The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

“I already been told they won’t take me, on account of my dishonorable discharge.”

  “That’s all right, pal.” I sent him over to the plant with a strongly worded note of recommendation, complete with the suggestion that the order was coming from the old man himself. Whatever it was I figured Rackey could keep out of trouble on the floor until I figured out some better use for him.

  The next candidate fit the bill better. Herman Park’s history of violence was all within societally approved norms: the army (1931–37, 1942–46), Golden Gloves, and a stint with the Emporia Police Department in between. Somewhere along the line he’d had his nose broken, probably more than once.

  “Why didn’t you go back to Emporia after you mustered out?” I asked him.

  “Wife moved down here for war work in ’43. Wants me to get a job in an office or on an assembly line. I’d rather get my teeth pulled.”

  “How about the Wichita PD?”

  “Not hiring. Too many ex-cops coming back, so many of them they’re letting go some of the 4-Fs they hired during the fighting.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Some of those guys were walking around with a chip on their shoulder.”

  “Sure, everybody thought they were yellow. Tell you what, there were days in Germany I’d have traded places with any one of those guys, though.”

  I told Park he was hired and said I’d introduce him to Collins as soon as he was ready to carouse again.

  “That’s swell, Mr. Ogden.”

  I WAS FEELING like a good citizen, having found jobs for two returning vets, and I headed back to the plant to notify the personnel department, the head of which hated me. He had reason, since I regularly forced him to hire people he didn’t want to on Everett Collins’s say so. He was all right with Park, understanding as he did the need for a bodyguard for the boss, but he tried to put his foot down regarding Rackey.

  “We’ve already got this Rackey fellow on file, and we’re not hiring him.” His reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, and on the word “not” he whipped them off for emphasis. He was right, of course; Rackey didn’t meet any of the minimum requirements. Nonetheless I didn’t like him telling me no.

  “Mr. Whittaker, you will give Mr. Rackey a job. A job on the line. You will clear it with the shop steward, and if he has any trouble you report it directly to me. Is that understood?”

  He picked up a manila file and waved it. “Do you know why he was thrown out of the Marines?”

  “Don’t care.”

  “He was court martialed and found guilty of cruelty to animals.”

  I thought he was kidding and started laughing.

  “It’s not funny. He killed a poodle that belonged to his colonel’s wife.”

  “I don’t believe you. There’s no such charge in the Military Code of Justice.”

  “And when they arrested him for it they needed four MPs, two of whom were hospitalized with broken bones.”

  “You get all this from the Marines?” I asked, impressed with his thoroughness.

  “You bet. We’re still a military contractor, bub, and when I have to check someone’s background I go to the source.”

  “Have him work on civilian planes, then,” I said, and left him steaming.

  I STOPPED IN at my own office and said hello to Mrs. Caspian, the secretary of the Publicity and Marketing Department. I liked her because she made no bones about not liking me. She knew enough about my real duties at Collins to hold me in contempt, and I admired her integrity in not pretending otherwise. She was a plump brunette who smelled of rosewater and Old Golds, and other than hating me she was an exemplary secretary. No one but Mrs. Caspian showed any resentment at working under a man who left the running of the department entirely to them and who took all the public credit for it. I didn’t know beans about publicity, anyway, or about the airplane industry, either. As a kid I was wild about airplanes, but I’d gotten over that well before the war, which had certainly drained whatever romance aviation had left for me. I might as well have been working for a company that manufactured washers or adding machines.

  As long as I drew a paycheck and was allowed to come and go as I pleased I was fine. And make no mistake, I earned my living, wrangling our drunken founder in and out of roadhouses, hotels, and whorehouses.

  On my desk were some roughs of trade magazine advertisements that I was meant to initial if they met my approval. This was a sham, since nine times out of ten I wouldn’t show up at the office until long after deadline; oftentimes whoever placed it there would eventually recoup it and initial it himself. I scrawled my okay and dropped them on Mrs. Caspian’s desk, and she ignored me. All was as it should be in the publicity and marketing department.

  I STOPPED BY Collins’s office to get a look at Millie Grau, on the pretense of checking to see if anything needed to be taken to the old man at home. There was nothing, Millie told me, then she asked me if I’d like a cup of coffee. “I don’t usually brew any when Mr. Collins isn’t in the office. He drinks it all day long. My gosh, I’d be all atwitter if I did that. But I sort of like a cup this time of the afternoon, if you know what I mean.” I’d been drinking it all day at the diner, interviewing the bodyguards, but since it would involve her bending down to get the paper cups from the lower cabinet I told her yes.

  She chirped about this and that as she busied herself with the coffee, and when she knelt down before the cabinet her black skirt pressed so tightly against her ass I thought I might pass out from the sudden rush of blood away from my head.

  “I sure do miss having Mr. Collins around,” she said. To my knowledge the old goat had never made any attempt to screw her; maybe it was her squeaking voice that short-circuited his normal urge to pursue anything in a skirt within groping distance, though I personally found that it added to her appeal. It wasn’t out of any sense of professional decorum, either, since in addition to any number of girls on the production line, I knew Collins to have fucked a very homely predecessor of Millie’s before the war, a certain Miss Schergren, enthusiastically and regularly. And a young woman with strong religious principles usually just excited his sense of sport; I’d chauffeured a Seventh Day Adventist up to Kansas City for a medical procedure just two weeks before I shipped off in ’42.

  I was standing close enough to her to smell the Doublemint on her breath—she must have been chewing it on the sly when I walked in—mingled with a tart scent redolent of citrus and cinnamon, a scent quickly overpowered by the percolating coffee.

  “He should be himself in a day or two.”

  “No he won’t,” she said. “Have you ever had a broken rib? It hurts every time you breathe.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And all they can do is wrap up your chest. It’s awful.”

  “It must be.”

  “And you’re such a good loyal friend to him.”

  I was paid to be, is what I thought, but I didn’t want Miss Grau to think me cynical. “Well, he was my hero when I was a kid. All that Lucky Lindy-daring flyboy stuff. Goggles and rippling scarves and machine guns, shooting down German planes.”

  She giggled. “You sound like Donald.”

  “Who’s Donald?”

  She raised her left hand to display a decent sized rock, either a zircon or a pretty expensive piece of stone and silver. “Didn’t you hear? I’m going to be Mrs. Donald Thorsten.”

  I certainly didn’t want to marry Millie, and short of that I knew I’d never get the chance to take her to bed. Why, then, this ache upon hearing the news of her betrothal? “What’s his line?”

  “He’s the new associate pastor at my church. Since last November.”

  “That’s swell. I know you’ll be happy.”

  “I’m so excited. The big day’s this November, because Donald feels very strongly that a couple shouldn’t marry if they haven’t known one another at least a year.”

  “Wise man,” I said.

  She poured me a paper cupful of mild java, and I spent a few minutes
extolling the virtues of married life before making myself scarce. It was close to the end of the shift and I didn’t want to get stuck in the traffic heading westward away from the plant. There was no reason I couldn’t have headed straight for home, but instead I headed for Red’s.

  RED’S WASN’T HOPPING. There was a copy of the Evening Beacon on the bar, and I was interested to see on page four that a man in his fifties had drunk himself to death in an apartment west of downtown, not far from the Masonic Home, while his wife rotted away in the next room, having died of undetermined causes several days earlier. The reporter, Fred Elting, was always a good one for nasty details on these sorts of stories, and he wasn’t afraid to sensationalize. “What kind of city are we living in today, where a man is so afraid to report his wife’s decease to the proper authorities that he pickles himself to death with gin while she molders by his side? Is this what our brave men fought for in Europe and Asia?”

  To tell you the truth, Fred, I wasn’t giving Wichita and its lonesome drunks much thought when I was over there.

  There wasn’t much else of interest in the paper, and I fell into talking to one of the b-girls. Her name was Barbara, and she looked like she must have been a lot of fun before the war. The 1946 model had a drinker’s puffy face, though, and a little bit of a paunch that her girdle wasn’t quite containing beneath her dress. “That’s a pretty thin dress for March,” I said.

  “It’s been pretty balmy the last few days,” she said, crossing her legs, the slit in her dress aligning to give me a perfect view of the top of her right stocking. Her legs were okay, and the leer she was giving me suggested that a few good times might still be had with the old girl. “Where’s your friend?”

  “He got into a fight the other night,” I said, thinking she meant Collins. “His bodyguard let him get his ribs broken.”

  “Wait a minute, the bodyguard has a bodyguard?”

  Was she really that drunk or that stupid? “You’re talking about Billy Clark?”

  “Good-looking fella sits in a booth and watches you and old Collins drinking and having fun?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I always feel kind of sorry for him.”

  “He got beaten up too, and he lost his job on top of it, so your pity’s not entirely misplaced.”

  “Gosh. Lost his job and everything?”

  “He’s a goddamn idiot. What kind of numbskull bodyguard starts a fight with a couple of big hayseeds he couldn’t whip sober?”

  “Well, that Collins is a creep and a pervert.”

  I had no argument against that. “He pays okay,” I countered.

  “He was screwing my girlfriend Lottie, had her on all fours. Pushed her face down onto the mattress, just spit in his hand and did it pretty as you please. Boy she was mad. Threatened to go to the cops and report him as a pervert.”

  “Cops don’t care.”

  “Sure they do! It’s called sodomy and there’s a law against it in the state of Kansas.”

  “I mean the cops don’t care about it when Everett Collins does it.”

  “Well he sure seemed scared because when he sobered up he paid her two hundred and fifty dollars afterward not to squawk.”

  All this sex talk, on top of my earlier encounter with Millie Grau, was getting me thinking I needed my ashes hauled one way or another tonight. I thought of my beautiful wife at home, and comparing her in my head with the alcoholic harridan before me there was no way to find her wanting. But Barbara wasn’t going to ruin it by talking afterward about baby clothes or what religion to raise the little interloper in.

  Fifteen minutes later I was tucking my shirt back into my pants while she tugged her threadbare rayon panties back on, then deftly rehooked her brassiere behind her back. Her armpits were stubbly and dusted with something like talcum.

  “In Europe the girls don’t shave under their arms,” I said, rolling the window down to toss the used rubber out onto the gravel.

  “That’s disgusting.” She seemed genuinely offended.

  “You get used to it. When I first got back my wife’s shaved pits looked odd to me.”

  She got quiet for a minute while she pulled her stockings on and attached the garters. “I don’t sleep with married men as a rule,” she said, finally and with undisguised peevishness.

  I bristled at the implied slur on my character. In a spiteful moment I pulled a ten from my wallet and put it in her cold, sweaty little hand. “Just a little something to get you by.”

  She looked at it for a second like it was a turd some little songbird had laid on her palm, then wadded it up and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “What the hell do you take me for?” she said. “I don’t take money for screwing.”

  “Sorry,” I said, unable to suppress a grin. When we were fully dressed I followed her back inside and bought her a drink.

  “Here’s to you,” she said, raising her glass.

  “Post coitum animal triste, as my grandpa used to say.” Down the hatch, burning all the way.

  “What’s that mean? That a toast?”

  “Means I ought to think about getting home for dinner.”

  “When you coming back next?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer, just got up off of the stool and walked away. The bartender on duty, a lanky, hollow-cheeked fellow, watched me go with a look on his face like I’d just shot his mother, and I realized the truth of the old saw that there’s someone for everyone in this world.

  FOUR

  NYMPHOMANIA: A SEMINAR

  A NOTHER ENVELOPE HAD arrived at work from my secret admirer in Salem, Massachusetts, this one addressed to WAYNE ODGON COLLINS AIR WITCHIT KANS. I halfway wondered whether he wasn’t having fun with the spelling of my name on purpose. This time the note inside read:YOU KILLED HER AND YOUR GOING TO PAY THE PRICE

  That evening at home I scanned both afternoon papers. The top of the news on KFH was a stickup at a local restaurant that had happened too late for the papers. The cook was dead and so was the stickup man, shot by the cops, and the news man took pains to point out the fact that the robber was a returning vet. It didn’t mention whether he’d been able to find a job since he got back, or whether his wife had been fucking around in his absence, or whether he’d seen combat.

  The crime reporter told the story in a high-pitched nasal voice that was nearly as grating as the sound of the donnybrook the Dunphys’ were having downstairs. I was in my easy chair in the parlor, as close to the radio as possible, weighing the relative merits of going out on the town versus staying in and reading. I was midway through a book from the twenties entitled Sexual History of the World War, a pretty good read that Sally didn’t want in the house. “What if someone comes over and sees it on the shelf?” she’d said when I brought it home from the secondhand book store. It was a pretty good read. I had an idea that America’s sexual habits must have changed some after the boys came back from Europe in 1918, having learned about cuntlapping and blowjobs and various other bits of European business, and similarly in the last few years I’d seen many an Iowa farm boy wake up to the myriad possibilities inherent in human coition. I wanted badly to finish the chapter on the Regulation of Army Brothels, but the Dunphys’ clashes had been running long and loud of late, and I decided to join Herman Park and the boss on their nocturnal rounds.

  There was a downside to this, too; the old man was in fine form since the end of his convalescence, nastier than usual and quicker to anger. Those periods of jolly drunkenness between short-tempered hangover and havoc-wreaking, pie-eyed inebriation were shorter and rarer than before.

  I caught up with them as we’d tentatively planned at a blind pig above an old carriage house at 12th and Bitting in Riverside. The proprietor was an old friend of mine, a luckless boozer abandoned years ago by a wife he never stopped thinking or talking about. He and Collins were getting along like a house afire when I arrived, and Park was sitting in a chair drinking a ginger ale.

  “Keep trying to tell this sumbitch he needs a
goddamn drink,” Collins said when I walked in.

  “I’m driving you around, Mr. Collins, I like to be alert,” Park said.

  “I’ll have a bourbon, neat,” I said to my old pal Norman. He grinned, the gin blossoms on his nose and cheeks a deeper red than usual.

  Collins was in one of his professorial moods, and I had apparently interrupted a long discourse on the comparative sexual needs of men and women, which he now resumed.

  “On the other hand, though,” Collins said, “we have the women who can’t settle for one man. These are a rare breed. Most become prostitutes. Others bring shame upon good families by making spectacles of themselves. When I was coming up in Michigan there was a woman in our town, the wife of a judge, no less, who was discovered to have taken on no fewer than five lovers over a period of fifteen years. Now she was a handsome woman, but what sort of wife isn’t satisfied with a judge? And we knew, we men of the town, that the judge was perfectly capable in bed because he himself was known to keep mistresses. Now not everyone admired him for it, but it was proof that he could satisfy a woman, and by extension proof that his wife was insane. The scientific term is nymphomaniac.”

  NORMAN SHOOK HIS head and looked at the floor. Park sat back in his chair and drank his ginger ale while Collins went on for a while in this vein: the horrors of menstruation, women’s hormones leading eventually, inevitably, to insanity of one kind or another.

  As always Norman’s face hair was unwashed and a little too long, his glasses badly smudged, and he looked like he’d rather not listen any more. “Let’s go meet some women,” I said.

  Park was already out of his chair. “I know a roadhouse way out on Tyler Road has some pretty wild ones,” he said.

  “Guess we might as well before I get much drunker,” the boss said. I paid our bill (I was reimbursed every two weeks for expenses, since Collins wasn’t to be trusted with great amounts of cash on these expeditions), and we took our leave. At the bottom of the rickety staircase that led downstairs the old man stumbled and fell forward, hitting the door. A stream of obscenities and animal howls erupted, and when Park tried to reach for him Collins swung a wild fist in his direction.