The secretary was about thirty and he sat behind a desk with nothing on it other than a console telephone and a pad and pencil. Every so often the phone would hum softly, he would pick it up, listen, say “yes” or “no,” make a note on his pad, and hang up. It looked like a very soft job for someone who was at least six foot two and weighed about 175 pounds, all of it apparently big bone and hard muscle.
When he wasn’t saying yes and no into the phone he sat quietly at his desk with the patient look of a man who has learned how to wait. Once in a while he would flick a glance at me although I don’t think I really interested him that much. My one attempt at idle conversation had failed utterly. I had said, “Been with the union long?” He had said, “No, not long,” and then he had gone back to waiting for the phone to ring so that he could pick it up and say yes or no.
I took out my tin box, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and thought about Warner Baxter Gallops. I had first met him in the Birmingham bus station in 1964. He and Ward Murfin and I had met there for lunch because back in ’64, despite what the Supreme Court said, there still weren’t too many public places in Birmingham where two whites and a black could eat without somebody kicking up a fuss. And Murfin and I weren’t in Birmingham to desegregate lunch counters. We were there to pick up eight votes.
Warner B. Gallops was not much more than twenty-four then, which would make him thirty-six now. He was a tall, very black, almost shy young man who spoke slowly and carefully as if he weren’t too sure of his grammar and was worried about making mistakes. The only one that I ever heard him make was his inevitable use of mens for men, but I had seen no point in correcting him, not if I wanted those eight votes that he had in his hip pocket.
He and Murfin and I had moved down the cafeteria line in the bus station. Gallops had gone first. I remembered looking down the line toward the cashier. She was a white, middle-aged woman with a cheater’s eyes and a bitter mouth. Her gaze was fixed on Gallops and the only expression in her eyes was hate, the hot kind that supposedly sears souls.
Without taking her eyes off Gallops, she started ringing our lunches up on the cash register. She didn’t look once at our trays to see what we had bought. Nor did she once look at the cash register keys. She just banged away at them, her mouth working a little, as she tried to kill Gallops with her eyes.
When he and Murfin were past her she turned her death gaze on me. By then the hate was hot enough to fry brains. I said, “Nice day.” She ripped off the cash register tape and thrust it at me. The total cost of three pretty awful buck-fifty lunches in the Birmingham bus station came to $32.41, a net sum that I doubt that I’ll ever forget.
There were two things I could do. I could set up a howl or I could pay. But I wasn’t in Birmingham to set up a howl. I was there to pick up eight votes. So I paid, silent and perhaps shame-faced, and when I did she grinned spitefully, the way some people do when they’ve taken money away from a coward, and said, “Maybe that’ll teach you to take blue-gummed niggers to lunch.”
I think I said, “Go fuck yourself, lady,” or something equally trenchant. She gasped a little (it was 1964), but then she started grinning nastily again because, after all, she had won and the coward had lost.
When I sat down at the table Gallops said to me, “I’d sure admire to buy this lunch for you and Brother Murfin.” That’s what we were to him then. Brother Murfin and Brother Longmire. We called him Brother Gallops because he seemed to think that’s what everybody called each other in labor unions. Dear sir and brother.
“Thanks,” I said, “but it didn’t cost enough to even bother about.”
“How much did it cost, Brother Longmire?” he said softly.
“Four-fifty,” I said, but when I looked at Gallops I could see that he knew I had lied and he also knew why. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it.
Over the lunch, Murfin and I told Gallops what a wonderful guy he was and what an equally wonderful future he had in the union providing that Hundermark got re-elected. During the previous three years Gallops painfully, all by himself, without help or encouragement, had put together a small, all black local of city employees that was either laughed at or ignored down at Birmingham’s city hall. But it was a local that would have eight votes at the convention and Gallops would be casting those eight votes.
So we listened to his problems and his hopes and his dreams and then we assured him that once Hundermark was re-elected, the International union would bust its collective ass to see that he had all the organizational help and money that he could use along with a leased Chevrolet Impala four-door sedan so that he wouldn’t have to ride around on the buses anymore. But of course all this would happen only if Hundermark got re-elected.
It was our standard pitch and maybe if we hadn’t been so tired, we would have caught the flicker in his eyes when he solemnly assured us that he had only the best interest of his local and the International union at heart and that he had nothing but respect and admiration for President Hundermark. Then he had said, “My, my! A Chevrolet Impala sedan! Mmmm-mm!” And again, if we hadn’t been so tired, we might have caught a trace of the contempt in his voice, but after all, it was only eight votes and they seemed pretty safe, and besides, we still had Montgomery, Mobile, Memphis, Little Rock, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans to go.
At the convention Arch Mix had added up the votes and when he found that he might be four short, he had gone to see Warner B. Gallops. But Arch Mix hadn’t promised Gallops any Chevrolet Impala sedan. Mix had been too smart for that. He had promised him a vice-presidency instead and that’s when Hundermark lost the election. Although sometimes I have thought that Hundermark really lost it that day in the bus station in Birmingham.
I stopped thinking about the past when the door that I had been waiting outside of finally opened. A man came out of it, looked at me thoughtfully, and said, “President Gallops will see you now, Mr. Longmire.”
He stood with his back to the door and I almost had to brush up against him to get into Gallops’s office. He was a young man, not much more than thirty, if that, and as I went past him I could smell his cologne. It smelled expensive. He smiled at me as I went past but all he really did was stretch his lips without displaying any teeth and I didn’t detect any warmth in it.
He closed the door behind us, accompanied me into the large room, and said, “President Gallops, I believe you know Mr. Longmire.”
Gallops sat behind a huge desk that once must have belonged to Arch Mix. Gallops didn’t get up. He looked up at me without any pleasure that I could see and said, “Yeah, we know each other.”
“Why don’t you sit down over here, Mr. Longmire, where you’ll be comfortable,” the young man said and indicated one of the four or five chairs that were drawn up around Gallops’s desk. Then he said, “I think I’ll just sit over here.” The chair that he picked for himself was the one nearest Gallops.
I sat down, looked at Gallops, nodded my head toward the young man, and said, “Who’s he?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Longmire, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Ralph Tutor, President Gallops’s executive assistant.”
“Is he new?” I said to Gallops.
“That’s right,” Gallops said. “He’s new.”
“Where’d you find him?” I said.
The young man who said his name was Ralph Tutor smiled again and this time I was given a good look at his teeth. They were very white and shiny and almost square. “I formerly was with the government,” he said, “but that was some time ago. Most recently I’ve been associated with a firm of management consultants here in Washington.”
“That sounds exciting,” I said and then asked Gallops, “What do you think, Warner, is Arch dead?”