The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  “Nonsense!” I said. “The conservationists are being paid by the Mafia; everybody knows that. Uranium’s unsafe, but so is coal. Look at the Chinese. They run their whole industrial plant on U235. The U.S. was trying to find safe uranium in space, just like me, back when I was a kid. You can’t have elevators and fast cars on solar power, L’Ouverture.”

  “Benjamin,” he said, in his gravelly, soothing way. “Benjamin, who needs cars? They had all that in the twentieth century, and all they did was kill and maim one another on the highways.”

  “In the twenty-first century they stay home and watch TV,” I said, “and freeze in winter. There’s a price for everything. The Chinese have big bank accounts and their cuisine’s deteriorated; you can’t buy a Peking duck in Peking. Soyaburgers and fries. They have to come to New York to spend all that money. What kind of civilization is that?”

  “The Chinese are known the world over for the quality of their family life.”

  “Hogwash, L’Ouverture. They watch TV together and send their kids to business colleges. There’s more revolutionary zeal in Aberdeen than in all of China.” I thought of Isabel, of her sad capitalist love for communism. We should join the Communist Party together and start a revolution somewhere. I’d finance it and she’d write the slogans.

  Just then Morton came back in the room with a tray. “Let’s have our coffee now,” Baynes said. He nodded toward a permoplastic table by the marble fireplace and Morton set the tray there. “Why don’t you put the children back to bed, Morton?”

  “Shit!” one of the kids said, sotto voce.

  “Go to bed,” Baynes said wearily. That seemed to work, and they followed Morton upstairs like lambs. Baynes turned his attention back to me. He was still smiling but clearly tired. It was about four in the morning. “I don’t really care about the Chinese,” he said. “They’re admirable in their way, but East is East…”

  I leaned forward. It was time to make my pitch. I could feel the intensity in my voice. “L’Ouverture,” I said, “there’s more safe uranium where that came from.” I gestured toward the general direction of Aynsley Field. “A billion tons of it. We can beat those Chinese hustlers at their own game. We can be the richest nation on Earth again, L’Ouverture.” I leaned back and chewed my cigar a minute. “And this time we’re mellower. We’ll do it right. We won’t kill ourselves in our cars anymore. No more big horsepower. We won’t bully the little countries.” I paused a moment, overwhelmed myself by what I was going to say. “We can build a great civilization, L’Ouverture, a great, humane, and beautiful civilization. We can be an electronic Byzantium, a holy city. We can be the Age of Pericles and light up the world. Think of the talent in this country! Think of the architecture we can build with cheap power!”

  I sat back, moved by my own words. I really believed it. America is a magnificent, fertile place, and in decline it has lost much of its grossness. What a comeback we could have, with all that power from Juno!

  Baynes walked over to the table. “The coffee is ready,” he said coolly.

  I stared at him, miffed at his ignoring my rhetoric. “Come on,” I said. “Where’s your patriotism, for Christ’s sake?”

  He began pouring the coffee with a steady hand. “My daddy used to say to me at Fourth of July parades in Louisville, ‘Whitey talks pretty, but listen to him closely.’”

  I stared at him and almost screamed, Bullshit. But I didn’t. I remembered the black guys in prison. The U.S. has had two black presidents and a dozen black justices in the Supreme Court; a third of Congress is black—mostly women. But the black prisoners at Leavenworth still had to fight to get shoes that fit, had to pay bigger bribes to get the easy jobs in the prison factory. I shrugged and seated myself at the coffee table.

  “Your father made ten times the money my father made,” I said.

  His face became arctic, just for a second. “What in hell was your father good for?”

  There was one final ploy to try, a pretty drastic one, to give myself some operating room. I must at all costs get time and money and stay out of jail. The months on Belson, self-willed though they were, were jail enough. I needed action.

  Wouldn’t you know the coffee cups were plastic? Here was a man who could afford anything and he used coffee cups like these. I took a deep breath, tried to dismiss things like that from my mind, and said, “L’Ouverture, I’ll give you half my share of that uranium outright if you’ll get me back my citizenship and my money and drop those charges.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “A bribe?”

  “What else?” I said. “Draw up papers and I’ll sign them around noon, right after I get back my citizenship and the courts cancel that mumbo-jumbo.”

  He went on sipping his coffee in silence. I leaned back in the little plastic chair by the mantelpiece, feeling at last relaxed. L’Ouverture looked thoughtful and grandfatherly. I felt a part of me yielding to his spell and I didn’t mind, now that I’d played my cards. I knew Baynes: he would rather make a quiet deal like this than fool around. I looked at his contemplative, intelligent old face; this was turning out to be a pleasant welcome home. It was as good in its way as finding Isabel would have been. Maybe better, because with Baynes I wouldn’t be breaking crockery or screaming at cats. Yet I knew well enough that he could be an authentic blacksnake and a threat to life and limb. He who sups with the devil must eat with a long spoon. Oh yes. This man could have me clapped in irons. Still, I let myself love him a bit, dangerously, for his charm. Christ, do I ever want a father! And at my age! What a charming old son of a bitch, with his shiny black head and yellowing teeth and steady hands—so manicured, so well manicured. I wanted to lean across the table and hug him.

  He was looking at me. “Have some coffee, Ben,” he said.

  That reminded me of where I was. I took a sip of the coffee and almost spit it out. Instant coffee. Garbage! What kind of a father was he anyway? Somewhere in his soul was the demon that had dominated my real father: Low Rent. If Western Civilization dies it will drown in instant coffee, processed cheese and TV specials. Men and women in America have been born, lived, and gone to quickly dug graves without ever tasting real coffee, a real hamburger, or a real glass of lemonade. What right did this billionaire, the sharpest man in the Senate, have to drink powdered coffee out of plastic cups? Genghis Khan would have known better.

  “L’Ouverture,” I said, even though I could go to jail for it, “you should make your coffee with a Chemex. And I need fifty thousand in cash. I mean right away.”

  “Benjamin,” he said, a bit sternly, “I like instant coffee. I embrace the modern world and live happily in it. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not interest me. Instant coffee is the drink of the times and I drink it with pleasure. I don’t keep cash around.”

  “That’s a pity,” I said, and tried the coffee again. I needed the caffeine.

  L’Ouverture shrugged, still smiling, and spoke in his honeyed old voice, “Snobbery is a waste of energy. The past is dead, Ben. Your father was an historian; mine was a basketball player. Father adapted the crane dance of his ancestors to varnished oak floors and sent me to Harvard, where I learned to prosper even as he had. He hated sports, hated the Olympics, hated abstractions. Sometimes he slept with a basketball beside him. I too delight in the real, the contemporary.”

  It was seductive, but I knew Baynes too well to believe it. You’re a power jack-off, I wanted to shout, and the past is alive! Solipsist! The son of a bitch probably counted the votes of his Energy Committee with a hard on. “Look,” I said, “I’d like to go to a bank in the morning and get some cash. When can you have my accounts released?”

  He smiled benignly. “Just have an extra croissant for breakfast, Benjamin, and go to your bank at ten. I’ll have Justice Flaherty call in a reversal. Where did you bring the uranium from? Fomalhaut?”

  Jesus Christ! I thought, How does he know? It wasn’t Fomalhaut, thank God; it was Aminidab. Juno. But how did he know about Fomalhaut? Fro
m that geologist in Jamaica? Anyway, I didn’t fall for it. “Come on, L’Ouverture,” I said. “That’s not the deal.”

  He shrugged and set his coffee cup down with an air of finality. “If you won’t tell me where the uranium comes from, there is no deal. I’m going to get some sleep.” He turned his face toward a doorway and called out, “All right out there.”

  At first I thought he was hailing Morton, but I realized that was unlikely just as two men in brown suits came in the doorway, each holding a pair of handcuffs. The chair I was sitting on was low, in a sort of semi-Japanese way, and when I tried to jump to my feet I knocked over the table. L’Ouverture got out of the way just in time and I didn’t even get the pleasure of splashing him with hot coffee. They had me by the time I’d recovered my balance and was, ignominiously, in a semi-crouch like a small boy with a stubbed toe. The cuffs were of steel; I had one wrist cuffed to a wrist of each of those bastards in what seemed to be a single motion. They pulled me upright from my crouch. Private cops, probably. Cheap ones too.

  One of them began to recite, “You have the right to remain silent…”

  Baynes interrupted him. “No need,” he said. “Mr. Belson has no rights. He is not a citizen.”

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  “Take him to the Reagan Detention Center and book him for illegal entry.”

  My stomach sank. From rebirth to the Reagan Stir. I checked the two out. Poker-faced. But one of them, the fatter, seemed under his stern patriot look to be troubled by something. “Okay,” I said, “let’s get out of here.” And then to L’Ouverture, who was still smiling amiably, who had almost certainly never stopped smiling, “You are one deceitful son of a bitch.”

  He went on smiling. “Have a good day,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  The Reagan Stir is way out past Arlington Cemetery, and a long haul. The cops ushered me out the door of Baynes’s house and down the block to where they had a little methane-powered Honda with D.C. plates. Twenty miles per hour, maximum. We all squeezed together in the front seat, which forced me to put my knees under my chin. But I didn’t feel as uncomfortable as the fat guy looked, sitting on my right with one arm and half his head out the window. We chugged along under the moonlight for about ten minutes, until we were approaching a woodshop, clearly an all-night one, at the corner of Constitution Avenue and D Street.

  The fat guy with some effort pulled his head back in the car and I felt his soft belly mash against my side. The thinner one was driving with his left hand, his right being cuffed to my wrist. I really didn’t like this kind of physical intimacy one bit and I’d been repeating my mantra for the last two or three minutes. “Billy Bob,” the fat one said, “pull over at that store. I gotta use the restroom.”

  “Can’t you wait?” Billy Bob said, sounding a whole lot like my mother.

  “Hell, no,” the fat one said. “I’ve been waiting back at that house for an hour and a half.”

  “Shit,” Billy Bob said. I figured he was going to stop but, like mothers everywhere, was going to exact payment for it. “You might have used the toilet back there.”

  “Billy Bob,” Fatty said, “pull over.”

  Billy Bob drove up to the woodshop and parked. It took us a minute to get out the same door that we had all gotten in. I felt God had sent me this opportunity. I’d bet a million that whatever cops were at the stadium hadn’t told Baynes on the phone that I’d decked two of their number. As far as Fatty and Billy Bob were concerned, I was just an aging tycoon.

  There was an old Chinese woman at the cash register inside who looked as if she had seen all there was to see and had built no small part of the Great Wall with her own rough hands. When the three of us came in as a conjoined trio, as it were, she was reading a comic book. She looked up, laid her cigarette on the edge of an overflowing ashtray, and waited.

  “I need to use the restroom,” Fatty said, clearly ill at ease.

  She nodded toward the far wall. A faded print of Mao surrounded by awed children hung there, and under it on a small hook a key.

  There was no room for the three of us to walk abreast, but we managed to make it single file with a little shoving around and Fatty got his key. Getting back out the door was a bit confusing, but we made it. The shop was clearly an ancient gas station, with the restroom in back.

  “Why don’t you piss against a tree, for Christ’s sake?” Billy Bob said.

  “If I only needed to piss I’d a done it a quarter hour ago.” I was surprised at the uncowed quality in Fatty’s voice. He had apparently developed a sense of mission over this middle-of-the-night B.M. and he was riding it. Well, I was developing a sense of mission too, although not a cloacal one.

  “How in hell you going to stay handcuffed and do that?” Billy Bob said.

  “Let’s look it over,” Fatty said.

  In back was a room with MEN on its door. Fatty unlocked it easily enough and flipped on a little ten-watt light inside. What a grubby-looking place, with wet newspaper on the cracked linoleum floor! And what a smell! The Chinese have one of the most admirable cultural histories in the world. Their cuisine—where it still exists—is right up there with the French. Hell, they make a fine spaceship. But they’re in the Middle Ages when it comes to toilets.

  As a partner in this venture, so to speak, I could see right away that it was going to be a problem for Fatty. Had I been he, I would have found a dark lawn somewhere, dropped my pants and made the best of it. But either that hadn’t occurred to Fatty and Billy Bob, or it was far beyond Fatty’s sense of propriety.

  The room wasn’t big enough for the three of us. The toilet faced the doorway. Fatty tried to cool it. He walked in, dragging me by my wrist halfway into the door, which opened outward. He turned around facing me and began to loosen his belt with his free hand, while getting himself into kind of a crouch. For a moment I panicked; if I had to watch this I would rather do a month in solitary.

  But as I had hoped, Fatty suddenly gave up. “Look, Billy Bob,” he said, nodding toward the handcuff that joined us, “undo this thing for a minute.”

  Billy Bob looked doubtful. “What in hell…?” he said.

  “Come on!” Fatty said, in desperation. “He ain’t going nowhere with you attached.”

  “Okay,” Billy Bob said. He got the little magnetic key out of his pants pocket, walked in front of me and undid the cuff from Fatty’s wrist, letting it dangle from mine. Then he stepped back out the door and I followed him for a step, so that I was now all the way outside.

  “Close the door,” Fatty said. He was standing in the doorway. I had already seen there was no bolt latch on the inside. Only a knob.

  “Sure,” I said, casually. I took the knob firmly in my now free right hand, felt the steel heft of the door, and slammed it powerfully right into Fatty’s face. The door clicked shut and I could hear a thud. The strength in my pectorals felt like a triphammer. Then I jerked my left arm toward me with everything I had and Billy Bob’s head shot past my face and into the door. I smashed into the back of his head with my closed fist and felt him go slack. Then I turned the bolt on the men’s room door. It clicked into place beautifully.

  Billy Bob was out cold with his face bloody enough that I could see the mess even by moonlight. I had no pity for him just then; he had chosen a violent profession for himself and should have been more alert. I bent down and examined his left hand for the key. It wasn’t there. I’d been afraid of that. He’d probably dropped it when I’d jerked him. I began looking around the grass as well as I could by moonlight. No luck. I dragged him over a few feet and looked where he’d been standing after he’d unlocked Fatty. Still no luck. It was just too dark. From inside the restroom came Fatty’s voice now, shouting, “Get me out of here!” He began banging on the door.

  I was getting worried. I had just about made up my mind to pick up Billy Bob and carry him back to the car with me when a small miracle occurred: a light over the men’s room came on. I looked back towar
d the front of the building and, sure enough, Chinese Mama stood there, with her cigarette and comic book in one hand and her other on a light switch. She must have heard the commotion.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely and began searching the grass with my eyes. And there it was, about a foot the other side of where Billy Bob had been standing when I’d decked him. I dragged him a bit farther, stretched out and got it. I was astonished at how steady my hand was when I unlocked us.

  I looked back at Mama. Inscrutable, unperturbed. Billy Bob and I could have been discussing the weather. And the louder Fatty shouted and banged the door the calmer she looked, a genuine flower of heavenly repose all by herself. I could have kissed her. I checked out Billy Bob and figured he’d be all right in a few minutes, since his neck wasn’t twisted in any serious way. The poor son of a bitch.

  I started walking toward the front of the store, where I’d seen a cigar-and-candy rack. When I came up to Mama I said, “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  She took a puff from her cigarette. “Arabella Kim,” she said. “Are you Captain Belson from outer space?”

  I grinned at her. “Oh yes.” And then, “I’d like to buy some cigars.” I gave her my whole forty dollars for ten cigars—cheap two-dollar ones, but what the hell—and six Mars bars. Mars seemed appropriate for a space pirate. “Keep the change,” I told her, “and I’d be obliged if you didn’t help these two for a few minutes.” I was still out of breath a bit and my voice was husky.

  “Many people are on your side, Captain Belson,” she said. “People write letters to the Washington Post and say we should have your uranium. I think so.”