The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Charlie had fought bigger men. Or men as big, maybe. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. But all he wanted at that moment was Bender, Bender with his soothing words, his sangfroid, his ability to take things as they come and wriggle out from under the boot heel of calamity—all he wanted was for Bender to tell him that everything was going to be all right, just one more time. He tipped his hat to the bell captain’s engorged features, turned on his heels and went right back out the door and up the alley again.

  Next he tried the entrance at the bar, but it was locked—the Wee Nippy wouldn’t be open till four in the afternoon. Frustrated—he had to see Bender, he had to—he paced up and down the street, muttering to himself, gazing up at the high sunstruck plane of the hotel’s windows and again attracting the attention of the doorman, who hunched his shoulders and made a fist of his face. It was then that he thought of Ernest O’Reilly.

  Sure. Of course. He could send the boy up to Bender’s room and slip him a note—they’d meet at the Red Onion for lunch and hash over this Hookstratten thing one more time. He could have telephoned, he supposed, but he really didn’t want to have to deal with the snooty desk clerk and then hear that Bender’s line was engaged or that he was unavailable or some such crap. No, Ernest O’Reilly was the ticket—but where was he? It was a school day, wasn’t it? Charlie hadn’t laid eyes on a schoolyard since he’d left St. Basil’s and didn’t have the faintest idea where the spawn of the breakfast-food industry’s toasters, packers and bosses learned how to read and write, but he was instinctively moving in the right direction, hurrying, hurrying, and a few pointed inquiries led him to a three-story brick building on Green Street.

  It was ten minutes of twelve. He stood there in the shade of a tree across from the schoolyard, feeling conspicuous. He lit a cigarette, shook out the match, checked his watch. An unearthly silence had fallen over the building and its environs, as if the place were enchanted. Nothing moved. He wondered if this was what a pervert felt like and checked his watch again. He began to feel sleepy.

  And then a bell sounded and the schoolyard exploded in motion, accompanied by a mad ululating din that was like the charge of the Comanches. Suddenly children were everywhere, legs, arms, shouts, the scrape of shoes and the thump of balls, and they all looked alike. Charlie moved toward them, but they were like an army on the march and they surrounded him, engulfed him and hurried on by to other engagements and distant battles. The crowd had begun to thin and he was beginning to despair of finding Ernest O’Reilly, when he felt a tug at his arm, just as he had at the railway station on that night that seemed so long ago. “Hey,” Ernest O’Reilly said.

  Charlie saw that he hadn’t put on any weight. There was a scab the size of a silver dollar under his right eye and a matching one on his bare elbow. His shirt, shoes and pants were too big for him. His eyes were watchful. “Hey,” Charlie replied. “You want to make a dime?”

  “Two bits,” Ernest O’Reilly said.

  “Fifteen cents.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  Charlie waited round the corner while Ernest O’Reilly, his narrow shoulders slumped forward like an arrow in flight, darted in the rear entrance of the hotel. He was to go straight to Bender’s room and give him the message—Meet me at the Onion, 12:30, URGENT, Charlie had scrawled on a slip of paper—and if Bender wasn’t there, Ernest was to leave word at the desk. Five minutes of Charlie’s life eroded there on the corner, then ten. It was going on fifteen minutes and Charlie’s fingertips were beginning to ache from flipping open his watch and snapping it closed again, when the boy finally reappeared.

  He wasn’t alone. Charlie was thunderstruck to see both the doorman and the bell captain sustaining Ernest O’Reilly in the grip of their meaty bloated hands, one on each side of him, while the boy kicked away at the air as if he were running in place. Charlie’s impressions were fleeting—the white flash of the boy’s bare knees; an envelope fluttering in his hand; the look of intensity leaping into the eyes of bell captain and doorman as they spotted Charlie; sunshine, gay and incongruous—and then the scene began to drive itself. “Run!” Ernest O’Reilly piped, and in that moment he broke away from the two men and shot up the alley toward Charlie, the envelope held out before him like a baton. Charlie was in motion, too, though he was confused and indignant—what were they after him for? Sure, they were his sworn enemies, but he was out on the public street, wasn’t he? Still, there they were and you couldn’t deny them, coming up the alley on the boy’s heels, surprisingly quick for such big men, and Charlie was starting off now, too, trying to gauge the distance to the envelope—a message from Bender?—and finesse the moment at which the apes would be upon him.

  It didn’t work. They weren’t interested in the boy at all, as it turned out—or the envelope, either. No: it was Charlie they wanted. Sausage-faced, blowing, their boots pounding at the pavement like hammers, they overtook Ernest O’Reilly easily and left him in their wake—Charlie had no choice but to run, run for all he was worth. He bolted across the street, turned left down a block lined with shops and ducked into an alley to his right. There was a livery stable here, and the way was blocked by half a dozen carriages in various stages of disuse and repair. Charlie never hesitated. He dodged round a big red gelding, vaulted a hack with the top down and kept on going, pumping his knees and jolting his shoulders, running because he was being pursued.

  And why? Why? What had he done? It was no time for deductive reasoning, the thundering footsteps of his pursuers ten paces behind him, but the terrible twisted seed of an explanation began to sprout in his brain: Bender. Something had happened to him. Something bad. Inadmissible. Something that would cut the insides out of Charlie, Per-Fo and Mrs. Hookstratten and hang them on a wire for the crows to pluck clean.

  He kept running, an amalgam of rage and fear caught in the back of his throat, his eyes fixed on the obstacles ahead—the open door, the barrel, the cart. Midway through the next block he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that the doorman had fallen out of the race. It was only him and the former wrestler now, and he could hear the big man’s breath dragging at his lungs, torn ragged gasps that were like sobs, like an infant’s puling cry, like weakness and collapse. Without warning, Charlie dug in his heels and swung round on the bigger man and in the next moment felt him melt into his fist: the bell captain went down like a corpse. He lay there wheezing in the dirt, and when he rolled over on his back, the eyes loose in his skull, Charlie saw Bender, only Bender. His feet did the rest. A kick for the Otard Dupuy, another for the telephone in the private sitting room, one for Bookbinder, one for the sample boxes and one final bruising sharp-toed boot for the hope raised and the hope denied. He knew it, knew it all along!

  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, YOU WILL KNOW BY THIS THAT I AM GONE & THAT THERE IS NO REASON TO LOOK TO THE PER-FO ACCOUNT AT THE OLD NATIONAL & MERCHANTS—CONSIDER IT MY FEE IN YOUR EDUCATION. WITH ALL REGRETS AND BEST WISHES, YOURS, GOOD.

  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

  Freikorper

  Kultur

  There 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 gri
nning. 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.”

  Lionel laughed, no more than a tickle in the back of his throat, and he squatted beside her, his shadow swooping over her like a cold hand. “Truly, Eleanor,” he said, and she could smell the garlic on his breath, potent and earthy, “you must open yourself up to the radiant energy of the sun, unbutton your blouse, roll up your sleeves, lift your skirt—”

  She studied his face for signs of impropriety, but there were none. He was in earnest, proselytizing, a disseminator of the news, a prophet of health. “Actually,” she breathed, coloring just a bit, “I’ve been trying. With the Women’s Auxiliary of the Deep-Breathing Club—well, you know that we’ve been meeting out-of-doors these past two weeks, where we have privacy, of course, round the women’s pool—”