Silent Retreats by Philip F. Deaver

kids, can't stay home and be a mom because she has to work, so the kids watch television and get fat and flunk school and do dope; she endures hubby's flying tackle at bedtime if hubby still wants to tackle her, but she can't much pay the bills and can't continue to live without digging the credit hole deeper, and she worries all the time and that makes her ugly—what's the women's movement to a woman like that, eh, Martha, with your big ideas? And how many of those women flew down to Houston and got to shake Gloria's hand? Martha and I, we had a lot to discuss.
    There was no telling when we'd get the time, because work mercilessly absorbed us both, and of course I was a family man and a Chief, and Martha had a child and husband. In fact, Martha was married to one of the real, all-time ranking ass holes, a guy named Bill, who thought for a long time—he was then about thirty-five—that if he just never came home from work, if he went on every trip he could, if he drank every martini ever offered him by any executive in the next echelon up of Buckley-Formitron Digital (BFD), well, someday he'd be president of the whole damn company.
    And naturally the people at BFD loved that kind of old-fashioned ambition. They knew Bill was one of the all-time ranking assholes, but, in their case, this was a very big career plus. If he could harness and sustain the energy and determination which made him the asshole he was, and could get some experience in the world of hard knocks, they knew that there was virtually no limit to the asshole Bill could become.
    His one real drawback, however, was major by any standard and caused BFD executives to shake their heads, rub their chins, and pace. BFD was a forward-looking outfit and very much into personnel development (PD, they called it), and there was a lot that the BFD PD consultants and specialists could handle in the way of drawbacks and deficiencies if they had the right raw material , so to speak. And ordinarily they would not hesitate to invest in a comer like Bill. But in Bill's particular case, because he was such a broad-based and wide ranging asshole, the company was frankly hesitant to invest in his executive development. With an asshole of this proportion, they were into an area of numerous unknowns. They knew, for instance, there was an odds-on chance someone would kill Bill and, with that, negate a very significant PD investment. They hadn't become great by taking crazy chances.
    There had already been an attempt on this gentleman's young life. As a practical joke, when he was breaking in with the company down in Dallas, he peed in the Listerine bottle of the guy he was on the road with, a redneck salesman from South Texas with flat ears, walleyes, and no discernible sense of humor. For Bill—Martha calls him William—for William, this joke was enormously funny; for the redneck who gargled the pee—well, two days later he caught Bill on the freeway en route to the airport and opened fire on him with a thirty-aught-six. Although he missed Bill himself, he put a three inch hole in the door of the company car and blew the steering wheel off its mounting, causing a fantastic wreck to occur. Bill was in the hospital ten weeks with broken ribs, broken toes, and a broken face. Of course, the company had to pick up the tab. There was a rumor, unconfirmed, that someone in BFD's personnel development section turned in the redneck for spite, maybe because he missed. Anyway, he's still locked up down at Richmond.
    When Martha got back from Houston and hung over my desk, talking about women's liberation and sexual harassment on the job, her small, pale breasts visible in the shadows beneath the crisp drapings of her blouse, I determined that I would have to quite soon make every attempt to explain some things to that girl.
    So one evening (it was my wife's racquetball night and Scott went with a friend to Star Wars for the second time in two weeks) I slipped over to