Gay Place (12 page)

The motion was all so smooth and effortless, so lacking in violence, that Roy could only sit on the damp grass and smile, looking about the neighborhood, watching the weird morning light touch the tops of houses. From a railroad siding miles away a single switch engine thudded against a boxcar. The lawn’s moisture was coming through the seat of his trousers. He touched his jaw and attempted to look serious.

Earle stood above him, embarrassed. On stage. His movements were oddly wooden as he circled warily. Finally he bent down and extended a hand.

“Aw hell, Roy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Roy looked up at him, still serious.

“You want a sonofabitch,” he said, “I’ll be your sonofabitch, Earle.”

Fielding began backing off and waving his hand. “Naw,” he was saying. “Jesus … forget it …”

Half a block down the damp street, the engine in Rinemiller’s car exploded like a cannon in the stillness of the dawn. Roy sat back down on the grass and watched Earle and the auto vanish over a hill.

F
ENSTEMAKER ROUSED HIM AT
eight with awful exhortations, a compound of biblical wisdom and Hill Country homily. Roy groaned and looked out through the window at the quiet surface of the lake, wondering about the hour. There were no fishermen in sight, nor had the water-skiing contingent from the college arrived.

“Jesus …” Roy said. “What’s the time?”

“How long, America, O how long,” Fenstemaker was babbling.

Roy turned round the face of his clock, blinked in the harsh morning light and groaned again. Fenstemaker badgered him mercilessly. Roy protested: “I’m a sick man, Governor … I had three hours sleep night before last; I gave blood yesterday; I got in late again last night … this morning … I’m getting a nervous tic …”

“You get over here in an hour?” Fenstemaker said. “I got somethin’ important … How soon you get over here?”

Roy said he would come as soon as he had strength enough to shave and dress. “I’m sick, Governor,” he said. “I got the neurosis.”

“You tie your shoelaces?” Fenstemaker said.

Roy said maybe he could.

“You’re all right, then,” Fenstemaker said. “Psychiatrist friend mine says man’s not really disabled emotionally till he gets up in the mornin’ and can’t decide which shoe to pull on first …”

Roy gave assurances he would get to the Capitol sometime before noon.

“Bring your friend,” the Governor said.

“Who’s that?” Roy said. For a terrible moment he thought the Governor was going to start in on the business with Ouida.

“That Willie,” Fenstemaker said. “Bring that Willie person. I got somethin’ for the both of you.”

Then the Governor rang off with characteristic abruptness. Roy got slowly to his feet, washed, shaved, fed his cat, and ate a bowl of cereal. He tore off the cereal boxtop for the Fielding boy and listened unhappily for a moment to the sounds of fun and games commencing on the lake.

Willie’s offices were in a semi-abandoned building several blocks from the college. It was a large frame structure put together during the war to house Navy V-12 personnel. There was good reason to doubt whether it could ever again survive another national emergency, but efforts were being made from time to time, very much in the manner that building construction progressed in Mexican towns, to restore it for use as office space. A new stone veneer rose halfway up the front; window screens were being repainted and striped linoleum laid along the first-floor hallway. Brightly colored asbestos paneling was used to partition off the ground-floor rooms. There was no way to reach the second floor from inside: only half a stairway hung from its fractured supports, leading up to nowhere. Willie’s guests had to climb the fire escape outside.

Willie worked alone in the unimproved quarters upstairs. He had the whole upstairs — a space roughly the size of a basketball court — the dark floor littered with waste paper, cheap newsprint, candy wrappers, beer cans, soft drink bottles, and numerous pasteboard boxes on which the word
FILES
had been drawn in black crayon. There were also three enormous, new and shining metal garbage cans. Willie had a single desk, a typewriter and stand, a makeshift worktable put together with sawhorses and thick plywood, an ancient wicker chair, a broken-down sofa, a clothestree, a leather ottoman, a fading, partially collapsed beach umbrella, a phonograph, and remnants of what appeared to be an army shelter half. A smell, an inexpressible something compounded of commercial detergents, sawdust, new paint and rat droppings, clung to all the upstairs.

Willie had secured these offices through a rental agent friend, an ex-pipefitter who had not yet got over his uneasiness from deserting the labor movement. The agent had recommended the building to Willie’s sponsors, advising that work on the newspaper could be conducted in the upstairs space free of charge until such time as the newspaper became a moneymaking proposition or restoration of the upper half of the building was resumed. The likelihood of either seemed infinitely remote at this time.

Roy climbed the fire escape and found Willie bent over his desk, talking with the young man from the college, Kermit’s friend, named Jobie. Roy sniffed the incredible air of the loft and said hello.

Willie looked up, nodded, and went on talking to the boy. “You make some persuasive points …”

“I know the prose is rather splendid,” Jobie said, “but the content — do you think it really says something to the common man?”

“Yes … Yes …” Willie said, nodding, looking up at Roy for help. “I think it says a great deal.” Roy decided it was simply in Willie’s nature to be gentle on all occasions.

“Is it true you have a large number of, uh, working class subscribers?”

Willie nodded. He looked at the window for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “Yes …” he said. “The unions conducted subscription campaigns in all the locals.”

“You’ll use it then?” Jobie said.

“I imagine so,” Willie said. “It’s a bit long — forty pages — but —”

“Plus the footnotes …?”

“Yes … Well … We’ve got to be
realistic
about space. We’re necessarily limited to …”

Roy sat down in the wicker chair and read an old issue of the newspaper. He knew Willie would carry Jobie’s article in one form or another, possibly in installments of several weeks. Life for Willie had become a progressively desperate, never-ending struggle to get the pages of the little journal filled and sent to the printers. There was never any advertising that amounted to much: an occasional beer ad, an “institutional” endorsement from one of the unions, legal notices sent over from sympathetic lawyers. Those eight to twelve pages each week yawned at Willie like a voracious sea monster, a scavenger, swallowing up everything, meat and vegetables, gold and dross, whole or in part, whatever garbage and flotsam was washed close by. Roy sat in the wicker chair and turned through the pages, glancing over an article written by Kermit, the Mad Doctor, entitled
Radical Pacifism
—
A Way Out.

Out of what, Roy was not able to determine on so brief an examination, but he did note that Willie had managed to stretch Kermit’s “monograph” over three pages, breaking up the gray spaces with line drawings clipped out of a 1934 issue of the old
Scribner’s Magazine.
He looked up, wanting to commend Willie as a newsman in the best tradition, but Jobie was still talking fiercely.

“You have an art critic?” the young man wanted to know.

Willie shook his head and said he had never exactly given any thought to the possibility of carrying art criticism. “But we’re certainly not bound by precedent,” Willie added. “You have anyone in mind?”

“You might want to look at some
small
things I’ve done,” Jobie said. “Lately I’ve been very much interested in the idea of the
mot juste
in art — have you ever thought of that? The painter striving much as Flaubert to arrive at …”

“Yes …” Willie said, jerking his head up and down.

Roy got to his feet and said: “That’s the wonderful thing about this newspaper …” Jobie looked at Roy, delighted. “It
is
a wonderful thing,” Jobie agreed.

“Any work,” Roy went on, Willie giving him a grateful look, “any work that is honest and genuine — anything of a special lyric or
human
quality, as primitive as it might seem to the academician, as bewildering as it might appear to the, uh, working class type, will nonetheless have great appeal to Willie as art … a
folk
art that is
indigenous
to the region …”

Jobie strode round the workbench, waving his arms. “That’s it! That’s exactly what I had in mind! There are some revolutionary things being done here … In the arts … This is a frontier … You won’t find such vitality in … anywhere else. This is where new things are being done. I have a friend experimenting with ceramic murals, using the native soils to produce a tile painting that will reflect not only the
images
of the region but its very
fundament
as well …”

“I hope you’ll excuse me for breaking in,” Roy said. “Willie and I have an appointment downtown.”

“I do some painting myself,” Jobie said.

“We’re supposed to be at the Capitol in fifteen minutes,” Willie said. He looked at Roy. “That right?”

“Though I’m normally a writer,” Jobie said. “I’ve had some shows.”

“It’ll take us ten minutes to get there,” Roy said.

“Of course sculpture is really the most exciting, the most
plastic
of …”

“Play the recorder?” Willie said suddenly.

“Pardon?” Jobie got his eyes in focus and looked at them.

“Clock’s out of order. You have the time?” Willie said.

“Nearly eleven.”

“We’ve got to leave.”

They climbed out of the window and walked down the fire escape, blinking in the sunlight, trying to keep their balance so as to avoid holding on to the metal railing which rubbed off, dusty and black oxidized, on the hands. They dropped the young man off near the college and headed the car toward the Capitol grounds.

T
HEY CLIMBED THE GREAT
stone steps and headed down the main corridor of the Capitol building, taking a back elevator that let them off at a third-floor passageway near the Executive Offices. They sat waiting for a few minutes, watching the nice-legged secretaries moving back and forth. Occasionally, the Governor’s voice could be heard through the thick walls, a little like Grand Opera from a great distance. Jay McGown passed through the reception room, looking gloomy and efficient. He stopped and talked with them.

“He ought to be ready for you,” Jay said, looking back toward the Governor’s conference room. His attitude was not so much one of anxiety; Jay had more the quality, characteristic of those constantly exposed to Arthur Fenstemaker, of having peered steadily at the scene of an accident, experienced a revelation, seen death and redemption, God and Lucifer staring back, and somehow, incredibly, survived.

Jay started off toward the pressrooms down the hall. Almost immediately the Governor came banging out of his office, one arm draped round the shoulder of a state senator. The senator grinned at everyone, eyes glazed, the Governor leading him as a blind man toward the door. Then Fenstemaker turned, a great happy smile on his face. “Come on in, you two,” he said.

They got to their feet to follow him inside. Fenstemaker had already collapsed in his chair, stretching out, neck and spine resting against the leather cushions. They sat across from him and stared. Fenstemaker pinched his nose, moved a big hand over his face as if probing for minute flaws in a piece of pottery. He rubbed his eyes, sucked his teeth, punched holes in a sheet of bond paper with a gold toothpick. He stood and paced about the room and stared out the windows and scratched himself. “Well goddam and hell …” he said. It was like a high mass, a benediction.

“Let me do you a favor, Willie,” he said.

“What kind of favor?”

“I don’t know. Anything you ask. I just want to get you obligated,” the Governor said, grinning and winking at Roy.

“Don’t know of anything I want offhand,” Willie said.

“Think of something.”

“How ’bout some more of that Scotch whiskey then — the smoky twenty-five-year-old stuff you served me last month.”

Fenstemaker smiled, showing his shark’s teeth. “Hell and damn,” he said. “That’s no favor.” He swung round in the big chair and opened a side panel of the desk. There was the sound of ice clacking in metal tumblers, and he pushed drinks across to them. “Look at this,” the Governor said, setting a seltzer bottle on the desk top. “Damndest things … Used to see ’em in the movies when I was growin’ up. When I could afford a movin’ picture show.” He held the bottle in one hand and pressed the lever, sending a spray of water across the room. For a moment there was a fine mist suspended in the air between Roy and Willie and the sunlit windows. A lovely rainbow appeared.

“You’re a mean sonofabitch,” the Governor said, staring at the seltzer bottle. Roy wondered if he was talking about the bottle or his guests, until he repeated himself. “You’re a mean sonofabitch, Willie,” he said, still smiling.

“I’m lazy and no-account,” Willie said. “But not mean, especially.”

“You ever think about old Phillips?” He referred to a minor state official now serving a term in the penitentiary who was convicted on several counts of theft and conspiracy from evidence developed in Willie’s news columns.

“I think of him,” Willie said. “I keep thinking how I wish he’d come back and do it all over again. I’m running out of people to expose.”

The Governor spun round in his swivel chair, grinning. “Well you keep tryin’, Willie,” he said. “You keep tryin’. What’s your circulation now?”

“About the same as it was. About ten thousand. But only about six of it paid. We give away a hell of a lot of copies.”

“That’s not much,” the Governor said. “Ten thousand’s not much.”

“No.”

“How much money you losin’?”

“Lots.”

“I imagine so,” the Governor said.

“I try not to think about it,” Willie said. He looked unhappy for a moment, thinking about it.