The Road to Wellville (13 page)

C
harlie Ossining was a little late.

Not that the train had delayed him—it was right on schedule, rolling into Battle Creek’s Main Street depot on the stroke of the hour, brakes crying out, steam rising in plumes, the town lit like an ornament beyond windows fogged with the rich exhalations of drummers, real-estate men and breakfast-food magnates. Leaning forward to peer out the window, Charlie felt his stomach contract with excitement, and he caught a brief taste of his supper—tongue sandwich and pickles—in the back of his throat. This was it: Battle Creek. The Mother Lode. He looked up into the big, gently swaying sign the local boosters had erected and felt it spoke directly to him. He
would
better himself, he knew it, just as he knew that Mrs. Hookstratten’s $3,849—make that $3,846.55, after tips to the porter and waiter and drinks and sandwiches in the club car—was nothing more than the first nugget prized from the mountain he was destined to conquer. This was his opportunity and this was the place. Battle Creek, the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A., Cereal Bowl of the World, Foodtown. “Right on time,” a man in a bowler hat and overcoat murmured in his ear, and in the next moment he was disembarking into the thrilling cold of the star-hung Midwestern night.

The platform was a confusion of businessmen, health seekers, hawkers,
cabbies, porters, newsboys, shine boys, boys who didn’t appear to have any recognizable purpose, and they all seemed to want to go in the same direction at the same time. Charlie stood there bewildered in the middle of the throng, clutching his imitation-alligator-skin grip to his chest and keeping one eye out for the Negro with his trunk and the other for Bender. “Cyrus!” a woman cried beside him. “Yoo-hoo, Cyrus! Over here!” Charlie watched as the anonymous passengers found themselves in the animated faces and outstretched arms of those who’d come out to wait in the cold for them, and he felt more uncertain than ever, fretting about his trunk and the size of the tip he would be expected to press on the porter and where he was going to spend the night. He couldn’t help feeling a stab of regret as the man in the bowler rushed past him and threw himself into the arms of a neat little woman in bonnet and muff while a boy of six or so clung to his legs, piping “Daddy! Daddy!” And where was Bender? All his anticipation seemed to sour in that moment, and he had a sudden longing to be back again in the cozy confines of the club car.

It was then that he noticed the Lightbody woman. She was descending from the near car like royalty, electric in her furs, the conductor fluttering round her gloved hand as if she’d just touched down from the clouds. Behind her, his head floating in the void like a balloon on a string, was her gawk of a husband, closely followed by a trio of porters straining under a burden of bags, satchels, hatboxes and Saratoga trunks—all in matching monogrammed leather.
A small block of stock can be had by the right sort of investor
, Charlie was thinking, and found that he was staring directly into Eleanor Lightbody’s saturate eyes. He smiled, lifted his hat in greeting. She returned the salutation with a little dip of her chin and a smile of her own, and then her husband staggered between them like a blind man, like an ambulatory corpse, the porters closed in the gap, and they were gone. Charlie watched the little group wend its way through the already thinning crowd, then pass through the waiting room and out to the street beyond, where an automobile rolled up to the curb to receive them.

“Hey, mister.” Charlie felt a tug at his sleeve and turned to find one of the superfluous boys gazing up at him expectantly from beneath the brim of a porkpie cap. The boy was about fourteen, sleepy-eyed and
heavyset, and he slouched in his overcoat and galoshes like the old man he would one day become. A group of his compeers—seven or eight of them—stood a few paces off, watching intently.

Bender, Charlie thought. Bender must have sent him. “Oh, hello,” he murmured, leaning down to him. “Are you from Mr. Bender?”

Something awoke and shook itself briefly in the depths of the boy’s dully glinting eyes. He swiped the toe of one boot over the other and let out a long whistling breath that hung round his face in a pale cloud. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I, uh, just wanted to know if you were interested in an investment opportunity, a chance to be part of the newest and best Battle Creek breakfast food yet, at just fifty cents a share. What I’m talking about, mister,” and here he produced a printed prospectus from inside the folds of his overcoat and lowered his voice as if disclosing a closely guarded secret, “is Push.”

Charlie didn’t know how to react. Was the kid serious? Or was this just a prank the local boys played on unsuspecting travelers? It was the sort of thing he might have done himself a few years back. “Push?” he repeated, distracted in that moment by the shriek of the train’s brakes as it lurched forward a few feet and then halted again—where was that damned porter?

“Yes, sir, mister, that’s it:
Push.
The newest and best Battle Creek breakfast food yet, and only fifty cents a—”

“Aaaaah, don’t listen to him.” A second boy was at his side now, taller, rangier, with a face splashed with freckles and ears that stood straight out from his head. “It’s Grano-Fruto you want, just ninety cents a share to get in on America’s favorite breakfast food—”

But he was interrupted by another, crowing for Vita-Malta and waving a prospectus in Charlie’s face, while yet another shouted, “Twenty-five cents a share, twenty-five cents a share,” as the whole band of them surged round him hopefully.

Charlie was late, and it was just beginning to dawn on him. He’d known there were a number of cereal companies here—Post had made his first million by 1901, and there were the Kelloggs, of course—but this was ridiculous. For the first time, as the boys cried our the names of their brands in breathy cracking voices and waved their offerings in the air, he began to doubt Bender. The uncertainty must have shown
in his face, because the boys redoubled their efforts, scrabbling at him till he began to fear for his wallet, his grip, the fabric of his coat. “Beat it,” he snarled, “all of you—just beat it.”

The boys fell away from him like dead leaves, but then they regrouped and started after a new prospect, shrilly touting their wares: “Pep! Push! Vim!” Impatient, angry, shaken, Charlie set down his valise and paused to light a cigarette. But there was the Negro with his trunk, standing at the far end of the platform and looking as unconcerned as if he were curling up next to the stove in the waiting room for a good nap. “Hello!” Charlie cried, waving an arm over his head. “Down here!”

No response. Damn it. The man might just as well have been deaf, dumb and blind. “You, porter!” he shouted, but he was tired suddenly, very tired. Tired of traveling, tired of worrying over Mrs. Hookstratten’s $3,846.55, tired of lazy porters and incompetent waiters, tired, already, of Battle Creek. He felt the exhaustion seeping into his limbs like gas into a coal mine, and as he wearily hefted his grip and started up the platform, he was just waiting for it to explode and shatter him into a thousand limp and volitionless pieces.

He hadn’t gone five steps when he felt a hand on his arm.

The hand belonged to a man about his own age—twenty-four, twenty-five, maybe—and it exerted a pressure that was both apologetic and insinuating. “Excuse me, friend,” the man said, “have you got a match?”

Charlie did have a match, and he set down his grip, squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, to produce it. As he held the flame to the freshly cut tip of the stranger’s cigar, he couldn’t help noticing his clothes—the tightly cut woolen suit in an up-to-the-minute brown-and-gray plaid beneath a fleece-lined overcoat, the pink-and-white striped shirt identical to Charlie’s own, the elegant gray fedora that perched atop the crown of his head as gracefully as if he’d been born wearing it. Charlie was surprised. Here he was in the hinterlands, and the first man he ran into could have been one of the sports lounging round the theaters on Broadway or the amusement park on Coney Island—somehow he’d never expected westerners to dress so smartly. He’d expected hicks, rubes, cowboys.

The man exhaled with satisfaction. “Thank you,” he said, “very much
obliged.” And then he held out his hand. “Harry Delahoussaye,” he said. “Glad to make your acquaintance.”

Charlie shook hands and introduced himself, and he looked up in that moment to see the porter yawn and consult his pocket watch. “I’m sorry,” Charlie said, “I’ve got—”

“Oh, no problem,” Delahoussaye returned, “I understand. Business, “business, business, eh?”

Yes, that was it:
business.
Charlie was here on business. Big business. He felt flattered, felt important, felt like the President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company. He wondered if he should give the man a card.

“I could see it in your clothes, in your bearing,” Delahoussaye said. “Just in from the city, eh? Philadelphia? Chicago? New York?”

“New York,” Charlie whispered, and the words were like a balm on his lips, soothing, protective, words that bespoke his intimate connection with that great city and all its glamour and riches.

“I knew it. I just knew it.” And then, before Charlie realized it, Delahoussaye’s hand was on his elbow again. “Listen, a man like you, a man of business, you must be interested in an opportunity when it comes your way, am I right?”

A gust picked up at the end of the platform and threw a handful of cinders in Charlie’s face. He saw the light now—this was a pitch, another pitch. The understanding saddened him, devastated him, took a stake and drove it right through the heart of the shrunken little ball of optimism he still carried with him.

“What I’m talking about, Charlie, is
Push
, the newest and best Battle Creek breakfast food yet—and just a dollar twenty-five cents a share. A man like you, though—you’d want a block of stock, I’m sure, and I can accommodate you, no problem. What can I put you down for? You’ll be doing yourself a favor, believe me.”

Without a word, Charlie bent for his grip and started up the platform. “Hey,” Delahoussaye shouted at his back, “I can get you Vita-Malta at seventy-five—”

Charlie was short with the porter. He tipped him a penny and dragged the trunk himself through the waiting room and out to the cold, gaslit street. By now, the crowd had dispersed, and Charlie was left alone at
the curb—even the few horse-drawn cabs had plodded on up the street. There was an interurban trolley, but Charlie had no idea where he was going—Bender was at the Post Tavern Hotel, that was all he knew. He was about to ask directions of an old man with rheumy eyes and a tobacco-stained beard, when for the third time since he’d stepped down off the train, he felt a tug at his sleeve.

It was too much. It was. What did they take him for—a rube? A half-wit? A dupe? He whirled round angrily on yet another kid, jerking his arm away in the process. “Beat it,” he said, and his voice was bottled up with the rage in his throat.

The boy held his ground. He was in short pants still, and his lips trembled with the cold. Twin streams of snot depended from his nostrils. “You Charlie Ossining?” he asked in the smallest rupture of a voice.

Charlie nodded wearily. He breathed out a sigh of resignation. So this was Bender’s emissary, this was his welcome, this was his grand entrance into the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A.

“Mr. Bender says you’re to come along with me,” the boy squeaked, reaching out a raw little bunch of knuckles to take the valise from Charlie’s grasp.

Relieved—at least Bender hadn’t forgotten him—Charlie softened and handed over the valise, but when he gave the street a quick scan and saw neither car nor carriage, the anger boiled up in him again. “And what about my trunk?”

The boy looked down at his shoes. His voice was a whisper in a closet on the far side of the street. “Don’t think I can manage it myself, sir.”

They walked twenty blocks in a howling wind, the boy hunched and snuffling, Charlie staggering like an inebriate beneath the weight of his trunk. He’d managed to heave the thing up onto the unsteady platform of his bowed back, and he held it in position by exercising his tailbone as a stop and gripping the handles over his shoulders with two numb clawlike hands. They hadn’t gone a block and a half before he felt the tin-reinforced frame of the trunk digging through his overcoat, jacket,
vest and shirt to gouge, with knifelike precision, at his spine and hips. “Where you taking me, kid—the North Pole?” he gasped.