Blenner looked at his daughter and his eyes were utterly bored. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Mike.

"I'll give you a call," Mike said. "If we decide to do it, I'll buzz you."

The girl smiled and then quickly followed her father out of the office. Mike noticed that she limped slightly.





CHAPTER 17

The Ocean and the Desert

Georgia Blenner called Mike four days later.

"I've found some farming land," she said. Her voice was cool and unexcited. "Would you like to go look at it? I've arranged to pick up an agricultural expert from the University to give us some advice. Could you go this afternoon?"

"I can get free, but I don't want an expert along."

"Why not?"

"All an expert can do is tell you what worked in the past. They're always too conservative. Always hedging; afraid they'll hurt their reputation. The time for experts is later."

Georgia laughed.

"All right," she said. "We won't take the expert. Can you meet me at Karl's Drive-in on Wilshire . . . out by Westwood? Around one-thirty?"

"Sure. I'll be there," Mike said.

When he put the phone down, he leaned back in his chair. He hadn't talked to Cromwell about Blenner's proposal. He knew he would not. He also knew that he would go along with Blenner.

It isn't the money, Mike thought. We can win without Blenner's money. But it was the crazy idea about going into farming. it was a little fishhook of curiosity that sunk into his flesh; a curious little gnaw of interest.

She was sitting in the drive-in drinking coffee when he drove up. She saw him through the plate-glass window and walked out to meet him. She was tall and she walked with a peculiar gait. It gave her a coltish, angular appearance, although she had very full breasts and round hips. She opened the door and got in the car.

"The land is out in the San Fernando Valley," she said. "Why don't you drive out Wilshire to the coast and then over Tujunga to the valley?"

"It's shorter to go over Sepulveda," Mike said.

"I know that. But I like to drive along the ocean. It's warmer too." She turned and looked at him. She had a large mouth with fine white teeth. When she smiled she brought her lips quickly back over her teeth, with the curious sharpness that little girls have when they wear braces. Her hair was very black and cut short. Her skin was white; the sort of white that never tans, although she had a pattern of freckles across her nose. "I'm cold most of the time. I had polio when I was a kid and although the doctors say it's impossible, I've been cold ever since. I like the sun."

That explains her gait, Mike thought. She never recovered from the polio. She must be a little paralyzed.

They did not speak as they went through the heavy traffic around Westwood. They drove by the big new Robinson store and the sleek modern apartment houses of Westwood. The traffic moved in great slooping rushes from one signal to another, like a flight of orderly birds. The fast drivers slid in and out, jockeyed for position, and between each signal gained a place or two. As they went up the hills of Westwood they could see other platoons of cars ahead of them, marked off by signal lights, moving rhythmically up the soaring strip of highway.

They went through Westwood Village, past the golf range which was crowded with people driving balls. On the other side of the highway was the Veterans' Cemetery, and behind the hedges the little white crosses, broken by an occasional Star of David, ran in perfectly straight lines until they shattered against a hillside.

They stopped at a light and Mike watched a little group of veterans walk out from among the palm trees that bordered the Veterans' Hospital and stand on the curb. One of them was wearing a bathrobe and slippers. His bathrobe was open and the sun splintered on the gray wiry hair on his chest. The neck of a bottle showed in the pocket of the bathrobe. They were all slightly drunk and they stared brazenly, defiantly at the cars.

"How they hate dying in Southern California," Georgia said.

Mike looked around, startled. His eyes went over the veterans, swept up the long reach of green lawn, glanced at the other cars. His face was blank.

"Who hates to die in Southern Galifornia?" he asked.

"Those veterans," Georgia said. "That little bunch of them standing there. See the one with the bottle in his bathrobe pocket? He wants to shock the people going by in their new cars and they don't even look at him. He's mad.".

The veteran in the bathrobe saw them looking at him and grinned crookedly. He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and unscrewed the top. He put it to his mouth, his eyes glaring at them. When he threw his head back, the cords in his neck drew the red wrinkled flesh tight. He looked like a person who had once been very fat and now hated being skinny.

The signal changed and their platoon of cars picked up speed; in a collective spasm they rushed toward the next signal.

"How do you know they hate it here?" Mike asked.

"How do you know anything? I guess by looking at them. I think the sunshine and palm trees and salt air frustrates them. When you're dying you ought to be in a cold, dreary climate. It would make it easier. They ought to build the veterans' hospitals in the mountains and out on the deserts . . . where it's lonely and bleak. It must be hard to sit around in the sun and watch people going by in sport shirts and know you're going to die."

She paused, looking quickly at Mike and then went on. "When I was little and read all the adventure books, I used to think it would be easier to die in the freezing Arctic, like Scott and those people. It must be easier to die in a harsh climate, a cruel place. This is a terrible place to die."

"I never thought about it before," Mike said slowly. "I've been by this hospital a thousand times and I never noticed them. That's funny, isn't it?"

"Not many people do notice them, I guess," Georgia said. "After a while they become just like the palm trees or fire hydrants. You just don't see the individuals anymore."

At the next stop signal, Mike looked over at Georgia. She was sitting very straight in the seat, looking out the window. She glanced quickly from one object to another. He guessed that she was twenty-two years old.

The land in San Fernando was owned by two polite Japs. They said the land was really not for sale and then, with much embarrassment and sucking of teeth, said that it could be had for $10,000 per acre. They all walked out and looked at the land.

The land was very black and rich. It was planted in spring onions and the tiny light green spikes were laid out in long even rows. The earth between the rows was soft and recently turned. A Japanese woman and a boy were irrigating and the water ran down the rows in long thin streams.

"This isn't what we want," Mike said. "They think we want it for subdividing and so they jack the price up."

His voice was irritated and he spoke directly to the Japanese. They grinned and ducked their heads. Georgia blushed.

On the way back to Los Angeles, Mike drove to the top of Mount Wilson. It was a clear day with the smog blown out to sea. Below them was all of Los Angeles.

The older part of the city was dun-colored, neat and made soft by trees. Crawling out of the older city, like parasites abandoning a decrepit and useless host, were the new subdivisions. Close-packed, identical, shining-new, glittering with paint and new grass the subdivisions flowed down toward the sea and around the blackened spikes of the abandoned oil derricks of Signal Hill. They moved, in a welter of two-bedroom one-bath globs, toward Pomona and Whittier and devoured the orange trees as they went. In the Hollywood Hills and in the slopes behind Burbank, the land was scarred by raw new roads and the units were bigger and sparkled with polished glass and redwood. Only occasionally was there an open and orderly stretch of green where crops were growing.

"Now all this is hopeless," Mike said restlessly, sweeping his hand to include the whole area from the mountains to the sea. "It's too crowded. Pretty soon it will all be subdivided. It's too expensive for farming. We have to get farther out."

"Farther out?"

"Yes, farther out. Out where the land hasn't been worked over. Where you are the first person to get to it. I don't know where, but not around here." With a sharp cut of his hands he rejected the city, the houses, the whole bright saucer of land. "You have to get something that's new; where you're the first one."

Georgia glanced at him and there was interest in her face. Mike put his hands down and swpped talking. They looked out over the city for another minute.

"All right, let's go," Georgia said. "I'll find out about Imperial Valley, the desert, all those places. I understand."



Two days later they drove to Imperial Valley. Hank went along. Mike knew it was his day off and insisted that Hank go with them. As soon as Hank got in the back seat of the car he fell asleep.

He fell asleep sitting up. His chin fell forward slightly, but he sat straight and stiff, as if he had just closed his eyes for a moment. Mike could see his head in the rear-view mirror. Hank was thinner and the hair above his ears was streaked with gray. He had a bone-and-gristle leanness that indicated he would never get fat. Oddly, the freckles still stood out on his nose and added to his bleached-out, tense look.

The highway was new and broad and neat. It was eight lanes wide and was divided down the center by a strip of grass. The lanes were made of poured concrete, six inches thick. The shoulders were made of black asphalt and were bordered by a strip of gray gravel. The trees close to the highway were stifled by the gasoline fumes and their skinny limbs were as leafless as bones.

The highway rolled across the countryside without mercy. It cut through hills in great raw gashes and swept on concrete bridges across the rivers. It cut through mountains in long tunnels lined with white tile and gleaming with lights. Occasionally from the new highway, the old twisting road could be seen and the remains of the towns that had lined the old road. The towns held up their french-fried almond signs and antique signs and date shops and chirichilla ranches to the abandoned empty strip of asphalt, while the dirty windows in the back brooded malignantly over the new highway.

Mike held the Cadillac steady at seventy-five miles an hour. The car poured into a long beautiful curve and there was the faint rasp of rubber. Hank opened his eyes, lifted his head and looked out the window.

"Miss Blenner, do you spend all your time driving around with Mike looking for farm land?" Hank asked. "Or do you do something else?"

Georgia turned around and looked at Hank. She smiled.

"Sometimes I go to U.C.L.A. and take a course. I never finish them, but I start a lot of them. Ceramics, creative writing, history; things like that."

"Why don't you finish?"

"Sometimes because they get boring. Take sculpturing. They show you a nude girl and tell you to sculp her. But first you have to learn about armatures and keeping clay wet and plaster and anatomy and sculpturing theory. Someplace along the line I always get bored and give it up. I feel bad about it, but I never finish the courses. And then there's the family."

"What about the family?"

"The family is just more interesting than the courses. So I get to thinking of the family and it's more interesting than ceramics and I go home."

"Do you have a big family?"

"No. Not really. Just Father and Morrie, my brother. But there are always a lot of people around. Fund raisers for Israel Bonds or producers from New York or broken-down comedians who want Father to finance a new picture for them. The house is full of them."

Something about the girl disturbed Hank. She seemed to lack a dimension, a quality. For one thing she was not careful enough. She said everything she thought. When she answered a question she thought for a moment, but not to protect herself or to be careful. She paused the way a child will pause, so that she could give a complete answer. Then she said everything. Some instinct of protection, some device of insulation or caution was missing in the girl. Really, Hank thought, it's that she's exposed. No protections.

They drove past the turn-off for Palm Springs and Thousand Palms and came to the long rows of date trees. The dates were tiny and green against the brown of the trees. At Coachella it began to get hot, and in the valley hundreds of Mexicans walked down the rows of melons. Like huge clever ants they hurried down the rows, rapping with a knuckle on the melons, picking only the ripest. The melons gathered in huge yellow mounds along the road.

"They say only Mexicans can tell a ripe melon in the field," Mike said. "They can tell by the smell or the feel or something. Put an Irishman out there and he'd pick all the wrong melons. But a Mexican, even a little Mexican kid, never makes a mistake . . . always picks the ripe ones and leaves the green ones."

Hank moved over to the window and looked out at the fields with new interest.

"That's why all the big farmers encourage the wetbacks to come over from Mexico," he said. "So they'll have a supply of pickers who can smell out a ripe melon. I read somewhere that some of these Mexicans will be deported by the immigration people six or eight times during a harvest season. And they just keep coming back for more."

They left the fields and went past the white glittering emptiness of the Salton Sea and the endless stretching away of alkali flats. Every few miles there was a little town. They were all alike. Each one had a restaurant, a few bars, a truck-fueling station with a few semis parked around it. There was a garage with a big tow truck ready to go, the hook hanging free. At the outskirts of every town there was always a great ugly heap of wrecked and abandoned cars. The Model-T's and old Chevvies were on the bottom of the heap, turning rusty and stripped almost bare, reduced to a carcass. On top of them were the layers of newer cars; Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Chryslers, Mercurys. Some were squashed up into oddly shortened and twisted bodies; others were jerked lengthways. The guts of the cars; the cushions, steering wheels, wires, rubber mats and mirrors spilled down the side of the heap. On some of the newer wrecks the blood still showed on the windshields and the rust was just beginning to eat away the fresh chrome of the bumpers.

"So now you don't sculp or go to school or anything else except go along to see your daddy's investment is protected?" Hank asked as if they had been talking about it all along.

Mike laughed. Georgia turned with a smile on her face, but then she saw Hank's tight unsmiling face and a bruised, confused look appeared around her eyes.

She knows I meant it to hurt, Hank thought. He was sorry at once. The girl had no defenses, it was pointless to attack.

"That's not the reason I'm along," she said carefully, slowly. "I just want to see what happens. See, Hank, we're Jews and we're in motion pictures and those two things make people scared of politics. At home everyone gets nervous when politics come up. They're afraid the government will censor the movies or pass legislation against Jews or something like that. Politics always seemed distant and very bad and confusing." She shrugged her shoulders, despairing of her words. "So I came along."

"You hang around Mike and you'll learn a lot about politics," Hank said and his voice was not mocking. Then he paused and too swiftly his voice became harsh. "Jesus, Mike, you're not really going to run that bum Cromwell for governor? He doesn't have a chance. And if he does he shouldn't."

Georgia looked startled and then interested and Hank felt a quick relief. She had not detected his clumsy shift away from her,

The rest of the way into Brawley they talked about Cromwell's chances. Mike nodded his head and grinned, but he did not say how he thought Cromwell could win.

In Brawley they talked to a real estate agent. He was a lean, sun-burned, friendly man. He had an office, but he liked to do business in his air-conditioned Cadillac. He leaned back in his seat, yawned as the air-conditioner hummed quietly. He had shown them all the land that was for sale.

"Well, thars the situation around here," he said. "Nobody really wants to sell. Maybe later if farm prices drop a bit they will. But not right now. Oh, you could get land if you wanted to go high for it. Eight or ten thousand an acre. But, God, with what they're getting for honeydews and casabas in L.A., everyone is making a fortune."

"What if there's a depression?" Mike asked. He was irritated, restless.

"Then watch 'em run," the real estate agent said. "None of these people are really farmers. They're just like the old prospectors. Come in, skim off the surface gold and leave before you have to get down to the low grade ore. None of 'em want to put in fertilizer or really build up the land, they just want to skim the cream."

"O.K., let's go," Mike said. "This isn't what we're looking for."

Later, as they drove back toward Los Angeles, Mike was silent. He did not speak until they reached the Morongo Valley turnoff.

"I don't know anything about farm land, but I don't want to get into anything like Imperial Valley," he said.

"I knew it," Hank said. "As soon as I saw those big melons and those solid red tomatoes and the nice straight rows in Imperial, I knew Mike wouldn't be interested. Too easy."

Georgia looked from Hank to Mike. Mike was grinning. His teeth were held together, his eyes narrowed. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigar, slipped off the cellophane. His teeth separated and he put the cigar into the corner of his mouth, bit down with the big heavy teeth, closed his lips. He did not light the cigar for ten minutes.

They turned east and drove past the Bouillon Mountains and the Sheep Hole Mountains. They went past the dry bed of Bristol Lake, through Bagdad and into the white, searing desert below Rasor. Mike parked the car on top of a low bluff and they got out. The sagebrush had vanished and the ground was covered with a few greasewood trees, some dwarfed yuccas, cholla cactus, and occasionally the great spiny figure of a giant saguaro. There was not a building in sight. Only the straight, narrowing strip of grease-soaked road. They stood silently and looked at it.

"It's impossible, Mike," Georgia said. "Nothing could grow here."

"It could if you had water," Mike said.

Hank watched them from the back seat of the car.

At their feet a gridiron-tailed lizard came up out of the sand. His tongue flicked wildly and suddenly he saw them and dove into the sand. He was gone instantly, leaving only a tiny cloud of dust where he had disappeared. In a few seconds he popped up a yard away and then dove under the sand again.

"But there isn't any water," Georgia said.

Mike walked back to the car and took out a map. It was labeled "Irrigation System Map of California." He pointed to a large irregular blank spot on the map.

"That's where we are," he said. "Right in the middle of nothing. The land here is cheap. We could get it for almost nothing. All it needs is water. And the state could put water in here if it wanted."

He pointed at a thick line which marked the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It ran black and promising across the map, far above the land on which they were standing:

"All you'd have to do is to run an irrigation canal from that aqueduct and this land would be as rich as Imperial Valley," he said. His voice was tense. "Then you'd have something, Georgia. And it'd be new; brand new. Something you carved out of nothing. Better than taking over something that's already there."

In the middle distance a big, ugly, splayfooted jack rabbit went in great bounds. His ears stood straight up as he went over some four-podspurge. Then he disappeared; instantly as if he had been swallowed by the hot sand.

"Could this land grow anything?" Georgia said doubtfully.

"Anything. Bring water in and it'll grow alfalfa, cotton, celery, any damned thing," Mike said. "Georgia, this is like a great big natural hothouse here. There are months when the temperature is over a hundred. And some days the humidity is absolute zero. Bring water in and you'd have tomatoes as big as . . . " he paused, searched for the right word, could not find it and moved his hands to make a globe as big as a watermelon, " . . . really, big, huge. Anything would grow."

Georgia looked slowly around the desert, to the burning edge of the horizon, over the shimmering dunes.

Hank saw the excitement start across her face. She looked from the blue hulk of the mountains, across the stretch of sand and burnt earth and her eyes glittered. She can see it already, Hank thought. An irrigation canal, rows of lettuce, enormous sweet melons, everything ordered and won.

Mike kicked the sand. She watched him. It was not a casual kick. It was hard, deliberate, done with meaning. He kicked again and the sand sprayed away from his foot and fell in a shapeless heap. Mike grinned.

Georgia's excitement deepened. She knew it was not her own excitement. It was something borrowed from Mike. It was a paler, more austere, thinner version of what he felt, but it was still important and big. She knew, suddenly, that her perceptions were more diminished than Mike's and she was aware of the larger, harder things that he felt. As if Mike were an instrument through which she could gather impressions of things that she would not otherwise perceive.

And she sensed something of what Mike was unable to transmit to her. She knew that he did not care about the fruit and vegetables and trees and greenness that would come from the desert. She knew that what he wanted was to fight the white still sand, to cut the hot dead surface with bright strips of water, to rip it with tractors, to make it yield. When that was done he would no longer be interested. She understood why he had not wanted to buy land that was already worked or easy to develop.

She understood why he did not need an expert, not for the farm land or anything else. He went at a problem directly, like a physical assault, reaching for the heart of it. Then he reordered the whole thing, reshaped it, made it his. He did not want an expert around to take the edge off the victory. She was certain that he was right about the desert and the water.

Dimly she knew that her own excitement lacked something powerful and violent that Mike felt. But what she did feel was sufficient to make her tense, expectant, excited.

"Let's go and call Morris, my brother," Georgia said. "He can find out if this land is for sale and how much it costs. Are you sure we could get the water in here?"

Mike grinned at her and nodded his head. He threw the butt of the cigar into a cholla and it caught on the spikes, A thin blue spiral of smoke rose in the hot still air; foreign, different from everything else, it was like a sign of domination. Mike turned and got in the car.

On the way back to Los Angeles they stopped at a drive-in outside of Barstow. It was a huge red and gold affair, built in a great clump of eucalyptus trees. It was late afternoon when they stopped. Mike and Hank went inside.

The carhops were all girls and they wore cowboy outfits with red pants that tucked into white cowboy boots. Their jackets were cut short and buttoned tightly in front. Two inches of flesh showed between the pants and the jacket. The pants were very tight.

Most of the cars were filled with Mexicans, six or seven in each car. The trays fastened to the windows were filled with beer bottles. The Mexicans pressed their faces against the windows and watched the carhops. From one of the cars came the sound of singing in Spanish.

"You look busy," Georgia said when the carhop gave her a menu.

"Usual Saturday night crowd," the girl said. Her face was heavily made up, as if she were a starlet getting ready to go on a set. Her hair was a bright peroxide blond. "They're mostly Mexicans. They bring 'em up to do the stoop labor. They can't get in the regular bars in town so they all chip in and buy a car together and spend Saturday night in the drive-ins." She looked around quickly and leaned forward. "Fact is, honey, they're all horny. They just like to see a girl's ass wobble is all. It's these outfits. The boss orders them from one of those fancy places in Hollywood. They cost a hundred and seventy-five bucks each and they fit across your ass so tight that it feels like a girdle. The boss does it because it brings in the Mexican trade. He only hires blondes because he says they like blondes better. I had to dye my hair. I'd be sore except that the Mexicans always leave big tips." She smiled and touched her hair softly. "What're you gonna have? Hamburger's good here."

"Three hamburgers and three beers," Georgia said.

Hank and Mike came out and got in the car.

"Mike, if everything goes all right, who will work the farm?" Georgia asked. "Mexicans? Like the men in those cars?"

Mike glanced at the other cars. The Mexicans stared out, their brown faces gently sweating, their mouths open and singing softly. The leaves flickered, moved by a sudden breeze, and the faces became more distinct in the green light.

The peroxided carhop went to the closest car and picked up the empty bottles.

"You can't just sit here," she said in a hard voice. "You have to have something on your tray."

She tapped her booted foot on the asphalt. The Mexicans talked in Spanish. They ordered another round of beers. When the carhop turned around she winked at Georgia.

"Sure, we'll use Mexicans or whoever can do the work," Mike said. "Maybe we can use machines for most of it. But there aren't any machines invented that will pick things like lettuce or melons or artichokes. So we'll use Mexicans, I guess."

"Have you made any plans for them?" Georgia asked. "I mean for their families? Like housing facilities, laundries, that sort of thing."

"Now, Georgia, don't go getting' sentimental," Hank said. "Don't expect Mike to elect a governor, bring in irrigation, raise the biggest crops in the world and also take care of the Mexicans. Not old Mike, not old Mike the big wheeler and dealer."

Mike looked at both of them uncomprehendingly.

"That's right," he said. "You can't plan for people. They come or they don't. If they don't come you raise your wages."

"Maybe we should plan something for them," Georgia said. "I'll talk to Morrie about it."

"No you won't talk to Morrie about it," Mike said. "That's one thing you can't plan. You can plan roads and irrigation and parity prices, but you can't plan for people. They're not like a road, for example. Any engineer can tell you what is the best topping and how much rolling and scraping a road needs. But you can't do that for people. You don't plan for them. You just make them an offer and see if they take it or not."

The carhop brought them the beer and hamburgers. They ate quickly. Before they were finished the Mexicans in the next car had finished their beers. They tooted their horn for the carhop. When she took the tray from their car, there were three one-dollar bills on it. As she walked back to the drive-in, she held the tray low so Georgia could see the size of the tip.

Mike paid their bill and they swung out on the road that led to Los Angeles.





CHAPTER 18

Memories

On the table in front of Cromwell was an untouched martini.

He could smell its chilled, lemon-scented surface. It was a thin odor and he knew the sensation of thirst and tightness in his chest would be eased when he drank. But he waited. He looked at the Board members; made himself smile.

Kelly put his hand around his old-fashioned glass, started to lift it and then thought of a joke.

"Did you hear the one about the woman who saw the bull outside the kitchen window?" Kelly said. "Well, the woman is mixing bread . . . "

Kelly took his hand away from his glass without drinking and Cromwell felt a sharp disappointment. He did not look down, but he turned the cold thin stem. Saliva gathered around the back of his mouth; dry, cottony flecks that stuck to his teeth. He opened his mouth, worked his lips. Costello, the Mexican, lifted his old-fashioned and took a sip. Cromwell raised his glass and drank half the martini. The cold tasteless liquid flowed through dry passages and into his stomach with a soft stunning sensation. Instantly it was in his blood. His head cleared, a nervousness disappeared, the saliva vanished from his mouth. He bent forward eagerly to hear the rest of Kelly's story.

"And there the woman is, kneading and kneading away at the bread and muttering, 'Damn that husband of mine; never around when I want him,'" Kelly said.

Kelly lifted his hand and smashed it down on the table. They all laughed. Cromwell finished his drink and signaled to the waitress for another round. The Jonathon Club dining room was slowly filling. Cromwell looked at the Board men.

Kelly was the strongest member, he thought. Costello was a Mexican with a bland face and a pattern of smallpox scars across his nose. He claimed to have great influence with the Mexican voters and no one could prove whether he did or didn't. Franwich was a small wiry farmer from the north of the state and he was very attractive to the prohibitionists. He was reputed to be the most corrupt member of the Board. Smithies was from the north. He was a huge sprawling man. Buttons, belts and suspenders dug into his flesh like strings that held his baggy shape together. But the flesh edged around its bonds. The suspenders disappeared in fat. The tips of his shirt collar stuck out from a drooping roll of flesh. His mouth was a pink gash among folds of flesh. He had an enormous knowledge of California politics and he was scrupulously honest.

"I remember your father, Cromwell," Kelly said. "I went to San Francisco once to see him. Just before he died. Wanted to get him to invest in a pet project of mine. You were just out of law school then."

"I remember," Cromwell said. "It was your avocado idea."

The other men at the table laughed and Kelly's face tightened up defensively.

"That's right. And it was a hell of a good idea," Kelly said.

Cromwell remembered how shocked his mother had been by Kelly. Cromwell's father had brought Kelly to dinner just once at their home in Atherton and after that his mother had refused to entertain Kelly again.

Kelly came to San Diego from Dublin. He stepped off a ship in San Diego Harbor in 1910, and two weeks later he was in the avocado business. He looked at the crisp green skin of the avocado, tasted its bland rich flesh and it seemed the most exotic and beautiful of fruit. In 1910 avocado trees were used mostly for decoration and only Mexicans and bums ate the fruit. Kelly bought 250 acres of avocados. After working twelve hours a day in a foundry, he went out to the grove and tended his trees. On Sundays he worked in the hot dry soil, digging irrigation grooves, hoeing around the trees, trimming the limbs back. He wore out his cheap Dublin tweeds, bought cheap blue denims and wore out three suits before the trees bore fruit.

The fruit came out heavy and green, hanging with a peculiar richness from the thin branches. Kelly used to stand and stare at the trees, lifting the fruit delicately with his stubby fingers, unable to believe that dirt and water and sun could do anything so wonderful. The California sun burned his hands mottled brown and his neck cherry red and wove tiny triangles of bloodshot in the corners of his eyes and he forgot entirely about Dublin and its rain and mist and cold.

But no one wanted the avocados. The Mexicans bought a few and squashed them up with onions and ate them on folded tortillas. And the bums from the harbor drifted out on sunny days and stole avocados and spooned their bellies full and fell asleep beside Kelly's trees. Most of the avocados rotted in great stinking heaps; going soft and flowing together and making a brown-green mound that hummed with flies and gave off a queer sweet smell that was enough to make strangers vomit when they first caught wind of it.

Kelly decided to make cold cream out of the avocados. For months he ground the flesh of the avocados into a thick paste, mixed it with perfume and musk and preservative. But the paste always turned brown and stank. Until one day a druggist told him about a new preservative and he added it to the avocado paste and the paste stayed green and sweet. Then Kelly sold the cold cream from door to door. He sold it in white pots with a little brochure which told women how the oil would rejuvenate the skin of the face and neck and hands. One day something happened, and like a breeze the knowledge of avocado cold cream spread all over California and movie stars and housewives and great women were using it. The magazines ran articles showing pictures of Kelly mixing the cold cream and quoting him as saying "It's nature's way to nourish the skin."

A neat little factory grew up beside the grove and Kelly stopped working at the foundry. He bought newspaper ads and the white pots started to carry a gold label. He picked up 2500 acres in Seal Beach and planned to plant it to avocados. He bought a car and had cases of Irish whisky shipped over directly from Dublin. But he still worked in the groves; his head bare, and grinning as his face and chest were burnt by the sun. The Mexicans who worked the groves laughed and thought he was crazy; made mad by the sun. He roared and bellowed among the trees, jabbing his shovel at the irrigation canals, softly testing the fruit, kicking the dry rich soil.

Then one night a Hollywood starlet woke up, ran her pink tongue over a cupid-bow mouth made tender by avocado cold cream. She swallowed some of the cold cream. She died the next morning, screaming in agony. Like a dropping breeze, the avocado cold cream business vanished, although Kelly went from door to door again, arguing and scolding and fighting with the women, telling them that the cold cream was wonderful. He would reach into the pots and scoop out huge fingerfuls of the green paste and eat it to show them it was harmless, but they were not buying.

Kelly went broke trying to save his avocado cold cream. He believed in it fanatically, blindly, with an Irish single-mindedness. He spent money on newspaper ads and he hauled seven different people into court for libeling his product. Finally he lost his original avocado grove when he couldn't meet the mortgage.

In the end it made no difference, for they found oil on the land he owned at Seal Beach. With a canny insight he refused to sell the land to Standard or Shell or Richfield or anyone. He held on to it and as the land sprouted derricks and black tank farms, he grew rich.

For five years he tried to revive interest in the avocado cold cream business. He poured a million dollars into it. He bought new avocado groves and raised the largest, greenest and richest avocados in California. But women would not use his cold cream and Kelly hated them for their reluctance. Finally avocados became a popular food and Kelly, mollified by this, gave up the cold cream idea.

"Some talk the Democrats might run you for governor, John," Smithies said.

He moved in his chair; his body sighed against its braces; the flesh heaved and shifted. The other Board people looked sharply at Cromwell.

Cromwell let the clean chill of the gin and vermouth pour around his teeth. Five minutes before he had been old and defenseless; aware of aching bones and a shortness of breath. And now they were waiting to see what he would say, their faces expectant. He felt confident, alert.

"With Warren going to the Supreme Court, the situation is a little peculiar," Cromwell said.

"This is a hard year to figure out," Smithies said, his eyes half closed. "Maybe a Democrat will have a chance. Not much of a chance, but a chance."

"What about Daigh?" Cromwell asked. ''The Republicans will run him, won't they?"

The Board members paused, looked at Smithies.

"They'll run him and he'll get the Republican nomination," Smithies said flatly. It was not a conjecture or a guess or an opinion. It was a fact. They all accepted it.

"How could a Democrat win?" Cromwell said.

The waitress brought their food. Smithies looked down at the breaded veal cutlet, the bread and butter, the string beans. He took one bite and then talked through the food.

"Depends on the Democrat, John," Smithies said. "Now you've got two things in your favor. First, you've got a good name. Everybody knows the Cromwells, even if they don't know you. Second thing is you can speak. You're an orator. That helps."

It helps? Cromwell thought. Is that all it does? I don't believe it. It's everything.

With part of his mind Cromwell listened to Smithies talk, but a part of his mind reached back and uncovered an old memory . . . he had learned to speak at a speech class at Stanford. He was tall and awkward and he hated Stanford. He hated the girls, the fraternities, the dances, the football games, the classes. He was depressed by everything about the university.

In the speech class everyone had to give a short talk. Cromwell watched with dread as his turn approached. When he stood up in front of the class and looked at all the strange hostile faces his mind seemed to fall into fragments, to go to pieces. They were ready to laugh, ready to hoot him out of the room.

His first words came out cracked and strained. They fell senselessly from his lips. The smiles in the class grew broader. Then he felt a wave of anger; an intense and personal hatred for every person in the class. The anger chilled him; ordered his thoughts, calmed him.

He forgot his prepared speech and began to talk very slowly and deliberately. He did not know where the words came from, but they were orderly and sharp. He did not hesitate once.

He talked about the idleness and stupidity and irresponsibility of college students. He reminded them of the beer parties and the careless way in which they squandered the money given to them by their families. He scolded them. He was sure he was ruining himself, but it didn't matter. The anger was like a white spiky growth that kept prodding him. He felt righteous and sustained; even if he were ruined.

Gradually the faces in the class came into focus and then, with a slight shock, he saw that they had stopped smiling. The boys were watching him attentively and one girl had tears in her eyes. The other girls were looking down at their hands or out of the window. Slowly he realized that they were angry, but not with him. They were angry with themselves or the system or something, but not with him. He did not know how he knew this, but he did. His words made them angry and disturbed, but not with him.

Then, recklessly, Cromwell tried something else. He told the class how they could restore good moral standards on the campus. Without anticipating the words or forming a definite argument his words became reassuring, calm, placating. The angry look left their faces and a sort of relief flowed back into the room. Intuitively, beyond words, he sensed that he had destroyed something that held them together; a common pride or bond or knowledge. And surely, as if he had always known how, he wove them back together; stitched up the common injury. Just a word here, an inflection there and the sureness came back to their faces, the confidence returned. And they were grateful to him.

When he stopped there was a moment of silence in the room. Then they did something they had never done before. They began to clap . . .

. . . "The family and the oratory will take you part of the way, John," Smithies was saying. "But not all of the way."

"You'll need money and an organization," Kelly said. "Lots of money."

"How much money?" Cromwell asked.

"About a half million bucks," Kelly said. "And you have to raise it all in a few months between the primary in May and the general election in November. That's a lot of money and not much time."

"What he means is that you have to have most of it lined up before the primary," Costello said.

"I think I could get it from the voters," Cromwell said.

In his mind he had a brief, vivid image of all the little groups he had addressed in the last fifteen years. Their faces rolled past some inner eye; thousands and thousands of them; all alive with enthusiasm; all loyal.

The four Board men laughed.

"Don't kid yourself, John," Smithies said. "You won't get enough from the voters to pay five per cent of your expenses. You have to get the money in big chunks. Five or ten thousand at a crack."

"Not me," Cromwell said. Their laughter irritated him. "I'm not going to sell out to the Montgomery Street and Spring Street boys just to get their money. I'll go right to the people. I don't need the bribes of the big-money boys."

Instantly, in one smooth, simultaneous action the faces of the four Board men went blank. They bent over their plates and began to eat. Cromwell watched Costello push some frijoles into a tortilla, put the tortilla in his mouth and bite. The brown, smooth substance of the frijoles gushed out at one corner of his mouth. It was a stranger's face. Costello's black eyes went over Cromwell as if he were not there.

"We're just friends," Smithies said softly, as if Cromwell were the only person at the table. His mouth opened to receive a spoonful of apple pie and ice cream. Suddenly his eyes had become hard.

Without speaking to Cromwell the other three Board members finished their lunch and left the table. Smithies stayed in his seat and lit a cigar.

"John, you weren't fair to the boys," Smithies said. "They're tender on talk about big money and bribes. Since all this crap about Artie Samish and graft came out, everybody thinks that if you're on the Board you must be taking money under the table from the big-money boys. Hell, John, I don't even know who the big-money boys are." He paused, put a thumb under a suspender and pulled it out. It came away from his moist flesh reluctantly and left a groove in his shirt. "I don't know them, but they're around."

"I didn't mean to insult anyone," Cromwell said. "But I'm damned if I'll change my ideas just to get the big contributions."

"John, you're a strange sort of politician," Smithies said. "You've been around a lot, but not in real politics. You've got to learn that you have two platforms. One is the official platform. That public and your party will talk about it and it will go out to the newspapers and they'll make up a pamphlet on it. The voters don't pay any attention to it, but you have to do it anyway." He paused, pursed his lips and cigar smoke trailed out of his lips, thinned out and exhausted as if most of it had been absorbed by the huge spongelike body. "The second platform is the private one. That's the important one. That's what you'll really do. They're watching, John, to see what your private platform is."

"Who is 'they'?" Cromwell asked.

"Not the voters. 'They' are the people who are interested in offshore oil, highways, gasoline tax."

"Or liquor taxes," Cromwell said bitterly.

"Or liquor taxes," Smithies said blandly. "They won't come and ask you, John. You have to let them know. Just a line in a speech or talking to one of their people over a drink. Take liquor. It's big business. Know how much beer we drink in this state in a year? About twelve million gallons. In a year that'd make a hell of a big pile of beer cans. And that's only beer. There's whisky, gin, brandy, applejack, wine, scotch, sour-mash, corn, rye, crčme de menthe and a lot more. And the whole damn mess is sold a shot or a bottle at a time. Maybe a hundred thousand people in this state making money off of booze." He inhaled the cigar, crisped an inch of the tobacco in a breath. He smiled at Cromwell. "They know you have to attack the liquor interests and booze barons . . . just to get elected. They don't care about that. But they'll be watching, John. Watching to see what you're really going to do about liquor. Beer-truck drivers, brewery workers, bartenders, wholesalers . . . all watching to see. Maybe a hundred thousand altogether. Maybe more."

Smithies let go of his suspender and it snapped back, shrunk its way into the grooved and waiting flesh, almost disappeared. He stood up.

"I haven't made up my mind yet about liquor taxes," Cromwell said.

"Sure, John. You think it over and let me know. I'm not threatening you. You know that. But a lot of people around the state ask us about politics and we have to tell them something. So when you know where you stand you just let me know. We'll get the word around. You can say whatever you want publicly, but we'll get the real word around."

Smithies paid for the lunch and they left the club. They shook hands at the door.

Cromwell started back toward the office. He kept walking until he came to Pershing Square. He listened briefly to a dark lithe man speak on the advantages of Syndicalism and the general strike and noted that he was not holding his audience. He walked past a group of slim boys with penciled eyebrows and shrill voices who were talking to a girl in a bright flowered dress.

"You're a bitch to wear that dress down here," one of the boys said in anger to the girl. The girl smiled and lifted a hand to her hair and Cromwell saw that it was a rough, calloused man's hand and that the hair was a wig.

"You're jealous, Danny, that's your trouble," the girl said. "You hope the cops pick me up for impersonation. You do, you really do. You're just mean, I hate you."

Cromwell went over to a bench and sat down. He stretched his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. The sun beat down on his face, and from his stomach the thin vapors of gin floated to his nose and the back of his mouth.

They're worried, he thought. When the Board of Equalization starts to worry, it must be good. If Mike can just do what he says he can, it'll be all right, I'll make it. Mike's all right; don't worry about him. He's got some things I haven't got, some talents and skills. Something about Mike disturbed him and his mind moved away from the subject. With a glycerin ease his thought poured around other thoughts.

The edge of his mind dulled and things slipped liquidly through his head. With a sigh of satisfaction he lifted a set of recollections to the top of his consciousness; let them slide easily through his mind.

They were the memories of the six girls he had seduced before he was married. Over the years he had sharpened the recollections; the acid of time worked at the episodes until they stood out with a cameo-like perfection: each pinkening breast, each exhalation of breath, the twist of a thigh, the feel of hair and flesh and moisture. Each of them became more perfect and distinct the farther they retreated in time. He had forgotten all the other conversations of his youth, but these he could recall exactly; with a weird precision. Disembodied, separate in time and space, perfect by themselves, each episode came back to him.

As the sun beat down on Pershing Square and the pigeons cooed on the statues and shuffled through the peanut shells, Cromwell lay back, mouth open, and recalled the old, polished, well-remembered episodes.

The first had been the cook at their summer place at Tahoe. He had been fourteen. The cook was a strong pleasant woman in her forties. Cromwell walked into the laundry room when she was bent over scrubbing. He saw the long bare flesh of her legs and the swell of her buttocks and a fuzz of hair. She turned around with her hands full of wet clothes and stared at him. She knew what he had seen and for a moment she said nothing, then she squeezed the water out of the clothes, and as the mass of soft cloth shrank in her hands Cromwell shuddered. With that her face suddenly worked and she put the clothes down. She backed slowly into her room beside the laundry and Cromwell followed her. Without speaking she wiped her hands on her skirt and took her clothes off and revealed a strong firm body with soft breasts. She walked toward him and felt him through his pants and he felt a great stab of pleasure. She helped him out of his clothes and he smelt the White King soap on her hands and the flesh of her fingers was white and puckered and very soft.

On the bed her legs wrapped around him and her hands rubbed his back.

"Oh my god, you're good, boy, really good," she whispered after fifteen minutes and her eyes were misted. "You god damned boss's son you, you're really good. You . . . are . . . really . . . good" and the last words were hissed through her teeth.

Cromwell almost fainted with pleasure.

The second and third and fourth and fifth had been college girls. He had forgotten their names, but he remembered very precisely their legs and breasts. He remembered the hillsides and car seats where the seductions had occurred.

They came out of the blackness of his memory like bubbles rising from a pool; each episode rounded and bright, connected to the next memory with a thin bright strand. Each thing about them was jewellike in its precision: the vaccination scar on a leg, the sharp intake of breath as contact was made, the smell of perfume and beer, the odor of grass.

"Mr. Cromwell, Mr. Cromwell," a voice said.

Cromwell opened his eyes and for a moment he could not focus because of the sun and all he saw was the tangled pattern of Pershing Square, the whirling pigeons, the palm trees, the sailors, the statue, the azaleas, the limp bodies of old men dozing. Then he saw the face of Riley, the office boy, looking down at him.

"Mr. Freesmith sent me out to look for you," Riley said. "He says he wants to talk to you."

"What's all the rush?"

"I don't know, sir. He just said he wanted to see you and for me to find you." Riley's face was marked with freckles and bruised by a blunt nose and a tough look.

He is, Cromwell thought, just like an ape that has been taught to read and write, but still carries around a jungle suspicion. Cromwell remembered dimly a story of Kafka's about an ape that made a speech to an academy.

He felt a sudden pique at having the sequence of his recollections interrupted. Usually he went ahead with the sequence, giving each episode its proper time and never being rushed. It had become a sort of ritual. If he started he must run through the entire series.

"Just a minute. I'm thinking something out," Cromwell said. "Just wait and I'll walk back to the office with you."

Just before his-eyes closed, when his vision was cut to a tiny bright crescent, he saw a hard understanding grin go across Riley's face. He felt a flicker of outrage and then forgot it.

The sixth girl had been Gloria. He had met Gloria on a summer's day in Atherton when the whole San Francisco Peninsula had just been swept clean by summer fog that was burned off by sparkling sun. His mother wanted him to marry Gloria. They met by the tennis courts back of his family's big redwood house. Gloria came out to the tennis courts followed by her four older brothers. She had a long elegant neck and rather large feet that were covered with white tennis shoes. Gloria and her four brothers stood at the side of the tennis court, racquets in their hands, watching Cromwell finishing a game. Like Gloria they were all tall and lean and tanned and Cromwell knew they would be very good tennis players. Also he knew from the look on their faces that they thought he was poor. Cromwell had an awkward, scrambling style, but he won most of the games he played. Cromwell ran far back and with an awkward powerful smash sent the ball back and won the point. But, as he ran over to meet Gloria and her brothers, he could see a look of disapproval on their faces and he knew they disliked the way he played.

Days later he and Gloria were in the hayloft of the old barn on the back of the Atherton estate. They were both lying naked in the hay and the sunlight came with a muted golden color through a small window, The air was full of hay motes and the edges of Gloria's legs and arms glowed softly. There was the soft smell of fresh hay and beneath it the odor of the older rotting hay. Once a horse snorted and kicked a hoof against its stall.

Cromwell looked down at Gloria's body and through the muted, obscured, beautiful air he studied her: from her large shapely feet, up the length of her legs, to the round swelling of her belly, to the small hard breasts with their madder-brown nipples and then her long neck. He could not remember her face, but he could remember her eyes. They opened slowly and looked at him with a cool detached expression.

"I wasn't the first one," he said softly.

"That's right," she replied. "You are not the first." Her eyes looked calmly at him.

"Who were the other ones?" he asked.

"My brothers," she said.

Cromwell leaned up on his elbow. He felt a strange churning sensation in his stomach; a mixture of shock and curiosity and desire. He felt as if he would like to vomit and also as if he would like to again take her strong naked body in his arms.

"Which of your brothers?" he asked and his throat felt congested and his voice shook.

"All of them," she said and her voice had something of defiance in it.

Cromwell stared at her, and her body seemed to merge with the soft strands of hay; to glow like some strange plant which took on the color of its surroundings. The churning sensation in his stomach no longer had anything of shock or disgust. The sensation was of complete concupiscence and excitement. He bent down and ran his tongue over her lips. Her golden arms came out of the hay and went around his body. Five minutes later he looked down into her face. Her eyes were wide, looking at nothing, the cords in her neck were tight. Her face was flat with pleasure.

"Wait, just a minute," she whispered fiercely. "Don't come now. Wait just a minute."

Her hands went behind his buttocks, pulled him up against her. At the same time she reached up and bit his shoulder. Between her teeth there was a fold of his flesh and he could feel her tongue run over it.

Later he had married Gloria. Since the day of their marriage he could not recall what she had looked like before they married. It was as if she had become another woman. And really, in his mind, he considered her to be two women. He never consciously thought of the woman that he was married to. Only of the long-legged, golden-colored girl whose body was half sunk in the hay.

Cromwell opened his eyes and stood up. Riley was still waiting for him.

"All right, Riley, I've worked it out," Cromwell said.

They walked across Pershing Square, turned up Sixth Street and walked toward the Citrus Building. The cars poured down the streets, and above the buildings the smog was a thin yellow layer. Behind the huge plate glass windows of an airline office there was a new bas-relief map of California and they stopped a moment and looked at it. From a cornucopia in the rear of the window a flood of real oranges poured across the tiny miniature oil derricks, the model ships at San Pedro, and rolled up to the tiny wrinkled foothills of the Sierras. One orange rested in the curvature of the San Joaquin Valley.

As they turned away from the window Cromwell felt the sun on his shoulders and, suddenly, he was very happy. He began to whistle.





CHAPTER 19

A Tiny Systolic Splash

Georgia and Mike looked at land around Ojai and Santa Barbara. It was mostly elegant little valleys already planted in oranges and lemons. They went up to Kern County and watched the big earth-movers working miles of rolling land into a perfect flatness so that the water could flow across it. They went up to Salinas and looked at the long light-green rows of lettuce that ran from the highway out to where the fog broke the precise lines. They went to Modesto, Merced and Tulare. They followed the Friant Kern Canal and saw that where it ended the growing ended and the desert took over again. And this was true of the Delta Mendota Canal and the All-American Canal and wherever there was water.

"Morrie wants to talk to you today," Georgia said one morning over the telephone. "He wants to talk about the farm land."

"Good. I'll be out about two this afternoon," Mike said.

There was a pause and then Georgia spoke.

"I have to explain about Morrie," she said. "He's an invalid. He's been in bed for twelve years. He was a classics student in college and then he went to medical school. But he dropped out after his first year and has been in bed ever since." She hesitated and because Mike said nothing she went on. "He's very bright and he helps Father a lot with business. He'll try to be rude, but don't let it upset you. He doesn't really mean anything by it."

"He won't upset me," Mike said.

"No. I guess he won't," Georgia said. She laughed and hung up.

The Blenner home was in Bel-Air. It sat far back on a knoll and was hidden by a row of California wild oak trees. From the street to the house there was a stretch of closely cropped and very green grass.

Georgia was waiting for him in a parking area behind the house. It was very hot and bright and the sun was reflected off the white concrete. She was leaning against the garage, dozing; with the sun full on her face. She opened her eyes as Mike drove in.

She led him around the house along the side of a large kidney-shaped swimming pool. An old and very thin man was lying beside the pool in a pair of shorts. He had a shrunken, pot-bellied body and his flesh was very white and wrinkled. He had a beard that reached almost to the middle of his chest. He lay there, sweating and ancient, his eyes closed against the sun, his nose hawklike.

"That's Grandfather Blenner," Georgia said. "He's a very orthodox Jew. He wants us to eat kosher, but nobody else in the house wants to. It's a long battle. Sometimes we have separate china services for dairy and meat foods and then someone wants sour cream and the servants mix the plates up and Grandfather won't eat off of them. Once he ate for a week from paper plates because he said that washing dishes together in an electric dishwasher mixed the plates."

They went into the huge colonial style house. They walked through french doors into a library. On a leather couch two girls and a boy, all about twelve years old, were seated. They were wearing Levi's and saddle shoes. Across from them was a small dark man who was teaching them an opening move in chess.

"Now this is the Capablanca opening," the small man said in an intense theatrical voice. He moved a pawn and looked up with startled eyes. "What would you do now?"

The children stared intently at the board.

Georgia led Mike up to the second floor of the house. She stopped at the head of the stairs.

"You won't let him upset you?" she asked. In the dimness of the hall she looked intently at Mike, bent forward slightly to see his face.

"For Christ's sake," Mike said.

"All right, I'm sorry," Georgia said. "He upsets some people; that's all. I'm sorry."

She opened a door and went in. The room was dim. Venetian blinds covered one side of the wall and through the ivory-colored slats horizontal lines of brilliant sunshine cut into the grayness of the room. A large man with a very white face was sitting up in the middle of a Hollywood bed. His head did not move, but his eyes looked at them, rotating like marbles sunk in suet. On a table beside the bed was an array of medicine bottles. A bottle of yellow and red capsules had spilled over the table and onto the rug. In the midst of the medicine bottles was a plate with a half-empty bottle of Pabst beer, a glass with dried beer scum on it and a plate with the remains of a ham sandwich.

"Hello, you're Freesmith," the man said. "I'm Blenner. Morrie Blenner."

He put out his hand and Mike took it. The hand was soft and puffy and the middle finger was squeezed tightly by a thick band of gold.

"That's right. I'm Freesmith," Mike said. "How did you know?"

"I've heard you described," Morrie said. He looked up at Mike, almost shyly. "I told Father to see you. I know a lot about you."

Georgia sat down in a chair by the head of the bed, but Mike remained standing. Georgia looked intently at Mike, trying to read his reactions.

"Are you sick?" Mike asked flatly.

Morrie's head moved for the first time. He looked up sharply at Mike and then over at Georgia. Georgia smiled rigidly and then looked quickly at Mike. Morrie began to laugh. His lips pulled away from his large white teeth, and at first, for a short moment, his laugh had the pure trilling quality that Mike remembered when Mr. Blenner laughed. Then Morrie was laughing so hard that he was soundless. He was almost convulsive. He slowly turned red and then with an act of will he pulled his lips back over his teeth and cut off the laugh, He pointed a white finger at Mike.

"You're the first person who's asked me that in ten years," he said. "Everyone else is afraid to. They just come in and stand around and try to be cheerful. Nobody else has asked me if I'm sick. That's funny."

"All right, nobody else has asked you," Mike said. "But are you sick?"

"It's really something of a mystery," Morrie said. "Wait just a second."

He fumbled in the bed covers and brought up a stethoscope. He fixed the earpieces in his ears and then pulled back his pajamas. His chest was hairless and his breasts were white and protruding, like those of a young girl. He pushed the diaphragm of the stethoscope against the flesh and winced. Georgia watched him move the diaphragm, her face strained.

"It's cold at first," he said and smiled at Mike.

He probed. with the stethoscope, his face expectant and then he relaxed against the pillows.

"Now I've found my heart. At first it's very faint, but then it gets more solid. Go ahead, take the earplugs and listen."

"No, I don't want to listen. You tell me what you hear," Mike said.



"You've heard the old story about medical school students," Morrie said. "How they develop the symptoms of whatever disease they're studying. They all think they've got syphilis when they're studying that and hypertension when they're studying that. The symptoms change with each disease they study. Well, I was like that. Except that I kept having the symptoms of one affliction, even when we stopped studying it,"

"What was it?''I Mike asked.

"Systolic splash," Morris said. "A leakage of the valves of the heart. It is characterized by a tiny gush of blood that leaks during the systolic pulse of the heart. Eventually the valves get weaker and weaker and finally the blood just rushes through and the heart fails. With the stethoscope you can hear the tiny splashing sound the blood makes as it leaks through the valve. In medical school they described it. I listened to my own heart and could hear it; exactly what they described. A throb, an easing of pressure and then a tiny faraway splash of blood . . . barely audible."

He opened his eyes wide and turned his head up at Mike. Georgia turned and looked up at Mike also. Her face was expectant,

"Trouble was that nobody else could hear it. All the professors tried to catch it. None of them could hear it. But I could. Every time I used the stethoscope I could hear it."

"Can you hear it now?" Mike said.

Morrie looked shyly at Mike.

"Yes, I can hear it now," he said. "The only cure for systolic splash is complete rest. So I came home and decided to rest. I got in bed and I'll stay here until I die or the systolic splash disappears. It's as simple as that."

"You'll stay here until you die," Mike said. He reached over and took one earplug out of Morrie's ear so that Morrie could hear him distinctly. "It's simple. Everyone tells you that you don't have systolic splash. You listen and hear it. Obviously you're only going to accept the evidence of your own ears. And you'll hear the sound of the splash the rest of your life."

"You're pretty logical and clever, Mr. Freesmith," Morrie said. There was no irony in his voice. "You're probably right. After a while a person gets some very weird notions. For example, at medical school they tell you that the heart is a firm strong piece of muscle. If I want to reassure myself I can open a medical book and look at the diagram of a heart. But sitting here, listening to my heart, I know that it's a big quivering bag full of blood. It is covered with a thin glistening layer of material. Oh, damn is it thin. I can feel the blood pushing against it, trying to burst out. And it's much bigger than they told me in medical school. It almost fills your whole chest. A huge delicate bag that squeezes softly and sends the blood out through all the arteries. And almost anything can break the bag of your heart, I don't want to do anything that will injure my heart . . . Nothing, understand? Really, nothing."

Mike looked at Georgia. She was watching him. She was tense, waiting for judgment. Then she smiled at something she saw in his face. They looked down at the huge sprawling loose body in the bed. Mike knew they were thinking the same thing: of how long it had been since the body had been used, how the muscles must have become shrunken and thin and encased in fat. They thought of how carefully the body moved, anxious not to disturb the rhythm of the big pulsing membrane of blood that rested in the chest. The long careful thought-out avoidance of strain and effort. And the eating of ham sandwiches and beer and potato chips and chopped chicken liver and rich spicy foods that had gone into the production of the soft rich fat.

Then Morrie looked up at them and smiled and Mike felt that he knew exactly what they were thinking.

"I know what would get you out of bed," Mike said and he laughed. "If the Blenner family went absolutely broke, if you couldn't afford this house and twenty-four-hour a day nurse service and expensive doctors, then it would be simple. You'd have to get out of bed and start to work."

Morrie laughed. His face wrinkled with delight.

"You're very right, Freesmith," he said~ "If we went broke I'd have to get out of bed. But we aren't going broke. Not even close to it." He swung open a low cabinet beside his bed. It held a row of files. "There are the key files on all the Blenner enterprises. Right there. I keep an eye on them. I watch everything. For example, the matter Father discussed with you was my idea. I worked it up; did all the research, everything."

"Did you tell him to see me?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"It's really very simple. I came to the conclusion that the only sure investment in the future would be something which was supported by the government. I decided on agricultural land. It was a long complicated analysis and I won't bore you with the details. But once that was decided then the problem was to find some person who could do something about the political picture, could make sure that politics wouldn't endanger the investment. That called for a person who knew something about politics, could exercise enough control and still wasn't committed to someone else or to a political party. It narrowed down to you. You've got a candidate, you're not committed to a political party and you're not in politics for political reasons."

"Why do you think I'm interested in politics?" Mike asked.

"I don't know. It doesn't matter. I just had to be sure you weren't committed already. I don't care what else is involved. We just had to make sure we didn't have a reformer or do-gooder or fanatic in the political end of the job."

"You're a pretty logical person yourself, Mr. Blenner," Mike said.

"Thank you," Morrie said. He smiled at Mike and Georgia laughed with pleasure.

"What do you think about the farm land we looked over?" Mike said. "Georgia has told you all about it."

"You did very well," Morrie said and his voice lost the shy, half-playful quality and became crisp. His body shifted, the fat rolled under the sheets and somehow he was sitting erect. "I was worried at first because you didn't take along an expert, but you were right. I've had everything checked out. That desert land down around Rasor is the best. It's cheap and they say it will grow almost anything if you can get water into it."

"That's the land we liked the best," Georgia said excitedly. "There's nothing there now, Morrie. Not a thing. Just a strip of road and some cactus. With water . . . "

"Can we get the water in?" Morrie broke in and said.

"That depends on a lot of things," Mike said.

"But the most important thing is whether or not Cromwell becomes governor," Morrie said. There was no question in his voice.

"That's right."

"You can manage that," Mottie said. "The thing you need most is money. We'll give you that." He hesitated and then looked squarely at Mike. "Maybe you'd show Georgia the political side of it some day? How you see the campaign, the people, the issues . . . all of that. Then she could tell me." Mike shrugged.

"Whenever she wants," he said. "It's not very complicated. I'm not running it like an ordinary campaign. I can explain it to her in an afternoon."

Morrie nodded and suddenly his face looked bored. He picked up the stethoscope and put the plugs in his ear. He probed his chest with the diaphragm, his mouth opened expectantly. Mike and Georgia stood up and left the room.

"I've never heard anyone talk to him like that before," she said when they were in the hallway. "I was scared for a minute, but he liked you."

"What were you scared of?"

"I'm not sure. That he'd have an attack or something. Maybe that his heart couldn't stand it."

Mike laughed.

"He could stand that and a lot more," he said. There's nothing wrong with his heart."

Georgia looked at him and then away. She did not speak until they were out in the sun again.

"Would you like to drive down to the beach and have a drink?" she said. "Sometimes I take a thermos of martinis and go down to Santa Monica or up toward Malibu."

"O.K. Let's go," Mike said.

When they went by the swimming pool, the old man turned slowly over onto his belly without opening his eyes. He left a perfect outline of his body in sweat on the warm concrete.

They drove out Wilshire and the sleekness of the boulevard ended when they got to Santa Monica. The chinchilla ranches, the clothing stores, the hamburger stands, the enchilada restaurants began. Then suddenly they were at the Palisades and the city ended. The road cut down the face of the Palisades in a sharp slanting angle and all they could see was the Pacific and the sky and the long black strip of the Coast Highway.

They drove for ten miles along the coast and then Georgia told him to stop. He parked by a big rock that reached across the beach and into the water. Steps had been cut down the side of the rock and they walked down and out onto the sand. The sand was clean and tidewashed. There was a thin crisp layer of sand across the surface and their feet broke through into the cooler sand beneath. They put a blanket beside the rock and sat down. Mike opened the thermos and poured out two cups of martinis.

Behind them they could still hear the shrill whine of tires on the highway, but all they could see was the ocean and sand. Far out to sea a couple of freighters were moving sluggishly. Close to shore a fishing boat was motionless; behind the boat a round saclike shadow floated in the water and the net was held up by an ellipse of cork floats. In the sky two jet planes were moving. They were visible as two tiny triangles at the point of a long, perfect, growing vapor trail.

"You don't spend much time with your wife," Georgia said. "Does she mind?"

"I don't think so," Mike said. "She never says anything about it. She's busy with the two kids, clubs, clothes . . . that sort of thing."

Mike's voice was not apologetic or protective. He looked at her curiously; as if she had mentioned a subject he had never thought of.

"I like the beach here," Georgia said suddenly. "Part of the reasbn I like it is because you look out and see the big ocean and the sky, yet just behind you, just a few yards away, is the city. Here the beach means something; it's a boundary; a limit. Once I saw the beach up at Big Sur. It was all lonely and desolate. I didn't like it. Here the beach is exciting."

Mike leaned back against the rock. It was getting dark and the sand was cooling. The fishing boat pulled in its net and he thought that he could see the silvery bodies of the fish pour over the side. The two jets had moved to the edge of the sky and just at the line of blackness they seemed to come together; to merge into one heavy and beautiful-vapor trail. The waves came higher on the beach, began to break around the base of the rock.

They sat quietly, not talking, and when they heard the voice it came as a surprise.

"Whatcha doing buddy, trying to pecker the girl?" the voice said. It was a mocking voice, very loud and firm.

Mike pulled his head back and sat up. Four boys were standing in a semicircle behind them. They were all about twenty years old, but the one that spoke was older than the others. He was wearing a soft yellow flannel jacket and gabardine pants. The cuffs were tucked into shiny black Wellington boots. The boy's hair was cut long on the sides and brushed back so that his head looked long and lean, like an Indian's. His hair was very short on top. He had strong hands and muscular shoulders.

"I asked you, mister, if you were trying to pecker this poor girl here in daylight," the boy said. The other boys smiled.

One of them was swinging a toy baseball bat in his hand. It was about twenty inches long and it hung from his wrist by a silver chain.

"He could be arrested for exhibitionism," another boy said. He pronounced the word slowly; with elegance.

Mike looked at them. The boys all looked the same, black hair, Wellington boots, flannel jackets. "Imagine being arrested for exhibitionism and sent up to City Hall. It's not worth it, mister. You should're taken the babe to a motel. Here, maybe I can loan you the money?"

The boy reached in his pocket and jerked his hand around and his eyes opened in mock surprise. The other boys laughed. The boy took his hand out and it was empty.

"What do you want?" Mike asked. "If you don't want anything, shove off."

"Oh, gee, mister, don't scare us like that," the boy in the yellow jacket said. "We're friendly boys. Just rat-rat-racketing along in our car . . . taking a look at places like this to keep an eye on public morals. Just cruising, that's all we're doing."

"The girl's morals are all right," Mike said. "You can leave now. She's safe."

The boy in the yellow jacket squatted down comfortably on his heels. He smiled at Mike. The other boy, who had reached in his pocket, walked over to the thermos bottle. His eyes opened wide as he sniffed the cork.

"Why, George, I do declare they were drinking," he said. "This bottle smells like liquor. Imagine him bringing liquor along and giving it to the poor girl. The rascal."

"Put on your coat, Georgia," Mike said. "We're going.''

He stood up. Before Georgia could stand up one of the other boys reached into his pants and took out another toy baseball bat. The boy in the yellow jacket looked up and grinned.

"Now don't be in a hurry. Just because we came," he said. "You were planning something with the girl before we came. We don't want that blanket and all that good liquor to go to waste. Why don't you just go ahead and keep up the good work?" The boy spoke precisely and slowly, almost solemnly. But his tongue flicked at the corner of his mouth.

Mike stood still. He looked down and Georgia was staring at the boy.

"Don't mind us," the boy went on. "We'll sort of stand guard. You just go ahead and skin her clothes off and you can pecker her right here on the beach. Then you'll save yourself the motel money and we'll make sure you have privacy."

The boys, unconsciously, all moved forward a step. The boys swung their bats. They looked down at Georgia.

"If you don't we'll persuade you," one of the other boys said. His voice was choked.

The boy in the yellow jacket jerked his head around.

"Shut up, Eddie," he said. "Don't be rude to the man. He appreciates the help we're giving. Why don't you just start in, mister? Just as if we weren't here. Give her a kiss and get her hot and. then skin her clothes off. A piece at a time. Her sweater and her skirt and then her brassiere . . . oh gosh I forgot girls wear slips, don't they. I'm sorry."

"Listen, buddy, you're getting yourself in trouble," Mike said. His voice was flat and steady. "Why don't you just take your boys and clear off the beach?"

"Oh, gosh, you've got it all wrong, mister," the boy said. "We want to help you. You've probably been trying to get into that girl for a long time now. We're going to help you out."

"I won't ask you again," Mike said. "Get off the beach."

The boy stayed squatting for a second more. Then he stood up and as he did his face changed. The humorous joking look left his face. He was suddenly, instantaneously, angry and, somehow, it made him look much younger.

"Ya tellin' us to shove eh?" he said. "You and everybody, always tellin' us to shove. Off the beach, off the road, off the Palladium dance floor, off the school grounds, off the sidewalk. Always get off, shove! Awright, big tough guy. Cops ain't around to make us do it. So you do what we say or we'll pound the living piss out of ya. See?" The boy's language changed; the elegance and precision peeled off as if he had been speaking in an artificial voice. "Take 'er clothes off. Take yours off. Then screw her."

The other three boys stood rigid. When they looked at Georgia their faces came undone; went limp and ragged, sagging with excitement.

It was getting dark along the beach and occasionally a car turned on its lights and the faint yellow column of light swung out over the beach. It was still light enough, however, to see the boys.

Mike looked down at Georgia. He could not see her face clearly, but he sensed that she could see him.

"O.K., mister. Just git goin'. Start skinnin' down. Take your clothes off," the boy said. "Then you can help the girl with hers."

"Boy, I'm not going to take my clothes off," Mike said slowly. "The girl isn't going to take her clothes off. There's not going to be a show this afternoon."

The boy looked startled and then puzzled. His face twisted and he looked quickly at the other boys. Then he took out a set of brass knuckles and slowly put them on. He grinned at Mike.

"You a bully, eh? A tough egg," he said softly, with pleasure. "You like to kick people round. Maybe we'll kick you around. Ever see a man worked over with little baseball bats and brass knucks? It's not nice, mister. Now you just start skinnin' down."

"You'd better come after me," Mike said. "I'm not skinning down. Neither is the girl."

He looked down at Georgia. She picked up the thermos bottle and stood up. She held the bottle like a club.

"We'll fight them, Mike," she said in a distinct voice.

The boys looked at one another. The boy in the yellow jacket grinned.

"No. You start up the path," Mike said. He turned to the circle of boys. "All right. Come on in. You were doing the big talking. Why don't you come on in? There's just one guy and a girl. That's all. Nothing to be afraid of."

The semicircle tightened around them. The boys no longer looked young and somewhat overdressed. They crouched forward and in the twilight they looked huge and dark, menacing. Their faces were twisted with excitement. The boy in the flannel jacket took two steps forward, his hand carefully cocked, the brass knuckles gleaming.

Mike's mind slowed down, he watched the boys carefully. Precisely he remembered what the Marine at Nouméa had told him. about in-fighting. "There's no man on the face of the earth who can stand a kick in the nuts. An Eskimo, a Russian, a Texan or an African will stop everything and grab their nuts if they get a good kick. It's the first law of in-fighting."

He watched the boys creep in. The two baseball bats were yellow in the half-light and they swung in easy arcs at about shoulder height.

"Me first," the boy in the yellow jacket said. "Let me clip 'im one first. Dirty son of a bitch. Big-mouth bastard. Let me have 'im first."

Georgia threw the thermos bottle at the boy. He put his hands up and the bottle bounced away. For a moment the boy stood straight and unprotected.

Mike aimed and kicked the boy in the groin. His toe hit cartilage and bone and something very soft. The boy screamed sharply. His hands shot out in front of him, fingers widespread and grasping. Then delicately they moved down toward his groin. Mike caught the hand with the brass knuckles in mid-air, twisted it sideways. The boy's free hand grabbed his groin, but Mike had his other hand behind his back.

In the dim light the other boys stumbled forward.

"Just a second," Mike said. "I've got his hand behind his back. The one with the brass knuckles. You take another step forward and I'm going to break one of his fingers backward over the knuckles. Before you can get me I'll break every god damned finger on his hand."

The boy in the yellow jacket was still blubbering, but the pain had eased enough so that he could hear Mike.

"I'm ruined," he said shrilly. "Get me to a hospital. That's what I need. Christ, I'm ruined. He kicked my nuts off. I can feel one of 'em hanging down my leg."

The boys hesitated. Mike held the boy's hand so that they could see it. He bent the middle finger backward over the knuckle and the boy screamed again. But he did not take his other hand away from his groin.

"All right," Mike said. "We'll just walk up to the highway together. The three of you first. Me and your buddy second. The girl last. Just throw your baseball bats on the sand. Right now."

They hesitated and Mike pulled on the boy's finger. The scream sounded out above the waves, louder than the whir of tires along the highway. The boys threw their bats down and started up the side of the rock.

Mike picked up one of the bats, then pushed the boy ahead of him up the path. When they came out on the highway the night was sliced by the swift passage of car headlights in the blackness.

Mike let go of the boy. The boy put both of his hands to his groin. He held himself tenderly and from between his fingers black drops fell. His eyes were wide with terror.

The other boys took him by the elbows and led him to their car. It was a cut-down, powerful car with chrome exhaust pipes sticking from the hood. They eased the boy into the back seat and he screamed as he sat down. The car shot out onto the highway with a roar.

Mike turned to Georgia. They walked over and got in Mike's car.

Georgia sat forward on the seat with her arms around her knees. Mike started the car.

"Don't go home, please, Mike," she said. "Drive up the highway. Up toward Santa Barbara."

Mike drove slowly out onto the highway. He drove past Cliff Rock, past Malibu Beach and then picked up speed when they came to the divided highway. They came to Point Mugu and the highway swung inland. Across the dun-colored salt grass and sand dunes the superstructure of the ships at Port Hueneme broke the last light with a spidery precision. They went through Oxnard and Ventura and they came out on the great swooping highway that follows the curves of the shore. Salt spray blew across the highway. Below Carpinteria the highway went up abruptly like an arrow, and they came out on the plateau above the ocean. The smell of oranges was strong.

"Can we stop and eat something?" Georgia said. "I'm hungry."

Mike stopped at a seafood restaurant and they had abalone steak. He ordered a bottle of red wine and they were both thirsty. They drank the bottle and ordered another one. When they were finished they drove on toward Santa Barbara. When they passed the first motel on the outskirts of Santa Barbara Georgia looked up.

"Let's stop at a motel," she said. "I don't want to go home tonight."

Mike stopped at a motel that backed up to the ocean. He registered and then drove the car down to one of the neat little cottages. When they went in, Georgia turned on the lights and leaned against the bureau. She turned and looked at Mike. Her eyes were very bright and frightened.

"Mike, there are millions of people like those boys, aren't there?" she said. She gestured and took in the world outside the neat motel room. "I never saw them before, but I know that there are millions of them out there."

"Sure. Millions."

"And we're separated from them by just a thin little boundary that anyone can walk across. A few policemen and some laws. That's all the boundary there is. They can walk across anytime they want to." Her eyes were focused rigidly on the wall. "Why don't they just get organized and take over? What holds them back? They could just come walking in anyplace, with their little baseball bats swinging from their wrists. Into homes and schools . . . and everyplace."

"Because they're scared, Georgia," Mike said and his voice was tired. "Because they're scared and because there are guys like me around that know that they're scared. I'm one of 'em, Georgia. I know what they want and why they want it. There are millions of them, you're right. All mad, frustrated, petulant, whining, ugly."

"I never saw them before," Georgia said.

"No. Of course you never saw them before," Mike said. "All you saw was your father and Morrie. They think they're tough and practical, but they're only tough and practical when they're dealing with their own sort. They don't know about those others out there. They don't know that those millions are waiting for some sort of instruction on how to act. And because they don't get instructions, because no one tells them, they act the way they feel. Which is tough and mean. So someone has to tell them how to act; someone has to give instructions and say that you act like so and so and such and such. Morrie can't do it. Your father can't do it. I can't do it. But I can give orders to someone who can. I can tell Cromwell and he can tell them."

"Let's go outside," she said. "Maybe we can walk along the beach."

They went down a steep wooden stairway and came out on the beach. They took off their shoes and left them on the bottom step. The sand was still warm. They walked by a large hotel and the sound of music came from the open windows.

Once Georgia left him and walked down and stood in the shallow water. Then she came back and they continued down the beach. In the deep sand her coltish, almost crippled gait was emphasized.

They went past the hotel and came to a small oval stretch of sand. Georgia sat down. Mike sat down beside her.

Faintly, like an exudation, the cooling ocean gave off the smell of petroleum. It was the thin passing debris left on the surface by the day's passage of tankers.

A faint light came from the sea; a sort of bluish loom that deepened as each wave broke and then receded. The light was good only for close vision, but Mike could see Georgia's features and her fingers clasped around her knees. The light was adequate only for that. If he moved his head back only slightly she blurred and became indistinct.

She lifted her head. In the blue, faint, oceanic light her eyes were invisible except for splinters of light that reflected from the big bony eye sockets. Her head moved and he knew she was looking at him. Her lips parted to talk and then came together silently.

He noticed that his fingertips were trembling against his pants.

"Mike, you're so . . . " she said and paused, her lips open, trying for the correct words. "You're like one of those little glass balls that has artificial snow and a winter scene inside of it. You shake it and the snow swirls around the scene. Except that all one sees of you is the swirling, the snow. All the things are there inside, but I can't get a fingernail into the glass to pry it open. It's all smooth and tough." She licked her lips. "And you don't want anyone inside. You'd fight it; you'd keep them out." Her voice faltered and Mike felt that she was almost crying.

Mike leaned forward and kissed her. At first he was only aware that there were a few grains of sand caught on her lips. The tiny pieces of sand worked between their lips, like nuclei of irritation. And then from the grains of sand a sensation of raptness went through Mike. He stiffened and was caught in an experience he had never. known.

He pushed Georgia back on the sand. He put his hand on her belly and it was round and firm. It felt incredibly feminine. Her mouth opened slightly and he could feel her breath against his tongue.

Dimly, he was aware that her breathing was the rhythm of the ocean; identical with the rise and fall of the waves. He felt caught between the two rhythms; one pressing against his eardrums and the other communicated through his lips. He felt incapable of moving, caught in a luxury of immobility and, on some deep and hidden level, afraid that if he moved he would end it.

Georgia pulled her lips away and sat up. She clasped her knees. Mike felt a huge despair; he was certain that she would deny him.

"Not like this, Mike," she said. "I'll take my clothes off."

He felt a slow surge of relief. She stood up and in the darkness he heard the soft gnash of a zipper, the hissing of cloth over flesh.

When she knelt down beside him he could, in the bluish loom, make out her naked breasts and the swelling of her shoulders. He kissed her on the neck and then ran his hands over her breasts. She breathed into his hair. When he rolled over on top of her, her arms went around him and her hands locked over the small of his neck.

"Mike, I'm not sure of anything," she whispered. "Nothing . . . not anymore. Except one thing . . . I want all of you in me. Not part of you, but the whole man . . .lonely . . . person."

She sighed and seemed to fall away from him.





CHAPTER 20

"A Low But Certain Ground"

Two days later Georgia came to Mike's office.

"You told me you'd tell me about politics today," she said. "Remember?"

"Sure," he said. But he had not and he made no effort to pretend. He grinned at her and then got up from his desk. "Let's go upstairs. That's where the politics takes place."

They took the elevator and went up three floors. They walked down the hall and entered a room with "Computation Room" on the door.

The room was large and bare. In one corner was a table with a Pyrex coffee maker, a stack of paper cups, a box of sugar cubes and a can of condensed milk. Along the other wall was a long low machine. It had a smooth glistening top, thirteen metal pockets and a number of counters on it. The letters I.B.M. appeared on a metal crest. The machine was well rubbed and it hummed. Bedside it, on a metal table, were several boxes of cards.

A woman was leaning against the machine, She had the taut, wiry, nervous body of a marathon runner. A cigarette hung from her lower lip. She wore a cheap rabbit-hair sweater. Her breasts were sharp and small and she looked very confident. She looked at them through the cigarette smoke that swirled past her eyes.

Without looking at the machine, the woman pressed a button. The humming rose in pitch; took on an eager sound. The woman touched a lever and instantly a stack of cards began to feed from a hopper into the machine. The cards were snapped flat, caught between some rubber belts and flicked into one or another of the thirteen pockets. The stack of cards in the hopper jiggled downward. The pockets, each one balanced on springs, moved downward under the weight of the cards. The cards shot into the metal pockets with a sharp snip of sound that was repeated with incredible speed.

The part of the woman's mouth that was holding the cigarette was half open, caught in a smile of pleasure. Her fingers rested lightly on the machine.

"Here it is," Mike said and waved his hand around the room. "This is the whole thing.".

"Where are the men with cigars and the rolls of bribe money?" Georgia asked.

"Later, that comes later," Mike said smiling. "This is the only systematic part of politics. After this stage it's all guesswork."

They walked over to the machine. The woman watched them carefully through the cigarette smoke. With a snap the last card vanished into a pocket and at once the machine started to race frantically. The woman pressed a button and the machine was quiet.

"Henri, this is Georgia Blenner," Mike said. "Henri's an expert on IBM machines."

"Hi. Wanna know 'bout the machine, eh?" she asked. She put out a thin calloused hand, stained with nicotine, and shook hands. "I'm really expert on the 101. You know, the electronic statistical machine. I can run this O K., but I'm really best on the 101. That's really tough ."

"Miss Blenner doesn't know anything about the machines," Mike said. "She's not looking for a job."

Henri's face cleared. A soft covert look of hostility vanished and Georgia did not know it had been there until it disappeared.

"Sure, honey. I can tell you all about it. I can run 'em all," Henri said brightly. She lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the other and threw the butt on the floor. "Christ, I went to that IBM school for a year almost. More 'Think' signs around than you could shake a stick at. They wanted me to hang around and instruct, but I wanted to get out of New York. After I learned the sorter, the ESM and the collator verifying machines, I took off for L.A. Where you can grow gardenias in your back yard. Hah."

"Did the last run of cards come in?" Mike asked.

"Just in. Fresh from the offices of Pacific Polling, Incorporated. Or Pac Pol Ink as I call 'em," Henri said.

She took the cover from a box on the table. It was full of rectangular cards. She ran her fingers down the cards with an expert casual motion. They gave off a sharp trilling sound.

"All right. Run them through for the First Question," Mike said.

"Mike, you'd better explain it to me first," Georgia said.

"Sure, sure," Mike said. "I intended to. First, just forget about the Democratic and Republican Parties. This doesn't have anything to do with them. This is just a little operation by Cromwell and Freesmith. All we're trying to do here is see what makes the California voter tick. Later we'll worry about the parties."

Mike walked over to the table and sorted through some documents. Henri leaned forward.

"This is a crazy operation, honey," she said. "I never saw anything like it. Sometimes I think they're nuts."

Georgia smiled at Henri.

"You start with this," Mike said, handing Georgia a blue document. "It's the census abstract plus a lot of other information. Tells you how the population breaks down: how many street cleaners, Negroes, veterans, trade union members, truck drivers, fry cooks, Protestants, Jews, Catholics, foreign born, Okies, doctors and teachers there are. Also how much money they make, the size of their houses, the kind of car they drive, the degree of education, lodges they join and a lot more."

"Then you get your sample," Henri broke in.

"That's right," Mike said. "This abstract describes the Great Beast, the public. Everything we know about it is there. It's what they've been trying to do for centuries; describe the beast. Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's people, Rousseau's general will; they all took a crack at it and missed. Partly they missed because the Great Beast is changing all the time. Now if we were really scientific we'd go out and snap a picture of the Great Beast, but we can't. Ifs too expensive and by the time you got to his tail his muzzle would be changed already. So we make up a Little Beast; an animal that's just like the Great Beast, but smaller, diminished. You take what you hope is a good slice of the Great Beast; you include Jews, protestants, Catholics, poor men, rich men, city dwellers, farmers, plumbers and carpenters. Then you go to Pacific Polling and tell them to go out and find out what the Little Beast looks like."

"They're good," Henri said with admiration. "If your sample includes three Negro, Protestant, non-trade union, pork-chop-eating preachers they'll find "em . . . or anything you want."

"And in a calm and neutral voice they ask them any question you want," Mike said. "Then they punch the answers into the IBM cards and bring them back here and we run them through the machine. We pay them three dollars for each card. Our sample is made up of three thousand people." He picked up the box of cards and slapped them on the table. "There they are; a Little Beast of three thousand people that's just like the Great Beast . . . we hope."

"Can I see one of the cards?" Georgia said.

Mike handed her a card. It was rectangular and its face was covered with closely printed, black rows of numbers. Some of the numbers had been punched out, leaving tiny slots in the cards. There were no words on the cards.

"Read it for her, Henri," Mike said.

Henri took the card and held it toward the window. She narrowed her eyes and glanced at the pattern of slots.

"Subject is: White. Male. Thirty-four years old. Catholic. Married. Three children. Clerk. Less than four thousand and more than thirty-five hundred a year. No television. In debt."

She handed the card to Georgia. Georgia turned it over.

"Doesn't it have his name?" she asked.

"We don't care what his name is," Mike said. "We just hope that all the other white, male, Catholic, three-kidded, married clerks react the way he does. Oh, not exactly, but within a per cent or two."

"What was the First Question?" Georgia asked.

"The interviewer handed the subject a card with six names on it and asked, 'If these six men were running . for governor of California which one would you like to see win?'" Mike said. "Here's a copy of the card."

He handed her a heavy white card with six names on it. They were:

Earl Warren Wingate Daigh James Roosevelt Richard Cutler John Cromwell Hiram Johnson

"But Hiram Johnson's dead," Georgia said. "He died years ago."

"That's right," Mike said. "I threw him in just to see how many people would vote for a dead man."

Georgia looked at Mike and she felt a twinge of anxiety, too slight and passing to notice.

"Who did the white, Catholic, married trade unionist pick?" she asked.

"I can tell you without looking," Mike said. "He picked James Roosevelt. Take a hundred low-income Catholics and show them a list like that and they'll pick the name with the strongest Democratic Party associations. So Roosevelt's son, Jimmy, is who they pick."

"Well, check it anyway," Georgia said and there was irritation in her voice. "Maybe this clerk had a mind of his own."

Mike handed the card to Henri. She glanced at it.

"He picked Roosevelt," Henri said. She grinned.

"All right, Henri," Mike said. "Start to run them through. Give me the percentages when you figure them."

She nodded. She put the cards from the box into the hopper and pressed the button. The machine began to purr. She looked down at it with pleasure, moved her fingertips lightly over the quivering surface. Then she touched the lever and the cards began to flick through the machine.

Mike turned and walked over to the window with Georgia. Outside it was bright and clear. Across the air well of the building they could see into a dentist's office. A well-dressed woman, soft and expensive, was lowering herself into the dentist's chair. They could see the dentist's back, his thin neck sticking up out of the white smock, his hands clean and pink.

"This sort of thing isn't very important right now," Mike said. "We won't be able to use it until after the pre-primary Democratic convention."

"What's that?"

"Well, they have cross-filing in this state. A Democrat can file in the Republican primary and vice versa. So both parties have a pre-primary convention to select the man they want for governor. About five hundred Democrats will go to the convention and make the choice. After that is when the information on the cards gets important."

Henri handed him a card. He showed it to Georgia.

"This is the percentage of voters that picked each of the six people on the card," he said.

Warren 35% Daigh 22% Roosevelt 18% Cutler 15% Cromwell 4% Johnson 2%

Georgia looked at the card and then up at Mike. She felt a quick, sharp sense of relief and then anger.

"Why, Mike, Cromwell doesn't have a chance," she said. "Only four per cent of the people picked Cromwell."

Father and Morrie think Cromwell has a chance, she thought. And he doesn't. Not a prayer.

"That's right, honey," Henri said. "That's what I told 'em after the first raw tab. He's backing a bum horse. Christ, his man is just a little better than the dead man."



"It could be worse," Mike said. "Much worse."

He grinned and at once the irritation and anger faded in Georgia; she felt wary, cautious.

"Sure it could be worse," Henri said. "Your man could be dead."

She laughed so hard that her eyes watered. Georgia watched Mike. He was bored.

"All right, Henri, run off the results of the Second and Third Questions," Mike said.

Henri turned back to the machine; rearranged the cards.

Mike put the card down on the window sill. He drew a line through three names.

"The voters aren't going to get to vote for all six people," he said. "Johnson's out: he's dead. Warren's out: Supreme Court. Roosevelt is out: he's running for Congress."

The card now read:

Daigh 22% Cutler 15% Cromwell 4%

"But Mike, only four per cent of the voters are for Cromwell," Georgia said softly; not confidently, but cautiously, waiting.

"Sure. That's right. But Daigh's a Republican. He'll get the Republican nomination in the primary for sure. Cutler and Cromwell will be going for the Democratic nomination. But only one of them will be on the primary ballot . . . the one who gets selected by the five hundred delegates at the pre-primary convention of the Democrats," Mike said.

He spoke as if there were something she should understand. Georgia shook her head.

"Mike, the Democrats won't pick Cromwell at the pre-primary," she said. "They'll pick Cutler. He's got more support, a better chance in the general election."

"Look, Georgia, there are only five hundred people at the Democratic pre-primary convention. They'll go for Cromwell. And when they go for him he'll be the only Democrat in the primary."

"But why, Mike? Why would they go for Cromwell?"

"Because there are only five hundred of them and a group of people that small is pretty easy to influence," Mike said. His voice fell away, was more cautious. "The pre-primary convention will be in Fresno in March. Why don't you come up and see what happens?"

"I will," Georgia said. "Look, Mike, I'm not trying to be dumb, but even if Cromwell does get the Democratic endorsement how will he beat Daigh? My God, Daigh's a big man in this state. I've even heard of him. And nobody knows Cromwell. Look at your own statistics. He's just a little more popular than a man who's been dead for years."

"O.K. Forget about the pre-primary. Assume that Cromwell wins the Democratic nomination and Daigh wins the Republican nomination. Then they run off in the November election. All right?" He stepped over to the table and picked up the box of cards which Henri had just finished running through the machine again. He put the box on the window sill and opened it. "Now here's your Little Beast; a diminished tiny copy of the Great Beast. Just the same except there's only three thousand of him here instead of five million . . . but just the same. Makes the same noises, barks the same, scared of the same thing, same markings, same gait."

Mike ran his fingers over the cards. and Georgia noticed, with surprise, that his fingers were trembling. Somehow she was embarrassed. She looked across at the dentist's office. The chair and its chromium and steel appliances glittered in the sun; water bubbled from a spigot. The dentist stood with a hypodermic in his hand, a drop of liquid hung at the sharp point of the needle, with his left hand he made a placating, distracting gesture. The woman looked sideways and instantly his right hand darted forward, disappeared in the woman's mouth. The woman's shoes jerked suddenly and her arms went rigid. The dentist pulled the empty hypodermic from her mouth.

"Go on, Mike," Georgia said.

"A funny thing happens after the primary . . . after the Republican and Democratic candidates have been chosen," Mike said. His voice was only a shade tense. "Just put 'Republican' after a man's name and he'll get forty-five per cent of the votes. I don't know why, but it happens." Mike lifted out a little less than half of the cards and placed them on the window sill. "And the same with the Democrat. He'll get forty-five per cent of the votes just because he's the Democrat. It doesn't matter if they're crooks, cuckolds, veterans, young, old or a damned thing. Just put the label on and each of them will get forty-five per cent of the vote."

Mike took out almost all of the remaining cards. There was only a thin stack of cards left. The rest were on the sill

"Why does it happen that way, Mike?" Georgia said.

The dentist stepped away from the woman and a burr in his hand glistened with bright red blood.

"I don't know," Mike said. "I really don't. But they do. It's like an instinct; something that tells them to split up; to divide evenly. Jesus, it's uncanny. The Great Beast splits up into two beasts; almost exactly the same size. It always happens."

Georgia looked away from the dentist's window, down at the cards in the box.

"So these cards, the ten per cent left over, they're the ones that really decide the election," Georgia said. "That's it, isn't it, Mike? You just forget about the rest . . . the ninety per cent who are going to vote Democrat or Republican and you concentrate on the ten per cent. That's right, isn't it? They're the ones you try to attract to your candidate?"

"Not attract," Mike said. He grinned. "That's not the way it works. The ten per cent that's undecided is scared. So you scare them into voting for your man. See, that's what nobody knew before. They didn't know why the undecided voter was undecided. But I found out. He's undecided because he's scared."

"And that's what the Second and Third Questions are about?" Georgia asked. "That's it, isn't it?"

"That's right. That's absolutely right," Mike said. He went back to the table and picked up some papers that Henri had just finished.

"Here's the Second Question," Mike said. He threw the paper on the sill. "Usually the polls just ask who's going to win. But I asked a couple of extra questions."

"What's the Second Question?"

"The Second Question is: 'In general, what sort of things do you worry about?' That's all."

"What did people say?" Georgia asked.

Georgia hesitated. She felt a nag of irritation. She looked out the window again. The woman was sitting up. She opened her mouth and a spill of red liquid gushed from her lips. She smiled wanly at the dentist. His left hand was again reassuring. The right hand fumbled with a new burr; a bright sharp piece of steel.

"I don't know. Communism or the atom bomb or war . . . something like that," she said. "Maybe they're not worried about anything."

"Everybody worries about something," Mike said. "And if they're approached by a neatly dressed interviewer who says their answer will be confidential they blurt it out. Like you. Tell me what you worry about most." He pointed his finger at her. "Go ahead. Don't think. Just say it."

Georgia looked at his finger, at the neat white crescent of his fmgernail, the strong bony undulations. She looked over at the machine. It rested quietly.

"I won't tell you."

"All right," Mike said and laughed. "But you had an answer. That's the important thing. Everybody does. And their answers fall into four classes. The first class is what I call 'Economic Worries.' That's for guys who are worrying about payments on the television set or unemployment or the cost of living. The second class is 'International Worries'; like fear of a war, a catastrophe with Russia, reciprocal trade, Red China . . . that sort of thing. The third is 'National Worries.' That's for people worrying about the national debt, Communists in government, politics, that kind of answer. The fourth is 'Personal Worries.'" He grinned and shook his head. "That's for the guy who is worrying about being impotent or his kid getting polio or if the boss likes him or if his clothes look like a hick's. That's the kind of thing you were worrying about. Right?"

"Yes," she said. She did not even feel curiosity. "It was a personal worry."

The dentist took the drill from the woman's mouth and already it was a bright dab of blood.

Georgia looked down at the paper.

Economic Worries 43% Personal Worries 49% National Worries 5% International Worries 3%

"I don't believe it," Georgia said. She stared at the. paper. "Only eight per cent of them worry most about war and depression and the atom bomb. The rest are worried about their jobs and themselves. I don't believe it." Mike laughed and she knew he did not believe her. "What can you do with this information?"

"Wait till you look at the Third Question," he said. He put the paper on the sill. "The Third Question was 'What group, in general, do you think is most dangerous to the American way of life?' Any guesses about the results?"

"No," Georgia said. "Not anymore."

"The answers always fall into five categories," Mike said. "Just like clockwork. First, the people who say Big Business or Wall Street or the Bankers or Rockefellers or General Motors. I call that the 'Big Business' category. Second is the 'Trade Union' category. That's obvious . . . anyone who says trade unions or Walter Reuther or John L. Lewis; Third is the 'Communist Conspiracy' category. Fourth is a category you won't like much. It's the 'Jewish Conspiracy' category. That's where you put the people who say the Jews or International Jewry or Bernard Baruch. The fifth group is the 'Religious Conspiracy' . . . people that say the Pope or the Catholics or 'those snotty Episcopalians' or 'those Mormons and all their wives' . . . that sort of thing."

Georgia looked down at the paper.

Big Business 32% Trade Unions 22% Communist Conspiracy 11% Jewish Conspiracy 21% Religious Conspiracy 14%

"What does it mean, Mike?" she whispered. "How do you make politics out of it?"

"That's the end of the scientific part of it," Mike said. "To make politics out of it you use your common sense, your intuition."

"Sure. But what do you do? How do you use the answers?"

The dentist bent forward and his back tensed. The woman's legs suddenly went rigid, lifted off the footrest. Her hands tightened on the armrests. Then she relaxed. The dentist stood back with a bloody tooth held in heavy forceps. The woman sat up and spit into the bowl. She was very pale. Georgia fell some plug of anxiety pull loose in her mind; she felt almost gay. She was ready for Mike's answer.

"I tell them what to be scared of," Mike said. "It's as simple as that."

He picked up the ten per cent of the cards left in the box. He held them in his hand like a small club and slapped them hard on the window sill. They made a loud cracking sound. Georgia twitched as if she had been hit on the spine.

"Scared?" she asked.

"Sure . . . scared. That's what the rest of than are afraid to do; the politicians, the professors, the clubwomen, the bureaucrats, all of them. They're afraid to ask the questions I asked and if they did they'd be afraid to use the answers. But I'm not. And it's so simple. Most of the voters don't care about politics. They're bored. It's faraway, distant, meaningless. They vote out of habit, because they've been told to vote. And they always vote Democrat or Republican. Everybody knows this, but the more obvious it becomes the more everyone feels that they have to tell the voter that he's smart and has a lot of power . . . that he's important. But the really important ones are the eight, or ten per cent that're scared. They're the real independents, the people whose vote can be changed."

"Can you change their vote?" she asked.

"Yes. I can."

She looked at Mike. Then she looked out the window. The dentist's chair was empty. A neat nurse was laying out fresh aseptic linen, shining new tools.

"I want to see you do it, Mike," she said.

He took her arm to lead her out of the room and through the thick soft material of the coat he could feel a slight shivering.





CHAPTER 21

The Convention

The road to Fresno was lined with vineyards. Clumps of tiny green grapes hung from the branches. Occasionally a spray rig moved down the rows, the mist drifting from the nozzles in great glittering shreds and making the vines glisten wetly under the sun. Once they passed a winery and saw a railroad tank car backed up to the building. Wine, a huge thick red gush of it, poured from a hose into the tank car and a pink spray rose from the opening; tinctured the air. Far away the hills were green and fresh, but they simmered in the thin heat of early spring. The sunny slopes were already turning brown; very softly and slowly.

"When we get to Fresno, I'm going to get a bottle," Hank said from the back seat. "I need some relaxation. So don't count on me for the convention."

Georgia did not turn around, but Mike nodded.

"Do whatever you want," he said. "I don't give a damn. I just want to get you out of the hospital for a little while."

Hank narrowed his eyes and watched the vines in the distance turn from a green mass into separate vines, separate into rows and then suddenly snap by the window of the car. He was irritated.

"Why don't the Democratic bosses just decide by mail who the candidate will be?" Hank said. "Save the expense of a convention."

"Hankus, you've got bosses on the brain," Mike said. "There aren't bosses anymore in politics. Wait till you see this bunch in Fresno. They aren't bosses."

"Who says there aren't bosses?"

"I say. That's old stuff; Lincoln Steffens stuff. The party boss depended on two things: graft and immigrants. All the immigrants would come trooping into a town; couldn't speak the language and too dumb to find work. So the boss would give them a job wiping blackboards in a public school or a pick-and-shovel job and they give him their votes. With the votes he'd put his people in office and then collect whatever graft was around."

"And I suppose that's all changed?" Hank said ironically.

"Hank, they have machines in Sacramento that would turn up graft money in two minutes. Just take roads. The boss used to let the contract go to his brother or uncle and they'd put in lousy material and overcharge the state. Nobody was the wiser. But now all construction jobs are publicized, bids are solicited, opened publicly and then awarded to the lowest bidder. And the immigrants stopped coming . . . or they started making two-fifty an hour screwing bolts on Fords and they own cottages in the suburbs. No immigrants, no graft, no nothing."

"So nobody gets anything out of politics today?"

"I didn't say that," Mike said. "Hell yes, some people get something out of politics. Take Georgia's daddy. If all goes well he'll benefit. But not by grafting; not by having a boss who's his friend and does him a favor. He'll benefit by changing the law. The law will be changed publicly; out where everyone can see it. That's not graft. That's making something legal that you want to do. Or making something illegal that you don't want done."

Hank saw Mike's grin in the mirror; twisted squat and huge by the distortion in the glass. Georgia looked back at Hank; her face expectant.

Hank started to reply and sensed that it was useless. Not if the laws were changed publicly by the representatives of the people.

"What kind of people come to this convention?" Hank asked.

"Middle-class, college-educated people," Mike said. "Doctors, lawyers, professors . . . maybe a few do-gooding housewives. They're the ones that remember their civic lessons when they grow up: be a doer, an activist . . . work hard and keep politics out of the hands of the bosses. You'll see."

Ahead of them a low-slung truck was moving down the highway. It was heaped high with freshly picked carrots and a few of the carrots spilled out onto the highway, left a-green and orange track behind the truck. Mike rushed down the trail of carrots, exploding them under his tires with a sharp popping sound. Behind the Cadillac the carrots were turned into little mashed heaps of orange fiber. Mike swung around the truck, and the highway was clean and unblemished. He went faster.

They came to the big clover-leaf intersection outside of Fresno and ten minutes later they arrived at the Hotel Conquistador. Over the marquee of the hotel was a large cloth sign that said "Welcome Democrats."

When they walked through the lobby they saw a huge blown-up photograph beside one of the lounges. Over the entrance to the lounge a sign said, "Dick Cutler for Governor HDQ'S." The face on the blow-up was round and honest like the face of a very fat child. The picture was so huge, however, that the pores on Cutler's nose, the hairs in his ears and a wart along his chin looked outsized. His face looked as if it were wet.

"That's the competition," Mike said. "He's a big car dealer from San Fernando and he's got lots of money."

Mike had reserved three adjoining rooms for them. When they registered, he had their bags sent up and then asked what room Cromwell had.

Only Cromwell and Clara were in the room. Clara was sitting in a chair in the corner. She lit a cigarette, held it in her fingers, her hand cupped over her cheek. She glared at Mike over her knuckles.

"Cutler's already made his move," Cromwell said as the door closed. "His people are giving cocktail parties in every motel in Fresno, they've passed out lapel buttons and you saw that blow-up picture when you came in the lobby. He's going to beat us, Mike."

Cromwell stopped pacing, stood rigidly in one position and scratched his nose. He stared suspiciously at Hank and Georgia and then ignored them.

"Don't worry, John," Mike said. "Things are going to be all right."

"Whadda you mean, all right?" Clara said. "No pins, no cocktail parties, no banners, no placards, no quarter cards, no nothing. And he says don't worry. This isn't a League of Women Voters meeting, Mike. This is the real thing."

Cromwell started to pace again. He searched his pockets for a cigar, could not find one. He picked up a cigarette from a table, stuck it in his mouth. A shred of paper stuck to his mouth. His tongue licked at it.

The cigarette came apart in his mouth, pieces of wet tobacco flecked over his lips. He wiped his mouth harshly. The grains of tobacco were black against the fabric of his sleeve. He dropped the ruined cigarette on the rug and stepped on it.

"It's going to be all right," Mike said. "You just do two things, don't drink too much and don't be seen with Clara." Cromwell wheeled and looked at Mike. His hands trembled across his vest pockets, vainly searching for a cigar. His eyes were angry.

"Listen, Mike, don't go too far," he said. "I'm not . . . "

"At a convention like this people get all concerned about personal morals," Mike said. "Some of them might think that Clara's your mistress. There's been talk about that before."

Clara sat motionless in the chair. She pushed her hand flat against her birthmark, as if it were suddenly hot.

"I'll stay out of sight," Clara said.

"That's a good girl," Mike said. "Now I'm going to go out and scout around a little."

Mike led Hank and Georgia out to the elevator. As they waited for the elevator they heard a door open and Clara came down the corridor. She stopped a few feet from Mike. She carefully looked away from his face.

"Look, Mike. You get him that nomination, understand?" she said. "You said you would. You told him. He left everything to you. Now you get it." Her voice was fierce.

She turned and walked back down the corridor; not waiting for an answer.

"Can you get it for him, Mike?" Hank asked when they were in the elevator.

"Sure, sure. If he'll just do what I say."

"Mike, those Cutler people are awfully weLl organized," Georgia said doubtfully. "Maybe you should have some cocktail parties and posters . . . things like that. After all it's not a question of money. Father said he'd pay for anything reasonable."

"Look, just leave it to me," Mike sald. "These posters and buttons and free drinks don't mean a thing. Everybody does it because they believe they ought to. Nobody knows if it really helps. You just forget about your daddy's money and leave it to me."

They stepped into the lobby and walked over to the Cutler headquarters. The lounge was called the "Room of the Dons" and the walls were hung with thick green gold curtains. Huge pictures showed columns of Spanish Dons on tossing horses moving toward a distant mission. On one of the hangings a huge Catholic monk with a crucifix around his neck was blessing a crowd of Indians who were kneeling at his feet. At one end of the room some tables had been converted into a bar. On other tables were stacks of campaign literature, boxes of shining buttons and quarter-cards with pictures of Cutler on them. The room was crowded with people.

A man walked toward them. He took Mike's hand. Georgia recognized him. It was Cutler.

"Mike, it's good to see you," Cutler said. His face was flushed with excitement. He looked much older than his pictures. His face was wet. "Things are happening, boy. Really moving. I never thought I'd pick up support like this. Really, Mike, I'm as surprised as anyone."

"I'll bet," Mike said and smiled.

"Really, Mike," Cutler said. "Jesus, all the northern counties have already caucused and they're for me . . . Shasta, Alpine, Modoc . . . lots more."

"They're little counties, Dick," Mike said.

"Jesus, we've got two thirds of the delegates to the convention in here. I've already got commitments from over half of the delegates to go for me on the first ballot," Cutler said.

"What do you want me to do, Dick?" Mike asked. "Congratulate you?"

"Quit kidding, Mike," Cutler said. "I've got the nomination for sure." Cutler opened his big red hand, closed it slowly and held the fist up for Mike to examine. "But I'd like to get it on the first ballot and I'd like the party united behind me. So I've been thinking about the lieutenant-governor's spot. Why doesn't Cromwell come in with me on the lieutenant-governor's spot? It'd be a strong ticket. I'll win without him, but I like Cromwell and it's a chance to get party unity."

"Dick, you'd make a good governor," Mike said. Cutler's tongue came out of his mouth, ticked at the corners d his mouth and a slow grin was suppressed on his lips.

"Don't kid me, Mike," Cutler said. "Cromwell wants the governorship. But he hasn't got the votes. He might just as well face the fact. I'm giving him a chance to be lieutenant-governor. If he doesn't take it, hell with him." The grin went off Cutler's face and he looked carefully about the room, made himself grin again, but when he leaned toward Mike and spoke his words were threatening. "Don't try anything funny, Mike. Let me know before the first session if Cromwell wants a joint ticket. If he doesn't, don't try and foul me up. I'll break your wagon, Mike, if you try and stop me."

Cutler smiled, his automobile salesman's smile, all white teeth and pink skin and the faint odor of Aqua Velva, but the words were tough and hard. Underneath the prosperous fat and the doublebreasted suit, Cutler was still muscular and strong. Cutler smiled over Mike's shoulders at delegates and occasionally his hand went up to wave at them. But his other hand was knotted into a ball and was jammed into his pocket.

"Cutler's making a mistake," Hank said in Georgia's ear. "He's getting tough with the wrong guy. When you get tough with Mike it's like giving him permission to ruin you. Did you ever noticethat Mike can't get tough with gentle people?"

"No. I never noticed," Georgia said.

She turned and looked at Mike. He was grinning.

"All right, Dick, you've got the votes. You've told me that," Mike said. "But don't try to scare me."

"No one is trying to scare anybody, Mike," Cutler said. Cutler waved at a woman with a big blue and gold "Cutler for Governor" button on her lapel. "But Cromwell is soft, Mike. He's not good on the Communist issue. He's been running around the state for years talking to all those foreign-language groups and Wobblies and the rest. He looks like a radical to a lot of people."

"So did Roosevelt to a lot of people," Mike said.

Cutler hesitated, his tongue flicked again at the corners of his mouth.

"Can I talk in front of your friends here?" Cutler said, and glanced at Hank and Georgia.

Sure. Say anything you want."

"I wasn't going to say anything about it, Mike," Cutler said. "But we've got plenty on Cromwell. We've got sworn affidavits that he spoke to Communists, Syndicalists, radical trade union people. Even anarchists, Mike. Think of that. Maybe you don't know it, Mike, but one of those Italian vineyard workers groups that Cromwell spoke to in the 1930's was an anarchist outfit."

"All Cromwell did was talk to them," Mike said softly.

Hank sighed. Georgia looked at him. He turned his head and whispered to her.

"This Cutler is a sap," he said. "Really a sap. Why doesn't he stop talking? He's just asking for it."

"You know Grover, political editor of the 'Los Angeles Post'?" Cutler asked. "Well he's got a series ready to go attacking Cromwell on this radicalism stuff. The other papers will have to pick it up if the 'Post' does, Mike. Look, you better go talk to Cromwell. Tell him he can still run for lieutenant-governor."

A group of women came over and pulled Cutler away. In their midst was a tall calm Negro woman.

Mike turned and winked at Georgia.

"Let's go upstairs," he said. "I want to make a phone call. I'm going to call your brother Morrie."

When they got to the room Mike placed the call to Morrie Blenner with the operator. He whistled as he waited for the call. In a few minutei the call came through.

"How are things going in Fresno, Mr. Freesmith?" Morrie's small precise voice asked. "How is our candidate doing?"

"All right, Morrie," Mike said. "Only one thing can lick him. If he gets over that he'll get the nomination."

"What is it?" the tiny voice on the phone asked.

"A reporter for the 'Los Angeles Post' named Grover," Mike said. "He has some articles attacking Cromwell." "Spell his name please, Mr. Freesmith," Blenner said. "G-R-O-V-E-R, Robert Grover."

"I'll check it," Morrie said. "When will they make the nomination?" His words came tiny, jeweled, almost inaudibly to Mike's ear.

"Tomorrow morning," Mike said. ,

"It will be over by midafternoon tomorrow then?"

"That's right," Mike said. "I'll give you a call when it's over. Don't worry about what you read in the papers. They don't know what's going on. All the reporters think Cutler is a sure bet for the nomination. But they don't know what's happening."

Morrie chuckled.

"I never believe the papers," he said.

The phone clicked dead in Mike's ear. He hung up.





CHAPTER 22

"Bind Not the Madmen . . . "

Mike woke up. He waited a moment and then put out his hand. Georgia was there. He sat up in bed and called room service. Georgia woke up and reached for a cigarette. Her naked body came up out of the covers and she sat yogi-style.

"Send up a copy of the 'L.A. Post' and two grapefruit and a lot of crisp bacon and some buttered toast," Mike said. "You put the butter on the toast. Don't send those hard little chunks of butter. Lots of coffee. O.K.?"

Georgia slid out of bed and stood in front of the mirror. Her figure was far from perfect. Her ribs showed and her wrists and elbows were knobby. Also her legs were too long and the knees showed the effects of being crippled. But her hips were round and firm, the flesh was without a wrinkle and the hipbone was soft and curved. Her breasts were full, but not large, just at the very edge. of being lush.

Georgia was showered and dressed by the time Hank knocked on the door. She was putting on her lipstick when he came in. He looked at her without speaking and she flushed.

"Did you se~ the story in the 'Post'?" Hank asked.

"No. Read it to me," Mike called from the bathroom.

"Fresno, March 15. Delegates to the Democratic Pre-Primary Convention in Fresno today were angered by reports that Richard Cutler, candidate for Democratic endorsement for governor at the primary, was preparing to blast John Cromwell, also rumored to be seeking endorsement, as being pro-communist.

"Party leaders said that the Cutler charges were based on information that had long been discredited. It was felt that Cutler's chances would be endangered by such charges. Cromwell could not be reached for comment. There was an unconfirmed report that . . . "

"O.K. That's enough," Mike said. He came out of the bathroom. The waiter came in with a large tray and put it on a coffee table. Mike picked up a piece of toast and put three pieces of bacon on it, rolled it into a bun and began to eat. "Now that's very helpful of the 'Post' to do that. Who wrote the article?" Hank looked at the paper.

"Grover. Robert Grover." Hank said. He poured himself a cup of coffee. "Look, Mike, has Cromwell ever been a Communist?"

"No."

"Then why doesn't he just come out and say so?" Hank asked. "Just say he doesn't want their support; has never been for them."

"You don't do it that way," Mike said through the toast and bacon. "See, there are about two thousand Communists in this state."

"Let 'em go to hell," Hank said. "Just count on losing two thousand votes."

Mike shook his head, chewed on the toast and bacon. He took a swallow of coffee. Georgia began to eat; not looking up from her grapefruit.

"You don't get it," Mike said. "The political parties in California are like two icebergs floating around in the ocean. Most of them underwater; just a little tip of each one sticking above water. Most voters won't change parties come what may. They're underwater and they're happy. At the top, like ants, are the ones that might change; milling around looking for some reason to jump from one iceberg to another. I don't know why the icebergs are about the same size, but they are. Now the trick is to keep them from changing or to control the change. Or make just the right ants jump from just the right iceberg at the right time. Control, my boy, that's the answer. Control."

Mike grinned. Georgia looked up from her grapefruit. Hank watched her.

"What's all that got to do with the Communists?" Hank asked.

"One thing about a Communist . . . he's a hell of a good worker. He'll do anything: precinct work, address envelopes, haul people to the polls, ring doorbells, make phone calls. Just as a rule of thumb you can assume that any good worker, in any party, can bring in about fifteen votes . . . he can drag fifteen people up from the bottom of the iceberg and make them jump with him, So multiply fifteen times two thousand and you get thirty thousand votes. That's too many. It might win an election. So Cromwell won't say anything about Communists in this election."

"So Cromwell's going to try for Communist support?" Hank asked.

"I didn't say that, my boy," Mike said. "You don't listen. He just wants to keep them underwater; make sure they don't come out onto the tip of the iceberg and dance around; make people nervous. Don't rock them icebergs, Hank, unless you know what you're doing. That's the art of the politician. The Communists won't support Cromwell whatever he does. What we want to do is just keep 'em neutral."

"Oh, Mike, they couldn't hurt you anyway," Georgia said. "You're just being melodramatic."

Mike shrugged his shoulders. He picked up three more pieces of bacon, rolled them in toast. He sucked the grease from his fingers.

"They could hurt Cromwell if they wanted," Mike said flatly. "Or Cutler or anyone. What would happen if you had two thousand people who went around quietly pulling your quarter-cards down or saying in Jewish delicatessens that they heard Cromwell was anti-Semitic or asking in a Negro liquor store if it were true that Cromwell came from a long line of Mississippi plantation owners? Or say that they came out with a recommendation in the 'Daily Worker' for Cromwell . . . the Republicans would smear it all over the state. It would be a real deadly kiss."

Hank watched Mike closely as he talked. Georgia was squeezing the juice out of the grapefruit, watching the spoon intently.

"Mike, aren't you afraid that you or some other guy will calculate things like this and discover you've made a mistake and you've put a Hitler in power?" Hank said. "Look at Gemany in 1933. Everyone was trying to play everyone off against everyone else and the result was that Hitler got in."

Georgia hesitated, sat still with the juice dripping from the grapefruit. The spoon filled and then overflowed onto the carpet. She looked down and quickly swallowed the spoonful of juice.

"Sure. It might happen any day," Mike said. "But what of it? Is that bad? Look, Hankus, the first law of politics is: you can't give the people something they don't want. That's true in Russia, Germany, Japan or Timbuctoo. It's true in a dictatorship or a tyranny or a democracy. If the Russian people didn't want Communism it would be over in a week . . . finished, kaput, gone. But they want it; so they get it. So don't worry, Hank. Everything is for the best."

"You know, Mike, for the first time I'm beginning to worry about you," Hank said. "Not a lot, but a little."

Georgia started to say something, but Mike said they had to go to the meeting hall. In the corridor, people were moving slowly, talking loud. Several of them had large "Cutler for Governor" buttons on their lapels.

"The Cutler people are organized, Mike," Hank said. "You'd better get moving, I haven't seen a Cromwell sign yet."

"All in good time," Mike said. "That high-pressure stuff can be overdone."

He stopped at a room just outside the entrance to the convention hall. He knocked on the door and it opened. Inside were a half dozen men. They looked like confidential clerks in a bank or stock house; neat, well-dressed, modest ties, black shoes. Mike looked at Georgia.

"Keep Hank company," he said. "I'll be out in a few minutes. Got a few things to talk over."

Inside the clerks were writing on pieces of paper with soft lead pencils. They worked quietly, quickly, without smiling. The door closed behind Mike.

"I'm worried," Georgia said. "Mike's so disorganized. Those Cutler people will have all the delegates committed before Cromwell's campaign ever gets rolling."

"Mike's not disorganized," Hank said. "He's beautifully organized. But only on important things. The rest of the things, the unimportant things, he just doesn't care about. If this endorsement is important for Mike he'll be organized. He'll be organized to the last dot."

"He's not very well organized with me," Georgia said. "He's always late for dates, forgets appointments, that sort of thing."

"That's because he's sure of you, Georgia," Hank said. He hesitated a moment and then went on. "He's sure of me too . . . and his wife and Cromwell and Clara. So he doesn't waste any time on us. He concentrates everything on what he feels is important. The thing he's not sure of."

"He doesn't sound like a very nice person," Georgia said.

"But efficient," Hank said. "Mike doesn't worry about everything. He just worries about what's important. Everything else he just forgets, doesn't think of it. Then he concentrates on the few situations or persons that he is not sure about; that are still important." Hank turned and looked directly at Georgia. "Think back. I'll bet there was a time when he devoted a lot of attention to you, when he appeared very organized. And then, after something happened, he pushed you down under."

Georgia stared at him a moment and then realized what he was saying. Her cheeks burned slightly, but she did not drop her eyes.

"You're right," she said. "Until one night at Santa Barbara I had the feeling . . . "

"I don't want to hear about it," Hank said. "I'm not interested in your love life. I just wanted to illustrate a point."

Hank's voice was harsh.

"I'm not sure I'm below the surface now," Georgia said. "I feel . . . "

"You feel you're very prominent in his mind," Hank said. "Well, you're wrong. You're under the surface . . . just as I am. That doesn't mean he can't love you. Maybe he does. Maybe he loves you very much. But he just doesn't waste time on you. It's a wonderful thing about Mike. That's why he can do so much. He's not like the average sharp young executive who gives the impression of being highly organized and spreads equal energies over his wife and kids and business and Rotary Club and college reunion. Not Mike. Mike knows what he has to do. Exactly. He does it. The rest he doesn't worry about."

Inside the hall the "Star-Spangled Banner" sounded. In a moment four American Legionnaires came walking out of the hall. Only their hats and jackets were uniform. Their pants were regular business slacks and they wore natty two-tone sport shoes. The two men with the chrome-covered rifles marched smartly, but the men with the flags were more heavily burdened and they moved slowly as if their feet were tender.

Mike came out of the room across the corridor.

"Let's go on into the hall," he said. "They've just opened the floor to nominations."

They walked in and sat in the rear row. The hall was almost full and several people were moving around the platform. Behind the podium were large pictures of Roosevelt and Truman. A tall fat woman in a mauve suit was standing behind a lectern.

"The chair will recognize Mr. Ernest Eaton," the woman said. "A delegate from the Lassen County delegation."

A tall, almost bald young man stood up. He had small and very shrewd eyes that were lost in a pleasant face. He wore a plaid shirt and his tie was pulled down from an unbuttoned collar. He stood with his hands in his hip pockets.

"Up in Lassen County us Democrats aren't used to big-time political doings," Eaton said. "Mostly we just sit around 'and talk and try to win a schoolboard election or a few county offices and it's all peanuts, I guess. But we'll learn pretty quick how you do things around here and we'll probably be able to get along." Eaton rocked back on his heels, looked broadly out over the hall. The delegates laughed.

"Eaton is one of Cutler's men," Mike said. "He's been in Lassen County three years and you'd never think he went to Harvard Law School and has twenty thousand a year of inherited money. He picked up that hayseed pose very, very quickly."

"I'm here today to do just one thing," Eaton said. He scratched his head. "That is to place before you the name of a candidate who can win the governorship of California for the Democratic Party in November. He can win for three reasons. First, because he's never been associated with any group or person which has been in the least sympathetic to Communism . . . foreign or domestic. And that's important to California voters."

He paused as a ripple of applause went through the hall.

"Secondly, my candidate is a self-made man. He's met a payroll; he knows the problems of the working man; he knows the problems of business. He doesn't live on inherited wealth or from clipping coupons. He is a man of action," Eaton said. "Thirdly, the person whose name I am going to place in contention has been a lifelong Democrat. He hasn't wavered from party to party; from candidate to candidate. He has always gone right down the line for the Democratic platform and for Democratic candidates." Eaton paused and his big, egglike face creased in a smile. "And that can't be said of all the names you will hear today."

Mike smiled and whispered.

"He means Cromwell," Mike said. "Cutler's really taking out after Cromwell. He's sore because I didn't come around and talk about Cromwell running for lieutenant-governor."

Eaton went on talking, but Mike did not listen. He looked around the hall.

He nudged Hank and pointed at a little group of eight people sitting in the rear of the hall. They were older people and they sat primly in their seats. The women were dressed in cheap dark clothes. The men wore black suits. They sat quietly, listening to Eaton talk.

"They're the pension people," Mike said. "They aren't delegates; they're observers. Up from Long Beach probably. They represent the senior Citizens, the Ham-and-Eggers, the Townsendites. The pension people send a group to every political meeting in the state. They just sit and watch and then report back what happens. They've got a lot of votes. No one knows for sure, but it's probably, a hundred thousand . . . maybe more."

Mike pointed to a small dark Jew who was sitting off by himself. He was a small man and only his eyes, the top of his head and a cigar showed. He studied the tip of his cigar very carefully and then looked up at the ceiling.

"Who is he?" Georgia asked.

"That's Notestein, he's the political agent of the public utility companies," Mike said. "That's not his title and he doesn't even have a position with the utility companies. But he's their man. Lately he's become the political man for the, oil companies too. They're starting to worry about the state gas tax getting too high. Oil consumption is starting to go down so the oil people are getting back into politics."

"Who's that big red-faced man?" Hank asked. He pointed at a man sitting in the front row.

"That's Wilson, an AFL man," Mike said. "We won't see much of him. Trade unions don't mean much in this state; not in politics. But we'll see some of the others. Come on, let's get out of here. We'll go up to the room. This will go on for five or ten minutes and then Cutler will give a speech. We can miss all that."

They stood up and walked up the aisle. Hank looked at the rows of identical, round, prosperous faces. They were attentive and alert. They gave off an aroma of Odorono, Aqua Velva, Old Crow, good perfume and tobacco. When they stepped out of the hall, at once Hank caught the old, familiar cheap odor of the hotel.

Mike walked over to the little room across the hall and knocked on the door. One of the neat clerkly looking men opened the door. Mike spoke to him. The man nodded and went into the hall.

When they got to the room, Mike took off his coat. "Call up and order some beer," Mike said. He went to his briefcase and began to haul out documents. Georgia ordered the beer and some chicken sandwiches. Almost at once there was a knock on the door. Mike went over and opened the door.

"Hello, Mr. Appleton, come right on in," Mike said.

Mr. Appleton was a small thin man. He had a long thin neck with red skin, folded like turkey's skin into tough slanting rolls. He looked as if he had once been much fatter and his bones and cartilage had simply shrunk inside the bag of his skin. He had bright glittering eyes, hard with suspicion. His shoes were very shiny and when he sat down he carefully pulled up his pants legs to save the press. His shoes were high. He wore a white shirt, but the points of the collar were tiny and yellow; the kind of yellow that comes from home washing and long careful storage and putting mothballs in linen drawers.

Mr. Appleton was followed by a woman whom he introduced as Mrs. Sweeton. She was formless in a black crepe dress. She wore a long string of coral beads around her neck and they hung to her waist. The beads were large and yellow, like the aged teeth of some large animal. Her fingers never left them alone.

"It's your meeting, Mr. Freesmith," Mr. Appleton said. "You asked for it. So tell us what's on your mind. Mrs. Sweeton and I will talk to any politician that wants to talk to us. We represent the Senior Citizens Clubs of Long Beach, Gardena, Seal Beach, and San Pedro. So what's on your mind?"

"I'm not a politician," Mike said. "I'm just a lawyer."

"That's right, you're just a lawyer," Mr. Appleton said and laughed a dry thin acid laugh. "But maybe you represent a politician. So get on with it."

Mr. Appleton sat with a simple proper arrogance, his back not touching the chair, his feet squarely on the floor. There was something mathematical, precise, clean and unattractive about him.

"How do your people feel about Cutler?" Mike asked.

"Don't know yet. Haven't seen his pension planks yet. Next question?"

"What would you like to see in a platform, Mr. Appleton?" Mike asked.

"You know that. A pension that senior citizens can live on, an act by the legislature that will make pension funds the first obligation on state funds, the administrator of the pension fund to be a friendly person. It's all on the record. We've said it before. We'll say it again. It's all on the record. Next question?"

Mr. Appleton sat calmly in the chair, rigid with confidence.

There was a knock on the door and it swung open. A waiter walked in with a tray on his shoulder.

"Six Pabsts, chicken sandwiches. That right?" the waiter said. He swung the tray down onto a table. Mike pitched him a half dollar.

"Like a bottle of beer or a sandwich, Mr. Appleton?" Mike asked.

"Don't drink," Mr. Appleton replied crisply. "Go right ahead, though. Go right ahead."

"Mrs. Sweeton, excuse me," Mike said. "Would you like a glass of beer or a sandwich?"

Mrs. Sweeton's brown round eyes moved for the first time since she entered the room. She had been sitting quietly, her fat smooth hands manipulating the jagged coral beads. Since the tray came in the room, however, she had been staring out the window. Now her eyes focused on the sandwiches, examined the soft white bread, the green lettuce, the rich mound of potato salad On each plate, the brown heap of potato chips.

As if she were remarking on something novel and unique and quite unrelated, she said, "It's been so long since breakfast," and after a quick look at Mr. Appleton she stared out the window again.

Georgia picked up a plate and passed it to Mrs. Sweeton. Staring out the window, quite obliviously, Mrs. Sweeton took the plate and her soft sure fingers quickly grasped the sandwich and put it to her lips. She turned her head away so that they could not see her take the first bite.

"Would you like me to send out for some tea or milk, Mrs. Sweeton?" Georgia asked.

The gray hair moved quickly and she looked up at Georgia.

"Oh, don't send out for anything. I'll just drink whatever you have here," Mrs. Sweeton said.

She did not look at the glass of beer as Georgia pressed it into her hand. She took a deep drink of the beer and then put a wisp of a handkerchief to her lips to wipe away the foam.

"Go on, Mr. Appleton," Mike said. "You were saying that your aims were all on the record. Do you think Cutler is in agreement with those aims?"

"Can't tell, I said," and his voice was as cool and thin as shredded ice. "If we ever get him on record we'll know what he stands for."

"Your people would not approve him though on what you know now?"

Mr. Appleton brought the tips of his fingers together in what was clearly a gesture of pleasure. "No," he said. "No. We wouldn't approve him or any other pie-in-the-sky, big-bellied lying politician. Not until we saw their platform in black and white. If his pension plank is right we'd support him. But we wouldn't really believe him until we saw the right laws roll out of Sacramento." Mr. Appleton paused a moment. He glanced coolly at Mrs. Sweeton, at the big attractive tray of beer and sandwiches, at the big suite of rooms. "We're not as stupid as we were ten years ago, Mr. Freesmith. And we're a hell of a lot better organized. We don't buy very easily now. We've got a program and we're going to get it. Franklin Roosevelt framed us, Upton Sinclair framed us. But we ain't fools,anymore. We're organized."

He stopped abruptly. Like a man who has already said too much. He stopped tapping his fingertips together and twisted his hands together into a mass of thin fingers and white knuckles.

Mrs. Sweeton was frightened and she put the glass of beer down on the table. She continued to nibble at the sandwich. Her teeth worked deftly and minutely at it, wearing it down with nervous small bites so that she chewed incessantly.

"Mr. Appleton, what did you do before you retired?" Mike asked.

"I was a carpenter. Journeyman carpenter. Iowa first and then California. Good one too. Laid three thousand feet of oak flooring in . . . " he stopped slowly and glanced at Mike. "I was a carpenter."

Mike poured a glass full of beer. He did it slowly. He poured the beer down the side of the glass and watched the thin collar of foam climb slowly up the side. He turned the glass upright just as it was perfectly full. He took a bite of a sandwich and then pushed a handful of potato chips in his mouth. The sound of the chips being crushed was the loudest noise in the room. Mike wiped his hand across his mouth and smiled at Mr. Appleton.

"Mr. Appleton, have you got a minute to spare so I can tell you a little story?" Mike asked. "It's a very short story. Very short."

Mr. Appleton's bright birdlike eyes swept over Mike with a look of hard pity. His hands uncurled and he tapped his fingertips together; the five fingers of one hand gently bouncing off the five fingers of the other hand.

"A minute, Mr. Freesmith? I've got lots of minutes," he said and cackled shrilly; a harsh arrogant sound; chickenlike and hard; utterly confident. "Sure. I've got a minute."

"You see, Mr. Appleton, we know a little bit about how our eider citizens, our senior citizens, were treated in other societies," Mike said in a soft voice. He looked relaxed and powerless. Sweat marked his armpits and blotched the front of his shirt. His eyes were half closed against the heat and the glare of the sun that came in the venetian blinds. "We know; Mr. Appleton, from anthropology and sociology that every society tends to protect its most productive members . . . the men and women who can work the hardest, reproduce, fight wars, invent things, expend energy. In tough times the entire society will instinctively protect its strongest members. An old Eskimo will make up his mind one day and wander off into a storm and die if the food supply gets low enough. He does that because he knows that if he doesn't the younger people might force him out into the storm. And so he goes by himself."

"Mr. Freesmith, my people are waiting for me back in the Convention Hall," Mr. Appleton said and his upper lip was drawn thin. "They want to know what Cromwell stands for. They don't want to hear horror stories."

"Sure, sure. Just a minute," Mike said. He took another drink of beer. He put more potato chips in his mouth, crunched them loudly. "Just hear me out. Let me tell you about one society and the way it took care of its older people. This was a society that was hard pressed by its enemies . . . pretty much the way the United States is today. They began to worry, wonder if they could stand the pressure, argue about how they'd do in a war. They worried about whether they were strong enough and what they ought to do to keep strong. What they finally did was have all the citizens take off their clothes once a year . . . all at the same time. Then they would all gather naked in the public square and march in front of a committee of wise men. It was pretty clever really. All the young bucks would see girls they were interested in and it would become obvious that they were interested and, even more important; that they were capable of doing something about it."

Mike paused and looked at Mr. Appleton. Mr. Appleton was looking straight ahead, but his eyes were a deeper color and they had lost their hard suspicious look. His tongue licked at the corners of his dry old lips and he almost smiled.

"Round and round the public square they'd march," Mike went on. "Everyone buck-assed naked. And slowly they'd pair off. The strong young men would pick the strong young women they liked and the committee of selection would let them leave the square and wander off into a grove of trees nearby. Then what would be left would be old people who obviously couldn't do what was necessary. Thin old geezers with skin hanging around their waist and knock-kneed; fat old men with pot bellies and double chins. Old hags; no corsets or girdles to hide them. Just their white old ruined childless flesh for everyone to see. No muscles left; no energy, no nothing. Understand?"

Mr. Appleton was still sitting very straight, but his eyes were unfocused and vague. His face seemed slightly dissolved. He crossed his arms across his chest and rocked back and forth.

"Understand, Mr. Appleton?" Mike asked."No energy, no nothing?"

Mr. Appleton's eyes roamed around the room and then fastened fiercely on Mike. He nodded savagely.

"Finally the only ones left in the square would be the old people," Mike said. "They'd walk around and around, the old naked men and the old naked women . . . with the committee giving them a cold eye. Waiting to see if the old men still had it in 'em. Or if anyone wanted the old women. The committee didn't say a thing. They didn't do anything. But after a while the old men and women would disappear. They would wander off. Not into the grove but out into the countryside and far away from the town. Out of the society altogether. Gone. Gone forever. Some of the stronger ones became slaves or shepherds, but none of them hung around." Mike paused a minute and took another sip of beer. His teeth, when he bit into the sandwich, looked very white and strong and he looked up with a grin.

Mr. Appleton twisted in his chair. Mrs. Sweeton sobbed distantly and fumbled for the beer glass with her hand. Hank handed it to her and she drank deeply and then wiped off her lips with the back of her hand. There was a smear of mayonnaise on her chin. Mr. Appleton was trying to smile, but his teeth made a thin, chalky sound as they ground together in a desperate effort to keep his chin from gaping and wagging.

"You're . . . you're . . . you're . . . a savage," Mr. Appleton said finally and snapped his mouth shut. Saliva ran from the corner of his mouth and in a bright silvery streak down his chin. He leaned far back in the chair. Suddenly he looked very frail and small; almost childlike. Some thin strong certitude had snapped and his jaw hung open and showed the false pinkness of his dentures and the real pinkness of his tongue.

"No. I'm not savage," Mike said softly. "I'm just trying to tell you the facts of life. The story is true. It happened in Sparta and the man who wrote it down Was Lycurgus. Go to the public library and check it out. Read it. It really happened."

"Well, it's uncivilized~" Appleton said, but his voice lacked conviction. His tongue clacked softly against his false teeth.

"You have to realize that America's in a crisis today," Mike went on. "Just like Sparta was. Russia is looking down our throat. Pretty soon there's going to be a war. And people will get scared. They'll wonder if we're strong enough to win. And they'll take a cold look at who can help in the fight and who can't. Every society does it, Mr. Appleton. Every single society that's under pressure does exactly that. When we take that cold look we might decide that our senior citizens are a liability; a handicap."

"It's not so," Mrs. Sweeton said. There were tears in her eyes, but her face was not anguished, it was frightened. "No one thinks that in America."

"Look, Mrs. Sweeton," Mike said. "Did you ever hear of euthanasia until recently? Of course not. It's a polite term for murdering people who don't have any good reason for living anymore. Right now euthanasia would only be applied to congenital idiots, incurable cancer and things like that. But let things get really tough; let the battle really begin, and that will change. Someday soon someone is going to suggest that maybe euthanasia be applied to people over a certain age . . . everyone over a certain age would get the works. It's in people's minds already; you can see it stirring around; just waiting to be said. You don't see many young people anymore, but they're talking about it; gnawing away at the idea. Worries 'em. And the word euthanasia keeps popping up."

"You shut up. You're a god damn liar," Mr. Appleton said. He was crouched in the chair, like a tiny defensive monkey. His old splayed carpenter's hands were held out in front of him. "You're lying. That's what you're doing." -

"Mike, my God, don't talk like that," Georgia said. She looked at Hank, but he was staring at Mike. Her voice was thin; at the shatter point. "Even if it's true don't say it."

"But it's true," 'Mike said. "I have to say it. If these people are going into politics they better find out the facts." Mike reached out and shuffled through the papers on the coffee table. He picked up a sheet. "Now, look at this report. It's from UNESCO. It's a survey of what age groups suffered most in Russia and Germany during World War Two. Do you know that the old people, people over fifty-five, just about disappeared from those two countries? No one knows just how, but they did. They just vanished away; Starved, maybe, or sent off to Siberia or killed from overwork or something. But they're gone. Just as if the Germans and the Russians decided that the old people had to go first."

Mr. Appleton moved his bent, tough carpenter's hands, but no words accompanied them: only a sound like a muted sustained yelp.

"The point is, Mr. Appleton, you don't want to press a society too hard," Mike said. "Those slick young men down in Long Beach that run your organizations tell you you can get anything you want if you just push hard enough. But maybe you'll get more than you bargained for. Maybe America is saving up a surprise to hand you. Maybe you'd better protect yourself."

Mrs. Sweeton stood up as if she were going to leave the room. She stood hesitantly and then Mike looked up at her. He did not smile and for a few moments they looked at one another. Then she saw the sandwiches and the broken look left her face; she went soft with desire. She picked up a sandwich, pushed it savagely into her mouth, roughly jabbed the bits of chicken past her lips. Little bits of lettuce fell unnoticed on her neat black bosom.

"What should we do?" Appleton asked. His voice was thick and mechanical; as if the words were made only by the false teeth.

"The first thing is to forget all that stuff about calling yourselves senior citizens or the deserving elderly or any other term like that," Mike said. "Just face the facts. You're old, marginal, used-up, surplus. All right. How do you protect yourselves?"

Mike picked up a folder. He opened it and spread the paper on the table. The top item was an architect's sketch of what looked like a great sprawling army camp with Quonset huts and barracks neatly arranged in blocks.

"Now the worst problem that old people face is adequate housing," Mike said. "Cromwell is prepared to undertake a state program of old-age camps where everyone past a certain age could have an individual room, adequate food and an issue of clothing. The camps would be out in the country. They would be nicely built. It wouldn't be luxurious, but it would be safe. Now the thing the old people have to do is . . . "

When Mr. Appleton and Mrs. Sweeton looked up, their eyes were bright and clear like the eyes of very trusting and loyal children. They watched Mike's lips move, but they scarcely heard his words. They nodded endlessly.

When the old people left, Mike stood up. He walked to the bathroom door. He turned.

Hank spoke very slow, with careful deliberation, reaching measuredly for the words.

"Mike, you dirty, dirty, dirty bastard, you deliberately . . . "

And then he stopped. For a grin was spreading over Mike's face. It was not a hard grin or without pity. But it was certain; absolutely sure.

Mike waited, but Hank did not speak. Mike turned and went into the bathroom.





CHAPTER 23

An Honest Man

There was a knock on the door and Notestein came in. He wore a large hat that came almost to his ears and hung just over his eyebrows. It was an expensive and subdued hat and he wore an expensive and subdued suit. He took a few steps into the room and stopped, peering out at them. He smiled, almost pluckishly; like a person expected to be clownish. Without speaking, he took the hat off. The hat was too large, the suit tailored too abundantly, as if to show that he could afford plenty of excellent material. His hands manipulated the expensive hat as something to be valued, to be viewed, to be appreciated. He wanted it big. He moved his feet, calling attention to his shoes. They were two-toned, brown and white. The white inserts were made of linen lattice that was worked into the initials T.N. Mike came out of the bathroom and Notestein smiled at him, took a few steps toward Georgia.

"Good morning, Miss Blenner," Notestein said. He held the hat a few inches in front of his belt and turned it slowly with his hands. "Ve never met, but you I recognize from der picture in society page. Dis man I never met, but it is a pleasure."

"Shake hands with Hank Moore," Mike said. "Hank, this is the only really honest man in California."

Notestein rolled his eyes modestly.

"He jokes," Notestein said. "California is full mit honest men. Lots I meet every day. An honest man is not so hard to find."

"No, Terence is really honest," Mike said. "He represents all sorts of people on all sorts of things and never has a contract. He just gives his word and says how much it will cost to do a certain thing and he does it. Absolutely trustworthy. Never betrays a confidence."

Notestein sat down. His suit wrinkled and the motion forced the tips of six Bering Ambassadors, in aluminum tubes, out of his breast pocket. He glanced down and picked one out. Neatly and quickly he opened the tube, took out the cigar, threw the debris in the wastebasket, bit off the end of the long cigar and lit it.

"I von't offer you cigar," he said quietly to Hank. "I never giff or accept little giffs. Or big giffs for dat matter. Only exactly vot was agreed. Giffs can be misunderstood. Look, dis crazy investigation in England. A big government man is persecuted because he takes a bottle whisky and a toikey from a friend who vants a license or something. And the toikey only weighed seven pounds. Dey should make toikeys that little? You can nefer tell ven dey'll vant to know if you took any favors from Terence Notestein. Now you can say no. But if you took a cigar from Notestein and someday dey put you on de vitness stand, dey vould keep screaming about dat cigar and vould discover it vas an expensive cigar. Ver der are expensive cigars people vill think der is expensive booze and ver booze is der might be girls and ver girls der might be big money. Now I don't giff you a cigar and you can say no, I never took a ting from Terence Notestein."

Notestein sat quietly while Mike filled the beer glasses again.

"How does the convention look, Terence?" Mike asked. "Think Cutler will get it?"

"Can't tell," Notestein said. "Dese tings are crazy. Cutler looks strong now. But you haven't moved Cromwell. I'll vait and see how you handle Cromwell's nomination. Den I tell you."

"Notestein, you're an old hand at this game," Hank said. "You tell me. Has Cromwell got a chance?"

Notestein rubbed his cheek and then leaned toward Hank with his finger alongside his nose.

"Look, Mr. Moore, just in dis room I tell you someding," he said in a grotesquely loud whisper. "It's like a crazy chess game in vich the pawns get excited and can jump around. Dose delegates are the pawns. Excitable people. Cry easy, laugh easy, easy to make enthusiastic. The queen, king, knight and rooks . . . all sensible pieces, all able to deal with one another. But the pawns get excited, jump from square to square, advance too fast, retreat too soon, jump crazy sideways. You can't win unless you make the pawns do the right things. Maybe that's democracy. I don't know. How vould a Hungarian Jew refugee know?"

Notestein fluttered his fingers and drew a crazy erratic pattern. He put his hands over his ears and shook his head from side to side, moaning.

"Your people going to support Cromwell?" Mike asked.

"Not my people, Mike," Notestein said. His face was pained. "I don't control what they do. I just giff advice. But you esk a question, I giff an answer. Cromwell won't get the support that Cutler gets. My friends would giff more quickly to Cutler. After da primary dey giff to both candidates . . . Republican and Democrat. But dey would giff more to Cutler."

"Why?" Mike asked bluntly.

Notestein looked steadily at Mike.

"Cutler is the more steady man, Mike," Notestein said.

He said it as bluntly as Mike asked it. Hank felt warmness for Notestein; a quick admiration for his directness. He leaned forward and whispered to Georgia.

"This guy's tough," he said. "He won't roll over like those old-age people."

She looked up at Hank and nodded, but he could not tell what she was thinking. He thought she looked frightened.

"What difference does it make that Cutler's more steady?" Mike asked.

"Mike, dese are hard times for businessmen. Especially businessmen in the oil business," Notestein said. "All kinds risks. Terrible risks. What if gas tax goes up another cent or two? Maybe people stop driving their cars so much. Z .. u .. t .. ," he hissed and drew his hand across his throat. "End of profits in the oil business. Or what if the oil companies don't get the offshore oil. Z .. u .. t. Or what if the mineral exploitation clause is cut out of the tax law. Z .. u .. t. Profits gone, men out of work, equipment obsolete. Awful business."

"They want to be reassured?" Mike asked.

Notestein smiled. His accent had thinned out; was less consistent; almost as if he were an American who had learned an accent.

"That's it, Mike. Dey want to be reassured. Also, Mike, just as a friend, I tell you something else." Notestein paused, bit the soggy end off his cigar and dropped the moist wad of tobacco in the wastebasket. He lit the cigar and waited until the tip was a round perfect circle of red. "On this Communist thing, Mike, my friends act like pawns. Crazy, wild, excited. Jist on this one thing. I got a theory why dey act that way. Because dey hated Roosevelt and the New Deal and all that government interference with business and when dey were told it was due to Communist agents it was good to hear. Also, Mike, they are scared. Like everyone else. The atom bomb is too big to worry about from day to day . . . but a Communist. Now dere is something you can hate every day in your life. So dey don't worry about the bomb; dey worry about the Communists. That's my theory, Mike."

"They think Cromwell is a Communist?" Mike asked.

"Of course not," Notestein said quickly. "But look at 'im. Rich son of a rich family, but always out talking to anarchist and radical groups. Always signing petitions to get Tom Mooney out of jail. Always supporting the newest thing."

"Terence, your friends are way off base," Mike said. "They ought to calm down and get reasonable. Cromwell's no Communist. They know that. He talks to all those little groups because, taken together, they've got a lot of votes. A thousand Italian anarchists here, a thousand CIO votes there, five hundred longshoremen in L.A. or San Francisco . . . pretty soon you've got enough people to swing an election. You know that, Terence. You get votes wherever you can; the vegetarians, the Bohemian Club, the churches, the Italians, the Portuguese, the sardine fishermen. Your friends think Cromwell is radical because he talks to those little off-beat groups, but he's always been looking toward an election. All those little chunks of votes are what will put Cromwell in."

"But why not talk to the regular Democrats and Republicans a little?" Notestein asked.

"Because the Democrats will be for him if he gets the nomination," Mike said. "He doesn't have to talk to them. But those little blocs of votes, those are the real difference in this state."

"And Cromwell has influence mit them?" Notestein asked. He smiled at the tip of his cigar.

"Sure."

"Evidence, Mike? What is the evidence?" Notestein asked.

Mike stood up and walked to the table. He picked up a briefcase and turned it upside down. A stream of letters poured out on the carpet.

"Pick any one of them," he said. "Read one."

Notestein bent forward. The tip of his cigar broke away, the ash fell on one of the letters. He picked up the letter carefully, slid the ash off into the wasetebasket.

At the top of the letter was a small red and white engraved sailboat. At the left was a list of officers.

"Dear Mr. Cromwell," Notestein read. "The Executive Committee of the Balboa Yacht Club would like to thank you for your efforts in having the Corps of Army Engineers widen the Eslay Channel. As you know this makes it possible for the members of this club to use their boats throughout the entire year. This means, of course, that our seamanship skills, so valuable in time of war, are not allowed to grow rusty . . . " Notestein waved the letter in his hand, "and so forth and so on."