The Erection Set

We sat in the Chock Full o’ Nuts mopping up the plate of eggs with crisp toast, two guys watching the early shift of New York go to work before seven in the morning. Leyland Hunter’s cauliflower ear was redder than the day he got it and his suit was a mess, but there was a James Cagney twitch in his shoulders that was a suppressed laugh at himself and me at the same time.

“You’re dead now, Dog. You proved your point,” he said.

“I just wanted you to be sure.”

He tucked the last piece of toast in his mouth and sat back, happy and satisfied. “I never thought an old fart like me could get laid anymore.”

“When was the last time?”

“I forget.”

“Charmaine thought you were pretty damn good.”

“Lovely of her. She’ll never be forgotten. Ah, the feel of silky flesh unmarred by wrinkles is something to be remembered. What annoys me is that I never thought of the alternative. Never again will I be so devoted to my work. By the way, I understand you footed the bill. What do I owe you?”

“My treat. I always felt guilty about spying on you and old Dubro.” I laughed again. “How did you make out in the end?”

“A brush-off. I understand she married the gardener a year later. In those days a skinny-dip was a real orgy.”

“Man, have you got a lot to learn.”

“Unfortunately, no. I’ll get all my kicks from pornography collected during the censorship trials or wait for those rare, exotic visits from distant friends. Now let’s get back to you. I’m not quite stupid, you know.”

“I didn’t want you to have to lie, friend.”

“There are some lengths you don’t have to go to.”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Because I could have told. You’re not the same Dog they used to kick around.”

I finished my coffee and picked up the bill. “Isn’t it going to be a ball when everybody finds that out?” I said.

This time Leyland Hunter wasn’t smiling. With a studied, serious look, he scanned my face and nodded solemnly. “I’m going to be afraid to look,” he said. “Do you hold still for advice these days?”

“Depends on the source. From you, yes. What pearls of wisdom have you got for me?”

Hunter took out a gold ball-point pen and fiddled idly with the calibrated rings that made it a slide rule. “Remember, Dog, I’ve been close to the Barrin family all my life. It was your great-grandfather that made sure my education was attended to and who established a business for me. All that because he and my father were friends, old prospecting buddies, and my father was killed before he ever saw me. Like it or not, I have a moral obligation to be of service.”

“You paid off any debt a long time ago, Counselor. It was your business acumen that saved the Barrin corporation during the Depression, your foresight that built them into millionaire war profiteers and your ingenuity that kept them rolling ever since.”

His fingers kept working at the dials, arranging them into precise figures. “That was while your grandfather was alive and active. Unfortunately, the generation gap isn’t a new thing at all. When Cameron Barrin began to decline, the family was quick to introduce a new regime ... their own. I was one of the old guard and my opinions were merely tolerated, not accepted.”

“Then why sweat it, mighty Hunter? You’ve made it big on your own. Today you’re handling conglomerates that make Barrin Industries look like a toy. Oh, a damn big toy, but that’s all.”

“I told you,” he said. “I feel the obligation.”

“Good for you, but I’m still waiting for the advice.” I signaled the waitress for some more coffee. It looked like it was going to be a long lecture.

“Remember when your cousin Alfred had that accident with his new roadster?”

I let the sugar lumps drop in my coffee with soft plops. Somehow they had the faraway sounds of bones breaking. I said, “There was no accident. The little bastard ran me down deliberately. He got a roadster and I got a used bicycle. He went off the road to get me and if I hadn’t jumped for it there would have been more than a broken leg.”

“He said he lost control in the gravel drive.”

“Balls. You know better.” I stirred the coffee and tasted it. Now it was too sweet. “Funny, but I was more pissed off about my first bike being wrecked than getting the leg busted.”

“Remember what you did to Alfred when you got out of the hospital?”

My mouth was working to suppress a laugh. I had swiped a short-fused aerial bomb from the July Fourth fireworks display in town and rigged it under his car. It blew right through the seat of Alfred’s roadster and they picked star-dust out of his ass for a month. “How did you know about that?”

“Being of a legal, inquisitive mind, I surmised it, then made inquiries until I located a few witnesses. Tying in a boy with missing pyrotechnics wasn’t too difficult.”

“You could have burned my hide, buddy.”

“Why?” His eyes twinkled. “Frankly, I thought Alfred deserved it and it was an original form of revenge. I don’t think he ever molested you again, did he?”

“Not physically. There were other ways.”

“Except they never really bothered you.”