Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Doug shrugged.

“What’s that? A sign? Wind sock for ‘That shit happens’? I know it happens. What do you think, I fell off a turnip truck? But no one bothers to lie anymore. In the past it was different. In the past people clung to their bits and snippets, their scraps and threadbare. But today, today the first thing to go is the fig leaf. It’s all ta-da today.

“Shameless. It’s shameless. Not like when you and I were young, Maggie. You know what she said to me? Dick’s chippie? (Charlotte, incidentally, by her own report, and a mother of twins.) You know what she said? ‘ Nolo contendere.’ Can you imagine? ‘ Nolo contendere.’ Well, I ask you!”

“And this was after she lied to you,” Doug said sympathetically.

“What?”

“This was after she lied to you. After she told you no one by that name even lived there. That you had the wrong number.”

Druff perfectly understood that it was entirely possible that today might be the day he would meet a violent death. He rated his chances at less than likely, but it certainly wasn’t out of the question. Put it this way, he thought — I wouldn’t be surprised.

Because it didn’t even occur to him that he’d caught Doug out, that Druff’s drunk act, or any of his subsequent tirade, had sufficiently disarmed the man to a point where he would offer up information involuntarily. It would have been a waste of breath now to spring any traps, launch his devastating accusations. (“Aha! Who said she lied? Who ever mentioned wrong numbers?”) Of course the old-timer had said it intentionally. Of course he had. Doug? A suspect old shady for as long as Druff knew him? But that was all it came down to finally. Suspicions. Smoke but no fire. Rumor and chitchat. Nothing ever proven. A man with no goods on him. Without goods. Goodless. Druff would not trouble to give Doug the lie. He wouldn’t give the shithead the satisfaction.

So when the commissioner finally shouted at him and threw his challenges in Doug’s face, it was for his own satisfaction. Not to see the sucker sweat so much as to hear what the old no-good rat bastard had to say. A matter of simple human curiosity.

“Well, you’re our boss,” said Doug.

“Your boss.”

“We take an interest.”

“In?”

“Your comings and goings.”

“I see.”

“It’s only natural.”

“So?”

“We keep an eye open.”

“And?”

“An ear.”

“And?”

“We call each other up.”

“This could be it, all right. This could be the day.”

“No,” Doug said. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t be so fatalistic. It’s too depressing.”

“Well,” said Druff, “I guess I’ll be going.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Yep. I’m on my way.”

“Where to?”

“Oho.”

“No, really.”

“Aha.”

“See you Monday, then.”

“Your mouth to God’s ears.”

“Please,” Doug said.

But the City Commissioner of Streets was standing now. They both were. “No,” he said, “don’t bother,” giving himself the satisfaction, enjoying the words, anticipating the pleasure — this in split seconds, it was all split seconds on the special days — of the rest of the phrase, their melodramatic heft, “I’ll let myself out.” And just about did, was already at the door when he turned, giving himself still more satisfaction. “Does the name—” he said. And stopped.

“What?”

“Never mind, it’s not important.”

“No, what?”

“See you Monday,” Druff said, and left Doug’s apartment, moving carefully down the stairs and waiting for the S.O.B. — Druff sensed his presence at the railing — to rain names on his head, dropping them over him like water balloons, a shower of accomplice. Expecting him to. Margaret Glorio, he might have said. Mikey. Hamilton Edgar, Jerry Rector. Whatsisname, Dan. Su’ad herself, even. Or broadening the variables altogether, introducing new, devastating names, hush-hush high-ups from the inner workings, people so powerful your need to keep them out of it amounted to a kind of prurience, a sort of rut. Thinking what one of these might sound like, resonant, reverberant in the hallway as a shout in a shower.

No? Nothing? Off we go, then.

And now he’s on his rounds, like a guy in a detective story. On his toes. The rhetoric of Q and A. The rhetoric of wheat and chaff. Sifting, sifting. Bobbo Druff, the truth mechanic.

Except now the jungle telegraph was onto him. They took an interest, Doug said. In his comings and goings. Well, what did he expect? They were professional chauffeurs, these guys, it was only natural. They called each other up, kept each other apprised. Administered apprisal advice. Like weather fucking forecasters. (He could talk this way. Who better entitled to use the rhetoric of the streets than their commissioner?)

What gave him pause was that he might not ask the right questions of whatever suspects he could yet run into on his last sweep of the day before he went home to eat his supper. Though that wasn’t all that gave him pause. Not if this was Doomday. (He still handicapped the chances for this at less than likely, though they were up a bit since his conversation with Doug. Put it this way, he thought, it’s safer than riding in an automobile, as the aviation people liked to keep reminding you. Yes, or being struck down by one, as Su’ad might herself have said. Poor Su’ad.) This could be the day.

He was hitchhiking.

It had been impossible to hail a cab in Doug’s neighborhood and by the time he’d left his driver’s residential streets for a busier district it had already begun to get dark, the beginning of twilight.

A guy in a pickup stopped for him.

“I seen the suit,” he said.

“Hitchhiking,” Druff said. “A man my age. It’s quite extraordinary. One of those things — I’m fifty-eight — you figure will never happen to you again. Like going skinny-dipping or getting a piggyback ride. You know?”

“Sure,” said the guy. “You don’t have to be fifty-eight for them to start turning out the lights in your rooms. All the time stuff that might not ever happen again occurs to me, and I’m not even out of my thirties.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Well, when you put me on the spot like that…”

“I’ll never be a father again,” Druff said wistfully.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Druff said.

And then the two of them — the early Saturday evening traffic had begun to move out into the streets — folks on their way to claim six-o’clock dinner reservations in restaurants, people headed for the rush-hour movie, girls from junior high chauffeured to friends’ houses for sleep-overs — started their curious confidings in earnest, intimate as strangers. They bid up their famous last-this lists, their famous last- thats. Charles — that was the man’s name — said his prom days were over, but Druff disallowed that one, not on the grounds that they weren’t, but that the category, by its nature singular, was meaningless. “You might as well tell me you’ll never have your first haircut again.”

“I won’t.”

“Of course not,” Druff said. “That’s not the point. You can’t have any feeling about that one way or another. It passed you by right when it happened.”

“I’m told I threw a fit I was so scared, that the barber had to wait until I wore myself out crying and fell asleep in my mother’s arms before he could come near me.”

“You see?” Druff said. “It passed you right by.”

“Oh sure,” Charles admitted, “in that sense.”

“Well, that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We’re talking about things we’ll miss because they can’t happen again.”