Free Bandbox by Thomas Mallon Page B

concentrate on their braying superlatives.
    “W-w-would you like some r-r-raisins?” asked Allen Case, who, still grateful for her solicitude this morning, was now at her door.
    “No, thanks, Allen. Have I missed much?”
    Case was about to tell her something, but the first syllables of whatever it was remained locked on his palate while Harris came loudly bounding out of his office, sporting a smile even fresher than his haircut. Becky got up to join the copyeditor at her doorway.
    “Mr. Lord!” cried Harris, summoning the art director into the hall, so that everyone could hear their conversation. He detested solitude when he was happy; any upturn in fortune demanded an audience.
    “I don’t want a month to go by without more animal pictures from Arinopoulos! That stuff he shot at lunchtime is unbelievable. What do you call the thing nuzzling Lindstrom’s behind? A cheetah? A ferret? Whatever it is, it makes the coat look grand! Tell him we want rhinos, pterodactyls, whatever. Get the critters what they like to eat and keep ’em shiny with that spray. More snakes! More of everything!”
    Allen Case had gone so white that Becky put an arm around his shoulders. She wished she could tell him that he needn’t worry. She knew what photograph Harris was
really
excited over. The boss just needed something to crow about while he deployed the actual object of his glee on its delicate mission.
    Spilkes had come into the corridor to give Lord and Harris “a well-deserved pat on the back.” Becky edged past them toward Hazel’s desk. The boss’s secretary had already left, but Becky was able toconfirm her hopeful surmise about Harris’s elation when she saw Chip Brzezinski at Hazel’s OUT box. He was carefully undoing the string on a manila envelope that was boldly addressed, in Harris’s own hand, to JIMMY GORDON,
CUTAWAY
, 18TH FLOOR . Standing silently behind Chip, she, too, could read the bold strokes Harris had applied, from the fattest of his fountain pens, to the back of the incriminating Composograph: WOULD MAKE A GREAT SOUVENIR FOR JOANNA, MELVIN AND MICHAEL. Jimmy Gordon’s wife and two boys out in Garden City. The boys were actually Mortimer and Monroe, but Jimmy would get the point.
    Becky reached around Chip to pick up a rubber stamp from Hazel’s desk.
    “Oh!” he said, stuffing the picture back inside its envelope. “It’s, uh, already marked,” he told Becky.
    “I know it is,” she said, before she pressed the OUTGOING stamp against Chip’s ever more sizable forehead. “So are you.”

9
    John Shepard had been traveling for twelve hours. After hitchhiking from Greencastle to Indianapolis, he had boarded an eastbound train. For most of the eight hours since, John had sat up straight in his cane seat while the train made stops in Anderson and Muncie and Union City and—rather to John’s amazement—sped through big towns like McCordsville and Versailles without a halt.
    “Another piece of pie, hon?”
    “Thanks, but I’d better not,” John told the waitress. Here in the Hotel Cleveland it was a quarter to three in the morning, and hisstomach was too excited to hold anything more. His first sight of Cleveland’s Public Square had so astonished him that for a moment he thought he might somehow already be at his final destination, New York City. The almost-finished Terminal Tower, still sheathed in scaffolding, was the tallest building John had ever seen. He had stood there at 2:30 A.M. , counting its fifty-two stories. Through the window of the hotel’s all-night coffee shop, he could see vast new excavations and steel skeletons all over the square, some of them flooded with electric light, although right now the world seemed to be inhabited by no one besides himself and the waitress putting away the apple pie.
    Five hours remained until the first
Limited
left for New York. John looked across the coffee shop’s big tiled floor and spotted the door to the men’s washroom, no doubt a much