My problems began when I whacked Dirk Jones over the head with a shovel. I surprised him more than I hurt him. Earlier in the week I’d been called into the supervisor’s office for my year-end review as a caseworker for Social Services. Pretty standard stuff, with the usual room-for-improvement lecture.

“I see you’ve got a couple of complaints filed against you, Bean,” Mr. Thompson said.

“Yes sir, but as you can see I—”

“Bean, we deal with the public—public perception’s everything, even if it’s wrong.”

“I understand sir, b—”

He held up his hand like a crossing guard and cut me off. I thought of palm trees, the sweet smell of coconut tanning oil and white sand sticking to the sweat on the tops of my feet. I had visions of sunsets, and I imagined the sounds of crashing waves in the darkness, fingers of mist tickling my face. I could see shadows of lovers on the beach floundering like sea otters while t—

“BEAN! You gettin’ this?”

“Yes SIR, Mr. Thompson SIR.”

“Sarcastic are we? I should…never mind. Dismissed, Bean.”

When I left his office, people’s heads popped from their cubicles like the moles from the Whac-A-Mole game at a carnival. And that’s what I felt like doing to each and every one of them.

Dirk Jones is one of my cases. He’s been imprisoned in a wheelchair since Nam. He was run over by a delivery truck in Saigon while he staggered down Hang Duong Boulevard blasted out of his gourd from too many mai tais. Dirk told everyone he lost his legs when he stepped on a land mine. I knew better. The facts from his file stated the truck flipped over after hitting Dirk, spilling its contents—ground pork—out onto the street, where it mixed with the remains of his legs. No one could figure out which meat was which.

On Friday of this particularly brutal week, I was finishing my rounds. As I walked down Fourth Street, I could see him circling round and round in his motorized wheelchair. He looked like one of those crazy toys, spiraling in the same spot as if held there by an invisible hand. He was talking to the ground. My eyes popped when I saw what he was doing. He was running over a rabbit. Over and over and over, mashing the thing into the sidewalk until its neck was as sheer as a pair of Betty Page’s nylons, legs jerking like a marionette. Old folks watched with jaws agape as Dirk went mad in front of the County Retirement Home. I grabbed a red plastic shovel next to the revolving doors and brought it down hard, smashing his hat around his head.

Thompson fired me. Lippman, Lowell and Bernstein took the case, and the press did a number on me. Now everyone points. No one seems to care that Mr. Muzzy, a gift from me to Dirk, rests in a box in my room like some ordinary road kill.