Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tom Wolfe
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue : Cap’m Charlie
I: Chocolate Mecca
II: The Saddlebags
III: Turpmtine
IV: Beige Half Brothers
V: The Suicidal Freezer Unit
VI: In the Lair of the Lust
VII: Hello Out There, 7-Eleven Land
VIII: The Lay of the Land
IX: The Superfluous Woman
X: The Red Dog
XI: This Is—Not Right!
XII: The Breeding Barn
XIII: The Arrest
XIV: God’s Cosmic Joke
XV: The Rubber Room
XVI: Gotcha Back
XVII: Epictetus Comes to Da House
XVIII: The Aha! Phenomenon
XIX: The Trial
XX: Mai’s Army
XXI: The Real Buckhead
XXII: Chambodia
XXIII: The Deal
XXIV: Gridiron Heroes
XXV: Starring Darwell Scruggs
XXVI: Holding Hands
XXVII: The Screen
XXVIII: The Spark of Zeus
XXIX: Epictetus in Buckhead
XXX: The Bull and the Lion
XXXI: Roger Black
XXXII: The Manager
Epilogue: A Man of the World
Copyright
Charlie Croker was once a fabled college football star and is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real estate entrepreneur-turned-conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife and a half-empty downtown tower with a staggering load of debt.
Tom Wolfe was the razor sharp chronicler of the 1980s and now boldly turns to dissect greed-obsessed America on the cusp of the millennium.
Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Pump House Gang
The New Journalism – edited by Tom Wolfe and EW Johnson
The Painted Word
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter and Vine
The Purple Decades
The Right Stuff
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
A Man in Full
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN 9781446442067
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Vintage
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Tom Wolfe 1998
Cover illustration based on a photograph © Jerry Avenaim/Corbis Outline
Tom Wolfe has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel’s story and characters are fictitious.
Certain long-established institutions, agencies, and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved in them are wholly imaginary. One institution, the Santa Rita jail, is dealt with anachronistically. The jail was demolished not by the last major earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area but shortly before it
Quotations from Epictetus are drawn from The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, edited by Whitney J. Oates (1940)
Several chapters of this novel have been published, in slightly different form, in Rolling Stone, The Times and Men’s Journal
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1998
First published in paperback by Picadorin 1999
Published by Vintage in 2011
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The author bows deeply to
JANN WENNER
the generous genius
who walked this book along until it found its feet,
just as he did The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities,
and Ambush at Fort Bragg.
KAILEY WONG
whose eye for the telling details of contemporary American life
is unsurpassed and whose help, once more, has been invaluable.
TOMMY PHIPPS
whose walks on the beach with the author never failed to generate
the necessary new approach and the joie de vivre to try it.
GEORGE AND NAN McVEY
who provided the denouement,
not to mention decades of treasured friendship.
COUNSELOR EDDIE HAYES
who stepped out of his starring role in Act III
whenever the author needed him, which was often.
You were there on the darkest night, Counselor!
The author embraces
SHEILA, ALEXANDRA, AND TOMMY
whose love has made it all worthwhile.
CHARLIE CROKER, ASTRIDE HIS FAVORITE TENNESSEE WALKING horse, pulled his shoulders back to make sure he was erect in the saddle and took a deep breath … Ahhhh, that was the ticket … He loved the way his mighty chest rose and fell beneath his khaki shirt and imagined that everyone in the hunting party noticed how powerfully built he was. Everybody; not just his seven guests but also his six black retainers and his young wife, who was on a horse behind him near the teams of La Mancha mules that pulled the buckboard and the kennel wagon. For good measure, he flexed and fanned out the biggest muscles of his back, the latissimi dorsi, in a Charlie Croker version of a peacock or a turkey preening. His wife, Serena, was only twenty-eight, whereas he had just turned sixty and was bald on top and had only a swath of curly gray hair on the sides and in back. He seldom passed up an opportunity to remind her of what a sturdy cord—no, what a veritable cable—kept him connected to the rude animal vitality of his youth.
By now they were already a good mile away from the Big House and deep into the plantation’s seemingly endless fields of broom sedge. This late in February, this far south in Georgia, the sun was strong enough by 8 a.m. to make the ground mist lift like wisps of smoke and create a heavenly green glow in the pine forests and light up the sedge with a tawny gold. Charlie took another deep breath … Ahhhhhh … the husky aroma of the grass … the resinous air of the pines … the heavy, fleshy odor of all his animals, the horses, the mules, the dogs … Somehow nothing reminded him so instantly of how far he had come in his sixty years on this earth as the smell of the animals. Turpmtine Plantation! Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses, all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip, complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar—all of it was his, Cap’m Charlie Croker’s, to do with as he chose, which was: to shoot quail.
His spirits thus buoyed, he turned to his shooting partner, a stout brick-faced man named Inman Armholster, who was abreast of him on another of his walking horses, and said:
“Inman, I’m gonna—”
But Inman, with a typical Inman Armholster bluster, cut him off and insisted on resuming a pretty boring disquisition concerning the upcoming mayoral race in Atlanta: “Listen, Charlie, I know Jordan’s got charm and party manners and he talks white and all that, but that doesn’t”—dud’n—“mean he’s any friend of …”
Charlie continued to look at him, but he tuned out. Soon he was aware only of the deep, rumbling timbre of Inman’s voice, which had been smoke-cured the classic Southern way, by decades of Camel cigarettes, unfiltered. He was an odd-looking duck, Inman was. He was in his mid-fifties but still had a head of thick black hair, which began low on his forehead and was slicked back over his small round skull. Everything about Inman was round. He seemed to be made of a series of balls piled one atop the other. His buttery cheeks and jowls seemed to rest, without benefit of a neck, upon the two balls of fat that comprised his chest, which in turn rested upon a great swollen paunch. Even his arms and legs, which looked much too short, appeared to be made of spherical parts. The down-filled vest he wore over his hunting khakis only made him look that much rounder. Nevertheless, this ruddy pudge was chairman of Armaxco Chemical and about as influential a businessman as existed in Atlanta. He was this weekend’s prize pigeon, as Charlie thought of it, at Turpmtine. Charlie desperately wanted Armaxco to lease space in what so far was the worst mistake of his career as a real estate developer, a soaring monster he had megalomaniacally named Croker Concourse.
“—gon’ say Fleet’s too young, too brash, too quick to play the race card. Am I right?”
Suddenly Charlie realized Inman was asking him a question. But other than the fact that it concerned André Fleet, the black “activist,” Charlie didn’t have a clue what it was about.
So he went, “Ummmmmmmmmmmm.”
Inman apparently took this to be a negative comment, because he said, “Now, don’t give me any a that stuff from the smear campaign. I know there’s people going around calling him an out-and-out crook. But I’m telling you, if Fleet’s a crook, then he’s my kinda crook.”
Charlie was beginning to dislike this conversation, on every level. For a start, you didn’t go out on a beautiful Saturday morning like this on the next to last weekend of the quail season and talk politics, especially not Atlanta politics. Charlie liked to think he went out shooting quail at Turpmtine just the way the most famous master of Turpmtine, a Confederate Civil War hero named Austin Roberdeau Wheat, had done it a hundred years ago; and a hundred years ago nobody on a quail hunt at Turpmtine would have been out in the sedge talking about an Atlanta whose candidates for mayor were both black. But then Charlie was honest with himself. There was more. There was … Fleet. Charlie had had his own dealings with André Fleet, and not all that long ago, either, and he didn’t feel like being reminded of them now or, for that matter, later.
So this time it was Charlie who broke in:
“Inman, I’m gonna tell you something I may regret later on, but I’m gonna tell you anyway, ahead a time.”
After a couple of puzzled blinks Inman said, “All right … go ahead.”
“This morning,” said Charlie, “I’m only gonna shoot the bobs.” Morning came out close to moanin’, just as something had come out sump’m. When he was here at Turpmtine, he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was … a man.
“Only gon’ shoot the bobs, hunh,” said Inman. “With that?”
He gestured toward Charlie’s .410-gauge shotgun, which was in a leather scabbard strapped to his saddle. The spread of buckshot a .410 fired was smaller than any other shotgun’s, and with quail the only way you could tell a bob from a hen was by a patch of white on the throat of a bird that wasn’t much more than eight inches long to start with.
“Yep,” said Charlie, grinning, “and remember, I told you ahead a time.”
“Yeah? I’ll tell you what,” said Inman. “I’ll betcha you can’t. I’ll betcha a hundred dollars.”
“What kinda odds you gon’ give me?”
“Odds? You’re the one who brought it up! You’re the one staking out the bragging rights! You know, there’s an old saying, Charlie: ‘When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops.’”
“All right,” said Charlie, “a hundred dollars on the first covey, even Stephen.” He leaned over and extended his hand, and the two of them shook on the bet.
Immediately he regretted it. Money on the line. A certain deep worry came bubbling up into his brain. PlannersBanc! Croker Concourse! Debt! A mountain of it! But real estate developers like him learned to live with debt, didn’t they … It was a normal condition of your existence, wasn’t it … You just naturally grew gills for breathing it, didn’t you … So he took another deep breath to drive the spurt of panic back down again and flexed his big back muscles once more.
Charlie was proud of his entire physique, his massive neck, his broad shoulders, his prodigious forearms; but above all he was proud of his back. His employees here at Turpmtine called him Cap’m Charlie, after a Lake Seminole fishing-boat captain from a hundred years ago with the same name, Charlie Croker, a sort of Pecos Bill figure with curly blond hair who, according to local legend, had accomplished daring feats of strength. There was a song about him, which some of the old folks knew by heart. It went: “Charlie Croker was a man in full. He had a back like a Jersey bull. Didn’t like okra, didn’t like pears. He liked a gal that had no hairs. Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker!” Whether or not there had actually existed such a figure, Charlie had never been able to find out. But he loved the idea, and he often said to himself what he was saying to himself at this moment: “Yes! I got a back like a Jersey bull!” In his day he had been a star on the Georgia Tech football team. Football had left him with a banged-up right knee, that had turned arthritic about three years ago. He didn’t associate that with age, however. It was an honorable wound of war. One of the beauties of a Tennessee walking horse was that its gait spared you from having to post, to pump up and down at the knees when the horse trotted. He wasn’t sure he could take posting on this chilly February morning.
Up ahead, his hunting guide and dog trainer, Moseby, was riding yet another of his walking horses. Moseby signaled the dogs with a curious, low-pitched, drawn-out whistle he somehow produced from deep in his throat. Charlie could just make out one of his two prize pointers, King’s Whipple and Duke’s Knob, ranging through the golden sea of sedge, trying to get wind of quail coveys.
The two shooters, Charlie and Inman, rode on in silence for a while, listening to the creaking of the wagons and the clip-clopping of the mules and the snorts of the horses of the outriders and waiting for some signal from Moseby. One wagon was a rolling dog kennel containing cages for three more pairs of pointers to take turns in the ceaseless roaming of the sedge, plus a pair of golden retrievers that had been born in the same litter and were known as Ronald and Roland. A team of La Mancha mules, adorned in brass-knobbed yokes and studded harnessing, pulled the wagon, and two of Charlie’s dog handlers, both of them black, attired in thornproof yellow overalls, drove them. The other was the buckboard, an ancient wooden thing rebuilt with shock absorbers and pneumatic tires and upholstered with rich tan leather, like a Mercedes-Benz’s. Two more of Charlie’s black employees, wearing the yellow overalls, drove the La Manchas that pulled the buckboard and served food and drink from an Igloo cooler built into the back. Sitting on the leather seats were Inman’s wife, Ellen, who was close to his age and didn’t ride anymore, and Betty and Halbert Morrissey and Thurston and Cindy Stannard, four more of Charlie’s weekend guests who didn’t ride or shoot. Charlie himself wouldn’t have been caught dead confined to a buckboard during a quail shoot, but he liked having an audience. Off to the side were two black employees on horseback, wearing the yellow overalls, whose main job was to hold the horses of the shooters or of Charlie’s wife, Serena, and Inman and Ellen’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, when they dismounted.
Serena and Elizabeth had drifted off from the rest of them and were riding side by side fifty or sixty yards away, Charlie now discovered. This he found annoying, although at first he couldn’t have said why. Both were dressed with perfect propriety, in khaki—at a Georgia plantation shoot khaki was as obligatory as tweeds at a grouse shoot in Scotland—and both were mounted flawlessly on their horses, except that they were leaning slightly toward one another, chatting away softly, smiling, and then going into convulsions of stifled laughter. Oh, what great chums they had become this morning—his wife and Inman and Ellen’s daughter … No one who saw Serena’s thick, slightly wild array of black hair and her big periwinkle-blue eyes, which stood out so vividly beneath it, could help but realize how young she was. Less than half his age! Even from fifty or sixty yards away she had Second Wife written all over her! Moreover, she was making it pretty obvious that she had more in common with this teenager, Elizabeth Armholster, than with Elizabeth’s mother or Betty Morrissey or Cindy Stannard or anybody else in the party. Elizabeth was a sexy little number herself … pale skin, a great mane of light brown hair, big sensual lips, and a chest she made sure you saw, even beneath the khaki … Charlie chided himself for thinking that way about his friend’s eighteen-year-old daughter, but the way she flaunted it all—the way her stretch riding pants hugged her thighs and the declivities of her loins fore and aft—how could you help it? What did Ellen Armholster really make of Serena, who was much closer to being her daughter’s contemporary than her own—Ellen, who had been such a pal of Martha’s? Then he took a deep breath and drove Martha and all of that old business out of his mind, too.
You could hear the low voice of one of the buckboard drivers saying, “Buckboard One to base … Buckboard One to base …” There was a radio transmitter under the driver’s seat. “Base” was the overseer’s office, back near the Big House. Buckboard One … Charlie hoped Inman and Ellen and the Morrisseys and the Stannards got the drift of that and were reminded that he had sent out four shooting parties this morning, four sets of weekend guests, with four buckboards (Buckboards One, Two, Three, and Four), four kennel wagons, four dog trainers, four sets of outriders, four of everything … Turpmtine was that big and that lavishly run. There was a formula. To send out one shooting party, with one pair of shooters, half a day each week for the entire season, which ran only from Thanksgiving to the end of February, you had to have at least five hundred acres. Otherwise you would wipe out your quail coveys and have no birds to shoot the following year. To send out one party all day once a week, you had to have at least a thousand acres. Well, he had 29,000 acres. If he felt like it, he could send out four parties all day, every day, seven days a week, throughout the season. Quail! The aristocrat of American wild game! It was what the grouse and the pheasant were in England and Scotland and Europe—only better! With the grouse and the pheasant you had your help literally beating the bushes and driving the birds toward you. With the quail you had to stay on the move. You had to have great dogs, great horses, and great shooters. Quail was king. Only the quail exploded upward into the sky and made your heart bang away so madly in your rib cage. And to think what he, Cap’m Charlie, had here! Second biggest plantation in the state of Georgia! He kept up 29,000 acres of fields, woods, and swamp, plus the Big House, the Jook House for the guests, the overseer’s house, the stables, the big barn, the breeding barn, the Snake House, the kennels, the gardening shed, the plantation store, the same one that had been there ever since the end of the Civil War, likewise the twenty-five cabins for the help—he kept all this going, staffed, and operating, not to mention the landing field and a hangar big enough to accommodate a Gulfstream Five—he kept all this going, staffed, and operating year round … for the sole purpose of hunting quail for thirteen weeks. And it wasn’t sufficient to be rich enough to do it. No, this was the South. You had to be man enough to deserve a quail plantation. You had to be able to deal with man and beast, in every form they came in, with your wits, your bare hands, and your gun.
He wished there was some way he could underline all this for Inman, but of course there wasn’t, unless he wanted to sound like a complete fool. So he decided to approach the subject from a wholly different direction.
“Inman,” he said, “did I ever tell you my daddy used to work here at Turpmtine?”
“He did? When?”
“Aw, back when I was nine or ten.”
“What’d he do?”
Charlie chuckled. “Not a hell of a lot, I s’peck. He only lasted a couple months. Daddy musta got fired”—came out farred—“from half the plantations south of Albany.”
Inman didn’t say anything, and Charlie couldn’t read anything in his face. He wondered if this reference to the Cracker origins of Clan Croker had made Inman uncomfortable. Inman was Old Atlanta, insofar as there was any Old Atlanta. Atlanta had never been a true Old Southern city like Savannah or Charleston or Richmond, where wealth had originated with the land. Atlanta was an offspring of the railroad business. It had been created from scratch barely 150 years ago, and people had been making money there on the hustle ever since. The place had already run through three names. First they called it Terminus, because that was where the new railroad ended. Then they named it Marthasville, after the wife of the governor. Then they called it Atlanta, after the Western and Atlantic Railroad and on the boosters’ pretext that the rail link with Savannah made it tantamount to a port on the Atlantic Ocean itself. The Armholsters had hustled and boosted with the best of them, Charlie had to admit. Inman’s father had built up a pharmaceuticals company back at a time when that was not even a well-known industry, and Inman had turned it into a chemicals conglomerate, Armaxco. Right now he wouldn’t mind being in Inman’s shoes. Armaxco was so big, so diverse, so well established, it was cycleproof. Inman could probably go to sleep for twenty years and Armaxco would just keep chugging away, minting money. Not that Inman would want to miss a minute of it. He loved all those board meetings too much, loved being up on the dais at all those banquets too much, loved all those tributes to Inman Armholster the great philanthropist, all those junkets to the north of Italy, the south of France, and God knew where else on Armaxco’s Falcon 900, all those minions jumping every time he so much as crooked his little finger. With a corporate structure like Armaxco’s beneath him, Inman could sit on that throne of his as long as he wanted or until he downed the last mouthful of lamb shanks and mint jelly God allowed him—whereas he, Charlie, was a one-man band. That was what a real estate developer was, a one-man band! You had to sell the world on … yourself! Before they would lend you all that money, they had to believe in … you! They had to think you were some kind of omnipotent, flaw-free genius. Not my corporation but Me, Myself & I! His mistake was that he had started believing it himself, hadn’t he … Why had he ever built a mixed-use development out in Cherokee County crowned with a forty-story tower and named it after himself? Croker Concourse! No other Atlanta developer had ever dared display that much ego, whether he had it or not. And now the damned thing stood there, 60 percent empty and hemorrhaging money.
The deep worry was lit up like an inflammation. Couldn’t let that happen … not on a perfect morning for shooting quail at Turpmtine. So he returned to the subject of his father.
“It was a whole different world back then, Inman. A big Saturday night was going to the jookhouse up near the—”
Charlie broke off in the middle of the sentence. Up ahead, Moseby, the dog trainer, had stopped and looked back and lifted his cap. That was the signal. Then his low voice came rolling across the sedge:
“Poi-i-i-int!”
Sure enough, over there was Knobby—Duke’s Knob—in the classic pointer’s stance, his nose thrust forward and his tail sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle like a rod. He had gotten wind of a covey of quail in the sedge. Out beyond Moseby, Whip—King’s Whipple—was in the same position, backing Knobby’s point.
The wagons came to a halt, and everyone grew quiet, and the two shooters, Charlie and Inman, dismounted. Luckily for Charlie, when you mounted or dismounted, your left leg bore the weight as you swung yourself over the horse’s back, and his right knee didn’t have to go through the ordeal. He had barely dismounted when one of his boys in the yellow overalls, Ernest, arrived on horseback and took the reins of his horse and Inman’s. Charlie withdrew his .410 from the leather scabbard and slipped two shells into its twin barrels and began walking through the sedge with Inman. He realized that the knee had stiffened and he was limping, but he was not conscious of the pain. The adrenaline took care of that. His heart was thumping away. No matter how many times you went hunting quail, you never became immune to the feeling that came over you when the dogs set the point and you approached a covey hidden somewhere nearby in the grass. The quails’ instinct in the face of danger was to hide in the tall grass and then, all at once, to explode upward in flight with incredible acceleration. Everybody used the same term for it: explode. You didn’t dare have more than two shooters at a time. The little birds rocketed upward in every direction, scattering in order to confound their predators. In the excitement, hunters swung their guns about so wildly that three or more shooters would pose more of a threat to each other than to the quail. It was dangerous enough with two. That was why he made his help wear the yellow overalls. He didn’t want some idiot guest with buck fever cutting loose with a load of buckshot in the direction of one of his boys.
Inman took a position off to Charlie’s right. The understanding was that an imaginary line ran between them, and Charlie could go after any birds to the left of it. It was so quiet, he could hear his own breathing, which was too rapid. He could feel the pressure of all the eyes now fixed upon him, the guests’, the mule drivers’, the outriders’, Moseby’s, his wife’s … He’d brought quite a little army out here, hadn’t he—and he’d opened his big mouth and announced he was going to shoot only the males—and bet Inman a hundred dollars, within practically everybody’s hearing.
He had the stock of the .410 up near his shoulder. It seemed to take forever. In fact, it was no more than twenty seconds—
Thrash!
With an extraordinary pounding of the air the covey burst up out of the grass. The sound seemed suffocatingly loud. Gray blurs hurtled at every angle. A patch of white. He swung the .410 to the left. Keep the barrel moving ahead of the bird! That was the main thing. He fired one barrel. He thought—didn’t know. Another white patch. Swung the barrel almost straight up. Fired again. A bird came peeling down out of the sky.
Charlie stood there holding the shotgun, conscious of the sharp smell of exploded gunpowder, his heart hammering away. He turned toward Inman.
“How’d you do?”
Inman was shaking his head so hard his jowls were lagging behind his chin and flopping around. “Shit—’scuse me, ladies”—his wife, Ellen, and Betty and Halbert Morrissey and the Stannards had climbed down off the buckboard and were heading toward the two shooters—“I missed the first one. Didn’t lead the sonofabitch.” He seemed furious with himself. “I might’ve gotten the second one, but I ain’t even sure a that, goddamn it, ’scuse me.” He shook his head some more.
Charlie hadn’t even been aware of Inman’s gun going off.
Inman said, “How’d you do?”
“I know I got the second one,” said Charlie. “I don’t know about the first one.”
“Got both, Cap’m Charlie.” It was Lonnie, one of the dog handlers on the kennel wagon.
“Better be bobs,” said Inman. “Either that or you better have a picture of Ben Franklin handy.”
Soon enough the retrievers, Ronald and Roland, had fetched both of Charlie’s birds from the underbrush and brought them to Lonnie, who in turn brought them over to Cap’m Charlie. Quail seemed so small, once you actually had one in your hands. Their bodies were still warm, almost hot. Charlie turned up their beaks with his forefinger, and there they were, the white patches on their throats.
A surge of inexpressible joy swept through him. He had done it, just as he said he would! Shot two males from out of that rocketing bevy! It was an omen! What could go wrong now? Nothing! He didn’t even dare to let himself smile, for fear of revealing just how proud and sure he was of himself.
He could hear a buzz of conversation between the mule drivers and the outriders and among the guests about how Cap’m Charlie had called his shots and made them, with a hundred dollars riding on the outcome. Inman came over and put his hand down on one bob and then the other.
Now Charlie allowed himself a smile. “Whatcha doing, Inman? You think me and Lonnie’s got a couple of old birds stowed away to trick you with?”
“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said Inman glumly. “I didn’t think you could do it.”
And now Charlie let himself laugh from deep inside. “Don’t do to doubt me, Inman, not where quail’s concerned! Now how ’bout introducing me to that pal a yours you were talking about, Ben Franklin!”
Inman thrust his hands down into the pockets of his khakis, and a sheepish expression came over his face. “Well, hell … I didn’t bring anything out here. I didn’t come out here to shop, f’r chrissake, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna buy anything at that plantation store a yours.”
“Oh brother!” said Charlie. “ ‘Didn’t bring anything out here’! I’m gonna file that one along with ‘The truck’s broke down’ and ‘The cook took sick’! ‘Didn’t bring anything out here’?” Charlie looked around at Ellen Armholster and the Morrisseys and the Stannards and beamed. “Juh hear that? It’s easy to bet blue chips when you ain’t even got table stakes!”
Oh, this was rich stuff. Now he looked around at his mule drivers and outriders, all his boys in the yellow overalls, to make sure they were in on it, too, and at Moseby, who had ridden back toward them, and at Serena—
—but where was she? Then he spotted her. She was still way off, maybe seventy or eighty yards away, out in the field, Serena and Elizabeth Armholster, too, still on their horses, which were side by side. They were chatting and laughing up a storm. He couldn’t believe it. The two young women, with their wild hair and loamy loins, hadn’t paid the slightest attention to what had just gone on. Couldn’t have cared less about what two … old men … had or hadn’t accomplished with their shotguns. He was suddenly filled with a rage he didn’t dare express.
Just then Serena and Elizabeth swung their mounts about and headed toward them, laughing and talking to each other the whole time. And now, still high in the saddle, they pulled up beside Charlie and Inman and Ellen and the Morrisseys and the Stannards. Their youthfulness couldn’t have been more obvious … the high color in their flawlessly smooth cheeks … the imperiously correct postures of two girls at a horse show … the tender curves of their necks and jaws … the perfectly packed fullness of their cloven hindquarters … as compared to the sagging hides of Ellen Armholster and Betty Morrissey and Cindy Stannard’s generation …
The ever-obliging Betty Morrissey looked up at Serena and said, “You know what your husband just did? He shot two bobs, and Inman owes him a hundred dollars.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Charlie,” said Serena.
Charlie studied her face. She hadn’t said it in any pointedly ironic way, but from the mischievous way her eyes, which were such a vivid blue, flashed beneath the black corona of her hair and from the little glance she flicked toward Elizabeth Armholster, he knew she meant it ironically. He could feel his face turning hot.
Elizabeth looked down at her father and said, “How’d you do, Daddy?”
“Don’t ask,” said Inman in a glum voice.
Teasingly: “Oh, come on, Daddy. ’Fess up.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” said Inman, twisting his lips in a way that tried, unsuccessfully, to make it seem as if he were making light of his miserable performance.
Then Elizabeth leaned way over in the saddle, causing her long, light brown hair to cascade down either side of her face, and put her hand on the back of Inman’s neck and rubbed it and puckered up those full lips of hers and said in a babyish, coquettish voice she had obviously used on her father before:
“Oh, golly gee, Daddy didn’t shoot anybody in the whole quail family?”
With that she flicked a glance of her own toward Serena, who compressed her lips as if she was making a determined effort not to laugh in the two old shooters’ faces.
Now Charlie’s face was red hot. The whole quail family! What was that supposed to mean? Animal rights? Whatever it was, it was intentional heresy—the two of them peering down from the eminence of their steeds upon the old parties below and sniggering and exchanging glances of conspiratorial superiority—why, the … the … the … the impudence of it! According to a tradition as old as the plantations themselves, a quail shoot was a ritual in which the male of the human species acted out his role of hunter, provider, and protector, and the female acted as if this was part of the natural, laudable, excellent, and compelling order of things. None of this could Charlie have put into words, but he felt it. Oh, he felt it—
Just then a burst of static came over the radio on the buckboard, followed by some words in a deep voice Charlie couldn’t make out.
One of the mule drivers yelled over: “Cap’m Charlie! It’s Durwood. Says Mr. Stroock called from Atlanta and wants you to call him back right away.”
A sinking feeling ran through Charlie. There was only one reason why Wismer Stroock, his young chief financial officer, would ever dare try to track him down in the fields of Turpmtine on a Saturday morning during a quail shoot.
“Tell’m—tell’m I’ll call him later on, after we get back to the Gun House.” He wondered if the quaver of concern in his voice had been detectable.
“Says it’s urgent, Cap’m.”
Charlie hesitated. “Just tell’m what I said.”
He looked down at the patches of white on the throats of the two dead bobs, but he could no longer focus on them. The birds’ bellies looked like a reddish-gray fuzz.
PlannersBanc. The mountain of debt. The avalanche has begun, thought Cap’m Charlie.
I WON’T STAY LONG, WES,” SAID ROGER. “I KNOW YOU’VE GOT A whole waiting room full of people who want to see you, but I just had to come by and shake your hand. It’s just great. Congratulations. I couldn’t be happier if it was me who had done it.”
“But you did do it,” said the Mayor. The two of them were standing in the mayoral salon, and Wes gestured toward the familiar white couch. “Come on, sit down, have a seat.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am.” He gestured again. “I’ve been thinking about you all morning.”
“Me?” said Roger as he took a seat. “How do I rate that on this day of all days?”
At first Wes just smiled, and not ironically, either. His face looked ashen, despite his black-as-thou suntan. There were deep dark circles under his eyes, which were bloodshot. He probably hadn’t had a real night’s sleep for a week, maybe two weeks, and he must have been up all night last night, since the final tally hadn’t come in until 4 a.m. He had defeated André Fleet by less than one percentage point.
For a moment Wes gazed pensively out the big plate-glass window behind the couch. It was a miserable November day with dark, low clouds, fog, and a dreadful level of humidity that made it seem warm one minute and cold and clammy the next. Then he pulled up his armchair and sat down and smiled some more and said:
“I hope Gladys or Miss Beasley offered you something to drink. We’ve even got champagne. You may not see champagne in here again, unless you run for mayor.”
Roger gave a laughing snort, as if the idea were preposterous. In fact, he regarded it as merely unlikely. “No, they were very hospitable. But I’m not sure I can take champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
The Mayor raised his right hand as if it held a glass. “Then I’ll toast you, one teetotaler to another. You were the turning point, brother.”
“How so?”
“The way you got the most hidebound Cracker in town to come to that press conference. Charlie Croker. That turned this election around.”
“Are you being funny? We’ve talked about this many times, but I still feel terrible about what happened. I thought I was being so shrewd. I thought I had Croker right where we wanted him. And then he double-crosses us! He as much as calls Fareek the sort of young black man who thinks with his groin and goes about deflowering the sweet young white flowers of the Piedmont Driving Club set. Frankly, I thought I’d managed to blow the election for you.”
“Quite the opposite,” said Wes. “We now know—from the exit polling yesterday—we now know that every voter, or every African-American voter—”
Roger interrupted. “You’re sticking with African American, even now that the election’s over?”
“I’m sticking with it, brother, I’m sticking with it, sticking with it, sticking with it. In fact, I’m stuck with it.”
Roger said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“That’s okay. Anyway, we now know that practically every African-American voter looked upon Croker’s performance as a betrayal of Fareek. Obviously he had agreed to be at the press conference to say something entirely different, and then, like a snake, he does all he can to destroy Fareek’s personal reputation. He calls him arrogant, obnoxious, impertinent, and an animal who grabs whatever he wants. I probably got more sympathy for that than anything else that happened in the whole campaign. It looked as if the white business interests were out to sabotage me. And I don’t get much sympathy as a rule, Roger. Oh, I think people look at me in a generally good way, but I strike them as a little too … self-confident, or whatever it is.”
“Gee,” said Roger, “wonder why. Incidentally, I don’t know if I ever told you, but that line about the snake—Croker had said something about ‘the Manager, the weasel, and the snake’?—and you elbowed him away from the microphone and said you hadn’t heard the Manager talking, so it must have been the weasel or the snake?—you remember that?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, that was brilliant, Wes. It was one of the best ad lib lines I ever heard. But now, please explain something else to me. You had thought of getting Croker to support Fareek because you didn’t want to alienate your white support by defending Fareek in a rape case involving Armholster’s daughter. So what happened to your white vote?”
“I did lose some white support. No question about it. But two things softened the blow. First, it brought me so much more black support. And Croker’s performance was so crazy—all that talk about the Manager and the two elements and how it’s better to be a tranquil beggar by the side of the road than a perturbed plutocrat in Buckhead—Godalmighty!—he was so crazy that day. Then he announces he’s giving away everything he has—I mean, he sounded so crazy, a lot of white voters ended up discounting everything he said, including his vilification of Fareek. Tens of thousands of people watched that press conference on television, because the subject was race and sex.”
“What did happen to Croker? I never hear anything about him.”
Wes smiled broadly. “You don’t? You’ve got to put your ear to the ground, Brother Roger. Croker’s out there stomping around. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. He said, ‘Okay, boys’”—Wes turned his palms up and then lifted them in the gesture that says “empty”—“ ‘here it is. It’s all yours. You fight over it.’ I mean, he walked away from a corporation worth hundreds of millions. Of course, his debts were even greater, by another couple of hundred million or so, but still—it was unbelievable. Now he’s an evangelist.”
“An evangelist?”
“Exactly—and apparently doing very well.”
“Oh—come—on! What in God’s name is he preaching?”
“Nothing in God’s name. He’s out there talking about the Manager … him and Zeus. Apparently the two names are interchangeable. And there’s Epi-something—I can’t remember the name. And there’s Messenger Connie, who’ll soon be returning to Earth from wherever.”
“Zeus?”
“Yep. Zeus and the Manager—and he calls himself a Stoic.”
“Where’s he doing all this?”
“He started off down in Baker County,” said Wes, “and now he’s moved into the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama. Apparently he’s dynamite, at least among white folks who go in for that sort of thing. He can talk your socks off, and the bills out of your wallet, is what I hear. The fact that he gave up everything—and he had a lot—to work for the Manager gives him tremendous credibility. He’s about to sign a syndication deal with Fox Broadcasting.”
“Fox Broadcasting?”
“That’s the word. It’s going to be called The Stoic’s Hour.”
Roger’s mouth hung partway open. “Dear God in heaven … The Manager … Zeus … national television … The Stoic’s Hour … I think I’m going crazy, Wes.”
The Mayor laughed. “I’ll tell you something. A lot of white folks look down on the way we worship. They think we’re too emotional and demonstrative and so forth. Our choirs sway when they sing and clap their hands to the beat. Our preachers don’t just preach, they o-rate. Our congregations don’t just sit there mumbling, they shout ‘Right on!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Say it, brother’ and ‘Amen.’ “ But I’ll tell you something. At least our people don’t turn … weird. At least they don’t start praying to the Manager and Zeus and calling themselves Stoics as soon as some old ox with a deep voice comes to town with a tent. I mean, Godalmighty.”
“What about—”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said the Mayor, “but I’ve just got to show you this little footnote to Croker and Zeus and the Manager and all that.” He got up, went into his little inner office, and came back with a small newspaper clipping, which he handed to Roger. “Take a look at the headline.”
The headline said: TURN ME LOOSE, ZEUS.
“That’s from some paper in Oakland, this summer. Anyway, as you’ll see there, it’s about a young man named Hensley, a white kid. He escaped from jail in California during that earthquake last whenever it was, and he turns himself in sometime in July, and he’s about to be sentenced, and the judge asks him if he has anything to say, and the kid says, ‘It’s up to you to do your part, Judge, and it’s up to me to do mine.’ And so the judge says, ‘You seem awfully relaxed about the whole thing.’ And the kid says, ‘I’m completely tranquil.’ That’s the word he uses, tranquil. ‘I feel completely in accord with nature,’ he says. Then he says, right here”—Wes pointed it out in the clipping—“he says, ‘My body, it’s nothing but a clay bowl with a quart of blood, and it’s only on loan in the first place. But Zeus has given each of us a spark of his divinity, the ability to say yes to what is true, and no to what is false, and no one can take that away from you, not even in prison.’ So the judge says, ‘Zeus, hunh? Escape from custody is a serious offense, but I’m going to take a chance on you. I’m setting you free on two years’ probation, in the custody of Zeus.’ You’ll never guess who this kid is.”
“Zeus. Must be Charlie Croker’s son or something. Who is it?”
“Elihu Yale, the police chief, sent the clipping over last week. Seems that last spring the California State Police, or whoever it was, asked our police department to be on the lookout for this kid who had broken out of jail and was believed to be in the Atlanta area. The FBI had done some kind of phone taps. The kid had been in jail for aggravated assault. By the time our department finally got a lead on him, he was long gone from Atlanta. He’d been working here for an outfit called Carter Home Care as a sort of attendant for sick people. One of the people he worked for—are you ready for this?—was Charlie Croker. I don’t know if you remember, but he was the kid who helped Croker up to the landing for the press conference.”
“I remember him!” said Roger. “I saw him at Croker’s house, too. He had these huge forearms.” He made a gesture over his left forearm with his right hand.
“Oh sure,” said Wes. “All these convicts do is lift weights and make license plates. But you can see what happened. Croker converts the poor bastard to this weird Zeus religion of his, and the kid goes and pulls this Zeus stuff on some California judge—and it works! Can you believe that? I’ll tell you what I said before. You can find fault with our people when it comes to faith, if you want to, but we—do—not—turn—weird on you. Isn’t that a great headline? turn me loose, zeus? I don’t know how they think up these things. Anyway, I’m sorry, Roger, I interrupted you.”
Roger said, “Yeah, uh … what the hell was I was going to ask you? Oh yeah. What about Croker’s wife? You remember that number?”
“Oh yes,” said the Mayor.
“So is she out on the camp-meeting circuit with Croker, too?” asked Roger.
“Not that I know of,” said the Mayor. “I don’t think young Mrs. Croker is very spiritual. I think she believes that everything that’s sweet in this life ends when we die.”
“Didn’t they have a child?”
“A little girl,” said Wes. “Her name is Kingsley Croker.” He pulled a face, as if to say, “Pretty outlandish name, hunh?”
“And she’s with her mother, I assume?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Wes. “You know, when these hot little vamps marry their rich old men, they often have a child as fast as they can, as an insurance policy. What happens to the child when there’s nothing left to insure, I don’t want to think about.”
“What did happen to all his property?”
“Oh, the creditors—you remember he said, ‘The keys are on the table, they’re all yours, go to it,’ or something like that? Well, PlannersBanc and all the other creditors were ecstatic at first. Croker wasn’t going to tie them up in Chapter 11, which could’ve dragged on for years. So they all had at it—and now they’re busy suing each other, the creditors are, and it’ll probably drag on for decades. There’s been some funny fallout from this thing. You’re a lawyer, you’ve probably heard of ‘surrendering a deed in lieu of foreclosure’?”
Roger nodded to show that he had.
“Well, Croker just handed over his deeds, including the deed to the property that ruined him, Croker Concourse. You remember Croker Concourse?”
Roger nodded again.
“If you’re handed the deed, in lieu of foreclosure, you don’t have to have an auction, but what happened was, Croker and his financial troubles got so much publicity following the press conference, all sorts of vultures and bottom-fishers got interested in Croker Concourse, figuring they could get it on the cheap. So they started bidding against each other, and pretty soon PlannersBanc had an auction going, all the same. They got $130 million for the thing. Some group from Dallas bought it. That was a lot less than they’d lent Croker for it, but at least they got away with their hides. In the middle of the whole thing they discover that one of their loan officers, a guy named Peepgass, has secretly formed a syndicate to buy the thing for $50 million, which he was going to talk his superiors into accepting. Of course they canned the guy—but that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that just last month this Peepgass married Charlie Croker’s first wife! I’m not kidding! And so now he’s living in a mansion in Buckhead that Croker paid for, with a woman who has millions Croker had to give her in the divorce settlement. Meantime, the guy’s involved in a paternity suit with some woman in Decatur, but that didn’t seem to bother the former Mrs. Croker.” Wes shook his head and then smiled his best ironic smile and said, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”
Roger laughed and said, “Wes, I still don’t see how that whole thing with Croker turned the election around, or were you speaking in hyperbole?”
Wes maintained his ironic smile, but then looked through the plate-glass window, as if toward the murky clouds outside. He stayed that way for what seemed like a very long time.
Then he turned back toward Roger, smiled faintly, and said, “Do you remember the first time you came in here, and I asked you if I could speak to you as Brother Wes and Brother Roger? I never regretted that, incidentally.”
“Oh, I remember.”
“Can we do that again, just Brother Wes and Brother Roger?”
“Absolutely.”