The Adjustment

TWO



RUTH SNYDER’S PRETTY ANKLES



IF YOU ARE a reasonably competent and ambitious individual with a bit of initiative and creativity, and a willingness to look at strict regulations as loose guidelines to be skirted when necessary or convenient, there is no better job for you than Master Sergeant in the United States Army Quartermaster Corps.

I volunteered in December of ’41, and like everybody else my motives at that time were strictly patriotic, although a certain desire to escape the wife and hometown for a while did play a minor role. My wife Sally was all for it, and proud as hell of me. The objection came from Everett Collins; back then Collins was less of a lunatic, and I was actually touched at his concern for me, though I see it in retrospect as petulance at the loss of a useful subordinate.

Getting assigned to the QM Corps was the single best stroke of luck in my life. At first I objected to it because of the fact that the Corps kept its men behind the lines; I wanted to kill Nazis with my bare hands or, failing that, a rifle. But before long I started getting reports back from the front, and I realized that my job as Quartermaster was probably going to keep me alive for the duration.

By the time I was reassigned to Rome from London I was an old hand at thievery and black marketeering, and I had some small experience as a pimp as well, though the possibilities there far exceeded what I could accomplish in old Blighty, where the systems of local vice remained more or less intact during the conflict; Rome’s had been shattered by the war and the fall of the fascists.

And now I was back in my hometown, with a wife who looked like a movie star and a job that entailed more boozing and carousing than actual work. What the hell was the matter with me that I was missing the excitement and danger of the war? Granted, the dangers I’d faced were nothing compared to those experienced by the troops at the front, but I did have that scar from being stabbed, and I was shot at more than once by unsatisfied johns and once was threatened by a purchaser of black market gasoline who wanted the stuff for free. A colleague of mine made sure he didn’t come around any more, and I never knew exactly what happened, but I have a suspicion that the answer lies at the bottom of the Tiber.





IT WAS A Thursday, and I was looking at the Evening Beacon in Red’s, a roadhouse five miles east of the Wichita city limit on 54. You could do a fair number of theoretically illegal things at Red’s, as long as you knew how to ask and didn’t make a spectacle of yourself. Kansas was a dry state, and if you wanted anything stronger than 3.2 percent beer, you had to go across state lines or to a blind pig or to a roadhouse like Red’s, whose owner paid the authorities well to look the other way. There was an interesting article in the Beacon about a foot somebody found underneath a bridge in Riverside. It was a man’s right foot, the article said, size eleven, and there was a pretty good quote from the elderly fisherman who found it: “I hate to think of somebody gimping around missing a foot.”

The Beacon was a better read than the rival Eagle if you were looking for sex and mayhem. When a car hit a train, the Eagle would report the casualties but the Beacon would be there with a photographer to record the blood and guts and tortured metal, and I felt sure the Beacon’s editors were bitterly disappointed at their failure to get a picture of the foot.

“How’s that pretty wife of yours,” Everett Collins asked me, one elbow on the bar, annoyed that I was reading the paper instead of listening to him.

“Same as ever,” I said. The fact that he wanted so badly to screw my dear Sally was one of several things that kept me employed and relatively free of actual day-to-day responsibility. “How’s yours?”

He stared at me for a second like he was going to lose his temper, then he laughed, just drunk enough to find my impertinence funny. I couldn’t have imagined needling the boss before the war, but I wasn’t scared of him any more. He slapped his palm down on the bar. One of his ears was missing its lobe, having been sliced off in some long-ago cutting scrape he never elaborated on, and that ear always got redder than the other when he got mad or drunk.

“Thinks she’s going to outlive me. When I croak, you make sure the cops take a real good look at her. I got it in my will if I die before she does I want a full autopsy.”

“I’ll see that she gets the chair whether she’s guilty or not.”

He laughed again. “I like that. Maybe I should just have her framed for something while I’m still kicking, then I’d get to watch her burn. You ever see that picture of Ruth Snyder in the chair?”

“No.”

“Some reporter snuck a camera into the witnesses’ gallery, strapped it to his shin, snapped one right when they turned on the juice. Kind of blurry. Strapped into that chair with a hood over her head, body all tensed up with the current running through her.”

“Never saw that.”

“January ’28. I was in New York talking to the bankers the day it ran, took up the whole the front page of the Daily News and I tell you what boy, I had to have a call girl sent up to my room so I didn’t walk into those bankers’ offices with a goddamn hard-on.”

At times like these I almost liked him. Hung over, which was as close as he got to sober any more, he was a surly mean son of a bitch, and much drunker than this he’d be pissing his pants and throwing wild punches, protected by his money and his power in these parts as much as by the presence of Billy Clark, the ex-cop who followed him around most nights to make sure he got home in one piece.

It was only seven o’clock, and I guessed Billy had another seven or eight hours to go. The bartender, an old-before-his-time hillbilly named Jake Bearden with eyebrows like blond sagebrush and deep furrows running from his nose alongside his mouth, looked like he wanted to say something but he kept his counsel.

“I think I’d like to get me some strange tonight, Wayne,” the old man said.

What he meant was I should pick up some girls and he’d decide which one he wanted to screw. Looking around the roadhouse I saw only two unaccompanied women, both of them worn-out b-girls the old man had tired of months before. “Pickings are slim around here,” I said as one of the girls, thinking herself unnoticed, delicately stuck her little finger up a nostril and, upon extraction, examined the nail with a curiosity as dull as her blonde permanent.

“Why don’t you call one of your friends and get some fresh gals out here.”

“Management doesn’t like that.” Red Garnett, the roadhouse’s owner, had warned Collins not to bring any more whores around, at least not in the numbers the old man liked. Last time the unpicked extra girls went around propositioning the other customers and while this wasn’t necessarily bad for business, it wasn’t covered under the terms of his deal with the county. Liquor and gambling were all old Red could afford to pay off, and he’d warned me more than once that the slack he’d been cutting the old man was not unlimited.

“Let’s head out to the Eaton and get you a suite, and we can have some girls sent up,” I said.

He scowled like a disappointed five-year-old. “All right.” He picked his bottle up off the bar and headed for the door with me close behind. I waved at Billy Clark, and he climbed out of his booth, shaking his head.

On the way to the Eaton he pontificated about the natural states of men and women, and men’s physical needs versus women’s. It was one of his standard lectures, and I marveled that before the war I used to take his shit seriously, listening to his lame-brained theories and thinking how lucky I was to be able to bask in the presence of the Great Man. He had been good at one thing in his youth, putting airplanes together, back in the days when they were much simpler craft than they are now. Sure, he had to improvise and invent in those days, and I’ll give him that much. But on any subject outside the mechanics of flying machines he was a fool and a blowhard.





BY THE TIME I got back to the apartment that night I’d paid off four girls, only two of whom ended up getting screwed in Collins’s Packard. One of the others made a play for Billy, who turned her down flat, and I screwed the fourth in the parlor of the suite we’d rented. It was close to three when I opened the door and heard Sally’s voice from the bedroom.

“Honey?”

“It’s me.”

“Want to come to bed?”

Having had the foresight to take a shower back at the suite, I was reasonably sure no traces of the whore’s smell remained, but I’d still hoped to come home and find my wife asleep. When I pushed the bedroom door open I found her lying on the bed wearing nothing but her high heeled shoes and enough makeup to caulk a small bathroom, one long leg stretched out and the other raised up at the knee.

“I been awful lonesome tonight,” she said.





I WAS A little sorry about the whore at the Eaton, because it took me a good half an hour to get to the point of ejaculation. Afterward we lay there staring at the ceiling and she started talking, babbling the way she did sometimes about babies and the meaning of life and marriage and church and all that kind of crap.

Now she was saying something that required a response, and having no idea what the subject at hand was, I let out a long, thoughtful sigh.

“I just think a child ought to have a yard to play in,” she said.

“That’s true.” Jesus, what was she saying? That snapped me right back to attention.

“And a neighborhood where there are other children to play with.”

Something vaguely electrical ran from the top of my head to the base of my spine. “Wait a second. What were you just saying a minute ago?”

She hit me with her pillow and started for the bathroom.

“You son of a bitch, you’re not even listening to me!” She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and started running a bath.

I knocked on the door. “I’m sure as hell listening now,” I yelled, at which point the phone rang.

“Mr. Ogden? It’s Mrs. Dunphy downstairs.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Dunphy,” I said, though I wasn’t sorry in the least; I loathed the old termagant and her pasty husband. “We’ll quiet down.”

“You know perfectly well my Hank goes to work at six-thirty. This is not fair.”

It suddenly struck me as funny that at this late stage of her dismal existence Mrs. Dunphy still expected things to be fair, and I was still laughing after she hung up on me.