Bubba poured him another drink. “Now look, Benny, you been doing real good, lately. You been going easy on the booze, and you haven’t seen anything for a couple of years, now, have you?”
Benny yanked off his Caterpillar cap and wiped his sweaty brow with a sleeve. “I seen under the lake,” he gasped.
“What do you mean, you seen under…” Bubba stopped and stared at the little man. “Jesus, Benny,” he said. “Your hair’s turned all white.”
1
John Howell stirred to the sound of a familiar voice. Elisha Cook, Jr., he registered immediately. He kept his eyes shut and listened to the next voice. Sidney Greenstreet. He had the scene before Bogart even spoke: The Maltese Falcon and Bogart had just been drugged. Howell sat up and, throwing up a hand against the morning sunlight, stared at the television set in disgust. The Maltese Falcon was a midnight, not a mid-morning movie. Where did these people come off putting a dark movie like that on at ten o’clock in the morning? Probably some postgrad Bogart freak of a programmer at the station. Howell should be waking up to “I Love Lucy” reruns, not The Maltese Falcon. What was the world coming to? There was no sense of fitness, of propriety any more.
He looked about him at the seedy room above the garage; it was a mess, as usuaclass="underline" manuscript paper scattered over the desk and floor; the typewriter, its keys dusty from disuse, waiting. The sight of it filled him with the nameless dread that seemed to start most of his days lately. The inside of his mouth felt like the inside of his head; swollen, inflamed, dirty. There was an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle and a second, one-third empty, on the desk next to the typewriter, silent evidence of the origin of his condition. No, not the origin, just a symptom. The origin was harder to pin down, required more thought than Howell felt able to muster. Howell fixed his mind on the only thing that would move him off the old leather sofa and get him into the house: a toothbrush. He would kill for a toothbrush.
He squinted to bring his wristwatch into focus: eleven fifteen. Shit; he had an appointment at noon. He struggled upright, slipped his feet into his sneakers, grabbed the empty bourbon bottle and headed for the house, dropping the bottle into a trash can next to the back door. He didn’t want the maid picking up empties.
“Afternoon, Mr. Howell,” the maid said, drily, as he passed through the kitchen. Bitch. He didn’t need that from her. He ran up the stairs to the bedroom. She had left it pin neat; the maid wouldn’t have to lift a finger. He dug a suit out of his dressing room, flung it on the bed, brushed his teeth violently far two minutes, then dove into a hot shower.
Forty-five minutes later, miraculously on time, he sat, flipping idly through the pages of Poultry Month magazine and wondering what the hell he was doing here. The reception room was a perfectly normal, even tasteful one, with plush carpets, leather furniture and decent art. Only the seven-foot-high fiberglass chicken seemed out of place.
The phone on the reception desk buzzed, and the young woman lifted it and turned toward Howell. “Mr. Pitts will see you out.” she said. She rose and opened the office door for him.
Lurton Pitts came at him from behind the huge desk like a baseball manager comes at an umpire after a questionable call. Only at the moment his hand shot out did the man smile. “John… can I call you John? I’m awful glad to meet you. I’ve admired your work for an awful long time, I can tell you. I’ve been reading your stuff ever since you won the Pulitzer Prize for the stories about those murders. I read your book about it, too. Fine stuff, that was.”
“Well, thanks, Mr. Pitts…”
“Call me Lurton, son, everybody does. Can we get you a glass of ice tea or something?”
Howell supposed that a man who had on his office wall a warmly autographed photograph of himself with the Reverend Jerry Falwell would not have a bar in the same office. “No thanks, I’m just fine, uh… Lurton.”
“Good, good,” Pitts said, directing him toward a chair and circling the desk to find his own. “I’m grateful to Denham White for arranging this meeting. I know how valuable your time is, and I’ll get right to the point. What do you know about me, John?”
“Well, only what I read in the papers, I guess.” Howell knew that the man had over a thousand Little Chickie fried chicken parlors all over the country, that he was the quintessential self-made man, and that he espoused causes and gave money to charities and office holders that were all over the political ball park, from far right to far left field. It was hard to get a fix on Lurton Pitts.
“I’ve had a rewarding life,” Pitts said, leaning back in his high-backed leather chair and gazing out over the Atlanta skyline. “My daddy was a one-mule farmer until I showed him how to get in the chicken-raising business. I was fourteen when I figured that out. By the time I was twenty-one I was the biggest chicken farmer in the state. I opened my first Little Chickie that year, too. It’s grown by leaps and bounds, and I don’t mind telling you we’re snapping at Colonel Sanders’ ass, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Mmmm,” Howell said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Why was he here?
“But my interests have always been broader than the chicken business,” Pitts continued. “I’m interested in foreign relations; bet you didn’t know that.”
“Nope,” Howell replied, trying not to giggle.
Pitts leaned forward and fixed Howell with an intense gaze. “John, can I confide in you?”
“Oh, sure.” This was some bizarre joke of Denham White’s. He would arrive at lunch and there would be six guys around a table, drinking martinis and speechless with laughter. He tried to think of some graceful way just to leave, but failed.
“This is strictly off the record, now.”
“Don’t worry, Lurton, I’m not a newspaperman anymore.”
“This is August first, the year of our Lord 1976,” Pitts said. “In November, Gerald Ford is going to be reelected President of the United States.”
“Could be,” Howell said.
“The American people are not going to elect a peanut farmer to the presidency,” Pitts said, in a voice that brooked no argument.
Howell agreed with the man but said nothing.
“Four years from November I’m going to be elected the next President of the United States of America,” Pitts said, with absolute confidence.
Howell let his breath out as slowly as possible to keep from bursting out laughing and worked at fixing his face in an interested expression.
“I guess that’s left you pretty much speechless,” Pitts said after a moment.
“Pretty much,” Howell agreed. Pitts was not only eccentric, he was crazy. If the American people wouldn’t elect a peanut farmer president, why a chicken farmer?
“Well, let me tell you, I’m not going about fulfilling this ambition haphazardly. Some of the finest minds in this country are signing on to help me realize it.”
“Anybody I know?”
Pitts held up a hand. “Too soon to talk about that right now. What I want to talk about right now is you.”
“Me?” Here it came. He wondered how long Denham White had been planning this.
“I want you to write my autobiography.”
Howell was so entertained by the contradiction in that statement that he forgot to reply.
“What do you think of that?” Pitts asked.
“Well, it’s very kind of you to think of me for something as… important as that, Mr. Pitts…”
“Lurton.”
“Lurton. But I’m pretty wrapped up in my own work at the moment…” That was a bald-faced lie; half a dozen publishers had already rejected his attempt at a novel, and he didn’t have an idea in his head.
“Yes, Denham White told me that you were writing for yourself at the moment. Of course, you understand that I would expect to meet your usual fee for writing a book. Excuse me if I get personal for just a minute, John, but how much did the Pulitzer Prize pay you?”