Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Then when they played in the States. You could hear them when they played Chicago. On the Pittsburgh station. Plenty of places.”

“Half their games are at home.”

“It hasn’t happened yet. These things are complicated. Most of the time they fall through.”

The thin reassurance seemed to settle him, but then he found out there was a newsstand downtown where they sold yesterday’s out-of- town papers. Each day the kid took their car and fought the traffic and went there to buy the St. Louis papers. He pored over details about the impending sale. Taking hope — more than hope, euphoria — when articles began to appear saying that a consortium of St. Louis businessmen was trying to put a package together to buy the team and keep it in the city. Mikey’s moods hung on these delicate negotiations. He followed the proceedings closely. He kept Druff posted. He dragged Druff in.

And Druff — this was what constituted current events for Mikey — almost felt honored, an elder statesman, a good gray eminence. He followed the proceedings himself. He sent Doug or Dick out to buy his own out-of-town papers, special-ordering the Canadian papers, not just the ones in Calgary and cities even farther west with a declared interest in acquiring the team, but the Toronto and Montreal papers, too, where the sale of the Blues was also current events. He went over the information with Mikey, parsing the various accounts and rumors like Americans in a foreign country discussing late-breaking but already outdated developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis, say, as new reports filtered down to the International Herald Tribune, and then to Americans lingering in foreign cities, waiting on every fresh detail.

In a way, they’d never been closer, more psychological with each other.

The team had gone into a slump. Mikey suggested they wouldn’t be themselves again until the issue of where they’d be playing next year was resolved.

“Most of the players are married,” he said. “They have homes, kids in school. In a situation like this they have to be under all sorts of pressure. They have to be worried about what they’ll be able to get for their houses. I mean if you’re forced to sell your house, doesn’t that mean you might have to take less for it than you could ordinarily expect? And I’ve been looking at the housing ads in the St. Louis papers. It’s a buyer’s market out there right now. They’d have to sell at a loss.”

“That’s true,” Druff agreed.

“And what about their kids? The players are young. Their children are mostly in grade school.”

“That’s right.”

“It puts a kid in a bad position. I mean, if he thinks he might be in a different city next year, let alone a different country, he’s going to have a lot on his mind. His grades are bound to suffer even if he isn’t deliberately trying to goof off.”

“There’s something in that.”

“And children can be cruel. His classmates don’t always understand that it isn’t the child’s dad who wants to move, that he’s only going where the job takes him.”

“So?”

“So maybe they’re fans, so maybe they think the team wants to leave town, that maybe they took a vote on it or something, that they’re deliberately betraying St. Louis. All right, they don’t know any better. But they could tease the kid, pass remarks. And if the kid isn’t mature enough, and doesn’t entirely understand the situation himself, maybe he feels the same way. Unconsciously, he could begin to side with his classmates. He could become depressed, even sullen. Communication breaks down. He won’t speak to his dad, he’s nasty to his mom.”

“I see what you’re driving at.”

“Sure. And meanwhile this is going on in all the houses of all the players. In the defensemen’s families, in the houses of the wings. In the home of the goalie, in the home of the center. Even in the coach’s house, though his kids are probably older and ought to know better. Pressure’s got to build up. There are going to be fights. Things will get said which shouldn’t get said. It’s in the heat of the moment, sure, but that doesn’t change anything.”

“I’m certain you’re right.”

“And aren’t we forgetting something here, Dad?”

“What’s that?”

“That no matter what we read in the papers, no matter how many St. Louis and Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and other Canadian columnists and newspapers we read, we’re only getting part of the story. They’re there. They’re on the scene. They’re hearing things we can’t possibly know anything about — talk in the locker room, things they pick up on the road from opposing players.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“The latest rumors about the changing positions and attitudes of the various owners. Gee, if we think we’re confused about all the mixed signals that come in, you can imagine how they must feel!”

“That’s a good point.”

“So the thing isn’t that we’ve been losing, but that we’ve been losing by so little. That we’ve managed to keep from being blown away.”

“You’ve really got a handle on this thing, Mike,” Druff ventured feelingly.

And then Mike asked him to use his influence with the St. Louis Commissioner of Streets either to dissuade the owner of the Blues from selling or to see to it that the St. Louis consortium of businessmen that was seeking to buy the team was successful in its efforts.

Because what Druff hadn’t understood was that all this talk about the Blues, however distant, however remote from Druff’s full blebs, precarious as blown bubble gum, however wide of the mark of his marked heart, was finally concerned with Druff’s existence, the flawed ramparts and bulwarks where Mikey crouched, his son’s magic, superstitious circle of well-being.

He couldn’t even blame him, couldn’t cut bait or pare his losses.

Because how old could M. have been during Druff’s deathbed speech, nine, ten, eleven?

Dick had come around and opened the door for him.

Druff must have looked surprised, possibly threatened. He may even have thrown his hands up defensively.

“You startled me.”

“I thought you were asleep,” Dick said.

“Lost in thought.”

“You’ve got nothing to think about, Commissioner.” Druff didn’t take it personally but the driver thought he had. Dick lowered his voice. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry. I got this bug up my ass. Trouble at home. Shit with the wife. Like someone said, we go back, you and me. Thick and thin, long and short. I know it don’t always seem that way, but I got no complaints. It ain’t anything personal. Hell, you’ve been good to me. I know I sounded off, but we both said some stuff. Here, let me help you. You can stiffen up pretty good on those jump seats. They’re more trouble than they’re worth, you ask me. Hey, sit where you want. Sit where you can keep an eye on me. The way I’ve been at you? I just wanted to let you know. You don’t have anything to think about. Not from this quarter. Mum’s the word. Mrs. D. don’t hear boo from this quarter. Not a peep. Hellfire, Commissioner, if you could just find it in your heart to let the past forty minutes’ worth of bygones be bygones, you have nothing to fear from me.

“And I’ll tell you something else. Old Doug isn’t going to hear anything about it either.”

“Get away from me.”

“What did I do?”

“Hey,” Druff said, changing his tune, “nothing. It’s how I tell people good night.”

And let himself into his darkened house, though before he went upstairs for what little remained of the night, he made, in the dark, his way to the kitchen where, still in the dark, not bothering with the light switch, he fumbled about for a few seconds around the kitchen table where, near the unwashed cereal bowl, the glass in which perhaps an inch or inch and a half of milk lay souring, hard by the crumbs of toast and drying smears of jelly, he found, propped against the toaster, where the thirty-year-old man-child couldn’t miss it, the note Rose Helen had left for him and which, because it had been laid in so cheery a place as a kitchen, so redolent of his mom’s home cooking, against an appliance designed not to reheat the bread she did not bother to bake but to receive fresh slices of the packaged white bread he preferred, he would not even remove, reading the signs of the message instead of the message itself, and which Druff, the adventurer/philanderer neither of them had bargained for, did not bother to read either, that would undoubtedly say (there in the dark, so why even bother with a light, which just might wake him, draw him, concerned, who was always concerned, who lived in the depths of concern as a fish lives in water and who, even if he didn’t clear tables, had made of himself this safety-first sentinel, this factless, better-safe-than-sorry son who pulled space heaters from their wall sockets, standing lamps, radios, anything electric which, at least in the estimation of his concerned imagination, could reach the critical mass to draw energy, ignition flame, into the kitchen to check, to make sure their house hadn’t been broken into and his parents left for dead in their beds): “Michael sweetheart, I’m upstairs in bed. Dad’s not home yet, but called to say that he’s with some men arranging about that Marathon he’s been trying to get for the city, and not to wait up. I hope you had a good evening at school, or in the gym working out. If you’re going to have something to eat, please rinse out the dishes before you go to bed. They’re hard to wash when food is left standing in them too long, and they attract bugs. See you in the morning. Love, Mother.”