A Fatal Glass of Beer

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “You get a look at him?” I asked.

  “The tall guy, yes. Whoever hit me, no. Sorry, Sandy. I think he was big.”

  “Go back to bed, Virgil,” she said. “You did your best.”

  Virgil slunk out of the room.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Got nothing to hold any of you on or for,” she said, getting up and going to her desk. “I’ll have the state police check the bullets. You’ll have to make a statement, sign a few papers, and then I guess you’ll be leaving town.”

  “As quickly as we can,” I said as she handed me my .38.

  After she took our statements, Chief Milch herself drove us back to the hotel. Our bags were packed and waiting for us. Fields had already paid the girl with the baby the night before, but she was out watching as Gunther brought the car around.

  After we had packed everything in the Caddy and gotten in, I said, “Where now?”

  “No idea,” said Fields. “But I want to get that son of a bitch.”

  “Ottumwa,” said Gunther. “Iowa. I found this on the windshield, under the wiper.” Gunther reached over his shoulder and handed us a card on which was printed: “Ottumwa. See you there.”

  Chapter Seven

  Of all the presidents’ hobbies, I think General Grant’s came nearer to my ideals …

  Fields sat in silence, looking out the window, leaning on his cane as Gunther sped up the Interstate on the way to Indianapolis and, beyond that, Ottumwa, Iowa. The cane was a spare he had brought with him and had been pressed into service when whoever had shot at us had cut the other one in two.

  Finally, Fields muttered, “There’s more damn corn in this country than there are people. I eat two ears a year and give my neighbor’s dog an additional one or two just to watch him struggle with getting the little bits out from between his teeth. I’ve sent more canines into dental madness than modesty permits me to disclose.”

  “Corn is used principally to feed cows, extract oils, and to make alcoholic beverages,” Gunther said seriously from the front seat, where he watched the road carefully and managed to drive just above the posted speed limits.

  “Fascinating,” said Fields, putting down his morning drink. “Pull over, we just crossed into Indiana.”

  Gunther pulled over. Cars zipped by us as Fields got out of the car and moved to the driver’s window.

  “Out,” he ordered, opening the door.

  Gunther looked back at me and I shrugged. Gunther got out and Fields leaned over to remove the straps on the pedals and shove the padded seat over to the passenger side. Then he got in. Gunther stood next to the car with some bewilderment.

  “I,” said Fields, “will show you how to get to Iowa faster than it takes a man I once knew named Whalebait to down half a pint of distinctly inferior whiskey.”

  Gunther looked at me. I shrugged and opened the rear door. Gunther got in. No sooner had he closed the door than Fields took off, tires screaming, almost hitting a truck that had “Royalist Cigars” painted on the side, along with a large picture of a cigar and smoke curling up.

  “Should look where he’s going,” Fields muttered as he glanced back in his rearview mirror at the truck and its badly shaken driver. “Did you know that eighty-three percent of the women of these United States put out ashtrays the size of thimbles, designed to embarrass the cigar smoker whose ash, of necessity, falls on the table or arm of the divan?”

  Neither Gunther nor I answered. Fields gathered speed. Over the course of the next four hours we had six near collisions, were almost hit by a train, and came close to a fistfight with the driver of an A & P truck who Fields had forced partly off the road and very nearly into the Vermilion River just past the Illinois border.

  Fields reached back through the open sliding window from time to time for a glass of liquid from his thermos. He didn’t trust Gunther or me to mix a martini for him.

  “Drinking and driving is the only reasonable thing to do,” he said, passing a trio of cars on a two-lane highway and coming within a dozen yards of a collision with an oncoming Oldsmobile before scooting back into our own lane, almost toppling the Cadillac.

  Gunther was pale and gripping the armrests. I was preparing for my death somewhere between Danville and Davenport. Fields had made it clear that there would be stops for bladder relief only. He had allowed us to pause before we got out of Indiana for a stack of sandwiches, some bottles of Pepsi, and some ice, which Fields said we could keep in his backseat cooler. Neither Gunther nor I felt much like eating or drinking.

  At least a dozen times, Fields drove partly off the side of the road, sometimes hitting small stones that flew up and pinged off the windows or spitting up dirt and mud that made it hard to see.

  “If he can beat us to Ottumwa,” Fields muttered at one point, “the bastard must be part eagle.”

  Finally, I tried to eat a sandwich, ham and cheese, while we drove. It wasn’t easy getting it to my mouth. Gunther opened a sandwich and daintily took small pieces of meat and cheese. I spilled some Pepsi on the seat, looked up to see if Fields had noticed, and then managed to drink.

  “Keep the upholstery clean,” Fields shouted. “Never know when I might entertain a studio executive or his secretary back there.”

  Fields flipped on the radio, carefully zipping past anything that sounded like music. We heard from a serious-sounding man with a deep voice that General Patton had wept after his aide, Captain Richard Jenon, twenty-seven, was killed. The announcer said Jenon was from Pasadena.

  Fields listened attentively, barely managing to avoid collision with the rear of a small pickup truck full of crates of chickens.

  The newscaster added that Rommel was still on the run, that Dorothy Lamour had married Captain William Ross II, and that Beau Jack had won a decision to keep his lightweight crown. The announcer said that the crowd had almost unanimously booed the decision. Once again I had lost to Violet Gonsenelli, girl handicapper.

  “Pugilism,” Fields pontificated, “is the sport of men, ancient, honorable. I once went three rounds with Jack Dempsey. Just a lark. Got him good and drunk before I stepped into the ring. Managed to elude the staggering champion and engage in several pirouettes and entrechats in the process. He never laid a glove on me. Never caught me. I, being a gentleman, did not lay a glove on him. The newspapers called it a joke. I called it a draw.”

  “We’re going to go through that red light,” I said as calmly as I could.

  “It’s yellow,” said Fields calmly.

  “It’s turning red right now,” I said.

  Gunther was attempting to speak but nothing was coming out.

  Fields ran the light, missing a green Chevrolet by no more than a few inches. Fields opened his window and shouted at the bewildered man, who had pulled to the side of the road.

  “Go to a decent driving school,” Fields yelled. “Or buy a bicycle.” Satisfied, Fields closed the window.

  “You want to go home when we hit Ottumwa?” I asked Gunther quietly.

  “Decidedly,” said Gunther. “However, I have always made it a practice to live up to my agreements, contracts, and obligations. I will remain with you in the hope that Mr. Fields approaches something resembling sense and allows me behind the wheel once again.”

  “I heard all that, you runt,” Fields shouted over the roar of the engine at seventy-five miles an hour as we swayed forward. “You’re a good man. Ever play any pool?”

  “No,” said Gunther.

  “Ping-Pong?”

  “No.”

  “Poker?”

  “No,” answered Gunther.

  “Do you chase women?”

  “I am fond of females,” said Gunther. “But I find that they often disappoint me. Perhaps the novelty soon fades.”

  “You mean you can’t hold your own?” shouted Fields.

  “No,” said Gunther. “I mean yes. I was referring to the novelty of my stature. I am, as you so sympathetically put it, a runt.”

  “Don’
t like me much, do you?” asked Fields, honking the horn and forcing an old woman in an ancient car off the road.

  “Strangely enough,” said Gunther, “I have grown quite fond of you.”

  “You are an appreciator of the comic art of conversation and the skills of a world-class driver,” said Fields, looking down the road for further prey.

  “No,” said Gunther seriously. “I do not understand your wit. Perhaps it is a language problem. Your vocabulary is large, but your use of it is confusing. I find you, however, a very sad man.”

  Fields had a smile on his face as he turned to face us, ignoring the road. He was about to say something but his eyes met Gunther’s and Fields’s mouth closed. He turned around and drove with something approaching his idea of caution for the next hundred miles. He drove without speaking, other than to ask for refills.

  “I should like to take up Ping-Pong or pool,” Gunther finally said as we crossed into Iowa.

  “And I should consider it an honor to teach you the nuances of the art of table tennis,” said Fields.

  Except for almost hitting the woman pushing the baby carriage in Burlington and the unintended brief detour off the road and into a field of some sort of grain when a deer appeared in the road, we reached Ottumwa, alive, late in the afternoon.

  I checked the watch on my wrist. It said six-fifteen. The watch was a bequest of my father. It had its own mad sense of time and seldom came within hours of being right. I’d been told by three watch repairmen that there was nothing they could see wrong with my father’s watch. One of them, an ancient Austrian, said that it was probably me—a force field or something. He had seen many such cases of perfectly fine watches that wouldn’t keep the right time and even stopped for no reason. This had happened even when the wearer changed watches. “You have, I think,” the Austrian watchmaker had said, “an electromagnetic field that is negative instead of positive.”

  When I asked him to explain, he said he was a watchmaker, not a physicist.

  One thing I did notice as we slowed to the pace of a mad cheetah was that not many of the stores seemed to be opened, though it wasn’t quite five.

  “Town closes down early,” Fields observed, looking for the bank, trying to remember, having little success.

  Finally, we pulled into a Texaco gas station where a thin man with a drooping lower lip, wearing overalls, came out, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

  “Fill the tank, my good man,” Fields said. “And point us in the direction of the bank.”

  The gas-station man nodded and said, “Which bank?”

  “How many you got?” asked Fields.

  “Three,” said the man, moving to the rear of the Caddy to fill up the tank.

  “All of them,” said Fields, sticking his head out the window. “And hurry.”

  “Won’t make any difference if I hurry or not,” said the man, starting to pump the gas and looking through the rear window at Gunther and me.

  His demeanor suggested to me that he thought we were the sad remains of the Dillinger gang out to remove all the hard-earned money of the citizens of Ottumwa before hurrying on to more easy pickings in Nebraska.

  “What time do the banks close?” asked Fields.

  “Five-thirty,” said the man, still pumping.

  “Gives us more than half an hour,” said Fields with satisfaction and a smile, patting the steering wheel as if it were Ken Maynard’s horse Tarzan, and he’d just carried us over the Rocky Mountains.

  “Nope,” said the man in overalls, removing the nose of the pump and closing the tank. “Banks are all closed. Saturday. Only open in the morning till noon on Saturdays.”

  None of us, not even Gunther, had noticed that it was Saturday. The days had begun to melt into each other.

  “We can’t get in. He can’t get in,” Fields said. “And I’m damn sure we beat him.”

  “Now,” said Gunther softly, “we must spend tonight and Sunday here.”

  He sounded relieved.

  “You can drive again after we catch Hipnoodle here in the heartland,” Fields said.

  “A buck-fifty, even, and gas-ration stamps,” the man in overalls said.

  Fields produced both, handed them to the man, and said, “Dare I risk it? Can you point us in the direction of the finest hotel in your fair city?”

  “Two lights straight ahead,” said the man, pointing. “Turn right. Keep going. You’ll be downtown. Hotels there. Never stayed in one myself.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Fields, touching the rim of his boater hat and heading toward downtown.

  Not much was open as we drove slowly along, but there were cars parked on either side of the street, cars and a variety of small trucks. Fields spotted a hotel and pulled into a space, slightly scraping an already heavily scraped pickup truck.

  When we hit the lobby, we all saw a modest banner across the wall, stating, “Welcome, County Grange Members, 12th Annual Meeting.”

  There were groups of men, probably farmers, talking in the corners of the lobby, around tables, at chairs drawn up so they could lean forward and hear themselves. There was also a table behind which sat a very heavy woman with thick glasses and a stack of papers before her. She looked up at us as we passed her and headed for the checkin desk.

  We had to ring to make a young man in a neat, tan, but slightly worn suit appear behind the counter. He had no left arm, just a kind of mechanical pincer showing through the end of his sleeve.

  “Yes, sirs,” he said.

  “Two rooms,” said Fields.

  “You with the Grange?” asked the young man politely.

  “The Grange?” Fields repeated.

  Gunther was already, with the help of an old bellman, dragging in our considerable stack of luggage.

  “Entire hotel is sold out. Has been for months. Grange members only.”

  “We are farmers,” said Fields, standing erect.

  The counterman with one arm looked at Fields and me and over at Gunther, who had almost completed the task of hauling in the luggage.

  “Darned if you don’t look and sound like W. C. Fields,” said the clerk with a grin.

  “I’ve been told there is a faint resemblance,” said Fields. “Perhaps an anomaly on my mother’s side.”

  “Mr. Fields is my favorite,” the clerk said. “Don’t miss a movie or a radio show. Never saw him live.” He reached below the counter and came up with a copy of Movie Life, flipped through the pages, found what he wanted, and turned the page to Fields. There was no doubt that the man in the picture and my client were one and the same. “I’d appreciate your signing this for me,” said the young clerk. “I’ll have it framed and put it on the wall.”

  Fields took the pen offered to him by the young man and said, “What’s your name?”

  “Alex Collins.”

  “To my dear friend, Alex Collins,” Fields said as he wrote on the picture. “And to the secret we have promised to share with no one but each other. W. C. Fields.”

  Collins turned the magazine around and grinned.

  “Rooms?” asked Fields.

  “Gotta convince the Grange checkin lady,” Collins said with a shrug. “Can’t risk losing my job.”

  “How’d you lose your arm? War?” asked Fields.

  “No. Tractor. I was twelve.”

  “Farming’s dangerous,” said Fields.

  “That’s why I’m behind this desk,” said Collins. “Good luck.”

  We moved, now a trio, to the desk where the fat woman in glasses sat. She looked up, hands folded and smiling.

  “We’re farmers,” said Fields, removing his hat.

  The woman blinked at the three of us.

  “Up near Clarinda,” said Fields, pointing toward the hotel door.

  “Names,” said the woman, pulling a typed pile of papers in front of her.

  “Pearlfender,” Fields said. “And these are my partners, Mr. Whalebait and Mr. Pertwee. You’ll not find our names on your list. We just purchase
d the acreage and the delightful house and barn yesterday.”

  “Terry Willans’s place?” she asked.

  “The same,” said Fields.

  “I’ll be cracked like an acorn,” she said, shaking her head. “Terry and his family have been trying to unload that place for years. You’re city people.”

  “Your powers of observation are beyond normal human ken,” Fields said, still smiling and leaning over. “And your eyes are the sweet brown of a cow I once had the pleasure of milking in Minnesota some years back.”

  The fat woman blushed.

  “What are you gonna try to grow on the place?” she asked.

  “Couscous, farfel, exotic hearty grains no longer available to the palates of the sophisticated city dwellers who have not seen a couscous bud since before the war.”

  “I never …” the woman began.

  “But soon you shall, my little prairie daisy,” said Fields.

  “Two dollars each,” the woman said, holding out her pudgy palm.

  Fields fished into his pocket and came up with a twenty. The woman found change and handed Fields a receipt.

  “Just take it to the desk,” she said. “Dinner’s at seven. James W. Kroft is the dinner speaker.”

  “James W. Kroft,” Fields replied amiably, handing me the receipt.

  “Designer of the Kroft Heavy-Duty Silo,” she said. “Is that couscous stuff heavy?”

  “No, but the farfel sits in your stomach like an anvil,” said Fields and then added in a whisper, “I’d prefer you not tell any of our fellow tillers of the soil about our crop plans.”

  “Mum,” she said. “And don’t miss the dinner. You paid for it. Besides, we always get rambunctious afterwards.”

  “Irresistible,” said Fields.

  The one-armed clerk checked Mr. Pearlfender, Whalebait, and Pertwee in with a smile and said, “I knew you could do it.”

  “Professional,” said Fields, plunking down cash for the night’s lodging and signing us in.