The Cordwainer Read online

  Chapter Two

  Re-tartared

  Fluky brought the silver truck to a halt in front of the large, derelict Queen Anne home perched at the zenith of the hill. It stood distinct from the concrete shotgun shacks that neighbored it – obviously of an older pedigree. A glance further down C, as the street started again to descend the hill, showed silhouettes of similar-style homes. At the top of the hill, we were on the very border of Boot Hill, with the empty boarded-up remains of Pottersville beyond. Here the scrub was slowly reclaiming what Man had once built, and Mitty's home sat right on the cusp of this reclamation. The garbage of the house and whole sections of its construction seemed to be littered over the lawn. The place looked worse than I remembered. Mitty's mother's house had always been something akin to a junk pile, but four years had done it no favors. The house looked positively squalid.

  Fluky pulled on the handbrake and killed the engine. The black cloud of the exhaust enveloped us as I hesitated to open my door. “Mitty still live with his mom?” I asked, incredulously.

  “He likes to say she still lives with him,” Fluky chuckled, cracking open his door with a rusty squeak.

  “It still stink as bad in there?” I asked, stepping out of the truck. “She still got all them cats?” Fluky didn't bother to answer. We both stepped up onto the walk and I started for the front door.

  “No, you can't get in that way no more,” Fluky instructed as he cut across the brown, sandy front lawn. “'Round back.”

  I hesitated, contemplating the state of the insides if the front door was impassable. The memory of garbage piled shoulder-high returned to me; tight passages cut through the filth; just enough room to move. Presently, a whistle came from behind the house, and I looked around for Fluky. He'd vanished.

  “Come on!” a yell came from the rear and I picked a path through the debris with my toes, kicking aside rusting kitchen equipment and sandblasted children's bassinets. Something scurried suddenly from under a pile of rotting winter coats and I quickly doubled my pace, leaping piles of bric-a-brac in great bounds.

  I found Fluky waiting for me at the base of the rear stairs. The back of the house, what had once been a sun porch, was now enclosed with plywood. Fluky skipped up the three steps and rapped heavily on the makeshift door, with a rope loop for a handle, that topped the stairs. A muffled voice from inside attempted some form of reply, but Fluky drowned it out with another staccato series of knocks.

  I paused to savor the view that Mitty's back porch had once boasted. Feasting pigsty the house might have then been, but once it had been a home of some luxury – a symbol of wealth for some Victorian merchant or locomotive baron. Its vantage point looked down over the whole of Boot Hill and I could take the town in with one sweeping glance. From Main Street and the large Art Deco box that was the Concession Department Store, across the mega-gauge rails that evenly bisected the town; past the Concession Depot where the black worms of the freight behemoths belched black steam into the sky; and out to the flat, football field-like roofs of The Shop rising like stepped terraces away into the heat haze of the scrub. All of it I could ponder without taking the trouble to turn my head. All of it, I realized standing there, from Concession Store to Concession Shop was the property of that one company. The mega-rails, the plots of land, the houses rented to workers – the hearts and souls of those who depended on the Concession for their livelihood – all the property of the Concession. Seeing it all at once, after being away for four years, my eyes saw it all as if for the first time.

  “By Washington's wooden teeth, who's banging on my door?” The plywood sheet that served as a back door flew open and the large melon head of John Mitty came poking through. A Jefferson hung from his mouth in a cigarette holder, and despite the dirty gray dressing gown he was wearing, his hair was neatly combed and a scarf was wrapped meticulously around his neck.

  Once, back in high school, some girl or other had casually remarked on the similarity in appearance of Mitty and Errol Flynn. It had been true, too... back then, when he'd been, maybe, a hundred pounds lighter. But ten years had passed since that comparison, and now there was little about Mitty's round, flabby face that still resembled the classic movie star. Mitty, however, still wore the rakish, pencil-thin mustache he had grown in his doppelganger's honor; and it still sat – oh so rakish and pencil thin – above his fat upper lip.

  “Look who I found.” Fluky cocked a thumb back over his shoulder. Mitty looked up, and at the sight of me, his face exploded into an expression of genuine joy.

  “Beanie!” he screamed through the cigarette holder. “Beanie, my old fellow...” He came lumbering down the stairs, his bulk creaking the wood. He grabbed my hand in his large, meat-like paws and shook. “Beanie! How do you do? It is a pleasure, sir, a real pleasure!” He pumped my hand up and down, vigorously shaking it and bringing his face in close to mine. “When did you get back to town? How was school? Did you get my letters? How was the weather?” he fired his questions, then thought better of it all. “No, no, come inside. Fluky! The McTavish, and quick about it!”

  Still holding my hand, Mitty led the way back up the stairs and through the makeshift door. The purpose of the plywood, I realized as I stepped inside, was to convert the old sun porch into living space. Again, my mind was at a loss to guess the state of the interior of the house for Mitty to have been forced out to the back porch. But the odor, at least on the porch, seemed manageable. A cot covered in numerous blankets sat in one corner, and an old cupboard sat next to it, seemingly serving as Mitty's dresser.

  Most of the porch, however, was taken up by a sizable dining table, an antique oak structure covered in notebooks, maps and a number of small figurines. On the plywood wall behind the table a number of other maps had been pinned. Detailed plans of Patton's Iberian campaign, I instantly recognized. It was Mitty's obsession.

  There was something about Mitty you should understand, before I go on, before you judge him too harshly.

  Mitty was an idiot.

  The way he was, it really wasn't his fault.

  And I mean he was an Idiot, not an idiot. Capital I. The standardized testing – the tests given to all of us during our sophomore year, that had apprenticed Fluky so wisely to Old Man Zimmerman – determined Mitty to have a deficient IQ. Sixty-five, if I remember correctly, which officially classified him as an Idiot, earned him an automatic Class F work chit and a check every month for the rest of his life for sitting on his ass.

  Thing is, Mitty never really seemed to me to be that stupid. Eccentric, sure, and dull as a block of sandblasted oak, but not really stupid. In the subjects he was interested in... well, he was practically a savant; like the War or the schedules of the Concession trains. But when you strayed too far outside the scope of his interests, or made him interact too much with the public, he was an imbecile. I mean, he could barely write his own name or add two numbers together. What sort of work could you do like that? Seriously. But stupid?

  Truth be told, the whole idea of The Cordwainer was Mitty's – Mitty's Plan. Okay, he didn't design the engine, or really do anything practical towards the success of the project. That just wasn't Mitty. Given a million years and a million dollars he'd have just sat around and talked about doing something. Talked and talked. But the idea – the overarching, grand vision – that was Mitty. And it was everything and anything at all but stupid.

  Looking back, it made me wonder: Did Mitty really try that hard when those standardized tests had been given? Stupid, maybe, but I was the guy looking at thirty years stretching out ahead of me with my nose to the grindstone.

  Mitty sat down heavily on a raised stool beside the old dining table as I dropped myself into a threadbare, old armchair next to the cot. Almost as soon as Mitty had lowered himself down, he sprang to his feet again and came lunging towards me. For a second I thought he was about to throttle me, but his hands instead grabbed at the lapels of my new jacket, feeling the material.

  “That's a si
ngular coat,” he commended, admiring the hemp, exhaling smoke from his Jefferson into my face, making me hack. I brushed his hands away from my person, pushing him back out of my personal space. He didn't seem to take offense and snorted as I fanned smoke away from my nose and mouth.

  “Beanie here's a college grad-u-ate,” Fluky said, head down, digging something out of the bottom shelf of the china hutch. He came up with an opened carton of McTavish and a few dirty paper cups. “Class A right there in his pocket. He done showed me.” Fluky poured a dixie cup of whiskey and handed it to Mitty, doing the same for me. The carton, he kept for himself. I sniffed at the noxious, brown liquid that someone, somewhere had the gall to call Scotch and knocked it back in one belt. Mitty did the same as Fluky gulped from the carton.

  “Well, where are my manners?” Mitty said, holding out his cup for a refill. “This calls for a toast. To Beans! Red Beans and Rice! Ph.D.!” And they both drank.

  “No, not...” I began to correct, but trailed off. It didn't really matter. Bachelors, Ph.D., they all – in the end – really meant the same thing: Class A work chit. Without a college degree, all you could ever honestly hope for was a Class B. Like Fluky. Tradesman.

  “And I take it that it's not presumptuous to assume that you've sought employment at Amalgamated Holdings?” Only Mitty ever called the Concession by its real name.

  “Start Monday,” I confirmed.

  “Bully! Just bully!” Mitty took a draw off his cigarette and puffed out a gray cloud. With his round face and the cigarette holder he looked like some fusion of the two Roosevelt presidents.

  “Bet your pa is just as happy as a pig in shit.” Fluky had pulled up an old dining room chair, and sat at Mitty's strategic gaming table like he was expecting dinner.

  “Couldn't be happier,” I agreed. And he truly was. First Sophie, now me. Two kids out of college and gainfully employed. Sophie in Accounts Receivable at The Shop, and me following in Dad's own footsteps as a Foreman on the floor. It was everything he'd been working towards, ever since Ma died. Yeah, so he looked like a fool, walking around town with that stupid grin on his face, but he had plenty to be smiling about.

  “And your starting salary, as a Junior Foreman?” Mitty asked. It was classic Mitty: Totally without social charm.

  “Mitty! Ya tartarhead...” Fluky exclaimed before I could answer. I just let my mouth hang open. “You don't ask shit like that! What you get a month for being a mor-ron?” he countered. “Fuck...”

  Mitty steamed, glaring at Fluky though lowered eyelids, “Retarded,” he corrected. “Retarded is now the preferred idiom for my condition. 'Moron' has fallen out of favor.”

  “Retarded. Tart-a-head. Re-tartared tartarhead...” Fluky paused to laugh at his own joke, letting a guffaw slowly slip. When he had recomposed himself he took a sip off the McTavish carton. “You still get paid for being a damn fool...”

  “I merely inquired after the base pay...” Mitty began, than stopped himself, thoughtfully. I think the social nuances of the situation began to dawn on him.

  “How's your mother, Mitty?” I asked, throwing Mitty an easy out.

  He rolled his eyes and pointed his Jefferson towards the house. “In there, still at the center of her Cretan maze – the horned beast. I've ceased all contact! I moved out here not two years past, the house having become simply unfit for habitation, man or beast. So, I've relocated my HQ out here.” He swirled a finger around him. “Fluky helped with the paneling.” Mitty slid his cup across the table for Fluky to refill.

  “Freezing cold in the winter, boiling hot in the summer,” Fluky added, filling Mitty's cup and taking a belt off the carton. The Fraus and the McTavish were starting to do their work on Fluky and his speech was beginning to slur. “Gotta be re-tartared to live out here...”

  “I can't begin to describe the conditions beyond that door,” Mitty rolled his eyes again. “Though, I believe the mold under the kitchen sink is sufficient to apply as a carbon offset. I just fret that the EPA will declare the whole place a protected wetland!”

  I laughed. I could feel the McTavish beginning to warm my belly. Despite the rancid taste, I was beginning to long for another. I looked across the room at my old friends as they chuckled at their little joke. Fluky, drinking sour Scotch through brown, tobacco-stained teeth. Mitty, replacing the spent Jefferson in his cigarette holder, lighting up a new one and taking a long drag.

  It was good to be home, I was thinking, as the fingers of the whiskey started to work their slippery way though my veins. Good to be back with my friends. I had friends away at school, sure, but somehow... the shared history that the three of us had together. I could almost feel myself choking up.

  Okay, maybe it was good to be back home – maybe I had to admit it to myself that I'd actually missed these guys? No, I just couldn't go that far. To admit that I missed Fluky spewing obscenities and drinking himself stupid? To admit that I missed Mitty's pedantic, tiresome diatribes about Patton's northern campaign? No, it was just too much for me to admit to myself, too great a leap.

  Nothing I could admit, at any rate, until I'd had at least a few more drinks.