One night Park and I were along for the ride with Collins at a blind pig up near Newton that one of his high-rolling buddies had told him about. It was in a big farmhouse in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, and it was better appointed than a lot of real bars I’d been in. The boss was in an expansive mood, after a long and friendly conversation with the proprietor regarding the ins and outs of rural lawbreaking. They established at length that bringing whores into the blind pig, even just for tonight, might jeopardize the barkeep’s delicate position with local law enforcement. It was decided that after a couple more drinks we would head for the Crosley Hotel just north of downtown and find some there.
Collins stood with his arm on the mantle above the fireplace and smirked. “Admit it, boys, this is the best goddamn job you ever had.”
Park nodded and I just smiled. Sure, it wasn’t exactly coal mining, and I was grateful to have a position that got me out of the house—when I’d left that evening, Sally was listening to “Baby Snooks” on KFH, and if I’d had to listen to a whole half hour of that shit I’d have blown my brains out—but this wasn’t the best job I ever had, not by a mile.
In the army I used to look back at my pre-war self with a mixture of nostalgia and pity. What the hell had I thought I was accomplishing selling airplanes? The QM Corps gave me thrilling and lucrative work. Men needed the things I offered for sale. Women, some of them beautiful women, relied on me for protection and income, and the army relied on me to distribute whatever I wasn’t able to reroute and sell elsewhere. It was a good life, and by the time it came to its violent end I could see my sweet situation beginning to unravel. There would be no place for me in Italy after the war, without the army to protect my position and provide my clientele, and my stab wound—for which I managed to con my way into a Purple Heart—got me home months earlier than was right.
So acting as bag man and babysitter for an alcoholic skirtchaser came in a poor second. Hell, I had a job as a kid selling pots and pans door to door that might give this one a run for its money.
THE FRONT DESK man at the Crosley greeted Collins by name and told him to go right up. “Elevator’s broken, you’ll have to use the stairs.”
The stairs smelled like a lioness in heat had pissed her way up to the fourth floor, by which time Collins was gasping. “What the hell happened to this place?” I asked. “This used to be a nice hotel.”
“Whores and hopheads now,” Collins said between wheezes. He knocked on the door of room 406, which was answered by a tired looking forty-year-old with blonde bangs wearing a tattered silk robe that hung open, revealing a matching set of underwear underneath.
“Benny called and said you was coming up, but he didn’t say you brought friends. Let me call a couple girls and we’ll all of us have a party.” The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises, and I suspected that once she doffed that robe we’d be treated to the sight of track marks inside her elbows.
“I think I’m going to make an early night of it, boss.”
“What the hell?” the old man said, his fury manifesting itself instantly and, as usual, without warning. That chopped-up ear was the color of a July tomato. “I’m paying, where the hell do you get off saying no to a free piece of ass?”
“Hey, fellahs, not in the hallway, please,” the girl said, trying to usher us into the room. “There’s still citizens live in this hotel.”
“I’ll get a cab,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“How about you?” he asked Park. “You a fucking water lily too?”
“I’ll have me a piece, sure.”
“Good. Go on get in there. Ogden, you’re fired, you lousy little queer piece of shit.”
Without turning around I waved them goodnight. This wasn’t the first time he’d fired me in such a state, and in the morning he’d be lucky if he remembered enough to regret it. Everett Collins didn’t know it, but he’d just sent me on a much-needed vacation.
I HAILED A cab on North Main and told him to drive out toward Red’s. I shouldn’t have gotten to thinking about Italy, where I was my own boss, even if several thousand men could legitimately claim to have the power to give me orders. I pulled from the inside pocket of my sport coat a letter I’d been carrying for two weeks, from my old buddy Lester, stationed now in occupied Japan. After the usual pleasantries and perfunctory asking after my family, he got to the real gist of the matter: You ought to be here, Oggie, there is action all the time and guys arriving looking for a game or a girl or a fix and man oh man its wide open. Local enforcers are all on the run and that’s the way it is going to go around here till they get thereselves ready to re-join civization. Come on back to Mother Army, Oggy, all is forgiven. If you re-up there is strings can be puled and you will end up here and not Europe where the game is already winding down.
Red’s was no busier than I’d have expected on a Tuesday. My b-girl Barbara was sitting with the off-duty bartender who’d given me the dirty look before, and she made a point of looking away from me when I passed by. I was almost glad for her, and it simplified things around Red’s if she wasn’t looking for another turn.
I didn’t see any other girls that appealed, though. I hurried through a whisky soda and stepped outside into the night air, warm and still for a Kansas March. I was on the verge of going inside to phone for a cab when I saw what looked like an old friend sitting in the far corner of the lot. It was a 1916 Hudson, a Phaeton Super 6, identical to the one I’d owned as a boy, painted white or something near it. Someone had taken good care of it; it gleamed in the moonlight, and I wanted to hear if it ran as nice as it looked.
Before I’d considered what I was doing I found myself climbing in and fooling with the starter, and then I was driving eastward toward town. The Super 6 ran as well as mine ever had, and I wished I could congratulate the owner; maybe someday I would; maybe I’d even let on that I was the one who’d stolen it that beautiful spring night back in March of ’46.
What the hell, I was going to Kansas City to get my ashes hauled and to talk to the owner of the Nonpareil Photographic Studio. Lester could probably use the connection even if I couldn’t.
I tried not to wake Sally as I rummaged the bedroom closet in the dark, but she wasn’t sleeping well. “You’re packing a bag?”
“Ssshh. Go back to sleep. Business trip. Five-fifteen train.”
“You never said anything about a business trip.”
I buckled the suitcase shut and gave her a peck on her cheek, cupping her left breast as I did so. She smelled like soap and cigarettes, and for just a second I loved her as much as I ever had.
BY THE TIME I abandoned the Super 6 in the parking lot of Union Station, it had started to get cool. Inside I waited in line behind a stout lady in a mink coat topped with a fox stole. The fox’s glass eyes were both loose and hanging from its furry face by what seemed to be strips of rotten suede, and he stared wall-eyed at the early morning crowd while his mistress sorted through some sort of complicated ticketing problem with the clerk. I wasn’t paying any attention to the details, since I was in no particular hurry; I had a good hour and a half before my train left. I was enjoying the subtle, almost musical interplay of her bullying whine and the clerk’s stubborn, irritated monotone. At length, another ticket window opened and I moved over to it. By the time I’d transacted my business the confrontation at the other window had degenerated into shouting, and my ticketseller glanced over and snickered. The fat lady had been joined by an expensively dressed middle-aged man the size of a twelve-year-old, and he stood behind the lady as if for protection.
“Looks like Casper Milquetoast from the funny pages, don’t he?” the ticketseller said, and I had to laugh. The little fellow did, right down to his rimless spectacles.
I bought the early editions of the Morning Beacon and the Morning Eagle from the midget who ran the newsstand and took a seat in the Harvey House. The Harvey girl who took my order looked like she’d rather be sleeping, and I asked if I should buy her a
cup of coffee too. She faked a chuckle, stifled a yawn, and explained that this wasn’t a normal waking hour for her, that she was covering a shift for a girl whose mother was ill. “Normally I don’t get up until seven at least. Boy, I don’t know how people do it. I’m so cranky I gotta watch I don’t slap somebody.”
BY THE TIME the Harvey girl brought my bacon and eggs I was almost done with the Eagle. It seemed odd, the idea that there was still news to report after the war was won. But people were still robbing grocery stores and crashing their cars and having Chamber of Commerce meetings, still drowning and going on strike and breaking jail. The funnies, on the other hand, weren’t as funny as they used to be. What ever happened to Thimble Theater? Was Krazy Kat in the paper any more? Mutt and Jeff were still in the Beacon, I was relieved to note, but they weren’t as funny and mean as they used to be, just a couple of shitkickers telling corny jokes. And if Casper Milquetoast was in print I hadn’t seen him.
I went back to the newsstand after breakfast and bought a couple of magazines for the trip. The rocking motion of the train might lull me to sleep, but at that moment I felt excited enough that I imagined I’d stay awake the whole trip, and I didn’t want to be bored.
It was still dark when the train pulled out of the station, and I unfurled my copy of Life. Like a comet shooting through the sky announcing an auspicious event, the page I happened to open to had a photo essay on the establishment of a permanent military base in Japan. I started reading the article, but before I was done with it my late night caught up with me and I was out.
When I awoke it was light and there was a stocky man of eighty or more sitting across from me. A farmer, I guessed, shrunken a bit from his days of physical labor but not gone entirely to seed. “Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I said, looking out the window and trying to figure out where we were.
“Where you headed? Chicago?” He had on a suit that looked like one my grandfather used to wear, the height of fashion thirty years before. His shirt collar came halfway up his throat.
“Kansas City,” I said.
“Me, I’m headed for Chicago. Going to be married to a woman I’ve been corresponding with.”
“That’s good,” I said, though I suspected it wasn’t.
“Want to see her picture?” Without waiting for my reply he pulled a glossy four-by-five print from his coat pocket and handed it over. The woman in the picture was no older than forty and generously daubed with kohl and rouge like Theda Bara from the silent pictures, though the dress she wore was of more recent vintage. Her broad smile, more of a leer, really, showed an irregular mouthful of jagged teeth. “Ain’t she something?”
“She is. Known her long?”
“Since’t last September.”
“Ever met her in the flesh?”
“No, sir, this here’ll be the first time.”
“That’s terrific.”
“She’s going to come back and live on the farm with me. She’s tired of city ways, she says.”
I took a closer look at the old gent. His suit was out of date, but it had been a good one when it was made, and a heavy gold chain hung from his coat. “Say, you don’t know the time, do you? My watch stopped.”
He reached for that chain and, as I expected, out came a solid gold watch bigger than a silver dollar. “Nine twenty, just about.”
“Thanks. So how’d you get in touch with this gal?”
“One of them lonely hearts correspondence clubs. We had a whole mess of interests in common. Gin rummy, for a start. Stamps, for another.”
“I used to collect stamps,” I said.
“It’s a wholesome hobby. I also breed horses, Morgans, and turns out she’s loved horses her whole life and hasn’t had a chance to be around ’em.”
“Good for her,” I said, feeling a little sorry for the horny old bastard across from me.
“Course my daughters and sons-in-laws are dead set against it. Afraid I’ll leave the farm and the money to her and not them. Well, sir, if they don’t treat her like a mother, then that’s just what’ll happen.”
I gathered that part of his desire to remarry was the idea that he’d missed out on something the first time around. “Fern was a mean woman, and her daughters are all three mean and crabbed as she was. I’ll tell you something on the QT. I was married to that woman thirty-seven miserable years, and she only let me make a woman out of her eight times, and the last three of those was by force. I didn’t care no more about it, I was done with her. When she hanged herself, you know what I said? Good.”
He leaned forward, the multitude of tracks outside signaling our imminent arrival at KC’s Union Station.
SIX
THE FRIENDS OF TOM PENDERGAST
SINCE THE VISIT was a surprise anyway I decided to grab a taxi and go straight to Vickie’s place in Westport. It was a hell of a lot colder than it had been in Wichita, and the cabbie laughed when I mentioned it. “Yeah, yesterday fooled you. You thought it was really springtime, didn’t you? Big arctic front coming down from Canada. Snowing in Chicago right now, is what it says on the radio.”
“You don’t say.”
“Could have some here tonight. And yesterday it got up into the high sixties.”
He was about my age and looked to be in sound health. “Let me ask you something, buddy. You in the war?”
“Sure was,” he said. “You?”
“Yeah. Miss it?”
He looked at me in the rear view mirror like I was either kidding or crazy. “Hell, no. I never had a worse time in my damn life than in the lousy goddamn Navy. There’s a petty officer I came damn close to killing. If I thought there was any chance of getting away with a murder on a United States aircraft carrier I by God would have done it, too, no regrets.”
I almost laughed; there was the Navy for you. An Army man would have figured out a way, and a Marine would have just killed the son of a bitch and damn the consequences.
IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me in the slightest that Vickie might be less than thrilled to find me standing there all chipper and horny on her welcome mat.
“Jesus, Wayne, don’t you ever send a telegram or anything?” She looked worse than I’d ever seen her look, which was still a cut above most women. Puffy-eyed, her hair a wreck, no makeup, and wearing just a tattered bathrobe, she gave me an up and down that, while still disapproving, was moving into the realm of the friendly. “You know perfectly goddamn well I work nights.”
“I could use some shuteye myself,” I said. “I only slept an hour or two on the train.”
“No, huh-uh. I need to sleep, and I mean sleep and nothing else.”
“How about I crash on the couch?”
“Nuh-uh. You be on your way. You’re lucky ’cause I’m off tonight, but right now I’m going to sleep. Come back at four or five and you can take me out on a proper date and then maybe we’ll see what happens.”
When she shut the door on me she had a look on her face that was almost affectionate.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER a cab was dropping me off outside a dingy office building on Troost. The building directory led me to a suite on the top floor, and when I rang the buzzer no one answered at first. After a third and a fourth buzz, a baldheaded man with a painfully annoyed look on his face answered.
“Whatever it is I don’t need it. Scram,” he said. He was in his shirtsleeves and his suspenders were frayed. One lens of his black-framed eyeglasses was cracked.
“Hold on,” I said, and stuck my foot in the door.
“Scram,” he said again.
“Used to be a customer. United States Army Quartermaster Corps in Rome. Wayne Ogden’s the name, if that means anything to you.”
He cocked his head. “Ogden. The hell you say. I’m Merle Tessler.”
“I used to order quite a lot of material from you. I was in town, thought I’d look you up.”
“Huh,” he said. “Never ever had a customer visit in the flesh before.”
“Glad to see
you’re still in business. I have a buddy stationed in Japan right now, running the same type operation I used to. Thought maybe you could send him a set on approval.”
“Hell, come on in. We could sure set something up like that.”
IT WAS LIKE any other photographic studio, with a skylight above and a portrait lighting kit. A corner of the room was used as a set, with various pieces of furniture. There was a darkroom in the corner, and a number of cameras in different formats, including one I hadn’t expected to see.
“Is that a Bolex, there? Swiss?”
“You know your gear, don’t you?”
“My grandfather was a photographer, and my dad was an amateur. So you’re making movies.”
“Yep. Sixteen millimeter. Started making stags right about six months back.”
“No fooling. I bet my buddy in Japan would like to get his hands on some of those.”
From a file cabinet he extracted a folder and handed it to me. Inside were pictures of girls, most of them better-than-average looking, getting fucked by an assortment of disreputable-looking men. Most of the men had the haggard, hopeless look of dope fiends, skinny degenerates with well-defined ribcages and jutting Adam’s apples.
“That’s the regular sex stuff. Shot those last month.”
“I don’t recognize any of the girls from the sets I was selling.”
“No, the turnover’s pretty high. Plus which the customers like to see new girls every once in a while.” He handed me another folder. In this one, girls in lingerie and black stockings abused one another. One of them showed a blonde in a girdle using a cat-o’-nine-tails to torment a sallow brunette tied face-forward to a painter’s ladder. The brunette was no actress, the expression of horror on her face laughably false. “These here are real popular too.”
The Adjustment Page 5