client ship around. He’d even had a
gut.

“May I please just be allowed an opportunity—” But a
knock at the door cut Fink off before Wharton could cut him off again.

Nathan Ellison, a senior partner in his midforties
with the body and energy of a younger man able to both network around town at
all the right social gatherings and find time to teach Sunday school, stepped
inside. “Didn’t realize you were still doing an interview.” He apologized to
Wharton, then noticing Fink, asked, “Is Brock giving you a real pressure
cooker?”

“Can’t complain, no one’s shooting at me,” Fink
said, bounding up from the chair to straighten his corkscrew backbone into an
erect fig­ure of authority for a handshake, with a nod to Wharton. “Yet.” Their
hands met and held, arm wrestling blue veins popping out in the kind of
kingmaker handshake set aside for finalizing backroom palace coup plots. They
smiled at each other and continued to ignore Wharton as if he were a naked man
changing in their locker room row. “Only jest­ing. He’s great, Nate.”
Wharton brooded over the liberty taken with Nathan’s name, paraded as it was by
Fink, who no longer sniffed the air but deeply inhaled the noxious fumes that
he had introduced to the office.

It dismayed Wharton that the late-afternoon autumn
light from his window slightly softened the crags of Fink’s bird-of-prey
profile, the challenging mannerisms and hillbilly hostility of the hawk-nosed
dive bomber jettisoned for the litheness of the assassin, high on hash and his
mission, who moves limberly along the corridor wall in wait on the balls of his
feet. “Unlike our intellectual discussion, Brock and I were sparring about the
value in establishing networks of influ­ence onsite with clients. I suppose we
represent differing schools of thought”—Fink motioned with his hands to group
him and Nathan on one side against Wharton on the other—“regarding the best
method of how to mine pertinent data to achieve effective results. Just waiting
on him to give me the case, but if you two are in a rush to get to your
meeting, I am happy to skip over the bio part.”

“Can’t talk about it,” Nathan said, and turning to
Wharton added, “or he’d have to kill us.” Was the newly christened infantile
persona Nate, once a sober CCG senior partner by the honest Christian name of
Nathan, as high as Fink?

“Influence.” Fink flicked his wrist in the air to
snap an imaginary towel at Nathan, who laughed and closed the door. Fink’s
reciprocal laughter, forced to begin with, stopped the moment the door shut.

Wharton hypothesized that Fink’s true intellectual
capacity could be brought to the surface quite easily with the right
application. Deployed not to the Middle East but to the far more unsympathetic
region of high finance, how would Fink operate in the world of big money?

“Let’s play with some numbers. We have to know that
you are com­fortable with numbers and speak the language of the business world
while coming up with unconventional solutions to complex problems, as I recall
you endeavoring to frame it earlier. The best way for us to discern whether you
have the skill set required for the intellectually rigorous environment of
consulting is by walking you through a case and seeing how . . . you . . .
compete.”

“Mike Freedman writes with a distinct sensibility. His new novel King of the Mississippi throbs with humor and American exuberance.”

—Ha Jin, National Book Award winning author of Waiting and The Banished Immortal

“I like to win . . . in . . . life.”

Win? Was Fink attempting to commandeer winning,
the very ethos Wharton lived by? Wharton handed him four clean sheets of paper
and a clipboard with a pen attached. “How many in-flight meals were prepared on an average day
last year for flights from George Bush Intercontinental Airport?”

“Forty thousand.”

“Come again?”

“Forty thousand.”

Wharton could not have been felled harder had Fink
launched his entire gangly frame at his knees. In point of fact, Wharton
would have normally explained if Fink had not rendered him speechless, the cor­rect
answer to the market-sizing question was forty-three thousand after factoring
in the four thousand meals for the international flights. Wharton attempted to
salvage some dignity from this unfathomable opening checkmate that had always
stumped even the smartest busi­ness school students by an incorrect margin of
at least ten thousand. “Would you care to illustrate how you arrived at that
number?”

“For the reason that around forty thousand is the
right answer,” Fink charitably clarified.

“I am interested not in Hail Mary guesstimates but
your thought process. That you were on the runway for ten minutes and watched
two other planes touch down that you then multiplied by six to calculate how
many per hour. You then extrapolated out that there were three runways total
and each plane on average carried one hundred forty-five passengers. Which you
multiplied by twenty instead of twenty-four, as the time from midnight to four
in the morning is essentially a dead zone for departures. And that, of those
domestic flights, only twenty-five percent of them provided a meal service.”

“Which is how I arrived at around forty thousand
meals. Just do the math like you just did. I solved it like I had one shot, one
kill. Some of us applicants have been vetted—and I don’t mean at an investment
banking desk job playing with myself and numbers.”

Fink released a cackle of a laugh aimed to pierce
what patience Wharton had left. The Prohibition gangster–suited Brer Rabbit
across from him had duped Wharton into illustrating a method aloud that backed
Fink’s wild-ass guess, now claiming ownership of Wharton’s mathematical
reasoning. What next: squatter’s rights to Wharton’s office? After Fink’s
barrage of assaults on football, his manhood, and the nonvetted like himself who had played with
themselves while in­vestment banking, Wharton suspected that his colleague Piazza
was behind all of this. The explicit attack on investment banking by Fink was
an overplaying of the inside information he had been fed, reveal­ing the puppet
strings. It was time to cut them, as Fink was still an applicant applying for a
job at Wharton’s firm. Why hadn’t he stuck with the Dr Pepper case, a
straightforward branding case? Fink could not even articulate his own identity.
“You will need to write down your calculations and structure an outline for the
remaining part of the in­terview. And I will be collecting your notes when we
finish for confi­dentiality purposes.”

“I understand. You’re talking
to a holder of a Top Secret security clearance.”

It occurred to Wharton that
such a fact, if true, did not bode well for national security. Wharton got up
and walked to the window. “For the sake of simplicity, let us use the number
forty thousand meals a day.” He faced Fink and began the mad minute of firing.
“Our client, a company called Swanberry Foods, is responsible for fifteen
percent of the daily in-flight meals at George Bush Intercontinental Airport
with a profit margin of one dollar per meal—but the meals only stay edible for
eight hours. Recently, management at Swanberry Foods has been considering an
overhaul, moving to frozen meals that stay edible up to twenty-four hours,
enabling our client to increase its profit margin twenty-five percent per meal.
The technology and new equipment to switch to the frozen meals costs fifteen
million dollars over five years.” Fink’s pen lay untouched atop the paper.
“What would you advise our client to do under the circumstances? You may take a
minute to struc­ture your—”

“I’d pull the trigger and double down on this new technology if our client’s only objective is to maximize profit over the long run. You’ve got to roll the dice to make money.”

“Please demonstrate beyond the
usage of military and gambling metaphors how our client should strategically
approach this decision. This time, be so kind as to walk me through your
calculations that support your hypothesis after taking a moment.”

Fink held up his index finger
to Wharton and began to scribble manically. The same index finger reappeared
two more times sepa­rated by three-minute intervals between flashes. It took
all the reserve in Wharton not to snatch the finger on its third appearance and
break it.

“What do your numbers say?”
Wharton asked, putting an end to the longest ten-minute silence of his life.

“Profits of almost six million
dollars a year if Swanberry switches to the proposed plan. That’s before I
shave their fixed costs to trim them down.”

“I think you mean variable
costs,” Wharton said, allowing a laugh to escape at such amateur histrionics.
He leaned over to try and read the chicken scratch on the top piece of paper.
He was enjoying this and shook his head slowly at the illegible writing,
indubitably representa­tive of the mind that had dictated it. “God only knows
where, but I’m afraid you have an extra zero or two in there somewhere. I don’t
know where to begin helping you because I can’t make out a single number on
your paper. This is why a successful applicant will use this as a dia­logue
and voice aloud each major step in his or her explanation; that way we can help
guide you a little should you stumble in one of your calculations. Had you done
the math correctly, you would see that at their projected rate of sales
Swanberry would lose almost a quarter of a million dollars a year over the next
five years, and that it would take almost six years just to break even after
the investment if they could withstand the initial losses.”

“I was shooting for long term,
the big picture.”

Like the trajectory of a clay pigeon, Wharton had anticipated this
rationalization before he fired. “If you were thinking ‘long term’ and the ‘big
picture,’ you would have noted they needed to increase their market share by
marketing to airlines that their newly designed meals would last longer and
save the airlines money compared to the other products being offered by
competitors. Even acquire a competitor and streamline costs. And that’s only
after analyzing whether the indus­try is growing. You would have recommended
that they diversify with other products or at least expand their current market
into supermar­kets, hospitals, retirement
centers, prisons, and even your military base chow halls. And that is exactly
what we did, because I worked on this for eleven months—though the real company
was not called Swanberry.”

“Not bad, though, for ten minutes versus what took
you a year, right?”

Wharton did not bite on this tease designed to
distract him from closing in for the scalp. “Where’s your outline or structured
strategy? I need to collect your scratch paper as well.”

Fink first handed Wharton a sheet from the bottom,
the out­line. “There might be a gem or two buried in there y’all could use,” he
thought he heard Fink say as Wharton gazed transfixed on the only two things
written on the paper: profits = revenue –costs, and cir­cled below it, always
look at the revenue.

“ ‘Always look at the revenue.’ I don’t even know
what this means,” Wharton muttered in shock, letting the outline float down to
his desk. “This is your foundation?”

“Winning,” Fink instructed, standing up and tapping
with the fa­miliar index finger on the written equation at the top of the
outline. “Or in the more narrow terms of this particular world, maximizing
profits. In a wildcatting oil town like Houston, a thin line—”

“I must conclude this interview, for I have to
attend our office meeting,” Wharton said, rising from his chair and sparing
himself from Fink’s clichéd interpretation of the essence of Wharton’s home­town.
“Do you have any questions for me?”

Fink held up his hands as if about to make a
confession. “I’ve got nothing for you.”

Wharton thought it was the first valid point Fink had made.

Excerpted from King of the Mississippi, Copyright © 2019 by Mike Freedman. To be published by Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on July 9. Excerpt published on Wrath-Bearing Tree with permission.