The Masters of Atlantis (18 page)

Miss Hine, in exchange for a suite of rooms and a small salary, would act as manager. The guests were to be chosen with care. They were to be clean, quiet, nonsmoking, non-drinking Christian gentlemen of the kind that downtown landladies are forever seeking through the classified ads, and perhaps sometimes even finding.

Mr. Jimmerson was to be inconvenienced no more than was necessary. He, Popper and Maceo would keep their bedrooms and bathrooms, along with the Red Room, the screened porch and the inviolable Inner Hall. They would share the kitchen with Miss Hine. The roomers would room upstairs and enter through a back door so that Mr. Jimmerson would not have to see them and nod to them in their comings and goings.

No one had advised Maceo of the new arrangement and at first he refused to let Miss Hine into the Temple. His doorkeeping duties had become confusing. Mapes had instructed him to keep everyone out, by way of protecting the Master from insurance salesmen. Then Fanny Jimmerson had sent word down to let everyone in. Then Popper had come along and countermanded that order, ending the open-door policy. With all these threats in the air, Maceo was to screen out obvious thugs and yeggs, all newspaper reporters, which was to say all prowlers wearing shabby suits, and anyone else who looked the least bit odd. For Maceo this would be most white people. The Temple callers all looked more or less moonstruck to him and he could not be bothered trying to sort them out. A little wren like Miss Hine or a maniac with a machete, it was all the same to him.

But Miss Hine's entry was not delayed long and she was soon moving freely about inside the Temple, opening windows, pulling down old calendars and offering decorator tips. She even talked of “knocking out” interior walls.

Mr. Jimmerson had reservations about the new arrangement. He was concerned about careless roomers who might let bathtubs overflow above his head or doze off with burning cigarettes in their yellow fingers. He was suspicious of Miss Hine, the organ player, and her background in public entertainment. The woman was getting on in years but she was clearly a coquette, a flapper, with those scarlet fingernails and blue eyelids. Such women were blazing inside and he feared that at the earliest opportunity she would try to back him up against the kitchen table and press her paps against him and try to nuzzle him and kiss him, married man or not. Would she be parading around the house in her step-ins? Hardly a fit sight for Maceo to see. What could Fanny be thinking of, to put him in such an awkward position? It could only lead to the tawdry spectacle of two women, and old friends at that, fighting over him.

Several days passed and Miss Hine made no improper advances. At no time did she attempt to pin Mr. Jimmerson's ample hams against a tabletop, or touch him in a suggestive manner. But he remained wary and took care to stay just beyond her grasp, sometimes moving crabwise in a quick little shuffle that startled her.

Miss Hine had her own fears, and of course her own little ways. She wrote her name on bits of paper and strips of adhesive tape and tagged all her food. This, from long experience with female roommates, who, without permission, had guzzled her milk and gobbled her cherry tomatoes and pineapple rings and cottage cheese. Here in the Temple it was a needless precaution. Just as she had no designs on Mr. Jimmerson's person, neither did he have designs on her food, all very light fare.

Largely a leaf eater, she could make a meal out of a salad of sickly white shoots. She ate her supper at the cafeteria and such cooking as she did at home ran to cold soup, jellied soup, underdone fish and canned vegetables warmed up in a pan of tap water. Her bread was dry toast. Nothing there to tempt Mr. Jimmerson, no likely medium into which a love potion might be introduced.

On the morning of the twenty-fourth he was ready with his speech, despite the domestic upheaval. He was waiting on the screened porch. He looked at his watch. Austin was sleeping late again. He looked out over the grounds. Maceo was tinkering with the Buick. “The Burick,” he called it. The builders of the elevated highway were standing about chatting and smoking. It was hard to catch them in the act of working, of actually joining one structural member to another, but somehow their work got done. The big concrete pilings had now risen to such a height as to block out the Chicago skyline, the higher crags of which had once been just visible through the industrial haze. The loss of the vista meant nothing to Mr. Jimmerson. The soaring handiwork of Chicago Man was less substantial to him than the orichalcum spires of Atlantis.

His glance fell on Miss Hine's sewing machine. She had established a sewing nook at one end of the long porch, and her stuff was there to stay from the settled looks of it. Natural light, she said, was just the thing for fine sewing, and she had proceeded to set up her tailor shop here, where, strictly speaking, she had no right to be. “The solarium,” she called it.

The woman was popping up everywhere. Only last night she had proposed a game of cards in the Red Room, another area where she had no business. “How about a hand of canasta, Lamar?” she had said. “You're not doing anything, are you?” Not doing anything! Couldn't the woman see all those books and papers in his lap? Did she think he had time to waste on parlor games? She had her own sitting room, why couldn't she sit in it? She had also presumed on a very brief acquaintance to call him Lamar. There were just three people left on earth who addressed him so—his wife, Sydney Hen and Mr. Bates—and he saw no reason why this little woman should be the fourth. Not even W.W. Polton had taken such a liberty.

All this, with the best yet to come, the roomers. Soon there would be a pack of coughing drifters bumping around upstairs, alcoholic house painters and clarinet players, tramping to the bathroom at all hours of the night. Still, to give the woman her due, she had been very decent in offering to mend his clothes and in putting her tiny car at his disposal. She had brought no cats along with her and no miniature dogs. She did not whinny or titter and had not, so far, tried to embrace him. And, in any case, someone would have to stay behind as caretaker of the Temple when he went to Indianapolis. He would need Maceo at his side in the governor's mansion.

One term, at his age, would probably suffice. Was it two years or four? He read through the closing words of his speech and shook his fingers outward in a remembered gesture from the lectern. It was good to be active again. It was all coming back to him now and he was eager to face his old adversaries, the ignorance and indifference of men, row upon row of blank faces and fallen jaws. It was a good speech with an interesting theme, change, although, to be honest, he had never really seen himself as an agent of political change.

What could he, Governor Lamar Jimmerson, Master of Gnomons, do for his fellow citizens? One service came immediately to mind. As his first official act he would order the Parks Department to install a guardrail all around the base of Rainbow Falls, with plenty of warning signs. Such an inviting place and yet so treacherous. At this very moment white-haired judges and rumpled old family attorneys were down there losing their footing and crying out as they fell and bruised their buttocks on those cruel green rocks, first slick and now hard. But then downstream a bit, below the cascade, all violence spent, wouldn't there be a limpid pool where older men in prickly blue wool bathing briefs could paddle about unobserved with swim bladders under their arms?

Outside there was a roar and an expanding plume of white smoke. The construction workers had pushed the Buick off to get it started. It was a 1940 Buick Century, black, with four doors, a straight-eight engine, the starter button under the accelerator pedal. Maceo, behind the wheel, waved off the pushers with thanks, then turned to look at Mr. Jimmerson on the porch. Mr. Jimmerson nodded once in response, to acknowledge that the Buick was living and breathing again. They looked at each other across the way for quite some time.

It was almost ten o'clock when Popper emerged from his room, smelling of rum. He was nervous. His smile was tight. The black wig was riding low on his forehead. He made no apology for being late.

“Are we ready? Is everything in hand? Pawing the dirt, are you, sir? We need to shake a leg. Has Maceo loaded the books? Here, sir, let me help you with your Poma. There we go, snug does it. Say, what happened to the hair on this thing?”

“It's been falling out for years.”

“The dapple effect is lost.”

“Yes.”

“It needs something to set it off.”

“No, it's all right.”

“But your Poma no longer has Focus, sir. It needs something—right here at the peak, some culminating event. A big yellow jewel would do it, or no, a blue Christmas tree bulb powered by a hidden battery. A soft blue radiance atop the Cone of Fate.”

“No, it's all right the way it is, Austin. I don't want my cap wired up. It's Sydney who likes trinkets. He has a brass ball or a marble on top of his Poma. That's not for me. You know how I feel about trinkets.”

“Your scorn for ornament. I did know but had completely forgotten.”

They joined Maceo beside the rumbling, smoking Buick and there engaged in a discussion over which car to take. Mr. Jimmerson was for the Crosley, he having no confidence in the rotted tires on the Buick. Popper argued that the Crosley was too small for three men and several hundred pounds of books. Maceo agreed, and said that he did not care to wear his chauffeur's cap if they took the Crosley. Mr. Jimmerson pointed out that the Crosley was a later model than the Buick, with sound little tires, offering less risk of breakdown.

“But the Crosley is not a touring car, sir,” said Popper. “What about your rest? Have you thought of that? I know a little something about sleeping in cars and, believe me, no one has ever taken a nap in a moving Crosley. And what will those lawyers think when we come driving up in such a clownish little car, with the back bumper dragging from all the weight? ‘Look, here are three fellows coming up in a pale green Crosley. I wonder who they are. I wonder what their visit means. Pranksters, you think?' Now is that the kind of reception we want? No, sir, the Crosley won't do.”

Mr. Jimmerson tapped a sandal against one of the Buick tires. He now wore thin white socks to protect his feet against the chafing straps. “But look at those cracks,” he said. “You can see the cords. We could have a blowout and turn over. We might find ourselves stumbling around in a pasture holding our bloody heads.”

“They'll hold up if Maceo takes it slow. Heat is the great enemy of tires.”

Maceo loaded the Buick trunk with boxes of
Hoosier Wizards
. Popper and Mr. Jimmerson sat in the back on seats of dirty brown plush.

They were off. Out on the highway the white exhaust smoke increased in volume. The cars behind them had to drop back from a normal interval or be caught in a choking, blinding whiteout. The drivers of these cars were hesitant to pass, to move into the dense cloud, the unknown, and, with Maceo taking it slow, there soon developed a long, creeping, serpentine motorcade behind the black Buick.

“Let them honk,” said Popper. “A very low form of expression. If they knew who they were honking at they would blush.”

Inside the car the sweet smell of rum was strong. Mr. Jimmerson rolled down a window to get relief and asked Popper if he had taken to drinking in the morning now. Popper did not answer the question. Instead, he reached over to Mr. Jimmerson's wattles and took a fold of flesh between thumb and finger. “Patches of gray bristles,” he said. “Here and here. You missed a spot or two with your razor. It doesn't look good at all.”

Mr. Jimmerson recoiled, and said, “I don't believe I would talk about anyone's looks, Austin, if I was wearing a Halloween wig like you.”

Popper raked the clotted black locks out of his eyes. “I'm sorry, sir, I don't know what got into me. I'm on edge, I'm not myself today. Don't pay any attention to me. It's not a pleasant subject, which of us looks the worse, and I should never have introduced it. I doubt if the point could ever really be settled. The truth is that all three of us, Maceo not excepted, could do with a facial tone-up. What am I talking about? I'm sorry, sir, it's my nerves. I had a bad dream last night. I was out in a desert and a rat crossed my path. He was not scurrying, with abrupt starts and stops, none of your rat sprints, but loping like a cheetah. His ears were laid back. This rat had no local business to see to. He was on a cross-country mission. A rat of doom. When I woke I was soaked in sweat and my heart was thumping, and so I had a couple of rum-and-tonics on an empty stomach. I'll be all right when I get a bite to eat. Once we get this maiden speech out of the way everything will come right. Did you have a good breakfast, by the way?”

“Yes.”

“Meg calls it the most important meal of the day.”

“I had a good enough breakfast but what are we going to do about my lunch?”

“No need to worry on that score, sir. They'll have a lavish buffet down there if I know my lawyers. Great red haunches of meat and crystal tureens piled high with chilled shrimp. Expense no object. These are not abstemious men. It won't be a soup kitchen.”

The tires held all the way to Rainbow Falls State Park. The streamer of smoke gave an illusion of speed and as the Buick rolled down the woodland lane it was like the passing of a comet. But the arrival caused no stir. There was no one on the veranda to greet the Master, no receiving line, no photographers, no reception of any kind. Rain was pattering on the leaves. Maceo began unloading the books. Popper led Mr. Jimmerson up the steps and into the great timbered hall.

The lawyers were drowsy. They had been feeding and drinking for more than an hour and many of them were sunk in leather chairs and couches, dozing, the older ones blowing like seals. A few were still on their feet, standing about in pairs, at the bar, around the snooker table, before the cold fireplace, laughing quietly as they exchanged stories of daring raids on public funds, strife fomented, judgments consumed, snares successfully laid.