Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“So they’ve taken us off the charge plate, have they? Well, who needs them? Say that with me. ‘ Who needs them? ’ The charge plate is new-fangled anyway. It’s against nature. We’ll put out our own charge plate. We’ll do better. We’ll make the customer bring a note from home. Come on, we’ll show them, Victman. Are you with me on this? The ammo’s running out and winter’s coming and there’s nothing between an enemy bent on rape and our helpless, sleeping women and children but you, me and the token niggers. Never say die , I tell you. Rally round the flag, pal. Stomach in, chest out. Five, six, pick up sticks and beat hell out of them. What do you say? Never say die. What do you say?”

“Leo, the property I told you about — why don’t you look at it? Won’t you look at it now? This is no joke. Our volume is down. We haven’t kept pace. Come this afternoon. I’ll get the developer to meet us. What do you say?”

“I say die.”

“It’s a beautiful site, Leo. When the projects go up, there’ll be ten thousand middle-income families within a twelve-block radius.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

“Parking for fifteen thousand cars. At least talk to the developer.”

“Die.”

“You can’t avoid it any longer. The handwriting’s on the wall. Leo, I warned you a year ago. It’s no joke, being dropped from the group charge plate. It’s a slap in the face. What do you keep me for if you don’t listen to me? I don’t sell for you, I don’t wrap packages or wait on trade. I’m an idea man, Leo, a merchandising-concepts man. I see ways to bring this all off. We can get financing. My home-shopper plan, Leo—”

“Die,” Feldman said. “I say die .”

“It could be terrific. We put the customer’s size on IBM tape, we code his tastes, his needs, then we keep him advised what we have for him and send it to his house. They’ll go for this big, Leo.”

“Die.”

“Leo, you don’t listen. My franchise plan. What was wrong with my franchise plan? It’s only logic. If the little name can’t absorb the big name, let the big name absorb the little name. Merge , Leo.”

“Die? You say die? ”

“All right, forget that, but at least look at the site I have in mind. This charge-plate business is only a first step. If the big stores put on the pressure, the papers won’t accept our advertising. It could happen. It happened in Mobile to Blum’s. Our volume is down eight percent. We let go sixteen people this year. Gerard Brothers took on fifty, Llewelyn’s thirty-seven. At least look at the site.”

“All right,” Feldman said, “I’ll see the sites. Die. Die.”

“Listen to what the developer tells you. It’s important.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

Feldman with his buyers — there were more men than women now (the war over and no more shortages, it being everywhere a nineteenth or even twentieth fat year, Feldman’s girls had been replaced, no longer traded away in his name their ultimate quiff pro quo, happily married for years, raising kids; really, he thought, it was astonishing how many of them had married the very men who had once been their clients, the boys stirred to sacrament by the premise of unvirtue). They were in a private dining room of the best hotel for the Quarterly Lunch. Back from the Coasts, returned from the factories and showrooms and warehouses for the ceremony, they felt, he supposed, in what was after all their home base, somehow even further than the miles they had traveled, because they were all there together, like correspondents returned from the fronts, knowing some special sense of colleague that lent distance. Specialists, authorities, one big happy family with private knowledge of the skies over Texas, Twin Cities’ economy, what’s moving in Portland. Today their mysterious brotherhood even deepened by a still unconfirmed report of a brother downed, Chester Credit of Furniture, alleged to be aboard a plane that had crashed outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. One of our aircraft is missing .

Feldman taps the cut-glass water goblet with the edge of his butter knife, rises to speak, their gloomed attention making him cozy, snuggish, solemn-comfy in the orderly business reality, actually at home, and them too — you couldn’t tell him otherwise — in the reserved room, reassured by the deep brown walls and the dark carpets and the white tablecloths and black waiters and, oh yes, this too, even Credit’s empty chair. He waves off the white sleeve of a waiter offering a dish of ice cream. He speaks to him in a soft voice, making an arrangement. “Don’t bother with that now, Waiter, please. I have to speak to these people.” The waiter looks at him. “If it melts, it melts, pal, okay? My responsibility. Thank you very much.” He clears his throat, a joy rising in it with the phlegm. He loves saying something important. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dear associates,” he begins formally, pleased as always by the rhetoric he brings to these occasions (his Secretary of State diction, as he thinks of it). “In private conversations just prior to this luncheon, I have already given some cursory briefing to a few of you regarding the absence of Chester Credit. I did not intend that my unfortunate news be imparted to some rather than all, and if I may be permitted a rather bitter paradox, it pleases me to see all of you so solemn. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all myself, and I take it that the seriousness of your composure is an indication that you have all been apprised of my fears for Chester.

“Regarding the crash itself, I have very little additional to report at this time. During salad I was in telephone contact with our Miss Lane, and she tells me the situation in Charlotte is still indefinite. Let me emphasize that there has still been no official confirmation of the crash — repeat — there has still been no official confirmation of the crash. All we know for certain is that a check with the tower in Pittsburgh indicates that Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven is seven hours overdue. My informants tell me that an airliner’s instrumentation, and that would include its radio apparatus, frequently kicks out during the traumatic jar of a forced landing. But this ought not to comfort us very much, as none of the control towers between Charlotte and Pittsburgh report having had any communication with Flight Number Eighty-seven. The reflex s.o.p. for a pilot forced to bring his ship down is first to declare his intent over a special emergency frequency. Additionally, the weather throughout the East has been almost preternaturally clear for the past eighteen hours with an unlimited ceiling. Thus, unfavorable climatological murk can have nothing to do with the plane’s disappearance. For all these reasons, we can only conclude that the ‘fireball’ reportedly discerned by the two farmers fifty miles from Charlotte probably was Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven. I can extend no reasonable hope that these men may have been mistaken.

“Half an hour ago, during meat, Charlotte Airport was still unwilling to release its passenger manifest for Flight Eighty-seven. Coast Airlines was quite as adamant. I’m not blaming them for their reticence. Indeed, as I understand it, they are bound by law to maintain silence until it is positively ascertained that there has been a crash. Frankly, they have been most cooperative, and I for one am proud as hell of both of them. I’ve obtained their promise to release the manifest to us as soon as it’s made available, even before the agonizing rituals of positive identification and notification of next of kin, which, strictly speaking, they are obliged by law, though not, I gather, so stringent a one as the other, to observe. Their cooperation here could save us literally days of anxiety, and so, even under the oppression of our feelings, I don’t think we ought to let this occasion of still another instance of the mutual courtesy and respect between one American industry and another go by without acknowledging it. Whatever happens, I am tomorrow sending my personal letter of appreciation both to the executives of the Charlotte Airport and the executives of Coast Airlines.