The Adjustment

THREE



A PALMFUL OF WARM SPIT



A FEW DAYS LATER I was still getting over the shock of having knocked up my wife. Sally had woken up nauseous and pissed off at me for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words, and for the first time since my return in May I was missing the nature of my relations with the gals in my employ in Rome: sexual in several cases but strictly impersonal.

It was Monday morning and my first task of the day was to spring a couple of farmboys at Police Headquarters downtown. The clerk didn’t ask me why I was bailing them out, just gave me the fisheye and breathed in and out with a loud, phlegmy sound while he filled out the forms and stamped the endorsement onto the back of the Collins Aircraft Company check. Considering the amount of time I spent watching and helping Everett Collins break various laws, the clerk and I probably ought to have been on a first name basis, but the great man couldn’t get arrested in Wichita for anything short of manslaughter. The clerk knew who I was, though, and he knew what the farmboys had done.

“Heard they busted his ribs. Heard Billy Clark wasn’t much help to him, either. Some bodyguard.”

“That’s about right.”

“You fixing to bail him out too?”

“I’m going to let Billy-boy cool his heels in the jug until he’s arraigned. Let him do some thinking in there.”

“Heard he told old man Collins he was retired from the force.”

“Isn’t he?”

“Hell, no. Fired, fall of ’44. Pulled his service revolver on a civilian over at Lawrence Stadium, off-duty, before a ball game. Claimed it was a legit arrest, turned out to be a beef over a parking space. We hired a whole bunch of 4-F morons when our men started signing up and getting drafted, and that’s one time it bit us right in the ass. Collins ought to have had him checked him out before he put him on the payroll.”





ONCE THEY GOT out, the farmboys didn’t show much curiosity as to who I was or why I’d posted their bail. A pair of giant brothers by the name of Gertzteig, they seemed to think this was just the way things worked in the big city. “Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”

We went across the street to the drugstore and sat down. “Anything you like, boys, it’s on me.”

A couple of uniformed officers were enjoying their complimentary breakfast at the other end of the lunch counter, and glancing at the brothers, they surely pegged them for the recently sprung drunks they were. Back at the pharmacy counter I could see the pale, baldheaded druggist staring daggers at the freeloading cops. He hated giving away those free meals, and locating his drug store across the street from City Hall turned out to be the worst mistake he’d ever made.

The Gertzteigs ordered up t-bones and fried eggs, sunny side up, and hash browns and toast, both of them, and they attacked the meals when they came in exactly the same order: potatoes, eggs, toast, steak. They weren’t twins, as far as I could tell, but they matched each others’ motions pretty well. I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a fight with them, especially with a wobbly drunk like Collins on my side.

“So here’s the deal, boys. You know the old man you hit?” I asked between mouthfuls of corned beef hash.

“Only hit the old guy but the one time,” said the bigger of the two. “In the ribs.”

“Once’t was enough,” said his brother.

“We wasn’t mad at him so much, it was his friend.”

“The old man feels bad you spent the night in jail, and he wants to give you a little something to get home on.” I handed them each an envelope containing a fifty dollar bill. Examining the contents they grew more slackjawed than before.

“Golly damn,” said the bigger one. “That’s purt square of a feller just lost a fight.”

“He doesn’t want you boys to walk away from Wichita thinking that’s the way things usually go in the big city. Now can I give you boys a ride to wherever your car is so you can get on back to Butler County?”





I DIDN’T BOTHER phoning Collins to tell him about it. He’d grouse about the expense and indignity of having to pay off the cretins who’d broken two of his ribs, but in a day or two he’d see the logic of it, and he’d be as grateful as I was for the knowledge that the Gertzteig brothers had no idea of the identity of their assailant-turned-benefactor. And my next task was unpleasant enough without Collins making it worse. By ten AM Billy Clark had already been before the judge and released, and I called him on the phone and told him to meet me at Red’s.





I WAS STASHING the receipt for the boys’ bail in my inside overcoat pocket when I noticed an envelope I’d almost forgotten. It was addressed to WAYNE OGDON COLLINS AIRPLANE CO. WITCHATA KAS, and it had nonetheless managed to make its way to my desk a mere two weeks after someone mailed it from Salem, Massachusetts, a town I had never visited and from which no acquaintance of mine had, to my knowledge, ever sprung. I guess I’d had it sitting there in the pocket for a week or more, some irrational sense of dread having stopped me from opening it when I saw it laying there on top of some reports I didn’t intend to read.

Inside was a penciled note, crudely printed in block letters:

YOU SON OF A BITCH THIEF THERES’ BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. ERUOPEAN LADYS ARE DELICATE AS FLOWERS.





Something went sour in my stomach, and I tried to put it down to the corned beef.





THAT NIGHT WE sat in Billy Clark’s usual booth. It was another quiet night at Red’s, but we were familiar enough from our visits with the old man that the b-girls didn’t bother us, though one of them kept giving us cold, appraising looks that gave me the fantods. “What are we going to do about this?” I asked him.

“Don’t know,” he said. He had two black eyes and a split lower lip, and his right index finger was in a little metal splint wrapped with surgical tape.

“You should have told Mr. Collins when he hired you that you couldn’t fight worth a damn.”

“You didn’t see them two farmboys that jumped us,” he said.

“I sure did, I made their bail and paid ’em off and sent ’em back to Butler County. Now what the hell were you thinking starting a fight yourself? And don’t try telling me anything different because I talked to three people who watched it.”

“I don’t know, Wayne. Something about them just set me off.”

“Another thing. Mr. Collins knows about the incident that lost you your badge.”

He reared back and craned his neck to look at the ceiling, a gesture meant to convey exasperation at the unfairness of the thing that instead suggested an inability to meet my eyes. “That business was a bunch of lies from start to finish.”

“Nonetheless Mr. Collins feels it would be best if you sought employment elsewhere.”

His mouth hung open and his eyes watered as if I’d just slapped him. All he’d expected was a reprimand. I was tired of looking at Billy, though, and I didn’t like his lying, and he’d proved that as a bodyguard he was useless. I handed him a check on Collins’s personal account. “Two weeks severance and you’re lucky to get it.”





COLLINS HAD TAKEN to phoning me at home, a familiarity I was beginning to resent but hadn’t yet figured out how to stymie. That night when he called I told him I’d fired Billy. Might as well take the hit now if he was going to react badly.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, complete with tightly controlled breathing. “Son of a bitch had some balls calling himself a bodyguard. Put an ad in the paper for somebody new.”

“Already set for tomorrow’s Beacon.”

“Shit. That Jew rag? Put one in the Eagle instead. Nobody reads the Beacon but left-wing degenerates.”

This I would ignore. I liked the busty girl who ran the Beacon’s classified desk. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Come on over and see if you can’t sneak some booze in. Bring a flask or two. Make it three. I can hide ’em; we’ll tell the old bitch you’re here to discuss advertising strategy.”





THE AD IN the Beacon read as follows:

Man with police or military experience wanted for bodyguard work. Familiarity with firearms essential.





References. Box 397, Beacon.





The day after the notice first appeared I had half a dozen responses. One was a woman whose husband had taught her to use a rifle. Two were from ex-convicts who at least had the honesty to admit it. One was from Billy Clark, admirably already on the lookout for new opportunities. The two who remained were ex-servicemen, and I made arrangements to meet them both at Stanley’s diner at Kellogg and Oliver.

The first was a barrel-chested ex-marine who sat across from me, seething over some unspecified grievance.

“How’s civilian life agreeing with you?” I asked him.

“Bitch don’t know when to quit.”

“Yeah, ain’t that the way.”

“I swear to Christ, Mister, I know she was f*cking my brother while I was gone.”

A hell of a thing to say to a stranger in the context of a job interview, I thought; this guy needed his head shrunk more than he needed a job. “That’s pretty rotten,” I said, as blandly as I could.

“I’m going to prove it, and then I’m going to kill them both.”

His name was Rackey, and though I knew he wasn’t going to work as a bodyguard, I had an idea I might find a use later on for that barely contained violent impulse of his. “Listen, Mr. Rackey, it looks like the bodyguard position’s already filled, but I have another proposition for you until a similar position opens up again. How would you like a job on the line at Collins aircraft?”

“I already been told they won’t take me, on account of my dishonorable discharge.”

“That’s all right, pal.” I sent him over to the plant with a strongly worded note of recommendation, complete with the suggestion that the order was coming from the old man himself. Whatever it was I figured Rackey could keep out of trouble on the floor until I figured out some better use for him.

The next candidate fit the bill better. Herman Park’s history of violence was all within societally approved norms: the army (1931–37, 1942–46), Golden Gloves, and a stint with the Emporia Police Department in between. Somewhere along the line he’d had his nose broken, probably more than once.

“Why didn’t you go back to Emporia after you mustered out?” I asked him.

“Wife moved down here for war work in ’43. Wants me to get a job in an office or on an assembly line. I’d rather get my teeth pulled.”

“How about the Wichita PD?”

“Not hiring. Too many ex-cops coming back, so many of them they’re letting go some of the 4-Fs they hired during the fighting.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Some of those guys were walking around with a chip on their shoulder.”

“Sure, everybody thought they were yellow. Tell you what, there were days in Germany I’d have traded places with any one of those guys, though.”

I told Park he was hired and said I’d introduce him to Collins as soon as he was ready to carouse again.

“That’s swell, Mr. Ogden.”





I WAS FEELING like a good citizen, having found jobs for two returning vets, and I headed back to the plant to notify the personnel department, the head of which hated me. He had reason, since I regularly forced him to hire people he didn’t want to on Everett Collins’s say so. He was all right with Park, understanding as he did the need for a bodyguard for the boss, but he tried to put his foot down regarding Rackey.

“We’ve already got this Rackey fellow on file, and we’re not hiring him.” His reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, and on the word “not” he whipped them off for emphasis. He was right, of course; Rackey didn’t meet any of the minimum requirements. Nonetheless I didn’t like him telling me no.

“Mr. Whittaker, you will give Mr. Rackey a job. A job on the line. You will clear it with the shop steward, and if he has any trouble you report it directly to me. Is that understood?”

He picked up a manila file and waved it. “Do you know why he was thrown out of the Marines?”

“Don’t care.”

“He was court martialed and found guilty of cruelty to animals.”

I thought he was kidding and started laughing.

“It’s not funny. He killed a poodle that belonged to his colonel’s wife.”

“I don’t believe you. There’s no such charge in the Military Code of Justice.”

“And when they arrested him for it they needed four MPs, two of whom were hospitalized with broken bones.”

“You get all this from the Marines?” I asked, impressed with his thoroughness.

“You bet. We’re still a military contractor, bub, and when I have to check someone’s background I go to the source.”

“Have him work on civilian planes, then,” I said, and left him steaming.





I STOPPED IN at my own office and said hello to Mrs. Caspian, the secretary of the Publicity and Marketing Department. I liked her because she made no bones about not liking me. She knew enough about my real duties at Collins to hold me in contempt, and I admired her integrity in not pretending otherwise. She was a plump brunette who smelled of rosewater and Old Golds, and other than hating me she was an exemplary secretary. No one but Mrs. Caspian showed any resentment at working under a man who left the running of the department entirely to them and who took all the public credit for it. I didn’t know beans about publicity, anyway, or about the airplane industry, either. As a kid I was wild about airplanes, but I’d gotten over that well before the war, which had certainly drained whatever romance aviation had left for me. I might as well have been working for a company that manufactured washers or adding machines.

As long as I drew a paycheck and was allowed to come and go as I pleased I was fine. And make no mistake, I earned my living, wrangling our drunken founder in and out of roadhouses, hotels, and whorehouses.

On my desk were some roughs of trade magazine advertisements that I was meant to initial if they met my approval. This was a sham, since nine times out of ten I wouldn’t show up at the office until long after deadline; oftentimes whoever placed it there would eventually recoup it and initial it himself. I scrawled my okay and dropped them on Mrs. Caspian’s desk, and she ignored me. All was as it should be in the publicity and marketing department.





I STOPPED BY Collins’s office to get a look at Millie Grau, on the pretense of checking to see if anything needed to be taken to the old man at home. There was nothing, Millie told me, then she asked me if I’d like a cup of coffee. “I don’t usually brew any when Mr. Collins isn’t in the office. He drinks it all day long. My gosh, I’d be all atwitter if I did that. But I sort of like a cup this time of the afternoon, if you know what I mean.” I’d been drinking it all day at the diner, interviewing the bodyguards, but since it would involve her bending down to get the paper cups from the lower cabinet I told her yes.

She chirped about this and that as she busied herself with the coffee, and when she knelt down before the cabinet her black skirt pressed so tightly against her ass I thought I might pass out from the sudden rush of blood away from my head.

“I sure do miss having Mr. Collins around,” she said. To my knowledge the old goat had never made any attempt to screw her; maybe it was her squeaking voice that short-circuited his normal urge to pursue anything in a skirt within groping distance, though I personally found that it added to her appeal. It wasn’t out of any sense of professional decorum, either, since in addition to any number of girls on the production line, I knew Collins to have f*cked a very homely predecessor of Millie’s before the war, a certain Miss Schergren, enthusiastically and regularly. And a young woman with strong religious principles usually just excited his sense of sport; I’d chauffeured a Seventh Day Adventist up to Kansas City for a medical procedure just two weeks before I shipped off in ’42.

I was standing close enough to her to smell the Doublemint on her breath—she must have been chewing it on the sly when I walked in—mingled with a tart scent redolent of citrus and cinnamon, a scent quickly overpowered by the percolating coffee.

“He should be himself in a day or two.”

“No he won’t,” she said. “Have you ever had a broken rib? It hurts every time you breathe.”

“Is that so?”

“And all they can do is wrap up your chest. It’s awful.”

“It must be.”

“And you’re such a good loyal friend to him.”

I was paid to be, is what I thought, but I didn’t want Miss Grau to think me cynical. “Well, he was my hero when I was a kid. All that Lucky Lindy-daring flyboy stuff. Goggles and rippling scarves and machine guns, shooting down German planes.”

She giggled. “You sound like Donald.”

“Who’s Donald?”

She raised her left hand to display a decent sized rock, either a zircon or a pretty expensive piece of stone and silver. “Didn’t you hear? I’m going to be Mrs. Donald Thorsten.”

I certainly didn’t want to marry Millie, and short of that I knew I’d never get the chance to take her to bed. Why, then, this ache upon hearing the news of her betrothal? “What’s his line?”

“He’s the new associate pastor at my church. Since last November.”

“That’s swell. I know you’ll be happy.”

“I’m so excited. The big day’s this November, because Donald feels very strongly that a couple shouldn’t marry if they haven’t known one another at least a year.”

“Wise man,” I said.

She poured me a paper cupful of mild java, and I spent a few minutes extolling the virtues of married life before making myself scarce. It was close to the end of the shift and I didn’t want to get stuck in the traffic heading westward away from the plant. There was no reason I couldn’t have headed straight for home, but instead I headed for Red’s.





RED’S WASN’T HOPPING. There was a copy of the Evening Beacon on the bar, and I was interested to see on page four that a man in his fifties had drunk himself to death in an apartment west of downtown, not far from the Masonic Home, while his wife rotted away in the next room, having died of undetermined causes several days earlier. The reporter, Fred Elting, was always a good one for nasty details on these sorts of stories, and he wasn’t afraid to sensationalize. “What kind of city are we living in today, where a man is so afraid to report his wife’s decease to the proper authorities that he pickles himself to death with gin while she molders by his side? Is this what our brave men fought for in Europe and Asia?”

To tell you the truth, Fred, I wasn’t giving Wichita and its lonesome drunks much thought when I was over there.

There wasn’t much else of interest in the paper, and I fell into talking to one of the b-girls. Her name was Barbara, and she looked like she must have been a lot of fun before the war. The 1946 model had a drinker’s puffy face, though, and a little bit of a paunch that her girdle wasn’t quite containing beneath her dress. “That’s a pretty thin dress for March,” I said.

“It’s been pretty balmy the last few days,” she said, crossing her legs, the slit in her dress aligning to give me a perfect view of the top of her right stocking. Her legs were okay, and the leer she was giving me suggested that a few good times might still be had with the old girl. “Where’s your friend?”

“He got into a fight the other night,” I said, thinking she meant Collins. “His bodyguard let him get his ribs broken.”

“Wait a minute, the bodyguard has a bodyguard?”

Was she really that drunk or that stupid? “You’re talking about Billy Clark?”

“Good-looking fella sits in a booth and watches you and old Collins drinking and having fun?”

“That’s him.”

“I always feel kind of sorry for him.”

“He got beaten up too, and he lost his job on top of it, so your pity’s not entirely misplaced.”

“Gosh. Lost his job and everything?”

“He’s a goddamn idiot. What kind of numbskull bodyguard starts a fight with a couple of big hayseeds he couldn’t whip sober?”

“Well, that Collins is a creep and a pervert.”

I had no argument against that. “He pays okay,” I countered.

“He was screwing my girlfriend Lottie, had her on all fours. Pushed her face down onto the mattress, just spit in his hand and did it pretty as you please. Boy she was mad. Threatened to go to the cops and report him as a pervert.”

“Cops don’t care.”

“Sure they do! It’s called sodomy and there’s a law against it in the state of Kansas.”

“I mean the cops don’t care about it when Everett Collins does it.”

“Well he sure seemed scared because when he sobered up he paid her two hundred and fifty dollars afterward not to squawk.”

All this sex talk, on top of my earlier encounter with Millie Grau, was getting me thinking I needed my ashes hauled one way or another tonight. I thought of my beautiful wife at home, and comparing her in my head with the alcoholic harridan before me there was no way to find her wanting. But Barbara wasn’t going to ruin it by talking afterward about baby clothes or what religion to raise the little interloper in.

Fifteen minutes later I was tucking my shirt back into my pants while she tugged her threadbare rayon panties back on, then deftly rehooked her brassiere behind her back. Her armpits were stubbly and dusted with something like talcum.

“In Europe the girls don’t shave under their arms,” I said, rolling the window down to toss the used rubber out onto the gravel.

“That’s disgusting.” She seemed genuinely offended.

“You get used to it. When I first got back my wife’s shaved pits looked odd to me.”

She got quiet for a minute while she pulled her stockings on and attached the garters. “I don’t sleep with married men as a rule,” she said, finally and with undisguised peevishness.

I bristled at the implied slur on my character. In a spiteful moment I pulled a ten from my wallet and put it in her cold, sweaty little hand. “Just a little something to get you by.”

She looked at it for a second like it was a turd some little songbird had laid on her palm, then wadded it up and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “What the hell do you take me for?” she said. “I don’t take money for screwing.”

“Sorry,” I said, unable to suppress a grin. When we were fully dressed I followed her back inside and bought her a drink.

“Here’s to you,” she said, raising her glass.

“Post coitum animal triste, as my grandpa used to say.” Down the hatch, burning all the way.

“What’s that mean? That a toast?”

“Means I ought to think about getting home for dinner.”

“When you coming back next?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, just got up off of the stool and walked away. The bartender on duty, a lanky, hollow-cheeked fellow, watched me go with a look on his face like I’d just shot his mother, and I realized the truth of the old saw that there’s someone for everyone in this world.