The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,45

getting the same treatment as Fish, the camera wrecked and the film inside ruined.

IN THE CAFETERIA I was spotted by Mr. Rackey, who boldly joined me. I almost never ate lunch at the plant, but I’d arrived and hung my picture at eleven-thirty and it didn’t seem worth the trouble driving off the premises.

“Do you know what I did once?” he asked me.

“I sure don’t,” I said.

“Set a barn on fire when I was sixteen, this old son of a bitch was yelling at me and my buddies, saying I thought I told you kids to get off my goddamn property. You ever hear of Boy’s Town? Judge sent me there. Didn’t do me a lick of good. You know how old Father Flanagan’s supposed to have said ‘there’s no such thing as a bad boy?’ That was before the old bastard met me.”

“Never knew anyone who went to Boy’s Town before.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Beats any other kind of lockup I was ever in. Hey, Ogden, you been back to Red’s lately?”

“It’s been a little while.”

“I got eighty-sixed last week, forever.”

“What for?” I couldn’t remember too many people being eighty-sixed from Red’s, even temporarily, so Rackey’s transgression must have been serious.

“Broke that whore’s arm.”

“Which whore is that?”

“Hell, I don’t know all their names. Kind of flabby but not too hard to look at.”

“Barbara?”

“That’s it. Barbara.”

“That skinny bartender with the bushy eyebrows has it for her pretty bad. How’d you end up breaking her arm?”

“She wouldn’t dance with me, wouldn’t even get up off her moneymaker, so I yanked her out of the chair and bent her arm right back.”

He grinned, his mouth a spectacle of jagged, multicolored teeth, proud of himself and his prowess with the ladies.

THAT AFTERNOON I found Millie Grau a distracted wreck, pulling nervously at a loose strand of hair at her temple and looking like she’d missed a couple of nights’ worth of sleep.

“I told him, Mr. Ogden. He’s broken it off temporarily while he prays on it. He . . . he says he feels like he doesn’t really know me any more. Like . . . like I was lying to him all along.”

“Sorry, Millie,” I said.

“I was, wasn’t I? Lying?”

“No, you weren’t, and if he’s any kind of a man he’ll put this behind him.”

I left her feeling a little better, I thought. I didn’t know what the matter was with this two-bit tent preacher anyway, but if he let Millie Grau get away because he wasn’t the first one in, that made him a stupid shit in my book.

That night Sally fixed a casserole, the recipe for which she’d found in one of the numerous ladies’ magazines to which she now subscribed. It was awful, a grisly olio of mayonnaise, cheap canned tuna, and a variety of cheese I’d never encountered before that possessed an unsettling metallic undertaste. I ate a large portion and pretended to be pleased, and afterward when I suggested a detour to the bedroom before she washed the dishes she demurred.

“I’m just not feeling that way tonight,” she said.

“That’s fine,” I said.

A few months earlier I might have cursed Sally to her face and given her a hard time for her reluctance to perform her marital chore. Now was a different story; now I understood that a noxious potage of baby chemicals was making her temporarily crazy. I kissed her and said it was all right, and would she mind if I went out to meet some friends for a beer?

All my friends were in the army, though, so instead I headed for the Eaton hotel, got Herman Nester on the phone, and asked for a girl to be sent up.

“Any one in particular, or should I surprise you?” he said.

“Is Irma available?” I hadn’t ever requested a specific girl before, but the memory of her lingered pleasantly.

When Irma showed up she put her hands on her hips and said, “Well look who it is. The ass man.”

“Not tonight, I don’t think.”

“Good, ’cause the pounding you gave me last time kept me on my feet for a week.”

It was standard whore flattery, but she was nice to bother with it. “You want a drink?”

“Sure,” she said, “bourbon if you got it.”

I poured her a drink. She had her hair done differently, swept up instead of bangs the way she wore it last time, and though she was arguably prettier this way she no longer bore such a striking resemblance to Joan Blondell. I didn’t care much, as