The Road to Wellville (55 page)

Voices cried out. There was a face at the end of the alley, two faces, a cluster. Charlie lurched off blindly and he ran another three blocks before he began to calm himself—
A phone
, he thought,
I’ve got to get to a phone.
Sweating, wild-eyed, his tie askew and his hat clamped down like a lid over his head, he lurched into a druggist’s and asked to use the telephone. The old man behind the counter was glad to oblige. “Are you all right?” he asked, his face fractured with concern.

Charlie waved him off and asked the operator for the Post Tavern Hotel. There was a click, and then the effete whine of the desk clerk came back at him, wishing him a good afternoon. “Goodloe H. Bender,” Charlie pronounced, and his heart was beating like a drum.

There was a pause. Static over the line. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Bender is no longer with us—may I ask who’s calling?”

“That’s not possible,” Charlie heard himself say, and the drumbeat
was in his throat, beneath his eyelids, paradiddling his scalp. “Mr. Goodloe H. Bender. Check again.”

“Who is this calling?”

Mountains were toppling into the sea, lava erupting all around him. “Goddamnit, man, will you connect me or not?”

Another pause. The words were etched in acid: “Mr. Bender has … disappeared, shall we say, as the fourth-floor maid has only just discovered. His account here—a substantial sum, very substantial—has been left unsettled. Would I by any chance be speaking to his business partner?”

Charlie broke the connection.

When he found Ernest O’Reilly back at the schoolyard and Ernest handed him the envelope containing Bender’s note, he already knew what it would say, already knew what had happened to the $32,000 in advance orders, to the checks from the local burghers and Mrs. Hookstratten’s ill-advised investment in the breakfast-food business, already knew who was left holding the bag, culpable, foolish, had: Charles P. Ossining, Esq., President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, Inc., Battle Creek. He could have read it off his business card. In shock, his fingers trembling as Ernest O’Reilly gazed up at him in wonder and a hundred jostling, hooting schoolchildren filed by on their way back to class, he slit open the envelope and unfolded the note inside. It was written in the block letters of a child, Bender’s characteristic hand, as if he’d never learned to write in cursive, as if his sophistication were as spurious as his dyed whiskers:

Charlie stared numbly at the words. He might just as well have been reading his own epitaph.

The evening was mild, hushed, the breath of some fragrant austral place hanging over the depot like a benediction. Shadows striped the tracks and the trees behind the station were cast in bronze. Somewhere a bell tolled the hour: Though people had begun to gather on the platform, their voices were pitched low, and the only sound that came to Charlie as he sat on a bench against the outside wall was the murmur of the swallows flitting in and out from beneath the eaves. The swallows didn’t charm him. The softness of the evening and the play of light in the trees didn’t uplift him or fill him with a reverence for the earth and the creation and the pure animal joy of being alive. Quite the contrary. He waited there for the whistle of Mrs. Hookstratten’s train as he might have waited in his cell for the footsteps of his executioner.

For the past three nights he’d slept in his clothes, afraid to approach Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s till past midnight and slipping out the back way at the first hint of dawn. Suddenly it seemed as if half of America wanted a word with him. The very day after he’d made his escape from the bootlickers at the Post Tavern Hotel, the Per-Fo correspondence mysteriously began to turn up at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s—and with it, as if it were almost coincidental, Bender’s bill. (The bill, which not only included the last month’s charges but carried a line of credit all the way back to October, was a sybaritic wallow, a blow-by-blow chronicle of excess and indulgence. On such and such a day, Bender had ordered shellfish in his room, or he’d descended to the Wee Nippy to entertain in state, risen to his suite with Coq au Vin, Tomcod Frit and Escalope de Veau à la Guennoise, plunged again to the main dining room with a jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck and a plate of beluga caviar, sent out for three pairs of shoes and six shirtfronts, ordered a carriage, cut flowers, personalized linen.)

But the bill was the least of his worries—that, at any rate, was in Bender’s name. What was disturbing, what kept Charlie from his bed, his room, his house, was the flood of angry letters from bilked grocers, hapless investors, irate realtors and concerned law-enforcement agencies from all over the Midwest and Northwest—all of which were addressed to Charles P. Ossining, President-in-Chief, The Per-Fo Company, Inc., Suite 414, The Post Tavern Hotel. Had Bender been posing as his partner while foisting off his phony boxes of Per-Fo and bilking widows
out of their pensions? Could he stoop to such a thing? It certainly looked that way. Oh, yes indeed. And that was only the beginning—there were more immediate legal problems, too, all of which Bender had kept from him. It seemed that separate lawsuits had been filed in the Calhoun County Court to enjoin the production, sale or transport of “Kellogg’s” Per-Fo and to sue for damages on the grounds of trademark infringement. There were also three letters from their own attorney, a Mr. Barton Noble of Woolhough Street, who wanted to discuss the matter of his account with them. Urgently.

Charlie was in shock. Had been for four days now. He should have known better—did know better—but Bender had strung him along just as he’d strung along the Post Tavern Hotel and everyone else he’d ever run across, paying out a sop on account now and then, bluffing, boasting, flimflamming and humbugging. Charlie was a fish. A chump. A sucker. He’d been hooked, landed, scaled, gutted, stuffed, roasted, chewed, digested and shat out. He thought he was on his way to becoming a tycoon—and now he was only a criminal. George Kellogg, a bum off the street, a drunk in rags, was curled up blissfully in his prepaid room at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, oblivious, while Charlie couldn’t get within a hundred yards of the place—they had men out front waiting for him. Process servers. Bill collectors. Bone breakers.

If this was the low point of his life, sitting there helpless on the mute uncaring boards while the boys began to gather to hawk their worthless stocks and Harry Delahoussaye slunk out of the shadows at the far end of the platform, things were about to get a whole lot worse. For at that moment the great moving shadow of Mrs. Hookstratten’s train came into sight, and he could hear it and feel it in the earth, a tremor rising up through the platform and into the soles of his feet, the rush of implacable power that set the big sign before him quaking on its hinges like some sadistic joke:
BETTER YOURSELF IN BATTLE CREEK
.

He stood then and the whistle blew and a harsh wind stung his face.

   
Chapter 3   

T
here wasn’t much to see, really—a vague, horseshoe-shaped mound with a bite of raw earth taken out of it and a tumble of rock, fragments of unglazed pottery and what might or might not have been human remains. Eleanor didn’t know quite what she’d expected—the skeletons of braves and squaws bound together in supernatural embrace, every bone perfectly articulated, as in the model Frank kept in his office, a favorite dog at their sides, maybe. Headdresses. Vases. Beads. Jewelry. Those pipe things with the feathers on them—what did they call them? Still, it was a pure joy just to be out here under the sun, drinking up the health-giving rays, lying back on a bed of wildflowers and watching the scroll of the sky roll ceaselessly back on itself.

She was of two minds with regard to the sun, and she’d brought her parasol along so as not to get too much of it all at once. She’d always been taught—and she’d felt it instinctively—that sun-braised cheeks, sallow skin and reddened hands were coarse and unsightly, the emblem of the foreigner and the day laborer. But Dr. Kellogg had taught her the vital importance of phototherapy and she’d spent an otherwise pallid winter invigorating her constitution beneath the healing rays of the electric-light bath, the photophore, the thermophore, the arc light and the quartz actinic lamp. If anything, her skin was fresher and more
supple than ever. She’d been blessed with a flawless complexion, the envy of the girls who’d gone to school with her, found husbands and settled down to homes and children in the crisply painted and turreted houses that garnished the undulating hills of Peterskill. And what were they doing now, those girls? May Boughton, Christine Peckworth, Lucy Strang? Obliviously poisoning their husbands and children with creatine, with putrefying flesh, with steaks, chops and roasts. Lucy, at least, should have known better….

Peterskill. Her thoughts hovered there a moment, and she saw the yellow roses climbing the trellis outside her kitchen window, the honeysuckle spilling over the fence into the Van Tassels’ yard, her father’s soft wistful smile and the way he took up her hands as if they were buns warm from the oven … God, she hadn’t written him in weeks….

“Well, well, well, well—enjoying a bit of the old Sol, eh?”

Shading her eyes, she looked up into Lionel Badger’s sun-dazzled face. He was wearing a Panama hat and a pair of canvas lederhosen with galluses of woven hemp, and he was grinning. He’d omitted a shirt and she ought to have been mildly shocked to see the flesh revealed beneath the hempen straps, the body hair, the striations of his rib cage, the white slash of a scar at his shoulder, but he’d removed his shirt twice in her presence in the past week and she was growing used to it. After all, he was only opening himself up to the sun, as per the Kellogg regime and his own persistent lights (anything the Doctor advocated, Lionel advocated to the power of ten). “Yes,” she murmured languidly, the sun like a great warm golden spatula, pressing her back into the torporous, sensual earth. “But really, I’ve been about to get up and join Virginia for the past half-hour now.”