Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Hey,” Druff said, “I’m fine. I’m fit as a fiddle.”

Because she would probably have had an inventory. Not many people would put out a few hundred bucks, let alone several thousand, for an expensive rug without having something to compare it to, seeing a selection. So she needed money up front. Forget the people working customs, here, overseas — guys guarding the borders, working the stony, sandy, various desert checkpoints where they inspected the crates or boxes or whatever the hell they came packed in — bribes, according to Druff’s hierarchical imagination, for the still-more-official officials at the ports and air terminals, some compounding, snowballing sum of cash to get them to look the other way. So forget whatever considerable consideration it took to do just the stiff, burdensome logistics of the thing. She needed it for the terrorists. Who would get it to the weavers, who would get it to their wool suppliers and dye manufacturers, and all the hidden, unseen, unknown rest of the backstage, baksheeshed personalities who contributed to the production of a smuggled rug. Where would she get such sums, a poor student who didn’t even have a green card and had had to enroll in a night-school art class in order to use its facilities and find and take on an accomplice or accessory just to have the use of his father’s paints and canvases? Well of course she borrowed it. From those bankers he’d been hearing so much about. Probably from the hardened Macklin himself until he was retired by his long illness and, then, the even harder Hamilton Edgar, the steely Dan, the adamantine Jerry Rector. Su’ad was killed when she couldn’t pay off her loans to the bankers of B’nai Beth Emeth. Well, it was only a theory. He didn’t know for sure, but dollars to doughnuts.

“It works for me.”

“What?”

“Oh boy,” Druff said. “A new symptom. Now I talk out loud even when I’m awake.”

“What?”

Cautious, tentative, like someone testing exactly how much weight he can put down on a bad ankle, Druff took short, experimental breaths.

Mikey hovered. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Terrific.”

Because MegGluffio had taken a few rugs off Su’ad’s hands. Almost certainly on some no-strings consignment. No different, surely, from her other arrangements with the trade — the nifty, voguish lamps and spiffy, à la mode furniture. The folding Japanese screens and futons. In keeping with all the other provisional terms of her life — her plastic cutlery, Styrofoam cups and paper plates — all that fast food paraphernalia of her get-out-of-town, one-night-stand ways.

“You’re, sure?”

“Your ma is rich and your daddy’s good-lookin’,” Druff said. He looked at his son, the wheelman, full on.

“I don’t like this much,” Mikey said nervously.

Because he’d said Su’ad hadn’t answered when he’d called to her. Because it was as if she hadn’t even heard him, he’d said.

“The rug’s still in my trunk, isn’t it,” Druff said. It wasn’t a question.

Mikey shrugged.

Sure, he thought, because he thinks Dick’s been watching him, that Doug has. No, Druff thought, I’m wrong. Because they’re watching me, Mr. Mayor’s deputized observers. No, because he simply doesn’t know who it is who’s supposed to take delivery. Because she never said. Because he knew she didn’t have enough confidence in him and wouldn’t have told him until they were already on the way. Because he figures there’ll be time enough to switch it if he ever finds out.

Oh, Mikey, he thought. Oh, oh, Mikey.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Sure,” Druff said.

“Oh,” said his son. “Do you need a doctor? Should I wake my mom?”

“I heard from Scouffas and McIlvoy,” Druff said. “They’re not going to let us have the marathon.”

And watched as Michael closed his eyes, a voyeur to his son’s humiliation. Because as much as Druff had hurt and disappointed Mikey, he was up to here with the kid’s character, its rigorous, repetitious, lock- step ways. His son’s impervious shell of stunted, undaunted, familiar behavior. His peace-at-any-price conditions. Because he knew what Mike was thinking now — that there’d never been a Scouffas, that McIlvoy was an invention. That his father had lied to him.

And waited till the long, extended blink was finished. And then, very deliberately, threw one of his own like a willed fit. Thinking, I read yours, now you read mine.

Thinking, she was financed by bankers, by bankers, not usurers, not loan sharks who required exorbitant interest, bankers, these merely hardened bankers who, when she couldn’t pay back her loans (because Druff’s middle-sized, rather backwater city, with its good-enough symphony orchestra of the second rank, its undersubscribed newspaper and losing football and basketball franchises, and narrow, four-story, dressed-limestone City Hall — once a department store — old-fashioned and less imposing, finally, than a county courthouse — for where were its cannons, its respectful, generic, de rigueur statues of Civil War rebs or Yankees or doughboys or G.I.’s? — in a town square; the building still, despite its conversion, faintly mercantile, vaguely pro tem, giving off trace elements of officious red-tape vibes, as if it were the headquarters of some army of occupation, was a fairly conventional, fairly conservative middle-sized city, whose relatively timid consumers wouldn’t much care for, so didn’t much buy, the risky frills and back-of-the-truck furbelows of contraband rugs, and whose conventional, conservative loan officers in its great gray banks and S&Ls would have pretty much written off the Third World and have had nothing to do altogether with the out-and-out nutso fringe doings of a subterranean Fourth One, let alone any shady arrangements of a black market venture capitalism, who wouldn’t so much as consider, even out of politeness, handing over a loan application to be filled out by one of its representatives, never mind that they wouldn’t have bothered to read it if they had, and so Su’ad had miscalculated, had been taken in by what she perceived — poor, dusky, benighted, cause-ridden, wacko Shiite Muslim maiden lady that she was — to be the advertised, universally obtaining Satanic condition, although — fortunately for her short-range goals, however disastrous it turned out to have been for her longer ones — this particular middle-sized city had fringe arrangements of its own, even its own quiet, stylish, hardened-banker terrorists not so squeamish or choosy as their éminence grise banker cousins with their stuffy, institutional FDICs or as their snooty enough second cousins with their FSLIC ones, and who would extend her cash, Druff imagined, not for her signature on a contract, or even, he imagined, for her marker, but just — they must have insisted on this, worked it into the deal like the devastating fine print in some apparently innocuous clause — on the basis of her given word alone) then, though I can’t prove this either, struck her down in what wasn’t quite yet even her prime, because, well, just because, because downtown had become too tame, and what was a fellow to do, where was he supposed to go to if he wanted to go wilding?

Yeah, Mikey, Druff thought, go ahead. Read that!

Which, of course, Mikey didn’t, couldn’t. They had different agendas. Mikey and Dad were on two separate, totally different, entirely arrested beams. Mikey into his preoccupations with Health and a sort of immutability on command of anything that might once have pleased him. (He would have gone back to Lebanon with her, even if it meant they might have taken him hostage! The trouble with his son, Druff thought, was that he didn’t think things all the way through. He was going to go back to Lebanon with the woman he loved, willing to accept the risks, to take his chances on becoming a hostage. All right. So far so good. But had it once crossed his mind that they might not carry Blues hockey in the Middle East?) And Druff, Druff thought, never one to let himself off lightly if he could shoot himself in the foot with both barrels — with his own opposing preoccupations, with finding the action and recklessly throwing himself into harm’s way, not only forbidding the immutable but absolutely encouraging it, not only inviting a MacGuffin into his life but positively becoming one!