Reinhart in Love (15 page)

“Keep your eye on me, bud,” he said. “It's worth a college course.”

Since the boss was going to this trouble over him, Reinhart believed it was only fair to advise: “Which reminds me, sir—”

Humbold buried him in an avalanche of derision.
“Sir!
That went out with Tom Thumb golf and near-beer, bud. You never make a dollar calling ‘sir' like a Limey butler. To a client, I repeat,
you
got to be boss. And as to me”—on a shaded avenue, going fifty, he suddenly squashed the brakes, which hurled Reinhart against the dashboard and permitted a woman to wheel a baby carriage across the street in the middle of the block; or rather, she was forced to cross by Humbold's sweeping arm; it was doubtful whether she had really wanted to—“as to me,” Humbold repeated, then parenthetically told Reinhart to snap out of it, the dashboard would break sooner than his head, and accelerated forward, waving his hat at the woman. “As to me, everybody calls me Claude, but nobody forgets who pays the bills.”

He shot past a stop sign onto an arterial highway, greeting with one raised finger, as if in the schoolroom signal of Number One, the motorcycle cop hiding behind the billboard there, among the early poison ivy. Reinhart cracked his neck to turn and read what wind and weather, or a cunning vandal, had made more eloquent:

He decided there was little point in hastily telling the boss he could work only until school started, since at this moment culture seemed irrelevant even to himself. Uncomfortable in his new clothes, he drew a cigarette and punched the dashboard lighter, which instantly glowed like a witch's eye.

“No boy no!” cried Humbold, at the same time gunning off the highway onto a washboard dirt road, the Gigantic much bumpier than the ads, with their photos taken by stroboscopic light at the Gigantic Torture Test Track, Dearborn, Mich., admitted. “Stamp out the King Brothers!”

By the time Reinhart had puzzled this through—he was really very pleased to have been able to: Smo King and Drin King—they had drawn up on the village green, only it was mud, of a cannibal village, only instead of shrunken heads, diapers were everywhere hanging out to dry on sagging lines between the huts, which were made of corrugated iron rather than palm fronds, and the children who burst ululating upon him and the boss were white beneath the dirt.

Humbold broke a passage by flinging a handful of nickels in another direction, saying to Reinhart: “When I was a boy, you could buy off a kid with a penny. I made it my bidniss to be completely nauseating and soon I had more cents than anybody.” He asked nothing for his wit, however, and didn't smile himself, but rather studied his shoe-tips in annoyance, which were gathering a film of dust as they padded towards the nearest Quonset.

A respectful half-step behind, Reinhart asked, trying to be professional: “Is this hot territory?”

But he learned that you either knew the jargon or not, simulation was ill advised. Thus Humbold answered as if he had been questioned on the weather: “Temperate.”

“Sorry,” Reinhart said, and he lowered his voice, for they were almost at the door of the hut. “I mean, this place looks pretty low-class. Are there many clients here who could afford a house?”

Humbold banged the door, the same rusty metal as the siding, with his foot. Instantly it was opened by a skinny young man in eyeglasses, a T-shirt, and an expression of ancient apology. Humbold seized his hand and under the guise of shaking it performed a neat judo type of throw which lifted the man from his threshold and literally dropped him on Reinhart.

“Meet Bobby Clendellan.”

Ah, thought Reinhart while helping Clendellan settle shakily on his own two feet, the strong-arm technique. But this fellow didn't seem effeminate, only confused and guilty, other things entirely.

Humbold retrieved poor Clendellan before Reinhart could do too much for him, and holding him by the scruff of his T-shirt, finally answered Reinhart's earlier question: “Can these jokers afford a house? Bud, this is Vetsville, these boys got all them benefits from a grateful country. Ain't that right, Bobby?”

Clendellan adjusted his glasses back of the ears, while looking cravenly through their lenses at Reinhart. He said: “I was a yeoman in the Navy.”

“He killed two regulations and wounded a fountain pen,” said Humbold. He propelled Clendellan into the hut, patting his slack behind. “Go get your ball and chain and your deductions, if they haven't been eaten up by the vermin in this dump: I got a nice place to show you.”

Clendellan poked his head out the door again, and called to Reinhart: “I had limited service because of bad vision.”

“That's quite all right,” Reinhart answered grandly. He waved the client to his errand.

While they waited, Humbold pawed the ground like a bull and snorted, to maintain his role, but
sotto voce
he advised his apprentice: “A fairly uncommon case, noncombatants being usually the tough ones, with paratroopers and Marines being soft and easy to work.”

“I get it,” said Reinhart. “Noncombatant service is more like civil life than combat is, and—”

“Wrong, bud. All wrong. Just the opposite: life, real life, is exactly like the fighting, except in the latter you use guns and therefore don't destroy as many people. But if you already had your combat one place, you don't want it in another…. The present client is the black sheep, the foul ball, of the moneybags clan who own among other items the Clendellan Building in the city. He lives here like a goat while his family could buy the state from their petty cash. You figure out why?”

“Because he wants to Make His Own Way,” whispered Reinhart.

“Absolutely incorrect,” the boss said, beheading his gum ball again and again with chipmunked incisors and restoring it with his tongue. “Because he's a Commonist.” He let that soak in for a moment, but it didn't faze Reinhart, who had been in Berlin with the real Russians. “Or a Fachist,” Humbold continued. “I don't know which, whatever kind of crank it is who likes to live like a nigger when he ain't one. That's seldom a real nigger, by the way. Say bud, do you have a politics?”

“Not so's you can notice,” Reinhart answered, sure at last he had said the right thing.

But Humbold turned away in chagrin and punched the side of the hut. Something fell from the wall within and broke, and Clendellan's contrite voice was heard: “Be with you in a minute. We're changing the baby's diapers.” Perhaps because they didn't answer, he came to the door and explained to Reinhart: “I was stationed at the Norfolk Naval Base throughout my service, which is how I could raise a family.”

Reinhart shrugged cynically.

Humbold removed his big hat and extended it, with the hole upwards, in supplication. “All right, then. Can you at least pretend to be a Red?”

“I'm sorry, Claude. I thought we always went against the grain.”

“With the men, bud, the men. Look.” He literally buttonholed Reinhart—or tried to, but in fact the lapel slot on the new jacket was still sewn shut; Humbold settled for a grip on the notch. “Your job is the wife.”

Reinhart felt himself blush in involuntary, anticipatory lasciviousness; his id, or whatever it was, always made its own translation of remarks that linked him with a woman no matter what the intended relation. Humbold however noticed nothing amiss. He was almost a foot shorter than his assistant, but didn't admit it. This was another reason why Reinhart had begun not to dislike him: Humbold was superior to details unless they had a practical application to an immediate purpose. For example, he would never mention Reinhart's size until he wanted someone beaten up.

“You got it?” asked the boss.

“I think so.”

Humbold frowned, looking like a rubber ball being pinched. “That's not the right comeback. Be positive, defiant, overbearing, never welch. When you are asked ‘You got it?' answer ‘Better than you!'“

“Even to you?”

“Especially to me, bud. Who you think's paying you?” Humbold found a handkerchief beneath his coat and snapping it at his shoes in the way a towel is used to sting someone's bare body, cleared them of dust. “O.K.,” he said, “now try it. Got
it?”

Because the boss held the handkerchief as if he would give him a taste of it for failure to comply, Reinhart counterfeited a heavy, sneering insolence that made his stomach curdle, replying: “Better than you, goddammit!” He felt ill and hoped he musn't have to do this frequently.

“There's one thing I won't stand for,” Humbold asseverated. “And that is a foul mouth. Clean it up, bud, or you're out of a good opportunity. No taking of the Lord's name in vain; no friendship towards the King Brothers; no suggestiveness about the fair sex. Just listen to your Dutch Uncle Dudley. Remember you wouldn't be in this world without your dear old mother. Write to her frequently, boy. Worship your God in your own way, and go to the church of your choice this Sunday. I say so even to a Jew, for in the eyes of the Big Boy upstairs we are all even as children. He's the greatest bidnissman of them all, bud, and knows a bad property when he eyes one. Don't forfeit your Big Commission.”

When Reinhart, more or less sincerely, said: “You know, Claude, you would have made a great preacher,” he saw he had at last pushed the right pedal. Humbold uttered no sound, struck no attitude; rather, his eyes disappeared in true humility, he briefly locked arms with his employe in that old knight's embrace where each fellow clasps the other's biceps, and said: “You'll make a great bidnissman, bud, in time.”

And there came upon Reinhart in this barren March afternoon a portent of imminent glory, a kind of Star of Bethlehem in whose radiance he saw himself as Henry Ford Reinhart, emperor of the clangorous assembly lines; or Woolworth Reinhart, seated on a mountain of small coins; and finally, John D. Reinhart, withered, digestion ruined, dining on milk and crackers, tipping dimes, his mouth like an empty purse and his purse like a full mouth, not the worst kind of dotage. And for years he had hated business in general and Humbold in particular; we don't know how the other half lives.

“Bandits approaching at three o'clock,” warned Humbold, using his left fist as an intercom; his right presumably on the rudder, he banked towards the hut, from which Clendellan emerged with an armload of baby and extra swathings. Another child, of about two and a half feet—Reinhart was no good at computing age—a girl, and malicious of expression, walked alongside her papa clutching the seam of his chinos. Behind this group, carrying nothing, shuffled a little man in the garb and make-up of a silent-movie comedian, baggy of pants, saggy of shirt, unbarbered, with a face white as flour and hair black as night.

Of course Reinhart knew all along this little Chaplin was a woman and Clendellan's wife, but it was part of the strategy he was swiftly formulating that he pretend otherwise. He saw in astonishment that the boss had turned on a gross gallantry, bowing with fingers to his gut.

“Humbold,” Mrs. Clendellan said, a description rather than a greeting.

Straightening, Humbold imperiously signaled the attendance of Reinhart. “My assistant, to take the kids off your hands.”

“They're not on mine. Are you myopic?”

“No mam,” said the boss. “I speak with all respect.” He appealed mutely to Reinhart and back-pedaled to the side of Clendellan, where the girl fetched him a kick in the shins, which could have done little damage considering her height, but Reinhart saw his pride was wounded and marveled at it.

Reinhart himself was now unnerved at a situation that had thrown his boss, and was desperately planning to speak in the character agreed upon—he tried to think of something favorable to say about the Soviet Union—when Mrs. Clendellan shook his hand with incredible strength for so small a woman and said: “I'm Alice.”

“My name is Carlo Reinhart. How do you do, madam.”

She smiled and slid her grip to his big forearm. “You can drop the feudal designations, Carlo. I'm Alice, and I've been a worker in my time, too: the five-and-ten housewares section. What kind of wage does this reactionary pay you?”

“Oh, a very decent one.” For a moment Reinhart thought he discerned a basically attractive woman disguised somewhere within the little creature kneading his arm, and thought oh what a pity, and there was a catch in his voice.

Mrs. Clendellan interpreted it otherwise.

“Strength!” she said, in both sympathy and triumph, and moved her grasp to his upper arm, which was indeed as high as she could reach and it must have been awkward to walk in that manner, for all this while the party was proceeding towards Humbold's car.

The word, however, had to the apprentice a certain Fascist connotation; perhaps after all Claude had been correct in his strange assessment of the Clendellans. So Reinhart answered it with: “Through Joy!” and opened the rear door of the automobile. Frankly he didn't care what they were.

He struggled briefly with Mrs. C. over who helped whom into the car. At last he won, and she clambered in giving him a view of the back of her slacks, from which no valuable data were gained, for they were too baggy to show the shape of her bottom. When he got in, however, he ascertained that her hip was very firm, for she pressed it against his and otherwise sat close enough to allow for three more passengers, though only one came: the small daughter, with a final kick at Humbold, swarmed like a chimpanzee over the backrest of the front seat and violently embraced Reinhart with all her extremities, sharp little kneecap in his ear, little paws in his nostrils, etc., screaming “I love you, big giant!”

Now if Reinhart was flattered, he was also embarrassed, not towards the titular head of this clan—for Clendellan's weak eyes were watery with approval, looking back over the baby's transparent scalp; it was clear his women were seldom pleased—but towards the boss, whose face he could see through the small fingers passionately clawing at his own.