Uncivil Seasons

by Michael Malone

  We were waiting and Mr. Phelps was an hour late.

  “Maybe,” said Cuddy, gnawing at an old stale loaf of French bread, “maybe Parson Phelps and his girlfriend Patience took time off to go at it back behind the pianos.” And he gave his crotch-pumping gesture.

  I shook my head. “Mangum, I thought love was going to refine you.”

  “You never know what love’s gonna do. Look what it’s done for you: losing your job, punching husbands out, you and Red running wild and slobby in the streets. Is this bread bread, or is it bricks?” Teeth clenched on one end of the loaf, he was yanking wildly at the other with both hands.

  “It’s old.”

  “Of course it’s old. It’s yours, isn’t it? I think it’s got two of my teeth in it, too.” He gave up and let the loaf clatter to the table. “Anyhow, what you don’t know is, one reason Professor Briggs Junior is so crazy about me is because I’m so, let’s call it, loose. How’s that? Loose.” He jiggled all his lanky limbs in an attempt to convey a languid, easygoingness. “And she’s uptight. I mean, not really uptight from the inside out, but a little bit from the outside in. Due to her losing her ma and hating her pa—wonder why?—and due to that phony-leftist ghoul she slipped up and married up North. That creep actually beat her, on his way to a Hooray Hanoi march, and if I ever come across him I’m gonna be tempted to do to him what a guy from Hanoi did to a friend of mine. Oh, lord, you know: we all plum lost our innocence to the sixties. I oughta be ten years younger. Know what I mean? 1965 to ’75, Uncle Sam was an old acidhead. Good politics, though.”

  I sat down across from him with my yogurt and said, without planning to, what I never had said in five years of almost daily conversation. “Cuddy. I want to tell you something, all right?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You say you lost a decade. Well, so did I. I was in a sanitarium. Twice. A hospital up in the Blue Ridge.” His jay eyes looked into mine, warm in the sun coming across my shoulder onto the table’s clutter of food. “They called it ‘acute alcoholism.’ But it wasn’t just drink. I was, well, okay, I was pretty crazy.” Blushing, I rubbed hard at my ear. “It’s not the sort of thing I want people to know. But I’ve told Alice and I’ve always felt bad not being open with you about it. So…well, that’s it.”

  The sun moved in among the bony shadows of his face. “Aww, General,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you said so.” Then he smiled. “But I’ve known it for years.”

  “Known what?”

  He rolled his blue eyes extravagantly. “That you’d gone to the bin, as my grandma used to say when they took her spinster sister there for being too much of a friend of Jesus—even though the hymn says you’re supposed to be. But she fell into the habit of too-long nightly phone talks to Him, and they were on a party line.”

  I was rattled. “Don’t kid me. You knew?”

  “’Course I knew. So what? I told you, everybody went crazy back then. You should have seen me out in those rice paddies.” He grimaced. “No. I take it back. You shouldn’t have seen me.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Not much.”

  “You didn’t bring it on yourself.”

  “I brought my first wife on myself trying to get out of going.”

  I found him another beer in the back of the refrigerator. “Who told you?”

  “Guess.” He snapped off the can top. “Right. Old V.D. Fulcher wanted me to keep an eye out, let him know if you slipped up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

  His Adam’s apple bobbled as he drank. “Never saw you slip up.”

  I pushed the yogurt away. “Rowell must have told Fulcher.”

  “Probably.” Cuddy squatted down by the cabinets. “So, I wasn’t open with you either. And another thing I never told, I’ll tell you now it’s true confessions. Your old love Lunchbreak made a play for me about a year ago. That time I came to that cast party y’all had when you did, what was it? The Philadelphia Story. She was high and wanted to know if I wanted to step into a back room and get that way too.” He had his head in the cabinet, looking among the cans there.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Nope.” His head poked around the corner of the cabinet door. “Don’t you have any junk food in this house? Nothing in here but a million jars of vitamins. I crave junk food. Some of us never had the willpower to kick our bad lunch habits the way you did.”

  Then the doorbell rang and Ratcher Phelps came in, sanctimonious in his black suit, as if he’d arrived to show us a catalogue of caskets. Instead, what he carried was a cardboard box. Holding it on his knees, he sat on the edge of the couch cushion and accepted a snifter of brandy to war against his lumbago. “Young gentlemen,” he said, “my party was not punctual, and consequently I apologize for keeping you waiting, but I needed to ascertain for certain that my party was not hiding and watching where I went.”

  “Let me see the coins,” I said.

  Phelps smiled sadly and snuffed at the brandy. “Suppose.” And now he began another of his hypothetical propositions. “Suppose when I leave, you were to find a box on your stoop, and maybe it has coins in it, and maybe it doesn’t.”

  On his feet quickly, Cuddy snapped, “Look here, Parson, why don’t you—”

  But I waved him down and asked him to show Phelps the mug shot of Luster Hudson he’d brought with him. “Mr. Phelps,” I said, “I have a photograph here I wonder if you’d glance at, and give me a nod if it reminds you of your unpunctual party.”

  After the briefest look, he gave me the nod, adding, “Ummm. I guess that’s what you white people would have to admit was a ugly face.”

  Cuddy said, “Yep. Luster’s the bad kind of ugly. I’m the good kind. Now, let’s move on. You told Lieutenant Savile on the phone that you’d explained to Mr. Ugly you had to check out this merchandise, and locate your capital. You have such a fine reputation in the business—”

  “The music business,” interrupted Phelps.

  “That Ugly actually trusted you to cart off this stuff! And you’re going to meet him with the money. Right?”

  “Well, this isn’t all the merchandise, and there was a down payment.” Phelps moistened his lips, and then he chugged the entire brandy as if it were water.

  Cuddy asked, “Meet him where for the rest? And when?”

  Phelps’s moist, bereaved eyes were peering into the empty snifter.

  “Would you care for another?” I asked him.

  “Why, just a morsel,” he replied, and stared politely at the ceiling while I poured the snifter half full. “Thank you. As to the ‘when,”’ he said, “one o’clock this morning.” Phelps peeked up through the bottom of his glass. “As to the ‘where,’ where might you say my remuneration may be at?” Now he spun the snifter and scrutinized me through it, his eye like an owl’s, shrewd and inquisitive.

  I assured him arrangements were being made, but repeated that I’d already explained I didn’t have the money with me.

  He nodded. “The thing is, I’m accustomed in my business, the music business, to deal on the down-payment plan, and being as I’ve just put down a thousand dollars on this particular transaction, I am short, and I am troubled by that fact.”

  I said, “I could give you a check of my own for eight hundred, but anything more would bounce.”

  Cuddy whispered, “Are you crazy?” but I wrote out the check anyhow, while Phelps tossed down his second brandy with long liquid swallows.

  Neatly folding my entire checking account and tucking it into his vest pocket, he said, “The ‘where’ is a little alleyway next door to a white people’s dance place named the Tucson Lounge, if that name’s familiar to you.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said. “We’ll be there at one A.M. You stay away.”

  He shook his head mournfully. “It would be agreeable to me, Mr. Savile, to stay to home, being that I am not partial to the music they play at the Tucson Lounge, but this party is going to be waiting and watching for my car to d
rive up. And then I get out and walk and then I put down the money and then he picks it up and then he puts down something for me. The fact is, you need me there.”

  He was right, and we worked out a plan together. When we finished, Phelps stood up and handed me his empty glass. “You people be just as careful as I’m going to be,” he told us. “This particular man is a running man and a scared man and this man already showed me a gun and rubbed it a little too hard into my neck.” Phelps pointed out the small bruise just under the drooping lobe of his ear. “That gun was by way of impressing on me not to do just exactly what I’m doing.” He studied each of us in turn. “And I ask myself, why am I doing it?”

  “Well, sir, you’re a good citizen,” suggested Cuddy.

  The short portly body bowed its Mandarin bow. “Exactly what I decided must be so,” said Ratcher Phelps.

  Cuddy added, “Plus, you love your nephew Billy. Plus, five thousand dollars’ reward is better’n messing with stolen goods nobody smart would try to fence for the next ten years. Plus, I’ve heard Luster Hudson’s views on the race to which you have the honor of belonging, and I imagine he hasn’t been too shy about sharing those views with you.”

  Phelps bowed again.

  Cuddy asked, “Just how much more does Mr. Ugly think you’re going to pay him for this stuff? And where does he think he’s going with the money?”

  The box under his arm, Phelps sauntered over to my old upright piano, where he played a run of scales with his left hand. “He didn’t specify his travel plans, but he knows he needs to go somewhere new, fast. And the sum he mentioned was twenty-five thousand, and the sum I mentioned back was fifteen thousand. Of course, you gentlemen tell me those articles are worth twenty times that.”

  Cuddy whistled. “Whooee. He thinks you’ve got fifteen thousand in cash! That’s a lot of pianos, Parson.”

  Phelps changed keys, modulated through a series of chords, while his whole face sagged into a mask of despair. “Mr. Savile,” he sighed. “Talking of pianos, you need a new one.”

  I told him, “Well, it needs to be tuned.”

  “It needs to be…” He rolled his tongue thoughtfully, and then smiled. “Ostracized. That’s what it needs to be. Ostracized.” He set the box down beside him, and, standing there in his overcoat and fedora, romped through “Maple Street Rag,” wincing at the sticking keys and flat notes.

  “Well, hey!” Cuddy clapped. “That was fine!”

  Phelps told me sadly, “I hate to see a man that says he likes Fletcher Henderson having to play his tunes on a piano this bad.” He flashed his aggrieved, specious smile and wished us a good evening. We were to meet again at midnight.

  When Cuddy came back inside with the cardboard box, he rolled his eyes. “My, my! Look what I out of the blue found on your front doorstoop.”

  “You know,” I said, holding up the Photostat, “this picture of Hudson? Remember that mug shot of the punk we showed Joanna Cadmean? The big blond guy you said had gotten killed in Vietnam. That guy and Hudson look a lot alike. Remember how she kept staring at that photo out at the lodge?”

  Cuddy had opened the box. “Stare at this,” he whistled. Out of the satin jewelry bag, he poured bracelets, a necklace, and a single emerald earring. Unsnapping a leather case, he held it up for me to see the ten clear-plastic, labeled envelopes, within each of which was a single coin.

  “Damn it,” Cuddy yelled. “Don’t put your fingers on them.”

  But I had already seen an envelope that I was astounded, and sickened, to find among the others in that case. It wasn’t supposed to be there. It made no sense there. On the other hand, it was the only way that everything did make sense. This envelope was labeled, like all the others, in Bainton Ames’s methodical spidery handwriting; the words identified the coin inside this envelope as his “1839 Liberty-head quarter eagle, Charlotte mint.” With my handkerchief, I held up the packet by its corner. The profile of Liberty gazed with the same exquisite disinterest I’d seen on the coin—now at headquarters—that Cuddy had found in the diary that was supposed to have belonged to Cloris Dollard. The same coin, and Ames had only owned one.

  Twenty minutes later, we were in Etham Foster’s lab, and his saturnine face, brown and dry as toast, was glowering at us. “I ought to report you two.”

  Cuddy winked. “Why, Doctor D, we’re the ones got the goods for you.”

  “Yeah. And jumbled them all up, too. If you Dick Tracys have smeared my prints!” Away he stalked on the stilts of his legs.

  And so in another hour we knew that the two coins were exactly the same model; that according to Ames’s records he had at no time ever had two of the same model; and that the envelope in the stolen case was definitely in Ames’s handwriting. There had not been anything at all written on the envelope found in the diary.

  I slumped against the wall. “Well, that’s why Joanna Cadmean told us the envelope was blank when she supposedly saw the coin in the case last summer. She couldn’t risk trying to forge Ames’s handwriting.”

  Foster had dusted the leather case and was working with his microscope on the prints. Now he looked up. “Come here.” Elation inched into his voice. “It’s Hudson, okay. A big, fat, juicy thumbprint, right there. On the corner of the case. Look.” He pressed his own huge thumb over the Photostat of Hudson’s print. “The size of mine. Look.” Glee, pushed out of Foster’s voice, escaped by making him rub his hand rapidly up and down his long thigh. “I got him,” he said. “He stopped being careful. They always do. And that’s all I need. Now it fits. Didn’t fit before. No prints at all on that diary. Except y’all’s, of course. Why not Mrs. Dollard’s, see? That lady flimflammed us, Justin, that psychic of yours. She was good. I’ll say that. Flimflammed us, see?”

  Yes. I saw. Finally. Joanna had done just what Rowell had claimed.

  And Rowell had done just what Joanna had dreamt.

  And neither of them had been careful enough.

  Foster stood, one gigantic foot on his metal stool, his hand outspread as if he were dribbling an invisible basketball. “Another thing,” he said. “We got in touch with that auction gallery of yours in D.C., Savile. One of these quarter eagles did come on the market there a few years back, like that guy Bogue said. Agent that bought it wouldn’t reveal over the phone who he was bidding for. But we can subpoena him if we need to.”

  Cuddy sighed loudly. “I think we know who he was bidding for. Joanna Cadmean. Fuck the ducks.” He tilted his head at me sadly. “We’ve been had, General. You know, that night at the lodge she was hustling me and Junior out the door so fast and saying how we should make a night of it, and I thought the whole time she was just matchmaking.”

  “Theories,” snorted Etham Foster, stooping over his microscope. “Real evidence is where it is at, my men.” His mood broke through again, giving his voice almost an effusive sound. “I knew there had to be more for me than a dumb Marlboro butt. And here it is!” His hand rubbed happily along his lean flank. “Don’t slam the door.”

  “I think Doctor Dunk-it is bidding us adieu,” said Cuddy. “Come on, General, let’s sneak out of here before somebody gets the idea you’re trying to do your job.”

  On the way back to my house, Cuddy said, “So we grab old Luster, good old all-American solo, and bring him to V.D., and get us some medals, and unlock poor little Preston Pope so he can try to win back Charlene’s affection.”

  “Fine. Will you please be sure you have your gun?”

  “Listen, Sherlock, I’ve got to go to Moize with all this crap. The coroner’s got to be filled in too. Remember that thin ice you used to spout about? We’re dancing on it.”

  “I don’t know whether I wish we could suppress the two coins and let Moize go ahead and prosecute Rowell for Joanna. Or let Rowell just fade in peace.”

  “Whoaa.” He turned to stare at me. “Don’t go closing family ranks on Lady Justice, General. I’ll bust right through your ivy vines and come after you. I mean it.”

  “Watch
the road. I know, I know, hell. Well, he didn’t kill her.”

  Cuddy leaned back, pushing his thin arms straight out on the steering wheel. “Yep. That Mrs. Cadmean took us in, rolled us good, and left us in the street in our shorts. Lord, imagine that kind of hate dripping drop by drop down on your brains for thirty years. Humankind! Maybe I oughta go into a monastery and just pray. It’s gotten so sitting on the benches in the damn River Rise Shopping Mall is enough to break my heart just watching the sadness and meanness go by.”

  “He didn’t kill her. But he did kill her baby. She’d had an abortion just before she slashed her wrists.”

  “Don’t tell me any more.”

  “And he did kill Bainton Ames. Let me out at my car. I’m going back to the hospital.”

  Now Cuddy grinned, his sharp features splintering into new angles. “What hospital? No need to check into your old room at the booby hatch. How about a Trappist retreat for us both? We’ll find one with cable TV, where they’ll let us bring Junior and Red, and we’ll live happy ever after, planting zucchini.”

  “I suppose you haven’t read Candide either.”

  “Candy? Sure, I read it. I read everything with a blow job in it.”

  I said, “Cuddy, I hope just because I told you about being in that sanitarium, I’m not going to have to listen to you joke about it from now on.”

  He pulled to a stop behind my Austin and waved out the window at two Frances Bush students, one of whom casually gave him the finger and went on talking with her friend, as they walked through the gate. “My my, such rudeness,” he sighed. “Aww, listen, if people can’t joke about the ones they love, next thing you know they want to burn queers and bomb Iran. Love’s a joke, General. Why, it’s just the best joke on life there is in the world, if you wanta know the capital T Truth. How about a Baby Ruth?” He tugged a candy bar out of his pocket. “You know, now, our generation worked on being rude. But these youngsters don’t give the appearance of knowing the difference. Imagine that.” He tossed the candy bar into my lap.