The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

  The drink tasted of whiskey, tomato juice, and tabasco. Rudolf felt better immediately. Pamela appeared momentarily at the head of the stairs. “Good morning, everybody,” she said. “I’ll be down soon.”

  Rudolf discovered he was drunk again. “What time of day did she get here?” he asked.

  “About noon.”

  “Spend the whole afternoon snooping around?”

  “Lad, what makes you Indians so suspicious?”

  “Five centuries of trafficking with Europeans. Will you please stay off the sauce for a while?” He told Flaherty about the muck-filled lipstick tube.

  “She fell down several times.”

  “You weren’t so forgiving when Riordan scuffed his shoes on our carpet.”

  “Dear boy, you don’t really know if your lady friend’s spying. And if she is, what difference does it make?”

  It made a great deal of difference so far as his relation with Pamela went. Why did Flaherty have to be so irritatingly cheerful? Even Pamela’s good morning was entirely too cheery.

  Flaherty skidded a cup of coffee in front of him. “Great weekend for relaxing.” He pointed at the TV where a man before a weather map was saying, “… Another eye-smarting day in prospect as the Regional Pollution Control again clamped a lid on open burning.”

  The weather man disappeared and another commentator said, “Meanwhile the mystery submarine works its way downriver, giving sleepy towns their first excitement since the night boat to Albany stopped running. Thousands of dying fish…” Flaherty turned it off.

  “How’re we going to get to Northumber? I had to ditch the car.”

  Flaherty thought a moment. “We could use the truck.”

  Rudolf gave a cracked laugh at the thought of arriving at the superposh center of the cocktail circuit in a dump truck. Then he decided it was just the touch that might reestablish him one sneer above the rest of them. He’d been worrying about what to wear. Screw them! Wear the mud-stained clothing he’d been using to make money. His happy reverie of the ultimate put-down was interrupted by an ululating shriek ranging from grating to hypersonic. Finally Rudolf realized it was Pamela.

  When he got upstairs and forced open the bathroom Pamela stood in the middle of the floor, pantyhose bagging inelegantly. She was still screaming.

  Flaherty burst in. He got his arm around her and began emitting the steady stream of blarney Irishmen use to calm women and horses. Finally he got her downstairs into the kitchen and sipping a drink.

  “It came right up and touched me!” she was repeating.

  “You mean the — uh. The plumbing’s old. Sometimes it backs up,” Flaherty soothed.

  “It wasn’t water,” Pamela wailed. “It was sticky, slimy. It reared up out of the bowl like a—” she shuddered and sipped again.

  “Now now,” Flaherty said, “you’ve had a bad night. Sometimes I see things too.”

  “You sodden sot!” Pamela shrieked, “I’m not an alcoholic. It was there! I saw it!”

  Flaherty looked at Rudolf. Rudolf bounded upstairs and closed the bathroom door. “Tuchi!” he hissed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER 6

  There was no answer. The water in the john remained quiescent. Rudolf poked with a long-handled brush and decided it really was water. The plumbing in this old house had been known to give an occasional disconcerting belch. Perhaps after last night Pamela had been overwrought. She was, after all, a delicate, sensitive person.

  With Flaherty doing the lion’s share, it still took half an hour to convince her that it was all in her mind. But by the time they were eating breakfast Pamela was almost gay, thanks to more draughts of Irish Tranquilizer. Flaherty glanced at Rudolf. “Sure and there was nothing up there?” he whispered.

  Rudolf shook his head.

  When the first mention of dump truck threatened to unravel all of Flaherty’s calming Rudolf surrendered. They crowded into the oriental red Lamborghini with a thoughtful and slightly anaesthetized Pamela slumped in the middle.

  Halfway there she revived enough to turn on the tape deck. There emerged a monotonous chanting and thumping in some language Rudolf didn’t recognize. Mohawk? Christ, as if he hadn’t heard enough owlscreeching back on the reservation! He stood it for a minute, then shrieked a war whoop and bits of the disaster-to-enemy curse. Pamela started from her lethargy. “He’s off key,” Rudolf said. “It hurts my ears!”

  Impressed with such esoteric sensitivity, Pamela flipped a switch and the tape was replaced with news. “… thousands of dead lampreys and hagfish as the unknown poison makes its way toward the mouth of the Hudson along with persistent rumors of — a submarine? A man from Mars? Witnesses could agree only that mysterious booms and flashes accompany the fish kill.”

  Pamela turned it off.

  Rudolf found the exit ramp and switched to another turnpike, studying the rear-view mirror and wondering if it was just his paranoic imagination or was that blue VW really following him?

  “What’s a hagfish?” he asked.

  The Flaherty roused from his study of the scenery. “Cyclostome,” he said. “Related to the lampreys.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  Flaherty laughed. “The hagfish waits till a big fish is hooked and can’t move.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this,” Pamela said.

  “Slimy little brutes,” the Flaherty continued. “Tentacles round their mouths. Cut open a shark and he’s hollow, full of drowned hagfish. They go up the anal vent.”

  Pamela looked straight ahead with compressed, whitened lips.

  “You’re an ichthyologist too?” Rudolf asked.

  “No, lad. I was a fisherman.”

  They arrived at Northumber. The baronial magnificence of the St. Audrey country seat was a mixture of English medieval and Hollywood silent. Rudolf had never been certain which was which but he was always impressed. They went past a gate house up a looping driveway and were greeted by a huge butler who smiled and yassuhed as if he had never heard of black power.

  In the drawing room Rudolf saw the cocktail crowd still arguing theology, about how many clients could dance on the pinhead of a case worker. A well-constructed young woman wearing something vaguely maid-mod offered him a drink from a tray. My god, Rudolf thought, it’s only noon! From the corner of his eye he saw Flaherty accept a glass. Rudolf took a sip of his own and resolved to carry it around the rest of the day. Somebody had to ride herd on the wild Irishman.

  He looked around for a friendly face. There were people he knew but none seemed to know him. Then somebody clapped a hand over his shoulder. “Hello, haven’t seen you around lately.”

  It was a longhaired man dressed in very expensive mod clothes which did not quite conceal the fact that he was too old to wear them. Rudolf remembered him vaguely as having something to do with the media. He found the dark-haired, vaguely Indian looking girl beside him far more interesting than all the longhaired man’s studied elegance. “I’ve been busy,” Rudolf said, and let his eyes wander back to the girl.

  “That’s nice.” Longhair smiled, his eyes darting nervously in search of bigger game. “What’ve you been up to?” he asked.

  “Axe murder,” Rudolf said. When there was no reaction he continued, “Got tired of the wife’s nagging. Kids were a drag so I adopted a goat and took up animal husbandry.”

  The dark-haired girl betrayed the hint of a smile.

  “Really?” Longhair said. “Sounds interesting. Hope you sell a million copies.” They drifted apart and Rudolf was fating a pouty, pigeon breasted woman whose wig had slipped enough to reveal a fringe of iron gray hair.

  “Oooooooooohhhhh,” she began, “you must be the Indian Pamela was telling me about. Tell me, is it difficult to play the sitar?”

  “I don’t know,” Rudolf said. “I’m not that kind of Indian.”

  “Your English is very good. Have you been here long?”

  “Several generations.”

  �
�That’s nice. Did you fly or come by ship?”

  “We walked.”

  “Oh?” She was still frowning when a cigar followed by a barrel caught Rudolf’s arm. “Been wanting to talk to you all day,” the barrel said.

  “I just got here.”

  “I know, I know. Now, about that color spread, we can do it bleed; but a gatefold — man, do you know what those things cost?”

  “Do it any way you want,” Rudolf said. “I rely implicitly on your expertise.”

  Across the room a knot of people parted momentarily. The Mohawk glanced up and met Rudolf’s eyes. He smiled and for the barest flicker Rudolf saw canary feathers stuck between his gleaming teeth. The crowd closed again, leaving Rudolf to wonder what that goddamn Mohawk was doing here. He looked around for Flaherty. The wild Irishman was helping himself to another cocktail from the mod-maid who was trying not to giggle while he made a production of admiring her matched set.

  Pamela had disappeared. The Flaherty looked up from his ogling and caught Rudolf’s eye with an unreadable expression. Rudolf wondered how drunk he was. He also wondered what was going on back at the gravel pit. If Pamela and Riordan both knew…

  Pamela appeared at the head of the curving staircase, looking so exquisitely virginal in a white cocktail dress that Rudolf found it difficult to believe he had disported himself last night with this fragile flower. A hush crept over the room as heads turned. There was a cheer and applause as she descended the staircase. Royalty, Rudolf decided, could not have done it better. “Rudy, darling!” She crossed the room to kiss him. “I’ve finally found him!” she exclaimed to the gawkers.

  Rudolf wondered if a white man would be suspicious. That sullen, reservation mentality was taking over again, trying to guess what these bastards wanted from him this time. It couldn’t be money. They all had more than he did. From the corner of his eye he saw that goddamn Mohawk, now stripped of his circle of admirers. The canary feathers were no longer visible in his teeth. Neither were his teeth.

  A scowling, out-of-place man wearing a pepper-and-salt suit and the harassed look of an accountant on a movie set meandered about, conversing with no one. Rudolf wondered where he had seen him before, then he saw the Flaherty throw a smoldering glance and remembered. It was the foot-scuffling detective who had tracked them down. Riordan!

  But Pamela St. Audrey still led him on a triumphal tour around the drawing room. Silently, Rudolf thanked whatever gods held jurisdiction that she seemed to have forgotten last night’s drunken inquisition. He still carried the glass in his hand, waiting a chance to substitute it for an empty.

  The goddamn Mohawk gave Rudolf a hearty handshake and a non-ornithophagous grin as Pamela thrust them together. Before Rudolf could maneuver for a killing blow Pamela had swept him on to a gaggle of tweedy types busy regaining their academic freedom.

  “You’re of the involved generation,” one said to Rudolf. “How would you end the war?”

  “Dam the Mekong,” Rudolf suggested. “When the country’s neck-deep in water, transport every native who opts for capitalism. Build a tube to bring down enough Yukon water to turn Arizona into a rice paddy.”

  “But what about the cactus?” an ecologist cried.

  “Transplant it to the Boeing parking lot in Seattle.”

  “How about the Indians?”

  “Well,” Rudolf sighed, “in every war somebody has to lose.”

  Pamela led him to a closed door.

  “Where are we going?”

  She gave a mysterious smile. They proceeded down a hall and she opened another door. Suddenly Rudolf realized he was being pushed into the traditional smoke-filled room. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked. But Pamela was gone.

  There was a single overwhelming air to this room. Each man radiated power like a miniature nuclear reactor. Unlike the media clowns out in the front room, Rudolf had never seen these men. Then he realized he had seen one. Pamela’s father was smiling at him.

  “Been wanting to talk to you for some time,” St. Audrey said, his man-of-distinction image coming across undiluted. Turning to the others, he said, “Gentlemen, I give you Rudolf Redwolf, the young man I was talking about.”

  In the back of Rudolf’s mind was the memory of a vacuum cleaner salesman who had covered the reservation, unworried by any lack of electricity. “Have a cigar,” Mr. St. Audrey was saying. Though Rudolf had been in and out of Northumber for months, this was the first complete sentence he had ever gotten from Pamela’s father. The old man had done little to disguise his contempt for Pamela’s liberal friends and causes.

  Investment banker types were shaking one of Rudolf’s hands. He had a brandy snifter in the other and a cigar in his mouth. Christ, he thought, if I were white I’d look like li’l Abner!

  “… Organizing a new company,” Mr. St. Audrey was saying. “We want you.”

  “Why?”

  St. Audrey laughed. “Didn’t I tell you he was sharp?” he said admiringly. “To put it bluntly, we need an Indian.”

  “You’ve got one out in the front room.”

  St. Audrey laughed again. “With just about enough brains to stand in front of a cigar store,” he said. “I can be just as frank as you. As long as we’re getting a token Indian I’d rather have one who knows when to open his umbrella. He’s out.”

  Rudolf laughed. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. But what kind of company? Why do you need an Indian? And why me?”

  St. Audrey closed a fist. “Building and construction supplies.” He straightened one finger. “A man to negotiate with a predominantly Indian union of high rise steel workers.” He straightened another finger. “You’ve written about the Iroquois who make up the bulk of the union and my daughter thinks you know what you’re talking about.” He straightened the third finger.

  “Is this company set up especially to supply material for that fancy new building you’re putting up?” Rudolf asked.

  “That’s right, son.”

  Already a member of the family!

  “What kind of a partnership are you offering?”

  “Full,” St. Audrey said.

  “How many partners?”

  “There are, uh — eight of us, counting you.”

  “How much is each partner putting up?”

  St. Audrey smiled. “You’d have to ask my accountant for an exact figure.”

  “How about an inexact figure?”

  “About a million apiece.”

  “And I get an equal partnership without putting up anything?”

  “Well, uh, naturally we’d expect you to contribute something. An assignment of future profits should take care of the legal aspects.”

  Between the smells of brandy and cigars Rudolf detected a faint odor of fish. “Your building is going together with aluminum girders instead of steel. Do you want me to negotiate the Structural Iron Workers in, or do I negotiate them out?”

  There were startled hems and haws while Rudolf drew a breath. “Or,” he continued, “is this whole gig just to con me into assigning my rights to a process somebody hasn’t been able to steal?”

  “See!” St. Audrey cackled. “I told you he had a head on his shoulders.”

  Rudolf felt like using St. Audrey’s smug smile to put out his cigar. These fine-haired sons of bitches were admitting it, laughing and smiling as if it were perfectly proper to screw him out of his one chance ever to get rich. Custer, he decided, must have had a smile very like Mr. St. Audrey’s.

  Rudolf wondered where the old canard about Indians having poker faces had started. He couldn’t hide his contempt for this horde of barefaced pirates. Homicidal fury welled until he didn’t dare speak.

  St. Audrey patted his shoulder. “We gambled and we lost,” he said.

  Rudolf drew a breath, counted to ten, and tried to think beautiful thoughts. The only thing that came to mind was the superbly engineered curve of Pamela’s posterior. “Did your daughter know why she was leading me here?” he asked.

  S
t. Audrey laughed. “Pamela’s not business minded. She probably assumes it’s the usual prospective-son-in-law inquisition.”

  In front of a bunch of bankers? In the back of Rudolf’s mind sirens were screaming and bells clanging. Marriage to Pamela! He tried to speak normally.

  “Why should I join your company?”

  A balding man with a Bernard Baruch pince nez cleared his throat. “There are legal aspects you may not have considered,” he rumbled. “Dr. Flaherty is under contract. Anything he discovers is legally ours.”

  “You’re welcome to anything Dr. Flaherty discovers.”

  “Come now,” St. Audrey laughed. “You don’t expect us to believe it’s your discovery!”

  Rudolf smiled back. “Shanghai the good doctor,” he said. “Lock him up with truth serums and transmission microscopes. Dump a few millions down the drain. While you’re at it, run another search and see if I was stupid enough to apply for a patent. Working from the full knowledge that this Indian has had experience with the white man’s paper, give one good reason why he should share his private bonanza with thieves and highwaymen.”

  “I told you he was smart,” St. Audrey gloated. It was almost as if he were on Rudolf’s side. There was puffing of cigars and shaking of wattled jaws. Finally St. Audrey interrupted the debate.

  “The main reason you should join us,” he told Rudolf, “is self interest. We could play mutually destructive games of suit and countersuit, drag it through the courts for years, and only the lawyers would win. I prefer to avoid that. Not just because we both lose, but because the third party who gained might not have the country’s best interests at heart.”

  “Spare me the commie menace,” Rudolf said. “I’m busy fighting the godless capitalists.”

  “We’re not fighting,” St. Audrey protested. “We ask you to join us. Name your own price.”

  “In return for what?”

  “Protection. The government, for instance, might get ideas about security. If you want horror stories, check out how much Einstein or Oppenheimer ever made out of nuclear power. Go it alone and you’ll end up outside watching us, or somebody far more ruthless, spend the money that could have been yours.”