Miss Greyhound spat out a tooth, and said: “Al, we could—” Al’s roundhouse knocked her flat.
“Here now,” Reinhart remonstrated, “brutality to women is prohibited by the laws of this county.”
“Well, I got you there,” said Al, grinning through his tears. “That happens to be my wife.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Reinhart said. “I didn’t know one of my boys had already been around. Callahan, probably—round-faced fella about five-ten with sandy hair?”
“Nah, tall fella, long-faced fella, called Dixon.”
Reinhart nodded. “Yeah, Dixon.” The sounds of merriment came from the tent behind them. “Don’t worry so much: listen to how well the show’s going.”
“And you tole me he broke it up,” said Al to his wife and caught her with a left hook just as she was rising on one knee.
“I don’t care if you are married to her, that sort of thing makes me very uneasy,” Reinhart admitted. “I wish you would quit it.”
“Why don’t you butt out, you sonofabitch?” the woman yelled at Reinhart.
Al would have kicked her had he not been blocked. He threw up his puffy fingers, which were yellow from cigarettes. “Listen to that. She ain’t got no sense, officer. Don’t hold it against me.”
“I don’t,” said Reinhart. “It is clear that woman cares for you, Al, and I never question Love, but rather marvel at its existence in a world so full of other distractions.” He then gave permission to carry on with the show, free of further harassment by Jenkins of the Vice Squad providing only that certain alterations, of which Al would be apprised by Billie-Jo and Grace, be maintained.
“You will make more money,” Reinhart said. “Your customers will be satisfied, and not frustrated. And finally, though the entertainment will still err on the side of vulgarity, in the degree to which it makes public what under perfect conditions would be kept private—which charge of course can be brought against any art—it will no longer outrage Nature to anything like the old extent. Just remember, you never have to apologize for normality.”
Saluting God and country, he made himself scarce.
Chapter 25
Reinhart had been sidetracked, but in a good cause. He had always wanted to strike a blow against that teasing. “Only in America,” as a great man once said, “can you find a woman who looks like a whore, dresses like a whore, and acts like a whore, but who if you treat her like a whore will call a policeman.” Reinhart had no faith that his reforms would last—he was opposed by the whole mystique of modem entertainment as well as the general sexual trend of pis aller; also, in this show he had been operating on the lowest level—but the principle had been stated. Despite Bee’s advice he could not help being idealistic.
He went towards the roadhouse to fetch Homer, whose car was still parked in the lot but no longer by itself, the evening being well into the shank, the game afoot, and the area alight with pseudo carriage lanterns. He was twice almost run down by arriving customers, one vehicle carrying the sort of young marrieds who pledge at their nuptials never to become stodgy, and for the first year go out on the town every Thursday night; the other, a bald-headed joker with a kidney condition: he couldn’t drink himself, but liked to see some life around him while he ate his chicken sandwich on whole wheat. Naturally Reinhart couldn’t know these details, but the possibility that he might be absolutely wrong—that the couple were gloomy adulterers and the other fellow an alcoholic—made it all the more interesting to speculate.
Speaking of patrons, the door suddenly swung open and one came hurtling out upon the shoe of a brawny chap in a tuxedo, who cried: “And stay out!” Carried on by momentum, the ejectee went some yards into the parking lot, clawing feebly at nothing, like a lobster en route to the boil; at last his borrowed energy ran dry and, spreading the eagle, he plunged to the earth, nose down.
As luck would have it, he fell directly in Reinhart’s path. Otherwise the ex-corporal would have ignored him at all costs, there being little profit in commerce with a drunk, especially when one himself is sobering.
“Come on,” said Reinhart, prodding him with a shoe, “you’re in the roadway and might get run over.”
The drunk put his hands beneath his chest and did a perfect push-up, one straight line from back-swell to heels—he did ten, in fact, up and down, before collapsing prone again.
“Do that, drunk or sober,” he said, the words rattling out of the gravel against which his mouth was pressed, “you rotten mongrel, and then tell me I’m no gentleman.”
“Hello, Blaine,” said Reinhart, for by the light of the fake carriage lanterns he could mark that it was indeed his father-in-law, whom he had earlier seen at the bar as if in a vision.
Raven rolled over onto his back and, looking up with closed eyes, asked: “What’s your school?”
“Dartmouth,” said Reinhart to pacify him. “Where’s your topcoat?”
The next moment the door opened again and the bouncer flung out the garment in question. Reinhart had turned to fetch it when Raven, having risen quietly to his knees, tackled him ferociously.
“Fumble!” he crowed. “Our ball.” He clutched the wadded coat to his midsection and ran towards the highway, stepping high and carrying a fixed straight-arm for which he soon found a use: down went the bald-headed guy, who had just left his sedan. At the edge of the highway Raven turned left and circled back, crazy-legging along the line of parked cars. Reinhart was not nearly so nimble; he also felled the bald-headed chap, who was just arising, but by accident; and had to postpone his apology.
It became clear he would never catch his father-in-law by direct pursuit, Reinhart himself moving like a freight train, inexorable but slow. Nor was wearing down the quarry to his taste, for by that time scandal would long have outrun them.
So he stopped midway alongside a convertible and shouted: “Out of bounds! Your ball and ten to go.”
Raven whined in protest, but at last he trudged, head down, back to the arbitrary line of scrimmage and surrendered his coat to Reinhart, who now represented the disinterested referee instead of Dartmouth.
“God, these field lights are poor,” said Reinhart, pointing to one of the lanterns on a post nearby, and as Raven snapped his head in that direction in the resentful, too-quick reflex of the drunk, Reinhart threw the topcoat over his father-in-law, buttoned it as a strait-jacket, and carried him to the old blue Continental, whose location he had established during the chase. Raven uttered a few expletives deep within his swaddling clothes, then apparently passed out, his weight going sodden.
The key had been left in the ignition, so after tripping the device that moved the driver’s seat back to accommodate his length, Reinhart started the motor and pulled out, leaving his plans behind and Homer to the mercies of roadhouse personnel.
Put a father-in-law before friends and before thyself, said the old maxim, probably Chinese, that Reinhart hereby honored, not to mention mere common decency. Reinhart really was a traditional person even though he habitually frequented innovators, and nobody could say he did not keep the faith, even when to do so hardly accorded with his own welfare. It would be much too late, by the time he got Raven home, to start out again for the river—these things are done only when the wind is up. Tomorrow he must take his medicine, and everyone would turn against him, no doubt including Genevieve. He drove towards total disaster, and yet whistled along with a popular tune that came over the radio, which oddly enough worked, though notes in the lower registers vibrated the whole car. Was he mad? No, if you can question your reason, you still have it; so says every expert in the field. He was simply trying to take life as it came, which always seems odd.
Meanwhile he twisted the tone-control back to treble, in cultural superiority to Raven, who was out of date in a preference for the bass notes; everybody nowadays was turning to treble, along with other harshnesses, no doubt in reaction to the mushiness of wartime.
After the first quarter mile he opened a button at the
neck of the topcoat to give Raven air; and after the second he closed it again, on the principle that better the passenger suffocate than the driver be overcome; it had smelled as if they were closeted in a distillery. Booze could be a philosophy only to the unaesthetic. But it was poor satisfaction indeed to count his points against Raven: look at the slob—who actually couldn’t be seen because of the topcoat hiding him. Reinhart opened it again, and also the windows, even if the night felt cool now that he was at last relatively static after a long day of almost continual motion. The incoming breeze blew back the covert-cloth lapel, revealing Raven’s face in the glow of the oil-gauge: features of prime quality, lower lip petulant, evident infantilism, absence of doubt—the world was wrong but never Raven—But, poor bastard, it suddenly occurred to Reinhart, he must be over forty.
This was the sort of reflection that Reinhart felt gave him depth and perhaps compensated for some of his failures of judgment. At present, however, it served to mask his authentic feeling. Her father’s chin reminded him of Genevieve and the resemblance made Reinhart jealous, causing him to doubt whether he was loved to the same degree as, say, Al the dirty-show operator. What appeared to be pity was thus actually a mean gloating at the likelihood of his outliving Raven by at least two decades.
He had some difficulty, when he reached town, in finding his inlaw’s house, for he had been there only twice before, by day; and by night the neighborhood was rather dangerous—to the soul, not the body; no lurking footpads, but a fluorescent nameplate at the mouth of every driveway, so that the headlights gave acclaim to a succession of misapplied apostrophes: “The Wilson’s,” “The J. Dominic Santan-gelo’s,” and the like. Raven’s house, however, when discovered at the end of the block, had none such, and Reinhart felt a little twinge of pride.
His substitute dad jerked to life as they entered the drive. While Reinhart pulled on the parking brake and switched off the ignition, he was conscious of being watched by beady eyes, and prepared to defend himself. Consequently, when Raven put across his right hand, Reinhart captured it and squeezed hard.
“Sir,” said Raven, wincing, “it is my pleasure to serve with you. Welcome aboard…. You have a mighty grip, as I have too, except you claimed the initiative.”
“Are you all right now, Blaine?” asked Reinhart, letting him loose. “Because if you are, I’m leaving.”
“Ah, we’re on first-name terms?” Raven asked, widening his mean eyes. “I’m sorry, sir, you have the advantage on me. Are we acquainted? School, club, Corps, or before the bar?”
“Bar,” said Reinhart. “To be specific, the Kit Kat Klub. I don’t mind your forgetting that, but in view of the trouble I’ve just gone to in bringing you home, you might remember that I am your son-in-law.”
Raven chuckled. “Excellent jest, my dear chap. You must be my guest soon at the officers’ club. Have the darky seat you at my usual table if you arrive before me.” He was shaken briefly by a drinker’s cough deep in the gullet, then flung out the door and lurched across the lawn, making it to the first shrub and falling therein.
Forty-five minutes later, when Reinhart had reached his own home by putting one shoe ahead of the other ad infinitum—he had forgotten to take the money from his sock, and had a great blister to show for it—Genevieve answered the door in her pneumatic housecoat, across which he had to bend a considerable distance to find her mouth. She tasted of licorice.
He licked his lips and remarked genially: “I see you have already launched the attack on your constipation.”
She shook her limp hair, and wouldn’t have looked like much to anyone not related to her. “Yes, and I’m slightly nauseous. I forgot I never could stand licorish as a child. Mary Janes were what I liked, and those mothballs with an almond inside.”
“Weren’t they great?” said Reinhart, falling into both nostalgia and the leather chair and taking her, childish mother, onto his knee. “And do you recall those miniature pop bottles made of wax and filled with colored water, which you drank and then chewed the bottle like gum? … We’re getting old, Gen, and though you may want someday to leave me, you will never be a virgin again.”
“Carl, you can be quite asinine into the bargain,” Gen replied, from which phrase he knew she had spent the afternoon reading. “I trust you’ve had a productive day. You reek of beer.”
He deflected his mouth. “Business, I assure you. Did Claude ever call?”
“Hours ago. Carl, why did you also miss supper both last night and tonight?”
“It’s too complicated at this juncture,” said Reinhart; “and since I wasn’t untrue to you, it really doesn’t matter.” He let her sink into the chair as he left it. “I’d better call him back. Darling, we may have to take a trip, even though you’re not supposed to travel. But pregnant movie stars do it all the time without mishap, and so do the wives of prime ministers and other heads of state. You just have to keep calm. And think of the pioneers opening up the West in their covered wagons, along trails where comfort stations were unknown. Have we really degenerated so much since? Not if I know my Genevieve!”
While this malarkey still echoed through the vaulted living room, he went to the solarium telephone and literally dialed C-L-A-U-D-E—CLermont 2833.
“Bud, greetings and salutations!” shouted the boss before Reinhart had even identified himself. “If this ain’t Bud, get off the pipe, fella, because I ain’t got time for no one else.”
“Yeah, Claude,” Reinhart admitted sheepishly. “O.K., let’s have the worst.”
“Where you been all day, bud? I hope it ain’t with my enemies, because you won’t be happy with ‘em, guy. Lissen, you and me work together like ham and mustard. Ain’t I always said one day I’d take my hat off to you? Well it’s on the floor here right now—or was till the durn dog run off with it—Hey! Get him, Louise, in the dining room!—scuse me, bud, that pooch is a mind-reader rivaling the best to be found in the trained acts of two continents. I will maybe go on tour with him if you turn me down, but you won’t, no sir, you would never do that to Claude Humbold who brought you up like a dad. … I just had your own daddy on the horn, bud, and he is proud as me. You recall just last spring when he begged me to take you on, I figured you was feeble-minded. I’m big enough to admit it, bud, so don’t throw it in my face.”
Reinhart couldn’t make head nor tail of this, so he stuck to his original assumption. “All I ask,” he said, “is that you give Splendor a break. He had nothing to do with it, even though the excavation is near his house. It was all my idea.” So long as he was going to get it in the neck anyway, Reinhart had decided to be noble.
“I’m way ahead of you,” cried Claude. “Your friend already told me that himself.” He went into a ridiculous imitation that sounded nothing like Splendor, who never—well, really he had once, and perhaps for tactical reasons had again: “Ohhh, Massa Claude, Massa Reinhart done blowed up duh whole West Side.”
That’s my friend, all right, said Reinhart to himself.
“Now I never had anything against a smoke, bud, and no man can say I gouged them on the rent all the years I have owned them crummy dwellings on Mohawk Street, but I call that typical: your typical coon never looks ahead like you and me. However, what I can’t figure is how you knew I just negotiated, in the name of the town, a goverment loan to raze that district and erect a nice new development of reinforced concrete, with a swell blacktop parking lot out front where we’ll paint white lines so the kids can play hopscotch and suchlike during the day when the cars are gone. I can’t figure it, bud, because I kept it mighty durn quiet on account of the Senator’s connection—nuff said, bud, these phones might be bugged.”
“On the contrary,” said Reinhart, from his coma of clairvoyance. “He’s the only one who does look ahead. That’s what is so sinister about him.”
“I don’t get your drift, bud, but whatever you say is jake with me, because I couldn’t have got them dumps cleared of inhabitants all winter without blowing them up—which y
ou did. I consider that remarkable timing, and want you to know a fella is already down the office relettering the door in the name of Bud Reinhart, Limited, followed by your name as chairman of the board. That’s big stuff, guy. You can also keep the house and car, and I’m sending over a deep-freeze in the morning. Call my butcher for a deal on T-bones, bud; he flies to Texas once a week and collars his beef on the open range.”
Reinhart closed his eyes and cleared his lungs; he was very tired, what with beatings, performances, and football games, but had saved strength to ask wryly: “Claude, I think I deserve to know. Do you have any intention of actually building this project?”
“Bud,” said Claude, “to make a long story short, that rests like everything else in the hands of the Guy Upstairs, don’t it? And now with your big hole, I figure it to be humanly impossible to do anything but wait till the earth settles; your snows are on the way, bud, already developing up in Western Canada, wherever that is; and your rains will come next, bringing you already up to the Fourth a July weekend, when everybody goes out to the highways and run one another down now that you can’t blow yourself up with firecrackers any more. And so it goes to Thanksgiving, and you got turkey and fixings to stick your face in. In short, bud, I can give you every assurance that the situation will bear deep thought; and if Humbold Houses ever rises against the skyline, it will be a true triumph of man against nature.” Claude cleared his throat. “That’s all I would predict at this here time, bud, because already I can hear the scratching of some filthy spy tapping these wires. Just grateful it ain’t you, bud.”
“Claude,” said Reinhart, “I wonder whether we might work out something for Splendor? I might even make that a condition of my own involvement. I’ll tell you about that guy: I have never figured out whether I even like him. I sometimes suspect he has never told me the truth about anything. For example, he makes the most fantastic comments on his own family. He has been guilty of certain inexcusable failings. I fear his interest in power, and am suspicious of his attitude towards authority. Yet when all is said and done, Claude, I feel privileged to be associated with him. It might sound strange in view of the foregoing, but judging by the standards of dignity, exquisite manners, and moral vision—and meaning no offense to present company—Splendor is the only real gentleman I have ever known this side of the Atlantic.”