The Contractors

"Who did you see there that night?"

"Well, the Reverend Cretin Lovelace. He works for Equipment Express. That's based in the northwestern Indiana community of Rolling Prairie"

"And what kind of company is that?"

"They make machinery for packaging liquids"

"What kind of people work there?"

"They are burly employees: violent, dirty, unruly. Many of these same employees are unemployed and express themselves with difficulty. They smell of promiscuous troublemakers' helplessness. 'To the airport!' they cry-- the airport, in itself, a fortress"

"What about Brunhoffer, what was he like?"

"Well, to relax, Brunhoffer went on long runs, drove to an empty field to listen to the wind, or cross-stitched for bowl-overs"

"Did anyone scream anything?"

"They screamed, 'Kill him!' as they ran towards him carrying large rocks"

"Was anyone from KBR there?"

"Former KBR supervisor Steve Powell said, 'They do all the grunt jobs, but a lot of them are top notch'"

"Did Brunhoffer want to go back?"

"Well, Brunhoffer would rather throw himself off a balcony than go back to the kink-pants managers with their ineptitudes, MBAs, and verbal attacks"

"Did you tell him anything?"

"'Don't go,' we told him, 'it's not worth the suffering'"

"Do you have a personal opinion about...?"

"Backwater work in a hurricane equals the contractors being the brownshirts. Utilizing clawback payments, blisters, blood, choking, and probably nerve agents"

"What else did you see?"

"Um... White smoke billowed into the sky from the brick-red water, suggesting the repeated use of a spiked knuckle duster"

"Did anyone from the Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation say anything?"

"Well, David Novak, the chief executive of Louisville-based Yum brands, KFC's parent, said that back of the envelope, Kentucky Fried Chicken is the one big trend that's going on in the world today. Except we're the chicken capital of the USA"

"Thank you very much, that's all for today"