The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  When he stopped there was a moment of silence in the room. Then they did something they had never done before. They began to clap . . .

  . . . "The family and the oratory will take you part of the way, John," Smithies was saying. "But not all of the way."

  "You'll need money and an organization," Kelly said. "Lots of money."

  "How much money?" Cromwell asked.

  "About a half million bucks," Kelly said. "And you have to raise it all in a few months between the primary in May and the general election in November. That's a lot of money and not much time."

  "What he means is that you have to have most of it lined up before the primary," Costello said.

  "I think I could get it from the voters," Cromwell said.

  In his mind he had a brief, vivid image of all the little groups he had addressed in the last fifteen years. Their faces rolled past some inner eye; thousands and thousands of them; all alive with enthusiasm; all loyal.

  The four Board men laughed.

  "Don't kid yourself, John," Smithies said. "You won't get enough from the voters to pay five per cent of your expenses. You have to get the money in big chunks. Five or ten thousand at a crack."

  "Not me," Cromwell said. Their laughter irritated him. "I'm not going to sell out to the Montgomery Street and Spring Street boys just to get their money. I'll go right to the people. I don't need the bribes of the big-money boys."

  Instantly, in one smooth, simultaneous action the faces of the four Board men went blank. They bent over their plates and began to eat. Cromwell watched Costello push some frijoles into a tortilla, put the tortilla in his mouth and bite. The brown, smooth substance of the frijoles gushed out at one corner of his mouth. It was a stranger's face. Costello's black eyes went over Cromwell as if he were not there.

  "We're just friends," Smithies said softly, as if Cromwell were the only person at the table. His mouth opened to receive a spoonful of apple pie and ice cream. Suddenly his eyes had become hard.

  Without speaking to Cromwell the other three Board members finished their lunch and left the table. Smithies stayed in his seat and lit a cigar.

  "John, you weren't fair to the boys," Smithies said. "They're tender on talk about big money and bribes. Since all this crap about Artie Samish and graft came out, everybody thinks that if you're on the Board you must be taking money under the table from the big-money boys. Hell, John, I don't even know who the big-money boys are." He paused, put a thumb under a suspender and pulled it out. It came away from his moist flesh reluctantly and left a groove in his shirt. "I don't know them, but they're around."

  "I didn't mean to insult anyone," Cromwell said. "But I'm damned if I'll change my ideas just to get the big contributions."

  "John, you're a strange sort of politician," Smithies said. "You've been around a lot, but not in real politics. You've got to learn that you have two platforms. One is the official platform. That public and your party will talk about it and it will go out to the newspapers and they'll make up a pamphlet on it. The voters don't pay any attention to it, but you have to do it anyway." He paused, pursed his lips and cigar smoke trailed out of his lips, thinned out and exhausted as if most of it had been absorbed by the huge spongelike body. "The second platform is the private one. That's the important one. That's what you'll really do. They're watching, John, to see what your private platform is."

  "Who is 'they'?" Cromwell asked.

  "Not the voters. 'They' are the people who are interested in offshore oil, highways, gasoline tax."

  "Or liquor taxes," Cromwell said bitterly.

  "Or liquor taxes," Smithies said blandly. "They won't come and ask you, John. You have to let them know. Just a line in a speech or talking to one of their people over a drink. Take liquor. It's big business. Know how much beer we drink in this state in a year? About twelve million gallons. In a year that'd make a hell of a big pile of beer cans. And that's only beer. There's whisky, gin, brandy, applejack, wine, scotch, sour-mash, corn, rye, crčme de menthe and a lot more. And the whole damn mess is sold a shot or a bottle at a time. Maybe a hundred thousand people in this state making money off of booze." He inhaled the cigar, crisped an inch of the tobacco in a breath. He smiled at Cromwell. "They know you have to attack the liquor interests and booze barons . . . just to get elected. They don't care about that. But they'll be watching, John. Watching to see what you're really going to do about liquor. Beer-truck drivers, brewery workers, bartenders, wholesalers . . . all watching to see. Maybe a hundred thousand altogether. Maybe more."

  Smithies let go of his suspender and it snapped back, shrunk its way into the grooved and waiting flesh, almost disappeared. He stood up.

  "I haven't made up my mind yet about liquor taxes," Cromwell said.

  "Sure, John. You think it over and let me know. I'm not threatening you. You know that. But a lot of people around the state ask us about politics and we have to tell them something. So when you know where you stand you just let me know. We'll get the word around. You can say whatever you want publicly, but we'll get the real word around."

  Smithies paid for the lunch and they left the club. They shook hands at the door.

  Cromwell started back toward the office. He kept walking until he came to Pershing Square. He listened briefly to a dark lithe man speak on the advantages of Syndicalism and the general strike and noted that he was not holding his audience. He walked past a group of slim boys with penciled eyebrows and shrill voices who were talking to a girl in a bright flowered dress.

  "You're a bitch to wear that dress down here," one of the boys said in anger to the girl. The girl smiled and lifted a hand to her hair and Cromwell saw that it was a rough, calloused man's hand and that the hair was a wig.

  "You're jealous, Danny, that's your trouble," the girl said. "You hope the cops pick me up for impersonation. You do, you really do. You're just mean, I hate you."

  Cromwell went over to a bench and sat down. He stretched his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. The sun beat down on his face, and from his stomach the thin vapors of gin floated to his nose and the back of his mouth.

  They're worried, he thought. When the Board of Equalization starts to worry, it must be good. If Mike can just do what he says he can, it'll be all right, I'll make it. Mike's all right; don't worry about him. He's got some things I haven't got, some talents and skills. Something about Mike disturbed him and his mind moved away from the subject. With a glycerin ease his thought poured around other thoughts.

  The edge of his mind dulled and things slipped liquidly through his head. With a sigh of satisfaction he lifted a set of recollections to the top of his consciousness; let them slide easily through his mind.

  They were the memories of the six girls he had seduced before he was married. Over the years he had sharpened the recollections; the acid of time worked at the episodes until they stood out with a cameo-like perfection: each pinkening breast, each exhalation of breath, the twist of a thigh, the feel of hair and flesh and moisture. Each of them became more perfect and distinct the farther they retreated in time. He had forgotten all the other conversations of his youth, but these he could recall exactly; with a weird precision. Disembodied, separate in time and space, perfect by themselves, each episode came back to him.

  As the sun beat down on Pershing Square and the pigeons cooed on the statues and shuffled through the peanut shells, Cromwell lay back, mouth open, and recalled the old, polished, well-remembered episodes.

  The first had been the cook at their summer place at Tahoe. He had been fourteen. The cook was a strong pleasant woman in her forties. Cromwell walked into the laundry room when she was bent over scrubbing. He saw the long bare flesh of her legs and the swell of her buttocks and a fuzz of hair. She turned around with her hands full of wet clothes and stared at him. She knew what he had seen and for a moment she said nothing, then she squeezed the water out of the clothes, and as the mass of soft cloth shrank in her hands Cromwell shuddered. With that her face sud
denly worked and she put the clothes down. She backed slowly into her room beside the laundry and Cromwell followed her. Without speaking she wiped her hands on her skirt and took her clothes off and revealed a strong firm body with soft breasts. She walked toward him and felt him through his pants and he felt a great stab of pleasure. She helped him out of his clothes and he smelt the White King soap on her hands and the flesh of her fingers was white and puckered and very soft.

  On the bed her legs wrapped around him and her hands rubbed his back.

  "Oh my god, you're good, boy, really good," she whispered after fifteen minutes and her eyes were misted. "You god damned boss's son you, you're really good. You . . . are . . . really . . . good" and the last words were hissed through her teeth.

  Cromwell almost fainted with pleasure.

  The second and third and fourth and fifth had been college girls. He had forgotten their names, but he remembered very precisely their legs and breasts. He remembered the hillsides and car seats where the seductions had occurred.

  They came out of the blackness of his memory like bubbles rising from a pool; each episode rounded and bright, connected to the next memory with a thin bright strand. Each thing about them was jewellike in its precision: the vaccination scar on a leg, the sharp intake of breath as contact was made, the smell of perfume and beer, the odor of grass.

  "Mr. Cromwell, Mr. Cromwell," a voice said.

  Cromwell opened his eyes and for a moment he could not focus because of the sun and all he saw was the tangled pattern of Pershing Square, the whirling pigeons, the palm trees, the sailors, the statue, the azaleas, the limp bodies of old men dozing. Then he saw the face of Riley, the office boy, looking down at him.

  "Mr. Freesmith sent me out to look for you," Riley said. "He says he wants to talk to you."

  "What's all the rush?"

  "I don't know, sir. He just said he wanted to see you and for me to find you." Riley's face was marked with freckles and bruised by a blunt nose and a tough look.

  He is, Cromwell thought, just like an ape that has been taught to read and write, but still carries around a jungle suspicion. Cromwell remembered dimly a story of Kafka's about an ape that made a speech to an academy.

  He felt a sudden pique at having the sequence of his recollections interrupted. Usually he went ahead with the sequence, giving each episode its proper time and never being rushed. It had become a sort of ritual. If he started he must run through the entire series.

  "Just a minute. I'm thinking something out," Cromwell said. "Just wait and I'll walk back to the office with you."

  Just before his-eyes closed, when his vision was cut to a tiny bright crescent, he saw a hard understanding grin go across Riley's face. He felt a flicker of outrage and then forgot it.

  The sixth girl had been Gloria. He had met Gloria on a summer's day in Atherton when the whole San Francisco Peninsula had just been swept clean by summer fog that was burned off by sparkling sun. His mother wanted him to marry Gloria. They met by the tennis courts back of his family's big redwood house. Gloria came out to the tennis courts followed by her four older brothers. She had a long elegant neck and rather large feet that were covered with white tennis shoes. Gloria and her four brothers stood at the side of the tennis court, racquets in their hands, watching Cromwell finishing a game. Like Gloria they were all tall and lean and tanned and Cromwell knew they would be very good tennis players. Also he knew from the look on their faces that they thought he was poor. Cromwell had an awkward, scrambling style, but he won most of the games he played. Cromwell ran far back and with an awkward powerful smash sent the ball back and won the point. But, as he ran over to meet Gloria and her brothers, he could see a look of disapproval on their faces and he knew they disliked the way he played.

  Days later he and Gloria were in the hayloft of the old barn on the back of the Atherton estate. They were both lying naked in the hay and the sunlight came with a muted golden color through a small window, The air was full of hay motes and the edges of Gloria's legs and arms glowed softly. There was the soft smell of fresh hay and beneath it the odor of the older rotting hay. Once a horse snorted and kicked a hoof against its stall.

  Cromwell looked down at Gloria's body and through the muted, obscured, beautiful air he studied her: from her large shapely feet, up the length of her legs, to the round swelling of her belly, to the small hard breasts with their madder-brown nipples and then her long neck. He could not remember her face, but he could remember her eyes. They opened slowly and looked at him with a cool detached expression.

  "I wasn't the first one," he said softly.

  "That's right," she replied. "You are not the first." Her eyes looked calmly at him.

  "Who were the other ones?" he asked.

  "My brothers," she said.

  Cromwell leaned up on his elbow. He felt a strange churning sensation in his stomach; a mixture of shock and curiosity and desire. He felt as if he would like to vomit and also as if he would like to again take her strong naked body in his arms.

  "Which of your brothers?" he asked and his throat felt congested and his voice shook.

  "All of them," she said and her voice had something of defiance in it.

  Cromwell stared at her, and her body seemed to merge with the soft strands of hay; to glow like some strange plant which took on the color of its surroundings. The churning sensation in his stomach no longer had anything of shock or disgust. The sensation was of complete concupiscence and excitement. He bent down and ran his tongue over her lips. Her golden arms came out of the hay and went around his body. Five minutes later he looked down into her face. Her eyes were wide, looking at nothing, the cords in her neck were tight. Her face was flat with pleasure.

  "Wait, just a minute," she whispered fiercely. "Don't come now. Wait just a minute."

  Her hands went behind his buttocks, pulled him up against her. At the same time she reached up and bit his shoulder. Between her teeth there was a fold of his flesh and he could feel her tongue run over it.

  Later he had married Gloria. Since the day of their marriage he could not recall what she had looked like before they married. It was as if she had become another woman. And really, in his mind, he considered her to be two women. He never consciously thought of the woman that he was married to. Only of the long-legged, golden-colored girl whose body was half sunk in the hay.

  Cromwell opened his eyes and stood up. Riley was still waiting for him.

  "All right, Riley, I've worked it out," Cromwell said.

  They walked across Pershing Square, turned up Sixth Street and walked toward the Citrus Building. The cars poured down the streets, and above the buildings the smog was a thin yellow layer. Behind the huge plate glass windows of an airline office there was a new bas-relief map of California and they stopped a moment and looked at it. From a cornucopia in the rear of the window a flood of real oranges poured across the tiny miniature oil derricks, the model ships at San Pedro, and rolled up to the tiny wrinkled foothills of the Sierras. One orange rested in the curvature of the San Joaquin Valley.

  As they turned away from the window Cromwell felt the sun on his shoulders and, suddenly, he was very happy. He began to whistle.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Tiny Systolic Splash

  Georgia and Mike looked at land around Ojai and Santa Barbara. It was mostly elegant little valleys already planted in oranges and lemons. They went up to Kern County and watched the big earth-movers working miles of rolling land into a perfect flatness so that the water could flow across it. They went up to Salinas and looked at the long light-green rows of lettuce that ran from the highway out to where the fog broke the precise lines. They went to Modesto, Merced and Tulare. They followed the Friant Kern Canal and saw that where it ended the growing ended and the desert took over again. And this was true of the Delta Mendota Canal and the All-American Canal and wherever there was water.

  "Morrie wants to talk to you today," Georgia said one morning over the telephone. "He want
s to talk about the farm land."

  "Good. I'll be out about two this afternoon," Mike said.

  There was a pause and then Georgia spoke.

  "I have to explain about Morrie," she said. "He's an invalid. He's been in bed for twelve years. He was a classics student in college and then he went to medical school. But he dropped out after his first year and has been in bed ever since." She hesitated and because Mike said nothing she went on. "He's very bright and he helps Father a lot with business. He'll try to be rude, but don't let it upset you. He doesn't really mean anything by it."

  "He won't upset me," Mike said.

  "No. I guess he won't," Georgia said. She laughed and hung up.

  The Blenner home was in Bel-Air. It sat far back on a knoll and was hidden by a row of California wild oak trees. From the street to the house there was a stretch of closely cropped and very green grass.