Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

It was true, and she suddenly remembered the look. It had been there when old man Yellin bailed him out after Junior had worked over Ted’s books, and there it was again when his father had settled his gambling debts, all the times he had sprung to his son’s defense, made good on his losses, the thriving, striking codependency of his thievery, principle standing firm in the defense of what was only finally family. Yes, it was true. He had needed partners. Ted. The Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Consultants gang. Even, for a time, Hector Camerando, whose name he did not know and refused to hear. And now Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Are they very dear?” she asked.

“No, no, not at all. There’s different models of course. There’s low end and high end, but they’re all pretty reasonable. They go for between thirty-nine to a hundred ninety-nine dollars. There’s a good one put out by Radio Shack for about eighty-nine dollars.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Sensitivity,” he said. “You’re paying for power. The cheaper ones usually just pick up iron, the pricier jobs have a finer discrimination. But even the eighty-nine-buck jobs work in up to two inches of water.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Fools rush in, Dot.”

“If we do this,” said Mrs. Bliss, “what would we be looking for?”

“Like you said, the sky’s the limit, kid.” He looked at her solemnly, levelly, and uttered the remark as soberly as if he were offering inside information.

What he couldn’t know, of course, was that Mrs. Bliss had no use for inside information, or for his project, or even (it could have been the differential in their ages) for the limitless opportunities of young Junior’s sky. If she did this thing she would do it, quite simply, because, as he said, he needed a partner. He’d been a baby even when he was a young man. Now that he was an old one he was an even bigger baby.

Not for old time’s sake, not because he was one of the last direct living connections to her dead, beloved husband. Not out of sentimentality, and not out of any need for companionship, but simply because he was too used to his character and, partnerless (though much of his banter with Nathan Apple was pure snow job, he’d been caught at least a little short by her refusal to allow him to move in with her), he would flounder and wither and die.

She made a further show of interest by throwing faint demurrers in his path.

“Oh, no, Dorothy, quite serious people are engaged in this activity. Policemen in police departments hunting spent bullets and shells, actual murder weapons — guns, knives, and hatchets.”

“I hope we don’t find anything like that.”

“And lose out on the reward money?”

“Just the same,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Treasure hunters,” Junior mused. “Archaeologists. Prospectors.”

At Yellin’s insistence they bought two devices. So they could halve the size of their sites. So they could double their efficiency. Nor was he content to buy one of the cheaper models. He argued more bang for the buck and quite agreeably forked over two hundred dollars for Radio Shack’s deluxe detector. Mrs. Bliss, who felt she’d done her part by agreeing to go in with him in the first place, was not to be bullied into buying something beyond her price range. This was Junior’s hobby-horse, not hers, and if he chose to ride it in some Cadillac of metal detector, Mrs. Bliss was content to go with a perfectly serviceable Buick LeSabre. She bought the one for eighty-nine dollars, batteries not included.

Despite what he’d said she had no idea how the things worked, so naturally she was a little surprised when he came by for her that first day in one of the various off-road vehicles to which he seemed to have such unlimited access. He handed her a trowel, a small shovel, a sort of short-handled hoe.

“What’s this?” Mrs. Bliss asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yellin said, “we’ll settle up later.”

“No,” she said, “what is this? We’re digging a garden?”

“A treasure garden, what else?” Yellin smiled. “What, you thought this was a magnet? That all you have to do is run it over the ground and it picks stuff up like a Hoover?”

As a matter of fact that pretty much was what she thought and, feeling how foolish she must seem to him, blushed.

Junior grinned and tried to explain how the metal detector was actually a kind of transmitter that sent out waves. These were amplified, converted into signals that were then reflected back to the instrument. Listening to him, hearing him out, patiently trying to absorb the information he attempted to hand down from the superior heights of his male, mechanical inclination and intuitions, Mrs. Ted Bliss gave up years, returned in seconds to the trusting, contingent condition of her brief girl- and maidenhoods, her extensive marriage, much of her almost as extensive widowhood. Yellin might have been some faintly ill-willed Manny teaching her the art of balancing checkbooks, the two DEA agents violating her husband’s car, Holmer Toibb giving her homework assignments, a Hector Camerando laying down the who’s whos and what’s whats, or Alcibiades Chitral describing for her the limits of her humanity. He might have been Rabbi Beinfeld alerting her to bold, arcane death escapes, tricks of the trade. He might, God bit her tongue, have been a sort of Frank, or for that matter, any man who’d ever rushed in to instruct her — even her beloved Ted.

Junior Yellin was like any other man. She was old, and couldn’t hurt his feelings.

As Yellin explained she remembered the year in Michigan, the last time she’d been a farmer. Well, farmer’s wife, actually, with her chores (which she didn’t mind) and discomfort (which she did), and proposed that she first go upstairs to change into more suitable clothes.

“But you look fine,” Junior objected, anxious to start.

“I thought it was magnets,” Mrs. Bliss said. “I thought it would be more like fishing than digging and pulling.” Before he could object further Mrs. Bliss turned and walked back into Building One. Upstairs, she improvised a costume she thought more suitable for the work that lay in front of her. She exchanged her wedgies for a pair of Isotoner slippers and took off her polyester pants suit and put on a long, loose-fitting sun dress with a white blouse. She found some light cotton gardening gloves (from her days as a landlord’s wife), and finished off her outfit with a big, white, wide-brimmed straw hat beneath which she fitted a large silk scarf that she drew down the sides of her face and tied under her chin.

“Excuse me, Dorothy dear,” Junior Yellin said when she returned to the strange vehicle, “but you look like a fucking beekeeper.”

Because even though she’d lived in Florida for all these years she was terrified of the sun.

As frightened of it as one living above a fault line, or on the side of a dormant volcano, or in the direct path of tornado activity, the Florida sun an object of dread and superstition to her, some poisonous sky augury like an ominous arrangement of planets. Moving to Florida had been her husband’s idea and, when they first started their forays into Miami Beach back in the fifties, often with other couples and always over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the winter warmth after the bitter Chicago cold had been an agreeable novelty. During the days they shopped or played cards under immense beach umbrellas and ordered sandwiches and bottles of pop from the towel boys. At night they shuffled from hotel to hotel catching the shows, Sophie Tucker a headliner, Jack Carter, Myron Cohen, Buddy Hackett. They were hardly aware of the sun and, after the first time or two when one or another of the group suffered bad sunburns, they gradually learned to budget the time they spent outdoors, which hours of the day were the safest to go.