McQuary's Quandary

Ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ka-thump, shp
Ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ka-thump, shp

back and forth, over and over, the drum grips the paper, rolls down the tracks, prints the page, releases the page, rolls back, grips the paper, rolls down the tracks, prints the page, forever and ever, amen. With every crank of the wheel and every rise and fall of the mechanical arms, Mack felt his young man's sap spilling like ink into articles about wayward livestock, county elections, faceless obituaries, and the cost of corn, articles as mundane and tedious as the task of printing itself.

Mack turned the wheel and thought, I'd do anything to get out of here. Anything.

The fact that Mack's father was a whistler only compounded the tedium and exacerbated Mack's irritability. The Reverend A.L. McQuary was a stupidly happy man of modest ambitions and serene conscience who whistled because he loved printing and Jesus and springtime. He loved "working heartily as unto the Lord." When Mack started turning the wheel and the press began its rhythmic work, A.L. would erupt into whistled hymns of ear-piercing exuberance. The thump and rhythm of the Prouty that annoyed Mack was comforting to his father, rather like the rocking of a train on a long trip or the clip-clopping of a horse's hooves down McCord Street. The Prouty press was nicknamed the "grasshopper" because of the mechanical arms on either side of the frame. At rest, they looked like the peaked back legs of a grasshopper, and in motion, the press looked as if it were leaping in place. A.L. was fascinated by the precision and efficiency of the press and the cooperation of its various parts. The fingers gripping the paper, the platen rising, the drum rolling as the legs peaked, the paper peeling away from the drum, the platen falling as the legs fell, and the drum returning: A.L. never tired of the press's ingenious mechanism. That the Prouty had been invented by a Baptist minister (for whom it was named) sanctified the press and transformed it into an analogy, for A.L. frequently compared the harmonious movements of the printing press to the members of the Body of Christ, working together for the truth and glory of God. For that reason, the Prouty appeared in many a sermon, a metaphor that irked his congregants and lulled them to sleep.

But A.L. McQuary also liked the vinegary smell of the oak sawdust scattered on the floor and the mild euphoria he experienced from breathing the fumes of solvents: turpentine and ammonia and oxalic acid. The giddiness enhanced his sense of well-being and righteousness, and the longer he and Mack worked, the less he would whistle and the more he would instruct Mack on the virtues of integrity and hard work and service to his community. He said, "Mack, the Neosho Rustler gives our family a good standing in this town. Don't ever forget that! Besmirch your reputation but once, and your good name will never be restored. We are honest men, you and I: newspapermen, truth tellers, pillars of goodness in a temple erected on the firm foundation of the Gospel and bearing above an image of Virtue." Then the Revered McQuary would inhale deeply and whistle through his teeth while Mack turned the wheel.

As the elder McQuary fed paper into the press, he would watch his boy—for so he deemed Mack though his "boy" was twenty-three years old and a man in every way except maturity—as he cranked the wheel. Mack's chin was firm and jutted forward, giving him a confident, even haughty air. His lips were full, and his high cheeks set off his eyes, which were dark hazel and gazed out on the world with a melancholic yearning. Crowning all were chestnut locks of hair, trimmed around the ears and sweeping over the forehead.

As Mack turned the wheel, his father saw the boy's muscles flexing beneath his shirt, and he thought, We make a good team, my son and me. A good, honest, hard working team.

Mack was the oldest of the McQuary children, and A.L. and Alice had received his birth like the fulfillment of an old Old Testament promise. Before he was born, Alice had suffered four late-term miscarriages, and the discharge of blood and placenta and the tiny malformed bodies, not to mention the laudanum administered for pain and melancholy, nearly drove her to addiction and madness. She took long naps, and her hands shook when she sipped her tea. A.L. and Alice had all but given up hope for a live birth when Mack came along: He survived the first three months and then the next three, and he continued to grow and swell until he burst forth in the full bloom of infant health, wailing and pissing and clutching his fists. He was their miracle, and A.L. and Alice doted on the boy. They gave him pie for supper, and when they threw a birthday party for the children who followed in Mack's wake—whether it be Vertrude or Lucien—they would bestow on Mack an even larger gift than the one given to his sibling. When Mack turned thirteen—thirteen, mind you!—A.L. promised him the Rustler. Now, ten years had gone by, and Mack was still turning the wheel.

Ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ka-thump, shp, while over and over A.L. whistled—
How great Thou Art!
How great Thou Art!
Ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ka-thump, shp

On the morning of April 7, 1897, the Prouty press thumped and clattered as Mack and A.L. printed the latest edition of the Rustler. When the noon whistle at the Tri-State Mining Company screamed over Neosho, father and son paused for lunch. They took their accustomed places opposite each other at A.L.'s desk in the corner of the shop. Each had a small slab of cheese, a small loaf of bread, a can of Cudahy's, and dried apples. Then they drank coffee and water and talked about the weather and the afternoon's work: advertisements and public notices, declarations of intent and contracts in a Gothic font. A.L. said, "There's much work to be done, son!" So he stood and swept the crumbs from his lap and wiped his mouth; then back to the Prouty and—

Ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ki-diddle-ka-daddle-ka-thump, shp

Five o'clock and another, longer screeching whistle. A.L. said, "We're almost finished." Mack sighed and continued turning the wheel. At half-past six, the last bill went "shp" as it peeled from the drum, and A.L. said, "That was a good day's work! Let's say we call it a day." He clapped Mack on his muscled shoulder and went to the desk, put on his reading spectacles, and began shuffling through a stack of invoices.

Mack went to the storeroom and returned with a rag and four large jars on a tray. He dipped the rag in three of the jars and began cleaning the "sorts"—the individual letters and characters cast in lead. He returned the sorts to their appropriate boxes, cleaned the frames and quoins, and then wiped down the press itself. The fourth jar contained oil with which Mack lubricated the entirety of the machine. The smell of the solvents and machine oil was overwhelming and not nearly so pleasant to Mack as it was to his father. Indeed, he found the odor nauseating, and his head began to throb. When the machine was finally cleaned and oiled for the next day's round of printing, Mack scrubbed his hands with pumice, hung his apron on a peg, and swept up the oak sawdust. He looked at his father, who was now poring over the ledgers, and thought, Welp, in another ten years that'll be me. Damn.

Mack shivered and said, "I've finished cleaning up."

No response. A.L. was "going over the books."

"I'm leaving."

Far away but in a kind voice, "Did you clean up the storeroom?"

"Yessir."

Still looking at the ledger, "Did you stack—?"

"Yessir. The copies are on the bench."

"Okay. Thank you, son, I'll see you at dinner."

"Yessir."

Mack emerged from the fumes and stuffiness of the shop and onto McCord Street. He looked over the shabby, three story buildings across the street to the twilight sky; all that was left of the sun was a vague glow of lavender, and a sliver of moon hung in the deepening purple. The new moon holds the old moon in her arms, Mack thought, and a wave of loneliness came over him. A robin tut-tutted nearby. Somewhere in the distance a train whoo-whooed. A girl was laughing in the cafe down the street, and a wagon rattled over the cobblestones. Mack breathed deeply, and the spring air tasted good. The shops, of course, were closed, and the street was empty except for the receding wagon.

Mack walked down the street and looked through the cafe window. The girl turned out to be a middle-aged wife with a young woman's laugh, and she was having dinner with her husband. Mack wondered what the man said that was so funny. He watched a moment longer, shoved his hands in his pockets, and sauntered down to the billiard hall. That's how lonely he felt, for Mack hardly ever went to the billiard hall, not because his father inveighed against billiards as a sinful waste of time—Mack had decided long ago to ignore his father's "simple-minded judgments"—but because only men play billiards—no girls allowed—and Mack throbbed with an insistent, cloying, mad desire for girls, a desire that was more intense, more palpable at twenty-three than it had been at sixteen when Mack dreamed of Abby McRae and awoke in sticky sheets.

When Mack entered the billiard hall, the men looked at him as if he belonged anywhere but there. Their cue sticks stood momentarily motionless, and their smoking cigarettes hung from their lips. Their sullen eyes asked, What the hell are you doing here?

So back into the vapid streets he went, yearning for girls who weren't there.

I hate this goddamn town.

The problem for Mack was that he was twenty-three years old and living with his parents in a small Ozarks town, and the year was 1897, and the pretty girls he knew had married before they turned twenty. As for his chums, most of them had married the pretty girls and so had little interest in adventures of any kind. The fellas still hunted coons and chewed tobacco by campfires, and sometimes they fired their shotguns at the stars, but their wives had largely succeeded in sanding their rough edges to a smooth and domesticated arc. When Mack suggested to his buddies that they get together and gamble on a dogfight or share a jug at Abbott Cave, they just shook their heads and said, "Naw, you go on. You don't have nothing stopping you. But I got a young'un on the way. You go on ahead."

Mack didn't really want to do those things anyhow. He wanted girls.

When Mack was sixteen, Abby McRae let him kiss her. She was a precocious fifteen, and her bodice had begun to swell nicely beneath her periwinkle pinafore. Mack had been assigned the desk beside hers, a happy coincidence that suggested to Mack that God might indeed be watching over him, and her young form became an obsession to him, one might say an affliction, but one that he hid lest the teacher move him across the room. Young Abby smelled of roses and warm milk, and her pretty chestnut locks were tied back from her face with a lavender ribbon. When she leaned forward to write on her tablet, her little tongue peeked out, and in those times, Mack pretended to focus on his own work. He would cover his brows with his left hand and wriggle the end of his pencil with his right, all the while straining to see the glistening tip of her tongue. Once, in a moment of extreme concentration, she opened her mouth and ran her tongue around the circumference of her lips, and Mack almost groaned aloud.

After school, Abby was walking with her friends, and Mack ran up beside her.

"Hi," he said, not knowing what he should say and not really caring because his desire had outstripped his diffidence. "Going home?" he asked.

Abby said, "Where else would I be going?"

The other girls tittered, but Mack soldiered on.

"I don't know. Where would you like to go?"

"How about the soda bar at McGinty's?" Abby smiled, and Mack noticed that her right canine had a chip.

So, Mack escorted Abby away from her friends and into the department store, past the ladies dresses, and back to the soda bar where he ordered a chocolate soda with two straws. In a kind of delighted delirium, Mack watched the girl sucking on her straw. Her pink lips drawn together and her hazel eyes looking into his and her chestnut hair pulled back and falling to her shoulders and her periwinkle hillocks rising from her chest, indeed, the milky smell of her virgin presence infused him with yet wilder desire, and he thought he might cry. On their way home, he pulled the girl into an alley and leaned in to kiss her. Abby tilted her face toward his and parted her lips, and Mack touched his lips to those tender petals. She put one hand on his neck and another on his cheek. He wondered how she had learned such delicate maneuvers at such a tender age, and he kissed her harder.

"Ow!" she said.

"What?"

"Not so hard. Easy, pardner."

"Where'd you learn to kiss like that?"

"Don't you know you must never kiss and tell?"

"Let me try again."

"Okay."

She whispered, "That's better." Mack's hand slipped down the girl's back to rest on her upper buttocks.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"I think you are. Don't press your luck, Mack McQuary. There are boundaries."

"I don't like boundaries."

"No one likes boundaries. But that doesn't mean you can do what you want."

"Who knows? Maybe I can."

"Well, not with me you can't." And that ended that. Nevertheless, Mack remained forever after obsessed with the mouths of girls, their moist lips and pink tongues and imperfect, lovely teeth.

Here it was seven years later, and he was still thinking of pink mouths as he left the billiard hall. He had kissed precisely four other girls in the intervening years but none were so delicate and expert as Abby. And none of the girls was accommodating in the ways he wished.

I need to broaden my horizons. Get out of here. Small town people are too damn religious. Too strict. But how to get out, that's the question?

He continued down Coler Street toward the depot. Sometimes pretty girls from St. Louis or Kansas City would be there with their suitcases and valises, looking for a ride to auntie's house or biding their time until the next train. Everybody knew what city girls with time to kill would do. City girls were a lot more fun than small town girls. Or so Mack had heard.

No one was on the platform.

Mack listened for a while to the mechanical dots and dashes of a telegraph machine through the open window of the station master's office and thought, How the hell does anybody ever learn to make sense of that? Mack didn't really want to learn Morse Code, but even if he had the desire, he knew he didn't have the patience. And maybe the smarts either. So, he sat on one of the empty benches and looked over the tracks and into the darkness. All he could see were occasional globes of lantern light in the windows of people's homes.

Little people with little lives in a little town.

Mack knew in his bones he was better than this! He knew he could rise above Neosho with its little people, that he could be somebody if he just had the chance. But he was so alone! Yes, he had his parents, loving and annoying but necessary for the time being. And there were his irrelevant siblings—

Who have no imagination whatsoever.

Someday, the Rustler would be his. Mack envisioned himself with spectacles on the end of his nose and poring over invoices.

Ugh.

Then Mack realized he was hungry, so he stood and began walking through the empty town toward his house. His mother would be fretting by this time, and even his father would be looking through the window.

Maybe we'll have pie.

After supper, he would go up to his room where he had his books, and the best part of his day would begin.

Mack loved his books. Thomas Malory and Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. He had recently finished Stoker's Dracula and was nearing the end of du Maurier's Trilby. Every evening he would light the lantern, turn up the wick, and descend to the center of the earth with Lidenbrock or sail to the bright moon on Barbicane's back or circle the globe with Phileas Fogg. He had churned up the mighty Mississippi with Twain and was knighted with Hank Morgan at King Arthur's court; he had joined Holmes in the squalor of central London and Ligeia in the horrors of the crypt. He had been kidnapped with Davie and followed the thumping gait of Long John Silver. He had been fascinated by Count Dracula and was currently mesmerized by Svengali, the mad Jew pianist who used hypnotism to manipulate the innocently amorous Trilby. After Mack finished du Maurier's book, Mack sought out an English translation of Dr. Mesmer's Animal Magnetism, a copy of which he found in the most prosaic and American of publications, the Sears & Roebuck catalog. He ordered a copy and read it with great care; he even memorized the twenty-seven propositions. Number Thirteen was his favorite: "Experiments show the passage of a substance whose rarefied nature enables it to penetrate all bodies without appreciable loss of activity." Mack longed to experiment with such rarified passages, especially with regard to penetration.

On this particular night, however, Mack was reading yet another book by Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mack was eager to continue the story because the night before he had witnessed the brutal murder of poor Danvers Carew, a well-respected and honorable gentleman, by a dark, dwarfish man who matched in description the malevolent Mr. Hyde. Ever the savvy reader, Mack suspected that Jekyll and Hyde were the same man, but he kept reading to be sure.

The conclusion bore out Mack's intuition, and Mack congratulated himself on his perspicacity. What Mack didn't anticipate was the "philosophy," if you will, of Dr. Jekyll's rather long and difficult suicide note to his friend, Mr. Utterson. Jekyll's philosophy was nothing less than an epiphany: mind altering in its possibilities and life changing in its import. For in the letter, Jekyll laid a foundation for Mack's future enterprise, not by presenting a model to follow—

God forbid I would end up like Jekyll!

—but by suggesting a potential means to rise above the monotony of his existence.

Exactly! Mack thought. Every man has at least two parts. Like William Wilson in Poe. One part of me was raised by A.L. and Alice McQuary, and he has to go to church and waste his life in trivial work—call him "good" Mack. And then there's the part of me that wants girls and adventure! And who knows? As Jekyll says, there might be even more "me's" inside. I would rather be more than less, that's for sure.

So where did Jekyll go wrong?

Mack continued reading and quickly found the answer to his question. Dr. Jekyll thought it would be a good idea to split his two selves apart and let his "bad" side pursue its own pleasures, thereby leaving the "good" side unstained and unimpaired. That way the "good doctor" could have his "bad" cake and eat it, too. But it was the splitting that destroyed him. In fact, Jekyll bemoaned the fact that his "better half" was inclined to emulate the qualities of his "worse half."

The answer in William Wilson was even worse because the bad side killed the good side. Mack stroked his chin and pondered. But what if instead of splitting himself in two, a man could control both parts according to the need of the moment? Move them around like two queens on a chess board: the spirit and the flesh working together, so to speak? What if a man used his "good" side to help the "bad" side get what it wants? And what if he used his "bad" side to help the "good" side get what it wants?

What if—

Mack thought of Abby's rose petal lips and the tip of her tongue while she worked on her arithmetic.

He thought of Dr. Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism and the passage of rarified substances into bodies, and he imagined Count Dracula drinking the blood of virgins.

He thought about Svengali and the hypnotic control he exercised over his protege, the innocent, beautiful Trilby.

How could he, T. Allen McQuary from Neosho, Missouri, enjoy such pleasures?

Where there's a will, there's a way. That's what father always says. At least he got one thing right.