Stronghold Read online

  Kenneth Quimby also said much the same to me, although not in Janet’s condemnatory tone. Indeed, Kenneth and Ethel sometimes came very close to approving Jimmy’s adoption of violence as a tactic in righting social wrongs. “Maybe,” Kenneth said during one memorable coffee hour after meeting, “the kid has all the courage we only pretend to have. We Friends have been abiding in patience and waiting on the Light for three hundred years now, and look where it’s gotten the world.”

  “Kenneth Quimby,” said Anna Marcy, “thee is talking rot. There is no courage in killing for one’s convictions, there is only courage in being willing to suffer for them. I cannot center down in meeting, knowing thee is seated beside me, your head full of killing.”

  That was a merry time of it, when during the next few weeks Anna and Elizabeth would not attend meeting but, instead, invited the rest of us to their home for midweek evening meeting for worship-sharing, and Kenneth and Ethel, seeing what was up, followed the same disruptive procedure and put us all in the most difficult spot as well as reducing First Day meeting for worship itself to no more than a Hayworth family gathering sometimes shared by Uri Shapiro. It took two months before peace reigned again, and we could put aside the bleak thought that Scammons Landing Meeting—or what was left of it—might have to be laid down.

  And now here is Jimmy Flood back among us.

  It turns out, as I suspected, that Jimmy and his mentor, the Reverend Hubert Digby, are very much involved in the Pentecostal movement. Their church is in Florida, but with a couple of other members of it who are providing the transportation, they have been attending to churches in Canada and are now on their way home. They had stopped at Scammons Landing on their way north so that Jimmy could visit us, but he was so unsure of his reception that he lost nerve and simply continued on his way. On the return trip, however, the Reverend Digby made an issue of this. When a sinner has come to Christ, he told Jimmy, he has not merely the right, but the duty, to stand proudly before the world and declare himself.

  So here is the new Jimmy Flood declaring himself, and more than that, putting in a bid for our hospitality. “The brethren with the car,” he says, “are doing some sightseeing for the day, but they’ll pick us up first thing tomorrow. I wonder if you could put us up for the night. Of course, if it’s inconvenient—”

  “Not a bit of it,” Emily says firmly. “Sarah Frisch told us about your being in town last month. We’ve been feeling awful that you didn’t drop in to say hello.”

  We, she says, using, as Emily would, the courteous plural. But I find in myself reservations about having even the new-model Jimmy Flood as a house guest, and from the expression on Janet’s face, I surmise she has a great many reservations. The others, however, David and Deborah and the two communards, seem much intrigued by Jimmy’s presence and manner. And, no question, having the very Negro Hubert Digby as a house guest makes up a little for the unpleasantness of that scene before meeting for worship when the Negro chauffeur, faced with the stony eyes of the three tourist ladies employing him, refused to enter the meeting house with them. Tempted he was, I am sure, but those eyes gave him a distinct signal to remember his place.

  So we have a large party for lunch, Ray McGrath and Lou Erlanger of the commune, apparently approving of our two house guests, joining us, and the longest grace ever to preface a meal at our table. It is our way to simply clasp hands around the table and share in brief silent thanks for our benisons. What we are now offered is a sermon by the Reverend Digby, an interminable discourse on the last supper of Jesus and the communion it denoted and the sacrifice it preceded, on and on in that lilting West Indian accent, musical but monotonous, so that my thoughts eventually wander far afield, a sign to me here, as it sometimes is at meetings for worship, that the voice of the messenger is outlasting his message.

  It goes far better during lunch when Jimmy, engagingly open for the first time in all my acquaintance of him, brings us up-to-date on his experiences during the past few years. A painful account it must be for him, because he doesn’t hedge on any detail, and what emerges is a record of petty crime, a loss of all self-respect, until, during the last of his several confinements in prison, he became the concern of the Reverend Digby, a prison visitor. Had, indeed, been brought to Jesus right there in prison and has never looked back.

  We are a long time at lunch, and then, after a talky afternoon, again at dinner, although this time without the company of Ray McGrath and Lou Erlanger, who have their commune to attend to, and Janet, who without a by-your-leave simply departs from the table early in the meal and then stays out of sight in her room for the rest of the evening. In a way, it is just as well she does. Her manner toward Jimmy throughout the day had been openly contemptuous, her verbal shots at him sometimes rude enough to make me flinch, although he bore up under them good-naturedly.

  At bedtime, without telling Emily, who always puts her foot down on what she regards as my excessive concern for the children, I go down the hall and tap a finger on Janet’s door. She opens the door in robe and slippers. Inside the room, I have to nerve myself to say it, her expression is so forbidding. “Is anything wrong?” I ask.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because of your behavior toward Jimmy all day long. And then that business of walking out at dinner. He must have felt it was aimed directly at him.”

  “It was.”

  “Then there’s no reason for any of it,” I point out. “It’s obvious that he’s changed.”

  “To what? A Jesus freak? That’s this year’s transformation. Come back next year and see what’s left of it.”

  “Janet, back in the old days when Jimmy was around so much of the time, did something happen between you two to turn you against him so violently? Something I don’t know about?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “I don’t believe you, Janet.”

  She studies me with narrowed eyes. She gives me the same painful feeling I have known before during such scenes with her, of a bitter hostility toward me for no reason I can comprehend. At last she says, “You’re right. In polite language, we went to bed together. It turned out he wasn’t really ready for the experience.”

  I say incredulously, “You mean a sixteen-year-old boy could persuade you to—”

  “Don’t be foolish. I asked him to screw me and he did. My mistake. Afterward he was working up to some petty blackmail, but I settled that on the spot, thank you. And there’s no use standing there and looking at me like that. If you don’t want honest answers when you cross-examine me, just don’t bring me into court. Now goodnight.”

  “Janet—”

  “Goodnight!”

  James Flood

  Coco is getting edgy, prowling the bedroom in his underwear shorts as if he is back in his cage at Raiford. Now and then he checks the midnight blackness outside the window through a slat in the Venetian blind.

  I finally say to him, “Hayworth House. A deluxe room, twin beds, private crapper. And free. What the hell more do you want?”

  “Man, I want to know for a certainty that Harvey and Lester will pull up here at five-thirty A.M. I would like to know where they are now. If they are somewhere getting stoned—”

  “You know them better than that.”

  “After three days’ touring the Eastern Seaboard with them, I know they are remarkably stupid.”

  I say, “So far they’ve delivered the goods. For that matter, you weren’t so bright yourself today, the way you overplayed the Reverend Digby act. You’ve got the wrong audience for it here.”

  “It was well done, Mr. Flood. It sold the customers the goods. That is what it was supposed to do.”

  “You laid it on too thick. You were supposed to run interference for me, not lead a revival meeting.”

  Coco says, “The only one not buying it is that Janet woman. You cannot lay this on me, laddie. She would not buy James Flood if he flew in on angel wings with a halo over his curly head. She is a mean, skinny bitch who thinks you are po
ison. Why is that? You made so much about all the pussycats gathered here. You never said one of them would be a tiger. That was a miscalculation.”

  “Not the kind that matters.”

  “It could be, man. You planned on female hostages who could be counted on for some crying and some praying and no complications. Easy handling of them, easy transport out of the country, they all get released in prime condition. That might not apply to tigers.”

  It had been a miscalculation. In my Scammons Landing reconnaissance last month, I had picked up word that one of the Hayworth girls had gotten herself married, and I had somehow taken it for granted that it was Janet. Not altogether my fault. The last time I had seen Deborah, she had been a little kid in jeans, sometimes getting underfoot and making a nuisance of herself, always stinking of horse manure from her riding lessons. But Janet was eighteen to my sixteen when I first came to the house, hot-looking for all her boniness, tough-talking as any man down in the south end of town. A standout among all those mealy-mouthed Quakers. I think she scared the hell out of the family. I know she scared the hell out of me.

  Especially the day when she pulled up in the car beside me where I was filling potholes on the road with a wheelbarrow of gravel. “Come up to the house,” she said.

  “Why?” Nobody else was home, the old man at the bank, the rest of them, including the maid, gone off shopping to Glens Falls, and the last thing I wanted was to be getting orders from Janet. “Anyhow, I have to finish this job.”

  “Later. Right now I want to see you at the house.”

  She drove away fast, spraying gravel all over me, and I waited awhile, just to show her I didn’t jump when she snapped her fingers, then I dragged ass up to the house. She was waiting for me in the foyer, puffing hard on a cigarette and looking all wound up and ready to explode. I had done something wrong, I had goofed off on some job, what was it her business? The old man gave me my work orders, the old lady told me not to get overtired tending the place, so what was this one stepping in for now?

  But she wasn’t offering explanations yet. She was piling up the mystery. “Upstairs,” she said. The court had given me a year’s probation, and I still had six months of it to go. It was the old man’s lawyer who had made the deal with the judge, and the old man who had signed all the papers. I didn’t say no to any Hayworth.

  It was when I followed Janet up the stairs, watching the motion of that flat little butt in tight shorts, that I had the first inkling that maybe this didn’t have to do with hauling furniture around for her or getting a window unstuck. Put it all together, the way she was acting, here we were alone in the house going up to the bedroom floor—hell, wild as the thought was, it wasn’t that wild.

  She led me into her bedroom, locked the door behind us. She said without looking at me, “Have you ever made love to a girl?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “Have you ever fucked a girl?”

  “No.” Twice I had fumbled around with girls to a point where I suspected I was being offered the whole works, but neither time had nerve to test the offer.

  Now Janet did look at me, her face angry. “But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”

  Lying about it might only make me sound like a freak. Telling the truth, as far as I could see, wouldn’t be violating my probation. The funny thing was, I had already gotten these same questions from the psychology genius the law had put on me to find out what made me tick. “Yes,” I said.

  “All right then,” Janet said, and next thing she was peeling off her clothes. What she had to show me was even less meat than either of the schoolkids I had fumbled around with.

  That was my seduction, a deliberate humiliation from start to finish, a kind of clumsy struggle in bed where I was made to look foolish from the opening bell. Foolish enough anyhow to stay turned off women completely until I was in the Movement in college and found that with someone other than Janet Hayworth, it was only a case of doing what came naturally.

  So here I am standing in the bedroom across from hers ten years later, considering her, and I can’t help shaking my head at what lights up in it.

  The odds were that I had been seduced by a dyke who was going to give the male animal a try before making the final decision on which way she was headed, and I happened to be the handiest and safest male animal around. Never mind the damage this could do to her guinea pig, this butch was going to settle her own problem.

  Well, it’s my turn now. Comes the dawn, and comes the Shanklins, and Janet will find out that life is not all fun and games and guinea pigs.

  Coco says peevishly, “Man, you are at it again. I talk to you, and you are in Rio spending your million dollars.”

  “All right,” I say, “talk.”

  “I was asking about that other one. That David. He is as new to you as he is to me. Another unpredictable element.”

  “He’s one of this crowd. You got a good look at them today, including those two scarecrows from down the road. Peace at any price, that’s the slogan.”

  “You intend to keep David here with us just to make sure of that?”

  “No. He goes along with Hayworth. The three women are what’ll pay off for us, not counting in the maid. Even if we have to waste one of them, Hayworth’ll pay the same money for the others.”

  Coco says, “What do you mean, waste one of them? When I talked to my contacts in St. Hilary, I assured them there would be no such thing. I assured them all the women would be kept safe, although I guaranteed nothing about any police or federals who got in the way. That is the understanding. I do not want phase three wrecked in advance because you are going to go crazy and foul up phase two.”

  “Nothing will be fouled up. I’m just trying to get it into your thick head, Mr. Digby, that no matter what happens in here, Hayworth only has two options. Either way, the police and FBI will move in. But one way he can leave it all to them, and they can take their chances on blasting us out of here while we’re holding guns on the women. The other way he can use the pigs to make everything easier for us.”

  “Will he want to keep them from blasting?” Coco says. “Now that I have met him, I don’t know. He seems very tight-assed to me. Very law and order.”

  “All right, if he turns them loose on us, we hold them off until the pressure is all on them. That’s why I want only the women in here. Mix men in with the hostages, it takes the edge off it. Only poor helpless women whose lives are in danger, that’s the stopper. Those fucking FBI heroes are always thinking about their public image. They’ll be half crippled to start with by the kind of public image we can plaster them with.”

  Coco thinks it over. Then he says, “But no wasting anybody. None of the women, I mean. You do that, it would be a serious mistake. When Harvey and Lester are about, if they ever get here, I do not want you to even mention it. They are very impressionable.”

  It looks like he and his St. Hilary pals have their public images heavy on the brain too.

  We can’t risk trying to stay with it until five-thirty and then falling asleep just when the Shanklins are due to show up. And for all we need whatever sleep we can scrape together after that three-day run from Florida, there is no other way to guarantee we’ll be up and functioning as greeting committee than to spell each other at sleeping, one hitting the sack while the other stays on watch.

  I take first watch, and when it comes my turn to crawl into bed, all I can do is lie there and keep grinding the Company’s options over in my head. We risked time heading north just to stop at the out-of-town newspaper stand on Times Square in New York and get the latest Miami Herald instead of holding tight to the expressway, but there was nothing in the paper to indicate that Santiago and his partner were listed among the missing yet. And if the Shanklins’ daddy has gone to the police about his erring boys and his car, it didn’t rate any space in the paper. But that doesn’t mean Harvey and Lester, with orders to cruise around away from Scammons Landing, haven’t run
into local problems and might not show up on schedule.

  Question. In that case, can Coco and I make it on our own? There are two doubles and a single in three bedrooms upstairs, each with a phone on the night table, and a single, the maid, in her room off the kitchen downstairs, and there’s a phone right there on the kitchen wall. Any little slip, and the lid blows off with a bang.

  Get outside now and cut the phone line into the house? Next thing, the way it works in a town this size, a repairman will be up here knocking the schedule apart. Word would be out and the police will be in before we even have Hayworth set up to deliver the money. And unless I want to handle all the negotiations close up, I need that phone line open.

  Worse, the only weapons Coco and I have with us are two of the Colt Police Positives. I have a picture of Hayworth and David and a phone repairman locked inside here with the women, while the local pigs and an army of FBI heroes outside are doing business their own way, and—if we slice up one of the hostages to show we mean action—having them use this as an excuse to blast the house down. Who the hell can forget Attica? The excuse is all they’re looking for.

  So, no Shanklins, no show. No Shanklins could also mean Harvey and Lester are having that arsenal in the car checked out right this minute by some state troopers. They might hold out a long time under questioning, Harvey and Lester, but even so, it means that first thing after breakfast here, Coco and I would have to get a lift into town and there say goodbye to each other and take off in opposite directions. While the Monday-morning money which is unloaded on the bank from half the hotels around Lake George and Hayworth’s three other bank branches in the county who use this Scammons Landing bank as their deposit point—well, all that money would be just as usual unloaded into armored cars and deposited in whatever warehouse in New York that Friend Hayworth has piled to the roof with his money. That sanctimonious son of a bitch could sink four million in the lake and never miss it.