The Road to Wellville (24 page)

The boy was tiny, shriveled, pathetic, a little homunculus preserved in a jar. He shrugged, looked away. “Nothin’. Business, that’s all.”

Business. Of course.
Charlie leapt at him. “Where is he?”

Ernest O’Reilly was a sack of rags, lighter than air, hopeless. “You’re hurting me,” he said in his tremulous little flute of a voice, and there was no outrage in it, no protest, just a sad familiar acquiescence.

“Bender,” Charlie repeated, and he tightened his grip. “Where is he?”

The boy jerked his neck to indicate the building behind them. It was a place with which Charlie was destined to become intimately familiar in the months that lay ahead, but his first view of it was inauspicious. He saw an awning, a bank of windows, a door. And beyond the windows,
tables, chairs, people hunched over plates and cutlery: a restaurant. Like a hundred others. The sign over the door proclaimed “The Red Onion,” and beneath it, in hand-painted letters, white on a barn-red background, there was this further inscription:
Tired of Bran & Sprouts? Try Our Famous Steaks, Chops & Fries & Our Detroit Special Hamburger Sandwich.

Inside, the place smelled incorrigibly of grease, stale beer, sweat, cheap cigars and the gut-clenching ambrosia of a good sixteen-ounce steak in the pan on a bed of onions. Bender was sitting alone at a table in back, a half-empty pitcher of beer at his elbow, the remains of a T-bone steak settling into the plate before him. “Bender,” Charlie barked, crossing the black-and-white tile floor in half a dozen strides, faces looking up in alarm from cutlets, chops, sausages, split chickens and wieners, and then, lowering his voice to a pained rumble, “where in hell were you?”

Bender rose from his seat with an answering roar, tumbling out of the chair like some great sea lion going into battle on the California beaches, crying “Charles, my boy,” over and over, as if he were glad to see him. “Have a seat, have a seat”—he was repeating himself, saying everything twice, and Charlie saw that beneath the bluff exterior, he was agitated. “Pull up a chair, pull up a chair, sit down, sit down, my boy, my fine—my very fine—boy and business partner.”

Charlie wouldn’t sit. Bender hadn’t answered him yet, and he was reluctant to surrender the high moral ground. “Where the hell
were
you?” he repeated. “We had an appointment, didn’t we? At eleven
A.M.
? Do you know I waited around that broken-down factory freezing my damn bones for over an hour and a half?”

“Sit down, Charlie, you’re making a scene,” Bender hissed, and he was in command again, his face serene, unperturbed, sunk back into the mask it customarily wore. They sat down together. Bender reached over to pour Charlie a glass of beer. “Have you eaten yet?” he asked. “Hungry?” And without waiting for a reply he turned portentously in his seat and hailed the waiter in the fruity rich commanding voice he used on the public like some old Shakespearean faker. When he turned back round he drew a cigar from his breast pocket, clipped the end and leaned forward to light it off the tallowy candle puddled in a dish in the center of the table.

“Well?” Charlie demanded. “I’m waiting for an explanation. Listen, Goodloe, if we’re going to be partners we’ve got to get a few things straight here, like—”

Bender cut him off. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” he crooned, massive, paternal, dredging up all the authority of his years and his bulk and his legendary successes (
I was a millionaire and busted flat two times over before I was thirty
, he’d told Charlie any number of times). “I apologize, I do. To tell the truth, the whole thing slipped my mind.” And here he held up a hand to forestall any further protest. “The factory’s small potatoes, Charlie. Something’s come up. Something worth any twenty burned-out cereal factories.”

At that moment the waiter sidled up to them, obsequious, squirming, dog-whipped, a man reduced to his rump-kissing essence. “Yes, Mr. Bender?” he breathed, and everybody in town seemed to know Goodloe H. Bender, the once and future tycoon. “May I bring you anything else?”

Bender kept him waiting as he drew the cigar from the crevice of his bearded lips and exhaled a cloud of smoke redolent of cane, frangipani, the steaming rains of the tropics. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Bring this gentleman the Delmonico steak, rare, smothered in mushrooms and onions, and serve him up a plate of your best fried potatoes and some soup and half a roasted chicken, will you? Looks like he hasn’t eaten since he got off the train two days ago.”

The waiter vanished. Bender leaned back in his chair like a sultan, pleased with himself, the rich blue tobacco haze wreathing his head like a crown. Charlie felt his heart slip. How could he have doubted a man like this? Bender was born to inherit the earth, to eat off silver salvers and drink from golden goblets, there was no doubt about it. “So what is it? What’s come up?” Despite himself, he could barely contain his excitement.

The big smile, the self-congratulatory pause. “Nothing more than this: we’re going to get rich at a rate six times faster than we were yesterday, that’s all. Oh yeah—and we’re changing the name of the company.”

“Changing the name?” Charlie clutched involuntarily at the leather card-case in his breast pocket—how he loved those cards. “But why?”

“Just a minor change, Charlie, no big deal. We’re just going to add another name to the full appellation, that’s all.” Again the pause, lingering and dramatic. Worlds collided, ships went down in the time it took Bender to flick the ash from his cigar. “Are you ready? ‘Kellogg’s Per-Fo Company, Incorporated,’ that’s what we’re going to call it.”

“Kellogg’s? What are you talking about? We can’t just—”

But at that moment the front door swung open and in walked the man Bender had been waiting for. He was clean-shaven and he’d had a haircut and somebody had buried the vomit-stained overcoat and gotten him a new suit of clothes, but Charlie recognized him in an instant. He staggered a bit as he came up to the table, and Charlie, bewildered, took Bender’s lead and rose to greet him. “Ah, George,” Bender purred as he took the man’s hand in his fleshy embrace, “good of you to come. Capital.” And, turning to Charlie: “I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Charles P. Ossining, Esquire.”

The muddy eyes, the yellowed stumps of the teeth, and not the vaguest glimmer of recognition.

“And Charlie, dear old, good old, fine old Charlie,” Bender crowed, flush with geniality, an arm round each of them, “Charlie, I’d like you to meet George Kellogg.”

   
Chapter 10   

T
wo weeks before Thanksgiving, that holiday of universal glut, Will detected a subtle change in the atmosphere of the dining hall. It was during the morning meal—or, rather, during the period he occupied at table watching Mrs. Tindermarsh gobble her chopped-beet-and-split-rail salad while Hart-Jones roared like an ass over his soft-boiled eggs and Miss Muntz took neat little bites of her leg of Protose, or whatever it was. He wasn’t eating, himself. This was the second of his three days on the laxative diet, and he swallowed the rubbery psyllium seeds and cardboardlike hijiki as if he were taking so many pills; for beverage, he enjoyed a glass of water. At any rate, the ambience of the place seemed different somehow, almost festive, the buzz of conversation more animated, the titters and bursts of laughter more convivial and frequent. Something was afoot.

A bit sore from his prebreakfast bout with Nurse Bloethal and her irrigating machine, Will gave a stiff nod of welcome to his tablemates as he eased himself down and unfolded the napkin in his lap. There was no need to bother with the menu—he’d barely gotten the napkin settled when one of the dietary girls appeared with his plate of shriveled dark seaweed and bitter seeds, which had all the appeal of a bowl of wood shavings and lint. Professor Stepanovich gave him a shy look of commiseration, then went back to digging at his corn flakes; the others,
even Homer Praetz, a man not given to levity, wore tight little smiles, as if they could barely contain themselves. “What is it?” Will demanded, and despite himself he could feel a silly grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Am I missing something?”

Miss Muntz, his lovely greenish friend who’d been swaddled beside him on the veranda for the past three afternoons now, let a little calliope toot of a laugh escape her. Homer Praetz put a hand to his mouth and harmonized in a reedy falsetto. “Haven’t you noticed—?” she began, and broke down in a trill of schoolgirlish giggles.

“What she means, Mr. Lightbody,” Mrs. Tindermarsh added, and she was in on it, too, “is that the hall seems a bit rustic today, wouldn’t you say?”

“The barnyard invades the healing pen!” Hart-Jones crowed, waving a spoon slick with egg yolk and showing his blunt yellow horse’s teeth.

Put on his mark, Will scanned the room. He saw the usual horde of feeding faces, the celebrated, the rich, the dyspeptic and nervous. Pillars rose to the ceiling; waitresses flowed though the aisles in an unrippled stream. He saw Eleanor’s table and noticed, with a little stab of alarm, that she wasn’t there—nor was Linniman. Maybe she’d eaten earlier—or overslept. Or maybe Dr. Kellogg had her on an early-morning enema-and-exercise regimen … but where was Linniman, the grinning one, that paragon of health and mesmerizer of married women, that breakfast eater? Will had learned that he was a bachelor, and the knowledge depressed him still further—no trim physiologic wife awaited the lusty doctor at home, no patter of running feet answered the rattle of his key in the door. All the more reason he should give free rein to his unbridled bacheloric libido and hunger after other men’s wives.

But no, Will was probably just imagining things. So what if Linniman was cordial—exceptionally cordial—to his wife? That was his job, wasn’t it? And besides, Will felt secure in Eleanor—she might poison him, but she’d never forsake him, never even think about it, never. Would she? They’d made up their differences—it was nothing, really, they agreed; it was just that they were both ill and under a good deal of strain, what with the change of scene and regimen and the long enervating journey. She’d come to his room the previous evening, sweet in a simple white shirtwaist and black skirt, to see how he was. She
wound up staying for over an hour, sitting at his bedside and reading to him from Helen Keller’s
The Story of My Life
, and when she got up to leave she bent over him, took his face in her hands and gave him a prolonged and very promising kiss.

“Oh, Mr. Lightbody, really,” Miss Muntz laughed from the other end of the table, “don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it yet?” And then she was up out of her seat and sweeping round the table with a rustle of skirts to hover over him and point out this marvel, this wonder, this new cynosure of the dining hall.

Will saw it then, caught up in the aura of her perfume and tingling with the awareness of her proximity, and he couldn’t help himself: he burst out with a laugh. How could he have missed it? There it was, the talk of the room, right there in front of his eyes, thrumming to itself in a wood-slat cage set up on a table in the corner. A turkey. A fat, wattled, feathery, preening bird staring out at the diners from the thicket of its glittery dull eyes. Above it, another of the Doctor’s didactic banners: