The Road to Wellville (54 page)

The next day he retired the sandwich board—at least until Bender got back. Standing there in the driving rain, looking ridiculous in front of Eleanor Lightbody while the true cereal tycoons sat warm and dry in their offices or on their yachts and had their lackeys build pyramids of boxes in grocers’ windows, he’d had an epiphany of sorts. What it boiled down to was this: what was the use? At that point, Bender was scheduled to return within the week, and he’d written twice—from Gary, Indiana, and Galena, Illinois—to report that the orders were flowing in. Well, all right. In a week they’d have the capital to open a real factory, with a bona fide expert, not some worn-out yea-saying imposter like Bookbinder, and then they’d be in business. Charlie figured he’d worry about advertising then, when they actually had something to sell. Let Bender wear the sandwich board if he was so keen on it.

Bender got back at the end of the week and re-established himself at the Post Tavern like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars. He had the best of everything, of course, and welcomed himself home with a lavish private dinner at the Wee Nippy, to which he invited Charlie and a
dozen of the most suggestible local burghers, people he’d been courting since the fall. He gave a long speech before dinner—three-quarters oration, one-quarter pep talk—in which he outlined his plans for Per-Fo and dwelled on the significant sums he’d already taken in advance orders for the most revolutionary new breakfast food in the history of Battle Creek, and hence, America. And he let his close friends and associates, now gathered before him, know just how much their’ shares in this new enterprise could be expected to appreciate if only they got in on the ground floor.

Charlie had never seen his partner in better form. Bender railed and thundered against his competitors and the nay-sayers who dared claim that the breakfast-food market was glutted, against the timid and short-sighted who insisted on living in the last century, the sort who wouldn’t have invested in Ford or Standard Oil, in streetcars and telephones. But he didn’t simply rail. Oh, no: Bender was far too subtle for that. He was a master of the art of persuasion, a virtuoso of the sales pitch. Once he’d softened them up, once he saw the doubt come to roost in their eyes, he modulated his voice, sweet-talking, seducing—he even passed round his ledger showing some $32,000 in advance orders. By the time the guests had finished the bowls of Per-Fo he’d served as an appetizer (that is, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes poured conspicuously from bright new Per-Fo cartons) and were digging into their lobster and steak, he had commitments from all but one of them and three fully executed checks already tucked neatly away in his wallet.

It was a glorious night for Charlie. A night of redemption, promise, hope, vindication. Thirty-two thousand dollars! And these new checks on top of that. It made Mrs. Hookstratten’s contribution seem paltry by comparison—paltry, and safe. After all the months of doubt and frustration, the pounding of the streets, the solitary hours at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, the fish-head soup and the heartbreak of the Bookbinder basement, it was finally happening—at long last, Per-Fo was fully fledged. Charlie could have raised a statue to Bender that night, could have worshiped him with incense, candles, blood sacrifice.

But then nothing happened. Three weeks dragged by, Bender wrapped in inscrutability, Bender vague about the factory site, the builder, the plans. In Charlie’s joy and delirium on the night of the dinner, he’d
been so carried away he’d almost told his partner about the check from Will Lightbody, its proceeds accruing interest in an account under the name of Charles P. McGahee at the Central National Bank on the corner of Capital and Michigan. Almost, but not quite. Some kernel of apprehension, a last resisting pinch of caution, had held him back. Now that kernel had begun to bloat and swell, stewing in the bile of Bender’s indifference, his dilatory tactics, his testudineous progress through the days. What was he doing? What was he waiting for? “All in time,” he’d said. “All in good time. Have I steered you wrong yet?”

And then the letter had come, and Charlie’s life was demolished.

The sun hung overhead, fat as a melon, splashing the street with light. Women in straw bonnets glided in and out of shops, neighbors called out giddily to one another, an old man on a bicycle wobbled up the street in a magic-lantern show of sun and shadow. Though it was morning still—quarter past eleven by Charlie’s watch—it was warm, the warmest day of the year so far, but Charlie experienced it only as an irritation, By the time he turned the corner opposite the Post Tavern, he was breathing hard and his shirt was damp under the arms.

Since his strained relations with the hotel’s underlings precluded his entering through the lobby, Charlie was in the habit of making his way along the alley behind the Wee Nippy and slipping in at the service entrance. That was his plan now. When he’d passed by the hotel altogether, he crossed the street, dodging vehicular traffic, a flock of pigeons scrabbling in the gutter and a piebald cat catching up on its sleep on the curb out front of the jeweler’s. Cradling the letter in his pocket with the crook of his left arm, moving swiftly, agitated and preoccupied (what did he expect from Bender, anyway—some sort of delaying action, a sham factory fabricated overnight for Mrs. Hookstratten’s benefit, a speech, miracles?), he didn’t think to glance up to see if he’d been noticed until it was too late. He had. The doorman, implacable, immovable, eternally vigilant, was stationed in his usual spot, his eyes locked on Charlie’s. Charlie looked away.

He felt the man’s eyes on him as he mounted the sidewalk and hurried
past the corner of the hotel and out of his range of vision. But as he passed the Wee Nippy’s street entrance and the alley behind it, he thought to look back over his shoulder—and a good thing, too. The son of a bitch was there, standing at the corner, two hundred feet from his post, his arms folded across his chest, watching. Charlie kept going. It was ten minutes before he ventured back up the street, and this time the doorman was nowhere to be seen. Ducking down the alley, Charlie made for the service entrance, wondering if they could manage to dynamite the tracks along the Michigan Central Line or send Mrs. Hookstratten a phony telegram informing her that her sister had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and he was in the door and headed for the back stairs before he understood that the form in the chair propped against the rear wall and materializing now from the shadows was that of his old antagonist, the bell captain. The man occupied the chair like a side of beef, a slab of meat molded to bone. He was in his shirtsleeves and he was barefooted, the uniform draped over a peg on the wall behind him. He held a sandwich in one hand, and it was hard to tell where the sandwich ended and the hand began. “I’ll be goddamned,” he uttered in a low growl, and lurched up out of the chair with a quickness that was startling.

Charlie had fought bigger men. Or men as big, maybe. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. But all he wanted at that moment was Bender, Bender with his soothing words, his sangfroid, his ability to take things as they come and wriggle out from under the boot heel of calamity—all he wanted was for Bender to tell him that everything was going to be all right, just one more time. He tipped his hat to the bell captain’s engorged features, turned on his heels and went right back out the door and up the alley again.

Next he tried the entrance at the bar, but it was locked—the Wee Nippy wouldn’t be open till four in the afternoon. Frustrated—he had to see Bender, he had to—he paced up and down the street, muttering to himself, gazing up at the high sunstruck plane of the hotel’s windows and again attracting the attention of the doorman, who hunched his shoulders and made a fist of his face. It was then that he thought of Ernest O’Reilly.

Sure. Of course. He could send the boy up to Bender’s room and slip
him a note—they’d meet at the Red Onion for lunch and hash over this Hookstratten thing one more time. He could have telephoned, he supposed, but he really didn’t want to have to deal with the snooty desk clerk and then hear that Bender’s line was engaged or that he was unavailable or some such crap. No, Ernest O’Reilly was the ticket—but where was he? It was a school day, wasn’t it? Charlie hadn’t laid eyes on a schoolyard since he’d left St. Basil’s and didn’t have the faintest idea where the spawn of the breakfast-food industry’s toasters, packers and bosses learned how to read and write, but he was instinctively moving in the right direction, hurrying, hurrying, and a few pointed inquiries led him to a three-story brick building on Green Street.

It was ten minutes of twelve. He stood there in the shade of a tree across from the schoolyard, feeling conspicuous. He lit a cigarette, shook out the match, checked his watch. An unearthly silence had fallen over the building and its environs, as if the place were enchanted. Nothing moved. He wondered if this was what a pervert felt like and checked his watch again. He began to feel sleepy.

And then a bell sounded and the schoolyard exploded in motion, accompanied by a mad ululating din that was like the charge of the Comanches. Suddenly children were everywhere, legs, arms, shouts, the scrape of shoes and the thump of balls, and they all looked alike. Charlie moved toward them, but they were like an army on the march and they surrounded him, engulfed him and hurried on by to other engagements and distant battles. The crowd had begun to thin and he was beginning to despair of finding Ernest O’Reilly, when he felt a tug at his arm, just as he had at the railway station on that night that seemed so long ago. “Hey,” Ernest O’Reilly said.

Charlie saw that he hadn’t put on any weight. There was a scab the size of a silver dollar under his right eye and a matching one on his bare elbow. His shirt, shoes and pants were too big for him. His eyes were watchful. “Hey,” Charlie replied. “You want to make a dime?”

“Two bits,” Ernest O’Reilly said.

“Fifteen cents.”

“What do I have to do?”

Charlie waited round the corner while Ernest O’Reilly, his narrow shoulders slumped forward like an arrow in flight, darted in the rear
entrance of the hotel. He was to go straight to Bender’s room and give him the message—
Meet me at the Onion, 12:30, URGENT
, Charlie had scrawled on a slip of paper—and if Bender wasn’t there, Ernest was to leave word at the desk. Five minutes of Charlie’s life eroded there on the corner, then ten. It was going on fifteen minutes and Charlie’s fingertips were beginning to ache from flipping open his watch and snapping it closed again, when the boy finally reappeared.

He wasn’t alone. Charlie was thunderstruck to see both the doorman and the bell captain sustaining Ernest O’Reilly in the grip of their meaty bloated hands, one on each side of him, while the boy kicked away at the air as if he were running in place. Charlie’s impressions were fleeting—the white flash of the boy’s bare knees; an envelope fluttering in his hand; the look of intensity leaping into the eyes of bell captain and doorman as they spotted Charlie; sunshine, gay and incongruous—and then the scene began to drive itself. “Run!” Ernest O’Reilly piped, and in that moment he broke away from the two men and shot up the alley toward Charlie, the envelope held out before him like a baton. Charlie was in motion, too, though he was confused and indignant—what were they after him for? Sure, they were his sworn enemies, but he was out on the public street, wasn’t he? Still, there they were and you couldn’t deny them, coming up the alley on the boy’s heels, surprisingly quick for such big men, and Charlie was starting off now, too, trying to gauge the distance to the envelope—a message from Bender?—and finesse the moment at which the apes would be upon him.

It didn’t work. They weren’t interested in the boy at all, as it turned out—or the envelope, either. No: it was Charlie they wanted. Sausage-faced, blowing, their boots pounding at the pavement like hammers, they overtook Ernest O’Reilly easily and left him in their wake—Charlie had no choice but to run, run for all he was worth. He bolted across the street, turned left down a block lined with shops and ducked into an alley to his right. There was a livery stable here, and the way was blocked by half a dozen carriages in various stages of disuse and repair. Charlie never hesitated. He dodged round a big red gelding, vaulted a hack with the top down and kept on going, pumping his knees and jolting his shoulders, running because he was being pursued.

And why? Why? What had he done? It was no time for deductive reasoning, the thundering footsteps of his pursuers ten paces behind him, but the terrible twisted seed of an explanation began to sprout in his brain: Bender. Something had happened to him. Something bad. Inadmissible. Something that would cut the insides out of Charlie, Per-Fo and Mrs. Hookstratten and hang them on a wire for the crows to pluck clean.

He kept running, an amalgam of rage and fear caught in the back of his throat, his eyes fixed on the obstacles ahead—the open door, the barrel, the cart. Midway through the next block he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that the doorman had fallen out of the race. It was only him and the former wrestler now, and he could hear the big man’s breath dragging at his lungs, torn ragged gasps that were like sobs, like an infant’s puling cry, like weakness and collapse. Without warning, Charlie dug in his heels and swung round on the bigger man and in the next moment felt him melt into his fist: the bell captain went down like a corpse. He lay there wheezing in the dirt, and when he rolled over on his back, the eyes loose in his skull, Charlie saw Bender, only Bender. His feet did the rest. A kick for the Otard Dupuy, another for the telephone in the private sitting room, one for Bookbinder, one for the sample boxes and one final bruising sharp-toed boot for the hope raised and the hope denied. He
knew it, knew it all along!