The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Eighty-five cents? Are you crazy? You said fifty cents to the lake and two bits to the factory—”

  “And ten cents back.”

  Charlie could feel the frustration rising in him, all the driver’s little gibes and taunts come home to roost in that frigid moment. “But you didn’t … I assumed—”

  “Assumed, shit,” the driver growled, working the mucus in his throat and rolling it back and forth across his palate before letting it go in the street, “what do I look like, a charity worker?”

  Charlie was about to counter this, violently, the words already on his lips, when he looked up and found himself staring into the watchful face of the doorman. The man wore a smug, superior look, as if he knew to the penny what every man who entered the Post Tavern Hotel was worth, and he caught Charlie’s eye as he leaned forward in his crisp uniform to open the door of the carriage ahead of them. Charlie was suddenly embarrassed. Here he was, President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, and he was haggling over a dime on the front steps of the best hotel in town. A dime. When just yesterday he’d waltzed up those very steps with nearly four thousand dollars in his pocket. The doorman helped a woman out of the hack in front of them and turned to Charlie’s cab. “Can you make change, at least,” Charlie muttered, handing the driver a two-and-a-half-dollar gold piece. At that moment, the door swung open as if under its own power and Charlie backed out into the street, preparing to straighten up on receiving his change and nod a stiff, icy greeting to the doorman.

  “Well, my goodness,” came a voice at his back, “if it isn’t Mr. Ossining!”

  He didn’t jump, but it was all he could do not to flinch as he turned to look into the mocking green eyes of Eleanor Lightbody. She was wearing a fur coat—a different one altogether from the one she’d worn at the station the previous evening—and she was in the company of a fit-looking man with fair hair and a boyish face, the sort that goes into middle age and beyond looking as if he’d just broken the tape at a track meet. Charlie tried to compose himself. Here was a potential investor, he told himself, not to mention a woman who seemed to offer him more each time he laid eyes on her.

  “Ah,” he returned, striking a casual note, the breakfast-food magnate returning in a coach from overseeing his dominion, “Mrs. Lightbody—Eleanor—what a pleasure.” He was uncomfortably aware of the doorman at his side, and of the driver, hunched like a gargoyle over the seat of the hack and poking through a filthy coin purse with clumsy mittened fingers.

  Eleanor held him a moment with her eyes, the whole group frozen as if in a portrait—The Arrival of the Tycoon, or some such nonsense—and then she turned to introduce the young athlete at her side. “Mr. Ossining, I’d like to present my physician, Frank Linniman. Frank, Mr. Ossining.”

  Charlie took the man’s hand in a firm grip. “It’s ‘Charlie,’ please,” he said. “And Mrs. Lightbody,” shifting his gaze back to her perpetually amused little mouth and mocking eyes—what was so funny?—”I hope you’ll call me ‘Charlie,’ too. And I hope you won’t mind my calling you ‘Eleanor.’ After all, we survived the Twentieth Century Limited together, not to mention the Michigan Central Line.” He let an urbane laugh escape him, as if rail travel were a constant and unavoidable nuisance.

  “Yes, of course,” Eleanor murmured, but she didn’t join him in a conspiratorial chuckle, as he’d hoped. She turned to her companion instead (she had hold of his arm, Charlie noticed) and let her voice ring out in a coy little trill, “Mr. Ossining is the president of a breakfast-food company, Frank—”

  “Oh?” Frank didn’t seem particularly impressed.

  At that moment the driver entered the conversation. “Listen, Diamond Jim,” he called, wiping his nose on the underside of his sleeve and leaning forward to leer at the whole group, “I’ll have to give you pennies and nickels, I don’t seem to have a whole lot of two-bit pieces—”

  Charlie waved him off. “Keep it,” he said. “Keep the change.”

  The man was incredulous. “But that’s—?”

  “Keep it,” Charlie repeated.

  “And what was the name of your company, Mr. Ossining?” Eleanor asked, taking her hand from the doctor’s arm to reach up and adjust her hat. “‘Perfect Flakes’ or ‘Perfect Food’ or something like that?”

  “Per-Fo,” Charlie murmured, heartsick over the dollar and sixty-five cents he’d just thrown away as if he were J. P. Morgan himself, and wanting only to get out of this, disappear, crawl into his den at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s and lick his wounds. But a voice whispered in his head, An investor, here’s an investor, and he stood his ground as the hack rattled off and the doorman returned to his station.

  “Yes, Per-Fo,” Eleanor pronounced, “how forgetful of me. And have you managed to find a manufacturing plant, Mr. Ossining, for this peptonized marvel of a celery-impregnated food?” She was mocking him.

  “As a matter of fact, no—I’ve just come from inspecting a very, uh, substantial plant, a terrific-looking place, with all the equipment intact—went out of business, you know—but I don’t think it’s for us. Not nearly the floor space we were hoping for.” He was talking too fast, and he caught himself.’ “By the way, have I given you my card?”

  Eleanor held up the palm of a black velvet glove. “Yes, Mr. Ossining, thank you—you were kind enough to present both my husband and me with cards at dinner the other night. You did get Will’s card?”

  Distracted, forgetful, her gawk of a husband had left his card under the butter dish. William Fitzroy and Eleanor O. Lightbody, Parsonage Lane, Peterskill, was all the information it conveyed, but Charlie had held on to it, treasured it, in fact, as the key to establishing future contact. He nodded.

  “Well.” The sharp green eyes, the pursed lips, a pronouncement of finality. “We must be going, though I’ve enjoyed so much seeing you again—Dr. Linniman has been kind enough to take me out for my evening constitutional, and we really must get back. He means to build my appetite, don’t you, Frank?” A pause, a glance to the doctor and back again. “Are you stopping here, Mr. Ossining?”

  Charlie shot a quick glance at the grand entrance, the show of the lights, the rigid doorman. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. A splendid place, really, every bit as classy—elegant, I mean—as the best of our New York hotels. And the service is quite adequate. There’s no place like it in town, I’m told.”

  “Oh, there you’re wrong,” Eleanor said, and still she seemed to be sniping at him. “You haven’t tried Dr. Kellogg’s Sanitarium. But, then, you wouldn’t need to, would you, a healthy specimen like yourself?”

  Charlie laughed, covering his mouth in the way Mrs. Hookstratten had taught him. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know about that, but—”

  She’d already turned to go. “Watch out for those oysters,” she warned, calling out gaily over her shoulder, and then she was heading up the street, her arm in the doctor’s. Charlie watched her till she turned the corner, then made his way up the steps and into the lobby of Bender’s grand domain, suddenly feeling as weary as if he were carrying one of those three-Story ovens on his shoulders.

  Bender wasn’t in. There was no message. Guilt-ridden over his heedless expenditure—this was only his first day and already he’d gone through half of what Bender had given him for the week—he lowered his head and walked the twenty frigid blocks to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s. And as he sat down at the table with the full, wheezing, snuffling, whey-faced complement of his fellow boarders and spooned up the landlady’s bland fish balls and hard-boiled pike, he found that he couldn’t stop thinking about Eleanor Lightbody and the way her eyes lit on him as if he were so vastly amusing, as if he were a clown or a court jester set down on earth for her royal entertainment. It was like an itch, an ache, and he was still rubbing at it as he mounted the creaking stairs, threw himself onto the cold rumpled mattress and let the night overtake him.

  In the morning, it was fried pike with eggs and horseradish butter and a kind of pancake that tasted of fish—pi
ke, specifically—and then the long lonely walk to the Post Tavern. Bender wasn’t in. There was no message. Irritated, impatient, wanting only to get on with it and feel useful, to do something, anything, Charlie found himself pacing the lobby, back and forth, until he began to draw looks. The desk clerk, the long-nosed, suck-cheeked simp he’d wanted to throttle two nights ago, was particularly watchful, jealous of every step across his precious carpets and unblemished floors. The doorman, too—though he seemed a touch more respectful now that he’d seen Charlie lay so princely a tip on the hack driver. Even a few of the guests—pampered, white-haired, holier-than-thou types—began to take notice of him. It wouldn’t do for the President-in-Chief of Per-Fo to get the bum’s rush through the front door of the best hotel in town, so Charlie sank into his collar and went back out into the chill morning. Around the corner he found a sandwich shop, where he invested ten cents of his dwindling resources in a cup of coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich—anything but fish—and he sat there, reading the previous afternoon’s paper over again and nursing his coffee till his watch showed 10:40. Then he pulled on his gloves, squared the brim of his hat and started off for his meeting with Bender at the old Malta-Vita plant at the corner of Verona and Wattles.

  The day was brisk, but not nearly as cold as the day before, and if his feet weren’t aching from overuse he might almost have enjoyed the walk. The exercise calmed him, and by the time he reached Capital Avenue he began to feel hopeful again—Bender knew what he was doing, sure he did. There was no sense in getting upset over nothing. For the first time since he’d got off the train he came alive to the sights and sounds around him, almost as if he were awakening from a deep sleep. A carriage glided sedately down the street, and he could hear the creak of harness and spring beneath the gentle, almost reticent punch and slap of the horse’s hooves; a pair of women in bonnets and shawls passed him on the sidewalk with a whisper of skirts; somewhere a dog barked in anticipation of its morning run. The whole scene was like something out of a novel—the streets swept clean, the houses freshly painted, the trees marching along in an ordered row: nothing could go wrong here. This was the middle of America, and it was staunch, virtuous, noble, monied. Charlie peered up at the fanciful turrets and spires of the houses, at the wraparound porches with their motionless gliders, at the stained-glass panels brilliant with light and the big bay windows that seemed to invite the passerby in, and he wondered what it would be like to live in such a house, to go out to work in the morning and come home in the evening to a trim little green-eyed wife … and here the image of Eleanor Lightbody settled into his head, airily superior, deriding him with her unattainability. The image stayed with him, all the way up Capital to Verona and all the way down Verona to Wattles Lane.

  Charlie arrived at 11:00 A.M. on the dot, but Bender was nowhere to be seen. The ruins were as still and silent as an Etruscan tomb. There were no birds to give the walls life, no rats stirring in the corners—even the bum seemed to have moved on to greener pastures. Charlie walked round the place twice, poked about in the rubble, stood before the great three-story ovens and tried to conjure up some of the awe he’d felt the previous afternoon. He checked his watch reflexively, every minute or so, the ritual of seizing the chain, pulling it from his pocket and snapping it open like a tic. It was twenty past the hour, half past, twenty till. No Bender. After a while Charlie huddled in the back corner, out of the wind, and turned his face to the wan, cloud-tattered sun as it put in its brief appearance for the day. At 12:30, he gave it up and trudged back to the hotel.

  His mood was black. If before he’d felt a surge of hope and the streets had seemed pristine and cheerful, now his heart was a cinder, the streets sterile and dead. Bender had cheated him, he was sure of it. He’d taken Mrs. Hookstratten’s nest egg and skipped town, leaving Charlie holding the bag. By the time he reached the Post Tavern he was in a state. He shoved past the doorman without a glance and strode up to the desk, where the clerk was busy with a couple just off the train from Chicago. “We do have a top-floor suite, if you prefer,” the clerk was saying. The wife stood primly at the husband’s elbow, cocking her head like a bird on a wire, a so-pleased-to-be-here smile pressed to her lips. The bell captain, a big-shouldered man squeezed into a tight red wool uniform with epaulettes and braids, was stationed behind her, poised over the sprawl of the couple’s luggage.

  Charlie pushed past the little group and laid a hand on the desk. “Mr. Bender,” he hissed.

  The clerk looked at him as if Charlie were a clot of manure he’d just scraped from the bottom of his shoe. He could barely suppress the contempt in his voice. “One moment, please,” he said.

  Charlie’s fist came down like a sledgehammer on the desk. “One moment be damned,” he choked. “I want Bender. Fetch him this instant.”

  The lobby was a fabric of whispers, the whole royal edifice tottering over the detonation of his rage. The couple backed off a step. No one would look him in the eye. The desk clerk’s upper lip was crumpled, his gaze stricken; he looked like a schoolboy unjustly singled out for punishment. Charlie was filled with a brutal elation: the poor fool looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “Bender,” Charlie snarled, his tone as sharp as a slap in the face. “Now.”

  But he didn’t get to see Bender. Nor did he get to see the clerk break down in nervous sobs or the hand-wringing couple dance a little reel to their impotence and agitation. No. Because at that moment he felt himself seized as if by a monumental pair of pincers, as the bell captain, a former wrestler, put a full nelson on him and, with the aid of the doorman, wrenched him across the lobby, out the door and down the steps, dumping him unceremoniously amidst the horse droppings in the street. The two men, bell captain and doorman, titans both, stood silently over him, arms folded, only wishing that he would make an attempt to get back up the steps and into the hotel so that they could take him out in the alley and deal with him properly. Charlie lay there, his shoulder twisted and a bright vibrant glowing pain settling into the base of his neck, and cursed them weakly. After a moment the doorman stepped forward, and in a thoughtful, almost tender way, kicked him twice in the ribs.

  Charlie just wanted to lie there in the street, the force of the humiliation a thousand times worse than any pain they could ever have hoped to inflict on him. But people were watching and he knew that the police would be bending over him any minute now, and he knew, too, just how sympathetically the police were likely to treat the reputed President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company after glancing at his torn trouser leg and the smears of horseshit on his coat. So he sucked in his ribs, pushed himself up as if nothing in the world were the matter—my goodness, had he slipped on a patch of ice?—bent for his hat and limped up the street with as much dignity as he could muster under the circumstances.

  But he was raging inside. Revenge, that was all he could think of—finding that ape of a bell captain in a saloon one night or alone on a dark street, looking up the address of that wooden-faced doorman and surprising him over his soup, just blow in the door and give him a good crack at his own kitchen table. That’s what he would do, and he was the man to do it, too. And Bender. Goddamn him. Goddamn the day he’d ever laid eyes on the miserable son of a bitch. He’d cut him up good, he would, just let him get his hands on the bastard. He was walking blindly, muttering to himself, neither knowing nor caring where he went, up one street and down another, walking to cool the rage in his heart. And the despair. Per-Fo. What a joke. Bender was a confidence man, that was all, and he’d reeled in Charlie like a fish. And Mrs. Hookstratten; what would he tell Mrs. Hookstratten?

  When finally he looked up to take his bearings, he found that he’d landed practically on the doorstep of Battle Creek’s grandest edifice, the rock on which the whole town was built: the Sanitarium itself. He stood across the street from it, on the walk of a busy city block, and the very solidity and massiveness of the place shook him out of his funk. So this was where the Eleanor Lightbodys of the world went to salve thei
r little hurts and palpitations, this was where the corn flake was born and a thousand speculators had struck gold. The place was something, all right, he had to admit it—and she was right, it could have swallowed the Post Tavern three times over.

  He was standing there, lost in reverie, in awe, when a familiar piping voice spoke at his elbow: “Hey.”

  He swung round on Ernest O’Reilly, Bender’s pitiful little messenger boy. “Hey,” he returned, and there was no animation in the greeting. “What are you doing out here, Ernest O’Reilly—shouldn’t you be in school?”

  The boy was tiny, shriveled, pathetic, a little homunculus preserved in a jar. He shrugged, looked away. “Nothin’. Business, that’s all.”

  Business. Of course. Charlie leapt at him. “Where is he?”

  Ernest O’Reilly was a sack of rags, lighter than air, hopeless. “You’re hurting me,” he said in his tremulous little flute of a voice, and there was no outrage in it, no protest, just a sad familiar acquiescence.

  “Bender,” Charlie repeated, and he tightened his grip. “Where is he?”

  The boy jerked his neck to indicate the building behind them. It was a place with which Charlie was destined to become intimately familiar in the months that lay ahead, but his first view of it was inauspicious. He saw an awning, a bank of windows, a door. And beyond the windows, tables, chairs, people hunched over plates and cutlery: a restaurant. Like a hundred others. The sign over the door proclaimed “The Red Onion,” and beneath it, in hand-painted letters, white on a barn-red background, there was this further inscription: Tired of Bran & Sprouts? Try Our Famous Steaks, Chops & Fries & Our Detroit Special Hamburger Sandwich.