A man in full, p.74
A Man in Full, page 74
“Me?”
“Look, nobody’s gonna ask you to say Fareek ain’t guilty in this thing, because that you don’t know. Just like I don’t know. And nobody’s even gonna ask you to say anything nice about Fareek. I know he’s not the easiest kid in the world to get along with. Although a lot of it is that nobody ever raised him to be polite. Nobody ever taught him about everyday common courtesy. All you’d have to do would be to tell what you do know, namely, that you’ve been there before. You know the pressures of being a football star for Tech, in a town like this that goes crazy over the sport. You know how people try to exploit you—or whatever—however you want to put it.”
Charlie was speechless. His lips were parted.
“And look at it this way,” said McNutter. “You wouldn’t be speaking out on behalf of Fareek or even on behalf of Tech, although it would mean a lot to Tech, and I’m talking about from Welly Swindell all the way down. No, you’d be doing something for the whole city. You’d be saying, ‘Whoa! Slow down! Let’s don’t rush to any judgments here! Let’s don’t tear ourselves apart along racial lines!’ And you know what? The whole town will applaud you. Everybody’ll talk about your courage, including the Journal-Constitution. You can be sure that they’ll be behind you a hundred percent. Your very presence there—a press conference is what we’re thinking of—your presence, saying ’Stay cool, let’s wait for the facts, let’s have open minds, let’s be fair’—the press will hail your very presence as an act of leadership and courage.”
“Great,” said Charlie. “And what other courageous white people you think are gonna show up for this?”
“That’s a fair question, Charlie,” said McNutter, “and I’m gonna answer it as candidly as I can. So far all I know of is Herb Richman. You know, the guy who owns all the fitness centers, DefinitionAmerica?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Charlie. Jewish and a liberal; the phrase was by now fixed in his brain.
“But he don’t really carry much weight,” said McNutter.
“And what about you?” said Charlie.
“Me?”
“Yeah. Are you gonna speak out for Fareek?”
“Well, we been thinking about whether I ought to or not. I’d come across as an obviously interested party.”
“Unnh-hunnnnh,” said Charlie dubiously.
“So how about it?” said Buck McNutter.
Charlie just stood there staring at McNutter’s huge head and its fussy silver-blond hairdo here in Langhorn Epps’s old mahogany-paneled study. So he was to be the lone white person speaking out on behalf of this lout! Inman … It was impossible! Who could he look in the face after that? Who of all the people he had entertained at Turpmtine would ever come again? On the other hand, if he refused—then suppose he lost Turpmtine, lost everything he had, including his house on Blackland Road—was wiped out! demolished!—the result would be the same, wouldn’t it! No one would come visit him then, either! All that which comprised the great Cap’m Charlie—punctured, deflated, humiliated abjectly, pitied … and not even that for very long.
chapter XXV
Starring Darwell Scruggs
LATE THIS PARTICULAR AFTERNOON, AS USUAL, CHARLIE DROVE home from Croker Concourse and went in the house and headed for the library, where Jarmaine Woo always left his mail in a neat, squared-off pile on his desk, right in front of his chair, an old walnut swivel chair upholstered in oxblood-red leather, the most comfortable chair in the house to Charlie’s way of thinking. As usual, he took off his jacket, loosened his necktie, and opened his shirt at the collar as soon as he entered the room, sat in the chair, turned on the desk lamp, leaned back, exhaled a contented sigh, and eyed his stack of mail, which was no greater and no smaller than usual. In an age of telephones, faxes, and computers, the mail seldom required any true cogitation. Fund-raising requests, invitations, bills, mail-order catalogues; and there you had it. Charlie had come to look forward to this mindless interlude. Mindlessness meant not thinking about PlannersBanc, Fareek Fanon, Inman Armholster, perfidy, betrayal, or financial ruin.
And then he noticed a package Jarmaine had placed to the left of the stack of mail and slightly behind it. Idly he leaned forward and picked it up and sank back in the swivel chair again. No postage; must have been delivered by a courier service. It was one of those padded manila mailers that books come in, and indeed the contours of what was inside looked like a book’s. In the upper-left-hand corner, in a typeface with a lot of bold flourishes that Charlie couldn’t have begun to describe, was the legend STONE MOUNTAIN PRODUCTIONS, with an address in Decatur. In the lower-left-hand corner was a large gold seal, almost three inches in diameter, bearing more fancy type, which said: Croker Concourse: A Vision of the Future. Then in smaller letters: “A Stone Mountain Production.”
Charlie sat upright in the chair. What the hell was this supposed to be? Croker Concourse? A Vision of the Future?
He found the mailer’s little opener tab and ripped it open and pulled out … a videotape cassette. On one edge was a label in the same typeface, but smaller, saying: “Croker Concourse: A Vision of the Future. A Stone Mountain Production.” Various possibilities came churning through his mind. His own publicity people? Had they made a promotional tape without his knowledge? Or was he always so groggy from insomnia he had forgotten?
Wearily he got up from his beloved chair and limped over to the television set, a monster concealed in an old-fashioned cherry-wood cabinet the size of a closet, and inserted the tape in the VCR slot. The set immediately came to life, and Charlie limped back to his desk, withdrew a little remote-control gadget from a drawer, and sank back in his chair once more. At first, no sound: just an FBI warning about unauthorized use of this material—Never saw a promotional tape with an FBI warning, thought Charlie—and then “Croker Concourse: A Vision of the Future” and “A Stone Mountain Production” in bold white lettering against a black background, and then music, just music at first, no picture. The music Charlie recognized. BOOM boom BOOM boom—it was the same as the theme song for that movie—what was it called?—2001, that was the name of it, 2001: A Space Odyssey. BOOM boom BOOM boom DAH dahhhhhh— but wasn’t that a little … bombastic for a real estate video? Then came the picture. The camera seemed to be swinging across an infinite sea of green. The tops of trees were what you were looking at, a lush forest stretching on toward the horizon, and then, in the distance, a tower with a dome-like top: the tower at Croker Concourse. The 2001 music continued, and as the camera drew slowly closer to the tower, a voice … a solemn baritone voice … said: “From out of the tangled trees and thickets of Cherokee County, Georgia, a land formerly devoted to hoed rows, lowing cattle, and country stores with Coca-Cola emblems at either end of the sign out front, rises …” The camera now had the tower in a close-up—“one man’s vision of the future … for metro Atlanta … if not, indeed, metro America.” The BOOM boom DAH dahhhhhhhh music swelled up into a veritable thunder of grandiloquence. The camera was now above Croker Concourse and showed the roofs of the mall, the hotel, the apartments, the tower, before lingering, for some unfathomable reason, over the immense blacktop of the parking area, which was practically empty. The camera lingered and lingered and lingered over all that empty asphalt. Charlie was going to have to have a few words with whoever approved the editing of this damned thing.
Meantime, the voice was saying: “And that man is … Charles Earl Croker.” A stock publicity shot of Charlie filled the screen. Earl? He never used the Earl, and he had told them not to use it in publicity material … Take your eye off the ball for a couple of seconds and these people will find some way to screw up on you every time … “And that development is … Croker Concourse …” BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM boom … Now the camera lingered lovingly on the tower itself, moving slowly down one side. Floor after floor … you could see clear through them … Looking through the window on this side you could see through the window wall on the far side … floor after floor after floor … because there were no tenants in them … The damnable term see-through building—the name for new developments that were desperately short of tenants—popped unbidden into Charlie’s brain. The solemn voice said: “And that future? … a future free from leasehold obligations and, for that matter, leases.” What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Suddenly—no more Croker Concourse, no more trees, no more music. Instead, a man in a gray suit sitting alone at a long plastic-laminate conference table in a practically bare room. The man was smiling and looking straight into the camera as he said:
“Good morning, Mr. Croker, or good afternoon or good evening, whatever the case may be.”
Him! The insolent one with the big chin! Zale or Zell or whatever it is! What the hell was this? Charlie wanted to kill the picture with the clicker, the remote-control gadget, but he was too morbidly hypnotized by what he now saw.
“We’ve chosen this unconventional way of saying hello because our conventional attempts—I might mention innumerable telephone calls, letters, faxes, E-mail, FedEx envelopes, and in-person requests for audiences—have produced no response. But we feel sure that you will respond to this documentary about the creation of Croker Concourse.”
Now Charlie recognized where this bastard was. The conference table he was sitting at was the same one they had used for the workout session. You could see the modular units that made up the table but didn’t meet truly. In the background, over there, was that same dying dracaena plant with the drooping yellow fronds. And visible on a side wall: one of the huge rude NO SMOKING signs.
Zale’s rasping, grinding voice was saying: “Our story begins seven years ago, when Charlie Croker was looking for land in the southern part of Cherokee County for a grand outer perimeter mixed-use development. To his surprise, he learned that speculators had already decided that the county had a great future and had bought up most of the land and were willing to sit on it until the moment for high-priced development arrived. As things now stood, the land was prohibitively expensive. The acreage Charlie Croker required for Croker Concourse would have cost approximately $4 million.”
The sound of this man’s grating voice, the cocksureness with which he tilted his great melon of a chin up whenever he wanted to make a particularly salient point, reminded Charlie all too grimly of how much this bastard had already humiliated him. Yet he couldn’t turn him off. He was spellbound. What nasty surprise did his nemesis have for him this time?
The nemesis continued: “One day Charlie Croker was driving slowly through a Cherokee County back road, looking for land the speculators might have missed, when he came upon a familiar figure walking along the side of the road. His name was Darwell Scruggs.”
Now a picture of Darwell filled the screen, but a picture from way back. It was from the high-school annual! No mistaking Darwell: that thin, hollow-cheeked face coupled with huge ears that stuck way out to here and a nose about twice too big for his face. Back then the annual was a homemade job. You got Ping-Pong pictures of yourself for everybody in the class, and you wrote each other’s captions, and you pasted it all up in scrapbooks, and you made one extra, which the school kept.
This man Zale was saying: “Charlie Croker and Darwell Scruggs had been classmates in high school in Baker County thirty-five years ago, and so Croker stopped his car, greeted his old friend, and talked a bit. In high school Darwell Scruggs had been memorable mainly because he had joined the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager and bragged about it openly. Darwell was now living in Cherokee County, where he had formed a Klan kave himself. ‘Aha!’ said Charlie Croker.”
The wrenching, rasping voice of this man Zale proceeded to tell the whole story of Charlie’s oh-so-ingenious and oh-so-insidious scheme. There was André Fleet leading his placard-carrying black protesters from Atlanta through Canton, the county seat. There was Darwell Scruggs, albeit not in white raiment and pointy hood, screaming vile racial imprecations along with a pack of raggedy youths. There were television crews from around the country, and there was Frank Farr’s network talk show boldly broadcast from the very main drag of Canton as a fist in the face of racism … And there was the reputation of lovely, leafy Cherokee County being dragged through the muck … And there were close-ups of deeds of transfer showing that Charlie Croker had now been able to assemble his land in this viciously slandered county for about $200,000, one-twentieth of what it would have cost before André Fleet and Darwell Scruggs did their duet.
Then this Zale’s face grew larger on the screen, and his eyes seemed to pierce Charlie’s. “As far as we can tell, Mr. Croker, there is nothing illegal about any action you took. You merely manipulated public opinion. Happens every day in this free country of ours. Congratulations. The citizens of Cherokee County will no doubt marvel at your cleverness.” He smiled broadly and, as the camera pulled back, opened the jacket of his suit in order to adjust his belt where it went through the belt loops on the sides. And now you could see his suspenders. Death’s-heads ran up and down a black road on either side. BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM—and the music reached its finale as the picture of that impudent gladiola faded out on the screen.
Charlie felt as if he had just been kicked in the abdomen by a horse. His head and shoulders keeled forward and he shut his eyes and slumped over. How did they know? Who could have possibly told them? There were a few people who knew he had been “friendly with” André Fleet at one time. But nobody knew about Darwell Scruggs. Nobody would see it as just a shrewd move by a developer, would they … They’d want his head. They’d want his very hide. It would be worth his life to step across the county line—or to show up at the Piedmont Driving Club, as far as that went. Just let this tape circulate and he’d be finished. How did they know! Too late to even ask. The fact was, they knew!
Slumped over like a dead man, he opened his eyes and let them pan around the room. The Great Man’s Library … by the celebrated Mr. Ronald Vine of New York … all the carved wood, the $250-a-yard fabrics, the custom-made carpet from What-the-hell-was-the-name-of-that-place-in-New-York … He was precisely where he had dreamed of being as a young man: living in a mansion in Buckhead, the master builder of metro Atlanta, creator of a gleaming tower named after himself, a man whose footsteps made the halls of the mighty vibrate … and how hollow it all was! It meant only that when your egomania and the defects in your character finally plunged you into ruin, your collapse would provoke more and tastier gloating. That would be it! They’d chuckle, rub their hands together, and smack their lips—and that would be the great Charlie Croker’s entire legacy. What a fraud he was!—sitting here in his oxblood leather throne as if any of it were still … his … Why couldn’t he put an end to it all by … disintegrating, by vanishing, by walking out into the woods and never coming back? … Oh sure … With his knee, he’d be lucky to walk a hundred yards … Why couldn’t he—
Dear Lord—take me away! Take me away in the night! I go to bed and never wake up, and it’s all over … But shit, never wake up?—never wake up, how? I have total insomnia, I never go to sleep in the first place! … Besides, just how could the Lord take him away? Via a heart attack—or what? He was a logical enough candidate for a heart attack. He was way too heavy, and he hadn’t taken care of himself when it came to diet or exercise, and his was what they call a type—what the hell kind of type was it?—he had that type of personality. But if he just lay down at night and waited for God to call him across the river Jordan via coronary ischemia, he might have a long wait. Maybe he could induce a heart attack. He would start running, sprinting the way they used to sprint in training at Tech, and his heart couldn’t take it—but neither could his knee. Jesus Christ … he could see it now … He’s running like hell in order to kill himself … and he has to discontinue killing himself because his knee hurts … Reminded him of the story he had read somewhere of the man who decided to kill himself by swimming out to sea until he was utterly exhausted and then would have no choice but to sink and drown. So he starts out—and all of fifteen yards from shore he runs into a flotilla of stinging nettles and can’t stand it and turns back. Well—why not the sea? And in that moment he understood for the first time the death of Robert Maxwell, whose body had been found in the sea near where his yacht was moored. No one had ever been able to figure it out, but now Charlie … knew. Maxwell had faced bankruptcy, humiliation, and, likely as not, a prison sentence. So he climbed over the railing of the yacht one night and hung from the edge of the deck by his fingertips. He hung on until he couldn’t hang on anymore. He hung on until his immense weight, almost three hundred pounds, began to tear the muscles of his shoulders and his upper back. Then he let loose and hit the water and swallowed the ocean and drowned. The torn muscles made it look as if he had slipped overboard and had struggled mightily to clamber back to safety. That way he didn’t let the bastards have the satisfaction of knowing he had taken his own life. But he, Charlie, didn’t have a yacht. Maybe— a shotgun. He handled shotguns all the time, and a shotgun could blow you away at short range. Fontaine Perry! Fontaine Perry had owned a big plantation near Thomasville, and one day he was out hunting wild turkey. So he winged one, and the bird led him on one of those wild chases through the underbrush such as only turkeys can do. Fontaine is plunging down a slope after the turkey, and he stumbles, and a vine rips the shotgun out of his hands and twists it about so that he falls on the muzzle, and the gun discharges right into his belly. You don’t survive a load of buckshot in your intestines, and the accident would be easy enough to simulate. But Jesus Christ, how Fontaine suffered! Hung on for three days—in mortal agony! And suppose, through some “miracle,” you didn’t die, and you had to live as a cripple with a colostomy bag—and you still had all your problems … and all the vultures were still circling … There had to be some way to do it the way Maxwell did it … What was he thinking—
Christ, why didn’t he just put the shotgun in his mouth and be done with it? But then he would be right back where he started. The bastards would … gloat … and who was supposed to have the nice surprise of coming upon your body with your head exploded like a melon and your brains all over the wallpaper?
