Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  “It’s three thousand,” I say. One way to make a suspicious man less suspicious is to drive a hard bargain with him.

  “Oh?” says Santiago.

  “On delivery,” I say.

  Santiago swivels his head toward Harvey. “The last thing I said was four thousand.”

  Harvey shrugs. “The last thing I said was three.”

  Santiago says amiably, “The price is four thousand. You said you had three and could get up the rest before delivery. I can wait. My merchandise won’t spoil.”

  The waiter sets a cup of coffee and a plate of flan before Santiago. Nobody says anything until the waiter takes off, then I say, “Your merchandise won’t improve with age, either.”

  “Unless,” Coco points out, “one has a notion to sell it off as antiques some day. I have been told there is a considerable profit in antiques.”

  Santiago spoons a large helping of pudding into his mouth. Savoring it, eyes half closed, he looks like Porky Pig working up to a hard-on. “Four thousand,” he says.

  “Thirty-five hundred,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Santiago, “I thought we’d get around to that.” He goes through that process again of studying us one after the other. “We’re talking business, right? Suppose we talk some good sound business. Some interesting possibilities.”

  “Interesting to you, man?” Coco says. “Or us?”

  “Let’s explore that. The project you’re working on—”

  “You don’t know anything about any project,” Coco says.

  “Look, the merchandise you ordered—well, it means something big is in the making. Now let’s turn off the shit machine and get down to cases. I’m an investor, maybe a little bit of a gambler. If your project is political, count me out. But if it isn’t, well, you can’t go wrong with a partner who’d be willing to extend some credit to you.”

  “Who says we can’t?” Coco asks.

  “Everybody has to have faith in people. Look at it from my angle. How do I know you’re not the law just setting me up for the kill? But I have faith in you. Extending credit is an act of faith.”

  “Beautiful,” Coco says. “What is your church, man? The First National Bank of Miami?”

  I say to Santiago, “What have you got against political projects?”

  “They’re all investment and no return. And look what comes out of them. Look at this Watergate mess. Who was at the bottom of the pile? My people. Simple Cuban patriots. Visionaries. Pigeons for the plucking.” Santiago sucks in another huge mouthful of flan, then waves his spoon back and forth before us like a metronome. “But not me, my friends. No, thank you.”

  “Forget about the project,” I say. “All you have to do is supply the merchandise and collect your money. When and where do you deliver?”

  “Do you know the Everglades?”

  “Yeah, some,” Harvey says.

  “You know Ninety-four where it cuts off from the Trail?”

  “I know it.”

  “Watch your mileage after the cutoff. Just about three miles, and there is this burned-out shanty. Drive around it, and you’ll see a track going south. That will take you to a canal. Wait there.”

  “You bringing the stuff by boat?” Lester asks.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. That’s my business. Your business is to be there tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock sharp. With the money.”

  “Thirty-five hundred,” I say.

  “Four thousand. Make up your minds about it now. The whole four thousand on delivery.”

  All of us in the Company look at each other. Coco shakes his head. He solemnly says to me, “It won’t leave us much. We’ll be down to bedrock, man.”

  “We’re not being offered any choice,” I say just as solemnly.

  “Bedrock or no deal, that’s how it looks,” Harvey says.

  Coco heaves his shoulders. “Well, it’s only money. Filthy lucre, right?” He says warningly to Santiago, “But no pig in a poke, man. I want to look over everything in the inventory before we make payment.”

  “Naturally,” says Santiago. “After all, my friend, faith can be extended just so far.”

  After he waddles away, leaving us to pay his check, I say to Harvey, “You ought to tell baby brother not to ask questions at the wrong time.”

  “That’s a fact,” Harvey says.

  Lester opens his big blue eyes wide. “What questions?” he says innocently. I mean innocently. He is not putting us on.

  Harvey says to him, “Like if Santiago’s coming by boat.”

  “One if by land,” I say. “Two if by sea.”

  “Ain’t no sea,” Lester says. “Just swamp canal. And I was only trying to do some figuring. Makes a difference if we have got to lay for him two different ways. Up to now I was just thinking of one way.”

  Harvey says patiently, “You can’t do such thinking out loud, Les. You put that man’s back up, and he didn’t trust us that much to start with.”

  “Oh. Ah,” Lester says, catching on. “Well, it don’t make that much difference as long as he does show up.” He mentally shifts into high. “And he’ll show up. Once he got a look at the money, that’s all he needed. You did that fine, Harve. I would have thought that money was for real myself, if I didn’t know about it.”

  “We all did fine,” I say. “But it still leaves us not knowing if he’ll show up by road or by canal. He won’t be coming alone, either.”

  Coco says to Harvey, “Do you know that area off Ninety-four?”

  “Some. I know that burned-out shack. South of it is deep swamp. Anyhow, we’ll be looking it over before Santiago shows up.”

  “Any cover there?” Coco says.

  “Maybe not. We can make cover.”

  “Do not underestimate that fellow,” Coco warns. “There is fat everywhere on him except between those cute little ears. He knows there is the chance of an ambush. He could be at the area before ten o’clock, waiting for us.”

  “Sure,” Harvey says. “But don’t you worry, we’ll be there before him.”

  “Tonight?” I ask. “Right from here?”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “We don’t have to set up the stakeout in the dark. We can wait until morning. But this way we’ll know for sure we’re there ahead of him.”

  “Can’t stay away from the house all night,” Harvey says apologetically. “Daddy’ll raise hell. No sense having him look Les and me over, wondering what’s up. Better to tell him we’ll be going fishing in the morning, let it go at that. No questions that way. No fuss.”

  “Sweet and loving Jesus,” Coco says. “I hear this man but I refuse to believe what I hear. Daddy does not want his little lads up all night. Daddy says that if they intend to go out in the morning to knock over some Cubano game, they must get a good night’s sleep and make sure to drink their milk before they leave the house.”

  “You motherfucking black clown,” Harvey says without heat, “nothing is changed. We pick up the cash and the car from the old man before he knows it, and if we tell him it’s fishing tomorrow, we got almost all tomorrow head start. If we take off tonight and he makes bed check, first thing he’ll do is look-see what happened to his cash. We’ll be hot even before we meet with Santiago.”

  “That’s the truth,” Lester says.

  “What do you think?” Coco asks me.

  “It looks like daddy is too smart for us.” Then I say to Harvey, “What about the license plates on the car? We’ll be on the road between Florida and upstate New York about three days, but we’ll have only one day’s head start on daddy. The next two days those plates can make trouble. Or is there a good chance daddy won’t turn the cops loose on you, once he wises up?”

  “No, he’ll turn them loose on us,” Lester says. “Won’t be the money as much as the car.”

  I could believe it. Harvey had said there was never more than a couple of hundred dollars stashed away in the brick wall of the gas station against emergencies, but that the car was only a few-years-old
LeSabre, tuned to sweet perfection.

  “I’ve got other plates for the car,” Harvey says. “Old-time customer of daddy’s left his heap up on blocks in the garage. I’m switching plates with him.”

  “And,” says Lester, “nobody’ll take notice of what plates that heap is wearing. Not right away, anyhow.”

  I say to Coco, “It looks like phase one is in good hands.”

  “Perhaps,” Coco says.

  “It goddam well is,” Harvey says. “Another thing, I figure we can’t take a chance on shorting out of gas on the road, so I’m taking along sixty gallons in reserve cans.”

  “Sure enough,” Lester puts in. “Ought to get us right past New York City. If that kind of load in the trunk don’t bust us an axle.”

  “We’re not out of Florida yet,” Coco says. “What about tomorrow morning right here in the swamp?”

  Harvey says, “We get everything together sunrise, then pick up you and Jimmy. Then we get out to the area and set up to cover the road and the canal. You got a place to sleep tonight?”

  “A lady of my acquaintance is expecting my company tonight,” Coco says. He looks at me. “And you?”

  “My bag’s in a locker over at the Greyhound depot. Any room around there will do, if we can raise the money for it.”

  We lay out our money on the table. Eighteen dollars from the Shanklins, eight from Coco, two from me. Twenty-eight dollars minus fifteen for the Company dinner. Thirteen dollars net.

  I take five, give Coco five and the Shanklins three.

  For the waiter’s tip under a plate, One Happyland Dollar.

  Marcus Hayworth

  Perhaps there is something about flawless July mornings in the pine-scented Lake George country which brings out the randy in a man more than usual. So this day starts off in fine style, myself at fifty-five waking pleasingly robust, Emily at fifty-one pleasingly compliant, and after we have ended a rousingly youthful bed-clattering session, Emily lies back in smiling relaxation and says, “You see? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  I say, “Seems so, doesn’t it?” Then I can’t keep myself from saying, “You know, the Times had something in it yesterday about that estrogen stuff you take. About how women who take it run the risk—”

  “I read it too, dear. And it’s birth-control pills that make the problem, not estrogen. And I am well past the birth-control stage.”

  “Deborah isn’t,” I remind her. “She does take those pills, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she does. But she happens to be twenty years old and very much married now. She and David can work out their own medical problems, I’m sure.”

  “Doesn’t she want children?”

  “I haven’t asked her. And, Marcus dear, you are not to ask her, either.”

  “Emily, I am not really the bull in the family china shop you make me out to be.”

  “Sometimes you are. After two years you still can’t accept the fact that your daughter is a married woman. It makes for some broken china now and then.”

  Poor Emily, the peacemaker. I say, “Well, whatever’s broken, I’m sure David can mend it. After all, that’s his trade, isn’t it?” And it is. My son-in-law, God help us, after surveying all the prospects I could open to him, had decided to become a handyman, no less. Anyone who doubted that need only drop in at the Fix-It-All Shop on Front Street in the township of Scammons Landing. The shabby gent behind the counter is the son-in-law. The pretty girl, usually barefoot and raggle-taggle, sweeping the floor while she listens to his words of wisdom is my daughter Deborah, whose marriage to this paragon I am supposed to rejoice in.

  Emily is determined to press the issue. She says teasingly, “Thee must open your heart to David, Friend. He is a good man, and you know it.”

  “A thirty-five-year-old man who’d marry a child of eighteen with her head full of feathers?”

  “Marcus dear, Deborah and David were visited by the meeting’s Committee on Clearness and the marriage fully approved.”

  “Committee on Clearness. The Marcy sisters are a couple of eighty-year-old spinsters who get starry-eyed when anyone mentions young love to them. And Ethel Quimby thinks she has to be matchmaker for everybody in sight, whether they’re Quakers or not.”

  Emily seems to find this funny. “Of course, the proper committee would have been you all alone, holding the fort.”

  I resent this. And the resentment leads me to come out with the thought which had nagged me during the wedding in the meeting house, but which I had never expressed before. “Damn it, if it had only been Janet he wanted to marry. She was twenty-five, then, that much closer to his age. All right, she may not have Debbie’s looks, but I’ve seen the men she works with at the bank take plenty of notice of her.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, they do. So it can’t be that she feels insecure about her looks. Certainly not about her brains. Yet she’s a very unhappy girl, Emily.”

  “If she is, your watching her with that worried, fatherly expression won’t make her any happier.”

  “Talk about unfair. I never let my feelings about her show.”

  “Dear, you are the most totally transparent human being I know. But I’m not complaining. After all, that’s why I married you.”

  So now I’m supposed to feel guilty for my concern about my older daughter. And I do. That sense of guilt, of course, is part of the Calvinism the colonial Hayworths of Marblehead in Massachusetts lived by. That, like the incongruous design of this old sea-front house with its widow’s walk on the roof, not overlooking returning ships but virgin forests, is something that their emigration here and entrance into Quaker meeting could not eradicate.

  More and more, in recent years, I seem to suffer pangs of guilt whatever direction I turn my eyes, inwardly or outwardly. I am burdened with the feeling that along the two-mile length of Ridge Road—that enclave made up of my house and outbuildings, the house Emily inherited and we now rent to a youthful commune, the Friends meeting house, the old Marcy place where Anna and Elizabeth, who only a little while ago had been brisk, middle-aged women, are now sharing their peppery but timeworn eighties, the Friends cemetery itself—this whole peaceable kingdom of my childhood is under assault from subtly destructive forces, all strange faces, strange manners, strange thoughts, trying to penetrate, confuse, and confound it. And my abiding guilt is that where I should perceive the Light in these strangers, I often cannot, but instead find myself closing my heart to them in resentment.

  Guilt, too, that in a world of oppression and deprivation I am so comfortably shielded from suffering. And trying to assuage that guilt by heavy contributions to every good cause that comes by only makes it that much worse. Gives me the embarrassed sense as I make out the check that I am buying my way into grace.

  A missionary manqué?

  Hardly. In fact, the word missionary itself has been anathema to such as the Hayworths and the Oates, Emily’s family, for some hundred and fifty years and more, since the time Friend Elias Hicks came out of Long Island and opened the split between his breed of Quaker and the evangelicals with his message that the Light in Jesus was no more meaningful than in any man since time began, that the guidance we may find for ourselves in the communion of silent meeting for worship is as sound as the guidance once found by those who wrote the Bible. So spake old Elias, and put Scammons Landing Monthly Meeting in the hands of the Hicksites, after a loud and un-Quakerly separation. Since reunion only a generation ago—a reunion I myself had labored toward for many years, in more committee meetings than I care to remember—we have often been in happy cooperation with the orthodox, but there is still in me a compulsive shying away from the concept of pastoral meetings with their hired ministers and altars and hymn books, a Hicksite wariness of, especially, the evangelical outlook, the peculiarly arrogant sense of religious mission, as if any Friend is bestowed with a Light which all humanity in this diverse world must accept as the one unchallengeable truth.

  So there is no sense of mission
in me, but that guilty feeling that I have it too easy in my life, and unable to bring comfort to that vast population on earth which has it so hard, that I might be better off if I myself had it less easy. On the other hand, I am, as my son-in-law David once remarked, as much a birthright banker as I am a birthright Quaker. He did not, I was irritably grateful to observe, go as far as some Quakers by convincement and suggest that birthright Quakers are not quite up to snuff, but about the banking he was only telling the truth. I inherited a prosperous bank and made it into several prosperous banks, and what the devil would I designate as my talent if I made application to join such as the Peace Corps? A skill at calculating mortgage rates?

  And whose money made from banking patched and repaired and finally rebuilt the meeting house? And whose money largely supports what activities the meeting engages in?

  And yet, and yet, is that all Marcus Hayworth amounts to? Financial mainstay of an antique meeting where un-Quakerly dissidence so often prevails? Kindly landlord of a so-called commune where a group of fuzzy-minded young people are trying to demonstrate a way of life which Friend Hayworth finds sticking in his craw? Amiable delegate to Yearly Meeting, where he draws strength from morning meetings for worship-sharing with unfamiliar Friends from afar, and then finds the strength ebbing in bewildering evening sessions where youth comes not to seek guidance, but to hurl challenges?

  And to return home and find that my son-in-law can offer a certain degree of clarity and reason and balance. That is the most awkward part of it. The guilty knowledge that if he were not my younger daughter’s husband, I might respect and admire him much more than I do.

  This way it is like living intimately with a perpetual irritant, an outwardly kindly but inwardly disapproving superior.

  A perpetual toothache.

  Emily and I are last down to the breakfast table, the whole clan already gathered around it, including Ray McGrath, one of the commune’s elders, which is how I think of the somewhat middle-aged founders of the curious institution down the road. He and Lou Erlanger, the other founder, and some of their junior communards—the juniors all seem to have the ability to grow full beards at puberty and so remain largely undistinguishable from each other—have a way of dropping in on us for breakfast without notice, taking our hospitality for granted, and making it plain that we are free to trespass on theirs just as casually, although after my first visit to the commune once it was in operation, the mere thought of eating at their table can turn me queasy.