Comfort Station

8:00 A.M

The unobtrusive black automobile which rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the Bryant Park Comfort Station at four minutes to eight on that unobtrusive Tuesday morning — the rain continuing to drench an already-drenched city — was an unobtrusive black Checker Marathon, the car for unobtrusive people. Manufactured with painstaking care by the artisans of Kalamazoo, Michigan, this particular unobtrusive black Checker Marathon — like so many others of its kind — had a one-hundred-twenty-inch wheelbase, an overall length of one hundred ninety-nine inches, and a width (at its widest width) of seventy-six inches. Powered by a powerful two-hundred-thirty-six-cubic-inch Perkins diesel engine, the noise of the motor while idling was not as unobtrusive as it might have been, but the savings in fuel could be counted in pennies. And however unobtrusive its black coloration, modest grille, and seemly quartet of headlights, the Marathon of which we speak stood a proud five feet three inches high, towering over all those pinched-down creatures from Detroit, and towering as well over most people’s girl friends.

Of the two individuals inside this particular Checker Marathon, the one sitting at the steering wheel, his hands on the wheel and his feet on the pedals jutting out of the floor, could most properly be termed the driver. He it was who had operated the nearly two ton vehicle in its travels through the now heavily trafficked city streets to this spot directly in front of Bryant Park Comfort Station, and it was undoubtedly the strain of commanding all this fine-honed machinery in such difficult conditions — lots of traffic, lots of rain — which had given him the morose and irritable expression which his countenance now demonstrated to whosoever might cop a glom through the windshield-wiper-wiped windshield, if anyone cared to. But what would be the explanation for the similar expression of unhappy gloom now to be seen upon the countenance of the other occupant of the vehicle already described, properly called the passenger?

For that — the explanation /• — one would have to search more deeply than minor current annoyances like rain or traffic; one would have to search — in fact — into the mentality and past of the individual concerned, by name Arbogast Smith, thirty-two years of age, a uniformed policeman by trade, currently on special plainclothes detail to Bryant Park Comfort Station, in Manhattan.

At this moment — in fact — Arbogast Smith himself, seated in the front seat of the powerful though unobtrusive black Checker Marathon beside the driver, was reflecting on his own past, the curious turns and twists of which had landed him here at this most unusual spot in space and time. It was not peculiar for Arbogast Smith to go into periods of introspection concerning his own history; he did it whenever nothing much was happening. In one way, however, his periods of introspection did set him apart from much of humanity: he did not do his flashbacks in the pluperfect tense. Most introspections, in this grammatical day and age, occur in what is called the past perfect or pluperfect tense — that is, he had been, he had gone, he had went — but Arbogast Smith got along without a lot of extra “hads,” throwing one in every now and then for seasoning but generally permitting his past to remain as simple as his present.

What Arbogast Smith was reflecting on was the three generations of cops he had come from and the pressure on him to live up to them in their field. This reflection was all worked out in neat paragraphs in Arbogast Smith’s mind, even including a fully fleshed scene — dialogue and all — at a kitchen table, the whole reflection being long enough to run, if printed in a book, a good solid nine pages. He had, however, barely gotten into the first paragraph of the reminiscence (“It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...”) when he was recalled to the present by the urgent honking of a bus horn directly behind the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon in which he was seated.

“Darn!” Arbogast said, with his usual forcefulness. “I hate to keep being recalled to the present like that.”

“It’s no fun for the rest of us either,” responded the driver, whose name I have in my voluminous research somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I’ll look again later.

“Gosh, you’re morose and irritable today,” Arbogast said, his usual modest and amiable demeanor returning to him with the speed of light (one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second).

“Ah, go fumigate yourself,” retorted the driver. “And get out of the car.”

“Listen,” said Arbogast, his tone now demonstrating that no more nonsense was to be taken, “I understand you have personal problems, as haven’t we all, but we are both cops together, both ultimately concerned with the greater good above minor personal contretemps, both working together—”

The driver reached across Arbogast, opened the passenger-side door, lifted his knee, pressed the sole of his black Thom McAn shoe against Arbogast’s hip, and kicked him into the gutter, where he landed, all unnoticing, on a suicide note.

Before Arbogast could counter with a stinging denunciation of violence in interpersonal affairs, the unobtrusive black Checker Marathon had growled away in the rain, becoming instantly invisible in the stream of traffic.

Arbogast sat there, on the suicide note, and watched the traffic go by in the rain. It was funny, he reflected, how things happened in this old world. It was a long time ago that he remembered his mother got the phone call ...

He was recalled to the present by the honking of the selfsame bus horn that had rousted him the last time. Looking up, his annoyance now reaching the point of spilling over, he saw directly to his left the right double headlight of a 42nd Street Crosstown bus. Looking up, he saw the windshield, with the big wipers going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And through the windshield he saw the angry face of Fred Dingbat.

See how the threads are beginning to cross?

Of course, Arbogast didn’t yet know it was Fred Dingbat he was seeing up there through the windshield, but he was about to find out. Getting to his feet, both angered and saddened by the necessity of what he was now going to have to do, Arbogast went around to the side of the bus and knocked forcefully on the door. “Open up,” he said. “Police.”

Fred Dingbat opened the door. “Don’t you know you were obstructing me?” he demanded. “I have miles to go before I sleep. I have—”

“Don’t you know—?”

“Just a minute, will you?” Fred insisted peevishly. “I’m not done. I have miles to go before I sleep.”

“You already said that,” Arbogast pointed out.

“I have to say it twice,” Fred explained.

“Oh. Well, in any event, I am a police officer of the law, and here is my rain-soaked badge. See?”

“It’s rusting.”

“Being a cop isn’t all apples and kickbacks, you know. In any event, in blowing your horn in the New York City limits you have violated Municipal Ordinance 147, Part C, Subparagraph 12a. Now I don’t know how often your business brings you into New York City, but around here—”

“I’m here all the time! I drive this bus!”

“Around here,” Arbogast persisted, knowing how the public in general tried to avoid hearing the truth about these situations, “we have a municipal ordinance against blowing horns. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of these by-the-book boys, but if we don’t follow the letter of the law, how do you suppose we’ll ever manage to follow its spirit?”

“I never thought of that,” Fred admitted.

Arbogast nodded. “Most members of the general public never do,” he said. “So I’m afraid I’m just going to have to give you a summons.”

“Well,” Fred said, “if you have to, I guess you have to.”

“I have to.” Arbogast took his rain-soaked summons book from his pocket. “What’s your occupation?” he asked.

“I drive this bus!”

“I see.” Arbogast wrote out the summons, gave it to Fred, and stepped out again onto the rain-soaked curb. Looking back, he gave Fred a stern look and said, “Don’t let me see you around here anymore.” And then he turned toward the Bryant Park Comfort Station. The bus drove away. The rain rained.