Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  No argument.

  I get in beside Coco and we head south toward the Trail. “How much money did you turn up?” I ask Harvey.

  “Fifty.” He had not only taken the money daddy kept stashed behind some loose bricks in the garage wall, he had taken it in the rusted soup can it had been stored in. He passes the can to me, and I haul out the soggy wad of bills. Fifty it is.

  I say to Harvey, “You figured on a lot more than that.”

  “I know. But this is what there was.”

  Lester says, “There was twenty in the cash register, but we let it be. If daddy saw it was gone, he’d know for sure we backslid. He’d have the law after us soon as he dingged that register.”

  Backslid. Whatever flickering suspicion I have that this pair of Shanklins removed some of the can’s contents before turning it over to the Company, that word alone anesthetizes it.

  Coco says, “Poor pickings, man. We require at least three days’ eating money for the four of us.”

  “Yeah, but don’t forget Santiago,” Harvey points out. “Man like that don’t go around with his pockets empty.”

  “Perhaps not,” says Coco, “but if you want to bet your million on it, that does not mean I want to bet my million on it.”

  “Knock it off,” I tell him. “We’ll make do.”

  “One does not make do in an enterprise like this, Mr. Flood. One takes all variables into account.”

  Enterprise, he says. Variables, he says. The Scholarship Grant Commission of St. Hilary could be proud of him. He was their first national project ten years ago, the first local high achiever shipped off to jolly old London University by St. Hilary’s taxpayers, and he had made it at school for almost a year before getting hooked on the Black Students Union and knifing an unsympathetic bobby in a fracas at Trafalgar Square. That bobby was one of the few variables in Hubert Digby’s life he had handled carelessly. He was never that careless again.

  I say to Hubert Digby, “According to the Company rules, Harvey is running phase one, and so far he’s done all right. If he fouls up, you can be chairman of the paranoia committee.”

  What the hell, I’d put in twice as much time in college as he had, two years of Alma Mater, mother of Friends, where after tepid institutional breakfast on Sunday—beg pardon, First Day—you could, out of boredom, indulge in Quaker silent worship among believers glassy-eyed in their search for the Light. Oral messages invited, of course, from anyone who came up with a glimmer. I had the compulsion to deliver just one message there during my time, that First Day morn when stoned two inches short of the stratosphere I rose to say, “I hope all of you here realize that this is a lot of shit,” and those who know what Quakers are will not be surprised to learn that I was not given the firing squad for this—heavens to Betsy, no—but was delicately eldered by a committee who pointed out that this gasp of revulsion was, in truth, a revelation of my own hungry search for the Light—a white-haired elder actually, if awkwardly, using the words doing your own thing—so that, like one in the embrace of a giant jellyfish, I found myself clutched even more tightly in the Quakerly embrace for having tried to act as an irritant to all that jelly. And SDS, embryo Weatherman division, embraced me even more gladly, which is how I—not uncoincidentally paralleling Coco’s crisis at London U—wound up in the thick of a fire-bombing, followed by a suspended sentence and a life on the open road.

  What did I say to the Movement itself when I cut the umbilical cord? I said, “I, James Flood, am not freaking out. I am not selling out. But I have examined the System closely and have come to see that it is a vast jellyfish. Its life is tedious and gray; it requires a fix now and then to make the endless tedium bearable. And our youthful role has been to provide that fix. We fling our ruthless, idealistic, shaggy beings against this pulp; we send charges of our negative current through it, giving it a sense that it is still alive; then we are engorged. But no more of this for me. No more providing shock treatment for the monster by way of headlines and TV news shows. No more waiting for bail to be met while rotting in the local juzgado where uncouth elements eye my tender asshole with hungry eyes.

  “No, no, dear idealistic chums, you have started with a false premise and compounded it into a gigantic theological error. You have seen yourselves as an angelic host warring against Satan, the Establishment. But in truth, the Establishment is the Lord God Jehovah Himself, and you and I are pathetic little imps aiming tiny kicks at His armored shin.

  “So, chums—ex-chums—James Flood is now joining with the forces of righteousness, is now going forth to cut himself a slice of the action. What is the measure of his calling? He will have his first million before he is thirty. One million and no less.”

  End of sermon.

  Did I actually lay this on them that night? I did.

  Because what I would not risk for a penny less than that, I would risk for a million.

  Why before thirty?

  Because the night of that sermon I was twenty, and so thirty looked like the end of all manhood. Now, at twenty-six, I know better. With a treasure chest under his arm, one strolls past thirty without even realizing it. And I would have the treasure four years before the target date.

  “Man, what the devil are you dreaming about?” Coco says to me. “You see something out there in dreamland the rest of us don’t, kindly paint the picture out loud. Perhaps it concerns what we do if Santiago does not have a pocketful of eating money for us.”

  Chairman of the paranoia committee, all right, that one.

  In all the monotonous length of the Tamiami Trail, which we traverse to the sound of soft rock from the car’s radio—acid rock diluted with Kool-Aid—we find almost no traffic. When we turn off onto Route 94, which heads us southwest into deep swamp, there is no traffic at all. Not until we’re slowed up by a happening in front of us. Half a dozen huge contraptions, their drivers perched on seats high over our heads, are lumbering along like a procession of mechanical elephants.

  “Swamp buggies,” Lester says. “Racing day today.”

  “Around our area?” asks Coco.

  “No, around here. We still got more than a mile to go.”

  “Oh?” Coco says. “And what about these people hearing a gun go off that close?”

  “It’s a carbine,” Harvey says. He leans forward and pinches Coco’s neck between his thumb and middle finger. The size of that hand, it looks as if he could circle Coco’s neck and strangle him with those two fingers. “Not a cannon,” Harvey says. “Just a little bitsy popgun.”

  Coco suddenly stops the car and looks at Harvey in the rear-view mirror. “Mister, I do not like to be caressed without invitation.”

  If you know Coco, you know this is an ultimatum. He is not altogether blacksnake, Hubert Digby. No, there is a strain of rattlesnake in him too. One warning buzz allowed, and this is it.

  Harvey knows Coco. But Harvey, from what he had recounted about his youth on the edge of the good old Everglades, had been a laddie who liked nothing better than to tease a rattlesnake into lively spirit before bagging it and fetching it to the Miami Serpentarium for a quick cash sale. Once Harvey had teased too carelessly and was struck by the rattler, so Lester had snagged it by the tail and flogged it to death against a tree trunk.

  It is a tactical error for Coco to deliver an ultimatum with Harvey’s fingers pressing into his neck and with Lester sitting beside Harvey. On the other hand, it is a mistake for Harvey to think he can keep those fingers pressed into that black neck without eventually getting stung.

  I like this. Like the way the tensions are building up. A guitar with loose strings makes no music. Here is evidence that the Company is ready to make music. The troops are primed for action.

  I say to Harvey, “Cool it, Harve,” and then to Coco, “Get moving and pull around that parade. They start turning off the road up there, they’ll cut us off too long.”

  Harvey releases those knackwurst fingers from Coco’s neck. Coco gets the car going and pulls past the parade i
nto the clear. James Flood has spoken. When J. Flood speaks in this manner, impatiently commanding what must be done, he gets no comeback from his companions. The reason? His unpredictability. His unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable finger hovering over The Button.

  They learned that at one of those Raiford experimental group therapy sessions which we all attended, partly because it offered us a chance for Company meetings, partly because ripping off the amiable idiot who conducted them was better than another game of checkers, and it was at such a session that my interesting past was exposed and The Button discussed. No rip-off there, the facts were indisputable, the rest of the Company accepted them with respect and ever after had a wary eye on that Flood finger and its proximity to The Button.

  Thus, if J. Flood is driven to the point of wasting any of his partners in the Company, he is not even likely to know he is doing it. So we are all equal indeed, but one of us—the wisest and most self-sufficient, although the most inconspicuous one—is considerably more equal than all the others put together.

  So when Harvey grudgingly releases his grip on Coco’s handsome neck, and Coco sullenly steers the car past the clattering procession of swamp buggies, it is evidence that they comprehend the dangerous facts of life and that the Company is soundly based and properly functioning.

  A good omen.

  The burned-out shanty is where Santiago said it would be. It had been a total fire. All that’s left of the shanty is some charred framework. The flames had reached out far enough to parch a metal sign hanging from a post ten feet from the shanty. The sign says in what remains of its lettering Glades Rifle Club. In even larger lettering beneath that is Private! Keep out! This means you!

  “Used to have a guard here,” Harvey says. “Mean-looking mother with a shotgun. Pull up here, and next thing you’d have that gun shoved right in your face.”

  Beside the shanty is a two-wheel, deep-rutted track leading off to a tangle of brush southward. Coco swings the car into the ruts and we slowly jounce along toward the brush, the rear bumper now and then thumping the ground with a sledge-hammer wallop.

  Coco says to the back seat at large, “What if Santiago and some friends are waiting for us the other side of that greenery? We are supposed to be carting four thousand dollars cash money with us. They could take us like pigeons, man.”

  “No way,” Harvey says.

  Coco stops the car and motions with his head. “Suppose you make sure.”

  The carbine is in a gun case at Harvey’s feet. When he pulls its sections out and assembles them, it does look like a popgun in his fist. He gets out of the car, ambles toward the greenery ahead, disappears through it. After a while he reappears and waves at us to move up. We do, and see that the greenery is not the dead end it seems to be. Where the track reaches it, it bends at a right angle and winds through the brush, leading us to another clearing walled off at its far end by a second stretch of tangled thicket. Again we move through a concealed opening and now are in a broad open area bordered by a canal. The remains of a wooden dock thrust out into the canal. Beyond the canal is a whole world of saw grass.

  We get out of the car as the Kool-Aid rock cuts out and somebody comes on the air to tell us it is seven A.M. and all traffic lanes in and out of Miami are clear. Traffic is moving along just fine, boys and girls.

  “That’s for sure this time of day,” Lester says. He reaches in and switches off the radio, and we all watch Harvey make his way to the dock, look up and down the canal. On his way back to us he scuffs his toe into the ground here and there and picks up muddy souvenirs. He shows them to us. Oversized cartridge cases. “Plenty more around here,” he says. “Looks like this is one rifle club didn’t stick to rifles.”

  Coco picks one of the cartridge cases from Harvey’s hand. “Fifties,” he says. “Heavy machine gun.”

  Harvey points at the surrounding greenery. “And there’s rusty old barbed wire all the way along in there.”

  “Very military,” Coco says. “Well, man, which way do you think he will be coming, road or canal?”

  Harvey shrugs. “Road, most likely. If he comes by the water there, you’ll know it a long time ahead. Those airboats are loud.”

  “But he could come by boat,” Coco says.

  “He could. Only thing is to cover both ways.”

  “From those bushes?”

  “Nope, too far away. Must be seventy, eighty yards to the dock from there. Up to thirty yards, Les can hit a dime with this here gun. We just set up where the car is now, he can cover everything.”

  “From the car?” Coco says. “Santiago is sure to have company with him, man. You show that weapon through a car window, and it will be only a question of which of us gets blasted first.”

  “Not in the car,” Harvey says. “Under the car.”

  He has, in his methodical Shanklin way, thought of all possibilities and has come prepared for the one we face. A shovel wrapped in burlap sacking is in the car’s trunk. Lester does the digging, first of soft dirt, then of muck, carrying each shovelful down to the canal and dumping it into the water, until he stands waist-deep in his foxhole. “Ain’t sitting down in this slop dressed up,” he says. He strips naked, then squats down in the hole. His scalp is just on a level with the surrounding terrain.

  Harvey hands him the carbine, then gets into the car and inches it forward over the hole. “Yo!” calls Lester when the car is centered over him, and Harvey puts on the brake. He comes out of the driver’s seat and squats down to peer under the chassis. “No cave-in?” he says.

  “Some,” Lester says. “I got slop shoving right up my asshole. But it’s no sweat.”

  Standing there, I can’t see Lester at all. Squatting low beside Harvey, I can make out the glimmer of his eyes and the barrel of the carbine.

  “Cover everything?” Harvey asks him.

  “Everything from the road all the way down to that dock. You just have to keep him this side of the car. Now back up and let me loose from here until we hear him coming.”

  When the car is backed clear of the hole, Lester takes a bath in the canal, then stretches out naked on the dock to work on his tan. He and Harvey have that miraculous capacity to fall asleep under any conditions, once they know they are faced with waiting time. I sit in the car, hunt around on the radio until I find a newscaster reporting the latest from out there in Chaos. Coco goes prowling through the brush, thicket, and saw grass surrounding us, the blacksnake slithering along on a journey of exploration, until Harvey calls him off.

  “How do you know some of that wire and stuff ain’t booby-trapped?” Harvey asks him.

  “Why would it be?”

  “Because I got a feeling this was real army stuff back a while. Cubano training stuff. Like for that Bay of Pigs mess.”

  “That was in Guatemala,” Coco says. “What would you know about it? You were peeing in your baby pants then.”

  “It was here too. You think folks around here go poaching for alligators with machine guns?”

  “Do what he says,” I tell Coco. “Until we’re out of the county, he’s in charge.”

  “Indeed,” Coco says chillingly. He is no good at all at waiting, not when faced with unpredictables. “There will be Santiago, and at least one more. They will have guns on them, Mr. Flood. With the open market in handguns down here, we could have matched them in fire power very easily.”

  “So what?” Harvey says. “Santiago said he’s already been hijacked once too much. He said he sees any guns on us, that’s the end of the deal right there. He takes off, and we wind up with a bad name if we try to deal with anybody else.”

  “Did it strike you,” Coco asks at his snotty meanest, “that if we came properly prepared, we could have stopped him from taking off?”

  Since Coco’s knife is strapped to his arm and not yet in his hand, Harvey has time for a little fun. “Sure,” he says. “But if shooting starts, fact is I’m the biggest target around here. You stand sideways and the only thing anybody can
see to aim at is that skinny black cock of yours.”

  I see the look in Coco’s eye. So just to make sure the Company doesn’t dissolve itself before payoff time, I take the carbine from the back seat of the car where Lester laid it. “Meeting’s adjourned,” I say, and when Coco says, “Who made you chairman of it?” I level the carbine at him through the window and sight it between his eyes. He knows, does Hubert, that while I am in the book for two convictions for manslaughter, they were the result of plea bargaining when the witnesses against me in both cases showed a loss of nerve before the trial. Manslaughter is a very nice word for it. And, of course, he knows all about The Button too.

  He cools off fast, Hubert does. But not looking to lose face, he spits hard on the ground, then turns and walks away.

  “Hold it!” I call, and he freezes in his tracks, not even daring to turn his head in my direction. I put the gun on the back seat and lean out of the window empty-handed. “Now run,” I say. “Fast. Move around. Don’t make it too easy for me. I’ll count three before I shoot.”

  Coco looks at me over his shoulder, his eyes staring, his mouth gaping. Then he sees I am not holding the carbine, and he goes slack all over. He stands shaking his head. “Very funny,” he says. “Very funny indeed.”

  “I don’t hear you laughing,” Harvey says.

  At nine-thirty we hold a Company meeting and run through the permutations and combinations of the coming event. Then Lester, grumbling when Harvey commands it, takes the carbine and settles down in his foxhole, and Harvey centers the LeSabre over him.

  A little after ten we hear the sound of a machine banging and clattering as it makes its way along the rutted road. When it shows up through our perimeter, it turns out to be an old pickup truck, Santiago at the wheel, another man almost as fat as Santiago standing in back, a gun in his hands, a submachine gun, aimed in our general direction.

  Santiago steers, not toward us, but along the whole perimeter, checking it out. Another good omen. If Lester was staked out in that underbrush, he would have been spotted by that close inspection sure as hell. Santiago swings the truck around and pulls up near us, the gunman covering us from about twenty feet away. The door of the truck is lettered A & A Scrap and Salvage, and the cargo is a couple of rusting deep freezers, roped around and laid out like coffins, and a collection of metal junk.