The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  But it was too late, had already been too late when Druff had let himself into the darkened house and, ever so quietly, and with as much care as if there had been a real MacGuffin in his life, made his way into the kitchen to confirm what he should have taken for granted in the first place, which he did take for granted. It would have been too late even if he hadn’t fumbled about at the kitchen table for those few seconds, even if he hadn’t clinked the spoon in the cereal bowl or brushed his arm against the box and shaken the cornflakes in it.

  “Dad?” his son stage-whispered from the stairs. “Dad, is that you down there, Dad?”

  “I’m all right, Mikey,” Druff said.

  Down came the boy the rest of the way and switched on the light in the kitchen.

  “Why didn’t you turn a light on? You could have fallen.”

  “I didn’t fall. I’m fine. What are you doing up so late? And if you’re so worried about people falling in the dark, why’d you turn off that hall light Mother leaves on all night?”

  Now, in their bright kitchen, Mikey performed his strange, blind tic. He shut his eyes. Druff, who’d picked the tic up from his son, shut his eyes. They watched the tinted darkness of their squeezed lids, passed through the waves and breakers of their mutual resentments. Mikey went first.

  “So,” he said, “how’d it go, Dad?”

  Druff didn’t realize at first what his son meant, answering, “Fine. I said I’m all right.”

  “No,” the kid said, “I meant with Scouffas. I meant with that other guy.”

  Hurriedly, Druff glanced down at the note Rose Helen had left.

  (So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.)

  But Mikey was already speaking. “Jeez,” said their man-child, making his queer symbolic associations, working his own ritualized actuarials, factlessly, baselessly, adding years to his father’s life, extending by decades the frontiers of his own boundless childhood, “you could have knocked me over and over with a feather. Any city can have a baseball team. Seattle has one, unlikely towns like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. And all those places in the Sunbelt? Come on. San Diego? Give me a break. They’re jokes, they’re just jokes. I don’t care how many times they win their division, or the pennant. Or the World Series, even. They’re just jokes. Or can you imagine a state like Texas having two teams? In the Lone Star State? That’s just got to be graft. Somebody must have had their hand out big time. You know how that works. I mean I don’t have to tell you! If it ever came out, the people responsible could get years. Years! They’d be put away so fast for so long their kids would never see them again. And how long do you think they’d survive locked up like that? People like that? Privileged people. People accustomed to giving the orders. Just the shame and disgrace would kill them if the hardened cons and the bread and water didn’t get to them first.

  “Don’t make me laugh. Those guys would be goners.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing, Dad. It’s one thing to have an NBA franchise, or even an NFL one. Or even your own hockey team in the NHL, but you saw what happened in St. Louis. Well, the Blues came out of that one all right, and no one’s more grateful than I am, but what happened in St. Louis could happen anywhere. Let’s face it, Dad, the fans are subject to the whims of the owners. And the only thing those people care about is the bottom line. That’s where their loyalties lie. You’re deluding yourself if you think otherwise. ‘Build us a bigger stadium. Give us a tax abatement, maybe we’ll stay. Promise not to go after us in the press to get better players if we don’t produce. Let us raise ticket prices whenever we want. Give us a bigger percentage of the popcorn and peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Permit us to keep more from the Cold beer, cold beer here!’ They’re such babies! And we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of people who have no mercy!

  “You tell me I should be realistic. Well, I am. I am realistic. I’m realistic enough to know that the Indianapolis 500 is locked in, that the Kentucky Derby is, that it’ll always be run in Louisville. That the Preakness belongs to Baltimore, and the Rose Bowl to Pasadena, and the Masters to Augusta. Those are American Classics, Dad, and no so-called owners can ever come along to try to change the venue.”

  Druff, fascinated, terrified, thought, he knows “tax abatement,” he knows “venue.” He’s almost eloquent, he is eloquent.

  “Well, then,” the son said, “you can just imagine how I felt when I saw Mom’s note. You can just imagine. So how was it? How did it go? What did they say?”

  “Scouffas?” Druff said. He took up his wife’s note and read in the light all he’d known in the dark would be in it, failing to predict only the additional details of his visitors’ names. Rose Helen had managed to get even the difficult I in McIlvoy right, a tribute, he supposed, to his careful pronunciation of his absurd, complicated, unpremeditated lie. (Thinking, Why, I’m good, I’m really good. Under the guns of Old MacGuffin I’m really good.)

  “Yes,” Mikey said, “and that other one. What’s his name, the stuffed-shirt one, the stickler—oh, what is his name?—McIlvoy. Did you get to see the gadget, the thing no bigger than a stopwatch? Did they let you hold it?”

  “The gadget was Scouffas’s department.”

  “Oh,” Mikey said, “you’d think it would have been the stickler’s.”

  “Life is strange, Mike,” he told his son truthfully. “How’d you even know about the gadget? There’s nothing about it in your mother’s note.”

  “I think it was written up somewhere. Anyway, Mom told me about it after I got back and read her message.”

  “She was in bed. You woke her up? What for, to do your dishes?”

  His son’s eyes closed tight for three beats. It was as if he was in pained, desperate biofeedback trance. He sniffed the air, opened his eyes, then aggressively asked his father if he’d been smoking.

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Maybe McIlvoy, maybe Scouffas,” his son said. “There’s this funny smell.”

  “What funny smell? I don’t smell anything funny. What funny smell?”

  “I don’t know. This funny smell. It’s not a bad smell.”

  The trace elements, Druff thought. Margaret Glorio’s hair tars and breath shellacs. Royal dust from the crown rack. He smelled it himself, tasted it. Love laundry, the stale savories and sweet fetids of their rich, cloyed traffic. Was this a counterattack? Nonsense. The child was factless. Yet he’d heard him be eloquent. Could he also be clever? He spooked at the notion of a clever Mikey. Suppose he hated him. Suppose there was malice there, bad blood, evasion like the unsettled soup of magnetic aversion, some call in the bones for revulsion, repugnance, abhorrence, revenge. Suppose there were menace, rancor, all the pledged bitters and solemn loathelies of stalled grudge? Suppose this was the long, slow abiding of crusade, jihad, uprising, holy war? He had always known that his son’s fear for Druff’s life had little to do with love. But suppose his son’s behavior had nothing to do with love? Suppose he needed him around to give his hatred something to believe in? What if his dependency had been adversarial all along? Only a campaign? Some Hundred Years’ War of Getting Dad’s Goat? MacGuffins were abroad in the land tonight. Thick as pea soup. Druff was breathless, he couldn’t move. It was MacGuffin gridlock.

  Yet when his son began speaking again it was in the same loopy register and tropes of his ancient argument.

  “So how did it? You didn’t say. Did they give you an indication? I know this was only preliminary, a feasibility study.” He knows “only preliminary,” Druff thought, he knows “feasibility.” “Still and all,” Mikey said, “they came all this way. Their plane was held up all that time on the ground in Denver waiting for a heating element to be replaced in the galley!” He knows facts. He knows the facts of my convolute lie. “I mean, they could have canceled. Important fellows like that! They might even have taken that stupid delay as a sign. And there must be just plenty of cities dying to get a marathon. Every Middlesex village and town, right, Dad?

 
“So did they give you any indication, did they hold out any hope?”

  “It was all very preliminary. It was only a feasibility study.”

  “Sure,” Mikey said. “Those birds have to play it close to the vest. It’s how they are. I suppose they wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t. Still, Dad,” he said, “I hope you didn’t buy into any of their tired old arguments.”

  “Which tired old arguments?”

  “Oh, you know, that there’s already a Boston marathon, a New York marathon. That there are marathons in Chicago and Honolulu. All that ‘oversaturated’ stuff you usually hear.”

  “Those are factors,” Druff said.

  “Those are factors. They are. But all they’re looking for are assurances. It’s the consortium of St. Louis businessmen all over again. Just tell them you can get them national exposure, TV coverage. The cable sports networks are out beating the bushes looking for events to cover. You might even suggest the possibility of closed-circuit stuff on the big giant screens, spin-offs from T-shirts, paper cups with soft-drink advertising and the marathon’s logo spectators can hand out to the runners as they pass critical points in the race—Dead Man’s Hill, Heartbreak Flats. Or how our marathon could be this really different marathon, open only to serious runners—no one on crutches, no one pushing himself in a wheelchair or muscling along strapped to a board and doing the twenty-six-plus miles in push-ups or some other simple brute force variation of chinning yourself through space.” He knows twenty-six- plus miles, Druff thought.

  “Those are some good points,” Druff said. “You should have been there.”

  “I wish I had been, Daddy.”

  And Druff suddenly recalled the strict, explicit terms of Dick’s limited guarantees. Mrs. D. wouldn’t hear a peep from that quarter, Doug wouldn’t. And then his son was nattering away again, but this time in the baby talk of the more familiar mystic Mikey mode.

  “Because,” he was telling his dad, “an owner can move his franchise right out of a city. I suppose that if he wanted, and had the permission of the other owners, he could even shift it into a different league entirely. Owners can do just about anything they want because this is the United States of America and it’s their own private property, after all. They can even let the team stay in a city but ruin it anyway by never spending any money on it to buy better players. But a marathon would be different. It would always be our city’s marathon. And there wouldn’t ever be a way it could have a losing season. I mean someone would always win it every year, and even if their times weren’t as good as the times in the New York marathon or the Boston marathon, still, since they invented the gadget that gives the exact degree of difficulty of a marathon, then even if they did take it to another city it would still be our marathon in all the record books. In a way it would, anyway, because anything that came after it would have to be judged by our weights and measures. Do you see?”

  He didn’t and, frankly, felt relieved he didn’t—better the Mikey you know than the Mikey you didn’t—but still, he thought, rising from the chair in which he’d been sitting, it could be a trap. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers, pushing them through some rich semaphore, wigwagging weariness, beddie-byes, all the studied repertory of his Mac- Guffin handjobs and shrugs, his shakelegs and stiffness-be-gones, auditioning the full range of his showboat moods from the good-talkin’-to- yas to his see-you-in-the-mornin’s. “I guess I’ll be going up,” he said. “Shall I get the light or will you do it?”

  “I’ll do it, Dad,” Mikey said. “Good night, now.”

  “Good night,” said Druff. And then, checking himself before passing through it, turning slowly around in the kitchen doorway, poised there for a curtain speech like the vaudeville bang of a rim shot, only tossed off, thrown away, scored against the pace of the scene, as if to say, God knows why I’m telling you this, or what made me think of it just now, but while it’s fresh in my head, and before I forget, let me try this on for size, see how it plays in Peoria, Druff said, “Oh, hey, I meant to tell you, I almost forgot. In the cab—it’s been a long night, Doug was tired so I sent him home and picked up a cab at their hotel—Scouffas and whoozis’s—well, I don’t know where it came from, but anyway there was more traffic for that time of night than you can shake a stick at, and normally I might not have noticed it but it hadn’t been there earlier—and a good thing—when we were pacing off the marathon and, incidentally, did you know you don’t actually have to strap the little sucker to your leg like some Boy Scout’s pedometer, or even hold it in your hand like you’d find your way through the woods with a compass, but almost just stick it there in the chauffeur’s pocket and forget about it while Doug or whoever just cruises along as if he didn’t have a care in the world, or the fate of an entire city’s hopes and dreams for a marathon of its own wasn’t riding on every little bump and grind in the road, every pothole and manhole cover, every cobblestone and speed bump, or forget about it, that is, as long as the guy doesn’t have to pull up short or come to any sudden stops—the damn thing’s so sensitive and is programmed to make every conceivable adjustment and compensation, except, as I say, for sudden stops, and that’s why I say it’s a good thing that that traffic wasn’t there earlier in the evening when McIlvoy and Doug and Irv Scouffas and I were doing the dry run of the dry run of the dry run of the contemplated battlefield or it might just have played Oh, Well, Back to the Drawing Board with all our plans—when I happened to notice these long delays on some of the traffic signals, particularly on the cautious left turn on greens, but on lots of others too, especially where the pedestrian activates the signal in order to put the green light in her favor, and I say her favor advisedly because I suddenly flashed on Su’ad, on how it might have happened to her, just that very way, stepping off the fatal curb at just the fatal moment when she became impatient and the hit-and-fatal-goddamn-run driver slammed all that fatal second-per-second tonnage and momentum into her frail, mortal Shiite bones. What do you think, Mikey? What do you think, kid? Is that a scenario you can live with?”

  The father studied the son during all this long speech, carefully watching his boy’s face as, wide-eyed, it bumped along in the eddies of information then pulled up short, and opened out again into the avenues of its snarled syntax. Abruptly, when Druff came to Su’ad’s name, Mikey’s eyes squeezed shut, but it was difficult to imagine that he was not seeing her anyway, despite whatever layers of darkness he interposed between the light and his sealed, locked lids.

  And didn’t wait for an answer, going instead, and at a pretty good clip, too, particularly for a guy of his advanced age at this advanced time of the night, up the stairs to the bedroom, tired, of course, but not a little compensated for his troubles by adventure’s and danger’s spiced, chemical buzz, interested, observing himself, thinking, Oh, right, so that’s how they do it. Sure, right, yes, of course. (Removing a shoe, pulling a sock.) Thinking, I see. Ahh. But of course. Even as you, even as me. (Taking his pants off, one leg at a time.) Thinking (loosening his tie, discarding his shirt, in the bathroom fumbling his shorts, peeing a ton), Well, I have to suppose that the body has its priorities too, and that’s why, caught up, we don’t require as many pit stops as otherwise. (Thinking “we” now.) Brushing his teeth and thinking, Now this surprises me, it really does. And this! (As he bothers to floss. To floss!) But really wowed, blown away wowed, by what he does next. He takes two ten-milligram Procardia out of their plastic prescription bottle, unscrews the lid from a jar of stool softeners and removes one odd, brown, football-shaped Peri-dos softgel. He takes a Valium, considers his unusual circumstances and decides to spring for a second. (Well, diazepam, actually, since it came in generic now.) (This is amazing, Druff thinks, all those others, CIA glamour boys, or just ordinary, caught-up bystander types, professors, say, businessmen, docs off on medical convenings in Paris, part business, part pleasure, would be dipping into the generics these days. Well, why not? We’d be crazy—he thinks “we,” already translated into
that distinguished fraternity of fall guys, straw men and stalking horses pursued by blurry, unfocused, maniac furies and enemies—not to. Ain’t a chap with a MacGuffin already in enough trouble? Does he have to buy into inflation and the exorbitant prices the big drug companies get for their pills, too?) Well! This has certainly been a lesson for him!

  And the lesson is this:

  Life goes on. Life goes on even in the chase scenes. Life goes on even as Grant and Stewart and Kelly and Bergman run for their lives. They would have Kleenex in their pocket, lipstick in their purse. In the climates calling for them they would have Chap Stick, sun block, insect repellent. They would have diarrhea equipment. They would need batteries for their transistor radios, stamps for their mail. Life goes on. They would need a place to cash their checks. They would have to get haircuts. Life goes on. They would require reservations, they would have to stop at the gate to obtain a boarding pass. Life goes on, life goes on. If they were religious they would be saying their prayers. They would continue to watch their salt intake and think twice before accepting an egg. They would laugh at good jokes, whistle, hum, wipe themselves, scratch where they itched, obey the laws of gravity and try not to use the strange, immediate pressures of their new situations as an excuse to start smoking again. They would, irrelevantly, dream. A glorious drudgery, life goes on. It goes on and goes on.