Chapter 17
The Good Earth
In Beijing, Beatrice and I found our quarters comfortable. Beatrice seemed to me to feel my pleasure in returning to this old home of mine, and she seemed to me to feel at home herself. Our Chinese house-staff moved around us with ancient grace not often on her side of the seas. She felt their grace quickly and soon moved in accord.
Our official advice, from the State Department sinologists, was to stay in our quarters until we had met Mao. But, our second day in Beijing, we borrowed bicycles from our house-staff and tooled where our whims took us, stopping to drink tea as we wished and to look more closely at anything that caught our attention. I felt a little ashamed of leaving Beatrice for my greeting from Mao our third day there, but Mao made me feel a little better about that. His grace to us proved perfectly Chinese.
He seemed to know me from before. I presented him with a little green paperback copy of the Tao Te Ching, and he presented me with a little red paperback copy of the Quotations of Chairman Mao. I invited him to Texas, and he invited me and Beatrice to travel China, wherever we wished. He promised freedom and state protection for us in any of our travels there. I took him at his word, and he kept it.
And that was pretty much the end of my official duty there. Beatrice and I visited tiny villages and temples, the Shaolin and many others. We visited villages built of stones carried by hand from the great wall, leaving gaps and rubble for many of its four-thousand miles. Now the wall was both beautiful and historic.
“I wish the Berlin wall would fall so gracefully,” said Beatrice.
“No Ozymandius am I,” I begged, for hope.
“I know,” she answered.
We were there, and that itself was the play of the card. I didn’t meet with Mao again until I had to leave again, and that was fine. Chinese leadership is not corrupt in the sense that United States leadership is corrupt, because Chinese have always admitted that they cannot easily lead billions of people. So Chinese revolutionaries come and go, while most of their people remain the same. So Chinese leadership is not as much corruption as acceptance of power. It’s not as much greed as acceptance. Leaders can take, and so they do. The concept is very Chinese. It’s very Taoist.
Mao understood that. So his cultural revolution was no revolution at all, just a route to a seat for himself where he could take as many first steps on journeys of a thousand miles as the others around him would and could permit. He was grateful for the step I had taken, gaining his nation the name-recognition that was simply fair, and he was grateful for the economic-aide that could follow that. So he followed that step by opening as many doors as he could for other appropriately following steps. He was pleased to have us as a guest, and there was nothing more that I could do.
Consequently, after Dickey’s paranoia stepped him out of his presidency, I asked his successor to have me back for another line on my résumé and a closer focus on the state of the project I shared with Mikhail. Gerald appointed me Director of Central Intelligence, and brought me back to America.
“So you’re going to be a spy,” said Mao, in my second and final meeting with him. “Good. You seem to me to be a quiet man.”
On inauguration day, when Dicky succeeded Linden, I had been the only Republican to see Linden off, when he flew back to Dallas from Dulles. But, when Gerald replaced Dicky, I was in China and had never met Gerald, despite all my Republican party ties and responsibilities. Before succeeding the Maryland misappropriator vice president, Gerald had been a man too quiet, even to meet me. Whoever succeeded Dicky’s mess could not be reelected. So it didn’t matter to our mission. But I learned to like Gerald.
When I first met him, on my return from China, he served up doughnuts from his desk in the oval office, as I sat in a Chinese chair in front of it. He said he’d flown them in from the shop of a friend of his in Grand Rapids.
“Perks of the office,” he said.
Looking into his football-player face, I had a distinct impression that no special trip was made for that. He had a sense of irony that perfectly matched his big grin, and later I met the doughnut-maker, who was black.
“I’m going to pardon Dicky,” said Gerald. “That’s a perk of the office I can’t deny, or an honor to the office I have to accept, and it’s diplomatically essential to continuing what he and you and Klingmonger have done. Klingmonger told me you helped him conceptualize the China-card, and that’s why I’m telling you what I’m going to do about Dicky, and why I accepted your request to direct central intelligence. I’m also appointing Klingmonger Secretary of State, so you can keep working well together.”
I had known my stature, in the party and now internationally, would have Gerald pass my request to Klingmonger for consideration, and I had known that Klingmonger would tell Gerald enough of the story to produce the outcome Gerald explained in this first meeting between him and me. But I was a little surprised at what he said next.
“I’m a quiet man,” he said. “I’m a team player, and I know how to delegate authority and how to accept advice from my superiors in expertise, regardless of their rank. So I’m not going to meddle much in what you and Klingmonger do. But I think we need to devote some resources to Afghanistan. I think we have a powder-keg there.”
“I agree,” I said. “What’s your view?”
“Dumping the monarchy,” he said, “was a stroke of genius, and not the doing as much as how it was done, fomenting rumors of a coup to prompt removal of the batteries from all the tanks in the country, except the palace guard brigade while the king was on vacation in Italy, then using those twelve tanks to take over the country. It’s a good thing so few Americans can spell Afghanistan, or someone might have reported in the media that we trained the commander of that brigade here, in the good old U.S.A.”
“I thought that was kind of tidy, myself,” I said.
He looked at me and laughed with that big grin.
“And nobody was hurt, either,” he continued, “although I heard one of the tanks put a pretty big hole in the bedroom wall of the prince we spread the rumors about, and I heard his house was about two blocks from our embassy. I heard one Afghan soldier shot a foot of his own, but I suspect that that’s a silly rumor. But, anyway, things seem to me to be backfiring there. And the Afghans I’ve met seem wonderfully gracious.”
“No question in my mind,” I said. “Things are backfiring, and not for the people. Have you eaten the bread they bake there, in their little stone ovens hewn beneath their shops? It’s as rich as these wonderful donuts from Grand Rapids, maybe more!”
“Yes,” said Gerald. “And I didn’t choose my words ‘powder keg’ and ‘backfiring’ lightly. Afghanistan is as hard to change as China, a circumstance I have no doubt you understand. But, at the same time, Afghanistan is more volatile or explosive, less civilized, more wild. Most Afghans didn’t much care that they had a monarchy, and they care less who dumped it. So what we’ve done with our coup is to open an inroad for Soviet influence. We were providing military training-aid, but mainly to train ourselves. You know I don’t mean mainly for military coups. I hope.”
“To see how the trainees compare their equipment to ours,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Gerald. “And their equipment is nearly all Soviet, because the Soviets have been providing them military materiel-aid for years, while we’ve been restricting our aid to that training. Afghans are quite material people, and now Soviet influence dominates their government, the government we let happen with our coup.”
“And that hotbed is between oil and the Indian subcontinent,” I said, “as far as I can see and understand what you’re saying, or what I hear you saying. And I hear you suggesting you have a solution, an answer in which all can work.”
“I knew you’d see the signifying fact, and so I’m asking you to work with Klingmonger. You’re the expert, and Klingmonger understands that.”
I felt my plate already too full, but I did see the significance, beyond oil to imperialism. The Holy Land was out of control because imperialism was almost over, because England and France had figured out that they could more efficiently and effectively serve their commercial interests by soliciting support from governments to commercialize their countries than by being the governments and paying all the overhead inherent in that, from fighting the wars to feeding the poor. Military and economic aid would be cheaper than being the military and the economy. That’s why the French relinquished Egypt and why the British relinquished Canaan. And it’s why England acquiesced at last to Gandhi’s civil disobedience. It’s the least of his lessons.
It was a new world order. Only the Soviet gerontocracy didn’t know it. And, clear as daylight, Gerald was right about one thing. Afghanistan was a political fireworks-display, and it had been since before the Afghans built their own great wall, to keep out Genghis Khan. Selling antique firearms remains a major source of revenue in Kabul, and tribes and other factions use antique firearms otherwise, to shoot anyone inhospitable, almost as a hobby. The Viet Cong guerillas organized themselves for a purpose, but Afghans seldom seek either organization or purpose. They kill for reasons westerners watch movies, for hope of a brave new world. Conundrum bought a Khyber rifle there, on one of his pointless boondoggles.
“What do you think?” I asked Klingmonger, calling on him at Foggy Bottom to congratulate him on his promotion. I was pleased to note that he didn’t call my appointment a promotion, although he did say he welcomed the opportunity to work more closely with me. He considered the Afghanistan question with a few seconds of his finger-pressing. Then he dropped his fat right hand to his desk.
“Piece of cake,” he answered. “Wait until the Soviets escalate their interests to an imperialist level. Then boost the quagmire factor. Make it their Vietnam.”
One thing nice about working with intelligent people is that all you have to do to get them to do the right thing is to present the facts, unless they have a private interest in doing the wrong thing. But, then, having such interests isn’t intelligent.
“Just don’t tell me what you’re doing,” said Klingmonger. “I’ll see it, anyway.”
I felt the same way, since a main interest of mine was to focus on Mikhail’s position, and I thought of Afghanistan as a distraction. But I also saw the situation as a serendipitous strengthening of our hand against the hardliners, if we could make them look like fools in a nation where poppies were the main cash-crop, where children didn’t wear diapers, so they could fertilize the land. And I also saw that doing that would be easy in a land whose people played football on horseback, using a decapitated goat as the ball. So I just had to use some of our Fits assassination tactics to create a little catalyst. But this time I did it quite overtly. I sent it straight to Congress.
I asked Linden to find me a drunken hardly conscionable congressman with some bravado and a little influence in appropriations and intelligence. He found me a Texas Democrat named Charlie who perfectly fit the bill, and with maybe more bravado than we needed. Charlie loved the idea and never had to meet with me, taking Linden’s suggestion as a cause of his own. He pushed appropriations for the CIA to do the job and traveled to Afghanistan to try to oversee. Beyond that, all I had to do was make sure my CIA friends knew what I wanted. The rest is history.
And that was about it for Gerald’s presidency, all the major history of it. He pardoned Dicky and strengthened the positions of me and Klingmonger, to keep the China-card face-up on the table. And he quarterbacked the play to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. And he imported wonderful doughnuts to the Whitehouse.
Me, however, I had to put out a couple of less international fires during Gerald’s presidency. I didn’t do much within the CIA in that short official-time as Director of Central Intelligence, because I’d been working closely with the agency most of that life. So I took some time to settle some internal and personal dust, with a mixture of emotions.
First was getting rid of Jimmy Huffa, and that was essential to guaranteeing Gerald’s successor. Fits Jr’s reputation was still the strongest factor in the popularity of the Democrat party, and we had decided on another Jimmy to succeed Gerald. I shouldn’t say we, because Theresa had decided on her own, while I just went along.
Theresa and I met in Detroit, in a diner near the river and near the Renaissance Center, the site of Slavey’s final speech this trip. We met without Raymond or her mother, so we’d be able to discuss our more plainly eternal situation. I ordered a banana-split, and Theresa ate a chocolate sundae, although it was Saturday.
“Norma’d feel at home here,” said Theresa.
“Yeah,” I said. “How have you been doing?”
“Fine,” she said. “But I miss Pine Level, and I have an idea.”
She licked some ice-cream from her spoon with her lips, and she smiled looking at me while she did it. I knew from that that, whatever her idea was then, it would have to come about in fact. Her gaze was clear and bright and certain, no space there for doubt. It was plainly down to Earth.
“A Georgia peanut-farmer,” she said. “You need a president to fill in between that Grand Rapids boy and you. How about a Georgia peanut-farmer.”
I knew better than to suggest that she might be out of her mind.
“I trust you have someone in mind,” I said, shaking my head.
“Jimmy,” she said. “Everybody calls him Jimmy, and I’m not sure he knows his name is James. After Fits Jr.’s and Linden’s and Dicky’s arrogance, that seems to me to be appropriate, to fit some bills long overdue.”
“Yes,” I answered. “That’s exactly what we need to follow Gerald.”
“Not only that,” she added, “but his mother loves him, and he and his wife love each other. He has a brother who drinks too much beer, but I don’t think many Earthlings will hold that against him, or against his brother.”
“How about his more public résumé?” I asked.
“Governor of Georgia,” she answered.
“That’s enough,” I replied.
“It’s more than enough,” she said. “I think it’s time to blow the diehard-segregationist southern-Democrats out of the water, and that should help Republicans as well. I’m still sick of how that Fits Jr. creep weaseled into the presidency by hooking himself to Oliver’s coattails, and I’m still sicker of the southern Democrats, George Wallace, Lester Maddox. Hypocrisy still keeps their bigotry in their party.
“And now the cancer’s spreading to the party of Lincoln. That scumbag Strom Thurman jumped ship like a rat, thinking his segregationist notions were sinking in the Democrat party when Fits Jr. and Linden let the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act slide through congress on Birmingham’s and Selma’s momentum. Not much he can do by himself, since he’s too stupid to have seen through his own leaders’ hypocrisy, but others are following him. Already, Republicans have inherited the southern-Democrats’ reputation, and somewhat rightly so. Maybe Jimmy can inspire Democrats to sincerity, and Republicans will have to catch back up.”
All this she said, over that chocolate sundae, chewing the cherry and the crushed nuts, stirring the whipped cream into the chocolate, as I saw the no-denying in her onyx eyes. Theresa had wished to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the southern-Democrats and other segregationists had denied her that right through all his elected terms. Now it was her turn, and so her candidate would preside.
He could preside for just one term, but for some grand accomplishments, of which Theresa would be proud. Earth is a wonderful place for conversation, if its inhabitants would just take the time to listen to each other.
But there was no talking to that other Jimmy. He was too busy huffing over how important he’d become by promising a better life to workers and getting paid for it, in the momentum of Fits Jr.’s father. He was now president of the union Sugar Fits had founded, and he’d huffed up his ego to the point where he thought he might soon be president of the United States. That was absurd, but he could be a spoiler, and he tried.
Our machine was in motion. Linden, who never did like Fits Jr., threw his influence for our candidate wherever he could, and Theresa still had her NAACP ties and was now working as a secretary to a Michigan congressman, in the more-and-more-motivating motor city, now more integrated than Manhattan. We knew we could do it. We had the technology. We hoped to rebuild. This was a step.
The southern Democrats considered our Jimmy naïve but harmless, and they thought they could control him after he moved into the Whitehouse. But the Sugar Fits Democrats were depending more now on Huffa’s labor-union and other such scams to win the vote. For the black vote, they were depending mostly on the Fits Jr. momentum. So we had to work to balance that, to keep some motes from eyes.
Having no orders outside his ego to campaign, Huffa scrambled a plan of his own. He called on Jimmy, desecrating the quiet front-porch of Jimmy’s mother’s home outside Plains, Georgia. There, he offered Jimmy union-support if Jimmy would place him second on the ticket, to be his vice president. Jimmy looked across the peanut fields and escorted Huffa to his waiting limousine. He didn’t deign to answer.
“They call me a peanut-brain,” he said, at a dinner-party in Atlanta, when another union-leader said he’d heard of such consideration. “That guy’s a cashew.”
Beatrice and I shared that dinner, and I buttonholed Jimmy after.
“Has he tried to contact you?” I asked.
“He came to my mother’s home,” Jimmy answered.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll see if I can do something.”
“This is getting hard to bear,” said Beatrice in our sharing.
Huffa huffed himself into extreme high blood-pressure when he heard what Jimmy had said about him to his cohort, and he decided to resort to his old tactics. I had underestimated his audacity, supposing he’d never mention our meeting about Remington Bosworth, because of his part in it. But his poker was worse than his ethics, and so he tried to bluff me. I hadn’t expected it, but I wasn’t surprised.
He called Langley and got through to me by making absurd suggestions. Lev told me that he’d once made his way to K. Buggen Goober’ office at FBI headquarters by suggesting that he knew something about the relationship between the Cuban missile crisis and the Fits Jr. assassination. Huffa made a similar trip to me by telephone.
“This is Huffa,” he said, when I answered the phone. “El Dorado, Wednesday, 2:00 p.m. You know I know something. Be there.”
He hung up, and I suppressed an intense urge to call Jimmy and ask him exactly how he felt about cashews. Then I thought through this whole part of the situation, which now extended over more than a decade, and I decided to make the meeting.
Again, 2:00 p.m., Wednesday, the club was closed, and Huffa sat drinking alone. The El Dorado hardly glittered now, looking as it had those years ago, but more worn. No musical instruments were on the bandstand. The club had become just another crumby bar. Again its front door was not locked. I sat at his table, saying nothing.
“You can get me on the ticket,” opened Huffa. “I know a CIA director has connections bigger than his party, and I know that Republican klutz can’t win. So, if you get me on the ticket, I’ll be vice president. If you don’t, you won’t be anything.”
“Are you threatening to kill me?”
“I’m threatening to rat you out!”
I thought the situation through again. Maybe he was bluffing, and maybe not. But, either way, the world had had way far too much of huffing. And, like Fits Jr., he was now out of control, and sooner or later he’d make himself more dangerous than he’d proved himself working his way up through his corrupt and often murderous concerns. Best to get it done, I thought. And so I did, myself. Without Theresa.
“Listen,” I said. “You have a choice. You may remember you told me that trash is a matter of opinion, relative to appropriateness, to being out of place.”
“What’s your point?” he asked, sloshing his dregs as he had those years before.
“My point is that my opinion is that you’re trash. My opinion is that, as soon as I walk out that door, you’ll follow me out and walk around back and climb into the dumpster with the trash waiting there. My opinion is that a trash truck will arrive a few minutes later, pick you up with that other trash, dump you in with some more, and crush you down, until you’re dead. Then it’ll take you to your rightful place.”
“I didn’t know you had such a great sense of humor,” snuffed Huffa.
But, as quickly as he said it, a drop of sweat appeared on the bottom of his chin, and his hands now sloshed the dregs in his glass as his will seemed to me not a factor. In a few seconds, his whole face was wet with sweat, and the glass collapsed in his hand holding it, and the hand began to bleed. The blood mixed with spilled scotch.
“Damn!” he said, his voice now shaking, too. “I hate it when that happens.”
“Remember,” I replied. “As soon as I walk out that door. If you wait any longer, you’ll have some other guests, and they won’t be so nice to you. Also remember that you have a family, and know that life doesn’t stop here for anyone, except you. You’re right in your opinion, that I have some connections. Some were your friends.”
He didn’t speak again. I bade farewell.
I was bluffing, and Huffa is dead, and I went on to more important things. That was not my favorite way to be, and I learned from it how humans shake when they’re ashamed. I don’t mean Huffa’s fear. I mean my shame.
I didn’t feel I could face Beatrice that day, and so I checked into a hotel and drove to Ben’s apartment, after I drove far enough into the Mohave to switch in isolation the license plates on the rental-car, back to the rental-car company’s.
“Dad!” said Ben at his door. “What a surprise.”
After the hugging, he kept smiling and staring at me.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, but then, “Oh, crap.”
“Crap, what?” I asked. “What did you forget?”
“I forgot to tell you that Quincy’s got a problem.”
“Oh, crap,” I couldn’t help but say. “What kind of problem?”
“Oh, no big deal,” said Ben. “He was arrested, for drunk driving.”
I looked at my youngest son in wonder and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” said Ben. “I couldn’t help it. He’s alright, but he wants to see you. He didn’t know where you were, and he called here. He asked me if I knew where you were. As if you’d ever be here. But you are here. I’ll be darned.”
“Can I use your phone?” I said, laughing because I couldn’t help it, either.
“Sure,” he answered, tossing me a cordless one from the kitchen bar-window.
“Where’s Chet?” I asked, as I pushed the button with Quincy’s name beside it.
“He’s at work,” Ben answered. “He doesn’t have bankers’ hours, like I do.”
“Thanks for calling, Dad,” said Quincy, when he answered the phone and heard my voice. “It’s no big deal, but I’d like to talk with you about it, if you can find the time. Of course I’ll understand if you’re too busy. Where are you?”
“I’m at Ben’s,” I said, and I started laughing again, or something like it.
“I’m glad you find it funny,” said Quincy. “What are you doing at Ben’s?”
“I don’t find it funny,” I said, but I was laughing harder now, and Ben was looking at me like I’d at last lost it.
“Okay,” I said, getting as serious as a CIA director who had just killed Jimmy Huffa. “Where are you? In Houston?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tomorrow soon enough?”
“Sure,” he said. “Thanks, Dad.”
I gestured to Ben that I was going to use the phone again and pushed the button for his mother. She answered it before its second ring.
“I’m going to stop in Houston on my way home,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “You’d better straighten that boy out. Where are you now?”
“I’m at Ben’s,” I said.
“What are you doing at Ben’s?” she asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said, stopping myself from laughing again. “I’ll bore you with some of it when I get home. My meeting here went as I expected, and I just thought I’d stop and see the son of my right hand.”
“Well,” she said. “Don’t you give your other son the back of any hand.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I love you.”