The MacGuffin (21 page)

“And I’ll tell you something else. Old Doug isn’t going to hear anything about it either.”

“Get away from me.”

“What did
I
do?”

“Hey,” Druff said, changing his tune, “nothing. It’s how I tell people good night.”

And let himself into his darkened house, though before he went upstairs for what little remained of the night, he made, in the dark, his way to the kitchen where, still in the dark, not bothering with the light switch, he fumbled about for a few seconds around the kitchen table where, near the unwashed cereal bowl, the glass in which perhaps an inch or inch and a half of milk lay souring, hard by the crumbs of toast and drying smears of jelly, he found, propped against the toaster, where the thirty-year-old man-child couldn’t miss it, the note Rose Helen had left for him and which, because it had been laid in so cheery a place as a kitchen, so redolent of his mom’s home cooking, against an appliance designed not to reheat the bread she did not bother to bake but to receive fresh slices of the packaged white bread he preferred, he would not even remove, reading the signs of the message instead of the message itself, and which Druff, the adventurer/philanderer neither of them had bargained for, did not bother to read either, that would undoubtedly say (there in the dark, so why even bother with a light, which just might wake him, draw him, concerned, who was always concerned, who lived in the depths of concern as a fish lives in water and who, even if he didn’t clear tables, had made of himself this safety-first sentinel, this factless, better-safe-than-sorry son who pulled space heaters from their wall sockets, standing lamps, radios, anything electric which, at least in the estimation of his concerned imagination, could reach the critical mass to draw energy, ignition flame, into the kitchen to check, to make sure their house hadn’t been broken into and his parents left for dead in their beds): “Michael sweetheart, I’m upstairs in bed. Dad’s not home yet, but called to say that he’s with some men arranging about that Marathon he’s been trying to get for the city, and not to wait up. I hope you had a good evening at school, or in the gym working out. If you’re going to have something to eat, please rinse out the dishes before you go to bed. They’re hard to wash when food is left standing in them too long, and they attract bugs. See you in the morning. Love, Mother.”

But it was too late, had already been too late when Druff had let himself into the darkened house and, ever so quietly, and with as much care as if there had been a real MacGuffin in his life, made his way into the kitchen to confirm what he should have taken for granted in the first place, which he
did
take for granted. It would have been too late even if he hadn’t fumbled about at the kitchen table for those few seconds, even if he hadn’t clinked the spoon in the cereal bowl or brushed his arm against the box and shaken the cornflakes in it.

“Dad?” his son stage-whispered from the stairs. “Dad, is that you down there, Dad?”

“I’m all right, Mikey,” Druff said.

Down came the boy the rest of the way and switched on the light in the kitchen.

“Why didn’t you turn a light on? You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t fall. I’m fine. What are you doing up so late? And if you’re so worried about people falling in the dark, why’d you turn off that hall light Mother leaves on all night?”

Now, in their bright kitchen, Mikey performed his strange, blind tic. He shut his eyes. Druff, who’d picked the tic up from his son, shut
his
eyes. They watched the tinted darkness of their squeezed lids, passed through the waves and breakers of their mutual resentments. Mikey went first.

“So,” he said, “how’d it go, Dad?”

Druff didn’t realize at first what his son meant, answering, “Fine. I said I’m all right.”

“No,” the kid said, “I meant with Scouffas. I meant with that other guy.”

Hurriedly, Druff glanced down at the note Rose Helen had left.

(So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.)

But Mikey was already speaking. “Jeez,” said their man-child, making his queer symbolic associations, working his own ritualized actuarials, factlessly, baselessly, adding years to his father’s life, extending by decades the frontiers of his own boundless childhood, “you could have knocked me over and over with a feather. Any city can have a baseball team. Seattle has one, unlikely towns like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. And all those places in the Sunbelt? Come on. San
Diego?
Give me a break. They’re jokes, they’re just jokes. I don’t care how many times they win their division,
or
the pennant. Or the World Series, even. They’re just jokes. Or can you imagine a state like Texas having
two
teams? In the Lone Star State? That’s just got to be graft. Somebody must have had their hand out big time. You know how that works. I mean I don’t have to tell
you!
If it ever came out, the people responsible could get years.
Years!
They’d be put away so fast for so long their kids would never see them again. And how long do you think they’d survive locked up like that? People like that? Privileged people. People accustomed
to giving
the orders. Just the shame and disgrace would kill them if the hardened cons and the bread and water didn’t get to them first.

“Don’t make me laugh. Those guys would be goners.

“And I’ll tell you another thing, Dad. It’s one thing to have an NBA franchise, or even an NFL one. Or even your own hockey team in the NHL, but you saw what happened in St. Louis. Well, the Blues came out of that one all right, and no one’s more grateful than I am, but what happened in St. Louis could happen anywhere. Let’s face it, Dad, the fans are subject to the whims of the owners. And the only thing
those
people care about is the bottom line. That’s where
their
loyalties lie. You’re deluding yourself if you think otherwise. ‘Build us a bigger stadium. Give us a tax abatement, maybe we’ll stay. Promise not to go after us in the press to get better players if we don’t produce. Let us raise ticket prices whenever we want. Give us a bigger percentage of the popcorn and peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Permit us to keep more from the
Cold beer, cold beer here!’
They’re such
babies!
And we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of people who have no mercy!

“You tell me I should be realistic. Well, I am. I
am
realistic. I’m realistic enough to know that the Indianapolis 500 is locked in, that the Kentucky Derby is, that it’ll
always
be run in Louisville. That the Preakness belongs to Baltimore, and the Rose Bowl to Pasadena, and the Masters to Augusta. Those are American Classics, Dad, and no so-called owners can ever come along to try to change the venue.”

Druff, fascinated, terrified, thought, he knows “tax abatement,” he knows “venue.” He’s almost eloquent, he
is
eloquent.

“Well, then,” the son said, “you can just imagine how I felt when I saw Mom’s note. You can just imagine. So how was it? How did it go? What did they say?”

“Scouffas?” Druff said. He took up his wife’s note and read in the light all he’d known in the dark would be in it, failing to predict only the additional details of his visitors’ names. Rose Helen had managed to get even the difficult
I
in McIlvoy right, a tribute, he supposed, to his careful pronunciation of his absurd, complicated, unpremeditated lie. (Thinking, Why, I’m good, I’m really good. Under the guns of Old MacGuffin I’m really good.)

“Yes,” Mikey said, “and that other one. What’s his name, the stuffed-shirt one, the stickler—oh, what
is
his name?—McIlvoy. Did you get to see the gadget, the thing no bigger than a stopwatch? Did they let you hold it?”

“The gadget was Scouffas’s department.”

“Oh,” Mikey said, “you’d think it would have been the stickler’s.”

“Life is strange, Mike,” he told his son truthfully. “How’d you even know about the gadget? There’s nothing about it in your mother’s note.”

“I think it was written up somewhere. Anyway, Mom told me about it after I got back and read her message.”

“She was in bed. You woke her up? What for, to do your dishes?”

His son’s eyes closed tight for three beats. It was as if he was in pained, desperate biofeedback trance. He sniffed the air, opened his eyes, then aggressively asked his father if he’d been smoking.

“What? No. Of course not.”

“Maybe McIlvoy, maybe Scouffas,” his son said. “There’s this funny smell.”

“What funny smell? I don’t smell anything funny. What funny smell?”

“I don’t know. This funny smell. It’s not a
bad
smell.”

The trace elements, Druff thought. Margaret Glorio’s hair tars and breath shellacs. Royal dust from the crown rack. He smelled it himself, tasted it. Love laundry, the stale savories and sweet fetids of their rich, cloyed traffic. Was this a counterattack? Nonsense. The child was factless. Yet he’d heard him be eloquent. Could he also be clever? He spooked at the notion of a clever Mikey. Suppose he hated him. Suppose there was malice there, bad blood, evasion like the unsettled soup of magnetic aversion, some call in the bones for revulsion, repugnance, abhorrence, revenge. Suppose there were menace, rancor, all the pledged bitters and solemn loathelies of stalled grudge? Suppose this was the long, slow abiding of crusade, jihad, uprising, holy war? He had always known that his son’s fear for Druff’s life had little to do with love. But suppose his son’s behavior had
nothing
to do with love? Suppose he needed him around to give his hatred something to believe in? What if his dependency had been adversarial all along? Only a campaign? Some Hundred Years’ War of Getting Dad’s Goat? MacGuffins were abroad in the land tonight. Thick as pea soup. Druff was breathless, he couldn’t move. It was MacGuffin gridlock.

Yet when his son began speaking again it was in the same loopy register and tropes of his ancient argument.

“So how did it? You didn’t say. Did they give you an indication? I know this was only preliminary, a feasibility study.” He knows “only preliminary,” Druff thought, he knows “feasibility.” “Still and all,” Mikey said, “they came all this way. Their plane was held up all that time on the ground in Denver waiting for a heating element to be replaced in the galley!” He knows
facts.
He knows the facts of my convolute lie. “I mean, they
could
have canceled. Important fellows like that! They might even have taken that stupid delay as a sign. And there must be just plenty of cities dying to get a marathon. Every Middlesex village and town, right, Dad?

“So did they give you any indication, did they hold out any hope?”

“It was all very preliminary. It was only a feasibility study.”

“Sure,” Mikey said. “Those birds have to play it close to the vest. It’s how they are. I suppose they wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t. Still, Dad,” he said, “I hope you didn’t buy into any of their tired old arguments.”

“Which tired old arguments?”

“Oh, you know, that there’s already a Boston marathon, a New York marathon. That there are marathons in Chicago and Honolulu. All that ‘oversaturated’ stuff you usually hear.”

“Those are factors,” Druff said.

“Those
are
factors. They are. But all they’re looking for are assurances. It’s the consortium of St. Louis businessmen all over again. Just tell them you can get them national exposure, TV coverage. The cable sports networks are out beating the bushes looking for events to cover. You might even suggest the possibility of closed-circuit stuff on the big giant screens, spin-offs from T-shirts, paper cups with soft-drink advertising and the marathon’s logo spectators can hand out to the runners as they pass critical points in the race—Dead Man’s Hill, Heartbreak Flats. Or how our marathon could be this really different marathon, open only to serious runners—no one on crutches, no one pushing himself in a wheelchair or muscling along strapped to a board and doing the twenty-six-plus miles in push-ups or some other simple brute force variation of chinning yourself through space.” He knows twenty-six- plus miles, Druff thought.

“Those are some good points,” Druff said. “You should have been there.”

“I wish I
had
been, Daddy.”

And Druff suddenly recalled the strict, explicit terms of Dick’s limited guarantees. Mrs. D. wouldn’t hear a peep from that quarter, Doug wouldn’t. And then his son was nattering away again, but this time in the baby talk of the more familiar mystic Mikey mode.

“Because,” he was telling his dad, “an owner can move his franchise right out of a city. I suppose that if he wanted, and had the permission of the other owners, he could even shift it into a different league entirely. Owners can do just about anything they want because this is the United States of America and it’s their own private property, after all. They can even let the team stay in a city but ruin it anyway by never spending any money on it to buy better players. But a marathon would be different. It would always be our city’s marathon. And there wouldn’t ever be a way it could have a losing season. I mean someone would always win it every year, and even if their times weren’t as good as the times in the New York marathon or the Boston marathon, still, since they invented the gadget that gives the exact degree of difficulty of a marathon, then even if they
did
take it to another city it would still be our marathon in all the record books. In a way it would, anyway, because anything that came after it would have to be judged by our weights and measures. Do you see?”

He didn’t and, frankly, felt relieved he didn’t—better the Mikey you know than the Mikey you didn’t—but still, he thought, rising from the chair in which he’d been sitting, it could be a trap. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers, pushing them through some rich semaphore, wigwagging weariness, beddie-byes, all the studied repertory of his Mac- Guffin handjobs and shrugs, his shakelegs and stiffness-be-gones, auditioning the full range of his showboat moods from the good-talkin’-to- yas to his see-you-in-the-mornin’s. “I guess I’ll be going up,” he said. “Shall I get the light or will you do it?”

“I’ll do it, Dad,” Mikey said. “Good night, now.”