A man in full, p.86
A Man in Full, page 86
To Charlie it seemed as if the boy stood there beside him for five minutes without saying a word. He looked as if he were off on a cloud somewhere. What the hell was the big deal about the book?
“All right, Mr. Croker,” the boy said finally, “I’ll leave it with you when I go. But please look after it. Remember, it’s … alive.”
Alive. Charlie didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean, but there was no mistaking the drift of what the boy had said.
chapter XXXI
Roger Black
ALL AT ONCE IT OCCURRED TO ROGER THAT THE VERY FIRST TIME he had come here to City Hall to talk to Wes about Fareek Fanon and Elizabeth Armholster, Wes was the one who hopped up and started pacing this brown-and-white Yoruban phoenix rug with a puzzled but halogen-like gleam in his eye. And this time it was him. Oh yes. Roger Not a Bit Too White.
He couldn’t stay seated. He kept marching up and down all those deep-piled, tall-tufted birds, the phoenixes, with the adrenaline flowing. He felt as if his eyes were burning brighter and brighter with his gradually dawning awareness of his new role in life. Not a Bit Too White.
As for Wes, he remained seated in his armchair, his excitement, if any, over the new Roger successfully contained.
“So I just opened the screen door and walked in!” said Roger. “Then I walked right up to him! He was standing there on his crutches with this attendant, or whatever he was, a white kid, and I was no farther from him than I am from you right now, and I said, ‘This isn’t a game, my friend. Are you going to appear at the press conference or are we going to videotape your statement, or neither? If it’s neither, my friend, a lot of things will have to be changed, starting with PlannersBanc.’”
Wes said, “Did you really keep calling him ‘my friend’?”
“Well, maybe not quite that often, but that’s what I called him.”
“Okay,” said the Mayor, “go ahead.”
“He didn’t say anything at first,” said Roger, “and so I said, ‘Do you understand? … Do—you—understand?’And finally this little peep comes out of this great big man: ‘Yes …’ That’s the way he said it: ‘Yes …’ The great Sixty-Minute Man! Makes you wonder … the way some of these so-called powerful business interests turn out to be when you actually confront them. I said to him, ‘You’ve made a commitment to me, and I’ve been assuring the Mayor you’ll be there. This press conference is going to be a crucial moment for the city.’ I said, ‘You double-cross me—and the Mayor—it won’t be pleasant. You know that, don’t you?’ Meek as a kitten he says, ‘I know that …’ That was the way he was talking! ‘I know that.’ You had to be there, Wes!”
Even as he spoke, it occurred to Roger that he was embroidering the scene more than a tiny bit. But he decided that a little … enhancing … of the truth was justified in this instance, since it helped make up for the missing emotion, tension, and drama of the scene as it had actually occurred.
“Christ,” said Wes, “I hope the sonofabitch isn’t in such bad shape he’s a basket case at the press conference.”
Uh-oh, he’d gone too far. He hastened to reassure the Mayor: “Not at all, Wes, not at all. It’s just that Croker, if you ask me, is your typical bully. When his bluff is called, he folds.”
“So you feel sure he’ll turn up for the press conference,” said the Mayor.
“Oh, absolutely,” said Roger. “He knows that if he doesn’t, it all goes”—he snapped his fingers—“like that, the plantation, the big house in Buckhead—incidentally, I wish you could set foot inside Croker’s place. There’s this entry … hall … or lobby … or whatever you call it, that’s bigger in square feet than most people’s entire houses. I really wish you could see it. The house is worth probably three or four million in the current market. He’ll sing any song you want before he’ll give up the kind of life he’s living now. Croker Concourse, the buildings in Midtown, this wholesale food operation he has—it’s all going to go if he doesn’t come to that press conference.”
“All right,” said Wes, “but just for good measure keep prodding him and reminding him, because I really do need the sonofabitch.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Wes,” said Roger. “He’s going to get daily reminders, and if I have to, I’ll march right back into his house.”
The Mayor looked up at Roger, who was still pacing, and smiled broadly without saying a thing.
Roger stopped and looked down at the Mayor and asked, “What’s funny?”
“You’re really enjoying politics, aren’t you,” said the Mayor.
“Politics?”
“That’s what all this is, Roger, everything you’ve been doing—it’s politics as it’s actually conducted. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m immensely grateful for what you’ve already done. I mean that. All I’m saying is that it gives me pleasure to see you enjoying politics as much as I do. There’s nothing else in this world like it.”
Roger was busy mining Wes’s remarks for irony, but all he said was “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Wes said, “Do you know what politicians really love about politics—what makes politics so hard to give up once you’ve had a taste of it?”
“Oh, I don’t know … Power? Fame? Money?”
Wes laughed. “It’s certainly not money. Anybody who goes into politics to make money has to be an idiot. I know some idiots have done precisely that, but it’s a stupid thing to try. Me, I actually lose money every year, because on my salary I can’t do all the things I’m expected to do. And it’s not power, if by power you mean the power to get things done, change the life of the city, reduce crime, rehabilitate the South side, all those things. And it’s not fame. You quickly get used to publicity. You get used to seeing yourself on television, seeing your picture in the newspaper, even to having a special ‘In Depth’ segment done about you on the NBC nightly news or articles written about you in national magazines or The New York Times. You start to take all that as nothing more than a natural part of your life, your role. You start looking at it as something that’s just … there … like the sky, the sun, the clouds, the night, the moon, the stars, the traffic on Georgia 400. No, what really gets you, what really grabs you, what really turns you into a political junkie is … seein’em jump.”
“Seeing them jump?”
“Exactly. Seein’em jump. Sometimes they’re literally jumping up. Anytime I walk into a room, at least in Atlanta, everybody who’s sitting down is going to jump up, even if it’s the so-called business interests, which is our current euphemism for prominent white people. When it’s time for me to sit down, somebody is going to jump to get me a chair. People in stores—not that I go shopping very often—they drop whatever else they’re doing and jump to see to it I have whatever I want. On that score, white people are no different from African Americans.”
“You’ve started saying ‘African American’?” asked Roger.
“Oh yes,” said the Mayor. “Anyway,” he continued, “if I’m going out to the airport to catch a flight, and I’m running late, they’ll stop the whole damned airport to make sure I catch my flight, if that’s what it takes, and if I’m walking through a public space, whether it’s here near City Hall or out at the airport or wherever, people—white people—will jump to get near me and coo the sweet nothings of fandom and ask for my autograph. Roger, that’s what’s addictive about politics: seein’em jump. And that’s what you’ve had a little taste of. Or a big taste. Charlie Croker has always been a big player in Atlanta, and you’ve had him jumping ever since you first went to see him in his office at Croker Concourse. So far you’ve been a great politician, and you’ve done something very valuable for me and for your client. That having been said—it’s fun, isn’t it, it’s fun!”
Roger frowned. That was a skill Wes had, striking close to the bone before you even knew he was about to thrust. And as usual, Roger resented him even more for being right. Wes was always two steps ahead of him when it came to things like understanding human motivation, and Roger was in no mood to forgive him for it.
“I don’t know that I’d call it fun,” he said, more crossly than he meant to.
“Well, anyway, you’ve done great work, Counselor. Having Croker at that press conference is going to mean more to your client and to this city than you can possibly imagine. I didn’t tell you, but we had a riot on our hands last night.”
“A riot?”
“Exactly. A bunch of the usual homeys are out on the street on English Avenue, and they’re talking shit about how their hero, Fareek ‘the Cannon’ Fanon, has been framed by this wealthy white girl, and their emotions rise, and they start heading over toward the World Congress Center, yelling and breaking windows, and then they made their mistake. They saw a bunch of white men working late on that new construction over there, and so they decided on a little brawling and pillaging. Their mistake was, they went after the wrong white workingmen. These white guys were the wire lathers. They’re the white guys you see at these building sites with hard hats, five-day growths of beard, paunches, and sleeveless T-shirts out of which protrude their eighteen- and twenty-inch biceps. They’d just as soon brawl as drink beer. Either one’s okay with them. Five minutes later there was no more riot. The riot had been outrioted, thank God. I called Elihu Yale”—the police chief—“and told him to put an absolute lid on the whole thing, and nobody in the press ever got wind of it. But that shows you where we are right now. We’re nearing the boiling point. Students have been making speeches at Morehouse—and Spelman, for that matter. The so-called Morehouse elite is all for solidarity on an issue like this—if there’s ever been an issue like this. They’re all convinced that Fanon was set up and framed.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“Not if you use ‘framed’ to mean a plot that’s hatched ahead of time. If you mean framed in the sense of did she use the R-word as an on-the-spot excuse when her girlfriends find her balling a 225-pound African American, that I find believable. That’s Fareek the Cannon’s story, and it’s believable.”
“I’m sorry,” said Roger, “but it strikes me as funny, hearing you use the term African American after all the things you said about Jesse Jackson.”
The Mayor put on his ironic smile. “As I told you, times change and things change. When Jesse hits a home run, there’s no use grousing about it. There’s nothing to do but record the score. Come on, sit down. You’re making me nervous.” The Mayor gestured toward the couch.
Roger Not a Bit Too White sat down, but before he knew it, he was on his feet again, pacing the phoenix rug, looking at the patterns that the ivory Yoruban ceremonial swords made against the ebony paneling, and musing to Wes about Charlie Croker and how he wouldn’t be happy until he saw him jump straight through the hoop.
Charlie had always used the term below the gnat line as a piece of Down Home humor. But this time it didn’t strike him as funny. As he hobbled on his aluminum crutches from the Cadillac toward the Big House, black gnats were dive-bombing his eyes in waves, without any letup. Why the eyes? Probably the water. They wanted to drink the water out of his eyes. Because of the crutches he couldn’t lift his hands high enough to shoo them away. Now he could hear them singing in his ears. Turpmtine was not the place to be in the summertime. In the summertime South Georgia bowed down, helplessly, abjectly, to her rulers, the insects.
“Owooooh!” That was Serena, who was just behind him. “Charlie! A bee stung me!”
“Wasn’t a bee,” said Charlie, without looking around. “’Sa fly.” Probably a black fly, thought Charlie. Mean little bastards. They were mottled, mostly black, in an unhealthy-looking way, and their wings were swept back like a jet fighter’s or a Stealth bomber’s. They never missed. But it could have been a yellow fly or a horsefly. All three of them stung, but there was no need to go into all that with Serena. He turned his head about and said:
“Heidi! Cover up the baby’s face with something.” He almost never referred to her as Kingsley.
“You don’t worry, Mr. Croker,” said Heidi. “I hold her—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—close to me—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—and I have chiffon.”
Serena again: “Charlie! Damn it! Another one! How can a fly—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—how can a—damn it, Charlie, another one!”
Charlie knew that whuhhhhhh whuhhhhh sound from way back before the first word he ever knew. It was the sound of a human being, a hopelessly slow species, trying to blow the gnat swarms away from her eyes in Baker County in the summertime.
“Ughhhh!” That was Connie, carrying the bags and bringing up the rear, muttering to himself. No doubt the flies attacked him, too, but he was the Stoic.
Shit! One of them got Charlie in the back of the neck, and they still had another thirty feet to go before they reached the front door.
“Charlie!” said Serena. “What are these little—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—white things? They’re disgusting!”
Charlie saw them, too: another mottled fly, but mottled white instead of black. “They’re privy flies,” he said. “They won’t hurt you.”
“What are privy flies?”
“They swarm around—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh— privies.”
“What’s a privy?”
“An outhouse.”
“That’s—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—disgusting! Uckkkkkkkkkkkk—I just stepped on something disgusting, too!”
A foul odor rose from the path as these wayfarers struggled through the badlands in the kingdom of the insects.
“There’s millipedes on the walkway. That’s what you smell there. Try not to step on ’em.”
“Mr. Croker!” said Heidi. “What happen to tree?”
Charlie craned his head about and saw her holding the baby with one arm and pointing with the other toward a maple tree. The branches appeared to be festering with some dreadful disease.
“Tent caterpillars,” said Charlie.
They had infested the entire tree. They would strip it bare of leaves before they were through.
“That sound,” said Serena, “is that the—whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh whuhhhhh—sound of them eating?”
“Yep,” said Charlie. They did make a sort of crunch crunch sound. In fact, it was the sound of them defecating, the sound of the droppings of tens of thousands of tent caterpillars hitting the ground. But no use introducing that piece of information when there’s still fifteen feet to go before reaching the front door. And no use mentioning that now, in June, in Baker County, right over there, in the shade beneath the live oaks and the magnolias, there’ll be mosquitoes, jumbo mosquitoes, thoroughbreds of the family Culicidae, right in the middle of the day. It wasn’t far from here to Jookers Swamp, where the mosquitoes multiplied by the billions in June and grew up looking for blood to suck. And no use calling attention to that old live-oak stump over there in the shade. Try sitting on that for a moment to rest your weary bones and get a little respite from the sun, or try lying down on this nice soft bed of pine tags over here. The mosquitoes, yellow flies, horseflies, black flies, and gnats will attack from above—and the chiggers will be after your ankles, your thighs, your neck, and your big unsuspecting bottom faster than you can pronounce the word. June was the chiggers’ month. For the chiggers, June was Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. Nothing those vicious, fiery red mites liked better than a human bottom sitting on a tree stump in June. A single chigger bite would give you a red welt that would burn and itch for a week.
Godalmighty it was hot. The cicadas were up in the trees rattling away. They were big, as bugs went, the cicadas were; an inch and a half long, some of them; and ugly, too; and noisy. In Baker County, when the sun reaches its zenith in June, and the cicadas descend on the trees and start that damned rattle of theirs, and you can’t get the vibrations out of your eardrums, that’s when you start “seeing the monkey,” as the field hands used to say. That was Charlie right now. The black gnats and three kinds of sweptwing flies were after him, and it was hot as hell, and he was seeing the monkey.
He glanced over his shoulder, and Connie was right behind him, carrying in the bags. Connie had done the driving, and he, Charlie, had sat in the back seat with Serena. Frankly, Connie had made him half-crazy, because he wouldn’t go more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, or maybe ten. Christ, it was bad enough to have to drive all the way from Atlanta. Durwood and the boys would start buzzing about that, all right. Cap’m Charlie always came to Turpmtine by airplane; not always the G-5, sometimes the Beechjet, but always by airplane. What could he say? The bad leg made it too hard to go up and down the Beechjet’s stairs? Aw, the hell with it. He wasn’t obliged to explain anything to anybody … although he felt a tremendous need to.
The Big House was set in a grove of live oaks, magnolias, and dogwoods. The white blossoms of the magnolias had never been more profuse or more lush. But with the magnolias, it wasn’t just the blossoms that got you. There were also the leaves, long, thick, deep green leaves, each one of which shone as if it had been waxed and polished by hand. The branches came all the way down to the ground, and the tops rose to a point, like a Christmas tree, and when you saw a dozen of them, arranged on either side of the Big House like this, it made you catch your breath, no matter how many times you had seen them before. The porch, which went almost all the way around the house, was about four feet above the ground, and the Confederate roses had grown on the trellises below the porch in such masses of blossoms, it seemed as if the house had been built atop a vast mound of flowers. Inside the house it was liable to be musty, since he hadn’t used it for several weeks, and no place on earth was hotter and more humid than Baker County, Georgia, in the summertime. Thank God he had put in central air conditioning ten—or was it eleven?—years ago, back when a $110,000 HVAC system seemed like nothing, a mere routine expense. Now he couldn’t put together $110,000 to buy anything. God … if only he didn’t feel so tired. He never slept anymore. He was dead tired from the moment he got up in the morning. He didn’t want to get up. Not for a minute. He only got up because he knew Serena would break his balls if he didn’t—that and the fact that he would look bad in Connie’s eyes. So … clackclack … clackclack … clackclack … clackclack … he made his way to the front stairs that led up to the porch. He looked at the stairs and delivered himself of a great sigh.
