“Don’t make me laugh. Those guys would be goners.
“And I’ll tell you another thing, Dad. It’s one thing to have an NBA franchise, or even an NFL one. Or even your own hockey team in the NHL, but you saw what happened in St. Louis. Well, the Blues came out of that one all right, and no one’s more grateful than I am, but what happened in St. Louis could happen anywhere. Let’s face it, Dad, the fans are subject to the whims of the owners. And the only thing those people care about is the bottom line. That’s where their loyalties lie. You’re deluding yourself if you think otherwise. ‘Build us a bigger stadium. Give us a tax abatement, maybe we’ll stay. Promise not to go after us in the press to get better players if we don’t produce. Let us raise ticket prices whenever we want. Give us a bigger percentage of the popcorn and peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Permit us to keep more from the Cold beer, cold beer here!’ They’re such babies! And we’re at their mercy. We’re at the mercy of people who have no mercy!
“You tell me I should be realistic. Well, I am. I am realistic. I’m realistic enough to know that the Indianapolis 500 is locked in, that the Kentucky Derby is, that it’ll always be run in Louisville. That the Preakness belongs to Baltimore, and the Rose Bowl to Pasadena, and the Masters to Augusta. Those are American Classics, Dad, and no so-called owners can ever come along to try to change the venue.”
Druff, fascinated, terrified, thought, he knows “tax abatement,” he knows “venue.” He’s almost eloquent, he is eloquent.
“Well, then,” the son said, “you can just imagine how I felt when I saw Mom’s note. You can just imagine. So how was it? How did it go? What did they say?”
“Scouffas?” Druff said. He took up his wife’s note and read in the light all he’d known in the dark would be in it, failing to predict only the additional details of his visitors’ names. Rose Helen had managed to get even the difficult I in McIlvoy right, a tribute, he supposed, to his careful pronunciation of his absurd, complicated, unpremeditated lie. (Thinking, Why, I’m good, I’m really good. Under the guns of Old MacGuffin I’m really good.)
“Yes,” Mikey said, “and that other one. What’s his name, the stuffed-shirt one, the stickler — oh, what is his name? — McIlvoy. Did you get to see the gadget, the thing no bigger than a stopwatch? Did they let you hold it?”
“The gadget was Scouffas’s department.”
“Oh,” Mikey said, “you’d think it would have been the stickler’s.”
“Life is strange, Mike,” he told his son truthfully. “How’d you even know about the gadget? There’s nothing about it in your mother’s note.”
“I think it was written up somewhere. Anyway, Mom told me about it after I got back and read her message.”
“She was in bed. You woke her up? What for, to do your dishes?”
His son’s eyes closed tight for three beats. It was as if he was in pained, desperate biofeedback trance. He sniffed the air, opened his eyes, then aggressively asked his father if he’d been smoking.
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Maybe McIlvoy, maybe Scouffas,” his son said. “There’s this funny smell.”
“What funny smell? I don’t smell anything funny. What funny smell?”
“I don’t know. This funny smell. It’s not a bad smell.”
The trace elements, Druff thought. Margaret Glorio’s hair tars and breath shellacs. Royal dust from the crown rack. He smelled it himself, tasted it. Love laundry, the stale savories and sweet fetids of their rich, cloyed traffic. Was this a counterattack? Nonsense. The child was factless. Yet he’d heard him be eloquent. Could he also be clever? He spooked at the notion of a clever Mikey. Suppose he hated him. Suppose there was malice there, bad blood, evasion like the unsettled soup of magnetic aversion, some call in the bones for revulsion, repugnance, abhorrence, revenge. Suppose there were menace, rancor, all the pledged bitters and solemn loathelies of stalled grudge? Suppose this was the long, slow abiding of crusade, jihad, uprising, holy war? He had always known that his son’s fear for Druff’s life had little to do with love. But suppose his son’s behavior had nothing to do with love? Suppose he needed him around to give his hatred something to believe in? What if his dependency had been adversarial all along? Only a campaign? Some Hundred Years’ War of Getting Dad’s Goat? MacGuffins were abroad in the land tonight. Thick as pea soup. Druff was breathless, he couldn’t move. It was MacGuffin gridlock.
Yet when his son began speaking again it was in the same loopy register and tropes of his ancient argument.
“So how did it? You didn’t say. Did they give you an indication? I know this was only preliminary, a feasibility study.” He knows “only preliminary,” Druff thought, he knows “feasibility.” “Still and all,” Mikey said, “they came all this way. Their plane was held up all that time on the ground in Denver waiting for a heating element to be replaced in the galley!” He knows facts. He knows the facts of my convolute lie. “I mean, they could have canceled. Important fellows like that! They might even have taken that stupid delay as a sign. And there must be just plenty of cities dying to get a marathon. Every Middlesex village and town, right, Dad?
“So did they give you any indication, did they hold out any hope?”
“It was all very preliminary. It was only a feasibility study.”
“Sure,” Mikey said. “Those birds have to play it close to the vest. It’s how they are. I suppose they wouldn’t be where they are today if they didn’t. Still, Dad,” he said, “I hope you didn’t buy into any of their tired old arguments.”
“Which tired old arguments?”
“Oh, you know, that there’s already a Boston marathon, a New York marathon. That there are marathons in Chicago and Honolulu. All that ‘oversaturated’ stuff you usually hear.”
“Those are factors,” Druff said.
“Those are factors. They are. But all they’re looking for are assurances. It’s the consortium of St. Louis businessmen all over again. Just tell them you can get them national exposure, TV coverage. The cable sports networks are out beating the bushes looking for events to cover. You might even suggest the possibility of closed-circuit stuff on the big giant screens, spin-offs from T-shirts, paper cups with soft-drink advertising and the marathon’s logo spectators can hand out to the runners as they pass critical points in the race — Dead Man’s Hill, Heartbreak Flats. Or how our marathon could be this really different marathon, open only to serious runners — no one on crutches, no one pushing himself in a wheelchair or muscling along strapped to a board and doing the twenty-six-plus miles in push-ups or some other simple brute force variation of chinning yourself through space.” He knows twenty-six- plus miles, Druff thought.
“Those are some good points,” Druff said. “You should have been there.”
“I wish I had been, Daddy.”
And Druff suddenly recalled the strict, explicit terms of Dick’s limited guarantees. Mrs. D. wouldn’t hear a peep from that quarter, Doug wouldn’t. And then his son was nattering away again, but this time in the baby talk of the more familiar mystic Mikey mode.
“Because,” he was telling his dad, “an owner can move his franchise right out of a city. I suppose that if he wanted, and had the permission of the other owners, he could even shift it into a different league entirely. Owners can do just about anything they want because this is the United States of America and it’s their own private property, after all. They can even let the team stay in a city but ruin it anyway by never spending any money on it to buy better players. But a marathon would be different. It would always be our city’s marathon. And there wouldn’t ever be a way it could have a losing season. I mean someone would always win it every year, and even if their times weren’t as good as the times in the New York marathon or the Boston marathon, still, since they invented the gadget that gives the exact degree of difficulty of a marathon, then even if they did take it to another city it would still be our marathon in all the record books. In a way it would, anyway, because anything that came after it would have to be judged by our weights and measures. Do you see?”