The Ant Farm

By Neil Hetzner

When Gene Almsson is forced into retirement after more than thirty years traveling the country helping the poultry industry, he finds it hard to go from advising wealthy people and earning their praise to doing dishes and finding ways to pass the time. He doesn't like his new life and he likes it even less when his daughter and one year old granddaughter move in.

Gene had spent decades finding ways to minimize his time at a home he thought of as an ant farm. Now, at sixty-three he is in the middle of it. His wife, Maryellen has a yarn store and insists she is done with nurturing. His daughter, Trish, seems to want what is best for her daughter as long as it doesn't take up any of her own time or money. Khloe, the one year old, wants and wants and wants and Gene always seems to be a step behind and a skill short of taking care of her unending, inexplicable wants.

It isn't long before Gene starts scheming how he can make his second escape from The Ant Farm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Hetzner
• Release date: Jul 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985603151

Neil Hetzner

Neil (aka C.N.) Hetzner is married, has two children, and lives a mile from the edge of the continent in Rhode Island. Since his inauspicious birth in Indiana in 1948 he has worked as a cook, millwright, newspaper columnist, business professor, vacuumist, printer's assistant, landscaper, railroader, caterer, factory worker, consulting editor, and, currently, real estate agent. In addition to working, which he likes a lot, and writing, which he likes even more, he enjoys reading, weaving, cooking, and intrepidly screwing up house repairs. His writing runs the gamut from young adult futurism to stories about the intricacies of families; however, if there is a theme that links his writing, it is the complicated and miraculous mathematics of mercy.

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THE ANT FARM

By

NEIL HETZNER

The Ant Farm

Published by Neil Hetzner at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Neil Hetzner

This work is dedicated to Michael Donohue, the antithesis of my main character, who gladly shares his great intelligence with the poultry industry and his care and love with his family and friends.

Prologue

June 1977

At the time of Tisha’s birth, Gene Almsson was twenty-seven. He was thirty-three when it became clear to him that something needed to change.

Gene was standing in the kitchen alongside his wife Maryellen. She was slicing a cucumber. He was spinning romaine leaves. Two year old Lora was rhythmically bouncing off his left thigh and Maryellen’s right thigh hypnotically repeating, Mommy! Daddy! Uppy! Uppy! Four year old Adele was to Gene’s right, jumping up and down trying to grab the salad spinner while shrieking, Let me, Dad-dy! Let me, Dad-dy! Let me spin! They’re all dead! Dead! All dead! My queen is dead! screeched six year old Tisha as she staggered into the kitchen holding the glass case of her ant farm.

They weren’t all dead. Hundreds were, but not all. In the same way that the world was slow to assign blame to what had occurred in certain Kurdish villages, the benefit of the doubt as to what caused the massacre of Tisha’s pet insects was extended to Adele even though a nearly empty can of Raid was found in her bedroom closet. That evening while he tried to console Tisha, Gene looked at the dozen surviving ants, staggering around like Ash Wednesday morning Mardi Gras revelers, saw the quiet that had replaced the frenetic teeming of the ant farm, and knew that something had to change.

CHAPTER ONE

JANUARY 2007

Gene! Gene Almsson! Hey, Big Bear! What’s it been? Six months?

Sixty-two year old Gene Almsson, a six foot four, balding, two hundred thirty pound well known source of knowledge and bonhomie in the poultry industry had just come down the ramp and stepped onto the concourse of Hart International Airport when he heard his name called. He had been fourth off the plane and first onto the concourse, which was a small, but important, victory for Gene. Now, just seconds later, he had his first contact. With a start like that, Gene knew it was going to be a great IPE convention.

Gene, along with 20,000 others, was in Atlanta for the annual International Poultry Expo. Knowing from past experience that he very likely was going to run into people he knew even before leaving the airport, Gene had switched his carry-on to his left shoulder to keep his right hand free. Now, after less than ten seconds on the concourse, he had Alan Delt’s hand in his. Was that a new record? Firing up his best smile, a re-arrangement of flesh that lifted his jowly cheeks up closer to his gleaming bald head in a way that gave him a benign Jack O’ Lantern look, Gene finished his greeting by sliding his hand up Delt’s arm to give his biceps a sincere squeeze.

Al, how are you? I’ve been looking at your numbers. It look like you’ve got that water usage problem all fixed.

Well, some fixed, if not all fixed. Thanks to you, Bear.

Gene shook off Delt’s praise. Thanks to you yourself, Al. It takes good management to make good changes. All I can do is point out the discrepancies and anomalies.

Be humble as a dying sinful man before his God, Big Bear, but there’s a few more quarters jingling in my pockets because of you.

Speaking of jingling did you hear the one where Mother Teresa’s sitting in a bar in Calcutta nursing a brew when who walks in but Dolly Parton…

By the time he left the chilled manufactured air of the terminal, Gene had four other IPE attendees in tow. They boarded the shuttle and traded all-feather stories as they headed downtown to their hotel.

Gene Almsson was in his twenty-ninth year of working for Poultristics as a consultant to the poultry industry. Poultristics collected data from the all of the major and many of the minor players in the $32 billion dollar poultry industry. It used that data to establish benchmarks. Gene’s job was to take an individual company, whether it was involved in breeder stock, egg production, broiler raising or processing, turkey production, or a half-dozen other market segments and show where it was excelling and where it was falling short. Gene’s insights came from spending hours every night of the work week in motels and hotels across America and Canada studying the data his company collected, aggregated, and massaged. Even before he walked through the front door of a sprawling processing plant, whether on the Eastern Shore, hunkered down in Arkansas or Georgia, Gene could tell the owner that 2.23 more ounces of water were being used by the plant to process each and every one of the thousands of broilers killed each week than the mean water use of the competition. He could tell you if your processors were as effective getting the last strings of meat off a carcass as the competition. Just about everyone in the poultry industry knew Gene Almsson, and almost all of them agreed that no one knew the nitty-gritty of the industry better than Gene. Big Bear Almsson knew the data. Not only knew it, but could present it with clarity and with a bit of self-deprecating humor that made the bad news, when it came, easier to swallow.

An ostrich and an eagle walk into a tanning salon….

Gene Almsson had spent almost three decades sitting in pastel colored plastic bucket seats in regional airports, wrestling with rust-rimed motel air conditioners and moving up the techno-evolutionary scale from over-head projector to lap top, laser pointer, white screen and smart phone. Gene’s dedication and expertise were well-rewarded beyond bear hugs and handshakes. Over the last five years of his career, Gene had been paid an annual salary over $200,000 before his bonus.

As he always did on the first night of the IPE convention, Gene’s boss, Dave Spicer, the owner of Poultristics, hosted a hospitality room. Poultristics had been started by Spicer, a Ph. D agri-economist out of Cornell and the University of Chicago almost thirty-five years ago. Whip smart and rickets thin, with a horse-shaped head that bobbled like a balloon on his tall stick of a body, Dave had taken one of Nature’s fiercest-faced and fantastically feathered creatures and reduced it to a series of data matrices. Head pecking, priority shrieking, blood spurting animals, as well as patties and nuggets and cases of frozen chicken feet bound for China, were fit to spreadsheets, colored charts and graphs.

With that transformation Dave got rich, and Gene got well-off and most importantly, at least in the early years, well away from his home.

When Gene walked in, his first thought was same ole, same ole. Although most of the guests were on the side of the room with the bar and food, holding drinks and sticks of chicken sate, or slices of chicken roll-ups, Dave was on the other side of the room with his back to the wall, looking uncomfortable as he listened to Mitch Camburst of Greentrim Farms. Ever since he had first gone to work for him, Gene had thought that Dave Spicer and hospitality were two words that did not naturally flow together. There was no doubt that Dave was smart. A master’s in Applied Econ from Cornell and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago attested to that. There was no doubt in Gene’s mind that most times Dave Spicer was going to be the smartest man in the room. Gene also had no doubt that Poultristics had made Dave very wealthy. Dave Spicer was rich and smart, but he was not good with people. The extra half-step distance Spicer kept between himself and others, the flat affect in his voice and face, the stingy hand gestures, and the parsimonious words, which seemed to be doled out reluctantly as if each word cost him money, left Gene’s boss looking uncomfortable and out of place when he was speaking with a client. Dave looked uneasy and, Gene was sure, his boss made those he was speaking to feel the exact same way.

Gene’s quick scan of the decent-sized crowd showed that none of the other Poultristics reps were present. As he bounded across the room, Almsson experienced a feeling that he frequently had at work, a mix of pique that others had dropped the ball and pride that he had not. In his most mellifluous voice, a delivery that had been much practiced in motel rooms and rental cars when he first went on the road, Gene said, Lord love us, it’s the chicken industry equivalent of the Traveling Wilbury’s. Poultristics is humbled to play host to the all-stars of the industry.

As a dozen hands reached out for his, Gene shrugged dramatically, Anybody got a shovel to remove the bull-do I just spread around? Seriously, it’s very nice to see all of you here, Gene pointed a finger toward the bar and buffet, and to have a chance to thank you for your generosity and forthrightness with your data. Without your willingness to help us, there is no way that Poultristics could be of any use to you.

Gene stayed in the hospitality suite for over three hours. Having kept careful count, in that time he had received eleven invitations for either more drinks or dinner. Although he had let people know how much he appreciated those invitations, he turned them all down so that he could go back to his room to fine-tune the presentation he was making the following afternoon. Gene always had worked hard to be good at the meet and greet part of his job. He had invented his generous smile, and had made his handshake and bicep clamp a stock in trade long before Bill Clinton worked a crowd. He had passed many hours in rental cars memorizing jokes and anecdotes, working on the accents that would improve their telling. He had developed and maintained a three by five card file, later converted to digital format, that held the names and titles of more than nine hundred industry decision-makers along with the names of those players’ spouse, children and pets’ names, alma maters, previous jobs, hobbies and charities. But, all of the efforts that Gene Almsson had put into developing relationships in the poultry industry paled against the time and thought that went into his presentations. Whether it was an initial pitch, a six month tune-up for a small specialty producer in Delaware or a presentation before an audience of industry’s heaviest hitters, such as would happen at 3:15 pm the following afternoon, Gene never allowed himself to be anything other than his best.

Some of Gene’s work ethic was motivated by pride—he wanted to be really good at what he did. A second energizer was that Gene wanted to understand the data so well that even the most seasoned sophisticated industry executive would think, Damn, I didn’t know that, at some point in Gene’s presentation. Gene’s biggest motivation, however, was one that he kept private.

Early on in his career on a night when he was lonely and feeling guilty that he was missing his girls grow up, Gene Almsson had had the idea that the more rational insight and economic truth he could bring to the poultry industry, the better off society would be. By helping the industry to produce billions of pounds of cheap, healthy protein, Gene Almsson, Michigan native but Ohio State graduate, was helping grain farmers in the Midwest prosper, and scores of equipment manufacturers to succeed, and, most important to Gene, thousands and thousands of legal and illegal bottom-of-the-ladder workers to climb up an economic rung or two. Gene had thought of how the bigger the price differential between poultry and red meat became, the more poultry would be purchased. As poultry replaced beef, the population would become healthier—less obesity, fewer heart attacks, and lower cholesterol. In the thirty years that Gene had been part of the industry, per capita consumption of chicken had more than doubled from forty to over eighty pounds, while turkey had gone from eight to seventeen pounds. During that same period, beef consumption had declined by twenty-five percent. Tracking along with that shift in consumption from red to white meat had been an increase in U.S. life expectancy of almost ten years. Those numbers made Gene Almsson feel very good about his work.

Gene worked through his Power Point slides so that the first part of his presentation was the bad news. Given the current production of breeder stock, current processing capacity, estimated grain harvest, projected rise in utility costs, possible changes in federal and state immigration, and, arguably, most important, federal mandates for ethanol usage, Gene was estimating that the industry was looking at an eighteen to twenty-four month period, beginning in July of 2008, when the industry could expect to lose between 8.3 and 10.1 cents per pound of processed meat. Shaking his head at that disaster, Gene re-checked the part of his presentation dealing with corn prices. Putting corn-based ethanol into cars to lower green-house gases was having a profound effect on the poultry industry. The idea that a bunch of environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians would kill lots of people today and tomorrow to maybe save some people fifty years from now did not make sense to him. There always was a lot of blood in the processing plant, but unless the federal ethanol mandates were lowered, soon the blood would be ankle deep in the boardrooms.

Gene rehearsed the second part of his presentation—the good news. There would be increased export possibilities if the Korean and South American trade pacts were signed. The market was growing for specialty products like duck breasts. It looked like demand for thighs might start to grow. There was some technological improvement coming down the pike that should help with both water and electricity consumption.

Gene knew that the good news did not come close to outweighing the bad. If his forecast was correct, and he had been very careful and very conservative with the data, there was going to be a serious shakeout in the industry. Given how much he knew of so many operations, Gene had a very good idea of who would survive and who would not. During his time in the hospitality suite, Gene had had moments shaking someone’s hand when he had felt like the Angel of Death.

The following day at a 3:15 p.m. session in the Adelphi Room, Gene looked out over the audience which he estimated at one hundred fifty conventioneers and guessed that twenty to twenty-five of them would not be back in Atlanta in 2010. That knowledge made Gene’s opening smile more than a little bittersweet.

A kangaroo wearing an electric blue tux and a worried expression walks into the Mad Cap Bar and Grill. Burly Bill, who’s been working the day shift since before God invented the Slim Jim and Jim Beam breakfast barks out….

It was almost two hours after the last toast of the IPE dinner. For the last hour, the ballroom had been full of mostly graceful women and cataleptic men. Even through the stark white tiles of the bathroom walls Gene could hear the throb of the bass guitar. Gene splashed water on his face and pulled a yard long sheet of stiff paper from the dispenser to try to pat his florid cheeks dry. Despite all of his many business skills, Gene never had given himself good grades for working with clients when a lot of drinking was going on. And that definitely was going on tonight. Even worse was trying to have a conversation with a half-drunk client in the middle of a pounding rendition of Margaritaville. Gene was just weighing the benefits of calling it an early night and retreating to his room when the bathroom door slammed open and Jerry Sayre of Rock Ridge Farms shambled in. As soon as Jerry noticed Gene, he threw out his arms and began hopping erratically. Gene watched Jerry hop to the urinal before asking, You okay, Jerry?

No, Gene, goddamnit. Can’t you feel it? Deck’s pitching. We’re goin’ down. Goddamn Titanic. You called it, Captain Big Bear. Iceberg ahead. Goddamn death boat. And all those light-footed, swivel stick twirling artists are out there dancing just like they’re gonna wake up tomorrow to a big ole golden sun and a bag of money. Goddamn, Gene. What the hell’s it feel like to be a prophet and ignored by your own goddamn people.

I could be wrong, Jerry.

As far as I remember, Bear, you haven’t been wrong since before the peanut president rode north outta Georgia.

Be nice if I was. And you know, Jerry, if we could get everybody who eats chicken just once a week to write to Congress to say that they’d prefer feeding chicken to their family rather than corn to their cars, that big ole sun you just spoke about just might rise some morning soon.

Bullshit, Bear. You know and I know that as long as corn grows in Iowa and the presidential primaries start there, corn for cars is gonna stay.

When Jerry stepped back from the urinal, he stumbled, then, hopped to regain his balance. This time, however, he didn’t mention the Titanic as he swore under his breath. Once he had recovered his equilibrium, Jerry stuck out his hand, I’d say see you soon, Big Bear, but if the shit covers the blades like you think’s gonna happen, I’m not gonna be able to afford to pay you to come out to my l’il operation to tell me what I’m doin' wrong.

As he shook Jerry’s hand, Gene said, No one’s doing anything wrong, Jerry. It’s just that some folks do some things better. And with most of the important metrics, you’re close to the front of the parade.

Nite, Bear. I hear Mr. Daniels callin’ my name.

Gene nodded as he held the rest room door open. As soon as Jerry was through, Gene’s nod turned to a shake. Jerry’s straight-up, commodity processing plant was forty miles north of Birmingham. Even if Jerry could survive the coming utility cost increases, Alabama was a very conservative state. If the state’s economic policy butted up against its policy toward illegal immigration, the illegal workers in Alabama were going to lose. And if those workers lost, then their employers were going to lose, too.

Man overboard, Jerry.

As he sat in his Atlanta hotel room looking back on 2006, Gene ticked off how his competitive urges, market knowledge, friendliness and decision making had made substantial additions to Poultristics bottom line. He was looking forward to sitting in a room with the rest of the reps and having Dave Spicer single him out for praise. He already could hear his boss go down the list. In the space of four months, Gene had added two large Canadian growers, a regional processor in North Texas, and a free range grower in Minnesota. He had gotten a big round of applause and a lot of feedback at the end of his presentation the day before. He must have shaken three hundred hands since he had arrived and had known the name of ninety-five percent of the owners of those hands. Dave had to be impressed with that. Dave might own the company, but Gene owned the field. Gene was sure that when growers and processors, the movers and shakers in the poultry industry thought of Poultristics, the face and name that most often came to mind was Gene Almsson’s, not Dave Spicer’s.

Hearing Dave’s praise in front of the others would be sweet frosting to go on top of the big year-end bonus Gene had received three weeks before. Praise was just something that made a good life better. For Gene, personally, it seemed like everything was on the up and up. Security lines at the airports had shortened and not every plane was filled to capacity. The stock market and his piece of it were growing. The insomnia that intermittently bothered him was taking a breather. In a lot of ways, Gene thought that his job was the best it had been since 911. Easier conditions in which to do the work and more and better work to be done. Even with rough waters ahead for the industry, Gene was feeling grateful.

When Dave had asked the Poultristics delegation to stay over for a morning meeting at the end of the IPE, Gene had never considered that his boss had called the meeting to do anything other than pass out some attaboys and to thank the reps for returning Poultristics back to where it was making money hand over fist. Unfortunately, Gene had guessed wrong.

After everyone had grabbed a coffee and seated themselves around the conference table, Dave opened the meeting by saying that he, like Gene, was worried about the economically illogical, but politically wise, decision to try to turn damn near every kernel of American corn into ethanol. He reached down to tap his laptop and a graph came up on the screen showing the percent of the corn harvest that was mandated to be diverted from feeding animals to feeding cars over the next ten years. In his humble opinion as a Ph.D. holding economist out of the University of Chicago, grain prices were going to shoot skyward like an f.ing mortar and every one underneath in the chicken industry was going to bleed out from the flechettes. As for Poultristics, Dave said there was no way that he was going to let his company out there on the killing field when that happened.

When Gene, from his position as the longest tenured sales representative, asked Dave what he planned to do, the owner responded that as far as he knew that to avoid a shit-storm you could either buy a big umbrella or run like hell. When Gene persisted with his question, Dave spread a thin layer