The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “From L.A.—the seedier bars, the slimier baths.”

  “Had he phoned them? Would Rodriguez let him?”

  “He wouldn’t have to. Not if that press conference of Orton’s was on television.” Nowell raised his head. Gulls came over the high red roof, wings creaking, straining into the onshore wind, headed for the beach. “They’d see it as only one thing, the chance for a demonstration—noise, obscene gestures, dirty words on signs. If possible, riot and arrest. Maybe with luck a bloody head. Never accomplishes anything. That’s why they love it. Another chance at defeat. And, of course, their leader was here.”

  “Why was he here?” Dave asked. “I mean, Rodriguez told me his reason for getting Cliff out of L.A. You’d left those two A.M. phone calls for him to answer all alone.”

  Nowell made a small, sour sound. “And God help the poor callers. They didn’t know what trouble was before they picked up that phone. He could double it for them by noon. Listen to me. I never stopped answering. I certainly did not leave everything to him.”

  “They stopped calling you,” Dave said.

  “Exactly. In our mousy little office with our mousy little magazine, minding our business, getting things done. Then, all of a sudden, here came the clowns. Calliopes, elephants, performing seals. The television people went mad. Naturally. I mean, anyone making a total ass of himself is bound to raise ratings. And everybody always knew homosexuals were a bunch of overgrown little girls painting their faces and getting themselves up in mommy’s best organdy. What more could the media ask for? Never a five-minute serious discussion. But screaming queens? Ha ha! Isn’t it killing?”

  “It made them easy to find,” Dave said.

  “Do yawl know”—Harv came bustling out, carrying a metal tray heaped with steaks—“what the two main floats were in that first parade down Hollywood Boulevard?” He set the tray on a Formica-top table with fold-down aluminum tube legs. “A crucified fairy with jeweled purple wings, and a ten-foot-high jar of Vaseline. What every bigot knew about homosexuality and never needed to ask.”

  Nowell answered Dave, “It made us impossible to find.”

  Steaks hit the grill and sizzled. In his red apron Harv went at a wiggle to lean over the balustrade. He waved a long-handled fork and shouted down at the pool. “Yawl better get your showers because it is supper time.” The wind took off his chef’s hat. He was bald under it. With a yelp, he chased it across the terraza.

  “I’ll go,” Dave said, and stood.

  Harv was on hands and knees in a far corner. Only his broad, blue-denimed butt, the red bow of the apron, the white soles of his Adidas showed. But his hearing was good. “Yawl are welcome to stay.” His voice came muffled. “Fresh corn on the cob? Genuine Mississippi beaten biscuits?” He pulled the hat from behind the stacks of tiles, sat back on his heels, slapped dust off the hat. “Homemade Texas pecan pie?”

  “Sounds great,” Dave said, “but I have an appointment.”

  “Go fetch him.” Harv stood up and settled the puffy red hat on his dome. “Bring him back. He’s welcome.”

  “It’s not that kind of appointment,” Dave said, and to Nowell, “Didn’t they sort of make it easier for you? To get on with what you were doing? Fewer interruptions?”

  “What really needed doing,” Nowell said, “wasn’t parades and picket lines and protests. It was changing the laws. For twenty years we tried single-handed. Now and then some new assemblyman still wet from the egg would flutter into the lion’s den with a timid little bill. They always ate him.” Nowell sighed and pushed up from the chaise. “Then, at long last, we got an experienced man on our side.” He moved his mock teenager’s body to the top of the stairs. “Someone who could do it right, who had the necessary committee chairmanships, the necessary power.”

  “And you got the laws changed,” Dave said.

  “We did not.” Nowell leaned out to peer down at the pool. “Come on, you tragic misfits.” He turned back to Dave. “Not then. We rounded up twenty expert witnesses, psychiatrists, law professors, police chiefs—”

  “Not Ben Orton,” Dave said.

  Nowell gave him a pitying look and went on. “We sat at long hearing-room tables being glared at by bleary-eyed political hacks who went after us, day after day, with questions like dull castration knives. Then we waited.”

  The boys from the pool came scrambling up the stairs, water streaming from long, wet-dog hair and laying a glaze on uncompleted bodies. They waved towels like guidons. A couple of them brushed Nowell’s sunken cheek with kisses before they followed the rest, laughing, shouting, dodging, into the house.

  Nowell’s neat little teeth smiled after them a moment. Then he saw Dave again and went back to his story. “Finally a phone call came from Sacramento. Our friend had lined up the votes. A slim majority, but enough.” His mouth twisted. “Unless you remembered Cliff Kerlee.”

  “What did he have to do with it?”

  A hefty girl with flushed cheeks and chopped blond hair came out the French doors. She wore tight, faded jeans over bulging hips. Her short-sleeved sweatshirt was stenciled OAKLAND RAIDERS. She pushed a stainless-steel restaurant cart on wheels. The shelves were loaded with plates, cutlery, napkins, drinking glasses. A girl who could have been her twin followed, hands in padded oven mittens, lugging a boiler that steamed. When she set it down and Harv removed the lid, Dave saw bobbing ears of corn. Harv poked at them and put back the lid.

  Nowell said, “He took his troops, as you call them, to the capital. And when the vote came up, they rushed screaming onto the floor, trailing chiffon scarves and clouds of dime-store perfume, and hugging and kissing every legislator they could catch.” Nowell tilted up his glass, tilted back his head, rattled ice against his mouth. “We didn’t get the vote.”

  “Someone got it,” Dave said. “Consenting adults?”

  “Years later. And it wasn’t me.” Nowell sounded bitter. “A lifetime of work. For nothing. Nothing.”

  “Which makes it a little hard to understand,” Dave said, “how Kerlee ended up here. La Caleta isn’t that big or that popular. Finding the two of you—”

  “My folks live in L.A.,” Harv said. “I go there all the time.” He was spearing steaks and flopping them onto plates. He yelled at the house, “Somebody better come and eat these. I mean it.” Laying new steaks on the grill while the football girls loaded corn and biscuits onto the plates, Harv told Dave above the sizzle, “Now Dick doesn’t agree with me, but I believe that if somebody is gay, it doesn’t matter if he is black or white or red all over, he is my brother. I don’t care if he agrees about what we should do—I’m talkin’ about politics now—we are on the same side. We can’t help but be on the same side. We want the same things, don’t we, after all?”

  “Do we?” Nowell said. “Harv, you are a fool.”

  Harv paid him no attention. “And I also patronize gay businesses. It’s my policy.” He fanned smoke away from his face. “I wanted a piggyback plant for my sister’s birthday. I went to Cliff Kerlee’s shop.”

  “And took your mouth along,” Nowell said.

  “Don’t interrupt now,” Harv told him. But it was the dentist with the peeling scalp and the sun-mummified wife who interrupted. They toiled up the steps, crowing about the good smells. Harv bustled around them, unfolding tube-and-web chairs, laying napkins across their laps, fetching them heaped plates. That taken care of, Harv went back to the grill, forked over the steaks, and told Dave, “And little Rodriguez was saying how he wanted to get Cliff out of L.A. Well, yawl better believe it—I knew what he meant.” Harv glared at Nowell.

  “How you could even speak to him is beyond me,” Nowell said. “After what Cliff Kerlee did to us.”

  “Dick, I am not vindictive like you.” Harv tossed imaginary curls. “I cannot go on hatin’ people. I certainly cannot go on hatin’ my gay brothers.”

  “I may throw up,” Nowell said.

  Harv looked at Dave. “And I remembered that vacant nursery up here in L
a Caleta goin’ to seed, dyin’ for somebody to take it over, somebody with a green thumb.”

  “Lavender, you mean,” Nowell said.

  “Exactly. If I had my way, every business in this town would be gay. If yawl would stop hatin’ and start lovin’, this would be a better world. We have got to stick together, Dick. How many times have I told you that?”

  “Eight hundred fifty-four thousand?” Nowell asked.

  Harv told Dave, “And little Rodriguez drove up here and loved the place and that’s how come Dick Nowell and Cliff Kerlee are both in the same little town. And I don’t feel one tiny bit sorry.”

  “I expect,” Dave said, “Kerlee feels sorry enough for both of you.”

  “Well, it’s not my fault,” Harv said. “Ben Orton started it. Dick Nowell’s father figure. He talks about my big mouth. It was Ben Orton’s big mouth that got Cliff Kerlee all stirred up.” Harv turned. “Dodo? Angie? Bring plates. These are done.”

  Dodo and Angie brought plates. Boys in sweat suits came out the French doors. A boy in a brown and orange dashiki followed. So did a boy in a white terrycloth robe. They made loud vocal noises and plate-clattering noises. “Butter!” somebody said. “Parkay!” somebody else said. Chairs rattled, unfolding. A green toy balloon came out an upstairs window, a scrap of paper fluttering from it. The wind caught the balloon, rubbed it along the stucco to a high corner of the house, and carried it off across the scrubby hills. At the window, a boy in a striped tank top wailed, “Aw, that was my order for room service.”

  “Yawl would look lovely skewered on my rotisserie,” Harv called. “You get on down here.”

  Dave said to Nowell, “Father figure?”

  “Harv’s never forgiven me.” Nowell took Dave’s arm and led him toward the stairs that climbed beside the house to the gate and road above. “After Ben Orton’s foot-in-mouth TV appearance,” Nowell said, “I had him and his wife up here to dinner.”

  “You startle me,” Dave said.

  “There was no way they could refuse. My family owned this town before the name Orton was ever heard of.”

  “Dinner?” Dave eyed the terraza, the jumping, joky boys, the napkins wrapped by the wind around their ankles, the suety smoke. “Here?”

  “It wasn’t like this.” Nowell started up the stairs and Dave followed. “It was indoors, private, and very sedate. Silver candelabra. Vintage wine. Spanish-lace tablecloth.” The shadow of the house turned the tennis court grape-juice color. The yellow ball lay there glowing. Nowell went and picked it up. “The best bourbon before. Chateaubriand. The best brandy afterward. Cuban cigars. Viennese coffee.”

  “Sounds persuasive,” Dave said. “Did it work?”

  Nowell grimaced. “It lacked a lovely woman.”

  “I’ve heard that about him,” Dave said.

  “Then you’ve talked to someone knowledgeable.”

  “Daisy Flynn,” Dave said.

  “She was one of the first.” Unexpectedly, Nowell threw the ball. High. Onto the house roof. He stood waiting, face turned up, a thin, gray-haired kid. “A gay, laughing, redheaded colleen. Cub reporter on the Sangre de Cristo Bulletin.” The ball rolled down the tiles, bounced, did a dying fall into Nowell’s hands. “My mother used to write me all the gossip.”

  “And somebody gossiped to Louise Orton, right?”

  Nowell wandered to a green slat bench. “After that”—he found a can lying there, dropped the ball into it, fitted on the lid—“our Ben was careful to put geography between Louise and the other woman—women.”

  “How long did it go on?” Dave wondered.

  “As long as he continued to breathe,” Nowell said. “At least—Harv and I saw him at a corner table, very discreet, in a little restaurant we thought only we knew about. Nirvana, it’s called. In the hills at Monterey. How long ago?” He squinted at the luminous sky. “Six weeks—eight? He was holding hands with a woman. No longer quite young but still handsome. Dark, brooding. Thick black braids, pottery beads, handmade sandals. I think she runs an art gallery. But then, who doesn’t in Monterey?”

  “Louise Orton wouldn’t know about Nirvana?”

  “I doubt she’d know anything a hundred-odd miles would let her avoid knowing. You should have seen her here that night. Smitten with him as a new bride.”

  “What you wanted from him was what Kerlee wanted.”

  “Said he wanted, but could never get,” Nowell said. “He didn’t understand men like Orton. I did, do. I grew up among them. Right here. Present them with a human problem any more complicated than hello or good-bye and they know only two things to do”—he started up the remaining dozen steps to the tall gate—“fuck it or stomp it. You don’t force them. Not into anything. Certainly not anything fruity. Certainly not in public.”

  Dave followed him. “Is this what you said on that Daisy Flynn TV show?”

  “In different words.”

  “Louise Orton told me you were a thorn in his side. At a guess, he could live with that. The evidence says he did. The porno movie closed. The underground paper. I didn’t see a boarded-up massage parlor but there was one, wasn’t there?”

  “If you want to win a fight”—Nowell used the tight little smile again—“you choose issue, time, and place.”

  “Only you didn’t win,” Dave said. “Or did you?”

  Nowell’s hand was on the iron latch of the gate. He turned, frowning. “What does that mean?”

  “Who were you fighting—Orton or Kerlee?”

  “What exactly did Hector Rodriguez tell you?”

  “That sometime after the riot, you sneaked back to the nursery and took Kerlee’s leather bag out of the pickup. He didn’t see you—he just knows that was how it had to be. You took the bag up to Orton’s, smashed his head in, and left the bag beside the body to frame Kerlee.”

  “Now you listen to me,” Nowell said. “Cliff Kerlee’s entire life was a headlong rush at self-destruction. He was violent. There was only one way for it to end.” Nowell swung open the gate. “And that’s the way it ended.”

  Dave went out onto the dusty road. Something whirred in the hilltop brush. He wondered what kind of insect it was. He’d heard the same sound when he’d walked out of the nursery an hour ago. He looked. Nothing stirred in the long sundown shadows. “Where were you when it ended?”

  “Where I always am at that hour,” Nowell said. “In a favorite cove of mine up the beach. Meditating.” His look was steady and mocking. “No, don’t ask. Nobody saw me.”

  9

  TIRED PLUMBING MADE THE flimsy house shudder. Behind her somewhere there was the hard tumble of water into a bathtub. She was tall bones inside a housecoat faded from many washings. Above high, broad cheekbones, her eyes tilted. Their whites were stained like old porcelain. Her hair was streaked with gray but he doubted she was fifty. She kept the screen door hooked between them.

  “How could he be here? They sent him to prison two years ago. It was a mistake. Lester wouldn’t do anything outside the law. Last thing he would touch is marijuana. Some other boy must have got the wrong motorcycle in the dark. Then the police stopped Lester.”

  “He’s been out of prison since the sixteenth,” Dave said. “His parole officer told me he was living here. Aren’t those his clothes piled up on your washing machine?”

  “Those are Bernard Stein’s clothes,” she said. “His mama and papa are on an Arctic cruise. I look after their house. Bernard didn’t come to me with those till I was set to go home. I brought ’em along to wash up here for him.

  “Lester owed you a lot,” Dave aid. “It doesn’t seem right—his not coming straight home to you. At least he could have telephoned. He telephoned Anita Orton.”

  “I don’t have a telephone,” she said. “I can’t afford it. Who is Anita Orton?”

  “She drove him to his parole officer’s,” Dave said. “Then she drove him here, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know any Anita Orton,” Ophelia Green said. “You’ll have to go now. M
y tub will run over.” She shut the wooden door with its neatly curtained cracked glass pane. The sagging boards of the stoop under his feet shook to her retreating steps. He raised knuckles to knock again, heard a car coming in low gear up the steep road, and turned. Through drooping pepper-tree branches, he saw the car slow at the crooked gate in the gaptoothed white-lath fence where red geraniums flared. The car was a pale lavender Montego. The driver, peering anxiously at Ophelia Green’s shack out of round dollbaby eyes, was Louise Orton. She saw Dave. The car bucked. Its tires squealed. It roared off up the hill. He turned back and rapped the door hard. The plumbing quit its noise. Footsteps thumped. Ophelia Green yanked open the inner door. “I don’t know why you keep bothering me.”

  “I wouldn’t, if you told the truth,” Dave said. “You know Anita Orton. She and Lester kept company back before he went to jail. At school and here in La Caleta too. Didn’t Lester tell you? They were going to get married.”

  She clutched the housecoat at her throat. “No,” she said. “He’s too young. He had to get his schooling.”

  “All right,” Dave said. “Maybe not. Maybe he was afraid of how you’d react. Anita wasn’t that smart. Or maybe she simply had different motives. She told her father. He didn’t like it. One way he showed that was to erase her name from his insurance policy. The other way he showed it, I think you know. You tell me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I wish you’d leave me alone. I work hard. I don’t know why anymore. Once I had Lester to work for, hope for. That’s all past now. They’ll never let some boy that’s been a convict be a lawyer. No black boy.” Her laugh was brief and bleak. “What a fool I was. To think he’d ever have a chance. To think bringing him up here to raise him would keep him out of trouble.”

  “It was a safe bet,” Dave said.

  “There are no safe bets,” she said. “Not if you’re black. Go away, now. I’m tired. I want my bath. I want my supper. I want to sit and look at the TV till I fall asleep. Is that so much to ask for? I get up every morning at five o’clock.”