The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (8 page)

“Come to you in trouble, do they?” Dave asked.

“By referral. Doctors, lawyers, agencies, juvenile authorities. Even the odd police department.”

Dave blinked. At the noisy pool below, at the
plock
of balls on rackets above. “All of them?”

“No, no.” Nowell shook his head, amused. “These are mostly just neighbor children come to play. You know how it is when you have a pool.”

Dave grinned. “Awful nuisance.”

“Hateful.” Nowell’s hard eyes twinkled. “No, the counting’s handled down at the office. Now and then I have a case who lives here. There’s plenty of room. Boys. Girls. And parents, of course.”

As if on cue, a stocky man with a mat of gray hair on a sagging chest came around a corner of the house. He wore floppy surfer trunks, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and clogs. He carried towels. He was bald and his sunburned scalp was peeling. A woman followed him. She was burned too dark and had starved herself to keep her figure right for a bikini and had almost managed it. The smiles these people gave Nowell showed astonishing teeth. The man had to be a dentist. Self-conscious, they nudged each other down toward the hectic pool.

“Do they pay?” Dave said.

“We’re a nonprofit educational—”

“You always were,” Dave said, “only I remember you in a pair of dingy offices around Third and Main in L.A. Building about to be torn down?”

Nowell laughed. “We used to beat pans and shriek in the hall,” he said, “to warn the rats we were coming. It was nice to have them out but they never tidied up before they left. Yes, those were the bad old days. A secondhand mimeograph, three frightened faggots, and a cause. Twenty-five years ago. You came there?”

“You were
amicus curiae
in the case of a friend of a friend. He didn’t have a car. I did. I picked him up at your place one day in the rain. We shook hands but I don’t expect you to remember. You must have been
amicus curiae
to a good many bewildered schoolteachers plucked naked out of steam baths.”

“We were in court more hours than we slept.”

“You had a magazine too,” Dave said. “Don’t I remember an obscenity case?”

“Poor, pathetic little rag,” Nowell said. “By today’s standards it was tame as a Sunday-school paper. But it helped. It told thousands of sad, lonely boys and men all over this country that they weren’t the only ones. You should have seen the letters, the pitiful dollar bills. Yes, there was an obscenity case. We fought it. We fought the police, the civil service, the armed forces. There was so much to fight. There still is.”

“But you quit,” Dave said. “Why?”

“Quit?” Nowell said sharply. “Who says I quit?”

“Besides Rodriguez,” Dave said, “Daisy Flynn, and Ben Orton’s widow. But mostly”—Dave looked at the place—“all this.” The swimmer brought back his tightly packaged genitals, his smile, and the drinks. He went whooping down the stairs toward the pool. Dave said, “This didn’t come out of pitiful dollar bills.”

“They were never enough,” Nowell said. “It was my own money that kept us going. You should have seen how I had to live. A quarter century of cockroaches, crackers, and peanut butter. It wasn’t only court costs. Men were fired, boys were thrown out at home. People tried to kill themselves, mutilate themselves. They needed doctors, psychiatrists, jobs, a roof over their heads.”

“Those two
A.M.
phone calls,” Dave said.

“Someone had to answer. Someone had to come up with the money.”

Dave looked at the house. “From here?”

Nowell snorted. “Least of all. My father made Ben Orton look like a left-wing radical. You can imagine the rejoicing when his only son turned out to be a bird of bright plumage. The festivities went on for months. I cherish his parting words—that looking at me made him want to vomit.”

Dave’s father said,
“
You’re full of surprises.”

Dave said,
“
I kept waiting for you to guess.
”

“No,” Nowell said, “I had a little annuity from a great aunt. Then, four years ago, five”—with a crooked smile he tried his drink—“my father died. Happily, he was the self-made type, tall in the saddle, short in the brain. He distrusted Jew shysters—his pet term for lawyers. Ergo, he made such an incompetent will that I ended up with this house he never wanted me to set foot in, and all his money.” The smile went away. “What did Daisy Flynn say to make you think I’d quit? I’d never quit.”

“I saw her introduction to a
TV
interview.” Dave tasted the German beer. American refrigeration had numbed it. “You and Kerlee. On the matter of Ben Orton’s refusal to hire homosexuals. She said the two of you disagreed. I knew how Kerlee felt. How you felt had to follow.”

“If you’d seen the interview—” A striped beach ball, shedding bright water, flew over the balustrade. Nowell had quick reflexes. He hit it with the flat of a hand. It arced high and dropped. Cheers came from below. “—You’d have heard Cliff raving on about getting up petitions, showing that the citizens of La Caleta wanted fruity cops even if their police chief didn’t. It was an insane idea, like every other idea Cliff Kerlee ever had.”

“He got the signatures,” Dave said. “How?”

“You’d never guess it to look at him,” Nowell said, “but he’s a great charmer of women. The gypsy syndrome or something. Those wild eyes. You can bet nine-tenths of those signatures were written in dishwashing liquid. Can’t you just see the poor things in their curlers and damp blue jeans blushing and stammering and scorching the TV dinners while that hypersexed aging adolescent lounged in the kitchen doorway looking sullen and rubbing his crotch?”

“You’re forgetting why he was there,” Dave said. “They’d have to know he was bent.”

“Women never believe that,” Nowell scoffed. “Each of them harbors a secret conviction that men are only homosexual because they haven’t met the right woman—herself, of course. Cliff knows that and he uses it.”

“It didn’t help,” Dave said. “Ben Orton wasn’t wearing curlers.”

“I warned Cliff.” Nowell watched Dave hunch over the steel lighter to start a cigarette in the sea wind. “On that interview. And later.”

“So Rodriguez says.” Smoke from the cigarette blew away thin and quickly. Dave pocketed the lighter. “You were there Saturday morning. Early. Telling him to cancel the demonstration. Rodriguez says you grabbed the petitions to tear them up. There was a fight. You rolled around together on the floor.”

Nowell showed neat, feral little teeth. “I wasn’t hurt. I’m not big but I’m wiry.”

“You’re also over forty,” Dave said.

Nowell shrugged. “It’s not my way of solving problems. It’s Cliffs. But he’s not built for it and he’s not prepared. I was a commando in the U.S. Army. If Rodriguez hadn’t been there, his friend would have gone to the hospital.”

“But you don’t hate him,” Dave said dryly.

A tall, fleshy young man in a red chef’s hat and a red chef’s apron came fussily onto the terrace, wheeling a round, red enamel barbecue outfit. “Yawl gonna be ready to eat in an hour?” he asked the air. He had a loud voice but Nowell acted as if he hadn’t heard. A yellow and black sack of charcoal leaned against a stack of tiles. The aproned man picked it up. “They ever gonna finish this roof?” Maybe he didn’t expect an answer, because he made a lot of noise emptying briquettes into the belly of the grill. “Did yawl call ’em?”

“Shut up, Harv,” Nowell said without turning.

“Dick, I told you I’d call ’em.” Harv moved with wiggles and flounces. He set the sack back in place. “All you have to do is say for me to call ’em and I’ll call ’em.” He poured lighter fluid from a flat can onto the coals. “I declare, with all this junk piled up here, there’s just no room for a person to move.”

“Harv, shut up,” Nowell said again.

“How is a person supposed to cook?” Harv bent and took from under the barbecue a cardboard tube printed with kitcheny flowers. A long match came out of this. “If yawl didn’t get your ribs or steaks or chicken on the dot at six”—he struck the match, stood well back, turned away his face, and poked the flame at the coals; the lighter fluid whooshed—“it’d be me yawl would bitch at. Dick, are you listenin’ to me?”

“I’ll call them tomorrow,” Nowell said. “Now shut up, will you?”

“Yawl say that every night.” Harv flapped at the coals with his apron. Smoke swirled up. “Now, if yawl don’t remember tomorrow, I declare I’m just gonna call ’em myself, that’s all.”

“If you call them, you’ll quarrel with them, and they’ll never come back.”

“Well, just look here what they did. Spilled all that wet mortar. Dribbles of it all along here. Hard as a rock. Look how ugly that looks.” He coughed in the smoke. “Who’s gonna clean that up? Not me. I’ve got plenty to do around here already.” He fitted a grill over the coals. “And look how they stacked these tiles. They are topplin’ over, Dick.” He bumped one of the stacks hard with a well-padded hip. “One of these days, one of ’em is gonna slip right off. They are heavy. If one of ’em falls on somebody down there, it could kill ’em.”

“If it falls on that side, it can only kill a ground squirrel,” Nowell said. “Now, as you can see, I have a guest, and I’d appreciate it if you’d shut up.”

“I’ll get the steaks.” Harv went away.

Nowell acted as if there’d been no interruption. He said to Dave, “No, I didn’t hate him. You don’t hate a madman. You try to keep him from hurting himself. I went to the nursery that morning to try and stop him making a laughingstock of himself and every other homosexual that walks. That demonstration was going to drop his chances of getting what he wanted to zero.”

“Where did his troops come from?” Dave asked. “They didn’t look like they belonged here.”

“From L.A.—the seedier bars, the slimier baths.”

“Had he phoned them? Would Rodriguez let him?”

“He wouldn’t have to. Not if that press conference of Orton’s was on television.” Nowell raised his head. Gulls came over the high red roof, wings creaking, straining into the onshore wind, headed for the beach. “They’d see it as only one thing, the chance for a demonstration—noise, obscene gestures, dirty words on signs. If possible, riot and arrest. Maybe with luck a bloody head. Never accomplishes anything. That’s why they love it. Another chance at defeat. And, of course, their leader was here.”

“Why was he here?” Dave asked. “I mean, Rodriguez told me his reason for getting Cliff out of L.A. You’d left those two
A.M.
phone calls for him to answer all alone.”

Nowell made a small, sour sound. “And God help the poor callers. They didn’t know what trouble was before they picked up that phone. He could double it for them by noon. Listen to me. I never stopped answering. I certainly did not leave everything to him.”

“They stopped calling you,” Dave said.

“Exactly. In our mousy little office with our mousy little magazine, minding our business, getting things done. Then, all of a sudden, here came the clowns. Calliopes, elephants, performing seals. The television people went mad. Naturally. I mean, anyone making a total ass of himself is bound to raise ratings. And everybody always knew homosexuals were a bunch of overgrown little girls painting their faces and getting themselves up in mommy’s best organdy. What more could the media ask for? Never a five-minute serious discussion. But screaming queens? Ha ha! Isn’t it killing?”

“It made them easy to find,” Dave said.

“Do yawl know”—Harv came bustling out, carrying a metal tray heaped with steaks—“what the two main floats were in that first parade down Hollywood Boulevard?” He set the tray on a Formica-top table with fold-down aluminum tube legs. “A crucified fairy with jeweled purple wings, and a ten-foot-high jar of Vaseline. What every bigot knew about homosexuality and never needed to ask.”

Nowell answered Dave, “It made us impossible to find.”

Steaks hit the grill and sizzled. In his red apron Harv went at a wiggle to lean over the balustrade. He waved a long-handled fork and shouted down at the pool. “Yawl better get your showers because it is supper time.” The wind took off his chef’s hat. He was bald under it. With a yelp, he chased it across the
terraza.

“I’ll go,” Dave said, and stood.

Harv was on hands and knees in a far corner. Only his broad, blue-denimed butt, the red bow of the apron, the white soles of his Adidas showed. But his hearing was good. “Yawl are welcome to stay.” His voice came muffled. “Fresh corn on the cob? Genuine Mississippi beaten biscuits?” He pulled the hat from behind the stacks of tiles, sat back on his heels, slapped dust off the hat. “Homemade Texas pecan pie?”

“Sounds great,” Dave said, “but I have an appointment.”

“Go fetch him.” Harv stood up and settled the puffy red hat on his dome. “Bring him back. He’s welcome.”

“It’s not that kind of appointment,” Dave said, and to Nowell, “Didn’t they sort of make it easier for you? To get on with what you were doing? Fewer interruptions?”

“What really needed doing,” Nowell said, “wasn’t parades and picket lines and protests. It was changing the laws. For twenty years we tried single-handed. Now and then some new assemblyman still wet from the egg would flutter into the lion’s den with a timid little bill. They always ate him.” Nowell sighed and pushed up from the chaise. “Then, at long last, we got an experienced man on our side.” He moved his mock teenager’s body to the top of the stairs. “Someone who could do it right, who had the necessary committee chairmanships, the necessary power.”

“And you got the laws changed,” Dave said.

“We did not.” Nowell leaned out to peer down at the pool. “Come on, you tragic misfits.” He turned back to Dave. “Not then. We rounded up twenty expert witnesses, psychiatrists, law professors, police chiefs—”

“Not Ben Orton,” Dave said.

Nowell gave him a pitying look and went on. “We sat at long hearing-room tables being glared at by bleary-eyed political hacks who went after us, day after day, with questions like dull castration knives. Then we waited.”

The boys from the pool came scrambling up the stairs, water streaming from long, wet-dog hair and laying a glaze on uncompleted bodies. They waved towels like guidons. A couple of them brushed Nowell’s sunken cheek with kisses before they followed the rest, laughing, shouting, dodging, into the house.