by W. T. Tyler
The caption on the poster read: MAFIOSO MOUTHPIECE PLEADS FIFTH AMENDMENT in banner headline fashion, but the picture below, enlarged tenfold, hadn’t been taken at a recent Senate hearing on labor racketeering but at testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It showed a taut, seething Alexander Haig in a dark pin-striped suit, head thrust forward belligerently as he ranted about El Salvador.
The poster had drawn no smile from Nick Straus, who had turned his attention that day to the review of current Pentagon projects, his old obsession put aside. It was a race against time. On Colonel Dillon’s desk that afternoon he’d found two telephone call slips left for him by his secretary on Friday afternoon, requesting him to call General Gawpin on an urgent matter. He had no doubt what Gawpin wanted to discuss.
The documents he’d found in Dillon’s file had been much more troubling, raising doubts that went far beyond his own welfare. One was a Top Secret options paper proposing that U.S. line officers in Europe be given “pre-clearance” for the battlefield use of tactical weapons in Europe—in effect, the yielding of that gravest of presidential responsibilities, the launching of a nuclear attack, to field-grade officers in Europe. A second document was equally frightening. A CIA study passed to DIA for comment concluded that Soviet strategic rocket forces were in the process of changing their readiness posture and would shortly be prepared to launch their missiles at the first sign of hostile intentions, a new “launch on alert” policy that would leave no margin for error. Each side would only reinforce the other’s paranoia. Much of the world would be delivered to nuclear terror by the electronic glitches of technology or the brutish muscular spasms of a few front-line field commanders, as primitive as that nameless Berlin battle group colonel Haven Wilson had recently described to him.
The final document that had drawn Straus’s notice was a faded Xerox copy of the most recent additions to the U.S. nuclear warhead strike list of Soviet targets. Each nuclear warhead in the U.S. strategic inventory was assigned a military or industrial target in the U.S.S.R. or Eastern Europe. Since the nuclear warheads had by now far exceeded the legitimate targets available, the National Strategic Target List Division had begun to show considerable ingenuity in assigning targets to the newest additions to the U.S. strategic warhead inventory. Nick Straus recognized the Russian place names. They were no longer identifying targets; they were inventing them.
He carried Colonel Dillon’s folder to the Xerox machine and began copying those documents that most frightened him. Four pages had been copied when the operating light went out and the machine stopped. Straus pushed the start and reset button, but the machine didn’t light up. He reset the plug in the receptacle and pressed the button, but the circuits didn’t respond. For months the machine had been his accomplice, sharing his solitude, its voice the only one he trusted, that soft secretive whir-and-whisk that so cleverly flipped the documents out. Its mind had been his mind, a perfect analogue, but now it was dead. Why?
Lifting the cover again, he peered down into the glass but saw only a dim repellent face peering out, eyes as exhausted as his own, lacerated with cowardice and guilt. The hands on the cold gray cabinet had a strange pallor—the transparency of those eyeless fish from an underground grotto—but they moved as he moved.
“Traitor,” the machine said. “Judas and thief.”
He left the office, his briefcase empty. The corridor he passed through led him by a half dozen deserted DIA offices, where the lights burned and the desks sat empty, their in boxes turned on their sides. At the DIA guard desk, the blue-uniformed security officer was talking to a sweeper from the weekend utility crew, who leaned against a trolley strapped with canvas bags full of unclassified waste.
Straus signed the register and disappeared up the ramp toward the river entrance. A watch officer from the Joint Chiefs passed him on the escalator. “Hey, Straus!” he called. “I thought you guys didn’t come in on Sunday!” He wore dress blues. Nick looked at him as if he’d never seen him before in his life. Outside the mall entrance, he paused in the gathering dusk and stood at the top of the steps as if waiting for an official sedan from the motor pool. Then, remembering how he had arrived, he went down the stairs, crossed the road, and found his Ford, parked in a reserved area, a parking summons on the windshield.
“Nick? Is that you?” Ida called to him from the living room as he entered the house. He didn’t answer, standing in front of the hall closet as he returned the briefcase to the top shelf. “Nick?”
He went upstairs, still wearing his overcoat, and rattled through the bottom of his dresser, uncovering some Xeroxed documents; then he took a folder of classified material from the bottom of the cedar chest, found an old wool cap there too, one he thought he’d lost in Nova Scotia, pulled it on, and returned downstairs. From a cabinet in his basement office, he retrieved several dozen additional documents and stuffed them in a paper bag.
Ida met him at the top of the stairs.
“Nick, someone’s here to see you. In the living room with me. He’s been waiting.”
He didn’t answer, his head turned to one side, as if listening for something. The blue yarn cap was pulled down over his ears, a pile of documents was under one arm, and a grocery bag of crumpled papers was under the other.
“I can’t take this anymore, Nick. I just can’t take it.” Her voice broke and she began to cry.
“It’s all right. It won’t be very long now.”
He went out the back door, stood for a moment on the rear patio, and then descended the stone steps to the back garden. Still holding the bag and the papers, he stood at the brick barbecue pit. There were no matches in his pockets and the can of combustible fluid for lighting the charcoal was put away. He stood in the darkness, holding the parcels, and then, as if he could go no further, sank down on the redwood bench and remained there, head lowered, like an old man returning from a grocery, collapsed at the bus stop, waiting for a taxi.
He was still sitting there when Haven Wilson opened the kitchen door and joined him. Ida Straus watched nervously through the kitchen window. Thirty minutes later, they adjourned to the basement office.
It was after eleven o’clock when Haven Wilson left by the front door—left a little unsteadily, Ida Straus thought. She was upstairs in bed by this time, most of the anxiety relieved by Nick’s increasingly awkward trips up the basement steps for replenishment. She’d left sandwiches for them out on the kitchen counter and they’d disappeared, but so had the bottle of Bordeaux from the top of the refrigerator.
As he came into the bedroom, she expected him to say nothing, to crawl into bed in silence, the way he usually did, the only conversation her own questions, all of which were usually turned aside. But this night, he needed no prompting:
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got stuck at the top of the Ferris wheel with Roy McCormick, the dumbest kid in my class?” he began. A shoe dropped.
“No, I don’t think you did.”
“The only time I ever went up in a Ferris wheel was at a class picnic and Roy McCormick talked me into it. I was sixteen. He was the dumbest in physics, in chemistry, in Latin, and in everything, I’m the winner of the Bausch & Lomb medal, the physics whiz kid, and I let the dumbest kid in class talk me into going on this Ferris wheel and we get stuck at the top. He’s a Roman Catholic; if we spill out, he goes his way, I go mine. That’s what he told me at the top.”
“I’ve never heard that story.”
“I was telling Haven about it. Fools are my fate. I’ve never said this before, but it’s true. I’m not unique, I’m not special. I’ve never pretended to be special, never. But it’s true. Fools are my fate. He’s had the same experience.”
“Really?”
“It was the same that time in Geneva when you weren’t with me. I’m invited out by this couple at the U.S. mission in Geneva—a weekend. I let them talk me into going on the gondola, the cable car. As soon as we get in and the door closes, I see my companions. They are all v
ery heavy German tourists—Bavarians. Very fat Bavarians. As soon as I see them, I know. Oh, I know. I didn’t want to go out that weekend with this very nice couple from the U.S. mission in Geneva. I want to read a little, to walk a little, to talk to the Russian, Kuimov. But I cannot say no. I’m too polite, too gentil, to say no. Now that I see these very heavy, these very fat German Bavarians, all Catholics, like Roy McCormick, gossiping away in the same German language my grandfather—well, never mind the language—I know, how can I not know? Do you understand what I feel? If I am going to be smashed to smithereens on the rocks below, I don’t want it to be in the company of a gondola car full of shrieking Bavarian tourists or an addle-brained couple from the U.S. mission in Geneva.…”
“Oh, Nick …” she said piteously.
“So fools are my fate, but it’s my fault.” Another shoe dropped. “So Haven and I were talking about it.”
“Talking about what?”
“A number of things. I want to be with my own kind.… No, I’m not going to Israel. In Israel, my own kind is a minority now, growing smaller. I’m talking about another kind. It’s time to say no to the Roy McCormicks, to silly people from the U.S. mission, to the Hank Squires and the Roscoe Dillons and the Les Fines. They’re not going to get me in their Ferris wheel or their gondola car, never. Neither will the Pentagon or those people across the river. That’s what Haven and I were talking about.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We will.”
Part Three
1.
The Pentecostal Church of the Open Door in Knoxville had a substitute parson that night, a short middle-aged man with sad gray eyes who’d taken over the late evening prayer meeting when the regular mission evangelist, Reverend Tolliver, had been hospitalized with pneumonia. His name was Dorsey Combs.
It was cold in the streets outside, a shadowy, decrepit section of the city near the river, not yet reached by urban renewal. A spittle of rain tattooed the storefront windows of the tabernacle as Mrs. Tolliver began the services.
“I see we got a right smart group of folks here tonight,” she announced, “so let’s do right by them.” She was a tall, matronly woman dressed in Baptist black. Her strong face had a tallowy tint to it, like lye soap, untouched by rouge or lipstick. She sat down at the old upright piano, turned back the leaf, briskly rubbed her hands, and began pounding out “Our Hope, the Lord, Is Here Tonight” as the Yellon sisters and Elroy Yates, an evangelist and gospel group, stood up in front facing the gathering of drifters and winos who’d come in to escape the frosty streets outside. Elroy was tall and horse-faced, with a gospel voice contrived from a chronic adenoidal condition that had been the misery of his high school days, a rain-barrel baritone that didn’t sound like the real thing to anyone outside Elroy’s head. As he sang, he was spared the audience’s facial spasms by his own muscular contortions, which lifted his eyes to the ceiling and kept them there, fastened to a few strips of crepe paper still hanging overhead, a dusty memento of some long-past harvest sale when the tabernacle had been a Goodwill clothing store.
The coal stove in the rear hadn’t heated up yet, despite the flickering brightness through the mica window, and the room was chilly. The Yellon sisters wore coats over their bright-blue taffeta dresses. Elroy Yates had a scarf wrapped around his rooster neck. The congregation was slow to warm up to the Bible songs and Mrs. Tolliver left her piano to stand at the lectern to read from the Scriptures. Satisfied, she turned back to the piano, hoisted her black skirts, and began another inspirational song.
After the revival music, she returned to the front to tell her listeners where Elroy Yates and the Yellon sisters would be appearing the following week—a social note intended to flatter the gospel singers, not entice their audience. Had any of them the carfare or the will to get out of town, they wouldn’t have headed for the Bethel Church in Kingsport or the Elks Club in Johnson City, but would have been long gone down the highway for work in the Texas or Oklahoma Sunbelt.
Buster Foreman sat on a folding chair in the back row, eyes impatiently roaming the muslin curtain hanging behind the old piano. Gusts of cold night air blew across his neck each time the door opened; the steady trickle of damp current along the floor made him conscious of his cold feet. Numbed by the cold, a few of his earlier companions had crept forward to the chairs nearer the stove. He sat alone with an elderly black man who leaned forward from time to time, as if to stifle a cough, but in fact to quickly warm himself from a half pint of muscatel hidden in his mackinaw.
It was a little after nine o’clock when Elroy Yates and the Yellon sisters filed out through the muslin curtains and Mrs. Tolliver introduced the middle-aged man who had silently emerged from the rear. They were fortunate, she said, to have Mr. Dorsey Combs on hand to carry out Reverend Tolliver’s work during his hospitalization. She described Dorsey Combs as a lay preacher of the gospel who had once had his own radio program, The Bible Answering Hour, when he had been “The Bible Answer Man” to thousands of Christian homes in the region. He had studied at Bible colleges in North and South Carolina, and published articles on the Scriptures for church publications in Atlanta and Nashville.
The subject of Mrs. Tolliver’s eulogium stood just behind her, a man in his late fifties with gray-black hair, bushy eyebrows, and secretive gray eyes that seemed to be wholly indifferent to the hungry, ravaged faces studying him from the shadows. His dark suit was rumpled, like his shirt and tie. His black shoes were scruffy and unshined. Across the front of his vest hung a gold watch chain. A man without an iota of self-consciousness, he was calmly searching the small pocket of the vest with his fingers as Mrs. Tolliver introduced him. As she finished, he brought something to his mouth and bit down just before she turned. Buster Foreman guessed it might be a plug of tobacco.
Mrs. Tolliver retired to the piano stool after Dorsey Combs replaced her at the lectern and began collecting her music. Dorsey Combs began by talking about St. Paul and Foreman listened, less conscious of the words than of the face. Had the hair been thinner and the face plumper, flushed to a cherubic warmth by the glow of television lights and a boisterous claque in the back of the Senate hearing room, he might have been watching Senator Bob Combs. His half-brother was merely a small-town facsimile, Foreman decided, a small-time tabernacle sponger and hypocrite, with sawdust on his shoes, silver in his tongue, and larceny in his heart.
Mrs. Tolliver softly closed her piano, arose, took up her sheet music and evangelical notes, and slipped on her coat. As she tiptoed out through the rear curtain, she paused to send a small gratified smile back toward the audience, and then disappeared. Dorsey Combs looked around, nodded, and then leaned forward against the lectern. With his foot he prodded something from beneath the base, leaned forward even farther, lips working, and spat into the spittoon. “I seem to have lost my train of thought there,” he began again, wiping his mouth. “Maybe Mrs. Tolliver carried it away with her, maybe it’s getting too late now and all of us are pretty tired.” He closed the Bible and lifted his eyes toward the front windows. “Looking out in the streets yonder, I can see all the winders around here are dark now, only our own lights lit, which kinda makes me uneasy. How do you folks feel about it? That worry you any?” No one spoke. “No? You ain’t worried? Well, maybe I ain’t worried either—”
“He ain’t from Tennessee,” came a drunken voice from the middle row.
Combs looked up. “Maybe I ain’t, but that don’t mean I haven’t been where you folks are. I been there too, and I didn’t have any answer man to help me.” He gazed at the drunk, waited patiently, and then resumed again, his voice lifted in a parody of a revival tent evangelist. Very loudly, he cried, “Seems like all you gotta do these days is reach out for the telephone to get you an answer, reach out for the telephone or the TV knob, whether it’s the hard times, the Good Book, the whiskey, or Brother Satan that’s a-jumpin’ up an’ down on you, a-hootin’ an’ a-hollerin’. You all hear w
hat I’m saying? How many of you’s awake?”
The room was silent. Combs studied them silently, shifted the plug of tobacco, and then draped himself over the lectern, speaking very softly. “It’s a sorry mess when you can’t even tell me if you’re awake or not. I count three or four maybe, like that big fellow in the back row yonder. I count two more like that fellow over there, sneaking a little somethin’ out of that bottle he’s got hid in his pocket. It ain’t sin. If it ain’t sin, how come he’s a-sneaking it?” Someone snickered. “It ain’t funny, it’s downright pitiful, that’s what it is. I ain’t talkin’ fire an’ brimstone, if that’s what you come to hear. I ain’t talking all that trash to you just on account of that bean soup an’ crackers you come to get.”
He looked around the room very carefully, still draped over the lectern, and stood up. “All right. Lemme put it to you simple like, so as even a mo-ron can understand. You boys been talked at too much. The time’s come to do something. You boys need to get yourself organized, get yourself a union. Does that reach you?” The room was silent. “I see it don’t,” he said, disappointed. “I’m trying to do right by you, but you ain’t making it easy. You boys are all wore out, wore to the bone, like everyone else who’s got any sense these days. You fellows just gotta get yourself woke up good, that’s all. Let’s see what the Good Book says.”
He opened the Bible and read a passage from St. Paul. “A man’s life is mortal, that’s what Paul is telling you, same as I’m telling you.” He closed the book. “But let’s take a step away from the Good Book an’ see what we can come up with on our own.” He stepped out from the lectern, standing at the edge of the small platform. “A man’s life is all mixed up with other lives, you an’ me all thrown together into this life, you follow me? This ain’t the TV you’re watching. It ain’t enough to just sit out there all the time listening. Look at it this way. I bet we got some carpenters out there—carpenters, hod carriers, maybe some masons. ‘Hewers o’ wood an’ drawers o’ water.’ You boys ain’t drawing any water. How come you’re just settin’ out there, all messed up, like a load of lumber, like a mess o’ bricks or buildin’ stones, all jumbled up? I tell you why. Because you haven’t got yourself organized. You’re not organized, when folks come to building something, they’re just gonna grab holt o’ you any which way, toss you here or there any which way, the way the hard times do, the way the textile mills do, an’ they’re just gonna slam you into this job or that, any which way, and when there ain’t no jobs they’re just gonna leave you rot out there in the high weeds where you folks are rotting, any which way. You hear what I’m a-telling you now?”
