A Fatal Glass of Beer (13 page)

“Decidedly,” said Gunther. “However, I have always made it a practice to live up to my agreements, contracts, and obligations. I will remain with you in the hope that Mr. Fields approaches something resembling sense and allows me behind the wheel once again.”

“I heard all that, you runt,” Fields shouted over the roar of the engine at seventy-five miles an hour as we swayed forward. “You’re a good man. Ever play any pool?”

“No,” said Gunther.

“Ping-Pong?”

“No.”

“Poker?”

“No,” answered Gunther.

“Do you chase women?”

“I am fond of females,” said Gunther. “But I find that they often disappoint me. Perhaps the novelty soon fades.”

“You mean you can’t hold your own?” shouted Fields.

“No,” said Gunther. “I mean
yes.
I was referring to the novelty of my stature. I am, as you so sympathetically put it, a runt.”

“Don’t like me much, do you?” asked Fields, honking the horn and forcing an old woman in an ancient car off the road.

“Strangely enough,” said Gunther, “I have grown quite fond of you.”

“You are an appreciator of the comic art of conversation and the skills of a world-class driver,” said Fields, looking down the road for further prey.

“No,” said Gunther seriously. “I do not understand your wit. Perhaps it is a language problem. Your vocabulary is large, but your use of it is confusing. I find you, however, a very sad man.”

Fields had a smile on his face as he turned to face us, ignoring the road. He was about to say something but his eyes met Gunther’s and Fields’s mouth closed. He turned around and drove with something approaching his idea of caution for the next hundred miles. He drove without speaking, other than to ask for refills.

“I should like to take up Ping-Pong or pool,” Gunther finally said as we crossed into Iowa.

“And I should consider it an honor to teach you the nuances of the art of table tennis,” said Fields.

Except for almost hitting the woman pushing the baby carriage in Burlington and the unintended brief detour off the road and into a field of some sort of grain when a deer appeared in the road, we reached Ottumwa, alive, late in the afternoon.

I checked the watch on my wrist. It said six-fifteen. The watch was a bequest of my father. It had its own mad sense of time and seldom came within hours of being right. I’d been told by three watch repairmen that there was nothing they could see wrong with my father’s watch. One of them, an ancient Austrian, said that it was probably me—a force field or something. He had seen many such cases of perfectly fine watches that wouldn’t keep the right time and even stopped for no reason. This had happened even when the wearer changed watches. “You have, I think,” the Austrian watchmaker had said, “an electromagnetic field that is negative instead of positive.”

When I asked him to explain, he said he was a watchmaker, not a physicist.

One thing I did notice as we slowed to the pace of a mad cheetah was that not many of the stores seemed to be opened, though it wasn’t quite five.

“Town closes down early,” Fields observed, looking for the bank, trying to remember, having little success.

Finally, we pulled into a Texaco gas station where a thin man with a drooping lower lip, wearing overalls, came out, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

“Fill the tank, my good man,” Fields said. “And point us in the direction of the bank.”

The gas-station man nodded and said, “Which bank?”

“How many you got?” asked Fields.

“Three,” said the man, moving to the rear of the Caddy to fill up the tank.

“All of them,” said Fields, sticking his head out the window. “And hurry.”

“Won’t make any difference if I hurry or not,” said the man, starting to pump the gas and looking through the rear window at Gunther and me.

His demeanor suggested to me that he thought we were the sad remains of the Dillinger gang out to remove all the hard-earned money of the citizens of Ottumwa before hurrying on to more easy pickings in Nebraska.

“What time do the banks close?” asked Fields.

“Five-thirty,” said the man, still pumping.

“Gives us more than half an hour,” said Fields with satisfaction and a smile, patting the steering wheel as if it were Ken Maynard’s horse Tarzan, and he’d just carried us over the Rocky Mountains.

“Nope,” said the man in overalls, removing the nose of the pump and closing the tank. “Banks are all closed. Saturday. Only open in the morning till noon on Saturdays.”

None of us, not even Gunther, had noticed that it was Saturday. The days had begun to melt into each other.

“We can’t get in. He can’t get in,” Fields said. “And I’m damn sure we beat him.”

“Now,” said Gunther softly, “we must spend tonight and Sunday here.”

He sounded relieved.

“You can drive again after we catch Hipnoodle here in the heartland,” Fields said.

“A buck-fifty, even, and gas-ration stamps,” the man in overalls said.

Fields produced both, handed them to the man, and said, “Dare I risk it? Can you point us in the direction of the finest hotel in your fair city?”

“Two lights straight ahead,” said the man, pointing. “Turn right. Keep going. You’ll be downtown. Hotels there. Never stayed in one myself.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Fields, touching the rim of his boater hat and heading toward downtown.

Not much was open as we drove slowly along, but there were cars parked on either side of the street, cars and a variety of small trucks. Fields spotted a hotel and pulled into a space, slightly scraping an already heavily scraped pickup truck.

When we hit the lobby, we all saw a modest banner across the wall, stating, “Welcome, County Grange Members, 12th Annual Meeting.”

There were groups of men, probably farmers, talking in the corners of the lobby, around tables, at chairs drawn up so they could lean forward and hear themselves. There was also a table behind which sat a very heavy woman with thick glasses and a stack of papers before her. She looked up at us as we passed her and headed for the check-in desk.

We had to ring to make a young man in a neat, tan, but slightly worn suit appear behind the counter. He had no left arm, just a kind of mechanical pincer showing through the end of his sleeve.

“Yes, sirs,” he said.

“Two rooms,” said Fields.

“You with the Grange?” asked the young man politely.

“The Grange?” Fields repeated.

Gunther was already, with the help of an old bellman, dragging in our considerable stack of luggage.

“Entire hotel is sold out. Has been for months. Grange members only.”

“We are farmers,” said Fields, standing erect.

The counterman with one arm looked at Fields and me and over at Gunther, who had almost completed the task of hauling in the luggage.

“Darned if you don’t look and sound like W. C. Fields,” said the clerk with a grin.

“I’ve been told there is a faint resemblance,” said Fields. “Perhaps an anomaly on my mother’s side.”

“Mr. Fields is my favorite,” the clerk said. “Don’t miss a movie or a radio show. Never saw him live.” He reached below the counter and came up with a copy of
Movie Life
, flipped through the pages, found what he wanted, and turned the page to Fields. There was no doubt that the man in the picture and my client were one and the same. “I’d appreciate your signing this for me,” said the young clerk. “I’ll have it framed and put it on the wall.”

Fields took the pen offered to him by the young man and said, “What’s your name?”

“Alex Collins.”

“To my dear friend, Alex Collins,” Fields said as he wrote on the picture. “And to the secret we have promised to share with no one but each other. W. C. Fields.”

Collins turned the magazine around and grinned.

“Rooms?” asked Fields.

“Gotta convince the Grange check-in lady,” Collins said with a shrug. “Can’t risk losing my job.”

“How’d you lose your arm? War?” asked Fields.

“No. Tractor. I was twelve.”

“Farming’s dangerous,” said Fields.

“That’s why I’m behind this desk,” said Collins. “Good luck.”

We moved, now a trio, to the desk where the fat woman in glasses sat. She looked up, hands folded and smiling.

“We’re farmers,” said Fields, removing his hat.

The woman blinked at the three of us.

“Up near Clarinda,” said Fields, pointing toward the hotel door.

“Names,” said the woman, pulling a typed pile of papers in front of her.

“Pearlfender,” Fields said. “And these are my partners, Mr. Whalebait and Mr. Pertwee. You’ll not find our names on your list. We just purchased the acreage and the delightful house and barn yesterday.”

“Terry Willans’s place?” she asked.

“The same,” said Fields.

“I’ll be cracked like an acorn,” she said, shaking her head. “Terry and his family have been trying to unload that place for years. You’re city people.”

“Your powers of observation are beyond normal human ken,” Fields said, still smiling and leaning over. “And your eyes are the sweet brown of a cow I once had the pleasure of milking in Minnesota some years back.”

The fat woman blushed.

“What are you gonna try to grow on the place?” she asked.

“Couscous, farfel, exotic hearty grains no longer available to the palates of the sophisticated city dwellers who have not seen a couscous bud since before the war.”

“I never …” the woman began.

“But soon you shall, my little prairie daisy,” said Fields.

“Two dollars each,” the woman said, holding out her pudgy palm.

Fields fished into his pocket and came up with a twenty. The woman found change and handed Fields a receipt.

“Just take it to the desk,” she said. “Dinner’s at seven. James W. Kroft is the dinner speaker.”

“James W. Kroft,” Fields replied amiably, handing me the receipt.

“Designer of the Kroft Heavy-Duty Silo,” she said. “Is that couscous stuff heavy?”

“No, but the farfel sits in your stomach like an anvil,” said Fields and then added in a whisper, “I’d prefer you not tell any of our fellow tillers of the soil about our crop plans.”

“Mum,” she said. “And don’t miss the dinner. You paid for it. Besides, we always get rambunctious afterwards.”

“Irresistible,” said Fields.

The one-armed clerk checked Mr. Pearlfender, Whalebait, and Pertwee in with a smile and said, “I knew you could do it.”

“Professional,” said Fields, plunking down cash for the night’s lodging and signing us in.

Collins handed us three keys, separate rooms. I found out why when we got to the third floor. There was an elevator which was much smaller and about the same speed as the one in the Faraday.

I had just closed my door, dropped my bag on the bed, and started to take off my shoes when there was a loud knock at my door and then a series of knocks.

“Coming,” I said, slipping back into my shoes.

Fields was standing outside. “He wants to talk to you,” he said.

“Who?”

“Hipnoodle,” answered Fields. “The phone was ringing when I went into the room. The fiend is uncanny.”

I followed Fields into his room and picked up the phone. “Yeah,” I said.

“At the end of the street where you are staying,” he said, “there’s a dead end. Turn left, keep going. On your right you will see a park. Inside the park you will find a fish pond. Be there alone at eleven.”

“The bank,” I said.

“I’ve already got the money out of the bank here,” he said.

“I’ve got the money out of almost all the banks. I’d been at this for weeks before I wrote to Fields. Eleven, park, fountain. You alone.”

He hung up. I hung up and looked at the waiting Fields.

“Well? How did he sound?”

“Articulate and scared,” I said. “He wants to meet me in a park at eleven, alone.”

“Demand total capitulation,” said Fields, pointing his cane at the phone. “Every penny he’s gotten of my hard-earned cash, or a life behind bars where he will be forced to live on grits and water and consort with people who are unable to read.”

“He says he’s already been to the bank here,” I reported. “And that he’s been to most of the other banks, went there before he wrote to you.”

“Bastard is smart and drives like a fiend,” said Fields, pacing the floor. “Well?”

“I’ll go to the park at eleven and see what’s on his mind,” I said.

“Apprehend the cur,” Fields demanded.

“We’ll see how it works out,” I said. “Meanwhile, I suggest that you and Gunther be downstairs talking feed prices and the price of a barrel of corn with your merry group. This may be a trick to get me away from you.”

“Good thinking,” said Fields. “I’ll inform the little fellow. Right after I have a small drink to calm my nerves.”

I showered, shaved, dressed in the best I had with me, and joined Fields and Gunther for the farmers’ dinner and the lecture on silos. We sat at a table with four other men, who eyed us suspiciously but talked politely. Fields took notes on what the silo man was saying. He wrote on the back of an envelope with the stub of a pencil. I have no idea why.

When dinner—a good steak, sweet potatoes, salad, and the best peach pie I’d ever eaten—was over, I told Gunther and Fields that they had to be downstairs in the lobby from a quarter to eleven till I got back. If I didn’t get back by midnight, they were to call the police and tell them I was last heard of standing in front of the fish pond in the park. I wrapped a couple of pieces of bread in a napkin and stuck it in my pocket.

Then I went back to my room and lay down to wait, and listen to the radio. I caught the last few minutes of “Can You Top This?,” a joke from Joe Laurie, Jr., and another one from Harry Hirschfield. Then the news, followed by a dance band live from Des Moines playing war songs, including “The General Jumped at Dawn” and “The Bombardier.”

I dozed in the middle of “The Bing Crosby Show” after catching a few jokes at the expense of the comic Ukie and John Scott Trotter, a duet of “Mexicali Rose” with Bing’s guest Roy Rogers, and Marilyn Maxwell and Bing doing “Two Sleepy People.” When I opened my eyes, “The Groucho Marx Show” was on, and Groucho was exchanging insults with Hedda Hopper.