Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  In a few days there came from upstairs an avalanche of paper. Form after modernizing form flopped onto our desks. A species of non-language crawled across each of these.

  A firm pen or pencil should be used, please bear down on these six part inner carbon dupes. Conform entries to previously described sets. New sets are budgetarily non-transferable. For any salary fraction whose source is changing enter new account number (four digits dash two digits dash five digits) in the column marked “Acct numb or descr of source funds.” If the account number is unavailable, describe the future source (e.g., “Expediting and Rationalization Department—applied for”; see note 4 in “General Instructions” for continuation numbers). Then record the dollar and cent figure. Be careful to columnarize properly the type source for either recommended or spent dollars….

  Next there landed on the desks of our department sets of huge new triple-entry ledgers, each with a long mimeographed text of instructions, composed in that same pseudolanguage. I expected an outburst in our cubicle. Quite the contrary. Never had Mr. Quintillian been so accommodating, so soft-spoken. That afternoon I actually saw him giving Scanlon, the office boy who’d had polio, an encouraging pat on the shoulder. He told me my work was getting a little better. At Stouffer’s a couple of days later, peering cautiously over a Tauchnitz paperback of Nostromo, I thought I saw him hold up a forbidding hand when Miss Tammer picked up her purse to pay for her own lunch. Of course I could construe such a gesture now with any of several meanings, but it did seem part of a definite pattern of softening in Mr. Quintillian.

  After lunchtime that Friday, just as Mr. Quintillian was unlocking his strongbox to start counting out our pay, I heard Scanlon’s uneven clip-clop coming along the passageway and into our cubicle.

  “Hello, son,” Mr. Quintillian said perfectly pleasantly. “What have you got for me?”

  “Envelope from His Nibs,” Scanlon said.

  I hadn’t turned around. Mr. Quintillian must have taken the envelope from Scanlon’s outreached hand. I heard a murmur of thanks. I heard paper tearing. Then silence for a few moments. Then, very softly, some low notes of that awful aria I had heard once before. Then I heard a squeal of Mr. Quintillian’s swivel chair, and his footsteps as he left the office.

  Now I turned around, and I saw that Mr. Quintillian had taken his topcoat and hat from the rack in the corner. On his desktop next to his huge adding machine I saw a torn envelope and, held down by his celluloid eyeshade, what appeared to be the single sheet of a letter. And also, to one side, the strongbox with its top wide open.

  I didn’t know what to do. For a long time I just sat there waiting. I supposed Mr. Quintillian must have felt a desperate need to go out for a cup of coffee, or perhaps the letter had peremptorily ordered him out on some urgent errand. But it was utterly unlike him to leave the strongbox, with so much cash in it that I trembled to think of it, open on his desk. I sat staring at the figures I had been working on. I have no idea how much time passed—perhaps an hour, perhaps two—before I stood up with a thumping heart, stepped to Mr. Quintillian’s desk, peered first at all the money neatly stacked in denominations in compartments in the strongbox, and then lifted off the eyeshade and turned the typed page around and read it.

  TO: All Department Heads

  FROM: Chester Byron, Jr., President

  You will be pleased, I am sure, to know that on advice of Ernst & Callaghan, the weekly pay of all employees of Byron Carpets will henceforth be issued by check. I am certain that all of you will be immensely relieved not to have the responsibility of the cash transactions with which we have burdened you for so many years. Check-writing machines were installed here on the ninth floor during the past week, and the first paychecks will be distributed by the messenger desk on each floor later this afternoon. With thanks as always for your loyal and trustworthy service.

  I closed the strongbox and twirled its dial, as I had seen Mr. Quintillian do, to lock it. Then I sat down at my desk and, staring again at the figures I had been working on, I wondered for a long time what to do. At a little after four, I heard the creak of the door from the elevator bank swinging open, and after that the squishing sound of Mr. Quintillian’s rubber heels on the polished tiles of the passageway—but there was something wrong with the rhythm of the squishes. He came banking around the barrier with his coat flapping like an alighting gull’s wings. And yes, here he came, this old geezer, weaving like a brain-busted pug on the verge of a TKO. He crashed into his chair and sat there humming that awful sound. An odor of alcohol quickly filled our cubicle, as rank as the afterburn of a car’s exhaust in a garage when the engine has been turned off.

  I waited a discreet few moments and then got up and went along to Miss Tammer’s compartment, and I asked her if I might speak to her out in the passageway for a moment. I whispered to her that Mr. Q was drunk. She took a step toward our cubicle, but I told her she had better get her hat and purse. She did that, and we went along to the stall at the end of the passageway.

  Mr. Quintillian still had his hat and coat on. She said to him in a low voice, “We’re going to go home now, Willard.”

  He looked up at her and, seeming not to recognize her, smiled and nodded. Miss Tammer and I helped him stand up, and with one of us on each side of him we managed to get him out to the bank of elevators without anyone from the office having seen us.

  In the street I did not hesitate for a moment to raise my arm for a taxi. When one pulled over, we bundled Mr. Quintillian in, and I went around to the far door, so he would be seated in the middle. Miss Tammer gave an address on East Ninetieth Street. The driver chose to go up Park Avenue. As my shoulder bounced against the limp figure of the old man, I felt a surge of revulsion and anger. That night, in my room, I realized that these feelings, directed at Mr. Quintillian and partly even at Miss Tammer, probably stemmed from the disastrous news I was reading, block after endless block, on the cab’s meter, because it would be a matter of course that I would have to pay the fare. It would also come to me that night, though, that there may have been some pity mixed in with my resentment, as, breathing the fumes of Mr. Quintillian’s boozing, I had dimly begun to know what must have blocked his rise, years ago, to the top of Byron Carpets.

  Our goal turned out to be a brownstone walk-up, not much different from the one I lived in. We had to pause often on the way to the fourth floor. In its hallway Miss Tammer knew exactly what to do. She unbuttoned Mr. Quintillian’s topcoat, reached her hand into his left trouser pocket, drew out his keys, and unlocked the door. And we teetered in.

  I was shocked, looking around at our boss’s digs—shaken by a question at the edge of my mind. Could such a hole as this be in my future? It was a one-room affair, with a tiny alcove as a kitchenette. There was a white-painted cast-iron bedstead with floral designs at the tops of the spindles; two straight wooden chairs; a round table with a green felt cloth thrown over it; a chiffonier with nothing on it but a pair of brass-backed military hairbrushes, the bristles of one stuck into those of the other. On the round table there were two photographs, a pair of dark eyes in one and a bald head with a bump on it in the other shouting that these must have been Mr. Q’s parents.

  We got Mr. Quintillian’s hat and topcoat off and balanced him in a seated position on the edge of his bed. Miss Tammer, starting to take off his jacket, turned to me and firmly said, “I can manage now.”

  I was taken aback by her level look and by the implications of this announcement, since she was obviously going to have to undress him and tuck him in. Mumbling absurd thanks for her help, I left. I realized, the moment the outer street door clicked shut behind me, that I would have no way of reaching Miss Tammer over the weekend to find out how things had gone.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday morning I got to the office as usual between eight and eight-fifteen. Mr. Quintillian arrived soon after me. He said good morning cheerfu
lly. A quick sidelong glance at his eyes brought to my mind a vivid memory of the piercing and defiant glare of a trout I had once caught with a worm and a bamboo pole in the stream near Gloversville—a look to say, I have swum a thousand miles; the worm that caught me was delicious. As if nothing had changed, he lifted the locked cash box off his desk and put it in its usual place in a corner. Then he sat down, donned and adjusted his eyeshade, and went right to work on some figures.

  I had a problem on my hands. Returning to the office on Friday afternoon, after the trip to Ninetieth Street, I had found my paycheck on my desk and Mr. Quintillian’s on his. Mine was made out wrong—fifty cents short of my due. Mr. Quintillian’s desk drawers were all locked, so I had placed his check for safekeeping in one of mine. I was apprehensive now about how he might take my handing his wages over to him—a check issued upstairs—in what would surely be a humiliating reversal of roles, since he had always paid me off in cash. Not once, by the way, with an error of so much as a penny. The worst of it was that he would be bound to assume that I had noticed the amount embossed by the check-writing machine in bold barred blue figures on his check. I had noticed, all right. Yes, I had taken the trouble to notice. I had had to look at the figure twice. I could not believe how little our department head, this “real rug man,” this ruin with a gift for figures, was being paid after all the years.

  Suddenly, as I sat there unsure what to do about the check, I felt a wave of anger at those barbarians of “efficiency,” Ernst & Callaghan, breaking in on the settled habits of our floor with their meddlesome new procedures, their memos and machines, and their half-dollar mistakes. The anger made me reckless. I pulled Mr. Quintillian’s check from my drawer, wheeled in my chair without standing, and leaned over to slide the check toward him.

  I said, “Found it on your desk Friday. Thought it ought to be in a drawer.” I turned back to my work.

  I heard a quiet voice say, “Thank you, Douglas.”

  He had never before used my first name.

  * * *

  —

  Nothing would do after that but a talk with Miss Tammer. It took me two weeks to get up my courage to approach her. Not being sure what her relationship with Mr. Quintillian amounted to, I felt that I had to be very careful. Bad enough to be rebuffed; worse to have her tell him behind my back that I was trying some funny business.

  Making a date turned out to be ridiculously simple. I was elaborate and she was not. I took a late lunch one day and afterward called her at the office from a pay telephone booth in a drugstore. I blurted out my question. Airily and easily she said yes.

  We met on a fine night in May. I had made severely cautious plans—asked her to meet me at a bar on Second Avenue, way uptown, north of Yorkville, in what she might have thought of as a marginal district. It was a dark place with a high ceiling made of squares of tin embossed with wreaths and roses; the noises of the place reverberated from the stamped tin, seemed even amplified by it. A jukebox thumped and whined. Some workmen laughed and argued around a long, narrow slab, along which they slid heavy metal disks about the size of hockey pucks to knock down electrically operated tenpins; shooting, the men screwed up their faces and chewed their tongues, as if they were great sculptors at work or third-graders trying to memorize multiplication tables. The whole time we were there, one of the customers at the bar shouted what seemed to be threats in some guttural foreign language, possibly Gaelic; perhaps he was announcing the end of the world. A drunken woman on one of the bar stools held on a leash of wrapping twine a mongrel dog, which put its head back and howled from time to time. Altogether, the atmosphere of the place rattled me, just when I wanted to be at my smoothest and be able to talk in confidential tones.

  Because I had said on the phone that we wouldn’t be doing anything fancy, Miss Tammer was wearing a sweater and skirt and some of those big fake pearls that pop into each other—which, along with her crownlike braid and her wax-paper skin, were very becoming, I thought. Like a fool I had dressed in a dark blue suit, and it embarrassed me that Miss Tammer would notice how glaringly we stuck out among the working people in the place.

  I went to the bar, where somber men sat silent behind shots of rye with beer chasers, and I ordered a couple of martinis. The barman, who was also, I guess, the owner, winked at me, as if to say, French-type behavior calls for French-type drinks, huh? And he mixed equal parts of gin and vermouth and poured them into wineglasses and charged me eighty cents for the pair. I am not the kind of person who sends things back to be done over again, and I carried the drinks to our booth, spilling a few drops as I went.

  We sipped and sipped in silence. Then abruptly I said, “About Mr. Quintillian’s money.”

  “What?” She sounded testy. I regretted having plunged in so rashly on what I wanted to know.

  “That day, um, he lost his wallet,” I said. “When I was taking up a collection. You told me—you told me—that he’s rich.”

  She laughed, but it was an awful laugh, the kind one coughs out to cover one’s confusion over an awkwardness that has caused a companion to stub his toe or bump into a lamp post. But then she said, “I thought you asked me out because you were interested in me.”

  This coyness—or maybe it was mockery—rubbed the wrong way. I said, “I need to know.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “He’s changed.”

  Suddenly her eyes were brimming with tears. “I didn’t like your taking up a collection. I thought it was insulting. I thought you were making fun of him.”

  “You were making fun of me. He can’t be rich. God, I’ve seen what they pay him.”

  “How do you mean, ‘changed’?”

  “He’s been so good to me in the last few days. He’s suddenly Mr. Sunshine. Is it you who have made him so ridiculously happy?”

  Now this tough number really was crying. “When do you think you saw this begin—this—this cheerfulness?”

  “Is it money? I want to know, Miss Tammer. The way these efficiency fiends are wrecking our business. Are they buying him off?”

  “Tell me when you noticed,” she said.

  “After we took him home that day. But really in a big way starting last Monday. He’s so considerate it makes me sick. He’s not himself.”

  She took out a Kleenex and blew her nose. Then, obviously trying to get herself in hand, she seemed to be studying her glass. She was very pale. Finally, twirling the stem of the glass, and still staring at it, she said, “Monday was the day they let him go. Fired him. After thirty-four years, they gave him two weeks’ notice.”

  I felt as if she’d slapped me. “Jesus God, why couldn’t he be angry?”

  “It’s not me. You have to know him. He’s a saintly person. He told me a month ago that this was going to happen. He said we have to face things, the world is changing.”

  My own anger suddenly floated free. I found that I was wildly angry at my roommate Charley Force because he would have known how to carry on through a ruined evening with such an attractive girl. Yet I hated her, too. How disgusting, to try to make a saint of that pathetic man. How could she say so breezily that she thought I’d asked her out because I liked her? Face things? I raged at a world that could change so easily right in front of my eyes. And then I realized that my anger was iced with fear. Face things? What kind of future was I supposed to face now, at Byron Carpets, or anywhere? The moment that question began to hover in my mind I pushed it aside, only to sense that my anxiety had abruptly swerved toward the hour at hand. How was I going to get Miss Tammer home? I could hardly walk her all the way down to Fifty-seventh Street and dump her on a Number 15 bus. A taxi, its meter racing, all the way to Queens?

  I think she must have seen perspiration on my forehead. Like a mind reader, knowing that our evening had so soon come to an end, she put her hand on mine and said, “Don’t worry about me, Douglas.” My first name again. It
came to me that I didn’t even know hers. “I’m going to Ninetieth Street,” she said. “It’s only a couple of blocks from here. We can walk.”

  The Terrorist

  Sometimes, in moments of high energy like this one, he sees himself as a character in a comic strip. This fragments his action. Jerks him through life. The strip is called The Iron Guerrilla. It has four panels. It is on the right-hand side of the funnies page, as he sees it, sandwiched between Blondie and Rip Kirby, and butted end-to-end with Dick Tracy on the inner tier of strips.

  FIRST PANEL

  In the first panel of today’s strip, he is running from left to right. He is running, but as he sees himself in this piece of the action, he is frozen in place in a drawing. A certain distortion—a pulling downward of his extended left leg and a pulling out rearward of his right leg—shows speed. His being arrested in mid-race in newsprint like this has psychological verity: he is running but he can’t move. He sees himself wearing what he is wearing as he runs: a little Gorky cap with a patent-leather visor, denim jacket, jeans, desert boots—the right one of which has dirty adhesive tape wound round and round the forefoot. No color, of course; the jeans aren’t blue; the strip is in black-and-white. This is like a passage in a dream. The iron guerrilla dreams in black-and-white. His straight hair would be shoulder-length, but now with his motion it flies out behind in free waves. Wow, that hair has been shampooed. Followers of the strip, as he would say, know that other characters in it sometimes refer to him as The Kleen Krazy. He is shaven. What the fuck—or fugg, as The Kleen Krazy prefers to put it—kind of an iron guerrilla is it who has no beard?

  Looking closer at the rest of the panel, one sees a street sign: MEETINGHOUSE LANE. This has to be Boston. Why does the strip buff know that? Well, what other for-real city with its head put together would have a street sign reading MEETINGHOUSE LANE? Anyone who knows Boston knows there are actually four Meetinghouse Lanes, all in the same downtown area. So there we are. The iron guerrilla is passing the intersection of HIGGINSON STREET. To the right of the panel, in the direction in which he is running, is the corner of a building, which any proper Bostonian would recognize as the new main branch of the First Transcendental Bank & Trust Company. Trust is what the iron guerrilla wants to blow up. Yes, he runs with both hands in front of him, they are black, he is wearing rubber gloves. In his left hand is his walkie-talkie radio. Its antenna has a fifty-nine-inch hard-on. This is a Peerless 21-112 one-watt one-channel talk box with a solid-state circuit and extrasensitive RF amplifier stage to really pull in the signals. Looking at himself in the panel, he can see that his thumb is wrapped around the box and so is not on the PRESS-TO-TALK button. Indeed, out of the tiny aluminum speaker with its sparkling triangulations comes a speech balloon. In it these words are printed (he hears them as he runs and also sees them in the panel in his head): THIS IS LOGO ONE. ALL CLEAR. KEEP COMING. This whole schmear is a kind of discontinuous comic-strip dream game. In his right hand is the explosive device. This is a wicked-pissa little package. Six half-sticks of dyna bundled into fasces and, at the end, a $29.95 Superclox shock-resistant antimagnetic unbreakable-mainspring (something is going to break it yeah man) alarm clock, face out and wired, it must be presumed, to a detonator, which cannot be seen in the small scale of the bomb in this panel. Beautiful compact infernal machine in his right hand as he runs toward the bank.