The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “Let me try something on you,” Buster said, “just see what you think. If Bob Combs’s politics are pretty bad today, they were worse twenty years ago. What would you say to that?”

  Combs nodded silently, looking toward the front windows. “There’s a whole lotta folks smarter than you an’ me that never figured that out, did they?”

  “So when you were active in the movement, what was he doing?” Foreman asked.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Combs said. “If he was up to no good, who’s gonna say so? If you find out, who’s gonna change him? The only way you’re gonna change him is change the country, and that’s not the way things are moving. You saw those folks tonight, buried so deep in misery it’d take more than anything I know to blow ’em out, an’ I don’t see anything like that walking down the road, not in my lifetime, not in yours. No, these here are the days when you gotta find your own way back, son, every man for himself. Not politics, not gov’ment—nothing. No one else is gonna help you, no one at all.…”

  “Who do you know up in South Carolina who could tell me something about Bob Combs?”

  “It’s bad,” Dorsey Combs continued, ignoring the question. “Maybe it’s been worse, but it’s bad. Worst I ever had was when I got myself picked up down in Laurel, Mississippi—’60, I think it was. I didn’t know anyone down there, just the advance man that come in by bus from New Orleans, but he hit the road before I got there, scared clean out of sight. Used to be a YMCA fella. I called on a few colored folks, but they wouldn’t hardly talk to me and I couldn’t blame them. Two hours after I got into town, the police picked me up. That was the worst week I ever spent. Two nights straight they took me out in a car, just me and these two deputies, packin’ pistols and a riot gun, riding around the back roads—just the three of us. They had me hog-tied in the back seat. I never knew whether they were gonna bring me back or not. The place they had me locked up didn’t have any winders. They took away my belt, my shirt, my pants, even my shoelaces. I thought it was all over. They woke me up one night with a bucket of cold horse piss poured over my head. Things have got pretty bad when they got you so far down you don’t even have nothing to hang yourself with when you’re ready to go. What you got left after that?”

  Dorsey Combs raised his sad, glistening eyes to the small figure squeaking toward the table in a pair of grease-colored shoes, carrying a steaming mug of coffee. He wore a counterman’s paper hat, a dirty white T-shirt, an apron and white trousers stained gray by a day at the grill. The cap and T-shirt carried the same logo as the electric sign outside, the menu, and the gilt-lettered signs that decorated the walls: Colonel Tom Pepper’s Fried Fritters.

  Dorsey Combs introduced Tom Pepper. “Colonel Tom and me go back a long way,” he said.

  “How come you’re out here?” Tom Pepper asked. “She run you off again?” He was small and wire-thin, with muscular arms as pale as lard. The yellowish-gray hair was long on his neck and the scanty sideburns reached far down his jaws. Two tattoos, a black panther and an American eagle, their blue ink faded with age, clawed their way up his forearms.

  “Me and my friend wanted someplace to talk.”

  Tom Pepper looked carefully at Buster Foreman. “Where you from?”

  “Washington.”

  “He’s come down to sample your fritters,” Dorsey Combs said dryly. “Fried any which way, take your choice. Got corn, chicken, oyster, okra, and I don’t know what all. Colonel Tom’s got a place up near Gatlinburg, right on the road where all the rubberneck tourists come rolling through. Must be worth a million dollars a year, all that free advertising. He’s gonna get him a national franchise that-a-way.”

  Tom Pepper looked again at Buster Foreman. “You in the fast-food business?”

  “No, afraid not.”

  Pepper called across the room to a small, dark-haired woman who was wiping the stainless-steel splash plate behind the grill. “Hey, Cora, you got any batter fresh?”

  “All finished,” she answered without turning.

  “With fritters it’s all in the batter,” Tom Pepper said, “same as it is with fried chicken or pancakes. What I got is an old family recipe.”

  “Handed down in the family Bible,” said Dorsey Combs. “Come with his chicken fricassee and his Confederate colonel’s commission.”

  Tom Pepper didn’t move his eyes from Buster Foreman. “You know any fast-food folks up there in Washington?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Colonel Tom used to be in the car business in South Carolina,” Combs amplified, refilling his cup. He stirred the coffee and whiskey together with a spoon. “Had him the Hupmobile agency in Spartanburg. Had the Kaiser-Frazer distributorship. Had the Packard franchise. Had a Studebaker lot. Would have had him the Edsel too, only someone took it away from him.”

  “Shit,” Tom Pepper said. “I wouldn’ta had no Edsel agency. I knowed it was a lemon first time I laid eyes on it. I started me up a foreign car business in Darlington, doing real good, until some sonofabitch stole it offa me. You notice I ain’t mentioning any names.” He looked at Dorsey Combs, then back at Foreman. “After that, I got into the restaurant business. You a car man?”

  “Not much.”

  Tom Pepper turned and called to the woman at the grill. “Hey, Cora, hon. Reach me one of them cards under the cash register.”

  The woman put down her rag, moved to the cash register, stooped, and then held out a card.

  “Reach it over here,” Tom Pepper said.

  Her shoulders dropped, she put her hands on her hips in annoyance for an instant, but then left the cash register and crossed to where they sat. Her dark hair was bound in a snood and there were deep shadows under her eyes. “That’s not reaching, that’s walking,” she said as she put the card on the table. “Your feet aren’t any more wore out than mine. How come you’re out here so late?” she asked Dorsey Combs sympathetically.

  “He’s resting up,” Tom Pepper told her.

  “Did she throw you out, or what?”

  “We’re talking business,” Tom Pepper told her. “You go mind your own.”

  She looked at her husband disapprovingly. “Dorsey comes drinking himself into trouble out here again, it is my business. I won’t tolerate any trouble with that tabernacle woman.”

  “You’ll tolerate trouble with me, you don’t git on back there where you belong,” Tom Pepper warned without looking up. He passed the business card to Buster Foreman. “This here’s my new card,” he said in a friendly voice. “Just had ’em made up.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Cora said.

  “You and her both,” he threatened.

  She laughed wearily. “I’ll bet. She’ll come out here and raise a knot on your head you could grow hair on, then she’d take those skinny bones of yours and scramble them up in that batter so fast you’d come out not knowing whether you was okra or pork sausage.”

  “I don’t have any pork sausage,” Tom Pepper said, insulted.

  “You would by the time she turned loose of you.”

  Tom Pepper ignored her, concentrating on the card he’d passed to Buster Foreman. “’Course this here isn’t the only outlet I got,” he said politely. “There’s one on the road to Gatlinburg, like Dorsey said, but this one here is the number one store.”

  Buster Foreman nodded, studying the card. Like everything else in the truck stop restaurant, it was another advertisement for Colonel Tom Pepper and his fried fritters. In the lower-right-hand corner, it announced that franchises were available.

  It was after one o’clock and the dark streets were deserted when Buster Foreman drove Dorsey Combs into Knoxville. At Combs’s direction, he turned through the downtown commercial district and into a shabby old residential area now gone to furnished rooms and boardinghouses.

  “Just a little Bible reading an’ hand holdin’ is all,” Combs was murmuring drunkenly, his mind now running free, disengaged from that caution that had restrained their earlier conversation. “Find yourse
lf a good woman an’ hold on to her, that’d be my advice. Find one an’ stick to her. Don’t go running around like I did. Up at Highlander in the fifties, met a little woman from Boston. College teacher. Unitarian. Smart too. Talked the way the books talk, right off the page. I mean, if you could take an’ let the words walk off the page the way they were written down, that’s the way she talked. Like a goddamned dictionary.” He hiccuped and drew a deep breath. “But it was all wrote down. Book learning. When it come to bed learning an’ you had her in the dark, had to be hand taught. She was some woman. Maybe she’d put up with it, all the women trouble I had. It’s right up there,” he advised, pointing up the street with an unsteady hand. “That porch where the two lights are on.”

  Foreman saw only one porch light. “A boardinghouse?” he asked. He’d been tempted by Dorsey Combs’s condition to draw him out further on his half-brother, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “Tolliver’s. Rest home, they call it. Got a tax-exempt license. Where folks that have strayed can find a helpin’ hand. But you’ve gotta be Pentecostal. You a Pentecostal?”

  “No. I don’t know much about it.”

  “You an Odd Fellow, Order of Odd Fellows?”

  “Don’t know that, either. Why?”

  “Ought to look into it for your old age. Odd Fellows got rest homes all over, old folks’ homes, places where you can sit out the last years in peace an’ quiet.” He hiccuped again. “Take care of you, take care of you good, better than any Medicare or social security, which they’re gonna close down anyway. Only it’s just for the Caucasian race, like the Republicans these days, that’s the trouble. Coloreds have their own. You’d qualify. I’d rather be a new-baptized Pentecostal—better than a goddamned Democrat these days.” His fingers fished in the vest pocket for the tobacco plug. “She can put up with tobacco if it’s snuff or chewing, but not much else. She’s a right hefty piece of work, Miz Tolliver is, but she’s got a hateful problem.” He bit down on the plug.”

  “What problem’s that?” Buster asked, drifting toward the curb.

  “Her husband,” Combs said. “Stone cold dead in the britches. Just ease up here and I can slip out, quiet like, no doors slamming, no loud talk, hear?” He clapped Buster on the shoulder and eased the door open. “Nice talkin’ to you, son,” he whispered. “I got your card. Something turns up, I’ll send a picture postcard.”

  Foreman watched him go unsteadily up the walk, pause at the foot of the wooden steps to collect himself, sway for an instant, smooth his rumpled jacket, and then start to climb. He staggered twice and stumbled back to the sidewalk. On the third attempt, his hands reached forward to touch the risers, like a crawfish; he gained the top and stood up to creep very slowly across the porch.

  The hall light was dim. Dorsey Combs took off his shoes inside the door and tiptoed past the open staircase to the second floor, past the dark parlor, smelling of faded altar flowers, past the cheerless sitting room and the closed doors of the transient guest rooms, and on to the tiny cold bedroom at the back of the house. An old iron bed occupied half the room; against the walls were a wooden dresser and a cardboard wardrobe where his other suit hung.

  Sitting on the bed, he removed his coat and the shirt and staggered across the hall into the small bathroom. As he stood at the basin, he heard the creak of the back stairs and straightened. As the second squeak from the steps reached him, and then the third, as stealthy and ominous as the first, he turned out the light and fled frightened back across the hall and closed the door. He had pulled off his socks and was stepping out of his trousers when the door was pushed open and Mrs. Tolliver stood there. She was still dressed in black, her face as white and cold as a somnambulist’s. The smell of hospital corridors and sickrooms was still in her garments.

  “You’ve been drinking,” she said coldly. “I smelled it then, I smell it now.”

  “My chest was worrying me; it was all knotted up—”

  “Liar,” she said, stepping into the room. “Liar and hypocrite. Drunkard, defiler, blasphemer—” She brought the leather belt from behind her back, raised it high over her head, and struck him savagely. The first lash drew blood high on the cheekbone, the second blurred the vision in his left eye. He could no longer look up, no longer think of the words he wanted to say, but was driven to the floor, hands over his head, his drunkenness no longer shielding him from the pain of the slashing belt.

  Her expression didn’t change. She seemed hardly aware of him at all, even as she turned finally to go out, switching off the light, closing the door, and leaving him in darkness. He crouched there for a long time, naked shoulders and face burning with fire. At last he lifted himself and crawled blindly into bed with his pain, but he tried not to think of his agony, only hers. He tried to imagine how she might one night be released from it—he drunken and weak, she standing there with the belt, merciless and strong, but then finding him for the first time in his lifted eyes. She would know then what had become of her, what had become of him, and she would drop the flail to gather him in and cleanse them both.…

  Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, he recalled through his agony, as if waiting for her to come. But that night, as on other nights, he heard only the creak of boards as she undressed for bed in her lonely room on the second floor—she the warden of his bondage, he the prisoner of her faith, as dark and windowless as that jail cell in Laurel, Mississippi, so many years ago.

  Buster Foreman drove east through the gray overcast Saturday morning, the thoughts of the previous night’s conversation dissolving in the mist and smoke as the miles rolled by under his wheels. But outside Gatlinburg, one last memory of that long evening aroused him. He saw a roadside stand, perched on a clay bank, offering souvenirs. A hundred yards beyond was a second stand, its facade scrolled in a kind of bargeboard, like the gingerbread porticoes of the old riverboats that once paddled along the Savannah and Tennessee rivers. The red letters, dim and peeling with the corruptions of the seasons, advertised Colonel Tom Pepper’s fried fritters, but winter was in the air, the sky was dark, and the gravel shoulder of roadside deserted. At the front of the lot was a rusting sign mounted on an iron frame, declaring that the stand was closed until spring.

  But something else caught his eye, a name even more familiar by now. The car radio was playing “I’m the number one fan of the man from Tennessee,” a guitar was strumming relentlessly, and a tractor-trailer’s air horn was blowing furiously ahead of him; yet the small printing in hard enamel on the iron base sprang out at him like the towering See Rock City advertisements visible on every granite face he’d passed since leaving Knoxville.

  The sign in the weeds at the side of the road had once belonged to Bob Combs’s car emporium in South Carolina.

  At the next intersection, the cloud-hung mountains of the Great Smokies still in the distance, Buster Foreman turned around and headed back to Knoxville.

  Tom Pepper admitted grudgingly that he’d once worked as a used-car salesman for Bob Combs marketing cars from Combs’s wholesale lot to small operators in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, but he attached no importance to it.

  “How come you’re asking all these questions?” he complained loudly, but his aggravation was more for the benefit of the two truckdrivers who sat listening at the far end of the counter, waiting for their order. Tom Pepper’s cap, apron, and trousers were clean, he was freshly shaven, his hair damp, but the smell of grease and boiled coffee was very much the same. “Maybe he done me dirt once, maybe he didn’t, but that’s between him an’ me. I didn’t steal that sign no ways; I borrowed it. I ain’t looking for no trouble now; got a franchise business to sell. Bob Combs has done a lotta good in Wash’n’ton and that’s all right by me. I ain’t into politics no ways, nohow. What are you, a newspaper fella?”

  Without Dorsey Combs’s mediating presence, Buster Foreman was just a meddlesome stranger, in off the road. The two truckdrivers sat watching him. Tom Pepper saw their glances.
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  “Bob Combs is all we got going for us up there, ain’t that right, boys?” he said smartly. One nodded in sullen agreement, still studying Buster Foreman. “Goddamned right,” Tom Pepper said. He picked up his cigarette from the edge of the counter, puffed on it, then drank from a coffee cup as he waited for the hashed brown potatoes. “I’m into fast food, not fast talk. They’re all fulla shit anyway, all them goddamn politicians. Ask them boys what their road taxes are. You wanna hear some loud talk for your paper, ask ’em about that.”

  “I didn’t say I was with a paper,” Buster said, getting up. Through the small serving window he saw Cora Pepper bent forward, looking sternly at her husband.

  “Even if I had anything on him, which I ain’t, I wouldn’t go talking to no stranger about it. I got enough troubles without the government tormentin’ me. Get some little sucker from IRS on my ass, I’d really be up shit crik.”

  Buster Foreman paid for his coffee and went out. As he reached his rented car, he saw Cora hurrying around the side of the building from the kitchen, a cardigan sweater drawn over her thin shoulders. “Lemme tell you something,” she called out. “Hold on a minute. You wanna find out something about Bob Combs? You go talk to Miz Birdie Jackson over in South Carolina, hear? A colored woman over there. You wanna find out what Bob Combs and some of that trash of his done? You go talk to Birdie Jackson. You tell her Cora sent you. Her name’s Bertha Jackson, Miz Bertha Jackson. She’s in the phone book. If you can’t find her, go out to Frogtown and talk to Deacon Caldwell Taylor of the Mount Zion Reformed Baptist Church. He’ll know what I’m talking about, only don’t tell no one except Birdie I sent you.”

  She took the card Buster Foreman gave her, turned without looking at it, and hurried back around the building.

  2.