A man in full, p.91
A Man in Full, page 91
Roger interrupted. “You’re sticking with African American, even now that the election’s over?”
“I’m sticking with it, brother, I’m sticking with it, sticking with it, sticking with it. In fact, I’m stuck with it.”
Roger said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“That’s okay. Anyway, we now know that practically every African-American voter looked upon Croker’s performance as a betrayal of Fareek. Obviously he had agreed to be at the press conference to say something entirely different, and then, like a snake, he does all he can to destroy Fareek’s personal reputation. He calls him arrogant, obnoxious, impertinent, and an animal who grabs whatever he wants. I probably got more sympathy for that than anything else that happened in the whole campaign. It looked as if the white business interests were out to sabotage me. And I don’t get much sympathy as a rule, Roger. Oh, I think people look at me in a generally good way, but I strike them as a little too … selfconfident, or whatever it is.”
“Gee,” said Roger, “wonder why. Incidentally, I don’t know if I ever told you, but that line about the snake—Croker had said something about ‘the Manager, the weasel, and the snake’?—and you elbowed him away from the microphone and said you hadn’t heard the Manager talking, so it must have been the weasel or the snake?—you remember that?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, that was brilliant, Wes. It was one of the best ad lib lines I ever heard. But now, please explain something else to me. You had thought of getting Croker to support Fareek because you didn’t want to alienate your white support by defending Fareek in a rape case involving Armholster’s daughter. So what happened to your white vote?”
“I did lose some white support. No question about it. But two things softened the blow. First, it brought me so much more black support. And Croker’s performance was so crazy—all that talk about the Manager and the two elements and how it’s better to be a tranquil beggar by the side of the road than a perturbed plutocrat in Buckhead—Godalmighty!—he was so crazy that day. Then he announces he’s giving away everything he has—I mean, he sounded so crazy, a lot of white voters ended up discounting everything he said, including his vilification of Fareek. Tens of thousands of people watched that press conference on television, because the subject was race and sex.”
“What did happen to Croker? I never hear anything about him.”
Wes smiled broadly. “You don’t? You’ve got to put your ear to the ground, Brother Roger. Croker’s out there stomping around. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. He said, ‘Okay, boys’”—Wes turned his palms up and then lifted them in the gesture that says “empty”—“‘here it is. It’s all yours. You fight over it.’ I mean, he walked away from a corporation worth hundreds of millions. Of course, his debts were even greater, by another couple of hundred million or so, but still—it was unbelievable. Now he’s an evangelist.”
“An evangelist?”
“Exactly—and apparently doing very well.”
“Oh—come—on! What in God’s name is he preaching?”
“Nothing in God’s name. He’s out there talking about the Manager … him and Zeus. Apparently the two names are interchangeable. And there’s Epi-something—I can’t remember the name. And there’s Messenger Connie, who’ll soon be returning to Earth from wherever.”
“Zeus?”
“Yep. Zeus and the Manager—and he calls himself a Stoic.”
“Where’s he doing all this?”
“He started off down in Baker County,” said Wes, “and now he’s moved into the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama. Apparently he’s dynamite, at least among white folks who go in for that sort of thing. He can talk your socks off, and the bills out of your wallet, is what I hear. The fact that he gave up everything—and he had a lot—to work for the Manager gives him tremendous credibility. He’s about to sign a syndication deal with Fox Broadcasting.”
“Fox Broadcasting?”
“That’s the word. It’s going to be called The Stoic’s Hour.”
Roger’s mouth hung partway open. “Dear God in heaven … The Manager … Zeus … national television … The Stoic’s Hour … I think I’m going crazy, Wes.”
The Mayor laughed. “I’ll tell you something. A lot of white folks look down on the way we worship. They think we’re too emotional and demonstrative and so forth. Our choirs sway when they sing and clap their hands to the beat. Our preachers don’t just preach, they o-rate. Our congregations don’t just sit there mumbling, they shout ‘Right on!’ ‘Hallelujah! ’ ‘Say it, brother’ and ‘Amen.’ But I’ll tell you something. At least our people don’t turn … weird. At least they don’t start praying to the Manager and Zeus and calling themselves Stoics as soon as some old ox with a deep voice comes to town with a tent. I mean, Godalmighty.”
“What about—”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said the Mayor, “but I’ve just got to show you this little footnote to Croker and Zeus and the Manager and all that.” He got up, went into his little inner office, and came back with a small newspaper clipping, which he handed to Roger. “Take a look at the headline.”
The headline said: TURN ME LOOSE, ZEUS.
“That’s from some paper in Oakland, this summer. Anyway, as you’ll see there, it’s about a young man named Hensley, a white kid. He escaped from jail in California during that earthquake last whenever it was, and he turns himself in sometime in July, and he’s about to be sentenced, and the judge asks him if he has anything to say, and the kid says, ‘It’s up to you to do your part, Judge, and it’s up to me to do mine.’ And so the judge says, ‘You seem awfully relaxed about the whole thing.’ And the kid says, ‘I’m completely tranquil.’ That’s the word he uses, tranquil. ‘I feel completely in accord with nature,’ he says. Then he says, right here”—Wes pointed it out in the clipping—“he says, ‘My body, it’s nothing but a clay bowl with a quart of blood, and it’s only on loan in the first place. But Zeus has given each of us a spark of his divinity, the ability to say yes to what is true, and no to what is false, and no one can take that away from you, not even in prison.’ So the judge says, ‘Zeus, hunh? Escape from custody is a serious offense, but I’m going to take a chance on you. I’m setting you free on two years’ probation, in the custody of Zeus.’ You’ll never guess who this kid is.”
“Zeus. Must be Charlie Croker’s son or something. Who is it?”
“Elihu Yale, the police chief, sent the clipping over last week. Seems that last spring the California State Police, or whoever it was, asked our police department to be on the lookout for this kid who had broken out of jail and was believed to be in the Atlanta area. The FBI had done some kind of phone taps. The kid had been in jail for aggravated assault. By the time our department finally got a lead on him, he was long gone from Atlanta. He’d been working here for an outfit called Carter Home Care as a sort of attendant for sick people. One of the people he worked for—are you ready for this?—was Charlie Croker. I don’t know if you remember, but he was the kid who helped Croker up to the landing for the press conference.”
“I remember him!” said Roger. “I saw him at Croker’s house, too. He had these huge forearms.” He made a gesture over his left forearm with his right hand.
“Oh sure,” said Wes. “All these convicts do is lift weights and make license plates. But you can see what happened. Croker converts the poor bastard to this weird Zeus religion of his, and the kid goes and pulls this Zeus stuff on some California judge—and it works! Can you believe that? I’ll tell you what I said before. You can find fault with our people when it comes to faith, if you want to, but we—do—not—turn—weird on you. Isn’t that a great headline? TURN ME LOOSE, ZEUS? I don’t know how they think up these things. Anyway, I’m sorry, Roger, I interrupted you.”
Roger said, “Yeah, uh … what the hell was I was going to ask you? Oh yeah. What about Croker’s wife? You remember that number?”
“Oh yes,” said the Mayor.
“So is she out on the camp-meeting circuit with Croker, too?” asked Roger.
“Not that I know of,” said the Mayor. “I don’t think young Mrs. Croker is very spiritual. I think she believes that everything that’s sweet in this life ends when we die.”
“Didn’t they have a child?”
“A little girl,” said Wes. “Her name is Kingsley Croker.” He pulled a face, as if to say, “Pretty outlandish name, hunh?”
“And she’s with her mother, I assume?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Wes. “You know, when these hot little vamps marry their rich old men, they often have a child as fast as they can, as an insurance policy. What happens to the child when there’s nothing left to insure, I don’t want to think about.”
“What did happen to all his property?”
“Oh, the creditors—you remember he said, ‘The keys are on the table, they’re all yours, go to it,’ or something like that? Well, PlannersBanc and all the other creditors were ecstatic at first. Croker wasn’t going to tie them up in Chapter 11, which could’ve dragged on for years. So they all had at it—and now they’re busy suing each other, the creditors are, and it’ll probably drag on for decades. There’s been some funny fallout from this thing. You’re a lawyer, you’ve probably heard of ‘surrendering a deed in lieu of foreclosure’?”
Roger nodded to show that he had.
“Well, Croker just handed over his deeds, including the deed to the property that ruined him, Croker Concourse. You remember Croker Concourse?”
Roger nodded again.
“If you’re handed the deed, in lieu of foreclosure, you don’t have to have an auction, but what happened was, Croker and his financial troubles got so much publicity following the press conference, all sorts of vultures and bottom-fishers got interested in Croker Concourse, figuring they could get it on the cheap. So they started bidding against each other, and pretty soon PlannersBanc had an auction going, all the same. They got $130 million for the thing. Some group from Dallas bought it. That was a lot less than they’d lent Croker for it, but at least they got away with their hides. In the middle of the whole thing they discover that one of their loan officers, a guy named Peepgass, has secretly formed a syndicate to buy the thing for $50 million, which he was going to talk his superiors into accepting. Of course they canned the guy—but that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that just last month this Peepgass married Charlie Croker’s first wife! I’m not kidding! And so now he’s living in a mansion in Buckhead that Croker paid for, with a woman who has millions Croker had to give her in the divorce settlement. Meantime, the guy’s involved in a paternity suit with some woman in Decatur, but that didn’t seem to bother the former Mrs. Croker.” Wes shook his head and then smiled his best ironic smile and said, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”
Roger laughed and said, “Wes, I still don’t see how that whole thing with Croker turned the election around, or were you speaking in hyperbole?”
Wes maintained his ironic smile, but then looked through the plate-glass window, as if toward the murky clouds outside. He stayed that way for what seemed like a very long time.
Then he turned back toward Roger, smiled faintly, and said, “Do you remember the first time you came in here, and I asked you if I could speak to you as Brother Wes and Brother Roger? I never regretted that, incidentally.”
“Oh, I remember.”
“Can we do that again, just Brother Wes and Brother Roger?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay. And do you also remember one time I told you that when you enter a citywide race, in the first month you’re going to learn 100 percent more about politics than you ever knew before and that in your second month you’ll learn 200 percent more, and so on?”
“I sure do.”
“Maybe I’m just vain, but I figure that just being privy to my campaign as much as you were, you probably learned about 25 percent more than you knew before. Am I close?”
“No,” said Roger, “because I’m sure it was a lot more than that.”
“Well now, Brother Roger, I’m going to tell you something that ought to raise your political IQ a little more. The first time you came to see me, you told me about how Inman Armholster was furious, and he was going around to people at Tech saying that Fareek had raped his daughter. Right?”
“Right.”
“And I told you Inman Armholster was the one who was putting up André Fleet’s get-out-the-vote money.”
“Right.”
“I knew right away this was important information, but at first I couldn’t figure out anything to do with it. The news that Armholster wanted Fareek’s hide was spreading pretty fast, but nobody was about to run a newspaper story or something on the television about a rape case in which no charges had been filed, particularly when the male and female were Fareek Fanon and Inman Armholster’s daughter. Then from out of nowhere come these two nuts with their ‘Chasing the Dragon.’”
“Who are they, anyway?”
“A couple of Internet creeps, is my considered opinion,” said the Mayor. “They look like two white noodles with hair. Makes you itch when you’re in the same room with them. But they do put out an Internet gossip column. Atlanta’s very short on gossip columns. In New York all sorts of personal things about well-known people get slipped into gossip columns, but in Atlanta there’s just these two nutcases.”
“It sounds like you met them.”
“Oh, sure,” said Wes. “After their big coup they began showing up at City Hall as reporters in search of their due deference.”
“For God’s sake.”
“Well, for about a week, Roger, they had this town humming. Once they published the story, and then the newspapers published it, I knew what I had to do.”
“Which was what?” said Roger.
“Call my State of the City press conference. I was genuinely concerned that the whole thing might blow up into something very ugly, and that’s exactly what I’d told Armholster when I met with him. But the press conference was sort of a borderline call, to tell the truth. Fareek is an admired figure in South Atlanta, but he’s not what you’d call a beloved figure. Oh, people are for him, and everybody is proud that one of their own has made it big, and I’m sure there are lots of teenage boys who identify with him. But Fareek is not warm, he’s not good, he’s not kind, he doesn’t come back to do good deeds in the community, he’s not charming—boy, is he not charming. Our polls showed that African Americans in Atlanta believed Fareek was being railroaded, but it didn’t amount to a widespread anger with any real voltage to it. All we had was one halfway riot, the one I told you about. But I had my own reason for having the press conference. It would be my only chance to speak out in behalf of your client.”
“What do you mean?”
“No politician can go around taking sides in sex cases, because the facts can come out and blow up in your face at any time. But when the issue is not guilt or innocence but fairness, justice, individual rights, and peace and calm in the city—then you can have your say, and I came down as hard in favor of Fareek Fanon as it was possible to do in that context. And then when Croker turned on Fareek—it looked as if he was proving my point! The ‘business interests’ were determined to be unfair and unjust! Now I’m Fareek’s one defender in public life! Now I’m right on top of what is known as a ‘black issue’! And where does that leave André Fleet? André Fleet’s off in the bleachers sucking his thumb. He remained practically silent through the whole thing. What could he say? He couldn’t very well back Elizabeth Armholster the way I backed Fareek, because that would cost him too much of the South Atlanta vote he was counting on. But that’s what Armholster wanted! At the very least he expected Fleet to attack Fareek! But Fleet just sat on his hands. Armholster was so mad, he cut off Fleet’s get-out-the-vote money! He had none! Zip!” Wes started laughing as hard as Roger had ever seen him laugh. “Yesterday Fleet’s out in the street with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out! He’s got nothing to buy votes with! Nothing!” More laughter, to the point of tears. “Roger, when you got Croker to that press conference for me—you won the election!”
Roger didn’t even smile. “What happened was very nice for you, Wes, but not for Fareek. His name was dragged through the mud for a long time.”
“The mud?” said Wes sharply. “You don’t know mud, Brother Roger! Mud is not when some girl’s loudmouth father is going around saying you raped his daughter. Mud is when you get arrested, fingerprinted, put in a cell, bailed out, arraigned, indicted, and then you sit in a courtroom, all 225 pounds of you, with a shaved head and a neck the size of a tree trunk, trying to look innocent while a pretty little white girl sobs out the story of how you ravaged her! That’s … mud!”
“Stilt—”
“Through the mud,” said Wes sardonically. “But that hasn’t happened, has it?”
“No, but—”
“Don’t No, but me, Brother Roger! No charges have ever been brought, have they. And do you know why? Because the Armholsters got a pretty good taste of just what kind of hell they’d have to go through if they made it a real case.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“Well … I don’t know it for a fact, but what other explanation is there? Armholster is a blowhard, but he’s not just a blowhard. He’ll do something to Fareek sooner or later. God knows what. I just hope to hell it isn’t within the Atlanta city limits and not on my watch. But he didn’t want to do it this way, not with the media going into a frenzy over it. Or that’s the way I see it. What I did was the best thing for Fareek Fanon and the best thing for the city.”
“Even accepting the part about Fareek, which I don’t,” said Roger, “why ‘the best thing for the city’?”
“Because Atlanta needs me,” said Wes. Not a touch of irony in his expression. “Have you any idea of what a catastrophe it would have been if André Fleet had been elected? It would have set Atlanta back two generations. The sum total of André Fleet’s knowledge of strategy here at the turn of the century is the pick, the give and go, and the Alley Oop.”
