John D. MacDonald

Travel Light and Travel Far

The moment I walked into my office after three rugged days in Detroit, my secretary, Miss Nancy, told me Prentice Flannigan wanted to see me right away. I knew from her tone he wasn’t anxious to give me a bonus. I asked her if she had any clue.

“Lew Wales goofed up the Chem-Land contract,” she said.

I stared at her. “Completely?”

“Nobody seems to know yet.”

“But how the hell could he have even got close enough to it to have...”

“I honestly can’t tell you any more about it, Bill.”

After Flannigan’s girl told him I was waiting in the outer office, he took two minutes to wind up his conference with a couple of the engineers. When I went in and closed the door, he asked me, in a soft, funereal voice, to sit down. He tilted his chair back and closed his eyes, laced his big white fingers across his flat belly, and sighed a few times.

Prentice Flannigan, except for his prematurely white hair, looks a little like old photographs of Henry Wallace. He has cultivated vague, professorial mannerisms, and he dresses like a medical missionary. But, if any fat and ancient corporation in America should suddenly feel the need of a totally ruthless hatchet man to bring it back into a competitive position in the shortest possible time, and should make a list of the ten possible candidates for the job, Flannigan’s name wouldn’t be far down the list.

Without opening his eyes, he said, “Brewster phoned me from Detroit.”

“It took some infighting to bring him around.”

“You did well out there, William.”

“Thank you.”

He opened one ice-blue eye. “Don’t thank me. I sent you out there so the whole thing would be handled the way I wanted it handled.” He sat up abruptly and began to carefully straighten a paper clip, scowling at it as he did so. “I am responsible to the Board of Directors. Mr. Ellison. They are not interested in why things go right or go wrong. If they don’t go right, most of the time. I am a pretentious, overrated bum. They throw me out. In any corporate structure as complex as this one, I must assign authority and responsibility to people who will, out of self-interest plus ability, keep me from looking like a bum.”

“Mr. Flannigan. I—”

“You have exactly the same problem I have, Ellison, but on a humbler level. I am your board of directors. I think of you only in terms of your usefulness, without sentimentality. When this corporation needed surgery, they brought me in. I brought some of my own people. I found others here, like you, I felt I could make good use of. I have suspected you have a blind spot, a serious flaw. I was able to prove that suspicion correct.”

“I guess you must mean—”

“Now I have a problem, Ellison. Logically, I should request your immediate resignation. If I had a man to slip into your job, that is exactly what I would do. But I happen to need your services. Understand, I operate only on the basis of your usefulness to me. I must eradicate this flaw which limits your usefulness.”

I could feel a chilly trickle of sweat along my ribs. Flannigan has the ability to terrify me, but if I ever let him know it, I would be lost.

“Tell me about my flaw,” I said.

“I can name three incidents in the past fourteen months, William. The Therman-Gould Tool Company problem. The Reiseman lease. And now the Chem-Land fiasco. You took full blame for the first two incidents and repaired the damage. Perhaps you would have tried to handle Chem-Land the same way.”

“I’ve heard that one of my people, Lew Wales, goofed, but I don’t know how.”

He looked so disappointed. I knew he had been planning to jump me with it. He shrugged. “How do the innocents always mess things up? Shaking with zeal, they take onto themselves authority they do not have to handle matters about which they are ignorant. Your Mr. Wales dug into your project file, William, and came up with the draft of the least advantageous agreement with Chem-Land we were willing to make. It was to have been our final offer, if such an offer proved necessary, which it didn’t. We had negotiated a very favorable contract which was to have been signed tomorrow. Mr. Wales thought it was something you had forgotten. So, helpfully, he rushed it off to the Chem-Land attorneys.”

I lowered my face onto my open hands. “Does this blow it?” I whispered.

“Not at all! Not at all! It just skims the cream off the contract. We’ll still do a little better than break even, if nothing goes wrong. It will put an ugly little dent in the operating statement.”

“Did you talk to Lew?”

“Until he became totally incoherent. It took him about four minutes to reach that condition. But before he reached it, he began apologizing to me for the mistake he made in the Therman-Gould estimate, and the matter he overlooked regarding the Reiseman lease. This morning I looked at your file and his, as maintained by Personnel.”

I kept my hand motionless as I held a match to my cigarette. “Looking for the flaw?” I asked him. “A flaw named Lew Wales? So why didn’t you five him?”

Flannigan smiled at me. His smile is notoriously more dangerous than his frown. He uses it to quick-freeze the blood of his victims.

“You’re so unruffled. Bill Ellison. I’m not making a mark on you, am I?”

I felt my way into that one very carefully. “At my age, Mr. Flannigan, and taking into account your reputation, if you bounce my pants off the front sidewalk, the industry will know it and remember it. I’ll find other jobs, but you will have sawed off the top third of the ladder, and I’ll never live long enough to cash in on a stock option. I’ll spend the rest of my life like a deep-sea diver who isn’t getting quite enough oxygen. I’m aware that, right at this moment. I’m fighting for a kind of survival that is the most important thing in my life. That is the kind of a mark you’re making. But if I should start to beg and plead and crawl, Mr. Flannigan, you can be damned well certain you’d be better off hurling me the hell out of here.”

He studied me for a few moments and then said, “Perhaps I can consider myself fortunate that I am safely twenty years older than you are. I would not like to be thirty-two right now, standing nose to nose with you, boy. You can make a lousy pair of sixes smell like a full house.”

“Which is why you’ve been hustling me along so fast, isn’t it?”

“Suppose you just tell me why I didn’t fire Wales, William.”

“In the first place, you’ve left it up to me and your other lieutenants to hire and fire our own staff people. I’ve fronted for Lew twice. I should have fired him. I didn’t. So, in the second place, if I have personal reasons for not firing him, you don’t want to do me the favor of taking me off the hook. Thirdly, you don’t know if this is a special circumstance unlikely to occur again, or if it is characteristic of me to take such a soft attitude toward my people that I endanger my own career.”

“Which do you think it is?”

“A special circumstance.”

“How special?”

I had to look away from him. “We both went out of Penn State and into the Korea thing together. I used the hell out of him in school. He was the offensive guard. He opened fine fat holes. He made me look very, very good. I used him in Korea. I got a field commission. He became my platoon sergeant. And he brought me in on his back one night, off a recon patrol. We applied here, and we both got on, and he made me look good, at first. We had a double wedding, a pair of Pittsburg girls, good friends. If you looked at the files, you noticed the addresses. We live next door to each other. Alice and I have no kids. Lew and Janey have two, and they live in our house as much as in theirs. Alice and Janey are more like sisters than friends. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had six promotions. Lew has had five. I’ve been responsible for the last four he’s been given. I thought I could keep him backstopping me, a step behind me. In this past year. I’ve come to realize it was a bad mistake.”

“Why?”

I felt annoyed at having to explain the obvious. “In his way, he’s a great guy. Point him out a target, and he’ll go steaming and clanking after it. He’s earnest. But I hauled him up too far. This latest goof arose from a great desire to be of help to me.”

“I’m sure it did, but I don’t give marks for good motives.”

“Anyhow, it’s a very special case.”

“What makes you think you won’t adopt a new Lew Wales after you chuck this one, Ellison?”

“Because I never needed a Lew Wales before this one came along, Mr. Flannigan. When I was about eight, right here in Youngstown. I figured out all by myself there are four kinds of people in the world. Some start with it and keep it. Some start with it and lose it. Others start low and stay low. I knew I was in the last group, the ones that start with nothing and keep climbing until they die. I’ve learned a lot of different ways of climbing. There are more to learn.”

“Right now, you’re lugging dead weight along.”

“I know that.”

“So you cut it loose.”

“There’re some places in the company where he’d really work out all right.”

He smiled again. “Maybe I am interested in motivations, William. Yours. And how strong they are. I’ll be through here in another year. I’ll leave some of my team here. It always happens. They get a little bit fat and secure. I’ll need people who can travel light and travel fast, and not waste time looking back over their shoulders. I need twenty-hour-a-day men, the smiling ones with nerves like bandits.” He shrugged. “I suppose it’s something to think about. Your staff is your own problem, of course. If you make any changes, let me know.” He nodded and reached for his phone.

I walked out and grinned at his girl and went briskly down the corridor. But when I came to the fire door. I pushed it open and went out onto the cement-and-steel landing. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the roughness of the wall and hit the wall very gently many times with my fist. I moved for a moment into an impossible future where I had all the cards, all the weight, all the edge, sitting behind my desk, smiling, telling Flannigan three different ways he was through, watching his eyes as I told him.

I pulled myself back out of the dreams and went back to my own shop. Nancy told me Lew was anxious to talk to me. I told her to keep him the hell away from me, and to get me Alice on the phone. My wife likes to know when all plane rides are over. She can’t get it through her head that it is the same as calling her after every ride on a city bus.

She told me the car was making a funny sound, that the black dirt had been delivered, that we were going to the club tonight with Lew and Janey, and that she was glad I was home.

I said I would be late and she said I could join them at the club whenever I could make it.

It was after seven before I let Nancy go, and I kept working for another hour. By that time I had enough pain in my middle to make the club food a bad risk, even if I could have arrived in time to be served. I could thank Lew for the recurrence of the symptoms which, they keep telling me, can turn into a nifty ulcer if I don’t pace myself. While I had a bland meal in town, I read over my first draft of the Detroit agreement. By the time I had driven home, changed, and driven on to the club, it was nearly eleven.

The bar was crowded and noisy. I found Alice and Janey right where I expected them to be, in the alcove off the bar, making a concerted attack on one of the dime slot machines.

I kissed Alice, then Janey. Alice had to make certain I’d gotten something to eat. They said one jackpot had put them way ahead of the machine.

“Have you seen Lew?” Janey asked.

“Isn’t he here?”

“Sure, he’s here, but he’s got the uglies. He thinks you’re sore at him, Bill.”

I found Lew out by the service bar on the terrace, trading combat lies with Rick Greer who cannot seem to forget he was once a Marine. Both of them were a little loud and blurred by drink. Lew excused himself and we went down to the far end of the terrace and sat on the low stone wall that overlooks the eighteenth green.

Lew Wales is big, and his blond hair is thinning fast, and he isn’t watching his weight the way he should. He sweats heavily. I have learned that every man has one characteristic attitude which becomes his social and professional armor against a cruel and indifferent world. Mine, perhaps, could be described as an attitude of ironic challenge. Lew’s is one of jovial apology.

“I tried all day and I couldn’t get to see you,” he said, accusingly.

“Flannigan kept me on the jump.”

“I guess you’re sore at me.”

“Suppose you tell me how you happened to do something so stupid. If you were a Chem-Land spy, you couldn’t have done a better job.”

“Listen, Bill, dammit, we started to work up the materials list and I went into the file to check delivery schedules. I found that original draft in there, signed by Flannigan and all, and our file copy with it. I looked at the distribution, and saw where the other ten copies went, and figured by some mistake this one hadn’t gone to the Chem-Land attorneys. So... I sent it.”

“All the other copies were destroyed as soon as we made a better deal. Why didn’t you ask Nancy at least?”

“I work for you,” he said in a surly tone. “I don’t work for your girl, Nancy.”

“With you on my team, I don’t need enemies, Lew.”

“You know I didn’t mean to mess you up, Billy! You know, in my whole life I never had anybody chew me like Mr. Flannigan did. When I walked out of there, my legs were so weak I could hardly stand up. How was he with you?”

“We tickled each other into fits of helpless laughter. Lew, what I don’t understand is how you could have been around our shop for the past eight weeks and have been unaware of the series of deals we worked out with Chem-Land. Hell, you worked up some of the figures.”

“Well,” he said uneasily, “there’s a lot of tricky things to remember. Things change pretty fast. And you don’t always get a chance to brief me, Bill.” He paused and then said, with more confidence, “I’ve got on top of the Production Control setup, just the way you wanted it lined out, Bill. We can run in to the office tomorrow and go over it.”

“Have Nancy put it on my desk. I’ll check it out Monday.”

I didn’t want Lew explaining to me what he had done on a project I had originally explained to him. He belabors the obvious. He hammers it to its knees. And if there is any interruption, he goes back and starts at the beginning. There is a usable value in such men. They thrive on familiar detail. They give loyalty and expect trust. They have an incurable belief in the decency of man, and they have that terrible capacity to forgive.

“I guess I’d better be more careful,” he said, and I knew he yearned to be punished.

“If you’d promise to do absolutely nothing all day every day, I’d feel a lot safer,” I said.

In the silence, he decided how he was expected to react to that. He made the only choice permitted by his own pride. He laughed. He punched my shoulder and said, “You can’t get along without ol’ Lew out in front of you knocking the tacklers down, boy.”

“This time you got in my way and dropped me for a loss.”

“What does that make it? Third and eight? Just show me which way you want to go, pal, and I’ll make a hole so big you can stroll through it. Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

I took a chance on a milk punch in spite of the way my dinner was behaving itself, and soon learned I should have left the punch part out of the order. I danced once with Alice and once with Janey, and then it was time to split the winnings and go home.

I stood looking out the bedroom windows, smoking a final cigarette before undressing for the night, half aware of Alice puttering through her bedtime routines. She is, I suppose, a sweet and undemanding woman. In seven years of marriage, her features and figure have become heavier and her blonde hair has turned several shades darker, and she has begun to foreshadow just what she will look like at fifty. All her life, people have said, “Alice has such a sunny disposition!” It bothers both of us that we have been unable to have children, but for different reasons. Kids would have diluted some of the attention she focuses on me.

Don’t ask me what love is. She was a sweet, impenetrable mystery and I wanted her very badly. After we’d been married a year, I realized two things. There was no mystery left; she had become totally predictable in all things. And I realized that I had given up the opportunity to use marriage at some future time for business advantage. In that sense, I had deprived myself of the use of a weapon many men have utilized with great shrewdness, and I could not see that I had gotten very much in return. She could neither help nor hinder my career in any measurable degree.

I knew what I had to do and how I would do it, and it was only fair to let her know. She was sitting at her dressing table. I stubbed my cigarette out and said, “I’m letting Lew go, honey.”

She turned around to stare at me, with that smile people wear when they do not quite catch the point of a joke.

“Go where?” she asked.

Her denseness irritated me, and absolved me from any obligation to tell her what else I might have in mind for Lew. “I’m tying the can to him. I can get him two months’ pay.”

She stood up quickly and came over to stand in front of me. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“What’s so complicated about it? He’s made me look bad. I can’t afford him.”

“But you can’t do this to him! I can’t let this happen to Lew and Janey. You can’t he serious, Bill! No... no job can be so important.”

“You’d better understand that nothing you or anybody else can say is going to change my mind. When anything turns into a question of survival, honey. I come first. Do you think it’s going to be easy for me to tell him? Do you think that I’m going to enjoy it?”

She stared up at me for a long time, her head slightly tilted. “Yes.” she whispered. “I think you will.”

I walked away. “That’s a vicious thing to say, Alice.”

She backed away, and she looked puzzled. “I’ve never known you at all, Bill. I’ve been explaining you to myself in all the wrong ways. I haven’t wanted to believe you’re so... little.”

“There’s no reason for you to get all worked up about this.”

“No? I just... accept all this and go on as before, all humble and grateful about being married to such a promising young man.” She was crying softly now.

“Why should it change anything?”

“Because it is, as you say, a question of survival, Bill. And wouldn’t I be a dreadful fool to hang around here until the time when you decide you can’t afford me either?”

It all happened a long time ago. So much has happened, it seems impossible it was only two years ago. I fired Lew. I spent ten minutes firing him before he realized what was happening, and then, unbelievably, he wept. A big guy like that! Snuffling and trying to grin, then leaving my office almost at a run. Morella at Otis Wire owed me a fat favor, so I used it getting Lew a job over there, one he could handle.

When Flannigan left, he took me with him, and my picture appeared for the first time in many trade journals. I was the newest recruit on what was called Flannigan’s First Team.

Right now, I am reorganizing the whole Venezuelan setup. When I got hack to my hotel in Caracas last night, after three days in the field, I found a letter from Lew Wales, forwarded from the New York offices. It was friendly. Lew has never held a grudge against anybody in his life. He enclosed a picture of the four of them, taken in the hack yard of the house where I had once lived, the house I had turned over to Alice along with our savings. She refused alimony.

I had known his name was Rainey. I took the picture over under the light. He was a big man, as big as Lew Wales. The four of them stood in sunlight, grinning and squinting into the lens. The stranger had his arm around Alice’s waist, and she was swollen with child.

Suddenly, last night, a curious thing happened to me. It has never happened before and I hope it will never happen again. I looked at the picture and I suddenly had a sensation of great loss, of a twisting, bitter regret that rasped my heart and blurred my eyes. I felt as if I had walked out of a good and warm place and closed a door and learned, too late, it had locked when it closed.

But this morning I looked at the picture again. And I smiled because it had a look of quaintness, of unassuming middle-class charm. The four of them were trapped back there in a tiny world, squinting in the sunlight, content to breed and work and die, yearning for no more than they were receiving.

As I looked at the picture, I felt a nostalgic sentimentality. I imagine that a great man would look in that same way at a photograph of the humble circumstances of his birth, and marvel at his own escape.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Travel Light and Travel Far