The Road to Wellville (53 page)

P
ressed close to his hammering heart, in the left breast pocket of the very suit in which he’d transported Mrs. Hookstratten’s $3,849 from New York, Charlie Ossining carried the letter that had arrived at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s two days earlier. He carried the letter where he could feel it against his flesh, wearing it in the way a monk might wear his hair shirt, in fear and trembling. From the moment it had come, his prospects, which had been dismal enough to begin with, suddenly became superfluous, a dream to be discarded, wadded up and tossed in the rubbish like the rag they used on the spittoons at the Red Onion. He took no notice of the sun, the budding trees, the daffodils, azaleas, dogwood, the greening lawns and pollen-drunk bees—it might just as well have been winter still. As far as he was concerned, it
was
winter, deepest winter—and what was he going to do?

He was going to Bender, for one thing. On foot. Head down, moving along with the brisk heedless stride of the soul in torment, and no, he wasn’t wearing the sandwich board, and no, he didn’t feel guilty about it, either. What sense did advertising make if the whole world was crashing down around your ears? Of course he’d gone to Bender the minute the letter arrived, and then again yesterday, and Bender had cooed and hummed and purred and given his assurances and his vows and patted Charlie’s hand and poured out anaesthetic doses of Otard
Dupuy and reasoned and remonstrated with him—and what good had it done? None. Zero. Zilch. What was he going to tell Mrs. Hookstratten? How could he face her? He was just rounding the corner at McCamly, brisk-legging it up the street, when he thought of the alternative: not to face her at all. To vanish. Skip town.
Poof:
the disappearing act. All he had to do was keep walking till he reached the depot, get on the train and ride till the sun exhausted itself.

But even as he thought of the coward’s way out, he felt the sharp edge of the envelope stabbing through his shirt, and knew he couldn’t do it, not to Mrs. Hookstratten. Not to her. Never. All of a sudden he jerked himself to a halt and tore the letter out of his pocket, poring over it for the hundredth time, hoping against all reason that its meaning and configuration had somehow changed.

They hadn’t.

He stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, head sunk into his chest, shoulders slumped, reading, and his lips moved and his voice underscored the words in a sort of moan. People stepped around him. A woman in a hat as wide around as a wagon wheel gave him a look of alarm and the man in front of the cigar store, lounging in a rocker beside his carved Indian, gave him a good long unabashed stare. But what did Charlie care—was he an investor? Was she Mrs. Hookstratten? He read and moaned, spelling out the sentence of his doom yet one time more:

Eleanor Lightbody, eh? He cursed her aloud for a meddling bitch, and the cigar-store man dropped his eyes, suddenly absorbed in contemplation. And what else had she told the old lady? That she’d seen the President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company on the street in a sandwich board, touting a nonexistent product like a door-to-door peddler, like a rag-and-bone man?
God:
he had to close his eyes and massage his temples over the memory.

It was Bender who’d set him up for that. After the absolute, utter and unqualified failure of the manufacturing attempt in the Bookbinder basement, Bender had disappeared on an extended sales trip, but so as to occupy his partner’s time while he was away, he’d convinced Charlie that local advertising was the key to their success: if they could establish a presence in Battle Creek, Foodtown, U.S.A., they could do it anywhere.
That was clout. Real clout. And how could they advertise—really blanket the town—in the most economical way? Well, Charlie wouldn’t really be doing anything while Bender was out stumping his samples all over God’s Creation and breaking his back lining up accounts, would he?

And so, long before the weather turned, before the grizzled ice fell back to the curbs and the snowfields turned to mud, before people felt the urge to leave the coal-stoked warmth of their homes and businesses to take a turn round the streets, Charlie Ossining was beating the pavement sandwiched between two stiff new sheets of plywood that read, front and back:
PER-FO, THE NEWEST HEALTH TREAT FROM KELLOGG! MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD! TRY A BOX TODAY
! Of course, there were no boxes to try, aside from the samples stuffed with Will Kellogg’s genuine article—and they were in Bender’s possession, God only knew where. Charlie protested, but Bender had assured him they’d be creating a demand by withholding the product from the public—if you believed Bender it was the greatest advertising gimmick since free samples. People couldn’t get it, right? he’d asked, putting on his rhetorical face. And when people can’t get a product, what do they do—they get frustrated, right? Bender had held his smile a good long moment, his proposition self-evident—even a simpleton could see that. When they got the stuff on the shelves, he assured Charlie, there’d be riots in the aisles—why, people would buy up three and four boxes at a time, just to have it, just for insurance.

Charlie gave in. He walked the streets, a living billboard, a barker, a shill, and he felt like an idiot. The first day, a blustery March afternoon, dust, soot, fragments of leaf, paper and horse detritus leaping up into the air in a thousand whirling cyclones, he ducked into an alley whenever he saw someone coming. But then he steeled himself—maybe Bender was right, maybe they
were
creating a demand that would pay out a hundred times over—and he kept at it, making an effort to fight down his humiliation and show off his slogans to anyone and everyone with eyes in his head and a working knowledge of the English language. It wasn’t a raging success. Children shied away from him, pedestrians looked through him, shopkeepers turned the other way. Dogs, he didn’t bother with.

By the end of the week, though, the whole business had become second nature to him, and he was no more conscious of those two flaps of plywood than he might have been of his overcoat or shoes: the sandwich board was a part of him and he began to feel incomplete without it. When he got back to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s in the evenings, his feet aching, hands gone dead from the cold, he slipped out of the straps and thought he would float away. It felt strange to mount the stairs to his room and not have to walk sideways, to eat sitting down and have nothing more than his own head to support on his shoulders, odd to stretch out on the bed and smoke a cigarette without his wooden frame to enclose him. The weeks passed in a blur, one day indistinguishable from the next. He was a drone, a drudge. He walked the streets of Battle Creek from first light to sundown, and never a thought passed through his head.

Until he ran into Eleanor, that is. It was a raw day, around the beginning of April, a thick misting rain making the air palpable, the streets all but deserted. Charlie was wet through to his long Johns, his bowler shapeless and spongelike, strands of wet hair glued to his forehead and a persistent running drip cascading from the tip of his nose and trailing down the front plane of the sandwich board in a thin fan of tributaries. He was crouched beneath the awning out front of Sherwin’s Grocery, trying to light a wet cigarette, when he glanced up and found himself staring into those cool appraising eyes for the first time since he’d sat across the table from them at Christmas.

“Mr. Ossining,” Eleanor chirped, “is that really you.? Yes? What a surprise to see you—wet enough for you?” She was gathered beneath a parasol along with a tall, rawboned man with sunken eyes and a fringe of vaguely reddish hair poking out from beneath the brim of his hat. He wasn’t her doctor, and he wasn’t her husband. Charlie had never laid eyes on him before.

“Eleanor.” Charlie cleared his throat. The match sputtered, the cigarette dissolved in his hand. He wondered if she knew about the thousand dollars he’d got from her husband, speculated on her choice of the formal “Mr. Ossining” instead of “Charlie”—weren’t they pals, bosom friends, dining companions and intimates?—and then recalled, all in an instant, that he was wearing a sandwich board. It wouldn’t have
been so bad if she’d been wearing a sandwich board, too, and the lumphead with her and the man stepping out of a cab on the far side of the street and everyone else in Battle Creek, the rest of America and Europe, but that wasn’t the case. He, and he alone, was wearing a sandwich board, this gauche and awkward thing, this greedy silent shriek of a garment that had become so much a part of him it had taken him a full sixty seconds to recollect himself. His smile wavered. He swiped at his hair, beat the hat against his leg and, failing all else, tipped it in a mock-gallant salute as he settled it back on his sodden head. “It’s been a while,” he managed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to make conversation in a sandwich board.

“I see you’re wearing a sandwich board,” Eleanor observed.

Charlie tried to look casual. “Yes,” he said.

There was an awkward pause. Rain oozed from the awning. A cabriolet went up the street with a
shush.
Two feet from them, behind the big plate-glass window, a pyramid of Post Toasties boxes rose to the height of a man. Charlie felt foolish suddenly, deluded, no different from “Popcorn George,” with his stale and crumpled bags of popcorn for sale or barter, or the cripple covered in whisk brooms who wandered the streets like a ghost. What was he doing? What was he thinking? Was C. W. Post tramping around in a sandwich board?

“It’s one way to advertise,” Eleanor offered, but she seemed dubious. He could feel her eyes sucking at him, bright green leeches draining the color from his face. “Oh”—and she gave a sudden little gasp—“but please forgive me,” she said, and then she was introducing the lummox at her side, a man of unintegrated parts, the head too big for the shoulders, hands like flippers, the nose barely there and the teeth everywhere. Badger, his name was Badger.

“You’re in the breakfast-food business,” Badger put in, and there was no melody to his voice, only rhythm. Dry, throaty, feral, it was like the sound a dog makes when it’s crouched over a bone, only somehow he’d managed to strap words onto it. But he was astute, all right—and he could read. Yes, sir. No doubt about that.

The rain dripped. Charlie said nothing.

Badger didn’t seem to notice. He was off on the subject of breakfast foods, of their value to society as a corrective and an example to the
carnivores amongst us, and his voice rasped on till it was as dry as the wind raking a field of cornstalks. Charlie watched Eleanor as her companion gnashed away at his adjectives and adverbs—she never took her eyes from him, her expression fixed midway between worship and rapture—and he wondered what she saw in him. Was he some kind of Sanitarium savior? The gizzardite Messiah? He certainly looked the part—deranged, sallow, thin-wristed, his eyes lit with the fanatic’s gleam. “Animal fodder, they call it,” he said with a snort of contempt, “and so they think they can dismiss it as if, as if—” The umbrella seemed to collapse round his head then, and in the process of extricating himself and Eleanor, he lost his train of thought. He never did complete the metaphor.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Charlie interjected, seeing his opening—and his exit. “Breakfast food’s the ticket, peptonized and celery-impregnated. Well. Eleanor”—he tipped the soggy hat again—”and Mr. Badger. It’s been a pleasure.” And then he waddled off into the rain, ungainly as a tortoise in his plywood shell, the flap, flap, flap of his slogans crying out behind him,
MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD, MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD, MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD
.