Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  Close to midnight, the visitors finally stood and told Wallace they would have to be on their way. He instantly bobbed to his feet, and clinging to their hands, inquired, “Where yawl goin' now?” They told him they might drop by the Diplomat Lounge- a motel nightclub whose steam-driven go-go girls make it a favorite watering hole for state politicians in town. “Oh, yeah?” he said. He paused, taking a few shallow quick puffs on his cigarette, as if briefly pondering something, and then seemed to dismiss it, and escorted his visitors on through the kitchen to the back screen door. In the yard outside, several bodyguards were standing under a tree, smoking. “I'll have Dothard run yawl out there,” Wallace said, and then added, almost furtively, “Whatcha gonna be doin' at the Diplomat?” His visitors told him they were only going to have a few drinks. “Well,” said Wallace as he saw them out the door, “yawl look over that stuff out there, heunh?”

  Of all the people in Wallace's life, probably no one, not even his grandfather, was closer to him than Billy Watson. As Watson explained it, “I was about fifteen years older than he was, and I guess he kinda looked on me as his father. He usually took my advice, and I could always talk to him and calm him down…”

  Watson always regarded Wallace with a gruff irreverence. One of Wallace's old friends from Barbour County remembers, “Billy always looked kinda like a political boss, big and right sporty, and whenever salesmen came through Clayton they'd usually come up to Billy to get information. Not long after George was elected judge, a salesman came through asking Billy where he could find Judge Wallace. 'I'm the man you want to see,' Billy told him. 'I run this place.' So the salesman showed Watson his wares, and Watson told him, 'You go on over there to the courthouse and tell Wallace that Watson said to buy this desk here… ' While George was judge, he stipulated there would be no smoking, no standing, and no hats worn in his courtroom, and he told the sheriff to enforce the rules. Well, Watson strolled into the back of the courtroom one morning with a bright yellow straw hat on his head, a cigarette in his mouth, and leaned up against the wall there in the back and stared at Wallace. Wallace called the sheriff and instructed him to inform Watson that he was no better than anyone else and that he'd be cited for contempt if he didn't take off his hat, put out his cigarette, and sit down. The sheriff walked to the back and told Watson what Wallace had said. Watson thought a moment, puffing on his cigarette, and then said, 'Sheriff, you go up there and tell that little pissant I put him in office and I can take him out…” Watson's manner remained the same throughout Wallace's political ascent. During the second campaign for governor, Watson and Ralph Adams were riding in the car with Wallace, and the two of them, having bought beer at one stop, tossed the cans out the window on down the road. “Goddamn, Watson,” piped Wallace, “here I am runnin' for guvnuh with yawl ridin' around with me breakin' the law, throwin' beer cans out of windows and everything-” Watson replied, “Wallace, the law's made for niggers and white trash, it's not made for me and Adams.”

  They both seemed to derive enormous amusement from each other. At a Junior Miss pageant once in Mobile, Wallace was forging his way through the contestants and their families exuberantly shaking hands, when Watson tapped him on the shoulder and said, “There's somebody here I want you to meet.” Wallace whirled around, declares Watson, “and shook hands with a damn mannequin. That's right-a mannequin. And he kept right on goin'. I don't think he even noticed.”

  They frequently went to conventions together. On one trip, said Watson, “The best-lookin' woman on the plane was sitting right next to me, beside the window, and Wallace was sitting across the aisle from me. She didn't have her seat belt fastened, so I started fumbling around in her lap trying to help her. When George glanced over and saw what I was doing, he started kicking my leg, sniggering and carrying on and kicking my leg. 'Watson, stop 'at, Watson, watch out, here comes the stewardess… ' He came by to get me once to go to an American Legion convention with him-said, 'Watson, they gonna have all these pretty young gals there, you better come along.' He finally talked me into it, and turned out wadn't nothing but old bags wanting to grab you all the time. He sho thought that was funny.”

  On a rainy Sunday afternoon a few weeks after Lurleen's election, Watson sat in the front parlor of his home in Clayton and recollected, “Back yonder when he wasn't getting along so good financially, he'd come into my store downtown and pick up something and walk out with it, and I'd call to him, 'Wallace, aren't you gettin' a little heavy on the books?' He'd answer back over his shoulder as he went out the door, Tm gonna pay you, Watson, don't worry.' And he would: two dollars at a time. Just enough to be better than one dollar a time. He owed as high as three hundred dollars, four hundred dollars sometimes. 'Course, he was such a bigshot and all, he was judge and everything then…” Watson, wearing a brown sweater and a tie fastened to his shirt with a large gold Wallace tieclasp, was quiet for a long moment, his watery eyes blinking and his hands folded fragilely across his stomach as he reposed, barely seeming to breathe, in the solitary immediate glow of a table lamp. The French windows in the room were full of a watery gray light, dimly streaming, the afternoon dissolving away in them, while a coal-grate fire rustled in the stillness. “ 'Course,” Watson finally resumed, “he got so many votes in these last two campaigns, it's kinda gone to his head. He thinks everybody likes him how, and he don't even remember how many votes he got in some counties. Used to, he could tell you how many he got in every single county. Now, he's started forgetting exactly how many votes he got in each place… He says he's gonna come back here one of these days to live, but I tell him, 'Naw, George, you too used to being around people now, traveling around. You too used to seeing things. You know you never gonna come back to Barbour County to live ever again.” It was as if Watson- old now, his health fading, left behind in Clayton-was vaguely jealous of Wallace's extensions, felt that he had slipped irrevocably beyond him now and longed somehow to snatch him back to the old familiar custodial or at least paternal relationship. Watson grinned palely. “He called me up the other day after he'd been on this TV program, and he wanted to know if I had seen the show. I told him, no, I hadn't. So he hung up…”

  Nevertheless, Watson was on hand when Wallace returned to Clayton a few weeks later for the lighting of the Christmas tree on the square. The December night had a warm, damp flush in it, and as the townsfolk began to arrive from their supper tables and gather in front of the courthouse, a high-school band from nearby Eufala bleated out a thin and uncertainly assembled Noel. Then a piano whanged out O Come, All Ye Faithful, the choir on the courthouse steps following in sweet tinny unison. During the prayer by Wallace's hometown minister, a baby began crying at the far edge of the crowd in the hush, and a hound flowed between people's legs with silent and purposeful intentness, nose to the pavement. The mayor opened the cozy little holiday celebration with a dolorous sentence, “We'd ask you to look this evening to the gloom of Moscow-” the everlasting morbid preoccupation with the Red Peril touching even this gentle Christmastime occasion on this little town square in southern Alabama. Wallace's own speech was an improbable alche-mistic blend of religion and patriotism. While he delivered it, his bodyguards stood at the edge of the courthouse porch scanning the crowd, indulging in what has become for them the fine art of female-thigh-spotting, perfected over countless public speeches over the years. “See sittin' over there next to that fella in the-no, on the right of him, that other one; now watch her, she's about to cross her legs like she did a minute ago…” After Wallace's address, one of the town's rare Republicans stood at the microphone with his wife, the two of them dressed in maroon choir robes, and “rendered a vocal duet” while the antic shadows of children who were dancing before spotlights in the grass swooped and wheeled across the white brick wall of a store beside the courthouse. Wallace's smallest daughter, Lee, concluded the service with a speech of her own which began, “We are the littlest angel…” the rest being pretty much unintelligible, and after she finished, the mayor rushed
up to the mike and boomed, “Now, how about that! Lee did a wonderful job, didn't she?”

  After the lighting of the tree at the square, there was a private dinner at the newly remodeled Victorian home of a young Clayton lawyer and his bright young wife-a young man highly regarded by the elders for the restraint he had shown in not running for the legislature yet. “He's just too young,” said one lady, “and I thought he was so smart to wait. He has plenty of time to get up there. Next time would be so much better.” The gathering was small; reports rippled among the guests of people who had been offended because they hadn't been invited. Watson arrived and began grumbling because no liquor was being served. Looking at the host, Watson murmured, “He's a good Methodist, he don't believe in it.” The house was soon filled with quiet, gay voices. The men were mostly standing, the women mostly sitting. Then Wallace appeared, announcing with a snicker as soon as he came through the door, “Watson's mad because we let that Republican get up there and sing,” and Watson replied impassively, “That's right, we shouldn't of even let his ass come.” Wallace went off into the crowd, still saying “Yeah, Watson's mad now. We let that Republican get up there and sing, and he's mad now.”

  It was an ample buffet: turkey and ham and dressing and green-bean casserole and various garnishments, arrayed on the dining-room table in the soft glow of candles. Wallace, his plate filled, somehow strayed, slipped out of his usual pocket of attention, and sat for a few moments alone at one end of the table in the living room, stranded before the white expanse of tablecloth under the bright ceiling lights-looking momentarily like a small boy, forsaken, vulnerable, strangely touching. The first person to sit down at the table seemed to startle and bewilder him briefly, but then, as others began settling around him, he revived. “What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna run on a platform where I'll move the nation's capital out of all that muggin' and so on, move it to some place safer nearer the center of the country. And I'm gonna stop all foreign aid for a year, and tell those countries tradin' with our enemies they ain't gettin' theirs back until they stop it. Even Britain, yessuh.” He went on to speculate, “Let me tell you, you let a couple million people get out of work in this country, you gonna have a little ole revolution on your hands. There's gonna be some burnin' and shootin' sho nuff. Some folks gonna get killed. Only reason that hadn't happened before now is the high rate of employment in the country…” He then received, by asking for it directly, a common assent around the table that there had never been a governor in Alabama's history popular enough when his term was over to be reelected. He was asked if his wife's candidacy, then, had not violated the spirit if not the letter of the constitution, and he snapped, “There's one thing more powerful than the constitution, than any constitution, and that's the will of the people. What is a constitution anyway? They're the products of the people, the people are the first source of power, and the people can abolish a constitution if they want to…” His heat and aggressiveness in answering the question caused a slight flutter of nervousness around the table. The host began talking about football, and Wallace fell to eating in silence for a moment, listening to him.

  It was, on the whole, a nice evening, a nice supper, and just as soon as everyone had finished eating, they rose from the table, got their wraps, found their mates, and departed. The house seemed to empty just as abruptly as it had filled. They had come to eat supper there, and as soon as they got that done, they left.

  Wallace drove to Watson's house to watch a high-school football playoff game on Watson's color television in a tiny back sitting room with green-painted board walls and starched white organdy curtains. Wallace watched the game in silence for a while, smoking a cigar in the lamplight, his legs crossed and one small foot in its little-boy's shoe twitching. Presently he noticed Watson's dog idly chewing at something on the rug, and he turned to Watson. “Say, you got fleas in the house, Watson?” He sniggered, but Watson kept silent, watching the television. It seemed almost as if he were sulking-that faint helpless peevishness of old men who have lost the skill for aggressive banter, who find themselves betrayed by the almost feminine sensitivity of their childhood again, but who can not bring themselves to show it in the company of younger men who do not realize yet the change in them. During an airline commercial, Watson ventured an observation about a stewardess shown smartly clacking down a terminal corridor, “She's fixin' to go fly now.” Wallace said, “Say what, Watson?” Watson, his voice a little flatter, repeated it. Wallace asked him again, “Say she's fixin' to do what, Watson?” This time Watson didn't answer; he merely gazed fixedly at the television. Wallace tried once more, “Say you reckon she's fixin' to go fly now, Watson?” and then leaned back and gave a brief snuffling snicker. After a moment he began kneading his side with his fist. “Believe I got a little indigestion.” Watson's wife-a small, taut, brisk, assertive woman with a gruffly kind face resembling the Indian on the old nickel, who seemed also to take a certain private delight in Wallace, her eyes twinkling when Watson the Sunday before had recounted how Wallace once broke his arm “over some woman”-went next door and shortly returned, the screen slapping behind her, with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Wallace sat up and leaned slightly forward in his chair, his hands lying passively and submissively on his knees, and, his face uplifted like a newly hatched bird, dutifully took one large pink spoonful, which left a trace of a crescent at the edge of his mouth, he wiping it off with the back of his hand as he leaned back again.