quantities, and the Friday afternoon shopping rush. After he’d filled three carts, and the meat order had already been carried to the car, he was still only halfway down the list, but physically and emotionally exhausted. His toes were mashed, and he had been shoved, buffeted, butted in the ribs, and rammed in the groin. His legs trembled, his hands shook, and a tic had developed in his left eye. Waiting in the check-out line, maneuvering two topheavy carts before and one behind, he cursed man’s scientific devilishness in inventing H-bombs and super-markets, cursed Mark, and swore he would rather starve than endure this again.
At last he reached the counter. Pete Hernandez, acting as checker, gaped. “Good God, Randy!” he said. “What’re you going to do, feed a regiment?” Until the year before, Pete had always called him “Mr. Bragg,” but after Randy’s first date with Pete’s sister their relationship naturally had changed.
“Mark’s wife and children are coming to stay with me a while,” he explained.
“What’s she got-a football team?”
“Kids eat a lot,” Randy said. Pete was skinny, chicken breasted, his chin undershot and his nails dirty, completely unlike Rita except for black eyes and olive skin.
Pete began to play the cash register with two fingers while the car boy, awed, filled the big sacks. Randy was aware that seven or eight women, lined up behind him, counted his purchases, fascinated. He heard one whisper, “Fifteen cans of coffee-fifteen!” The line grew, and he was conscious of a steady, complaining murmur. Unaccountably, he felt guilty. He felt that he ought to face these women and shout, “All of you! All of you buy everything you can!” It wouldn’t do any good. They would be certain he was mad.
Pete pulled down the total and announced it loudly: “Three hundred and fourteen dollars and eighty cents, Randy! Gees, that’s our record!”
From habit, Randy looked at his watch. One hour and six minutes. That, too, was a record. He paid in cash, grabbed an armful of bags, nodded for Pete’s car boy to follow, and fled.
He stopped at Bill Cullen’s bar, short-order grill, package store, and fish camp, just outside the town limits. There was space for two cases in the front seat, so he’d lay in his whisky supply. Bill and his wife, a strawhaired woman usually groggy and thick-tongued with spiked wine, operated all this business in a tworoom shack joined to a covered wharf, its pilings leaning and roof askew, in a cove on the Timucuan. The odors of fried eggs, dead minnows, gasoline and kerosene fumes, decaying gar and catfish heads, stale beer and spilt wine oozed across land and water.
Ordinarily, Randy bought his bourbon two or three bottles at a time. On this day, he bought a case and a half, cleaning out Bill’s supply of his brand. He recalled that Helen, when she drank at all, preferred Scotch. He bought six fifths of Scotch.
Bill, inquisitive, said, “Planning a big barbecue or party or something, Randy? You figure you’ll try politics again?”
Randy found it almost impossible to lie. His father had beaten him only once in his life, when he was ten, but it had been a truly terrible beating. He had lied, and the Judge had gone upstairs and returned with his heaviest razor strop. He had grabbed Randy by the neck and bent him across the billiard table, and implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants, and on bare hide, until he screamed in terror and pain. Then Randy was ordered to his room, supperless and in disgrace. Hours later, the Judge knocked and came in and gently turned him over in the bed. The Judge spoke quietly. Lying was the worst crime, the indispensable accomplice of all others, and would always bring the worst punishment. “I can forgive anything except a lie.” Randy believed him, and while he could no longer remember the lie he had told, he never forgot the punishment. Unconsciously, his right hand rubbed his buttocks as he thought up an answer for Bill Cullen.
“I’m having visitors,” Randy said, “and Christmas is coming.” This was the truth, if not the whole truth. He couldn’t risk saying more to Bill. Bill’s nickname was Bigmouth and his lying not limited to the size of yesterday’s catch. Bigmouth Bill could spark a panic.
When he turned into the driveway, Randy saw Malachai Henry using a scuffle hoe in the camellia beds screening the garage. “Malachai!” he called. “How about helping me get this stuff into the house?”
Malachai hurried over. His eyes, widening, took in the cartons, bags, and cases filling the trunk and piled on the seats. “All this going up to your apartment, sir?”
“No. It goes into the kitchen and utility room. Mrs. Bragg and the children are flying in from Omaha tomorrow.”
As they unloaded, Randy considered the Henrys. They were a special problem. They were black and they were poor but in many ways closer to him than any family in Fort Repose. They owned their own land and ran their own lives, but in a sense they were his wards. They could not be abandoned or the truth withheld from them. He couldn’t explain Mark’s warning to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand. If he told Preacher, all Preacher would do was lift up his face, raise his arms, and intone, “Hallelujah! The Lord’s will be done!” If he told Two-Tone, Two-Tone would consider it an excuse to get drunk and stay that way. But he could, with confidence, tell Malachai.
With the meat packed in the freezer and everything else stacked in cupboards and closets Randy said, “Come on up to my office, Malachai, and I’ll give you your money.” He paid Malachai twenty-five dollars a week for twenty hours. Malachai picked his own days to mow, rake, fertilize, and trim, days when he had no fruit picking, repairing, or better paying yard jobs elsewhere. Randy knew he was never short-timed, and Malachai knew he could always count on that twenty-five a week.
Malachai’s face was expressionless, but Randy sensed his apprehension. Malachai never before had been asked upstairs to receive his pay. In the office, Randy dropped into the high backed, leather-covered swivel chair that had come from his father’s chambers. Malachai stood, uncertain. “Sit down,” Randy said. Malachai picked the least comfortable straight chair and sat down, not presuming to lean back.
Randy brought out his wallet and looked up at the portrait of his bald-headed grandfather, Woodrow Wilson’s diplomat, with the saying for which he was known stamped in faded gold on the discolored frame: “Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.”
It was difficult. From the days when they fished and hunted together, he had always felt close to Malachai. They could still work in the grove, side by side, and discuss as equals the weather and the citrus and the fishing but never any longer share any personal, any important matters. They could not talk politics or women or finances. It was strange, since Malachai was much like Sam Perkins. He had as much native intelligence as Sam, the same intuitive courtesy, and they were the same size, weighing perhaps 180, and the same color, cordovan-brown. Randy and Sam Perkins had been lieutenants in a company of the 7th (Custer) Regiment of the First Cav. Together, Randy and Sam had dug in on the banks of the Han and Chongchon, and faced the same bugle heralded human wave charge at Unsan, and covered each other’s platoons in advance and retreat. They had slept side by side in the same bunker, eaten from the same mess tins, drunk from the same bottle, flown to Tokyo on R. and R. together, and together bellied up to the bar of the Imperial Hotel. They had (if it were learned in Fort Repose he would be ostracized) even gone to a junior-officer-grade geisha house together and been greeted with equal hospitality and favors. So it was a strange thing that he could not speak to Malachai, whom he had known since he could speak at all, as he had to Sam Perkins in Korea. It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon line. It was strange, but this was not the time for social introspection. His job was to tell Malachai to brace and prepare himself and his family.
Randy took two tens and a five from his wallet and shoved them across the desk. `That’s for the week.”
`Thank you, sir,” Malachai said, folding the bills and tucking them into the breast pocket of his checked shirt.
Perhaps the difference was that Malachai had not been an officer, like Sam Perkins, Randy thought. Malachai had been in service for four years, but in the Air Defense Command, a tech sergeant babying jet engines. Perhaps it was their use of the language. Sam spoke crisp upstate-New York-Cornell English, but when Malachai talked you didn’t have to see him to know he was black. “Malachai,” Randy said, “I want to ask you a serious question.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What would you say if I told you I have very good information-about as good as you can get-that before long a war is coming?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
The answer surprised Randy. His swivel chair banged upright. “What makes you say that?”
Malachai smiled, pleased with Randy’s reaction. “Well, sir, I keep up with things. I read all I can. I read all the
