The Shadow Cabinet (28 page)

“Those were the best years I gave to anyone, the best years of my life,” Combs was saying. “I couldn't tell you how far I walked, how many places I went. The first time was from Selma to Montgomery, walked all the way, and got my head busted open outside the Jefferson Davis Motel, I think it was. There was some kind of honky-tonk next door and some trash standing out there alongside the road, a-hooting an' hollering. Closer we got to town, the worse it was, and so we had to close up a little. I was walking on the outside, right along the edge of the highway. Next to me was a Catholic priest, next to him a Congregationalist lady from somewhere up in Massachusetts. All of a sudden, I heard someone call out my name, call out just clear as a bell. ‘Hey, Dorsey Combs, what are you doing with them niggers, carpetbagger?' this fella yells at me. It was a used-car salesman I knew from up in South Carolina and I couldn't figure out what he was doing with that trash standing up alongside the road. So I tell the folks around me to keep moving, but I go over to him real quiet like, on account of those were the rules we laid out before we left Selma—no talking, no laughing, no heckling back—but once I step off the pavement I'm back with my own folks again, I can talk their talk, they can talk mine. So I say to this car salesman, ‘Who you callin' carptetbagger, you redneck peckerwood sonofabitch.' I never saw who it was cold-cocked me first, whether it was him or someone else, but when I woke up, I was in jail, me and that Congregationalist lady both. First time she'd ever been in jail.”

“But not the first for you,” Buster Foreman said.

“Could be; I don't remember now.” He studied Foreman curiously. “How come you know all this? You used to be government, son. If you're not now, you used to be. I seen too many of 'em not to know. What is it you wanna find out about?”

“What Bob Combs was doing all those years.”

“Go ask him. Haven't spoken to him in twenty-two years; not him, not the rest of that family. He's a half-brother—not real kin where I come from. Me, I'm my daddy's side. He worked in a textile mill, same as I started out.”

“When did you get into the movement?”

“I went up to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, training to help organize the textile mills and the coal tipples. There was some folks from the NAACP up there at the same time and that's where I met up with them. Rosa Parks. You remember Rosa Parks?”

“I don't think so.”

“December 1955. She started up the Montgomery boycott. Wouldn't sit in the back of the bus and got fined fourteen dollars. Just fourteen dollars to get it all started up. Find something you can get started up with fourteen dollars these days. Couldn't even get a hotel dinner in Nashville.” Combs waited for Buster Foreman to answer, but he had nothing to say. “What do you do—work for a newspaper, digging up dirt?”

“No, not a newspaper; just curious.”

“So you're looking for dirt,” Combs replied. “Lemme tell you something before you get started. You go butting into Bob Combs's business, you're buying yourself a whole lotta trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Dorsey Combs picked up the whiskey cup. “The kind of trouble that don't need asking. Bob Combs is like that textile mill over in South Carolina that run me out of town—big business.” The CB crackled from behind the counter, a trucker's voice warning of a disabled truck on an exit ramp, but there was no one there to hear.

“Let me try something on you,” Buster said, “just see what you think. If Bob Combs's politics are pretty bad today, they were worse twenty years ago. What would you say to that?”

Combs nodded silently, looking toward the front windows. “There's a whole lotta folks smarter than you an' me that never figured that out, did they?”

“So when you were active in the movement, what was he doing?” Foreman asked.

“You're wasting your time,” Combs said. “If he was up to no good, who's gonna say so? If you find out, who's gonna change him? The only way you're gonna change him is change the country, and that's not the way things are moving. You saw those folks tonight, buried so deep in misery it'd take more than anything I know to blow 'em out, an' I don't see anything like that walking down the road, not in my lifetime, not in yours. No, these here are the days when you gotta find your own way back, son, every man for himself. Not politics, not gov'ment—nothing. No one else is gonna help you, no one at all.…”

“Who do you know up in South Carolina who could tell me something about Bob Combs?”

“It's bad,” Dorsey Combs continued, ignoring the question. “Maybe it's been worse, but it's bad. Worst I ever had was when I got myself picked up down in Laurel, Mississippi—'60, I think it was. I didn't know anyone down there, just the advance man that come in by bus from New Orleans, but he hit the road before I got there, scared clean out of sight. Used to be a YMCA fella. I called on a few colored folks, but they wouldn't hardly talk to me and I couldn't blame them. Two hours after I got into town, the police picked me up. That was the worst week I ever spent. Two nights straight they took me out in a car, just me and these two deputies, packin' pistols and a riot gun, riding around the back roads—just the three of us. They had me hog-tied in the back seat. I never knew whether they were gonna bring me back or not. The place they had me locked up didn't have any winders. They took away my belt, my shirt, my pants, even my shoelaces. I thought it was all over. They woke me up one night with a bucket of cold horse piss poured over my head. Things have got pretty bad when they got you so far down you don't even have nothing to hang yourself with when you're ready to go. What you got left after that?”

Dorsey Combs raised his sad, glistening eyes to the small figure squeaking toward the table in a pair of grease-colored shoes, carrying a steaming mug of coffee. He wore a counterman's paper hat, a dirty white T-shirt, an apron and white trousers stained gray by a day at the grill. The cap and T-shirt carried the same logo as the electric sign outside, the menu, and the gilt-lettered signs that decorated the walls:
Colonel Tom Pepper's Fried Fritters
.

Dorsey Combs introduced Tom Pepper. “Colonel Tom and me go back a long way,” he said.

“How come you're out here?” Tom Pepper asked. “She run you off again?” He was small and wire-thin, with muscular arms as pale as lard. The yellowish-gray hair was long on his neck and the scanty sideburns reached far down his jaws. Two tattoos, a black panther and an American eagle, their blue ink faded with age, clawed their way up his forearms.

“Me and my friend wanted someplace to talk.”

Tom Pepper looked carefully at Buster Foreman. “Where you from?”

“Washington.”

“He's come down to sample your fritters,” Dorsey Combs said dryly. “Fried any which way, take your choice. Got corn, chicken, oyster, okra, and I don't know what all. Colonel Tom's got a place up near Gatlinburg, right on the road where all the rubberneck tourists come rolling through. Must be worth a million dollars a year, all that free advertising. He's gonna get him a national franchise that-a-way.”

Tom Pepper looked again at Buster Foreman. “You in the fast-food business?”

“No, afraid not.”

Pepper called across the room to a small, dark-haired woman who was wiping the stainless-steel splash plate behind the grill. “Hey, Cora, you got any batter fresh?”

“All finished,” she answered without turning.

“With fritters it's all in the batter,” Tom Pepper said, “same as it is with fried chicken or pancakes. What I got is an old family recipe.”

“Handed down in the family Bible,” said Dorsey Combs. “Come with his chicken fricassee and his Confederate colonel's commission.”

Tom Pepper didn't move his eyes from Buster Foreman. “You know any fast-food folks up there in Washington?”

“No, sorry.”

“Colonel Tom used to be in the car business in South Carolina,” Combs amplified, refilling his cup. He stirred the coffee and whiskey together with a spoon. “Had him the Hupmobile agency in Spartanburg. Had the Kaiser-Frazer distributorship. Had the Packard franchise. Had a Studebaker lot. Would have had him the Edsel too, only someone took it away from him.”

“Shit,” Tom Pepper said. “I wouldn'ta had no Edsel agency. I knowed it was a lemon first time I laid eyes on it. I started me up a foreign car business in Darlington, doing real good, until some sonofabitch stole it offa me. You notice I ain't mentioning any names.” He looked at Dorsey Combs, then back at Foreman. “After that, I got into the restaurant business. You a car man?”

“Not much.”

Tom Pepper turned and called to the woman at the grill. “Hey, Cora, hon. Reach me one of them cards under the cash register.”

The woman put down her rag, moved to the cash register, stooped, and then held out a card.

“Reach it over here,” Tom Pepper said.

Her shoulders dropped, she put her hands on her hips in annoyance for an instant, but then left the cash register and crossed to where they sat. Her dark hair was bound in a snood and there were deep shadows under her eyes. “That's not reaching, that's walking,” she said as she put the card on the table. “Your feet aren't any more wore out than mine. How come you're out here so late?” she asked Dorsey Combs sympathetically.

“He's resting up,” Tom Pepper told her.

“Did she throw you out, or what?”

“We're talking business,” Tom Pepper told her. “You go mind your own.”

She looked at her husband disapprovingly. “Dorsey comes drinking himself into trouble out here again, it
is
my business. I won't tolerate any trouble with that tabernacle woman.”

“You'll tolerate trouble with me, you don't git on back there where you belong,” Tom Pepper warned without looking up. He passed the business card to Buster Foreman. “This here's my new card,” he said in a friendly voice. “Just had 'em made up.”

“That'll be the day,” Cora said.

“You and her both,” he threatened.

She laughed wearily. “I'll bet. She'll come out here and raise a knot on your head you could grow hair on, then she'd take those skinny bones of yours and scramble them up in that batter so fast you'd come out not knowing whether you was okra or pork sausage.”

“I don't have any pork sausage,” Tom Pepper said, insulted.

“You would by the time she turned loose of you.”

Tom Pepper ignored her, concentrating on the card he'd passed to Buster Foreman. “'Course this here isn't the only outlet I got,” he said politely. “There's one on the road to Gatlinburg, like Dorsey said, but this one here is the number one store.”

Buster Foreman nodded, studying the card. Like everything else in the truck stop restaurant, it was another advertisement for Colonel Tom Pepper and his fried fritters. In the lower-right-hand corner, it announced that franchises were available.

It was after one o'clock and the dark streets were deserted when Buster Foreman drove Dorsey Combs into Knoxville. At Combs's direction, he turned through the downtown commercial district and into a shabby old residential area now gone to furnished rooms and boardinghouses.

“Just a little Bible reading an' hand holdin' is all,” Combs was murmuring drunkenly, his mind now running free, disengaged from that caution that had restrained their earlier conversation. “Find yourself a good woman an' hold on to her, that'd be my advice. Find one an' stick to her. Don't go running around like I did. Up at Highlander in the fifties, met a little woman from Boston. College teacher. Unitarian. Smart too. Talked the way the books talk, right off the page. I mean, if you could take an' let the words walk off the page the way they were written down, that's the way she talked. Like a goddamned dictionary.” He hiccuped and drew a deep breath. “But it was all wrote down. Book learning. When it come to bed learning an' you had her in the dark, had to be hand taught. She was some woman. Maybe she'd put up with it, all the women trouble I had. It's right up there,” he advised, pointing up the street with an unsteady hand. “That porch where the two lights are on.”

Foreman saw only one porch light. “A boardinghouse?” he asked. He'd been tempted by Dorsey Combs's condition to draw him out further on his half-brother, but couldn't bring himself to do it.

“Tolliver's. Rest home, they call it. Got a tax-exempt license. Where folks that have strayed can find a helpin' hand. But you've gotta be Pentecostal. You a Pentecostal?”

“No. I don't know much about it.”

“You an Odd Fellow, Order of Odd Fellows?”

“Don't know that, either. Why?”

“Ought to look into it for your old age. Odd Fellows got rest homes all over, old folks' homes, places where you can sit out the last years in peace an' quiet.” He hiccuped again. “Take care of you, take care of you good, better than any Medicare or social security, which they're gonna close down anyway. Only it's just for the Caucasian race, like the Republicans these days, that's the trouble. Coloreds have their own. You'd qualify. I'd rather be a new-baptized Pentecostal—better than a goddamned Democrat these days.” His fingers fished in the vest pocket for the tobacco plug. “She can put up with tobacco if it's snuff or chewing, but not much else. She's a right hefty piece of work, Miz Tolliver is, but she's got a hateful problem.” He bit down on the plug.”

“What problem's that?” Buster asked, drifting toward the curb.

“Her husband,” Combs said. “Stone cold dead in the britches. Just ease up here and I can slip out, quiet like, no doors slamming, no loud talk, hear?” He clapped Buster on the shoulder and eased the door open. “Nice talkin' to you, son,” he whispered. “I got your card. Something turns up, I'll send a picture postcard.”