The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,10
scarves and machine guns, shooting down German planes.”
She giggled. “You sound like Donald.”
“Who’s Donald?”
She raised her left hand to display a decent sized rock, either a zircon or a pretty expensive piece of stone and silver. “Didn’t you hear? I’m going to be Mrs. Donald Thorsten.”
I certainly didn’t want to marry Millie, and short of that I knew I’d never get the chance to take her to bed. Why, then, this ache upon hearing the news of her betrothal? “What’s his line?”
“He’s the new associate pastor at my church. Since last November.”
“That’s swell. I know you’ll be happy.”
“I’m so excited. The big day’s this November, because Donald feels very strongly that a couple shouldn’t marry if they haven’t known one another at least a year.”
“Wise man,” I said.
She poured me a paper cupful of mild java, and I spent a few minutes extolling the virtues of married life before making myself scarce. It was close to the end of the shift and I didn’t want to get stuck in the traffic heading westward away from the plant. There was no reason I couldn’t have headed straight for home, but instead I headed for Red’s.
RED’S WASN’T HOPPING. There was a copy of the Evening Beacon on the bar, and I was interested to see on page four that a man in his fifties had drunk himself to death in an apartment west of downtown, not far from the Masonic Home, while his wife rotted away in the next room, having died of undetermined causes several days earlier. The reporter, Fred Elting, was always a good one for nasty details on these sorts of stories, and he wasn’t afraid to sensationalize. “What kind of city are we living in today, where a man is so afraid to report his wife’s decease to the proper authorities that he pickles himself to death with gin while she molders by his side? Is this what our brave men fought for in Europe and Asia?”
To tell you the truth, Fred, I wasn’t giving Wichita and its lonesome drunks much thought when I was over there.
There wasn’t much else of interest in the paper, and I fell into talking to one of the b-girls. Her name was Barbara, and she looked like she must have been a lot of fun before the war. The 1946 model had a drinker’s puffy face, though, and a little bit of a paunch that her girdle wasn’t quite containing beneath her dress. “That’s a pretty thin dress for March,” I said.
“It’s been pretty balmy the last few days,” she said, crossing her legs, the slit in her dress aligning to give me a perfect view of the top of her right stocking. Her legs were okay, and the leer she was giving me suggested that a few good times might still be had with the old girl. “Where’s your friend?”
“He got into a fight the other night,” I said, thinking she meant Collins. “His bodyguard let him get his ribs broken.”
“Wait a minute, the bodyguard has a bodyguard?”
Was she really that drunk or that stupid? “You’re talking about Billy Clark?”
“Good-looking fella sits in a booth and watches you and old Collins drinking and having fun?”
“That’s him.”
“I always feel kind of sorry for him.”
“He got beaten up too, and he lost his job on top of it, so your pity’s not entirely misplaced.”
“Gosh. Lost his job and everything?”
“He’s a goddamn idiot. What kind of numbskull bodyguard starts a fight with a couple of big hayseeds he couldn’t whip sober?”
“Well, that Collins is a creep and a pervert.”
I had no argument against that. “He pays okay,” I countered.
“He was screwing my girlfriend Lottie, had her on all fours. Pushed her face down onto the mattress, just spit in his hand and did it pretty as you please. Boy she was mad. Threatened to go to the cops and report him as a pervert.”
“Cops don’t care.”
“Sure they do! It’s called sodomy and there’s a law against it in the state of Kansas.”
“I mean the cops don’t care about it when Everett Collins does it.”
“Well he sure seemed scared because when he sobered up he paid her two hundred and fifty dollars afterward not to squawk.”
All this sex talk, on top of my earlier encounter with Millie Grau, was getting me thinking I needed my ashes hauled one way or another tonight. I thought of my beautiful wife at home, and comparing her in my head with the alcoholic harridan before me there was no