The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  “Advertising!” Bender had roared that morning as they watched the barman hang the bright red-and-white banners from the beams. “You can’t sell a product without advertising!”

  Charlie reminded him that they didn’t yet have a product.

  Bender was undaunted. “Create the demand, Charlie, and the product will follow, as sure as summer follows the spring.”

  It had been six weeks since Charlie had arrived with Mrs. Hookstratten’s check, and they seemed no closer to their goal than they had the first day. They’d been rebuffed by both Kelloggs—Will Kellogg wouldn’t even let them in the gate at his Toasted Corn Flake Company and he’d had his lawyers on them before the sun went down—and factory space was impossible to come by at any price. Suitable factory space, that is. There were any number of rat-infested ruins like the Malta-Vita plant for lease, sale, barter or trade, but Charlie didn’t seem to have the special vision it took to picture them in operation, and since George had come along, Bender hadn’t expressed the slightest interest in any of them. “We’ll build, Charlie,” he shouted, waving sheafs of blueprints in the air, “everything new and spanking clean from the ground floor up. To hell with these depressing, burned-out heaps of rubble—what do we need them for, eh? We’ve got George Kellogg behind us now!”

  Yes. Well, sure. And though he didn’t want to be a naysayer, Charlie couldn’t help wondering what good it had done them. As far as he could see, the only thing the use of the Kellogg name had accomplished thus far was to arouse the considerable ire of the breakfast-food brothers and provoke a pair of lawsuits for trademark infringement—which in turn had necessitated the immediate outlay of a precious portion of Mrs. Hookstratten’s dwindling investment to defray legal expenses (though to Bender this was nothing, nothing at all, merely the cost of doing business). And as for George himself, though Charlie had found a room for him at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s when another of the decrepit inmates had gone on to meet his Maker, he was unavailable—unfindable, even—at any given moment. His bed was unslept in, the clothing they’d bought him scattered round the room and his own piss-drunk person lying sprawled in the alley behind the dry-goods store or folded up on a cot in the Marshall jail. Twice now Charlie had had to hire a cab, drive the twenty-four miles round-trip to Marshall and bail him out—and why there was no jail in Battle Creek was another mystery. The first time the judge had let him off, but the second time—George had been drunk and disorderly—he’d given him ten days. So they had George Kellogg behind them—and what did it get them but the cost of renting a room he didn’t use and providing meals he didn’t eat while their distinguished associate did hard labor on the county roads?

  But tonight, all that was behind him. The party had reinvigorated him, got his enthusiasm up all over again. Bender knew what he was doing. All Charlie had to do was watch him working some local rube in the corner and he could feel the money sprouting between his fingertips; and the Kellogg thing might have seemed crazy, but Bender would find the angle to make it work, just as surely as Ford would build his automobiles and Rockefeller suck oil from the ground. Besides, it was Christmas, and the walk to the Red Onion would invigorate any man’s soul, church bells tolling, children caroling, strangers crying out greetings, a candle glowing in every window and a wreath on every door. Charlie stepped in the door and half a dozen men called out his name.

  He had a drink at the bar with John Krinck, one of the young San patients who slipped out now and again to do some tippling on the sly, and he traded Sanitarium jokes with the bartender and had one on the house. Then Harry Delahoussaye came in and stood drinks for the bar. (Charlie had long since forgiven the man for trying to hustle him the night he arrived—it was nothing personal, after all.) Charlie returned the favor. By the time he spotted the slouch-shouldered, loose-limbed figure of Will Lightbody slumped over a table by the window, he was as full of cheer as a man short of delirium could be. On an impulse, he decided he’d wish his late traveling companion the best of the season, and he ambled over to the table with a beer in one hand and a plate of pickled eggs in the other.

  “Will!” Charlie cried, slapping him on the back in an excess of enthusiasm, “it’s me, Charlie Ossining! Remember? On the train?”

  Will Lightbody looked up from a table littered with spattered plates and scraps of bone, with dirty glasses, pots of ketchup, wadded-up napkins, fish bones, half-eaten fries, an ashtray buried in cigar stubs. His eyes seemed to have gone loose in his head, the misaligned one rolling round in its socket like a marble on a Chinese-checkers board. He looked haunted, juiceless, withered like last year’s apple gone dry in the cellar. If this was what the Sanitarium did to you, Charlie wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy.

  “Remember?” Charlie repeated lamely.

  Raising a glass of dark amber whiskey to his lips, Will Lightbody began to grin, and his grin spread until he had to concentrate on it and lost his grip on the glass. Whiskey trickled down his chin and sank into his collar, which was unfastened and already stained with ketchup, mustard and steak sauce. “Sure I remember,” he boomed, but his words were slurred and his eyes unsteady. “Charlie Ossining. Sure. Amelia Hookstratten, right?”

  “Right.” Charlie brightened. As inebriated as the man was, Charlie still knew the value of a good connection. “I saw you here and thought I’d wish you many happy returns of the season, Christmas, I mean—”

  “Happy returns,” Will slurred, and his voice seemed to reach out to every corner of the room as if it had tentacles. Heads turned at the bar. The waiter—Charlie knew him by name, Frank Loquatto—looked embarrassed. “Sure. Yeah. Happy returns. Whyn’t you join me? Have a drink on me, huh? Yeah, Charlie Ossining. Let’s drink to the birth of Christ.” He turned his head and gestured for the waiter. “Another round here,” he boomed, “and you can clear away some of this, some of this, this … clutter, yes, all right? And so”—turning back to Charlie, who’d set down his pickled eggs and pulled out a chair—”Charlie Ossining, how the hell are you? How’s the breakfast-food business—breakfast food, right? Yes? Well, how is it?”

  Charlie told him it was good, told him it was terrific, thriving. “Kellogg’s in on it now, George Kellogg—he’s the son of the Kelloggs, you know?”

  Will Lightbody had lifted one of Charlie’s eggs to his lips. He set it down, carefully, as if it were still in its shell and yet to be cooked. His eyes focused—that is, the recalcitrant one, the one with the cast, came back into orbit. “The name’s anathema to me. Kellogg”—he spat out the syllables—”he’s a fake, a sham, a charlatan, he’s a wife stealer and a fraud and a …” He trailed off, waving a long lax hand in disgust. “He’s a murderer,” he said finally.

  Charlie didn’t know quite how to take this, so he let it go by. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of money there—and a lot of people would disagree with you. My partner, Goodloe H. Bender, he claims the Kellogg name alone is worth its weight in—”

  “Dead before my eyes, dead as this, this egg—”

  “Worth its weight in gold,” Charlie said, overriding the interruption. “God knows how many millions that name is worth—it’s all in the advertising, did you know that?”

  Will knew. He dipped his head and stroked the bridge of his nose in mute appreciation of the power of advertising. “Homer Praetz,” he said, and then threw his head back to drain his glass.

  Charlie liked the guy, he did. He might have come across like some kind of idiot prince on the train, but here he was, drinking them down like anybody else. Suddenly he wanted to do something for him, give him something, a token, a gift. Inspiration came like a fist between the eyes: “How about a plate of oysters? On me. We’ll share them.”

  “Scavengers,” Will began, but he broke off to pound his breastbone and lean forward to dribble something into his drink. His voice was pinched when it came back to him: “Of. The. Sea.”

  “Yes, I know,” Charlie laughed. “So you and your wife informed me. But there’s nothing sweeter, not the sweet
est fish that swims the ocean, not the fattest shrimp or juiciest lobster—am I right?”

  Will paused a moment, as if considering degrees of sweetness. Then he began to bob his head as if it were caught on something, as if it were made of wood and somebody else was pulling the strings. A grin split his face. “Nothing sweeter,” he agreed, and in that instant his bony arm shot into the air and he snapped his fingers at poor glowering Frank Loquatto.

  Over the oysters, Charlie found their conversation leaping from one thing to another, from Mrs. Lightbody’s preferences in food and undergarments (she wore no corset and kept her camisoles simple and transparent to the health-giving rays of the sun) to somebody named Homer Praetz (Will kept harping on him, something about sinuses and baths) to Peterskill, life in New York, motorcars and Mrs. Hookstratten. After the waiter had cleared the plate away and freshened their drinks, Charlie steered the conversation back to the breakfast-food business in general, and to Per-Fo in particular. “We’re going great guns, Will,” he said, lighting up a cigarette and soaking in the smoke with a great deep sigh of pleasure, “but to be frank with you, we’re expanding our original design and we’re a bit, well, undercapitalized at the moment. I mean, this is the opportunity of a lifetime for the right investor…. I don’t know if you’re interested, but I can offer you a block of stock, Will—right here on the spot. If you want.”

  The man across the table from him looked as if he could barely carry the weight of his head. If half an hour earlier it seemed to be supported on invisible strings, now the strings had been severed. Will’s head wobbled. His hands shook. His eyes roamed the room at random. “You need money?” he said all of a sudden, as if the idea had just penetrated to his brain. “I’ll give you money”—he was fumbling in his coat pocket—“no problem, happy to help out a, a, friend. How much do you want?”

  For all he’d had to drink, for all his goodwill and casual nature, Charlie sat riveted in his seat. He watched Will flip open a checkbook, spread it on the table and smooth out the leaves, watched as he called cavalierly for a pen and took it from Frank Loquatto’s hand without so much as glancing up at him. “I, uh, well, anything you’d care to invest, of course—my partners and I would be delighted—you could, I mean if you want, you could—”

  Will Lightbody was writing. Charlie watched the bony knuckles ride up and down the astonishing, wonderful, insuperable loops and dips of three inspired words: One thousand dollars. Will tore the check from the register, sat back and scribbled Pay to the Order of Charles Ossining across the top.

  Someone was singing at the bar, off-key, We three kings of Orient are, gold, frankincense and myrrh, and another voice joined in, sonorous and exalted. Charlie took the check in a daze, folded it once and tucked it in his breast pocket without daring to look at it lest he break the spell. Lucky. He’d always been lucky.

  Will Lightbody belched. It was a long protracted belch, and when he was finished with it he held up a single scrawny big-knuckled finger. “Charlie?” he said, and his voice was too loud, too hollow, a depth-less quavering shiver of a voice that seemed on the verge of breaking.

  Charlie froze. Was he going to ask for his check back? Was that it? His throat constricted. He shifted in his chair. “Yeah? What is it, Will?”

  “You know any place where we can get a real drink?”

  Charlie awoke to the gray void of an indeterminate hour, huddled in his bedclothes on his mattress stuffed with useless stock certificates. The muffled sounds of subdued gaiety drifted up to him from between the cracks in the floorboards, and he had a fuzzy vision of Mrs. Eyvindsdottir and her rinsed-out boarders celebrating the day with Norwegian mulled wine, or a fruitcake that might have been put to better use as roofing material. He emptied his bladder in the pot in the corner, noting with a clinical detachment that the liquid draining from him was exactly the color of that which he’d put in, and then he took his very tender head and tentative limbs over to the mirror for a cold shave. His brain was a bit clouded—he remembered taking Will to Bathrick’s for a drink, and then to a back-room place on Calhoun—but from the moment he’d opened his eyes he was aware of the check. Of the fact of it. Of its existence. Of its presence in the room with him, looming large, a Christmas offering for Per-Fo tucked away in the inside pocket of his jacket. He glanced up from the mirror to where the jacket dangled from its peg, and he began to whistle. A thousand dollars. Not bad for a single night’s work. Wait till he told Bender.

  But wait: why tell Bender at all?. The check was made out to him, wasn’t it—to Charles Ossining? Who would be the wiser if he—but no, he couldn’t just take the poor fool’s money like that, could he? For one thing, it was illegal—false pretenses, fraud, theft even. And it was seed money, money that would grow a hundred times over—he knew that and knew he had to be patient. But he could hold it back from Bender, hold it in reserve, that is, squirrel it away for the moment the Per-Fo factory opened its doors and they needed a little extra for greasing the wheels, for advertising or paying off their suppliers or carton manufacturers or whatever—hell, for throwing a party. A thousand dollars. He could hardly believe it. It would take his father two years to earn that much at Mrs. Hookstratten’s, opening and closing the big wrought-iron gates every time the Oldsmobile went in or out….

  He couldn’t help himself. He set down the razor and crossed the room to throw back the flap of his jacket and dig out the check—just to admire it, gloat over it, stroke it in the way a red Indian might stroke a favorite scalp or a millionaire his bankbook. His fingers closed on it—and it was there, it was no dream—the feel of the crisp, single-folded sheet of paper like the feel of ready money, and then he was scanning the rich, spare, resonant command scrawled across the face of the thing: Pay to the Order of Charles Ossining, One thousand dollars, The Old National and the Merchants Bank, Battle Creek, Michigan. The elation rose in him, his heartbeat took off on a pair of flapping wings, and he was half a breath away from springing back from the wall and dancing round the room with Will Lightbody’s check for his sole partner when he noticed something odd: there was no signature at the bottom of the check. Nothing. Not a mark.

  The wings plummeted. His stomach clenched. The idiot had forgotten to sign it! And he, Charlie Ossining, was twice an idiot for not examining the thing on the spot—what would it have taken to say casually, “Oh, Will, by the way, I’m afraid you’ve forgotten to sign it here—ha-ha—no problem, no problem at all—another drink?” But now—he slammed his fist into the wall and watched a vein sprout in the plaster, capillaries and all—now he’d have to go up there to the Sanitarium, with all those bloated ducks and bran munchers gawking at him, and broach the subject to Lightbody over a bowl of celery soup. And what if he didn’t want to sign? What if he didn’t remember or had changed his mind or excused himself because he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing? What if the wife was there? Or old man Kellogg?

  No matter: there was no time to waste. He stepped into the pants of his blue serge suit, slapping haphazardly at the eternal flecks of lint, dug a semidecent collar and a pair of cuffs from his suitcase, buttoned up his yellow shoes and hurried down the stairway, shrugging into his greatcoat on the fly. He caught a quick glimpse of Mrs. Eyvindsdottir, Bagwell and some of the others sitting round the table mournfully masticating goat’s cheese burned into rounds of toast and a “nice” haunch of muskrat or groundhog or whatever it was her intrepid inamorato had managed to pull out of his traps that week, and then he was out the door. Walking. Walking yet again. The interurban wasn’t running because of the holiday, and the hacks, if there were any, would have been clustered round the Post Tavern at the other end of town.

  It took him twenty minutes to reach the grounds of the San, and his ears were stinging and his toes dead by the time he entered the gleaming, cavernous lobby. There wasn’t much activity—nothing like his first visit, when he’d had to cool his heels outside the old man’s office with George and Bender. A whole parade of people had trooped by
them that day, nurses, doctors, women in the kinds of dresses you’d see in the magazines, beautiful women and women not so beautiful, bodybuilders, lacto-ovo vegetarians, a squadron of millionaires in beards and bathrobes (Bender claimed to have recognized half a dozen of them—”It’s not the clothes that make the man, Charlie, it’s the way they carry themselves, fore and aft, remember that—fore and aft”). But today was Christmas day, and the place was pretty quiet. Just as well. Charlie didn’t relish the idea of running into the Doctor or one of the apes who’d hustled him out the door and into the street after his last, ill-fated visit.

  He was concentrating on the man at the desk, trying to act casual, ignoring the inquisitive stares of the bellhops in green and the white flash of an orderly he spied out of the corner of his eye, striding purposefully, as if he were at home, as if he belonged here, and he came within a deuce of bowling over a little stick of a woman in a wheelchair with her plaster-bound leg stuck out in front of her like a battering ram. Profuse apologies, tip of the hat, bow to the waist, and a merry Christmas to you, too, ma’am, and all the while he was scanning the place for Kellogg, ready to shrink under the hand at his collar, the boot applied to his backside. He straightened himself up, stared down the nearest bellhop and crossed to the desk without incident.

  The man behind the desk had the pinched face and bright fawning eyes of a lapdog. He stood there as if he’d been nailed to the floor, his back as stiff as an ironing board. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and his smile was saccharine, oozing, insipid, “welcome to the University of Health. And how may I be of assistance?”

  Charlie asked for Will Lightbody.

  “Lightbody, Lightbody,” the man murmured, scanning the register, “ah, here it is—room five-seventeen. Shall I ring him for you?”