Youngblood hawke, p.45
Youngblood Hawke, page 45
Hawke knew that Lax was on his way up from Lexington. They had an appointment to meet at the office building at three. But he was having great fun, and he had lost all track of time. He was extremely astonished when a train of cars rattled up and the mine foreman came tumbling out of a gondola car followed by the Hollywood agent, who crawled after him on hands and knees through the black puddles, dressed in big flopping coveralls and an oversize miner's cap. The agent's bespectacled bird face looked so peculiarly incongruous in this outfit that Hawke roared with laughter. "Hi, Ferdie! I be god damn, you goin' in for honest work at last?"
Before Lax could answer there was an explosion, and a sound of rattling collapse. Black dust and gray smoke boiled out of one of the branching tunnels. The agent shouted at Hawke, "It's quite safe, I suppose?"
"Well, pretty safe. Vernon here, his uncle got killed last week in that tunnel."
Vernon, Lax's guide, yelled cheerfully that it wasn't blasting that killed his uncle, he was driving roof bolts and the roof fell in on him. Hawke drove the monstrous machine away with giant snortings and rattlings. He returned in a little while, ambling along with his knees up around his chin and his knuckles touching the ground, laughing as he came. "Let's go, Ferdie, let's hop a ride and get back to the sunshine. You're a brave man."
"How the devil did you learn to walk like that?" Lax shouted, following him on his hands and knees. Some of the gondola cars brimmed with coal, others were being loaded, but there was an empty one into which Hawke and the agent tumbled. The loading made such an infernal racket that talk was impossible. Soon a voice bellowed from the darkness, "Hey Art, you okay?"
"Okay, Verne," Hawke howled, and the cars lurched clanging into the tunnel.
Hawke said, his voice shaking with the jolts of the car, "You should have sent word in. I'd have come out. You're an hour early."
"The plane got to Lexington early. I'm glad I came in, it's interesting. A little scary."
"I was having fun running that loader. It's just a low-slung bulldozer, is all. You run a bulldozer you can run anything like that."
"Hawke, I don't think I ever saw you looking so happy. Maybe you're in the wrong business."
The writer threw back his big head and laughed, then yelled in his thickened accent, "Mah trouble is, Ferdie, Ah cain't really believe rahtin' is work. Now what Ah want to know is, what are you doing here? Why the rush? Why did you have to come up into these Godforsaken hills?"
"Well, Hawke, you've kept postponing your return to New York. Roland Givney has to go to Europe. He finally said the hell with it, let's go see him in Kentucky."
The coal train was making so much noise in the low totally black tunnel—squeals, groans, rattles, clangs—that Lax had to scream this answer twice. Hawke laughed, and gestured at him in the faint lamplight from his hat to stop talking. After a while the cool clammy air grew warmer, and dim twilight appeared ahead. It brightened, they rolled into sunshine, and the noise abated. The cars jerked to a stop on a high wooden tipple above a line of empty trucks. "Come on, before they dump us," Hawke said, blinking in the strong light. They scrambled to the platform, as the bottoms of gondola cars began to flap open, showering coal with a roar into the trucks.
"The thing is," Lax puffed as they went to the shack where they both had gotten the caps and coveralls, "I wanted to talk to you before you meet Givney. I thought maybe we could talk in the mine. I didn't think it'd be so noisy."
"Now who is Givney, again?"
"Roland Givney. People's Library. He's a paperback publisher."
"And he wants to finance me in publishing my own books, is that it?"
"Yes. I just want you to know," Lax said, scraping black muck off his suède shoes on the concrete sill of the shack, "that I buy your letter a hundred percent. Our contract was a handshake. You feel I've served my purpose. That's that. If you do make a deal with him, you owe me nothing."
Hawke stepped out of the coveralls in shiny blue serge trousers and a cheap tan windbreaker. Lax emerged like a butterfly out of a cocoon: gray slacks, a lemon yellow jacket, and a soft cap that looked rather like a large muffin baked of gray tweed.
"You've made a long expensive trip, Ferdie, to get nothing out of it."
"Look, you're a human being and I'm a human being. Paths keep crossing. You may want an agent again some day. I'm glad to do it, and I hope something comes of it."
Hawke stopped at Glenn Hawke's office after cleaning up, to thank him and say goodbye. His cousin said with a bleak effort at being friendly, "Any time, Art. Did you get the dope you were after?"
"Well, it was sort of a refresher. I reckon mines don't change much."
"Not in this county. You taking your Hollywood friends down to Hovey? They won't be impressed." Hawke laughed, and Glenn said, "I'm still not used to having a famous man in the family. How's Nancy? When's she having that baby?"
"Dunno, Glenn. Seems to me if she could get up a good sneeze she'd have it."
Glenn laughed without mirth. "Art, you talked to your mom at all about that goddamned lawsuit? It's a hell of a thing. I mean in a family people ought to be able to get together without having the law in."
"You know my mother, Glenn."
"I sure do. Scotty was on the phone a while ago. I told him you were here in the mine. He asked to talk to you when you came out. Okay?"
"Sure."
Glenn told his secretary over the telephone to call Scott Hoag in Frankfort.
When Scotty came on the line, he was bubbling with optimism about the doctors' and lawyers' building in Frankfort, in which Hawke had invested twenty thousand dollars. "This gonna be the best yet, Art. I'm up here checking it over. It isn't a large project, I mean there's not too much involved, but Jesus it's a sweet one. We all gonna pull out better'n two hundred percent."
"Great."
"Say, Art, I knew you were in Hovey but I heard you were working and I didn't want to disturb you. Also, I hear you got yourself one hell of a redhead tucked away in the General Morgan Hotel. You the talk of eastern Kentucky, Art, you know."
"She's my editor, Scott."
"She is? Then I better start writing books, by the Christ, from what I hear. Haw, haw. Say, Art, something's come up on that Frenchman's Ridge binness that can bust it wide open, if your mama'll be halfway reasonable. We have a chance to sell that whole goddamn ridge, some nineteen hundred odd acres of it, to a West Virginia outfit that wants to take the timber. There's this new chemical process that makes that trashy third and fourth growth up there good for paperboard or something. So they say. We won't get any fortune but it's a chance to clean out the mess. The thing is we can't move while there's litigation going on. If you and this young lawyer up in Edgefield could work out a figure, and get your mom to go along, I think this thing could be settled."
"What do you call a figure, Scotty?"
"Jesus, Art, there you got me. You know the bind we in. We mention any amount of money, and your mom she wants ten times as much."
"Just give me an idea. Five thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand?"
Scotty burst into rollicking laughter. "Hey, hold on, Art. We just country boys down here. What I mean, if you fellows show up talking somewhere around five, and if you can guarantee your mom'll go along, I think maybe this thing could be worked out. Your mom sort of has us over a barrel. But we'd have to move kind of fast. These people, this timber outfit, they about walked out on us when we had to tell them we got a lawsuit coming up on that land. If they drop out, this is all off."
Glenn was watching Hawke's face with apparent unconcern, dragging deeply on his cigarette every few seconds.
Hawke said, "Well, I'll talk to mama, Scott."
"You do that. I mean this is a dead parcel of land that's given all of us nothing but headaches. I mean you get your mom to talk any kind of sense at all and she'll get a pretty good windfall, because you and I both know Hawke Brothers don't owe her a goddamn quarter, Art."
2
The General John Hunt Morgan Hotel was not much of a hotel, but it was the best that Hovey had to offer: an old gloomy hostelry for travelling salesmen, built of red brick before the first world war, with sagging horsehair sofas and Morris chairs in the tiled lobby, and a few sagging dusty palms in pots, and a deaf clerk in his seventies sagging behind the desk. A syndicate led by Scotty Hoag was building a new motel atop MacDougall Hill, with a view of the Cumberland Mountains in every direction, and the Chamber of Commerce people said that the MacDougall Sky Lodge would be the making of Hovey. Meantime visitors still had to put up at—and with—the General John Hunt Morgan Hotel. Lax checked into this establishment with his party: the plump little paperback publisher, Roland Givney, and a girl named April who was a remarkable facsimile of Fay Pulver, except that she was an inch or two taller. April surveyed the lobby in dismay, while the shirt-sleeved old loafers in the Morris chairs stared at her with lecherous grins. She said to Lax in a tinkling voice, "My uncle ran a hotel just like this in Toledo, where I grew up. My aunt went crazy in the depression and he sold it."
Lax said, "Quiet, April." The old clerk was unable to take his gaze off April, and he peered after her in glassy-eyed shock as the bellboy led Lax, Givney and the girl off to their rooms.
Hawke called Jeanne on the house phone. She had the best accommodation in the hotel, a two-room suite, and fortunately the place struck her as comical, so she was enduring it well enough.
"Did your friends show up?" she said, her voice scratchy from cigarettes.
"Yes. Lax hauled me out of the mine, in fact. I'm having a drink with them, then we'll all have dinner. Want to join us for the drink?"
"Lord, no. I have no clothes on, and I have to do my hair. They must have some real dilly of a proposition if they've tracked you into these hills. Listen, Arthur, I think you've got the third act right. I've been going over it all day. When on earth did you write those new scenes? They're not anywhere in the book."
"I wrote them last night after I left you."
"But you said you were leaving for the mine at dawn. It's practically a new act."
"Well, I didn't sleep much, Jeanie."
"Good God . . . How was the mine?"
"Dark."
Jeanne chuckled. "I'm going to have a bath. You must need one too. And you must be dead. Dinner when?"
Hawke went into a spasm of deep baritone coughing. "Say eight o'clock."
"What's the matter, Arthur?"
"I don't know, it was chilly in that mine. I still haven't warmed up. I need a drink."
"You need a night's sleep. Listen, don't sign anything, do you hear? Just listen."
"Yes, love."
The bar in the hotel was called, for some reason, the Chinese Room. Perhaps it had once had an Oriental décor, but it had undergone the frightful face-lifting that has transformed most American bar rooms since women began to drink publicly. It was all maroon leather, chrome strips, and dim pink neon, and its one Chinese aspect was a steady loud drip in a tin sink behind the bar. Hawke, Givney, and Lax squeezed into a dark wooden cubicle and ordered bourbon, after Givney learned to his regret that no authentic Kentucky moonshine was available.
Hawke had been studying Givney during the automobile ride down to Hovey, which had mostly been filled with April's chatter about the heat and her thirst. This fat small man had odd prim ways with his hands and with his compressed mouth, a manner almost like a high school principal's. His straight pale hair, pince-nez glasses, and narrow features spread and softened to an even sleekness by good feeding, added to this ultra-respectable look. His expression in repose was a happy beam; but when his interest was aroused, as when the car first drove into Hovey, the beam gave way to a look of alertness, his lips disappeared, and all his features sharpened.
After some opening pleasantries Givney said, dancing spread fingers against each other, "I am here to talk about an author named Youngblood Hawke. And I am here to say that what an author like Youngblood Hawke needs is a million dollars. Not as money. Not as a reward. So that he can forget money. So that he can forget rewards. So that he can have an assured income and devote himself with a mind single and clear to the creation of art."
Naturally, Hawke was startled to hear his own long-cherished dream thus thrown back at him; and he was extremely suspicious of Givney. He said, "Well, I think if an author named Youngblood Hawke were here he might agree with you." Givney beamed at Hawke and giggled, and lit a cigarette, which he held and smoked as though it were forbidden. Hawke went on, "But who wants to endow such authors with a million?"
Givney said, "Mr. Hawke, you've just used the right word—an endowment. I understand from Mr. Lax that you want to publish your own books."
"That's true."
"It's a wise thought. The novel today is a mass consumer item—the novels of certain authors, to be sure—and therefore can be big business. I also insist that novels, at least your novels, are art. What I propose is a division of labor. Yours the art, mine the business. You've seen the People's Library on the news stands. I think you'll agree I'm a fairly realistic individual. We publish Westerns. We publish mysteries. We publish silly sex stories with undressed girls on the covers. We've found that the uncultivated reader has certain tastes. If we're to survive and to serve the larger end of nurturing art—and I think our library has nurtured some art, if nothing yet of the standing of the works of an author named Youngblood Hawke—then we must please those tastes. The People's Library has shown a profit since the year it started.
"Now then." He drew from his breast pocket a pad of white paper, and a long pencil sharpened to a needle point. He flourished the pencil, and drew a dark line down the middle of the pad. "Let us call that line the tax structure of the United States. On one side of the line we have an author named Youngblood Hawke." He wrote the name on the pad. "And on the other side we have—" He silently wrote $1,000,000 in sharp neat figures. "My task is to move that sum across the line unscathed, thereby creating our endowment. Correct?"
Givney beamed at Hawke. Lax regarded Givney from under heavy lids. Hawke stared at the sheet with the legend
Youngblood Hawke | $1,000,000
"Damned right," he said. "But there's no way to get the money across the line."
"Why, yes, there are several routes," Givney said. "Let's first consider Spread. That's the commonest device. If there's a large amount of money to be paid, you mustn't collect it in one year, because it goes into the ninety percent bracket and has to be handed straight over to the government. You spread it. In the case of our million, let's say, we would pay it to you at the rate of forty thousand a year over twenty-five years. Of course that cuts down the tax bite. But frankly I dislike this device. Let me show you why."
He began scrawling figures on the pad. He was sitting next to Hawke, and was writing under Hawke's nose, leaning against him and exuding the sweet smell of some hair lotion. "Let's say certain people are willing to put down a million for all the rights in a number of novels by you. They start paying you forty thousand a year.
"Now look here, Mr. Hawke. Any competent stockbroker can take that million and put together a four percent portfolio—utility bonds, high grade rails, blue chip stocks, and so forth. Now four percent of a million dollars is forty thousand a year.
"Mr. Hawke, don't you see that a spread deal like that is all done with mirrors? All we do is pay you your own interest. Of course there are taxes to pay on that interest, but we can find any number of jiggles to offset them. At the end of the twenty-five years we not only keep the original million, the capital sum that rightly belongs to you, but we've actually made money on it, because portfolios go up in value over a quarter of a century, and we get that appreciation. Not to mention further than twenty-five years from now you'll only be fifty-four, at the very crest of your creative powers, and the payments will suddenly stop. Now I call that unfair. I call it ridiculous."
Lax murmured, "It works."
"Who guarantees it?" Givney said sharply. "Who says for sure the Treasury won't turn around some day and throw out every spread deal that's ever been made?"
"Nobody can guarantee that the Treasury won't turn around tomorrow and take everything away from us and give us all numbers and ration cards," the agent said. "We just have to hope that the whole thing won't fall apart for a while."
"That's talk," Givney said. "The United States isn't falling apart. I say there's a criminal lack of imagination in the literary industry. My contention is, when you're doing business, study the masters. Study the oil companies. Study the big electric combines. Study the corporations that hire more tax brains than the Treasury can afford to hire. Their practices are legal, ethical, and inventive. Now, they've demonstrated that there are definite advantages to doing business under a foreign flag—what the shipping companies sometimes call flags of convenience. Of course when you create a foreign corporation you look for tax advantage plus stability. It turns out that Switzerland is a good place for many reasons. If we formed a Swiss corporation to publish your work and sell its subsidiary rights, such as paperback, stage, and film rights it would be a very simple matter to construct the stock picture so that within five years you could take home that million tax-paid at a capital gain rate. I assume you would continue your present rate of writing, and produce at least three important works by Youngblood Hawke in that time."
Hawke said, "What's involved? Would I have to become a Swiss citizen?"
Givney smiled at Lax. The agent said, "Nobody becomes a Swiss, Youngblood. You have to establish residence, but hell, you want to spend some time in Europe anyway, don't you? Switzerland's comfortable, and it's fine. A writer should know Europe."
