The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  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:

  Twin Oaks

  Lounsbury Pond

  Peterskill

  Monday, May 4, 1908

  Dear Charles:

  I hope this finds you well and our spanking new breakfast-food factory thriving (how I do love mahogany—it’s the perfect choice for the offices; you’ve acquired exquisite taste somewhere along the line, and I can’t help thinking your Auntie Hookstratten has had more than a little to do with it). But that Per-Fo flies! It’s all very exciting.

  But I anticipate myself: that’s what I wanted to tell you. Good news, dearest boy. I’m coming to visit. Auntie Hookstratten, who used to bounce you on her knee, who used to make all your little hurts and troubles go away as if they’d never existed, is on the way. Yes! To Battle Creek!

  Yes, Charles, it’s true! And not just for a whistle-stop visit (is that what they call it?), but to stay and settle in. You see, I’ve been in touch with Eleanor Lightbody, from Peterskill (you do know her, don’t you—charming woman), and she’s convinced me of what I already knew in my heart but wouldn’t admit—and what Dr. Brillinger has known for two years now …

  Well, it’s my nerves. It’s as simple as that. Dr. Kellogg will be admitting me to the Sanitarium for tests a week from today, and though we can’t know what we’ll find or how long the cure will take, I’ve made arrangements to stay through the end of June, at the very least.

  I’m terribly excited, darling! I’m thrilled and elated! Already, now that the decision has been made, I can feel myself growing better and calmer—and I just know that seeing you, and all you’ve accomplished, will be the crowning touch.

  You have all my love.

  Sincerely,

  (Auntie) Amelia

  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.

  The next day he retired the sandwich board—at least until Bender got back. Standing there in the driving rain, looking ridiculous in front of Eleanor Lightbody while the true cereal tycoons sat warm and dry in their offices or on their yachts and had their lackeys build pyramids of boxes in grocers’ windows, he’d had an epiphany of sorts. What it boiled down to was this: what was the use? At that point, Bender was scheduled to return within the week, and he’d written twice—from Gary, Indiana, and Galena, Illinois—to report that the orders were flowing in. Well, all right. In a week they’d have the capital to open a real factory, with a bona fide expert, not some worn-out yea-saying imposter like Bookbinder, and then they’d be in business. Charlie figured he’d worry about advertising then, when they actually had something to sell. Let Bender wear the sandwich board if he was so keen on it.

  Bender got back at the end of the week and re-established himself at the Post Tavern like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars. He had the best of everything, of course, and welcomed himself home with a lavish private dinner at the Wee Nippy, to which he invited Charlie and a dozen of the most suggestible local burghers, people he’d been courting since the fall. He gave a long speech before dinner—three-quarters oration, one-quarter pep talk—in which he outlined his plans for Per-Fo and dwelled on the significant sums he’d already taken in advance orders for the most revolutionary new breakfast food in the history of Battle Creek, and hence, America. And he let his close friends and associates, now gathered before him, know just how much their’ shares in this new enterprise could be expected to appreciate if only they got in on the ground floor.

  Charlie had never seen his partner in better form. Bender railed and thundered against his competitors and the nay-sayers who dared claim that the breakfast-food market was glutted, against the timid and short-sighted who insisted on living in the last century, the sort who wouldn’t have invested in Ford or Standard Oil, in streetcars and telephones. But he didn’t simply rail. Oh, no: Bender was far too subtle for that. He was a master of the art of persuasion, a virtuoso of the sales pitch. Once he’d softened them up, once he saw the doubt come to roost in their eyes, he modulated his voice, sweet-talking, seducing—he even passed round his ledger showing some $32,000 in advance orders. By the time the guests had finished the bowls of Per-Fo he’d served as an appetizer (that is, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes poured conspicuously from bright new Per-Fo cartons) and were digging into their lobster and steak, he had commitments from all but one of them and three fully executed checks already tucked neatly away in his wallet.

  It was a glorious night for Charlie. A night of redemption, promise, hope, vindication. Thirty-two thousand dollars! And these new checks on top of that. It made Mrs. Hookstratten’s contribution seem paltry by comparison—paltry, and safe. After all the months of doubt and frustration, the pounding of the streets, the solitary hours at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, the fish-head soup and the heartbreak of the Bookbinder basement, it was finally happening—at long last, Per-Fo was fully fledged. Charlie could have raised a statue to Bender that night, could have worshiped him with incense, candles, blood sacrifice.

  But then nothing happened. Three weeks dragged by, Bender wrapped in inscrutability, Bender vague about the factory site, the builder, the plans. In Charlie’s joy and delirium on the night of the dinner, he’d been so carried away he’d almost told his partner about the check from Will Lightbody, its proceeds accruing interest in an account under the name of Charles P. McGahee at the Central National Bank on the corner of Capital and Michigan. Almost, but not quite. Some kernel of apprehension, a last resisting pinch of caution, had held him back. Now that kernel had begun to bloat and swell, stewing in the bile of Bender’s indifference, his dilatory tactics, his testudineous progress through the days. What was he doing? What was he waiting for? “All in time,” he’d said. “All in good time. Have I steered you wrong yet?”

  And then the letter had come, and Charlie’s life was demolished.

  The sun hung overhead, fat as a melon, splashing the street with light. Women in straw bonnets glided in and out of shops, neighbors called out giddily to one another, an old man on a bicycle wobbled up the street in a magic-lantern show of sun and shadow. Though it was morning still—quarter past eleven by Charlie’s watch—it was warm, the warmest day of the year so far, but Charlie experienced it only as an irritation, By the time he turned the corner opposite the Post Tavern, he was breathing hard and his shirt was damp under the arms.

  Since his strained relations with the hotel’s underlings precluded his entering through the lobby, Charlie was in the habit of making his way along the alley behind the Wee Nippy and slipping in at the service entrance. That was his plan now. When he’d passed by the hotel altogether, he crossed the street, dodging vehicular traffic, a flock of pigeons scrabbling in the gutter and
a piebald cat catching up on its sleep on the curb out front of the jeweler’s. Cradling the letter in his pocket with the crook of his left arm, moving swiftly, agitated and preoccupied (what did he expect from Bender, anyway—some sort of delaying action, a sham factory fabricated overnight for Mrs. Hookstratten’s benefit, a speech, miracles?), he didn’t think to glance up to see if he’d been noticed until it was too late. He had. The doorman, implacable, immovable, eternally vigilant, was stationed in his usual spot, his eyes locked on Charlie’s. Charlie looked away.

  He felt the man’s eyes on him as he mounted the sidewalk and hurried past the corner of the hotel and out of his range of vision. But as he passed the Wee Nippy’s street entrance and the alley behind it, he thought to look back over his shoulder—and a good thing, too. The son of a bitch was there, standing at the corner, two hundred feet from his post, his arms folded across his chest, watching. Charlie kept going. It was ten minutes before he ventured back up the street, and this time the doorman was nowhere to be seen. Ducking down the alley, Charlie made for the service entrance, wondering if they could manage to dynamite the tracks along the Michigan Central Line or send Mrs. Hookstratten a phony telegram informing her that her sister had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and he was in the door and headed for the back stairs before he understood that the form in the chair propped against the rear wall and materializing now from the shadows was that of his old antagonist, the bell captain. The man occupied the chair like a side of beef, a slab of meat molded to bone. He was in his shirtsleeves and he was barefooted, the uniform draped over a peg on the wall behind him. He held a sandwich in one hand, and it was hard to tell where the sandwich ended and the hand began. “I’ll be goddamned,” he uttered in a low growl, and lurched up out of the chair with a quickness that was startling.