The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Maybe it was the doorman, or the weather, or the cuisine, or maybe he was still on edge over the awesome responsibility of safeguarding Mrs. Hookstratten’s investment, but there was no excess of civility in Charlie’s reply. “Goguac Boat Club,” he repeated, grinding his teeth for emphasis.

  The cabbie never moved a muscle. Beyond the curve of his shoulders and the ridge of his hat the sky was a dead thing, cheerless and bleak. Was it always this cold here? Charlie wondered, and he had a vision of C. W. Post on the French Riviera, in Italy, in Post City, Texas, the sun baking the earth till it cracked like a stone in a furnace. After a moment the man leaned over to hawk up another ball of sputum. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and without bothering to turn his head, he muttered, “Where to?”

  “Are you deaf?” Charlie couldn’t help raising his voice. “Goguac Boat Club. Get moving, man, will you? I’m on urgent business.”

  The driver turned halfway round, presenting his profile. “You don’t want to go there,” he repeated, and Charlie was half a second from slamming his way angrily out of the cab when the little man elaborated, “—nobody out there this time of year. All froze up. Or mostly froze, I guess. Haven’t been out there myself since, oh, September, I guess it was.”

  “But the Boat Club—there’s a luncheon there today.”

  “Luncheon, hell. There’s nothing out there but a boathouse—and it’s all closed up for the winter. Who’d want to take a scull out in weather like this? Coldest it’s been this early in maybe twenty years.” The cabbie removed his hat a moment to adjust his scarf and collar, revealing a pink swatch of naked scalp in the process. “Unless maybe it’s Stellrecht.”

  “Yes, Stellrecht,” Charlie cried. “Stellrecht—that’s who it is. I’m supposed to meet him there, at the Boat Club, him and my, my”—what would you call Bender?—“my business associate.” And before he knew what he was saying, it was out of his mouth: “We need paper.”

  Now the cabbie turned round full and gave him a look. He lifted a dirty finger to one eye and winked it shut, gently working over the mucus in his throat with a soft frictive sound, almost as if he were purring. “You and everybody else,” he said. “But let me guess—you’re starting up a breakfast-food business, am I right?”

  It was a crisp twenty-minute ride out to Goguac Lake, a ride that began amidst the prosperous urban canyons of Battle Creek, on cobblestone streets crisscrossed with telephone wires and streetcar cables and lined with three- and four-story brick buildings, and ended on a bleak country lane that gave onto a forbidding black expanse of water that might just as well have been an unnamed lake in the Yukon Territory for all the signs of life on its shores. The lake hadn’t frozen over yet, not completely, and the open water had a nasty rolling chop to it that spoke of glancing doom and the grappling hook. This wasn’t Westchester, with its placid ponds and cud-chewing cows; this was the West, and the sight of Goguac Lake, in all its primitive indifference, brought that home to Charlie Ossining in a way that no amount of scenery viewed from the windows of the Twentieth Century Limited could ever have. It was a grim place, no doubt about it. He knew he’d made a mistake the minute he set eyes upon it, but he was too stubborn to, admit defeat—besides which, it was going to cost him at least fifty cents one way or the other, and he figured he might just as well get his money’s worth. So when the driver pulled up the reins and turned round as if to say ‘I told you so,’ Charlie merely mouthed the words: “The Boat Club.”

  There was no lodge. There were no waiters, no diners; there was no fire, no food, no warmth. The Goguac Boat Club consisted of a long white clapboard building that might have been a warehouse or a feed store if it weren’t set out over the water. Charlie persisted in climbing out of the cab and trying the door. (And God, it was cold. Cold enough even under the canvas bonnet of the cab, but out here it was murderous.) There were no windows in the building and the door was padlocked. Charlie gave the door a brief hopeless rap with his knuckles while the driver regarded him scornfully and produced wad after wad of mucus, as if he were trying to turn his lungs inside out. He spat, briefly, three or four times, then looked up and said, “Where to now, fella?”

  Good question. If Bender wasn’t here—and clearly no one in his right mind would be, unless he was a wolf skinner or lumberjack—then where was he? And why the subterfuge? Huddled in the cab, Charlie extracted Bender’s note from his coat pocket and reread it. There it was, in plain English: Gone Goguac Boat Clb. Luncheon w/ Stellrecht. And then it occurred to him—maybe, just maybe, the Goguac Boat Club held its luncheon somewhere other than on the frozen inhospitable body-and-brain-numbing shores of the lake itself. Somewhere in Battle Creek, for instance. Some conscientiously heated tavern, restaurant, lodge or meeting hall. The cabbie spat, produced a filthy handkerchief, blew his nose and spat again. Charlie sat there, feeling like an idiot. But then his eyes fell on the second part of Bender’s message—the address of the factory site, at Verona Wattles, wherever that was. The day didn’t have to be a total waste. He could go there now, see it for himself, get a head start on things. “Listen, driver,” he called, poking his head out the window. “You know this place, Verona Wattles?”

  The driver sat hunched over his lap. The horse dropped a load and shuddered. There was no sound but for the wind sitting in the trees and the slap of the waves against the bare teeth of the shore. “I know Verona Avenue,” the driver said finally, without turning round. “I know Wattles Lane. It’s going to cost you another two bits, on top of what you already owe me.”

  No matter how much he rationalized or how much he resented Bender’s extravagance, Charlie didn’t like to part with money—Mrs. Hookstratten’s money, in particular. Yes, he told himself, he was cold and cynical and ruthless and calculating, a tycoon in the making who was born to fleece the rich, but Mrs. Hookstratten had been good to him and he truly wanted to see her get a fair return on her investment—while he himself coincidentally made his own fortune, of course. On the other hand, he was anxious to do something, anything, eager to get the company going and watch the profits roll in. He wouldn’t accomplish a thing by going back to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s and sucking on fish bones, that was for sure. He raised his voice above the wind. “Drive on,” he said.

  Dusk was setting in by the time they reached the old Malta-Vita plant at the corner of Verona Avenue and Wattles Lane. The company had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success some six years earlier, improving on Dr. Kellogg’s Granose Flakes by sweetening them with barley-malt syrup and obtaining a patent on the new product. A pair of out-of-town promoters, men not unlike Goodloe H. Bender and Charles P. Ossining, lured Dr. Kellogg’s former bakery foreman away from the Sanitarium Food Company, spent the lion’s share of their capital on advertising and soon had five big traveling ovens operating day and night. (The ovens, each three stories high, worked on the Ferris-wheel principle, circulating the wheat flakes till they were toasted to a dry, crisp, toothsome perfection.) The public was ready for them. Tired of oatmeal, sick of grits, bilious with salt pork, pone and flapjacks and crammed to the maw with Malta-Vita advertising, they saw that the new product was convenient, nutritious, scientific, physiologic, hygienic and downright simple: just open the package, pour, add milk and eat. Success came like an acclamation. The newly minted tycoons started up a second factory in Toronto; they shipped crate after crate of their crisp and uniform wheat flakes, wagonloads, freight cars jammed to the rooftops with them, and they shipped them to Mexico, France, Germany, Norway and Czecho-Slovakia. But then the original promoters sold out—handsomely—and the product deteriorated. Kellogg’s man went else-where, seduced by an offer he couldn’t refuse, and something went wrong in the processing plant. The flakes molded. Went rancid. Rotted on the shelves and in the bowl. And Grape-Nuts, Golden Manna, Norka Oats, Tryabita, Cero-Fruto, Egg-O-See and some forty others rushed in to fill the breach.

  And Charlie Ossining? He was just a little late.

  Charlie got out of the cab and walke
d tentatively round the ruins of the factory, stunned at the havoc a few short years could wreak. The building had been impressive once, a mighty fortress, brick walls and a vaulting roof, but it was a shambles now. There’d been a fire, that much was evident from the street, fingers of carbon clutching at the windows, the roof collapsed in a scatter of blackened timbers. In falling, one of the beams had torn a V-shaped gap in the rear wall, and you looked out past the brick and into the wintry snarl of trees beyond. The doors were gone, too, and the windows stood naked, the panes long since shattered, the woodwork either reduced to ash or prized up for salvage. It was no habitation, but people had sheltered here over the course of the fading months and years—vagrants, itinerant workers, factory hands short of housing during the boom years of ‘02 and ‘03—and they’d left the detritus of their lives behind. There was the usual litter of patent-medicine bottles, cans, boxes, bones, shreds of weathered newsprint and magazines, but there were more personal things, too—a washboard, a bureau with the top staved in and the drawers missing, a boot, a sock, a scrap of gingham. And beneath it all, a fine glittering carpet of broken glass.

  The waste of it, that’s what got to him. It was like that poem he’d had to recite in school about the stone head buried in the sand. That’s what this place was like—a stone head buried in the sand. There was no hope for it. None. Charlie felt his stomach drop. His breath came quick and shallow, and despite the chill blast of the wind he was perspiring under the arms, beneath the brim of his hat, and a single cold wet finger traced the ridge of his spine. Suddenly he was afraid for Mrs. Hookstratten, afraid for himself. This was the place Bender had chosen? This was the place where Per-Fo was supposed to fly? It was cursed, jinxed, a killing floor of failure and despair. He began to doubt Bender’s judgment, his sanity, even.

  His first instinct was to turn around right there and go back to Bender and tell him to forget it, they’d be better off building from scratch, but the morbid fascination of the archaeologist was on him and he kicked his way through the debris to the big open back room to have a look at the ovens. A bird—or was it a bat?—shot across the room and out into the gathering dark as he came through the open doorway, and something—rats?—stirred in the far corner. Then it was quiet. Eerily still.

  Two of the great three-story ovens remained, rising up out of the ruins and into the sky, rusted, battered, strewn with swallow’s nests and the crushed dark leavings of half a dozen autumns, but powerfully suggestive for all that. For a long moment he stood there in awe of the machinery before him, and in that moment he was an archaeologist, a treasure hunter come upon the undreamed-of temple, the rare find, the jewel. He was stunned. This was the source, the fount; this was where all those cereal flakes had come from, all those nuggets, all that cash, the cars and carriages, the libraries, the wine cellars and billiard tables—and it was what he wanted, all of it, his own billiard table especially. And a library, too, of course, not that he’d ever read much more than dime novels, Nick Carter, Frank Reade, Big-Foot Wallace and that sort of thing, but just to have it, all those leather-bound books with their gilded spines, the brandy in a cut-glass decanter, Otard Dupuy ‘78. That’s what gentlemen had, the tycoons and the millionaires and the breakfast-food magnates—he’d bet his eyeteeth C. W. Post had the whole lot of it, billiard tables, London suits, libraries, limousines, stables and a thousand other things Charlie couldn’t even conceive of. And these were the machines that made it possible—the Federal Mint in Washington couldn’t have awed him any more.

  It was while he was standing there in the midst of the rubble, gazing up at the big traveling ovens and trying to picture them in operation, burnished and new, dropping a shower of rich golden flakes, that the stirring in the corner started up again, a rasping, scratching sound that became a distinct rustle and then a crash accompanied by muffled curses. Charlie was not alone. He glanced over his shoulder and through a pair of neatly aligned door frames to where the cabbie sat hunched in his seat, and then back to the corner, behind the far oven, where a figure, cursing and kicking at the litter around him, began to emerge from the gloom. “Hello?” Charlie called. And then, stupidly, “Is anybody there?”

  The figure hesitated—it was a man, Charlie saw now, a man dressed in a ragged torn greatcoat and an old silk top hat with the crown punched out so that it looked like a section of stovepipe fitted to his head. A beggar. A bum. Charlie’s hand went reflexively to his wallet, and then he remembered that Mrs. Hookstratten’s money was no longer a concern—and he relaxed. The man’s voice came back at him, gloomy, hoarse, threatening: “Who the hell wants to know?”

  The bum advanced on him, his eyes muddied with drink, a glistening spatter of vomit trailing down the front of his coat. His hair was tangled, dark, festooned with bits of leaf mold and a fine filigree of lint and cobweb, as if he’d been mopping floors with it. He stank like a sewer rat.

  Charlie wasn’t intimidated. He could go toe-to-toe with anybody, and there were plenty of times he’d had to—at St. Basil’s Academy, where he was the youngest boy, courtesy of his parents’ indifference and Mrs. Hookstratten’s generosity, and afterward in the taverns and back rooms of Peterskill, Tarrytown, Croton and Ossining. Charlie was no stranger to the pugilistic arts—and besides, if anybody had a right to be out here in this dismal, godforsaken place, it was the Chief Executive of the company that was negotiating to buy it. He stood his ground.

  The bum approached to within five paces and then stopped suddenly and looked round him a moment, as if he’d forgotten something. Then his eyes came up, sharp and quick, the drunkenness a cloud burned off by something hotter, more intense, sharper than Charlie would have imagined. “You think I’m a bum, don’t you?” the man said. “The sort that begs change and sleeps in doorways? Am I right?”

  “Listen, friend,” Charlie hissed, and he folded his arms and set his jaw, “I don’t give a damn who you are or where you sleep, and I didn’t ask for any introductions, either.”

  A curtain of greasy hair fell across the man’s face as he leaned forward to spit, and he was unsteady on his feet. Charlie was ready to knock him down, if that was what he wanted. But the bum was oblivious. He flicked his hair back with a jerk of his neck and gave Charlie a smile. The smile was private, mad, a reflex of the lips above the rotten skirts of the teeth, but Charlie saw in that moment that the man was young, younger than he. “No, you listen to me,” the bum said, his breath going up in smoke. “You wouldn’t think I had a hundred dollars cash on me, would you? Currency? Notes redeemable on the United States Treasury? Well, you bet I have. A hundred dollars—or damn near it, minus something for a whiskey or two.” The wind came up then, a gust that tore through the windows, spun twice round the little amphitheater and rocketed away again. “I could book a room at the Post Tavern if I had a mind to, first-class all the way, you know that?”

  Charlie was bored suddenly. Let the poor idiot sleep in his hovel, who cared? The place meant nothing to him. Maybe it was interesting to imagine what it might once have been, but clearly this wasn’t what they were looking for. And he’d tell Bender as much, too. They’d just have to find more investors, that was all. He turned away abruptly and began to pick his way through the rubble and back out to the street.

  “Hey, mister,” the bum called at his back, but Charlie kept walking. “Mister, I’m talking to you.”

  Charlie paused at the front entrance to dig out a cigarette and light it. He turned to look back to where the man stood in semidarkness, his bearded face working. “It’s the breakfast-food business, isn’t it?” he called. “That’s what you’re doing out here in this shit pile in your shined-up shoes and your new overcoat—breakfast food. Am I right?”

  Charlie didn’t bother to answer. He drew on the cigarette and realized he was hungry. What he wanted was a steak. And some oysters—Battle Freaks, pure-foodists and health nuts be damned. He considered the prospects at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s—Norwegian fish-head soup or some such slop—and wondered wh
ere he could get a good hamburger sandwich without paying an arm and a leg for it.

  The bum was still ranting. “I can see it on you,” he spat, his voice cracked and ragged, “that tinhorn-millionaire look, just like my uncle. Or worse, my would-be father, the holy man of the temple himself. You know him, you know my father?”

  Charlie didn’t know his father, and he didn’t care to, either. He flicked away the butt of his cigarette, turned his back and ambled across the litter-strewn yard to the cold leather seat of the hack.

  “Where to now, Diamond Jim?” the driver asked.

  He should have gotten out and walked to save the money, but he was tired, irritated, profoundly depressed over the ruin of the factory, the mattress stuffed with worthless stock certificates, the scramble of boys at the station—Christ, even the bums on the street were gibbering about breakfast food—and he decided he had to see Bender, right then, right away, no matter the cost. The uneasiness he’d felt all day settled into his stomach like a lump of cold cereal, like oatmeal scraped from the bottom of the pot, and he thought he was going to vomit. If so many had come before them and failed, what chance did they have? What chance of raising money, buying equipment and ad space, paying workers? He’d been a fool, he saw that now, eating his oysters and sipping champagne on the train, playacting at being a swell—did he think the money was going to fall into his lap? Where was the grain going to come from? Who was going to stuff the boxes? Who was going to buy them? Bender. He had to see Bender. “Take me to the Post Tavern,” he said, and his voice was so weak he had to repeat himself before the driver heard him.

  The streetlamps were softly glowing and the shop windows lit by the time they pulled up in front of the hotel, where a pair of motorcars and half a dozen carriages were taking on and discharging passengers. There was an early-evening bustle to the streets, couples walking arm-in-arm, people darting in and out of the shops, workers heading home to supper, and despite his misgivings, Charlie saw that the city did have its charms. It was prosperous, that was for sure. People had money—cereal money—and they meant to spend it. He made a mental note to stroll around and survey the various grocers to see what brands they were stocking—after he saw Bender, of course, and got something to eat. He was digging into his pocket when the cabbie turned round and said, “That’ll be eighty-five cents—unless maybe you want to go back out to the Boat Club.”