The MacGuffin Read Free

a sudden, off-the-cuff agenda, the sweet reasonables of ordinary life; astonishing the reporters there, the wide- eyed ladies and gentlemen of the press patting down their pockets for a spiral notebook or a pen that worked while he, on a roll, continued: “If the able-bodied won’t mow their lawns, the city gets someone on welfare to mow them and presents a bill.” Enforcing the weekend curfew for teenagers at the fast food hangouts. All moving violations to be paid by mail. No more futzing with City Hall’s byzantine arrangements. Free jump starts on cold winter mornings if the temperature hadn’t risen into double digits by 9 a.m. (“It’s all traffic,” he’d told them, “government is all traffic and threats to tow your car.”) “In the fall,” he’d said, and quoted himself directly now, in the car, “in the fall, until the first snow, we come by for regularly scheduled leaf pickups. And haul off your oversize objects too, your ancient washing machine, your moldy box spring and mattress. And, if I’m elected, no one— no one —will ever again be required to put anything on the windshield or rear window of his car, safety inspection or tax or city sticker, that has on it any adhesive stronger than the glue on the back of an ordinary envelope.” (“No more senseless scraping!” he’d vowed.)
    “I liked the one where you promised to pull the cops out of the inner city and put them back into the good neighborhoods,” his chauffeur reminisced.
    “Yeah,” said the quite suddenly downed City Commissioner of Streets (who could have been a contender), “that was a good one.”
    “Yes,” Dick the chauffeur said, “the Fourteen Points. Let’s see now, the snow, the chlorine and stop signs and bus schedules. The parking meters, settling fines. Mowing the lawn, curfews. Jump starting the cars is nine. Leaf pickups, no senseless scraping, cops in the low-crime areas, coming by for the furniture in the alleys. I make that thirteen. Did I mention the parking meters? I think so. That’s thirteen. I leave something out?”
    “Deuces and one-eyed Jacks are wild,” the stupid old man said sadly.
    “God,” said his driver, “you could have been landslide material.”
    “Through every Middlesex village and town.”
    “What’s that, a Middlesex village and town?”
    “Don’t rightly know.”
    So they traveled over the potholes in the park, cruising the wintertime, salt-bruised paving, Druff, withdrawn and brooding in the deep, plush recesses of the outlandish automobile. (Because if you traveled in chauffeured limousines they really oughtn’t to have city seals blazoned on their sides, his department’s blacktop, bulldozer heraldics.)
    But Dick wouldn’t let it go, relishing, almost licking, his memory like some kid in a school yard, say, recollecting the best parts in a movie, recounting the combinations, all the “he saids” and “you saids” of their (to hear Dick tell it) mythological confrontation. “Remember, Commissioner? ‘Hell no,’ you told him, ‘I’m not mudslinging. It ain’t even gossip. Gossip would be if I named you your lovers.’ Then you listed the facts and figures for him, all the old trouper’s inadequacies and ineptitudes, so that ‘incompetent’ was the least of it, the part the reporters crossed out when they wrote up the story. Hot damn!”
    “Now now,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “it was hardly the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”
    “Hardly the Lincoln-Douglas, he says.” And then respectfully, seriously, even gravely, “As close as this town gets, Commissioner.”
    And Druff, who at his time of life—it was at least past late middle age in his head and even later than that in the cut of his cloth, his chest caving behind his shirts, emptying out, and his torso sinking, lowering into trousers rising like a tide and lapping about him like waves—was actually old enough to think “at my time of life” and so may have