“I can’t get a divorce,” Corsing said.
“No.”
“I can have a crazy wife in a nut house and nobody minds. I think it even gets me a few votes. It wouldn’t have perhaps ten years ago, but it does now. But I can’t divorce her and marry someone else and lead a normal life because that would be desertion and senators don’t desert their crazy wives. Not yet.”
“Wait five years,” I said.
“I don’t want to wait five years.”
“No, I guess not.”
“So,” he said. “What happened to you?”
“I live on a farm now.”
“Harvey.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been out to your farm. We’ve gotten drunk on your farm. It’s a very pretty place but it runs straight up and down a mountain and you couldn’t raise a cash crop on it that would pay the light bill.”
“We made almost twelve thousand dollars last year. Almost.”
“Off the farm?”
“Well, mostly off of those greeting card things that Ruth does. And my verses. I write greeting card verses now for two dollars a line.”
“Jesus.”
“We’ve got two goats,” I said.
“Have you thought about food stamps?”
“Food’s no problem. Actually, not much of anything is a problem.”
“How much did you make the last time you handled something?”
I thought about it. “That would be seventy-two. I made about seventy-five thousand that year. Net. Maybe eighty.”
He nodded. “But it wasn’t the money. I mean that wasn’t really why you were in it.”
“No, that wasn’t the reason.”
“So I’ll ask you again. What happened?”
I looked at him and I saw that he wasn’t prying. He was seeking information. There was also an expression of mild hope in his eyes as though he thought that I might give him an answer that would enable him to divorce his wife, marry Jenny, move to a hardscrabble farm in the Ozarks, and tell the voters to get stuffed. If I had done it, perhaps there was a chance, a very small chance, that he could, too.
There wasn’t any chance, of course, and he was realistic and honest enough, especially with himself, to know it and that was one of the reasons I liked him. It was also why I decided to tell him the truth. Or what, after nearly four years of thinking about it, I believed to be the truth, which was what would have to serve.
“You really want to know what happened?” I said.
He nodded.
“Well, it just wasn’t fun anymore. Any of it.”
He sighed deeply, nodded again, slumped a little in his chair, and turned slightly so that he could look out the window. “No,” he said softly, “it isn’t, is it?”
“Not for me anyhow.”
He looked at me again and once more it was the look of an intelligent, puzzled man seeking an answer. “I wonder why it isn’t?”
“I’m not quite sure,” I said and that’s as far as I would go even though he was still looking at me as if he expected something more, something wise perhaps, or even profound. But I had run out of wisdom and profundity nearly four years before, so instead I said, “You’re going to go for it again, aren’t you? In seventy-eight?”
He looked around his nice corner office. “I will unless somebody offers me a job that pays a lot with a fat pension plan and a big office and a large staff so that I don’t have to work too hard and still get to shoot off my mouth all the time and have my name in the paper and my picture on television a lot. You know any jobs around like that?”
“No.”
“You know what I wanted to be when I was a kid in St. Louis? A really little kid about seven or eight?”
“President?”
“I wanted to be a short-order cook in a diner. I thought that was kind of classy. I don’t think I ever told anyone that before.”
“Maybe you ought to tell Jenny,” I said.
He thought about it and nodded. “Maybe I should.”
There was a silence and then he said, “How’d you get tied up with Roger Vullo’s outfit?” Before I could say anything he held up his hand, palm outward like a traffic policeman, and said, “Don’t worry, I haven’t been running a check on you. Jenny’s got a friend that works down at Vullo’s place. They gossip a lot. Sometimes it’s useful.”
“Arch Mix,” I said. “Vullo’s going to pay me ten thousand dollars to tell him what I think happened to Arch Mix.”
“What’re you going to do with ten thousand dollars, buy some more goats?”
“I’m going to Dubrovnik.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never been there.”
“I thought you’d been everywhere.”
“Not to Dubrovnik.”
“Arch Mix is dead, isn’t he?”
I nodded.
“Any idea why or how?”
“No.”
“He was an interesting guy,” the Senator said. “He had a good mind, perhaps even a first-class one, although you can never really tell with guys who have jobs that require them to talk all the time.”
“It was a good mind,” I said.
“He had some interesting theories about civil service reform and the use of the strike by public employees as a collective-bargaining tool.”
“His garbage collectors’ theory,” I said.
“His what?”
“When Mix got elected president of the Public Employees Union twelve years ago it actually wasn’t much of a union. It was really more of a polite association, the kind that sponsors the annual city hall picnic. Strike was almost a nasty word. Well, if you’re going to have a labor union, you can praise good-faith collective bargaining all you want, but your ultimate weapon is the strike. If the political types that you’re bargaining with don’t believe that you’ll strike because there’s a law against public employees striking, then you’ve lost all your muscle. It’s like being in a poker game with no money to call a bluff. So Mix went south.”
“Why south?”
“It was a very calculated move. He needed to pull off a successful strike by public employees that would shake up and alter the membership’s attitude toward strikes. And he also needed to convince the various mayors and city managers and governors and state legislatures around the country that the PEU was no longer going to be a mild-mannered company union that doted on sweetheart contracts.”
“I remember now,” Corsing said. “He picked Atlanta.”
“In the summer.”
“Yes.”
“He also picked out the workers who had the least to lose. He picked the garbage collectors.”
“What was it, four months?”
“Four months. He took them out in May and he kept them out until September and the union almost went broke. It was the hottest summer in fifty years in Atlanta and the garbage piled up until they swore they could smell it in Savannah.”
“They were black, weren’t they?”
“The garbage men?” I said. “Ninety-eight percent of them. At the time I think they were making a buck and a quarter an hour and no overtime. Mix stayed with them all that summer. He slept in their houses, ate with them, and walked the picket line with them. He hated it because he always liked the best hotels and the best restaurants, and carrying a sign in a picket line when the temperature’s a hundred and three degrees was his idea of no fun. But he made Newsweek and Time and the network newscasts were carrying him as though he were sponsored by Exxon.”
“And then they put him in the hospital.”
I shook my head. “It was only for three days. And the bandages on his head looked good on TV. If you use strikebreakers to bust a strike, you have to pay them something. The city had to pay the ones in Atlanta five bucks an hour which was two and a half bucks more an hour than the garbage men themselves were out on strike for. Well, all that came out after the goons killed four of the garbage men and put Mix in the hospital. By then the garbage was a serious health hazard and the rats had moved in and then they had those three cases of cholera and that did it. The city caved in to all of Mix’s demands and this time he made the cover of Time and also Meet the Press. After that, he and the union were on their way. He took it from a membership of two hundred and fifty thousand to nearly eight hundred thousand and George Meany put him on the AFL–CIO executive council and they started inviting him to parties at the White House when they needed to show off an American labor statesman whose grammar wasn’t too bad and who could handle the forks all right. And Mix loved it. Every goddamned minute of it.”