The MacGuffin (23 page)

“Well,” Druff said grudgingly, “this will just have to be one of those unilateral truces then. It’s too nice a day to quarrel and let rip,” he said, quarreling and letting rip. “Because you know why Dad’s dressed up like this? Not because he thought it was still the workweek. Did you think he thought it was still the workweek? Well, you
are
easily fooled then. No. It’s because I thought maybe we’d all go somewhere nice together. Take you to McDonald’s, get you a Big Mac, see did their new Care Bears shipment come in yet.”

He didn’t know why he did it. It had to be more than a moody weekend virus traveling his system, too much time on his hands, nothing happening until Monday morning when he would climb back into his limo again. (Absent emergency, of course, sudden ice storms, something fucked in the infrastructure, the pavements buckling, whole thoroughfares taken out.) His inexcusable behavior. It had to be more than cabin fever. Cabin fever? It wasn’t even lunch yet. Though whatever was bitching him, the weekend was part of it, of course. Also, Druff had a MacGuffin. Anything could happen. It had been only twenty-four or so hours, but you learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin. Basic crash course for a City Commissioner of Streets. (How’s that for irony?) Already he was at least a little qualified in MacGuffin technique. No, anything
could
happen. He’d overslept. Margaret Glorio may have called. Perhaps she was taken with him. Maybe he was a dynamite fuck, him this political bigwig and all, this power-play type. She might have been a democracy groupie, some victor/spoils sport. He’d met her at Toober’s after all. Car trouble or no car trouble, the City Hall hangout had been her restaurant of choice. (Two meals he’d had with her now.) Who knew? The best defense… He slammed back into action.

“Did anyone call?” he asked his son.

“The phone rang a couple of times.”

“Well?”

“Mom got it.”

“She say it was for me?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Listen,” he told the boy, “go find your mother.” Playfully he reached his hands out to Mikey’s neck, straightened a pretend knot on an imaginary necktie he made believe his thirty-year-old kid wore down the front of his T-shirt. “How’s them eyes?” he whispered. “All better?” It was an allusion to the tears he’d shed peeling potatoes. His eyes were shut now too, guarding against the vision of Druff’s slant purpose. He’d spent a lot of time, Druff thought, crouched behind his sight today. All through his father’s Monopoly, cancer bag, salmonella and McDonald’s riffs. “Say how late I got home, tell her I’m still a little cranky,” he instructed his son. “Ask in a nice way if there were any calls while Daddy was sleeping?”

Druff poured a second cup of coffee for himself.

Mikey lumbered off. Well,
lumbered.
Actually, he moved rather gracefully for so big a fellow. It was all that muscle gainsaid his grace, the vaguely armored, vaguely plated, faintly scaly quality of his flesh, skin’s moving parts, pads of muscle like a moving man’s quilted being, that lent him all the slow, frozen majesty and power of some giant, foursquare reptile. For all Druff’s contemptuous swagger, he feared the kid, scared in the rudiments and deep fundamentals, like someone apprehensive in darkness, or held frozen, checked by his atavistic willies. All that repression, all that hatred. It was maddening, Druff thought, no day at the beach, no month in the country. He hadn’t even the pie-plate look and sweet nature of the openly retarded, but all the feral anger and pronounced cheekbones of a psychopath, always wrong, always belligerently logical. Druff feared the poke Mikey would one day take at him, the swat that finished, the swipe that killed.

Or suppose, he thought when Mikey went off—it was the weekend, all that time on his hands—company
was
coming? Druff’d just had his ashes hauled by a beautiful woman. How could he be expected to sit through a big meal?

“Why,” Rose Helen said, “were you expecting a call?”

“Oh,” Druff said, “you startled me.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “you look startled.”

“You surprised me,” he said, “your voice surprised me. I was a million miles away. A shock to the system. Ever take up your water glass when you reached for your tea? Has that happened to you?”

“What?” she said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”

“Nothing,” Druff said, “I said you surprised me.”

“Oh damn,” said Rose Helen. “I
just
put this battery in. That’s the second
time
this week. And now I’m all out. Wait, maybe it’s not seated properly.” She removed her hearing aid and laid out its parts on the table near the remains of Druff’s breakfast, his unfinished coffee, the crusts of his bread. A bit of earwax clung to a side of the stainless steel battery like jam on cutlery. “I swear,” she said, “these things are more trouble
than
they’re worth.”

“Is that a zinc oxide?” Druff asked. “Dr. Zahler told you only zinc oxides.”

Rose Helen, vulnerable, missing one of her senses, began to cry.

“Oh Christ, oh Jesus,” he comforted. “Baby,” he cooed. “Rose,” he said. “Never mind.
Don’t.
Aw,” said the Commissioner of Streets,
“I
know,
I
know. So what,” he said, rubbing her back, raising her chin to hold between his forefinger and thumb, “fuck it. Let ’em hear cake.”

He took the battery out of her hands and fit it into a little compartment in the hearing aid. (Druff was no expert, of course, but it looked no different to him from the less efficient, less expensive mercury or silver oxide batteries.) “There,” he said, “see is that any better.”

The First Lady of City Streets took the device and, turning away, reinserted it. She inclined her head, she shook it, as if testing to see if water was lodged in her ear. “Oh my,” she said, turning back to her commissioner.
“Oh
my, yes. Yes indeed. What a difference.
Day
and night. What a relief. I thought for
a
minute… Well,” she said, “what were we… Oh yes, how startled you looked. Then my
silly
battery went dead on me.
It’s
so strange,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll
ever get
used… One minute I hear everything they throw at
me,
the next I’m deaf as a post. Well, I can’t say he didn’t warn me. He said when he first fitted me for the stupid thing not to let the batteries
go
down, to take them out when
they’re
not in use. It’s a nuisance and really, well, frankly, to tell you the truth, there are times I don’t dare take them out. That’s why
it’s
important I should try to see about getting tested for a second hearing aid, one of those new space-
age
models that practically
turn
you into a spy satellite. Wouldn’t that
be
something? How’d you like your wife
to
have such powers? I could overhear everything that goes on, all the plotting. Can you think of a better advantage a politician could have? I thought,” she said, “the impression I was left
with,
was it wouldn’t happen with a zinc oxide, that it drained down more slowly,
like
the reserve in a gas tank after you’re already on ‘E.’ That’s what it’s supposed to have over the mercury or
silver
oxide. It’s
six
of one, half a dozen
of
the other, if
you
ask me. And twice as expensive. Even if I get them
from
Zahler. I bought half a dozen from Zahler. It couldn’t
have
been a month ago. He’s no cheaper than Williams Pharmacy and they’re an
arm
and a leg. But take them out when they’re not in use? When aren’t they in use? That’s a laugh. When aren’t they in use? When I go
to
sleep? Could I have taken them out last night? With you gone and Mike out all hours? Suppose there’d been a fire? Suppose
there’d
been a fire and the smoke alarm went off? How would I
have
heard it? I wouldn’t
have
heard it. I’d have burned up in my bed. The deaf perish in fires. On a per capita basis more hearing-impaired burn up in fires than people still in control of their sound.
Did
you know that?”

“Come on, Rose. You’re not going to burn up in a fire. It’s senseless to worry about a thing like that. What are the odds, Rose? More people win the lottery in this town than go up in flames.”

But she couldn’t hear him, probably couldn’t hear herself, her mistaken emphases bumping up the stress on certain words like a hiccup, knocking meaning for a loop, blowing it sky-high, sounding alarms, laying down her insistence and hysteria like a trail.

And then this occurred to the commissioner: This was the same little lady who stepped on his best lines in dreams. This was old Rose Helen. It couldn’t have been forty years ago she rested her palm on the tiny shelf above her damaged left hip, posturing buffalo gals, dance-hall ladies, leading him on with the thrust of a raised hip beneath those full skirts, drawing him, luring him, pulling him in with her seductive dip and forward glide, turning her “deformity” into a lewd suggestion. This was old Rose Helen here, the throwback cripple, pouring it on with the skewed iambics, cute as a lisp, of her oddball speech and nervous, loony monologue.

Only suppose she was faking it? Suppose this was only another lewdness meant to arouse in Druff whatever sucker passions he had left to his name? After all his decades in politics he ought to be able to recognize a dirty trick when it stared him in the face. Suppose the batteries still lived in her hearing aid? What a mistake to have thought MacGuffins took weekends off. That’s just how adulterers, their guards lowered and their minds groggy from the candles they burned at both ends, from their monkeyshines and escapades and scrapes, had their nuts handed to them.

Aha! thought the City Commissioner of Streets. (Thinking Aha! Thinking its concomitant, exclamatory dagger, too, as, yesterday, in the limo, he could have slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand.) Had Margaret called? Probably Margaret
had
called. Rose Helen was getting him up with her hear-no-evils, waiting to listen in the minute he picked up a phone.

“Well, no,” he said evenly (and getting sore now, too, recalling the silver or mercury oxide thingummy in its tiny compartment in the hearing aid which, for whatever reasons, Rose Helen, some misleading alchemist of the downscale, was eager to pass off as zinc), setting his own traps and thinking two can play this game (having just thought Aha! and into clichés’ easy, comfortable rhythms now), turning his head away and speaking into his coffee cup, answering the last question which, on the evidence, he could be certain she’d heard. “It’s just that I thought the company you’re making that turkey there for might have canceled out at the last minute.”

Rose Helen didn’t answer.

“Because frankly, Rose Helen,” he said, “I was hoping they had. I’m too tired even to go through the motions. Last night really took it out of me.”

She didn’t say boo. He’d just have to up the ante was all. He turned to face her.

“They marathoned my tail off, those two. Scouffas and his broad.”

She smiled at him.

“Margaret Glorio,” he risked fearfully. Rose Helen nodded and went back to polishing her turkey.

What? he wondered. Does she or doesn’t she?

Poor Druff, poor Druff thought, who recognized a no-win situation when it stared him in the face. Because if she really
couldn’t
hear him it meant not only that she was deaf and that he was married to her, but that he was, well, maybe just a little paranoid into the bargain, and that his suspicions, so reasonable and even exciting during the workweek, seemed so much blown smoke in the glare of a civil-service sabbath. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d been picking on a little sixty-year-old lady with white hair and a failing hearing aid and a limp. And as if
that
wasn’t, he’d been cheating on her, too!

A grown man. Well, he amended,
once
a grown man.

And then, contemplating an endless vista of the long weekend before him spelling nothing but trouble, he was overcome with a sort of bedrock blues. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Maybe he could run out for half a dozen nice fresh zinc oxides for Rose Helen’s hearing aid. Saying as much, watching her face, testing, uncertain how to read her bland regard, first thinking up and then pulling the old switcheroo, throwing mixed signals, underscoring innocent, cheerful things with sneers and scowls, bad, devastating ones with encouraging smiles, a jaunty facial merriment.

“I
don’t,”
she said, “know what
you’re
talking about?”

Well, thought Druff, if Rose Helen was in the enemy camp (if there
was
an enemy camp), she was a worthy adversary.

He fixed her wagon. Neutrally he asked a question at point-blank range.

“Do you expect there’ll be an earthquake sometime soon?”

Neutrally Rose Helen shrugged.

“Oh no you don’t,” Druff said, “no you
don’t!”
Making his mistake, as if to shake her reaching out.

She turned away from him, locking, so to speak, her mouth, throwing away, as it were, the key.

Druff, steamed, losing it.

“What is it?” he shouted. “Tell me. What’s going on? I demand to know. What are you people after? What’s the scam? Just what are you pulling here? Out with it, Betty Marjorie.”

Oh, he was fuming.

He didn’t even believe the weekend had anything to do with it anymore, and laid down a barrage of piggyback names. Mary Molly, he called her, Annie Mildred. Sonia Eileen. Scandalizing, he figured, an entire generation of Peter Pan-collared women.

“Because it ain’t as if there were two sides to this story. I’ll tell you something, Beth Jessie—our lives are short enough as it is. Here we are, down toward the precious few. Toward?
Into!
Does ‘bottom of the barrel’ mean anything to you? I don’t need the aggravation at this juncture.”

And hoped like hell there was something to it.

Because as he was just telling Heidi Minnehaha here, he
didn’t
need it. Here he’d made an eleventh-hour connection. If it didn’t pan out, if his fears weren’t real, why then,
that
was the aggravation. He’d become cranky, another fearful old fart afraid in the streets (and him their commissioner), shying at bogeymen who weren’t there, at robbers and highwaymen, cutpurses, pirates and rustlers after his cattle, poachers with a blood lust for his fish and his game. If the pillagers and ravagers weren’t at the gates, then his suspicions and fears were merely the sure signs of a withering self-regard, the miserly selfishness of the craven aged.