“I booked a laptop and a projector for this morning.” Paul came up to the desk and tried to see what Callie was reading. She shoved it into the kneehole of the desk.
“Let’s go, um, check the sign-out sheet,” she said, in her subdued drawl. Under the desk she let go of the volume she was holding, and it made a phonebook-sized thump on the floor. Paul backed up as Callie came around the desk, still blushing. She was easily as tall as Paul, maybe even an inch or two taller. She was also very pale, and Paul swore he could feel the heat from her blazing face as she passed. Standing behind her as she bent over the sign-out book on the desk in the other room, he let his eyes drift down Callie’s long waist to her full hips, admiring the tautness of her t-shirt.
Paul backed up as she moved to the shelves. She handed him a laptop without a word, then lifted her long arms and forcefully yanked a bulky video projector off an upper shelf. Paul admired the sudden definition of her upper arm as she lowered the projector onto its little wheels and jerked the towing handle out of its slot. Paul dipped his head and saw a thick volume on the floor under the desk, a computer manual perhaps or an almanac. Callie has aspirations, thought Paul. Don’t we all?
“Don’t forget to sign it in again,” she said, deftly kicking the book under the desk out of sight, “when you bring it back.” Fergit, she said, and brang. Paul smiled at her as he backed out of the office lugging the laptop and dragging the projector on its little wheels, but she had stooped under the desk to retrieve her book and wasn’t watching him.
In the conference room, Paul hoisted the projector with a grunt onto the conference table — damn, she must work out, he thought, flashing on Callie’s biceps — and plugged both units into the wall and into each other. He started the laptop and dashed back to his cube for the PowerPoint disk as well as the stack of RFPs he’d copied during his fit of conscientiousness yesterday. He placed a copy in front of every chair around the table, then he yanked down the screen at the end of the room and fired up the projector and ran quickly through the slideshow. He clicked on the last slide just as Rick came in the door leading the maintenance managers and the rest of the RFP team. The men distributed themselves around the table in a basso rumble of bonhomie and joshing. Rick edged down the room to sit at the end of the table, with Paul at his right hand.
“This cheer’s our technical writer,” Rick announced, and all eyes turned to Paul. “He used to be an English professor, so make sure you dot your p’s and q’s.”
Paul’s face got hot, and he hoped he wasn’t blushing as bright as Callie had.
“Tech writer?” The Colonel settled into the chair on Paul’s right and gave him a long look. “Since when?”
“Since yesterday,” mumbled Paul, desperate to change the subject. “The PowerPoint thing is all loaded and ready to go,” he said to Rick, pushing over a copy of the slideshow’s script.
“Way-ul, let’s try this shoe on and see who salutes,” said Rick. “Somebody get the lights and shut the door.”
“Tech writer,” said the Colonel, regarding Paul sidelong. “Huh.”
The projector’s little fan hummed as the first slide flashed on the screen at the far end of the table. In the pearly reflection of the screen, Paul noted that the visiting managers all sat on one side of the table, the RFP team on the other. To Paul’s right sat the Colonel, leaning forward on his elbows with his hands manfully clasped, as if he were in a briefing room at the Pentagon. On the other side of him, J.J. slumped in his chair, glowering at the screen, while in the chair beyond him Bob Wier nodded solemnly as Rick clicked to the next slide, which read:
Districts Selected
1. Odessa
2. San Antonio
3. Nacogdoches
“This is y’all,” said Rick, which wasn’t in the script. “Your names in lights.”
“Ain’t we lucky,” said the Nacogdoches manager dryly. The other two managers looked on impassively. Odessa was a thin, balding, colorless guy with a turquoise belt buckle who looked like he’d rather be someplace else; San Antonio was a barrel-chested, bullet-headed Mexican American with a canny light in his eye. But the focus of the room, the one man Rick seemed to direct his pitch to, was the Nacogdoches manager, a big, raw-boned, slope-shouldered East Texan, who scowled at the screen. He had found a seat at the corner of the table that allowed him to stretch his long legs, and now he sat with his big hand on the table, drumming his enormous fingers a little more slowly with each successive slide. In the presence of the man’s obvious displeasure, Paul was glad he had deleted the obnoxious little animations from the presentation. Rick, however, scarcely seemed to notice the man’s disdain, narrating the presentation in his usual clipped singsong. The Colonel kept interrupting, plucking a laser pointer from his breast pocket—“Rick, if I may?”—and directing the managers’ attention to a particular bullet point with a wobbly little red dot. He spoke to Nacogdoches directly, man to man.
“Now if you think about it, Mike,” he said, in the hearty manner of a general addressing his officers informally, “half the time your boys are sitting on their behinds. They’re on the clock whether they have anything to do or not.” The laser dot danced across the screen. “Now, with a private vendor, we can work it so we’re only paying ’em when they’re actually turning wrenches.”
“Well hell, how much cheaper you want it done?” Nacogdoches’s big paw lay still on the tabletop. “Half my guys’re on food stamps, that’s how well the state of Texas pays ’em to sit on their behinds.”
Before anyone could answer that, San Antonio chimed in. “Your private vendor. He gonna come out in the rain, in the middle of the night, when I got a loader broke down halfway to Uvalde?”
“Now that’s a fantastic point,” said Bob Wier, selfconsciously enthusiastic. “We’re real glad you brought that up, Tom.”
“The thing is,” said Nacogdoches, drumming his fingers again. Everyone else fell silent, leaving only the whirr of the laptop and the hum of the projector’s fan. The staticky heat off the projector’s bulb was beginning to cancel out the air-conditioning.
“I’m sure y’all put a lot of work on this.” He laid his hand on the copy of the RFP on the table before him; like the other managers, he had not touched it yet. “And I appreciate that.” He hefted the document and let it drop. “But don’t take a dog turd and dress it up like a popsicle and expect us to lick it.”
The room erupted in laughter, and Rick took the opportunity to suggest a coffee break. Bob Wier leaped up, switched on the lights, and offered to lead the managers to the coffeepot. Odessa, San Antonio, and J.J. followed him out, while Rick bounded off on his own. The Colonel switched off his laser pointer and clipped it back in his shirt pocket. He edged round the table and paused with his hand on the doorsill, as if he might say something to the Nacogdoches manager, but then he ducked his head and went out. Paul leaned across the table and switched off the hot bulb of the projector, then put the laptop on standby.
“You don’t say much.”
Paul glanced up. Nacogdoches still leaned back in his chair, his cowboy boot crossed over one knee, his hand still on the conference table. But now he was watching Paul, sizing him up.