“Come on, Dad,” Mikey, fingering Druff’s mood, his weekend irritability like some virus held in the bones, said. “Come on,” he said. “Please?” Managing him, gingerly, like a handler of drunks.
“Well,” Druff said grudgingly, “this will just have to be one of those unilateral truces then. It’s too nice a day to quarrel and let rip,” he said, quarreling and letting rip. “Because you know why Dad’s dressed up like this? Not because he thought it was still the workweek. Did you think he thought it was still the workweek? Well, you are easily fooled then. No. It’s because I thought maybe we’d all go somewhere nice together. Take you to McDonald’s, get you a Big Mac, see did their new Care Bears shipment come in yet.”
He didn’t know why he did it. It had to be more than a moody weekend virus traveling his system, too much time on his hands, nothing happening until Monday morning when he would climb back into his limo again. (Absent emergency, of course, sudden ice storms, something fucked in the infrastructure, the pavements buckling, whole thoroughfares taken out.) His inexcusable behavior. It had to be more than cabin fever. Cabin fever? It wasn’t even lunch yet. Though whatever was bitching him, the weekend was part of it, of course. Also, Druff had a MacGuffin. Anything could happen. It had been only twenty-four or so hours, but you learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin. Basic crash course for a City Commissioner of Streets. (How’s that for irony?) Already he was at least a little qualified in MacGuffin technique. No, anything could happen. He’d overslept. Margaret Glorio may have called. Perhaps she was taken with him. Maybe he was a dynamite fuck, him this political bigwig and all, this power-play type. She might have been a democracy groupie, some victor/spoils sport. He’d met her at Toober’s after all. Car trouble or no car trouble, the City Hall hangout had been her restaurant of choice. (Two meals he’d had with her now.) Who knew? The best defense… He slammed back into action.
“Did anyone call?” he asked his son.
“The phone rang a couple of times.”
“Well?”
“Mom got it.”
“She say it was for me?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Listen,” he told the boy, “go find your mother.” Playfully he reached his hands out to Mikey’s neck, straightened a pretend knot on an imaginary necktie he made believe his thirty-year-old kid wore down the front of his T-shirt. “How’s them eyes?” he whispered. “All better?” It was an allusion to the tears he’d shed peeling potatoes. His eyes were shut now too, guarding against the vision of Druff’s slant purpose. He’d spent a lot of time, Druff thought, crouched behind his sight today. All through his father’s Monopoly, cancer bag, salmonella and McDonald’s riffs. “Say how late I got home, tell her I’m still a little cranky,” he instructed his son. “Ask in a nice way if there were any calls while Daddy was sleeping?”
Druff poured a second cup of coffee for himself.
Mikey lumbered off. Well, lumbered. Actually, he moved rather gracefully for so big a fellow. It was all that muscle gainsaid his grace, the vaguely armored, vaguely plated, faintly scaly quality of his flesh, skin’s moving parts, pads of muscle like a moving man’s quilted being, that lent him all the slow, frozen majesty and power of some giant, foursquare reptile. For all Druff’s contemptuous swagger, he feared the kid, scared in the rudiments and deep fundamentals, like someone apprehensive in darkness, or held frozen, checked by his atavistic willies. All that repression, all that hatred. It was maddening, Druff thought, no day at the beach, no month in the country. He hadn’t even the pie-plate look and sweet nature of the openly retarded, but all the feral anger and pronounced cheekbones of a psychopath, always wrong, always belligerently logical. Druff feared the poke Mikey would one day take at him, the swat that finished, the swipe that killed.
Or suppose, he thought when Mikey went off — it was the weekend, all that time on his hands — company was coming? Druff’d just had his ashes hauled by a beautiful woman. How could he be expected to sit through a big meal?
“Why,” Rose Helen said, “were you expecting a call?”
“Oh,” Druff said, “you startled me.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “you look startled.”
“You surprised me,” he said, “your voice surprised me. I was a million miles away. A shock to the system. Ever take up your water glass when you reached for your tea? Has that happened to you?”
“What?” she said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”
“Nothing,” Druff said, “I said you surprised me.”
“Oh damn,” said Rose Helen. “I just put this battery in. That’s the second time this week. And now I’m all out. Wait, maybe it’s not seated properly.” She removed her hearing aid and laid out its parts on the table near the remains of Druff’s breakfast, his unfinished coffee, the crusts of his bread. A bit of earwax clung to a side of the stainless steel battery like jam on cutlery. “I swear,” she said, “these things are more trouble than they’re worth.”
“Is that a zinc oxide?” Druff asked. “Dr. Zahler told you only zinc oxides.”
Rose Helen, vulnerable, missing one of her senses, began to cry.
“Oh Christ, oh Jesus,” he comforted. “Baby,” he cooed. “Rose,” he said. “Never mind. Don’t. Aw,” said the Commissioner of Streets, “I know, I know. So what,” he said, rubbing her back, raising her chin to hold between his forefinger and thumb, “fuck it. Let ’em hear cake.”
He took the battery out of her hands and fit it into a little compartment in the hearing aid. (Druff was no expert, of course, but it looked no different to him from the less efficient, less expensive mercury or silver oxide batteries.) “There,” he said, “see is that any better.”
The First Lady of City Streets took the device and, turning away, reinserted it. She inclined her head, she shook it, as if testing to see if water was lodged in her ear. “Oh my,” she said, turning back to her commissioner. “Oh my, yes. Yes indeed. What a difference. Day and night. What a relief. I thought for a minute… Well,” she said, “what were we… Oh yes, how startled you looked. Then my silly battery went dead on me. It’s so strange,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used… One minute I hear everything they throw at me, the next I’m deaf as a post. Well, I can’t say he didn’t warn me. He said when he first fitted me for the stupid thing not to let the batteries go down, to take them out when they’re not in use. It’s a nuisance and really, well, frankly, to tell you the truth, there are times I don’t dare take them out. That’s why it’s important I should try to see about getting tested for a second hearing aid, one of those new space-age models that practically turn you into a spy satellite. Wouldn’t that be something? How’d you like your wife to have such powers? I could overhear everything that goes on, all the plotting. Can you think of a better advantage a politician could have? I thought,” she said, “the impression I was left with, was it wouldn’t happen with a zinc oxide, that it drained down more slowly, like the reserve in a gas tank after you’re already on ‘E.’ That’s what it’s supposed to have over the mercury or silver oxide. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, if you ask me. And twice as expensive. Even if I get them from Zahler. I bought half a dozen from Zahler. It couldn’t have been a month ago. He’s no cheaper than Williams Pharmacy and they’re an arm and a leg. But take them out when they’re not in use? When aren’t they in use? That’s a laugh. When aren’t they in use? When I go to sleep? Could I have taken them out last night? With you gone and Mike out all hours? Suppose there’d been a fire? Suppose there’d been a fire and the smoke alarm went off? How would I have heard it? I wouldn’t have heard it. I’d have burned up in my bed. The deaf perish in fires. On a per capita basis more hearing-impaired burn up in fires than people still in control of their sound. Did you know that?”