Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

As the nurse marched away toward the exit, Joe’s ancient scrawny hand emerged from under the blankets, making clutching motions. “Come a litde closer,” he said.

  “Oh, I think I’m close enough,” Sara said. “Now, let me tell you about the party. We found some Geesters outside Cicero, Illinois, might be related to you, and—”

  “Liars!” Joe snapped.

  “Well, anyway,” Sara said, her smile insistent and undimmed, “they’re coming to the party, you can compare relatives then. And guess who else is coming?”

  “Cheryl Tiegs?”

  Ignoring that, Sara said, “Three mayors! And Dr. Bark, and—”

  “Butcher!” cried Joe.

  Sara didn’t follow that. She said, “You want me to invite the butcher?”

  “Bark’s a butcher!” yelled Joe, and a few quavery voices nearby said, “Right on!” and, “Tell it, brother!”

  “Oh, now, Jim,” Sara said, “look on the sunny side. I bet—”

  “I’m Joe,” Joe snarled.

  “Oh. Sorry. Anyway, I bet Jim doesn’t feel that—”

  “Jim’s dead,” Joe said, and snapped his gums.

  Sara blinked at him. “What?”

  “Died about an hour ago,” Joe said, in grim satisfaction. “Went—” And he rattled in his throat; a truly dreadful noise.

  Sara, her heart in her throat, leaned close to the suspiciously silent Jim. Those were not living eyes. That was not a living mouth. “Oh, golly,” she said.

  Joe’s clutching hand reached out, moving toward Sara, but too slow and too late; she was already turning away, shocked, gray-faced, moving, running, yelling, “Nurse! Nurse!”

  Massa sat at his desk in his elevator/office, drinking beer from the bottle. Jacob Harsch paced back and forth in front of the desk, studying various sheets of paper. “They’re getting lax, sloppy,” he muttered. “A few random firings, that’ll put some spirit in them.”

  Massa laughed. “Haven’t had a good old bloodbath in quite a while,” he said.

  “They’re getting fat, they think it’s too easy, they think they deserve all this somehow. Chop a few heads, that’ll do it.”

  “But not Boy,” Massa said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Boy’s worth the lot of them.”

  The phone on Massa’s desk rang, and Massa watched Harsch pick it up and speak into it: “Mr. DeMassi’s office.” He listened, his lips twitching faindy, and then he looked over at Massa to say, “The twins, hundred years old tomorrow.”

  “Sweet story,” Massa said, smiling at the thought of it. “Beautiful story.”

  “One died.”

  Massa’s mouth dropped open. “Died? Before his birthday?”

  “The reporter out there wants to know, do we go ahead with the party.”

  “Of course not!” Massa said, astonished that the question could even be asked. “What’s that supposed to be? A party for one twin?”

  Into the phone, Harsch said, “No party.” He listened again, nodded, said to Massa, “What about the cake?”

  Ridiculous; Massa knew it was ridiculous. He pushed the button on his desk that opened the elevator doors, revealing that they were at this time on the third floor, with the conference table and, beyond it out over the floor, Editorial. Way out there, among the other people, desks, chairs, filing cabinets, Jack Ingersoll stood beside his desk with the phone to his ear. But Massa didn’t need a phone for this. Half rising over his desk, pointing out at Ingersoll, knowing the fellow could see and hear him, Massa bellowed, “He doesn't get the cake!"

  On the pay phone on the street comer down the block from the Elysian Fields Manor and Convalescent Center, pickup trucks and old Hudsons puddling by behind her, Sara said unbelievingly, “He doesn’t get the cake? Do you mean, not only is his brother dead, he doesn’t get the party? He doesn’t even get the cake?”

  In her ear, faintly apologetic but holding out no hope at all, Jack Ingersoll’s voice said, “Sorry, Sara, that’s from Massa himself. He just bellowed it at me from across the room.”

  Sara shook her head, trying to think, saying, “I can’t believe even Massa, even the Galaxy, would be so low that—” She broke off, blinked, licked her lips, looked desperate, and quickly said, “Yes, Doctor? Wait a minute, Jack. Yes, Doctor?”

  “What’s that?” Jack’s tiny voice said. “Sara?” Speaking a few inches away from the phone, sounding hopeful but doubtful, Sara said, “Are you sure, Doctor?” Then, in a sudden burst of delight, “That’s wonderful, Doctor!”

  “Sara? Sara?”

  “A miracle?” Sara cried into the phone. “Jack, did you hear? He isn’t dead! He had a relapse! The other thing, I mean, the opposite. He’s alive, Jack!”

  The deeply suspicious voice of Jack said in her ear, “Sara, are you trying to con me?”

  “Jack, how can you say that? The doctor’s right here, you can ask him your— Oh, he had to get back to his patient. Jack, listen, I better get off, I’ve got this party coming up.”

  “With pictures, Sara,” said that deeply suspicious voice.

  “Well, sure! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” There on the street comer, out of her mind, Sara laughed girlishly, and a middle-aged couple, on their way to visit Mom at Elysian Fields, gave her a dirty' look. “I’ll have pictures, Jack,” she said, waving brightly at the passing couple. “I’ll have everything, I’ll get it all. Bye, now!” And she hung up, clenching her teeth, not moaning in agony until the connection was definitely and absolutely broken. Then she sagged forward against the phone, resting her fevered brow on the coin slot. “I’ll have pictures,” she muttered. “Everything. Somehow.”

  Slowly Jack hung up the phone, but continued to stand there, looking at it as though it might make a sudden move, might all at once bite him. Mary Kate looked over. “Sara?”

  “She’s out there,” Jack said. “With a questionable number of twins. Give me your reading, Mary Kate. Does that girl know what she’s doing?”

  “Of course not,” Mary Kate said. “Why should she be any different from the rest of us?”

  Five

  Tann-ta-rraaa!! The Whitcomb, Indiana, Volunteer Hook and Ladder Fire Department, Engine Company 2, Fife, Drum, Bugle, Bagpipe, Glockenspiel and Clarinet Corps marched in place, blowing and plinking and whomping and wheezing, pounding the emerald green front lawn of the Elysian Fields Manor and Convalescent Home into brown muck, tearing off their rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In” (not, perhaps, the happiest of choices, but no one seemed to notice), until Company Commander and Bandmaster J. Garrison Murchison IV shrilled his whistle, smartly about-faced, and led his seventeen widely assorted musicians in through the front door, down the wide main hall, through the double doorway at its end with the banner strung overhead reading HAPPY 100, JOE AND jim!, and into the dayroom, alive—sort of—with the birthday celebration.

  It was a dayroom transformed. Pink and white crepe streamers corkscrewed from comer to comer and from light fixture to light fixture overhead. Golden-agers seated in all manner of chairs and conveyances lined both long walls, flanking THE CAKE, whose twenty-foot length down the middle of the thirty-foot room effectively created through mitosis two parties where only one had been planned. THE WEEKLY GALAXY AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SALUTE JOE AND JIM GEESTER ON THEIR 100TH BIRTHDAY!!! read the cake, from end to end, in garish red letters on the pure white icing.

  The cake had not as yet been broken into; in the meantime, secondary tables on the side walls contained platters of cheese sandwiches on white bread, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup dip with potato chips, thawed but unheated egg rolls, a big green and red platter of crudites which everybody avoided on the assumption it was merely a decorative vegetable centerpiece, and both chocolate chip cookies and Fig Newtons. Weak coffee, see-through tea and a big bowl of Hi-C punch were the available quaffs.

  In addition to the dayroom’s normal occupants, shunted for the moment to the side, there were new faces here for the spec
ial occasion. Three bewildered mayors, a whole lot of intendy eating Geesters from Cicero, Illinois, Dr. Bark the butcher and various other celebrities milled about both sides of the cake. The photographer, ungainly and lumpish in her brogans, gray tube socks, heavy shapeless black skirt, pilled brown sweater over tom green polo shirt, and decayed red bandana around neck, hung about with cameras and light meters, swooped and squatted around the room like some endangered species of flightless bird, now standing bent forward on one leg, now seated in a sprawl of skins on the floor, now flat on her back under one of the tables bearing the cake, now lunging with high-kneed hops toward some new object of her magpie interest, and always with one or another of her cameras to her sweating and exalted face.

  Just to the right of the doorway, as the marching band marched in (to bifurcate at the cake and finish the number marching in place all around it, while various sections of the cake slowly subsided), stood Sara with Harry Razza and Louis B. Urbiton, they drinking plastic cups of Hi-C punch which they had privately altered to their taste, she drinking and eating nothing, but smiling broadly in terror and accomplishment. This was her party, her creation and then some.

  Of course, she’d had help. The staff and other residents of Elysian Fields, when shown the clear choice between abetting a felony or losing the party, with its attendant food and drink, not to mention publicity and visitors from the great outer world, had seen immediately and to a person which way duty lay. (In fact, when the surviving Geester boy, out of simple cantankerousness, had threatened not to cooperate, it was his fellow residents of the Manor who had swiftly ended that revolution, with graphic portrayals of what Joe’s life among them would be like, however long or short, should he continue to make trouble.)

  Among Sara’s fellow representatives of the Weekly Galaxy, participation had been general, unstinting and immediate. The photographer, faced with the alternative of the long solitary drive back to Indianapolis without even the solace of sold photographs and paid expenses, had with great enthusiasm entered into the conspiracy. Harry Razza and Louis B. Urbiton, old hands at the manufacturing of news, fell in with a will and many a valuable suggestion. But the whole thing would nevertheless have been impossible were it not for Bob Sangster and his nose.

  It turned out, on close inspection, that the Bob Sangster nose and the nose shared by Joe and Jim Geester were so markedly similar in both size and construction that they might actually even be related in some distant way, a concept that both Bob and Joe denied with vehement disgust. Working from that proboscal commonality, with makeup assistance from Sara and Harry Razza and the photographer, selective shaving of the Sangster head, and a set of pajamas, slippers, blanket and wheelchair to match that of the surviving twin, Bob Sangster was turned into a simulacrum of Jim Geester (or Joe, actually, that having been the model they’d worked from) so realistic that one nurse, seeing the false Jim placed in his wheelchair beside the real Joe, commented, “By God, it’s like having the filthy old bastard back again.”

  (The real Jim Geester slept the long sleep upstairs in his room, the air conditioner turned on full and the door locked. Immediately after the party, it would be discovered that the joy and excitement had been too much for old Jim. Dr. Bark the butcher, cheerily eating Fig Newtons and chatting with the mayors, would fill out and sign and date the death certificate, and Lloyd Llewellyn of Llewellyn’s Mortuary, who considered Elysian Fields Manor by far his most frequent and valued customer, could be counted on to handle the obsequies without question or fuss.)

  The mayors and Cicero Geesters and other special guests were the first gulls of this cabal, and were eating it up a lot more enthusiastically than they did the mushroom soup. At the far end of the room, in subtly dimmer light, the two birthday boys sat in identical postures of slumpshouldered hopelessness, one clutching an empty plastic cup (he’d spilled the Hi-C punch on his blanket), the other feebly picking at a Fig Newton. Watching them from her post near the door, as the dismemberment of “When the Saints Come Marching In” at last clattered to its photo finish, Sara for just a second couldn’t remember which was which, but then got it straight—the one who’d spilled his punch was Bob, startled at having found it non-alcoholic—and said, “By golly, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “Amazing,” Louis B. Urbiton agreed. “Bob’s the spic qualities all these years unknown, unsung.”

  “They’d better stay unknown and unsung,” Sara said.

  “Oh, truly,” Louis agreed. “Be worth our jobs, wouldn’t it?”

  Harry Razza knocked back his redecorated punch and said, “Looks like two of them to me anyway.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” cried Dr. Bark the butcher into the comparative quiet left when the volunteer fire department had downed instruments, “it’s time to cut the cake!”

  “Don’t let him cut it!” quavered some ancient wag. “It’ll never survive!”

  “Ha ha,” Dr. Bark the butcher said, smiling around like a searchlight, trying to find the funny fellow.

  “Hold it!” cried the photographer, crashing over a number of invalids and visiting Geesters to get into just the right position. “Now!” she yelled. “Cut it now!”

  “Joe and, uh, Jim,” Dr. Bark the butcher said, smiling broadly in their direction and raising over his head the unnecessarily large knife, “this is for you.”

  “Look out, Joe!” cried the still anonymous wag.

  Ignoring this interruption, Dr. Bark the butcher sliced into a somewhat underdone segment of cake and brought up a knife all gooey and runny, to which a piece of exclamation point adhered, that being the end at which the doctor’s operation had begun. Gazing in revulsion at his knife, Dr. Bark the butcher said, “Who did the prep on this cake?”

  Well, it didn’t matter. Once the initial incision had been made, the guests fell to the cake with knives and forks and spoons and spatulas and playing cards and tearing fingers like an Islamic mob finding a heretic in its midst. In the eating frenzy that followed, no one thought to give any of the cake to the birthday boys, but that was all right; it wasn’t on their diets, anyway.

  The fuss around the cake woke Joe Geester from a dream in which he was at last putting it to that little Mrs. McKellahy the trolley conductor’s wife in 3A; sixty-seven years dropped on him like a dead buffalo with consciousness; so who would want to be conscious? He turned his head to say something nasty to Jim, and what he saw brought near-term memory into alignment with long-term memory and gave him even more to be sour about. “You,” he commented, without pleasure.

  Bob Sangster, not all that rollicking in mood himself since discovering and spilling the contents of his Hi-C punch cup, nodded in agreement. “Me,” he acknowledged.

  Joe looked him over, feeling more cranky by the second, but knowing he didn’t dare do a thing to queer this deal; which only made him crankier. “You don’t look a thing like me,” he snarled.

  “I’m not you, you old turkey,” Bob said. “I’m your brother Jim.”

  “Don’t sound like me, neither.”

  “Was your brother as sweet as you?”

  “No,” Joe said thoughtfully, looking back down the years. “I was always the good-natured one.” Bob stared at him in disbelief.

  “Hold it!” cried the photographer, squatting wide-kneed in the space between them and the cake as though planning to relieve herself right then and there; but with the black box of the camera mashed to her absorbed face.

  “Come a little closer,” Joe told her.

  “This is perfect, right here!” the photographer told him. “Hold it!”

  They held it.

  Six

  Jack held the photo in both hands, studying it, studying the two old guys in the wheelchairs, surrounded by obvious partygoers. The two old guys were identical, with identical bad-tempered expressions. One held a floral design plastic cup, the other a crumbled cookie. Jack could see this photo, touch it, look at it; so why did he mistrust the goddamn thing so much?

  “Well?”
Sara asked, standing there, bobbing on the balls of her feet, filling and overflowing his squaricle with her triumphant smiling presence. “All right,” Jack said grudgingly. “All right.” Well, it had to be all right, didn’t it? Here were the hundred-year-old twins. Here they were again in photos with the twenty-foot-long birthday cake, the Galaxy’s name prominent. Here they were with the three mayors. Here they were with the long-lost cousins from Cicero, Illinois. Here they were with the nursing home doctors and staff. Here they were with their fellow residents. Here they were looking balefully at the camera and wearing tall conical birthday hats.

  Here they were, all right. And here was Jack, hip deep in verification and authentication; so what was there about this story that made him feel as though somehow or other he’d just bought the Brooklyn Bridge?

  It shouldn’t matter, really. If the story was solid enough to get past the fact checkers and into the paper, that was all anybody needed. It was just that ... it was just that ... if there was any conning to be done, Jack was supposed to be one of the conners, not one of the connees.

  Oh, well. At last, knowing that if in fact he had been taken for a ride it had been masterfully done, that he would never see the seams—no, it hadn’t been done with mirrors, he’d already checked that possibility—he tossed the photo back among the others on his desk and said, “Well, you did it.”

  “I sure did,” she agreed, swelling with pride. “You sent me to do a birthday party for one- hundred-year-old twins, and that’s what I did. Sorry about the governor.”

  “That’s okay,” Jack assured her. “The three mayors are fine, very American.”

  Mary Kate paused in her typing to say, out of the comer of her mouth, “It’s a real heartwarming story.” And she went on with her typing.

  “It was a really nice party,” Sara said.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be there,” Jack said truthfully.

  Sara laughed and said, “What next?”

  “Felicia,” Jack told her. “The famous Felicia. Or the nonfamous Felicia, unfortunately.”