The Erection Set

I reached for a cigarette and pulled Lee’s note out with the pack. He had left it on my dresser and I had stuck it in my pocket without reading it. I unfolded it and laid it on the table.

Across the top Lee’s scrawl read, “Doorman gave me this.” The rest of the note was only two words and a number printed carefully in pencil with an odd flourish to the letters. “Dog. Ferris. 655.” It didn’t make sense at all. I turned it over, but the other side was blank and I looked at the message again. The paper was cheap, but water-marked and seemed to be the bottom half of the small stationery sheets you find in hotels. There was some odd familiarity about the whole thing, but nothing that wanted to come out of my memory.

Yet somebody knew where I was. Somebody delivered it and somebody expected me to understand the cryptic message. Had it been from any of the old bunch it would have been coded so that I could decipher it. Of all the shiny new faces I had met since I got off the plane, I couldn’t pick one who’d bother corresponding this way. And it wouldn’t be the hunters. They didn’t write notes. They just tracked you down and killed, picking their own time and place.

When the details of each letter and numeral were clear in my mind I touched a match to the note and let it burn in the ashtray on the table. The counterman looked over at me curiously, then shrugged and turned away. The trucker finished his coffee, paid his bill and left. Outside, the sun had pushed up over the horizon and Linton had started to come alive. I picked up my check, handed the guy at the register a five, took my change and left.

At the comer of Bergan and High, cars flanked both sides of the street outside Tod’s and men in working clothes were drifting inside in groups of twos and threes. I parked at the end of the line, cut across the street and went in with a couple of men in their fifties who looked at me curiously.

One said, “You with the union?”

“Nope. Just a visitor. Used to live here.”

“Come back for a job?”

I grinned at him and shook my head. “I’m in a different business. I know Tod, that’s all. What’s going on?”

“Barrin’s taking on more men,” the one guy told me. He gave me a wink over his glasses. “They won’t have much to work with. They could use some young blood like you.”

“You flatter me, friend, I’m one of the oldies too.”

“Not like us, son, not like us.”

Tod had given up in exasperation and put three girls behind the bar. A couple more were hustling coffee in the next room where all the noise was coming from and Tod was sitting it out at a back table with a schooner of beer in front of him and his ear glued to a portable radio. When he saw me his eyebrows went up and he pointed to the chair beside him.

“Hi, kid. I shoulda known something would happen. You’re like your old man, always action when he was around. A good fight, maybe, plenty of singing, lots of action.”

I took the beer the girl brought me and let it sit there. The suds wouldn’t go right on top of breakfast. “Don’t look at me, Tod. Whatever’s going on isn’t my bit.”

“Pig’s ass. Maybe you just stirred the soup.”

“What’s happening?”

Under the sweater the bony shoulders tha: used to be weighed with solid muscle gave a small shrug. “Barrin’s got new contracts, that’s what. They’re hiring again.”

“The labor pool looks a little sad,” I said.

“Good guys, but old-timers. Half of ’em have been on welfare for years. The fuckin’ union’s flipping. They can’t get anybody down here since McMillan’s paying higher than union wages and these old coots’ll do anything to get back on the job again. You know what this meeting is all about?”

“I just got here.”

“Barrin wants to go under union minimums and the labor leaders are screaming. This bunch is about to tell the unions to go frig themselves and cut out. All they want is work and they’re not going to let them city boys tell them they can’t.”

“What’s going to happen, Tod?”

“You ought to know, kid. They’ll picket, run goons up here and try to stop the contracts. Those city boys know all the cute tricks. Right now they’re meeting with some of the Washington boys and putting on the big squeeze.”

I wiped the sweat off the cold beer with my fingers and let out a laugh. “You got it wrong, Tod.”

“Come on, bucko.”

“Labor’s running scared on this one if you’re telling it right.”

“Oh hell!”

“Take a good look,” I said, “a dying town, impoverished workers who want off public welfare and an opportunity to get back on their feet, blocked by fat, rich, politically oriented organizations howling for dues money.”

“So what?”

“A newspaper’s dream story and a labor lobby nightmare.”

Tod watched me for a moment, then shut the radio off impatiently. He took a long pull of his beer and put the stein back down. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. “You know, you may be right.”