by Ross Thomas
“For doing what?”
“For doing the same thing you did out on Saracen Street this morning—and what you did down in Richmond day before yesterday.”
“I ain’t interested.”
“Well, the Richmond cops would be mighty interested in you. But not as much as the Baltimore cops. All you did was shoot a nigger down in Richmond. But still, they’d be mighty interested.”
“You said something about money.”
“That’s right, I did.”
“How much money you talking about?”
“Thirty-five hundred to begin with. Interested?”
“Go on.”
“Well, that’s all. You’ll get the money in the mail along with a name. All you gotta do then is take care of the name just like you took care of that nigger and old Bruce. You also might have to do a little traveling.”
“How many times I gotta do this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe once a year. Maybe twice.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There’s no catch. All you gotta do is make sure the job is done within two months after you get the letter with the money and name. That’s all.”
“There must be some kind of catch.”
“Well, if you don’t do it, there will be. You understand what I mean.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Well?”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to say? I ain’t got any choice, do I?”
“No, Truman, you don’t. You don’t have any choice at all. You’ll be getting a letter in the next couple of weeks or so.”
“Can I ask you one question?”
“Sure,” the man who called himself Just Bill said.
“Have you got a moustache and gray hair that’s sorta wavy on the side?”
The man who said his name was Just Bill didn’t answer. He hung up instead.
13
Kelly Cubbin had been born in 1945, three months after V-J Day, and one of his earliest memories was of the CIO convention that he had attended in 1951 and of going with his father to the hotel room of a man with wavy, dull, red hair and twinkling eyes who had given him some orange juice. Kelly remembered the orange juice because the man had squeezed it himself from some oranges that he had bought from a supermarket that was close to the convention hotel. Kelly also remembered that the man had kept squeezing a black rubber ball in his left hand over and over again. Years later, whenever he saw the redheaded man on television, Kelly remembered the orange juice and how much he had admired the man for having had his own oranges in his hotel room.
Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, but he had grown up in Washington after his father’s union moved its headquarters there in 1951. He had lived in Northwest Washington in a house that Donald Cubbin had bought at a bargain from a defeated U.S. senator from Washington state. The house was almost new at the time and was in Chevy Chase and Kelly’s mother had died in it in 1965 when Kelly was in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin.
Kelly didn’t see too much of his father when he was growing up and attending Lafayette School on Broad Branch Road and Alice Deal Junior High and Woodrow Wilson Senior High, graduating from the last when he was still sixteen years old. Kelly remembered his mother as a quiet, shy woman who looked after his clothes, and smiled at his report cards, and gave him books, and tried to spoil him a little, and cooked wonderful dinners, mostly for the two of them because his father was seldom home until late. She had died as quietly as she had lived, in bed alone, except for a copy of the poems of Rupert Brooke.
His father, not knowing too much about children, had always treated Kelly more as a contemporary than as a child, usually assuming that Kelly had the judgment and resources of a grown man. In that way Donald Cubbin escaped much of the responsibilities that go with fatherhood and his son grew up regarding his father as an elder and often errant brother. It was a relationship that made Kelly mature a bit more quickly than most children but it had also helped prevent Donald Cubbin from ever growing up—at least all the way.
When he graduated from Wisconsin in 1965 with a degree in English literature, Kelly, not much wanting to go to Vietnam, had joined the war on poverty’s domestic Peace Corps, a draft haven whose overly precious acronym was VISTA, for Volunteers in Service to America. VISTA assigned him and three other volunteers, two white youths and a black girl, to a small unincorporated Negro community just outside of Anniston, Alabama. The community was what the professional experts on poor folks at the Office of Economic Opportunity referred to as a rural poverty pocket. Three months after the VISTA volunteers arrived, whatever natural leadership the community might have had abdicated in favor of the young people and Kelly found himself serving as the black community’s unofficial mayor. That lasted until the Ku Klux Klan, or a would-be affiliate, came riding by one night and shot-gunned the shack that he was living in.
At the time of the shotgunning Kelly had been in the bed of a twenty-six-year-old divorcée whom he had picked up in Anniston. Three days later Washington transferred Kelly to a Navajo reservation in Arizona where he spent the remainder of his year in service to America by getting Indians who had been arrested as drunk out of jail on their own recognizance. Often he would lend them a dollar so that they could buy a jug to keep the shakes away.
In 1966, with the draft still hanging over him, Kelly joined the army. But he wasn’t sent to Vietnam. Instead, he spent a cushy two years in Hoechst, just outside of Frankfurt, as an enlisted staff announcer and news reader for the American Forces Network. The deep, polished baritone that he had inherited from his father made him a natural for the job.
Kelly was still only twenty-two when he arrived in New Hampshire fresh from the army in February of 1968 to do what he could for the poet-politician from Minnesota. He became disillusioned with the McCarthy campaign in April of 1968, not because of the senator himself, but because of the people that he had around him. Kelly threw his support to Bobby Kennedy and later explained to his father that “my support consisted of one vote and an expert familiarity with damned near any Xerox or mimeograph machine.”
He was in Chicago, of course, for the 1968 Democrat convention and he got slugged once and gassed once and he left Chicago early with a black eye and the resigned conviction that he, alone or in concert, would never do much about steering his country off of its detour to hell.
Kelly thought of himself as a kind of social-democrat about halfway between the Americans for Democratic Action Left and the Trotskyite right. He also nursed the bitter, but perfectly indent conviction that he would always be in the minority.
Kelly had once tried to explain some, but not all of this to his father. It was nearly two years after Chicago and Kelly had a night off from his job as the midnight-to-dawn disc jockey on a Baltimore radio station. By chance he had picked a good night to talk to his father who was home alone, roaming through the large, empty house, nursing a beer. Sadie was in Los Angeles getting her teeth capped and even the ubiquitous Fred Mure was off somewhere.
Father and son had sent out for a Flying Chicken dinner and after they had eaten they settled down in the living room with a bottle of Martell between them.
“What I’ve been trying to say, chief, is that I’m a typical product of the upper middle class. We’ve never been hungry enough. There’s nothing that we ever really wanted way deep down—except somebody to love us and that’s not much of a base is it?”
Donald Cubbin wasn’t much good at talk like that. He decided that the kid probably got it from his mother who’d always had her nose in a book. Cubbin thought of falling back on the current lib-lab line, which he knew by heart, but he also knew that his son wouldn’t wear it. So instead he stalled, “You’re not a kid anymore, Kelly, and what’s more you never gave me and your mother or me and Sadie any problems.”
“You mean I’ve never been busted?”
“Well, hell, you went to college and got your degree. That’s more’n I ever did. You served your countr
y in that VISTA outfit and went overseas and came back without getting your ass shot off. You got interested in politics and did something about it. You’re not on drugs, at least as far as I know, and you’re not a boozer like me so, what the hell, you’re indent or nearly so and I’m goddamned glad of it.” Cubbin took a sip of his brandy and added, “Also you’ve got a pretty good job and I guess that’s important. Christ, I’ve made my career out of jobs.”
“But I’ve never been interested in the union.”
“Christ, kid, that’s no disappointment to me. No, sir. Most of the time it bores me stiff; you know that—or you should know it by now. But it’s what I do and I’ve worked hard at it, well, at least I worked hard some of the time, and what the hell else could I do at sixty? It’s too late for me to go out to the Coast like I should’ve gone back in thirty-two.”
“You would have liked that, wouldn’t you?”
Cubbin gave his son a rare smile, rare because there was much genuine shyness in it. “Yeah, I’ve got just enough ham in me to have liked it, really liked it. I might even have made a pretty good living out of it, playing second leads in what they used to call B pictures. Shit, Kelly, I’d have eaten it up.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m trying to explain. You knew what you wanted; I’m not sure that I do.”
“I didn’t do anything about it,” Cubbin said.
“But you did something else. You achieved a kind of fame and prominence and all that crap.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t think so, although that might be a damned lie. What I really mean is that I don’t want to pay the price that you have.”
“You mean look where it got me?”
“No, I don’t mean that either. Let me put it another way. What would happen to me if you were to die tomorrow?”
“Well, Christ, you’d get along. You’d make out all right.”
“That’s not it, chief. You’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“I’d be a rich man with half of that insurance that you and the union carry on you.”
“You need some money?” Cubbin asked, not really wanting to talk about anything as unpleasant as his own death.
Kelly sighed. “No, I don’t need any money. I think maybe that’s what’s wrong. I’ve never needed any money because I could always touch you for some.”
“Let me tell you something, kid, there’s no virtue in poverty.”
“I’ve lived poor,” Kelly said. “Down in Alabama that time I lived just like the blacks, ate what they did, and I saw what it could do. But there was one big difference. I wasn’t black and I didn’t have to do it so that wiped out whatever lesson there might have been in it.”
Cubbin was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “Yeah, it does something to you, being poor. I mean really poor. It gives you a twist that you never really get over. Fear, I guess. It makes you afraid.”
“How much money did you have when my granddad died?”
“You mean my old man?”
“Yes.”
Cubbin smiled again, this time the wry smile of a man who remembers something whose once dreadful importance has been partially erased by time. “When your grand mother and I got back to Pittsburgh from his funeral, we had twenty-one dollars and thirty-five cents between us. That’d be worth about a hundred dollars today, maybe two hundred, I don’t know.”
“And money was important then?”
“Dear God, yes, money was important.”
“And that’s really why you didn’t go to Hollywood?”
“Yeah, I suppose that was it—that and a lot of other things.”
“Well, I can go to Hollywood, chief.”
Cubbin brightened, but only for a moment. “I thought there for a second—but, yeah, I see what you mean. You mean you don’t really want to go to Hollywood, but if there was something like that you wanted, you could go ahead and do it.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, have you got something in mind?”
“Maybe. I think so.”
“I’ll back you in anything you want to do.”
“Sure, chief.”
“I don’t know, I guess I haven’t been a very good father,” Cubbin said, lapsing into a small bid for sympathy, the kind that had always worked very well with his late wife.
He didn’t get any sympathy from his son. “No,” Kelly said, “I suppose you haven’t.”
“What kind of lousy crack is that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that somewhere along the line somebody like you should have said hey, look, sonny, you’re going to be a biochemist whether you like it or not so you’d better hop to it. Maybe I’d have liked somebody saying that to me. Maybe anybody would.”
“Well, you didn’t get it.”
“No.”
“And you’re sure as shit not going to get it now.”
“No.”
Cubbin decided to retreat a little. “You’ve got a pretty good job with the station.”
“I’ve got that.”
“I listen to you whenever I can. You got a hell of a voice.”
“I got that from you.”
“So what d’you think you’re going to do?”
“I know what I’m not going to do. I’m never going to make any money. I might have some after you die, but I’m never going to make any.”
To Cubbin that was still a kind of economic heresy, but he shrugged it away. “That’s not so important.”
“And I don’t want power. I don’t mean I wouldn’t take it if it were offered. Hell, who wouldn’t. But I haven’t got the drive or the hunger or whatever it is to go after it.”
Cubbin nodded. He knew about power and what was done to get it. “Well, if you don’t crave it, you almost never get it.”
Kelly looked at his father. “This is going to sound corny but I found out something about myself. I like to help people, I mean individuals.”
“Well, you probably got that from me.”
“You bet, chief.”
“You sure as hell don’t make any money helping people. You usually get kicked in the teeth for it.”
“Well, I like it and I’ve even figured out why. You see, I’m smarter than most people. I’m not bragging, it’s just something that happened to me like the fact that I’ve got black hair and blue eyes. So I know how to do things for people—or get things done for them and I get a kick out of that. I get a kick out of being the one they come to when they have a problem.”
“Maybe you oughta be a lawyer. Like you say, you’re smart enough. You got that from your mother, I guess,” Cubbin said, this time in a mild bid for a little praise.
“I got it from you, too, chief, but I don’t want to be a lawyer. You see what I really want to be is the town wise man. I’d like that. I really would like that.”
Cubbin looked at his son, at the intense young stranger who sat across from him. I think I know what he means, Cubbin told himself. He wants to be “it.” Hell, he might call it a wise man, but he wants to be the one who messes around in other people’s lives. He wants to do what the old-time ward heelers who could fix things used to do. That’s power of a kind and that’s one way to get more of it, doing favors for people. And once you’ve tasted it, you want a little more and then a little more until one day you wake up and find out that you want it all.
He doesn’t understand, Kelly thought, staring back at his father. He thinks that there’s really more to it than I’ve told him, that there’s something devious about what I want to do that I don’t really understand. Or am not aware of. He doesn’t understand that it’s partly guilt and partly my need to be respected and liked and loved by a few people, but not too many, because I don’t think I could handle that. And wait’ll I tell him how I’m going to do it.
“So what do you think you might do, son, go into one of the—what do they call them—the helping professions? Social work, teaching, something like that?”
>
“No, I’m not wild about kids and I’ve known a few social workers. A lot of them get bitter after a while and they get all mixed up with their jargon.”
“Well, what have you decided on?”
Kelly took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “I’m going to become a cop, chief.”
Cubbin sat bolt upright in his chair and grabbed at the brandy bottle. “Good Jesus Godalmighty, you don’t mean it?”
“Yes,” Kelly said. “I’m pretty sure I do.”
“Jesus. My son, the fuzz.”
“Your son, the pig.”
Cubbin looked at Kelly carefully. “This isn’t just some childhood ambition that you’ve decided to realize a little late, is it?”
Kelly shook his head. “My attitude toward cops is typically American.” He touched his left eye. “Another inch or so up and I’d have lost this at Chicago.”
Cubbin nodded and then said, “It’s the hard way to do what you want to do, isn’t it, become the village wise man?”
“You’ve got it, chief,” Kelly said, “it’s probably the hardest way there is.”
Two months later Kelly Cubbin joined the Metropolitan Police force in Washington, D. C, at the peak of its recruiting drive for college graduates, a drive that petered out a little less than two years later when Washington decided that it really didn’t need any more smart kid cops.
But when Kelly joined they put his picture in the paper and after training assigned him to a beat that was just back of the Hilton and took in most of Columbia Road. It had once been a toney enough white neighborhood, but by the time Kelly arrived the fancy grocery stores had closed, a once-popular nightclub had folded, and one of the movie houses had been torn down and the other ran Mexican films and called itself a teatro instead of a theater. And everybody began putting special locks on their doors and heavy metal screens over their windows.
Kelly tried. He taught himself Spanish and because he was nearly as good a mimic as his father he was speaking it quickly, hamming it up at first on purpose, getting a few giggles from the youngsters that he talked to on the street and patient instruction from the older people.
