Front-Page McGuffin & The Greatest Story Never Told

by Peter Crowther

  “And, you know … I think it helped her. Course, it could just’ve been the rubbing that helped but I didn’t think so. Anyway, I wasn’t taking any chances. So the girl came with me to the hospital another couple of times and then she didn’t want to come any more. I can’t say as how I blamed her. Hospitals can be downbeat places at the best of times and I was bad company to go with.”

  McCoy takes a slug of beer and rests his glass on the table. “So what did you do then?”

  “By this time I had gotten so many of these folk-stories, sayings, homilies, and who knows what else that I was taking a whole bunch of stuff in there every day … and I was visiting with Betty morning, afternoon and evening, each time with something else to slip under her pillow or in her bedside cabinet.”

  “Things like what?” Jim asks.

  “Oh, good luck coins—pennies with her year of birth printed on them—taped-up saltpot, a model of a black cat, piece of wood from an alter, rabbit’s foot … there were so many I kind of lost track what I was doing there for a while.” Front-Page shakes his head and raps the table. “And I had started doing things by myself, too.”

  Jack is back down on the floor and he shifts his weight from one knee to the other. “Like what?” he asks.

  “Knocking wood all the time,” he says, rapping the table to demonstrate, even though no demonstration was necessary, “spitting when I saw the back of a mail-van, spinning around when I inadvertently walked across cracks in paving stones, moving one hand in an arc to join the other hand when I saw a nun or a priest—you’d be surprised how many nuns and priests you see when you’re doing this kind of stuff.”

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t lock you up,” Jim observes and then winces when Edgar kicks him in the shin.

  “That’s okay,” Front-Page says, and he raps the table just to make sure.

  “But Betty … Betty didn’t make it,” he says quietly.

  There’s a world of regret in that simple statement and, even though Front-Page’s voice is low, the two guys at the bar look around, just for a second, not knowing why they’re looking around but simply responding to the sudden sense of loss that permeates the bar and mingles with the sound of Art Pepper’s alto on ‘Why Are We Afraid?’.

  Edgar and McCoy and Bills and Jack and Jim just sit there, taking it in turns to nod, Edgar and Bills squeezing Front-Page’s shoulders.

  Front-Page shakes his head. “By then, I was too heavily into this stuff to back off. Even tried to change her burial day.”

  “Why?” asks Jack

  “I read that, in County Cork in Ireland, it’s bad luck to be buried on a Monday and that’s when … when Betty was scheduled. They wouldn’t change it. Said that it wasn’t as simple as just changing days. I was devastated. There was a whole lot of spitting and knocking and turning the night after I found out, I can tell you that for nothing! But then I read someplace else that it was okay to be buried on a Monday so long as at least one sod was turned on the grave-site a day or two beforehand. So I went down to Lawnswood and dug over a small section. Then I was … heh, I was going to say happy: I was placated.

  “How come you never told us any of this?” Edgar asks. “We saw you the night after Betty died and you seemed … well, you seemed normal. I mean, you were upset—hell, that was obvious—but I didn’t know about any of this other stuff.” He turns to the others. “Anyone know about this?”

  There were several shakes of heads and a few grunted ‘No’s.

  “Well, I’m pleased to hear that,” Front-Page says. “I tried to keep it to myself … though I’m pleased that nobody happened to see me when I could see a nun!”

  Sometimes it happens that a conversation just naturally takes a pause and this one does right here. A time to take a drink and to watch the guy at the bar throw a couple of bills on the counter before making his way to the stairs and up to the waiting streets of New York; a time to nod to the music, like you were listening to it all along; a time to take a drink.

  “So,” Jack Fedogan says, his voice kind of lilting, phrasing the question like he’s asking what Front-Page thinks to the new album by Jimmy Smith, “what took you down to Battery Park?”

  “Just walking,” comes the reply. “I spent the past three years just walking … walking and thinking … and rapping, and spitting, and turning, and who knows what else. And I just fell right over, felt like a truck ran over my chest. Then I got up. Went somewhere … like I say, I don’t remember. Wasn’t until a couple of days later, after I’d stopped eating and sleeping and drinking, I felt for my pulse and there wasn’t one. Put my hand on my chest”—He puts his hand on his chest to demonstrate—“No heartbeat.”

  Front-Page opens his mouth wide. The inside is grey and dry and, just for a second, before he turns his head away, Jim Leafman thinks he sees something wriggle across the back of Front-Page’s mouth, down near the top of the throat. “No saliva,” Front-Page explains. “Gets so I can hardly open my mouth sometimes. The drink helps though … I think,” he says as he takes a slug of beer and swishes it around his mouth, then swallows.

  “So why’d you come here?” Jack asks. “I mean, why’d you wait until tonight?”

  “Well, for a time there, I didn’t want to see anybody who would remind me of what I had and don’t have any more. Kept myself to myself. Lived out on the streets … down in the subway tunnels sometime. Met some strange people. Met some nice people, too. It’s like I say, there’s good and bad everywhere.

  “Then, when I’d … you know; when I’d died … I met this guy in an alley and I told him pretty much everything I just told you guys. And he says—after we’d established the fact that I was dead … and he was mighty surprised at that, I can tell you—he says maybe I need to do it again.”

  “Huh?” says Jim, a thin trickle of beer dribbling down his chin. “Do it again? Do what again?”

  “Die.”

  The five men stare at Front-Page McGuffin wondering if they heard him right.

  “He says to me—this guy I met—he says that maybe, every once in a while, it doesn’t take the first time and I need to do it again. So—”

  Edgar Nornhoevan shakes his head and pushes his chair back. “Hey, do I want to hear this?”

  “No,” says Front-Page. “It’s okay. Really.

  “So, we think of ways I can do it. He says, why don’t I throw myself under a car or onto the subway under a train. Now I don’t want to do that because it’ll maybe mess up the driver of that car or train. But I say, yes, I’ll try the subway track because it’s electrified, but only when the train has been through.

  “So we go down onto 42nd Street, buy the token, the whole business, and we wait until a train comes through. Then when it leaves, I climb down onto the track and lie against the third rail. Nothing happens. I mean, I took hold of that thing and there was nothing. By the time I’m climbing out, commuters are coming onto the platform for the next train. They look at me and the other guy like we’re scum of the earth and we high-tail it out of there as quickly as we can, with folks shouting after us, calling us names.

  “So then he suggests I go up somewhere high and jump down. This sounds like a good idea to him—I mean, what could be more final, right?—but I always had this fear of heights and, well, I just couldn’t do it. And another thing was that if it didn’t work, and I was still conscious but with every bone in my body mushed to pulp, I wouldn’t even be able to get around.

  “So I say how’s about I drown myself. He thinks this is a good idea.

  “We go up to Central Park—out to the lake?—and I wade on out into the water, which I have no sensation of, incidentally, and I keep walking until it covers my head. And I keep on walking. Then I just stand there, looking up through the water at the stars twinkling up there in the sky. I can hear this other guy shouting to me—a kind of half-shout, half-whisper … because it’s late at night, you know, and the muggers are out—he’s shouting asking me if I’m okay. And I’m trying to answer him
. There I am, in ten feet of water, trying to talk. I stayed there for about fifteen minutes and then came out.”

  Front-Page shakes his head and takes a slug of beer.

  Edgar suddenly notices that beer is dripping onto the floor from Front-Page’s chair but he doesn’t say anything.

  Shrugging, Front-Page says, “And I tried other things. Hanging myself. No good. I think it broke my neck, which is maybe why I have trouble swallowing, but it didn’t do anything else. I only thank God that I did it with this other guy near at hand. I mean, I just kicked away a waste basket—we were in the Park again, under cover of darkness—and swung there from the branch of this tree. I felt fine … well, I felt no different. If he hadn’t have been there, I’d have been found in the morning, still swinging there, still trying to talk and ask someone to please get me down.

  “Then I tried poison. You see, I was trying things that, if they didn’t work, wouldn’t make me look any different than the way I always look. I mean, if I’d tried fire, then I may have burned all my body into a blackened mass which I would still maybe have to walk around with.”

  Front-Page shakes his head again and knocks wood.

  “Then this guy, he says maybe he’s not the one to give me any advice. He means by this, maybe nobody alive can give me advice on this one. So I ask him what he means by this. And he says I should think about trying to speak to somebody who’s already dead.”

  At this point, Front-Page McGuffin turns to Bills Williams and says, “I want you to help me talk to Dawdle O’Rourke.”

  Without saying a word, Jack Fedogan gets to his feet and walks over to the counter. A couple of minutes later he comes back to the lilting piano of Herbie Hancock playing ‘My Funny Valentine’, carrying another pitcher of beer. Nobody has said anything while he’s been away, like it was some kind of performance which couldn’t continue while one of the actors was taking a leek.

  Jack pulls over a chair and sits down at the table, setting the pitcher next to the empty one. “This should be bourbon,” he says. To which Edgar gives a short snigger and then does the honours of freshening everyone’s glass.

  “Can you do it, Bills?” McCoy asks.

  Bills nods and looks down at the playing cards in his hands. “I can try,” he says. “But are you sure Dawdle is the one? You don’t want me to call on Betty instead?”

  “Uh uh,” says Front-Page. “She’d worry. I mean, I should be up there—or ‘out’ there … or wherever the hell ‘there’ is—and the fact that I’m not with her will mean I must still be alive. If she knew all this was happening, she’d worry. It has to be Dawdle. Dawdle and me go way back. If he can’t help me, then nobody can. I know I can trust him not to say anything to anyone else … mainly to Betty. He’s the only one. I love the others but they’d think they were doing me a favour by speaking to Betty. I can’t take that chance.”

  Only Herbie Hancock has anything to say after that, and he’s doing his talking with his piano.

  After a while, Front-Page says to Bills, “Will you do it?”

  Bills nods. “I’ll do it.”

  As they’re preparing one of the tables over near the wall, Jack Fedogan is going around telling the other folks that he’s closing up for the night, closing up early. It’s a credit to him and the Working Day itself that the other patrons accept this as just the way things are. They leave with smiles and nods, pulling on scarves and overcoats as they prepare to venture up the wooden stairs and out into the January streets of Manhattan.

  Pretty soon there’s just the six of them.

  Eleven if you count Coleman Hawkins, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Tommy Flanagan, Ron Carter and Gus Johnson, whose mellow ‘There Is No Greater Love’ is wafting around the bar, filling the corners and all the nooks and crannies of The Land at the End of the Working Day, preserving the mystery of those hidden places while removing their threat.

  Front-Page himself is not taking part in the preparations. He’s sitting at the old table, the one near the bar, sitting by himself and occasionally looking up, looking around, and then looking back at his drink, sometimes taking a slug, the pool of beer around his chair widening all the while.

  “All his insides are shot,” Edgar explains to Jim Leafman as they throw a green cloth over the designated table. “Liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, bowel, colon … all rotted to mush.”

  “Yeah?” says Jim, sneaking a glance across.

  “It’s what happens,” Edgar says matter-of-factly. “Happens to us all.” He pulls a face. “You catch the smell?”

  Jim frowns and shakes his head.

  “You should’ve been sitting next to him. Poor guy. Smells like an open sewer.”

  Bills Williams comes out of the bathroom with McCoy Brewer. “What he’s done,” he’s saying to McCoy, “is mess up his natural forces with protective talismans and totems. Maybe it’s the sheer number and frequency, maybe it’s just the interaction of one or two … I don’t know.”

  They stop at the table and look across at Front-Page.

  “And in doing so, he’s made it so that he … his soul, his id, his karma … whatever you want to call it—he’s made it so that his very essence has been imprisoned. Maybe he was protecting himself—for a while anyways—from external influences, but he died from what sounds like a heart attack. It was an internal force that killed him. I don’t think you can protect yourself from what’s happening in your own body. Don’t think you should even try.” Bills gave a small smile, without humour. “We are born, we live and we die. That’s the way it is … and that’s the way it has to be. When Front-Page’s time came and his body could no longer continue, his essence should have been free to go. We’re going to do this thing—contact Dawdle O’Rourke—but I don’t know as how it’ll do any good.”

  “Okay, everybody ready?” says Jack Fedogan.

  “As we’ll ever be,” says Bills. “Front-Page?”

  The time of inaction seems to have taken its toll and Front-Page is once again moving with extreme difficulty. So much so that Jack and McCoy have to go over and help him to the new table.

  When they are all seated evenly around the table, Bills starts to speak.

  “Okay, here’s the way it’s going to work. We all link hands palm-down on the table. Nobody breaks the link, whatever happens. If this thing is going to work, it’ll work right away. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t going to work. Okay?”

  Everyone nods and grunts assent.

  “No talking or sounds of any kind, okay?”

  Without waiting for a response, Bills Williams takes a hold of McCoy’s and jack’s hands and allows his head to fall forward onto his chest.

  “Dawdle O’Rourke?” Bills says, his voice sounding deep and strange, sitting on the sound of Tommy Flanagan’s piano like a cork on an ocean. “Dawdle O’Rourke, I need to speak with you. A friend of yours needs your help. His name is Front-Page McGuffin. Please respond.”

  They wait in silence.

  After a couple of minutes, Bills repeats the message word for word.

  Still no response.

  “Dawdle O’Rourke, you are urgently needed. This is Bills Williams in The Land at the End of the Working Day. Please respond.”

  Front-Page tries to smile and pulls his hands away from Edgar and Jack. “It’s no good,” he says as he tries to pull his eyelid up. “It’s just not going to work.”

  They all break their hand-holds.

  Jack Fedogan leans forward on the table. “Hey,” says Jack, “you ever hear about those cases where folks lift automobiles off of kids who are trapped beneath … just regular scrawny people who suddenly have this amazing strength?”

  “Yes?”

  “Yep.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Well,” says Jack, “why is that?”

  “You think this is the time for-”

  “No, Edgar, this could be important,” says Jack. “It’s the power of the mind, isn’t it? That’s what does it.”

  “Yeah, that’s
what they say on Cable TV, Jack,” says Edgar, “so what’s your point?”

  “My point is … ” He turns to look at Front-Page and sees his old friend’s wrecked face, sees the black rings around the eyes, pieces of lip that seem to be coming away—he never noticed those before—and tufts of hair that stand proud of the scalp which itself is going kind of blue and mottled, like hands that have been in water too long. And, taking hold of Front-Page’s hand again, he asks, “Do you trust me?”

  The voice that comes back is deep and resonant, the voice on an old vinyl record that’s playing when the power cuts out on the player. “I trust you, Jack,” Front-Page says, and he blinks his eyes closed.

  “Front-Page?” Edgar says.

  “He’s gone,” says Bills.

  “Where’s he gone?” says Jim. “He’s right there. Where could he—”

  “Give me a hand with him,” Jack Fedogan says. He stands up and pulls Front-Page up to his feet by his arm. “Jeez, his arm!”

  “What’s wrong with his arm?” asks McCoy.

  Bills rushes around the table and takes hold of Front-Page McGuffin’s other arm, hoisting it around his own shoulder. “The muscles have atrophied,” he says. “Gone to mulch.”

  Jim Leafman scowls. “Yeuch.”

  Edgar kicks nudges him and says, “Shh!”

  With Front-Page on his feet, but his eyes still closed, and his arms around Jack’s and Bills’s shoulders, Bills says, “What now?”

  “Help me get him to the stairs.”

  “Where you going?” asks Bills.

  “Out.”

  “Where out? It’s below zero out there,” says McCoy getting to his feet.