“Sweet Baby Jesus, Fish, what the hell happened to you?”
“I was tailing your man Huff all week. Home, the plant, home, the plant, nothing. Then Friday night he leaves the car parked in the driveway instead of inside the garage. Around eleven-thirty he leaves the house, rolls the car down into the street without turning the engine over. Gets her a little momentum and turns it over real quiet, did a good job. You can bet he’d done that before.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“There’s hardly any traffic so I can’t just pull out and follow without him noticing. But I remember what you said about Riverside Park, so I waited until he was out of sight and headed on over there via Douglas instead of Central, which is the way he was headed.”
He was clearly proud of his initiative and creative thinking, but not wanting to give him a swelled head I said nothing.
“So I get to Riverside Park and I get out with the Speed Graphic and snuck around for a while trying to find him. Well, guess what? That goddamn park is chock full of queers, and one of ’em spots me and the camera. Says ‘What’s the big idea?’ And I didn’t even think this guy was queer, more like your linebacker type. I didn’t know what the hell he’d be doing there that time of night, but I told him I was there to get a picture. ‘Picture of what?’ the linebacker says. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I tell him, ‘but all these guys walking around? They’re fairies. One of ’em’s gonna get his picture taken sucking a dick.’ Well what do you know, the guy calls over somebody else, and that guy calls over somebody else, and pretty soon there’s a whole bunch of fairies giving me shit about wanting to take the picture. Then one of ’em hits me, and then another one takes the Speed Graphic and smashes the shit out of it. Pretty soon the linebacker’s kicking the hell out of me, and about the third kick to my ribs I figure out he’s one of ’em. Can you beat that? Hell, half of ’em just looked like regular guys. And even the little ones were punching me pretty hard.”
I gave him my best deadpan stare and waited a long moment before responding. “Then I’m assuming you don’t have the picture.”
“I just told you they smashed the camera! That’s the second one I’ve lost this year, you might recall.”
My expression didn’t change, which was difficult because I really wanted to laugh at the poor dumb shit. “If you don’t have my picture, why did you call me down here?”
“Well, tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping you’d pay my expenses on this. Replace the camera, pay my medical bills.”
“You’re a moron. You stroll casually into a well-known queer hangout, full of guys with a big goddamn secret, carrying the camera under your arm? And without knowing exactly where the mark is, just looking around for him? Are you kidding me? What did you intend to do when you found him? Ask him if he can say ‘cheese’ with his mouth full?”
Fish cleared his throat and winced. I was pretty sure he had the idea by now that the interview wasn’t going well. “I’d sure like help with my doctor bill. I ended up driving over to St. Francis with one eye swollen clear shut and the other barely open. I still hurt something awful.”
“Not a chance.”
“If you’ll recall, I quit working for Mrs. Collins over a medical bill.”
“I recall, all right.”
“And I came to you offering to watch her for Mr. Collins.” Despite the attempt at a threat there was still a pleading overtone to his thin, nasal voice.
“If you’re implying that you’d ever go work for Huff against the old man I can tell you right now I’d gut you like a fucking catfish. Then again, considering what a king fuck-up you are, maybe I should call Huff and recommend you.”
“How about replacing the camera, at least? How can I take that picture without a camera?”
“I don’t want you to take it. You’re lucky I don’t take the ten spot back. For all we know Huff may be onto us now.”
“I never said his name, I just said I was looking for a guy.”
“Maybe not, but you can be sure the queer network has got the word around town you were looking to snap someone. They have to protect their own, you dumb shit.”
“So what’s the next move?”
“For you? There isn’t one. Wait around for the phone to ring.”
“I’m fired?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean all that and I’m out of pocket on this job?”
“That’s right. And quit looking at me like a whipped pup. Count yourself lucky no one decided to fuck you, pretty boy that you were up’til Friday night.”
I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the camera store and looked at what was available. The larger formats like Fish’s Speed Graphic were expensive and bulky, but there were a number of smaller cameras that might fit the bill. I settled on a German 35 millimeter model with a reasonably fast lens and bought four rolls of the fastest black and white film Kodak made. I added to the sale a used printer and the makings of a basic darkroom and hauled the crateful of equipment out to the Olds. In the morning I’d present Miss Grau with my receipts; in the meantime I was going home to set up a darkroom in the basement and take a few practice rolls.
“MY DONALD WANTS to meet you,” Millie Grau said the next morning while she was filling out the form for my reimbursement.
“He does?” I said, feeling some mild alarm.
“He thinks what you’re doing for Mr. Collins is wonderful. And I should add that I do too.”
“Oh,” I said. I wondered if they were thinking of my procuring whores for the boss, or getting him hooked on narcotics, or maybe it was the blackmailing business.
Miss Grau was blushing, something she did with great charm, spontaneously and fairly often. “You know I would never say this to most people, but Mrs. Collins is really a nasty old . . . ” She groped for the right word for a moment and blushed a little deeper. “Old hag.”
“How’s that?”
“She calls me and says the most terrible lies about Mr. Collins. Horrible things.”
“What sorts of things?”
“She told me about that girl Emily, you know the one.”
“Sure.”
“Well I knew all about it, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge anything of the sort to her. And you know what? I think she got a great big kick out of telling me. Trying to shock me. Make me hate him.”
You should hate him, I thought, but one of her most appealing traits was that blind loyalty.
“And the things she said about the girl, the things she called her.” Millie was starting to break down, the blush covering her throat as well as her face, her eyes wet but not yet dripping. “You know that could happen to just about any girl,” she said, and grasped blindly for a Kleenex from the dispenser on her desk. I plucked one and applied it to her eyes. “Can I tell you something, Mr. Ogden?”
“Sure.”
“You can’t tell anyone, ever.”
“You have my word.”
“I really like you, in fact you’re the only person here besides Mr. Collins I think of as . . . as a friend, if you see what I mean.”
“Sure,” I said. We were both sitting now, my chair pulled close to her desk.
“Before I came here, I was engaged to a boy in Wisconsin.”
“I didn’t know you were from Wisconsin.”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, there was this boy, and we were engaged, and he . . . he took off one day. Said he was joining the army—this was in’42, everybody was joining up. Well, guess what I found out? I was . . . ” She looked me in the eye, as though second-guessing her previous judgment as to my trustworthiness. Apparently I passed, because the next thing she said bowled me over. “I found out I was pregnant.”
I’d assumed Miss Millie Grau’s hymen was intact and under lock and key; the news that she was a retread virgin, called back to righteousness by some misguided impulse, shook me. The poor kid, I thought.
“You think that’s terrible?”
“Not at all. That’s life. So what about
the fiancé?”
“That’s the next thing I found out. I tried to contact him through the army, and they said there was no such recruit. I checked the navy, too, and finally I went to the recruiting office in Fond du Lac, and I found out he was 4-F. He’d just skipped out.”
“You poor kid.”
“So I went to one of those homes for unwed mothers, this place in Michigan where nobody knew me, and I had the baby there. He was adopted by some nice family and that was that. But you know, I think about him every day.
“Anyway, that’s how I ended up in Wichita. I couldn’t go back to my folks’. And you and Mr. Collins are the only people I’ve ever told it to since I got here. I guess one reason I got so upset just then was I haven’t told Donald.”
“You think he might react badly?”
“He’s a minister.”
“Then he’s heard a thousand times worse.”
“Sure, but not from the girl he’s going to marry. He thinks I’m a, you know.”
“Right. Well, don’t tell him.”
“But then it’s like a lie.”
“It’s an omission.”
She stood up. “What you must think of me, Mr. Ogden.”
“Same as always, Millie, the world.” I dared then to reach out and squeeze her shoulder pad and then, giving her a broad, friendly, avuncular smile, left her office.
THE NIGHT SHOTS I took were inadequate, even when I pushed the exposure by two stops, which ruined the contrast anyway. I was about to abandon the whole project when I realized that the tiny metal socket on the front of the camera’s body was intended for a flash attachment. Once I’d bought such a device plus a couple of dozen bulbs and bolted it to the side of the camera I found I had all I needed. The first night I got a shot of a hissing mother opossum in the back yard, its primeval marsupial fangs bared at the loping biped violating her territory. The picture came out so nicely I made an eight by ten enlargement and got a frame for it the next morning on the way in to work, then hung the thing on the wall behind my desk.
I had a tactical problem, though, now that I had solved the technical one. As far as I knew, all of Mr. Huff’s fellating was performed in the wee hours of the morning in the company of his fellows; the firing of flash gun would inevitably attract the unwelcome attention of the park’s other denizens, and in all likelihood I’d end up getting the same treatment as Fish, the camera wrecked and the film inside ruined.
IN THE CAFETERIA I was spotted by Mr. Rackey, who boldly joined me. I almost never ate lunch at the plant, but I’d arrived and hung my picture at eleven-thirty and it didn’t seem worth the trouble driving off the premises.
“Do you know what I did once?” he asked me.
“I sure don’t,” I said.
“Set a barn on fire when I was sixteen, this old son of a bitch was yelling at me and my buddies, saying I thought I told you kids to get off my goddamn property. You ever hear of Boy’s Town? Judge sent me there. Didn’t do me a lick of good. You know how old Father Flanagan’s supposed to have said ‘there’s no such thing as a bad boy?’ That was before the old bastard met me.”
“Never knew anyone who went to Boy’s Town before.”
“It wasn’t so bad. Beats any other kind of lockup I was ever in. Hey, Ogden, you been back to Red’s lately?”
“It’s been a little while.”
“I got eighty-sixed last week, forever.”
“What for?” I couldn’t remember too many people being eighty-sixed from Red’s, even temporarily, so Rackey’s transgression must have been serious.
“Broke that whore’s arm.”
“Which whore is that?”
“Hell, I don’t know all their names. Kind of flabby but not too hard to look at.”
“Barbara?”
“That’s it. Barbara.”
“That skinny bartender with the bushy eyebrows has it for her pretty bad. How’d you end up breaking her arm?”
“She wouldn’t dance with me, wouldn’t even get up off her moneymaker, so I yanked her out of the chair and bent her arm right back.”
He grinned, his mouth a spectacle of jagged, multicolored teeth, proud of himself and his prowess with the ladies.
THAT AFTERNOON I found Millie Grau a distracted wreck, pulling nervously at a loose strand of hair at her temple and looking like she’d missed a couple of nights’ worth of sleep.
“I told him, Mr. Ogden. He’s broken it off temporarily while he prays on it. He . . . he says he feels like he doesn’t really know me any more. Like . . . like I was lying to him all along.”
“Sorry, Millie,” I said.
“I was, wasn’t I? Lying?”
“No, you weren’t, and if he’s any kind of a man he’ll put this behind him.”
I left her feeling a little better, I thought. I didn’t know what the matter was with this two-bit tent preacher anyway, but if he let Millie Grau get away because he wasn’t the first one in, that made him a stupid shit in my book.
That night Sally fixed a casserole, the recipe for which she’d found in one of the numerous ladies’ magazines to which she now subscribed. It was awful, a grisly olio of mayonnaise, cheap canned tuna, and a variety of cheese I’d never encountered before that possessed an unsettling metallic undertaste. I ate a large portion and pretended to be pleased, and afterward when I suggested a detour to the bedroom before she washed the dishes she demurred.
“I’m just not feeling that way tonight,” she said.
“That’s fine,” I said.
A few months earlier I might have cursed Sally to her face and given her a hard time for her reluctance to perform her marital chore. Now was a different story; now I understood that a noxious potage of baby chemicals was making her temporarily crazy. I kissed her and said it was all right, and would she mind if I went out to meet some friends for a beer?
All my friends were in the army, though, so instead I headed for the Eaton hotel, got Herman Nester on the phone, and asked for a girl to be sent up.
“Any one in particular, or should I surprise you?” he said.
“Is Irma available?” I hadn’t ever requested a specific girl before, but the memory of her lingered pleasantly.
When Irma showed up she put her hands on her hips and said, “Well look who it is. The ass man.”
“Not tonight, I don’t think.”
“Good, ’cause the pounding you gave me last time kept me on my feet for a week.”
It was standard whore flattery, but she was nice to bother with it. “You want a drink?”
“Sure,” she said, “bourbon if you got it.”
I poured her a drink. She had her hair done differently, swept up instead of bangs the way she wore it last time, and though she was arguably prettier this way she no longer bore such a striking resemblance to Joan Blondell. I didn’t care much, as long as all of her parts functioned.
“So where’s the old guy tonight?”
“Don’t know. He doesn’t get around like as he used to.”
“He some kind of hypo? Was that the problem last time?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, that’s what I guessed. I was married to one for a while. After a while it’s fine with him if he can’t get it up, ’cause he doesn’t even want to. Why fuck when you could be fixing?”
“He doesn’t fix. The old man’s hooked on pills.”
“Heroin pills? I never heard of that.”
“Not heroin. Something like it.”
“Huh.” She downed her drink and rattled the ice cubes, swirling them around faster and faster at the bottom of the glass. “What do you feel like tonight?” she asked.
HALF AN HOUR later she was taking a shower while I lay there on the bed, thinking I should have brought that little 35 millimeter camera with me. The thought triggered a snicker; what the hell would I do with naked arty farty pictures of Irma? Jerk off to them? Sell them through Merle Tessler’s outfit in KC? No, it wasn’t my kind of thing. I was no Edward W
eston, no Albert Stieglitz. I was born to sell pornography, not create it.
When Irma came out of the bathroom, though, still toweling her torso dry, skin still pink from the hot water, a curious natural grace to the sway of her hips as she crossed the room from bathroom to bed and hopped on, I had second thoughts. I’d pay for pictures of that.
“You’re paid up for another hour,” she said. “Just in case you might want another turn.”
“I will in a little bit.”
I lay there for a little while staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing and content to do so. She startled me out of my trance by asking me if something was eating me.
“What makes you say that?”
“You look like something’s on your mind, that’s all. Sometimes guys’ll hire a gal just to talk about stuff they can’t tell wifey or their pals.”
This wasn’t news to me. In Italy, fully a quarter of our trade was guys who just wanted a sympathetic female ear, which was fine with me as long as the hour was paid up. On a whim I sketched out my difficulties with Huff, without naming any names, and she listened attentively.
“You ought to stake out one of the queer bars,” she said when I was finished.
“I didn’t know there were any.”
“Sure, they’re just like any other bars except full of homos.”
“I know what they are, I just meant I didn’t know there were any in Wichita.”
“Sure, where do you think they hang around?”
“You know a lot about queers,” I said.
“I know a few. I didn’t tell you this, but there’s two that work for Nester.”
“Nester’s pimping men?” I didn’t think I was easy to shock, but that one came clear out of left field.
“Keep that under your hat.” She propped up her right knee and picked at the bright red nail of her little toe.
“WHAT DO YOU think about baby names?” Sally asked me a couple of days hence over a breakfast of ruined grey eggs and carbonized bacon, washed down by coffee that was too strong, a welcome relief from her usual thin and transparent brew.
The Adjustment Page 11