Edsel (8 page)

“I thought you had an expense account,” Agnes said, wiping a patch of ketchup from the corner of her mouth. “I dressed for an expense account.”

Her dress looked like crushed charcoal, with a full skirt and a tight top that left her collarbone exposed when she took off her shawl. It was a nice collarbone for fifty, including a brown mole on the left side. I had on a windowpane sport coat and a blue tie rashed all over with red fleurs-de-lis. We had been the only ones so attired in a theater full of sweatshirts and dungarees with the cuffs turned up. I wasn’t sure just when people stopped dressing to go to the movies, but it seemed to have happened around the time the first FOR SALE sign went up in front of one of the old motion-picture palaces. In another generation we’d be attending them in swimsuits. If we were attending them at all; the place had been one-third empty for the early-evening show.

I blew across the top of my cup. “You’re not a client. When I’ve made my stripes I’ll buy you a house in Miami on Mr. Ford’s ticket, but right now I’m the new kid in school. What did you think of the picture? Personally I’m glad Van Heflin got the job, even though in real life he’d bankrupt the company with all those ethics. If I were Clifton Webb I’d have given it to Fred MacMurray.”

“I liked June Allyson’s dresses.”

“The hell you did. She looked like Shirley Temple with a thyroid condition. What did you really think?”

“I’m wondering why you took me to see that particular film.”

“I thought you’d like to see a woman’s picture for a change. You said you were sick of westerns.”

“That’s not a woman’s picture. The men called all the shots. The women were either scheming shrews or simpering little ninnies. If that’s what Hollywood thinks women want to see, it’s no wonder movies are in trouble.”

A pair of pimple-pocked youths in black leather and Brylcreem and their ponytailed dates were gallumphing through the record section looking for Bill Haley and the Comets, loudly. I swiveled my stool to keep them in the tail of my eye. Young people had become a threat in ways more direct than the traditional.

“Movies are in trouble because for the price of ten Saturday nights anyone can put a box in his living room that spews out Clark Gable, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Gorgeous George all week long. That’s why the people who still go to them dress like bums and talk all the way through the feature. They think they’re still home.”

She blinked and shook her head rapidly. “For just a second there you sounded like my father. The nurses in the home don’t even listen to him any more.”

“I always wanted to be an old fart.” I took a bite out of my hamburger and put it down. Ground meat had changed commercially since the war. It no longer had texture. They had chopped and harrowed it so fine the raw patties must have looked like unbaked oatmeal cookies.

“Well, congratulations.” Her forehead broke into a stack of creases that didn’t go away when it relaxed. That depressed me somehow. I was more sensitive to signs of decomposition in my contemporaries than I was in myself. “I am worried about you, you know. You treat change as some kind of contagious disease. If you thought you could avoid it by bundling up and breathing bottled oxygen, you would.”

“I don’t mind change when there’s purpose in it. I’m not opposed to change. I just changed jobs.”

“No, you changed employers. You’re still a flack. Or I think you are. You still haven’t said just what it is you’re doing for Sonny. And don’t tell me you’re the one who fixes the radios so they turn off when they go under a bridge.”

I felt my face wince and poured coffee into it to cover up. That popular condescending nickname for the scion of the Ford family had never bothered me before I went to work for him. I’d used it myself once or twice. I belonged to that age group that didn’t run down the man who signed its paychecks, or at least I hoped I did. I wasn’t even sure I could spell sycophant, let alone be one. “I’m supposed to see to it that Ford doesn’t become a division of GM. Aside from that I’ve been told to avoid specifics.”

“Ah. Another Cadillac.”

This time I didn’t cover up worth a damn. She grinned beatifically. “Come on, Connie. They’ve been wanting to crack the luxury-car market ever since the old man died. The Lincoln didn’t do it; it’s what you drive until you can afford a Caddy. So Junior wants to put a car in every driveway in Grosse Pointe, and he’s hired you to do the grunt work. Impressive. Very impressive. So how come my delicate stomach juices are gnawing at a raw onion instead of caviar?”

“If you can find it up on the menu I’ll get some to go.”

Someone jostled me hard. I swiveled my stool to beg his pardon and bumped into a black-jacketed post-pubescent stinking of sweat and motor oil. I’d lost track of Young America during the conversation and now he and his companion, a hefty redhead in a two-tone Pershing High School jacket whose cream-colored leather sleeves covered all but the tips of her fingers, crowded onto the stools on either side of us. There was a vacant pair of stools at the end of the counter, but the pair had ignored them.

The boy grinned past me at his date. Pink tongue showed where his front teeth were missing. “Pass the salt.”

Red skidded the grenade-shaped shaker his way, bumping up Agnes’ elbow as she did so. Toothless poured salt into a tin ashtray in front of him and set down the shaker with a bang.

“Pass the ketchup.”

Bumping me with his shoulder, Toothless lunged for the red plastic squirter and rolled it down the counter. Red grabbed it and squeezed half a cup of the viscous contents onto the Formica top. A drop flew off the nozzle as she jerked the container upright and landed on Agnes’ sleeve. She jumped.

“Pass the pepper.”

I caught the shaker on its way down to the boy.

He leaned his body against mine. I smelled beer as strongly as if from an open keg. He was sweating pure Schlitz. “Hey, Gramps, I asked for the pepper.”

“Grow up, son. Get a job. Find a wife. Have kids. Grow old and die.” I slid off the stool and took Agnes’ elbow.

Toothless grasped my arm, squeezing the bicep. I let go of Agnes and splayed a hand against his chest. That was where I went wrong, if you discount catching the pepper shaker. It should have been his chin, and instead of my hand it should have been the stool.

I remember the first blow and the second. After that I lost count. I remember being on the floor and something hard and sharp hitting me in the side that turned out to be the pointed toe of a motorcycle boot. I remember Agnes shrieking obscenities, being surprised at how many she knew, and I had a flash of her hitting Toothless with her purse—holding it like a sap, not swinging it by its strap like an old lady—and Red grabbing her from behind and trying to claw her face with ragged nails. I have no recollection of seeing counter help or any other store personnel, although I was told later a security man broke it up with a hammerlock and his service revolver. I passed into and out of this world in the back of an ambulance in need of shock absorbers, banging and rocking over dips and breaks in the pavement, with Agnes looking down at me through tendrils of hair hanging loose in front of her face. Stutters of light from passing street lamps found most of the cracks in her makeup, which still depressed me.

Somewhere in there I dreamed a memory, of lunch at Carl’s Chop House on Howard with Janet Sherman after our tour of Rouge. She spoke sketchily of her childhood and schooling in Toledo, followed by her first employment at Ford as a secretary-typist, while delicately trimming scraps of lettuce from the edge of a tuna sandwich with her fingers. Finding the sandwich too big to handle, she had stopped to cut it in half. The operation forced her to lean a way over in order to brace the fork with her short arm, an awkward maneuver that she somehow made appear graceful. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman who had obviously spent hundreds of hours practicing such activities with the object of de-emphasizing them and distracting attention from her deformity. She was intelligent as well and spoke knowledgeably of things related to the history of the company she worked for that she could only have learned secondhand. If, as I assumed, her physical imperfection explained the lack of a ring on her left hand, she had made the best of that situation with interest, abandoning the typing pool in less than two years for a position as executive secretary to Henry II’s least-dispensable Whiz Kid. And I was pleased to learn that this far on the wrong side of middle age I could still be aroused by admirable attractive women. Funny what you think of when you’re bleeding.

In movies and on the clothes-closet sets of television, injured characters are always awakening to the sight of some concerned-looking doctor. In real life it’s more often to the slack weary face of a bored cop. Mine, looming over me in the harsh white light of the emergency room at Henry Ford Hospital, had on the same uniform that had been handed him when he’d finished training a dozen or so years before. Far from having grown into its tired folds and gathers, he had come to resemble them. His face looked as if he could turn around inside it without disturbing any of its pockets or creases. Even his eyes were set so far back behind the bunting of their lids I couldn’t find them. I might have caught him in mid-turn.

“Mr. Meaner, I’m Officer Kozlowski. Think you’re up to telling me what happened back there at Woolworth’s?”

I had to maneuver my lips out of the way of my words. They felt so swollen I was surprised I couldn’t see them. “If you know where it happened, I guess you know what.” I was hoarse as a dust devil. If I could have tumbled off the gurney I’d have crawled over to the cinderblock wall and licked the condensed moisture from the mortar between the blocks.

“The store turned the puke and his little whore over to the precinct. You going to press charges?”

“I used to know a Kozlowski in the detective bureau. Any relation?”

“Probably. Everybody in the family’s been some kind of cop. My mother’s still working Dispatch in Royal Oak. We’re holding them two for A-and-B. You want to forgive and understand them and set them on the right path, or would you rather we stick their butts in juvie? Personally I don’t give a shit. Either way we get to deal with ’em all over again.”

“Could you get me a drink of water?”

“We’re not supposed to give you nothing. Croakers get awful sore. So how about it, you pressing the rap? ’Cause chances are their parents live in Grosse Pointe and when we pull them out of whatever party they’re at to take the pukes home they’ll slap a suit on you for cutting little Buster’s toes with the busted ends of your ribs. This way you get something back.”

“How’s Agnes?” I was ashamed of not having asked first thing. My face was throbbing and every time I inhaled someone sank a hat pin in my side up to the head.

“She’s okay. I think she broke a nail.” He flipped shut his pad, a dime-store notebook with a cardboard cover hanging by two loops. “Tell you what, I’ll talk to you later. Right now I’m answering all the questions. You got a strange way of being in shock.”

“I used to be a reporter.”

“Yeah? Well, you must’ve stunk at it, You ain’t reported a thing since I been here.”

He left me to stare at the tube lights in a trough on the ceiling. After a long time the dark oval of an orderly’s face blocked it out and the gurney started moving. In X ray a young nurse whose skin was as pale as her cap helped me off with my shirt and pants and rolled me around on a cold steel table like an egg noodle, putting torque I didn’t need to my cracked ribs and then doing it all over again half an hour later when the pictures didn’t turn out. When a doctor finally made his appearance, he was half my age and his face wore an expression of even less concern than Officer Kozlowski. He poked at my abdomen and rib cage, twisted my head right and left, examined my pulse, and took six stitches in my lower lip, which was as big as a couch. While a nurse who may or may not have been the Florence Nightingale who had manhandled me in X ray sponged the blood off my face, Young Dr. Kildare scowled at my vital statistics on a clipboard in his hands.

“You have three cracked ribs, Mr. Minor,” he said. “We’ll tape them up before you leave, but you’ll have to leave the bending over and climbing stairs to someone else for a while. I’d like to hang on to you overnight for observation; however, we have no beds available. We had a little roadshow performance of
The Wild One
on Hastings earlier tonight and some of the actors have decided to honor us with their presence.”

I grunted, grateful for the reprieve. A steady stream of youths swathed in bloody gauze had delayed my treatment for almost two hours. The battle seemed to have been drawn along racial lines, reminding me uncomfortably of the ’46 riots. “What about Agnes?”

“The woman who came in with you? She’s in the waiting room. She has a facial contusion she refused treatment for. Otherwise she seems all right.” He skinned back a page. “There’s one laceration I can’t account for. Did the boy who attacked you have a knife?”

“Not unless you count his boots.”

“It’s a four-inch gash on your upper right thigh. It seems to have had an adhesive bandage on it until quite recently.”

“Oh, that. I did that to myself when I dropped my portable typewriter. I shouldn’t have tried to catch it.”

“That would be sometime last week?”

“More like a month. I was moving from my last job.”

“Are you a slow healer, Mr. Minor?”

“I’m slower at most things than I used to be.” I wondered where my clothes were.

“How is your urine?”

“As compared to what?”

“Do you have to empty your bladder frequently? Several times during the night?”

“Don’t you?”

“Do you have to go right now?”

“I can wait till I get out of here.”

“I’m guessing you take in as much as you put out. Are you extremely thirsty at the moment?”

“I wouldn’t turn down a gallon of water and a beer chaser. Does any of this have a point or are you charging me by the hour?”

“Have you ever been treated for diabetes?”

Something caught in my stomach.

“A doctor told me I was a borderline case a long time back. It kept me out of the army. I’ve always thought I grew out of it.”