A Flash of Green Read online

  With an awesome celerity, Major appeared at Jimmy’s side and placed a drink on the table in front of him, saying, to himself, “Kitchen whiskey and one cube for Mr. Wing.”

  “Thank you, Major.” Major and Ardelia, his wife, worked full-time for the Bliss family. Their grown children helped out. The whole Major Thatcher family lived on a back acre Elmo had deeded them, in a frame house Elmo had bought when it was in the way of a new county highway, and had moved onto the land.

  The girl was swimming again. Elmo gestured toward her and said, “Leroy here was just now telling Buck what a damn fool he is, but Buck won’t listen to advice from a real expert.”

  “What’s all this about advice?” Buck demanded, obviously annoyed. “Why should I have advice? I told you the score. She works for me in the office. She’s been working for me a couple of weeks.”

  “Listen to the protestations of utter innocence,” Shannard murmured. “That poor confused child bears the fabulous name—Charity Prindergast. Please understand, James, we have extracted this data from Buck a fragment at a time. She went down to Lauderdale from some midwestern university for the spring orgy, and apparently developed such a taste for gin she never quite managed to get back across the city line, until Buck went over to Lauderdale a few weeks ago and found her there, living in squalor and confusion on the pittance her dismayed parents were sending her. Out of the goodness of his great heart, he brought her back here and gave her honest work—at least honest to the degree that the Palm Highlands development can be considered honest.”

  “We build a damn good house for the money,” Buck said.

  “Our Mr. Flake claims that his employment of Miss Prindergast has nothing at all to do with the fact his sweet wife Elizabeth and their two sturdy sons are spending the summer on her parents’ farm in Pennsylvania. Yet, when questioned, Mr. Flake admits that though he writes his wife faithfully, he had made no mention of his charitable gesture.”

  Buck scowled and then grinned. “All right, you bastards, so I shouldn’t have brought her over here.”

  “You probably couldn’t help it, Buck,” Leroy said. “You tend to consume as conspicuously as possible. The brightest colors, the biggest tail fins, the table closest to the floor show. Miss Charity is a spectacular morsel, and you have a great talent for vulgarity, Buck.”

  “Now hold it, you—”

  “But you must face the fact you will pay a price for unseemly display. Even if you should send the nubile creature on her glazed way before Elizabeth returns, she will inevitably be told about her, due to your carelessness, and then, my dear fellow, that dear little wife of yours will flay you, salt you down, and hang your carcass in the sun. Your lies will not work, and finally you will be blubbering and whimpering for forgiveness. All you have to decide now is whether the lassie is worth it.”

  “Get him the hell off me, Elmo,” Buck said.

  “Consume conspicuously,” Elmo said. “That’s a nice way to put it, Leroy. I guess I do that too, in ways a little different from Buck here.” He stood up. “Come along, Jimmy. You boys excuse us and yell for Major when you need him.”

  They went out through the door and up the path that branched toward the house. Elmo chuckled and said, “Leroy is teasing him, and Buck, he doesn’t want to get too mad about it on account he knows I don’t like him bringing that hard-drinking girl here to my house. Buck doesn’t use much sense about a lot of things. That’s the trouble with getting people together on anything, Jimmy. Everybody is a damn fool in his own way.”

  Elmo led the way around the side of the house and up the steps into the air-conditioned silence of his study. The big pale desk was shaped like a boomerang. Elmo turned on a single brass lamp on the desk. The floor was cork, the walls burlap, the chairs and couch of dark leather. Elmo had patterned it after the private office of a bank president in Jacksonville, even to the gun rack and built-in television and high-fidelity music system.

  Elmo sat in the deep chair behind the desk and put his feet up and looked across the desk at Jimmy Wing. “I should have brought it up right here in the first place, instead of at the courthouse this morning. Then you wouldn’t have spent all day wondering about the rest of it.”

  “I’ve done some guessing.”

  “Mostly what we need to go into is where we both are going to fit into this thing. Take me. I’ve made it plain I’m not running again. One term on the county commission is enough. I’ve told everybody I have to give more time to my building business. Do you have the idea I’m getting out of politics, Jim?”

  “No. You took to it too well.”

  “Do you think it’s been a good thing for Palm County, me being four years on the commission?”

  “Elmo, that’s a strange question, and I don’t know where you’re heading with it. I know damn well you’re not fishing for compliments, so I’ll give you an honest answer. On the whole, I think you’ve been of more benefit than Elihu Kibby would have been. Will that do?”

  Bliss made a soft sound of amusement. The lamplight was strong across his mouth and left his eyes in semishadow. His sports shirt was a soft shade of green-gray, with a tiny monogram on the breast pocket in black.

  “Playtime is over, Jimmy,” Elmo said. “We’ve had the four years of fun.”

  Jimmy Wing knew he had been invited into another room in that structure which was Elmo Bliss. Another door had been opened—another degree of intimacy. He could look back at all the other lighted rooms, at the connecting doors which stood wide open, and remember the time when each had been opened for him. Now here was another degree of closeness, yet with the inference there were still other rooms beyond. He felt a degree of excitement and alarm which he could not rationalize. Somehow closeness was in ratio to menace, as though, in the ultimate room, the door would slam shut and there would be darkness and a knife. He told himself that the suggestion of menace came merely from the awareness that it was contrived—that Bliss opened the doors for his own purposes when the time was right, that Bliss was using him.

  “Four years of many things,” Jimmy said, smiling, stalling.

  “And four more years to come, and four after that, and God knows where we’ll be by then, boy. Depends on the size bite I can take. I learned in a lot of hard ways that the way you set your teeth, and the timing of it, they’re the only things that count. Bite too big and you strangle on it. Bite too small and you starve.”

  “Is that all there is to it, Elmo? The jungle approach?”

  Elmo took a long time in unwrapping a slim cigar, lighting it. “I play a game, Jim. Nobody knows I’m playing it. What I do, I make out I’m the man I’m talking to. I add up all I know about him and I try to become him and look out of him at Elmo Bliss and see what he sees. You’ve got simple ideas about me, I think. You think I’m some kind of animal. Now when I look at you, maybe I see some kind of animal too, but sort of a sorry animal.”

  “Thanks a lot, Elmo.”

  “Because you got a weak connection between your teeth and your head. You worry so much about what you should want, you lose track of what you really want. You’re a mixed-up animal, like a vegetarian dog. But that’s the way most people are, Jimmy.”

  “Maybe my wants are small.”

  “Maybe it pleasures you to think they’re small. Up in Georgia we had a school catalogue with the snap courses marked, so we wouldn’t have to put too big a strain on our football brains. I took a marked one in philosophy. Ethics it was called, a lecture course by a man named Hoosin. Now don’t bug your eyes at me like that, boy, it’s downright impolite. The lessons didn’t take hold on me. I listened good, but I thought it was a lot of crap. Those lessons didn’t jell until my time on the road gang, with Pete Nambo beating on me of an evening, whistling between his teeth and grunting when he wound up for a good one. I came up with my own ethic right about then. I want satisfaction, Jimmy. And I want to know when I’m having it, and keep track of what it costs. I want the most people possible saying ‘Here comes Elmo’ and
‘There goes Elmo.’ I want people anxious to make sure I’m comfortable. I want all the pretty things—like people writing down what I say, and motorcycle escorts, sirens, steaks, secretaries, dollar cigars, mahogany boats, clothes tailored to fit, my name in books, little girls fussing to pleasure me. To get it all, and keep it coming, I have to take the right-size bite at the right time.”

  He leaned into the light and banged his fist on the desk with a force which startled Jimmy Wing. “I want the world knowing I’m here, and I want it excited about Elmo Bliss, and a little nervous wondering what comes next. Because I know what comes next for everybody, boy, and that’s a black hole in the ground, and of all the people who have lived and died in this world, maybe one tenth of one percent even got a name on top of the hole they’re in.”

  He leaned back. After a long silence Jimmy said, “You’re uncomplicated in a complicated way, Elmo. How about good and evil?”

  “I’ll keep doing enough good to make it no problem living with the bad, and let somebody else keep score. This is my time to be here, and I want the meat in my mouth and room to taste the juice. There’s getting to be so many people crowding the earth, it makes it easier.”

  Jimmy was startled by the concept. “Easier?”

  “Everybody fights hard to be ordinary and inconspicuous, just one of the group. Fifty years ago there were so many unusual fellas around, you had to be hell on wheels to get any attention at all. Nowadays the people of the world are so hungry for somebody different that a lot of half-bright men stand out. Watch the news. Every month or so some little pissant will get up on his hind legs and say something stupid and startling and find out he’s a public figure.”

  “Maybe it isn’t that simple.”

  “We’ll have a chance to find out, Jimmy. Right now I’m not running again. I don’t have to. I’ve got the county. Old Elihu is being eat up by the cancer; and the heart has gone out of Sam Engster, so when two new commissioners go on this fall, they’ll be the ones I put there, Brade Wellan and Willy Bry. In four years I’ve put a lock on this county nobody can shake off in a hurry, and I’ve made a lot of grateful friends in five other counties and in Tallahassee. I haven’t been either so greedy or so pure I’ve made the boys nervous. I built up and run a successful business. I’m a family man. I’ve worked hard for the party. I come over real good on television. I’ve been on the right side of the issues that have come up. Four years from now, when I’m ready to make my move, I’ll be forty-four. Now you tell me the size of the bite I’m thinking about.”

  Jimmy Wing considered it carefully. The nape of his neck felt cool. “Senator?”

  “Not my style, boy, but you’re moving in the right direction. I don’t want to try to get elected to a club where you wait twelve years before you’ve got any weight or voice. Governor, Jimmy. Governor of the Sunshine State.” He got up abruptly and went over to a cabinet, brought back a bottle and two glasses, poured drinks. “Twelve-dollar brandy, Jim. And right now we drink to setting up the machine that’s going to do it. Right now that machine is just you and me. And years from now, boy, we’ll both remember how we started it together.”

  Jimmy Wing sipped the brandy. “Forgive me, Elmo, but … it seems a little fantastic.”

  “With a whole four damn years to set it up?” He reached into a lower drawer of one of the desk pedestals, fumbled and came up with two fifty-dollar bills. He slapped them on the desk in front of Jimmy.

  “And here’s the first investment in the campaign, Jim. Go ahead. Pick it up. Don’t look so worried. You’ll keep right on at the paper until things get so hot and heavy you’ll have to come over with me full-time. But I sure want you to have regular expense money for the little things you’ll be doing for me. It isn’t salary, Jim. It’s for expenses. I’ll be accounting for it, so you don’t have to worry about it. You’ll get that every week, and when you quit the paper, I’ll triple it. Pick it up, boy!”

  “What will I be doing for you?”

  “Gathering information. Writing speeches. Giving out news items. Sort of a public-relations job, I guess you’d call it, and eventually you’ll be a personal aide and press representative. You’ll be my Salinger. There won’t be anything you won’t know about, and you’ll be in on the strategy. You rate yourself too small, Jimmy. You’ve got a hell of a lot on the ball. It’s time you got stirred up.”

  Jimmy picked the two bills up, put them in his wallet and noted a slight tremble in his hands. He hesitated as he started to return the wallet to his hip pocket. “Elmo, this isn’t buying you any immunity in the work I do for the paper.”

  “If it did, Jimmy, I wouldn’t have any use for you.”

  “I suppose the next question is, what do you want me to do first?”

  Elmo poured two more shots of the fine brandy, took his glass and went over to the couch on the other side of the room. “I’ll have to have backing, of course. But I don’t want to go to Tallahassee as somebody’s hired hand. And that means coming up with some money, a good piece of clean money I haven’t got. I think three or four hundred thousand would do it just fine. And that means a capital gains. I’ve been hunting a good one for a year now. Once I’m out of office, I think those boys who’ve started this Palmland Development Company will let me buy in. Burt Lesser, Leroy Shannard, Buck Flake, Bill Gormin, Doc Aigan. I’ve got reason to believe those five old boys would each let loose of a piece of their piece in return for my personal note.”

  Jimmy Wing had turned his chair around to face Bliss. Though he could feel the tension in the room, he kept his voice as casual as Elmo’s. “For those shares to be worth anything, the county commission would have to approve changing the bulkhead line. When anybody runs for governor, the opposition takes a good close look. Somebody could make quite a thing out of it, a man voting himself into a piece of money.”

  “Now, I wouldn’t want to do a thing like that, Jimmy. Look at the record and you’ll find I was the one had most to do with getting that bulkhead line established in the first place. I believe in preservation of natural beauty. I believe in it so much that the record after the public hearing is going to show I voted against the Grassy Bay fill.”

  “But you vote next to last.”

  “Now, I would guess that DeRose Bassette and Horace Lander, being in favor of growth and progress and so on, would vote for it. Then Stan Dayson, being our only Republican right now, and against everything Horace and Stan are for, he’ll vote against it and so will I. Then it’ll be up to the chairman, Gus Makelder, to cast the deciding vote. So as long as it goes through in spite of my vote, I’d be a damn fool not to buy into it after my term is over, given the chance.”

  “So that’s the agreement, is it, Elmo? You promise to deliver Makelder, Lander and Bassette in return for a good price to buy in at.”

  “I wouldn’t want anybody to think there was a deal like that.”

  “Even me? I’m the guy who is supposed to know everything that’s going on. Remember?”

  “There is a sort of agreement, Jimmy. Just casual like. Nothing in writing. No options or anything like that. Gus, Horace and DeRose will be happy to vote for something that’ll mean so much to the whole area. I’ll buy syndicate shares, and when Leroy turns it into a corporation, I’ll just sell off the shares I get, pay off my notes, pay the capital gains tax and put the money into something where I can get it out fast and easy when we come to needing it. See any holes in that?”

  “Well … just one, Elmo. Voting to move the bulkhead line and voting to recommend the sale of the bay bottom by the IIF doesn’t mean it will go through without a hitch.”

  “You keep proving to me what a good idea I had when I decided to make you the first member of the team, Jimmy. I watched you close two years ago when those outsiders tried to move in on us. Ben Killian tried to keep the paper neutral, but you got your licks in. You worked close with those Save Our Bays people, and you helped them a lot.”

  “Van Hubble talked me into it. He was a good friend
.”

  “Jimmy, the way it stands right now, I’m pretty sure the bay fill group will win out over that Sandy Key crowd and all the damn fish lovers. But winning locally isn’t enough. They’ll want to take the fight right to Tallahassee and then into the courts. That’ll take money, organization, enthusiasm. So what we’ve got to do right in the first round is take the heart right out of them. We’ve got to win it so big they’ll have no stomach for carrying it any further. We’ve got to demoralize that bunch, Jimmy. So I want you to get just as close to them as you can. You know a hell of a lot about the people in this town. And there are some weird types on that executive committee. With enough private information, the kind they wouldn’t put in public speeches, we can cut the head right off that organization by clobbering their executive committee.”

  “I’m supposed to spy on my friends?”

  “First off, that’s the ugliest way you could have put it. Second, nobody is about to know it, unless you tell them. Third, if you don’t do it, Leroy will bring somebody in from outside who’ll maybe do a nastier job on them than would happen if you handle it yourself. I hear you show up at the bank pretty regular to take that redhead Hubble woman out for her coffee break. If all of a sudden it should get gossiped around that she’s took to screwing her dead husband’s best friend, who’s got a wife in the asylum—”

  “God damn it, Elmo, I—”

  “Easy, now. I didn’t say you were. But somebody else could make it sound that way, and it could hurt hell out of that nice little woman. True or false, it would take her mind off Grassy Bay real quick. I figure if those people are your friends, you can do a good job of coming up with stuff that’ll sink that executive committee without hurting the people too much. You’re in the best position to do that job, aren’t you?”