The Adjustment

by Scott Phillips

  “Goddamn broken ribs, Jesus Christ, I need back on the fucking morphine. Ogden, you get on that first thing in the goddamn morning.” His voice broke on that second “goddamn.”

  THE ROADHOUSE PARK took us to was indeed full of wild women, and the boss’s mood cleared right up on arrival. He was talking to a pretty brunette who was dressed for a much better class of place than this, and she was rubbing his sleeve and laughing with delight at whatever he was saying to her, probably an indecent proposition. Park and I had earned our keep for the night.

  Park stood in the doorway beckoning me. “There’s a dark Plymouth been following us since the blind pig; I don’t know if they were on our tail before or not, but that’s my guess. Parked in the back corner of the lot, guy’s sitting behind the wheel still.”

  I went through the back door and moved to the parking lot, lurking among the twenty or so cars until I spotted the Plymouth and its driver, watching the front door of the roadhouse with a camera perched on top of the dash, a new-looking Speed Graphic. It was Hiram Fish, whom Mrs. Collins occasionally entrusted with the job of following her husband around gathering evidence of his misdeeds. There wasn’t much point to it besides masochism that I could see; devout Catholic that she was, she wouldn’t be able to use the photos in a divorce case.

  On one occasion during the war, the old bitch had shown the old man a set of photos and demanded an explanation. They showed him at a party in the company of a homely and heavily made-up woman wearing only panties, garter belt, and black stockings, a getup similar to which most of the women in the background were also wearing. The men were in shirtsleeves and most wore paper hats marked with stars and stripes. He explained to the Mrs. that this was a birthday party for Uncle Sam, and that as defense contractors he and some of his colleagues were required to attend. When he added that the girl with him was a good patriotic American girl whose contribution to the war effort was made horizontally, Mrs. Collins slapped him. He backhanded her in response, knocking her into a cabinet filled with little porcelain figures, some of which fell off their shelves. She started crying, picking up the shards of the precious little things, and he left the house looking for a fight or a fuck or both. Or at least that’s the way Collins told me the story; I was in Italy at the time, or maybe still in England, fighting the Nazi menace in my own roundabout fashion.

  In any event, Fish represented a threat to my status quo, and I didn’t like the looks of him anyway, with his little pencil moustache like a slick villain in a movie and his too-perfectly brilliantined hair. Not to mention there was always something a little shady about these ex-cops who take up snooping, just one step removed from window peepers and dickflashers, as far as I was concerned. I retraced my steps and went all the way around the building, then crept, doubled over, to Collins’s Packard. I opened up the right rear door and grabbed the baseball bat I kept stashed under the front seat.

  Then I rose to my full height and strode across the gravel to Fish’s Plymouth. He tried frantically to start it up, but before he got it into gear I’d already smashed the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass badly enough to prevent its operation until the shards were busted out. Fish scrambled out the driver’s door.

  “You crazy son of a bitch, what the hell you mean busting my windshield?”

  I swung again, left-handed this time, and caught him in the shin. He went down in hysterics and I got him a good one on the forearm. I could hear bone cracking, and I figured he was probably out of commission for the evening.

  A crowd had formed at the door of the roadhouse. Park was walking towards me, saying something conciliatory to a concerned stranger who was wondering whether I needed bringing to heel. I reached into the front seat and grabbed Fish’s Speed Graphic, took out the film holder and pulled the sheet out of it, then opened half a dozen more he had laying on the seat. I didn’t know if they contained latent images of Collins or not; I scattered the raw negatives onto the gravel. Then I set the camera on top of the Plymouth’s hood and clipped it like Ted Goddamn Williams. It flew a good twenty feet and banged into a Studebaker.

  “Mr. Ogden,” Park was saying.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you listening? This is important.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Ogden, I’m the bodyguard. It makes me look bad when you take it upon yourself to do something like this. I’m still new, I know, but next time just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  “You’re a good man, Park. Let’s have a drink.” I was well pleased at having hired him. We walked back inside and found the old man ensconced in a booth with his brunette, rubbing the inside of her thigh, completely unaware of the activity outside.

  I GOT HOME exhausted at two in the morning and was relieved to find the lights out in the apartment. I undressed and got into bed and closed my eyes, and just as I began to relax into a state conducive to sleep the lamp came on.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said, up on one elbow. Then she wheeled around and got out of bed, looking like she might hit me.

  I was in worse trouble than I’d first assumed. “What the hell?” I said.

  “If you won’t tell me what’s wrong I can’t fix it.”

  Despite herself she was starting to cry. I was in bad trouble, I knew it; she hadn’t ever cried in my presence beyond her eyes getting a little wet, not even on the occasion of her mother’s death.

  She struggled to get control and spoke again. “You don’t love me any more.”

  Jumping Jesus, what do you say to that? “Course I do, baby, what are you talking about?”

  She swallowed. She was regaining some of her control. “You’re out and about almost every night, I eat dinner with your mother more often than with you, ever since I told you about the baby you’ve barely touched me. You like that boss of yours more than me.”

  I laughed at that, and she gave me a look of pure snake venom. Beautiful and feminine as she was, she was a big girl nonetheless, and she’d hit me before, and hard. “Baby, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t stand the son of a bitch.”

  “Then why are you out with him every night?”

  “Because since I got back, that’s what my job is. Babysitter. Didn’t you ever wonder why the head of the Publicity and Marketing Department doesn’t go in to work most days until ten in the morning? My job is to keep a muzzle on the old man, and the only public relations I do is keeping the old pervert out of the Beacon and the Eagle.”

  She wiped both cheeks with the heels of her palms. “You aren’t seeing somebody else?”

  “Hell, no, why would I? I got the sweetest piece of tail in the state right here at home.” Despite herself I had made her giggle. “If you doubt me you can come along some night and watch me and the bodyguard sitting around watching the boss carouse.” In fact Collins would love that; he’d probably make a pass at her, pregnant or not.

  “If you’re not seeing somebody else how come we’re down to four or five times a week any more?”

  “Every night’s a tall order, baby. I’m thirty-one years old, and coming home late the way I do . . . half the time you’re asleep anyway.”

  “I’m not asleep right now,” she said with the suggestion of a smile, lifting her nightie and exposing that exceptionally lovely torso. I stared at her body, her pubic hair especially black against her slightly swollen winter-white belly, nipples wide and erect, and said a little prayer of thanks for this heaven-sent carnal bounty.

  DOCTOR EZRA GROFF kept a little house just west of Hillside he’d reconfigured as a doctor’s office, with two examining rooms and a little surgery in the back. For a long time he’d been the town’s most reliable angelmaker, but toward the end of the thirties there was a local crackdown and he started referring girls in trouble to out-of-town docs like Beck in Kansas City. Enough girls of prominent birth had been helped out of sticky situations that he avoided prosecution, and his practice had survived, though it couldn’t be said to have thrived. I was the only patient in
the waiting room at ten in the morning.

  His elderly nurse Lois had me fill out some paperwork, since I hadn’t been in since ’41. Her bright red hair had gone pinkish and she’d put on a good deal of weight, which may have accounted for the slight limp she’d taken on since I saw her last. She chatted amiably while I wrote, talked about what a precocious little boy I’d been, insisting on knowing the Latin names for treatments and ailments and body parts when I was as young as five. I liked Lois. According to my father, she’d been Dr. Groff’s girlfriend as well as his nurse in the old days, long before Dr. Groff’s wife was carted off to the state lunatic asylum at Larned. I wondered if they were still at it.

  In the examination room I sat on the table with my shirt needlessly off on nurse Lois’s instructions. The whole place smelled like mercurochrome and ammonia and mold.

  “Well, young Ogden,” Groff said when he came in, stubbing a dead butt into the ashtray. “Back from the war, I see.”

  “Back since spring,” I said.

  “And what’s troubling you that the VA can’t fix for free?”

  “It’s for a friend.”

  He snorted. “It always is. This friend, what’s her name?”

  What the hell, this was one old man who knew how to keep a secret. Everett Collins.”

  Groff’s wild grey eyebrows lifted, and I couldn’t tell whether he was dubious or impressed. “Go on.”

  “He broke a rib or two, got sucker-punched by a big farm boy in a road house.”

  “Painful, broken ribs. Awful bad.”

  “That’s the thing. He wants to know if I can’t get him a prescription for some morphine.”

  “I want to make sure I understand. This is the same Everett Collins that founded Collins Aircraft?”

  “The same. I’m working for him.”

  “All right. You don’t want morphine, it’s too hard to administer properly. I’ve got something new, just as good and not as addictive.”

  “The prescription needs to be in my name, for discretion’s sake.”

  He nodded, eyes closed. His eyelids were veined and purplish. “Of course.” He grabbed a pad and started writing. “It’s called Hycodan, what we call a semi-synthetic opioid. Cross between codeine and thebaine, if that means anything to you.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Groff.”

  “Your mother was in for woman trouble a couple of weeks ago. She says your wife is expecting.”

  I winced. I didn’t want to hear about my mother or any kind of woman trouble she might be having. I didn’t want to think about the pregnancy, either, for that matter. “That’s right.”

  “Hope it doesn’t ruin that pretty figure of hers. She’s quite a gal.”

  I smiled, or tried to. “Sure is.”

  “How’s she taking her new condition?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Moods. Morning sickness. All that.”

  “She’s taken to crying. She never used to do that. She’s quicker to anger.”

  “Get used to it. A baby in the womb sets off a whole string of chemical and hormonal reactions in a woman’s body that you and I can be thankful we’ll never have to deal with.” He started scribbling on a pad of paper. “Now, you might mention to Mr. Collins that I’m angling for the position of County Coroner next year.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “I’m not asking for a quid pro quo. You know that. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t mind having some powerful people in my corner when the time comes.”

  I took the prescription from his hand. “I don’t think he’ll forget this.”

  THE PHARMACIST ON Hillside across from Wesley hospital filled the scrip without comment or question. “Take that up to Mrs. Perkey at the cash register and she’ll ring you up.”

  Mrs. Perkey beamed as she took the prescription from me and rang it up. “Wayne Ogden, isn’t it nice seeing you.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Perkey,” I said, only vaguely aware of ever having known her and grateful to the pharmacist for having supplied the name.

  “Your mother and I were just talking about your blessed event.”

  “She’s beside herself,” I said, though this was just a guess. I hadn’t seen or spoken to the old bird since I found out about it. I guessed Sally must have told her. “She’s got step-grandchildren, but this is the first of her own.”

  I paid her and walked out. “Hope you get to feeling better right quick,” she called after me.

  THE BOSS GLOWERED at me when I walked into his office, his shoulders hunched and hangover tense, a condition that had to exacerbate the pain in his ribcage. Before he had a chance to snap at me I dropped the bag with the Hycodan on the blotter that sat atop his massive mahogany desk. “Instructions are written on the side of the bag.”

  It was as though a state of grace washed over him just then. His musculature relaxed visibly, and he exhaled as though he’d been holding it in all morning. His torn ear got redder, his eyes brightened and he opened the bag like a little kid digging into his Christmas stocking. “Morphine. Hot diggetty.”

  “Isn’t morphine. Something new. Better than morphine.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Fix you right up, is what the doc says.”

  Without reading the directions he unscrewed the bottle top and tossed one into his mouth and crunched it. On the desk was an elaborately detailed model of the Collins L-120, the biplane that had put the company on the map in the twenties. Lindbergh flew one of the first, and later Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart did too. I nearly bought a used one in the days after I finished college and before I got my first job at Collins, even though I didn’t have an aviator’s license. These days I couldn’t have been more indifferent to the whole business of flying, but the sight of the dark blue fuselage and the robin’s-egg blue wings by the light of Collins’s desk lamp brought forth a little twinge of innocent nostalgia. I almost wished I could make myself care about the damned things again.

  “The old fishcunt was pretty sore at me this morning, Ogden,” he said with a grin.

  “How’s that?”

  “Mr. Fish is dunning her for his medical bills. She says I ought to pay them. I told her I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”

  “She ought to hire somebody better than that to follow you around.”

  “I think she just likes that pretty moustache of his. Always talking about how handsome this movie star or that one is. Occurs to me you should have messed up his face, maybe. Thinking maybe if he wasn’t so pretty she’d quit hiring him.”

  “Problem with that is she might stumble onto someone halfway competent, then you’d be screwed.”

  “That might be right. Anyhow, I think she might be in cahoots with some of the board. There’s a move afoot to fire you, boy, you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You and me both. One or two of ’em on the board want to replace me with the wife, can you beat that?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “They think I’m irresponsible. Want her sitting in here doing what they tell her to do. Because her last name’s Collins. Inspires confidence. Look like I’d just stepped aside for her.”

  This was bad news. I might not stay at Collins forever, but if I did go I was determined to leave at a time of my choosing and on my own terms. Another goddamn mess for me to fix, and probably without much in the way of help from Uncle Blackout here. “Who’s with her?”

  “Huff, that sanctimonious son of a bitch.” Ernest Huff, the comptroller, was a notorious straight arrow, stickler for detail and all-around pain in the dick. “Latham, probably, he doesn’t like the way I do things. I’ll ask a couple of the fellows who else there is, and when I find out we’ll fix the sons of bitches.” He swished some saliva around in his mouth to get rid of the chunks of pill. “Get me a drink of water.”

  I left the room and stepped out into the reception area, where I was rewarded with a sweet look from Millie Grau. I poured a glass of water
from the cooler and went back into the office, where Collins swigged half of it down and gargled.

  “You shouldn’t drink water,” he said after he swallowed the rest. “Know why?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Fish fuck in it.”

  FIVE

  THE BEST JOB I EVER HAD

  I WAS TRYING TO find an excuse to get back up to see Vickie in Kansas City but was stymied by the boss’s baffling failure to knock up any more wayward girls. She sent me a letter at work—the only address I’d provided her—promising me a hell of a good time when I got there. I answered with a non-committal post card. I needed to get back to KC. It wasn’t just Vickie; I was looking into a potential source of income separate from the job.

  The idea had come to me when I passed a cigar store that my grandfather used to frequent on his occasional trips to visit us in Wichita. Trebegs were his brand, and he used to send me off with a two-dollar bill to buy a boxful and let me keep the change. Another popular item at the cigar store were dirty comic books and postcards, kept under the counter and only available to customers the clerk knew well. Good old Grandpa bought me a stack of Tijuana Bibles when I was twelve, a real godsend for my budding career as a chronic onanist, which lasted until I was fifteen and started getting laid regularly.

  The severe, lipless relic manning the counter in the present day had stared at me as though offended by my very existence; he certainly lacked the hail-fellow-well-met demeanor that any sort of under-the-counter trade demands of a merchant, so I didn’t bother inquiring. Something came to me as I walked out the door, though, the memory of a wholesaler that used to provide me with pornographic photos in Rome: the Nonpareil Photographic Studio of Kansas City, Missouri.