The Cleaner of the 1990s and early ’00s, having transitioned from coups to disasters, served as handmaiden to the federal government where hurricanes made land, oil tankers foundered, parking garages exploded, and, in a moment of superlative patriotic assistance, airplanes entered office buildings. The Cleaner believed in vague neoliberal tenets, which is to say that he believed that he was immune to every ideology, save that of the general goodness of goodness, a pure identity rather than a suspect value, and had seen fit to begin his son’s education at a local Montessori school (unlicensed but self-professing allegiance to the movement) where he thought that Loudermilk the Younger would gain an atheistic affection for the phenomenal world unsullied by history or the more exploitative aspects of contemporary capitalism. The Cleaner was not exactly wrong on either count, though Loudermilk the Younger seems to have been more his mother’s son than The Cleaner was initially willing to allow. While Loudermilk the Elder occupied himself with maintenance of a growing sideline in bird-dog breeding, Loudermilk the Younger made friends with the sons of members of the local militia and roamed the countryside, fully convinced of the unalienable rights afforded him by his American birth.

After the tree-planting ceremony that indicated the conclusion of local schooling, Loudermilk the Younger consented to continue his education at the nearest state school, more to escape his father’s constant juice cleanses, plus the string of Ukrainian mail-order fiancées, all of whom were returned unwed, than because he sought deeper knowledge. Loudermilk the Younger was no fool, but he didn’t really care to be book smart. The world was his preferred teacher, action his rhetoric and surrogate mother. And though Loudermilk the Younger was outstandingly, one might say willfully, ignorant of the ways in which money functioned, he had always had plenty of it, even as The Cleaner was perpetually offering more.