The vanishing American had vanished today, but this provided small reassurance. Copee was, Elgar gathered, only part Indian, and today he had reverted to pressing the cause of his other ancestors, and sporting their garb, a majestic swathing of brightly printed cotton. Apparently the vengeful African was his favorite role. He moved easily in bare feet and batik toga, and his awkwardness with a tomahawk was no cause for complacency, judging by the expertise with which he hefted a six-foot spear.
But just in case, backing him up with a baseball bat was his and Fanny’s older darling, Willie Lee, a lean little warrior with mean little eyes that suggested there was nothing whatever left to teach him in school.
They stood arrayed against him, Fanny with sloe eyes blazing, her husband menacing in his gorgeous robes, and their redskinned, evil-eyed son—an exotic tribe who did not look exactly like Negroes, or Asians, or Indians, but like a blend of all three. A new breed, stranger than any of its components, and more sinister.
“Uhuru!” cried Charlie with a deft, sudden gesture that confirmed Elgar’s suspicions that he was no stranger to spear-craft. “Out of my house, on the double, invader! Uhuru!”
“Freedom!” piped little Willie. “That means, ‘Freedom now!’ Mister, you better go.”
“Howdy,” said Elgar wearily. “I was just leaving.” He turned and descended the steps just as the shaft swooped overhead with rocketlike grace.
Now, trying to forget the unfortunate incident, he became absorbed in the morose progress of a frail white candy wrapper down the gutter. Caught up in the whirls and eddies of last night’s rain, it bobbed, backtracked, struggled weakly, drifted sadly sidewise, finally sank down the corner sewer, reminding Elgar all too forcefully of his likely future progress. If present currents were any indication.
For a bit of cheering contrast he thought of his older brothers: Moe, a thriving banker, and Shu, now happily managing three of the Seven Branches. Each had progressed easily and logically from the standard schools to junior exec jobs to management, acquiring on the way the standard one skinny wife and three fat children. Could either of them, with their perfect sense of order and sequence, ever possibly get into such a hopeless situation? And, if the impossible occurred, could either fail to become extricated, smoothly and with a handsome profit?
No, he knew, was the answer. To both.
There remained his father, Julius Pride Enders. Old Iron-fists himself, the King of Merchant Princes, with his standard solutions to the problems of Holding Your Own and Getting Your Return and Giving the Peasantry What They Want While Keeping Them in Their Place (Down). Applied to limited questions, Fathaw’s answers were remarkably successful, though. No doubt, if Elgar phoned him, he would have a good suggestion or two for Holding Your Own Under the Present Shaky Conditions. But at the thought of calling Fathaw and asking, “What do you do when the peasantry hurls spears at you?” Elgar’s stomach refused to stay in its place, became an angry jack-in-the-box demanding its own Freedom Now.
Elgar had demonstrated his own imperfect sense of sequence by taking up a series of undistinguished occupations—forester, stable hand, horse-farm manager, construction worker, building contractor, bum—while postponing plans to study architecture, plans to study law, plans to go into real estate, plans, plans, plans. The current abortive attempt at real estate would be viewed by now as an unfunny family joke. The latest illustration of his disappointing failure to jell as solidly as citizens Moe and Shu. Who every day in every way, mental and physical, in their small boxes of offices and their large, boxlike, eighteenth-century houses, were growing squarer and squarer. While Elgar, still suffering from a constitutional inability to shape himself along cubical lines, knew of his future only what he had always known: he could not stand to be like them.
This knowledge, however, was a frail stalk to depend on for support in one’s upward climb from the gutter. For, if he was not like his brothers, who or what was he?
Elgar’s reflection on glass panes, as he fled back into the phone booth, was a silvery, ghostly blur.
The minute he heard Fathaw clear his throat at the other end, Elgar knew it had been a serious mistake to call. That harrumph, the backfiring of a twelve-inch cannon, announced a heavy forthcoming barrage.
“What’s the difficulty this time, Elgar? Haven’t Neeby and Levin been following my instructions?”
Neeby was the Trusts and Investments man at Moe’s bank, and his instructions were to turn certain regular sums over to Levin, who had his instructions on how much to invest and how much (a trickle) to release to Elgar. Steel-eyed Levin watched fish-eyed Neeby, and Neeby watched Levin, and Fathaw watched them both, and they both watched Elgar. Oh, it was a pretty, pretty net in which they had him dancing like a deranged butterfly, balancing his doom against his father’s.
“Are you still seeing that crackpot talking doctor, Elgar?” Fathaw’s respect reached out to encompass all solid things like land, figures, prime ribs of beef and machinery, but withdrew contemptuously from anything so slippery and limitless as talk.
“Yes,” Elgar squeaked. “Yes, Fathaw. He’s helping me.”
“Well, why in hell do you need help? You’re crazy. I mean you’re not that crazy. All you need is a good hard job. A stiff upper lip. Some good fresh air in your lungs. Why don’t you get away from it all? I mean camp out in the woods, rough it, don’t waste money on one of those expensive resort vacations. Go up in Canada with your brothers and bag some deer.”
The standard answers, with the standard reference to curbing expenses which always occurred in the first thirty seconds of Elgar’s conversations with his millionaire father. Also the standard suggestion about hunting, which Elgar always ignored, out of a conviction he was bound to fail, being essentially on the side of the deer.
“Why must you always assume there is a difficulty, Fathaw? I called to ask what you know about real estate.”
“What do you mean, ‘what I know?’ I know everything about it, of course. Know real estate like the back of my hand. That tract along the Upper County line. Built a shopping center up there recently. Now developing a town around it. Endersville. What’s Levin suggesting? Mortgages?”
“Why must you assume I act only on Levin’s suggestions? No, an apartment house, Fathaw. My own idea.”
“Tricky business, apartments. More nuisance than profit. Anyone who would rent a place to live is a gypsy. A vagrant. Miserable, dirty little people. No sense of responsibility. Wear and tear on property. Precious little return on your money. Bad business, Elgar, for anybody except old men and widows. And you know I don’t consider anyone old till he’s passed seventy-five. My time is money, you know. Real estate’s a large subject. Don’t be vague. What’s your problem?”
“The fact that you’re not even past sixty-five,” Elgar whispered into the phone, his clenched fist poised to drive through the nearest pane of glass, the one that held his own vague reflection.
“What?” the old man bellowed. “Speak up, will you?”
“The fact that as yet I’ve derived no income from this property. Have you any thoughts on how to collect rent from tenants?”
“Put it in the hands of a constable! Give them thirty days! Let him evict them!”
Put your problems but not your money into someone else’s hands. Another standard answer which had worked well for Fathaw all his life.
“I don’t want to do that, Fathaw. I want to handle it myself.” Even as he uttered this plea he knew it sounded ridiculous. As when once he had pleaded, “Let go of the bike. I want to ride it by myself. Even if I fall flat on my face.” Which, of course, he had done. His stomach went into such acrobatics at that point, Elgar had to put his head between his knees.
“Elgar,” said the stern