The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,19

and going on strike and breaking jail. The funnies, on the other hand, weren’t as funny as they used to be. What ever happened to Thimble Theater? Was Krazy Kat in the paper any more? Mutt and Jeff were still in the Beacon, I was relieved to note, but they weren’t as funny and mean as they used to be, just a couple of shitkickers telling corny jokes. And if Casper Milquetoast was in print I hadn’t seen him.

I went back to the newsstand after breakfast and bought a couple of magazines for the trip. The rocking motion of the train might lull me to sleep, but at that moment I felt excited enough that I imagined I’d stay awake the whole trip, and I didn’t want to be bored.

It was still dark when the train pulled out of the station, and I unfurled my copy of Life. Like a comet shooting through the sky announcing an auspicious event, the page I happened to open to had a photo essay on the establishment of a permanent military base in Japan. I started reading the article, but before I was done with it my late night caught up with me and I was out.

When I awoke it was light and there was a stocky man of eighty or more sitting across from me. A farmer, I guessed, shrunken a bit from his days of physical labor but not gone entirely to seed. “Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” I said, looking out the window and trying to figure out where we were.

“Where you headed? Chicago?” He had on a suit that looked like one my grandfather used to wear, the height of fashion thirty years before. His shirt collar came halfway up his throat.

“Kansas City,” I said.

“Me, I’m headed for Chicago. Going to be married to a woman I’ve been corresponding with.”

“That’s good,” I said, though I suspected it wasn’t.

“Want to see her picture?” Without waiting for my reply he pulled a glossy four-by-five print from his coat pocket and handed it over. The woman in the picture was no older than forty and generously daubed with kohl and rouge like Theda Bara from the silent pictures, though the dress she wore was of more recent vintage. Her broad smile, more of a leer, really, showed an irregular mouthful of jagged teeth. “Ain’t she something?”

“She is. Known her long?”

“Since’t last September.”

“Ever met her in the flesh?”

“No, sir, this here’ll be the first time.”

“That’s terrific.”

“She’s going to come back and live on the farm with me. She’s tired of city ways, she says.”

I took a closer look at the old gent. His suit was out of date, but it had been a good one when it was made, and a heavy gold chain hung from his coat. “Say, you don’t know the time, do you? My watch stopped.”

He reached for that chain and, as I expected, out came a solid gold watch bigger than a silver dollar. “Nine twenty, just about.”

“Thanks. So how’d you get in touch with this gal?”

“One of them lonely hearts correspondence clubs. We had a whole mess of interests in common. Gin rummy, for a start. Stamps, for another.”

“I used to collect stamps,” I said.

“It’s a wholesome hobby. I also breed horses, Morgans, and turns out she’s loved horses her whole life and hasn’t had a chance to be around ’em.”

“Good for her,” I said, feeling a little sorry for the horny old bastard across from me.

“Course my daughters and sons-in-laws are dead set against it. Afraid I’ll leave the farm and the money to her and not them. Well, sir, if they don’t treat her like a mother, then that’s just what’ll happen.”

I gathered that part of his desire to remarry was the idea that he’d missed out on something the first time around. “Fern was a mean woman, and her daughters are all three mean and crabbed as she was. I’ll tell you something on the QT. I was married to that woman thirty-seven miserable years, and she only let me make a woman out of her eight times, and the last three of those was by force. I didn’t care no more about it, I was done with her. When she hanged herself, you know what I said? Good.”

He leaned forward, the multitude of tracks outside signaling our imminent arrival at KC’s Union Station.

SIX

THE FRIENDS OF TOM PENDERGAST

SINCE THE VISIT was a surprise anyway I decided to grab a taxi and go straight to Vickie’s place in Westport.