Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

And shut his eyes.

When he opened them again he felt, though they’d gone only another two dozen blocks, refreshed. Traffic had considerably thinned, but they were stopped four or five cars back at a signal waiting on a green left-turn arrow.

He lowered Dick’s window.

“Well,” the man said, “what is it this time?”

“I was just thinking,” Druff said, “I have more conversation with you than I do with my wife. We do more bickering, too.”

“You should take that up with your wife.”

“What is it,” Druff said, “how do I explain your nerve? It can’t just be tenure or the peaceable kingdom standoff between public servants, the lion/lamb sleeping arrangements we lay on each other, our mutual in-it-together durance. Sooner or later something stirs the straw. A smell, a sound, a movement, a look.”

“You’re really something, Commissioner. Think you can put me off with your one-on-one, you sweet-talker, you? Is a sound made in the forest if the Lincoln-Douglas takes place and there’s no one to hear? Maybe we never even had this conversation. I mean, why’d you call me? You got two drivers. Why’d you pick me to wake in the middle of the night? You don’t even trust me.”

“The only thing I don’t understand,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “is why anyone would go to such lengths. To put a twenty-four-hour tail on me, we never close. There are jobs in this town that make mine look pathetic. And I’m not so bad. Really,” he said, “I’m not so bad at all. I’m not greedy. I don’t solicit. I never hold my hand out. My policy — I hope you’re getting all this, Dick — has always been you call me up we make an appointment. We meet for drinks, we ask about each other’s kids, we look at one another’s snaps. My God, Dick, sometimes we get so caught up we never even get to the point. That’s happened. That’s happened plenty of times. More than you’d think. Because we’re each too embarrassed, if you take my meaning. Because a fellow thinks his innards are a hideous thing, his secret manners, what he does with his fluids. Jesus, Dick, we come on like we were career diplomats, secretaries of state. All of us, all of us do. Like we had silver hair and cards with our names embossed. Like we shower three times a day and speak only after we’ve tippy-tapped the crystal with our butter knives and have the attention of the table. And even then only to make gracious speeches, to thank our guests for coming and eating up our food. Folks are so shy, Dick. That’s why there’s actually less evil in the world than more.

“And none of us really thinks well of himself. Though we talk a good game and may try to drive our flimsiness off with our self-importance.

“Jesus, is that light stuck, or what? I have a theory that that Su’ad kid might have been killed because something was wrong with the traffic signal. That it wouldn’t turn red on the driver or something, and finally she got impatient, didn’t notice the car — maybe he didn’t have his lights on, maybe one was out, maybe he was just less than that mile from home where they say most automobile accidents take place — and she stepped off the curb without ever seeing it. That’s all that would have had to happen. From then on it’s all bingo bango, that’s all she wrote, good night nurse. Just look at that one up there if you want an example. Honk the horn, see can we get a little action here. Just listen to me, will you. So impatient, and I’m City Commissioner of Streets, for goodness sake.”

“Then why don’t you behave like one?”

Rather than sounding rude, the question, at least its tone, had seemed conciliatory, or as if Dick was waiting for an explanation, anything he could mark down as a mitigating or exculpatory circumstance. Well, the commissioner thought, that seemed fair. He would try to meet them — tired as he was, he was under no illusion any longer, if he ever was, that Dick was working on his own; there had to be at least two of them, at least two, since Dick himself had said that Druff could just as well have called Doug — halfway.

“Would you really have me behave like one?” he asked in what, playing to Dicky’s gallery, he hoped was a sort of wounded wonderment. “I mean would you? I mean, look at me. I mean, even if there are guys in City Hall with juice and firepower to beat the band, I’m Street Czar here. There are no other gods before me in the greater metropolitan area. Along the byways and highways, at least. On the blocks, at a minimum.

“I mean what about cable? Do you know what a cable franchise is worth to a street czar in a market like ours? What just maybe HBO or MTV is going for these days? We ain’t Chicago. Hell, we ain’t Detroit or even Indianapolis. Do you have any idea? Well, you could put your kids through college. You could put your kids’ kids through and have enough left over to buy everyone a fine dress and a nice suit for all their graduations. And I’m not even counting the buck or buck and a half skimmed off the top from the installation fees, or the two or three cents he realizes off every item on every order filled by the Home Shopping, or the penny for postage and handling.

“There are people who have founded fortunes, Dick, from behaving like City Commissioners of Streets. And I’ll tell you the truth — we’re telling the truth here, we’re telling the truth, we’re clearing the air — sometimes I wish I’d been more like them. Sometimes I wish I could have put my scruples behind me and gone for the mink fur with the chinchilla lining and just chucked the good gray Republican cloth or never claimed it again when it went to the dry cleaners. Rose Helen might have been a happier woman today if I had, Mikey a different young man.

“Well,” Druff said, “if wishes were horses beggars would ride. What’s done’s done, right, Dick?”

The left-turn arrow had come and gone and now they were waiting for it again. Only one car was in front of them.

“Oh,” Druff said comfortably, “my intention isn’t to whitewash myself. — Someone really ought to make a note of that signal. The timing’s off. And that’s another thing, one more area a City Commissioner of Streets could clean up, could pull it in plenty, make it worth his while to have his own gnome in Zurich. Because location’s what it’s all about to the merchants.”

“Location.”

“I agree with you,” Druff said. “If he’s on his toes the first thing a merchant does when he opens up in a new location is try and get next to someone like me — get him to fiddle with the traffic patterns, hold the Right or Left Turn on Green Arrow Only burning forever if it favors his shop, snuff it like that one there if it doesn’t. Did you know, Richard, that out in San Francisco, out in San Francisco, Chinatown is where it is today because back in the twenties the City Commissioner of Streets threw in his lot with the egg-roll interests and created it entirely out of traffic flow?

“So behave like a City Commissioner of Streets? Come on, kid, why not tell me to put a patch over my eye, wear my hand in a hook, my leg in a peg, and go for a pirate?”

They were still at the goddamn light, still waiting on the green arrow, almost posed there like racers waiting for a checkered flag, Druff smarting under the pressure of his own blocked flight path. “Jesus,” he said cunningly, “there’s all the latest wrinkles. There’s CDs back here and practically a microwave to boil my soup. Ain’t there a damn siren on this thing?”

“There’s a siren.” The chauffeur in him sounded almost miffed that Druff didn’t know the equipment.

“Use it, then,” commanded the City Commissioner of Streets.

“Use it? What about Dum dum de dum dum? What about the neighbors?”