The Return of Marvin Palaver

by Peter Rabe

  I could be wrong about this, on account of that 250 watts in the distance, but one person walking around looked a lot like a rabbit. He kept rushing around in a sports coat but no pants and kept shaking a pocket watch by his ear. That’s how I got the impression that he might be a rabbit, on account of those ears. He kept shaking the watch and saying: Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be too late, a nutty way of talking, but then what’s special about that, you find crazy people all over, that’s been my experience.

  Something else was not normal, like this person came up to me and started talking just like that I never heard of such a thing in New York, unless it’s a bum who wants a hand-out or a pervert wanting whatever. But this person coming up to me did not look like either one or the other.

  “Hi,” he said. “You’re new and just got here, am I right?”

  What was this, Hicksville, USA? I was polite, but cautious.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “You mean you don’t know me?” and he smiled a little.

  The funny thing was, he did look almost familiar, the kind of familiar which niggles at you but you can’t put your finger on it. I summed it up and said,

  “Why should I?” I’m always careful with strangers.

  “I don’t know from should,” he said, “but you could,” and he ran a finger along his collar, left to right, jaw held up like a bulldog who is trying to look at his chin.

  There was plenty of that. He was much too fat, if you came right down to it, and always smiling. He looked as if he thought that life was some kind of a joke. Correction. In this case, maybe dead was supposed to be funny. Anyway, such a sense of humor I can do without. He did that thing with his chin again and then he said,

  “Well, you ready to go?”

  “What are you, the tour guide?”

  “Why? You plan on doing the sights and then good-bye, Charlie?”

  “What is this? Maybe you think I’m here on some kind of vacation and this is Disneyland with a crazy rabbit running around checking time, but the fact is I got business elsewhere and the sooner I get back the better.”

  “Are you serious?” and he sounded like he had just heard the most ridiculous thing in his life. He made a little shrug, like I was the meshuggener but he forgave me. “Tell you what,” he said, “there’s some people here you might like to meet.”

  “Forget it. How do I get out of here?” and I turned in the direction away from the light.

  “I don’t really know,” he said. “And besides, I understand there are certain problems about coming back, travel restrictions, you might call them — “

  “If you don’t know how to get out of here, who does?”

  He came drifting around where I could see him again, but he didn’t stand there in any way to keep me from going.

  “Actually, you do,” he said. He started to fade a little. “I guess what you do, you just let the gravity of the situation take over and it’ll pull you right down.”

  It didn’t make sense, but it worked. The light went and he became faint. Just before he was all gone he waved an arm.

  “Try and be nice,” he called across, “and come back soon.”

  Ridiculous. Right then, as if nothing had happened, I was back in Sid’s crummy shack on Lot #1.

  Chapter 3

  The Real World, You’re Welcome

  I don’t know what came over me, but for a second there I was glad to see him. Of course, it wouldn’t do that he should recognize such a thing, so when he looked up I changed my expression to something he could handle.

  “Not to worry, Sid darling,” I said. “I had to step out for a minute, got a little faint or something, but it’s all under control. Now, we were saying — “

  I let it trail off, the cheer, the sentence, the humbleness, because of the way he raised his head and looked at me glassy eyed like some kind of a stuffed animal, real impolite. Then he let out this terrible fart. Right after that he smiled like a baby.

  “Gevalt,” he sighed. “That spells relief.”

  He got up, grabbed a folder off his desk, came my way and went to the door. And walked right through me.

  I was so shocked I didn’t believe it. As if to make the point, in case I didn’t believe it, he came back and did it again. After walking back through me he stopped by the desk and picked up the phone.

  “Herbie,” he snapped in that wonderful way he had, “did you hear from the crew? — Whaddaja mean no!”

  He kept speaking like that for a while to his foreman Herbie — keeping the men in line, he called it — while I thought about my new situation.

  Like everybody else, I have sometimes thought what a wonderful thing it would be to walk around invisible, though right then and there I couldn’t think what was so wonderful about it. So people could walk right through you? So I could stand there and listen to Sidney on the telephone?

  “I want that inventory outa the way two days early! I got a customer waiting. And another thing. Call Schlosser what used to run things for Marve — No. You call him, I’m busy, call him at the shack on Lot Two and tell him to meet me there in one hour sharp. Do it,” and Mister Sidney Silvertongue smacked down the telephone. Walked through me again and out of his crummy shack.

  Alright, I figured, enough surprises already, now let’s see what was left. What was left was myself invisible and Sidney about to do inventory ahead of time.

  It was always those bald-headed thin guys wearing loud shirts and gold chains who were in such a hurry about everything, as if getting away from wherever they were might solve all their problems. Fat chance. What it did, it made problems for me. But before taking care of the pain about this rush over inventory, there was this little matter of a contract which was hid right there under the blotter.

  So that was an advantage about being invisible. I could steal my own contract in Sidney’s shack and nobody could see me doing it. Such an advantage. Nobody was here anyway.

  I walked around the desk. I looked at this really crummy blotter — and at the paper still sticking out on one side in plain sight.

  To have so much luck, I must have done something right in my life, was my thinking, when I grabbed the contract, grabbed the contract again, and watched my hand go right through the thing. Through the blotter, the contract, and the desk.

  A wonderful advantage to be invisible and so right away and into the bargain unable to steal my own contract back. And without the contract, who’s to make Sidney pay for the steel plate he owned already?

  But no sooner was I getting upset from shock number one, when I have shock number two.

  On the desk is a calendar and in the middle of everything else, I’m looking at it. It said April fifth. That was the shock.

  The time when Sidney was signing the contract and I died from joy, that was when I had ten days left to fanagle before inventory time. Ten days, meaning April tenth. And now I saw by the calendar that I had lost already five days by rolling around heaven all that time. But what’s the big surprise? Since life is problems, why should dead be any different?

  The philosophy of that thought helped me pull myself together. Back to work. Five days lost in heaven, two days lost on account of Sidney always in such a hurry, so I had three days left. Time to see Schlosser right away. So I went.

  How did I do this, you wonder? I did it the way we do it when you’re dead. That means, you point your mind to the place you call the destination and you go there in thought, except the rest of you comes along too. Since I had always been quite a thinker, this new way of getting from one place to the other came very easy to me. So I found at least one advantage to being dead, after all.

  Swift as I went, it still was a lovely sight all around. I went through a flatbed parked outside the shack, I went through a pile of latkes made from cars, through the big press at the end of Sid’s yard, and then along the very neat rows of sorted stock in the yard what used to be my own.

  Such a pleasure to be back here with the packed dirt on the groun
d, packed so hard it never made mud in the rain, such a wonderful sight all the tall piles of heavy clunkers and rods and shapes of metal which came in rust red or in different greys which could tell you the grade and the composition. And all around that faint smell of black grease and that sour touch of wet metal coming up your nose. All this, I used to love it, neat, heavy, in order. Life could be like that, except then there were always people in it. Which brought my mind back to Schlosser.

  He was in my shack, except I don’t call it a shack. It is a mobile home without wheels and big enough to have everything in it. There is the desk and files, which I call the office, a toilet, a kitchen sink and refrigerator, and even a place with a couch and a short legged table in front of it for the feet and the magazines. I had always been quite a reader. Every day, no matter how busy, I used to take time and sit there on the couch. Now who sits there? Schlosser sits there.

  But Schlosser with his heels on my magazines was not a reader. He was sitting practically on his shoulder blades and in the meantime on his belly he was holding a bottle of beer. There he sat and was watching the bottle go up and down.

  Now I started to worry This was a person to help me in my present condition?

  This question was very important. As a dead person with a superior mind, I could not talk anymore face to face, voice to ear like I used to do in the past, I could talk only from one mind to the other.

  The problem? Here was Schlosser, no Wunderkind, watching a bottle go up and down, and I had to go and find his brains.

  I entered the place where it was supposed to be. Such a mish-mash I had never seen. This was a brain? Gefilte fish maybe.

  “Schlosser!” I said on the level of that mind.

  I could see that the bottle was going up and down just like before.

  “Schlosser! Are we talking money or what?”

  The bottle jumped on the belly, the feet came down on the floor. Schlosser frowned. But then he always frowned when a thought came passing through.

  “You listening, Schlosser? It’s me, your boss.”

  “Oh dear Jeesis in heaven!” and the bottle with the beer in it rolled around on the floor, foaming at the neck.

  “No, no. It’s Marve. It’s me talking.”

  He calmed himself. Quick like a lizard he grabbed for the bottle on the floor and poured the beer down his throat before any more could spill out. Then he shook his head and said “Ah.” He sighed, put the bottle on the coffee table, and stood up.

  So now he stood there, an old man with muscles. I also used to have a lot of muscles, it stands to reason, because how else was I going to move my weight around like a regular person? But I did not make a display of my muscles, I could fool anybody and look like a fat man instead. Not Schlosser. Like a stuffed sausage, was his way, with everything bulging out.

  But what good was it? All I had to work with was gefilte fish. He now started to crouch a little and to look all around. Before he got set to wrestle Jesus maybe or to go look for another beer, I had to get his attention without spooking this very limited person who was also my only link with success in this very important business venture I was doing on Sidney.

  “Like all the brainiest people,” I put it into his head, “my thoughts come sudden, like from nowhere.”

  He came out of his crouch and cocked his head a little, trying to get used to thinking.

  “But I’m getting used to it,” I put in there. “It’s time to crank up and get going on that wonderful Marvin deal.”

  “Huh?”

  It worked fine, talking to him, as if he was thinking all this himself, but maybe I was going a little too fast.

  “Okay,” I put into the brain, “let’s go out to the truck,” and I made it cheery, like a fun adventure.

  “What the hell,” he said to himself. “Why don’t I go out to the truck? Uh — Why am I going out to the truck?”

  “The wonderful Marvin deal, the money deal, out at the end of Line Three.”

  He thought that made sense and he went out to his pick-up in front of my trailer and drove down the line, to the end of it.

  Line Three was the alley where we stacked mostly I-beams on one side and the railroad axles on the other. At the end of that alley was an open place which we called the square. Here were the piles of stock that had not yet been sorted.

  Someone was working the crane in Line One where I used to keep cast iron mostly Since that stuff was all sorted and because there were no trucks for loading near the crane, this must have been the inventory crew starting to do Sidney’s suspicious work, just the way he had ordered.

  Schlosser stopped in the square. Three lines came in here, and the chain link gate was to one side where the trucks came in from the road in back. When Schlosser got out of the cab, I started to do his thinking again.

  “There’s the stuff!”

  “Huh?”

  “The wonderful Marvin deal, goyisher, kopp. Now pay attention.”

  “The wonderful Marvin deal, oh boy.”

  “The carbon steel plate, right behind the crummy girders hiding the steel, get it?”

  “Got it!”

  “Delivery time coming up in three days. Not much time to do all the work. So, first you got to call Tony at Coogan’s, the way it was set up.”

  He was getting a little confused by my speed but he looked at the girders and then out past the gate. Coogan’s Transport and Warehousing was down on the left of the road, the big place with a hundred trucks all over, all kinds, and there the road went on past a few machine shops and storage yards all the way to the road that went on to the Triborough Bridge.

  “When you call Tony at Coogan’s place, you tell him to set it up with the trucks like we planned, except he’s got to be ready tomorrow night, not a week from now, because….”

  “Hold it! Just one damn minute.”

  He was thinking on his own, which was not good.

  “Why the hell bother?” he said to himself in his head. “Why bother anymore?”

  “Why? I tell you why. Because it’s a brilliant plan, the Schlosser-Marvin plan to sell….”

  “Marve’s dead.”

  “So what. A deal’s a deal!”

  “What deal? Everything with Marve was a deal,” and he started to get back into his cab.

  “Wait a minute! It was not!”

  “It was so. He even used to sit on the toilet and say: Another shtickle, another nickle. After half an hour of that he used to come outa there and pay himself from petty cash.”

  Schlosser had a rotten way of looking at an innocent game. So I was a little constipated once in a while, which is no wonder when a man is all business and no time for anything else.

  “The deal,” I poked it into his head, “is still on, if you want to make that big money. For half a night’s work, all that money, think of all that big bucks money.”

  “Oh dear Jeesis in heaven,” he mumbled along. “Ten thousand bucks for half a night’s work, if that fat jerk hadn’t dropped dead.”

  “Schlosser, sweetheart, don’t throw dirt on the memory of the one person in your life who’s ever offered you ten, just a minute, offered you three thousand dollars for half a night’s….”

  “Hold it, hold it just one damn minute there, I’m not stupid or anything like that. It’s ten grand for the job to move the girders and load five flatbeds from Coogan’s in the middle of the night with Tony driving, take five loads from Lot #2 around to Lot #1, and Tony gets one grand and I get ten for the risk I take.”

  Judging by the heat he was putting into it, he was still interested, which was good.

  “Who needs Marve, the poor, dear person who’s dead now, because the marvelous plan is all set up to go with Schlosser at the wheel!”

  “Me?”

  “Right. Call Tony, set it up for tomorrow…”

  “Who’s paying? Where’s the money?”

  “Wait. That comes later. Right now…”

  “And who knows if Sid’s interested? If I know Ma
rve, and I do know Marve, that fat man could put a whole scam together with nothing but hot air and a few names thrown in.”

  “Don’t be a meshuggener all your life!”

  “And maybe Sid don’t know from nothing about carbon steel and has enough already to sink Manhattan.”

  Then he stared out of the side window of his truck and said “Jeesis” again.

  So what else is new, but what came was not good.

  Chapter 4

  A Hard Bargain, Like Steel

  On the other side of the back gate, which nobody ever used, except trucks and cranes, there stood the Cadillac, white with red upholstery inside behind the dark tinted glass, and Sidney-Who-Else sitting at the wheel.

  But what you really pay for with your money in a car like this is the sneaky way in which that hearse slides up to you without the decency to let a person know that it’s coming.

  “Open up the damn gate, Schlosser!”

  Such a commanding voice from a nebish, maybe you get that for gratis when you buy a Cadillac with colors like from a circus tent? But Schlosser, he didn’t know from nebish, or from having no class, he jumped out of his pick-up and ran over there to open the gate. Schlosser had no class either.

  The Cadillac came slithering through, Schlosser closed the gate, and Sidney got out on the driver’s side. After slamming the door he put one elbow on the roof of the car and looked around like Napoleon inspecting the troops from the top of a hill.

  “Schlosser!”

  From the top of the hill he was now yelling down at the drummer boy who kept maybe missing a beat, screwing up the battle.

  “Yessir.”

  “Where’s that carbon steel?”

  Schlosser and me, we were both surprised but for different reasons. Schlosser was surprised to discover his wonderful Marvin deal was not dead, and I was getting excited because the Waterloo of Mister Sidney Napoleon was really not that far away. Then Schlosser recovered.

  “Whassat? You say what?”

  Not bad. For a dummy, that was a very good way to get information.