The Plant (7 page)

He looked at me for a long time and then said, “If you’ve been to college, Riddley, why do you talk that way?”

“What way is dat, Mist Po-tuh?”

He regarded me for a moment longer and then said, “Never mind.”

51

He leaned close—close enough so I could smell cheap cigars, hair tonic, and the graywater stench of fear. “Can you get me a gun?”

For a moment I was literally without a response—which is like saying (Floyd would, anyway) that China was for a moment without manpower.

I had an idea that he had changed the subject completely, and that what I had heard as
Can you get me a gun?
had actually been
Can you get me some
fun,
as in ho. Definition of a ho: dahk-skin woman who do it fo money on account of de food-stamps is gone and de las fix be cookin in de spoon.

My response was to either fall down, shrieking wildly with laughter, or to throttle him until his face was as purple as his tie. Then, belatedly, I began to understand he really
had
said gun...but in the meantime he had taken the overload in my mental switchboard for refusal. His face fell.

“You’re sure?” he asked. “I thought that up there in Harlem—”

“Ah lives in Dobbs Ferry, Mist’ Po’tuh!”

He merely waved this aside, as if we both knew my Dobbs Ferry address was just a convenient fiction I maintained—that I might even actually go there after work, but of course was drawn back to the velvety reaches beyond 110th as soon as the sun went down.

“Ah g’iss I could git you a gun, Mist’ Po’tuh, suh,” I said, “but it wouldn’t be no better or wuss’n one you could git yo’sef—a .32...maybe a .38...” I winked at him. “And a gun you buy under de countuh in a bah, cain’t never tell it ain’t goan blow up in yo face fust time you pulls de trig-gah!”

“I don’t want anything like that, anyway,” Porter said morosely. “I want something with a laser sight. And exploding bullets. Did you ever see
Day of the Jackal,
Riddley?”

“Yassah, and it sho was fine!”

“When he shot the watermelon...
plowch
!” Porter tossed his arms wide to indicate how the watermelon had exploded when the assassin tried an exploding bullet on it in
The Day of the Jackal
, and one of his hands struck the ivy sent to Kenton by the mysterious Roberta Solrac. I 52

had all but forgotten it, although it’s been less than two weeks since I put it up there.

I tried to assure Porter again that he was probably far from the top of Hecksler’s perhaps infinite list of pet paranoias, and that the man was, after all, seventy-two.

“You don’t know some of the stuff he did in Big Two,” Porter said, his eyes beginning to move hauntedly from side to side again. “If those guys who hired the Jackal had hired Hecksler instead, DeGaulle never would have died in the rack.”

He wandered off then, and I was glad to see him go. The smell of cigars was beginning to make me feel mildly ill. I took down Zenith the Common Ivy and looked at him (it is ridiculous to assign a male pronoun to an ivy, and yet I did it automatically—I, who usually write with the shrewish care of a French
petit bourgeoise
housewife picking over fruit in the marketplace). I began this entry by saying what a difference a day makes. In the case of Zenith the Common Ivy, what a difference
five
days has made. The sagging stem has straightened and thickened, the four yel-lowish leaves have become almost wholly green, and two new ones have begun to unfurl. All of this with absolutely no help from me at all. I watered it and noticed two other things about my good old buddy Zenith—first, it’s even put out its first tendril—it barely reaches to the lip of the cheap plastic pot,but it’s there—and second,that swampy, unpleasant smell seems to have disappeared. In fact both the plant and the soil in which he is potted smell quite sweet.

Perhaps it’s a psychic ivy. If General Hecksler shows up here at good old 490 Park, I must be sure to ask him, hee-hee!

Got twenty pages done on the novel this week—not much, but think (hope!) I am approaching the halfway point.

Gelb, who had a modest run of luck yesterday, tried to push it today—this was about an hour before Porter hopped in, looking for arma-ments. Gelb now owes me $81.50.

53

March 8, 1981

Dear Ruth,

Just lately you’ve been harder to reach on the phone than the President of the United States—I swear to God I’m getting to hate your answering machine! I must confess that tonight—the third night of “Hi, this is Ruth and I can’t come to the phone right now, but...”—I got a little nervous and called the other number you gave me—the super. If he hadn’t told me he’d seen you going out around five with a big load of books under your arm, I think I might have asked him to check and make sure you were okay. I know, I know, it’s just the time difference, but things have gotten so paranoid here lately that you wouldn’t believe it. Paranoid? Weird is a better word, maybe. We’ll probably talk before you receive this, making ninety per cent of this letter obsolete (unless I send it Federal Express, which makes long distance look like an austerity measure), but if I don’t narrate it by some means or other I think I may explode. I understand from Herb Porter, who is nearly apoplectic (a condition I sympathize with more than I would heretofore have believed, following l’affair Detweiller), that General Hecksler’s escape and the murders which attended it have made the national news the last two nights, but I assume you haven’t seen it—or didn’t make the connection—or I would have heard from you via Ma Tinkerbell ere now (prolix as ever, you see—would that I could be as succinct as Zenith’s faith-ful custodian Riddley!). If you haven’t heard, the enclosed Post clipping (I didn’t bother to include the centerfold photo of the asylum with the obligatory dotted line marking the dotty General’s likely route of escape and the obligatory X’s marking the locations of his victims) will bring you up to date as quickly and luridly as possible.

54

You may remember that I mentioned Hecksler to you in a letter only six weeks ago—something like that, anyway. Herb rejected his book, Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers, and provoked a barrage of paranoid hate-mail.

Joking aside, his bloody escape has created a real atmosphere of unease here at Z.H. I had a drink with Roger Wade after work tonight in Four Fathers (Roger claims that the owner, a genial man named Ginelli with a soft voice and these odd, gleeful eyes, is a mafioso) and told him about Herb’s visit to me that afternoon. I pointed out to Herb that it was ridiculous for him to be as frightened as he obviously is (it’s sort of funny—under his steely Joe Pyne Exterior, the resident Neanderthal turns out to be Walter Mitty after all) and Herb agreed. Then, after a certain amount of patently artificial small talk, he asked me if I knew where he could get a gun. Mystified—sometimes your ob’dt correspondent is amazingly slow in making the obvious connections, m’dear—I mentioned the sporting goods store five blocks from here, at Park and 32nd.

“No,” he said impatiently. “I don’t want a shotgun or anything like that.” Here he lowered his voice. “I want something I can carry around with me.”

Roger nodded and said Herb had been into his office around two, feeling him out on the same subject.

“What did you say?” I asked him.

“I reminded him that the penalties for carrying concealed weapons without a permit in this state are damned severe,” Roger said. “At which point Herb drew himself up to his full height (which is, Ruth, about five-seven) and said, ‘A man doesn’t need a permit to protect himself, Roger.’”

“And then?”

“Then he walked out. And tried you. Probably tried Bill Gelb as well.”

“Don’t forget Riddley,” I said.

“Ah, yes—and Riddley.”

“Who might just be able to help him.”

Roger ordered another bourbon, and I was thinking how much older than his actual forty-five he is coming to look when he suddenly grinned 55

that boyish, winning grin that so charmed you when you first met him at that cocktail party in June of ’80—the one at Gahan and Nancy Wilson’s place in Connecticut, do you remember? “Have you seen Sandra Jackson’s new toy?” he asked. “She’s the one Herb should have gone to for black market munitions.” Roger actually laughed out loud, a sound I have heard from him very seldom in the last eight months or so. Hearing it made me realize again, Ruth, how much I like and respect him—he could have been a really great editor somewhere—perhaps even in the Maxwell Perkins league. It seems a shame that he’s ended up piloting such a leaky craft as Zenith House.

“She’s got something called the Rainy Night Friend,” he said, still laughing. “It’s silver-plated, and almost the size of a mortar shell. Fucking thing fills her whole purse. There’s a flashlight set into the blunt end. The tapered end emits a cloud of tear-gas when you press a button—only Sandra says that she spent an extra ten bucks to have the tear-gas canister replaced with Hi-Pro-Gas, which is a hopped-up version of Mace. In the middle of this device, Johnny boy, is a pull-ring that sets off a high-decibel siren. I did not ask for a demonstration. They would have evacuated the building.”

“The way you describe it, it sounds as if she could use it as a dildo when there were no muggers around,” I said.

He went off into gales of half-hysterical laughter. I joined him—it would have been impossible not to—but I was concerned for him, as well.

He’s very tired and very close to the edge of his endurance, I think—the parent corporation’s steadily eroding support for the house has really started to get to him.

I asked him if something like the Rainy Night Friend was legal.

“I’m not a lawyer so I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Roger said. “My impression is that a woman who uses a tear-gas pen on a potential mugger or rapist is in a gray area. But Sandra’s toy, loaded up with a Mace hybrid...

no, I don’t think something like that can be kosher.”

“But she’s got it, and she’s carrying it,” I said.

“Not only that, but she seems fairly calm about it all,” Roger agreed.

56

“Funny—she was the one who was so scared when the General was sending his poison pen letters, and Herb hardly seemed aware any of it was going on...at least until the bus driver got stabbed. I think what freaked Sandra out before was that she’d never seen him.”

“Yes,” I said. “She even told me that once.”

He paid the tab, waving away my offer to pay my half. “It’s the revenge of the flower-people,” he said. “First Detweiller, the mad gardener from Central Falls, and then Hecksler, the mad gardener from Oak Cove.”

That gave me what the British mystery writers like to call a nasty start—

talk about not making obvious connections! Roger, who is far from being anyone’s fool, saw my expression and smiled.

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” he asked. “It’s just a coincidence, of course, but I guess it was enough to set off a little paranoid chime in Herb Porter’s head—I can’t imagine him getting so fashed otherwise. We could have the basis of a good Robert Ludlum novel here. The Horticultural Something-or-Other. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Convergence,” I said as we hit the street.

“Huh?” Roger looked like someone coming back from a million miles away.

“The Horticultural Convergence,” I said. “The perfect Ludlum title.

Even the perfect Ludlum plot. It turns out, see, that Detweiller and Hecksler are actually brothers—no, considering the ages, I guess father and son would be better—in the pay of the NKVD. And—”

“I’ve got to catch my bus, John,” he said, not unkindly.

Well, I have my problems, dear Ruth (who knows better than you?), but realizing when I’m being a bore has never been one of them (except when I’m drunk). I saw him down to the bus stop and headed home.

The last thing he said was that the next we heard of General Hecksler would probably be a report of his capture...or his suicide. And Herb Porter would be disappointed as well as relieved.

“It isn’t General Hecksler Herb and the rest of us have to be worried about,” he said—his little burst of good humor had left him and he looked 57

slumped and small, standing there at the bus stop with his hands jammed into the pockets of his trenchcoat. “It’s Harlow Enders and the rest of the accountants who are going to get us. They’ll stab us with their red pencils.

When I think about Enders, I almost wish I had Sandra Jackson’s Rainy Night Friend.”

No progress on my novel this week—looking back over this epistle I see why—all this narrative that should have gone into Maymonth tonight went ended up here instead. But if I went on too long and in too much novelistic detail, don’t chalk it all up to prolixity, my dear—over the last six months or so I have become a genuine Lonely Guy. Writing to you isn’t as good as talking to you, and talking to you isn’t as good as seeing you, and seeing you isn’t as good as touching you and being with you (steam-steam! pant-pant!), but a person has to make do with what he has. I know you’re busy, studying hard, but going so long without talking to you has got me sorta crazy (and on top of Detweiller and Hecksler, more crazy I do not need to be). I love you, my dear.

Missing you, needing you,

John

58

March 9, 1981

Mr. Herbert Porter

Designated Jew

Zenith House

490 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Dear Designated Jew,

Did you think I had forgotten you? I bet you did. Well, I didn’t. A man doesn’t forget the thief who rejected his book after stealing all of the good parts. And how you tried to discredit me. I wonder how you will look with your
penis
in your
ear
. Ha-ha. (But not a joke) I am coming for you, “big boy.”

Major General Anthony R.

Hecksler (Ret.)

P.S. Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

I am coming to castrate.

A Designated Jew.

M.G.A.R.H. (Ret.)

59

MAILGRAM FROM MR. JOHN KENTON TO RUTH TANAKA