Yellow Dog Contract

by Thomas Ross

  He had put on weight, although not enough to keep him from bounding around his desk to shake hands with me. His hair still flopped down into his eyes and he still brushed it away with a quick, nervous combing gesture. But the hair was no longer light brown, it was grey, and although his lopsided, awshucks grin had lost none of its charm, it might have become just a bit more mechanical.

  I saw that there were also some new lines in his face, but there should have been at forty-two. His grey eyes, set wide from the beginning of his big, handsome nose, had lost none of their intelligence that bordered on brilliance, and I could feel them running over me in order to assess my own wear and tear. It made me give my moustache a couple of brushes.

  “I like it,” he said. “It makes you look a little like David Niven—when he was a lot younger, of course.”

  “Ruth likes it,” I said.

  “How is she?”

  “Still the same.”

  “Still wonderful, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “I know.”

  “Sit down, Harvey, sit down, hell, anywhere, and I’ll get Jenny to get us some coffee.”

  I sat down in one of the leather chairs and instead of going around behind his desk and sitting behind it, Corsing sat down in a chair next to me. It was a nice touch, and he knew it was a nice touch, and I didn’t mind at all.

  Jenny was the tall brunette with the wise eyes and she and the Senator must have used telepathy to communicate, because as soon as we were seated she came into the office bearing a tray with two cups of coffee. “You use one spoonful of sugar, don’t you, Mr. Longmire?” she said and gave me another one of her wry smiles.

  I looked at Corsing. “Hell,” he said and grinned, “that’s one you taught me. Always remember what they drink and what they use in their coffee.”

  As Jenny was serving us the coffee she said, “I understand that you were with the Senator on his first campaign.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “That must have been exciting,” she said.

  “It was close,” I said and smiled.

  “Are you handling any campaigns this year?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “What a pity,” she said, smiled again, and left.

  I looked at Corsing again after Jenny had gone. He nodded, sighed not unhappily, and said, “She’s the one. Has been for four years now. Smart as hell.”

  “She seems to be,” I said.

  “Heard her over the phone?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I would have done anything she might have suggested.”

  We were silent for a moment and then he said, “Annette’s not any better. In fact, they think she’s worse.”

  “I’m sorry.” Annette was the Senator’s wife. The official diagnosis was paranoid-schizophrenia, but nobody was quite sure because Annette hadn’t said a word in four years that I knew of although it must have been six years now. Annette sat quietly in her room in a private sanitarium just outside of Joplin. She would probably sit there the rest of her life.

  “I can’t get a divorce,” Corsing said.

  “No.”

  “I can have a crazy wife in a nut house and nobody minds. I think it even gets me a few votes. It wouldn’t have perhaps ten years ago, but it does now. But I can’t divorce her and marry someone else and lead a normal life because that would be desertion and senators don’t desert their crazy wives. Not yet.”

  “Wait five years,” I said.

  “I don’t want to wait five years.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “So,” he said. “What happened to you?”

  “I live on a farm now.”

  “Harvey.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been out to your farm. We’ve gotten drunk on your farm. It’s a very pretty place but it runs straight up and down a mountain and you couldn’t raise a cash crop on it that would pay the light bill.”

  “We made almost twelve thousand dollars last year. Almost.”

  “Off the farm?”

  “Well, mostly off of those greeting card things that Ruth does. And my verses. I write greeting card verses now for two dollars a line.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We’ve got two goats,” I said.

  “Have you thought about food stamps?”

  “Food’s no problem. Actually, not much of anything is a problem.”

  “How much did you make the last time you handled something?”

  I thought about it. “That would be seventy-two. I made about seventy-five thousand that year. Net. Maybe eighty.”

  He nodded. “But it wasn’t the money. I mean that wasn’t really why you were in it.”

  “No, that wasn’t the reason.”

  “So I’ll ask you again. What happened?”

  I looked at him and I saw that he wasn’t prying. He was seeking information. There was also an expression of mild hope in his eyes as though he thought that I might give him an answer that would enable him to divorce his wife, marry Jenny, move to a hardscrabble farm in the Ozarks, and tell the voters to get stuffed. If I had done it, perhaps there was a chance, a very small chance, that he could, too.

  There wasn’t any chance, of course, and he was realistic and honest enough, especially with himself, to know it and that was one of the reasons I liked him. It was also why I decided to tell him the truth. Or what, after nearly four years of thinking about it, I believed to be the truth, which was what would have to serve.

  “You really want to know what happened?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Well, it just wasn’t fun anymore. Any of it.”

  He sighed deeply, nodded again, slumped a little in his chair, and turned slightly so that he could look out the window. “No,” he said softly, “it isn’t, is it?”

  “Not for me anyhow.”

  He looked at me again and once more it was the look of an intelligent, puzzled man seeking an answer. “I wonder why it isn’t?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” I said and that’s as far as I would go even though he was still looking at me as if he expected something more, something wise perhaps, or even profound. But I had run out of wisdom and profundity nearly four years before, so instead I said, “You’re going to go for it again, aren’t you? In seventy-eight?”

  He looked around his nice corner office. “I will unless somebody offers me a job that pays a lot with a fat pension plan and a big office and a large staff so that I don’t have to work too hard and still get to shoot off my mouth all the time and have my name in the paper and my picture on television a lot. You know any jobs around like that?”

  “No.”

  “You know what I wanted to be when I was a kid in St. Louis? A really little kid about seven or eight?”

  “President?”

  “I wanted to be a short-order cook in a diner. I thought that was kind of classy. I don’t think I ever told anyone that before.”

  “Maybe you ought to tell Jenny,” I said.

  He thought about it and nodded. “Maybe I should.”

  There was a silence and then he said, “How’d you get tied up with Roger Vullo’s outfit?” Before I could say anything he held up his hand, palm outward like a traffic policeman, and said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t been running a check on you. Jenny’s got a friend that works down at Vullo’s place. They gossip a lot. Sometimes it’s useful.”

  “Arch Mix,” I said. “Vullo’s going to pay me ten thousand dollars to tell him what I think happened to Arch Mix.”

  “What’re you going to do with ten thousand dollars, buy some more goats?”

  “I’m going to Dubrovnik.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “I thought you’d been everywhere.”

  “Not to Dubrovnik.”

  “Arch Mix is dead, isn’t he?”


  I nodded.

  “Any idea why or how?”

  “No.”

  “He was an interesting guy,” the Senator said. “He had a good mind, perhaps even a first-class one, although you can never really tell with guys who have jobs that require them to talk all the time.”

  “It was a good mind,” I said.

  “He had some interesting theories about civil service reform and the use of the strike by public employees as a collective-bargaining tool.”

  “His garbage collectors’ theory,” I said.

  “His what?”

  “When Mix got elected president of the Public Employees Union twelve years ago it actually wasn’t much of a union. It was really more of a polite association, the kind that sponsors the annual city hall picnic. Strike was almost a nasty word. Well, if you’re going to have a labor union, you can praise good-faith collective bargaining all you want, but your ultimate weapon is the strike. If the political types that you’re bargaining with don’t believe that you’ll strike because there’s a law against public employees striking, then you’ve lost all your muscle. It’s like being in a poker game with no money to call a bluff. So Mix went south.”

  “Why south?”

  “It was a very calculated move. He needed to pull off a successful strike by public employees that would shake up and alter the membership’s attitude toward strikes. And he also needed to convince the various mayors and city managers and governors and state legislatures around the country that the PEU was no longer going to be a mild-mannered company union that doted on sweetheart contracts.”

  “I remember now,” Corsing said. “He picked Atlanta.”

  “In the summer.”

  “Yes.”

  “He also picked out the workers who had the least to lose. He picked the garbage collectors.”

  “What was it, four months?”

  “Four months. He took them out in May and he kept them out until September and the union almost went broke. It was the hottest summer in fifty years in Atlanta and the garbage piled up until they swore they could smell it in Savannah.”

  “They were black, weren’t they?”

  “The garbage men?” I said. “Ninety-eight percent of them. At the time I think they were making a buck and a quarter an hour and no overtime. Mix stayed with them all that summer. He slept in their houses, ate with them, and walked the picket line with them. He hated it because he always liked the best hotels and the best restaurants, and carrying a sign in a picket line when the temperature’s a hundred and three degrees was his idea of no fun. But he made Newsweek and Time and the network newscasts were carrying him as though he were sponsored by Exxon.”

  “And then they put him in the hospital.”

  I shook my head. “It was only for three days. And the bandages on his head looked good on TV. If you use strikebreakers to bust a strike, you have to pay them something. The city had to pay the ones in Atlanta five bucks an hour which was two and a half bucks more an hour than the garbage men themselves were out on strike for. Well, all that came out after the goons killed four of the garbage men and put Mix in the hospital. By then the garbage was a serious health hazard and the rats had moved in and then they had those three cases of cholera and that did it. The city caved in to all of Mix’s demands and this time he made the cover of Time and also Meet the Press. After that, he and the union were on their way. He took it from a membership of two hundred and fifty thousand to nearly eight hundred thousand and George Meany put him on the AFL-CIO executive council and they started inviting him to parties at the White House when they needed to show off an American labor statesman whose grammar wasn’t too bad and who could handle the forks all right. And Mix loved it. Every goddamned minute of it.”

  We were silent for a moment and then the Senator said, “I was back home last week.”

  I nodded. Back home was St. Louis.

  “The union’s pretty strong there.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Council Twenty-one, I think it is.”

  “A guy came to see me. He used to be executive director of the Council.”

  “Freddie Koontz?” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “I know Freddie. He was one of Mix’s original backers. I didn’t know he’d retired though. Hell, Freddie can’t be more than fifty.”

  “He didn’t retire,” the Senator said. “He got bounced.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Before I tell you that, I’d better mention that the Council’s contract with the city expires a couple of weeks from now on September first.”

  “So?”

  “So when Mix disappeared the Council was in the early stages of negotiating a new contract with the city. A week after Mix disappeared the International sent out about a half-dozen guys from its headquarters here in Washington to help with the negotiations.”

  “That’s not unusual,” I said. “Sometimes the International will send out a team that includes an economist, a lawyer, some resource people, and even some trained negotiators.”

  “Freddie would know most of them, wouldn’t he?”

  “Sure.”

  “He didn’t know any of this bunch.”

  “Who were they?” I said.

  “Freddie still isn’t sure. All he knows is that they were very smooth and they had plenty of money and they weren’t afraid to use muscle.”

  “So how’d it happen?”

  “Freddie says that after they were there a week a special meeting of the Council’s board of directors was called. This was right in the middle of negotiations with the city. Well, the first order of business was Freddie. A motion was made to fire him, it was seconded, there was no discussion, the vote was six to five, and Freddie was out of a job. After that they appointed a new executive director. He was a nobody, Freddie said, a rank and filer who knew as much about negotiating a contract as a hog does about a white shirt. I guess you remember how Freddie talks.”

  “I remember,” I said. “Colorfully.”

  “Well, the Council broke off negotiations, which Freddie said were going pretty well, and two days later they were back with an entirely new set of demands. Freddie says the new demands ask for everything but city hall.”

  “And the six guys that the International sent out?”

  “They’re still there. They’re calling all the plays now. If any opposition from the membership pops up, they buy it off. Two thousand, three thousand, even as high as five thousand. All cash, or so Freddie says. He also says that when they can’t use cash to buy off opposition, they resort to muscle.”

  “So what does it look like?”

  The Senator took out his pipe, filled it, and lit it with a wooden match that he struck against the sole of his left shoe. “It looks like a strike,” he said after he puffed on his pipe for a few moments.

  “The whole city?”

  “Everything but the police and the firemen. The teachers will go out because the Public Employees have the school janitors. Or custodians, I think they’re called now.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s interesting.”

  “It gets better.”

  “How?”

  “My colleague, the distinguished junior senator from Missouri, is scared shitless. If he doesn’t carry St. Louis he’s dead. Now suppose you were an average voter and a strike by the people whose wages are paid with your hard-earned tax money closed down your schools, interrupted your bus service, shut down your hospitals, eliminated your garbage collection, screwed up your traffic lights, ended your street cleaning, and fucked up all the records at city hall. Now suppose you were that voter and you usually voted the straight Democratic ticket, how would you vote come November the second?”

  “By gum, I’d vote her straight Republican.”

  “That’s what my distinguished colleague, the junior senator, is scared shitless about.”

  “He’s not the only one who should be scared,” I said. “If the Democrats can’t carry St. Louis
, they can lose the whole state. They can’t afford to lose any states.”

  “No,” the Senator said, “they can’t.” He puffed on his pipe again. “It seems strange to me that a labor union, which in the past has so publicly aligned itself with the Democratic party, should call a strike that could well lose the party a U.S. Senator, not to mention a Congressman or two, and conceivably, even the presidential election. That seems strange to me. Passing strange.”

  “So that’s why you asked me to come see you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mix would never have done it like this, would he?”

  “No,” the Senator said, “he wouldn’t.”

  “But Arch Mix is no longer with us.”

  “No.”

  “It’s sort of a motive, isn’t it?”

  “Barely.”

  “You haven’t gone to anyone else with it, have you? Such as the FBI?”

  Corsing looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s suppose the FBI went clumping around out in St. Louis and the union found out that they were there at the suggestion of Senator Corsing. Well, Senator Corsing is up for election in two years and Senator Corsing would very much like to get re-elected. If his theory is full of shit, Senator Corsing would much prefer that nobody found out that it was his theory—especially the splendid public servants of the great city of St. Louis and their sizeable bloc of votes.”

  “So you thought I might do your poking around for you?”

  “You, Harvey, are the logical choice. You knew Arch Mix. You are familiar with the union. In addition, you are intelligent, discreet, totally without ambition, and on somebody else’s payroll so you won’t cost me a dime. All in all, Harvey, I find you a remarkably felicitous choice.”

  I rose. “You remember Max Quane, don’t you?”

  The Senator nodded. “I’m sorry about Max. I heard about it this morning.”

  “Max called me yesterday just before somebody cut his throat.”