The Adjustment (9 page)
“First of all,” I told her, “I’ll tell him whatever I damned please. Second, I don’t have a baby yet.” I proceeded to explain to her my theory about the change in her behavior, and suggested that I knew people who could take care of the situation for us if we wanted to return things to the way they’d been before the war, when we were happy.
Her weapon this time was a cast-iron skillet that had belonged to her mother. Even though it just clipped the back of my skull it drew blood; curiously, this got me no sympathy. I retreated and with Sally screaming obscenities and threats from our open door I ran down the building’s main staircase to the street, where I hopped into the Olds and headed straight for the Eaton Hotel, where I got a four-dollar room for the night. This, I suspected, was not going to blow over without my eating a lot of crow.
IN THE MORNING I went to see Dr. Groff again. He didn’t seem surprised to see me back so soon.
“I want to know if there’s any way to induce an abortion without the woman knowing.”
“Use your head, Ogden, how’s she supposed to not know she’s not pregnant any more?”
“I mean is there a way to do it so it looks like a miscarriage?”
He shook his head, scowling. “Nope. None that I’ll be part of. I’ve done my share of angelmaking, but never without it being the woman’s express wish. I don’t know of any other doctor who’ll do such a thing either.” He drew back and his expression softened. “Listen, you’re a nervous first timer, it’s understandable you get crazy ideas. Don’t worry about it, things won’t change as much as all that. Look at it this way: every single ancestor of yours back to Adam and Eve did it. Why should you be the one to break the chain?”
I WENT STRAIGHT to my office and found another envelope addressed to DWAYNE OGDUNN on my desk. I put it into the cardboard grocery box I’d brought along with me and started cleaning out the desk for dramatic effect. Mrs. Caspian immediately dialed Miss Grau, without having spoken a word of greeting. My intention was to empty the desk and get out, the better to leverage my position, but as I was on my way out with the desk’s meager contents I found Herman Park blocking my path.
“You need to come with me, Mr. Ogden.”
“I’m going home,” I said.
“You’re coming with me to see Mr. Collins at his house, on his orders. Now you’ve treated me decent, Mr. Ogden, and I’ve got no itch to hurt you, but Mr. Collins said I was to go ahead if that was the only way.”
“Let me follow you in my car.”
“You don’t have a car. The one you drove in on belongs to Collins aircraft, and if you want to drive off with it later you’d better see the old man now.”
WE GOT INTO another company car, an Olds identical to mine but with a different smell to it, and drove out to the southern part of College Hill. Collins’s house was large even by the standards of the neighborhood, a three-story colonnaded stone house on an enormous wooded lot. A frail, white-haired maid who looked too old to be in service answered the door and led us in to see Collins. As we passed through the ornately decorated foyer—Oriental antiques of jade and brass on an oak chest, an enormous full-length oil portrait of old Everett in jodhpurs with his goggles hanging around his neck, a burbling fountain with a statue of a spitting nymph—I caught a glimpse of one of Mrs. Collins’s paranoiac eyes staring at us from an open sliver of a sliding door. Having met my gaze she slammed the door shut with surprising vigor and produced a solid bang.
Collins was upstairs in his room, under the covers with the lights out, when the maid led us in. “He’s expecting you,” she said.
“Mr. Collins?” Park said. “Here with Ogden.”
Collins mumbled something incomprehensible from his blanket.
“What’s that, sir?” Park said.
Collins shouted and thrashed. “Medicine, goddamnit, did he bring the fucking medicine?”
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 youWhoever he was, he knew me.
EIGHT
A SENTIMENTAL TALE OF WOE
M
Y 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.
Y 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.
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