Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

by Max Shulman

  “Why, it’s a wonderful system,” declared George Melvin, the real estate dealer, who had an option to buy Haskins Hollow once it was filled and covered.

  “And very sanitary,” added Doc Magruder, who had three inbred cousins, otherwise unemployable, who were now on salary as custodians of the dump.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” said Isaac. “I don’t want to throw away a half million dollars on a garbage disposal plant. But the O’Sheel woman is coming in loaded for bear this time. She’s got some brand-new gimmick, and she’s also got a lot of people on her side. We better think of something.”

  Manning Thaw had been silent to this moment. Now he said two words: “Forget it.”

  They all turned and looked at him askance. “Forget it?” said Isaac incredulously. “Manning, I tell you she might have the votes to push it through.”

  “Forget it,” repeated Manning.

  Isaac looked at him narrowly. “Manning, do you know something we don’t?”

  “Yup,” said Manning.

  “You going to tell us?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause it’s a long story, and I got to tell it at the town meetin’. No sense tellin’ it twice.”

  “I see. But we’re not to worry about the garbage disposal plant?” Isaac pressed him.

  “Nope.”

  “All right,” said Isaac. “If you say so … Now here’s item number two: another wild woman with a mission. Laura Beauchamp wants the town to sponsor a folk-drama on the Fourth of July.”

  “What in tarnation is a folk-drama?” asked Doc.

  “Nothing small,” Isaac replied. “It’s a historical pageant. This one will have a cast of a hundred people.”

  “Doing what?” asked Minton.

  “Re-enacting the landing of the British on Ram’s Head Beach in 1778,” said Isaac. “And, believe me, the original British landing was a good deal cheaper. She’s asking for fifty Redcoat uniforms, fifty Minutemen costumes, a hundred muskets, a hundred sabres, three longboats, two field pieces, and God knows what else will pop into her feeble mind!”

  “Forget it,” said Manning.

  “This too?” asked Isaac.

  “Yup.”

  Isaac gave him a close scrutiny. “You’re sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “Positive?” asked Isaac.

  “I said, didn’t I?” snapped Manning.

  Isaac shrugged. “All right, Manning. On to the next item. Still another one of our busy young matrons—Grace Bannerman—is making a motion to reinstate that teacher who taught the second grade how to copulate.”

  “Anybody supporting this motion?” asked Minton incredulously.

  “Every so-called enlightened housewife in town,” Isaac answered. “They’ve been ringing doorbells, writing leaflets, passing petitions, making speeches, all week long.”

  “Forget it,” said Manning.

  “All right, Manning,” said Isaac firmly. “What’s this big secret of yours?”

  The others crowded around the first selectman.

  “Yeah, Manning, what’s up?”

  “What’s been going on?”

  “What makes you so cocky?”

  Manning rose. “Possess your souls in patience,” he said primly. “Come on, time to go to meetin’.”

  He started out with the others close behind him, wagging their heads in bewilderment. As they passed the staircase, Isaac stopped suddenly. “Go ahead, boys,” he said to his cohorts. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  When they had gone, Isaac shouted up the stairs: “Comfort!”

  “Yes, Daddy-O?”

  “I’m going to town meeting now.”

  “That ought to be yells.”

  “Do your homework, do you hear?”

  “Yes, Daddy-O.”

  “And don’t go running around.”

  “I dig you, Daddy-O.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Crazy, man!”

  Wincing, Isaac went out to join his friends.

  “The square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the gizmo on the rillera of my blue suede shoes,” said Comfort and flung her geometry text peevishly into a corner.

  “Dullsville,” said Comfort, lying on her back and regarding her toes. Everything dullsville. Geometry. Town meetings. Her dad. Her toes. Everything.

  Suddenly from beneath her window there came a roar of dual exhausts, a screech of brakes, the blast of a Klaxon. “Oh, no!” she groaned. “Not him again!”

  She looked out the window. At the curb behind the wheel of a make-it-yourself automobile sat Grady Metcalf, the leading juvenile delinquent of Putnam’s Landing. (The term “juvenile delinquent” is here used loosely. Grady was not the lean, hard, Sal Mineo type. He was more on the well-fed, spongy side. The tenement that spawned him was a $40,000 ranch house on two well-kept acres, and the sight of a switchblade would have put him in shock. Grady was a member of the new school of juvenile delinquency, the You-Too-Can-Be-A-Rebel School. The headmasters were Elvis Presley and the spook of Jimmy Dean, and the entrance requirements were completely democratic. A boy was no longer excluded from the glamorous ranks of the delinquents simply because he had had the rotten luck not to be born in a slum; all he had to do was look as though he had. If he would wear his hair in a duck-tail cut and his sideburns at nostril level, forsake grammar, dress in black khaki trousers with the cuffs narrowed to fourteen inches, never do his homework, and spit a lot, his origins, no matter how respectable, would not be held against him.)

  “Go away!” said Comfort, leaning out her window. Of all the gropers at Webster High, this one was far and away the stickiest. Only last week she had given him a fat ear, and here he was again! “Go away!” she repeated.

  Unheeding, Grady stepped out of his hot-rod. He took out a cigarette, struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail, lit the cigarette, tilted his pelvis, half-lowered his eyelids, hooked his thumbs in his wide, studded belt, and expressed some saliva. “Whaddya say, hey?” he said to Comfort. “Let’s do some cruisin’.”

  “I’ve got homework,” she said.

  “Homework’s for squares. Come on, we’ll have a few chuckles.”

  “Chuckles with you?” she hooted. “Oh, flake off, little man!”

  “You’re fighting me,” he said reproachfully.

  “You are a ninety-handed idiot,” said Comfort, “and I hate you like death!”

  “No, you don’t,” he said positively. “I figured it out, see? I drive you ape, and you just don’t trust yourself with me, that’s what it is.”

  “Har-de-har-har!” replied Comfort.

  “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else,” he continued. “In exactly three months, you and I are gonna be goin’ steady.”

  “Man, what are you smoking?”

  “It’s a fact, hey. No doubt about it. Because in exactly three months, I’m gettin’ somethin’ that’s gotta swing it.”

  “Plastic surgery?” asked Comfort.

  “A motorcycle,” said Grady.

  “Hm!” said she thoughtfully. This did put rather a new aspect on the situation. “Why do you have to wait three months?” she asked.

  “’Cause it’ll be my eighteenth birthday, and the fossils promised to buy me a Harley if I pass math.”

  “Then you’re dead,” she said flatly. “I’ve been knocking myself out all night with this Pythagoras cat, and I’m nowhere.”

  “Maybe if we kind of helped each other?” suggested Grady.

  “Well, maybe,” she allowed. “Come on in.”

  “No, you come out. We can cruise while we’re studyin’—maybe get a hamburger or like that.”

  Comfort sighed. So it was to be another evening of groping … Oh, well, what did it matter? She’d have no trouble handling this busy little man, and anything was better than laying around this dullsville house all by herself.

  “I’ll be right down,” she said.

  5

 
Some said it was metal fatigue, some said it was electrical failure, and some said it was plain old-fashioned pilot error. But all anybody knew for sure was that in four widely separated areas of the world—Utah, West Germany, Okinawa, and Natal—four U.S. Air Force C-124 transport planes had crashed within a single week.

  The Air Force began an immediate investigation. Pending the results, orders went out grounding all C-124s everywhere. One C-124, bound from Mitchel Field to Fairbanks, Alaska, was actually in the air when the grounding orders came through. The pilot made a 180 degree turn, headed back to Mitchel, landed, taxied to the hangar, and out came a passenger named Guido di Maggio, smiling the profound smile of the reprieved.

  “It’s the hand of God!” cried Guido thirty minutes later as he rushed into the office of Major Albert R. McEstway, post adjutant at Fort Totten. “It’s what I keep telling you: I am not meant to go to Alaska. Sir, if you send me now, you’re flying in the face of Providence!”

  “I’ll risk it,” said the Major.

  “Sir, look at me,” said Guido earnestly. “Have I got a pleasing personality? Am I bright? Alert? Agreeable?”

  “You are all of those,” allowed the Major, “and persevering into the bargain.”

  “Right! So why don’t you send me to New York? Boston? Washington? Are you going to waste officer material like me on the frozen tundra?”

  “That I am,” said the Major comfortably.

  “Sir—”

  “There will be another plane any day now, and you will be on it.”

  “Sir—”

  “Goodnight, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave,” pouted Guido. “But don’t expect a salute.”

  He left the adjutant and went to the nearest phone booth. He called Maggie Larkin in Putnam’s Landing. This was a rite he had been performing twice daily since his arrival at Fort Totten, and always with the same outcome; when Maggie heard his voice, she slammed down the phone. Tonight, however, the result was different: as Maggie was out baby-sitting at the Bannermans’, Guido got no answer at all.

  Muttering ripe expletives, Guido stomped over to the Officers Club. Seething with frustration and rage, he stormed into the bar-room. It was deserted except for the bartender and a solitary captain, hunched over a highball at the end of the bar. Guido had never laid eyes on the Captain before; nonetheless, he strode directly over to him and said, without preliminary, “Let’s get one thing straight, Captain. I’m in no mood for any conversation tonight. Okay?”

  “Suits me,” said the Captain, regarding Guido incuriously. The Captain was a large, muscular man of forty. His chest was decorated with three banks of combat ribbons of Korea and World War II. His hair was cropped, his neck was thick, his jaw was strong, his eyes were pale blue and glittered like two bits of ice.

  “No offense, see?” said Guido, his tone softening a little. “I mean, it’s nothing personal. It’s just there’s things on my mind.”

  “Okay.” The Captain turned back to his drink.

  “My name’s Guido di Maggio,” said Guido.

  The Captain sat motionless over his drink for a moment, then turned back to Guido. “I’m Walker Hoxie,” he said.

  Guido extended his hand. Walter Hoxie considered it briefly, then decided to shake it. This done, he turned back to his drink.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” asked Guido.

  Walker Hoxie sighed. He turned back to Guido. “Lieutenant,” he said softly, “I’m glad you don’t want any conversation tonight, because I don’t want any either.”

  “Well, that simplifies things, doesn’t it?” said Guido, flashing Walker Hoxie a winsome smile. No smile was forthcoming in return. Guido looked at Walker Hoxie’s flat, hard face, his corded beck, his bulging sleeves, his big, blunt hands, his battle ribbons. Guido felt a small chill. “See you,” he said hastily and retreated to a stool at the other end of the bar.

  He ordered a rye and ginger ale. As he drank, he stole a glance at Walker Hoxie, sitting motionless over his glass, his head down, his shoulders sloping inward, looking as hard and sharp and lethal as a projectile. Guido suppressed a shudder. “Boy,” he said to himself, “there is one guy I am never going to get mixed up with!”

  Somebody Up There chuckled.

  6

  The four clocks on the wall of Oscar Hoffa’s office said, respectively, 7:01, 6:01, 5:01, and 4:01, indicating the time in the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific zones, and indicating also that Oscar was a television executive of the first magnitude. Lesser executives had to get along with only one clock; it is said, in fact, that on poorer networks, they sometimes had to share a clock between two of them.

  Ignoring all four clocks, Oscar shot back his cuff, looked at his wrist watch, and punched a button on his desk. Instantly a thirty-one inch television screen on the wall across from him flickered into life. A rocket ship whooshed across the screen. The sparks from the exhaust arranged themselves into flaming letters that spelled: THE ADVENTURES OF CRUNCH CRANDALL—SPACEMAN!

  Never taking his eyes off the screen, Oscar snatched open the lid of a mahogany cigar box. His hand swooped in, seized an Upmann Monarch like an eagle seizing a lamb, carried it to his mouth. His teeth closed like a trap, ripping a ragged inch off the end of the cigar. He spat it on the Baluchistan rug. He ran a kitchen match over the blond leather top of his desk, raised the flame to his cigar, puffed furiously, shook the match out, flipped it on the rug.

  Oscar was a bow-legged, barrel-chested man with a skin head, gimlet eyes, bushy nostrils, oversize mouth, and a thirty dollar suit, purplish-brown in color, with the breast pocket full of mechanical pencils. This antithesis of a Madison Avenue tycoon had started his television career roundaboutly at the age of sixteen when he was hired as a skull-cracker by the circulation department of a New York tabloid. He advanced steadily in the circulation department until his knuckles gave out, and then he moved over to the business department. When the paper bought a radio station, Oscar went along. Then he went to another radio station, and another, and then to television, spiralling ever upward, and now he was a four-clock executive sitting with an Upmann cigar and watching Crunch Crandall, Spaceman, save the fair Skarlotta, a Martian lass, from the foul clutches of “It,” the nameless monster of Ursa Minor.

  Oscar watched intently until the show was over. Then he snatched up the speaker of his dictaphone. “Memo to sales,” he barked. “Main title runs too long. Cut ten seconds and sell it to Philip Morris … Memo to costume: More cleavage on Skarlotta. Let’s see those knockers … Memo to casting. Get a new monster. This one’s a faggot.”

  There was a buzz from the intercom on his desk. He flipped the key impatiently. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Hemming is still waiting,” said his secretary.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” snarled Oscar.

  “He’s been here since five-thirty.”

  “All right, all right. Send him in.”

  The door opened and admitted Mr. Hemming, who would have been very angry at having to wait two hours in the outer office, but he was an agent and could not, therefore, afford to get angry. “Good evening, Mr. Hoffa,” he said, smiling whitely.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Oscar, not rising.

  “As you know,” said Mr. Hemming, “I represent Lanier Mott, who, I believe I may say without fear of contradiction, is one of our truly great writers.”

  “If he’s such a great writer,” asked Oscar, “what does he need with television?”

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Hemming, somewhat unhorsed, “it isn’t that he needs television—”

  “On the other hand,” interrupted Oscar, “what does television need with him?”

  “Now, Mr. Hoffa,” said Mr. Hemming reasonably, “surely television can use a Pulitzer prize winner—a Critics Circle prize winner—one of America’s really important writers.”

  “Important writers!” sneered Oscar. “Listen. The yucks who look at television don’t know the difference between Ernes
t Hemingway and Huntz Hall. What do they care about important writers? What they want is shows where one guy kicks another guy in the belly while a dame leans over ’em with her cakes falling out of her negligee. Or domestic comedies where the whole family gets together to screw gruff old Dad. Or quiz shows where people get put in isolation booths and develop coronary occlusion before your very eyes … Important writers! Remember when NBC tried to beef up their Sunday nights with important writers? Plays by Robert Sherwood—Thornton Wilder—Ferenc Molnar. Important enough for you? … So what happened? I’ll tell you what: forty million people nearly broke off their dials turning back to Ed Sullivan to watch a dog fart The Star-Spangled Banner!”

  The intercom buzzed. Oscar flipped the key. “Now what the hell?” he asked angrily.

  “Mr. Wexler calling from production center,” said his secretary.

  Growling with exasperation, Oscar picked up the phone. “Yeah?” he snapped. “Yeah … Yeah … No … No! … No, goddamit, you cannot put the May-flower in the tank; Esther Williams is in there!”

  He slammed down the phone and returned to Mr. Hemming. “Now then, what’s this important writer of yours got to sell?”

  “It’s a play,” said the agent. “Ordinarily, of course, my client writes only for the legitimate theatre. But in this instance, because of the scope of the work, he feels that television may be a more suitable medium.”

  “So everybody on Broadway has turned it down,” said Oscar. “Well, all right, send it over. I’ll have a look.”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Hoffa. First, I want one thing understood clearly. My client has instructed me that there is to be no deal unless he retains strict control over the commercial announcements.”

  “In your hat!” replied Oscar promptly. “You get no control over the commercials. We’re in business for one reason—and it’s not to entertain or enlighten or enrich or educate. It’s to sell—and, buddy, nobody tells us how or when.”

  “My client doesn’t mean to be unreasonable,” said Mr. Hemming placatingly. “He is perfectly willing for you to have commercials at the beginning and end of his play. But he feels very strongly that the mood, the dramatic continuity, will be shattered if you interrupt the play with a commercial in the middle.”