Simple Grifts Read online

  Contents

  Copyright © 2019 Max Cossack

  What Readers Say

  Zarah's Fire

  Dedication

  Thoughts

  1 Gus Dropo

  2 Professor Soren Pafko

  3 Gloria Fiorenzi

  4 Flo Thorpe

  5 Struggle Session

  6 A Madhouse Saturday Night

  7 The Lunker

  8 Sunday in the Jackpines

  9 We’re Going to a Party Party

  10 Triggered

  11 Well Met in Ojibwa City

  12 A Man And His Plan

  13 Hard Bargaining

  14 Welcher’s Remorse

  15 Soren’s Exciting Discovery

  16 Sven’s Hot Mug

  17 Roper

  18 Tania

  19 The Magnifying Glass

  20 Señor Abarca

  21 Deirdre’s Place

  22 Claude Rivelle

  23 Soren’s Hope

  24 Mattie Wants A Lead Role

  25 Fate Walks In

  26 Gloria Spots A Snag

  27 A Wrinkle In The Plan

  28 A Disgruntled Roper

  29 Gus In Action

  30 Credit Where Credit Is Due

  32 Fake!

  33 Soren at the Bank

  34 This White Man

  35 The Breakdown

  36 The Breakup

  37 Abarca’s Big Offer

  38 Two Tracks Rolling

  39 The Big Test

  40 Mattie Takes Center Stage

  41 Me, Too

  42 Sylvia

  43 Mutual Guardians

  44 Roper’s Betrayal

  45 Mazal Tov

  46 Local Math Genius Prevails In Court

  47 Soren Hides Out

  48 Sunday in the Yard With Gus

  Author's Afterword

  Max Cossack

  Simple Grifts

  A Comedy of Social Justice

  Copyright © 2019 Max Cossack

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-7337313-2-4

  All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American copyright conventions. Without written permission of the author no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or down-loaded by any means electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, down-loading, or reverse engineering, nor may it be stored or otherwise introduced into any information storage and retrieval system by any means now known or hereafter invented.

  This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are the products of the author's imagination and are fictitious and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons or organizations living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Other Novels by Max Cossack:

  Khaybar, Minnesota

  Zarah’s Fire

  Other books published by VWAM include:

  By Susan Vass:

  Ammo Grrrll Hits The Target (Volume 1)

  Ammo Grrrll Aims True (Volume 2)

  Ammo Grrrll Returns Fire (Volume 3)

  Ammo Grrrll Home On The Range (Volume 4)

  What Readers Say

  about Max Cossack’s consensus 5-Star First Novel

  “Khaybar, Minnesota”

  “Frighteningly possible story, well told.”

  “A fast-paced pleasurable read.”

  “A great read, a great story and (unfortunately) extremely topical”

  “You won’t be able to put it down.”

  “Tremendous first novel.”

  “An entertaining tale which I enjoyed enough to read twice”

  “Great read! Hard to believe this is the first book by this author. He hit all the high notes with a timely, believable plot, interesting characters and authentic dialog…Get this book, you won’t be disappointed.”

  Zarah's Fire

  Max’s Second Novel

  Nine-year old Zarah struggles to escape the human traffickers who kidnapped her to a secluded compound thousands of miles from home. In her desperate flight across a treacherous foreign desert, she must overcome blistering summer heat, hunger, thirst, and predators while evading her kidnappers and their allies among narcotraffickers. Meanwhile, she has friends she does not know about, who go all out to find and save her.

  Some excerpts from early reviews:

  “Sweet, funny, extremely well written. More please.”

  “Seamless continuation from Khaybar, Minnesota…the character's voices sound authentic. The author didn't stuff words into their mouths to make them caricatures, their words flow naturally from the character's point of view…Attention to details makes the characters believable and the story captivating…I'm ready for Book 3. What's the hold-up, Max?”

  “New author? Wow!…Oh please, keep them coming! “

  “Bravo! I liked Max Cossack's first book, but I liked this one even more. In Zarah's Fire, Cossack ably juggles multiple plot lines, all of which are interesting and, surprisingly, very educational! The characters are engaging, the plotting is focused, and the writing is smooth and unforced, including a deft skewering of political correctness on campus run amok.”

  “Max delivers another home run!”

  Dedication

  For all victims great and small,

  of all totalitarianism, great and small

  Thoughts

  כל מי שנעשה רחמן במקום אכזרי

  סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

  (or, very roughly, in contemporary terms:)

  “To be kind to the cruel is to be cruel to the kind.”

  Babylonian Talmud, Qohelet Raba, 7:16

  “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

  ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelag 1918-1956

  1 Gus Dropo

  The first time Gus laid eyes on Professor Soren Pafko, Gus’s inner sociopath detector went haywire.

  It wasn’t the scale and relative luxury of Pafko’s office, which took up the entire top floor of a minor mansion some nineteenth century lumber baron had bequeathed the College.

  But how many college professors rate a private bathroom? And Gus could see both a tub and a walk-in shower through the door.

  Nor was it the placards leaning against the wall. In his time, Gus himself had picked up his own petty cash picketing for dollars, although it seemed unlikely that poverty had driven Pafko to stoop so low, considering the thirty-thousand-dollar Krencker-brand bicycle over in the corner.

  Nor was it the big poster of Chairman Mao with its sinister black Chinese letters, nor the giant one of Che Guevara, though Gus recalled that his buddy Hack Wilder—who unlike Gus read history books—had once mentioned that, despite his movie idol looks, Che was just your standard-issue psycho killer.

  Gus had seen dozens of Che posters around the Ojibwa campus. Everybody who displayed one couldn’t be psycho.

  It wasn’t even the huge red banner hanging on the wall behind Pafko’s desk, emblazoned with a black fist crossing over a black sickle, below them this legend in bold black cursive: “Democratic Communists of America.”

  No, it was the man himself.

  Professor Pafko was an animated smiling man who beamed at Gus with a show of warmth. He leaned his hands on the enormous walnut desk in front of him. He rested his chin on his tented fingers and peered over at Gus with merry bright blue eyes that sparkled with the over-abundant good will of a dime-s
tore Santa.

  Pafko’s ensemble—and it was an ensemble—leaned towards earth tones: tan twill slacks and brown tweed jacket but a red checked flannel shirt proletarianizing his look.

  The man looked trim. Gus supposed the bicycle loomed large in the man’s almost superfluous fitness, along with abundant hours in the gym and, Gus guessed, a miser’s diet. Pafko compensated for the balding spot in front with a feeble not-quite-pony tail which trickled down the back of his neck and failed to reach his shoulder

  On his side of the desk, Gus teetered on an eco-friendly wicker visitor chair, undersized and rickety beneath him. Gus kept shifting his weight to reduce the jabs from the rattan poking his thighs. He wondered how long before the frail thing collapsed and dumped him butt first onto the plush Afghan rug.

  Pafko nodded from behind his digital tepee. “Yes. LG Dropo. Fine young man.”

  “You flunked him.”

  Pafko nodded. “Not me personally, you understand. It was my Teaching Assistant Mason Offenbach who made the initial determination.”

  “So, I should be talking to this Offenbach dude instead of you?”

  “Actually, I’d prefer not. This is Mason’s first semester teaching here, and he has no experience coping with the local parental variety. I can answer any questions.”

  “And you have the final say anyway?”

  “It’s a collective decision.”

  “But you didn’t overrule him,” Gus said.

  “I rely primarily on Mason’s insights.”

  Gus paused to forge a mental path through the maze of circular reasoning. Then, “Since you are the ultimate decisionmaker and the adult in the room, I’m here to see you. Normally I stay out of LG’s business. He’s smarter than me anyway. But he’s after early admission to the University. The ‘F’ could kill his chances.”

  “The ‘F’ will kill his chances.” Pafko leaned back in his swivel chair and spread his hands out before him in a friendly gesture signifying openness and cooperation. “And I want to help LG as much as I can.”

  Gus said, “So my natural first question is why does he have to take this ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ course in the first place?”

  “The University requires it for early admission.” Pafko spread his hands out in a repeat of the previous gesture, this time signifying the unfortunate supplemental reality that, despite his powerful desire to help, there was nothing he could do. “And this was just an introductory course. If he does make it into the University, he’ll have to study the subject in depth to graduate.”

  “I looked at your stuff. What’s social inequality or intersectionality or race marginality got to do with engineering?”

  “We are all grappling with the extent to which problematic and hierarchical western male-oriented ways of thinking generate traditional engineering.”

  “There’s some other kind of engineering?”

  Pafko tilted his head in an expression apparently intended to suggest he was giving Gus’s question deep thought. “There must be. After all, there is more than one way of knowing. What we once accepted uncritically as objective scientific knowledge turns out to be gendered, raced and colonizing. We need to decolonize in order to build a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education.”

  “We do?”

  “Indeed. And Mason reports that your son has been quite vocal in rejecting that most fundamental principle. LG has absolutely refused to concede his own colonialist privileged upbringing and to see things from other perspectives.”

  “LG does that?”

  “Yes. In fact, in a class discussion, he said something other students experienced as colonialist, sexist, racist, cisnormative, phallocentric, transphobic and white supremacist.”

  “All at once?”

  “He claimed that people who accused math and physics of being white supremacist”—Pafko consulted a yellow sheet of paper off his desk—”in your son’s words, ‘they’re too lazy or maybe just plain too stupid to do the hard work’.” Pafko laid the paper back down. “He labelled people’s concerns ‘sour grapes’. He said they wouldn’t or couldn’t ‘hack it’, to use his offensive expression.”

  “My.”

  Pafko said, “As you expect, people were offended.”

  “I bet.”

  “Yes. Students felt their own perspectives disrespected. He was erasing them. We can’t have that.” As he spoke the final sentence, Pafko was nodding his head. He clearly expected that it would be just as obvious to Gus as it was to him what we could have and what we could not have.

  “I see.” But Gus didn’t really see what Pafko was yammering on about. What he did see was that LG was getting screwed for expressing an opinion, an opinion that sounded obvious. He supposed now wasn’t the time to say that last part.

  “I’m glad you see.” Pafko leaned forward and placed his elbows on his desk and tented his fingers again and beamed at his precocious adult remedial.

  “So, what’s the solution?”

  “An apology would be a good start.”

  “I agree.”

  “Great!” Pafko leaned back again but kept his fingers tented.

  Gus wondered if the man’s fingertips were glued together, like the guy in that comedy movie—what was its name? “And when will you and this Offenbach guy be apologizing to LG?”

  A frown clouded Pafko’s sunny expression. “I’ll take that as an ill-conceived attempt at humor. No, what we need is a demonstration that LG understands his position of privilege.”

  “LG grew up in a hundred-fifty-year-old house on the edge of the jackpine wilderness. When I first got it from my own father, there was no indoor plumbing. I just put in central heat two years ago. We get by on my salary as a part-time maintenance man at the College here.”

  Which was only partly true, since Gus augmented his intermittent meagre paychecks with often spectacular earnings from private enterprises. But Pafko had no more need to know about those than did the IRS.

  “I suppose it’s no surprise that white fragility enters the picture here,” Pafko said in a warm supportive tone.

  “Fragility?” No one had ever called Gus fragile before. Coming from this twerp, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  The professor continued. “Yes. Most white people face challenges having their assumptions challenged, if you’ll excuse the play on words. LG will benefit from recognizing his privilege as a white male. Hopefully that recognition will become the first step in a process by which other students can become comfortable with him. He can begin to grow out of the limitations of his upbringing.”

  “His upbringing by me, you mean?” Gus leaned forward and stiffened his thighs to hold himself up above his flimsy chair and tented his own fingers in front of his face. Now Pafko’s office contained two men gazing at each other over digital tepees.

  Pafko gave no sign he found anything odd in their postures. “Don’t concern yourself too much, Mr. Dropo. I’ve dealt with this situation many times these past few years and I’ve got a good handle on how to handle it, if you’ll excuse another play on words.”

  Gus said nothing.

  Pafko continued, “In fact, I designed the Diversity and Inclusion course myself.”

  No surprise there. “What happens now?”

  “Your goal and my goal are the same. We both want LG admitted to the University, where he can take advantage of the University’s rich vital exchange of ideas and experiences from individuals of diverse backgrounds.”

  That last bit sounded memorized. Of course—Gus had seen it embossed in one of the University’s multi-colored foil-stamped University brochures. Gus said, “So what next?”

  “LG apologizes and retakes the course.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  Pafko leaned back, serene as any potentate on his swivel throne. He smiled. He beamed. His blue eyes sparkled and twinkled. “No apology, no University. No university, no degree. No degree, no engineer.”

  2 Professor Soren Pafko
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br />   As soon as Soren could hustle the Dropo yokel out through his door, he picked up his desk phone and called Mason, who answered on the third ring.

  “Yes, Soren?”

  “Did Gus Dropo approach you?”

  “Who?”

  “Gus Dropo. LG’s father. The hick father of that big nerd we failed.”

  “No, haven’t heard from him.”

  “Well, if you do, don’t talk to him. Not a word. Just bounce him back to me.”

  “Sure,” Mason said. “What’s this about?”

  “He was in my office just now lobbying for a passing grade.”

  “Ahh.”

  “If he shows up, don’t talk to him.”

  Mason said in a mild tone, “Got it.”

  Just in case, Soren dosed him with Soren’s second-favorite revolutionary quote: “Keep in mind what Che said: ‘To execute a man we don't need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. It's that simple.’”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “And in this case, it’s simple. The ‘F’ is necessary.”

  “Exactly. So whatever else you do, don’t raise that grade.” Soren hung up.

  For the time being Soren was holding back his first favorite Che quote. Mason hadn’t yet developed sufficiently in his revolutionary consciousness. “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!”

  The Wall was where Che stood his class enemies before firing squads in revolutionary Cuba. The DCA was not yet strong enough to line up bankers and other counterrevolutionary punks like the Dropos against the DCA’s own American Wall.

  For now, the closest Soren could come was to grade on a political curve. He knew that would pay off for the Revolution in the long run.

  And it was a good place for Mason to start. Mason was unusual. He had both engineering chops and nascent political consciousness. After Soren met Mason at a Chicago conference, Soren had recruited Mason to teach Engineering at Ojibwa College of Minnesota. Mason was the first cadre in Soren’s long-term plan. Soren and the DCA had achieved general political consensus in most of the other departments, but reactionary so-called “science” departments like Engineering lagged back in stubborn resistance.