The Plant (25 page)

Herb Porter has been going around all day with a big, silly smile on his chops. He is actually being
nice
to people. What in God’s name can that be about? As if I didn’t know, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck.

Never mind Bill and Herb. Never mind Sandra’s hot thighs, either. I have another and more interesting thing to ponder. There was a pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip on my desk when I got back from lunch. Riddley called and LaShonda took the message. He says he won’t be back until next Wednesday or so, because winding up his mother’s affairs is taking longer than he thought. But that isn’t the interesting part. LaShonda has written, and I quote, “There are difficulties with his brother and sister. Mostly sister.” Did Riddley actually tell her that? They have never seemed particularly friendly, in fact I’ve always gotten the idea that LaShonda considers Riddley to be beneath her, maybe because she believes the Amos ’n Andy accent…although that’s a little tough to swallow. Mostly I think it’s 188

because he comes to work in gray fatigues from Dickey and she always shows up dressed to the nines…some days to the tens.

No, I don’t think Riddley exactly
said
anything about having problems with his brother and sister. I think L. just sort of…
knew
.

Zenith isn’t out in the reception area, so far the garlic seems to be working and it’s mostly growing in the other direction…toward the end of the hall and the window that looks out on the airshaft…but its
influence
may have reached the reception area.

I think LaShonda read his mind. Read it over fifteen hundred miles or so of long distance telephone line. And without even knowing it. Maybe I’m wrong but…

No, I’m not wrong.

Because I’m reading
her
mind, and I
know
.

[Five second pause on tape]

Whoo, Jesus.

Jesus Christ, this is big.

This is fucking
big
.

From Bill Gelb’s Diary

4/3/81

I’m at my apartment tonight, but am thinking about Paramus, New Jersey, tomorrow night. There’s an all-night poker game there on Saturdays, pretty high stakes and connected to the Italian Brotherhood, if you know what I mean. Ginelli’s game, or so I’ve heard (he’s the Mafia type who owns Four Fathers, two blocks from here). I’ve only gone there a couple of times and lost my shirt on both occasions (I paid up, too, you don’t fuck with the Italian gentlemen), but I have a feeling that this time things might be different.

189

Today in my office, after R.W. okayed my book idea (
Alien Investing
is going to sell at least 3 million copies, don’t ask me how I know that but I do), I took my dice out of the desk drawer where I keep them and started rolling. At first I was barely paying attention to what I was doing, then I took a closer look and holy shit, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I got out a legal pad and recorded forty straight rolls.

Thirty-four sevens.

Six elevens.

No snake-eyes, no boxcars. Not even a single point.

I tried the same experiment here at home (as soon as I got in through the door, as a matter of fact), not sure it would work because the telepathy doesn’t travel much beyond the fifth floor at 490 Park. The fact is, you can feel it fade each time you go down (or up) in the elevator. It drains away like water draining out of a sink, and it’s a sad sensation.

Anyway, tonight, rolling forty times on my kitchen table produced twenty sevens, six elevens, and fourteen “points”—i.e. spot combos adding up to three, four, five, six, eight, nine, and ten. No snake-eyes. No boxcars. The luck isn’t quite so strong away from the office, but twenty sevens and six elevens are pretty amazing. More amazing still, I didn’t crap out
one single time
, not at 490, not even here at home.

Will I be as successful at five-card stud and jacks or better on the other side of the Hudson?

Only one way to find out, baby. Tomorrow night.

I can hardly believe what’s happening, but there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that it
is
happening. Roger suggested that we stay away from the plant, and what a joke
that
is. Might as well suggest the tide not to turn, or that Harlow Enders not be such an asshole. (Enders is a Robert Goulet fan. All you have to do to know that is to look at him.) I found myself wandering down toward Riddley’s closet once or twice an hour all day long, just to take a big brain-clearing whiff.

Sometimes it smells like popcorn (the Nordica Theater, where I copped my first feel…I didn’t tell the others that part, but given current condi-tions I’m sure they must know), sometimes like freshly cut grass, sometimes like Wildroot Crème Oil, which is what I always wanted the barber to put on my hair as the finishing touch when I was but a wee slip of a lad. On several occasions others were there when I arrived, and just 190

before quitting time we all turned up at once, standing side by side and breathing deep, storing up those good aromas—and good ideas, maybe—

for the weekend. I suppose we would have looked hilarious to an outsider, like a
New Yorker
cartoon without a caption (would we even need one to be amusing? I think not), but believe me, there was nothing hilarious about it. Nothing scary, either. It was nice, that’s all. Plain old nice.

Is breathing Zenith addictive? I suppose it must be, but it doesn’t feel like a harsh, governing addiction (“governing” may be the wrong word, but it’s the only one I can think of). Not like the cigarette habit, in other words, or the pot habit. People say pot isn’t addictive, but after my junior year at Bates, I know better—that shit almost got me flunked out.

But I repeat, this is not like that. I don’t seem to miss it when I’m away from it, as I am now (at least not yet). And at work there is the inde-scribable feeling of being at one with your mates. I don’t know if I’d call it telepathy, exactly (Herb and Sandra do, John and Roger seem a little less sure). It’s more like singing in harmony, or walking together in a parade, matching strides. (Not marching, though, it doesn’t feel that structured.) And although John, Roger, Sandra, and Herb have all gone their separate ways for the weekend and we’re all far from the plant, I still feel in touch with them, as if I could reach out and connect if I really wanted to. Or needed to.

The mailroom is now almost completely empty of manuscripts, which is a damned good thing, because it’s now almost completely full of Zenith. Z has also overgrown the walls of the corridor, although much more densely in the southerly direction—i.e. toward the rear of the building and the airshaft. Going the other way it has curled its friendly (we assume they’re friendly) tendrils around Sandra’s door and John’s facing hers, but that’s as far as it had progressed as of four o’clock this afternoon, when I split. It seems reasonable to assume that the Barfield woman was right about the garlic and the smell—which we mere humans can no longer detect—is slowing it down, at least in that direction. South of the janitor’s closet and the mailroom, however, the corridor is well on the way to becoming a jungle path. There’s Z all over the walls (it’s buried the framed book jacket blow-ups down that way, which is a
great
relief), and large hanging bunches of green Z-leaves. It has also produced several dark blue Z-flowers, which have their own 191

pleasant smell. Sort of like burnt wax (a smell I associate with candles in the Halloween jack-o-lanterns of my youth). Never seen flowers growing on an ivy, but what do I know about plants? The answer is not much.

There’s a window reinforced with wire mesh overlooking the airshaft, and Z has begun to overgrow this as well, all leaves (and flowers) turned out toward the sun. Herb Porter says he saw one of those leaves snatch up a fly that was crawling over a pane of that window. Madness?

Undoubtedly! But: true madness or false? True, I think, which suggests some unpleasant possibilities to go with all those pleasant smells. But I don’t want to deal with that this weekend.

Where I want to go this weekend is Paramus.

Maybe with a stop at my local OTB for good measure.

I probably shouldn’t say it, but God! This is more fun than Studio 54!

From the journals of Riddley Walker

4/4/81

12:35 A.M.

Aboard the Silver Meteor

Question: Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever in his life been so confused, so disheartened, so shaken, so downright sad?

I don’t think so.

Has Riddley Pearson Walker ever had a worse week in the twenty-six years of his life?

Absolutely not.

192

I am aboard Amtrak’s Train 36, headed back to Manhattan at least three days early. No one knows I’m coming, but then, who would care?

Roger Wade? Kenton, perhaps? My landlord?

I tried for a plane out of B’ham, but no seats available until Sunday. I could not bring myself to stay in Blackwater—or anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line—that long. Hence the train. And so, to the sound of snores all around me, and in spite of the swaying motion of the car on the rails, I write in this diary. I can’t sleep. Perhaps I will be able to when I get back to Dobbs Ferry sometime this afternoon, but the afternoon seems an eternity away. I remember the narrative intro to that old TV show,
The
Fugitive
. “Richard Kimball looks out the window and sees only darkness,” William Conrad would say each week. He went on, “But in that darkness, Fate moves its huge hand.” Will that huge hand move for me? I think not. I fear not. Unless there is fate in John Kenton’s ivy, and how can fate—or Fate—reside in such a small and anonymous plant? Crazy idea.

God knows what put it in my head.

My reception in Blackwater was warm only from the McDowells—

my Uncle Michael and Aunt Olympia. Sister Evelyn, sister Sophie, sister Madeline (always my favorite, which is what makes this hurt so much), and brother Floyd all cold, reserved. Until late Friday afternoon I put that down to the distractions of grief, no more. Certainly we got through the painful rituals of the burial all right. Mama Walker rests beside my father, in the town graveyard. In the
black
section of the town graveyard, for there the rule of segregation holds as firm as ever, not as a matter of law but due to the laws of family custom—unspoken, unwritten, but as strong as tears and love.

Out my window I see a full moon riding serenely in the still-southern sky, a silver dollar pancake of a moon. So my Mama called it, and tonight it has gone full without her. For the first time in sixty-two years it has gone full without her. I sit here writing and feel the tears sliding down my cheeks. Oh Mama, how I weep for you! How yo littlest chile, de one dem 193

white boys used to call little ole blueblack, how dat chile do weep!

Tonight I is a Stephen Foster fiel’ nigger fo sho! Yassuh! Mama in de col’

col’ groun’! Yes ma’am!

Estranged from my sisters and my brother as well. Where will I be buried, I wonder? In what strange ground?

Anyway, it came out. All the bitterness. And the hate? Was it hate I saw in their eyes? In my dear Maddy’s eyes? She who used to hold my hand when we went to school, and who used to comfort me when the others teased me and called me blueblack or bluegum or L’il Heinie on account of the time in first grade when my pants fell down? I want to say no and no and no, but my heart denies that no. My heart says it was. My heart says yes and yes and yes.

There was a family gathering at the house this afternoon, the last act of the sadly prosaic drama that began with Mama’s heart attack on the 25th. Michael and Olympia were the nominal host and hostess. It began with coffee, but soon the wine was circulating in the parlor and something quite a bit stronger out on the back porch. I didn’t see my brother or any of my sisters in the house, so checked the porch. Floyd was there, drinking a little glass of whiskey and “memorating” (Mama’s word for reminiscence) with some of her cousins, and Orthina and Gertrude, from her book-circle (both ladies decorous but undoubtedly tiddly), and Jack Hance, Evvie’s husband. No sign of Evvie herself, or Sophie, or Madeline.

I went looking for them, worried that they might not be all right.

Upstairs, from the room at the end of the hall where Mama slept alone for the last dozen years since Pop died, I finally heard their voices. There was murmuring; there was also low laughter. I went down there, my footsteps muffled by the thick hall runner, doing a little memorating myself—on Mama’s bitter complaints about that thick runner and how it used to show the dirt. Yet she never changed it. How I wish she had. If they had heard me coming—just the simple sound of approaching footfalls—everything might have been different. Not in reality, of course; dislike is dislike, hate 194

is hate, those things are at least quasi-empirical, I know. It is my illusions that I am talking about. The illusions of my family’s regard, the illusions of what I myself had always believed they believed: brave Riddley, the Cornell graduate who has taken a series of menial jobs, work for the body while the mind remains free and uncluttered and able to continue work on the Great Book, a kind of
fin de siecle Invisible Man
. How often I have invoked the spirit of Ralph Ellison! I even dared to write him once, and received a kind, encouraging reply. It hangs framed on the wall of my apartment, over my typewriter. Whether I will be able to continue on after this is anybody’s guess…and yet I think I must. Because without the book, what else is there? Why dere’s de broomhandle! De can o’

Johnson’s flo’ wax! De squeegee for de windows and de brush for de tawl-its! Yassuh!

No, there must be the book. In spite of everything,
because
of everything, there must be this book. In a very real sense, it’s all I have left.

All right. Enough crybaby stuff. Let’s get down to it.

I’ve already written here about the reading of my Mama’s last will and testament on the day between her wake and her burial, and how Law Tidyman, her lifelong friend, allowed most of it to stand in her own words. It struck me passing strange then (although I did not put it down, being tired and grief-struck, states of remarkable similarity) that Mama would have asked Law to do it, old friend or not, rather than her own son, who is now considered one of the best lawyers of any color, at least on this side of Birmingham. Now perhaps I understand that a little bit better.