Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Screw the neighbors. Use it. Step on it. Take me home.”

Almost wearily the man made a show of producing a Mars light from somewhere beneath the dash and slapping it on the roof.

“Turn it on. Use it. Let’s get out of here.” Druff lowered all the limousine’s windows. Instantly they were awash in piercing sound, noise.

“So what do you have on me?” Druff suddenly demanded, enraged, furious, startling his spy. “What do you have on me besides the crap I’ve been handing you to take up your time and run out your tape?”

He’d pulled down one of the jump seats and moved into it. He’d leaned his head through the partition opened between them and was speaking devastating, incriminating things in a normal voice directly into his driver’s head, decibels beneath the ability of any sound equipment to register it against the continuous crescendo of the siren. “Just what, eh? What? The sexual goods? Big deal. Everyone alive has sexual goods. If they never even raised a hard-on they have them. There are no eunuch hearts. There ain’t a pussy living could pass a white-glove inspection. Not inside your maiden aunt in old lace and mothballs. Not under your mommy before she met your daddy. The sexual goods is just what’s baked inside all those innards I was trying to tell you about.

“So just what? Tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can help you find it.

“Who’s after my job? You ain’t the private sector, you aren’t the type. Who’s after my job? Is it Basset in Parks? Murphy in Hospital Administration? Who are my enemies here? Give me a clue. Sounds like? Is it Roth from Sanitation? Stern out of Water Treatment, De Conde from the art museum, someone on the school board? Somebody else? Is it Lap, the alderman? Yalom, the comptroller? Just who am I up against? What? Because ain’t we pals, don’t we go back, aren’t we thick? I’d tell you. Honest injun I would. I’d tell you who you were up against. I will, as a matter of fact. You’re up against me. Look for me on the monuments, I’ll be waiting for you. Look for me up along the ledges. Down by the railroad tracks where the freight trains live. Among the struts and spars and webbing on the spans above the rivers. Expect me in the cages of the tigers and the bear pits at the zoo. I’ll be right there behind you on the newspaper that lines the bottom of the bird cage. We’re into melodrama here, turf, putsch and the Higher Bullshit. Look for me backstage, on the catwalks, in the costume jewelry on the heavy chandelier dangling from the ceiling of the opera house.”

Despite what the Mars light and siren seemed to be saying, they were proceeding slowly, moving along barely faster than the pace of a float in a parade. The chauffeur seemed cowed and interested. Druff was moved, very excited. Past four, almost into false dawn, after the heaviest date he’d ever had, and him fifty-eight already, practically pushing sixty, and that meal heavy too for a man in his delicate position on the actuarial tables, Druff was feeling and talking like the old Bobbo again. He took another reading of their stately pace, noted its discrepancy with the terrific sound they made, the bewildered responses of what was left of the traffic. This was MacGuffin. This was MacGuffin, too, he thought. These odd displacements, the skewed idiosyncratic angle of their engagement.

Dick said something the commissioner couldn’t hear. Druff asked him to please turn off the siren, how did he expect to be heard over all that racket.

“I think you are,” Dick said, “if you want to know.”

Druff didn’t follow him, listened for hints in the tone of his voice, from which, like the stilled siren, all hostility seemed to have been drained. Indeed, they seemed to have exchanged moods — Dick, exhausted, now as worried and wounded as the commissioner had been twenty minutes earlier, puzzling the traffic, parsing the now-you-see-it- now-you-don’t essence of his fled MacGuffin. It’s what Dick might have been doing, lying back, nursing his abeyant energy, waiting for the proper growing conditions of a fallow strength. His voice was not just polite, it was courteous, almost obsequious. Like the fearful voice of a fallen foe. He would tell Druff anything he wanted to know. What Druff wanted to know was the question to the answer he had just provoked. Dick the Spy, who seemed to know so much about him, evidently knew this, too. “I said I think you are. You asked for an enemies list. You’d have to be on it. In my opinion. Right up there.”

“Jeez,” said Druff, “out of the mouths of babes.”

And, turning around on the jump seat, sat back. Leaning his head against the window between them, closed again, resting his hair, leaving greasy trace elements from Glorio’s bed — hair tars, soured breath shellacs, lamb and soufflé resins, love-nest suets — on the rapidly amortizing municipal glass. He was so tired. He couldn’t remember when he’d been so tired. And rode braincase to braincase with the driver, only the partition intervening. He could have been more comfortable, of course, if he’d stretched out on the long leather back seat, but it was worth his life to move just then. He just couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t in him. When, he wondered, did those guys in the movies catch catnaps? Always on the go, on the run, making a moving target of themselves. All that going, going, going, all that stress. Boy, thought Druff, it took a heap of living to make a heap of living. A man his age? Was it worth it? Yeah, he thought, tasting Glorio’s glorious gall again, her mouth gone off like laundry. But recognizing the pattern now, the dangerous action/respite pulses of adventure, would not permit himself to drift off. That’s why he sat in the jump seat. That’s why he pulled himself up.

Right up there? Well, he didn’t believe him. A politician, even so peripheral a one as himself, had enemies. The simplest candidacy called them down on your head — your opponent, everyone in the other fellow’s campaign, everyone who would vote against you. And it was a myth that they didn’t hold grudges, that everyone came together again after you sent off your concession telegram and read it against the silenced dance band and canceled joy of your disappointed rooters and partisans. Add your enemies to your enemies list, add your rooters and partisans. Well, it was a question of worldview, wasn’t it? Of Manichaean divisions. Darkness, light. Of generosity, of the hint in the heart that you don’t live long enough to afford generosity. It was ancient political principle, the basis of party. Frighten the demons, fend bears with the fire. Or use it to dance around the light. Joy factions, fear. The there’s-no-tomorrows. The waste-not-want-nots. Lo the Democrats, lo Republicans. You had enemies. He had enemies.

Oh, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Druff mourned his boy. Whose trouble was that he had no facts. No hard information. Was without data, proofs, lowdown. Chapter and verse. Grounds. Had neither at hand nor on call any of the hard evidentiaries of the world, none of its soft circumstantials. Who was neither learning-disabled — he knew his alphabet when he was three, could read when he was still in kindergarten — nor stupid so much as plunked down in a world he did not take in. (He confused, for example, motels and hotels, always said the one when he meant the other. Motels, Druff had constantly to remind him, stood for motor hotels. They were the ones with the swimming pools.) It was as if, at entirely the wrong age for it, he had been moved to a country whose language he did not understand, would never completely master.

Also there was the question of his alarming, unreasonable fears. He lived at a level beneath cause, some constant red-alert life. Druff remembered — this would have been before seat belts came in — that Mikey insisted that all the doors in an automobile be locked before he would let his father — otherwise he would cry, howl, scream bloody murder — turn the key in the ignition.