Yellow Dog Contract

by Thomas Ross

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how lucky you are?”

  “Yes,” I said after a moment, “I think I do.”

  “Arch and I were like that,” she said. “I mean I think we liked each other.”

  “Did he ever mention someone called Chad to you?” I said.

  Audrey thought about it and then asked me how it was spelled. I spelled it for her. She shook her head and said, “No but he did talk about a Chaddi to me. I remember now because after I mentioned it to Sally she came back the next day and asked me about it again.”

  “Chaddi Jugo, right?” I said.

  “That’s right. He was president of one of those little countries down in South America, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sally wanted to know everything that Arch had said about him. It really wasn’t very much.”

  “What was it?”

  “He just said that they were trying to do what they had done to Chaddi Jugo and he was going to stop them. That’s all. The only reason I remembered the name was because it was so unusual. I asked Arch if Chaddi Jugo was Spanish and he said no, he was an American. Or had been born here anyway. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but it probably would mean a lot more to somebody else we know.”

  “Who?”

  “Slick,” I said. “It should mean just a hell of a lot to Slick.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BY NOON THE NEXT DAY I was sitting in Ward Murfin’s room in the St. Louis Hilton listening to him try to convince Freddie Koontz that we were no longer bastards, but really very nice guys. He was trying to do it by phone and Freddie didn’t seem to be buying.

  Freddie was the longtime director of the Public Employees Union’s Council 21 in St. Louis who, according to Senator Corsing, had suddenly found himself out of a job. The Council, which virtually had been Freddie’s life work, was composed of the dozen or so Public Employee Union locals in the St. Louis area. It served as their spokesman during negotiations, did the organizing, published their union newspaper, sometimes handled members’ grievances, ran their credit union, furnished the locals with research material and even legal counsel, and most important of all, had provided Freddie Koontz with a rather nice livelihood for nearly twenty years.

  “Freddie,” Murfin was saying into the phone. “Freddie, goddamn it, will you just shut up and listen a second? I wanta make three points. First of all, the only reason Longmire and me are out here is that we’d like to find out what happened to Arch. Now that’s one. Second is no, we’re not working for Gallops. We don’t like Gallops any more’n you do.” Murfin stopped talking and started listening again. He listened for almost a minute before he broke in again. “Freddie, listen just a goddamn second, will you? Longmire isn’t asshole buddies with Gallops. He doesn’t like Gallops any better’n you do. That’s right. Longmire’s sitting right here in the room with me nodding his head up and down.” Murfin started listening again but finally got the chance to break in with, “Look, Freddie, I know Longmire used to be a slick and slimy, no-good son of a bitch. But he’s changed. Christ, he even lives on a farm now. Can you imagine that? Longmire on a farm? Now listen, will you, and let me make my third point and then I’ll shut up. If you’ll just talk to us maybe it’ll help us find out what really happened to Arch and maybe that’ll help you get your job back. Just think about it.” There was a pause and then Murfin said, “Okay. Okay. That’ll be good. We’ll meet you there at two.”

  He hung up the phone and turned toward me. “Freddie’s got a long memory. He doesn’t much care for us. Especially you.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “But he’s gonna meet us at a bar down near city hall at two. He says it’ll at least get him out of the house.”

  I watched as Murfin rose, went over to his suitcase, and started unpacking. The first thing he unpacked was a fifth of Early Times bourbon that he set up on the dresser. I got up and went into the bathroom and came back with two glasses. I poured some of the bourbon into each glass and then went back into the bathroom and ran some cold water into the drinks. It was a kind of ritual that Murfin and I had observed when we traveled together. He brought the bourbon and I mixed the drinks.

  I came back into the room just in time to see Murfin take the final item from his suitcase. It was a .38 revolver with a snub nose. A belly gun.

  “What’re you going to do with that?” I said.

  “Put it under my shirts,” he said.

  “That’s a good place,” I said. “Nobody’d ever think of looking there.”

  “Last night,” he said as he tucked the pistol away underneath his shirts. “Last night I got to thinking. Two people who were sort of mixed up with trying to find out what’s happened to Arch Mix have got themselves killed. There was Max and then there was the Raines girl. I figured maybe if either one of them had had a gun, maybe they just wouldn’t have got themselves killed. So I decided I’d bring a gun along.”

  “And put it away underneath your shirts where you can get to it real quick.”

  “Maybe I’ll put it under my pillow tonight.”

  “That’s a good place, too.”

  “You don’t think I need it, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe you’re right. I think that Max and Sally probably got themselves killed because they knew what Chad meant. I think I do, too, now. So maybe I should carry a gun around.”

  “You say you know what it means?”

  “I think so.”

  “What?”

  “When Sally wrote down Chad, I don’t think she had time to finish. I think what she really wanted to write down was Chaddi Jugo.”

  I watched Murfin. His eyes glittered for a moment and then he smiled one of his more terrible smiles. I could almost see his mind working it out and sorting it over, moving the pieces around to see whether they’d fit. From the expression on his face he seemed to think that they fitted perfectly.

  “Jesus,” he said, still smiling as broadly and as nastily as I’d ever seen him smile, “it all goes together, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it all goes together.”

  The name of the bar and grill that Freddie Koontz had agreed to meet us in was called The Feathered Nest and it was the kind of place that was used as a hangout by those who had reason to hang around city hall. At two o’clock in the afternoon I thought I could spot three off-duty cops, a couple of lawyers, a bail bondsman, one pale man who looked hung over enough to be a reporter, and a pair of rather pretty young women who seemed to be waiting for somebody to buy them a drink. I had the feeling that almost anybody might do.

  It was a dimly lit place with a long bar. Opposite the bar was a row of high-backed wooden booths. The rest of the space was taken up by tables that were covered with the traditional red and white checked cloths. The waiters were elderly and morose-looking with seamed, dour faces that may have got that way because their feet hurt. They wore long, white aprons that almost reached their shoes.

  One of them came back to the rear booth that Murfin and I had chosen, flicked his napkin at our table, and said, “We’re outa the lamb stew.”

  “That’s too bad,” Murfin said. “We’ll just take a couple of draft beers.”

  “You coulda told me that when you come in and I would’na had to walk all the way back here.”

  “Maybe you oughta think about buying yourself a skate board.”

  “You wanta hear a poem?” the old waiter said.

  “Not especially.”

  “It goes like this: two beers for two queers, a splittail bass for a country lass, and if that don’t rhyme you can kiss my ass. I don’t remember the rest of it, but the sentiment’s nice.”

  He wandered off and Murfin said, “This place hasn’t changed in fifteen years. They keep these old guys on and encourage ’em to insult the customers because everybody seems to like it.”

  “Atmosphere,” I said.

  “Yeah,” M
urfin said. “Atmosphere.”

  I was sitting with my back to the entrance of the bar and couldn’t see Freddie Koontz when he came in. But Murfin spotted him and waved to let him know where we were.

  When Koontz arrived at our booth he didn’t sit down for a moment or two but instead remained standing as he looked first at Murfin, then at me, then back at Murfin again. He didn’t much approve of what he saw.

  “You’re getting fat,” he told Murfin. “Longmire here ain’t changed much though. He still looks like a East St. Louis pimp with a hard run of luck. That cocksucker moustache he’s got now don’t help none either.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Freddie,” Murfin said.

  “Move over,” Koontz said. “I don’t wanta sit next to Longmire on account of I don’t wanta catch something.”

  “Your mother still in the whorehouse business, Freddie?” I said.

  “Nah, she quit after she caught the clap off your old man.”

  The insults were offered routinely and replied to in the same fashion, almost mechanically, without heat or rancor. It was simply what Freddie Koontz had long ago decided should be the proper form of address to go with robust male companionship. If you couldn’t match him insult for insult, you were probably a pansy or worse, although it was doubtful that Freddie could think of anything worse.

  Koontz had been born on an Arkansas farm nearly fifty years ago and there was still something bucolic about the way he looked even after nearly thirty-five years in St. Louis. He had a big head topped with a shock of greying hair that hung down into his robin’s-egg blue eyes that were as innocent as evening prayer until he narrowed them so that they looked crafty and sly and maybe even mean. He had a large Roman nose, a wide, thin, sour mouth, and a heavy, jutting chin that made him look stubborn, which he was. He was also a big man, well over six feet tall, with thick, heavy, hairy wrists that stuck out from the sleeves of his expensive-looking grey leisure suit.

  The old waiter came with our beers and grumbled when Koontz ordered one for himself. Koontz grumbled back at him, but he did it without any apparent pleasure. Instead, he kept peering around the back of the booth toward the bar. When his beer arrived he took a swallow of it, wiped his mouth with the back of a big hand, and turned to look at Murfin.

  “Maybe you’d better tell me again what you and Longmire are up to.”

  Murfin told him and when he was through Koontz looked at me and said, “How come they picked you?”

  “They thought I knew Arch as well as anybody.”

  He thought about that, nodded, and said, “You ain’t been farming ever since ’64, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Longmire turned himself into a hotshot campaign manager,” Murfin said. “I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

  “Well, I ain’t exactly followed his career, but if I’d had to make a prediction back in ’64, I might’ve said he’d turn out to be a pretty good chicken thief. Or something like that.”

  Murfin took a sip of his beer and said, “How’d you ever let yourself get dumped?”

  “How?” Koontz said. He seemed to think about the question for a moment and to help him think he looked up at the ceiling. “I reckon I got blind-sided. After Arch disappeared, I reckon it was only a couple of days after that, well, I get a call from Gallops, who was already playing chief nigger. Gallops says he’s sending me out some help from Washington. I tell him I don’t need any help. He says he’s sending ’em out anyway. Well, we’re right in the middle of negotiations for a new contract. We’re not asking the city for much this time, just a touch here and there, and I’ve already sort of worked things out with the boys, if you know what I mean.”

  “We know,” Murfin said.

  “Well, the first thing I know these six guys that I never heard of before fly out from Washington. But they don’t come near me. So the next thing I know there’s this special meeting of the Council’s board of directors and here’re these six guys sitting there, not up to the table, you know, but back up against the wall. They all look alike. Maybe thirty or thirty-three, smooth-looking jaspers with real nice suits and shiny shoes. And from what I hear each of ’em’s carrying enough cash money to burn a wet mule. So they bought it. The vote, I mean. There was a motion to dispense with my services, it was seconded, there’s this six to five vote, and I’m outa my fuckin’ job just two months before I’m eligible for a pension. Well, I start nosing around and I find out that these guys laid out about twenty thousand dollars cash money to rig the vote on the board of directors. I can’t prove it, but that’s what I hear and it adds up because the next time I see old Sammy Noolan—you remember old Sammy who never had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of either—well Sammy’s driving a Pontiac GTO and he never drove nothing better’n a second-hand Ford in all his life.”

  Koontz took another swallow of his beer. “Okay, so I’m outa my job, but I still keep in touch. Well, the next thing you know, the Council breaks off negotiations with the city. Wham! Just like that. Then these six guys that Gallops sends out from Washington come up with a new set of proposals. Well, one of the guys on the Council board, maybe you remember him, Ted Greenleaf?”

  Murfin nodded to show that he remembered Ted Greenleaf.

  “Well, Greenleaf’s been around a long time and he takes one look at what these guys have come up with and he says to ’em that they’re fuckin’ crazy. Now Greenleaf’s the one who led the fight for me in the Council meeting, although it wasn’t much of a fight, so they don’t even try to buy him off. They don’t even try to argue with him. They just smile politely at him and let him have his say and on the way home that night his car is forced over to the curb and somebody beats the shit out of Ted Greenleaf and the next day he resigns from the Council board and puts it in writing. He has to put it in writing on account of he’s in the hospital with his fuckin’ jaws wired shut. You gettin’ the picture?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Murfin said.

  “What do the new demands ask for?” I said.

  “Well, lemme tell you about that. That’s really something. These new demands ask for a whole passel of stuff but the key points are real simple. They’re demanding a flat twenty percent pay increase across the board and a four-day week. Well, I mean that sits with the city like a saddle on a sow. The city just laughs at em. But these six guys who’ve taken over the negotiations by now, they don’t laugh back. They just smile as cool as you please and don’t budge an inch.”

  “What about the membership?” Murfin said.

  Koontz shrugged. “Well, you know what the membership is like. You tell ’em that they can have Friday or maybe Monday off as well as Saturday and Sunday plus a twenty percent pay hike and, hell, they ain’t gonna say no.”

  “Yeah, but will they go out on strike for it?” Murfin said.

  “We used to put the Council newspaper out once every month, right?”

  Murfin nodded. “Right.”

  “Well, now it’s coming out every week and I mean it’s slick. It’s full of figures and statistics to show how the city can pay for all this stuff with no sweat. On top of that each member has received an individually robotyped letter explaining to him just how much money he’ll make over the next five years when the city meets his demands. Well, shit, I mean it looks like a whole wad of money. All he has to do to get it is go out on strike for maybe a month or two. And even with what he’ll lose in pay, he’ll still come out way ahead, according to the phony figures that these six sharpers have come up with.”

  Murfin shook his head. “The city’ll never go for it. Hell, there’s hardly a city in the country that’s not almost flat-ass broke. They sure as shit won’t go for any four-day week and a twenty percent pay increase.”

  “You ain’t exactly telling me anything new,” Koontz said. “But that’s what they’re gonna go for anyhow. After they dumped me they dipped down into the rank and file and came up with this loudmouth nigger who they made executive director. The second t
hing they did after they named him was to vote him a new Cadillac. Not a little Cadillac, but a big fuckin’ Cadillac. Well, he gets his picture in the papers and on TV and they give him my salary and my expense account, and shit, there’s nothing that nigger ain’t gonna do for them.”

  Murfin drank some of his beer and looked carefully at Koontz. “But you haven’t just been sitting around the house all this time, have you, Freddie?”

  Koontz took another look around the back of the booth toward the bar. Then he turned back, hunched forward, and lowered his voice to a hoarse, confidential whisper. “Well, I’ve been talking to some of the guys and we’re gonna have a meeting tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “At the fuckin’ Odd Fellows Hall, can you imagine? Ten years ago I got the membership to vote that we oughta have our own headquarters. So they gave me the okay and I built us a hell of a fine place. Two stories, nice big meeting hall, even a recreation room and plenty of office space. Even had a nice little wet bar in my office. Well, day before yesterday, I tell ’em I wanta use the union meeting hall and they lie to me and tell me it’s all booked up. So I gotta go rent the goddamn Odd Fellows Hall for fifty dollars. Hell, I don’t mind the money. I’ve paid more’n that to watch two flies fuck. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “When’s the meeting?” I said.

  “At eight o’clock tonight. Some of the guys who ain’t got just shit, clabber or mud for brains are gonna be there. They don’t like all this strike talk either. Hell, if it was gonna come to a strike, we’d go for compulsory arbitration first. That’s what Arch always said and I agree with him. Nobody knows how a strike’s gonna turn out. For all you know it might bust the union and the first thing you know you’d be signing a yellow-dog contract to keep your job. You know, sign something where you’d agree to get out of the union if you’re in it or not join it if you’re not.”

  “You think that’s a possibility?” I said.

  Koontz shrugged. “Who the hell knows?” he said. “You get a long strike and who’s gonna get pissed off most? Well, the fuckin’ voters, that’s who, and they’re already screamin’ about how the city’s got too many people on the payroll anyhow. Well, if a strike keeps them from getting their garbage picked up for two months, then come election day they’re sure as shit stinks gonna vote for somebody who ain’t gonna play patty-cake with no union. And don’t think the pols don’t know this.”