“Now don’t do that,” said Reinhart. “Winona, stop that this instant! Do you hear me? The cake undoubtedly arrived after my exit, and no issue. … Winona?”
“Well, you know when I get hungry I can’t help myself.” She made some snuffling sounds.
“Unfortunately, dear,” said Reinhart, “I did not have a chance to explain to you earlier that your mother and I have decided to go our separate ways. We have different careers, you know. It is as simple as that. Time marches on. Before you know it, you’ll be off on your own. Have you picked a profession yet?”
Winona answered gaily: “Still airline stewardess. You get to see the world for free!” She chortled.
“That’s just fine,” Reinhart said, deflecting his sigh. “But you’ve still a couple of years of high school left. Maybe something else will turn up. I wouldn’t set my heart on any one thing, Winona. Maybe a millionaire will marry you.”
She said soberly: “I don’t want to get married. I hate fights.”
This caught Reinhart in a sensitive place. “I’m sorry about that, dear. …” But he really didn’t know what else to say that would neither confirm her desolate view nor hypocritically deny it. “You might think about Scandinavian Airlines,” he said. “I think they serve smorgasbord. … Say, Winona, is your mother there?”
“I’ll call her. But, Daddy, will I ever see you again in all my life?”
“You certainly will, dear. I’m going to get my own apartment any day now, and the first thing I’m going to do is make a big potful of chili con carne and—”
“With spaghetti?”
“Sure, if you want it, and grated cheese and chopped onions and a fried egg on top. Then strawberry shortcake to follow.”
“Bread pudding! Please, Daddy.”
“You name it, Winona.”
“Golly, I love you, Daddy. I’ll get Mother.”
But a male voice came on next. Reinhart at first took it for Harlan Flan, Gen’s boss and intended, and the swelling veins closed his throat.
Fighting this effect, he gave himself over to glottal adjustments while the voice said: “Sir, you are an unmitigated scoundrel.”
It was Gen’s father, the elder Blaine. He went on: “Only my girl’s intercession saved you from a savage thrashing at my hands the day you brought her home, years ago, after molesting her repeatedly and then conducting a charade before a J.P. to escape prosecution. Years of pain and humiliation ensued, brightened only by her magnificent son. Else I would have stepped in earlier and crushed you like the sewer rat you are.”
Reinhart actually felt a certain relief. “One good thing has come out of it,” he said. “I don’t have to be polite to you any more, you yellow skunk. The next time I see you, Raven, and I don’t care how old you are, I am going to hit you in the mouth with all my might and watch what happens to your front teeth.”
Raven cleared his throat. He said: “There’s no reason why we can’t conduct ourselves like gentlemen. In fact, it will be easier on all parties if your lawyer handles it. I say that for your own good, Carl. Personally I have never considered myself your enemy.”
“I know it was you who told Genevieve about a certain Gloria,” said Reinhart. “But sending that photographer today was lower than I thought even you could sink.”
Raven regained some of his aplomb. “I reject that allegation,” said he. “I sent no cameraman anywhere. I can state that without fear of contradiction.”
“You knew about Gloria because you are a whores’ lawyer.” Reinhart said. He felt reckless though having taken in no liquids recently except the Y’s watery coffee. “That in my opinion is worse than being a client, any old day.”
Raven was almost back to normal. “I abhor hooliganism,” he said. “It must be expunged without mercy. Excessive pigmentation is not an ameliorating circumstance. I carry a derringer now in my waistcoat pocket. If anyone toys with me I’ll blow off his kinky head.”
Reinhart stared at the dirty wall of the phone booth, with its smeared numbers. In all these years he had never recognized that Raven was insane. He felt deprived. You cannot hate a madman.
He said: “This has nothing to do with colored people.”
“The lines of battle are clearly drawn at last,” said Raven, “and that is a relief.”
Reinhart said, with a sudden suspicion: “Are you talking to me?”
“I am discussing social matters with my splendid grandson,” Raven replied. “I find, to my immense gratification, that we are very close in our thinking. He is in the mainstream of the Raven tradition. Our men are bold, our women compassionate.”
“If Blaine is near the phone, I want to speak to him.”
“He is shaking his head in negation,” said Raven. “You have alienated the youth with your liberal mess of pottage, with your sheenylike quest for the quick buck, with your elastic nigger morality.” Reinhart could hear a peal of Blaine II’s offstage laughter.
“Raven,” he said, “I never thought I’d feel any sympathy for you, but I do now. You are being had. Ordinarily that wouldn’t bother me, because I have always considered your opinions loathsome, but I now find yours preferable to his, because you are quite alone. It would be different of course were we in Nazi Germany. But Blaine not only wants to destroy this country: he may be capable of bringing that destruction about. You are merely an isolated crank—”
Raven was apparently talking to Blaine again: “I’d like to see that entire community razed and the earth sown with salt. I have always believed Chicago an abomination.”
The Windy City had been the site of several of the conventions at which Raven’s form of revelry had verged on the pathological. He had bombed pedestrians with beer bottles from a window in the Palmer House, and on another occasion had started, by willfully igniting the drapes, the fire that gutted a suite in the Blackstone Hotel.
“Raven, Raven, you don’t know what you’re doing!”
Raven said to him: “You jest, surely. We are wading chest-high through a swamp of excrement. My club has been forced to accept as members a half-dozen gorillas who take their lunch with Coca-Cola and perfume the showers with swarthy sweat. I carry a cattle-prod in the locker room, I who have yet to adjust to the obscene sight of hairy Jewboys on the jogging track, I must await my turn on the trampoline back of a squat simian.”
“Raven,” Reinhart cried. “Blaine admires the black militants. They don’t want to join your club. They want to burn it down.”
“I’ll supply the petrol,” said Raven. “If we have to have coons, then I say let them be as savage as possible and not pretend to be gentlemen. I respect the warlike Watusi, who remain in Africa. We have been the recipient of the scum of all lands, drink-rotted Irishmen, Neapolitan thugs, pigfaced Heinie draft-dodgers, and the cretinous coolies from Asia who cannot iron a shirt without leaving scorchmarks. Standards of excellence have vanished out of memory. It takes a first-class letter four days to travel across town. I am seldom served a glass of wine that is not flecked with sediment. I raise an arm to hail a taxi and my wristwatch strap disintegrates, and the cabman, arrogant with the success of his last strike, the settlement of which assured him a handsome income for cruising empty all day, ignores me. In all this city I cannot find a man who can tune a Weber carburetor, or French-polish burl walnut, or repair a Purdy shotgun, or clean a Lock hat.”
Someone began to bang on the glass of the booth.
Reinhart said: “All right, these are capricious matters, Raven, mainly errors of omission and so on. What I am trying to tell you is that Blaine has no program whatever. He merely wants to destroy what exists. He has no plan to rebuild. His aims are all vicious, wanton, and—”
“As are mine,” said Raven. “I should like to detonate a nuclear weapon in the District of Columbia. I should warn only the Marine commandant, certainly not those potbellied, eyeglassed, baggy-uniformed buffoons of the Army who have permitted a ragtag band of rickshaw-pullers to humiliate them in the Orient.”
&nbs
p; Reinhart looked out to see who was waiting for the phone, and a willowy young man stuck out a purple tongue at him.
“What was that stuff about Chicago?” Reinhart asked with sudden urgency.
“The Democrat Convention,” Raven answered. “My grandson intends to go there and disrupt it, and I am wishing him Godspeed and a steady trigger finger. I’d like to see the charlatan they nominate dropped, on television, with one well-placed round.” Raven snickered. “But I have warned him off the Mannlicher-Carcano, with Japanese scope, which is not effective in less than three.” He turned serious. “Oswald was trained in the Corps, so we must blame the weapon.”
Reinhart let the handpiece dangle and pushed out of the booth. He was conscious that the waiting fairy made an aspirate remark but he did not register its details. He made his way to the directory rack, against the exterior wall of the third booth, and searched for the listing of the FBI. There was none. “Faze, Harry L.” gave way to “Fealy, Mrs. Marjorie.” All his life Reinhart had been impersonally adjured to “contact your local FBI office” if he sighted a wanted man or had reason to believe a federal law might be broken in the foreseeable future. Little did he suspect they would have an unlisted number.
The whole thing was a lie, J. Edgar Hoover a composite photograph of the platonic ideal of a watchdog. Reinhart knew he was panicking, and loosened his belt buckle. But a good many public figures had been gunned down in the 1960’s, from Malcolm X across the spectrum to the American Nazi Rockwell. Anybody eminent, for good or ill, was a clay pigeon. Hey, there’s a top guy: let’s be egalitarian and cut him down! This had replaced the old cry: Let’s get a beer, or play pool, or get a piece of ass!
Get hold of yourself, Reinhart. Reflect. Use the old cocoanut. Of course: he must look under “Federal.” There it was. He kept repeating the number as he rushed in and out of the two dead-phone booths. The fag was vivaciously using the third. Reinhart pounded on the glass, and the swish opened the door a crack to say, furiously: “Go pee in your hat!”
Reinhart convinced himself he had transposed certain digits in the FBI number. He decided to look it up again when he found another working telephone. He stepped out of the Y into the night air, a mixture of heat and soot with the consistency of tear gas. The police could flush a killer from his stronghold by lobbing in canisters of ozone.
Reinhart saw three dark figures coming towards him when he reached the end of the block. They were between street lamps, and he could not ascertain their degree of pigmentation. On such a night everybody was Negro. Reinhart wondered whether he might be scaring them, but found this technique unconvincing, and crossed the street on a long slant. When he was opposite the trio he saw they were white priests. Well, you never knew. It was exactly a man of goodwill like himself who would be attacked by vengeful blacks, whereas a Blaine Raven would go scotfree. He saw a sidewalk phone booth, gained it, and heaved himself inside. He was now imprisoned in a lighted glass cube, visible at great range to night-stalkers, whereas for his part he could see only reflections of himself.
The black plastic directory-holder hung limp. A vandal had made away with the book and also the center-disk of the dial. The armored cable had also been chewed at, and when Reinhart lifted the handpiece it disintegrated into separate parts. Somehow he reunited them, put his dime in the slot, and wonderfully heard the electronic hum. He screwed in the cap of the mouthpiece. Someone had mutilated this device for no motive that was apparent to him, just as they chopped up park benches and destroyed public drinking fountains. Prosperous schoolboys had burned a bus last term. Jubilant fans had wrecked an entire stadium after their college had won the traditional Thanksgiving football contest. None of these incidents could be called valid social protests.
He did what he should have done earlier, got the FBI number from Information and used it. When it was answered, he hung up. Dialed half of it a second time, and hung up. Neither experience nor fantasy prepared him to blow the whistle on his son. He had nothing on him but hearsay. A skinny young kid could not merely shoot a public figure. Though both Oswald and Sirhan had so done. But Blaine did not believe in violence—his abhorrence of it was so great he thought anyone advocating it should be shot. He believed that the president of a university in which there was an ROTC unit should be hanged and not in effigy. He was an absolute pacifist, but had cheered at the Communist gains in the Tet Offensive. He thought the President should be put to death as a war criminal, but he advocated Ché Guevara’s theory that what the world needed was more Vietnams.
But he was personally pacific: witness his behavior in the men’s room at the Gastrointestinal System. Of course, he had been alone and unarmed. But he had always hated guns as a boy. It had been Reinhart who played with the cardboard shooting gallery, plastic parakeets which when hit with a cork from a little spring-powered rifle revolved on a wire.
A veritable monster of a Negro was glowering at Reinhart through the phone-booth glass and would put an eight-inch switchblade in his belly when he emerged. With such a fiend it would not serve to hand over one’s wallet. He would take that anyway when he ransacked your inert body. He would punish Reinhart for what the slaveholders had done before Reinhart’s forebears had set foot in America.
Reinhart slid the door open. He said: “I am unarmed and nonviolent.”
The Negro came around from the side. He said: “I am sorry to trouble you, but my wife is pregnant and about to deliver and my car has broken down.” He was seething with worry.
Reinhart said: “That’s OK. She will be just OK. Don’t you worry. Everything will come out just fine.”
He remembered how it had been when Gen’s time had come. Speeding to the hospital, Reinhart had been ticketed by a traffic cop who was totally ignorant of the traditions of emergency. Reinhart had a history of encounters with literal policemen and letter-of-the-law. Gen hadn’t helped, her coat arranged in such a fashion that she did not look pregnant, and nonchalantly smoked a cigarette though ten minutes earlier she had threatened to deliver on the garage floor.
He could not imagine Blaine with a gun. It was of course pure rhetoric. Reinhart could well recall youth’s easy way with verbal extravagance.
He watched the Negro talk anxiously into the phone. He felt a proprietary interest in the man’s baby, as yet unborn, cute little chocolate-colored rascal who might grow up into a hate-crazed militant. You never knew. What a lottery it was.
But nowadays people realized their threats. Negro gangs waged open warfare with municipal police departments. Students set out candidly to destroy hallowed old colleges. He had himself seen Blaine buying marijuana and standing naked in the bedroom of the girl next door. He had perused some statistics in a national magazine which revealed that a certain percentage of eleven-year-olds had already had sexual intercourse. There were now organized revolutionaries in high schools.
Public order would soon be a thing of the past. Already the streets were jungles. Had that colored guy been a ruffian, Reinhart would have had his back to the wall, alone. Passersby would have averted their heads, motorists speeding by. The old beat cop was now in a car, unavailable unless you broke a traffic law. The Supreme Court freed convicted murderers on technicalities. Peace-parade marchers carried the enemy flag. Heroin users were on the relief rolls. The President pleased everybody when he said he would quit at the end of the term. The war was apparently lost but would not end.
In a certain state of mind you could say that life in America was shitty, though the standard of living was at an all-time high. In the abstract the idea of dropping whatever impotent windbag the Democrats nominated was not without attraction. Line him up in the old crosshairs, take a breath, let it half out, and squeeze. It was spoiled by his being a man, a skinful of protoplasm that would run like an egg when the shell was broken.
“Are you all right?” It was the Negro gentleman, who had left the booth. In his own extremity he could yet feel concern for a stranger. This gave Reinhart a lump in the throat.
; “I’m a little heat-sick I think,” he answered. “Did you get an ambulance?”
“My brother-in-law is coming right over. You can always count on him. I must get back. You take care of yourself, you hear?” He was walking backwards. “Go home and put a cold rag on your forehead.”
Reinhart knew a great love for the race. Victims of persecution were invariably the nicest people. For example, never in his life had Reinhart met a nasty Jew. And even Captain Storm had not been impolite. … He must not panic. There were all sorts of decent folks around. America was still the only place on earth where you could quickly make a million, and one of the few where you could state your case and be heard.
Blaine was no Lee Harvey Oswald. Rest assured, the Democratic Convention would be the same old bore of endless “caucuses,” ugly word, and “Man who” speeches. Reinhart had been worn out for organized politics as a boy in a Republican family: on the other side it had been Roosevelt every time.
Problems enough remained: the divorce, the false accusation of paternity, the possibility of Streckfuss being an old Nazi, and the disappearance of Bob Sweet. There was a bill for the room rent in Reinhart’s box at the Y.
“Listen,” he said to Eunice on entering the office next morning. “I am out of funds. Can’t you cable Bob to authorize some money for me? Or can I sign a chit for petty cash?”
Eunice wore a chain-mail dickey, a breastplate of linked brass coins, over bare flesh. When she exhaled it hung loose, beyond her breasts.
“I can never remember town names or book titles or airplane schedules,” she said indifferently. “If I want to fly somewhere I go to the airport and say, ‘Where would you like to send me?’ I might end up on Air Pakistan and land in Karachi. Which reminds me. Would you like some chota hazri?”
While Reinhart colored, assuming this was an obscene term similar to poongtang, Eunice threw a paper bag at him. When opened it revealed a glazed doughnut.
Vital Parts Page 33
