The Salt Eaters (25 page)

“I dunno. We were supposed to meet this morning. She didn’t show.”

“No telling where she is,” Ruby was saying, attacking the quiche. “She blew the second executive committee meeting in a row last night. Probably another one of those out-of-town jobs. How she ever got clearance to do government work with her background is past my brain. Big-time computer jobs for civil service and so forth.”

“I thought she was working at the plant.”

“Transchemical? Velma? How’d she manage to juggle that contradiction, working for De Enamee? Either she’s lifting info or sabotaging the works. Ahh! I’ve hit on something?”

Jan sat still, feeling Ruby waiting, waiting and not chewing, knowing she’d stumbled onto something.

“Well, Jan, if it’s such a big secret, then pass me that squeezable bear. I need to squeeze me something. Ohh ohh ohh for a stationary man. Stay shun nary maa ah an. You know that Nathan Hardge has been on the road more days this month than he’s been at home?”

“He coming home for the festival?”

“I’m so sick of all this festival crap. Couldn’t get any business done at all at the meeting last night, everybody talking about the festival. But check this. Me and Bertha did get this done. And this is what I was getting ready to talk about when you thought I was going off about Jeeter and man shit. A Manhood conference. Velma worked on it a bit last week.” Ruby was diving under the table, wrassling with her ubiquitous tote bag. “Cause let’s face it,” she said from under the table, “Women for Action is taking on entirely too much: drugs, prisons, alcohol, the schools, rape, battered women, abused children. And now Velma’s talked the group into tackling the nuclear power issue. And the Brotherhood ain’t doing shit about organizing.”

“Oh I dunno. The Brotherhood has—”

“Bullshit. They’ve gotten so insulated and inbred up there in the cozy corner of the Academy’s east wing having their id ego illogical debates, no one even sees them anymore. And you know it. So quit the understanding, standing-by-the-men, good-supportive-sister crap. Cause you the one that started it. Yeh you. Weren’t you telling Velma just last week that half the shit that goes down between men and women is leftover nonsense between brothers and brothers?”

“What?” Couples and business gatherings at the various tables were turning their way, watching Ruby drag the bag up into her lap to wrassle with its contents. The Academy. Jan was tired of hearing the Academy applauded or lambasted whether because of the Brotherhood or the programs or the kids or now this rumor of guns. It was like Mrs. Heywood said: Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear.

“Ruby, What’s that song Sun Ra does about this planet being a cocoon or a railway station or some kind of temporary … a spaceship?”

“Because men jive around with each other instead of dealing for real and later for all the beating-on-the-chest raw gorilla shit, all the unresolved stuff slops over into man/woman relationships.”

“Give me an example, Ruby. Or better yet, shut up.”

“Sistuh, please. Give yourself an example. You were brilliantly expounding on the subject just last Tuesday. I got my own troubles,” yanking at a spiral notebook that was caught in the straps of the bag. “We designed a questionnaire. A thing that could be sent out to get ideas for workshops, panels, speakers, films and stuff like that. Mostly”—flopping the notebook on the table and shoving the teacups out of the way—“the
questionnaire is designed to provoke some thought about paternity and rape and misogyny and what have you.” Ruby flipped furiously, yanked out a bunch of papers and handed them across the table. “See what you think. Here, take a pencil and edit away.”

“In other words, Ruby, you want my ‘input.’ ”

“Don’t be difficult. We worked round the clock on this thing. Besides, we need you. I’m a ball-busting bitchy so-and-so. Velma’s a dogmatic hard-liner thus and such. And Daisy’s big and fat and still lives with her parents. You, on the other hand, are above reproach. So sign on. I want to hand it to Velma to pass on to Obie, assuming they’re speaking these days. He’s the only one up there likely to get them brothers off their big fat rusty dusters and—”

“Ruby?”

“Okay, okay. I will be cool.”

It sounded like thunder in the distance at first and people paused, forks poised, glasses halted, heads turned this way or that as people sniffed the air, studied the sky or otherwise attempted to discover whether a storm was coming. Drums, only drums. From somewhere near the corner of Gaylord and Tenth came the pittitt tibaka bata of small drums, echoed by the rada rada booming from the park. Then the jukebox from inside the café drowned it all out with the strains of a recent release of Dexter Gordon’s “Tower of Power.” The tinkle of glasses and metal against plates resumed and the hubbub of the outdoor diners rose.

Ruby twisted round in her chair, frowning at the musicians streaming by the dessert cart to a special table in the corner. She hoisted herself up two inches, pressing down on the fragile wire arms of the chair to do it, and cleared her throat.

“When the Europeans stopped killing Christians and became Christians, that was the end of Christianity and the beginning of Christendom and Christidolatry. And when the
white boy quit lynching niggers and became a nigger, that was the beginning of the Wild Bill Dogget revival and the beginning of Bloods wearing Blues Brothers emblems. When O when will confusion end, my sistuh. Tell us, O Janus-faced Janice, what’s the deal?”

“They’re drummers in the park, Ruby. Why don’t we go now? Dancers and incense and fresh fruit. Don’t you have a booth?”

“Too much confusion down there. No, I don’t have a booth. I’m sick of all this pagan spring celebration shit. And everybody handing out flyers about this rally and that meeting. Scattered, fragmented, uncoordinated mess. I’m so sick of leaflets and T-shirts and moufy causes and nothing changing. All I want is a good blowtorch and some paying customers for a change. And if one more rat-tooth muthafucker strolls into my shop asking to trade some cockeyed painting looking like a portable toilet for one of my masterpiece bracelets I’m gonna run amuck in the streets, I swear. Let’s go have a drink somewhere. Or are we waiting for Velma?”

Jan put the wad of papers under her elbow. She was in no mood for the cagey questions and printed confrontations.

“I’m not sure Velma’s coming. We were supposed to meet at the lawyer’s.”

“Oh? Tell it.”

“Well … She’s probably sick. And no wonder. The plant is not a healthy place to work, even in the office wing. Do you know that all the workers have to report for a medical once a month to the company infirmary, plus they can’t see their own records?”

“Never mind that.” Ruby had reached across the table and tapped Jan’s arm. “Tell it.”

Jan exhaled noisily and frowned. “It seems somebody at the plant wiped out the entire records.”

“How does ‘somebody’ do that?”

“By moving low values to first byte and then propagating it through the entire data base.”

Ruby patted Jan’s arm and let the cigarette dangle for a minute before she puffed, letting it out through half-opened mouth and nostrils. “You wanna break that down, teacher, to some basic Ronald McDonald-type English.”

“This ‘somebody’ fouled up the entire computer bank. Erased all the records. All gone. Total blank. Empty.”

“Beautiful. And they think it was our very own Friday Foster? But you said ‘lawyer’?”

“She was called in and questioned.”

“Let’s say ‘interrogated’ when we tell the tale.”

“Ruby, let’s not say anything, okay?”

“Aww shucks.” Ruby placed her cigarette in the ashtray and pulled her chair in closer. She set the teacups on the blowing napkins and then jammed her hat on tighter. “Velma do it?”

Jan stirred her tea, stalling. She was not sure why she hesitated to speak of it since she’d gone this far, was not even sure how she’d developed the theory. “My hunch,” she said slowly, “is that Jamahl did it using a touch telephone. You remember Jamahl.”

“The guy that always smells like incense, yeh. But touch tone? You’re losing me.” Ruby hunched forward on her elbows, hugging the pot, cup, honey and saucer to her so that Jan too could lean forward at least as far as Ruby’s wide-brim hat would allow. They looked and felt like conspirators. The waiters, several passers-by, a few people from nearby tables glanced their way. At a table in the corner by the service-counter window, the informer calling himself Donaldson looked up from his note pad, leaned away from the table he’d been studiously eavesdropping on to lean toward the table by the railing where the two women sat huddled, oblivious of the
napkins, candy wrappers, matchbooks blowing up against the table legs.

“… had robbed a bank out in California, Sacramento I think, by using a touch-tone telephone to speak directly to the computer to make withdrawals, by-passing the recording apparatus …”

Donaldson could make little of the whispering. He settled back in his chair. The three men to his right were far more to his liking anyway. At that table were three out-of-work writers, exploring the possibility of a script to present at the Academy writing workshop that night. They were waiting on Campbell to take a break and be a sounding board. They had three ideas. One, the kidnapping of the two men who possessed the Coca-Cola formula; the ransom to be broadcast world-wide a month before the 1980 Olympics—Russia, France, China and the U.S. must each divest itself of all nuclear arms and space hardware or there’d be no more Coca-Cola produced. They rather liked that one. The taller of the two had clipped articles about Coca-Cola franchises in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic to the one-page treatment and placed it on the edge of the table, vaguely aware that some nosy joker at the next table was ruining his eyes trying to read it. The second treatment called for a less-expensive budget. The two men paid to guard the Titans, instructed to shoot the other in case of bizarre behavior, have each come to the conclusion that the other is a security risk and stalk each other through the bunker. The third was similar. In a plane circling the strategic warhead site in Phoenix were the two men with the keys to destruction. On orders given over the hot line from the Pentagon, they’re to insert the two keys simultaneously to activate the missile. At the moment, the plane has hit some bumpy weather and flown above the turbulence. They’ve had to use oxygen for a bit and
are now totally bananas and scheming to insert the keys without the order. They’re that bored, nuts, frustrated. The three Bloods slapped five and toasted themselves with Perrier and lime.

“Campbell will want to check the fact sheet. He’s a bug about documentation.”

“I know. I’ve typed that up on the blue sheets.” The older brother took the opportunity to lift his brows and dart his eyes in the direction of the informer.

“Yeh, I checked him out the minute we sat down. I recognized him from before. Calls himself incognito. We ought to work him into the script somehow Blow his cover.”

“That’d be stupid. At least we know him now.”

“True.”

The three huddle together in imitation, it would seem, of the two women by the railing.

“… and Jamahl used to pick Velma up for lunch at the office and ask a lot of questions about the system, she was saying …”

Campbell gave his writing buddies a five-minute sign, then worked his way around the round table under the awning, gathering up glasses and emptying ashtrays, one eye on his work, the other on Jan and Ruby, curious about what secrets they might be sharing. With one hand, he anchored the tray on the edge of the table so as not to interrupt the men at their game. With the other hand, he flapped the bill against his teeth and watched and waited.

They always spun to see who’d pay for each round of drinks. There were six of them, five white Americans and one Japanese who kept his own liquor supply in one of the bar’s lockers—plum wine, sake and a Mason jar that looked like corn liquor to Campbell. They always sat under the awning and usually at one of the two large round tables on his station. They always
tipped well and always drank a lot. Their repertoire of games was extensive and peculiar to their profession. In a day or so, Campbell planned to introduce to them a new game, a board game, as soon as his papers were filed at the copyright and patent office. For now, he watched and waited.

They were spinning a cigarette lighter. Sometimes it was the salt shaker. Usually it was the instrument with the knobs and the centigrade markings he’d at first associated with quality control at a textile mill but knew now gauged water levels. The lighter head pointed to The Whiner, who groaned immediately and mopped his bald head with a napkin.

Campbell had names for all of them: Sudsy Sam, who always ordered a pitcher of beer and a frosted stein; Rising Sun, who never wore white shirts and ties like the rest but bronze-colored shirts with kimono collars; Piltdown Pete, who seemed too dumb to be a nuclear engineer, was no doubt some sort of lower-echelon technician they allowed into their august company because, perhaps, he was so totally out of their league he usually wound up paying the checks; Krupp’s Kreep, in Orlon shirts and hats that were too small, forever lecturing about the necessity of beating out the Ruskys; The Grim Reaper, a name they themselves came up with, for he was constantly spoiling the fun by calling attention to the latest studies that threatened the expansion of nuclear power plant production; and The Whiner, who had kids with braces, an overwhelming mortgage, problem-prone in-laws and a frigid wife, all of which he managed to bring into the discussions whatever the topic.

“Ahhh, let’s see,” The Whiner stammered, glancing around the table but catching no one’s eyes. Rising Sun was working a cigarette into an ivory holder and reaching for the lighter. The rest had eyes riveted to their wrist watches. “You guys have managed to cover all the good methods. Let’s see.” He was swinging his thighs, banging his knees under the table,
reminiscent of one of Campbell’s early tormentors in grade school. The Whiner was tapping his nails against the tabletop, rapping louder and louder, his legs swinging more and more furiously. “Suppose I were to pull an insulation sheath over the water gauge and then insert a piece of stiff plastic—”