Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Dan slapped his temple with an open hand. “You told him there was a head table?”

Even Druff had to laugh.

Even when Ham ‘n’ Eggs said, “I told him fucking nothing. He’s out of the loop.”

“Hey don’t,” Jerry Rector said. “Talk like that’s a lot of hooey.”

Druff understood that Rector couldn’t really speak the language, that he dropped his few measly words into the conversation like a tourist, like someone who knows how to ask the time, say, or directions to the toilet in French. It was the screwball vocabulary of a screwball. Yet he could not rid himself of the notion — he couldn’t account for this — that these men were sympathetic, that running into them like this was a boon, some omen of endowment, vaguely — they were at a place of worship — heaven-sent. Druff, tossed and turned in his sleep, drugged as a schoolboy on the glamour of a Margaret Glorio whose magical availability had been the cause of his ablutions, his grand investiture, suddenly saw his weekend salvaged. He could talk to them. They would get down.

And found himself leading the way, onwarding up the synagogue steps like a Christian soldier.

Not, now he’d taken things into his own hands, so much hurt by their cries—“Hey, hey man, where you going?”—as instantly aware of several sudden, even conflicting urgencies — to call Margaret, to do something about Rose Helen’s batteries, to pee, to come to terms with his understanding new pals. Leaving them behind, beneath him on the sidewalk, calling out and waving like people farewelling passengers on steamships in one of Rector’s screwball comedies. Wondering why they were calling him off and, to win them over, to show his good nature and, turning to face them, and not for the first time, turned the tables, welcoming them, signaling them aboard, urging in semaphore that they join him before the synagogue sailed.

“Come up, come up,” he called down.

And pushing open one of the temple’s big doors let himself into a vacant lobby.

“Gee,” Druff said, “where’s—?”

“All gone,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs.

“Split,” said Dan.

“Where’s that darn old poop think he’s going?” Jerry Rector muttered.

But Druff, too, had seen some movies, and was at once put in mind of an old one, a classic, a goodie. Cary Grant was a legionnaire. He’d stumbled onto a cave, a great, mysterious space. There’d been chanting, wicked prayers sent into the interior of the earth by savage assassins, cultists’ blood commitments, the dark, assured fanaticism of an immense pep rally, evil, awful. There was to have been, the commissioner sort of remembered, a virgin sacrificed, a white woman. The daughter of the regiment? Cary’s own sweetie? And what had put him in mind — this in the few seconds left to him (a moment like a fragment of precious time one speaker yields to another in a debate) before the others caught up with him — was the sudden, unexpected silence of the big empty lobby. (If “lobby“—he wasn’t sure — was what you called these bits and pieces of religious architecture, not “nave” or “narthex,” not “sanctuary” or “baptistery.” Not, he meant, its working, moving parts.) Wondering because — the doors were open — no one was in the sanctuary. Surprised by the absence of excited children, running, chasing one another in the halls, the sprung shirttails of the boys and collapsed stockings of the little girls, all the loose asthmas and hysterical else- wheres of their unruly attention. (He flashed abruptly on wild Mikey, on his ancient, disorderly holiday encounters with his fleeing cousins. He could have wept, Druff. He remembered wanting to kill the snob assholes, their under-control, son-of-a-bitch parents.)

“Excuse me,” Druff addressed the three spacey Jews, “but isn’t Saturday your day of worship?”

“Is that a crack?” Jerry Rector demanded.

“Jerry, please Jerry,” Hamilton Edgar was saying. “Commissioner here is a trained politician, a pro. A pro’s pro, even. Would such a man pass gratuitous anti-Semitic remarks if he didn’t have to?”

“Wait a minute,” Druff said, “I meant I thought it was a day of holy observation. That you set it aside for—‘services’ do you call them?”

“Services, that’s right,” said Rector, upset. “That’s what we call them, all right. That’s just what we call them. Who wants to know?”

“Well, no one wants to know,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “I’m here,” he said, pointing to Dan, pointing to Ham ‘n’ Eggs, who’d extended his open wallet to his friend like a submission signal in nature, “as their guest. I come in good faith. No one wants to know,” he repeated. “All I meant is, where’s the festivities? Where is everybody?”

“Jesus!” Jerry Rector said. “God! A sink of the lip slips ships! Does no one here understand that?”

“Someone bring that man a drinky winky,” Dan said, giggling.

“A dry martooni,” said guffawing Hamilton Edgar.

“You’re their guest? You’re their come-in-good-faith, invited comrade?” said Rector. “I’m hep. All right. That’s all right. Nobody tells me anything, but what the heck? That’s jimmy-fine-dandy. Maybe we’re into Plan C or something and someone simply forgot to inform me. I can live with that. You think I can’t live with that? I can live with it. I can live,” the screwball-comedy-dialogue admirer informed them coolly, “with anything you silly fuck wads can throw against me. Follow me,” he said. “The ‘festivities,’ as my new friend here calls them, are in the rabbi’s study.”

It’s cumulative, thought Druff. Whatever they’re on. He already knew it was catching.

“Jerry, man,” Dan said.

“Rector!” said Hamilton Edgar.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” said the commissioner, reminded of that film again, of its holy killer thugs, “as it happens, I am. A politician’s politician, I mean. I define that as anyone in public office who can make news with his mouth.” He was following Jerry Rector. The two other guys were following him. New surroundings were generally a maze to him, not a big plus in the City Commissioner of Streets department, he had to admit. For Druff it was the sewers of Paris all over again, new surroundings. And that went double, he thought, when what was at stake was at once as comic and interesting and possibly dangerous as he only just now understood his situation potentially was.

They went up stairs and down corridors, doing, he felt, these mysterious stations of the Star of David, hearing nothing, passing no one, Druff nervous in the strangely abandoned building (in their odd single file like the forced, time-honored defile of guards with a prisoner) like someone locked for the night in a shut-up office building. (His mazy new surroundings, all the queer, devious landscape and uncharted sewers-of- Paris quality of the apparently vacant temple now somehow powerfully familiar to Druff, as recognizable as the prescriptive tactics of their captured-prisoner maneuvers.) Primarily what he felt was watched.

So he could either catch up with Rector (clearly point man here), seize the cat’s cradle and perhaps change the pattern of the forced march, or he could distract them, as time-honored and in-the-tradition as anything he’d seen yet.

He began to talk.

“Well, I am,” he said. “I do. Make mouth news, I mean. It’s what us pol’s pols are all about. Really. Your kings and your queens, your go-ahead heads of state. Empress to alderman. Lowly streets czars like myself, even.

“Once, would you believe it, it made the papers just because I said I didn’t think it was fair that the City Commissioner of Streets in Tampa — St. Pete had a bigger line in the budget than I did with all my added responsibilities of weather to worry about — snow clearance, ice storms, pothole repair, the wear and tear of a cold climate. You wouldn’t believe what that started! It was good copy for a week. ‘Oh yeah?’ This was my opposite number, the other pol’s pol, the Tampa — St. Petersburg one, answering back through Reuters, United, the Associated Press. ‘Just ask old Jack Frost for me what he’d do after a hurricane hit and he had to lift all that soaked sand up off the highways and push it back on the beaches where it came from? Maybe our budget’s so high here on the Sun Coast because snow melts and sand don’t!’ ‘ Snow melts!’ Can you imagine? He had me with the ball in my court. Hey, they could have asked for my resignation. Mouth newsers go right into the doghouse when the cat has their tongue. They were really after me for copy now, the Reuters boys and A.P. people. ‘Tell him,’ I told them, ‘all that talk about the so-called Sun Coast must have gotten in my eyes and blinded me. I forgot Mother Nature had so damn much weather down there that they had to keep giving it names, as if all those storms and hurricanes were like so many children they had to keep track of before it all got away from them.’