Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  “Brent the meteorologist,” Will said. “I watched him at six. Not at eleven. I didn’t watch the eleven.”

  “Neither did I.” Dinkins said. “I got drunk.”

  “Because of me?”

  “No, Mister Baggett. Because of Barfield Simpson.”

  Will could feel his face flush. He started to speak, thought better of it.

  “He’s dying, you know,” Dinkins said.

  Will stared. “He said he was sick. I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “Bladder cancer. A couple of months, maybe less. He told his doctor he’s just gonna let nature take its course.”

  Old Man Simpson’s face flashed in Will’s mind -- the sallow, sagging skin, the tiny fractures around his eyes that Will recognized now as the fault lines of fear.

  “I didn’t know,” he said again, softly. He felt ashamed.

  Dinkins took off his cap and rubbed his hand through his thin straggle of gray hair. It was the first time Will had ever seen him hatless. He wore the hat as he would have an armored helmet, indoors and out. He looked especially old now, and vulnerable and incredibly sad.

  “You’ve known him a long time,” Will said.

  Dinkins settled the cap back on his head. “We went to high school together. Barfield’s family had money, mine were mill people. But we were pretty good friends. When both of us came back out of the war, Barfield bought a radio station and he offered me a job. Then he put the TV station on the air. I stayed on all these years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Will said. It sounded incredibly lame. “When did you find out?”

  “Right after I saw you yestiddy afternoon. After that Krupp fellow left, I went up to Barfield’s office and I said, ‘Barfield, what in the hell’s going on here?’ And that’s when he told me. All of it.”

  “What are you going to do, Mister Dinkins?”

  Dinkins got slowly, painfully to his feet. “Oh, I already quit. Went by this morning and turned in my keys. Now I’m gonna go home and think about what I’ll do with the rest of my life. I’m considering Alaska.”

  “Alaska?”

  “Always wondered what it would be like up there. When I came back out of the Navy in ‘45, I was all set to go to Alaska. Had a little money saved up. You could get a homestead up there pretty cheap in them days. But then I met this little girl and we got married and had a baby and Barfield Simpson offered me a job. So it just never quite worked out.”

  “Until now.”

  “I reckon I’m free to go. I’ll have a little retirement money, Social Security. I imagine I can make it okay.”

  He started off down the walk toward his car, then stopped and turned back to Will. “Some of the kids in the newsroom want to come over. They’re real torn up over this.”

  Will hesitated.

  “If you’d rather not…”

  “Not just yet,” Will said. “Tell ’em to give me a couple of days. Get my legs under me.”

  “They think a lot of you.”

  Will felt the sting of tears and fought to hold them back. He raised a hand. It was all he could do for the moment. Dinkins turned away again.

  “Mister Dinkins…”

  Dinkins stopped and looked back at him.

  “Do you feel betrayed?” Will asked.

  “Oh, I guess I could if I wanted to,” Dinkins answered. “So could Barfield Simpson. You talk about betrayal, Barfield’s body has plumb let him down. But I don’t have time to feel betrayed, Will. And Barfield ain’t got no time at all.”

  Dinkins turned around again and kept walking. It was, Will thought, the first time Dinkins had ever called him by his first name. He would have reciprocated, but he couldn’t for the life of him think what Dinkins’ first name was. They had just never been on a first-name basis.

  “They offered me fifty thousand dollars to keep my mouth shut,” Will called out as Dinkins opened the door of his old Ford.

  “Take it, Will,” Dinkins said with a grin. “Want to go to Alaska with me? We could have some good times.”

  “No,” Will said. “You go ahead.”

  Dinkins gave him a wave and got into the car and drove off, leaving Will on the steps in his bathrobe. He looked again at the Christian Construction and Renovators panel truck in the driveway. It was blocking his own car. But then, Will thought, he didn’t have anywhere to go. After awhile he got up and went back in the house to call Clarice.

  *****

  “ Some Christians are over here destroying our house,” he said when he finally reached her on her cell phone at mid-morning. “Listen.” He walked from the living room back toward the kitchen, holding up the cordless so she could hear the banging and smashing. The back wall was nothing but two-by-four studs now, and the Christians were inside the house, ripping away plaster and the lath work underneath, exposing the house to the fine Spring day. Through the studs he could see the growing pile of debris in the back yard, ruining his grass.

  “Will…Will!” he could hear her shouting through the phone. He put it to his ear. “All right. I hear it. That’s enough.”

  “Well?”

  “I didn’t know they were coming this morning.” He could hear the impatience in her voice as he retreated again to the living room. She was probably with clients. From Darien or Salt Lake City. And look at all this cabinet space!

  “ I didn’t know they were coming at all,” he said. “I had no earthly idea that people would be destroying my home this morning or any other morning. A natural disaster, I could handle that. Shit happens. But this…”

  “I told you about the addition.”

  “But that was four years ago.”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Everything’s changed.”

  He could hear voices in the background, then a muffled scratching as she cupped her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. After a moment she took her hand away and he heard her say, “…a really terrific deck. I’ll be on out in a moment.” Then she spoke into the phone again. “Will, the world can’t stop just because you’ve lost your job.”

  “How the hell do you think we’re gonna pay for this?”

  “I told you I would save up the money. I did.”

  “We may need that to live on.”

  “For God sakes,” she said, exasperated. “You’ll find another job.”

  “I don’t want another job.”

  “You’re sounding peevish.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “What about the fifty thousand dollars they offered?”

  “To hell with them.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Go get the money, Wilbur. Stop acting like a spoiled child.” There was a long, pained silence and when she finally spoke again her voice was calm and soothing. “I’m sorry. I know how upset you are. I’m upset too. But life goes on. Take their money. It’ll be okay, Will. It’ll work out. Have you talked to Morris?”

  “No.”

  “Call him. I’ll see you for dinner.”

  * * * *

  Shortly before two o’clock he was in Morris deLesseps’ office, sunk deep in a leather armchair while Morris, feet hiked on his huge mahogany desk, flipped through the pages of Will’s contract.

  Morris had been his friend at Chapel Hill, then later on, best man at his wedding. He was from an old Charleston family, French Hugenot stock -- impoverished gentility, to hear Morris talk about them.

  Will thought Morris really should have been an actor. He was constantly reinventing himself -- two wives before he was thirty and two more since, a series of legal personas. He had at one point favored buckskin jackets and cowboy boots in the fashion of a flamboyant lawyer who was frequently on television. At another, he had draped himself in sleek dark double-breasted pinstripe accented by paisley pocket handkerchiefs and had slicked back his longish hair with an Esquire-style wet look. He had spent a year in ponytail and denim, another in leather and cigars. He was now in a tweed-pipe-penny-loafer-half-rim-glasses phase, drove a Saab with rec
kless abandon, and had taken up skeet shooting. He affected a cheerful breeziness, alternated with somber introspection. He read John Grisham and the existentialist philosophers. In his pinstripe-and-Gucci existence, he had been a master of quip and one-liner, delivered in Bronx staccato. Now, he had become an accomplished raconteur, charming dinner guests with rambling, bitingly-witty stories drawn from his legal and personal experiences, readings, gossip, imagination. Half the stuff, Will thought, he probably made up. Himself, he made up.

  Morris molded and transformed his personality to fit whatever trappings -- wife, attire, professional interest -- went with the latest version of himself. He seemed to slide as easily and completely from one improvisation to another as if he had emerged newborn from the womb. To his friends and a succession of legal colleagues who had come and gone through the years, it was both exasperating and intriguing. If you didn’t like the present Morris, just wait. If you did, watch out. Who knew the real Morris deLesseps, they asked each other? Was there one?

  Through it all, he was a hugely successful attorney -- clever in the courtroom, skillful in the board room. His clients ran the gamut from Research Triangle conglomerates to death row inmates. And he had impeccable political connections of every imaginable stripe. He had himself served a two-year term in the legislature and had at various times been conservative, liberal, moderate, and now something he vaguely described as “compassionate pragmatist.”

  His legal digs invariably reflected the seasons of his life. He was at the moment surrounded by wood, brass and leather -- walnut-paneled walls, burgundy-upholstered seating, oil paintings of English country scenes, vast mahogany desk, the muted elegance of it housed in an old downtown Raleigh office building along the Fayetteville Street pedestrian mall, a block from the Wake County Courthouse. He had put together a group of investors to buy and renovate the building at enormous expense. He rented out most of it to a select clientele -- other lawyers, investment advisors, real estate developers, venture capitalists, a well-known and slightly notorious plastic surgeon who specialized in ladies’ facial features -- and kept the top floor for himself and the two junior attorneys who completed his present firm.

  Will thought that Clarice’s parents, the socially-correct and old-money Greensboro Palmers, would be quite comfortable with the current version of Morris deLesseps. What he might become next year, well that was another thing entirely. At the wedding twenty-five years before he had been outrageous -- stuffing the back seat of Will’s honeymoon-bound car with a giant pink foam rubber penis before he delivered the car to the front door of the Greensboro Country Club at the end of the reception. The Palmers had extravagantly pretended not to notice.

  Morris had been Will and Clarice’s attorney since he finished law school. He handled wills and trusts and real estate transactions, advised on the tax ramifications of investments. He was, no matter what drama or comedy he had chosen to star in at any given moment, a thoroughly efficient and competent lawyer. Morris might screw around with his head, but not with the law.

  Just now, he was seeing Will Baggett’s contract with Channel Seven for the first time. His brow knit in concentration as he flipped the pages, eyebrows going up at one point, mouth pursing at another. He finished and peered at Will over the tops of the half-rim glasses. “Been practicing long, Wilbur?”

  “Practicing? What…”

  “The law.”

  Will shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Morris at his dry, sarcastic best. “I just,” his hand fluttered briefly in the air, “always handled it myself. A gentleman’s agreement.”

  Morris tapped the contract sharply with the nails of two fingers. “Well, those gentlemen have you by the short hairs, boy.”

  “No, uh…”

  “Not a damn bit of wiggle room. This thing is as toxic as nuclear waste.” He lowered his feet from the desk, sat forward in his big leather chair and leaned across toward Will. “Now, you could possibly argue the restraint of trade thing.”

  Will sat up, feeling a tiny winged thrill of hope. “Restraint of trade?”

  “The non-compete clause.”

  “Uh huh.” Will waited for Morris to go on, but instead he reached for one of the pipes in the rack at the front of his desk, an odd-looking thing with a bowl of gnarled dark wood and a long, curved stem. He took a long time packing it carefully with tobacco from a leather-encased humidor, tamping it with a small silver device, lighting it finally with a brass lighter that he held sideways over the bowl. He sucked, exhaled a brief, short burst of smoke. He smiled across the pipe at Will.

  “Restraint of trade. The non-compete clause,” Will reminded him.

  Morris held the pipe about ear level with one hand, picked up the contract with the other. “Question is, is a non-compete clause a restraint of trade? When you tell a fellow he can’t go work for somebody else, are you depriving him of his right to make a living?” Morris put down the contract and stuck the pipe back in his mouth.

  “So? Are you?”

  Morris puffed a couple of puffs, cogitating. “Well, it depends. Case law is all over the map on it. Sometimes it’s restraint of trade, sometimes it’s a company’s right to protect itself from unfair competition.”

  “And in my case?”

  “You could go to court and find out.”

  “Could I win?”

  “Maybe. With a judge, or a judge and a jury, you never know.”

  Will could feel exasperation creeping like hives up the back of his neck. “All right, Morris. Tell me what the hell I should do. I’ve lost my job and I want it back. Can I get it?”

  “Not the one you had. They’ve got you dead to rights on that one. You signed a contract that said if somebody else buys the place, they don’t have to keep you on, even if you had a contract. Which you don’t.”

  “Can they keep me from working at another station?”

  “Maybe. Maybe even probably.”

  Will jumped to his feet. “Goddamn, Morris! Will you speak common English instead of that Justice Brandeis bullshit?”

  Morris gazed calmly, benignly up at him and made a little gesture with his pipe, waving Will back to the chair. “Whoa, son. Easy there.”

  Will sat back down -- hot, flushed, throat constricted.

  “Justice Brandeis,” he smiled. “Yeah. Nice thought, Will.”

  “Common English,” Will repeated.

  “Okay.” Morris parked the pipe in a brass-and-glass ashtray, leaned back and made a little tent of his hands beneath his chin. “We could sue, alleging restraint of trade, and ask for an injunction declaring the non-compete clause unenforceable. We might win. We might lose. Might depend on whether the judge’s underwear is too tight on any given day. At any rate, I would charge you a shit-pot full of money to handle the case and it could take, oh…” a wave of his hand, “eighteen months to wend its deliberate way through the judicial system of Wake County.”

  “Hell, the non-compete is only a year,” Will said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So win or lose, it’s a moot point.”

  “We both deduce that it is.”

  Will stared at his hands, his mind blank for a long moment. He studied the lines and angles of his hands and wrists, the ridges in his fingernails. Nothing in particular occurred to him except that his fingers were beginning to look pudgy. He looked back at Morris, who was studying him, waiting.

  Will spread his hands in resignation. “So…”

  “Right. Take the money, lay low, wait it out.”

  “You know about the money?”

  “I talked to Arthur Krupp right after you called this morning. Also, to one of the legions of learned attorneys that Spectrum Broadcasting has on retainer. This particular fellow combines the best of Harvard and Attica.” Morris lifted a single sheet of paper from the desktop. “We agreed on the wording of a statement you might make to the media.”

  “Hey, wait just a damned minute!”

  “I said ‘might.’”

  He han
ded it across to Will. Morris had written it out in longhand, black ink on yellow legal pad, a flowing, elegant script. My God, the man has even changed his handwriting. His college class notes had been a primitive scrawl -- virtually verbatim, but almost illegible. Will read:

  “After twenty rewarding and enjoyable years at Channel Seven, it is

  time for me to move on to other opportunities and challenges. I thank the loyal viewers who have allowed me to visit in their homes, and I wish the new owners of Channel Seven every success in the future.”

  Will crumpled the sheet and tossed it onto Morris’s desk. Morris picked it up, uncrumpled it, smoothed it out with the palm of his hand. “I’ll have my secretary type it up and fax it to the media,” he said. “Fifty thousand dollars is a nice sum of money, Will. You can sit on the verandah and sip mint juleps and play in the yard for a year. Then go to one of the other stations. A couple have expressed some interest.”

  “They have?”

  “Yes. I’ve had calls this morning. Very discreet, you understand. Nobody wants to get in a legal pissing match with Spectrum Broadcasting over a non-compete clause. And, they’ve got non-competes in their own employee contracts. But when the year is up… Hell, son, you’re Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman.”

  Will grunted.

  Morris lifted a telephone receiver, held it halfway to his ear. “Meantime, you might find something else you like more. Lots of people in this town would love to have Will Baggett on their payroll. I’ll keep my ears open.”

  “Clarice suggested politics,” Will said drily.

  “Bingo. City council, maybe even mayor. With fifty thousand dollars and your name, you could probably get elected.”

  “Not that I know anything about politics.”

  “Hell, Wilbur, this is a citizen democracy we’ve got here. Any half-wit with a filing fee can get on the ballot. Now, that would give Spectrum Broadcasting a case of heartburn. The guy they showed the door, deciding all manner of public policy that might affect a broadcasting station. Whooo-doggies.”