Cottontail Hayes accepted the cigarette. He touched it to his lips and took small, feminine puffs. His bracelets jingled.
?There?s a trick for a black man being mayor,? Horn said.
?Of course,? Hayes nodded. He smiled like he was hip to the whole situation.
?The trick to a black man being mayor,? Jimmie Horn continued, ?is that you cannot afford a single fuck-up blackman in the community. Because white people will only blow up what they do, blow it way out of proportion. They?ll talk about a murder, or a mishandled welfare case, like it?s the rule rather than the exception.?
Hayes shook out his bracelets at Jimmie Horn. ?Listen, I don? have time for this shit, you know. Where?s my fucking lawyer at??
After Hayes spoke his line, Jimmie Horn stood up again. He walked across the room and left it.
?Jackass,? he said to himself outside. He started down a long pale green corridor with cork bulletin boards covered with official and unofficial public notices. The corridor emptied into a small waiting room with a lot of plastic chairs lined up by a table surface completely covered by magazines. Not an inch of the tabletop was visible, Horn noticed. He was trying to calm himself down.
An attractive black girl was sitting alone in the room.
She had on expensive green velvet pants, hoop earrings, platform shoes. She was smoking like a 1950s movie queen, and Horn was tempted to tell her to stop it. She was Marshall Hayes? woman. Eighteen years old.
Then she was talking to him in a loud voice. ?Where is the Cottontail?? she asked. ?We got to go.?
Horn sat down in one of the plastic chairs. He had a Kool. ?If you don?t go away from that man,? he found himself saying to the girl, ?you?ll be dead before you?re twenty-five years old.?
That was all. Then he was walking back to Room #3 again.
Hayes was down on the white floor; he was clutching his stomach as though something was going to fall out if he let it go. Vernon Hudson was holding the feathered burgundy hat.
?You?ve been selling cocaine, and you?ve been selling heroin here,? Horn began to talk before the door ?was closed. ?You?ve sold heroin to freshmen and sophomores at Pearl High School.?
?I never sol? no fuckin heh-rehn in my fuckin life.?
Horn bent over so that his face was only a foot above that of Hayes.
?Listen brother,
You?ve sold plenty of heroin. People sell heroin for you. If there was the slightest doubt about that I would not be here. I don?t play games.?
?So how come you here?? Hayes? voice shot an octave higher than he?d wanted.
?I?m here to throw you out of this town. Plain and simple.?
?What, man, you can?t do shit like that.?
?Brother,? Horn was using the word to deride, ?I can do anything I damn well please. This is my town. Not the east side, or the west side, or Church Street. The whole goddamn thing!?
?And if you are seen in it after tonight,? Vernon Hudson spoke calmly from over near the door, ?I will shoot you and swear before the judge that you had a gun ? In case you hadn?t heard, boy, they shoot niggers down here.?
Jimmie Horn started to leave the room, then he stopped in the open door.
?Marshall Hayes,? he sighed, ?I?m sorry to have to do this to you.? He started to say more, but then he just closed the door on the man.
He left the building using a way that avoided the teenage girl waiting for Cottontail Hayes. Then, at 10:30 P.M., the mayor of Nashville headed home.
His car was followed by a green Dodge Polara.
New York, June 24, 25
Thomas Berryman was meanwhile eating a special diet of spaghetti and draft beer.
He did this for three consecutive days so that his face grew puffy. His stomach spread. He put on twenty pounds and ten years, and began to resemble the picture on M. Romains? BankAmericard.
One day in the last week in June he got a dollar crew cut in a subway station barber shop. He had his mustache shaved for another thirty-five cents. Then he purchased a baggy, pea green suit in Bond?s with the BankAmericard.
To loosen himself up that same night, he traveled to Shea Stadium with a Soho artiste who used eye shadow and rouge to make herself look like Alice Cooper; who liked to do
Berryman masqueraded as ?the Pleasure King.? He wore dark glasses and a black muscle shirt with his crew cut. The two of them obliterated themselves in the right field bleachers. They ate hot franks, drank Schaeffer beer, and smoked pot as the Red Sox bombarded the Yanks three hundred thirty-one to a hundred-nineteen.
In the morning, Thomas Berryman caught a businessman?s flight to Nashville. It was his thirtieth birthday and he was daydreaming about spending year thirty-one in retirement at Cuernavaca or San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Strangely, it was near the kind of dream (dream/game plan/ambition) Harley Wynn had once nurtured.
Berryman was aware of two strong inclinations regulating his entire life.
The first was the work of his circuit judge father, and it involved doing things well. It was reflex, Pavlovian: when Thomas Berryman did something to perfection, he derived a satisfying pleasure from the action. Doing things well, anything at all, was compulsive with Berryman.
