Yellow Dog Contract

by Thomas Ross

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “There’s one more,” Quane said. “Yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Uh-huh. Yours. Arch Mix.”

  The mockingbird abruptly shut up. There was no sound for a moment, no sound at all, and then a trout jumped in the pond. I rattled the ice in my glass. Then I said, “Never.”

  “Ten thousand,” Murfin said quickly. “Ten thousand for two months’ work. If you turn it, another ten thousand.”

  “No.”

  “You know why we’re handing it to you, don’t you?” Murfin said. “I mean, you knew Mix better’n anybody else. Christ, you didn’t do anything but study him for what, five months?”

  “Six,” I said. “I grew old studying him. When it was over I came down with mono. That’s silly, isn’t it? A thirty-two-year-old man with mono.”

  “Harvey,” Murfin said. “Talk to Vullo, will you? That’s all. Just talk to him. We told him we really didn’t expect you to turn up the who on Mix, but maybe you could come up with the why. If we got that, the why, then me and Quane could turn some redhots we got loose on the who.”

  “You think there is a who, don’t you?” I said.

  “There’s gotta be,” Murfin said and Quane nodded wisely. “Look,” Murfin went on, selling me now, “a guy has a great job. He gets along with his wife—well, okay anyway. His health’s good. He’s forty-five and his kids aren’t in jail and that’s something. So he gets up one morning, has breakfast, reads the paper, gets in his car and starts to work. He never gets there. They never find him. They never even find his car. He’s just gone.”

  “It happens all the time,” I said. “Every week. Maybe every day. It’s called the ‘Honey, I Think I’ll Run Down to the Drugstore for Some Cigarettes’ syndrome.”

  “Mix didn’t smoke,” said Murfin, the stickler.

  “You’re right. I forgot.”

  “Harvey,” Quane said.

  “What?”

  “Five hundred bucks. Just to talk to Roger Vullo.”

  I got up and went over to the porch rail. I took off my shirt and jeans. Underneath I was wearing some swimming trunks. I picked up the long bamboo pole with the hook on the end that I’d made out of a coat-hanger. I used the hook to pull the rope swing in, grasped the gunnysack, and climbed up on the porch rail. I turned. Murfin and Quane were watching me. So was Honest Tuan.

  “A thousand,” I said. “I’ll talk to him for a thousand.”

  I shoved off of the porch rail and sailed out over the pond. At the top of the swing’s arc I let go and started falling. When I hit the water I made a fine big splash and it was as much fun as I had thought it would be. Maybe even more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN MY YOUTH, which I sometimes enjoy thinking of as misspent, I was a bit of an over-achiever in a limited kind of way. Or perhaps I was simply in a hurry although a bit unsure of my destination. If any. But by the time I was thirty-two I had been a student, a police reporter, a state legislator, a foreign correspondent, a political gunslinger, and some even thought, mistakenly, a secret agent of sorts. Now at forty-three I was a poetaster and a goatherd, providing that two Nubian goats could be considered a herd.

  I learned my political primer in the New Orleans French Quarter where I was born, reared (rather loosely in retrospect), and whose crime I eventually covered for the old Item, a newspaper that I went to work for at seventeen while attending Tulane University. My studies were less than arduous since I majored in French and German, two languages that I learned to speak before I was five because my mother had been born in Dijon, my father in Düsseldorf.

  In 1954 when I was twenty-one and just graduated, some of the more depraved elements in the quarter decided in a fit of political pique, defiance, and probably despair that they should send a bitter joke to Baton Rouge as their state representative. They sent me. I won handily as a kind of machine candidate and achieved no little notoriety by making a good solemn campaign promise, which was to introduce a bill that would legalize cunnilingus and fellatio between consenting adults. Needless to say (then why say it?) my political career died swiftly and my self-appointed mentor, a kindly, aging former crony of the sainted Huey Long, advised me in all seriousness that, “Harvey, the state just ain’t quite ready for a pussy-eatin’ bill yet.”

  But a state legislature is an excellent place to further one’s political education, and if one is particularly interested in the study of political chicanery, knavery, improbity, and bamboozlement, the Louisiana state legislature was then—and may yet be—the fons et origo of all such knowledge. After my single term there I was never again to be shocked or surprised by political rascality. Saddened a few times and amused often, but shocked never.

  For no very good reason, I was thinking about my tarnished past as I stood before the mirror in the bathroom trying to decide whether to shave off my moustache. Ruth went by in the hall, stopped, and leaned against the door jamb.

  “If you shave it off,” she said, “you won’t look like Mr. Powell anymore.”

  I put a finger up trying to block out the moustache. “But there’d be a startling resemblance to Victor McLaglen wouldn’t there?”

  She looked at me critically. “Perhaps,” she said, “especially if you learned how to twist a cloth cap in your hands. He could twist a cloth cap better than anyone.”

  “Well, hell,” I said, “I think I’ll leave it.”

  “What time are you supposed to see Mr. Vullo?”

  “Eleven. You need anything?”

  “Gin,” she said. “We’re low on gin. And I also need three birthdays, a tenth and twentieth wedding anniversary, two get wells, a congratulations for a five-to-seven-year-old, and a couple of miss you’s.”

  About half of our income—which the previous year had reached a staggering $11,763—came from the sale of Ruth’s watercolor drawings to a Los Angeles greeting card firm. She drew gentle, immensely clever caricatures of animals and her models were mostly members of our own menagerie—plus a couple of beavers who lived upstream from the pond and for the most part minded their own business. The Los Angeles firm couldn’t get enough of Ruth’s drawings.

  Quite by accident I had found that I had a remarkable talent for writing greeting card verse that contained just the right touch of simpering banality. The L.A. firm paid me two dollars a line and occasionally dropped me warm little notes that compared my efforts favorably with those of Rod McKuen. I did a lot of composing while milking the goats. Birthdays were my specialty.

  I told Ruth that I’d write the stuff on my way to Washington. I had also discovered that while driving I could usually compose a line a mile. In the bedroom I opened the closet and studied the remnants of a once fairly resplendent wardrobe. Time, fashion, and personal indifference had reduced it to one London-tailored suit (the last of six), which I planned to be cremated in, a couple of tweed jackets, some jeans, and a seersucker suit with suspicious labels. I chose the seersucker, a blue shirt, a black knit tie, and when I looked in the mirror I thought I looked quite natty—providing that one still thought of 1965 as a natty year.

  I drove the pickup into Washington. It was a 1969 Ford with a four-wheel drive, which came in handy when it snowed or rained. I left our other car for Ruth. Our other car was a five-year-old Volkswagen.

  By the time I arrived at Connecticut Avenue and M Street I had composed thirty-six lines of doggerel, which I dictated into a small portable tape recorder, shouting some of the lines, even declaiming them to make myself heard above the Ford’s clatter. They rhymed, they scanned, and they were as sticky as honey and twice as sweet.

  I treated myself to one of those dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour parking lots and then found the M Street address that Murfin had given me. It was a fairly new building just east of Connecticut Avenue on the south side of the street. I rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, walked down the hall, and went through a door that was lettered: THE ARNOLD VULLO FOUNDATION.

  On the other side of the
door was a young receptionist and behind her was a rather large area filled with metal desks that were separated from each other by thin, pastel partitions that rose about five feet above the floor. The partitions were light tan, pale blue, and dusty rose. At the desks sat about two dozen men and women, most of them in their late twenties, although some were older, who typed, read, talked into phones, or simply sat staring into space. It looked very much like the city room of a prosperous, medium-sized daily newspaper.

  I told the receptionist that my name was Harvey Longmire and that I had an appointment with Mr. Murfin. She nodded, picked up the phone, dialed a few numbers, said something into it, and then smiled at me as she hung up.

  “Won’t you take a seat, Mr. Longmire? Somebody’ll be here in a moment to show you to Mr. Murfin’s office.”

  I took a seat and looked around at the reception area. It was all good, solid furniture that had a kind of W & J Sloane look to it. It was as if whoever had chosen it had decided on stolid durability and comfort rather than flash. I looked at my watch and saw that I was ten minutes early, but then I usually am, so I took out my small tin box and rolled a cigarette. I once smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, Luckies, unfiltered, but since I had started rolling my own I was down to the equivalent of a pack a day for which my lungs seemed grateful. I also saved approximately $124 a year.

  I could sense the receptionist watching me so I decided to give her a thrill and rolled the cigarette with one hand. I looked up at her and grinned. “I used to be a cowpoke,” I said.

  “You never,” she said, smiling. “I wish I could do that.”

  “You don’t smoke, do you?”

  She smiled again. “Not tobacco. That is tobacco, isn’t it?”

  “Afraid so,” I said.

  The receptionist went back to doing what she was doing when I came in, proofreading, it seemed, and I went back to smoking my roll your own. I was about halfway through it when a door opened and a tall woman with streaked blond hair came in and said, “Mr. Longmire?”

  I said that I was Longmire and she said that she was Mr. Murfin’s secretary and that if I would follow her she would show me to Mr. Murfin’s office and even get me a cup of coffee and how did I like it. I said I liked it with sugar.

  I followed the woman with the streaked hair down a carpeted hall that had five or six doors leading off of it. All of the doors were closed. She stopped at one of them and opened it, indicating that I should go in. I went in and found Murfin behind a large desk and Quane seated on a couch, his feet up on the coffee table.

  We didn’t shake hands this time. Quane waved at me lazily and Murfin nodded and grinned and said, “You’re right on time.”

  “Habit,” I said. “My only good one.”

  “Ginger’ll get you some coffee,” Murfin said.

  “Ginger’s the blonde?”

  “My secretary.”

  I looked around at Murfin’s office and nodded. “They seem to do you well here.”

  Murfin also looked around and nodded, a little possessively, I thought, at the good-sized room with its dark brown carpet, fabric covered walls, long sofa, four easy chairs, the coffee table, and what looked like a bar in one corner although it could have been a cleverly disguised filing cabinet. There were even some tasteful prints on the walls, but I was sure that Murfin hadn’t selected them because Murfin had no taste.

  “I’ve had worse,” Murfin said. “A lot worse.”

  “I know.”

  “Vullo’s gonna be tied up for about ten minutes so I thought we’d have the coffee first and then I’d take you in and introduce you.”

  “What about the money?” I said.

  “No problem.”

  “He means he wants it in advance,” Quane said. “Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Jesus, Harvey,” Murfin said, “you don’t hardly change at all.”

  “In our changing world constancy is a treasure.”

  Ginger, the secretary, came in with a tray containing three cups of coffee. There were even saucers and spoons to go with the cups. She served me first and then Quane and then Murfin. When she was done, Murfin said, “Bring that Longmire check in, will you, Ginger?”

  She nodded, left, and came back a few moments later with a check which she handed to Murfin. He thanked her and when she was gone he took out a ball-point pen and signed the check and then slid it over to Quane who used the same pen to sign his name. Quane then handed the check to me. I looked at it and put it in the breast pocket of my jacket.

  “You guys sign the checks around here?” I said.

  Murfin nodded. “Some of them. I sign them and Quane here countersigns them.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “They’ve got the fox watching the weasel. That’s very clever.”

  We all took a sip of our coffee and I noticed that Murfin still slurped his after blowing on it first. I decided that he hadn’t changed much since I had first met him twelve years before. He had put on a few pounds, but not many, and his dark brown hair was greying a little, but he still had his round pink face, almost unlined, his stubby nose, apple chin, wide, thin mouth with its mean smile, and eyes that were shaded a merciless blue.

  Now that he was all dressed up I had nearly forgotten how awful his clothes always were, but that came back as I examined his brown and green plaid summer-weight jacket, pink shirt, and the red, white and yellow tie that dribbled down its front something like a tomato surprise.

  It was Quane who had changed more. He was nearly as tall as I, almost six feet, but he looked leaner and his face had lost its chubby youthfulness and was now all planes, angles and harsh lines that were almost slashes. A couple of the lines were deep parenthetical grooves that ran down from the sides of his beaky nose to the corners of his mouth, which still looked as if it wanted to pout or maybe bitch about something.

  I remembered that Quane’s eyes when I had first seen them had been wide and grey and brimming over with something moist, probably innocence. They were still grey, of course, but they seemed to have narrowed and the moist innocence had all dried up and gone away. It was hard to tell what had taken its place. Probably nothing.

  “Well,” I said, “then what happened? You never did tell me.”

  “When?” Quane said.

  “After Wilbur Mills.”

  Murfin shook his head. “It was a rotten year. We hooked up with Muskie and then Humphrey and after the convention we landed a couple of advance spots with Eagleton.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It was a rotten year.”

  “So after the Eagleton thing,” Murfin said, “well, hell, I just went home and sat around the house and drove Marjorie and the kids crazy.”

  “How is Marjorie?” I said, trying to put a little interest into my question, but not succeeding too well. Marjorie was probably as nutty as ever.

  “She’s a pain in the ass,” Murfin said. “She’s started going to one of those consciousness-raising things twice a week. Now I don’t hardly ever want to go home.”

  “Well, some things never change,” I said. “That brings us up to Watergate. I heard both of you landed somewhere on the committee.”

  “I did first,” Murfin said, “and then I finally got hold of Quane.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Mexico,” Quane said.

  “Tell him about Mexico,” Murfin said.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Quane said.

  Murfin licked his lips and smiled one of his more terrible smiles. “They had this B-26,” he said. “Quane and a couple of other guys and this sixty-one-year-old World War Two-type pilot who claimed he could fly the goddamned thing. Or he was supposed to be able to fly it when he was sober anyhow, which was maybe every fourth day for about six hours. Well, they’ve got six tons of dope. Can you imagine, six tons? And they’re gonna fly it into the desert somewhere in Arizona and everybody’s gonna get rich. Well, they sober the old Air Corps vet up, and he finally finds his bifocals
someplace and puts those on, and they’ve got the plane all loaded and everything’s set, except there’s just one little thing wrong. The goddamned engines won’t start.”

  “So what happened?” I said.

  Quane shrugged. “The last time I looked back they were still trying to start them. I only looked back once.”

  “And that’s when you went on the Watergate committee?” I said.

  “As consultants,” Murfin said. “We got one twenty-eight a day and an office and some pencils and some yellow pads and what we did was think up questions. We thought up some pretty good ones.”

  “The tapes,” I said. “I think I heard somewhere from somebody that it was you guys who really came up with the question about the tapes.”

  Murfin looked at Quane who said nothing but merely smiled a little.

  “It was a pretty good question,” I said.

  Quane nodded. “Not bad.”

  “It only lasted till October though,” Murfin said.

  “Of seventy-three?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well,” Murfin said, “by then I’m off the payroll and I’m looking around again, you know, trying to connect somewhere, and about the only offer I get is from the Teamsters who wanta know if I’d like to go out to California and help red-dog Chavez. Well, shit, I mean, who wants to do that?”

  “Besides,” I said, “it might be hard work.”

  “Exactly. Well, finally I sort of stumble over this guy out in Ohio who thinks he wants to be a congressman, and his wife thinks so, too, and money’s no problem because they’ve both got a ton of it, and about the only problem they got is that they don’t quite know how to go about getting elected.”

  “Musacco,” I said. “You dumped Nick Musacco.”

  I was given another quick look at Murfin’s awful smile. He could flick it on and off like a flashlight. “Yeah,” he said, “Nick was about due, don’tcha think?”

  I shrugged. “Ten years ago,” I said, “maybe even five, Nick would have skinned you and hung you out to dry before breakfast. Or maybe lunch.”