Humpty Dumpty in Oakland Read online

  “Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Lane said in her smooth, deep voice, “you really look sad today.”

  “I am,” he said, agreeing to that.

  “Don’t look so sad,” she said. “Look on the bright side.” She went back to her desk and got, from the drawer, a set of car keys. “Why don’t I drive you over to the location I made mention of? I be glad to show it to you.”

  “Maybe later,” he said.

  “Why not now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, hearing himself mumble. “I have to get back to the lot.”

  “You might miss out on the opportunity,” she said.

  “Maybe so,” he said, feeling dulled and weighed down.

  “Listen, Mr. Miller,” she said softly, leaning her bare, round, brown arms on the counter. “You got to act or you miss out. I know that one thing I learned from my years in real estate; if you want to get somewhere, you have to take advantage of the situation and move. Do you know that?” She waited, but he said nothing; he gazed down at the floor, feeling his mind too empty for any answer. “You have to do or you be done. I mean, they do you. It not wrong to be live-wire.” Her voice had a warm, gentle patience, almost a lecturing quality, a mother-lecturing quality. “You not going to hurt anybody. I think that what bother you; you afraid you do something wrong to somebody. Because you in a business where everybody say that anyhow.”

  He nodded.

  Mrs. Lane said, “I talk to you before and I remark to myself and Mr. Jones, who help me here. You’re a good person to work with Mr.—what his name? Mr. Fergesson. He completely honest, too. I take my car to him…” Her voice trailed off. “Well, I have my own mechanic.”

  To himself, Al thought, A Negro mechanic. She wouldn’t dare take her car to Jim Fergesson, honest as he is. Because he probably wouldn’t work on her car. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But she can’t take the chance. It isn’t worth it.

  “Can I show you that location?” Mrs. Lane said, holding up her car keys.

  “No,” he said. “Some other time. Thanks.”

  As he left the real-estate office, he saw that she was watching him go; she watched him until the side of the building cut off his sight of her and hers of him.

  Going back, he said, speaking across the threshold, “Maybe in another couple of days. When my plans are more jelled.”

  Mrs. Lane smiled at him. With compassion, he thought. Compassion and understanding. He went on then. Back to his car.

  He thought, She just wants to sell me something. But he knew it was more than that; not that at all, actually. What was it, then? Love, he thought. Love for him. Big, middle-aged, good-looking, light-skinned, Negro business woman, he thought. Wants to mother me, if possible. He felt depressed, and yet, at the same time, it seemed to him as if some of his burden had departed. He did not feel as bad as before. That’s a smart woman, a smart saleswoman; she knows her stuff, he thought. A real professional. I’ll be back. She knows that.

  That peasant-minded, shrewd, cretin-brained old asshole Fergesson has put me here, he thought. Where I have to rely on this, on some woman feeling sorry for me. Where I have nothing else to get by on; I have no other way to survive, no system of my own. I have to appeal.to the soft side of some woman real-estate broker.

  What I ought to do, he thought, is ruin his sale, screw up his sale forever; I ought to open a whorehouse on the lot and bring disgrace on that location. I ought to turn it into a—what, that a used-car lot isn’t already?

  Who looks down on me? he asked himself. Everyone? Each person?

  He did not feel like going back to his lot. He started up his car, driving in no particular direction; he merely drove through the downtown Oakland traffic, enjoying the feel of the car. It was a good solid old Chrysler with leather seats. The shift would not go into reverse, however, and so he had acquired it for seventy-five dollars. But still, it was a good car. Good enough for any reasonable person. A fine highway car.

  As he drove along he conjured up, inside his mind, a sales presentation which would move this particular item; he dwelt on that, to keep himself occupied.

  When he got back to Al’s Motor Sales he saw that the big white door of the garage was shut. The old man had closed up the garage, but not for lunch, since the Pontiac was gone. The old-fashioned cardboard sign on the doors had the hands turned so that it all read:

  WILL RETURN AT 2.30

  As he parked amid the cars on the lot, he saw that a second car, a nearly new Cadillac, had followed him and was parking behind him, next to his Chevrolet. He got out, and so did the driver of the Cad.

  “Hello,” the man called.

  Al shut the door of his car and walked toward the man. The man, in his early fifties, had on a smartly-tailored business suit, tie—the narrow fashionable type of tie—and the pointed Italian style of shoes that Al saw in the ads and uptown store-windows. The man smiled at him. He had a reasonably friendly manner. His hair was curly, gray, and although somewhat long, was strikingly cut. Al felt a little awed.

  “Hi,” Al said. “How are you, today?” It was his standard greeting.

  On his lot there surely was nothing to interest this well-dressed and obviously well-to-do man, who drove last year’s Cadillac. For an instant Al felt uneasy; perhaps this was a tax agent from the State, or even from the Federal Government—a host of ideas flew through his brain as he faced the man, keeping a smile of greeting on his face.

  And then he recognized the man. This was one of Fergesson’s old customers. Obviously the man had brought his car around to the garage for work, and found the garage shut.

  “I’m looking for Jim,” the man said, in a full, impressive voice. “I see the door’s shut, though.” He lifted his arm and looked at a wristwatch visible by the silver cuff-link. Al gazed at both the watch and the cuff-link, and a deep, perplexing yearning came up inside him. That was something he had always wanted: a good wristwatch, the kind he had seen advertised in the New Yorker.

  Al said, “He’s probably picking up a part. Or maybe somebody broke down on the road. They call in to him instead of the A.A.A.”

  “I can see why,” the man said.

  If I had even three good cars, Al thought, I could attract customers like this. If I had anything decent to show . . . he felt gloomy, and he put his hands into his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels and staring down at the pavement. He could think of nothing to say.

  “I’ve been coming to him for four and a half years,” the man said. “For any little thing I need, even grease jobs.”

  Al said, “He sold the garage.”

  The man’s eyes widened. With dismay, he said, “No.”

  “That’s right,” Al said. His gloom increased; he found it almost impossible to speak. So he continued rocking back and forth.

  “Too old?” the man said.

  “Heart or something,” Al murmured.

  “Well, I am certainly sorry,” the man said. “Really sorry. It’s the end of an era. The end of the old craftsmanship.”

  Al nodded.

  “I haven’t been in for a month or so,” the man said. “When did he decide? He must have just decided.”

  “Yes,” Al said.

  The man put out his hand; Al noticed it, started, drew his own hand out and shook. “My name is Harman,” the man said. “Chris Harman. I’m in the record business. I run Teach Records.”

  “I see,” Al said.

  “You don’t think he’ll be back,” Harman said, again looking at his watch. “Well, I can’t wait. Tell him I was by. I’ll call him on the phone and tell him how sorry I am. Good day.” Nodding, and giving a friendly wave to Al, he got back into his Cadillac, shut the door, shifted into reverse, and, in a moment, had backed from the lot and out into the San Pablo traffic. Presently the Cadillac had disappeared from sight.

  Half an hour later the old man’s Pontiac appeared and parked. As Fergesson got out, Al walked up to him.

  “An old customer of yours came by,” he said
. “He was sorry to hear you sold the garage.”

  “Who?” Fergesson said, as he unlocked the garage door and pushed it up with both hands. With a worried expression he started into the garage. “God damn,” he said, “I’m really behind, now, with that job, having to go out like that.”

  “Harman,” Al said, following along after him.

  The old man said, “Yes, a ’58 Cadillac. Good-looking guy, silver hair. Around fifty.”

  “Owns a record line or something,” Al said.

  The old man switched on a trouble lamp and dragged the long rubber cord across the grease-covered floor of the garage, toward a Studebaker which was up on the hoist. “You know that brick building up on 23rd, just off Broadway? Up where those new car agencies are? Near where you branch off to get to the lake? Anyhow, his place is up there. He owns the whole building; it’s all his record company. He makes records. A presser.”

  “So he said,” Al said. He waited for a time, watching the old man lie down on his back on the flat cart with its castors; Fergesson rolled skillfully beneath the Studebaker and resumed work.

  “Listen,” the old man said, from beneath the car.

  Al bent down.

  “He makes dirty records,” the old man said.

  At that, Al felt his scalp crawl. “That well-dressed guy? With that car?” He could hardly believe it; in his mind he would have pictured it completely the other way. A man who made dirty records . . . it would be a short, greasy, sloppily-dressed man, with perhaps green-tinted glasses, a furtive look, bad teeth, a hoarse voice, picking his teeth with a toothpick. “No kidding,” he said.

  “That’s only one thing he makes,” the old man said. “That’s just between you and me; it’s not public.”

  “Okay,” Al said, interested.

  “It’s not his name on it, Teach Records. It’s one of those party labels, I mean, no label at all.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He came by about a year ago. He’s been coming to me to get his car fixed for years. He brought a box of dirty records and wanted me to sell them.”

  Al laughed. “No kidding.”

  “I—” The old man wheeled himself out for a moment, lying on his back and looking up at Al. “I kept the box around for a while, but it didn’t do anything. There were some folders.” He got laboriously to his feet. “I think I’ve got a couple left. Sort of dirty-joke folders advertising the records.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Al said. He followed the old man into the office, where he stood as the old man rummaged in the overflowing desk drawers. At last, in an envelope, the old man came onto what he wanted.

  “Here.” He passed the envelope to Al.

  Opening the envelope, Al found some glossily-printed small folders, the size to be put out in a little heap on a counter. A drawing on the front, of a nude girl, with the words SPREE RECORDS SUMMER FUN-FEST LIST (FOR MEN ONLY), and then, inside, a list of titles. The tides themselves had nothing dirty about them.

  “Songs?” he said. “Like ‘Ruth Wallace’?”

  “Mostly monologues,” the old man said. “I listened to one. It was about Eva crossing the ice; you know, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

  “Was it dirty?”

  “Really dirty,” the old man said. “Every word I ever heard. Some guy was reading it. Harman said it was some great comedian who writes a lot—or wrote a lot; he said the guy was dead, I think—for all the major magazines. Some really famous guy. You would have recognized the name. Bob something.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “No,” Fergesson said.

  “I’ll be darned,” Al said. “I never met a guy who makes dirty records, before. It’s illegal, isn’t it? Records like that.”

  “Sure,” the old man said. “He makes a lot of other stuff, too. But that’s all I saw, just that one thing. I think he puts out some jazz and even some classical stuff. Specialty stuff. Several lines.”

  Turning to the back of the folder, Al saw that there was no address. No manufacturer. “I thought he was a banker,” he said. “Or a lawyer or a business man.”

  “He is a business man.”

  That was so. Al nodded.

  “He makes a lot of money,” the old man said. “You saw his car.”

  “Plenty of people drive Cads,” Al said, “who don’t have a bean.”

  “You should see his house. I have; I let him off there one day. He’s got a place up in Piedmont. Practically a mansion. With trees and hedges all around it. And a wrought-iron gate. Ivy growing up the side of the house. And a really classy-looking wife. He’s got at least one other car, too. A Mercedes-Benz sports car.”

  “Maybe not paid for,” Al said. “He could have almost no equity in the house. I will admit he knows how to dress.”

  “And yet he’s been here,” the old man said, “and stood around and talked to me, and not acted snotty; not acted like he had on a nice suit like that and was in a garage.”

  “Some guys have that,” Al said. “A real gentleman has that. Grace. It’s part of being a real aristocrat.” But, he thought, not the kind of profession he had ever identified with the aristocracy. “I hope we’re talking about the same guy,” he said.

  “Ask him when you see him again,” the old man said. “He’ll probably be back if he needs some work done on his car. Ask him if he doesn’t sell party records.”

  “Maybe I will,” Al said.

  “He’ll tell you to your face,” the old man said. “He’s not ashamed. It’s a business. Like any other.”

  “Hardly that,” Al said. “Hardly like any other, considering it’s illegal. You could probably put the guy in jail with what you know. You better not tell anybody; I hope you aren’t telling everybody you see. Didn’t he say to keep it quiet?”

  His face flushing, Fergesson said, “I never told anybody but you. Now I wish I hadn’t told you. Get off my back.” So saying, he wheeled himself under the Studebaker once more and resumed work.

  “No offense,” Al said. He wandered back out of the garage again, into the bright sunlight.

  I could blackmail him, he thought. The idea bolted through his mind for an instant, sweeping everything away, leaving him trembling.

  Obviously Harman no longer made dirty records; this was a thing out of his past. Probably in those days he had not been wealthy, well-dressed, fashionable. Maybe he had just been starting out; he had not yet arrived. This was a period in his life that he hoped to conceal forever.

  Thinking that, he felt himself become cold and then even colder; he felt his heart cease beating for a moment. That really made the blackmail business into something plausible.

  Tell me to my face hell, he thought. If Harman knew I knew, he’d probably turn black and fall down in a faint.

  It was a wholly new idea for making money, the blackmail idea. What had Mrs. Lane said to him? Some damn thing about you got to act or you miss out. Maybe, he thought, she’s a prophetess. What’s it called? A medium, looking into the future. A fortuneteller.

  This was the ideal business opportunity.

  It took no capital. No stock. No fixtures. No investment of any kind. Not even ads or business cards. Nor a State Tax franchise.

  But blackmail was wrong. And yet, so was the used-car business. Everybody knew that. Nothing was lower than selling used cars, and he had been doing it now for a number of years. Was blackmailing a dirty-record manufacturer worse than selling used cars? It was hard to tell.

  While he sat at his desk in the little house in the center of his lot, he saw an old brown Cadillac draw up to the curb. A large colored woman stepped out, wearing a cloth coat. She walked toward him, smiling, and he recognized her as Mrs. Lane.

  Rising, he went outside to meet her.

  “How do you do, Mr. Miller?” she said, in a pleasant and yet somehow slightly mocking voice. “How are you? Seems to me I just saw you not an hour ago, and here I am to visit.” Her smile broadened.

  “Come on in,” he said, holdi
ng open the door of his office.

  “Thank you.” She entered, stood while he arranged a chair for her. “Thank you,” she repeated, and sat down, crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. “Mr. Miller,” she said, when he had also seated himself, “you was in talking to me about a lot? For your used-car sales business?” Frowning, deep in thought, she said, “I have called several persons and I have come up with several locations, one of which I think has special importance possibly to you. It would be ideal for a used-car sales lot, although it never been used that way before.” Her voice, soft, slurred, came over him like a cloud; he sat listening, letting it happen to him.

  Outdoors a passerby stopped to examine one of his cars. But Al made no move; he did not stir from his chair.

  “This lot,” Mrs. Lane said, “is in downtown Oakland, around Tenth Street. In the real business district where you don’t see so many lots. I mean, it isn’t on no used-car lot row.”

  “I see,” he said. And then, drawing himself up in his chair, he said, “I’ll tell you; I’ve been considering another line of business entirely. A new business opportunity that came my way since I talked to you.”

  Glancing up at him doubtfully, she said, “You mean since you saw me? An hour ago, when you was in my office?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She eyed him for a time. “My goodness,” she said.

  “It’s an entirely different line,” he said. “I was sitting here giving it some thought.”

  “You haven’t decided,” she said. “For sure.”

  “No,” he admitted.

  She said, “Mr. Miller, of course I don’t have no idea in the world what line it is you talking about. I know you could go into it however and do a bang-up job; I know that. However, I do point out to you that used-car sales is what you have been doing for some time, and in my opinion there’s no doubt but what that your chosen profession.” Her voice trailed off; she did not seem certain, now; she seemed to be trying to probe him, to draw him out. The notion of the new business opportunity had clearly thrown her off. She went on, “I like to drive you to the location in question, if you would be willing to permit me. For me, that’s an offer always good. I always be willing to do that.”