The Shadow Cabinet (31 page)

Rita Kramer returned silently from the bedroom, her glass of white wine now replaced by a whiskey. She curled up silently in the armchair, her face bathed, her auburn hair freshly brushed, watching silently as her husband lifted himself from the couch to pad across the floor to the foyer, where he turned the night lock and latched the chain.

“So I'm out in Kansas for the first time,” he resumed as he sat down, “eighteen or nineteen, my ass drafted, O.K.?, on my way to Fort Sill, which is an army camp in Oklahoma.”

“You think he doesn't know where Fort Sill is?” said Rita Kramer.

“I'm talking to Wilson. So anyway, I'm—”

“That's what I mean. You think he doesn't know where Fort Sill is?”

Artie Kramer hesitated, shut his mouth, and then sighed. “You know where Fort Sill is?” he asked Wilson.

“I think so. In Oklahoma.”

“You satisfied?” Kramer asked his wife.

“You don't have to explain everything,” she said.

“O.K., I'm on my way to Fort Sill. On a troop train, you know—just a cattle train, that's all it is. One boxcar, that's the mess hall, another's the kitchen, and the goddamn soldier boys are all jammed up in the seats. O.K.” He sat back again, puffing on the cigar. “It's hot as hell in the middle of August and the heat's coming off the metal like a goddamn frying pan. Every time a regular train comes whistling through, they pull this dink troop train off on a goddamn siding, like these sojer boys are just animals. So I'd never been on a train before like that, never been no place except Staten Island, but I've heard about these places, and I've got a blade in my pants—I shit you not, Wilson.”

“Talk about animals,” said Rita Kramer.

Her husband ignored her. “So we're standing on this siding waiting for this passenger train to come whistling through and it's about an hour late, so I'm outside, hanging over the vestibule door—you know how it half-opens?—waiting, taking a smoke. I've come halfway across the country and haven't seen nothing yet—you know what I mean?—not a goddamn thing. Just little hick towns and hick hills and hick rivers and hick railroad crossings you pass through so quick you don't know what the shit's sitting out there on the road behind the windshields you see, whether it's some broad or a bunch of rednecks with sawed-off shotguns.”

Rita Kramer sipped from her glass, carefully studying Haven Wilson's reaction.

“So I'm hanging over this half-door, see, my collar loose, my mouth dry, trying to look tough, only I'm scared shitless about this work camp they're sending me to called Fort Sill after that reception center in Jersey. I spent three days on KP, they shaved our heads, so I'm just a five-day private in the U.S. Army and already I look like a goddamn convict from Attica or Sing Sing, some kind of European DP like my old man musta looked like when he come off the boat at Ellis Island. Only now I'm hanging over this door, looking out at this hick Kansas field that's as flat as a pool table and nothing there except corn. Just corn, that's all. Nothing. Then I see this old man, this farmer, this old fart sitting on a front porch on the other side of the road, just about as far from me as that door over there. His chair's tilted all the way back and he's wearing these old overalls, and he's got on this straw hat. He's chewing tobacco, chewing it big, real heavy, but I pick him up real quick. I'm waiting, see, like he's got my number, my whole family history—some punk from Brooklyn with a blade in his pants who doesn't belong out here—and he's about to let me know, the way they would over in the next block in Brooklyn. I figure he's about to rip one off in my direction, a whole mouthful of toad juice he's getting pumped up there.
Splat!
That's for you, punk.
Splat! Splat!
There's two for your old lady, a couple of Kansas oysters. Big and brown. They don't wash off. Yeah, O.K. It's juvenile, like Rita says, but what do I know? I'm eighteen, nineteen. But anyway, this old guy finally gets rid of this big one he's been sucking up—
Phooey! Plop!
—right off the side of the porch.”

Artie Kramer sat back. “Shit, Wilson, this old guy doesn't even know I'm there. He's not looking at the train or all those loudmouth skinhead draftees. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't have to. You know what he's looking at? The goddamn corn. The corn and the soybeans or whatever that green stuff was, the cows out there in the field, the railroad tracks that are empty right on down the line, like in that flick
High Noon
—no shivs, no bicycle chains, no zip guns, no sawed-off shotguns, no punks from Brooklyn getting stomped under the back stairs. So that wakes me up, seeing that, and I know what it must feel like to live that way, just clean and wide open, like that old dude sitting in his straw hat looking at his corn.”

“So he decided to get out of Brooklyn,” said Rita Kramer, watching Wilson.

“So I said to myself, ‘Screw Brooklyn. I'm gonna buy me a ranch in Texas.'” Kramer laughed raucously, lifting himself from the couch with his empty glass. “That's where I thought I was—Texas. It'd make a great movie shot, wouldn't it? But you'd have to get the panning right, get the camera angles right.” He wandered across the room toward the kitchen, still in his stocking feet, his pants drooping low on his small hips below the slight paunch.

Rita Kramer watched Wilson silently, still curled up in her chair. They heard the blender go on in the kitchen and she said, “Did he tell you about the snow scene, the flat in Brooklyn?”

“He told me about it.”

“It's his favorite, except he can't get the writers he's worked with to get it right. Remember those paperbacks we saw at the Ramsey house—
The Geneva Quadrangle
, that garbage?” Wilson remembered. “He even got him to work on it.” She put her head back against the chair. “I'm not sure now whether it actually happened that way or something else. It's hard to tell with Artie sometimes. Sometimes he gets the real world and the celluloid one mixed up.”

“A lot of people from California have that problem.”

“Don't kid,” she said, her head still back. “I don't feel like kidding.”

The blender went off. “I didn't realize he was in the movies,” Wilson said. Her eyes were lifted toward the ceiling.

“He's not.” Her voice was flat, perfectly emotionless. “He just thinks he is. He gets all these hot ideas and gets someone to write a film script around them. He's dropped a bundle that way. He ought to be in comic books.” She sat up, moving her eyes from the ceiling toward the door as her husband came back.

“Only they got problems in Kansas too, Wilson,” Artie Kramer continued, as if he'd never left. He collapsed down on the couch with a fresh drink, a creamy concoction Wilson couldn't identify. “After Fort Sill, they sent me to Fort Riley, Kansas—to leadership school. This was during the Korean War. Junction City, Kansas, O.K.? A real sweatbox in summer. So one night in Junction City, I make a pass at a bar girl, but she freezes me out. So I come out at twelve, one o'clock, half-crocked, really snockered, and these three local rednecks are waiting, and they pound the shit out of me on account of one of them's her husband, a real animal. One of them's got on a pair of asbestos gloves, the other's got his fists all taped up with inner-tube rubber, which is something I'd never seen before, not even in Brooklyn, where they got bicycle chains. So what are you gonna do? ‘Screw Kansas too,' I told myself, and went to California.”

He laughed again, but his wife wasn't amused. “So what about our guest?” she asked. “Doesn't he get a drink too?”

“Sure, if he wants one. You want another beer, Wilson?”

“I don't think so, thanks,” Wilson said, looking at his watch. “I'd better be on my way.”

“Street wise,” Rita Kramer said dryly, getting to her feet, “not social wise.” She picked up Wilson's empty beer can. “You see the White House's problem?”

“He said he didn't want anything, that he's gotta go,” her husband compained. “So what do you want I should do—break his arm?”

“Don't be a klutz,” she said.

“Who's being a klutz? You're the klutz. I start talking about white wine and you get hot about some doll that don't mean nothing to me. What the hell's wrong now?”

Standing in front of the couch, Rita Kramer had dangled her head forward to mimic his speech, her jaw dropping cretinously, the words drooling out. “Doan mean nuthin' to me.” She picked up Wilson's glass. “You don't have to talk like that.”

“That's the way I talk, O.K.? If it's not some broad, it's the way I talk. O.K., I've heard you talk like a slut too. Remember that time down at Malibu, that fancy party, and this guy put the move on you? You think my ears weren't burning, all those classy people standing around? What the shit's wrong with you, anyway?—always on my back these days.”

“Tell him about your problems with the White House,” she said, turning away to flounce silently across the room, her hips swaying in some exaggerated parody of a nightclub waitress or cigarette girl.

“Who's that supposed to be?” Artie Kramer shouted as she vamped her way toward the kitchen. “What do you think you're doing, showing off like that? If it's supposed to be that doll I took to lunch, she doesn't walk that way, all right! She's got some class, not like that two-bit chorus line you used to show your legs with!” But Rita Kramer ignored him, hips swaying, like a stripper on a ramp, as she disappeared into the kitchen. Artie Kramer, who'd hunched forward as he'd called after her, sank back again. “Jesus, that woman,” he complained. “Thinks she's got all the moves, thinks she's got all the answers. Did you ever meet a broad like that? You can't keep up. What was I talking about?”

“She was saying you were having a few problems here,” Wilson said, “problems about this political job.”

“Yeah. Oh, yeah.” He sighed unhappily, holding the cold cigar, gazing out across the room as he had that first afternoon, sitting on the sunny terrace above the Potomac. “It's a long story, Wilson, lemme tell you, and I thought maybe you knew something about it—that fancy house out there, a sting, you know what I mean—but Rita says you're on the level—”

“He is,” she said as she crossed in front of the couch to hand Wilson a glass of beer. “So tell him.”

But Artie wasn't enthusiastic. “What's it matter?” he said morosely. “I'm not looking for no shoulder to cry on.”

Rita Kramer winced, closing her eyes. Her husband didn't look up. “There wasn't any sting,” she said as she returned to her chair. “You're just a babe in the woods. Maybe you're top banana with your pals out in L.A., but this is Washington and you're just a babe in the woods. Wilson isn't.”

“Edelman isn't, either,” Kramer said, “and Edelman doesn't know shit. What you know wouldn't fill up the Hollywood Bowl, either.” She didn't answer, curled up again in her chair, holding her drink and gazing silently at her husband, who'd turned again to Haven Wilson. “Lemme tell you one thing. This isn't any ego trip, taking a job in this administration. No way. I don't need the bucks because the bucks aren't there, right? It's costing me. Sitting here right now is costing me, when I've got a whole deskful of problems waiting for me back in California. But I'd made up my mind I was gonna help out, do something, make a contribution, like they say. Remember that old Kennedy speech—‘Don't ask what your country can do for you'? Remember that? Well, lemme tell you, I made a promise. I was mad—Jesus, was I burned. I musta lost—what?—thirty pounds? That's when I decided we had to get this country turned around again and I was gonna join up, do whatever they wanted me to do.…”

It was the American hostage crisis in Iran that had awakened Artie Kramer from fifteen years of civic indifference. He'd watched the first television footage in disbelief—American marines and diplomats herded from the U.S. embassy like prisoners of war, blindfolded and bound by their gloating captors. Beyond the front gates, a hysterical foreign crowd roared for their blood. As this national humiliation dragged on, weeks and months of it, the disgrace had become his own. It was as if he, too, were among the hostages, but even more as if all the old newsreels of World War II and Korea had gone berserk, as if the dim grainy historical footage of the past forty years had been reedited, respooled, and replayed nightly, but with a different ending—America the vanquished, the defeated, the disgraced, America the great Satan, led about in its prisoners' rags every evening on the television news to be taunted and reviled by the foreign rabble America had once given freedom.

“I saw these bastards, these crummy little sleazebag scum over there, burning our flag, holding our people in cages, like animals, like Nazis, and the idiot administration in Washington just sitting there, not doing a fucking thing. Then they had those demonstrations, those yippie Iranian students—remember?—in Washington, in L.A. even, where they burned the flag, just burned it, those scumbag maniacs, and we didn't do nothing, just like they let those helicopters get blown up in the desert over there. Then there was Carter, him and that shit-eating Howdy Doody grin on TV, and that's when I knew he had to go, him and all these rest of the idiots that got us into this mess. What Reagan and others were saying was true—a thirdrate country, that's where we were headed, getting pushed around by all these pipsqueak countries that don't have any more gross national product than San Bernoo, and if we didn't do something quick, it'd just be down the tubes.…”

“That's when he decided to get into politics,” Rita said.

“Yeah, that's when I decided. But it wasn't just Iran, it was everyplace else you looked. Take my mother, who I've got to keep locked up in this fortress condo down in Miami where she won't get mugged or pistol-whipped by some crazy drug freak down there. Or this coke they found in some Minuteman missile silo out in Montana—coke, heroin, acid, you name it. Then you got these new Russian missiles Reagan was talking about, drop 'em right down those missile silos, this window of vulnerability he proved was right—”