The Road to Wellville (21 page)

C
harlie Ossining’s first meal in Battle Creek, his first meal as the in-situ President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, Inc., consisted of a bowl of tepid fish broth and a handful of stale soda crackers. He ate standing up, hunched over the bowl like a beggar on a street corner, his buttocks pressed to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s kitchen stove in the vain hope of deriving some faint degree of warmth from its anemic embers. It was past two in the afternoon, and the other boarders, the bronchial Bagwell presumably among them, had already breakfasted and dined. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir stood at the drainboard, cleaning fish with a worn, fiercely honed blade. “Yust this once,” she warned in her patient but barely intelligible gargle of a dialect, “I feed you late. But no more. Is this correct?”

Charlie nodded, barely able to stomach the broth, strewn as it was with pike bones and bits of scale, fin and other unidentifiable debris. He’d always been a good eater and he was ravenous after the night he’d gone through, but the broth had an unfortunate aftertaste of muddy bottoms and pondweed, and the sight and smell of the fish on the drainboard didn’t improve matters any. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s knife flashed as she deftly worked the blade up under the gill slits of two huge slack yellow-green pike, removed their heads and dropped them into a gleaming pot. Charlie caught a glimpse of blood-rich gill and the flat cold
gaze of an extinguished eye and had to look away. He set the bowl down on the stove.

“Nice fish,” the landlady observed, nodding proudly to the basket in the corner where some eight or ten of them, each as long as a man’s leg and rigid with ice, bristled against the wall. Charlie didn’t yet realize it, but he would see those pike, in various guises, every day for the next week, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir was a widow, plump and economical, and a trapper who lived on Gull Lake and was particularly enamored of her charms—one Bjork Bjorksson by name—kept her supplied with mountains of fish and game. One week it would be pike; the next, muskrat, beaver, lynx or groundhog. No, Charlie didn’t know it, but he would come to rue the day Bjork Bjorksson had entered the landlady’s life, and his entire gastrointestinal system would seize up at the adjective “nice,” as applied to any furred, finned or feathered creature. At this juncture, though, he was naive enough to agree. “Yes, nice,” he grunted.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to track down Bender. The presiding genius and pro-tem treasurer of the Per-Fo Company had left a rather cryptic message for Charlie at the desk of the Post Tavern Hotel:
Gone Goguac Boat Clb. Luncheon w/Stellrecht in matter of paper Per-Fo boxes. Meet 11:00
A. M.
tomorrow for examine factory site, cnr Verona Wattles. Yrs., W/Bst Wshs & Sincest Regds, Good.
For a long moment Charlie stood there at the gleaming marble counter, reading the message over. He was mortified to think that he’d overslept and missed this luncheon, but then it was unclear whether he’d been invited or not—had Bender said anything about it the previous night? He couldn’t remember. Too tired. And drunk. But if he wasn’t invited, he damn well should have been—and he could feel the irritation rising in him. He was President-in-Chief of the blessed company, after all, and wherever and whatever the Goguac Boat Club was, he had a pretty strong suspicion that lunch there was bound to be an improvement over Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s room-chilled fish broth.

Well. And what to do? Perhaps it was a late luncheon and he could still make it, or maybe they were lingering over sherry and cigars in the smoking room. He pictured a rustic lodge with a high beamed ceiling and a great roaring blaze in the fieldstone fireplace, waiters in white
jackets ducking respectfully in and out of the room, Bender and Stellrecht talking of paper in low fraternal tones. They wanted it stiff, didn’t they? Paperboard. And how did it come—reams, rolls?
They’re shipping six carloads a day out of here, Charlie, six carloads a day.
Charlie didn’t know the first thing about the breakfast-food business, and he’d be the first to admit it—but how was he ever going to learn if Bender excluded him from even the most routine of business meetings? Or, worse: if he overslept and excluded himself?

Inquiring at the desk, Charlie discovered that a streetcar line ran out to Goguac Lake, a resort area south of the city, but to his chagrin he learned that it ran only in summer. Having footed it all the way from Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s in a subarctic gale over sidewalks that were like a bobsled run, he decided to invest in a hack and spare himself any further risk of pneumonia or a broken leg. And he didn’t have to feel guilty about it, either—he was an executive, wasn’t he? Chief Executive, at that. If Bender felt obligated to put on a show with Mrs. Hookstratten’s money, then why shouldn’t he? “Goguac Boat Club,” he pronounced grandly to the driver, sinking into the seat like a bored prince.

The cabbie was a tired-looking gnome of a man, wizened and white-haired, hunched over a tireder-looking nag from which a nimbus of steam rose steadily in the cold of the street. He turned round in his seat. “You don’t want to go there,” he said, reflectively dredging his throat and hawking a glistening ball of mucus into the street. They were sitting beneath the elaborate sheltered bridge that connected the second floor of the Post Tavern Hotel to the Post Building across the street. The hotel doorman, rigid as a cigar-store Indian, was watching them intently.

Maybe it was the doorman, or the weather, or the cuisine, or maybe he was still on edge over the awesome responsibility of safeguarding Mrs. Hookstratten’s investment, but there was no excess of civility in Charlie’s reply. “Goguac Boat Club,” he repeated, grinding his teeth for emphasis.

The cabbie never moved a muscle. Beyond the curve of his shoulders and the ridge of his hat the sky was a dead thing, cheerless and bleak. Was it always this cold here? Charlie wondered, and he had a vision of C. W. Post on the French Riviera, in Italy, in Post City, Texas, the
sun baking the earth till it cracked like a stone in a furnace. After a moment the man leaned over to hawk up another ball of sputum. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and without bothering to turn his head, he muttered, “Where to?”

“Are you deaf?” Charlie couldn’t help raising his voice. “Goguac Boat Club. Get moving, man, will you? I’m on urgent business.”

The driver turned halfway round, presenting his profile. “You don’t want to go there,” he repeated, and Charlie was half a second from slamming his way angrily out of the cab when the little man elaborated, “—nobody out there this time of year. All froze up. Or mostly froze, I guess. Haven’t been out there myself since, oh, September, I guess it was.”

“But the Boat Club—there’s a luncheon there today.”

“Luncheon, hell. There’s nothing out there but a boathouse—and it’s all closed up for the winter. Who’d want to take a scull out in weather like this? Coldest it’s been this early in maybe twenty years.” The cabbie removed his hat a moment to adjust his scarf and collar, revealing a pink swatch of naked scalp in the process. “Unless maybe it’s Stellrecht.”

“Yes, Stellrecht,” Charlie cried. “Stellrecht—that’s who it is. I’m supposed to meet him there, at the Boat Club, him and my, my”—what would you call Bender?—“my business associate.” And before he knew what he was saying, it was out of his mouth: “We need paper.”

Now the cabbie turned round full and gave him a look. He lifted a dirty finger to one eye and winked it shut, gently working over the mucus in his throat with a soft frictive sound, almost as if he were purring. “You and everybody else,” he said. “But let me guess—you’re starting up a breakfast-food business, am I right?”

It was a crisp twenty-minute ride out to Goguac Lake, a ride that began amidst the prosperous urban canyons of Battle Creek, on cobblestone streets crisscrossed with telephone wires and streetcar cables and lined with three- and four-story brick buildings, and ended on a bleak country lane that gave onto a forbidding black expanse of water that might just as well have been an unnamed lake in the Yukon Territory for all the signs of life on its shores. The lake hadn’t frozen over yet, not completely, and the open water had a nasty rolling chop to it
that spoke of glancing doom and the grappling hook. This wasn’t Westchester, with its placid ponds and cud-chewing cows; this was the West, and the sight of Goguac Lake, in all its primitive indifference, brought that home to Charlie Ossining in a way that no amount of scenery viewed from the windows of the Twentieth Century Limited could ever have. It was a grim place, no doubt about it. He knew he’d made a mistake the minute he set eyes upon it, but he was too stubborn to, admit defeat—besides which, it was going to cost him at least fifty cents one way or the other, and he figured he might just as well get his money’s worth. So when the driver pulled up the reins and turned round as if to say ‘I told you so,’ Charlie merely mouthed the words: “
The Boat Club.
”

There was no lodge. There were no waiters, no diners; there was no fire, no food, no warmth. The Goguac Boat Club consisted of a long white clapboard building that might have been a warehouse or a feed store if it weren’t set out over the water. Charlie persisted in climbing out of the cab and trying the door. (And God, it was cold. Cold enough even under the canvas bonnet of the cab, but out here it was murderous.) There were no windows in the building and the door was padlocked. Charlie gave the door a brief hopeless rap with his knuckles while the driver regarded him scornfully and produced wad after wad of mucus, as if he were trying to turn his lungs inside out. He spat, briefly, three or four times, then looked up and said, “Where to now, fella?”

Good question. If Bender wasn’t here—and clearly no one in his right mind would be, unless he was a wolf skinner or lumberjack—then where was he? And why the subterfuge? Huddled in the cab, Charlie extracted Bender’s note from his coat pocket and reread it. There it was, in plain English:
Gone Goguac Boat Clb. Luncheon w/ Stellrecht.
And then it occurred to him—maybe, just maybe, the Goguac Boat Club held its luncheon somewhere other than on the frozen inhospitable body-and-brain-numbing shores of the lake itself. Somewhere in Battle Creek, for instance. Some conscientiously heated tavern, restaurant, lodge or meeting hall. The cabbie spat, produced a filthy handkerchief, blew his nose and spat again. Charlie sat there, feeling like an idiot. But then his eyes fell on the second part of Bender’s message—the address of the factory site, at Verona Wattles, wherever that was. The day didn’t have
to be a total waste. He could go there now, see it for himself, get a head start on things. “Listen, driver,” he called, poking his head out the window. “You know this place, Verona Wattles?”

The driver sat hunched over his lap. The horse dropped a load and shuddered. There was no sound but for the wind sitting in the trees and the slap of the waves against the bare teeth of the shore. “I know Verona Avenue,” the driver said finally, without turning round. “I know Wattles Lane. It’s going to cost you another two bits, on top of what you already owe me.”

No matter how much he rationalized or how much he resented Bender’s extravagance, Charlie didn’t like to part with money—Mrs. Hookstratten’s money, in particular. Yes, he told himself, he was cold and cynical and ruthless and calculating, a tycoon in the making who was born to fleece the rich, but Mrs. Hookstratten had been good to him and he truly wanted to see her get a fair return on her investment—while he himself coincidentally made his own fortune, of course. On the other hand, he was anxious to do something, anything, eager to get the company going and watch the profits roll in. He wouldn’t accomplish a thing by going back to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s and sucking on fish bones, that was for sure. He raised his voice above the wind. “Drive on,” he said.

Dusk was setting in by the time they reached the old Malta-Vita plant at the corner of Verona Avenue and Wattles Lane. The company had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success some six years earlier, improving on Dr. Kellogg’s Granose Flakes by sweetening them with barley-malt syrup and obtaining a patent on the new product. A pair of out-of-town promoters, men not unlike Goodloe H. Bender and Charles P. Ossining, lured Dr. Kellogg’s former bakery foreman away from the Sanitarium Food Company, spent the lion’s share of their capital on advertising and soon had five big traveling ovens operating day and night. (The ovens, each three stories high, worked on the Ferris-wheel principle, circulating the wheat flakes till they were toasted to a dry, crisp, toothsome perfection.) The public was ready for them. Tired of oatmeal, sick of grits, bilious with salt pork, pone and flapjacks and crammed to the maw with Malta-Vita advertising, they saw that the new product was convenient, nutritious, scientific, physiologic, hygienic and downright
simple: just open the package, pour, add milk and eat. Success came like an acclamation. The newly minted tycoons started up a second factory in Toronto; they shipped crate after crate of their crisp and uniform wheat flakes, wagonloads, freight cars jammed to the rooftops with them, and they shipped them to Mexico, France, Germany, Norway and Czecho-Slovakia. But then the original promoters sold out—handsomely—and the product deteriorated. Kellogg’s man went else-where, seduced by an offer he couldn’t refuse, and something went wrong in the processing plant. The flakes molded. Went rancid. Rotted on the shelves and in the bowl. And Grape-Nuts, Golden Manna, Norka Oats, Tryabita, Cero-Fruto, Egg-O-See and some forty others rushed in to fill the breach.