The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  “Howdy, Miz Birdie,” he began, with that bounteous smile that was the most prominent feature of his billboard advertising and, his admirers claimed, could charm a cat out of a shrimp bucket. “I’m Bob Combs.”

  “I know who you is,” she said. “Seen your face often enough around town these days.” She didn’t open the screen door as she pulled on her faded woolen mackinaw. On her feet she wore a pair of men’s galoshes.

  “I came to see if maybe we could talk a little business, Miz Birdie. Maybe I could come in and we could have a quiet talk about this nice place you’ve got here.”

  She was looking at his cigar. “Ain’t no smoking in my house,” she said. “Hangs in the curtains, chokes my birds half to death, gets into my bread dough. You wanna talk, you stay out in the yard an’ we can talk like this. I was fixin’ to go out, anyway.”

  The kitchen behind her was small and neat; an iron stove stood across the floor. Two bird cages hung from the side window. A gray cat was lying on the sill. Combs rubbed the ash from his shoe in the yard, returned the cigar stub to his pocket, and followed Birdie across the path to the coal pile next to the rear shed. She filled the scuttle, her gloves on, and then carried it back to the house, still in silence. He made no offer to help. He thought she had reconsidered, now that his cigar was extinguished, and that she would invite him in. She didn’t. She locked the screen door instead, carried the scuttle inside, and then returned to the door.

  “If I’d sell, ain’t no place my chickens could go,” she said. “No place I could carry them. What’d I do with my birds; my cats too? This is the only place they got, just like me. Money don’t mean nothing to them, nothing at all. I got what I need to take care of myself.” She hesitated, looking at his bright eyes, the cherub’s mouth, and the polished light-tan shoes, curious as to what metal this billboard Jehoshaphat was made of. “How much would you be a-paying?”

  Combs thought she was being coy. “Five hundred dollars an acre,” he announced, generosity rich in his voice.

  “Lord a-mercy.” She smiled, embarrassed. He smiled too, not unaware of what such a princely sum must mean to this little old darky woman no bigger than a twist of burley tobacco. “Lordy me,” she continued. “You do go back a long ways, don’t you, Mr. Combs, you an’ my daddy both. I ain’t heard tell of them prices since the car line out yonder carried you all the way to town for a Roosevelt nickel.”

  Then she shut the door.

  Shyrock Wooster hadn’t been with Combs when he’d made the offer, but he knew of Birdie Jackson’s rejection. Combs had described the encounter, but with the same vagueness that marked his sales career: the subtleties and the fine print were omitted. He hadn’t revealed the stinginess of his offer. He’d said instead that she wouldn’t abandon her family homestead, her chickens, her cats and her canaries, and that the small cottage was her refuge against the intrusions of a rootless and changing outside world.

  Shy Wooster knew of Birdie Jackson’s passion for neatness, order, and propriety. He thought she was giving herself airs, an old black spinster in a broken-down shanty mimicking those Episcopalian dowagers from downtown whose cool parlors she dusted and whose silver tea services she kept polished.

  “Break them chickens loose and maybe she’ll go where they do,” he told a stripman from the Combs body shop one morning as they sat at the linoleum counter of the roadside coffee shop and diner on the pike. “Even better, throw a bucket of pig shit in that front parlor of hers an’ I tell you you’d see one fast nigger running down the road out there back to Frog-town, where she belongs.”

  The diner and coffee shop belonged to Cora Richards, the ex-wife of an army sergeant from Fort Jackson. They’d bought the diner’s inventory and lease from the former owner with his mustering out pay, but he’d re-enlisted, they’d been divorced, and now Cora ran the business alone—cook, waitress, and proprietor. She was a plain woman, but not unattractive. Her hair was raven black, her figure full-bodied, her eyes quick and friendly, but not with customers like Shy Wooster. Those who sat at the counter or the four small tables inside the door had known her ex-husband, but rarely talked about the divorce. They were for the most part salesmen from the car lot or the body shop across the pike, construction workers or dozer operators from the crews working on the new shopping center next door. Shy Wooster was much younger than most of them. In his whispered counter talk and vulgar innuendos she heard the frustrated sexuality of a college freshman of the times. After her divorce, he’d become obsessed with the idea of taking her out. He’d asked her three times, not over the counter with others present or even alone with her in the diner. The invitations had come by phone late in the evening, just as she was about ready to lock up. In the sly, insinuating voice she heard the same adolescent mixture of contempt, condescension, and sexual fascination she’d seen in his eyes as he’d followed her movements at the grill.

  “Come on, you wanna little of what I got to give, honey, just say so,” he’d urged during the third and final call. The voice sickened her the way an obscene telephone call would, and she would have responded vigorously this time, more than a match for Shyrock Wooster’s fraternity house imagination, but the hour was late and she was tired, and she’d slammed down the phone in tears. Alone with her in the diner that evening was Tom Pepper, a tired, silent, used-car salesman from Bob Combs’s lot across the pike. He’d served time in Tennessee for manslaughter after he’d returned from the war, and now lived alone in a weed-grown trailer on an isolated lot halfway to Frogtown.

  “Hot stuff, aincha?” he teased her after she told him the story. “Hot stuff, gettin’ all them college boys hot in the collar.”

  “Ornery too,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Next time he comes in here, I’m gonna take out after him, fix him good.”

  “Ornery as me,” he said as he wiped off the tables.

  “Ornrier,” she said, putting her handkerchief away. “You ever two-time me, I’ll tell ’em how you can tap-dance, tap-dance up a storm.”

  He didn’t believe her. “You ain’t that ornery,” he said as he straightened up the chairs. “But don’t you worry any about Mr. Rooster. I’ll have me a quiet talk with that little sucker.”

  Shyrock Wooster never called Cora again, and it was four months before he reappeared at the diner.

  Standing at the grill that morning, Cora heard Wooster’s remark about sending Birdie Jackson down to Frogtown. She bought country-fresh eggs and seasonal produce from Birdie, and the following Saturday morning, as the two women stood in Birdie’s back kitchen, she asked if Bob Combs had approached her about buying her property. After she learned that Birdie had rejected his offer, she cautioned her.

  “You better watch out,” she said. “You know what some of those car salesmen of his that are all the time on the road are mixed up in, don’t you?”

  Birdie knew. “But don’t you worry about my chickens and cats; this place, neither,” Birdie told her. “I got someone a-watching.”

  Cora wasn’t reassured. She thought Birdie was talking about the good Lord.

  A month after Birdie spurned Combs’s offer, the local fire marshal and his deputy appeared unannounced at Birdie’s back door, come to investigate a complaint that her two coal stoves were improperly installed, improperly vented, and violated the fire and building code. They found four violations and told her the tin stovepipes would have to be replaced by a brick or concrete-block chimney.

  “But that’d mean I’d have to tear out my walls,” she protested. “Tear down the walls, you might as well build you a new house.”

  “I tell you, Miz Jackson,” explained the fire inspector, “what you got here is a real fire hazard, real bad, this place built the way it was. First thing you know, that fire could spread and that whole place next door could go up in smoke—see how close it is? Then you got them sheds in back, that old chicken house. What you gotta do is hire yourself a mason and get them chimneys fixed up right.”

  “That’s a whole lotta cash you
’re talking about too,” she said. “I got by the whole winter all right. Be April soon.”

  “Your cook stove’s bad as your heating stove. That pipe there—see how close it is to the wall? Already scorched up. What I’d do if I was you would be get me a electric range an’ baseboard heat, forget about them old stoves—”

  “I can’t afford no ’lectric heat. You know what Judge Hooker pays down on Magnolia Street?”

  The fire marshal didn’t know. He gave her four citations and thirty days to comply. Only as she was escorting them out the door did she remember. “You talking about fire a-coming, I wanna show you somethin’. Lookit over here.”

  She led the two men from her rear stoop and around the side to her mulched strawberry patch a few yards from the side wall of Bob Combs’s body shop. “Lookit this here!” she called plaintively. “Ain’t this a shame.” The strawberry plants nearest the fence were yellow and dying. A dozen showed a speckling of vivid automobile lacquers. “Ain’t there some kind o’ law about that too, them paint smells eatin’ up my garden like this?”

  Beyond the wire fence, a paint compressor was chugging away on a concrete pad. The doors to the paint shed were closed, but the vapors from inside were even more crudely vented by the jerry-rigged gravity air ducts than Birdie’s two stoves, escaping well below roof level. The raw winter air was explosive with the smell of volatile paint fumes. “You smell that?” she asked. “Lemme tell you something else. Sometimes it come so thick an’ terrible you know the wind’d take fire too, quicker’n coal oil you touch a match to it. You can’t hardly breathe sometimes, it gets so bad, burning your face up.…”

  The fire marshal had turned to look at his deputy, conscious of the cigarette in his hand. The deputy backed away immediately, holding the cigarette behind his back.

  “Ain’t there something you kin do about that?” Birdie asked.

  In the office next door, the body shop manager, the bookkeeper, and Shy Wooster were all watching as the two fire inspectors had entered Birdie’s cottage.

  “I’ll bet they’re gonna stick her good,” the manager had said as they left the window. They were still discussing it ten minutes later, after Shy Wooster had telephoned Bob Combs and told him the fire marshal had arrived as scheduled.

  “You’re goddamned right they’re gonna stick her,” Wooster declared, leaning back in the bookkeeper’s chair with his feet lifted to the desk. “Stick her right in the pocketbook, where she don’t have nothing at all, just those skinny old dried-up bones of hers.”

  “I feel a little bad about it,” said the bookkeeper.

  “I wonder what she’s gonna do now,” the manager wondered aloud. “Maybe she’ll just wrap herself up warm until spring comes.”

  “I tell you what she’s gonna do,” Wooster said. “She’s gonna hire her a cut-rate home-improvement company like Oswald’s, that’s got all those liens on them new siding shacks down in Frogtown. Look me up Oswald’s number. I’ll tell him I got an old nigger woman’ll sign most anything at all for five dollars down an’ five dollars a month, sign right on the dotted line.…”

  But the bookkeeper didn’t reach for the telephone book. He and the manager were looking instead toward the service counter behind Shy Wooster, where the fire marshal and his deputy had just entered. They took off their hats and then the marshal put his citation book on the counter, licked his cold thumb, and began counting off the pages.

  “Howdy, boys,” he said, without lifting his eyes. “How you folks doin’, all this cold weather still hanging around?…”

  “What kinda fool would go an’ plant strawberries in a high-rise commercial zone, anyway!” Shy Wooster cried. “Plant nickel corn an’ squash in a goddamn shopping center at two dollars a square foot!”

  “Same kinda fool thinks she can get away with it,” said Bob Combs coolly, turning away from the rear of the paint and body shop. A structural steel rigger and a sheet metal crew had been at work for two days fabricating a new forced-air ventilating tower for the paint shed, lifting forty feet into the air and costing more than four thousand dollars. But this wasn’t the only expense incurred by the complaints about Birdie Jackson’s coal stoves. Near the front gate, a bright-yellow ditching machine was being loaded onto a lowboy. Behind it lay the freshly excavated trench alongside which lay scattered sections of the new three-inch water pipe for the emergency hydrants at the rear of the lot. The fire marshal had given the body and paint shop eight violations in all, totaling some seventy-five hundred dollars in construction costs, and no thirty-day grace period.

  “That nigger done closed me down,” Bob Combs said softly as he watched the lowboy trundle out into the highway, speaking now not as the JC or Rotary Club entrepreneur but as a redneck country boy out of the pinewoods down near the Georgia border. “She done closed me down, that nigger did.” His temper had two circuits, the first quick, nasty, and red-faced; and the second without animation at all, just a certain sullen grayness in the lifeless eyes, like scorched tin. This was the second. “What’s she cooking with now?” he asked Shy Wooster. “Coal oil?”

  “I haven’t found out.”

  “We’ve got to move Miz Birdie on, on down the pike to Frogtown with the rest o’ them niggers. She got a lien yet, hired Oswald?” Wooster didn’t know. “Well, you better be finding out. We got to move her out before warm weather comes. She thinks she’s gonna get me to pay her a dollar a square foot for that patch o’ sand burrs and pole beans and skinny roosters, she’s been sleeping with her head in a whiskey jar.”

  On Friday evenings, Birdie Jackson took supper with the ladies’ altar guild of the Mount Zion Reformed Baptist Church, driven out to the church by Deacon Caldwell Taylor on his way home from his caretaker’s job with a local cemetery. On this Friday, the small cottage was empty except for the birds in their cages and the two cats on their rugs in front of the kitchen stove. A night-light burned on the table just inside the back door.

  From the office of the used-car lot next door, Shy Wooster watched the taillights of Deacon Taylor’s rusty old Ford disappear down the pike to the west toward the Mount Zion Church, and then hurried out to the side of the lot where the colored handyman, Smooter Davis, had just finished buffing a Cadillac sedan acquired two days earlier from a black undertaker in Decatur, Georgia. Indicted for a numbers operation, he’d needed quick cash. Smooter Davis, a lean colored man in his mid-thirties, had washed and waxed it that day for Combs to deliver personally to a local asphalt paving contractor. Davis was the utility man at the car lot. He’d driven a six-by-six in Italy during the war and had studied to be a diesel mechanic in the East on the GI Bill. His own garage had failed, and he drove the auto carrier for pickups and deliveries in the Southeast, acted as Combs’s liaison with a few colored lots about the state, and did odd jobs around the shop and yard. He was unmarried. In Shy Wooster’s estimation, Smooter Davis was a man indifferent to anything except cars, whiskey, and all-night pussy from the front porch widows or husbandless wives of Frogtown.

  Smooter Davis began humming as Shy Wooster came around the building. As he climbed behind the wheel, the humming grew louder. Then Davis sang a few bars of “Don’t Let No Cadillac Woman Make No Flat Tire of You” as he snapped the cloth like a shoeshine boy.

  “Talk about yourself,” Wooster called through the window, “’cause I’m not getting any poontang these days, not like you.”

  Smooter Davis was doing his duck walk as he made a few last swipes at the hood. ‘“I got a woman,’” he sang, pretending to finger a harmonica, ‘“won’t fit in your backseat…’”

  Bob Combs was waiting on the back steps of the businessmen’s club as Shy Wooster drove up in the Cadillac twenty minutes later.

  “That sure is a whole lotta automobile,” Combs said admiringly as Wooster climbed out and gave him the keys. “I don’t care who owned it. Give Smooter a Cadillac and a shine cloth, he’ll really go to town, won’t he?” He leaned his head in and sniffed the back seat. “Got the smell
out too. You smell anything?”

  Wooster opened the door to sniff. “Don’t think so.”

  “Hair straightener? Lily flowers? They sure bury ’em big down in Decatur, don’t they? Big an’ black. How’s it handle?”

  “Easy as pie,” Wooster said.

  “Well, it’s sure one fine automobile. What Mr. Collier don’t know won’t hurt him. Maybe I ought to keep it, find Mr. Collier another.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Why don’t we take a spin, find out how all these thingamajigs work. What’s it got? Air, power steerin’, power brakes—lookit all that. Gotta be an airplane pilot or an organ player to get it off the ground. Come on, climb in—show me how to work it.”

  “I got to get to the pharmacy before it closes,” said Wooster.

  “How come? Someone sick?” Combs took off with a lurch, stopped, and started again. “This is one fine machine, I tell you that; just glides along, don’t it?” He turned up the dark street. “We’ll just take us a quiet ride down to Doc Coker’s pharmacy and see how this Cadillac automobile handles.…”

  It was a cold, clear night, with a full moon in the sky. At Doc Coker’s pharmacy, Shy Wooster disappeared inside while Bob Combs waited in the car, fiddling with the radio, the air conditioning, the heater, the power windows, and the power antenna. The windows slid up and down without a sound, operated by a small console on the driver’s door. Ten minutes later, Wooster reappeared, carrying a cylindrical parcel, tightly wrapped. As he closed the door, the lingering breath of some bitter pharmaceutical stirred from the recesses of his coat, a foulness compounded in part from asafetida, sulfur, and rotten eggs.

  Combs quickly took the cigar from his mouth and lowered the window. “What the Sam Hill’s that?”

  Shy Wooster left the wrapped parcel on the seat and scrambled out to rapidly open his coat and thrash the aroma away. Then he got back in. “Buzzard’s breath,” he said. “I was watching Doc Coker mix it up.”