A Flash of Green (32 page)

“Oh, yes! There’ll be a clear majority in favor of it.”

“And you think we are wasting our time and energy?”

“I guess you could put it that way.”

She moved closer to him and lowered her voice. “Then answer this, Mr. Palmland Lesser! If you are so bloody sure of winning, why is your side pulling dirty despicable tricks on us, like blackmailing Dial Sinnat into pulling out?”

Jimmy saw that Burt Lesser was genuinely shocked and astonished.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know the details. But you probably do.”

Burt Lesser flushed. “I don’t like your tone of voice, Jackie. I don’t know anything about Dial Sinnat and I don’t know anything about blackmail. That’s a damned dangeous word to throw around unless you know what you’re talking about, and I’m not sure you do.”

Jackie stared at him. “Now just one cotton-pickin’ minute, Mr. President!”

Lesser stood up. “I’m a little tired of this game.”

“Somebody on your team is playing dirty,” Jackie said sternly. “If you don’t know about it, you should. And if you don’t believe me, ask Kat here, or Jimmy, or phone Tom Jennings. Who have you got on your team who’d pull such a stinking trick?”

Jimmy saw the momentary uncertainty on Burt Lesser’s face. It disappeared quickly. “You know the five of us who have majority interests in this project, I’m sure. As far as the others who are on our team, as you prefer to call it, I can name Martin Cable, Ben Killian, Gerold Tucker, Willis Bry … in fact a long list of the influential men in this area. Every … uh … worthwhile project attracts support from all … uh … segments of society. I can’t be responsible, or be held responsible, if somebody in favor of the bay fill gets too anxious.” He turned to Kat. “Thanks for the drink, Katherine.”

“Well,” Jackie said thinly, “you better check out your folks, because if they get too anxious, some of our people might get too anxious too.”

“Is that some sort of a threat?” Burt asked her coldly.

“It’s a promise, pal.”

Kat said, “Burt, I’m sorry that this—”

“I know it isn’t your fault, my dear. No harm done. See you tomorrow morning, Jimmy. Goodnight, Ross. Jackie, I think you make a mistake in combining alcohol with your … civic activities.”

Kat went out with Burt. As soon as the door closed behind them, Jackie said, “The great white father! He’s doing it all to help the poor. Honest to God, men, if there’s anything I hate it’s a hypocrite.”

“You messed up pretty good, honey,” Ross said.

“Messed up? What did I mess up? I believe him when he says he doesn’t know anything about what they did to Di. So maybe he’ll go find out who did it and raise hell. Big fat phonies like
Burt Lesser get real upset about appearances. They don’t mind stealing as long as it doesn’t look like stealing. Right, Jimmy?”

“Burt has a good reputation in the real estate business.”

“How would he do if he didn’t have Sally Ann’s money in back of him?”

Kat came back in and said, “He isn’t really sore. He’s just sort of hurt, I guess.”

“What a dreadful shame!” Jackie said.

“Honey, I’m taking you home,” Ross said.

“Oh, the
hell
you are! Not on your life, boy! I’m just beginning to swing.”

Ross smiled and stood up and took her by the wrists. She tried to pull away. He kept smiling. She looked at him gravely. “Really? I’m due to go home?”

“That’s what the man says,” Ross said gently.

She gave a huge shrug and looked over her shoulder at Kat and Jimmy. “All of a sudden it turned into an early night. Goodnight, darlings. The food was nifty, Kat. You call me tomorrow and tell me how horrible I was. Okay?” She yawned and leaned against Ross. “Steer me away, lover.”

After they had gone, Kat sat beside Jimmy on the couch and said, “It got out of hand, I guess.”

“She’s a very direct type gal.”

“When she brought Burt in, you know the crazy thing I did? I started looking around the room for Van, knowing he’d take over and smooth things out. There was just a half a second of looking for him. I didn’t want to have to cope.”

“You coped fine.”

“Did I? I didn’t feel as if I was. Burt handled it pretty well, don’t you think?”

“He kept his dignity.”

“Which is more than you can say for Jackie, bless her.” She
yawned and hitched around on the couch to face him more directly. “Jimmy?”

“Yes, dear.”

“What do you know about that Reverend Coombs down in Wister?”

He looked at her in mild surprise. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing special, really. One of the guards at the bank was talking to me about him. He goes down there every Sunday. He said I ought to go down there too.”

Jimmy had the impression she was lying. “You don’t need him, Kat. You don’t need his brand of salvation.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“He’s found a button to push. A new mixture. A kind of militant revivalism. He took over an old school in the piny woods and turned it into a church. He keeps it filled with self-righteous, beat-down people who’ve always hated anybody better off than they are, and he gives them good reasons for the hate, and makes them feel like God’s weapons. They’re going to save all us wicked ones if they have to kill us to save us.”

“Is that why they’ve whipped some people?”

“Yes. And maybe some day they’ll whip the wrong one. I know of at least six cases which never even got into the papers. He works them up to a high pitch every Sunday and at least two evenings a week. They’re the good right arm of the Lord. The Army of the Lord, they call themselves. Full of holy fervor to punish the wicked. Politically they’re way to the right of the Birchers. They’re flat out against perfume, makeup, television, birth control, divorce, big cities, modern painting, fiction, jazz, public swimming, dancing, liquor, movies, magazines, candy, cigarettes. They make public confessions. Anybody who disagrees with them is un-American, a red Communist dupe. I don’t know how sincere Coombs is. If he’s after power, he’s getting
it. They’ve cowed a lot of people down in the south county. He gives radio talks now, over WEVS in Everset, and I heard he’s getting a pretty good-sized audience here in Palm City. He’s a stocky guy about fifty, with huge shoulders and a great big head on him and a voice like a trombone. He claims to have spent the first forty years of his life in black sin, started reading the Good Book in jail, saw the light, started preaching on street corners and preached his way all the way across the country back to the swamps where he was born. Wherever he goes, there’s a little herd of the faithful clumping right along with him, carrying weapons, because he claims the Reds are out to get him. There must be a hundred like him, scattered around the country. There’s always a chance one of them will get to be big enough to be genuinely dangerous. I suppose his chance is as good as any of them have. No, Kat. That brand of salvation is not for you. Are you looking for some?”

She looked down at her hands. “I guess not. Not really. You remember, I took that trip home after Van died. I knew the whole world was a dirty fraud. I knew it was all a bad joke on people, without justice or reason or … decency.” She raised her head and looked at him, frowning. “I’m more emotional than logical, Jimmy. The minister up home tried to help me. He’d sit with me and talk and talk and talk and try to make the whole thing
logical
. He was just fooling around with semantics. There was no logic in a world that could take Van away from me. But I … found my own way to whatever I believe, sort of in spite of him. I sat in a field on a gray stone. The leaves turn early there, you know. ’Licia came running to me with a bright red leaf. I turned it over and over. I wasn’t looking for any deep thoughts or revelations or anything. I was just blue and empty, a woman looking at a leaf. I saw the pattern of the little veins in the leaf and I remembered hearing that no two leaves out of the trillions and trillions on
earth are exactly alike. ’Licia had her hand on my knee, small and warm and grubby. I took her hand and turned it over and I looked at the patterns of it, the little pads and lines in the palm. It was unique too, like the leaf.” Kat opened her own hand for him to see.

“It wasn’t like solving a puzzle, Jimmy. And it wasn’t any great blinding flash of comprehension. The leaf was as much a part of some … orderly process as my daughter’s hand, both styled to live and die. I merely realized I wasn’t as empty as I had been. I felt a kind of a comfort. Whatever the leaf was, whatever my daughter’s hand is, even whatever the stone was I was sitting on, I was a piece of all of it, and all of it was a piece of me. And all that … that
flow
of reality, whatever it might be, it was certainly not something designed to benefit me. I felt ashamed, sort of. I felt I had shown a kind of witless, wicked arrogance to
blame
life for anything. A leaf could blame the tree for releasing it, and the stone could blame a glacier for carrying it away. You see, there’s no logic in it. It’s a kind of faith, I suppose. It’s my awareness of God, or I guess I should say Godness, because I’m more aware of a process than an entity. That awareness doesn’t make me miss Van any less. But it stops me from despising the other parts of life. It keeps me from poisoning myself. Jimmy. What do you believe in?”

“Me? Not very much. I don’t know. There’s as much chaos as there is order. There’s as much randomness as there is pattern. I believe in accident, mostly. I’m accidentally alive, and by being alive, I’m in the process of death. I believe in luck and good footwork.”

“With no purpose to any of it?”

“None that I can see at the moment.”

“That’s the emptiness I couldn’t endure, Jimmy. I’m too much of a coward to stand so alone.”

She looked at him in a quizzical way which deepened the small horizontal wrinkles above her rusty eyebrows. Her eyes were a shadowy gray in that light, her lips slightly apart. Her nearness was a magnetic field which pulled his mind into illogic, toward the threshold of words and acts which would mean nothing. He stood up quickly and with a great bursting effort, like a swimmer clambering up out of a pool.

“Did I say something wrong?” she asked.

“No. It’s just … I have to stop by the paper. I’d like to stay and talk. Thanks for the drinks and dinner, Kat.”

“You’ll see if you can find out who made Di resign?”

“I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble with the paper because you’re trying to help us.”

“I’m not worried.”

Sixteen

THE PALM COUNTY COMMISSIONERS MET
in Room 100 in the County Courthouse. It looked like a small auditorium in a country high school, a room which could double as a gymnasium or small ballroom. There were rows of folding chairs, enough to seat a hundred people. The seating area was separated from the dais area by a golden oak railing with a gate at the end of the center aisle. On the dais, raised about a foot above the floor level, was the long table at which the five commissioners sat, facing the audience. In front of the table, but down on the main floor level, was a smaller table with two chairs facing the commissioners. Behind the oak armchairs on which the commissioners sat were the United States flag and the flag of the State of Florida flanking a large detailed wall map of Palm County. The press table was to the left of the commissioners, and the staff table off to the right, where the secretaries, assistants and county attorney sat.

In front of the place where each commissioner would sit there
was a table microphone. There was a sixth one on the small table facing them. The system reproduced voices in a harsh and metallic fashion, and was frequently afflicted by feedback, a thin screeing, yowling sound that always infuriated the commissioners.

When Jimmy Wing took his seat at the press table on Tuesday morning, the five commissioners were just filing in, followed by the staff. Wing was astonished to see Borklund at the press table. He looked into the audience and saw Colonel Jennings and Major Lipe sitting together and alone in a front row, their expressions stern and watchful. On the other side of the aisle was a group of about fifteen persons, most of them women, all wearing an expression of rigid indignation. Behind them were several young men, none of them familiar to Wing. They stood near a bulky object draped in white, which was leaning against the wall. They sat down as Gus Makelder, the commission chairman, called the meeting to order. The young men looked brisk, competent and attentive.

The atmosphere of the meeting was informal. As the minutes and committee reports were disposed of, the commissioners made small conversational asides to each other, laughed at small private jokes. Elmo Bliss was in the chair at the end of the table nearest the press table. He turned and nodded at Borklund, winked at Jimmy. Commissioner Stan Dayson and Commissioner Horace Lander were arguing with some heat about the bids on the concession at the public beach on Cable Key when Burt Lesser, Leroy Shannard, Bill Gormin and Martin Cable came through the side door into the spectator section, eased the door shut and tiptoed to the nearest vacant seats. Both Jennings and Lipe swiveled their heads around and watched the entire process.

“Any new business?” Makelder finally asked.

“Mr. Chairman!” a woman yelled in a piercing voice, jumping
to her feet. “Mr. Chairman, I got something to bring up.” She came trotting down the aisle and through the gate and sat down at the small table. “I represent the Palmetto Circle Association. My name is Genevieve Harland.”

“Just speak into the microphone in a normal tone of voice, Mrs. Harland.”

“You put that wonderful storm sewer system in out at the circle, and it clogged up for that heavy rain we had last night, I mean night before last. All that water has tore out a big hunk of Palmetto Street. It come into four houses. And in the new houses out back of us, them septic tanks come a-floating right up out of the ground. Water is still standing around out there. I’ve been calling the County Health Officer, and the Road Supervisor and everybody I can think of and nobody has done one single thing, and we’re all sick and tired of the mess and the stink and having to come all the way around by Thompson Street to come into town. We want something done and we want it done fast!”