“Thanks, Dr. Groff.”
“Your mother was in for woman trouble a couple of weeks ago. She says your wife is expecting.”
I winced. I didn’t want to hear about my mother or any kind of woman trouble she might be having. I didn’t want to think about the pregnancy, either, for that matter. “That’s right.”
“Hope it doesn’t ruin that pretty figure of hers. She’s quite a gal.”
I smiled, or tried to. “Sure is.”
“How’s she taking her new condition?”
“How do you mean?”
“Moods. Morning sickness. All that.”
“She’s taken to crying. She never used to do that. She’s quicker to anger.”
“Get used to it. A baby in the womb sets off a whole string of chemical and hormonal reactions in a woman’s body that you and I can be thankful we’ll never have to deal with.” He started scribbling on a pad of paper. “Now, you might mention to Mr. Collins that I’m angling for the position of County Coroner next year.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I’m not asking for a quid pro quo. You know that. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t mind having some powerful people in my corner when the time comes.”
I took the prescription from his hand. “I don’t think he’ll forget this.”
THE PHARMACIST ON Hillside across from Wesley hospital filled the scrip without comment or question. “Take that up to Mrs. Perkey at the cash register and she’ll ring you up.”
Mrs. Perkey beamed as she took the prescription from me and rang it up. “Wayne Ogden, isn’t it nice seeing you.”
“Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Perkey,” I said, only vaguely aware of ever having known her and grateful to the pharmacist for having supplied the name.
“Your mother and I were just talking about your blessed event.”
“She’s beside herself,” I said, though this was just a guess. I hadn’t seen or spoken to the old bird since I found out about it. I guessed Sally must have told her. “She’s got step-grandchildren, but this is the first of her own.”
I paid her and walked out. “Hope you get to feeling better right quick,” she called after me.
THE BOSS GLOWERED at me when I walked into his office, his shoulders hunched and hangover tense, a condition that had to exacerbate the pain in his ribcage. Before he had a chance to snap at me I dropped the bag with the Hycodan on the blotter that sat atop his massive mahogany desk. “Instructions are written on the side of the bag.”
It was as though a state of grace washed over him just then. His musculature relaxed visibly, and he exhaled as though he’d been holding it in all morning. His torn ear got redder, his eyes brightened and he opened the bag like a little kid digging into his Christmas stocking. “Morphine. Hot diggetty.”
“Isn’t morphine. Something new. Better than morphine.”
“The hell you say.”
“Fix you right up, is what the doc says.”
Without reading the directions he unscrewed the bottle top and tossed one into his mouth and crunched it. On the desk was an elaborately detailed model of the Collins L-120, the biplane that had put the company on the map in the twenties. Lindbergh flew one of the first, and later Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart did too. I nearly bought a used one in the days after I finished college and before I got my first job at Collins, even though I didn’t have an aviator’s license. These days I couldn’t have been more indifferent to the whole business of flying, but the sight of the dark blue fuselage and the robin’s-egg blue wings by the light of Collins’s desk lamp brought forth a little twinge of innocent nostalgia. I almost wished I could make myself care about the damned things again.
“The old fishcunt was pretty sore at me this morning, Ogden,” he said with a grin.
“How’s that?”
“Mr. Fish is dunning her for his medical bills. She says I ought to pay them. I told her I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”
“She ought to hire somebody better than that to follow you around.”
“I think she just likes that pretty moustache of his. Always talking about how handsome this movie star or that one is. Occurs to me you should have messed up his face, maybe. Thinking maybe if he wasn’t so pretty she’d quit hiring him.”
“Problem with that is she might stumble onto someone halfway competent, then you’d be screwed.”
“That might be right. Anyhow, I think she might be in cahoots with some of the board. There’s a move afoot to fire you, boy, you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
“You and me both. One or two of ’em on the board want to replace me with the wife, can you beat that?”
“Doesn’t seem likely.”
“They think I’m irresponsible. Want her sitting in here doing what they tell her to do. Because her last name’s Collins. Inspires confidence. Look like I’d just stepped aside for her.”
This was bad news. I might not stay at Collins forever, but if I did go I was determined to leave at a time of my choosing and on my own terms. Another goddamn mess for me to fix, and probably without much in the way of help from Uncle Blackout here. “Who’s with her?”
“Huff, that sanctimonious son of a bitch.” Ernest Huff, the comptroller, was a notorious straight arrow, stickler for detail and all-around pain in the dick. “Latham, probably, he doesn’t like the way I do things. I’ll ask a couple of the fellows who else there is, and when I find out we’ll fix the sons of bitches.” He swished some saliva around in his mouth to get rid of the chunks of pill. “Get me a drink of water.”
I left the room and stepped out into the reception area, where I was rewarded with a sweet look from Millie Grau. I poured a glass of water from the cooler and went back into the office, where Collins swigged half of it down and gargled.
“You shouldn’t drink water,” he said after he swallowed the rest. “Know why?”
“No. Why?”
“Fish fuck in it.”
FIVE
THE BEST JOB I EVER HAD
I
WAS TRYING TO find an excuse to get back up to see Vickie in Kansas City but was stymied by the boss’s baffling failure to knock up any more wayward girls. She sent me a letter at work—the only address I’d provided her—promising me a hell of a good time when I got there. I answered with a non-committal post card. I needed to get back to KC. It wasn’t just Vickie; I was looking into a potential source of income separate from the job.
The idea had come to me when I passed a cigar store that my grandfather used to frequent on his occasional trips to visit us in Wichita. Trebegs were his brand, and he used to send me off with a two-dollar bill to buy a boxful and let me keep the change. Another popular item at the cigar store were dirty comic books and postcards, kept under the counter and only available to customers the clerk knew well. Good old Grandpa bought me a stack of Tijuana Bibles when I was twelve, a real godsend for my budding career as a chronic onanist, which lasted until I was fifteen and started getting laid regularly.
The severe, lipless relic manning the counter in the present day had stared at me as though offended by my very existence; he certainly lacked the hail-fellow-well-met demeanor that any sort of under-the-counter trade demands of a merchant, so I didn’t bother inquiring. Something came to me as I walked out the door, though, the memory of a wholesaler that used to provide me with pornographic photos in Rome: the Nonpareil Photographic Studio of Kansas City, Missouri.
One night Park and I were along for the ride with Collins at a blind pig up near Newton that one of his high-rolling buddies had told him about. It was in a big farmhouse in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, and it was better appointed than a lot of real bars I’d been in. The boss was in an expansive mood, after a long and friendly conversation with the proprietor regarding the ins and outs of rural lawbreaking. They established at length that bringing whores into the blind pig, even just for tonight, might jeopardize the barkeep’s delicate position with local law enforcement. It was decided that after a couple more drinks we would head for the Crosley Hotel just north of downtown and find some there.
Collins stood with his arm on the mantle above the fireplace and smirked. “Admit it, boys, this is the best goddamn job you ever had.”
Park nodded and I just smiled. Sure, it wasn’t exactly coal mining, and I was grateful to have a position that got me out of the house—when I’d left that evening, Sally was listening to “Baby Snooks” on KFH, and if I’d had to listen to a whole half hour of that shit I’d have blown my brains out—but this wasn’t the best job I ever had, not by a mile.
In the army I used to look back at my pre-war self with a mixture of nostalgia and pity. What the hell had I thought I was accomplishing selling airplanes? The QM Corps gave me thrilling and lucrative work. Men needed the things I offered for sale. Women, some of them beautiful women, relied on me for protection and income, and the army relied on me to distribute whatever I wasn’t able to reroute and sell elsewhere. It was a good life, and by the time it came to its violent end I could see my sweet situation beginning to unravel. There would be no place for me in Italy after the war, without the army to protect my position and provide my clientele, and my stab wound—for which I managed to con my way into a Purple Heart—got me home months earlier than was right.
So acting as bag man and babysitter for an alcoholic skirtchaser came in a poor second. Hell, I had a job as a kid selling pots and pans door to door that might give this one a run for its money.
THE FRONT DESK man at the Crosley greeted Collins by name and told him to go right up. “Elevator’s broken, you’ll have to use the stairs.”
The stairs smelled like a lioness in heat had pissed her way up to the fourth floor, by which time Collins was gasping. “What the hell happened to this place?” I asked. “This used to be a nice hotel.”
“Whores and hopheads now,” Collins said between wheezes. He knocked on the door of room 406, which was answered by a tired looking forty-year-old with blonde bangs wearing a tattered silk robe that hung open, revealing a matching set of underwear underneath.
“Benny called and said you was coming up, but he didn’t say you brought friends. Let me call a couple girls and we’ll all of us have a party.” The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises, and I suspected that once she doffed that robe we’d be treated to the sight of track marks inside her elbows.
“I think I’m going to make an early night of it, boss.”
“What the hell?” the old man said, his fury manifesting itself instantly and, as usual, without warning. That chopped-up ear was the color of a July tomato. “I’m paying, where the hell do you get off saying no to a free piece of ass?”
“Hey, fellahs, not in the hallway, please,” the girl said, trying to usher us into the room. “There’s still citizens live in this hotel.”
“I’ll get a cab,” I said, and headed for the stairs.
“How about you?” he asked Park. “You a fucking water lily too?”
“I’ll have me a piece, sure.”
“Good. Go on get in there. Ogden, you’re fired, you lousy little queer piece of shit.”
Without turning around I waved them goodnight. This wasn’t the first time he’d fired me in such a state, and in the morning he’d be lucky if he remembered enough to regret it. Everett Collins didn’t know it, but he’d just sent me on a much-needed vacation.
I HAILED A cab on North Main and told him to drive out toward Red’s. I shouldn’t have gotten to thinking about Italy, where I was my own boss, even if several thousand men could legitimately claim to have the power to give me orders. I pulled from the inside pocket of my sport coat a letter I’d been carrying for two weeks, from my old buddy Lester, stationed now in occupied Japan. After the usual pleasantries and perfunctory asking after my family, he got to the real gist of the matter:
You ought to be here, Oggie, there is action all the time and guys arriving looking for a game or a girl or a fix and man oh man its wide open. Local enforcers are all on the run and that’s the way it is going to go around here till they get thereselves ready to re-join civization. Come on back to Mother Army, Oggy, all is forgiven. If you re-up there is strings can be puled and you will end up here and not Europe where the game is already winding down.
Red’s was no busier than I’d have expected on a Tuesday. My b-girl Barbara was sitting with the off-duty bartender who’d given me the dirty look before, and she made a point of looking away from me when I passed by. I was almost glad for her, and it simplified things around Red’s if she wasn’t looking for another turn.
I didn’t see any other girls that appealed, though. I hurried through a whisky soda and stepped outside into the night air, warm and still for a Kansas March. I was on the verge of going inside to phone for a cab when I saw what looked like an old friend sitting in the far corner of the lot. It was a 1916 Hudson, a Phaeton Super 6, identical to the one I’d owned as a boy, painted white or something near it. Someone had taken good care of it; it gleamed in the moonlight, and I wanted to hear if it ran as nice as it looked.