The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  Right up there? Well, he didn’t believe him. A politician, even so peripheral a one as himself, had enemies. The simplest candidacy called them down on your head—your opponent, everyone in the other fellow’s campaign, everyone who would vote against you. And it was a myth that they didn’t hold grudges, that everyone came together again after you sent off your concession telegram and read it against the silenced dance band and canceled joy of your disappointed rooters and partisans. Add your enemies to your enemies list, add your rooters and partisans. Well, it was a question of worldview, wasn’t it? Of Manichaean divisions. Darkness, light. Of generosity, of the hint in the heart that you don’t live long enough to afford generosity. It was ancient political principle, the basis of party. Frighten the demons, fend bears with the fire. Or use it to dance around the light. Joy factions, fear. The there’s-no-tomorrows. The waste-not-want-nots. Lo the Democrats, lo Republicans. You had enemies. He had enemies.

  Oh, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Druff mourned his boy. Whose trouble was that he had no facts. No hard information. Was without data, proofs, lowdown. Chapter and verse. Grounds. Had neither at hand nor on call any of the hard evidentiaries of the world, none of its soft circumstantials. Who was neither learning-disabled—he knew his alphabet when he was three, could read when he was still in kindergarten—nor stupid so much as plunked down in a world he did not take in. (He confused, for example, motels and hotels, always said the one when he meant the other. Motels, Druff had constantly to remind him, stood for motor hotels. They were the ones with the swimming pools.) It was as if, at entirely the wrong age for it, he had been moved to a country whose language he did not understand, would never completely master.

  Also there was the question of his alarming, unreasonable fears. He lived at a level beneath cause, some constant red-alert life. Druff remembered—this would have been before seat belts came in—that Mikey insisted that all the doors in an automobile be locked before he would let his father—otherwise he would cry, howl, scream bloody murder—turn the key in the ignition.

  Well, he was craven. To this day he winced at fireworks, was uneasy in electrical storms, terrified when fuses blew or the phone lines were down. It was as if he’d been raised in air raids, rubble.

  It wasn’t, Druff knew, so much for his own safety he feared as the safety of his family. “Mom, Dad, I’m back,” he’d call when, no matter the hour, he let himself into the house. And if he or Rose Helen didn’t immediately respond he would march through the rooms looking for them. Nor was it love that made him call out this way. He needed protection. It was his fear of being suddenly orphaned. He needed protection, he needed reassurance. “Are we rich?” he would ask when he was still a teenager. “We’re comfortable,” Druff or his mother would tell him. He might mention the name of some friend’s parents. “Are we as comfortable as they are?” “Jesus,” Druff said, lying on the couch, his head up on pillows, “I sure am.” “No, really, Dad, no fooling. Don’t kid. Are we well off?” Druff estimated the size of his estate for him. “Is that net worth?” “What’s net worth?” (He was willing to tell him what they had. He only wanted to make sure the boy understood the term. Maybe, he reasoned, it might be a way of finally bringing his kid into the world.) “After probate. After outstanding debts.” “Gross,” Druff said. “Does that include insurance?” “Of course it includes insurance.” “But you’re rated, Daddy,” Mikey said, “you can’t get insurance.” “I’m a municipal official. I get term insurance.” “Do you have to take a physical for term insurance?” “I get the maximum for my grade. If I wanted to purchase additional insurance I’d have to take a physical.” Mikey was uncomfortable. “What about the house? Does it include the house?” “My term insurance?” “Your estate.”

  So the commissioner began to tell his factless, troubled, finally unreassurable son about certain deals that went down, little fiddles he was involved in at the Hall. He made them seem innocuous, said he was doing only what all politicians did, but made him promise never to discuss any of this with his friends. To a certain extent Mikey seemed appeased, but Druff wondered if he’d made a mistake when the boy started coming to him with questions about how much time his father would have to serve if he was caught. “How long can they keep you in jail if you’re found guilty of taking bribes, Dad?” “Oh,” Druff said, “if you’ve been bribed, they usually let you off with a fine. If you’ve asked for the bribe they generally give you up to three weeks per thousand.” The boy shook his head, concerned. “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart,” he counseled his son, “you know it’s your dad’s policy only to accept bribes.” “I know that,” Mikey said, “it’s what all those fines could do to your net worth.”

  Maybe he was exaggerating. Maybe he made Mikey seem worse than he really was. But he had him dead to rights in the essentials. His factless condition. His craven fear of the world, the frightful picture he had of himself left alone in it. His awful, debilitating dependency.

  Though to look at him—Well, to look at him the word “debilitating” would never have occurred. He’d belonged to the same gym for years. Had been working out since before anyone had ever heard terms like “fitness craze,” “health food,” “steroids.” Even in blazers he looked muscular, even in suits, heavy winter overcoats, sheepskin jackets.

  Power giving him neither self-confidence nor ease—he always wore his seat belt, still checked to see that all the car doors were locked before setting out on a journey—taking some weird, limited comfort not in sports heroes but in teams, leagues, as if it was only in the collective that he hoped to find some paradigm of fitness or invincibility to stand in for the pervasive flaws and frailties he saw all about him—Rose Helen’s just perceptible limp, Druff’s bust blebs and constricted heart; perhaps even a sense of his own naïveté (his ruling passion)—and that so terrified him about the world, his old anxiety that it was haunted and that when his mother and father died only he would be left, forced to spend his nights alone in it.

  The city had no baseball franchise. Mikey fastened onto the Atlanta Braves, a ball club whose fortunes he could follow on cable. He rooted for his hometown football and basketball teams.

  But it was hockey that consumed him and, of hockey clubs, the St. Louis Blues with which he passionately identified. He’d chosen hockey partly because of its long season, partly because of its intricate, complicated second season of play-offs, Mikey’s personal Manichaean system of extended drama, his second-chance, comeback heart. But mostly he’d chosen St. Louis because he’d been there once with his father, been to the Arena to watch them play, sat with him in the owner’s box, openly enjoying the privileged, baksheesh arrangement, sucking up power and favor and finding a kind of earnest in them of his dad’s license, some tiny, comfortable toehold on childhood and immortality. At any rate, Mikey had cast his lot with the St. Louis Blues Hockey Club. And though, except for an occasional game on television or the even rarer—although he watched for them every night—news clip on the local ten o’clock news—the town had no hockey franchise either—he never saw them play another game, he’d become a sort of whiz at picking them up on distant radio stations.

  One night—this would have been when the boy was already in his twenties—they were in their bedroom and heard the downstairs door slam.

  “Mom,” Mikey shouted, “Daddy? I’m back.”

  “Up here,” Rose Helen called out.

  “Dad too?”

  “I’m all right,” Druff said.

  He loomed powerfully in their doorway, huge, vastly troubled. Druff had a sudden vision of burst seat belts, broken door locks.

  “KMOX was fading,” their son said. “Sometimes, when it fades like that, you can pick it up better in the car. I listened out there.”

  “Did we win?” Rose Helen pretended to her son she was a fan. You went along to get along.

  “Afterward, they were talking to the Star of the Game? He said the owner is thinking of moving the team to Canada. Dad, is that true?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t know, Mikey. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “We sat in his box.”

  “We were visiting firemen,” Druff said.

  “But you talked with him.”

  “Fireman to fireman. He wouldn’t recognize my hook and ladder today.”

  “But we sat in his box. How’d we get to sit in his box?”

  “God damn it, Mikey. I was barely introduced to the man. We had those seats because I was a guest of the St. Louis streets commissioner. He had an in. If he came here he could go out on the snowplows or ride up front in the trucks when they salt for ice.”

  The boy had developed a curious tic. He closed his eyes when his father became impatient or said humiliating things to him. It was as if by squeezing the light from his vision he was able to hide, go so far the words never reached him. He did that now. It broke Druff’s heart, the son of a bitch.

  The commissioner softened.

  “Even if they moved,” he said, “you’d still be able to pick up their games on the radio.”

  “If they moved to one of those states they only speak French?”

  “Quebec is the only province they speak French. Don’t they already have a team?”

  “The Montreal Canadiens,” Mikey said. “The Quebec Nordiques.”

  “There, you see?”

  “What if he took them to one of those far-off places? I wouldn’t even be able to pick them up in the car.”

  “Then when they played in the States. You could hear them when they played Chicago. On the Pittsburgh station. Plenty of places.”

  “Half their games are at home.”

  “It hasn’t happened yet. These things are complicated. Most of the time they fall through.”

  The thin reassurance seemed to settle him, but then he found out there was a newsstand downtown where they sold yesterday’s out-of- town papers. Each day the kid took their car and fought the traffic and went there to buy the St. Louis papers. He pored over details about the impending sale. Taking hope—more than hope, euphoria—when articles began to appear saying that a consortium of St. Louis businessmen was trying to put a package together to buy the team and keep it in the city. Mikey’s moods hung on these delicate negotiations. He followed the proceedings closely. He kept Druff posted. He dragged Druff in.

  And Druff—this was what constituted current events for Mikey—almost felt honored, an elder statesman, a good gray eminence. He followed the proceedings himself. He sent Doug or Dick out to buy his own out-of-town papers, special-ordering the Canadian papers, not just the ones in Calgary and cities even farther west with a declared interest in acquiring the team, but the Toronto and Montreal papers, too, where the sale of the Blues was also current events. He went over the information with Mikey, parsing the various accounts and rumors like Americans in a foreign country discussing late-breaking but already outdated developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis, say, as new reports filtered down to the International Herald Tribune, and then to Americans lingering in foreign cities, waiting on every fresh detail.

  In a way, they’d never been closer, more psychological with each other.

  The team had gone into a slump. Mikey suggested they wouldn’t be themselves again until the issue of where they’d be playing next year was resolved.

  “Most of the players are married,” he said. “They have homes, kids in school. In a situation like this they have to be under all sorts of pressure. They have to be worried about what they’ll be able to get for their houses. I mean if you’re forced to sell your house, doesn’t that mean you might have to take less for it than you could ordinarily expect? And I’ve been looking at the housing ads in the St. Louis papers. It’s a buyer’s market out there right now. They’d have to sell at a loss.”

  “That’s true,” Druff agreed.

  “And what about their kids? The players are young. Their children are mostly in grade school.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It puts a kid in a bad position. I mean, if he thinks he might be in a different city next year, let alone a different country, he’s going to have a lot on his mind. His grades are bound to suffer even if he isn’t deliberately trying to goof off.”

  “There’s something in that.”

  “And children can be cruel. His classmates don’t always understand that it isn’t the child’s dad who wants to move, that he’s only going where the job takes him.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe they’re fans, so maybe they think the team wants to leave town, that maybe they took a vote on it or something, that they’re deliberately betraying St. Louis. All right, they don’t know any better. But they could tease the kid, pass remarks. And if the kid isn’t mature enough, and doesn’t entirely understand the situation himself, maybe he feels the same way. Unconsciously, he could begin to side with his classmates. He could become depressed, even sullen. Communication breaks down. He won’t speak to his dad, he’s nasty to his mom.”

  “I see what you’re driving at.”

  “Sure. And meanwhile this is going on in all the houses of all the players. In the defensemen’s families, in the houses of the wings. In the home of the goalie, in the home of the center. Even in the coach’s house, though his kids are probably older and ought to know better. Pressure’s got to build up. There are going to be fights. Things will get said which shouldn’t get said. It’s in the heat of the moment, sure, but that doesn’t change anything.”

  “I’m certain you’re right.”

  “And aren’t we forgetting something here, Dad?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That no matter what we read in the papers, no matter how many St. Louis and Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and other Canadian columnists and newspapers we read, we’re only getting part of the story. They’re there. They’re on the scene. They’re hearing things we can’t possibly know anything about—talk in the locker room, things they pick up on the road from opposing players.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “The latest rumors about the changing positions and attitudes of the various owners. Gee, if we think we’re confused about all the mixed signals that come in, you can imagine how they must feel!”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “So the thing isn’t that we’ve been losing, but that we’ve been losing by so little. That we’ve managed to keep from being blown away.”

  “You’ve really got a handle on this thing, Mike,” Druff ventured feelingly.

  And then Mike asked him to use his influence with the St. Louis Commissioner of Streets either to dissuade the owner of the Blues from selling or to see to it that the St. Louis consortium of businessmen that was seeking to buy the team was successful in its efforts.

  Because what Druff hadn’t understood was that all this talk about the Blues, however distant, however remote from Druff’s full blebs, precarious as blown bubble gum, however wide of the mark of his marked heart, was finally concerned with Druff’s existence, the flawed ramparts and bulwarks where Mikey crouched, his son’s magic, superstitious circle of well-being.

  He couldn’t even blame him, couldn’t cut bait or pare his losses.

  Because how old could M. have been during Druff’s deathbed speech, nine, ten, eleven?

  Dick had come around and opened the door for him.

  Druff must have looked surprised, possibly threatened. He may even have thrown his hands up defensively.

  “You startled me.”

  “I thought you were asleep,” Dick said.

  “Lost in thought.”

  “You’ve got nothing to think about, Commissioner.” Druff didn’t take it personally but the driver thought he had. Dick lowered his voice. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry. I got this bug up my ass. Trouble at home. Shit with the wife. Like someone said, we go back, you and me. Thick and thin, long and short. I k
now it don’t always seem that way, but I got no complaints. It ain’t anything personal. Hell, you’ve been good to me. I know I sounded off, but we both said some stuff. Here, let me help you. You can stiffen up pretty good on those jump seats. They’re more trouble than they’re worth, you ask me. Hey, sit where you want. Sit where you can keep an eye on me. The way I’ve been at you? I just wanted to let you know. You don’t have anything to think about. Not from this quarter. Mum’s the word. Mrs. D. don’t hear boo from this quarter. Not a peep. Hellfire, Commissioner, if you could just find it in your heart to let the past forty minutes’ worth of bygones be bygones, you have nothing to fear from me.

  “And I’ll tell you something else. Old Doug isn’t going to hear anything about it either.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Hey,” Druff said, changing his tune, “nothing. It’s how I tell people good night.”

  And let himself into his darkened house, though before he went upstairs for what little remained of the night, he made, in the dark, his way to the kitchen where, still in the dark, not bothering with the light switch, he fumbled about for a few seconds around the kitchen table where, near the unwashed cereal bowl, the glass in which perhaps an inch or inch and a half of milk lay souring, hard by the crumbs of toast and drying smears of jelly, he found, propped against the toaster, where the thirty-year-old man-child couldn’t miss it, the note Rose Helen had left for him and which, because it had been laid in so cheery a place as a kitchen, so redolent of his mom’s home cooking, against an appliance designed not to reheat the bread she did not bother to bake but to receive fresh slices of the packaged white bread he preferred, he would not even remove, reading the signs of the message instead of the message itself, and which Druff, the adventurer/philanderer neither of them had bargained for, did not bother to read either, that would undoubtedly say (there in the dark, so why even bother with a light, which just might wake him, draw him, concerned, who was always concerned, who lived in the depths of concern as a fish lives in water and who, even if he didn’t clear tables, had made of himself this safety-first sentinel, this factless, better-safe-than-sorry son who pulled space heaters from their wall sockets, standing lamps, radios, anything electric which, at least in the estimation of his concerned imagination, could reach the critical mass to draw energy, ignition flame, into the kitchen to check, to make sure their house hadn’t been broken into and his parents left for dead in their beds): “Michael sweetheart, I’m upstairs in bed. Dad’s not home yet, but called to say that he’s with some men arranging about that Marathon he’s been trying to get for the city, and not to wait up. I hope you had a good evening at school, or in the gym working out. If you’re going to have something to eat, please rinse out the dishes before you go to bed. They’re hard to wash when food is left standing in them too long, and they attract bugs. See you in the morning. Love, Mother.”