A man in full, p.64
A Man in Full, page 64
“What’s investor land?” asked Ray.
“That was another one of Charlie’s terms. Investor land is land that’s too valuable to be devoted to farming or timber but not yet ready for developing. So investors buy it for a song, like Charlie thought he was going to, and then they just sit on it, waiting for the time when they can sell it for a big price for development. Charlie couldn’t believe it. Cherokee County, or at least the southern part of it, was all investor land. He’s driving around through these back roads up there one day when he sees an old friend of his, or an old acquaintance, a real old Cracker named Darwell Scruggs. They’d gone to school together years ago down in Baker County. So Charlie stops the car and gets out, and he and Darwell Scruggs have a little reunion out by the side of the road. One thing Charlie always remembered about Darwell Scruggs was that he had joined the Ku Klux Klan back when he was seventeen or eighteen years old. So he asks him about the Klan, and sure enough, Darwell has organized a chapter, or a kave, or whatever they call it, of the Klan in Cherokee County. It was really pathetic, Ray—”
Ray!
“—I mean, I wonder if there were a dozen members, and most of them were teenagers of the sort Darwell had been when he first joined. But there they were, and a lightbulb went on over Charlie’s head. He takes down Darwell’s address and telephone number, and he waits three or four weeks and calls up Darwell and tells him he has it on good authority that a black group called Operation Higher is planning a march through Canton—that’s the county seat of Cherokee—protesting racism and de facto segregation in this old rural county that’s practically all white.”
“How did Charlie know that?”
“He didn’t! He had to find somebody! Now that he’d started the pot boiling, he had to find somebody to put in it, so to speak.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Peepgass. “Are you telling me—this I find hard to believe—but go ahead.” By now he had his elbows on the table and was leaning forward, an utterly rapt expression on his face.
“This is the truth,” said Martha. “I pledge you my word. One day Charlie read in the papers that this fellow André Fleet was organizing a rally for Operation Higher against something or other.”
“André Fleet—the guy who’s talking about running for Mayor.”
“I think so. I think it’s the same person. So Charlie goes to the rally. He was the only white person there, and he stood out like … like I don’t know what … this big, fifty-some-year-old white man wearing a coat and tie. At the end of the rally André Fleet came over to Charlie and said, ‘If you have a moment, brother, I’d like to see you backstage after this is all over.’”
Peepgass, leaning forward even more, said, “Were you there? Did you see this?”
“No,” said Martha Croker, “but I’ve heard Charlie tell the story a hundred times.”
“So what happened next?”
“I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but it wasn’t too long before André Fleet was leading a march on poor little Canton. And Darwell Scruggs did his part. He had all ten or twelve of his Klan kave out on the sidewalk.” She shook her head. “Those poor pimply little boys—they didn’t wear the pointy white hoods and all that, but they did yell a lot of racial epithets, which the television crews were delighted to record, of course, and for about three or four days the whole country was looking at Cherokee County, Georgia, as this vile bastion of … of … of bigotry, and so forth and so on. You may remember that Frank Farr filmed his talk show right on the main street of Canton. He acted as if he were doing something so courageous, broadcasting a television show inside this benighted backwater. He was talking about poor old Darwell Scruggs and a dozen children. Anyway, land values in Cherokee County suddenly dropped. Investors couldn’t unload their investor land fast enough, and Charlie bought a 142-acre parcel for less than $200,000. Before the march it would have brought four million easily.”
“So he paid Fleet to march on Canton?”
“I don’t know,” said Martha. “He never said so. All I know is that he pointed the man in the direction of Cherokee County. Maybe Fleet was looking for someplace to have a demonstration. He’s in that business, after all. I just don’t know.”
“Godalmighty,” said Peepgass, smiling a smile of wonderment and looking into Martha Croker’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he knew it meant something big and promising. “Does anybody but you know about all this?”
“As I said, there are people who know how he met André Fleet, because I’ve heard him tell that story to people. But I doubt that many people know about Charlie and Darwell Scruggs.”
A big loopy grin spread over Peepgass’s face. Martha couldn’t figure out why. Peepgass himself wasn’t entirely sure. All he knew was that what he had just learned was … dynamite.
Martha said, “Have some more coffee, Ray, and some more Sally Lunn.”
“I will!” said Peepgass, taking another slice of the fabulous bread from the silver gondola. While he loaded the bread with margarine and damson preserves, Martha Croker poured him another cup of coffee. Peepgass took a big bite of the bread, and as his tongue savored the sharp but sweet taste of the preserves, he looked out the middle window of the bay. The moldings around the window were like a frame, and the view was like a perfect painting by … Millais … no, Tissot … or maybe Millais and Tissot … or maybe some Pre-Raphaelite … in the foreground, old Franklin down on his knees … the earth tones of his shoes, his ancient puttees, his old khaki pants, his gray shirt, the faded gray-green Bemberg of the back panel of his vest seemed to blend into the earth into which he was so diligently troweling … then came a dazzling band of royal blue, pink, and white flowers, then the dense dark green of the boxwood border … and beyond that the big-breasted green lawn, suddenly radiant, almost chartreuse, with the sunlight that had made its way between two tall trees …
A fellow could learn to like this.
chapter XXII
Chambodia
POPOLO LOLO POPOLO GRIND YOU BRUDDA MOCKY DIE-DEAD NO make ass no want beef, pouring, gurgling out of Five-O’s mouth as he lay pinned under tons of concrete and the earth shifted and Conrad could feel himself falling off the top bunk—“Hunnh!”—which woke him up.
For an instant he couldn’t get his bearings. Couldn’t be Santa Rita, because he was lying on a floor with a carpet, a filthy carpet, but a carpet all the same. People—Asian faces standing over him and looking down at him, and someone was saying, “Lum loc mung ve nha pao poc, Conrad.”
He propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed his face with his hand. High-pitched giggling. Women. The tiny living room was now packed with people, with Vietnamese—must be fifteen or sixteen of them at least. Last night not nearly so many—last night—and with the recollection of last night, things began to sort themselves out in his mind.
He was on the floor of a shabby little modern apartment at ground level in a town called Chamblee, just outside Atlanta, Georgia. It had happened just the way Mai had promised him it would. He was met at the airport, in the baggage claim area, by a Vietnamese named Lum Loc, who recognized him by his Hi-Gro baseball cap. They got into Lum Loc’s pickup truck, and Lum Loc, a voluble little man, chattered in broken English all the way to Chamblee, to a two-story stucco apartment building with a sign out front reading MEADOW LARK TERRACE. Lum Loc pointed it out and laughed and said:
“Better they call Saigon West! Know what they call Chamblee? Chambodia.” He convulsed with laughter. “You in Chambodia! And this Saigon West!”
He had led him to the rear of the building, where he opened a sliding plate-glass door that also served as a picture window and swept aside some sort of rubbery plastic curtain—and Conrad had found himself in a room full of Vietnamese, ranging in age from five or six to eighty-something, the octogenarian being a wizened, shrunken woman who sat on the floor with her back propped up against a wall. There was a strong odor of fish cooking. Three middle-aged men were hunkered down and leaning forward with their arms between their knees, holding plastic deli plates up to their mouths and using chopsticks to shovel in some sort of rice dish. Two men and a woman were stretched out on the floor on futons, fast asleep. Another woman lay sleeping on the bare carpet, and yet another was asleep on the room’s only piece of furniture, an old-fashioned porch “glider,” which was a couch with plastic-covered cushions set into a metal frame with a big rusting yellow metal armrest at either end. Children were scampering about between the bodies of the quick and the dead asleep, playing some form of stoop tag, and suddenly their eyes and the old woman’s eyes and the eyes of the three squatting men were wide-open and pinned on Conrad. The place was ripe with the smell of too many human bodies in a small space.
Lum Loc had put on a stern voice and barked out something, the only part of which Conrad could make out was his own name, Conrad. To Conrad he said, “Morning I come back with ID.” Then he left via the sliding glass door.
Gingerly Conrad had made his way through the sleeping forms and past the hunkered-down men to investigate the rest of the apartment. All eyes had followed him. No one had said a word. He had had the impression that they didn’t speak a word of English and were almost as newly arrived at Meadow Lark Terrace, at Saigon West, in Chambodia, as he was. The rest of the place consisted of nothing more than a kitchenette, where some sort of fish stew was simmering, a tiny bathroom, and a tiny bedroom, no more than 12 by 9 feet, with at least eight or nine Vietnamese crammed into it. In here the carnal heat was even worse. Conrad had returned to the living room, to the only unclaimed stretch of floor in the place, and lain down, clutching his little traveling bag to his abdomen. The Vietnamese had all stared at him, and he had no idea who they were. He had thought he would never fall asleep, but within sixty seconds he had slid down that never-remembered, deep-folded slope of oblivion.
And now it was morning and the room was lit by daylight that came in through the sliding door where the rubbery curtain had been pulled back. The room was jammed with still more people. He struggled to his feet. He was terribly stiff … and foggy, almost light-headed. Vietnamese everywhere, standing up, lying down, hunkered down. The old woman had at last gotten access to a futon and was stretched out, snoring. Once more they stared at Conrad, or many did. Half a dozen men were engaged in a loud argument. One of them kept saying what Conrad heard as “Phao co nwha tong!”
Conrad smiled at everyone whose eyes he met, to show that he was a … friendly … alien … in this strange place. He had an overwhelming urge to urinate. He made his way through the crowd, smiling as he went toward the bathroom. There were four Vietnamese already lined up in front of the bathroom door.
He waited his turn. The bathroom was a mess. There were footprints on the toilet seat. He couldn’t imagine why. He was just departing the bathroom when he heard his name called out. It sounded like Lum Loc. Smiling as he went, he threaded his way through all the people. Now he could hear Lum Loc shouting something in Vietnamese. The six men suddenly stopped arguing. Lum Loc was berating them. Then he spotted Conrad.
“Conrad, you come here!” Sternly.
Conrad made his way through still more people and followed Lum Loc outside, through the sliding door. He looked this way and that, expecting to find—he didn’t know what. “I’m an escaped convict,” he said to himself. It was a thought so strange, he said it to himself again: “I’m an escaped convict.”
He could tell by the light that it was much earlier than he had thought. “What time is it?”
Lum Loc showed him the face of his wristwatch: 6:40.
Conrad said, “It’s early.”
“Must deal all these people,” said Lum Loc. “Must deal you.”
Between the buildings of Meadow Lark Terrace were wide swaths of grass. Six or seven black-haired children were already playing on a little cluster of swings and jungle gyms. Two Vietnamese women, both wearing black pajama outfits, stood by. Lum Loc motioned for him to step around the corner of the building, out of sight of the street.
“Okay, Conrad.” Lum Loc twisted his arms out of his backpack straps and unzipped the backpack and withdrew a cluster of small paper bags, the sort a stationery store might put greeting cards in when you buy them. He shuffled through them. Most of them had Vietnamese ideographs drawn on them in felt-tip marker. Then he came to the one marked “Conrad.” He opened it and withdrew three items. One was a Social Security card bearing the name Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi. The second was a state of Georgia driver’s license bearing a picture, a head shot, of Conrad and the name Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi. The third was a state of Michigan birth certificate, embossed with an official stamp, bearing the name Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi, born December 2, 1977, to Margaret Stuart DeCasi and Demetrio Giovanni de Bari DeCasi.
“My God …” said Conrad. “How’d you do this?”
Lum Loc laughed. “You don’t need know that. Birth certificate—real.” He put the embossed seal between his thumb and forefinger and gave Conrad a look that invited appreciation of this wonder. “Now you Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi.” This struck Lum Loc as extremely funny. When he stopped laughing, he said, “Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi died in 1982. Sorry, but you don’t get death certificate!” This struck him as even funnier, and he laughed and laughed. Then he turned serious. “Now you get a job.” He motioned toward the apartment. “Cannot stay here always.”
“Where can I get a job?”
“An American? Young as you? Hey, no problem. Those people”—he motioned toward the apartment again—“they work in the chicken plant.”
“Chicken plant?”
“Very big chicken plant in Knowlton. Always they can get jobs in the chicken plant.”
“Doing what?”
“They work on the assembly line. Always they have jobs on the assembly line.”
“Whattaya do on the assembly line?”
With a mixture of words and pantomime Lum Loc described how some slit chickens’ throats all day and some slit their bellies and disemboweled them all day and some took their feathers off all day and some sliced them into parts all day.
“Work hard and very smelly—but I have rule. I help you—then you get work. These people, I tell them they stay inside the building until I give them IDs and they get work. Cannot always walk around doing nothing in Chambodia.” The term Chambodia made him laugh all over again. “But you American, and you have ID, so you can walk around. But you must get job. That is Lum Loc’s way.”
Conrad said, “Where can I get something to eat?”
“You got money?”
“I have … some.”
“Ohhhhh … Buford Highway. Doraville. You can walk.” Lum Loc went on to explain how he should walk down the street in front of Meadow Lark Terrace and through the underpass beneath the MARTA railroad tracks—MARTA, he gathered, was a commuter railroad—and up New Peachtree Road to the Buford Highway, which apparently was a shopping strip of some sort. “MARTA,” he repeated. “This side, America. Other side, Chambodia.” He laughed again.
So Conrad headed off on foot, toward Buford Highway, carrying his overnight bag and thrusting his hand into the pocket of his jeans for the reassuring feel of the $700 he had left. The road out front of Meadow Lark Terrace was wide but ran through groves of trees and had the sleepy feel of any rural road in the early morning. Soon he came upon a cluster of apartment buildings up on a little knoll. A wooden sign out front read: HICKORY HEIGHTS. Duplex Apts. Three black-haired men, Latinos—Mexicans, it seemed to Conrad—were leaning on the railing of the outdoor walkway of the second floor of the building nearest the road. They checked out Conrad, and he looked straight ahead and kept on walking. Just around a bend in the road he came upon a little convenience store with a sign above the front entrance that read B-KWIK and, at each end, featured a picture of a bumblebee with a smiling human face. Out front was a pair of decrepit-looking gasoline pumps and a group of six Mexicans, if that’s what they were, standing with their hands in the pockets of their jeans. They kept looking up and down the road. A pickup truck driven by a middle-aged white man pulled up, and after a brief conversation, two of the Mexicans climbed in, and the truck took off, and now there were four Mexicans with their hands in their pockets, looking up and down the road. They eyed Conrad suspiciously, and he kept on walking. He figured he must be getting near the center of town—Chamblee?—Doraville?—because of all the small commercial establishments … Liza’s Restaurant, which had flowers jigsawed out of wood and painted lilac stuck on the sign at the corners … a little place called the 24-Hour Play Skool … antique shops with names such as Hello Again, the Rust ‘n’ Dust, and Antique Junction … and then a small building housing the City Hall and the police station … Chamblee this was … Two policemen, big meaty white men, came out the door and walked toward a cruiser … Conrad’s scalp suddenly seemed to be on fire … He was … an escaped convict! … For the first time in his life any policeman he saw anywhere was a threat to his freedom! He was a fugitive! … Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the two officers had stopped and were looking him up and down … Zeus! Give me coolness! Give me the … will to avoid! … He kept walking at a steady pace, eyes straight ahead, shoulders back … He could hear the cruiser starting off … and going the other way … What if they had stopped him? He hadn’t even figured out what he would say. What would he say his name was? He couldn’t say Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi. It was too strange a mouthful. He’d say … he’d say … Connie … Connie DeCasi was believable … Looking for work, warehouse work … He’d make sure they saw his big hands and forearms … They’d believe him … He ran his hand over his face … He needed a shave … Needed to be spic-and-span … An underpass up ahead … but it wasn’t a railway line, it was a highway … Once he went through the underpass, he could see the elevated MARTA line, which looked so strange rising up like a massive wall in this little country town. He walked through that underpass, and on the other side … another world! Just as Lum Loc said it would be! Ming’s Auto Service … Kien Ngay Brake Land … Minh Ngoc Travel Agency … Le Phan Mini-Storage … and now he was on New Peachtree Road where it ran into a six-lane strip … the Buford Highway … Hoang Nhung Jewelry … Hong Kong Bakery … Chuyen Tien Money Transactions … Quoc Hu’ong Chicken World … Pho Hoa Insurance Agency … Kim’s Pharmacy … Kien Ngay Music, which featured Vietnamese videos, CDs, and tape recordings … Many shops had no English at all in their signs. Instead, ideographs such as Conrad had never laid eyes on before … Thai? Cambodian? Laotian? Korean? Vietnamese? A big sign on a metal stanchion said ASIAN SQUARE. The cars pulling in—all driven by black-haired people—Asians. Barely ten feet away, a Pontiac Firebird, customized and painted lavender, nosed into a parking space, and from it emerged three young Asian males with long black hair, combed back but extending all the way down the neck to the shoulder line, dressed entirely in black: black warmup jackets, black T-shirts, baggy black homey pants gathered at the ankles where they met sneakers that were black with tongue-like white stripes. With a pumping gait they walked into a restaurant called the Pho Ca Dao.
