The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  IT WAS A Thursday, and I was looking at the Evening Beacon in Red’s, a roadhouse five miles east of the Wichita city limit on 54. You could do a fair number of theoretically illegal things at Red’s, as long as you knew how to ask and didn’t make a spectacle of yourself. Kansas was a dry state, and if you wanted anything stronger than 3.2 percent beer, you had to go across state lines or to a blind pig or to a roadhouse like Red’s, whose owner paid the authorities well to look the other way. There was an interesting article in the Beacon about a foot somebody found underneath a bridge in Riverside. It was a man’s right foot, the article said, size eleven, and there was a pretty good quote from the elderly fisherman who found it: “I hate to think of somebody gimping around missing a foot.”

  The Beacon was a better read than the rival Eagle if you were looking for sex and mayhem. When a car hit a train, the Eagle would report the casualties but the Beacon would be there with a photographer to record the blood and guts and tortured metal, and I felt sure the Beacon’s editors were bitterly disappointed at their failure to get a picture of the foot.

  “How’s that pretty wife of yours,” Everett Collins asked me, one elbow on the bar, annoyed that I was reading the paper instead of listening to him.

  “Same as ever,” I said. The fact that he wanted so badly to screw my dear Sally was one of several things that kept me employed and relatively free of actual day-to-day responsibility. “How’s yours?”

  He stared at me for a second like he was going to lose his temper, then he laughed, just drunk enough to find my impertinence funny. I couldn’t have imagined needling the boss before the war, but I wasn’t scared of him any more. He slapped his palm down on the bar. One of his ears was missing its lobe, having been sliced off in some long-ago cutting scrape he never elaborated on, and that ear always got redder than the other when he got mad or drunk.

  “Thinks she’s going to outlive me. When I croak, you make sure the cops take a real good look at her. I got it in my will if I die before she does I want a full autopsy.”

  “I’ll see that she gets the chair whether she’s guilty or not.”

  He laughed again. “I like that. Maybe I should just have her framed for something while I’m still kicking, then I’d get to watch her burn. You ever see that picture of Ruth Snyder in the chair?”

  “No.”

  “Some reporter snuck a camera into the witnesses’ gallery, strapped it to his shin, snapped one right when they turned on the juice. Kind of blurry. Strapped into that chair with a hood over her head, body all tensed up with the current running through her.”

  “Never saw that.”

  “January ’28. I was in New York talking to the bankers the day it ran, took up the whole the front page of the Daily News and I tell you what boy, I had to have a call girl sent up to my room so I didn’t walk into those bankers’ offices with a goddamn hard-on.”

  At times like these I almost liked him. Hung over, which was as close as he got to sober any more, he was a surly mean son of a bitch, and much drunker than this he’d be pissing his pants and throwing wild punches, protected by his money and his power in these parts as much as by the presence of Billy Clark, the ex-cop who followed him around most nights to make sure he got home in one piece.

  It was only seven o’clock, and I guessed Billy had another seven or eight hours to go. The bartender, an old-before-his-time hillbilly named Jake Bearden with eyebrows like blond sagebrush and deep furrows running from his nose alongside his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something but he kept his counsel.

  “I think I’d like to get me some strange tonight, Wayne,” the old man said.

  What he meant was I should pick up some girls and he’d decide which one he wanted to screw. Looking around the roadhouse I saw only two unaccompanied women, both of them worn-out b-girls the old man had tired of months before. “Pickings are slim around here,” I said as one of the girls, thinking herself unnoticed, delicately stuck her little finger up a nostril and, upon extraction, examined the nail with a curiosity as dull as her blonde permanent.

  “Why don’t you call one of your friends and get some fresh gals out here.”

  “Management doesn’t like that.” Red Garnett, the roadhouse’s owner, had warned Collins not to bring any more whores around, at least not in the numbers the old man liked. Last time the unpicked extra girls went around propositioning the other customers and while this wasn’t necessarily bad for business, it wasn’t covered under the terms of his deal with the county. Liquor and gambling were all old Red could afford to pay off, and he’d warned me more than once that the slack he’d been cutting the old man was not unlimited.

  “Let’s head out to the Eaton and get you a suite, and we can have some girls sent up,” I said.

  He scowled like a disappointed five-year-old. “All right.” He picked his bottle up off the bar and headed for the door with me close behind. I waved at Billy Clark, and he climbed out of his booth, shaking his head.

  On the way to the Eaton he pontificated about the natural states of men and women, and men’s physical needs versus women’s. It was one of his standard lectures, and I marveled that before the war I used to take his shit seriously, listening to his lame-brained theories and thinking how lucky I was to be able to bask in the presence of the Great Man. He had been good at one thing in his youth, putting airplanes together, back in the days when they were much simpler craft than they are now. Sure, he had to improvise and invent in those days, and I’ll give him that much. But on any subject outside the mechanics of flying machines he was a fool and a blowhard.

  BY THE TIME I got back to the apartment that night I’d paid off four girls, only two of whom ended up getting screwed in Collins’s Packard. One of the others made a play for Billy, who turned her down flat, and I screwed the fourth in the parlor of the suite we’d rented. It was close to three when I opened the door and heard Sally’s voice from the bedroom.

  “Honey?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Want to come to bed?”

  Having had the foresight to take a shower back at the suite, I was reasonably sure no traces of the whore’s smell remained, but I’d still hoped to come home and find my wife asleep. When I pushed the bedroom door open I found her lying on the bed wearing nothing but her high heeled shoes and enough makeup to caulk a small bathroom, one long leg stretched out and the other raised up at the knee.

  “I been awful lonesome tonight,” she said.

  I WAS A little sorry about the whore at the Eaton, because it took me a good half an hour to get to the point of ejaculation. Afterward we lay there staring at the ceiling and she started talking, babbling the way she did sometimes about babies and the meaning of life and marriage and church and all that kind of crap.

  Now she was saying something that required a response, and having no idea what the subject at hand was, I let out a long, thoughtful sigh.

  “I just think a child ought to have a yard to play in,” she said.

  “That’s true.” Jesus, what was she saying? That snapped me right back to attention.

  “And a neighborhood where there are other children to play with.”

  Something vaguely electrical ran from the top of my head to the base of my spine. “Wait a second. What were you just saying a minute ago?”

  She hit me with her pillow and started for the bathroom.

  “You son of a bitch, you’re not even listening to me!” She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and started running a bath.

  I knocked on the door. “I’m sure as hell listening now,” I yelled, at which point the phone rang.

  “Mr. Ogden? It’s Mrs. Dunphy downstairs.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Dunphy,” I said, though I wasn’t sorry in the least; I loathed the old termagant and her pasty husband. “We’ll quiet down.”

  “You know perfectly well my Hank goes to work at six-thirty. This is not fair.”

  It suddenly struck me as funny that at this late stage of her d
ismal existence Mrs. Dunphy still expected things to be fair, and I was still laughing after she hung up on me.

  THREE

  A PALMFUL OF WARM SPIT

  A FEW DAYS LATER I was still getting over the shock of having knocked up my wife. Sally had woken up nauseous and pissed off at me for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words, and for the first time since my return in May I was missing the nature of my relations with the gals in my employ in Rome: sexual in several cases but strictly impersonal.

  It was Monday morning and my first task of the day was to spring a couple of farmboys at Police Headquarters downtown. The clerk didn’t ask me why I was bailing them out, just gave me the fisheye and breathed in and out with a loud, phlegmy sound while he filled out the forms and stamped the endorsement onto the back of the Collins Aircraft Company check. Considering the amount of time I spent watching and helping Everett Collins break various laws, the clerk and I probably ought to have been on a first name basis, but the great man couldn’t get arrested in Wichita for anything short of manslaughter. The clerk knew who I was, though, and he knew what the farmboys had done.

  “Heard they busted his ribs. Heard Billy Clark wasn’t much help to him, either. Some bodyguard.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “You fixing to bail him out too?”

  “I’m going to let Billy-boy cool his heels in the jug until he’s arraigned. Let him do some thinking in there.”

  “Heard he told old man Collins he was retired from the force.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “Hell, no. Fired, fall of ’44. Pulled his service revolver on a civilian over at Lawrence Stadium, off-duty, before a ball game. Claimed it was a legit arrest, turned out to be a beef over a parking space. We hired a whole bunch of 4-F morons when our men started signing up and getting drafted, and that’s one time it bit us right in the ass. Collins ought to have had him checked him out before he put him on the payroll.”

  ONCE THEY GOT out, the farmboys didn’t show much curiosity as to who I was or why I’d posted their bail. A pair of giant brothers by the name of Gertzteig, they seemed to think this was just the way things worked in the big city. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  We went across the street to the drugstore and sat down. “Anything you like, boys, it’s on me.”

  A couple of uniformed officers were enjoying their complimentary breakfast at the other end of the lunch counter, and glancing at the brothers, they surely pegged them for the recently sprung drunks they were. Back at the pharmacy counter I could see the pale, baldheaded druggist staring daggers at the freeloading cops. He hated giving away those free meals, and locating his drug store across the street from City Hall turned out to be the worst mistake he’d ever made.

  The Gertzteigs ordered up t-bones and fried eggs, sunny side up, and hash browns and toast, both of them, and they attacked the meals when they came in exactly the same order: potatoes, eggs, toast, steak. They weren’t twins, as far as I could tell, but they matched each others’ motions pretty well. I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a fight with them, especially with a wobbly drunk like Collins on my side.

  “So here’s the deal, boys. You know the old man you hit?” I asked between mouthfuls of corned beef hash.

  “Only hit the old guy but the one time,” said the bigger of the two. “In the ribs.”

  “Once’t was enough,” said his brother.

  “We wasn’t mad at him so much, it was his friend.”

  “The old man feels bad you spent the night in jail, and he wants to give you a little something to get home on.” I handed them each an envelope containing a fifty dollar bill. Examining the contents they grew more slackjawed than before.

  “Golly damn,” said the bigger one. “That’s purt square of a feller just lost a fight.”

  “He doesn’t want you boys to walk away from Wichita thinking that’s the way things usually go in the big city. Now can I give you boys a ride to wherever your car is so you can get on back to Butler County?”

  I DIDN’T BOTHER phoning Collins to tell him about it. He’d grouse about the expense and indignity of having to pay off the cretins who’d broken two of his ribs, but in a day or two he’d see the logic of it, and he’d be as grateful as I was for the knowledge that the Gertzteig brothers had no idea of the identity of their assailant-turned-benefactor. And my next task was unpleasant enough without Collins making it worse. By ten AM Billy Clark had already been before the judge and released, and I called him on the phone and told him to meet me at Red’s.

  I WAS STASHING the receipt for the boys’ bail in my inside overcoat pocket when I noticed an envelope I’d almost forgotten. It was addressed to WAYNE OGDON COLLINS AIRPLANE CO. WITCHATA KAS, and it had nonetheless managed to make its way to my desk a mere two weeks after someone mailed it from Salem, Massachusetts, a town I had never visited and from which no acquaintance of mine had, to my knowledge, ever sprung. I guess I’d had it sitting there in the pocket for a week or more, some irrational sense of dread having stopped me from opening it when I saw it laying there on top of some reports I didn’t intend to read.

  Inside was a penciled note, crudely printed in block letters:YOU SON OF A BITCH THIEF THERES’ BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. ERUOPEAN LADYS ARE DELICATE AS FLOWERS.

  Something went sour in my stomach, and I tried to put it down to the corned beef.

  THAT NIGHT WE sat in Billy Clark’s usual booth. It was another quiet night at Red’s, but we were familiar enough from our visits with the old man that the b-girls didn’t bother us, though one of them kept giving us cold, appraising looks that gave me the fantods. “What are we going to do about this?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know,” he said. He had two black eyes and a split lower lip, and his right index finger was in a little metal splint wrapped with surgical tape.

  “You should have told Mr. Collins when he hired you that you couldn’t fight worth a damn.”

  “You didn’t see them two farmboys that jumped us,” he said.

  “I sure did, I made their bail and paid ’em off and sent ’em back to Butler County. Now what the hell were you thinking starting a fight yourself? And don’t try telling me anything different because I talked to three people who watched it.”

  “I don’t know, Wayne. Something about them just set me off.”

  “Another thing. Mr. Collins knows about the incident that lost you your badge.”

  He reared back and craned his neck to look at the ceiling, a gesture meant to convey exasperation at the unfairness of the thing that instead suggested an inability to meet my eyes. “That business was a bunch of lies from start to finish.”

  “Nonetheless Mr. Collins feels it would be best if you sought employment elsewhere.”

  His mouth hung open and his eyes watered as if I’d just slapped him. All he’d expected was a reprimand. I was tired of looking at Billy, though, and I didn’t like his lying, and he’d proved that as a bodyguard he was useless. I handed him a check on Collins’s personal account. “Two weeks severance and you’re lucky to get it.”

  COLLINS HAD TAKEN to phoning me at home, a familiarity I was beginning to resent but hadn’t yet figured out how to stymie. That night when he called I told him I’d fired Billy. Might as well take the hit now if he was going to react badly.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, complete with tightly controlled breathing. “Son of a bitch had some balls calling himself a bodyguard. Put an ad in the paper for somebody new.”

  “Already set for tomorrow’s Beacon.”

  “Shit. That Jew rag? Put one in the Eagle instead. Nobody reads the Beacon but left-wing degenerates.”

  This I would ignore. I liked the busty girl who ran the Beacon’s classified desk. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Come on over and see if you can’t sneak some booze in. Bring a flask or two. Make it three. I can hide ’em; we’ll tell the old bitch you’re here to discuss advertising strategy.”

>   THE AD IN the Beacon read as follows:Man with police or military experience wanted for bodyguard work. Familiarity with firearms essential.

  References. Box 397, Beacon.

  The day after the notice first appeared I had half a dozen responses. One was a woman whose husband had taught her to use a rifle. Two were from ex-convicts who at least had the honesty to admit it. One was from Billy Clark, admirably already on the lookout for new opportunities. The two who remained were ex-servicemen, and I made arrangements to meet them both at Stanley’s diner at Kellogg and Oliver.

  The first was a barrel-chested ex-marine who sat across from me, seething over some unspecified grievance.

  “How’s civilian life agreeing with you?” I asked him.

  “Bitch don’t know when to quit.”

  “Yeah, ain’t that the way.”

  “I swear to Christ, Mister, I know she was fucking my brother while I was gone.”

  A hell of a thing to say to a stranger in the context of a job interview, I thought; this guy needed his head shrunk more than he needed a job. “That’s pretty rotten,” I said, as blandly as I could.

  “I’m going to prove it, and then I’m going to kill them both.”

  His name was Rackey, and though I knew he wasn’t going to work as a bodyguard, I had an idea I might find a use later on for that barely contained violent impulse of his. “Listen, Mr. Rackey, it looks like the bodyguard position’s already filled, but I have another proposition for you until a similar position opens up again. How would you like a job on the line at Collins aircraft?”