Bitter Truth

5
DRIVING BACK INTO TOWN on the Schuylkill Expressway
I wasn’t fighting my way through the left lanes. I stayed, instead,
in the safe slow right and let the buzz of the aggressive traffic
slide by. When a white convertible elbowed into my lane, inches
from my bumper, as it sped to pass a truck in the center, I didn’t
so much as tap my horn. I was too busy thinking. One woman
was dead, from suicide or murder, I wasn’t sure yet which, another
was paying me ten thousand dollars to find out, and now,
most surprisingly, they both seemed to be Reddmans.
We all know Reddman Foods, we’ve been consuming its
pressure-flavored pickles since we were kids—sweet pickles, sour
pickles, kosher dill pickles, fine pickled gherkins. The green and
red pickle jar with the founder’s stern picture above the name
is an icon and the Reddman Pickle has taken its place in the
pantheon of American products, alongside Heinz Ketchup and
Kellogg’s cereal and the Ford motor car and Campbell’s soup.
The brand names become trademarks, so we forget that there
are families behind the names, families whose wealth grows
ever more obscene whenever we throw ketchup on the burger,
shake out a bowl of cereal, buy ourselves a fragrant new automobile.
Or snap a garlic pickle between our teeth. And like
Henry Ford and Henry John Heinz and Andrew Carnegie,
Claudius Reddman was one of the great men of America’s industrial
past, earning his fortune in business and his