Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Well, he was craven. To this day he winced at fireworks, was uneasy in electrical storms, terrified when fuses blew or the phone lines were down. It was as if he’d been raised in air raids, rubble.

It wasn’t, Druff knew, so much for his own safety he feared as the safety of his family. “Mom, Dad, I’m back,” he’d call when, no matter the hour, he let himself into the house. And if he or Rose Helen didn’t immediately respond he would march through the rooms looking for them. Nor was it love that made him call out this way. He needed protection. It was his fear of being suddenly orphaned. He needed protection, he needed reassurance. “Are we rich?” he would ask when he was still a teenager. “We’re comfortable,” Druff or his mother would tell him. He might mention the name of some friend’s parents. “Are we as comfortable as they are?” “Jesus,” Druff said, lying on the couch, his head up on pillows, “I sure am.” “No, really, Dad, no fooling. Don’t kid. Are we well off?” Druff estimated the size of his estate for him. “Is that net worth?” “What’s net worth?” (He was willing to tell him what they had. He only wanted to make sure the boy understood the term. Maybe, he reasoned, it might be a way of finally bringing his kid into the world.) “After probate. After outstanding debts.” “Gross,” Druff said. “Does that include insurance?” “Of course it includes insurance.” “But you’re rated, Daddy,” Mikey said, “you can’t get insurance.” “I’m a municipal official. I get term insurance.” “Do you have to take a physical for term insurance?” “I get the maximum for my grade. If I wanted to purchase additional insurance I’d have to take a physical.” Mikey was uncomfortable. “What about the house? Does it include the house?” “My term insurance?” “Your estate.”

So the commissioner began to tell his factless, troubled, finally unreassurable son about certain deals that went down, little fiddles he was involved in at the Hall. He made them seem innocuous, said he was doing only what all politicians did, but made him promise never to discuss any of this with his friends. To a certain extent Mikey seemed appeased, but Druff wondered if he’d made a mistake when the boy started coming to him with questions about how much time his father would have to serve if he was caught. “How long can they keep you in jail if you’re found guilty of taking bribes, Dad?” “Oh,” Druff said, “if you’ve been bribed, they usually let you off with a fine. If you’ve asked for the bribe they generally give you up to three weeks per thousand.” The boy shook his head, concerned. “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart,” he counseled his son, “you know it’s your dad’s policy only to accept bribes.” “I know that,” Mikey said, “it’s what all those fines could do to your net worth.”

Maybe he was exaggerating. Maybe he made Mikey seem worse than he really was. But he had him dead to rights in the essentials. His factless condition. His craven fear of the world, the frightful picture he had of himself left alone in it. His awful, debilitating dependency.

Though to look at him — Well, to look at him the word “debilitating” would never have occurred. He’d belonged to the same gym for years. Had been working out since before anyone had ever heard terms like “fitness craze,” “health food,” “steroids.” Even in blazers he looked muscular, even in suits, heavy winter overcoats, sheepskin jackets.

Power giving him neither self-confidence nor ease — he always wore his seat belt, still checked to see that all the car doors were locked before setting out on a journey — taking some weird, limited comfort not in sports heroes but in teams, leagues, as if it was only in the collective that he hoped to find some paradigm of fitness or invincibility to stand in for the pervasive flaws and frailties he saw all about him — Rose Helen’s just perceptible limp, Druff’s bust blebs and constricted heart; perhaps even a sense of his own naïveté (his ruling passion) — and that so terrified him about the world, his old anxiety that it was haunted and that when his mother and father died only he would be left, forced to spend his nights alone in it.

The city had no baseball franchise. Mikey fastened onto the Atlanta Braves, a ball club whose fortunes he could follow on cable. He rooted for his hometown football and basketball teams.

But it was hockey that consumed him and, of hockey clubs, the St. Louis Blues with which he passionately identified. He’d chosen hockey partly because of its long season, partly because of its intricate, complicated second season of play-offs, Mikey’s personal Manichaean system of extended drama, his second-chance, comeback heart. But mostly he’d chosen St. Louis because he’d been there once with his father, been to the Arena to watch them play, sat with him in the owner’s box, openly enjoying the privileged, baksheesh arrangement, sucking up power and favor and finding a kind of earnest in them of his dad’s license, some tiny, comfortable toehold on childhood and immortality. At any rate, Mikey had cast his lot with the St. Louis Blues Hockey Club. And though, except for an occasional game on television or the even rarer — although he watched for them every night — news clip on the local ten o’clock news — the town had no hockey franchise either — he never saw them play another game, he’d become a sort of whiz at picking them up on distant radio stations.

One night — this would have been when the boy was already in his twenties — they were in their bedroom and heard the downstairs door slam.

“Mom,” Mikey shouted, “Daddy? I’m back.”

“Up here,” Rose Helen called out.

“Dad too?”

“I’m all right,” Druff said.

He loomed powerfully in their doorway, huge, vastly troubled. Druff had a sudden vision of burst seat belts, broken door locks.

“KMOX was fading,” their son said. “Sometimes, when it fades like that, you can pick it up better in the car. I listened out there.”

“Did we win?” Rose Helen pretended to her son she was a fan. You went along to get along.

“Afterward, they were talking to the Star of the Game? He said the owner is thinking of moving the team to Canada. Dad, is that true?”

“I don’t know, Mikey. I don’t know anything about it.”

“He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“No.”

“We sat in his box.”

“We were visiting firemen,” Druff said.

“But you talked with him.”

“Fireman to fireman. He wouldn’t recognize my hook and ladder today.”

“But we sat in his box. How’d we get to sit in his box?”

“God damn it, Mikey. I was barely introduced to the man. We had those seats because I was a guest of the St. Louis streets commissioner. He had an in. If he came here he could go out on the snowplows or ride up front in the trucks when they salt for ice.”

The boy had developed a curious tic. He closed his eyes when his father became impatient or said humiliating things to him. It was as if by squeezing the light from his vision he was able to hide, go so far the words never reached him. He did that now. It broke Druff’s heart, the son of a bitch.

The commissioner softened.

“Even if they moved,” he said, “you’d still be able to pick up their games on the radio.”

“If they moved to one of those states they only speak French?”

“Quebec is the only province they speak French. Don’t they already have a team?”

“The Montreal Canadiens,” Mikey said. “The Quebec Nordiques.”

“There, you see?”

“What if he took them to one of those far-off places? I wouldn’t even be able to pick them up in the car.”