The Adjustment (7 page)
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.”
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.
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.
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
S
INCE 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.”
INCE 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.”
“I know the genre. I remember one, had a gal in a French maid’s costume with a feather duster sticking out her ass.”
Tessler laughed fondly at the memory. “You never ought to have gotten the likes of that one. That was made to order for a customer in Marshall, Minnesota. Model was a hillbilly gal from Tennessee someplace, damned if I can remember her name. One of those who’d do just about anything, I used her when I got special requests. Stuff the other gals wouldn’t.”
“Like what?”
He reached into his file cabinet and pulled out a third folder, marked “MADE-To-OrdEr,” and handed it to me with an odd, crooked half-grin. Inside was a passport to a whole wide wonderful world of idiosyncratic sexual interests most of the world didn’t dream existed: amputee pin-ups, Tijuana-style bestiality, even crisply and artistically rendered coprophilia. “Crazy what gets people going, ain’t it?” Tessler said.
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