The Corrections

mess?”
    “Ed,” Don Armour said, fanning cards, “you gotta be careful with those bananas.”
    Ed Alberding, the most senior draftsman, had a body shaped like a bowling pin and curly gray hair like an old lady’s perm. He was blinking rapidly as he chewed banana and studied his cards. The banana, peeled, lay on the table in front of him. He broke off another dainty bite.
    “Awful lot of potassium in a banana,” Don Armour said.
    “Potassium’s good for you,” Lamar said from across the table.
    Don Armour set his cards down and regarded Lamar gravely. “Are you joking? Doctors use potassium to induce cardiac arrest.”
    “Οl’ Eddie eats two, three bananas every day,” Lamar said. “How’s that heart of yours feelin’, Mr. Ed?”
    “Let’s just play the hand here, boys,” Ed said.
    “But I’m terribly concerned about your health,” Don Armour said.
    “You tell too many lies, mister.”
    “Day after day I see you ingesting toxic potassium. It’s my duty as a friend to warn you.”
    “Your trick, Don.”
    “Put a card down, Don.”
    “And in return all I get,” Armour said in an injured tone, “is suspicion and denial.”
    “Donald, you in this game or just keepin’ that seat warm?”
    “Of course, if Ed were to keel over dead of cardiac arrest, due to acute long-term potassium poisoning, that would make me fourth highest in seniority and secure me a place in Little Rock with the Arkansas Southern slash Midland Pacific, so why am I even mentioning this? Please, Ed, eat my banana, too.”
    “Hee hee, watch your mouth,” Lamar said.
    “Gentlemen, I believe these tricks are all mine.”
    “Son of a gun!”
    Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap.
    “Ed, you know, they got computers down in Little Rock,” Don Armour said, never glancing at Denise.
    “Uh-oh,” Ed said. “Computers?”
    “You go down there, I’m warning you, they’re going to make you learn to use one.”
    “Eddie’ll be asleep with angels before he learns computers,” Lamar said.
    “I beg to differ,” Don said. “Ed’s going to go to Little Rock and learn computer drafting. He’s going to make somebody else sick to their stomach with his bananas.”
    “Say, Donald, what makes you so sure you ain’t going to Little Rock yourself?”
    Don shook his head. “We’d spend two, three thousand dollars less a year if we lived in Little Rock, and pretty soon I’d be making a couple thousand a year more. It’s cheap down there. Patty could work maybe half days, let the girls have a mother again. We could buy some land in the Ozarks before the girls got too old to enjoy it. Someplace with a pond. You think anybody’s gonna let that happen to me?”
    Ed was sorting his cards with the nervous twitches of a chipmunk. “What do they need computers for?” he said.
    “To replace useless old men with,” Don said, his plum face splitting open with an unkind smile.
    “Replace us?”
    “Why do you think the Wroths are buying us out and not the other way around?”
    Shuffle, shuffle. Slap, slap. Denise watched the sky stick forks of lightning into the salad of trees on the Illinois horizon. While her head was turned, there was an explosion at the table.
    “Jesus Christ, Ed,” Don Armour said, “why don’t you just go ahead and lick those before you put them down?”
    “Easy there, Don,” said Sam Beuerlein, the chief of draftsmen.
    “Am I alone in this turning my stomach?”
    “Easy. Easy.”
    Don threw his cards down and shoved off in his rolling chair so violently that the praying-mantis drafting light creaked and swayed. “Laredo,” he called, “come take my cards. I gotta get some banana-free air.”
    “Easy.”
    Don shook his head. “It’s say it now, Sam, or go crazy when the buyout happens.”
    “You’re a smart man, Don,” Beuerlein said. “You’ll land on your feet no matter what.”
    “I don’t know about smart. I’m not half as smart as Ed. Am I, Ed?”
    Ed’s nose twitched. He tapped the table with his cards impatiently.
    “Too young for Korea, too old for my war,” Don said. “That’s what I call smart. Smart enough to get off the bus and cross Olive Street every morning for twenty-five years without getting hit by a car. Smart enough to get back on it every night. That’s what counts for smart in this world.”
    Sam Beuerlein raised his voice. “Don, now, you listen to me. You go take a walk, you hear? Go outside and cool down. When you get back, you may decide you owe Eddie an