Park looked at me in a half-panic, having evidently failed to understand that I had a mission to accomplish before I was brought into the mighty presence of the Great One.
“What medicine is that, Everett?” I asked. It was the first time I’d ever dared to use his first name to his face.
“You know goddamn well what medicine,” he said, saliva flying.
“Don’t you have a personal physician to take care of such things?”
“He won’t give me anything for the pain, says it’s not good to keep it up, anyhow I don’t even know what it was and goddamnit my ribs hurt.”
“Come on, Park, let’s go see if we can’t get Everett a script for those ribs.”
THAT NIGHT, ENSCONCED in my temporary home in the Eaton Hotel, I opened the envelope I’d found earlier in my desk. This time the note was typewritten, badly:You son of a BITCH I know all about you cheat Uncle sam out money and other and if you think your going to get away with it thing again cocksucker. I am a real hard man. So you should start say your payers and get ready to give me all that doh. Bet your sorry now you killed her. Do you think the rules apply to everyone but you
Whoever he was, he knew me.
EIGHT
A SENTIMENTAL TALE OF WOE
MY HINTING TO the wife that her pregnancy was not necessarily an immutable condition cost me a week at the Eaton Hotel. It also cost me more than seven thousand dollars in the form of a house not far from our apartment, a few blocks west of Hillside and south of Central, not far from Ketteman’s bakery and Cardamon’s grocery store. I bought it while I was still at the Eaton and Sally still sore at me. When I parked in front of the house and told her it was ours, a bungalow of recent vintage painted white with a comfortable little yard, her sullenness evaporated.
The first thing I did was install a chain-link fence around the back yard. Who knew, maybe when the kid was born I’d get him a dog. Sally flew around that house hanging curtains and directing deliverymen where to put the furniture, and the week we moved in I picked up my mother at her place in Riverside and brought her over for dinner.
She was a little wraith of a woman by then, much older than her fifty-odd years. She’d had a hard time of it since my old man died, and I wanted her to see that she always had a family to cling to.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Wayne,” she said. “Before Christmas, seems like.”
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“No, that’s right,” Sally said.
“Well it’s nice to see you anyway, son,” she said. She was cutting a pork chop into infinitesimally tiny bites, as she always did, never taking a bite until the whole piece of meat had been dissected. It used to bother me the way she did that, but now I felt a curious fondness for her odd ways.
I was sore at Sally because I’d brought steaks home from Cardamon’s, but she had three big pork chops in the icebox and was determined to fix them for my mother on the grounds that the old bird loved them. Fine, I said, but I bought steaks, good KC strips, and when a man has steak on his mind pork chops aren’t a satisfactory substitute. My voice must have been raised because I could see her eyes glistening, so I cupped her chin and kissed her and told her whatever she wanted to make would be swell with me.
After dinner I dropped my mother off at her house. I was still a little out of joint about the steak, so I stopped in at Red’s. I hadn’t been in in a few weeks; part of my new deal involved giving Park some of my responsibilities, including that of accompanying the old man on his nightly debauches. Of course he would have been present anyway, but the old man liked him better than he’d liked Billy Clark, and Park knew how to ignore a needling remark, which got the old man’s goat and earned his respect at the same time.
The scarecrow who loved Barbara the b-girl was tending bar, and as I bellied up there was a reserved hostility in his affectless gaze as he poured me a shot of bourbon and a Schlitz. Just to provoke him I asked if Barbara was around.
“Don’t know who you mean,” he said.
“Sure you do. She works here as a b-girl, got ants in her pants.”
“She’s not here.” There was emotion choking in his voice and I decided I’d better knock it off. I didn’t want to get into a fight, particularly, and I felt a little sorry for the guy anyway. What kind of numb-nuts falls in love with a gal like Barbara?
A different b-girl came and sat next to me. I bought her a sidecar and listened to her talk about life in wartime and how hard it was and her husband wasn’t even home yet and she sure wished he’d get mustered out so she could get some good loving. This one was younger than Barbara and hadn’t passed her prime yet, but her prime wasn’t much. She was skinny and hard-faced and wore her makeup wrong. Even by the forgiving light of Red’s I could see she had too much rouge on.
It’s funny the things you learn in different lines of work. Before I became a pimp I couldn’t have cared less about the subject of makeup, but when your livelihood depends on your girls looking their best you develop a keen interest in the subject. This one—Janice by name, if she was to be believed—didn’t wear enough eye makeup. She had a mean look to her, and she needed some eye shadow to soften her up.
She asked for another sidecar and I paid for it. The bartender was watching me pretty close, maybe in case I took her out to the parking lot the way I’d done with his beloved. There wasn’t much chance of that, though. This one didn’t excite me at all, though I found her tales of woe diverting.
As a child her pop had beaten her senseless on a regular basis, and then one day a man came to their house and had a talk with him. The stranger asked little Janice if her old man treated her okay. She was sore at Dad that day because he’d wrenched her little arm for talking back, so she told the man her dad beat her regularly and hard, too.
“What I hear,” said the stranger to her old man, “is that this child was put into the hospital with a broken collar bone.”
Her father tried to deny it, but little Janice piped up that it was true. “Did he do that, or was it an accident?”
She’d been told to say it was an accident, but something in the stranger’s deferential and courteous attitude towards her made her want to tell the truth. Maybe the man would convince her dad that she shouldn’t be hit for little things, just the big ones.
So she told him her dad had shoved her down the cellar stairs and made her stay down there in the dark for three hours with the broken collarbone. The stranger got an odd look on his face, sort of a smile and sort of a grimace, and then he proceeded to beat her father to death with his bare fists before her horrified eight-year-old eyes.
Turns out, she told me, the stranger was her real father, just out of jail for manslaughter, and he went looking for his wife and daughter and, asking around town, heard his wife was shacked up with a mean, mean man who was beating up the little girl. Her real father went to jail for a real long time for that; he was lucky he wasn’t hanged.
Or so she told the story. It was rehearsed to the point she probably didn’t know any more how much if any of it was true. I asked her where it happened and she told me Ohio, near Chilicothe, but she pronounced it wrong. I didn’t correct her, just bought her a third drink and went over to watch a couple of fellows in denim overalls playing pinball. One of them, a wiry farm boy who to me looked high on amphetamines, was winning a fair amount of money. Someone had done a piss-poor job of cutting the kid’s hair, leaving his temple nearly bare on the left side and a quarter-inch thick on the right. His friend’s head was buzz-cut to semi-baldness, and the friend watched the pinball’s cascading and careening with something like a sense of grief. The skinny pinball fiend was in an antic trance as he rocked the machine and caressed its lower corners, manipulating the flippers as expertly as the tailgunner on a B-29.
A powerful blow landed between my shoulder blades and propelled me forward and into the pinball hustler, whose machine clanged, a red TILT sign lighting on the board.
“Son of a bitch,�
� the kid said, and I was afraid I was going to have to fight three people when I saw the farm boys drop their belligerent stances. Over my shoulder I saw someone vaguely familiar and realized that the blow had come without malicious intent, or at least malice consciously aimed at me.
“Rackey?”
He was beaming and extending his hand for a shake. “Mr. Ogden, it sure is good to see you.”
He didn’t seem to grasp that he’d queered the kid’s pinball game, and the two farmboys were getting set up for another game, acting as though they were unaware of our very presence. “How are you? How’s that job on the line working out?”
“Real good. I don’t like the foreman much, and I’m liable to pop that shop steward’s head right off his neck one of these days, but hell, at least I’m working.”
We adjourned to the bar and stood discussing his wife’s continued perfidy over a couple of drinks. The bartender liked Rackey even less than he did me, which made me wonder what mayhem my protégé might have wrought here in the past.
“I’m sure she ain’t fucking my brother any more, ’cause I broke both his arms and told him stay the shit away from my house and my wife. Now my mom and pop are sore at me along with him and the wife.”
“Rough,” I said.
“You said it. At least the wife’s not straying any more.”
“That’s good,” I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, wanting neither to egg him on to further violence nor to suggest any sort of disapproval on my part.
“She knows damn well anybody she messes with is gonna bleed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, things are a little better with her since you got me that job, though.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Janice the b-girl had been watching us from her post down the bar. At length she arose and sashayed over to us on her skinny legs.
“How’s about introducing me to your big strapping friend, Wayne?” she said. I didn’t remember telling her my name, but what the hell.
He stuck his hand out. “Elmer Rackey.”
“I’m Janice,” she said as I signaled the bartender to bring her a drink. When he brought it I saw him looking at her in a pinched, hateful way and it struck me that he looked at everybody that way except for his idolized, roundheeled Barbara.
By that point Janice was well into another well-polished apocryphal anecdote featuring herself as the central sufferer. This one involved having her broken-down old Ford stolen right after she’d filled it up, and having it recovered by the police with its tank empty.
“That was a whole week’s ration of gas, Elmer. Lordy, I asked those cops how I could get the gas replaced, meaning was there some way I could get the ration stamps replaced legit, you know? And this big mean cop says to me, ‘you try it, lady, you’ll spend the rest of the war in the can, ’cause we don’t take to black marketeers here in Wichita.’ Can you imagine saying that to a poor woman who’s just lost her whole week’s ration of gas? I had to walk to work all week except when I caught a ride with a girlfriend.”
“Wish’t I could get my hands on the dirty son of a bitch that stole it, that’s all I can say,” Rackey said, the last clause barely audible. There was a murderous, distant glint in his eyes that gave me pause and made me consider once again how to keep this guy out of trouble until the day I might need him.
SALLY WAS ASLEEP when I got in, the dinner dishes drying in the rack next to the sink. By the light of a brand new lamp I sat in my dad’s favorite chair and read through a manuscript my grandfather had left him, an autobiography whose details and generalities I was unable to verify or credit, though I had heard him tell some of the same stories on his various visits. It was like listening to him talk, though, and the unpublishable randiness of the thing corresponded with my memories of him. In the early thirties he caused a scandal when, staying with us for the summer, he embarked on a liaison with a married, fortyish cashier at the Orpheum theater, an undeniably attractive redheaded woman with a pronounced lisp but no other obvious debilities. He was around ninety at the time and quite proud of the fact that her husband had threatened to kill him and never made good on the threat.
THAT ANONYMOUS PEN pal of mine was right about at least one thing: I had made a nice illicit bundle off of Uncle Sam. In the little safe in the basement that contained among other things my discharge papers and my Purple Heart—probably the only one ever awarded for getting stabbed by a rival pimp—was a whole lot of illicit cash I’d managed to smuggle back from Europe. The army doesn’t make that easy, believe me, but if anybody has an edge in that domain it’s a supply sergeant. I wasn’t able to bring it all; not to toot my own horn, but I wasn’t as greedy as all that anyway. I let the whores have some of it, in hopes they could band together and find a protector more worthy of them than my predecessor had been. I was busy with the combination, preparing to replace my grandfather’s manuscript inside, when the door above the stairs creaked open, startling a sharp intake of breath and an audible gasp from me.
“Wayne, sweetie?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just wondering if that was you down there.”
Annoyed at the interruption, and a little red-faced at having the shit scared out of me like that, I snapped. “Coming down to check was foolish. If it hadn’t been me, then it would have been a burglar. You could have been raped or killed.”
She didn’t react the way she’d been doing lately. Instead she came downstairs and put her soft, cool white hand on my cheek. “Are you doing okay, honey? I know you don’t really like the work at Collins.”
Her solicitousness caught me off my guard, and I stammered a reply to the effect that I was perfectly happy working there, that I’d do anything for her and the baby.
“I was just thinking tonight how much you always wanted to be a pilot,” she said.
“That was a long time ago.”
“But I know you still think about it. Would you like to take flying lessons?” she asked. “I’m sure you could get some kind of cut rate, working for Collins.”
It was sweet of her, wrong though she was. I stood and kissed her. “You go on to bed, now, and I’ll be up in a minute.”
She climbed the stairs, turning once to give me a loving, blushing look over her shoulder, and I resumed opening the lock.
The amount inside was a little over five thousand dollars, and I hadn’t yet spent a dime of it, not even on the down payment on the house. It was unworthy of me and I knew it, but the nagging fear that my dear wife might somehow get into the safe weighed upon me. The poison penman must have designs on the money, too, and despite my determination not to let the little shit get the better of me, I resolved to go to the Third National Bank downtown in the morning and rent a safety deposit box.
MAYBE IT WOULD have been wisest to wean Collins off the dope at that early stage, but I wasn’t about to give up the advantage I held over him. His own physician wouldn’t have allowed him opiates except under hospital conditions, and he was too well-known in Wichita to risk approaching another doctor. And cagey and evil though the old bastard was, he didn’t have the specific, hard-won skills necessary to procure illicit goods without consequence.
But Groff was getting nervous about dispensing the volume of Hycodan that Collins now required–-already there was one weekly prescription in my name and one in Park’s—and he gave me the name of a Dr. Briggs who would show great empathy for a man enduring the chronic pain of broken ribs, particularly a man as wealthy and well-connected as Everett Collins.
I met Dr. Briggs at his office in the same downtown building that housed my dentist’s surgery. He was about sixty years old, with receding salt and pepper hair, black, round-framed eyeglasses and a leering smile. He was only too glad to fill my prescription, and another in the name of Herman Park. “How about methadone?” he asked. “Has he tried anything beyond Hycodan? Lot of doctors, Groff among them, have an awful lot of faith in whatever’s the newest drug on the market, but so
me of the old ones are better, if you ask this old sawbones.” He went on to rhapsodize about the effects of this braintickler and that one, to the point that I began to wonder how the old coot had managed to hang onto his license to practice medicine all these years.
I promised him I’d ask the old man to think about it and headed for the nearest Rexall to fill the script. After reading the prescription, the druggist appraised me in a manner that bordered on disrespect, and though I affected not to notice I made a mental note to skip this particular pharmacy in the future.
When I dropped off the pills I stopped for a chat with Millie Grau, who had been treating me like the greatest thing to hit Collins Aircraft Company since the introduction of the Airmaster. “Mr. Collins just wasn’t himself while you were gone. I don’t know exactly what happened last week but I guess he got drunk and fired you again, didn’t he?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I wish he’d quit that drinking, he does things he regrets so often any more.”
“How’s that?”
“Firing you, firing Mr. Cook.”
“I took it upon myself to fire Mr. Cook while Mr. Collins was convalescent.”
“Well, things like that. And I guess you know about poor Miss Gladstone from the secretarial pool.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
She looked down at her shoes, flushing. I looked down too, though my focus was on her legs. “The girl who had to go away to Kansas City for a week. None of that would have ever happened but for his drinking. I’ve been praying so hard, but you know what? He has to want to stop on his own.”
I was newly impressed with Miss Grau. I’d always thought of her as a very pleasant and desirable girl, but I’d never attributed much to her in the way of smarts or insight. She was clearly the one person on earth the boss confided in, the only soul in all creation to whom he felt able to confess his multitude of shames and vulnerabilities. I hadn’t suspected the old boy still had that capacity; she was the last, tenuous connection between Everett Collins and the human race.
The Adjustment Page 7