The Seersucker Whipsaw

by Ross Thomas

  I gave him a pound. Shartelle said: “You’re an American, aren’t you?”

  The man looked at him. “I lived there for a while.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “You name it.”

  “Pittsburgh?”

  “For a while.”

  “You own this place?” Shartelle asked.

  The man looked around and smiled faintly. “No,” he said. “I don’t own it. I’m just helping out a friend.” He stood waiting for more questions, a not-too-tall man, about five-eleven, flat-bellied and lithe. When he moved he moved very much like Shartelle. He had a naturally olive complexion which a lot of sun had burned dark. His hair was cut short and it had some gray in it just over the ears.

  “My name’s Shartelle, and this is Upshaw.”

  “They call me Mike,” the man said.

  “You been here long?”

  “Not long; I’m just touring.”

  “And you’re helping out a friend,” Shartelle said.

  “That’s right. A friend.”

  Shartelle poured his beer into the glass carefully. The man called Mike stood waiting with the tray in hand, patient and poised. “We haven’t met before, have we, Mike?” Shartelle asked, talking it seemed to his glass of beer. “A long time ago—maybe twenty years back?”

  “You meet a lot of people, but I don’t think so.” He put the pound note in his pocket and placed my change on the table. “Anything else?”

  I said no and the man called Mike went back behind his bar, picked up a copy of the Times of London and smiled at the personal ad columns.

  William drank his beer out of the bottle, belched his enjoyment, and then went out to talk to the men who ran the gas pump. Shartelle and I leaned back in the porch furniture and drank the beer slowly. When we got up to leave, the man called Mike didn’t say goodbye or come back again. He didn’t even look up as we left.

  Shartelle slumped into his favorite position in the back seat. “You know, Petey, I think I know that old boy and I think he knows me.”

  “He didn’t seem to.”

  “It was in France during the war … when I was with Duffy and Downer. He was a sight younger then.”

  “You all were.”

  “That boy could talk French though—he could fair rattle it off just like he was born there.”

  “You sure he’s the same man?”

  “I’m sure, but if he’s not sure, then he must have a damn good reason. And he didn’t seem to think that his reason was any of my business so I think I’ll just let it drop.”

  The car was back on the road. The traffic was light except for the trucks and an occasional passenger car. I looked out at the rain forest and wondered where the animals were.

  I asked William. “Where are all the animals, William?”

  “Animals, Sah?”

  “Monkeys, elephants, lions, baboons.”

  “No animals, Sah. Just goat.”

  “I mean wild animals.”

  “No wild animals, Mastah. They go long time for chop. We eat them!” He exploded into a fit of giggling.

  “Never thought I’d be in Africa and not see any animals,” Shartelle said. “Hell, you can see more wild life on a Kansas highway than you can around here.”

  “Maybe they aren’t as hungry in Kansas. Speaking of being hungry, are we invited to lunch at Chief Akomolo’s, or is this a purely business call?”

  “Lunch, I understand,” Shartelle said. “He’s having some of the key political supporters in. It’s a major policy meeting. I figure on doing a lot of listening, but if I’m called on to say something, don’t be surprised at what comes out. Just be ready to back me up—with figures, if need be.”

  “Figures?”

  “Make ’em up as you go along. I’ll correct you a pound here and a shilling there to make them seem authentic. You and me might even haggle a bit.”

  “In other words, you want me to backstop you?”

  Shartelle pulled his hat down lower over his eyes and slumped even farther down into the seat. “Petey, that’s what I like about you. You don’t ask no goddamned fool questions and you don’t want to be elected to anything. You just keep that attitude and we’re going to be real good friends.”

  “By the way,” I said. “I ran into an army major from Ubondo last night. He’s invited us to dinner on Friday. I accepted, for both of us.”

  “That might be right interesting. You just keep on accepting all the invitations you can get. Then we can throw a couple of cocktail parties and get some mixing and mingling going. I’m afraid it’s part of the job.”

  I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes and thought about Anne. Shartelle fell asleep for a while under his hat and I didn’t have to talk much until we rolled up into the gravel driveway that curved through the acre or so of grounds that formed our compound, and met the five other members of the household staff who were to do our bidding.

  Chapter

  10

  To get to Ubondo you leave the crowned asphalt strip and turn off onto a four-laned concrete highway called Jellicoe Drive. It winds up a slight rise and at the crest you get a panorama of the second largest all-black city in Africa. It’s a million people living in a sea of tin-roofed houses with one skyscraper, white as a pillar of salt, shooting up out of the rusted roofs that cluster about it. It’s the Cocoa Marketing Board building and it rises twenty-three stories into the African sky.

  Ubondo is built in a valley and through the middle of it runs the Zemborine River west on its way to the sea. Small boats can navigate the Zemborine during the rainy season and some of them still do, chugging up the 154 miles of meandering river, powered by their tubercular outboard engines.

  The Zemborine provides no demarcation between the rich and the poor of Ubondo. The poor are on both sides and the hovels and fine houses stand cheek by jowl on the twisting streets. Thirty years ago Ubondo got its main thoroughfare when a drunken Irish contractor cranked up his bulldozer, took aim, and smashed a weaving line through the town from the top of one hill to the top of the other. He let nothing stand in his way and since the damage was done, they built the main road along the path he plowed through the town that hot August afternoon in 1935. His name was Diggins and the road is called Diggins Road. He stayed in Africa until he died. He had five wives, all at once, and countless children.

  I woke Shartelle up for the view and he shook his head in admiration. “Now, boy, that’s what I call Africa. Look at all that squalor. Ain’t that something?”

  “I never thought of squalor in just that way,” I said.

  “The old caravans ever get this far down south?”

  “No. They stopped farther up north—five hundred miles or so.”

  “I’d admire to see one coming over that hill with the camels chewing their cuds and the bells jingling from their necks and the Arabs riding up on top of them carrying those long-barreled rifles.”

  “Shartelle, you’ve got the goddamnedest preconception of a country of anybody I ever knew.”

  “Hell, Petey, this is Africa. I’ve been reading about Africa since I was six years old. I read Mungo Park and Stanley and Livingston and Richard Halliburton and Hemingway and old Osa Johnson and her husband. What was his name—Martin? You remember that story they wrote about the giraffes? They called it ‘The Creature that God Forgot.’ Now that was one hell of a story. If I was a writer, that’s the kind of stories I’d write.”

  We were winding down through the city itself, past a running ditch in which women were washing clothes. The goats and chickens were thick. The people moved quickly with a jaunty, almost strutting air. William hailed several, waved and they waved back. The street was narrow and the shopkeepers displayed their cloth and cigarettes and snuff and nails and hammers and pots and pans. The stores were about six feet wide and the shutters that locked them up at night served as display racks for the goods.

  “I never saw so many little general stores right smack up against each other in all my
life,” Shartelle said.

  “They all seem to sell snuff to each other.”

  We passed a bank and beauty shop and a drycleaners that looked as if it were going into bankruptcy. Next was a Christian Science reading room, deserted; a bar, packed; a restaurant called The West End, and a lonely shack with a closed door that read “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”

  We came to a stop sign and a policewoman in white shirt, blue cap, black skirt, sturdy black boots and immaculate white gloves, directed traffic in a performance of solemn grace that would have done credit to a dancer. Her movements were slow and deliberate, but with a measured rhythm that should have been accompanied by a drumbeat.

  There was the noise again, the African noise of shouts and screams, and cries that seem to be of pain but end in shrieks of laughter. The mechanical noise of Radio Albertia blared from five-inch speakers that seemed to be attached to every shop. “That’s some Muzak,” Shartelle grunted. It was insistent noise—or music, depending upon your ear—backed with a hard beat; and when the beat was strong enough, some of the pedestrians danced to it in curious shuffling steps that reminded me of the march back from a New Orleans funeral that I had seen a long time ago.

  Ubondo was no sleepy African village. It was thirty square miles of wide-awake, vibrant, magnificent slum with all of a slum’s cynical disregard for self-improvement. It was dirty, dog-eared urban sprawl, rotten at the core, and rotten at the edges. It had been that way when New York was new and it wasn’t changing because of the way any wind of change was blowing.

  Shartelle leaned forward, looking out the side windows, turning around to stare out the back, a new black, twisty cigar clamped in his mouth, his black slouch hat pushed back from his forehead.

  “By God, Petey, I’m going to like this place. My, it’s nice and nasty!”

  William took a left turn and cut down another boulevard. This one was lined with railroad tracks on one side which eventually passed a grubby station, and on the other side was a racetrack.

  “That’s racetrack, Sah,” William said. “On Saturdays they have many horses.”

  It was a big track, a mile or a mile and a half. I could see wooden stands along one side of it next to a row of small buildings that I took to be the places where you put your money down. At the near end of the racetrack was a raised podium covered with a round tin roof that looked as if a band might play there on warm Sunday nights.

  William turned left and began to wind through what seemed to be the classy residential section of Ubondo. The houses were set far back on lawns, some well-tended, some rather ragged. On one plot a two-story house of faintly American colonial lines dominated two acres of grass and shrubbery. At the driveway an old woman sat patiently beside a wooden box, a collection of oddments that she had for sale, spread across it.

  William waved at her as we sped by. She waved back and grinned a toothless smile. “That Madame Krinku. Her son is Minister of Transport.”

  “Her son?”

  “Yes, Sah. That is his house. Very fine.”

  “I hope she makes a lot of money,” Shartelle said.

  “She make very good money, Sah,” William said and giggled. “She sell cigarettes and kola nuts. She make two shilling, three shilling each day.”

  “That’s good money,” Shartelle agreed.

  The road, a narrow two-lane asphalt or macadam strip, curved and twisted through the area of wide lawns, carefully tended flower beds, and houses set well back from casual view. Most of them had their doors and windows wide open in the heat of the day. Bougainvillea grew in profusion. At the rear of the houses there was usually a row of connected concrete cubicles. Shartelle asked William what they were.

  “Quarters, Sah.”

  “For the servants?”

  “Yes, Sah.”

  “Goddamned slave quarters.”

  William took another curve that bent around a house to our left. He waved at some Albertians standing in the yard and they waved back and shouted and ran towards the front of the house. William giggled. He made the sharp bend in the road and turned up into a graveled driveway that curved like an inverted question mark across the front lawn of the near acre of ground that spread out from the house. Here, for the time being, was the African headquarters for Dolan, Downer and Theims, Ltd.

  There were five of them standing on the front-porch steps of the house with the wide eaves. William pulled the car up and stopped in front of them. The quintet clustered around the car, saying “Welcome, welcome Mastah” as Shartelle and I got out. William introduced the staff:

  “This Samuel, cook. This Charles, steward.” He pointed to a youth of fourteen or fifteen. “This Small Boy.”

  “Hello, Small Boy,” Shartelle said. The kid grinned.

  “This Ojo, gardener. He not speak proper English. Samuel speak him for you.” Ojo grinned. He was dressed in khaki rags and tatters, a short broad-shouldered man with bowed legs and a crumpled face that was criss-crossed with tribal markings. We smiled at him.

  “And this Silex, watch night.” At least it sounded like Silex.

  “I am please to make your acquaintance, Sahs,” he said and bowed slightly.

  “He student at daytime in university,” William said.

  “And studies all night,” Shartelle said.

  The cook, the steward and Small Boy were getting the bags out of the car. William, his job of driving done, stood to one side and supervised the task. I noticed that Samuel, the cook, had also assumed a strawboss role.

  Shartelle and I explored the house. It was a bungalow, Ministry of Public Works, tropical design No. 141. But for all that it seemed comfortable. The folding doors from the porch opened onto a living room. The dining room was to the left. The pantry and kitchen adjoined the dining room. That was practical. To the right was a hall leading to a bedroom and bath. Then there was another smaller bedroom followed by another bath and a bedroom that had a separate outside entrance.

  “Which one do you want?” I asked Shartelle.

  “Either.”

  “I’ll take the one with the private entrance.”

  He grinned at me, but said nothing. I told Small Boy and Charles, the steward, where to put the bags.

  “Mastah want chop?” Samuel asked.

  “No,” I said. “We’re going out to eat with Chief Akomolo. Did Downer leave any gin?”

  “Yes, Sah. Gin and tonic, Sah?”

  I looked at Shartelle. He nodded. “Gin and tonic,” I said.

  The living room was furnished with all the personality and charm of a second-rate Arkansas motel. It had a bookcase without books that served as a divider between it and the dining room. There was a couch made of African mahogany and covered with square pillows that served as seats and back. There were four matching chairs, a desk, a chair for it, some hexagonal mahogany tables, and a bookcase built into the wall—also empty. A dun-colored rug covered the floor.

  Silex, the watch night, had disappeared, but Ojo, the gardener, was busy mowing the lawn with a machete. “Now that, goddamn it, has just got to go,” Shartelle said.

  William was standing by the car watching Ojo. Shartelle called him.

  “Sah?” he said.

  “Have they got a hardware store in Ubondo?”

  “Hardware, Sah?”

  “A place where they sell—you know—grasscutters?”

  A happy look of comprehension spread across William’s face. “Yes, Sah.”

  “How much are they?”

  “Very dear, Sah. They cost ten, eleven, twelve pounds.”

  “Give him some money, Pete.”

  I already had my wallet out. I gave William three five pound notes.

  “Now take this and go down to Ubondo and kindly get us a goddamned lawnmower. Grasscutter, whatever.”

  “What kind Mastah want?” William said.

  “Ask the head gardener. Ask Ojo. I don’t know what kind of lawnmower.”

  Samuel came in from the kitchen, bearin
g a tray containing a bottle of gin, two bottles of Schweppes tonic, a bucket of ice, tongs, and glasses. He carried the tray first to me and bent low with it while I mixed a drink. Then he brought the tray to Shartelle.

  “We’re getting a lawnmower for Ojo,” I told Samuel.

  “Very good, Sah,” he said and smiled.

  I took a drink of my gin and tonic. “That was a damned decent thing of you to do, Shartelle,” I said.

  “Wasn’t it.”

  He leaned back in his chair, his long, seersucker-clad legs stretched out in front of him, a twisty, black cigar in one hand, his drink in the other.

  Small Boy ran out of the bedrooms carrying a bundle of soiled shirts, socks, and underwear. He giggled as he passed us. Shartelle waved a benign benediction at him with the cigar.

  “You ever have six servants before, Petey?”

  “No.”

  “Man could get used to having six servants around, bringing drinks, cooking dinner, driving the car, watching the kids, mowing the lawn, washing the clothes, cleaning the house, serving the tea at 5:30 sharp in the afternoon. I’ve been knee-deep in bellhops all my adult life, boy, but I never had six good men and true before to do my personal bidding.”

  “Gives you a sense of luxury.”

  “Makes me uncomfortable, if you want to know the truth. Now you’d think that with my fine Southern upbringing I’d be used to colored folks bowing and scraping and coming up to the big house on the hill for Christmas Gift.”

  “Why, no, Clint,” I said. “With that hat and that cigar and that jellybean suit I’d more imagine you astride some Palomino riding through the cotton fields and listening to those happy voices raised in joyful song whose rhythms go back more than a hundred years to—”

  “Boy, you do talk a bit of nonsense.”

  “And then, when the day’s work was done in the fields, and the dinner had been served in the old white-columned manse by the Negro butler with just a touch of silvery hair above his ears, you’d jump in your XK-E and roar off to Shartelle City for a night of whiskey-drinking and card-gaming with your cronies. Of course, all Shartelle City has is two stores, a whorehouse, and a cotton gin but they named it after your daddy’s daddy—”