Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Is Mom all right?”

“Of course she’s all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“She’s fine.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine and dandy.”

“Because you were gone all day. I was pretty worried.”

“No need.”

“Well, when you didn’t come back. And you’re fully dressed. You didn’t have chest pain, did you? You didn’t have to lie down on the couch till your pain went away?”

“I didn’t have pain. I’m fine. I was tired. As a matter of fact, I was waiting for you.”

“For me?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“Did you want to tell me something? Is it about you and Mom? Because just because you had that little quarrel this morning, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. Your parents don’t get divorced because they had a little quarrel.”

“Nobody’s getting divorced.”

Mikey actually said “Whew.” “Whew,” he said, “that’s a relief.”

“It’s about you,” Druff said.

His son closed his eyes, he did his disappearing act. Then, having found somewhere in his intimate, immediate dark the courage to face him again, he opened them. “Am I in trouble?” he asked his father.

“I don’t know,” Druff said. “You might be in trouble.”

“What did I do?”

“Do you remember all those times you used to ask if we were well off? What our financial condition would be if something happened to me?”

“Dad, I was a kid. ”

“You were a teenager.”

“A preteen. Maybe a preteen.”

“Mikey, you were working out at the gym. You could have bench- pressed the dining room.”

“I was nervous.”

“I know you were nervous. You were scared I was going to die. You were terrified you wouldn’t be ready.”

“I had some stuff to work out.”

“Well, do you remember the time we got this annual report from a company I had some stock in and we went over it together?”

“Vaguely. I think I remember.”

“It was this Fortune 500 company, some utility, I think. I forget which one. They listed their assets down one column, their liabilities down another.”

“I think I remember.”

“The profits they made each quarter from the natural gas they sold to their residential customers? What they took in from their industrial customers? How the two were charged at different rates because their industrial clientele consumed the stuff in much greater quantities?”

“Yes?”

“The profits from fields they owned but had leased to other gas companies?”

“Oh yes,” Mikey said.

“Then there were the debits. Well,” Druff said, “you can imagine. Their terrific operating expenses.”

“Sure.”

“A big fire. Equipment that had to be replaced. Disappointing yields from new wells.”

“I remember.”

“Then there were the acts of God.”

“I don’t recall the acts of God, Dad.”

“The acts of God, the acts of God. You remember.”

“No I don’t. I don’t think so.”

“The exceptionally mild winter they had that year. The unusually cool summer.”

“Oh,” Mikey said. “Sure.”

“Sure,” Druff said, “what finally accounted for their slight net loss.”

“I remember.”

“This was when you were still working stuff out.”

“Yes.”

“So I sat down with you and drafted my own annual report. I listed my assets and liabilities. I put down our savings and investments. My insurance. What my pension could be expected to bring in. The couple hundred bucks Social Security gives to help bury you. I listed the probable resale value of our house. I even put down the approximate worth of our possessions. The furniture, our car, the TVs and appliances, the appraised valuation on your mother’s jewelry, everything I could think of. What I took in over and above my salary that didn’t get saved or invested but was lying around the house in cash. (This part wasn’t in the annual report. This part was off the record. I just mentioned it to you on the qt.) Then I put down my debits.”

“What were those, Dad?”

“The twelve hundred or so dollars we owed on our charge cards. Whatever it was I’d pledged that year but hadn’t yet paid to a couple of charities. Some bills, our monthly expenses. I don’t know, maybe four thousand, forty-five hundred bucks tops.”

“That wasn’t too bad.”

“Well,” Druff said, “the mild winter and cool summer worked in our favor.”

“That’s right.”

“But of course those weren’t my only debits.”

“No? What were the rest, Dad?”

“My heart attack, my bad circulation. Whatever it was going to cost you guys to bury me.”

“Oh Dad,” his son said.

“No no,” Druff said. “You don’t remember. I showed you. We went over it very carefully. It was actually a net gain overall. You just don’t remember. A slight net gain, but a net gain’s a net gain. I was helping you to work out your stuff. I showed you that even though I was only one small, sick human being, in certain respects I was better off than a great big Fortune 500 company, and that if you and your mom were careful you could be in the black for another fifteen years.”

Though Druff waited him out, Mikey didn’t say anything for a long while. Then Druff broke their silence. “It’s all right,” he told his son. “You can ask me.”

“That’s okay.”

“No,” Druff said, “go ahead. Ask me.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ll tell you anyway,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “If I dropped dead tonight, you’d still be in the black. But, really, it depends.”

“What does it depend on, Dad?”

“Whether or not you actually ran over that girl.”

“Su’ad was my girlfriend, Dad. Why would I run over my girlfriend?”

“Su’ad,” Druff said.

“I’m no dummy, Dad. Who else could you be talking about? How many accident-prone Shiite Muslims do I know?”

“Did Dick do it, did Doug?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure, Dad.”

“You were a witness?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I was a sort of a witness.”

“What sort?”

“Gee, is this fair? I mean, I loved her, Daddy. What do you want from me? I planned to go back to Lebanon with her even if it meant they would probably have taken me hostage one of these days. So how do you think it made me feel when they ran her down?”

“Not over?”

“What?”

“Down, not over?”

“It was pretty confusing. All right,” his son said, “I’ll tell you what I think happened.”

And then, quite suddenly, Druff began to feel bored. Physically. Bored physically. As if boredom were a symptom like a tickle in your throat, a fever, or a runny nose. Perhaps he’d been exposed to too much MacGuffin. Maybe it was in his bloodstream by now. Gunking up the works. Causing rashes, eruptions, potholing his flesh. Like some disease, say, serious enough in childhood but devastating if you came down with it as an adult. What was it the old schemer had advised? Something-or-other something, or something-something, something-or-other, and that if you had enough of the one you didn’t need very much of the other. The fact was, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, solutions were boring, never as interesting as the trouble they were brought in to put an end to. Motion and sound effects. Like chase scenes. Shoot-outs. Guys scrambling over architecture or sprawled out in fields. Wrestling in water. Or caught, humbled on monuments. Dangled on ropes like clappers on bells. This far from vats, the various acid baths and boiled oils. Above great heights, precariously dancing. Fighting against time — the two-minute warning of armed nuclear devices, a few last inches of sizzling fuse. Character forgotten, left behind, left out, and only the juices of simple, driving survival left over, remaining, separated out, like whey, reduced, clarified like butter.