“God,” said his driver, “you could have been landslide material.”
“Through every Middlesex village and town.”
“What’s that, a Middlesex village and town?”
“Don’t rightly know.”
So they traveled over the potholes in the park, cruising the wintertime, salt-bruised paving, Druff, withdrawn and brooding in the deep, plush recesses of the outlandish automobile. (Because if you traveled in chauffeured limousines they really oughtn’t to have city seals blazoned on their sides, his department’s blacktop, bulldozer heraldics.)
But Dick wouldn’t let it go, relishing, almost licking, his memory like some kid in a school yard, say, recollecting the best parts in a movie, recounting the combinations, all the “he saids” and “you saids” of their (to hear Dick tell it) mythological confrontation. “Remember, Commissioner? ‘Hell no,’ you told him, ‘I’m not mudslinging. It ain’t even gossip. Gossip would be if I named you your lovers.’ Then you listed the facts and figures for him, all the old trouper’s inadequacies and ineptitudes, so that ‘incompetent’ was the least of it, the part the reporters crossed out when they wrote up the story. Hot damn!”
“Now now,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “it was hardly the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”
“Hardly the Lincoln-Douglas, he says.” And then respectfully, seriously, even gravely, “As close as this town gets, Commissioner.”
And Druff, who at his time of life—it was at least past late middle age in his head and even later than that in the cut of his cloth, his chest caving behind his shirts, emptying out, and his torso sinking, lowering into trousers rising like a tide and lapping about him like waves—was actually old enough to think “at my time of life” and so may have been—admittedly—subject to a sort of soft paranoia, all the compounding interest on disappointment, the wear and tear of ambition—hard by, as he was, the thin headwaters of the elderly—and was the first to admit the outrageousness of his surmise and discount the chinks in his argument, discounted his vulnerabilities anyway and suddenly knew the man, his driver, the chauffeur Dick, was some kind of spy.
Well well well.
And even appreciated the fact that he ought to have felt flattered. How many men his age had spies on their case? Even when he’d been on the campaign posters and big outdoor advertising there hadn’t been spies. It was a tribute at his time of life. So why, given his blues and vapors, didn’t Dick’s probable double agency perk him right up? Or at the very least offer some red alert of consciousness or push him to action? Why, if after all these years he was finally a target, didn’t he behave like one and get moving?
Ask him outright, Druff thought. Just put it to him. Say, Why, Dick?
And would have if, just then, a mounted policeman hadn’t called “Top of the morning there”—they were stopped at a stop sign—to them through the open window of the limousine. Druff turned sideways to wave and return the greeting. (Cops, he thought, in all their supposititious ethnics and green, adoptive blarneys; in their drawled, beefy flagpatch, redneck sheriff's ways; in their designer shades and presumptive cool.)
“And the same back to you, Offi—” the politician offered when the horse, or what was more likely, the man himself—startled—did this aborted, electric bolt, a maneuver like a double take.
“Oh,” the cop said recovering, smiling, “it’s you back there, Commissioner. Who’s that up front? Doug-go?”
“Stosh-o wants to know if it’s Doug-go, Dick-o,” the policeman’s City Commissioner of Streets told the driver, frowning.
“How you doing?” Dick said.
“Filling the quotas,” the centaur joked, “no complaints. Ain’t ten A.M. yet, maybe fifteen tourists took my picture. And yourselves?”
“On the trail of fresh potholes.”
“Well,” the cop said, “you’ve a grand morning for it.”
“Just how many people know you and Doug drive each other around?” the commissioner asked when they were again under way. (Under way indeed, thought Druff in the big, nautical-seeming car.)
“You know,” Dick said, “that’s a question that says something about people’s human condition. Lisher? Lisher,” he repeated. “The roughrider, the steed cop. Well, I’ll tell you something, Commissioner Druff. We get our share. More than our share. It ain’t only cavalry guys up on their coursers see that kind of action. You know how many people during the course of a day regard us as a photo opportunity? If I had a dollar.”
“Really,” Druff said.
“Oh,” Dick said, “six bits, four even. You don’t always see this. Often you’ll be indoors on important street business when they come up. They’ll want to know if it’s the mayor’s, the governor’s. They don’t know, it could be their senator’s. Your average citizen is easily impressed but don’t understand his city’s seals from Shinola.”
Bold, thought Druff. My spy is a bold spy. Indoors on street business.
Though of course Druff knew—or at least used to—all about photo opportunities—posing with constituents and cronies like Dan Dailey tricked out in a straw boater in a musical. How many rec rooms, he wondered, were still decorated with such pictures, the flash distorting their faces, darkening or overexposing them like flesh in a photograph taken in a nightclub?
The commissioner dipped a hand into a pocket in the jacket of his suit and withdrew a pouch of chewing tobacco from which he removed, staring steadily into Dick’s eyes in the driver’s rearview mirror, a few dried coca leaves which he put into his mouth, holding them carefully against his gums like some pleasure poultice and allowing the bolus of leaves to fill with syrups from his gums and face before he began to grind it in his jaws. (A cousin in Peru sent him the stuff in two-pound cans of mountain-grown coffee once or twice a year.)
“How can you stand to chew that shit?” Under his crowns Druff had the decayed and withered posts of an Indian, brown, twiglike teeth. “No,” Dick said, “really, how can you? These days they blow Tops even in the majors.”
“That’s because they’re superstitious,” the commissioner said. “They cut it with the gum and chew each other’s pictures on the baseball cards.”
(At fifty-eight, he liked to get high. He loved the euphoria, of course, the sidebars of music and landscape, everywhere beauty arranged, composed as a photograph; loved the concentration, his lasered focus, the sense drugs gave him of recovered obsession, the small motor movements of the will, his resumed patience with the world, with everything, even the pure plain humanness of his mistakes, his kid’s, his city’s, the tolerance and good intentions dope revealed to him. Though this, doing numbers on the job, was a new wrinkle.)
“What gets me,” Dick said, “I never see you spit.”
Druff spit on the floor of the limo. “Play ball,” he said.
“You’re the commissioner,” said the spy.
And, energy up, told his driver they’d discovered enough potholes for one day, that one day they’d be remembered as the Lewis and Clark of potholes and that they should proceed to City Hall.
Less than fifteen minutes later they were there.
The City Hall in Druff’s city had been built in 1871. It was a tall, narrow structure of dressed limestone, four stories high and only eight windows across, a classical descending hodgepodge of balustrades, cornices, dentils, friezes, keystones and quoins. There were engaged columns between the arched, Italianate windows. There were crests and garlands, a portico with a pediment like a diving platform on which stood a statue of the founder of the department store City Hall had originally been. (Some air of the mercantile about it still, of emporium and records filed years, or of some great commodity exchange, furs, even diamonds, or cotton, or tobacco factorage, something if not actually anachronistic about the place then at least geographically off, as if Druff’s city were three or four hundred miles south of where it really was.)
Druff’s rooms on the fourth floor reminded him of theatrical agents’ or producers’ office
s in old thirties films. (When he thought of them he saw them in black and white.) A gate, activated by a buzzer, opened in the low wooden railing that separated the public from the private suites and offices, a toy obstacle, some playpen of the governmental, civil, decorous, beyond which young hopefuls (in those old movies) cooled their heels while waiting not for the appointments which even they knew they would not be given, but for fabulous breaks in the routine, three minutes of extemporaneous, gift democracy to show their stuff when the door to the sanctum opened and Ziegfeld appeared. Which now, since San Francisco, since Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, didn’t happen so much. An armed security guard posted outside the little low fence mitigated the old honorable ambience of the place. Up in smoke, gone with the hopefuls themselves. Unless something was on the chest and burning the heels of the security guard too.
Though there were computers in Druff’s building now of course, modems, fax machines. Some people in data processing had desktop- published a pamphlet on sidewalk repair and replacement for his department, another on gutters and pavements, others on street signs, on markers and street graphics, on leaf collection and snow removal, on how to obtain permits for street fairs and block parties, on detours and barricades. And put out brochures on lighting and traffic signals, on street cleaning and lawn maintenance. (Not “lawn.” What was it called, that little strip of grass easement between the pavement and the curb the home owner was responsible for? The City Commissioner of Streets had forgotten.) Both the pamphlet on gutters and pavements and the one on markers and street graphics had won first prize in a national competition, and the lawn maintenance—verge it was called—brochure was a classic, better than Beverly Hills’, better than West Palm Beach’s, those garden spots. Druff, who hadn’t even known there was such a competition, had been sent by the mayor to the awards banquet in St. Louis. (He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets, and when he was called up to the dais to collect the citation in his category—public service publications in cities of between one and two million people—he made a speech without benefit of Inderal—“I’m totally unprepared for this,” he’d told them, “because whoever thought for a minute we’d win?”—and became, with that “we,” an instant favorite with the crowd. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets. And, afterward, took a drink with a few of the boys, some whom he knew from the days when he was political, but most of them new to him, a kind of under-professional—not docs or the lawyerly or of an insider-anything, killer-M.B.A. imagination, accepting burnout ten or so years down the road like some teenager the cancer she takes in with her suntan—municipally managerial, infrastructure type—hospital administrators, parks commissioners, fellows from water, from tunnels and bridges, low-income housing. Talking with one in particular, not a bad sort if you accepted up front that he was a bore, who’d asked him questions about his town and then confessed he’d never been there himself. “What, not even to change planes?” “No,” the guy said, “never.” And really wanted to know the sort of shop his city was, what the museums were like, if the zoo was any good, how come it didn’t have a baseball team. “It’s a great place to raise children,” Druff told him truthfully, then added, “not great children.” “Is it?” “Probably because our housing stock is so good.” Offering “housing stock,” because, Druff being Druff, he had to, since honor had it that tie went to the bore and Druff, thinking of the children he’d not too greatly raised, owed him.)
Then, back in town, an altered man, or at least an altered City Commissioner of Streets, thrown back on his old affection for the electorate, for shirtsleeve America and the July Fourth condition, his meat inspector—cum—fireman notions and mail-must-go-through priorities. His own shirtsleeves rolled and actively inventing campaigns, promoting civic pride, this patriot of the local, this hustling jingo of the here. (“What’s this all about?” Loft, the director of the airport, had asked. “A little slogan I thought up,” Druff said. “What? A slogan? ‘Change planes in our town and we’ll show you a time’?” “Sure,” Druff told him, “if they had even a two- or three-hour layover, we could pick them up in buses and show them around. No city in America has thought of this yet.” “There’s such a thing as turf, Druff. You’re the street man here. You of all people ought to know that.” So took his case over Loft’s head. “Look,” he’d argued to a chilly City Council, “what’s the worst that could happen? That the bus has an accident and everyone in it is killed or maimed. Don’t worry, it won’t happen, we’ll use only the most seasoned drivers. It won’t happen, but even, God forbid, if it does, most of these people are covered by the credit cards they use to purchase their airplane tickets, by their travel agencies, by the bus company itself. I asked counsel to look into this and he assures me we’re in the clear.” Going at his job in those mercantile rooms of yore as if City Hall were still a department store. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets and only wanted to be a better one. Why not? Streets were roads, roads were what the Romans built, and he, Druff, was road man here, Imperial Commissioner of the Way to the Empire! So give me a little credit please, he’d thought. I understand about empire, why wouldn’t I know about turf?)
And, honored by his honors (all the more splendid for his not having known about the national competition or such categories in the first place, or even all that much about the project itself, and all the more moving for his having merely signed off on it—signed off on?—their having come to him not so much a sign that he’d cashed in on other people’s efforts as much as a tribute to the smooth functioning of his department), by his Academy Awards in Gutters and Pavements, in Markers and Street Graphics, and his Lifetime Achievement Award in Mowing the Lawn, continued for a time to press his campaigns.
His shame campaign.
The oversized, non-removable Day-Glo stickers he’d have had the city slap on the windows of trucks and vans, of commercial vehicles double-parked in the street, tying up traffic, the sample copy for which he’d written himself. (“This vehicle is double-parked in violation of city traffic ordinances and has been appropriately ticketed. Citizens who feel they have been personally inconvenienced, either by being unable to move out of their parking spaces, or by being denied access to parking spaces which might otherwise have been available to them, or by being unduly held up in traffic, are, in light of the selfish disregard shown them by the other driver’s lack of consideration for his neighbors, encouraged to take down the name of the company, its phone number or address when available and vehicle license plate number, and report all such incidents to the appropriate authorities.”) If he’d been a mathematician or scientist such a solution to so longstanding a municipal problem might have been termed elegant—he didn’t mean his copy, his copy was merely a detail, an example, an instance, a first draft; he put no great stock in his copy; his copy could always be improved—so he was disappointed, though not surprised, when the city fathers to whom he’d shown mock-ups, complete, right down to Druff’s improvable text on the Day-Glo sticker and its permanent bond shaded in on the verso, had thrown up objections that were, well, political. (“Yes,” said the mayor—Dick’s “guy” and “old hack” of the morning’s reminiscences—“that would do the job all right, but those vans and trucks that block up the traffic are doing deliveries, dropping stuff off, picking stuff up. This is commercial traffic you’re talking about, acceptable lifeblood traffic. We have to deal with it. You’re mixing babies and bathwater, what do you call it, apples and oranges. Good government is knowing who should get the tax abatements.” A shot, Druff thought, a shot and a hit. “Yes,” he said, “I see what you mean, Mr. Mayor. I’m old and stupid, too caught up by ancient history and old times. Maybe what appealed about my idea was that it was so purely an adaptation of the eleventh of my Fourteen Points, ‘no senseless scraping,’ brought up to date.” The mayor brushed away Druff’s dismissal of himself. “Now now,” he said, “it’s a good idea. It is. Maybe its time hasn’t come but it’s a good idea,” adding, too cruelly for any absolutely
first-rate pol, thought Druff, “and whenever my City Commissioner of Streets feels he has another one up his sleeve, I want my City Commissioner of Streets to feel free to stop the presses and let me know.” Saying “my City Commissioner of Streets” as in ancient history and old times he’d said “my opponent,” for, yes, this was he, his old opponent from the Lincoln-Douglas. And might have assured Hizzoner right then and there that Druff would no longer trouble him with any more bright ideas from that sleeve of his. Which he didn’t because you never ever made a campaign promise you didn’t absolutely have to.) But abandoning the last of his promotional schemes right then and right there, returned to the easy status quo of Awards Banquet ante.
For the rest of the morning Druff accepted phone calls and answered letters, working routinely within the soft parameters of the job description. Twice he had fifteen-minute meetings, one with the department’s chief engineer, who’d been assigned to draw up plans for an enclosed walkway above Kersh Boulevard where three or four months earlier a young woman, a foreign exchange student from Lebanon, on her way back from campus to her dormitory after an evening lecture, had crossed not at the corner but at one of those push-button traffic signals in the middle of the block, and been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The engineer had shown him blueprints (“What’s this,” the City Commissioner of Streets said, “sheet music?” Then asked the engineer to rough the bridge in for him in terms—no cross sections, no esoterics—Druff could understand. “This won’t fall down, will it?” he’d asked. “No? You don’t think so? Well, what can we rely on if not our informed guesses? Go ahead, put a crew together.”) and now reported back to him that it was his, the chief engineer’s, understanding that the city was unwilling to proceed with construction until the university agreed to pay the costs on whatever was built on university property. The second meeting—Druff had forgotten that it had been scheduled for today—was with a lawyer, some bagman type from the university. He’d come with its sealed, lunatic bid. “Obviously the school regrets this tragedy, but isn’t this all a little like locking the barn door after the dish has run away with the spoon?” the fellow said. “The city should never have put up a pedestrian-activated traffic signal in that spot in the first place. It fair screamed ‘attractive nuisance’ to any beered-up kid who chanced by.” However, in the interest of putting all this behind them, he’d told Druff, the university was willing to help out, but preferred that the university’s builders be engaged on, well, the university’s buildings, that this was essentially a city project and that city contractors ought to be used on it, and it needn’t bother that the walkway be built in conformity with campus style, that a strictly neutral municipal architecture would serve, it was a matter of indifference to the university if the city failed to match its distinctive and rather expensive limestone. Druff, who smelled kickback the minute the guy opened his mouth, thanked him for coming and told him he’d convey the university’s position and get back to him with a decision.
The MacGuffin Page 2
