Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“It’s just I’ve got this feeling today could be the day I buy the farm. Fill out the forms, pay the points, do the closing. It’s only a feeling. I’m not really scared. It’s a little erotic, even. Catastrophe is required sometimes, the death-dangers. A touch of the apocalypse. You know, a lick and a promise.”

He could tell Charles was anxious to get going, that he wasn’t in the mood. (No, thought Druff, he ain’t? And was suddenly reminded of last night, of the cars stopped at cross streets waiting for the green.) The commissioner hung on to the pickup’s open door for dear life. He was still talking, making his impressions, marking his trail, territorial as an animal.

“It’s just I’m closing in on these guys,” he said.

“Which guys?”

“Well, as I say, I’m not at liber—”

“No no,” Charles said, “don’t give me that. You’re at liberty. You’re at liberty all over the place. I’ve never seen anyone at so much. So which guys? Come in, sit down, feel free. You, easy rider, I know all about you — your age, your contingency plans for when the house gets too big — which goes first, your pool or your dining room. I know which toilet you piss in. So don’t tell me you’re not at liberty. Ain’t I been sitting here like limo guy number three, listening to all your harum- scarum? Which guys? Which goddamn guys?”

“You’ve been very kind,” Druff said softly.

“Too right.”

The City Commissioner of Streets let go of the door but did not shut it just yet. “It’s true,” he said. “I’m not at liberty.”

“Hey,” Charles said, “are you going to be all right?”

“I’m not at liberty to say am I going to be all right,” said the City Commissioner of Streets, thinking it could be so, what’s there to stop it. There was something to his vague, titillative misgivings. There had to be. Knowing your chances and fate was at least as possible as knowing your body, your own most intimate, physical perceptions of the world. Once burned, twice sorry. If he lived another fifty-eight years he’d never mistake a heart attack for indigestion, could, with his telltale left arm tied behind his back, identify the singular pain that shot through it as clearly as some high, burning astronomical event over a quadrant of sky. He would forever recognize the particular stitch in his side, in his back, of a collapsed lung, the strange, sudden heaviness in the groin that prefigured a kidney stone. One minute nothing, asymptomatic, his personal weather like a day for flying kites, the next clouded over with squalls from nowhere.

Charles was all right, Charles was probably as clean as a whistle, clean-as-a-whistle-wise, as it was possible to get in a compromised age. Yet it was almost all he was worth not to ask what he hauled in the truck bed, not, as official commissioner of the city’s streets, to demand to see invoices and manifests. Druff knew from their conversation the man was married. He knew he still had kids young enough to be driven in a car pool. He knew he worked as a projectionist, a kind of on-site inspector, in one of those automated multiplex cinemas with enough theaters radiating out from beneath its roof it could almost be a video rental service. (The sewers of Paris, he thought, each time he went to see a movie in one of those places.) Well, for a car pool they’d have to come up with something better than a pickup truck, so if he didn’t use it as the family car, and didn’t need it in his business, then surely the truck must have been used, at least partly, for hauling a certain amount of contraband. No? Not? These days?

And old Druff still standing there staring at old Charley, sizing up his benefactor. For plunder, smuggle, loot, the sacked and secret booties.

Feeling these vibes, getting this picture, imagining the puzzle coming to a head like a pimple. Thinking like a gifted clairvoyant now, some canny working for the cops, on the city’s actual payroll, possessed, running for daylight, inspired, bursting with intimation, sensing the aura of what was, damn near almost seeing the big picture, where everything went, how they put it all together, not the trail he’d been marking so much as that other one, all the trampled green places in the woods others had done for, something as material as hunch, dizzying as odor, Druff at once exhilarated and crazed, chipper as a hound, in it for the luscious bloods and dirts, high on this stench of the hunted, until Charley, in consultation with vibes of his own, intuiting what Druff was up to could be, leaned all the way over and across the cab of his pickup and slammed the door.

Druff stared after the little truck, in the street now but still snagged on pieces of traffic, until the scent gradually cooled, faded, was gone.

So anyway. Even if he didn’t buy the farm, even if it wasn’t even for sale, something was up. The commish on the cusp of things heavy- hearted. We’ll see what we’ll see. But no longer in touch with his wiped impressions, these scattered as the shards of a dream.

Remembering only the grander outlines of his bozo itinerary. Margaret Glorio, check. Naming her name in his heart and, opening the plastic sack in which he still carried a half dozen batteries for Rose Helen’s hearing aids, he removed the three blister packs and distributed them discreetly about his person, placing one in the left inside pocket of his suit coat, another in the right, and shoving the last deep into the jacket’s breast pocket. Running on zinc now, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, his energy up, or on some fillip of shit more likely, what he felt trembling his gut now he’d left the pickup and was out on the wide sidewalks of Meg Glorioland, a jolt of the high school juices gathering, adrenalizing him and giving him, for all he knew, the zits altogether.

Oh, he thinks, taking in the prospect, high rises with their addresses scribbled across their canvas canopies like meticulous signatures or the lettering on expensive invitations; discrete, iron-fenced trees sunk into the pavement like extravagantly potted plants; impressed as always by the tony, handsome upscale of the neighborhood, adjacent, it occurs, to the very park where he and Dick, searching out potholes, had encountered the mounted policeman — has he come full circle? he wonders — only the day before.

Though from here he can’t even see Margaret Glorio’s building. He had deliberately passed it without saying anything — for Charley’s benefit — two blocks back. Nothing wrong, Druff thought, with a little camouflage. It was simple courtesy to lay down a trail. Nobody said it had to be a U.S. goddamn geological survey.

Druff went into Margaret’s lobby, started toward the elevator.

“Hey,” someone called. “Hey, hey.”

It was the man from the night before, the fellow dozing at the television monitors, and who, awakened by Dick pounding on the horn, had then roused Druff.

“What?” said Druff.

“Where you going? You can’t go up unless you’re announced.”

He didn’t want to be announced. He didn’t want to give her an opportunity to refuse to see him. (He remembered the call she said she was expecting, her initial rush to get him off the phone.)

The doorman insisted.

Druff wondered if the man recognized him, but couldn’t tell. (Though he’d made the limo, he recalled, had known it was from the city.) To keep him off the scent a while longer, he offered Margaret’s apartment number, not her name. (More lore from the woods, the higher camouflage studies.)

“What’s your name?”

“Druff,” Druff whispered.

“Wait, I’ll announce you.” He went to say something into an intercom and was back in less than a minute.

“Margaret has a visitor,” he said.