The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “Well, that push-button one on Kersh Boulevard,” his son said, his eyes shut, his own lights out. “Where they’re going to put that crosswalk.”

  “Scene of the crime,” Druff said.

  “Well, I pulled over. Well, I let her out at the curb.”

  “Scene of the fucking crime.”

  “Well, no,” his son said, “not exactly.”

  “Near enough. Scene of the fucking crime.”

  “No,” his son said. “Because after she got out of your car I drove another fifty or sixty feet before I remembered about the rug. That’s when I stopped and called out what did she want me to do with the rug in your trunk. She was still standing by that light.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “No,” Mikey said, “that’s just the thing. It was green. It had turned green in her favor.”

  “Did anyone see you?” Druff said. “Did they hear you call her?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Well, maybe whoever ran her down.”

  “Someone was at the light?”

  “In a car. Stopped in a car there, yes.”

  “Sure,” Druff said. “Because the light was against him.” His heart was pounding furiously. He began to feel not angina but the conditions for angina, his heart tightening, circling his wagons. Sure, Druff thought, this happens too. Your mouth dries up, your tongue gets thick. You get nervous. You need your pills.

  “Yes, but that’s just the thing, Daddy. Su’ad didn’t even answer when I called to her. She was staring so hard at the driver in that car stopped at that red light, it was as if she hadn’t even heard me.”

  “Why didn’t she cross?” he asked slowly, as carefully as he could. So as not to spook the horses. To keep them from rearing, to keep their hooves from trampling his chest. (And this happens. You get too excited, too caught up in shit for your own good.)

  “Well, I don’t know. I mean it was like she was hypnotized, fascinated. You know?”

  “Why didn’t she cross the street, the light was in her favor?”

  “Well I don’t know,” Mikey said again. “I mean then the light turned against her, and it was the driver who didn’t move. Then it was in her favor again and finally she just stepped out into the street.”

  Druff’s eyes were squeezed shut.

  “Next thing I knew there was this dull thump. I mean, that’s what it was. A thump. Su’ad was dead in the road but it made less noise to kill her than a fender bender, a little chip when a stone jumps up and breaks your headlight.”

  Druff was drawing short, shallow breaths.

  “And it wasn’t the Jews,” he said.

  “Someone I recognized from the lecture, lined up along that path we took or in the parking lot, you mean?”

  Druff was slow to answer. “That’s right,” he said finally.

  “That’s right,” his son said. “But it isn’t as if I got a really good look. I was maybe seventy-five feet in front of him when he was stopped at that light. Then after he ran Su’ad down, she got like caught on his car somehow and he was doing these really wild maneuvers, throwing it into reverse, making wide swings, coming forward hard and braking. To shake her loose. You know? I was watching Su’ad,” Mikey said. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off Su’ad. Her wild ride,” he said, his voice breaking. “When he passed it was like a blur. I mean I couldn’t even tell what make he was driving. I was all blinded by my tears.”

  “Hey,” Druff said, “Mikey, take it easy. It’s all right.”

  “It isn’t all right,” Mikey said. “I loved her. I was going to go back to goddamn Lebanon with her. I was going to let them make me a hostage.”

  Then, in the event, dread or no dread, thick tongue or no thick tongue, heart pressure or no heart pressure, angina or no angina, pills or no pills, this happens: You forget yourself, you forget you even have these things or that you need your medicine, and you make a MacGuffin-like leap.

  “How,” he asked his son, “did she get money for the rugs?”

  “She told me she borrowed it, Dad.”

  Druff had no proof. He could have done it. She’d been screaming at him, bitching at him for some incompetence or other. She might still have been shouting when he threw her out of the car. She could have gotten his goat, screamed some devastating thing at him that just might have torn it. Maybe he was on steroids. Christ, he was big enough. Maybe he was on steroids and they had brainwashed his heart. So he could have done it. He’d never know, would he, not really know. He was a mysterious kid, had been a mysterious kid, was now a mysterious man. Mikey. Jesus Christ Jesus. Mikey! So it was conceivable. So he could have done it, the mysterious man-kid, thrown some sudden, thunderous tantrum, some killer snit. But he thought not. For love he’d been willing to go for a hostage in Lebanon, he’d said—some foolish fate. Only an innocent was capable of inventing something like that. He hadn’t run anyone down. He was innocent. As innocent as he’d been in not coming forward in the first place, everything mitigated by fear. His son hadn’t done it. The very terms of his telling it had cleared him. So that should have been a relief. A load off Druff’s mind. But his body was still doing its things. He was short of breath now, too.

  It’s the excitement, he thought. I’m sound as a dollar.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” Druff said, “nothing. Not a thing.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m feeling fine.”

  “Shall I go get my mom?”

  “Hey,” Druff said, “I’m fine. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  Because she would probably have had an inventory. Not many people would put out a few hundred bucks, let alone several thousand, for an expensive rug without having something to compare it to, seeing a selection. So she needed money up front. Forget the people working customs, here, overseas—guys guarding the borders, working the stony, sandy, various desert checkpoints where they inspected the crates or boxes or whatever the hell they came packed in—bribes, according to Druff’s hierarchical imagination, for the still-more-official officials at the ports and air terminals, some compounding, snowballing sum of cash to get them to look the other way. So forget whatever considerable consideration it took to do just the stiff, burdensome logistics of the thing. She needed it for the terrorists. Who would get it to the weavers, who would get it to their wool suppliers and dye manufacturers, and all the hidden, unseen, unknown rest of the backstage, baksheeshed personalities who contributed to the production of a smuggled rug. Where would she get such sums, a poor student who didn’t even have a green card and had had to enroll in a night-school art class in order to use its facilities and find and take on an accomplice or accessory just to have the use of his father’s paints and canvases? Well of course she borrowed it. From those bankers he’d been hearing so much about. Probably from the hardened Macklin himself until he was retired by his long illness and, then, the even harder Hamilton Edgar, the steely Dan, the adamantine Jerry Rector. Su’ad was killed when she couldn’t pay off her loans to the bankers of B’nai Beth Emeth. Well, it was only a theory. He didn’t know for sure, but dollars to doughnuts.

  “It works for me.”

  “What?”

  “Oh boy,” Druff said. “A new symptom. Now I talk out loud even when I’m awake.”

  “What?”

  Cautious, tentative, like someone testing exactly how much weight he can put down on a bad ankle, Druff took short, experimental breaths.

  Mikey hovered. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Terrific.”

  Because MegGluffio had taken a few rugs off Su’ad’s hands. Almost certainly on some no-strings consignment. No different, surely, from her other arrangements with the trade—the nifty, voguish lamps and spiffy, à la mode furniture. The folding Japanese screens and futons. In keeping with all the other provisional terms of her life—her plastic cutlery, Styrofoam cups and paper plates—all that fast food paraphernalia of her get-out-of-town, one-night-stand ways.r />
  “You’re, sure?”

  “Your ma is rich and your daddy’s good-lookin’,” Druff said. He looked at his son, the wheelman, full on.

  “I don’t like this much,” Mikey said nervously.

  Because he’d said Su’ad hadn’t answered when he’d called to her. Because it was as if she hadn’t even heard him, he’d said.

  “The rug’s still in my trunk, isn’t it,” Druff said. It wasn’t a question.

  Mikey shrugged.

  Sure, he thought, because he thinks Dick’s been watching him, that Doug has. No, Druff thought, I’m wrong. Because they’re watching me, Mr. Mayor’s deputized observers. No, because he simply doesn’t know who it is who’s supposed to take delivery. Because she never said. Because he knew she didn’t have enough confidence in him and wouldn’t have told him until they were already on the way. Because he figures there’ll be time enough to switch it if he ever finds out.

  Oh, Mikey, he thought. Oh, oh, Mikey.

  “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Sure,” Druff said.

  “Oh,” said his son. “Do you need a doctor? Should I wake my mom?”

  “I heard from Scouffas and McIlvoy,” Druff said. “They’re not going to let us have the marathon.”

  And watched as Michael closed his eyes, a voyeur to his son’s humiliation. Because as much as Druff had hurt and disappointed Mikey, he was up to here with the kid’s character, its rigorous, repetitious, lock- step ways. His son’s impervious shell of stunted, undaunted, familiar behavior. His peace-at-any-price conditions. Because he knew what Mike was thinking now—that there’d never been a Scouffas, that McIlvoy was an invention. That his father had lied to him.

  And waited till the long, extended blink was finished. And then, very deliberately, threw one of his own like a willed fit. Thinking, I read yours, now you read mine.

  Thinking, she was financed by bankers, by bankers, not usurers, not loan sharks who required exorbitant interest, bankers, these merely hardened bankers who, when she couldn’t pay back her loans (because Druff’s middle-sized, rather backwater city, with its good-enough symphony orchestra of the second rank, its undersubscribed newspaper and losing football and basketball franchises, and narrow, four-story, dressed-limestone City Hall—once a department store—old-fashioned and less imposing, finally, than a county courthouse—for where were its cannons, its respectful, generic, de rigueur statues of Civil War rebs or Yankees or doughboys or G.I.’s?—in a town square; the building still, despite its conversion, faintly mercantile, vaguely pro tem, giving off trace elements of officious red-tape vibes, as if it were the headquarters of some army of occupation, was a fairly conventional, fairly conservative middle-sized city, whose relatively timid consumers wouldn’t much care for, so didn’t much buy, the risky frills and back-of-the-truck furbelows of contraband rugs, and whose conventional, conservative loan officers in its great gray banks and S&Ls would have pretty much written off the Third World and have had nothing to do altogether with the out-and-out nutso fringe doings of a subterranean Fourth One, let alone any shady arrangements of a black market venture capitalism, who wouldn’t so much as consider, even out of politeness, handing over a loan application to be filled out by one of its representatives, never mind that they wouldn’t have bothered to read it if they had, and so Su’ad had miscalculated, had been taken in by what she perceived—poor, dusky, benighted, cause-ridden, wacko Shiite Muslim maiden lady that she was—to be the advertised, universally obtaining Satanic condition, although—fortunately for her short-range goals, however disastrous it turned out to have been for her longer ones—this particular middle-sized city had fringe arrangements of its own, even its own quiet, stylish, hardened-banker terrorists not so squeamish or choosy as their éminence grise banker cousins with their stuffy, institutional FDICs or as their snooty enough second cousins with their FSLIC ones, and who would extend her cash, Druff imagined, not for her signature on a contract, or even, he imagined, for her marker, but just—they must have insisted on this, worked it into the deal like the devastating fine print in some apparently innocuous clause—on the basis of her given word alone) then, though I can’t prove this either, struck her down in what wasn’t quite yet even her prime, because, well, just because, because downtown had become too tame, and what was a fellow to do, where was he supposed to go to if he wanted to go wilding?

  Yeah, Mikey, Druff thought, go ahead. Read that!

  Which, of course, Mikey didn’t, couldn’t. They had different agendas. Mikey and Dad were on two separate, totally different, entirely arrested beams. Mikey into his preoccupations with Health and a sort of immutability on command of anything that might once have pleased him. (He would have gone back to Lebanon with her, even if it meant they might have taken him hostage! The trouble with his son, Druff thought, was that he didn’t think things all the way through. He was going to go back to Lebanon with the woman he loved, willing to accept the risks, to take his chances on becoming a hostage. All right. So far so good. But had it once crossed his mind that they might not carry Blues hockey in the Middle East?) And Druff, Druff thought, never one to let himself off lightly if he could shoot himself in the foot with both barrels—with his own opposing preoccupations, with finding the action and recklessly throwing himself into harm’s way, not only forbidding the immutable but absolutely encouraging it, not only inviting a MacGuffin into his life but positively becoming one!

  Well.

  Druff’s eyes open again, he saw his son shake his head, mournful, woeful.

  “Hey,” he said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Mike. I really am.”

  “Did they give you a reason?”

  “A reason?”

  “For not letting us have the marathon?”

  It was Druff’s last straw. He practically exploded. He could have awakened Rose Helen, upstairs sleeping, but he was past caring. “God damn it, Mikey, do you even know what I do for a living?” he demanded. “Do you? Well, do you?”

  “You’re City Commissioner of Streets.”

  “That’s right,” Druff said. “Now what do you suppose that entails?”

  “You’re in charge of the streets.”

  “Good,” Druff said. “Now where are the marathons run? Look at me. Don’t shut your eyes. Look at me! Where are they run?”

  “In the streets.”

  “Excellent. They’re run in the streets. Excellent. They’re run in the streets and I’m their commissioner. Why would I need a Scouffas, why would I need a McIlvoy? I’m City Commissioner of Streets, the streets are my jurisdiction. I could cross without looking both ways if I wanted. So if I wanted to put on a marathon why would I need the permission of people who don’t even live or pay taxes here?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t. Wonderful!”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  Druff stared at him.

  “You’ll do it? You’ll put one on?”

  And stared at him.

  “You promise?”

  “Sure,” said Druff, “honor bright. Cross my heart. Hope to kiss a pig.”

  Then Mikey said something in a manner so completely neutral and uninflected that, at first, Druff, though he’d heard the words, had no notion, none at all, what they meant. “Oh Dad” was what he said. But for the separation of the two discrete syllables, it could almost have been some sound of the body—some incoherent, vaguely natural (though not nature proper: not the wind, not the water; not fire, not earth) noise of the emotions, of displacement, like the tuneless, interstitial creak of bones. He said it again. “Oh Dad.” Was it nerves? It was grief.

  Then—to give himself time, Druff would have said “gradually,” but there was nothing gradual about it, nothing calibrated, nothing stepping-stoned, nothing scalar, nothing runged; there were no easy stages—he recalled its terms, and understood that whatever their agendas, they were on the same beam, all right. Even before Mikey
asked him if he remembered Diosodidio Macospodagal. Why, the kid was a hostage. He was Druff’s hostage.

  “The doctor?”

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “You were a kid,” Druff said. “How do you remember his name?”

  “I remember,” Michael said.

  “Well,” Druff said, “it’s a funny name. The kind of name you never forget. Hey,” Druff said, “what’s this? What’s the matter with you? Do you want to wake your mother? Hey, Michael, come on. Stop it, Mikey. You’re a grown man. Stop it now.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

  “Of course you can help it. Take a deep breath. Go on, take a deep breath.”

  “Fuck a deep breath.”

  “Do you know how silly you sound?”

  “Fuck a deep breath. Fuck a deep breath.”

  “All right now. Cut it out. Will you cut it out, please?”

  “Fuck cut it out. Piss on cut it out up the ass.”

  “You’re making a scene.”

  “Suck my scene’s dick.”

  “I’m tired, Mikey. Why are you carrying on like this?”

  “And I suppose you didn’t? You made a scene! You made a son of a whore’s bitch of a scene. God damn it to pus shit. You made a scene!”

  “Come on, now. Jesus. Get hold of yourself please. Here, take my handkerchief. Your nose is running.”

  “Stick my nose. Stick your handkerchief.”

  “Right.”

  “You made a scene. I’ll say you did. I’ll say so. ‘Your pop’s dying, Mikey. I’ll miss you, Mikey. You’re the one. I love you, kid. You’re the one I love. I’m sorry I crapped out on you, son. You’re man of the house now; take care of your mother, Mikey. Study hard. Behave yourself. Don’t get into trouble. Promise, promise me now. Your dad’s dying, kiddo. He’s had a massive cardiac infarction and he’s slipping fast. Put your hand over my heart like you’d pledge allegiance to the flag.’ Jesus, Daddy, I wasn’t even ten years old.”

  “He was crazy,” Druff said. “He had the bedside manner of an elephant. No idea how to talk to people.”