The Erection Set

Horror has to be seen to be enjoyed and I enjoyed it. Only seconds ticked by, but their faces went from indignation to anger, then a plea for pity, finally disintegrating into abject subservience when I gave them a narrow-eyed look to remind them of the delivery boys and the governess and the other things they didn’t realize I knew and they took off their clothes.

Everything they had was piled in a heap on the floor like I told them to do, then I made them turn around, then face me again. I dropped the stub of my cigarette in the old-fashioned inkwell and pushed the chair back.

I called out, “Harvey, bring my stuff in here.”

When the butler came in with my coat and hat he barely paused at the threshold, his eyes taking in the entire scene. I put my coat over my arm, put on my hat and looked at the two women. “Sloppy,” I said. “Pam, you ought to shave. You’re the hairiest broad I ever saw in my life” Harvey opened the door for me and this time he couldn’t quite hide his smile. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t think so.”

“Very good, sir.”

Two steps down I heard his chuckle. Softly he said, “Very good, sir.”

The pale-blue pickup was behind me for the fourth time. I stopped at the post office and bought a folder of airmail stamps and looked at the driver of the truck who was mailing a package at the parcel post window. He was about sixty, dressed in faded blue denim pants and a torn sweater. The clerk was giving his receipt when I went back outside. I waited in my car until he came down the steps, drove off and turned right at the first intersection. He turned left and in the rearview mirror I saw him pull into a parking slot outside a small appliance store.

I was getting edgy again and even the thought of my naked cousins couldn’t take the bite out of things. I kept thinking, DOG. FERRIS. 655, wondering what the hell it meant.

He was young and had blond hair and didn’t have time to grab his helmet. He was a young, grinning kraut and he damn near took me out after he shot down Bertram and all I had was that one look at him and the name Helgurt under his canopy and the five insignias, three American and two British under that just back of the yellow spinner on his ME 109. He lifted his wing the same time I did and we slid together like lovers waiting to kiss in a monumental close-up of flame, but air pressures and engineering combined to keep those lips apart and we hauled back on the controls into tight, stall-vibrating turns that dragged the blood from our eyeballs and there he was coming into my reticule before I came into his and my fingers squeezed the trigger on the stick and six fifties went off converging into a cone of fire at four hundred feet that took his yellow spinner off with the prop and chewed a beautiful flying machine into a pile of junk within three seconds leaving the young, grinning blond-headed kraut without any helmet and without any head or body parts anybody could remember. He had five kills and I had a hell of a lot more, but I remembered them and his name, Helgurt, and his yellow spinner, so why couldn’t I remember DOG. FERRIS. 655?

Somebody had left the brochure on the desk, a four colored come-on with block-lettered Farnsworth Aviation, Inc. headlining the aerial photo of the sky over the mountains with the latest Farnsworth executive jet streaking by under a high band of striped cirrus clouds.

“Nice plane,” I said.

“Who may I say called, sir?” the receptionist asked me.

“Just a friend of the family,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”