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by Billy Lee Brammer


  “I think we could,” Shavers said. “Matter of fact, I’ve had a couple of writers working on your scene, Governor. I think we’ve got it worked out. We had a problem at first — most of our tight shots and interiors are filmed at the studio. But I think we can handle it out here in the open.”

  “You’ll do it won’t you, Governor?” Vicki said. “You ought to make the most of your visit …”

  “Who’re the others coming out?” Sweet Mama said.

  “Picture stars,” Hoot Gibson said. “More of ’em.”

  “Greg Calhoun is one of them,” Shavers said. “He’s Vicki’s co-star. I think you’ll all like Greg … He’s fine boy.” He looked at Sarah and Sweet Mama as if for confirmation. “You ladies heard of Greg, haven’t you?”

  Vicki talked about Greg Calhoun and some of the players who had been cast in character parts. Sweet Mama nodded; Sarah did not comment. Vicki turned back to the Governor.

  “It’s such a waste of time to come all the way out here and then just stay a few hours,” she said.

  “What about it, Governor?” Shavers said.

  Fenstemaker looked at his wife. “How you feel about it, Sweet Mama?”

  “It’s up to you, dear,” Sweet Mama said. “You’re exhausted — I’m worried about you … I feel fine.”

  Fenstemaker nodded gravely at the suggestion that he might need rest. “Jay?” he said. “… Well I know you’d like to stay … Sarah, how ’bout you, honey?”

  “I just work here,” Sarah said hopelessly. “It’s — whatever you think. You’ve got some appointments to —”

  “Where’ll you put us up, Ed?” Fenstemaker said.

  “No problem at all,” Shavers said, waving his hand, as if inventing solutions. “All we do is bring in two more trailers …”

  “I got to make about a hundred phone calls,” Fenstemaker said.

  “We’ll have the trailers wired for calls before dark,” Shavers said.

  Fenstemaker pulled on his nose. He walked round the room for a moment and then paused to stare out a window, examining the country like a speculator about to buy. “Then I suppose …”

  “All settled, then,” Shavers said. “I’ll have everything arranged. Trailers be here before long — you’ll have your own rooms then. We’ll all have a fine time …” He looked at the others, vastly pleased. “You’ll excuse me now … We’re little behind schedule, and we’ll really have to push it if we’re going to get Vicki out of here for the Governor’s party this weekend.”

  “By all means then,” Fenstemaker said cordially. “Step it up!”

  Shavers spoke to Vicki: “We’ll shoot that scene in just a few minutes. Don’t take any more rides … Please.”

  “I’ll be along,” Vicki said, and Shavers left the room.

  Vicki stepped between the Governor and Hoot Gibson, touching their arms lightly. “I’ve got to change again,” she said. “It won’t take long. And when I’m through I want you all to come join me for a drink.”

  “Ah’d be for that,” Hoot Gibson said immediately.

  “Governor?”

  “I’m not so sure, Miz Vicki …”

  “You ought to take a little nap, Arthur,” Sweet Mama said. “Right over here on Mr. Shavers’ couch.”

  “Mebbe so,” Fenstemaker said. “I got a good deal of work waitin’ for me later …”

  “Governor, I understand entirely,” Vicki said. She smiled; Hoot Gibson smiled; Fenstemaker bent his head down, took Vicki’s hand and kissed it. “And I thank you, Miz Vicki,” he said.

  Vicki clutched Hoot Gibson’s arm. “It’s just the four of us, then,” she said. “Miss Lehman and Hoot Gibson and Jay and myself. I’ll be ready for you in a few minutes. We’ll have that drink. I’ve a maid in there who mixes an exquisite whiskey sour. Uses egg whites. They’re good for you.” She let loose of Hoot Gibson, reached out and tapped the end of his red nose. She waved at the others and walked out of the room, across the reception area and into her own quarters.

  “Bourbon!” Hoot Gibson exulted. “Haven’t had bourbon — haven’t had anythang but Scotch whiskey — since th’ goddam ’nauguration …”

  His mouth was flapping at the refrigerated air. None of the others was listening. The Governor had already moved away and settled himself on the couch. Sweet Mama was pulling a pillow and blanket down from a storage bin. Jay stared absently in the direction Vicki had gone. He turned finally to Sarah, smiling. “Godalmighty,” he said. “How long does it take to fly here from the coast?” Sarah did not answer him; her mind was plodding ahead in time, attempting to adjust, to equip itself for the drinks they would have presently and the nightmare that was surely due to engulf them before another day was ended. She realized suddenly that it was just as Jay had described it to her, months ago, and at that time she had not believed what he said. He had talked morbidly of his life with Vicki, but it had never seemed altogether real for Sarah. It was as if Jay had taken real situations and people and dramatized them, inflated them all out of proportion, given them such embellishments that the empty episodes he described lost all the breath of life.

  But it was true; all of it. It was all true, what he said, and now she could see it for herself. She tried to remember everything Jay had said to her in describing the horror off which he had been feeding. “I liked it,” he had said. “That was the awful part. Maybe I’m still drawn to it. Even now I get a perverse pleasure out of Vicki — all her sexuality. My head tells me one thing, but I can’t really hear it for all the whooping going on back and forth between my balls.” She had been offended by the admission, and he was never so candid with her again. Though now she understood what he had been getting at. She wished that she could tell him now that it was comprehensible, finally; that she had at last come through to visualizing what up to that time had seemed only a sort of imagery, a sleight of hand that Jay made with mirrors. Jay had described Vicki, but in fashioning a picture of his actress wife for Sarah the assembled impressions had amounted to no more than the cracked-glass reflections of Sarah herself and those few women who had ever seized her interest. And Vicki was like nothing in her experience — she was the authentic, the genuine article.

  She had been mistaken about Vicki, blundering along on false assumptions, thinking the Vicki that Jay had pieced together in his own imagination was a farce — and she belabored him for not recognizing the fact. But now she could see Vicki was no farce, no sniggering exaggeration, no crude burlesque of the merely carnal. Vicki’s special quality had been communicated to all of them in the room: in a look, in a casual shifting of the limbs, in a movement or a gesture or a rhythm of the pulse. Sarah knew it had been communicated. In the crackling sensuality of Vicki’s presence Sarah herself had felt very like an animal tasting the air.

  One weekend, years before, returning from a college party, she had shared a pullman berth with a girl she had known only casually. In the middle of the night she had come awake in the girl’s arms, only half aware that it was the girl, not wanting it to end and wishing she were still asleep. Another time, later on, during Arthur Fenstemaker’s first campaign, she and the Governor had been riding in the backseat of an automobile, returning from a rally in another city. Fenstemaker had begun to slump sideways against her, exhausted. She had held on to him, attempting to make him comfortable, and presently his big arm had come round her middle and his hand moved over her breasts. She had not wanted the drive ever to end or Fenstemaker to shake himself from sleep.

  Such episodes were like wild carryings-on in a back room, blinds pulled down against daylight convention. It was horrific, all a darkness, and seemed to have nothing to do with the other, the methodical push-pull of seduction. There had been the business with Jay a few weeks before; that had given her a taste of it. But that had been before she had gasped out the meaning to herself of Jay’s nether world, all the stopping points along the way that Jay had attempted to describe. Now she wanted desperately to tell him that she understood, and more: she wa
nted to move closer for a better look. There had been the business with Jay, she thought, but even in the darkness of his room there were bright stalks of sunlight that shone through the blinds … I must have acted awful, she thought, I must have —

  A Negro maid in a uniform of pale blue polished cotton appeared at the door.

  “Miss Vicki say she dressed now and would like ver’ much to have you come join her for a drink.”

  The Governor sat on the edge of the couch, poking mercilessly at his swollen eyelids. “I think I’ll have that drink after all,” he said.

  Sweet Mama helped him to his feet. There were the five of them then, moving toward Vicki’s room, and Sarah could not do anything about her feeling of their all being borne off to slaughter.

  Five

  IN THE SOFTLY LIT, caramel-colored dressing room, Vicki held court, stretching her golden legs along the deep carpet, seated on a short stool facing a many-sided mirror, talking to the others through the reflections, turning occasionally to supervise the pouring of the cocktails.

  Presently they heard the grinding of gears and the groan of the trucks coming toward them up the road from the highway.

  “That’ll be the trailers,” Vicki said. “Now you’ll have your own rooms and you can freshen up if you like.”

  The Governor and the others stood and looked through the blinds as workmen directed and assisted in setting up the staggered line of trailer houses.

  “Are there telephones in those things?” the Governor asked.

  “Oh yes — or there will be in a few minutes. We’ve also got a little intertrailer communication system. If you need anything, just pick up the pink phone. It’ll ring in Ed Shavers’ office, and somebody there will help you.”

  “I’ve got some phone calls — there’s some work I have to do. No — no Sarah, you needn’t come. Just some calls. I’ll try to get it over with in a hurry, Miss Vicki, so I can watch that scene of yours they’re shooting.”

  He turned and raised his glass to the others, finishing off the drink; then headed out the door. Mrs. Fenstemaker began to ask Vicki about movie stars. Jay and Sarah sat quietly while Vicki patiently answered her questions. Hoot Gibson followed the maid into another room and managed to have her serve him the bourbon straight — “raht on top uh them rocks.”

  Arthur Fenstemaker found a small writing table in the other trailer, where he seated himself and placed the call. It was close and uncomfortable at first in the stale air, but then the generators began to throb and the draperies moved silently in the coolness of the room. The draperies were splotched with half-moons and shafts of bright colors and spindly-legged martian creatures with clocks for faces. Arthur Fenstemaker looked at them, fascinated, until the call came through.

  “Arthur — you all right?”

  “Well, they are running hell out of me. They won’t give me any rest, and now I’m out here in no man’s land trying to —

  “Arthur, you are a pretty tough customer — one of the toughest. Do you want to come up here tomorrow. Is that it?”

  “I can’t come tomorrow. I want to come before you do this terrible thing that I heard this morning you are getting ready to do.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to you, Arthur.”

  “Well somebody’s after me — haven’t I been square with your bunch?”

  “You’ve been more than square, Arthur. What is it you want?”

  “I want you to get a sixty-day extension. That’ll give me time to —”

  “Extension on what?”

  “You know what. Hell and goddam — if you do this terrible thing —”

  “What can you do in sixty days?”

  “I don’t know. But we can reason together. You do this thing now and you’ll have a mess on your hands. You’ll defeat me, and the kind of fellow taking my place will have promised everything short of civil war to get in. I’ve been what you bastards up there call moderate. They’ll be calling me a Communist down here if you do this thing. You’ll crucify me, beat me, and there’ll be nothing moderate about whoever happens to be the next Governor.”

  “I didn’t even know you were running for re-election.”

  “Well somebody up there does — you can bet your sweet life on that. First I heard of this was sprung on me this morning, just before I was leaving for this no man’s land —”

  “Where the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Never mind about that. They called me and told me what you people were about to do in the courts. I didn’t know any action was even being contemplated. My God it would kill me. You realize that?

  “Yes, but —”

  “You know what my position is. I want to cooperate in any way I can. I want to abide by the law. But you get somebody stirring up the people and I’ll have a riot on my hands. And then pretty soon you won’t have me here to smooth things over. For example — there are a bunch of segregationists down in —”

  “Wait a minute, Governor …”

  “There are these segregationists and they’re bringing in this bird from — Well you know who he is. It’s been in all the papers. He’s making a speech tomorrow night, and they’ve got these special buses taking members of the Legislature down —”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me ask you a question or two. I don’t know whether I can get this postponed. It’ll take some work, I can tell you —”

  “I appreciate that …”

  “I don’t know if I can. If I do, I don’t want any credit for it, and if I don’t, I don’t want any credit for it.”

  “Neither do I. I’m not talkin’ to anyone. My staff doesn’t even know about it …”

  “There are a lot of things I can’t do. And messing around with the courts is one of them.”

  “I know that. But this was instigated by your people. Who they are I don’t know. But you can take the pressure off. Sixty days is all I ask. Somebody up here’s trying to defeat me.”

  “The way you say it, I belong to a giant conspiracy.”

  “No, no. The wicked fleeth when no man pursueth. I’m ready, willing and able to do the right thing — in sixty days. I need a stay of execution.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’re a good man. God bless you.”

  “Well you’re all right yourself. I’ll call you.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know — when it’s settled.”

  “Call me at the Capitol. My office will know where I am.”

  “All right.”

  “All right.”

  Six

  ARTHUR FENSTEMAKER SAT QUIETLY for a few minutes after he had broken the connection. He stared round the room, not seeing any of it, thinking of the conversation, going back over it sentence by sentence, reassembling the phrases in his mind. He thought casually of having a drink brought to him. He smoked a cigarette, one of the five he had rationed himself for the day. The other telephone, the pink one, made a buzzing sound. He picked up the receiver.

  “Governor?” Vicki’s voice came to him, twinkling and insistent; the emotions it aroused in him were unsettling. He wanted to keep his mind on his business.

  “Yes, Miss Vicki?”

  “Would you like another drink?”

  “Well now you must be reading my mind. I —”

  “Or would you like to take a walk over the hill with us and watch that scene?”

  “Perhaps I should — just to see how this business is done. I’m a little frightened about what I’ve committed myself to.”

  “Nothing to be frightened about. Come along and you’ll see how simple it all is.”

  He agreed to meet the others outside. It was now midafternoon but the sun was still nearly directly overhead; the reflections came at them from every direction. They did not have far to go to reach the set, which was hardly any set at all. One of the wooden oil derricks had been hoisted off the railroad flatcar and placed near a fence that was only a few hundred feet long. A dirt road paralleled the fenc
e and several hundred yards up the road the Dusenberg was parked. Vicki was driven to the Dusenberg in a jeep; the others stayed behind and watched the cameramen and technicians going over the scene with Shavers. One of the men stood in the middle of the road, paying out a tape measure to a camera boom. Others stood around under the wooden derrick, looking up dubiously at its insides.

  Then the area in front of the cameras was cleared except for a single person, a stand-in for Greg Calhoun someone explained to them, who climbed halfway up the derrick and straddled one of the cross timbers. The boom camera moved up and around like a cobra’s head, and Shavers climbed on top for a moment to satisfy himself about something; no one was quite sure what.

  They could hear the rumble of the Dusenberg, idling down the road, and then someone signaled Vicki to proceed. The old automobile moved ahead, and the cameras swung with the approach. It was rather an anticlimax for the visitors. Vicki approached in the Dusenberg; then the fellow hanging on to the derrick waved at her and the Dusenberg stopped and Vicki waved back and rested her arms along the open window of the car, her chin on her arms. They ran through the scene again, and once again, shifting the cameras occasionally, and Vicki had returned up the road for still another attempt when the Governor, Mrs. Fenstemaker, Hoot Gibson, Sarah and Jay gave up in exhaustion and headed back to the row of trailer houses.

  The Governor and his wife went directly to their “suite.” Hoot Gibson wandered on across to the mess tent. Jay and Sarah stood and talked for a few moments outside one of the trailers. It all seemed very formal and painfully remote. There had been little real communication between them since the week before when Arthur Fenstemaker had arranged the trip in exchange for a personal appearance by Vicki at his party. They talked idiotically outside the trailer house.

  “It’s hot,” she said to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Is my nose blistered?”

  “Yes. Is mine?”

  “You look like a lobster.”

 

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