“I wanted you to take care of a little problem with the board, not kill the sons of bitches one by one.”
I maintained my calm in case the situation could be salvaged. “Burress isn’t dead, sir, and Huff wasn’t strictly a member of the board. Anyway, how do you know I had anything to do with Burress?”
“Are you fucking with me right now, boy?”
Every second that passed left me less interested in holding onto my position as his monkey. “Begging your pardon, Everett, but when I fuck with you, you’ll know you’ve been fucked with.”
His mutilated ear was redder than I’d ever seen it, and concentrating on that detail helped me maintain my equanimity in the face of the grizzled old sot’s betrayal. “Did it occur to you,” he said without moving his jaw, “that this might look bad in the eyes of the rest of the board? Of the shareholders? That somewhere down the line the police might get involved?”
“Why would the police get involved? Burress had a stroke. And I went into Huff’s house the other night and stole the letter and the photograph.”
“Don’t try and confuse things, you devious son of a bitch. I been thinking about how ever since you got back from the war things have been going crazy around here. People killing themselves. Me getting stuck on that damned medicine and having to pay for a cure. Hiring whores for things besides fucking. And it always comes down to your doing. You weren’t like that before the war, Ogden. I don’t know what happened to you over there but I don’t want it here any more.”
A sudden wave of relief washed over me, and that urge to beat Collins to death with my bare hands evaporated. I was a free man; I saw the door to my own future open before me, inevitable. I was Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Though I didn’t forgive him his treachery, the old man had unwittingly set me free to realize a better, more profitable destiny. “If that’s the way you want it, Boss,” I said.
“Hell yes that’s the way I want it. And don’t go thinking about trying to get me into trouble with what you know. Whittaker down in Personnel has a nice severance check waiting for you when you get done in here.”
“That’s all right. I’m sure I’ll pick something else up.”
“Not in the aircraft business you won’t. I’ve spoken to every boss man in the industry, and you’re blackballed, you son of a bitch. Now get out.”
When I walked out, Wageknecht was speaking to Millie Grau. As soon as she saw me she pointed to the inner office and told him to go in. As soon as he was in there talking to my former employer she rose and, to my great surprise, embraced me.
“You’re a good man, Wayne Ogden, and Mr. Collins is just dead wrong firing you.”
“Thanks, Millie.”
“It was that letter from Mr. Park.”
“What, Herman Park? What kind of letter?”
She took a deep breath and looked at the floor. “Mr. Park came by with a letter addressed to Mr. Collins. He insisted on delivering it personally, and he stayed in there a good forty-five minutes. When he left Mr. Collins was hopping mad at you. I don’t know what was said but it wasn’t good.”
“It’s all right, kiddo. I’ll land on my feet.”
Walking out the front door of the office complex, without having stopped by Personnel to get that check, I reflected that Millie Grau, wonderful woman that she was, was nonetheless an abysmal judge of character.
I DIDN’T TELL Sally I’d been fired, but I did make a show out of reading aloud an ad in the
Morning Eagle
calling for vets to re-enlist. “I could be making good money back in the service,” I said that evening as she attempted to knit a tiny hat for the baby.
“Better than at Collins?”
“No, but good money just the same.”
“Huh. Well, as long as there isn’t another war. I was awful worried about you the whole time you were gone.”
“There won’t be another war, baby.”
The dinner she’d made was quite edible—canned peas, fried pork chops, and applesauce from a jar, and I hadn’t had to pretend to enjoy it. The sincerity of my praise got me out of the house without having to weather any hysterics, and I drove out to Ebenezer Lutheran Church and parked on the street with the sun casting long shadows on the lush green lawns of east Wichita. For a few minutes I sat watching a building in the back of the church. These, according to Millie, were the quarters for unmarried clergy in which Donald would abide until his marriage in November. The others were empty at the moment.
After a few minutes’ wait Donald walked out and headed up the sidewalk. I figured I had a good fifteen minutes and strolled around the block once and approached the building from the opposite side of the street. I pulled on the screen door and picked the cheap lock of the inner door with a bent paper clip.
It was spartan and dank inside, with a sour, sharp odor of mold emanating from carpet and furniture both. The kitchenette was filthy, and I wondered why the Lutherans, unlike the Catholics, didn’t spring for housekeepers for their unmarried clergy. Several days’ worth of dirty dishes sat in the sink, including a tumbler whose bottom third contained what appeared to be buttermilk. Milky, fetid water that smelled five feet away filled the rest of the glass.
I wasn’t here to gather information on his homemaking skills, though. A man of thirty who’s never married and doesn’t fool around has got to have some method of disposing of his seminal backlog. It was possible that he frequented whores or had a secret along the line of Huff’s, but that wasn’t my impression. What I’d gathered about Donald made me think he was sexually stunted, what the shrinks call an arrested adolescent. In other words, a jerk-off artist. Something told me I’d find a secret stash of masturbatory aids somewhere within easy reach of the bed or the toilet. Since there was a Kleenex box right on the nightstand I decided to check under the bed first. Nothing but an empty mousetrap down there, but between the mattress and the box springs I hit paydirt: a stack of cheaply printed magazines and thirty-odd eight-by-ten glossies of the cheapest variety and lowest quality, mostly homely girls shyly smiling in their birthday suits. The magazines were of the cheesecake variety, bare tits and suggestive captions, but even still, nothing you want your pastor yanking his chain to.
I replaced all of it and went back out to the car to wait for his return. I hoped it would be soon, because I didn’t want to wait for tomorrow to decide his fate. No, I didn’t intend to convict him without a fair trial and a chance to defend himself.
Ten minutes later he came walking up the sidewalk, preoccupied and holding a grocery sack under his arm. I got out of the car and approached him as he unlatched a screen door.
He frowned. “Can I help you?”
Close up I could see he had some sort of skin condition. His face was inflamed from a recent shave, and his ears were vermillion like the boss’s when he got drunk. Maybe that was the attraction for Millie. Maybe Donald was the result of one of those long-ago wayward nights in the old man’s past. But I had business to attend to and no time for idle fancy.
“You Donald?”
“I am.”
“My name’s Ogden. Friend of your fiancé’s.”
“From work,” he said, his nostrils flaring, though he showed no other outward sign of distaste.
“Right. Could I have a few minutes of your time?”
He let me in and I took a wooden chair without being invited to do so as he sat down on the reeking sofa.
“I just want to say it’s real big of you to forgive her the way you did.”
The look of confusion on his face as he pondered his options was pretty funny. Stand up and sock me in the jaw? Throw me out? Tell me it was none of my fucking business? Any or all of the three of those would have made him a man in my eyes, but he just leaned back with his arms folded across his chest.
Every syllable was clipped and precise, and after every two or three words came a little pause as he weighed the next. “It was a complicated situation. I’m aware that she confided in you before she did me, and that you advised her to tell me.”
“No need to thank me, pal.”
“I’m not thanking you. I would have much preferred to keep my mental image of her as pure and chaste.”
At least now he was getting a little steamed. I wondered if I could get him to take a swing at me. “Sure, everybody wants to marry a virgin. But really, how many of us do? And even then it’s over after the first time you top her. If you ask me that whole cherrybusting business is overrated.”
“You miss the point entirely. I believed I was engaged to one kind of woman and I found myself engaged to another.” He was talking faster but that prissy diction stayed with him, and I was thinking he must be a real snooze in the pulpit. “To a man like me the idea of coming to the marriage bed intact means a great deal, and when she told me the truth, I’ll be quite honest with you, I called her a name and asked her to leave.”
“Yeah? What name?”
He hesitated. “Slattern,” he said with a little choke, as though it were the dirtiest word he knew, and I had to take in a deep breath in order not to snort. “I regretted it instantly, but in the heat of the moment one says hurtful things.”
“So what made you decide she was worthy after all?”
“I don’t see as that’s any of your business.”
Finally I’d coaxed a reaction out of this stiff that I could understand, an acknowledgment that it was shameful to be sitting here discussing his intimate personal life with a stranger. But my relief was short-lived.
“I’m glad to get it off my chest, to be honest. There’s no one I can talk to about it. I can’t tell the senior pastor, I don’t want him looking at my wife that way. I can’t tell my parents, they wouldn’t understand.” He looked like he was about to cry. If he did, I told myself, I’d knock his fucking block off. “I didn’t decide she was worthy. I decided I couldn’t call it off because people would ask questions. I’m a thirty-year-old associate pastor and I need to be married or it will seem odd. I need a wife and it might as well be her.”
“You’re a good egg,” I said, standing up. “Millie’s a lucky girl to have a fellow like you.”
“Thanks,” he said as I opened the door and let myself out.
Half an hour later I phoned Rackey’s house. “It’s Ogden.”
“Heard you got fired, Mr. Ogden.”
“It’s all right, Rackey, I got some other things going on. But I need to warn you about something.”
“Warn me?”
“I stood up to the old man the other morning and he couldn’t take it, so he fired me. He may go after you next, see?”
“How come? Cause you hired me?”
“No, that’s not it. What I stood up to him over had to do with a woman.”
“You and him fighting over the same gal?”
“No. I told him he was a skunk for putting the meat to a married woman, and the wife of an employee yet.”
“Whose wife?”
Jesus, Rackey was as dumb as a bag of hammers. I was going to have to spell it right out for him.
IN THE MORNING I paid a visit to Dr. Ezra Groff, who seemed not at all surprised to find me asking for another script for Hycodan.
“Sometimes those cures don’t take. Most of the time, if you ask me. Patient’s got to want to quit and they hardly ever do.”
“I guess he’s old enough to know what he wants.”
“Yes, I suppose he is.” He handed me the slip of paper and grinned, his teeth yellow as onions and brown at the roots. “Tell him not to forget me when I put in my bid for County Coroner.”
“He won’t forget you, doc.”
AT UNION STATION shortly afterward I sent a telegram to my old pal Lester in Japan: ON MY WAY STOP PREPARE TO PULL STRINGS STOP. I don’t know what kind of crazy hours they keep over there but I figured whatever strings he had to pull could be pulled after I’d signed up, so without giving myself a chance to change my mind I headed for the recruiting office on Douglas.
The place was empty when I walked in except for one lonely recruiting officer with an oddly orange complexion and little round ears that stuck out perpendicular to his head. “I want to re-up,” I told him, and when I told him I was a Master Sergeant he looked like it was the only good news he’d had all day.
“Hell of a thing, the war’s over but it’s not like the world stopped turning. We’re losing all kinds of good experienced men and our reenlistment rates are just rotten. What’s the army going to look like in five or ten years when we have to fight the Russkies?”
I had a feeling that one was probably going to be eight or ten big explosions, but it really didn’t matter to me. I was a supply sergeant, and the fighting end of things wasn’t within my purview.
LACKING AN OFFICE phone, and unable to make the call within earshot of Sally, I got a pocketful of change and stepped inside a phone booth in the back of Gessler’s Drugstore on Douglas and told the operator to get me the Nonpareil Photographic Studio in Kansas City. When Tessler finally picked up he was wary of talking on the phone, but he thanked me for putting him in touch with Lester a few months back. “Your pal’s been a real good customer,” he said.