The Adjustment

NINE



THE ENEMIES LIST



I WAS SPENDING A little more time around the plant in the daytime and letting Herman Park take up a little bit more of the slack at night, preferring to carouse on my own, and the old man had picked up on the fact that I wasn’t around as much on his nocturnal excursions.

“What the hell are you hanging around here in the daytime for? That’s not what I pay you to do.”

“Thought it might be good to spend some time around the house in the evening, what with the wife expecting and all.”

He grunted and frowned. “I’m taking some flack for keeping you on, you know.”

He leaned back in his big leather chair and picked up one of the wooden models on his desk, an early Airmaster with black fuselage and golden wings. He moved it through the air, following it with his eyes and making a sputtering engine sound, the opiates having rendered him so boyish that it was hard to hate him, almost.

“That’s good of you,” I said.

“It’s Huff and that crowd on the board that’s been trying to replace me with the Missus. They think you’re a bad influence on me.” Down towards the carpet the Airmaster dove, saved at the last minute from disaster by the sure hand of its designer, who performed a couple of tricky loops on the way back skyward, still making that engine sound in the back of his throat. “And you’re paid too much versus what you actually do around here. You have some enemies in your own department, you know.”

“Mrs. Caspian,” I said.

“Nah, the big gal likes you, she’s the one who’s headed off an open rebellion down there.”

I was stunned to learn this about Mrs. Caspian, who’d never addressed a civil or unnecessary word to me in the entire time I’d known her. “I thought they all liked me okay down there.”

“There’s someone else they figure should be department head. I was thinking maybe I’d transfer you.”

“It’d be the same any place else. The fact is I ought to be on your personal payroll and not the company’s, but it’s your company and you run it the way you see fit.”

“You got that right, boy. Anyway, watch yourself around Huff.”

“Hell, I don’t even know him.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s the comptroller, he knows what you make, and he hears what goes on in your department. Which is pretty damned irregular. Thing is, see, Huff would love to see me carted out of here in a straitjacket so’s he could run the financial side his way, but that’s not going to happen, is it?” He brought the Airmaster down onto his desk for a perfect three-point landing, and I was impressed to note that its Lilliputian tires actually spun.

“How do you know all this?”

“Miss Grau keeps her ears open and tells me everything there is to know around this godforsaken place. Everybody talks to her, and a lot of people figure she probably doesn’t like you because you’re a bad seed and encourage my degenerate tendencies.” He laughed, as if that were the most ridiculous idea he’d come across all week.





I DROVE TO Stanley’s at Kellogg and Oliver and ordered a cup of coffee from a heavy, slouching waitress whose weak chin managed some sort of structural alchemy that made her wide face rather pretty. She stared at me after she brought the coffee, her manner neither hostile nor flirtatious, just curious. I did my best to ignore her as I wrote down a list of my known nemeses on a yellow legal pad.

I started with all the men in my department, and parenthetically added Mrs. Caspian to the list, albeit with a pang of guilt after hearing that she’d stood up for me. Until I could verify that, though, I would treat her as a possible quisling, just like everyone in the Publicity and Marketing Department.

Then I wrote down the name of Ernest J. Huff, the comptroller. I added the three members of the Board of Directors with whom he was allied: Mr. J.T. Burress, Mr. Wilbur Lamarr, and Mr. George Latham. The four of them had opposed Collins on matters of wartime production and postwar retooling, and I assumed they were the ones trying to replace the old man with his compliant wife. I put Mrs. Collins on there, too, just for the hell of it.

The waitress refilled my coffee cup and I asked her for a glazed donut to match her eyes. I added Hiram Fish to my list, not because he posed any real threat to me or the boss but because he was a fink who looked like a gigolo. I added Billy Clark because he’d stirred up all the trouble that ended up with the boss on narcotics, which was turning out to be a pain in the balls.

The waitress brought my donut and kept looking at me. Finally she spoke.

“Did you go to WU around ’36, ’37?”

“I sure did,” I said.

She grinned, and though it made her look familiar I still couldn’t place her. “Duane something?”

“Wayne.”

“That’s it! Remember me? Wanda Blythe? We had Biology together.”

I affected a look of joy. “Wanda, swell to see you.” Dear God, though, it wasn’t. I remembered her well, a lovely, charming sylph of a girl, possessed of a melodious giggle and a tendency to blush, and in my college years I wanted badly to get her into bed.

“Did you marry that girl? Was it Sarah?”

“Sally. Yeah, we’re married and she’s expecting our first.”

“Your first? After all these years? Gosh, I’m on my fifth already.” She patted her belly. “Pretty soon I’ll have to stop working on my feet and cashier until it comes.”

The idea that the young beauty I’d lusted after no longer existed hit me harder than I would have imagined. A sadness overtook me, a sense that the world I’d known was disappearing, decaying before my eyes, and I asked her to give me the donut in a bag.

“It’s for Sally,” I said. “Cravings.”





I ATE THE donut in the car on the way to Red’s. The sullen, self-pitying bartender wasn’t on the premises tonight, but there sat his cherished Barbara, looking more pie-eyed than usual. I wondered if Red had ever been told that the whole principle behind the b-girl system is feeding them watered-down drinks so they can keep cockteasing all night long without getting shitfaced and saying the hell with it and stumbling off to the parking lot with whatever charmer is lucky enough to get her to that exact level of inebriation.

Red Garnett was there tonight, sitting in a booth with a peroxide blonde who looked as drunk as Barbara did. Younger than Barbara, she looked rode hard and put up wet. When I went over to say hello I addressed Red only.

“How are you, Ogden? You working for the old flyboy any more? Never see you in here with him and that bodyguard.”

“I still am, just a different set of responsibilities now. Not so much babysitting.”

“Uh-huh. I heard about those responsibilities.” Red gave a low, rueful laugh. His hair wasn’t very red anymore but he still had most of it, and he reached back with his hand and smoothed down a cowlick. “Many’s the gal I’ve had to let go around here when they developed the habit. Methadone, is it?”

“No idea what you’re talking about, Red,” I said.

“Sure you don’t. Every time he comes in he’s goofy, the son of a bitch. You listen to me, you best get him off that stuff or you’ll find yourself in darktown scoring heroin some Friday midnight.”

“Doubt it.”

I knew that my failure to acknowledge the blonde’s presence would get her goat, and finally she looked straight at me. “Do you mind?” she said. “We were having a private conversation. And I don’t care to hear talk about that sort of low business.”

“Shut your noisemaker,” Red said. “You don’t determine what gets discussed.” He gestured to her. “Wayne, this here’s my wife, Betty.”

“Hello, Betty,” I said. Red was well over sixty, and despite her haggard appearance this girl wasn’t much more than twenty-five.

“You mind what I said now. You can get into trouble peddling scripts. Take it from one who knows.”

I sat down at a table by myself where some industrious cracker named FERLIN had applied his energies and skills to carving his name into the wood. No fewer than four Kilroys peered idiotically at me from that same tabletop, and someone named GaLEN had immortalized his love for a DoRothEa. The childishness of the inlay brought my anonymous correspondent to mind, and I felt an unexpected and unaccustomed sense of anxiety at the thought, accentuated by what Red had just said about my activities as a procurer of narcotics.

I set the legal pad down and by the time I got up to go home my list was filigreed with doodled pistols, daggers, skulls, and nooses, and I was no closer to neutralizing my enemies than I’d been before I walked in.





I’D TAKEN TO eating dinner at home on a regular basis, and Sally was making a serious effort to improve her cooking. The three miserable years she spent living in my mother’s house while I was in Europe hadn’t improved her skills in the kitchen; the old lady was an awful cook who had never cared for food much, possibly due to a head injury sustained when she was a young woman that diminished her sense of smell. Sally’s slovenly mother hadn’t been much of a cook either; when she was in a depressive trance, which was most of the time, she could hardly summon the wherewithal to throw together a roast chicken. During her occasional two–or three-day spells of frenetic activity, she’d concoct improvised artistic creations that wouldn’t have passed muster in the galley of an insane asylum, then cackle with glee at her family’s brave attempts to choke them down.

But Sally had noticed that I didn’t much like what she cooked, and she bought recipe books, and she was making improvements. She even made me calves’ liver and onions once a week, even though that meant she had to make herself a different main course. “It’s good for you,” I’d tell her, knowing full well the taste and texture nauseated her. “Full of iron. Good for baby,” a phrase that got thrown around a lot during those months.





THE CHANGE IN diet made more appealing the prospect of staying at home in the evenings, but one night after a strikingly unsuccessful attempt at a meat loaf—the spices the recipe called for struck her, in her delicate digestive condition, as unappealing, and at the moment it called for an egg to be folded in she realized we had none—I was feeling some hunger pangs and told her I was going out. Though she glared at me over my half-eaten lump of bland ground beef, overcooked to a blackish-grey stiffness, she didn’t object.





AND SO THAT evening I followed Park and Collins on their nightly prowl. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a woman, but when Collins decided he wanted to get some gals sent up to a room at the Eaton I didn’t object. Just like in the old days, I took care of renting the room, calling the fellow who ran the whores, and paying off the front desk.

I also made sure that the hotel detective got a separate payment, and when I poked my head in his office he greeted me like an old army buddy.

“Ogden, where the hell you been keeping yourself?” His pink, hairless head shone under the naked bulb in the overhead socket. The Eaton was still a swell place, but the hotel detective’s office belonged in a flophouse, right down to the worn-down trail in the carpet from door to desk and the peeling 1915 wall paper.

“Here and there, Jerry,” I said. “Out of trouble, mostly.” I handed him an envelope with a sawbuck in it.

“That doesn’t sound like the old Wayne. You out on the town with the boss?”

“Yeah, for old times’ sake. Got old Herman Nester sending some girls up, just so you know.”

“That’s fine. Most of Herman’s girls are class enough they don’t stink up the place. You tell the old man Jerry sends his best.”





AS PER USUAL we rented a suite for Collins and an adjacent single in case Park or I wanted to take a crack at the other girls. When they arrived I was drinking a Falstaff, Collins a water tumbler full of gin, and Park nothing at all. There were three of them, and as Jerry had indicated, they were high class by the standards of Wichita whores, neatly coiffed and dressed as fashionably as any outcall girls I’d seen. Collins was all over the first gal, groping her and pinning her to the couch while the rest of us sat quietly, waiting for him to make up his mind which girl he was going to f*ck. He got up off of the first one, a patient, unflappable redhead whose makeup and hair were considerably off-kilter, and moved to the second candidate. This one was a big-eyed, moonfaced blonde with a slight resemblance to Joan Blondell, and I was hoping Collins would settle on the third because I had always wanted to put the pork to Joan Blondell. Collins pulled her to her feet and backed her up to the wall, and she reached around and grabbed his ass and kissed him before he had a chance to move in. The old pervert was taken aback; he didn’t like aggressive girls as a rule. He pushed her to the wall again and pulled himself away, pirouetting inadvertently back onto the couch with a thud, right next to girl number three, another blonde. This one was a phony, and her features were so thin she looked a little like a ferret, but her makeup was applied professionally and to a drunkard’s eye she looked fine. Add to that her sly, eager smile and we had ourselves a winner.

While she and the boss adjourned to the bedroom I offered Park first dibs on the room next door. “No, thanks,” he said. “Got in a hell of a lot of trouble last time. Penicillin kind of trouble.”

Another rule I learned in the pimping trade: When screwing professional or semi-professional women, a prophylactic is always advisable. I didn’t say that to Park, though, since I was pretty anxious to get to that other room myself.





IN THE ADJOINING room the blonde call girl asked me if I wanted to undress her or watch her do it. I told her to go ahead and asked if she was up for an ass reaming.

“Sure, it’s ten dollars extra. You’ll have to go out for some Vaseline, though, I didn’t bring any. Also I need to be awful relaxed, so I’m gonna be needing my p-ssy eaten first.”

“Fine by me,” I said.

“I just mention it because a lot of guys won’t.”

“I’m not one of ’em.” I put my jacket on and poured her a drink. “I’ll hit the drug store and be back in a few.”





THE ALL-NIGHT DRUG store was just a few blocks away. Ten minutes later the clerk was ringing up the Vaseline, but not without trying to sell me on some Mentholatum instead. He was about twenty-two or three with too much grease in his hair, working too hard at being helpful.

“Most everything you can use the one for you can use the other. And it was invented right here in Wichita, did you know that? Plus it’s got the cooling menthol.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t think the whore in question wants her a*shole mentholated.”

His face went blank for a second, then he looked away with his mouth wide and without managing to meet my gaze again dropped the Vaseline in the paper sack.





BACK AT THE room the call girl was taking a bath with the bathroom door open. “I can come out any time,” she said. “This helps me relax beforehand.”

“Fine with me,” I said, watching her under the water.

“My hole’s already clean. Had a client wanted some yesterday and I haven’t had a BM since, so you’re in luck. You might have had to buy a douche bag, too.”

“I’ve always been lucky.”

“What’s your name?” She closed her eyes and slid down further under the water, her chest rising up slightly so that her nipples surfaced like big brown periscopes.

“Wayne.”

“Pleased to meet you, Wayne. I’m Irma.”

“Irma.”

“How’d you get interested in butt sex, Wayne?”

“High school. Had a girl wouldn’t do it the regular way.”

“Saving it, huh? I don’t exactly get that, but my sister’s that same way.”

“I only get a hankering for it every once in a while, but the wife’s knocked up and she won’t do it. Here’s hoping that’s temporary.”

“If it ain’t you know where to call.”





I SPENT A good fifteen minutes on cuntlapping, and then we got down to business. She was plenty relaxed by then, and her interior muscle control would have done a yogi proud. I was disciplined enough to get a good ten minutes out of her, though, and when I flopped down beside her afterward she had a peculiar smile on her face, like she’d just gotten away with some foul deed.

“I’ll tell you the honest truth, Wayne,” she said. “I like that just fine myself once in a while.”





WHEN I GOT back to the suite I found the old man sitting in an easy chair looking waxy and embalmed, staring straight ahead, and for a split second I wondered how he could be dead and still sitting up. Then he turned his head toward me.

“Ogden,” he said, voice sepulchral and strangling, “you have to help me.”

“Help you what?”

“Find me a doctor. Not my doctor. Not Pendleton, he can’t know about this.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It wouldn’t work, Ogden.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, what do you think I’m talking about?” He gestured toward the bedroom with his thumb, old yellow teeth bared and tears in his eyes. “It just wouldn’t stand up. You have to find me a sawbones to fix this.” He turned to the blonde whore, who was sitting with her redheaded friend on the couch. “And you, if you ever breathe a word of this I’ll have your tits cut off.”

“I’ll never breathe a word, sweetie. Anyway, believe me, it happens to every guy.”

“I’m sixty-three goddamn years old, I’ve had sexual intercourse at least once a day since I was seventeen and it has never, ever happened to me.” It was hard to tell whether the breaking in his voice was from rage or self-pity.

“You come see me again, you’ll do fine next time. I think you’re cute.”

“Well I think you’re a succubus. I think you stole the lead out of my pencil.” He stood up, pointing at her, and then he sat back down. He turned to Park. “Get the car, Herman.”





I ELECTED TO walk. It wasn’t that far, and it was a pleasant evening, getting warm with a clear sky and the stars thick as bedbugs. I picked up an Evening Beacon out of a machine on my way out and walked with it under my arm, thinking about Irma. That had been the best sexual experience I’d had since Italy, where one of my girls—as it happens, the one I got knifed over—had such exquisite muscle control that her colleagues charged half price on the nights she worked. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had any johns at all, so eager were the GIs to get a crack at the average-looking Giovanna. I learned an important lesson with those gals, that looks could sometimes come in second to personality and sexual experience and, occasionally, to anatomical idiosyncrasy. Not that I ever intended to pimp again, but speaking purely as a client I thought I had a leg up on my competing johns.

I got home and turned on the lamp and read the paper in the easy chair. On the front page was a photograph of a wife-killer getting taken into custody. His name was Bensen, a shop steward on the line over at Beechcraft, which meant he’d spent the war at home. Some guys were glad about that circumstance—getting classed 4-F, or having a militarily essential job—and some let it stick in their craw until they felt like they had something to prove. What struck me about the photo wasn’t the disheveled look of the skinny murderer, with his bloodstained undershirt and wild, greasy hair, but the expression of horrified surprise on his face as he found himself staring into the camera lens, as though the worst part of the day so far hadn’t been the realization that he’d gone too far and actually beaten his long-suffering Harriett to death, nor had it been his arrest (which, judging by his bloody lip, had also involved a walloping from the arresting officers). No, Bensen looked as though the worst of it was being ambushed by the Beacon’s photographer, the explosion of the tiny bulb in its round, silvered reflector, the worst day of his life forever enshrined in a morgue drawer of Wichita’s finest scandal sheet. The look was that of a public shaming; that look was why our Pilgrim forebears invented the stocks.

I knew my way around a camera. My grandfather’s work in photography had proceeded from the wet plate era to the first years of Kodachrome, and he had passed the rudiments of the trade on to me. I didn’t own a camera any more, but that night I started thinking about the possibilities. After all, I would certainly be needing a camera soon to record the first years of the baby’s life. Besides, who knew what kind of clandestine photographs a sly and resourceful shutterbug might be able to get, if he knew enough about his subjects’ habits and comings and goings?





THE NEXT MORNING before office hours I called Ezra Groff and arranged to bring Collins in for an early visit. When we arrived, Collins had on dark glasses and an old black overcoat of my own whose arms were a little short for him and a black slouch hat. He was addled that morning and, for the first time since I’d known him, seemed actually frail.

Groff was his usual curt self, but I could tell he was impressed to have such a luminary in his office. I offered to leave the room but Collins wanted me there. We sat across the desk from the doctor, who made a steeple of his fingers and nodded, frowning, at everything Collins said.

“I don’t believe you,” Groff said when the old man repeated his boast of having gotten laid every day of his adult life.

“Well, damn near anyway. Some days more than once so it amounts to the same thing.”

Groff shrugged. “And when you’re drunk you still manage?”

“Hell, yes.”

“And how many prescriptions for Hycodan are you current with?”

Collins looked over at me in search of an answer.

“Four,” I said. “But the other three are at higher dosages than the ones you write.”

Groff nodded, rubbed his temples, closed his eyes. “Mister Collins, it’s a tribute to your virility that this is the first time you’ve failed to achieve an erection, given the amount of opiates in your system.” The eyes popped open. “How are your bowel movements?”

“When I manage to have one these days it’s a big one.”

“Severe constipation’s another symptom.”

“Are you telling me I can’t have the pills any more?”

“You can have them if you want them. You just have to accept that they have other, unintended effects.”

“But if I want to have relations with a girl I have to quit.”

“You think about it. Have Mr. Ogden contact me if you want my help.”

Outside we got into the car. When I pulled away from the curb he tapped me on the shoulder (he was of course riding in the back seat). “You got any medicine on you? I need to think about this business real hard.”