The Shadow Cabinet (37 page)

“I don't know,” Rita said. “Where was I?”

“You were here, looking for a house, that first week.” He turned to Wilson. “What do you think this crumb says?”

“I couldn't guess,” Wilson said.

“I'll tell you what he says,” Artie continued, sitting up indignantly. “He tells me, ‘You wanna federal job, Artie, you got one,' just like that. ‘No sweat.' So I remember these government contracts he's gotten for Strykker. I'm talking maybe fifty, sixty million, understand. So that's what comes into my mind. Big dough. So I ask him, ‘How much?' ‘Ten grand,' this sleazebag says, and I tell him to get the shit out of my office. I mean, here I raised all this money for the Republican campaign committees, these congressmen, maybe two, three hundred thou, and this crum bum in a fifty-dollar suit is asking me to take ten grand for a federal job. Can you imagine this guy? I got Mexican cloth cutters down at the dress factory could hustle me with more class than this slob. I'm burned, really burned. I mean, it takes me the whole morning to get my head together. What the hell do they think I am—some cheap little shyster that'll take a ten-grand fix? That's gotta be peanuts, you know what I mean? I mean, I've got my self-respect.…”

Rita looked away suddenly. Wilson was the prisoner of the outraged eyes and the small hand that clutched his sleeve, bathed momentarily in a mist of expensive Scotch, light shampoo, and exotic skin bracer.

Even larceny had its protocol, Wilson thought dismally.

“Then I get to Washington and on Sunday Rita shows me this house out there. Maybe that's O.K. for her, trying to impress a few flaky friends down at Malibu, but what about me? There are a couple of cops in blue uniforms around the gate, the place is wired up like a rock band, and I get the word you and this lawyer were feds at the Justice Department, the guy that owns it is CIA. Something's going on, right?”

Feeling very stupid, Wilson said, “I still don't understand.” Rita hadn't turned.

“It's a setup,” Kramer said. “That's what I'm thinking—it's a setup. I don't go for the ten grand this schlemiel is dangling, maybe I'll go for something bigger. You've got my hundred-and-fifty-grand deposit, only when settlement time comes, you feds are gonna give me a pitch. I'm your pigeon now and you guys are gonna rip me off, only with more class this time, something that breaks big all over the front pages, like an Abscam.” He neatly drew the headline in the air with his manicured fingers. “‘L.A. Businessman Pays Thirty Grand for Political Appointment.' You see what I'm thinking?”

“I see what you're thinking,” Wilson conceded, “but it's a little primitive, isn't it?”

Rita had turned to look at her husband. “That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.”

“I'm talking to Wilson. You're telling me Abscam wasn't primitive?”

“Possibly. But that means you thought this approach in L.A., the ten thousand, was a government sting,” Wilson said.

“I'm nervous, I'm real nervous. What do I know what to think? This guy Chuck has real good connections in Washington. Too good, you know what I mean. Like you and this lawyer, Donahan—”

“Donlon,” Rita said.

“What's the difference? But Pete Rathbone tells me not to be nervous, move to Washington if that's what I want, but do it real quiet like, and it'll come through.”

“What about now?” Wilson said. “You still think I was going to rip you off?”

“Rita put me wise,” Artie said. “Anyway, I'm not a hundred percent perfect all the time.” He'd begun to massage his jaws again and finally decided he needed a shave after all.

“You just shaved two hours ago,” Rita reminded him, but he left them there and went upstairs anyway.

“You see what I mean?” she asked after he'd gone. “It's embarrassing sometimes.”

“A lot of people get confused,” Wilson offered.

“Not like that. Have you found out anything?”

He waited a minute before he answered. “I think I may know what's holding things up, but it's too early to say.”

“You'd rather not, then. You think he'll finally get an appointment?”

“I'd say so, yes.”

“That's what Pete Rathbone told him last night. They talked on the phone.”

“Rathbone's the man that's been encouraging him, is that the way it is?”

“From the first, I suppose. What did I say about Strykker that got you interested?”

“When you said he'd sell or buy anything if he thought he could get away with it.” He smiled as he thought about it. “Like his friend Chuck.”

“Don't be so mysterious,” she said.

“I'm not. What was his last name, this man Chuck?”

She thought for a minute. “Like the town in Wyoming, only a little different. Larabee.”

Part Four

1.

The Sunday afternoon was still dark, the rain intermittent, the small brick bungalows and ramblers in the South Carolina suburban neighborhood even more dismal in the drizzle, even more forlorn on their tiny patches of dun-colored sod. A few showed signs of home improvement—small chain-link fences, aluminum awning over the front windows, or iron filigree for porch posts—but not the thirty-year-old cottage with the peeling paint and the plastic birdbath in the front garden. Beyond the sidewalk, the front yard was trampled to dirt along the flower beds and porch. A child's tricycle lay overturned near the front steps. A
For Sale
sign stood in the yard next door, where two garbage cans were drawn to the curb, their ruptured black bags spilling refuse from a basement housecleaning.

“Someone's got dawgs,” the woman taxi driver complained as she pulled up to the curb. During the drive from the motel, she'd told him she'd been a WAC driver at Fort Jackson. “Lookit that mess laying out there on the sidewalk. Down at Fort Jackson, you couldn't keep no dawgs. Ain't that a shame now. This here neighborhood ain't what it used to be, I can tell you that. You sure you got the address right?”

“I'm pretty sure,” Buster said.

Birdie Jackson's cousin had been rudely explicit in telling him how to reach her house: “You come if she say so, but if you're out o' town, get you a cab. I don't want no out-o'-town machines outside my house, hear?”

“It's being lived in too,” the woman driver called through the window as Buster withdrew his wallet, “lived in hard as lye. Lookit that wash hanging out there to the side. Who'd go an' hang up wash on a day like this? Looks like she just throwed it up there on her way out the door.”

Buster paid her and went up the walk to the porch. The screen door was ajar and the lace curtain behind the glass pane dropped shut as his footsteps thudded across the wooden porch. Before he could knock, the door swung open and a dark, sullen face greeted him silently. A snow-white scarf concealed her hair. On her plump shoulders was a white smock, to which was pinned the star and crescent of a Muslim sisterhood.
Honkie
, the gruff black eyes seemed to say,
Honkie, what you doing my house?

The living room was dim and feverishly warm. The odor of incense hung in the air. A brown enamel heater hissed away against one wall; the windows were draped in purple plush, and overstuffed chairs circled the linoleum floor. A small television set sat on a metal table and on the wall behind it hung a black-bordered portrait of Malcolm X. An empty playpen stood near the entrance to the dining room, in which the overhead lights were on and the dining table was being used as an ironing board. On the top of the cabinet to the side were two artificially tinted portraits of uniformed black youths taken by some army-base photographer.

“Sorry to bother you this way,” Foreman said as she led him through the dining room. He felt embarrassed by her hostile silence.

“You ain't botherin' me none,” she muttered coolly, without turning. “Just don't go messin' her up any.” She moved in her worn carpet slippers, broad hips swaying, into a small, dark hall where she knocked softly at a door and then gently pushed it open. The room beyond was a sun porch, its windows covered with sheet plastic. Green plants hung everywhere, and Buster Foreman, confused for a moment by the profusion of cascading green, felt like a man peering into the crypt of some zoological garden, trying to find its inhabitant. The elderly woman who awaited him was so small, so still, and so silent that he noticed her no more quickly than he might a finch hidden in dense summer foliage. She sat in a portable wheelchair in the corner, wearing a heavy wool sweater over her green wool dress, which reached well below her knees. Her ankles and legs were encased in dark-brown stockings and one leg was surgically wrapped, larger than the other. On her lap was an open book. Her small head was lifted and she wore tortoise-rim spectacles, like those of a professional librarian circa 1920. Her gray hair was parted in the middle, as neat as a woolen cap, hiding her ears.

“This is him,” her cousin told her in a low voice. “Baby Ahmed's sleepin'.”

She went out. The old woman was smiling, her dark eyes bright, as if no longer able to suppress her curiosity. “How's Miz Cora?”

“She's fine.”

“Did he marry her yet?” Buster Foreman wasn't sure what she meant. She watched his hesitation in disappointment and then moved her head to look at him more closely. “How long you been knowing her?”

“Since a few weeks ago.”

The smile faded. “An' she tole you to come see me?”

“Just like that. She told me to go talk to Mrs. Bertha Jackson over in South Carolina.”

The quick, soft laugh betrayed her disbelief. “She didn't say that, she didn't never say that—not Bertha, not Mrs. either. I never been married.”

“She said go talk to Birdie Jackson.”

“She said that when you saw her?”

“That's what she told me.”

She nodded and pointed to a stool at the foot of the bed. “Fetch it around here so we can talk. I lose my eyes looking up at you like this. You a big, tall buildin', Mr. Foreman. Sit down so I can see you better.”

Birdie Jackson laughed for a long time after Buster Foreman told her why he'd come. She seldom thought of them anymore, Bob Combs, Shyrock Wooster, or any of the others. Cora she remembered often—they still exchanged Christmas cards—but she didn't know Tom Pepper very well, just that he was the friend of Cora's who'd taken her away. She was a shut-in, leaving her cousin's house only to go to church when someone with an automobile would offer to stop and pick her up, but that wasn't often now. The old generation, her generation, was passing away. She never passed her old place, the house her father had built and which had since burned, but she didn't miss it. She doubted she would recognize it now. Bob Combs's automobile acreage had devoured her father's three acres. The trees, fencelines, and small cabins that had once lined the old pike where she'd grown up were obliterated, paved over in asphalt or concrete on which stood new glass-and-concrete malls and shopping centers as unfamiliar to her as the new downtown skyline. She seldom read a newspaper or watched television. She preferred the radio. Most of her old friends who knew her story were buried now, like those elders of the Mount Zion Reformed Baptist Church to whom she'd deeded her property after her long trouble with Bob Combs.

From a dusty cardboard suitcase she dragged from beneath the bed, she removed an old cigar box, withdrawing an ancient photograph taken with a Kodak box camera on the dusty pike in front of her father's paintless cabin. A Model A Ford truck stood in the foreground. Two white men in engineers' laced boots and fedora hats leaned against the cab. A short black man squatted between them, his hat off, wearing faded overalls. At the front of the truck, a black youth held a surveyor's transit; next to him stood a small black boy holding a sight rod. The black man squatting in front of the two out-of-state surveyors was Birdie's father, the black boy with the rod, her brother. Both were dead now. The picture had been taken fifty years earlier, when the old rural pike was being widened for the first time, culverts added, and city water brought to the small paintless cabins hidden behind the clay bank among the pine groves.

Birdie thought her father was smiling in the yellowing photograph. She held it toward Buster Foreman for his inspection, but if there was a smile there, Buster couldn't identify it. She took it back to study it again. Yes, she detected the smile. Her father was a very serious man. He was smiling on this occasion for two reasons: first, because he'd never before had his picture taken by a white photographer from the local newspaper; and secondly, because he alone among the small community of rural blacks had the money to pay for the water connection. He was a maintenance man in a downtown hotel and the three acres he owned were free and clear. On a side acre he planted a small truck garden each year and on summer and autumn weekends peddled fresh vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon through the shady streets of the older residential section where his wife and later his daughter did day work as domestics. After a city ordinance banned horses and mules from the residential streets, he sold produce from a small wooden stand at the intersection a mile away.

He died in the early fifties and the insurance money enabled Birdie, his only survivor, to bury him decently and to pay for the sewer connection and the interior plumbing which exempted the small cabin from the condemnation order that soon leveled the other cabins and shacks adjacent to the Jackson property. The old pike lay along one of the principal arteries west of the city, which was creeping inexorably toward Birdie's vegetable and flower gardens. The first suburban shopping center had appeared just a mile to the east. To the west, the approaches to the new interstate were being surveyed.

On a mild autumn day in the mid-fifties, Bob Combs's advertising manager and general factotum knocked on the screen door at the rear of Birdie's house, doffed his coconut hat, and passed his card through the narrow opening reluctantly yielded to receive it. Shy Wooster was barely in his twenties at the time. His face was pink and chubby with baby fat. To Birdie Jackson he seemed like a boy who hadn't yet begun to shave. He was certainly too young for the hat, the wide-shouldered serge suit, and the ingratiating smile. He asked Birdie if she might be interested in leasing billboard space along the front of her property.