No Place for an Angel (10 page)

She wondered if even people who were out of it could escape, people who worked in filling stations and ten-cent stores, and she rather thought not, for the air that summer had been doctored, the water chemically treated: a sense of power permeated an entire continent. When a locomotive bears down on you, even if you are standing safely twelve feet back on the platform you will still feel the surge, the tingle, the something very close to joy and very close to fear. The little stewardess now with her professional ease refusing a drink was sitting on the chair arm opposite, waggling her foot, and all up and down her charming young self the message was flashing out that here before her was Someone in the Know. She was careful not to overplay her knowledge; she skillfully included Catherine in everything she said.

“It must really seem very peculiar to you both to take a commercial flight. What I mean is, how did it ever happen?”

“Oh, well, Senator Ogden—” Catherine began.

“He had to fly out yesterday,” Jerry filled in. “They left me behind to clean up one or two little jobs. I'm sort of a glorified errand boy, you know.”

The little stewardess knew just how to smile at that and say without saying it that Jerry's picture had been on the cover of a national magazine in recent months, a prototype of a rising class of quick-witted, well-heeled and powerfully connected young men in Washington who knew where to go and whom to see and how to make things happen.

“TV was as close as I could get to the conventions. I was at a girl friend's apartment in Denver. We both knew a couple of reporters there. Glenn Forrester was one. You may know him.”

“Sure. Sure, I know Glenn. He's a friend of yours?”

“No. I know him through Edie. She knows him very well.”

“Very well, huh? I see. This your girl friend in Denver? I see.”

Learning forward slightly in his dark tropical-wear summer suit, sipping bourbon and water and ticking the heel of one heavily stitched expensive black shoe against the edge of his lounge chair, no more mindful of the land beneath him, of the gloriously fading
sunset than if it were unfolding on a color TV screen someone else was looking at halfway across a motel lobby, Jerry Sasser was turning over in his mind something more important to him than the conversation. His wife was pretty positive what the something else was, and that it was not yet decided, only that it was being given a chance to develop. A nudge one way or the other and he might possibly forget it entirely. Catherine knew that given a very few more years the little stewardess, who had been so careful to make her very youth “interesting,” could have been her and Jerry's daughter. Age, to Catherine, seemed a simple enough fact, but far from wanting to accept his own, Jerry had once gone dark with anger after a political tea party during which she had felt moved to show a recent snapshot of their son. At the time he had simply removed the photo from her hands, said it wasn't a good one, and put it in his coat pocket. The minute the door had closed on the last guest, and perhaps needing a drink rather acutely after all that coffee, he had turned on her and, flushed with anger, had ripped the photo apart. Could he have? Well, he had; he had done it. How could she, then, after the quarrel, the anger, the tears, the hurt, the inevitable slackening off of the shock, put herself in Jerry's place? Was it the loss of youth that was getting at him, month by month, more and more? She could not understand.

No bad-looking woman herself, with a somewhat tall figure as slim as ever, wearing naturally and well the ageless kind of hair-do, long and drawn into a knot, that few women can get away with, she had been known, more than a few times, to look positively regal. “Cath'en, you jes' look so goddamn
nice!
” was how one of the party chairmen (Southern) had put it. But even men who got enthusiastic were not referring so much to sex.

With Jerry it was different; he was known as a “sexy guy,” a phrase she was always overhearing. The marvel of it was to Catherine that the more deeply he got involved in working out the nation's politics, the higher he climbed among famous names, the sexier he seemed to become. It was like a top-level collusion, a psychic conspiracy in the dark world of power. Maybe he had hardly guessed himself that the two things could mesh so perfectly together. Until it happened. Then suddenly there he was, a fusion of nerves and looks, of leanness, strength, control and possible ruthlessness, with the ability, above all, of knowing how not to miss the moment, how to get a thing done and make it stick. Jerry sat and walked and stood with his head tilted slightly, eyes with lids slightly lowered, moving restlessly—they seldom stopped on anything. It seemed to Catherine that the approach of age to anybody as vivid with energy as that must be any number of years away, but she guessed he didn't think so. Tactful toward this tender subject, she never mentioned it, but far more reassurance than she could provide was in charge of the little airline stewardess, who went on talking and nodding, eyes drawn increasingly to Jerry Sasser, cheeks flushing a little, lips parting, forgetting that Catherine was there at all. Well. She looked down through the night air, down to a small forlorn diagram of lighted streets, the sparse glimmer of car lights along a highway. He would have it the way he wanted it as long as he could. She knew that now. She moved her head slowly, like a person afraid sudden motion may reawaken injury.

“
Vogue
, Mrs. Sasser?”

The girl—Radley was her name, she had told them: Jan Radley—had duties to see to. But had found, just for them, her V.I.P.'s, new magazines, not yet put in the leather binders. Catherine accepted, nodding her thanks, while Jerry said, “Gee, that's great,” and began to leaf through two news magazines. “Jesus God!” he said.

This kind of language had still not gone over in a big way with surprisingly large segments of the American public, and Jerry seldom indulged himself in using it. Catherine turned to him. He was staring at a news item, and Catherine had time to reflect that even in a state of genuine alarm nowadays Jerry looked slick—a snap of the lens, a negative emerging from the wash, a caption, and here he would be: Senator's Bright Young Man Alarmed at News Story. “Son of a bitch,” said Jerry. His finger jabbed into the page.

“What is it?”

“The very thing I stayed over to stop. This morning. But it was already in print. Could we both have got the days mixed up, him and me? Else how could we sit there and agree about not running something already running?”

She took the magazine from him and glanced at it. “It's just a little paragraph.”

“A little paragraph predicting a big story about to break next week. You got to read between the lines a little, but not much. The point is, not only the big story but the little one too was supposed to be thrown out, killed completely.”

She returned the magazine to him. “Oh, well, Jerry, they print these things in five or six places. Maybe he didn't know how to stop it if it was already printed in Chicago.”

“To hell with that. They're paid to think of that, these guys. They know. Me, I know too. We even discussed it. And, hell, this magazine must have been put on in Washington.”

“We came down in Memphis,” she reminded him.

He thought it over. “Some damn little Southern bureau, you mean? Didn't get the word?”

“Maybe there're just a few advance copies. Maybe it won't get around.”

“Maybe, maybe. Maybe he's knifed me. Maybe the cards were stacked that way.”

“You sound like a gangster,” Catherine laughed.

But she could not put him off; in fact, she knew better than to try. His lean hand, dark-haired and tense, curled, then knotted around the magazine. He stabbed the end of the roll against the lounge table, snapping its center ridge. Ruined for other people, was the commonplace thing she didn't say. There would be no earthly use trying to communicate anything to him now, for until the plane landed it would be his cage and when it landed he would proceed as directly, as deviously, as cunningly as he felt impelled, to reach the point of release, of wising up, of knowing exactly how much damage it had done him to have openly and completely failed in a commission he had been specifically instructed by Senator Ogden himself to accomplish in Washington that morning. And then, my love, Catherine thought—as at that moment, the little stewardess returned, walking expertly as the plane pitched into a warmer level of air, moving solicitously from passenger to passenger but with, of course, the Sassers sky-written in large letters upon her—and then, my dear, if you're still around, your chance will come all right.

Politics, tension, women—if they soared to the moon or plowed away to the South Pole in an atomic-powered submarine, all three would come anyway, inevitably materialize, winging like pigeons out of the air, homing to nestle on Jerry Sasser's shoulders.

Jan Radley was sitting down on the chair arm again, her soft voice purring just adequately above the undertone of the plane. Yes, she did by chance have a lay-over in Dallas, and yes she would just love to come to the Longhorn Hotel for a party tonight, and if the Vice-President-to-be—oh, she had been for him from the first; why, she was one of the few who had said, Well, why don't they get him for Vice-President, and Edie had said, Now, Jan, that's the silliest thing, but she said, Well, I can't see why it's so silly, and sure enough it began to happen right on the TV set— “Well, now,” said Jerry, “we're making a mistake raiding Harvard for a brain trust. What about some of these girls' schools, eh, Catherine?”

“Why, yes, I think so,” said Catherine, and smiled her warm approval.

“You're going to have to brief me someday on just how you figured that. Is it a promise?” And he leaned over to light the cigarette of the trim blue-suited girl, who bent her cropped head forward over the flame.

Does it have to be this way? Catherine wondered. To think it did not have to be that way was like getting up on impulse out of a bed of high fever from snakebite maybe, and saying that nothing was the matter at all.

Catherine Latham and Jerry Sasser had been brought up together in a little Texas town called Merrill, about a hundred miles north of Dallas. It was one of the last of those Deep South-looking, deeply shaded little towns before the big West begins with its dry immensities of mesquite, cactus, arroyos, foothills, tumbleweeds, jackrabbits, alkali, desert and dust. Therefore the shade seems sweeter in little towns like Merrill and the water seems clearer and cooler and tastes better than in towns to the east of there.

All her life Catherine was conscious of living on the edge of something; always, they had assumed it was the West, but when she was a child and they struck oil on her father's land it seemed too that they had lived for a long while without knowing it on the edge of wealth. The Lathams were rich then, in a home-made, prodigious way. Before that they had just been farmers; not poor-white, not even quite dirt farmers, but just farmers who like most other farmers in those days didn't ever make much money. In those precious pre-wealthy days, they had got along fine with all the countryside and even went to revival meetings to sing all about it: “Makes me love ev-er-rie bo-die,” they sang. But the first oil Ben Latham got was off a neighbor's land; he had bought up Olive Hickman's oil rights back when Olive needed the money.

From then on there was bad blood: Olive Hickman said he ought to be allowed to buy back the rights for all parts, parcels and sections of land where the Lathams hadn't struck oil yet. Ben Latham said he would be crazy to sell them back; it was only a matter of time until the oil came in. He wouldn't let go of a single one. Olive threatened to go to court and sue, and Hickman children did not speak to Latham children. They beat hell out of them instead and threw brickbats at them. The Lathams left the farm and moved into Merrill. They bought the biggest house on the best street, a great big tall white Victorian house with lots of porches and a turret with a flagpole on it. Catherine's sister was a prissy little girl who told at school that the house was so big she couldn't walk around it in a whole day. Her brother Edward from across the room (it was during a hailstorm and all the pupils were congregated in groups up in the auditorium, being unable to go outside) said, “You hush that up. It's a lie.”

Out at the old place, out at the farm, about a mile from Merrill, two old uncles were still living, Uncle Dick and Uncle Mark. They wouldn't leave no matter how much money there was. They wouldn't even buy one new thing for fear of having to part with something old. Catherine would go out to see them in the summertime. They would give her cold water from the spring and peel peaches for her with their little fine whetstone-sharpened knife blades, laying the peeled peach sections on pieces of newspaper for her to eat. They would tell her stories about Sandy Gulch.

Sandy Gulch was nothing but a great big sandbar along a little stream most people wouldn't even call a branch, let alone a creek. In Texas it was called a river. Sometimes it dried up completely. The cottonwood, the eucalyptus trees and willows grew all along the horizon of Sandy Gulch. The wind had swept and ridged the sand which lay in pure white corrugations or gathered into damp glistening metallic fans, almost black, like horsehair sofas. The importance of Sandy Gulch, besides being a good place to go walking or wading or have a picnic, was that in the old days, the wagon trains for the West had crossed here. Uncle Mark and Uncle Dick didn't exactly remember it, but they had heard tell of it all their days. The wagons had come creaking out of the east to lower with shouts into the road that angled down from the eastern bank of Sandy Gulch into the sand. There they would have to stop and unload, like as not, because it was hard enough in some seasons to take even a horse across Sandy Gulch, let alone a wagon load of furniture and provisions.