Dancing Aztecs (5 page)

The old man didn't know it, and nobody would tell him, but it turned out his hobby was looking for hobbies. It was certainly keeping his mind active and his blood circulating, and if he was actually out in the park now with a homemade kite then maybe it was also keeping him young. “Yeah,” Jerry said. “Maybe I'll stop over there before lunch.” He finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.

His mother looked at him. “No breakfast?”

“I got a special pickup this morning.” He kissed her on the cheek. “See you later.”

“If you see your father,” she called after him, “tell him dinner at six. Not six-thirty, quarter to seven.
Six
.”

LATER THAT MORNING …

“They look like they're taking a crap,” Frank McCann said.

“It's a fart contest,” said his brother Floyd. “They're standing around trying to give out with the biggest fart.”

Frank and Floyd were in Frank's sunny kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table on which stood four gold-painted green-eyed Dancing Aztec Priests, hopping on their left legs amid a rural scattering of excelsior. The wooden box marked
A
was on the floor beside the table, with its top ripped off.

Frank's wife Teresa, who was also Jerry's sister, looked over at the table from where she was chopping carrots on the drainboard and said, “Maybe they're dancing.”

“Yeah, they're dancing,” Frank said. “The green apple two-step.”

Floyd said, “So what do we do? Throw them out?”

“We'll put 'em in the closet,” Frank said. There was a closet in the basement, behind the bar, where they kept things that might be valuable but for which they had not as yet found the right customer. Skis, for instance; there were a lot of skis down there.

Floyd said, “Let's see what else we got today.”

So they put the four Dancing Aztec Priests and most of the excelsior back in the wooden box, and then turned to the mail sacks and packages and boxes that were Jerry's regular harvest from the airport. They slit open the canvas mail-bags, punched open the cardboard cartons; crowbarred open the wooden boxes, and quickly separated the wheat from the chaff. All registered letters were opened, and cash was put in one pile, stocks and bonds in another. Small registered packages were likely to carry jewelry, which went onto a third pile. While Teresa went on preparing today's minestrone the loot heaped up on the kitchen table, with the discarded boxes and bags and envelopes and letters scattered around the floor.

The reason Frank was home during the day was that he was a member of a backstage theatrical union. The union required so-and-so many members be hired for every Broadway and Off-Broadway production, whether that large a crew was needed for that particular show or not. Frank, a pale-skinned, pot-bellied man of thirty-four, with thinning red hair and a thickening red face, had been with the union twelve years and had pretty good seniority by now, so he generally got himself hired by shows where he was redundant and didn't have to put in an appearance hardly at all.

Floyd McCann, a younger and somewhat thinner version of his brother, was in a construction union and so also had a lot of time off. If they weren't on strike—and they were usually on strike—then something else would happen, like the city running out of money or the contractor failing to get all the right permits. At the moment, blacks were sitting-in at the project where Floyd was supposed to be working, wanting some damn thing, so Floyd was at home again, on full pay, and he'd drifted over to Frank's house for today's opening.

Frank was counting the day's cash and Floyd was separating the “pay to bearer” stocks and bonds from those with names on them, when the kitchen door opened and Jerry came in, wearing his on-duty white coveralls and blue base-ball cap and looking annoyed.

Something had to be wrong. Jerry was
always
at work this time of day, and he
never
wore his coveralls away from the job. Floyd said, “Hey, Jerry,” and Frank said, “What's up?”

“We got a problem,” Jerry said. “With that goddam box.”

“What's wrong?”

“I went to get the right box this morning,” Jerry said, “and it was already delivered. Gone from the airport.”

Floyd said, “Then that's that.”

“No, it isn't.” Jerry took off his cap, wiped his forehead with it and put it back on. “I called that number,” he said. “The one the contact gave me last night. The answer was, they still want the box.”

“That's tough,” Frank said. “Once it's out of the airport, it's
their
problem.”

“The way they talked,” Jerry said, “I think maybe it's our problem.”

“But that isn't right Jerry.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Jerry said, “I don't think right and wrong is the question here, Frank.”

“Oh,” said Frank.

“The kind of people we deal with,” Jerry said, “I don't think we want any unsatisfied customers.”

Frank said, “So what do we do?”

“I'll have to take this other box to the city, to—what is it?” Picking up the box containing the four statues, Jerry read the stenciled address aloud: “Bud Beemiss Enterprises, 29 West 45th Street.”

“Sure,” said Frank. “You'll make a switch.”

Jerry held the box in both arms. “Kicks the hell out of the day,” he said.

“Don't worry about it.” Floyd told him. “We did terrific yesterday.”

“Oh, yeah? What was in that dental supply package?”

“Teeth.”

“Oh. Well, you win a few, you lose a few. Hold the door for me, will you, Teresa?”

BUT …

The Goddess of Heaven Chinese restaurant, on Broadway near 97th Street, serves Cantonese
and
Szechuan dishes, and has a menu so large and so long and so intricate in its minute shadings of detail that one time when a Korean philosophy student taking his advanced degree at Columbia stopped by for lunch there, he fell into a cataleptic ecstasy among the varieties of spicy pork and had to be taken away to Bellevue. Coming to his senses in the waiting room of Emergency was such a seminal experience—particularly after the Goddess of Heaven menu—that he at once gave up philosophy and is today a brakeman on a San Francisco cable car.

In addition to normal facilities for lunch and dinner, and in further addition to its elaborate take-out service, the Goddess of Heaven also provides private rooms for groups from twelve to two hundred. Your wedding reception, office shower, bar mitzvah, or revolutionary call to arms will be given the world-famous Goddess of Heaven treatment of courtesy, graciousness, and fine food: “Your Choice from Our Most Extensive Menu.”

Today at twelve-thirty a group of sixteen had taken advantage of this opportunity and was in possession of the Mandarin Room, up a flight of coral-colored stairs from the regular dining rooms. The Mandarin Room, with one green wall, one orange wall, one purple wall, and one glass wall overlooking the traffic down on Broadway, was set up today with connected tables forming a U. The sixteen table settings—heavy plates richly decorated in blue and gold, plus massive silverplate spoons and forks, delicate long red plastic chopsticks, real cloth napkins cunningly folded into the shape of dunce caps, and name cards in the form of tiny parasols—were spaced around the exterior of the U, leaving the center empty.

It would be impossible for the casual observer to guess what common bond had brought these sixteen people together in this room. Young and old, male and female, black and white, straight and gay, they were as disparate as a Gallup Poll cross-section, seeming to share nothing but a general interest in lunch. And yet, throughout the meal they chatted together across lines of class, age, race, and sex with cheerful familiarity.

At the end of the meal, with the ice cream balls and fortune cookies distributed, everybody was smiling and relaxed except for one young woman, Bobbi Harwood, who was
pissed off
. She was pissed off at her husband, Chuck “Professor Charles S.” Harwood, who was sitting next to her on her right and blandly assuring her he didn't mind that she'd cuckolded him with yet another black man, by having slept with Oscar Russell Green. “I have
not
slept with Oscar,” Bobbi said, through gritted teeth. “I'm telling you for the last time, Harwood.” (She never called him by his last name unless they were fighting.)

“But I don't
mind
, sweetheart,” Chuck assured her. (He never used terms of endearment unless they were fighting.)

“You stupid, egotistical son of a bitch, you have a mind like a drive-in theater.”

“Now, darling,” Chuck said. He had an absolutely maddening way of getting calmer and calmer and calmer the more hysterical the people around him became. It was this phlegmatism that had given him, in Bobbi's opinion, his totally inappropriate reputation for intelligence.

Chuck Harwood, a tall angular stooped Lincolnesque figure of thirty-three, was an anthropologist, originally from Chicago and now an assistant professor at Columbia. He had lived all his life either in major cities with adequate mass transit or in utterly backward corners of the world—seven months in Guatemala, fifteen months in Chad—with no transportation at all, and so was one of the few adult white male Americans of the twentieth century who didn't know how to drive a car. Had no interest, in fact, in driving cars.

Which infuriated Bobbi almost as much as his allegedly sophisticated attitude toward her alleged miscegenations. (Chuck never believed she was cuckolding him with white men.) The point wasn't even whether or not she was sleeping with all those black men, the point was whether or not Chuck's avowed nonpossessiveness was hypocritical.
That
was the point, the only point, and it drove Bobbi crimson with rage that he wouldn't admit it.

As for Bobbi, who had begun life as Barbara Ann Callfield in Oak Crest, Maryland, and who was perfectly capable of supporting herself as an independent woman (she was first harpist with the New York City Symphony Orchestra), she had never been either northern enough to feel guilty toward blacks nor southern enough to feel hostile, neither big-city enough to fear them nor rural enough to be bewildered by them. The result was, her unweighted treatment of black men as normal human beings occasionally created misunderstandings. “I like you as a
friend
, Jojo,” she would say, one restraining hand on his rippling dark brown arm. While across the room Chuck would suck on his pipe and smile with false indulgence.

As he was doing now, calmly, soberly, judiciously nodding, saying, “You have your own life to live, darling, I've always told you that, and I mean it.”

A flower arrangement in a heavy milk glass bowl was within arm's reach. Bobbi reached for it, but before she could complete her intention (whatever that might have been), she and Chuck and everyone else at the table were distracted by the tinkling of a spoon rapped against the side of a teacup. A tall and muscularly built black man had got to his feet at the center of the table, and was calling for quiet.

This was Oscar Russell Green, leader of this group of sixteen and Bobbi's latest alleged lover. With his bushy mustache, modest Afro, and easygoing smile he looked much younger than his forty-three years, and he'd been active in politics and Civil Rights activities for nearly a quarter of a century. He was also no stranger to public speaking, and now he stood in silence, smiling at his audience, until he was sure he had the attention of everyone in the room. Then, with a nod and a grin, he suddenly said, “Well, we did it.” And in an abrupt loud voice, fist punching the air,
“We made the system function!”

And the audience burst into cheers of delight, yelling and clapping their hands and grinning huge grins at one another. Even Bobbi gave off her feud with Chuck, and smiled happily around the table.

Oscar Russell Green nodded and smiled, and when the reaction had tapered off he said, quietly, “They didn't take us seriously, gang. Crazies and weirdos, that's what they thought we were. And they thought we couldn't work together for the common good. White and black, men and women, they thought we'd spend all our time fighting one another and no time at
all
fighting City Hall. Well, they were
wrong!”

More cheering, more applause.

But now Oscar Russell Green became serious. “I think we can be very proud of ourselves,” he said. “And I think we
all
learned and grew and became richer, better human beings as a result of this experience. We learned that we
can
work together. We can make the
system
work—for
us
.”

Applause again. Her hands beating together, Bobbi became aware of Chuck's indulgent smile, and she immediately stopped clapping. Then, outraged that he should keep her from joining a general applause by his hypocrisy, she started fiercely clapping again just as everybody else stopped. She yanked her hands down under the table, and began muttering into her throat.

“Well,” Oscar Russell Green was saying, “We've had a delicious lunch here today, and I might say we well deserved it. And at the end we got our fortune cookies, and I looked at mine, and it seemed somehow very appropriate, and I'd like to read it to you all.” He opened the little twist of paper and read, “He who hesitates is second.”

The audience laughed at that, nodding and making joking remarks at one another.

(In fact, Oscar Russell Green was not telling the truth. The fortune in his fortune cookie actually read, “He who keeps mouth open sure to catch flies.” Last night, however, in preparing today's speech, Green had decided what his fortune cookie fortune would read, and if the real-world fortune cookie of today failed to deliver as specified that was certainly not his fault. And what message was there anyway in, “He who keeps mouth open sure to catch flies”?)

Green went on, “Well, I guess we've all learned that much through this experience, haven't we? Not to hesitate, not to
allow
ourselves to be second. Not
ever
.”