Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“So how did it? You didn’t say. Did they give you an indication? I know this was only preliminary, a feasibility study.” He knows “only preliminary,” Druff thought, he knows “feasibility.” “Still and all,” Mikey said, “they came all this way. Their plane was held up all that time on the ground in Denver waiting for a heating element to be replaced in the galley!” He knows facts. He knows the facts of my convolute lie. “I mean, they could have canceled. Important fellows like that! They might even have taken that stupid delay as a sign. And there must be just plenty of cities dying to get a marathon. Every Middlesex village and town, right, Dad?

“So did they give you any indication, did they hold out any hope?”

“It was all very preliminary. It was only a feasibility study.”

“Sure,” Mikey said. “Those birds have to play it close to the vest. It’s how they are. I suppose they wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t. Still, Dad,” he said, “I hope you didn’t buy into any of their tired old arguments.”

“Which tired old arguments?”

“Oh, you know, that there’s already a Boston marathon, a New York marathon. That there are marathons in Chicago and Honolulu. All that ‘oversaturated’ stuff you usually hear.”

“Those are factors,” Druff said.

“Those are factors. They are. But all they’re looking for are assurances. It’s the consortium of St. Louis businessmen all over again. Just tell them you can get them national exposure, TV coverage. The cable sports networks are out beating the bushes looking for events to cover. You might even suggest the possibility of closed-circuit stuff on the big giant screens, spin-offs from T-shirts, paper cups with soft-drink advertising and the marathon’s logo spectators can hand out to the runners as they pass critical points in the race — Dead Man’s Hill, Heartbreak Flats. Or how our marathon could be this really different marathon, open only to serious runners — no one on crutches, no one pushing himself in a wheelchair or muscling along strapped to a board and doing the twenty-six-plus miles in push-ups or some other simple brute force variation of chinning yourself through space.” He knows twenty-six- plus miles, Druff thought.

“Those are some good points,” Druff said. “You should have been there.”

“I wish I had been, Daddy.”

And Druff suddenly recalled the strict, explicit terms of Dick’s limited guarantees. Mrs. D. wouldn’t hear a peep from that quarter, Doug wouldn’t. And then his son was nattering away again, but this time in the baby talk of the more familiar mystic Mikey mode.

“Because,” he was telling his dad, “an owner can move his franchise right out of a city. I suppose that if he wanted, and had the permission of the other owners, he could even shift it into a different league entirely. Owners can do just about anything they want because this is the United States of America and it’s their own private property, after all. They can even let the team stay in a city but ruin it anyway by never spending any money on it to buy better players. But a marathon would be different. It would always be our city’s marathon. And there wouldn’t ever be a way it could have a losing season. I mean someone would always win it every year, and even if their times weren’t as good as the times in the New York marathon or the Boston marathon, still, since they invented the gadget that gives the exact degree of difficulty of a marathon, then even if they did take it to another city it would still be our marathon in all the record books. In a way it would, anyway, because anything that came after it would have to be judged by our weights and measures. Do you see?”

He didn’t and, frankly, felt relieved he didn’t — better the Mikey you know than the Mikey you didn’t — but still, he thought, rising from the chair in which he’d been sitting, it could be a trap. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers, pushing them through some rich semaphore, wigwagging weariness, beddie-byes, all the studied repertory of his Mac- Guffin handjobs and shrugs, his shakelegs and stiffness-be-gones, auditioning the full range of his showboat moods from the good-talkin’-to- yas to his see-you-in-the-mornin’s. “I guess I’ll be going up,” he said. “Shall I get the light or will you do it?”

“I’ll do it, Dad,” Mikey said. “Good night, now.”

“Good night,” said Druff. And then, checking himself before passing through it, turning slowly around in the kitchen doorway, poised there for a curtain speech like the vaudeville bang of a rim shot, only tossed off, thrown away, scored against the pace of the scene, as if to say, God knows why I’m telling you this, or what made me think of it just now, but while it’s fresh in my head, and before I forget, let me try this on for size, see how it plays in Peoria, Druff said, “Oh, hey, I meant to tell you, I almost forgot. In the cab — it’s been a long night, Doug was tired so I sent him home and picked up a cab at their hotel — Scouffas and whoozis’s — well, I don’t know where it came from, but anyway there was more traffic for that time of night than you can shake a stick at, and normally I might not have noticed it but it hadn’t been there earlier — and a good thing — when we were pacing off the marathon and, incidentally, did you know you don’t actually have to strap the little sucker to your leg like some Boy Scout’s pedometer, or even hold it in your hand like you’d find your way through the woods with a compass, but almost just stick it there in the chauffeur’s pocket and forget about it while Doug or whoever just cruises along as if he didn’t have a care in the world, or the fate of an entire city’s hopes and dreams for a marathon of its own wasn’t riding on every little bump and grind in the road, every pothole and manhole cover, every cobblestone and speed bump, or forget about it, that is, as long as the guy doesn’t have to pull up short or come to any sudden stops — the damn thing’s so sensitive and is programmed to make every conceivable adjustment and compensation, except, as I say, for sudden stops, and that’s why I say it’s a good thing that that traffic wasn’t there earlier in the evening when McIlvoy and Doug and Irv Scouffas and I were doing the dry run of the dry run of the dry run of the contemplated battlefield or it might just have played Oh, Well, Back to the Drawing Board with all our plans — when I happened to notice these long delays on some of the traffic signals, particularly on the cautious left turn on greens, but on lots of others too, especially where the pedestrian activates the signal in order to put the green light in her favor, and I say her favor advisedly because I suddenly flashed on Su’ad, on how it might have happened to her, just that very way, stepping off the fatal curb at just the fatal moment when she became impatient and the hit-and-fatal-goddamn-run driver slammed all that fatal second-per-second tonnage and momentum into her frail, mortal Shiite bones. What do you think, Mikey? What do you think, kid? Is that a scenario you can live with?”

The father studied the son during all this long speech, carefully watching his boy’s face as, wide-eyed, it bumped along in the eddies of information then pulled up short, and opened out again into the avenues of its snarled syntax. Abruptly, when Druff came to Su’ad’s name, Mikey’s eyes squeezed shut, but it was difficult to imagine that he was not seeing her anyway, despite whatever layers of darkness he interposed between the light and his sealed, locked lids.

And didn’t wait for an answer, going instead, and at a pretty good clip, too, particularly for a guy of his advanced age at this advanced time of the night, up the stairs to the bedroom, tired, of course, but not a little compensated for his troubles by adventure’s and danger’s spiced, chemical buzz, interested, observing himself, thinking, Oh, right, so that’s how they do it. Sure, right, yes, of course. (Removing a shoe, pulling a sock.) Thinking, I see. Ahh. But of course. Even as you, even as me. (Taking his pants off, one leg at a time.) Thinking (loosening his tie, discarding his shirt, in the bathroom fumbling his shorts, peeing a ton), Well, I have to suppose that the body has its priorities too, and that’s why, caught up, we don’t require as many pit stops as otherwise. (Thinking “we” now.) Brushing his teeth and thinking, Now this surprises me, it really does. And this! (As he bothers to floss. To floss!) But really wowed, blown away wowed, by what he does next. He takes two ten-milligram Procardia out of their plastic prescription bottle, unscrews the lid from a jar of stool softeners and removes one odd, brown, football-shaped Peri-dos softgel. He takes a Valium, considers his unusual circumstances and decides to spring for a second. (Well, diazepam, actually, since it came in generic now.) (This is amazing, Druff thinks, all those others, CIA glamour boys, or just ordinary, caught-up bystander types, professors, say, businessmen, docs off on medical convenings in Paris, part business, part pleasure, would be dipping into the generics these days. Well, why not? We’d be crazy — he thinks “we,” already translated into that distinguished fraternity of fall guys, straw men and stalking horses pursued by blurry, unfocused, maniac furies and enemies — not to. Ain’t a chap with a MacGuffin already in enough trouble? Does he have to buy into inflation and the exorbitant prices the big drug companies get for their pills, too?) Well! This has certainly been a lesson for him!