by Lewis Shiner
*
Cole turned out to be correct in his guess that Alex’s brother Jimmy would know a guy who knew a guy. After the buy, he drove to Charlene’s shoddy apartment in South Austin without calling first, unsure what he was likely to find and not caring.
She answered the door after his second knock. She’d lost some weight, and the spark was gone from her eyes. She looked Cole up and down and said, “Yeah? What do you want?”
Cole showed her the translucent envelope of white powder he’d just scored. “I was thinking you might show me how to use this. You alone?”
She nodded. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It is.”
Charlene was a movie fan, and not above the occasional touch of drama herself. She pulled the door wide open and said, “Enter freely and of your own free will.”
*
Madelyn’s consciousness had just started to float away, like a balloon from the hand of a careless child. She was vaguely aware of the clean smell of Paul’s skin where her head rested on his chest, and then she wasn’t, and then his voice pulled her back. “Let’s get married,” he said.
“Can’t,” Madelyn said. “Sleeping.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
She’d heard, but hadn’t processed it. The surprise made her eyes pop open. She got up on one forearm to look at him. The only light came from a lamp with a bandana draped over the shade. “You’ve known me three months. I think we should wait and discuss this when you’re not experiencing post-coital hormone distortions.”
“When it’s for real, it happens fast. I knew I wanted to marry you the first time I met you.”
“Let’s stipulate, for the moment, that you really do know me as well as you think you do. I still haven’t got you figured out.”
“That’s because,” he said, “you’re still trying to pigeon-hole me. Pinko radical or capitalist tool.”
“I want to know what turned you from one to the other.”
“I’m the same person I was when I occupied Sproul Hall.”
“Only with an mba and working for General Electric.”
“Exactly. And, if things work out, for the imf.”
“Would the Paul Kirk of 1965 have taken a job with the imf?”
“If he knew what I know now. You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not as a rule, no. I think something happened to you in Africa, which you’re keeping me in the dark about.”
“I talk about it.”
“C’mon, Paul. Get real.”
“If I tell you about my life-changing Peace Corps experience, then will you marry me?”
“I damn sure won’t marry you if you don’t.”
He changed position so he was looking her in the eye. “Nothing happened to me personally. But I saw things… They sent me to Nigeria, okay? In 1968.”
“Sorry, those years are a little blurry for me.”
“How about Biafra, does that ring a bell?”
Though he wasn’t being sarcastic, she heard the bitterness in his tone. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no.”
“Biafra tried to secede from Nigeria in 1967, which started a civil war that lasted two and a half years. It was tanks and guns, but it was mostly a war of starvation. At one point ten thousand people a day were dying of hunger. A day. Every day. Day after day after day. They killed over two million men, women, and children.
“Biafra was in the southeast, and the Peace Corps sent me to the north. Which, to give the rebels their due, probably should have been a separate country. They were Moslems and they had a Sultan who was the civil and religious leader all in one. The Biafrans were mostly Christian, ethnically Ibo, had a democratic political system. I was teaching secondary school, ten- to sixteen-year-olds, and that part was pretty great. The kids were hungry to learn. Almost entirely boys, of course. But the poverty—I mean, kids with flies crawling in their eyes, dirt-floored houses that people shared with their goats and chickens, if they were lucky enough to have goats and chickens. No running water or toilets, just buckets that got emptied twice a week onto a truck that you could smell a mile away.
“We got refugees all the time. I know you’ve seen the pictures, these kids with stomachs like basketballs and little pipestem arms. And no matter how many times the government tried to warn them, and I tried to warn them, they would let the kids have whatever they wanted to eat and then the kids would get refeeding syndrome in three or four days because their electrolytes were all screwed up, and they’d go into a coma or cardiac arrhythmia or convulsions and end up dead anyway, just when they thought they’d made it and their worries were over.
“Those refugee kids, they’d tell stories of piles of corpses, and rape, and torture, I mean, kids who should have been playing with dolls or puppies, kids the same age as Ava. If they did manage to survive, those kids are going to have those images in their heads for the rest of their lives.
“But that wasn’t what did it to me. What did it was the money. They raised millions all over the world to help those starving kids and the Army and the politicians hijacked virtually every dollar of it. That was what made me see that most of the ways we try to change the world are a complete waste of time and moral energy. I mean, people were signing petitions, for God’s sake, saying, ‘Please stop starving people to death.’ And sending them to somebody who had already said, in public, that he considered starvation to be a legitimate weapon of war.
“That’s not even the worst. The worst is that Britain was sending military aid to the Nigerians. Why? Because Biafra includes the Niger Delta, and Shell and British Petroleum didn’t want to give up their oil profits. So it’s okay to kill two million people to protect your profits. You can still be friends with the US, and not have to answer to any kind of court or authority or have any sanctions put on you or anything.”
They were quiet for a while, and then Madelyn said, “What are we supposed to do? How do you change the world?”
“With money and power. You say, ‘I will loan you the money to fix your country, but only on the condition that you actually use the money to fix your country.’ One person can’t do it. A bunch of long-haired kids can’t do it by sitting around listening to the Grateful Dead. The Army can’t do it and Gandhi can’t do it.”
“And you think the imf can.”
“They’re not perfect. But they’re the best shot we’ve got.”
“So if they offer you the job, you’re going to take it. And move to Washington.” Until now, Paul had been vague about his chances at getting the job and about its potential effect on their relationship. Now it was clear that the effect would be seismic.
“Yes. I want this job. And if I move, I want you and Ava with me. Which is why I’m asking you to marry me.”
Madelyn could come up with a hundred reasons not to marry him. The only one that scared her was the idea that he might have something cold in him that wanted money and power for its own sake. In three months, she’d seen no hard evidence of it. He seemed like the most compassionate man she had ever known, next to her father. He was patient and gentle with Ava, and patient and gentle in a completely different way with Madelyn in bed. “I love you,” she said, not for the first time, but for the first time with a whole heart.
“I love you, too. So will you for God’s sake marry me?”
1980
Joe had always understood that the Mississippi Democratic Party was not the usual political machine. Only as he began to worm his way into its rotten core—attending school board and city council meetings, volunteering at campaign headquarters—did he appreciate the extent of the difference.
For one thing, the state had two completely different Democratic Parties, the “regulars,” who were white, racist, and reactionary, and the “loyalists,” who were progressive, largely black, and substantially younger. In 1968, the first year that black Mississippians were, theoretically anyway, allowed to vote, Mississippi sent two delegations to the national convention in Chicago, and the credentia
ls committee gave the seats to the loyalists.
The regulars were only the latest eruption of the state’s deep-seated white supremacy, a grand tradition that included such highlights as walking out of the 1948 national convention after Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey succeeded in getting a civil rights plank in the platform, and then forming the Dixiecrat Party to try to keep Truman off the ballot in the Deep South. There’d been a pitched battle for convention seating again in ’72 and ’76, both of which the loyalists had won, and there was every reason to expect another fight this year in Madison Square Garden.
After he passed the bar in 1976, Joe had applied only to law firms where the senior partners were high in the loyalist ranks. He’d landed an associate’s slot in a partnership headed by a longtime liberal Democrat and former judge named Winter. Joe had made no bones about his ambitions, and he’d raised his profile with pro bono work for poor black families. He didn’t sleep more than six hours a night and worked through the weekends, counting his attendance every Sunday morning at East Heights Baptist.
He’d met Peggy at East Heights the previous fall. She didn’t have the kind of looks that stopped him in his tracks. What she had was a neat figure and a face where he could read everything she felt, and when she was happy, it was a face Joe dearly loved to look at. She’d sat at his table at a church potluck one Wednesday night in October and introduced herself by saying, “That’s my corn casserole you just took a double helping of.” As they progressed to dinners on their own, she admitted that she’d been “kind of wild” in college, and hadn’t found the Lord until late in her senior year. She had a spark in her eye that suggested she might have a bit of wildness in her yet.
Joe found himself telling her things he’d never put in words before. “I guess I always believed in God,” he said, “but he was like… Charles De Gaulle. I mean, I knew he was there, somewhere, but I never saw him or talked to him and he didn’t have any effect on my life. Then they sent me on my first night patrol.”
He took it as a good sign that he was able to talk to her about the war. With anyone else he would have been wound up like a cornered bulldog. “When you first get over there, nobody wants anything to do with you. You’re an fng, where the ng stands for New Guy, and you’re a liability because you don’t know the ropes and you’re likely to get killed and maybe get somebody else killed along with you. So they don’t even train you proper, they just throw you out there and if you survive and pull your weight, after a few weeks they might bother to learn your name.
“Which means on my first night patrol, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m scared to death, and all I’m getting is, ‘Why’d we get stuck with the fng?’ and ‘Keep away from me, man, I don’t want to have to wash you out of my fatigues.’ I’m trying to do like everybody else, but I can’t see them in the dark, and my eyeballs are so tense they hurt, and every sound I hear sounds like a tripwire for a booby trap, or maybe a pit viper in the bushes, or a vc, and there’s all these smells—rotting fruit, and dust that doesn’t even smell like American dust, it’s got this curry powder kind of smell, and there’s my own sweat, and this kind of heavy green jungle funk. It was worse than fear, it was feeling more alone than I ever have in my life. I was so freaked that I started to pray without realizing it. I offered God a deal. I said I would do anything he wanted if he would just get me through this night. Right away, that second, I felt this warmth in my gut, like when my dad used to hold my hand sometimes when I was little. I was still terrified, but I could relax with it some, and I could see better and my brain could function, and I got through the night and the next thirteen months.
“God kept up his end of the deal, so here I am keeping up mine. The guys I went to school with in Austin, any kind of religion was the same to them as naked savages dancing around a campfire or burning witches. Unless it was a Buddhist thing, which they had decided was cool. I could never have talked to them about God.”
“That’s sad,” Peggy said, “but it makes me feel special.”
Judge Winter had told him the right wife would help his chances, and Peggy was made to order, pleasant-looking without being showy, firm in her religious commitment and malleable in her politics, not well-off but well connected to important Tupelo families, smart without real ambition for herself, capable yet willing to follow Joe’s lead. He proposed to her on Valentine’s Day, booked East Heights Baptist for a June ceremony, and, when Judge Winter asked if he was ready to try for the State House of Representatives in the November election, Joe said, “Let’s do ’er.”
They were sitting in a couple of leather armchairs in the Judge’s office. Hangin’ Judge Winter, they called him, because he was strict, and also because he didn’t hold with cronyism. More to the point, he tempered his compassion with realism. “You can sound noble on the tv, or you can get the job done. I prefer to make people’s lives better.”
He was no fan of Reagan, who told people what they wanted to hear, whether he could deliver or not. “There’s no doubt he’s changed the political climate. People want it to be 1950 again, when we were on top of the world. Thing is, it’s a different world. In 1950 we’d just won a world war. Europe was a pile of rubble and Japan was a stomped-on ant hill. Now the Germans and the Japanese have had them a resurgence, and there’s not as much of the pie left for us. People don’t care about the facts, though. Either you dance to Reagan’s tune or you sit out.”
“I got things that are important to me,” Joe said. “Social programs. We got to finish up what the Civil Rights Act started. And I want to stop the next war before it gets started.”
“All admirable. If you take it in stages. All these things you’re talking about belong to Stage Two. Stage One is where you say what you got to say so that you get elected. There’s ways to let folks know what you truly believe. But you must never, ever come out and say it.”
*
Before his first time, Charlene had told Cole that there were only two kinds of heroin users: the ones who were out to kill themselves from the get-go, and the ones who killed themselves by mistake. “If all you want is to die, I’ll give you what you need and you can go do it at home right now and get it over with. Leave your door unlocked and I’ll have the cops come by tomorrow before you start to stink too bad.”
“I don’t want to die,” Cole said. “I just want some peace.”
“Well, this here is the peace that passeth all understanding, as my momma likes to say, though she wasn’t talking about smack.” Charlene had a set of rules that allowed her to function. “I don’t do it but once a week. If you’re strong, and you know you got it to look forward to, you can make it through the week. You can keep your job and not have to be out stealing to pay for it. The other thing is, I don’t put it in my veins. I either snort it or shoot it im. You get almost the same high, only it comes on slower, instead of hitting you like a train, and you don’t get hooked so bad.”
For a few weeks Cole took his little glassine envelope over to Charlene’s on Saturday afternoons. Sometimes they would make love before they shot up, and sometimes Cole was so eager for the drug that he couldn’t wait. Charlene’s tolerance was higher, so she needed twice as much, and eventually Cole got tired of sharing.
Timing was also an issue. Charlene needed her weekly shot on Saturday so she could get over her junk sickness on Sunday and be back to the nail salon on Monday. Whereas Cole was trying to play some solo acoustic gigs and needed to be functional on Saturday night.
He also figured out that once a week was not going to cut it for him. Charlene was obviously more resistant to the drug. He dosed himself on Sundays and Wednesdays, and it was all he could do to hold himself to that.
Within six months he saw that he’d made a terrible mistake. The drug had become the whole of his existence. When he wasn’t high, he thought about little else. His sleep was shallow and restless. At one point in late ’78 he decided it couldn’t be any harder to quit entirely than to go on the way he was. Twenty hours of sic
kness and craving in exchange for each hour of being high, and the high was not particularly high anymore. Hating himself for nodding out because it was precious junk time that he was not able to consciously appreciate. So he tried to kick, using booze as a substitute. The booze nauseated him and he was unable to sleep at all, just like when he’d gotten out of the hospital when he was 16, and in less than a week he was back on schedule.
Valentina’s new lineup had made the Billboard top ten album chart and Templeton had done his magic on the high end, making the acoustic guitars sparkle, the harmony vocals soar, the violin and electric guitar solos scream. The bass and drums had a propulsive bounce and Cole, even in his drug obsession and bitterness, had to admit it was a great pop record. Best of all, it pulled the first Warners album onto the lower reaches of the charts, and the royalty checks meant that Cole didn’t have to move back into the Castle. He managed a restaurant gig or concert opener once or twice a week, and, when the managers would pay for it, he’d get Luke to back him on standup bass and harmony vocals.
If there was a path from there to something bigger, Cole couldn’t find it.
Though he didn’t have the heart to make it to any of Valentina’s shows, he did get out a couple of times a week as a spectator, hoping for something that might resuscitate his comatose muse. In the spring and summer he favored Liberty Lunch, a former downtown lumberyard, with a dirt floor and no roof. The Lotions, a great local reggae band, had a regular Tuesday gig there, and Beto and the Fairlanes played Latin jazz on Thursdays. Stevie Vaughan, the little brother of Chessmen guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, was at the Rome Inn near campus, and Antone’s on Sixth Street had touring blues acts. The Armadillo had overbooked itself into bankruptcy, yet somehow kept the doors open, and Jim Franklin, if he was around, always let Cole in for free.
Meanwhile, a joint named Raul’s, on the Drag across from ut, switched from Tejano to punk and by 1979 had become a national epicenter. The also-rans played the old Vulcan space downtown, rechristened Duke’s Royal Coach Inn, where short-life-span bands worked for a share of the door and the audience pogoed and spat on the floor and wore safety pins and ripped T-shirts. Cole liked the energy and sixties garage combo vibe of some of the bands, and he got a weird masochistic charge from being in the same place where the Austin Blues Group had begun its journey to becoming The Quirq. He even auditioned a couple of times, though he understood that he was too old, too hung up on technique, not angry enough.
