“He deserved that reputation.”
“Maybe. He says that since last summer he’s been a waking nightmare. He says if it hadn’t been for my affection and support, he would’ve overdosed on sleeping tablets by Christmas.”
“That’s touching. Considering the debt he feels he owed you, why do you suppose he never bothered to tell you goodbye?”
“He apologizes for that. He feared if he came to say goodbye, he’d chicken out and stay. When he learned he’d landed a research position with an American concern in the Dominican Republic, he didn’t know whether to cheer or what. It was such a drastic break with his own past: a Georgia boy with advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior. He turned his back on all that. He didn’t know if he could do it, Paul.”
“It looks like he managed.”
“Relax, will you? I’m not buying an airline ticket to the Dominican. I don’t love Brian. I’m just relieved to know he’s okay.”
I did relax. She no longer loved the man. Why, then, had she been so tentative about telling me he’d written? Well, my attitude toward him precluded comfortable talk about her former lover. She’d been afraid to mention Brian’s name, much less tell me about his letter. Also, she’d felt that to hold back word of the letter would be to sabotage whatever degree of trust we had so far created between us.
“What the hell’s he doing down there, anyway?” I blurted.
“He’s a sugar-industry hire.” I heard Caroline shuffling the pages of Brian’s letter as I’d once heard Puddicombe uncreasing his list of ransom demands. “The plantations on which he’s to work are owned by the Austin-Antilles Corporation. They’ve asked him to look into the conditions of Haitian canecutters. The canecutters are hired on a lottery basis by the local sugar-harvesting network. Brian’s supposed to propose cost-efficient ways of improving their lot—without destroying the economic base of the Haitian or the Dominican government.”
“Cripes. “
“What? Brian says he’s already begun spotlighting the squalid conditions of the canecutters. He’s excited. He thinks finding a way to channel some of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s money to these folks will be a challenge. He’s using his anthropological background for a humane sociological purpose.”
“Caroline, it’s a shortcut to crucifixion.”
“Why?”
“Don’t kid me. You’re the one who’s worked with Cuban and Haitian refugees.”
“Not down there. Only here. What’re you getting at?”
“Haitian politics are nasty. Dominican democracy is fragile, and Austin-Antilles is a multinational conglomerate that’s never shared the wealth with peons. The reverse, in fact. From what little I know, it sounds to me as if your friend Brian is getting caught in the middle of a canecutting public-relations ploy. Haitian workers always get the shitty end of the stick.”
“Brian thinks he may be able to do some good.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t end up with nails in his feet and palms.”
Caroline chuckled mordantly. “That’s the first time you’ve wished him anything less fatal than hanging at dawn, isn’t it?”
Probably, I admitted. I also told Caroline that if Brian did his job too well, and if Austin-Antilles did not fire him for his presumption, he’d surely be transferred to a less controversial company enterprise elsewhere. That was how the Big AAC did business.
For a moment, inarticulate arias of static. Then my caller said, “I love you, too,” and hung up. I sat there in the heat, stunned, savoring her words.
At Paradise Farm, Adam was vegetating. If he wrote RuthClaire a letter, he forgot to give it to me to mail. If he started a crossword puzzle, he soon lost interest. His books on theology, religious history, the philosophy of religion, and contemporary creation theory sat untouched in their boxes in the second-floor studio. Neil Hammond did not come by with news, and on Sunday morning, too wrought up by Caroline’s declaration of love to sleep late, I was the one who turned on Great Gospel Giveaway.
Maybe I had a hunch that McElroy would mention a recent $5,000 contribution from Adam Montaraz. Bingo. He acknowledged it just as an army of cleancut ushers began filing toward the altar to pick up the collection plates. Adam, too busy trying to think of a nine-letter word for “false piety” to glance at the set, made no sign he’d heard McElroy acknowledge the donation.
That afternoon, however, he fell asleep while watching a Braves game on Channel 17. I turned off the set without rousing him, a notable achievement because he usually slept as lightly as a cat. McElroy’s sermon had been called “Energizing Commitments,” and that was what Adam seemed to need. Unfortunately, he had not listened to the man.
On Monday about 10 A.M., I drove into town and stopped first at the Greyhound Depot Laundry to pick up my tablecloths. Ben Sadler, already looking rumpled and dehydrated, had them waiting on the counter. The black woman who operated his steam press—a forbidding-looking instrument with a lid like a coffin’s—also made a point of marking my entrance. Uh oh, I thought. What’s going on?
My subsequent talk with Ben was curiously aimless, focusing on such weighty topics as the humidity level and hog-market prices. Strange. Ben usually liked to provoke a verbal scrap over the deployment of U.S. forces in Central America or the morality of alcoholic-beverage licenses for local eating establishments. I started to leave.
“Say,” said Ben, “do you take Newsweek?”
“I don’t subscribe. Occasionally, I’ll buy a copy. Why?”
“Have you seen this week’s issue?”
“Is it out already?”
“Hy Langton, over at the drugstore, gets his copies first thing Monday mornin’. I bought one right off. He don’t know what to do with the rest of ’em, though—put ’em out for sale or stash ’em down under the register.”
“Newsweek? With the Playboys and Penthouses?”
“It’s a eye-opener, the new one. Milly and me—” nodding at the steam-press operator, who looked down in acute embarrassment— “we’ve been discussin’ how much times’ve changed, to let a magazine like ol’ Newsweek use the kinda cover it’s just used. Is it still safe to send your kids down a small-town sidewalk ’thout a blindfold?”
“But you bought a copy?”
“I got it for you, Paul.” Even in the morning heat and the heat of the laundry, Ben managed to blush. “Don’t be insulted. It’s not that I think you’re a creep or somethin’. It’s just that, you know, once bein’ married to an artist and all, you’re more sophisticated than most folks in Beulah Fork. You know how to take such stuff ’thout bein’ prurient about it. Isn’t that the word, prurient?”
“For God’s sake, Ben, what are you talking about?”
“Here.” With one emphatic motion, he produced the magazine from beneath his counter and plonked it down on the folded tablecloths. The magazine’s cover slapped me hard, but I kept my face as noncommittal as I could. Let Ben and Milly invent a reaction rather than simply relate it. The gossip mills would grind no matter what I did.
And the cover on the new Newsweek?
Well, it consisted of a photograph of Adam and RuthClaire standing side by side, frontally nude, Adam to the left, RuthClaire to the right. Adam had his hand raised in a venerable human gesture signifying “Peace” or “I have no weapon.” My ex-wife, although visible frontally from head to toe, was standing with her left leg slightly extended and her body canted a little bit toward Adam’s. Eye-catching as they were, the couple occupied only the vertical right half of the cover.