Chester wasn’t sure how much more of this he was going to be able to stand. He was dreaming some of those jokes, the stewardesses in the elevator, the astronaut in the men’s room. When would Andy Kelp and his friends make their move against Monroe Hall? They were still going to do it, weren’t they? But when? How much longer would they leave poor Chester all alone out here, at the mercy of Hal Mellon?
And here he came. Sample case into backseat, Mellon into the front seat, pointing: “We keep on now the same direction, maybe twenty miles.”
“Right.”
“A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew are on Mount Everest—”
•
It was twenty to six when he finally reached home in Shickshinny. He walked in, thinking a drink might be called for along about now, and Grace met him in the living room to say, “Your friend Andy called.”
They decided not to do it! Heart in his throat, Chester said, “What did he say?”
“Call him.”
“That’s all?”
“What more do you need?”
“You’re right, you’re right.” He hurried across the room, picked up the phone, looked back at Grace. “You’re right,” he said.
“I’ll get you a scotch,” she decided, and left the room. It was the girlfriend, Anne Marie, who answered, but when Chester identified himself she said, “Oh, Andy wants to talk to you. Hold on.”
He held on. How could he convince them not to quit? Grace came in and stood with a short thick glass in her hand.
“Chester?”
“Listen, Andy—”
“Looks to me, Chester,” Andy said, “we’re gonna need housing out around you. Just till we get hired, right? But it’s a hell of a commute from the city.”
“You’re gonna do it?”
“Sure, whadya think? It’s just we need billets.”
“Stay here,” Chester told him, happier than he’d been in a long time. (No more missionaries and no more cannibals.) “We got plentya room.”
He and Andy chatted a little longer, while Grace gave him a skeptical look, and when he got off the phone she handed him his drink and said, “We’ve got plenty of room? Where?”
“It’ll work out,” Chester said. “They’re gonna do it, that’s all, that’s all that matters.” He lifted the glass in a toast. “Monroe Hall.”
She looked aghast. “Monroe Hall?”
“May he rot,” Chester said, “from the head down.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Lemme get my own glass.”
27
FLIP WAS FURIOUS; he was beside himself. How could Monroe Hall, who just last week had called himself Flip’s “pal,” have done such a thing? There wasn’t even any profit in it for Hall; just loss, for poor Flip.
Driving toward the estate for today’s session, he rehearsed in his mind just how he would tell the man off. “Everybody knows you’re the most selfish man in the world, I mean that’s what you’re famous for, but why do me like this? What did you get out of it? Was it just for fun?”
Lips moving, mouthing the angry sentences, he turned in at the entrance and stopped at the guardshack. The sullen guard came out as usual, but today Flip didn’t give him a friendly greeting. Today he didn’t give him a greeting at all, or a word at all. Staring straight ahead, his telling-off of Monroe Hall still circling in his brain, he merely held his driver’s license up where the troglodyte could read it, if he could read. The man took a long time, unmoving, standing beside the open window of the Subaru, but Flip didn’t care. Take forever if you want, you creep. Ban me from the estate, I’ll be just as happy to go home.
Whether or not the guard could read Flip’s license, he could probably read Flip’s face, because he finally stopped waiting for Flip to do or say something, but just turned around to lumber back into his cave, presumably to make the call to the Big House.
Flip put his license away, then glowered at the bar directly in front of him, waiting for it to lift. When it finally did start its upward arc, the guard came back out, leaned down close to the window, and said, “You wanna be more friendly.”
Flip looked him up and down. “To you?” Then he drove through and onto the estate.
Well, that made him feel a little better, for a minute anyway, until, as he approached the Big House, he saw the front door open and Hall step out into the sunlight to wave at him. Today’s sweat-set was Day-Glo orange, so that Hall looked less like a Mafia subcapo and more like a weather balloon, slightly deflated.
I’ll show you some weather, Flip mouthed, as he parked the Subaru in its usual place, got out, and threw his canvas bag over his shoulder with such force he hurt his back. Smarting even more, blaming Hall for this as well, he marched around to the front door, where Hall greeted him with his usual smarmy smile, saying, “Right on time, Flip. As ever. Come in, come in. I did ask you one time if you rode horses, didn’t I?”
Thrown off stride, Flip tried to work out that question and its answer while Hall shut the door and they started toward the central staircase. “I don’t,” he decided was the clearest response, then expanded on it: “Ride horses.”
“Right, I remember,” Hall said. They moved up the stairs. “You remember that, I told you I have these horses, beautiful beasts, but I can’t find an instructor. This is a perfect time of year, Flip, perfect time of year. Up on that horse, ride over hill and dale, get an entirely new perspective.”
“I’ve never done it,” Flip said. Now I’ll tell him off, he assured himself, but the instant didn’t seem just right somehow.
Moving down the wide upstairs corridor, Hall said, “I know you told me I shouldn’t weigh myself every minute, but I did weigh myself this morning, and Flip, I’m down three pounds! From a month ago.”
“Very good,” Flip said, and somewhere a cuckoo commented threefold.
“Oh, there’s that damn thing again,” Hall complained. “Sometimes, Flip, I think I should just let it run down, not have it wound any more, not have to listen to it get things wrong all the time, but I don’t know, I just can’t do it. It would be like killing the poor little thing. I know, I know, you’ll say I’m just a sentimental boob, but there it is. I’ve gotta let that clock do its thing.”
Sentimental! Following Hall into the gym, Flip gnashed his teeth, and made a dozen brutal crushing remarks that somehow never quite passed his lips.
It went on like that, an hour of fuming silence. He got minor revenges by pushing the treadmill beyond Hall’s capacity, by overloading the weight machines, by being a bit more snappish and imperious than usual, so that by the end of the hour Hall was a sodden orange orange with all the juice on the outside. But the challenging of the man, the confronting him, the direct accusation, somehow that just never emerged. Flip boiled with it, he seethed with it, if he were a kettle his lid would be doing a polka, but it was just not possible for him to pour his fury all over Monroe Hall.
At the end, though, he did manage, though obliquely, to get to the subject of his distress: “I won’t be able to make our session Wednesday.”
Hall looked stricken; good. “Oh, Flip,” he said. “You have to.”
“No, what I have to do,” Flip told him, “is go to Harrisburg to meet with somebody at the Internal Revenue office.”