The Feather Merchants

by Max Shulman

  “I’ve got San Francisco,” said Papa in a quiet, unboastful tone which made it clear that for this radio getting San Francisco was hardly enough to work up a sweat.

  I decided not to point out that A. K. Hockfleisch could also be heard at this time over a Minneapolis station.

  Now the announcer went off to a dimly lit corner to brood over his unworthiness, and the roller-coaster inflections of A. K. Hockfleisch himself were heard. At first he reviewed the day’s headline news. Papa sat patiently puffing his cigar and smiling reassurance to me that this kid stuff would soon be over with and old A.K. would get down to business.

  Sure enough, in a few minutes old A.K. finished his résumé of the day’s news. The announcer, eager to be of some small use, rushed forward and poured him a glass of water.

  “Thank you, Mr. Stooks,” said the noted news analyst.

  The announcer, whose name was Callahan, whimpered with gratitude that he had been remembered, even erroneously.

  “Now,” said A. K. Hockfleisch, “let us look at Japan.”

  Papa rose quickly and walked over to the Pacific Ocean wall of the room.

  “The most impressive feature of the island empire of Japan,” said A.K. flatly, “is its vulnerability.”

  “Um-hmm,” agreed Papa.

  “In the words of the pugilist, the little yellow man’s homeland has a glass jaw,” said A.K., “and people with glass jaws shouldn’t throw stones.”

  Papa removed the cigar from his mouth, chuckled briefly, and replaced the cigar.

  “But,” continued A.K., in the manner of a fair-minded man who cannot blink the facts, “on December the seventh, nineteen hundred and forty-one, the beasts of the East threw the first stone. And now, by God, we are going to finish it!”

  Callahan ran out to join the Marines.

  “It will be a long, tough job,” said A.K. gravely. “It would be doing our cause a disservice to think otherwise. But, nonetheless, Japan is vulnerable.”

  “Umm-hmm,” said Papa.

  “Her far-flung archipelago is perfectly suited to the type of warfare perfected by our Yankee fighters. Her thousands of miles of level beaches provide untold landing places. The waters around these beaches are smooth as glass all year around. Moreover, for eleven months out of the year, because of neap tides, no moon shines over Japan.

  “In short, calm waters, smooth beaches, and complete darkness will make the coming invasion of Japan, to borrow a plumber’s term, a lead-pipe cinch.

  “But,” warned A.K., “we must expect severe opposition and heavy casualties. Anyone who does not expect these things is no realist and is only hindering our war effort.

  “However, we cannot deny that the little sons of heaven, bred on rice and table scraps, are no matches for our meat-eating Yanks. Even if the myopic little rats could defend their coast line, which of course they cannot, they would afford only temporary opposition to the invaders. The little yellow man has no love for the steel forged by American workers in Cleveland and Pittsburgh who, for the most part, are adhering patriotically to their no-strike pledges, although some have broken faith with their country in time of war, and if that is not treason, I should like to know what is.

  “And I have not yet mentioned air power.”

  Papa had been frowning at the omission, but now his brow unfurrowed.

  “The Jap plane is aptly named the Zero. It has nothing. In the last six months of fighting only two United States aircraft have been lost in the Pacific, and the destruction of one of those was due to a misunderstanding between the pilot and co-pilot as to who was driving. Our birdmen have been shooting down Jap planes like clay pigeons. Even the concussion of near misses is often enough to knock down the flimsily constructed Zeros.

  “And what a target the Jap cities present for our air blasters! Their buildings, as you know, are made of rice papers and bamboo shoots. What kindling for Yank incendiaries! You will permit me a moment of levity—when our bombers drop their loads on Jap cities, there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.

  “Yes, friends of radioland, the Nips have bitten off more than their buckteeth can chew. They will live to regret December the seventh, nineteen hundred and forty-one—those who live. For a familiar battle cry is in the air. A cry to quicken the pulses of free men everywhere, a cry to strike dread into the traitorous hearts of the saffron assassins—THE YANKS ARE COMING!

  “Good night, my friends, good night. Buy bonds.”

  The organist played the national anthem. Papa snapped to the civilian equivalent of attention. He looked disapprovingly at me sitting in my chair.

  “You don’t have to when it’s on the radio,” I explained.

  “It won’t hurt you any,” he complained mildly.

  When the organist had finished, Papa turned off the radio. He cleared his throat. “The way I’ve got it figured,” he said, “Japan is vulnerable.” He pointed at the coast line with his cigar. “Look at that coast line. There’s a million places where it would be child’s play to land troops. We could land here, or here or here or here.” He pointed out a number of reefs and shore batteries.

  “Maybe we’ll land at all of them at once. We’ve got plenty of men, best fighting men in the world, strong from eating meat. Believe me, I don’t mind going without meat or gasoline or anything else so that they should have it.

  “That little Jap is all through. Already he wishes he didn’t start something with us. We’ve got him beat six ways against the middle, if I may use a card player’s term.

  “Of course, Dan, you mustn’t be too optimistic. The Jap may be weak, but he’s still treacherous. It isn’t going to be quick and it isn’t going to be easy. But, still, it’s just plain foolish to deny the facts. We’ve got him beat. Anybody can see that. From now on it’s just a cleanup operation.

  “Now, let me tell you something about Japan’s air power.”

  At this point Mama entered. “General MacArthur,” she said to Papa, “maybe you want to keep him up all night?”

  “Dan,” said Papa, as though it was his own idea, “you better get some sleep. You’ve had a hard trip.”

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, struggling out of my chair, “I do feel a little tired.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I went up to the sterile bedroom where I had spent one third of my life. In the corner of the room was a blond maple bed stretched out like a prim but resigned maiden. A bare-topped bureau, also of blond maple, stood against one wall. On another wall hung my college diploma and a plaque proclaiming that I was the best sport in the sixth grade—my two proudest possessions. There were six windows, three on each side of the bed, through which the winds at night crossed over my recumbent form and caused my great healthiness. The wallpaper was severe but was softened by a top border of Indian heads. The Indian motif appeared again in the curtains, bedspreads, bedside rugs, and the room’s only picture, a study of an Indian who got hell beat out of him somewhere riding on a horse whose depression equaled his own. In the corner opposite the bed was a large closet smelling faintly of camphor and athletic equipment.

  I opened the bottom bureau drawer and took out a pair of pajamas that I had intuitively left at home when I went into the Army. They were called Fo-To-Mon-Taj-Ies by their neurotic designer. Printed in black dye on white cloth was a montage of photographs of ships, bridges, houses, women, landscapes, horses, street scenes, and sporting events which covered every inch of the pajamas and gave their wearer somewhat the appearance of a fast riffle through Life magazine. Thus attired, I climbed blackly between the sheets and prepared to sleep off thirty hours of train riding and, if I could, six months of Oklahoma.

  But Mama came in with a piece of apple pie and a glass of milk. “I thought you’d be hungry,” she said.

  “I was getting desperate. It’s been almost three hours since I ate.”

  She sat down on the chair beside the bed and watched critically while I ate. “More?” she asked.

  “No, thank yo
u.”

  “If you don’t co-operate, how can I build you up?”

  “I’ll force myself,” I promised.

  “I am going to write your lieutenant he should fix you a snack between meals. You look terrible.”

  Mama’s preoccupation with weight was one of long standing. She was Junoesque herself in a sawed-off way, and her life had always been a model of tranquil well-being. Corpulence to her was synonymous with health and prosperity. She had been born to a rotund father and a mountainous mother who now, in their seventies, continued to enjoy flawless health and still held hands in public. Her elder brother, Felix, a cheerful, bloated fellow, after an untroubled youth had married an amiable and glandular young woman, moved to the section of Minneapolis where the old people’s home was located, run for the state legislature on the one-plank platform of three-hundred-dollar monthly old-age pension, and was now serving his fifteenth consecutive term in the statehouse. The only thin member of Mother’s family was Lester, of her younger twin brothers, Chester and Lester.

  Lester was the basis for Mama’s weight fixation, and with cause. Chester and Lester began as identical twins, were nursed identically (Grandmother equitably rotated them), slept identical hours, laughed and cried and played identically.

  But after six months a difference became apparent. Chester’s baby fat solidified and multiplied. Lester, although he ate like a young bear, grew bone-thin. At the age of thirteen months Chester waddled fatly on his sausage-shaped legs. At three years he was singing tremulous ballads in kiddie revues at the neighborhood theater. Lester, on the other hand, did not even attempt to walk until the end of his third year and was stolen by gypsies at the age of five.

  In primary school Chester won any number of scholastic awards and lisped his class’s valedictory, while Lester became involved in a series of minor scandals having to do with the girls’ locker room in the gymnasium. In junior high school Chester won a trip to Yellowstone Park with his entry in a national essay contest, a thoughtful composition entitled “If Garcia Hadn’t Heard.” Lester cut off his right thumb and index finger in a manual-training class. In high school Chester’s ample bottom eventually filled the chair of president of the senior class. Lester persisted in a feckless romance with a janitor’s defective-sinused natural daughter.

  After high school fat Chester and skinny Lester went to work. Chester prospered from the first. He started as a tobacconist’s clerk, saved his money, opened his own shop, then another and another and another, until at the age of twenty-three he had four, all profitable, and he married a rife and jovial blonde and settled down to a happy, fecund life. Today he is one of Minneapolis’ foremost citizens and treasures an autographed picture of himself and Jack Dempsey taken when the Manassa Mauler refereed a tedious but well-attended boxing match at the Minneapolis auditorium in 1937.

  But Lester! He struggled along for years selling household gadgets which he was unable to demonstrate convincingly because of his missing fingers. In the halcyon Coolidge era he was able finally to make a little money, almost in spite of himself, and he was wed to a lean and saturnine wench who dabbled in occult sciences. Two nights before the stock-market crash Lester dreamed he was roller-skating nude down an endless cobblestoned street. In the morning he told his wife of his dream. She immediately consulted her charts and found that the dream unmistakably meant to buy Cities Service. Which he did with every cent he had. The following day Lester and his wife consummated a suicide pact of long standing by eating poisoned bonbons in front of a Cities Service station.

  “Mama,” I said, “where are you getting all this food? Don’t they use ration points in Minneapolis?”

  “Points, shmoints,” she said lightly. “I go to Felbgung’s market and I ask Felbgung to cut me a few steaks or chops. He cuts them for me and then I open my purse and give a look at my ration book and I say, ‘Well, well. What do you know? I haven’t got enough points.’ What’s Felbgung going to do, paste the steaks back on the beef? He gives them to me.”

  “Mama, when you do things like that you’re helping the enemy.”

  “I’m helping the enemy? He should live so long. Didn’t I give my only son to the service? Doesn’t your father buy a war bond every week and we don’t cash them in for three months? I’m a good American. Now, you take Mrs. Farworfen across the street. That one is a regular enemy agent. She had two miscarriages this year, and for each one she got a ration book. And Mrs. Rosenkavalier on Humboldt Avenue, the hoarder. She had so much flour and sugar hidden in her house that when she had a fire last winter, after they put it out there was a two-story cake standing there. And Mrs. Anthrax, who lives behind the Lutheran church, the one whose husband fell out of the back window and killed himself when he was leaning over spying into the women’s dressing room in the church the night the Ladies’ Aid put on Craig’s Wife. I suppose you think she’s not still using his ration book. I tell you, Dan, this town is full of regular saboteurs.”

  “What became of my ration book when I went into the Army?” I asked.

  “Maybe you would like a light snack? A toasted cheese sandwich?” said Mama, changing the subject.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Listen, you toothpick, how can I put some meat on those scrawny bones unless you help me? I can’t do it alone. From your father, that strategist, I can’t get any co-operation. He pays more attention to that devil Hockfleisch than to his own wife. You should see the radio he had before this one. It cost him $1,800. I never saw so many lights and dials in my whole life. It exploded.”

  “Mama,” I said, “I haven’t been in a bed for two nights.”

  “All right. I’ll get you a nice bowl of corn flakes and cream and then you go to bed.”

  “Just the bed. No corn flakes.”

  “Dan, what am I going to do with you?”

  “I’ll have two breakfasts in the morning.”

  “All right. Remember.”

  She kissed me good night and left. I curled up picturesquely in my Fo-To-Mon-Taj-Ies and fell immediately asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was awakened the next morning by the noise of the neighbors’ children shooting at each other with futuristic firearms obtained by sending tops of packages containing milled grains to radio stations. I scrounged my face into the yielding pillows, stretched my legs under the smooth linen sheets, ran my hand caressingly over the satin comforter. Ah, so soft, so smooth, so good! I had been a long time thinking about this bed. In the last weeks before my furlough I had actually begun practicing these awakening convolutions in my monastic G.I. cot. A private two bunks down saw me and started a rumor that I was smuggling in a woman at night. For a while my prestige around the camp was enormous. “Hot Dan” they called me.

  After wallowing in the bed a little more I removed my Fo-To-Mon-Taj-Ies and took a shower—a private shower, all by myself. Here was something else I had dreamed of back in camp where I showered in a communal room so crowded I was never quite sure whose leg I was washing. One man in our outfit, a little guy scarcely five feet tall, tried for weeks to take a shower in that jammed room and never even got wet. For nearly an hour I splashed in lone splendor in more water than falls on Oklahoma in a year.

  Then I selected a natty olive-drab ensemble so popular that season, dressed, and went downstairs to a tandem breakfast of tomato juice, Wheaties with some kind of canned or fresh fruit, pig sausages, eggs, hot biscuits, and marmalade, followed by orange juice, stewed prunes, Canadian bacon, French toast, syrup, and raspberry jam. Mama watched benignly as I slid, belching, under the table.

  “What do you want for dessert?” she asked.

  I escaped to the living room when she wasn’t looking and made my plans for the day. First there was the matter of my erstwhile true love, Estherlee McCracken. And a thorny problem that was. She had returned my last five letters unopened, the final one with a pamphlet concerning paper conservation. Estherlee was going to take some handling. I picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answ
ered.

  “Hello,” I said hopefully. “This is Dan.”

  Silence.

  “Dan Miller. I love you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “How are you? How’s your health?”

  “I’m well, thank you.”

  “That’s good.”

  Silence again.

  “I’m fine too. That is, I was until a minute ago. I feel a chill now.”

  “I’m busy, Dan. What is it you want?”

  “Busy with what?”

  “I’m going out in a few minutes to roll bandages for the Red Cross, if you must know. For men who are fighting in this war.”

  I guess she told me all right.

  “Can I see you this afternoon?” I asked.

  “Impossible. I’m rolling bandages this afternoon.”

  “When the soldiers go out on a raid,

  At home sits the young nurse’s aide.

  Upon their return,

  Though without scratch or burn

  She’ll bandage the whole damn brigade,”

  I recited, vainly hoping to ease the situation.

  “It’s well enough for you to make jokes sitting safe in Oklahoma, but—”

  “How about tonight?”

  “No.”

  I laughed ironically, like in the movies. “This is it, then?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Dan.”

  “Kismet.”

  “What?”

  “Kismet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s Arabic for Fate.”

  “Where did you learn that? That’s cute.”

  “I’ve picked up a lot of Arabic lately. I’ve got an Arab buddy at camp. Corporal Ali ben Zedrine. He gave me a burnoose. I wear it when I burn nooses. Have dinner with me tonight and I’ll teach you some Arabic.”