The Recruiter

John Spry is deeply involved with storm water management and civil engineering; only part of the time from behind a desk. He crawls through pipes under dams and goes underground to inspect the secret places where the rain goes when most other folk have long forgotten about it. He has been a landscaper, a forester, a stream restorer in a life devoted to saving a planet upon which he has too often felt like a stranger. His passion is storytelling and most often those tales are about worlds as far away as the farthest star, but as close as a breath taken in a dream. He lives in Maryland near Annapolis with his wife and three cats.

Author Comments

For every creature, no matter how alienated, there is a recruiter. This story surprised me in many ways. It’s not exactly part of the mythos that I enjoy writing about, on the other hand it is to some degree. A man tries to impress a woman by telling her in a barely disguised way of his own experience of alienation, the implication being that he is a “big bad threat.” Of course, as is often the case, the woman is a thousand times more “bad" than he can possibly imagine. In fact, she appears to be part of a mysterious force that has set him up to be a patsy. It is implied at the end that this woman is diabolically more than human if she can remember Lee Oswald’s recruitment and that making a patsy is a process that takes a lifetime. Personally as someone old enough to recall seeing Oswald shot on television, the jury is still out in my mind as far as Dallas 1963 is concerned. I tend to agree with Norman Mailer that he could have acted alone. After all, no one told Oswald that it couldn’t be done. The problem of alienation tasks me. Why do some come out of it and commit injustices, while others become bards and touch our hearts? Ah, if we only knew.