by W. T. Tyler
“Donlon,” Rita said.
“What’s the difference? But Pete Rathbone tells me not to be nervous, move to Washington if that’s what I want, but do it real quiet like, and it’ll come through.”
“What about now?” Wilson said. “You still think I was going to rip you off?”
“Rita put me wise,” Artie said. “Anyway, I’m not a hundred percent perfect all the time.” He’d begun to massage his jaws again and finally decided he needed a shave after all.
“You just shaved two hours ago,” Rita reminded him, but he left them there and went upstairs anyway.
“You see what I mean?” she asked after he’d gone. “It’s embarrassing sometimes.”
“A lot of people get confused,” Wilson offered.
“Not like that. Have you found out anything?”
He waited a minute before he answered. “I think I may know what’s holding things up, but it’s too early to say.”
“You’d rather not, then. You think he’ll finally get an appointment?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“That’s what Pete Rathbone told him last night. They talked on the phone.”
“Rathbone’s the man that’s been encouraging him, is that the way it is?”
“From the first, I suppose. What did I say about Strykker that got you interested?”
“When you said he’d sell or buy anything if he thought he could get away with it.” He smiled as he thought about it. “Like his friend Chuck.”
“Don’t be so mysterious,” she said.
“I’m not. What was his last name, this man Chuck?”
She thought for a minute. “Like the town in Wyoming, only a little different. Larabee.”
Part Four
1.
The Sunday afternoon was still dark, the rain intermittent, the small brick bungalows and ramblers in the South Carolina suburban neighborhood even more dismal in the drizzle, even more forlorn on their tiny patches of dun-colored sod. A few showed signs of home improvement—small chain-link fences, aluminum awning over the front windows, or iron filigree for porch posts—but not the thirty-year-old cottage with the peeling paint and the plastic birdbath in the front garden. Beyond the sidewalk, the front yard was trampled to dirt along the flower beds and porch. A child’s tricycle lay overturned near the front steps. A For Sale sign stood in the yard next door, where two garbage cans were drawn to the curb, their ruptured black bags spilling refuse from a basement housecleaning.
“Someone’s got dawgs,” the woman taxi driver complained as she pulled up to the curb. During the drive from the motel, she’d told him she’d been a WAC driver at Fort Jackson. “Lookit that mess laying out there on the sidewalk. Down at Fort Jackson, you couldn’t keep no dawgs. Ain’t that a shame now. This here neighborhood ain’t what it used to be, I can tell you that. You sure you got the address right?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Buster said.
Birdie Jackson’s cousin had been rudely explicit in telling him how to reach her house: “You come if she say so, but if you’re out o’ town, get you a cab. I don’t want no out-o’-town machines outside my house, hear?”
“It’s being lived in too,” the woman driver called through the window as Buster withdrew his wallet, “lived in hard as lye. Lookit that wash hanging out there to the side. Who’d go an’ hang up wash on a day like this? Looks like she just throwed it up there on her way out the door.”
Buster paid her and went up the walk to the porch. The screen door was ajar and the lace curtain behind the glass pane dropped shut as his footsteps thudded across the wooden porch. Before he could knock, the door swung open and a dark, sullen face greeted him silently. A snow-white scarf concealed her hair. On her plump shoulders was a white smock, to which was pinned the star and crescent of a Muslim sisterhood. Honkie, the gruff black eyes seemed to say, Honkie, what you doing my house?
The living room was dim and feverishly warm. The odor of incense hung in the air. A brown enamel heater hissed away against one wall; the windows were draped in purple plush, and overstuffed chairs circled the linoleum floor. A small television set sat on a metal table and on the wall behind it hung a black-bordered portrait of Malcolm X. An empty playpen stood near the entrance to the dining room, in which the overhead lights were on and the dining table was being used as an ironing board. On the top of the cabinet to the side were two artificially tinted portraits of uniformed black youths taken by some army-base photographer.
“Sorry to bother you this way,” Foreman said as she led him through the dining room. He felt embarrassed by her hostile silence.
“You ain’t botherin’ me none,” she muttered coolly, without turning. “Just don’t go messin’ her up any.” She moved in her worn carpet slippers, broad hips swaying, into a small, dark hall where she knocked softly at a door and then gently pushed it open. The room beyond was a sun porch, its windows covered with sheet plastic. Green plants hung everywhere, and Buster Foreman, confused for a moment by the profusion of cascading green, felt like a man peering into the crypt of some zoological garden, trying to find its inhabitant. The elderly woman who awaited him was so small, so still, and so silent that he noticed her no more quickly than he might a finch hidden in dense summer foliage. She sat in a portable wheelchair in the corner, wearing a heavy wool sweater over her green wool dress, which reached well below her knees. Her ankles and legs were encased in dark-brown stockings and one leg was surgically wrapped, larger than the other. On her lap was an open book. Her small head was lifted and she wore tortoise-rim spectacles, like those of a professional librarian circa 1920. Her gray hair was parted in the middle, as neat as a woolen cap, hiding her ears.
“This is him,” her cousin told her in a low voice. “Baby Ahmed’s sleepin’.”
She went out. The old woman was smiling, her dark eyes bright, as if no longer able to suppress her curiosity. “How’s Miz Cora?”
“She’s fine.”
“Did he marry her yet?” Buster Foreman wasn’t sure what she meant. She watched his hesitation in disappointment and then moved her head to look at him more closely. “How long you been knowing her?”
“Since a few weeks ago.”
The smile faded. “An’ she tole you to come see me?”
“Just like that. She told me to go talk to Mrs. Bertha Jackson over in South Carolina.”
The quick, soft laugh betrayed her disbelief. “She didn’t say that, she didn’t never say that—not Bertha, not Mrs. either. I never been married.”
“She said go talk to Birdie Jackson.”
“She said that when you saw her?”
“That’s what she told me.”
She nodded and pointed to a stool at the foot of the bed. “Fetch it around here so we can talk. I lose my eyes looking up at you like this. You a big, tall buildin’, Mr. Foreman. Sit down so I can see you better.”
Birdie Jackson laughed for a long time after Buster Foreman told her why he’d come. She seldom thought of them anymore, Bob Combs, Shyrock Wooster, or any of the others. Cora she remembered often—they still exchanged Christmas cards—but she didn’t know Tom Pepper very well, just that he was the friend of Cora’s who’d taken her away. She was a shut-in, leaving her cousin’s house only to go to church when someone with an automobile would offer to stop and pick her up, but that wasn’t often now. The old generation, her generation, was passing away. She never passed her old place, the house her father had built and which had since burned, but she didn’t miss it. She doubted she would recognize it now. Bob Combs’s automobile acreage had devoured her father’s three acres. The trees, fencelines, and small cabins that had once lined the old pike where she’d grown up were obliterated, paved over in asphalt or concrete on which stood new glass-and-concrete malls and shopping centers as unfamiliar to her as the new downtown skyline. She seldom read a newspaper or watched television. She preferred the radio. Most of her old friends who knew her story were buried now, like those elders of the Mount Zi
on Reformed Baptist Church to whom she’d deeded her property after her long trouble with Bob Combs.
From a dusty cardboard suitcase she dragged from beneath the bed, she removed an old cigar box, withdrawing an ancient photograph taken with a Kodak box camera on the dusty pike in front of her father’s paintless cabin. A Model A Ford truck stood in the foreground. Two white men in engineers’ laced boots and fedora hats leaned against the cab. A short black man squatted between them, his hat off, wearing faded overalls. At the front of the truck, a black youth held a surveyor’s transit; next to him stood a small black boy holding a sight rod. The black man squatting in front of the two out-of-state surveyors was Birdie’s father, the black boy with the rod, her brother. Both were dead now. The picture had been taken fifty years earlier, when the old rural pike was being widened for the first time, culverts added, and city water brought to the small paintless cabins hidden behind the clay bank among the pine groves.
Birdie thought her father was smiling in the yellowing photograph. She held it toward Buster Foreman for his inspection, but if there was a smile there, Buster couldn’t identify it. She took it back to study it again. Yes, she detected the smile. Her father was a very serious man. He was smiling on this occasion for two reasons: first, because he’d never before had his picture taken by a white photographer from the local newspaper; and secondly, because he alone among the small community of rural blacks had the money to pay for the water connection. He was a maintenance man in a downtown hotel and the three acres he owned were free and clear. On a side acre he planted a small truck garden each year and on summer and autumn weekends peddled fresh vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon through the shady streets of the older residential section where his wife and later his daughter did day work as domestics. After a city ordinance banned horses and mules from the residential streets, he sold produce from a small wooden stand at the intersection a mile away.
He died in the early fifties and the insurance money enabled Birdie, his only survivor, to bury him decently and to pay for the sewer connection and the interior plumbing which exempted the small cabin from the condemnation order that soon leveled the other cabins and shacks adjacent to the Jackson property. The old pike lay along one of the principal arteries west of the city, which was creeping inexorably toward Birdie’s vegetable and flower gardens. The first suburban shopping center had appeared just a mile to the east. To the west, the approaches to the new interstate were being surveyed.
On a mild autumn day in the mid-fifties, Bob Combs’s advertising manager and general factotum knocked on the screen door at the rear of Birdie’s house, doffed his coconut hat, and passed his card through the narrow opening reluctantly yielded to receive it. Shy Wooster was barely in his twenties at the time. His face was pink and chubby with baby fat. To Birdie Jackson he seemed like a boy who hadn’t yet begun to shave. He was certainly too young for the hat, the wide-shouldered serge suit, and the ingratiating smile. He asked Birdie if she might be interested in leasing billboard space along the front of her property.
She said she wasn’t.
She watched him as he consulted a small booklet, as small and as secretive as her bank deposit book with the Farmers and Merchants Bank, smiled again, this time brazenly, and told her that her property taxes would soon be due at the county treasurer’s office. He suggested she might be able to use the additional income.
She told him that she’d already laid money aside for her taxes, where it was earning interest, gave him back his card, and shut the door.
Bob Combs had that month bought the strip of property bordering Birdie on the west. He planned on relocating his used-car lot from its downtown location and adding to it in time a new suburban garage and showroom for his new-car franchise. In March the move was made. In May, Shy Wooster came to see Birdie a second time, with the same results. That summer, Combs bought the property bordering on Birdie to the east and within a month had moved his paint and body shop from downtown, installed in a pair of corrugated-metal buildings just across the fenceline. By then, construction had begun on a shopping center directly across the pike. To the west, clearing and grubbing had started on the new highway interchange.
During the following autumn, bulldozers and road graders leveled the ten acres directly across the road, filling the air with red dust; by night the floodlights of Bob Combs’s used-car emporium glazed the side windows of Birdie Jackson’s cottage, where the cups and saucers on her china shelf, the pots and pans under her stove, and the vials and bottles in her medicine cabinet marched back and forth until the midnight hours to the pounding and hammering of the Combs body shop just east of her parlor window.
In November, Shy Wooster came to see her a third time.
“Must get pretty noisy here at night,” he informed her through the back screen, “all that bangin’ and carryin’ on, all that dust an’ commotion ’cross the road there.”
“I don’t notice it much,” Birdie told him in her light, dry parlor-room voice. “Work all day in town an’ go to bed early, like I always done.”
“Some billboards on that bank out front would shut out a lot of that noise and dust.”
“’Deed they would,” she agreed as she began to close the door. “Shut out the morning sun from my garden, too, when spring comes.”
That same month the architect’s drawings for Bob Combs’s new- and used-car emporium were completed. The bank was satisfied, the zoning commission was satisfied, and the regional sales manager for the Detroit automobile manufacturer was satisfied, but not Bob Combs. He had amplified his original ambition and now wanted to consolidate his real estate holdings and build an even larger car mart, incorporating Birdie Jackson’s three acres.
“It sticks out like a sore thumb, that little pea patch out there an’ that shantytown crapper sittin’ in the middle of it. What kind of trade you gonna attract when you got roosters crowin’ and nigger wash hanging on the line all day right next door?” he told Shy Wooster. “We’ve gotta figure some way to get her to sell out real quick.”
This wasn’t what he told the regional sales manager. “Well, I tell you,” he said. “What I’d like to do is spread out even more with a high-volume trade, but I’m a little hemmed in right now. We got a lil old nigra woman livin’ over there, livin’ all alone, like she has all her life, an’ we kinda feel responsible for her. I don’t wanna go uprootin’ anybody, just moving them out of house an’ home like that. What I did was tell her we’d rent some billboard space out front so she could get a little money ahead an’ start looking for a place out there in Frogtown, where all the colored folks from around here have moved to, but she was too proud to take it. That life she’s got over there is all she knows. I kinda think it’s only the good Lord himself has the right to tell her, ‘Time to move on, Miz Birdie. Progress is movin’ in on you and it’s time to get on down the road.’”
Bob Combs had a seductive voice. Disembodied by radio from the chin-less face, the small sanctimonious mouth, the small watchful eyes, and the muscleless flab of his waist and shoulders, it was the voice of reverence and piety, flowing from the purest wells of rural and populist sentiment. He’d discovered it almost by accident during his secretarial college days, when he was selling a variety of kitchen gimcracks and medicine cabinet nostrums to keep himself in books, clothes, and hair tonic. He wasn’t quick on his feet, was incapable of spontaneity and as dull as a boardinghouse bathtub. Barbershop colloquy of any length, depth, or subtlety quickly proclaimed him for what he was—a nasty, short-tempered bigot. Sharp-eyed housewives who questioned him too shrewdly about his door-to-door product saw the same transformation—a nasty, red-faced bully stooping to collect his shabby merchandise in front of slammed doors, barking dogs, and, occasionally, abusive husbands. After a winter and spring of failure, he took to the back roads one June in a Ford coupé as an apprentice to a velvet-voiced salesman from a Nashville religious house, peddling devotional materials. By August he had a coupé of his own. He’d learned to len
gthen his sentences, deepen his delivery, and to introduce himself by talking about everything under the sun but the product in his display case. He’d also learned to keep to the dingier, less sophisticated side of the tracks. By the end of the summer he’d acquired a resonant baritone that didn’t so much enlighten his customers as entrap them, like flypaper, reaching its syrupy, comforting tongue into dim parlors and despondent bedrooms where the lonely, the elderly, or the infirm waited for visitors who never came.
That was the beginning. In time he moved from devotional ware to encyclopedias to Formica kitchen counters, then to automobiles, second mortgages, and finally into politics, returning to that same fundamentalist constituency whom he could now assure that the Gospel—less its devotional wares of songbooks, sheet music, telephone book covers, wall tapes-tries, birdbath statuary, and mother-of-pearl gifts for the pallbearers from the family of the deceased—was their only political hope, and Bob Combs its apostle.
The baritone had less effect upon Birdie Jackson, who had frequently been the prey of real estate developers, to say nothing of asphalt-siding and burial-insurance salesman who’d heard of her patrimony. She knew the value of her property, just as she knew it would go higher. She’d often discussed the subject with a trust officer at the Farmers and Merchants bank, whose advice followed her own instincts: if she was in no hurry to move, wait until the price was one she couldn’t afford to pass up.
The day Bob Combs appeared at her back door, he was smoking a Kiwanis Club cigar. He’d just returned from the monthly luncheon downtown and was feeling particularly benign. He knocked at the screen door, stepped back, cast a tolerant eye over the eclectic clutter of the rear stoop—washtub, scrub board, chopping block, a bag of chicken feathers, plaits of drying onions hanging from a beam—studied more covetously the side and rear acres, and lifted his hat as the inside door opened.