The Erection Set

“Dog.” Veda was sitting back, studying me with callous eyes. “You didn’t have to come here to insult us.” I grinned again, and she knew what I was grinning at and waiting for, so nodded and added, “Or remind us of the truth.”

“That’s right.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was wondering when you’d ask.”

Both of them wanted to look at each other, hang on to lines of communication and get mutual support like they used to, but neither of them dared to.

I said, “Unless all of want to find what it’s like to be out on the street, you’ll do exactly what I want you to do.”

“What ... will that be?” Pam managed to say.

“As far as Alfred and Dennie are concerned, you still have your stock. Condition one is, you’ll vote it the way I tell you to no matter what they say. You don’t have any choice, so it’s an easy condition. Be nice and I may drop some of those Barrin paper goodies back in your hands. Try any tricks and the shit hits the fan. I haven’t got a damn thing to lose, but your feminine dainties can get put up for auction. Clear?”

Neither of them was stupid. They didn’t have to look at each other for the answer. They knew I had it all in my hands and weren’t eager for any further clarification. The hard work of generations had slipped through the greasy fingers of avarice and they were beginning to find out that you don’t crap in a rose garden because human feces aren’t as adaptable to soil culture as animal dung and the stink is pretty damn distinctive. And even worse when you kicked the topsoil off and let them show.

Ladies. They sat there as if I were the liar, trying to compose themselves with all the Victorian demeanor of royalty looking down their noses at the hun upstart and I knew Veda would be the one to have to shed her wig.

She fell right into the trap. “And condition two?” she asked with that same ridiculous haughtiness.

The crunch. The tag line. She never should have asked it and suddenly she knew it. I lit another cigarette and put my feet back on the desk.

“Stand up,” I said. “Both of you.”

This time they got in that mutual glance, but they both stood up.

“Take off your clothes,” I told them.

Horror has to be seen to be enjoyed and I enjoyed it. Only seconds ticked by, but their faces went from indignation to anger, then a plea for pity, finally disintegrating into abject subservience when I gave them a narrow-eyed look to remind them of the delivery boys and the governess and the other things they didn’t realize I knew and they took off their clothes.

Everything they had was piled in a heap on the floor like I told them to do, then I made them turn around, then face me again. I dropped the stub of my cigarette in the old-fashioned inkwell and pushed the chair back.

I called out, “Harvey, bring my stuff in here.”

When the butler came in with my coat and hat he barely paused at the threshold, his eyes taking in the entire scene. I put my coat over my arm, put on my hat and looked at the two women. “Sloppy,” I said. “Pam, you ought to shave. You’re the hairiest broad I ever saw in my life” Harvey opened the door for me and this time he couldn’t quite hide his smile. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t think so.”

“Very good, sir.”

Two steps down I heard his chuckle. Softly he said, “Very good, sir.”

The pale-blue pickup was behind me for the fourth time. I stopped at the post office and bought a folder of airmail stamps and looked at the driver of the truck who was mailing a package at the parcel post window. He was about sixty, dressed in faded blue denim pants and a torn sweater. The clerk was giving his receipt when I went back outside. I waited in my car until he came down the steps, drove off and turned right at the first intersection. He turned left and in the rearview mirror I saw him pull into a parking slot outside a small appliance store.

I was getting edgy again and even the thought of my naked cousins couldn’t take the bite out of things. I kept thinking, DOG. FERRIS. 655, wondering what the hell it meant.

He was young and had blond hair and didn’t have time to grab his helmet. He was a young, grinning kraut and he damn near took me out after he shot down Bertram and all I had was that one look at him and the name Helgurt under his canopy and the five insignias, three American and two British under that just back of the yellow spinner on his ME 109. He lifted his wing the same time I did and we slid together like lovers waiting to kiss in a monumental close-up of flame, but air pressures and engineering combined to keep those lips apart and we hauled back on the controls into tight, stall-vibrating turns that dragged the blood from our eyeballs and there he was coming into my reticule before I came into his and my fingers squeezed the trigger on the stick and six fifties went off converging into a cone of fire at four hundred feet that took his yellow spinner off with the prop and chewed a beautiful flying machine into a pile of junk within three seconds leaving the young, grinning blond-headed kraut without any helmet and without any head or body parts anybody could remember. He had five kills and I had a hell of a lot more, but I remembered them and his name, Helgurt, and his yellow spinner, so why couldn’t I remember DOG. FERRIS. 655?

Somebody had left the brochure on the desk, a four colored come-on with block-lettered Farnsworth Aviation, Inc. headlining the aerial photo of the sky over the mountains with the latest Farnsworth executive jet streaking by under a high band of striped cirrus clouds.

“Nice plane,” I said.

“Who may I say called, sir?” the receptionist asked me.

“Just a friend of the family,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”

She poised her pen over the lined pad and gave me an annoyed grimace. “Ill be very glad to ...”

“I know you will, kitten, but I won’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.”

Behind me, the stout man in the pin-striped suit coughed behind his hand and I moved out of the way. He said his name was Meehan and he was expected at the conference. The receptionist pushed a button on her intercom, made the inquiry, then admitted him through the gate with a practiced smile. I went back to my car and drove away from the parking lot. On the other side of the building a double line of men were strung out for a good hundred yards. Two other men were taking down their information on clipboards, then admitting them into the main building.

The time was sixteen minutes after two in the afternoon and Barrin Industries looked for all the world like a thriving enterprise. I drove around the factory complex, took a side road through the old section up to a saloon, went in and had a beer and, halfway through, picked up my change and made a phone call from the booth at the back of the bar.

Sheila McMillan laughed when I told her who I was and dared me to come out for lunch. I told her to climb a tree and to meet me at Tod’s if she wanted to really know how her husband got that scar on his skull and when she said she would I hung up, finished my beer and drove down to Bergan and High, parked and went in where the moths were still gnawing at the stuffed dead heads of all those beautiful animals.

All the old men were gone now. The sun was on the other side of the room throwing a rosy glow through the dirt-streaked windows and the heavy tones of the Dante Symphony from Tod’s radio had quieted the three at the bar. I wouldn’t let Tod change stations and the mood had diminished the baseball talk, turning it into nostalgia and latrinograms of what might happen to the big smog mill on the riverbank and Tod didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Hell, he knew Sheila even if nobody else did. He had known Cameron Barrin and he had known my old man. He remembered my mother and he knew Cross. Now he was knowing me and trying to put all the pieecs together and all he could do was look at the two of us back in the comer sitting together and all he could imagine was the wires touching and the bomb going off with him in the middle and everybody else fat and happy minding their own business.

She didn’t have to turn up in those crazy hot pants under the leather skirt. She could have worn stockings instead of letting all the skin show. The fringed buckskin jacket didn’t have to be tied with a rawhide thong that let