The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  Stop this, stop this, he commanded himself. And said to Doug, “Stop me. I’m putting you on. With my alcoholic vaudeville. I’m playing you for a sucker. You mustn’t believe a word I’m saying.”

  “That’s all right, sir.”

  “Mrrt phhht.”

  “Perhaps the commissioner could do with a nice cup of strong coffee? Shall I put some up?”

  “Crackle shnarl buzzblat,” Druff whispered.

  “Sir?”

  “Put some up your behind, that means.”

  “What about a cool cloth for your head?”

  “No no no no no. You don’t know fuck-all about sobering up tipsies. You’ve got it all turned around in your head. First you throw me into the shower with my clothes on. Time is of the essence. Don’t even bother to empty my pockets. The water’s got to be hot. Hotter than human skin can stand. And never, never sit a drunk down in a chair. You walk him around. Keep me moving. I’ve got to keep moving. Break my ass if I even look like I’m going to use it to sit down. Then, if there’s time, then the strong coffee. Stick the cool cloth in it.”

  “Ah,” humored Doug.

  “I’m making a fool of you. You know that, don’t you? I’m rubbing it in. I come, uninvited, to your apartment on a day you’re off duty. I seem to interrupt you at a time when you’re about to go out. And then, because I’ve apparently nothing better to do, I proceed to abuse you by pretending I’m drunk.”

  “Strictly speaking, sir, I’m an officer of the law. I’m never off duty.”

  “You’ve no shame, have you?”

  “What would I be ashamed of?”

  Druff studied the man, a fellow he knew to be his own age. Up there. An AARP card in his wallet. No doppelgänger, no alter ego. Just a humorless, unattractive, bachelor, jokey sort of man. “Well,” Druff said, “there’s been some talk.”

  “Talk, Commissioner?”

  “Not so much talk as rumor, chitchat, idle gossip.”

  “What is it that’s said?”

  Druff, slumped in the chair, straightened up. “I’m no tale-bearer, sir,” he said.

  And then was talking away, spilling the beans. A mile a minute. But not about Doug, about the other one, dark Dick. “I’ve reason to believe,” he said, “the two-timing son of a bitch is tripping on his wife, making nice-nice with persons he never had no license to move on.”

  Doug shrugged.

  “What’s that? A sign? Wind sock for ‘That shit happens’? I know it happens. What do you think, I fell off a turnip truck? But no one bothers to lie anymore. In the past it was different. In the past people clung to their bits and snippets, their scraps and threadbare. But today, today the first thing to go is the fig leaf. It’s all ta-da today.

  “Shameless. It’s shameless. Not like when you and I were young, Maggie. You know what she said to me? Dick’s chippie? (Charlotte, incidentally, by her own report, and a mother of twins.) You know what she said? ‘Nolo contendere.’ Can you imagine? ‘Nolo contendere.’ Well, I ask you!”

  “And this was after she lied to you,” Doug said sympathetically.

  “What?”

  “This was after she lied to you. After she told you no one by that name even lived there. That you had the wrong number.”

  Druff perfectly understood that it was entirely possible that today might be the day he would meet a violent death. He rated his chances at less than likely, but it certainly wasn’t out of the question. Put it this way, he thought—I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Because it didn’t even occur to him that he’d caught Doug out, that Druff’s drunk act, or any of his subsequent tirade, had sufficiently disarmed the man to a point where he would offer up information involuntarily. It would have been a waste of breath now to spring any traps, launch his devastating accusations. (“Aha! Who said she lied? Who ever mentioned wrong numbers?”) Of course the old-timer had said it intentionally. Of course he had. Doug? A suspect old shady for as long as Druff knew him? But that was all it came down to finally. Suspicions. Smoke but no fire. Rumor and chitchat. Nothing ever proven. A man with no goods on him. Without goods. Goodless. Druff would not trouble to give Doug the lie. He wouldn’t give the shithead the satisfaction.

  So when the commissioner finally shouted at him and threw his challenges in Doug’s face, it was for his own satisfaction. Not to see the sucker sweat so much as to hear what the old no-good rat bastard had to say. A matter of simple human curiosity.

  “Well, you’re our boss,” said Doug.

  “Your boss.”

  “We take an interest.”

  “In?”

  “Your comings and goings.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s only natural.”

  “So?”

  “We keep an eye open.”

  “And?”

  “An ear.”

  “And?”

  “We call each other up.”

  “This could be it, all right. This could be the day.”

  “No,” Doug said. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t be so fatalistic. It’s too depressing.”

  “Well,” said Druff, “I guess I’ll be going.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yep. I’m on my way.”

  “Where to?”

  “Oho.”

  “No, really.”

  “Aha.”

  “See you Monday, then.”

  “Your mouth to God’s ears.”

  “Please,” Doug said.

  But the City Commissioner of Streets was standing now. They both were. “No,” he said, “don’t bother,” giving himself the satisfaction, enjoying the words, anticipating the pleasure—this in split seconds, it was all split seconds on the special days—of the rest of the phrase, their melodramatic heft, “I’ll let myself out.” And just about did, was already at the door when he turned, giving himself still more satisfaction. “Does the name—” he said. And stopped.

  “What?”

  “Never mind, it’s not important.”

  “No, what?”

  “See you Monday,” Druff said, and left Doug’s apartment, moving carefully down the stairs and waiting for the S.O.B.—Druff sensed his presence at the railing—to rain names on his head, dropping them over him like water balloons, a shower of accomplice. Expecting him to. Margaret Glorio, he might have said. Mikey. Hamilton Edgar, Jerry Rector. Whatsisname, Dan. Su’ad herself, even. Or broadening the variables altogether, introducing new, devastating names, hush-hush high-ups from the inner workings, people so powerful your need to keep them out of it amounted to a kind of prurience, a sort of rut. Thinking what one of these might sound like, resonant, reverberant in the hallway as a shout in a shower.

  No? Nothing? Off we go, then.

  And now he’s on his rounds, like a guy in a detective story. On his toes. The rhetoric of Q and A. The rhetoric of wheat and chaff. Sifting, sifting. Bobbo Druff, the truth mechanic.

  Except now the jungle telegraph was onto him. They took an interest, Doug said. In his comings and goings. Well, what did he expect? They were professional chauffeurs, these guys, it was only natural. They called each other up, kept each other apprised. Administered apprisal advice. Like weather fucking forecasters. (He could talk this way. Who better entitled to use the rhetoric of the streets than their commissioner?)

  What gave him pause was that he might not ask the right questions of whatever suspects he could yet run into on his last sweep of the day before he went home to eat his supper. Though that wasn’t all that gave him pause. Not if this was Doomday. (He still handicapped the chances for this at less than likely, though they were up a bit since his conversation with Doug. Put it this way, he thought, it’s safer than riding in an automobile, as the aviation people liked to keep reminding you. Yes, or being struck down by one, as Su’ad might herself have said. Poor Su’ad.) This could be the day.

  He was hitchhiking.

  It had been impossible to hail a cab in Doug’s neighborhood and by the time he’d left h
is driver’s residential streets for a busier district it had already begun to get dark, the beginning of twilight.

  A guy in a pickup stopped for him.

  “I seen the suit,” he said.

  “Hitchhiking,” Druff said. “A man my age. It’s quite extraordinary. One of those things—I’m fifty-eight—you figure will never happen to you again. Like going skinny-dipping or getting a piggyback ride. You know?”

  “Sure,” said the guy. “You don’t have to be fifty-eight for them to start turning out the lights in your rooms. All the time stuff that might not ever happen again occurs to me, and I’m not even out of my thirties.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “Well, when you put me on the spot like that…”

  “I’ll never be a father again,” Druff said wistfully.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” Druff said.

  And then the two of them—the early Saturday evening traffic had begun to move out into the streets—folks on their way to claim six-o’clock dinner reservations in restaurants, people headed for the rush-hour movie, girls from junior high chauffeured to friends’ houses for sleep-overs—started their curious confidings in earnest, intimate as strangers. They bid up their famous last-this lists, their famous last- thats. Charles—that was the man’s name—said his prom days were over, but Druff disallowed that one, not on the grounds that they weren’t, but that the category, by its nature singular, was meaningless. “You might as well tell me you’ll never have your first haircut again.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Of course not,” Druff said. “That’s not the point. You can’t have any feeling about that one way or another. It passed you by right when it happened.”

  “I’m told I threw a fit I was so scared, that the barber had to wait until I wore myself out crying and fell asleep in my mother’s arms before he could come near me.”

  “You see?” Druff said. “It passed you right by.”

  “Oh sure,” Charles admitted, “in that sense.”

  “Well, that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We’re talking about things we’ll miss because they can’t happen again.”

  “Hey,” Charles said, “that’s how I feel about my prom.”

  “All right,” the City Commissioner of Streets said graciously, “I take your point.”

  “I can never lose my cherry again,” Charles said.

  “Well, Jesus,” Druff said, “see what I mean? You could go on forever. Tell me, did you ever have mumps?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, you’ll never get them again. You’re through with mumps. Mumps are out of your life. When I mentioned that about hitchhiking it was with some awe, a certain sense of wonder. No,” Druff said, “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I ain’t going back to Capistrano. I’ve never been to Capistrano, and if I ever do get there it will be as a tourist. It’d be another thing altogether if I were a swallow.”

  “Got you,” Charles told him agreeably. “You give me the prom but I have to take back my cherry.”

  “Well, it isn’t a contest,” Druff said. “As I say, what I offered was by way of wonder and wistfulness. I was catching my breath, I was rubbing my eyes.

  “I mean it’s more than likely I’ve made my last move. I mean Social Security is practically around the corner, but I won’t be retiring to Phoenix or Florida. Whatever happens. Of course I could always end up in a home, or die in a hospital bed, but it’s a surefire, lead-pipe cinch we won’t be selling our house and moving into a condo.”

  “You have a house.”

  “A nice house.”

  “A nice house,” Charles said. “Kids?”

  “My share,” Druff said neutrally.

  “And you’re telling me that with grown, settled kids, probably raising families of their own by now, you and your wife are willing to go on living in a house way too big for just the two of you? I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What do you need all that responsibility for?”

  “It’s comfortable,” Druff said. “Living in a big house is comfortable.”

  “It’s a lot of work.”

  “I’m not talking about Buckingham Palace. I’m talking about a nice, comfortable house.”

  “More than six rooms?”

  “Living room, dining room, kitchen, den. Three bedrooms, screened- in breezeway, two and a half baths. A finished basement.”

  “Is there a garage?”

  “Sure there’s a garage. There’s a swimming pool.”

  Charles looked at him. “Aboveground?”

  “No. In-ground.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “We have a small garden. Well, my wife does.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “It’s not too much.”

  “All that upkeep?”

  “She could get a high school kid to come in once a week to do the gardening. We could close off a couple of bedrooms. We can shut down the dining room and take our meals in the kitchen. We could drain the pool, let the backyard reclaim it. And we don’t actually need the den or that second full bath. We don’t use them that much now, if you want to know. And let me tell you something else. When it becomes too much for us to drag ourselves down to the finished basement we’ll probably be finished ourselves, and a sure thing for the home anyway. So you can forget all that crap about upkeep. Upkeep’s the least of it. Upkeep is trivial. It’s upheaval kicks your ass.”

  “Well,” Charles said uncertainly, “I don’t know.”

  “Because you’re young,” Druff said. “When you’re my age, you’ll feel differently about it. Not so quick on the trigger to make major, irrevocable changes.”

  “It’s sure possible,” Charles said.

  They’d had a good talk, Druff thought. He’d settled important things with Charles that he and Rose Helen had yet even to discuss. Of course there was a certain flaw in his logic—the fallacy of the unmentionable middle or somesuch. He hadn’t said anything about Mikey. That they might just have to move out on him in the middle of the night when the kid wasn’t looking. Even so it had been a good talk. A wonderful talk. This was the stuff people without MacGuffins talked about. (This happens, too, thought the man with the MacGuffin.)

  Becalmed, they drifted awhile longer in the slow, heavy traffic. (People coming back from beauty parlor appointments, from high school sporting events, from visiting relatives in hospitals, from errands, from shopping, from making arrangements, from returning things to department stores, too small or too large, stuff which on second thought they didn’t really want to own, that was too expensive, too much trouble to maintain.) Druff gazing lazily into the traffic from the height of the cab, staring down into the laps of women. His ride as abstracted as himself, becoming engaged with the traffic, alternately pressing his gas pedal, his brakes; rapt as someone fishing as he touched his pickup’s controls.

  And Druff, who couldn’t get over it, trying to recall the last time he’d had a conversation that didn’t sound like dialogue in a book. He couldn’t do it. Well I’m a politician, he thought, I have enemies. I’m an enemy myself. Enemies can turn just about anything into a federal case. We’re all Sturm and Drang, enemies. We’re too excitable by half. We make life a big deal. And had to admit it was pleasant, doing the time of day with Charles—all that real estate chat, his dining room plots and plans. And wondered about the laid-back life. Nah, he thought, it ain’t good enough. I couldn’t live like that. Hey, I am what I am. A fellow has to give in to his fiction.

  “Awfully considerate,” Druff said. “You picking me up like that back there. You saved my life.”

  “No problem,” Charles said, “don’t mention it.”

  “No, really,” Druff said.

  “That time of day, that kind of neighborhood? I won’t tell you you could have called your shots a little better.”

  “There wasn’t much I could do, really,” said Druff, opening his book,
finding his place. “I don’t use my limousine on weekends.”

  “Maid’s day off?”

  “Maids is right. There are two of them.”

  “Two maids,” Charles said.

  “Well, chauffeurs.”

  “Yeah,” said Charles, “chauffeurs. That’s what I meant.”

  “It’s pretty ironic. I was just coming back from paying a call on one of my drivers. We had words. Or anyway I did. He tried to pretend nothing happened. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t think of it, but even if I had I was in no frame of mind to ask my chauffeur if I could use his phone to call a cab.”

  “No, of course not.”

  Druff understood Charles thought he was crazy, he understood none of this was any of his business. He didn’t care. He didn’t hold with secrets. And anyway, if something untoward really did happen to him, he was marking the trees, laying a trail. “So thanks for picking me up back there.”