The New City

by Stephen Amidon

  He kept on walking.

  It wasn’t until he reached Juniper Bend that he felt his anger begin to fade. That was it. Vota was through. He’d inform Austin that the man had crossed the line. Swope would find a way to fire him, government rules or not. Getting rid of seemingly untouchable people was high on the list of the many things Austin Swope knew how to do. By the end of the week that fat hillbilly would be swallowing his own spit. Still, it rankled. Not just Vota’s attitude but Wooten’s own indecisive response. Challenges to his authority had become so rare lately that he was getting rusty at dealing with them. Ten years ago it would have been different. Back then, he’d faced down chumps like Vota twice a week, wielding an invisible power that men responded to like a dog to a high-pitched whistle. Authority, he realized, was something you had to keep working on. Like muscle. And, like muscle, it could go soft if it wasn’t exercised enough.

  Wooten fretted for a while that maybe that was what was happening here. He was going soft. Maybe the money and the respect were eating away at the very part of him that made his success possible in the first place. The cash, for instance. A decade ago hardly a minute would pass without him worrying about having enough to keep his family safe and secure. These days, however, he hardly worried about money at all. His 1972 performance bonus had been a staggering twenty-four thousand dollars, more money than his grandfather could have made in five lifetimes. But it wasn’t just the green. There was the respect as well. He no longer had to fight for it. It was just there, like God’s grace. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble dealing with men like Vota. Incidents like the one he’d just endured had become as rare as April snow. In fact, in the last few months the respect afforded Wooten seemed to be on the verge of going nationwide. There had even been two magazine articles, a short piece in Look entitled “New City’s Master Builder” and an embarrassingly complimentary spread in Ebony called “From Mississippi Mud to Maryland Gold.” Phone calls had followed. Parren Mitchell. Vernon Jordan. Someone from the NAACP and a trustee of Howard University. Just to tell him how proud they were.

  And then, just three nights ago, there had been another call, one that Wooten suspected might be the culmination of the respect he’d been banking ever since he left St. Louis. Gus Savage, phoning him at home. Which was doubly unusual. Before that, he’d had scarce contact with the EarthWorks CEO. The man had more on his mind than housing starts or surface drainage problems or cement-vegetation ratios. For him to call Wooten outside office hours was unprecedented. But they’d wound up talking for nearly an hour. Savage had surprised Wooten with a series of vague questions. Things like “Are you happy?” and “Is our experiment working?” Wooten, who liked to deal in weights and measures, in costs and deadlines, had been warily tongue-tied at first, though he gradually began to unburden himself, speaking of his pride in what they’d accomplished as well as his unease at some of the recent strife. Savage listened intently.

  “Earl, here’s the thing,” he said when Wooten finished. “We’d like you to fly out here next week.”

  “Sure. Is there a problem?”

  “On the contrary. We’d like to discuss your future.”

  Wooten paused, waiting for more. But there was just an expectant silence.

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “How about a week from now? Friday? You could catch a late plane on Thursday and then grab the red-eye home.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “We’ll arrange the tickets on this end.”

  “Any chance of my knowing what this is about before then?”

  “Let’s just say you’ll be surprised and gratified. Very. Oh, and Earl—let’s keep this talk between thee and me, shall we?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”

  “Don’t tell anyone you’re coming.”

  “Including Austin?”

  “Including Austin.”

  Wooten hesitated. He already had one secret too many in his life. The last thing he needed was another.

  “Is that a problem?” Savage asked.

  Wooten snapped out of it. If Savage told him to keep his mouth shut, then that was how it would have to be. He must have his reasons. You didn’t get to be a man like Savage if you didn’t have your reasons. Austin would understand if he found out. He was, after all, a company man. Just like Wooten.

  “No, Gus. No problem at all.”

  The phone call puzzled him for the next few days. Clearly something big was in the offing, though Wooten couldn’t figure out what it might be. Even though he’d been with EarthWorks for five years, he was still not accustomed to the hidden grammar of office politics. That was Austin’s domain. And then, just yesterday, he was grabbing a quick lunch in the Newton Plaza cafeteria when Richard Holmes, the young personnel executive who headed EarthWorks Afro-Am, stopped by his table.

  “Just thought I’d let you know that we’re behind you, Earl,” Holmes said, plucking out the unlit pipe he kept perpetually clenched between his lips.

  “That’s good to know, Richard,” Wooten deadpanned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Holmes made a show of looking around to see if anyone was watching. His voice dropped a dozen decibels.

  “Your candidacy for the city manager post.”

  “You’ve lost me, my friend.”

  “I was talking to Hollis Watson back in Chicago and he said he heard it was in the works. All hush-hush, you know.”

  Wooten stared evenly at Holmes.

  “I guarantee you I do not have the slightest notion what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s cool.”

  Holmes’s slang irritated Wooten.

  “Richard, at summer’s end Austin Swope will be named Newton’s first manager. And at that time I fully expect you and everybody else in Afro-Am to get behind him.”

  Holmes planted his pipe back between his lips and held up his hands in mock surrender.

  “I understand,” he muttered. “Mum’s the word.”

  Though annoyed, Wooten quickly dismissed the exchange. There was no chance of him being offered city manager. Holmes had got his information seriously wrong. Somewhere between Savage’s office and Newton Plaza the message had become deeply distorted. Whatever they had in mind for Wooten, city manager was not it. The job was Swope’s, period. Ardelia seemed particularly skeptical about the notion when he mentioned his conversation with Holmes.

  “I don’t know, Earl,” she said, leveling that look of hers over her reading glasses. “I can’t really see it, myself.”

  “Why’s that? You think I’m not smart enough?”

  Wooten said the words with a smile, but there was something in them. Ardelia Wilson, daughter of a prosperous undertaker, valedictorian at Sumner High, had gained a B.A. from St. Louis University back in the days when he was riding around in the back of exhaust-spewing pickups, a rusty shovel between his knees.

  “It’s not smarts you need, hon,” she said.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Craftiness.”

  “And I suppose I’m deficient in that.”

  “Husband, if you weren’t I’d have never married you.”

  Her words stung Wooten, raising the specter of the apartment 27 situation and all the craftiness he’d employed to keep her ignorant of it. He decided it was best to let the matter drop. Besides, the discussion was moot. City manager was Swope’s job. Vine had promised it to him. Even in the unlikely event they really did want to give it to Wooten, there was no way he’d take it. He couldn’t do that to his friend.

  Which left open the issue of what Savage had in mind. After all, the main building in Newton was done. The infrastructure was laid, the big projects—the lake, the mall, the Plaza—completed. From now on it was just a question of chasing after goldbrickers like Vota. There had been talk about Wooten building the next new city out near Dayton, but he wasn’t sure he wanted that. God knew he’d put up enough houses for one lifetime. From shotgun shacks to five-t
housand-square-footers like his own, he’d built plenty. Each job leading to something bigger. When he was thirteen he’d left school to dig a ditch, a sewer line connecting a housing development in Florissant to the St. Louis County mains. Before long he was carving foundations for cheap GI housing out of Mississippi mud. Then the bankers at Boatmen’s gave him enough seed money to build the houses perched on those foundations. Two-fams, bungalows, even white-flight ranches on acreage out in La Due. Row upon row in the rubble of East St. Louis. Until, finally, the great Barnaby Vine read about him in the St. Louis American and asked him to build his city, teaming him up with a sharp-eyed lawyer and setting them loose on fourteen thousand acres of border-state clay. He was forty-four now, old enough to stop running around in a hard hat. Building Newton seemed to be a logical conclusion to an enterprise he’d started when he raised those first pink calluses on his hands back in 1942. A splendid conclusion. But still a conclusion.

  Which still left the question of what Chicago had in mind for him.

  Wooten entered the outer reaches of Fogwood, the first of the city’s six villages to be completed. Everything looked righteous. Benevolent cumuli dotted the June sky. There were moving vans everywhere, a few of them navigating quiet cul-de-sacs, the rest berthed outside new houses, their gangplanks running to the edges of sodded lawns. Vista Cruisers and Country Squires bearing Ohio or Pennsylvania or Michigan plates were parked nearby. Still-slim mothers hovered as movers carried oak dressers and grandfather clocks up walkways that Wooten’s men had poured just weeks earlier. Their husbands, men with just a hint of paunch—guys nobody was going to ask to pitch in and help tote the last of the furniture—kicked futilely at loose edges of sod. Boys drove their chopper bikes right off vans while their sisters formed whispering cabals with new neighbors.

  Wooten passed some kids playing baseball on a just-raked infield that three years earlier had been bouldered pastureland. Now it was as smooth as ice, able to carry anything with some mustard on it for extra bases. Just as Wooten looked a batter hit a frozen rope into the gap in left center. A skinny black kid took off after it, his sneakers kicking up blades of cut grass. At the last moment he stuck up his glove, shagging the fly just before it passed over his head. He stared at his webbing, astonished. The batter, rounding first, dropped to his knees. The fielders began to pirouette; gloves flew up in the air like a flock of flushed geese. The game was over.

  In another part of the park he saw a man and his two sons launch an Estes rocket. The parachute blossomed like a sudden cloud in the midday sky. A few blocks later he saw a black family emerge stretching from a station wagon with Alabama plates, staring up at the house they were about to inhabit with unabashed awe. He rode by streets with names like Gandolph’s Grotto and Barnaby’s Folly and The Great Gatsby. There was no roadkill, no litter or graffiti. No billboards or power lines or fences.

  It was perfect.

  Wooten marveled at the city he’d built. The way the sun hit the forked mist of a sprinkler to create minor rainbows, or the bat kite that crashed down into a jungle gym but continued to fly inside the bars like a newly caged creature. Three boys perched in the upper floor of a house frame chucked rocks into a pile of unpoured concrete, each impact raising small clouds that looked like the dust kicked up when the Eagle blasted off from the Sea of Tranquillity.

  And then he saw the silo and his good spirits vanished. From what he’d heard, the fight had been the worst yet. Chones’s deputies, by all accounts, had overreacted, using their nightsticks freely on any nappy head that came into view. Luckily, Joel had been able to escape. Wooten was deeply relieved when he got the news from Ardelia after calling home this morning. Though the boy had a good head on his shoulders, Wooten still fretted about him getting dragged into a situation he couldn’t control. Especially with that girl on his arm. Wooten felt the small flutter of dread that accompanied every thought of Miss Susan Truax. White as toothpaste and pretty as the spring day surrounding him. Wooten knew it was 1973, knew the city was supposed to be integrated and that things like Joel and Susan were exactly what Barnaby had in mind. But the first time he’d seen his son walking beside that gleaming blond hair and those little round hips, his borderline blood pressure just about went through the roof. Oh yes, she was sweet as the day was long, ma’aming and sirring and always offering to help Ardelia in the kitchen. And the girl certainly seemed to be crazy about the boy, hanging on his every word, jealously usurping his attention with all the usual pouts and prods. Her father was ex-army, working now as a realtor, many rungs below Wooten on the EarthWorks ladder. Which, he had to admit, made him feel secretly proud. And, well, as far as pretty went—which in Wooten’s experience was pretty far—he had to hand it to his son. The girl was gorgeous. There were moments when he’d find his own eye wandering. Ardelia caught him at it once, those green irises of hers rising over her reading glasses like the cold light of a winter dawn. But the alarm that had tripped when he’d met her last fall still rang, slow and low and insistent, like a burglar bell on a neglected house. The battery may be about to run out but that didn’t mean that anybody’s given the all-clear. Not yet, anyway. And the fact that no one else could hear it—not his wife or his colleagues or, as far as he could tell, the girl’s folks—didn’t mean the thing wasn’t still ringing. Wooten pictured his big, good-natured, brown-skinned boy and that snow-white girl caught between last night’s warring factions of crackers and ghetto hoodlums. The thought chilled him to the bone. He was definitely going to have to talk with Joel. Tonight. Just to let him know that the situation wasn’t necessarily as simple as young love. Just to let him know that he should be careful.

  The familiar profile of Renaissance Heights’ squat brown buildings came into view. The inexplicable jumble of feelings that always gripped Wooten at the sight of the place reared up inside him. The car seemed to lurch forward to get him past, his size thirteen steel-toed boot pressing down unconsciously on the gas pedal. It had been four days since he’d been. Four long days since his latest final resolution not to visit those velveteen sheets ever again. Breaking his own rule about speed, Wooten pushed the Ranchero up to thirty-five. Just to get him by that entrance.

  You’re a fine one to tell your son about being careful, he thought as he put the place into his rearview mirror. A fine one.

  A car almost hit Wooten as he pulled into the Newton Plaza parking lot. It appeared without warning, speeding heedlessly out onto the pike. Wooten had to mount the curb to avoid it. Only when the offending vehicle had vanished did he realize it was Teddy Swope’s Firebird. Woo-ten shook his head as he drove through the crowded lot. He’d been meaning to speak with Austin about Teddy’s driving, even though he doubted it would do much good. Although Swope was the smartest man Wooten had ever known, he was as blind as a mole when it came to his son. Not that Teddy was a bad kid. Just reckless. Neglectful. But there was no telling Austin that. He thought the sun rose and set on that strange child. Wooten had learned like many others in Newton that the best thing to do was just keep out of his way. He was secretly glad that Teddy and Joel would be separating come fall. Four years of Edward Swope was enough for anybody’s lifetime.

  He pulled himself out of his car, stealing a quick, reluctant glance down at the lake, where dead fish sparkled like floaters after a deep eye rub. He’d swung by first thing that morning, hoping that maybe the kill would be limited to a small fraction of the population. Fat chance. They were all going to die. The sight reminded him of how the hillbillies back home used to throw dynamite into a pond, killing every last thing just so they could get some dinner. He’d have to organize a crew to clean them out. The idea of using union men to row around the lake netting fish you couldn’t even fry drove Wooten half to distraction. Worse still, he’d have to wait another month at least to get out there and do some real fishing of his own.

  He recalled the lake’s creation as he walked toward the building. Digging it had been, without doubt, the biggest construction project of his
life. Starting with nothing more than a few tired-looking pastures surrounding a cow pond, he’d created this immense body of water. For most of the job he’d used the infernal machine EarthWorks had sent down from one of their discreetly owned Pennsylvania lignite mines, a bucket-wheel excavator that was able to gouge out forty acres of glistening clay and rock in just two weeks of merciless digging. What a machine that was, its eight-tread foundation nearly the size of a coal barge, its glass tower over three storys high. It took a team of four engineers to control the long steel claws that scooped clay from the ground like so much butterscotch ice cream. To fill the basin they’d cut a six-mile concrete aquaduct to the Patuxent. It had been opened last fall with a small ceremony, a frail Barnaby hammering away the chocks in front of a crowd of EarthWorkers and county elders. Wooten couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. Maybe the things just didn’t take. Sometimes, that happened. No matter how much you planned or hard you worked, sometimes things just didn’t take.

  Upstairs, Evelyn passed Wooten into the office with a sour nod. Austin was in the process of hanging up the phone when he entered. He looked grave. Wooten lowered his big frame into one of the chairs facing the desk. It responded with a sound like cracking knuckles.

  Swope nodded to the phone.

  “Those were our friends from the hatchery,” he said.

  “They have any theories?”

  Swope shrugged.

  “The best they can come up with is some sort of runoff from a site.”

  Wooten shook his head.

  “No chance. I’d know if there was effluent slurrying around.”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “I’ll get a crew out first thing tomorrow,” Wooten said. “We’ll have to keep them out there for a few days. Some of those fish might take a while to die.”

  Swope grimaced his approval, then looked out the nearest wall, his eyes tracking a rogue puff of cloud as it moved east.