“It looks and even smells new,” said Reinhart. “I thought it was right out of the showroom.”
“You sure did.” Harper cackled. “I keep it washed and polished and I drive out every day and look at all the fools. I been retired for fifteen years and some say you don’t have anything to do, but they are wrong. There is always plenty of fools to look at. I wish I seen that crackup.” They were just passing the overturned Jag.
“Looks like it was a doozer,” said Reinhart. He glanced back at Eunice, who was breathing through her mouth and staring glassily at the dome light.
“You eloping?” asked Harper. “I buried my old woman last year. We was married for thirty-seven years.” He wore a short-sleeved sports shirt, buttoned all the way up to his turkey neck. “If I ain’t out in this machine, I’m home watching the fools on color TV. I never eat nothing but canned stuff. I haven’t had a banana since 1916, and I call salads rabbit food. I still got most of my teeth. I’m going to take the next exit onto 203.”
“Sounds like you’ve got everything under control,” said Reinhart.
“Call me anything but late for breakfast,” Harper said, turning carefully into the curving one-lane egress, which within fifty yards debouched onto a state road of blacktop flanked with motel and restaurant ads. “Sometimes,” he said, “I will stay the night in a tourist cabin and dirty every towel. I paid for them, didn’t I?” While resting at the stop sign he turned and winked. “Where would you like to be dropped, son?’
Reinhart scanned the several route signs. Rabb was 2½ miles to the left, Rumpelstiltskin to the right at 3, and, at 5, of all places, Berne.
“Berne,” said Reinhart. “Miss Munsing and I are associated with the Robert Sweet firm, with warehouses there.”
“That’s my neck of the woods,” said Harper. “I used to own and operate the grain-and-feed store there. I sold it to a Hebrew gentleman in 1954, but he turned out to be a real nice fellow. I don’t want to call you on it, but I never heard of any Sweet being thereabouts. Them old warehouses is on a railroad siding, but they closed down the Mount Whipple spur in ’56 and there isn’t no trains coming through town any more. You want a train, you drive to Babson.”
“Well then, you can drop us anyplace we can rent a car.”
“How’d you get way out where I picked you up without one?” Harper asked, tooling along at thirty.
“That was it in the ditch.”
“You just leaving it there?”
“Sure,” Reinhart said. “It is just so much useless metal if it doesn’t work. I have contempt for useless gadgets.”
Harper was impressed. He said: “Now, is that right?”
“You see,” said Reinhart, “no criticism of a man like you, who takes good care of things, but it really does my heart good to discard a seven-thousand-dollar car when the water hose breaks.”
Harper gave a thin whistle. “Look here,” he said, “if you ain’t got anything better to do, I’d be proud if you would come and have supper with me. It won’t be like when the old woman was living, but I can fill your gut.”
This touched Reinhart, and attracted him, but with as little time as he had left for warmblooded experience, he stuck to the idea of gaudier pleasures, and declined with thanks.
“Well then,” said Harper, bobbing his parchment skull at the windshield, “we can do it when you bring the machine back.”
“Huh?”
“I’m loaning you this here automobile. It won’t do you a thing to decline. There ain’t noplace in the whole township where they will rent you one.”
Reinhart asked in amazement: “You would lend your car, which you have maintained so perfectly, to a man who just wrecked and abandoned another?”
“I’m insured,” Harper said. “Anyway, all my life I’ve worked on hunches. I had a hunch a yellow-haired young girl would work out for a wife and I married her and lived with her for thirty-seven years. We fought all the time, but that was all right. I had six boys. One died when he was little, and another deserted from the Army in the war and stole a tank and was put in prison. The second one become a shyster lawyer. Alfred was some kind of moron and is in a home—you couldn’t put up with him, except at holidays like Halloween, where he would stand all day at the gate holding a little jack-o-lantern. What’s that leave?” He counted on his fingers, still clutching the steering wheel: raised the nails one by one. “There’s Henry, he sells combines upstate. And then Wallace, he become a cop in San Diego, California. I got eight grandchildren. Anyway, I got a hunch about you, and I don’t even know your name. You got spirit. I like that. I never all my life knew a man who would discard a machine, unless it was an old junker, but even then they would strip off the usable parts.”
“They do the same nowadays with human beings,” Reinhart said, modestly steering the conversation away from the subject of his expansive, and expensive, gesture. It was of course nothing compared to his decision to be frozen.
Harper said: “Your girl is mighty quiet.”
Reinhart looked into the back seat. “She’s sleeping, I think. Hey, Eunice.” She was not dead, her chest moved regularly. He said: “I might throw her away, too.”
The old man chortled. “Yes sir, you are something.”
“I guess you think I’m pretty ruthless,” said Reinhart. “I am. I am your typical thrill-seeker. I run through fantastic adventures while other people put in their normal, dull days. I observe no responsibilities towards anyone or -thing. I have no principles. I take women at my pleasure, use them, destroy them, toss them aside. I have a family somewhere, whom I abandoned years ago when my children were babies. At age twenty-one I beat up my sick old dad, robbed my mom’s purse, and left forever.”
Harper loved this account. Reinhart elaborated on it during the ride to Berne, which turned out to be the typical little rural-American village of pizzeria, Cantonese restaurant, Maserati showroom, cat hospital, and stereo center in the business district, before reaching which you passed a Rose Bowl-sized football field with a million dollars’ worth of illumination for night games.
Harper kept going through all of this, with many stops because of the sophisticated traffic-control system of a half-dozen types of electrical signals, painted lanes, and zebra crosswalks, and at length they reached a residential area where sunlight filtered through the sycamores and old houses were skirted in green latticework below their spacious verandas.
Reinhart abruptly forsook his lies to peer in joy. As a child he had visited someone’s great-aunt or third cousin in such a house, with even a stone cistern in back. A neighbor kid had tried to push him in it.
However, Harper continued into a tract of beastly ranch houses beyond and Reinhart made the usual cynical reflections to himself. His new power was fading again. This looked like the kind of place Gen had forced him to live for years. He knew from the outside where the toilets were situated, the door into the garage, and the garbage cans.
“You see,” he resumed, gesturing at a flabby man on his knees trimming the edges of the lawn while several benuded teen-agers lounged nearby with a transistor radio, “that’s the sort of thing, the sort of people, I run roughshod over. Possession-collectors, the imagination-deprived, the little frightened rump-kissers whose opinions are molded by the military-industrial complex.”
“Big defense plant in Babson,” said Harper.
“I happen to be a leftist,” Reinhart said. He was saying whatever came into his head, like one of those new, extemporaneous comedians who get audience suggestions and wing it.
“Figure you was from the way you’re got up,” Harper said, chuckling.
“I’d love to see everything burned down to the ground,” Reinhart stated. “That’s the only way you will eradicate racism and poverty and war and sex hangups.”
“They sell a lot of filth now in the drugstore,” Harper said. “You mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. They got a paperback with a pair of young fellows on the cover who look like girls: call it Donnie and Claude. C
ouple of Percies.”
Reinhart forgot himself for a moment of nostalgia. “God, I haven’t heard that word in years.”
“Cover shows ’em kissing each other on the mouth.” Harper shook his old head, but he didn’t seem to be seriously bothered.
They were approaching a park full of trailers, except the term was no longer used: “mobile homes” was the current designation when, like these, the containers were static and mounted on foundations of cinderblock and, often, surrounded by little picket fences enclosing growing plants, even birdbaths, iron animals, and mirrored balls.
Harper turned in there and drove the car into a slot beside a sort of refrigerator car of glistening aluminum. The next trailer, a peagreen affair with turquoise awnings over the airplane-type windows, was so close that Reinhart feared he would not be able to open the door sufficiently wide for his bulk. But it cleared. Indeed, there was yet space enough for a four-year-old girl in a bikini bottom to stand and write her name on the wall of her home. If her name was FUCK, that is. Reinhart took the crayon away from her and made it BOOK, an old device of his from the days when Blaine was a dwarf with a foul pencil.
He decided not to wake Eunice, and followed Harper up the little stair. The air-conditioning had been left at idle, and the interior was quite cool. Reinhart successfully resisted the clichéd urge to observe how much larger it looked inside than out.
“I got nineteen thousand five hundred for the old place when the wife died,” Harper said. “And then they ripped it down, built a prefab, and sold it for forty-seven. Figure they cleared fifteen. I got a flush toilet here, in case you have to take a trot on the china horse.” He went back the aisle, opened a metal door, reached in, and soon a recognizable gush was heard. “Filgas range,” he said, and going to the appropriate area, produced a blue flame. “Running water.” He filled a kettle at a little stainless-steel sink and put it on to boil. “Anything you want: hot coffee, tea, or ice-cold Fresca. I was put onto that by the commercials where it snows.” He opened a small half-refrigerator and revealed several shelvesful of cold cuts mummified in tight-wrapped plastic. “Now for this stew of mine, I slice up baloney, take a can of White Rose creamed corn—”
“It sounds great,” Reinhart said, “but coffee will be fine. I’m anxious to hit the road again. Listen, while the water is heating I’ll just nip out and find a public phone—there must be one here—and call a cab.”
“Not on your life,” the old man insisted. “I told you to take my car. I don’t need it till you bring it back, with the story of all the adventures you have in it. You are a real interesting fellow, make other youngsters look like frozen fish fillets.”
They drank freeze-dried Maxwell House, yellowed with non-dairy Pream. Harper then pressed the car keys and registration on Reinhart, and having switched on an enormous color TV which filled most of the trailer’s back end, lay down on one of the built-in bunks to watch it.
“Bring it back when convenient,” he said, watching a late-afternoon kids’ cartoon show in which a rickety little clerk turns into a monster at the utterance of a magic word. “Or if you wreck it and throw it away, take me a photo first.”
Eunice was gone or had dissolved into the dark stain of moisture on the back seat cover.
The moppet from the trailer next door had grown into a longhaired sylph of sixteen and packed her pectoral abundance into a ribbon an inch wide.
“Hey,” said Reinhart. “Did you see a girl leave this car?”
“Yeah. She hitched a ride a couple minutes ago.”
“What kind of car?”
“A panel truck.”
Reinhart pursed his lips. “Thanks.”
She wrinkled her little sun-kissed nose, lifting her upper lip so as to reveal only the very tips of the incisors.
“You wanna?”
Reinhart’s return expression was of the same genre. Then he shrugged slowly and said: “No thanks.”
“Chicken.”
Well, why not take Harper’s car? The old man relied on him. He got in.
The teen-ager looked through the other window.
“Fag,” she said.
She seemed about the age of the next-door Julie, whom he was falsely accused of having ravished. He now recognized his old platonic lust for teen-agers as having been pure and simple fear. Girls old enough to be fully sexed but so young as not to die for decades—he now saw the sentimentality of his old obsession. This maiden, for example, might at any hour be run down in the street or drown in a public pool. She was no more eternal than he, he who had in independent volition offered himself to ice.
“Go tell your mother she wants you,” he said and backed out. Anyway, he was not much interested in sex at this juncture, nor in food. A man whose time was precious should have more exalted aims than emptying and filling himself. The high-speed travel had however been profoundly rewarding, disclosing to him truths beyond the range of verbal or pictorial expression in a universe in which the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second. Yet there are stars whose sparkle takes countless years to reach our planet. And he had moved at a mere hundred and forty mph.
Well, that was done. Harper’s car, a 1964 Plymouth, seemed to be inhibited from exceeding fifty: the old guy probably had installed a governor to protect his property against the mechanics who serviced it. Reinhart motored serenely along the back roads, avoiding the big highway when astride such weak horses. It was obvious that Eunice preferred him square. The same thing might well be true of Blaine, and of Gen as well. He was now provoking, no longer provokable. He should go home and terrorize them.
He bumped over some grass-grown railway tracks. To the right were several long sheds, sheathed in undulating panels of iron that had lost its galvanization to orange rust, moss-green stains, purple corrosions: nature’s psychedelic turn-on of man-made materials. He drove in on a truck road of dust and stopped below a loading platform.
The warehouse doors were hasp-locked. This was where Bob Sweet kept his cocoa beans. Reinhart had been through the whole of Berne: this was the only place. He worked for Bob. Were Bob along, Reinhart would ask him: OK if I take a look at your cocoa beans? I have eaten a lot of chocolate in my life and never seen what it’s made from. That’s one of the things I’d like to do before I check out, strange as it may sound. I am gratifying whims nowadays.
And Bob would produce a key.
So Reinhart went to the car, opened the trunk, and found a jack handle. He inserted it between jamb and hasp and ripped the latter off with a scattering of screws. Surely enough, loaded gunnysacks filled the dusky interior. Reinhart withdrew his little pocketknifenail file and slashed one bag. A stream of pebblelike particulars clattered onto the wooden floor. Reinhart picked one up, rolled it between thumb and forefinger, took it out to the platform and appraised it in the light of the sinking sun. It was indeed a pebble.
With the whiskbroom of his left hand he gathered a right palm-load of cocoa beans, took it outside for assaying, and saw a handful of gravel.
There could be no mistake. Bob had definitely said cocoa. The words were not similar. “Gravel,” Reinhard said aloud and pitched it onto the tin roof, for the childish pleasure of the sound.
Were he a scientist, he would of course have had to examine more than one sack. Streckfuss had frozen a variety of small organisms before he was ready for a man. Or had he? One monkey. There were others in the capsules. Only one had been thawed. When the doctor tested you for allergies, he made several scratches with as many substances, but always left one untreated, as “control”: the physical abrasion alone might evoke a bump.
But another thing from which Reinhart was now liberated was the law of probability in its literal sense, the code of the professional seeker-for-knowledge. And it had not been the truth that made him free.
Sweet had lied. Every sack, in all three sheds, contained not cocoa beans but gravel: Reinhart was convinced of that. It could further be assumed that this fact was substantive to some sort of swindl
e. Bob had spoken of a loan for which the contents of these warehouses were security. You could not say gravel was cocoa in this age of computers and wiretapping and hidden tape recorders, electric eyes, and omniscient professional and private busybodies.
Even secret Mafia meetings were bugged and the minutes disseminated nationwide. Reinhart himself, for example, knew that Luigi Malefice, alias Pat O’Toole, suffered from hemorrhoids, subsidized a Little League team, kept a henna-haired mistress in Alpine, New Jersey, and channeled his illicit earnings through a quite legal restaurant-laundry business.
A queer on the very staff of the White House had been publicly exposed. Everybody knew everything if it was shameful, and almost everything seemed to be, under its rind. Yet to take the Mafia alone, its activities seemed to be, openly, more profitable every year, its leaders, known, farther than ever from jail. If the whole FBI and the combined police departments of the nation could not nail Malefice, why could not Bob Sweet pass off three warehouses full of gravel as cocoa beans to some Midwestern bank?
On the other hand, Reinhart had been scandalously wrong in his easy assessment of Streckfuss as an old Nazi. There were better things to do with life than getting the goods on other people.
The precedent represented by Otto was useless for Reinhart’s purposes because the monkey could not speak. But Streckfuss had also injected goat-liver cells into the moribund Splendor Mainwaring.
Reinhart drove Harper’s car in the direction of his old homestead.
17
“So,” Reinhart said to Splendor, with reference to his own activities during the twenty years since they had last had a real talk, “I guess you could say I have survived, though I haven’t prevailed, to allude to the Nobel Prize speech of the late William Faulkner.”
“I have read some of his literary works, but frankly found them to miss the point,” Splendor said. “You know, my own immediate origins are in the South. Did you ever see that contemporaneous caricature of the first Negro-American members of a Southern legislature during Reconstruction days, feet up on desks, cigars between teeth, making a mockery of the institution?”
Vital Parts Page 38
