Simon watched her get into the Cougar and drive away, then remarked, “She didn’t find nothin’ good at Bejay’s, I think.” He studied the car as it disappeared around a curve, and scratched his nose. “I wish she wanted me to do something—I’d do it, me!” Then he turned regretfully and went back to sit in his worn cane-bottomed chair.
7
“The World’s What It Is!”
* * *
Savage rang the doorbell of Sunny Sloan’s apartment at exactly seven o’clock in the morning. He waited for what seemed a long time before the door opened a crack, only allowing him to see a pair of sleepy eyes peering out.
“Rise and shine, Sunny,” he said cheerfully. “Time to get the show on the road.”
The door closed, the safety chain rattled, and when the door swung back again, Savage entered to find Sunny dressed in a pair of rose-colored pajamas. “What time is it?” she muttered sleepily, batting her eyes against the sunlight.
“Crack of dawn,” Savage replied. “I thought you wanted to get an early start.”
Sunny stretched like a cat, her lush figure outlined against the sheen of the pajama top. She yawned, ruffled her hair, then shook her shoulders. “I was up late doing my homework on the gov,” she said. Suddenly she seemed to be aware of her attire and said quickly, “Have a seat, Ben. I’ll shower and be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Savage shrugged as he slumped down on the couch beside the window and said, “You’ve changed your ways if that happens.” Sunny disappeared through a door to his right, and he thumbed through the magazines scattered on the bleached walnut coffee table. Tossing aside copies of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle, he grunted in disgust. “Not a single decent magazine—no Popular Mechanics or American Car. Not even a copy of Dairy Goat Journal!” He found a six-month-old copy of People, leaned back and studied it for ten minutes.
He found the contents interesting—as an anthropologist would find the civilization of an alien culture interesting. The pictures revealed some sort of sub-specie of beings, wearing strange clothing and with rather frightening hairdos. They came in black and white, but all seemed to have been born with the same expression—a congenital smile with lips glued back to expose artificially white teeth. All look like descendants of a great white shark, Savage mused. Their marital habits were rather obscure, most of them treating the institution of marriage as some sort of a game he remembered called “Kitty in the Corner,” in which the participants would run from one person to another at a given signal.
Since the only movies Savage watched were those made before 1950—at which year he always insisted that moviemaking as an art form had died—he had seen almost none of the motion pictures mentioned. Most of the people seemed to be “celebrities” rather than people who had actually done something. That is, they were famous for being famous. None of them, he thought as he tossed the magazine aside, built anything, wrote anything worth reading, made a movie worth seeing, or left a legacy that would benefit the world. In an effort to be fair, he muttered, “But, then, neither have I.”
He got up and walked around the room, studying the pictures. He was not a student of art, but reacted to paintings strongly, liking some and hating others. One of the pictures was a print of three men and one woman dressed in scarlet coats and riding horses that seemed eager to jump over fences. He studied the print, and despite admiring the fine drawing, wondered if people still did such things. He assumed they did in Virginia and England—but such a world was as alien to him as the far side of the moon. He could understand chasing an animal that could be eaten—but who would eat a fox? He suddenly recalled Oscar Wilde’s definition of an English foxhunt: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
Moving over to another wall, he arrived at a small print that had a small brass plate on the bottom stating that it was Number 227 out of a limited edition of 1,000 prints. He studied the print, a photograph of a can of Campbell’s soup against a pale beige background.
Just a can of soup.
For all of two minutes, Savage stared at the print, trying to feel something. He had the rather old notion that art was supposed to be moving to the spirit, and here someone had issued 1,000 pictures of a can of Campbell’s soup.
Maybe the can is symbolic of man’s destiny. No, it can’t be that. I wonder if it’s supposed to remind me of my mother? No—all it reminds me of is a can of Campbell’s soup.
He shrugged and for one moment tried to compute how much the “artist” had been paid for taking the picture. More than ten sixth grade teachers made in a year, probably .
It was a depressing thought, and he moved to the third wall, pausing before a large print. It was not an original, and he’d seen a copy of it somewhere before, though he couldn’t remember just where.
It was a picture set in the downtown area of a large city. A late-night scene, it featured a circular cafe with glass walls permitting people to see inside. The inside of the cafe was brilliantly illuminated—but it was the cold light of fluorescent tubes rather than a warm light of sun or candle or lamp. Outside, dark buildings lined the city street, standing ominously bulked together like alien monsters in a murky darkness.
There were four people in the picture, three of them customers and one who was a combination short-order cook and waiter. The cook was a handsome young man with blonde hair. He was bending over, looking at the couple who faced him, evidently saying something to them.
The couple sat facing the interior of the cafe, their backs to the dark street outside. They were well dressed and were looking straight ahead, instead of at each other. They seemed, in fact, not to be conscious of each other, though they obviously were either married or on a date. Their faces were expressionless, so that they seemed like mannequins rather than live human beings.
The third customer sat with his back to the viewer, his face hidden as he slumped over the counter. There was something ominous about him, a dangerous look that was heightened by the way he seemed to be watching the couple with some sort of feral interest.
There was an aura of death over the scene in the painting, and Savage was staring at it with distaste when Sunny came out of the bedroom. “Oh, do you like my new print?” she asked brightly.
“No, I don’t.” Savage turned away from the picture. “I’d take it down if I were you.”
“Take it down?” Sunny was appalled at the suggestion, and somewhat angered. “I just bought it. It’ll be worth a lot of money someday. That’s a Hopper.”
“I don’t care if it’s a hopper, a jumper, or a leaper,” Savage shrugged. “It’s depressing. Look at the thing, Sunny—everybody in it is miserable. And if they leave that cafe they’ve got to go outside—and it’s even more depressing out there. Looks like one of the Projects in New Orleans where we get corpses on a daily basis.”
Sunny stared at Savage, then laughed. “I’d forgotten what a terrible critic you are, Ben. Edward Hopper is one of the finest artists America’s come up with.”
“Is he as good as the guy who took the picture of a soup can?” Ben inquired, motioning at the print with his chin. “That took real talent, didn’t it?”
“You don’t understand art!”
“Sunny, any twelve-year-old with a ten-dollar camera could take a picture of a soup can—and some of them could take a better one than that thing on your wall.”
Sunny stiffened with outrage. “That’s about all I need to hear, Ben! You don’t know enough to talk about art. Let’s go.”
Savage stepped outside, waiting as she locked the door. As they walked out to his car, his eyes moved constantly along the street. As he opened the door, Sunny noticed he was watching a black Pontiac Trans Am that had started the engine a hundred yards away and was pulling away from the curb. She saw his hand slip inside his coat, and her eyes grew large. “Ben—!” she said quickly, but stopped when he ignored her.
The Pontiac passed them by, the driver, a harried-looking woman with a small child trying to help her
drive, gave them a wan smile, and Savage’s expression lightened. Sunny, realizing she’d been holding her breath, let it go and got hastily into the car. When Savage got in and drove away, she asked timidly, “Ben, did you really think someone in that car was out to get me?”
Savage turned his head, a small smile on his wide lips. “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. Then he shook his head. “Better to suspect everybody.”
“Not a nice way to live, is it, Ben?”
“Well, it beats the alternative—which is to get killed.”
His casual brutality shook her, and she sat there silently, thinking hard as he drove toward the interstate. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” she murmured. “I’d like to be able to get up without wondering if I’ll be alive at sundown.”
They were passing through one of the inner city housing additions called Desire Project. It was what remained of a dream someone had had to give decent housing to poor urban people. Once the paint had been as bright and gleaming as those bureaucratic hopes, but paint and dreams were now faded, peeling, and reeking of decay.
“Those people who live in Desire Project, Sunny,” Savage remarked, “don’t have any chance at what you call a ‘normal’ life. You told us all about it in that special you did on the horrors of urban decay, remember?”
Sunny shot him an angry glance, but he continued, “Guess it’s one thing to do a story on a problem—and something else to have to live in the problem.”
“I did all I could to call attention to the crime and vice that goes on here!”
“Sure, I know,” Savage nodded. “That’s what sociologists and reporters always do—point out the problems. But they never solve any of them, do they?”
“And what do you do to solve them, Mr. Savage?” Sunny demanded. She had thought of such things herself, but it angered her to have him point them out. “I don’t see you mounted on a white horse, riding into the middle of the battle for right!”
“Guess I’ll leave that for the Lone Ranger and Tonto,” Savage nodded. He turned to her, studied her briefly, then cut his gaze back to the street. He drove up on Interstate 10 and headed west toward Baton Rouge before he said thoughtfully, “I think that’s why that picture of the cafe bothers me, Sunny.”
She thought about his remark, then asked in a puzzled voice, “What do you mean by that?”
“Guess I’ve gotten to the point where I believe the world’s like that picture—a dark, frightening place where we dodge into a lighted spot for a few minutes, then have to go outside with the monsters sooner or later.”
“The world’s what it is,” Sunny answered, disturbed by the cynical note in his words. He’d always been so easygoing, and tough enough to face whatever came. But now she saw that beneath Ben Savage’s light manner lay a dark cynicism and fatalism that frightened her. “We can’t change it—not really. The only thing we can do is make the best of it.”
“Eat, drink, and be merry?” Savage asked, his lips curved upward in a humorless smile. “What kind of a stupid philosophy is that? Like that old beer commercial, ‘You only get one trip around, so live it with all the gusto you can.’” Savage stepped on the gas and the Hawk lunged ahead, pushing Sunny back into the upholstery. “Got to be more to life than that.”
“Maybe there isn’t. Maybe what you see is what you get.”
Savage didn’t answer, but he shook his head stubbornly. Sunny moved around so her back was against the door and she faced him more squarely. She studied the rugged lines of his face, wondering about the source of the scar that rose out of his left eyebrow and wandered up his forehead to disappear into his thick black hair. She’d asked him once how he’d come by it, and he’d said in a curt voice, “Foolishness and misplaced confidence.”
“Ben, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t used to be like this,” she asked. “Are you in trouble or something?”
“No more than usual, I guess,” Savage shrugged. “Just thinking more about things. When you’re eighteen, you don’t meditate much, do you? You just put your head down and run at any big ugly problem that jumps in front of you.” Savage swerved skillfully, guiding the Hawk around an armadillo before continuing. “But those of us who survive that kind of youthful stupidity—well, we have to ask if there aren’t some things that can’t be whipped and that won’t go away.”
“What’s got you scared, Ben?”
Savage held the steering wheel firmly, his eyes fixed on the distance as though he saw some sort of message written on the inverted bowl of the sky. “Dead is a long time, Sunny,” he said finally. “I don’t want to use up all my life and get to the end of it just in time to discover I’ve lived it wrong.”
Sunny said no more, for she didn’t understand this side of Savage. Finally they came to the city limits of Baton Rouge and she said, “Take the Bluebonnet exit, Ben.” Half a mile later, he left Interstate 10 and followed her instructions to cross underneath the overpass. On the right was a pink building with green letters across the front that said Ralph ’n Kacoo’s. “We’ll meet Dani there tonight,” Savage observed. “Where we going?”
“Right up there,” Sunny nodded. “To that big building with the glass front.”
Savage was surprised. “I thought that was part of the Bible college.” He gestured at the sign that blazoned the name of a famous TV evangelist who had suffered a moral lapse.
“It was built to be a part of it, but after the trouble, DEQ leased it,” Sunny shrugged. “Made a lot of people mad when the decision was made to move the DEQ to this place. They claimed a ministry has no business renting out office space. Look, there’s the parking lot right over there.”
Savage pulled into a parking lot that was packed, and ended up by pulling the Studebaker up on a strip of lawn. “Probably get hauled off,” he observed as they got out. He looked up at the gleaming glass front of the building which was seven stories high, whistled, and said, “Some building!”
They walked through the glass doors, and as they went up on the elevator Sunny said, “I’ve spent a little time cultivating this lady, Ben. She’s kind of anti-men.” She hesitated, then added, “Behave yourself, will you?”
“I promise not to punch her out.”
“I’m not kidding, Ben. She can help us—but she’s on the razor’s edge. If she says too much, she’s out of a job.”
The door opened, and Sunny led him down a broad hallway with bright new green tile to an office that had six names on the door. “That’s her—Adelaide Lawson,” Sunny said. They stepped inside a large room cut up into small cubicles, each manned by a worker. Sunny ignored them and went to a room with a frosted glass door with an inscription in black script: Assistant Coordinator.
Sunny tapped on the door, and when a woman’s voice said, “Come in,” she opened the door and stepped inside. Savage followed her and shut the door behind him. Glancing around, he saw that the office was very small, with one window that looked out on a large warehouse across a field. The woman sitting at the desk was small, thin, and intense. She was, he decided, no more than thirty-five, but she had the look of an older woman. She had small eyes, made up to look larger, and dyed black hair. The roots were lighter than the jet black of the rest of the hair, he saw, and there was an angry light in her eyes.
“I asked you not to come here,” she snapped, then turned her eyes on Savage. “And who is this?”
Sunny said apologetically, “Addie, I’m sorry! But I’ve been having some threats, and had to have some protection. This is Ben Savage.”
Addie Lawson stared at Savage as if he had crawled out from under a rock, and then dismissed him. “What do you want?”
Sunny turned on her full powers of persuasion, but it took ten minutes for her to get the woman into a talking mood. Finally Addie relaxed, and even behaved civilly toward Savage. Sunny played her skillfully, saying, “Ben, it’s awful what’s been done to Addie!” She turned toward Savage so that the woman could not see the left side of her face and winked at him. “
She was absolutely robbed of her rights.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Lawson,” Ben said, putting regret into his voice, and trying to look as humble as possible. “What happened?”
He had asked the right question, for the answer boiled out of Addie like a fiery explosion. It appeared that she had been scheduled to become head of her department—a position that everyone agreed she deserved! But the governor had fallen for that little tramp straight out of a barroom—and had given her the job!
“Why, I can’t believe that!” Ben said, letting amazement wash over his face. “Even the governor couldn’t get by with something that raw!”
“Oh, he did it through his stooges, like he gets all his dirty work done. He got Phil Herndon to do the actual hiring.” Hatred sharpened Addie’s features, and she gave one short, bitter burst of laughter. “Can you imagine what that floozie did in that position?”
“But did she have any training in geology or environmental control?” Ben asked quickly, pouring gas on the flames that roared out of the woman.
“Training!” Addie stared at him scornfully, her black eyes glittering. “The only training she had was rolling drunks in a bar!”
Sunny spoke up sympathetically, “Ben, it was terrible! And Addie here had to do all that girl’s work in addition to her own! Isn’t that right, Addie?”
Savage sat there, getting a clear picture, and wondering how much validity there would be to the woman’s testimony. She obviously hated men, hated the governor, and hated Cory Louvier. Finally he heard Sunny set the hook by saying, “Addie, you’ve got to help us. The only way you’re ever going to get your rights is if this thing blows up in Russell’s face.”
At once apprehension made the woman blink. “You don’t understand state government, Sunny,” she said, lowering her voice. “The first rule—and the last rule—is: ‘Don’t make waves.’” A haggard look came into her eyes, and she seemed older and very tired. “No matter how bad things are—no matter if the director puts his muddleheaded nephew in charge of the whole operation—you don’t talk about it, especially to the press!”
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