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Authors: Scott Phillips
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“I don’t suppose you could use a man down in Wichita?”
“No,” he said. “The whole black market’s winding down with the war over. Shit, next year there’ll be new cars rolling off the line in Detroit and nylons in the department stores and no one’ll even remember rationing. Anyway we never had too much luck down in Wichita. You know who Stan Gerard is?”
“I know the name,” I said, though in fact I’d met him once in my youth and had made, sorry to say, a bad impression.
“Well, he runs this whole operation up here and a few things down in Wichita. The problem with Wichita is every time you get something good set up, the local competition drops a dime on it. We had a man there last year selling skag in a hotel downtown; first thing you know is some local pusherman called the cops. That’s a real low class of crook you got down there.”
“Mr. Gerard still doing okay after Boss Pendergast dropped?”
“Hell, yes. There’s always somebody to play ball with. Never be another Pendergast, though. You hear Harry Truman hisself went to the funeral? He was still vice president then and there was some people complained and he said ‘Tom Pendergast was a friend of mine and I was a friend of his.’ That’s class, in my book.”
VICKIE WAS IMPRESSED when I handed her the stockings that afternoon a little before five. “Jesus, Wayne, and here I was all set to read you the riot act for being an unpredictable son of a bitch.”
“Go put on a pair and we’ll go dancing.”
A light snow was coming down when we left the apartment. We danced to the Frankie Masters Orchestra at the Phillips hotel downtown, then got a table in the dining room. Over dinner she talked about hospital politics and a tentative plan she had about moving to Minneapolis for a job at a nursing school.
“What about the doctor?”
“Which?” she said.
“The one you’re married to.”
“Oh.” For just a second she looked uncomfortable, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “He doesn’t have any immediate plans to come home, so I’m not including him in my decisions.”
“Thinking about filing?”
She chewed the bite in her mouth very slowly before responding. “I don’t really believe in divorce.”
“You’re not Catholic, are you?”
“No. I just don’t believe in it.”
I watched her methodical dissection of her KC strip and wondered what it would be like being married to a really smart woman. Sally was a-one in the looks department but she’d come up a little short intellectually, raised in a house where no one ever read a book. Vickie was as intelligent and educated as I was, more so in some areas. She didn’t take any guff, either.
We talked for a while about the orchestra—neither one of us had thought much of it—and the state of the world, and then she asked me point blank why I was there without any advance notice.
“I got fired.”
“Fired? Jesus.”
“It’s nothing, the old souse doesn’t even remember he did it, probably. But this lets me put the fear of God into him. Might tell him I had some job offers up here.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet you could find something here if you really wanted.”
“Maybe. I talked with a fellow today who runs a photo studio.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in photography.”
“Sure I am. Thinking about ways to make money at it.”
“Like open up a portrait studio, shoot weddings, things like that?”
“Things like that, yeah.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER we were lying in her bed, exhausted. After the first time I lay there for twenty minutes and felt the urge again, and to my surprise, an hour or so after that the need arose again. After that one, in the dim lamplight of her bedroom, diffused through the sheets as if through a scrim, I took a good look at her and tried to figure out how she got to me the way she did. Her face was long enough to qualify as horsy, with a nose to proportion, ever so slightly
“No,” he said. “The whole black market’s winding down with the war over. Shit, next year there’ll be new cars rolling off the line in Detroit and nylons in the department stores and no one’ll even remember rationing. Anyway we never had too much luck down in Wichita. You know who Stan Gerard is?”
“I know the name,” I said, though in fact I’d met him once in my youth and had made, sorry to say, a bad impression.
“Well, he runs this whole operation up here and a few things down in Wichita. The problem with Wichita is every time you get something good set up, the local competition drops a dime on it. We had a man there last year selling skag in a hotel downtown; first thing you know is some local pusherman called the cops. That’s a real low class of crook you got down there.”
“Mr. Gerard still doing okay after Boss Pendergast dropped?”
“Hell, yes. There’s always somebody to play ball with. Never be another Pendergast, though. You hear Harry Truman hisself went to the funeral? He was still vice president then and there was some people complained and he said ‘Tom Pendergast was a friend of mine and I was a friend of his.’ That’s class, in my book.”
VICKIE WAS IMPRESSED when I handed her the stockings that afternoon a little before five. “Jesus, Wayne, and here I was all set to read you the riot act for being an unpredictable son of a bitch.”
“Go put on a pair and we’ll go dancing.”
A light snow was coming down when we left the apartment. We danced to the Frankie Masters Orchestra at the Phillips hotel downtown, then got a table in the dining room. Over dinner she talked about hospital politics and a tentative plan she had about moving to Minneapolis for a job at a nursing school.
“What about the doctor?”
“Which?” she said.
“The one you’re married to.”
“Oh.” For just a second she looked uncomfortable, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “He doesn’t have any immediate plans to come home, so I’m not including him in my decisions.”
“Thinking about filing?”
She chewed the bite in her mouth very slowly before responding. “I don’t really believe in divorce.”
“You’re not Catholic, are you?”
“No. I just don’t believe in it.”
I watched her methodical dissection of her KC strip and wondered what it would be like being married to a really smart woman. Sally was a-one in the looks department but she’d come up a little short intellectually, raised in a house where no one ever read a book. Vickie was as intelligent and educated as I was, more so in some areas. She didn’t take any guff, either.
We talked for a while about the orchestra—neither one of us had thought much of it—and the state of the world, and then she asked me point blank why I was there without any advance notice.
“I got fired.”
“Fired? Jesus.”
“It’s nothing, the old souse doesn’t even remember he did it, probably. But this lets me put the fear of God into him. Might tell him I had some job offers up here.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet you could find something here if you really wanted.”
“Maybe. I talked with a fellow today who runs a photo studio.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in photography.”
“Sure I am. Thinking about ways to make money at it.”
“Like open up a portrait studio, shoot weddings, things like that?”
“Things like that, yeah.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER we were lying in her bed, exhausted. After the first time I lay there for twenty minutes and felt the urge again, and to my surprise, an hour or so after that the need arose again. After that one, in the dim lamplight of her bedroom, diffused through the sheets as if through a scrim, I took a good look at her and tried to figure out how she got to me the way she did. Her face was long enough to qualify as horsy, with a nose to proportion, ever so slightly
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