Ross Thomas: The Seersucker Whipsaw

“I’ve heard about it,” I said. “They send copies of the speeches around. They’re translated and arrive all over the world the same day that the speech is given. You’d be surprised how many of them get printed.”

Shartelle poured us some more coffee from the pewter pot. He drank his black. I used sugar.

“I remember they handled that special election in California last year,” he said.

“Which side?”

“They had the one who used to play the bad guy in the movies. The one who used to play the good guy lost by half-a-million votes.”

“You in on that one?” I asked.

“I could have been, but I sniffed around out there and decided it was too dicey. I can’t figure that nut vote. But apparently Renesslaer got enough of them switched over at the last second.”

I drew some patterns on the tablecloth with my spoon. Shartelle was silent and remote.

“Who’s Renesslaer’s client?” I asked.

Shartelle fished in his coat pocket and produced a scrap of paper. “I wrote his name down. I wanted to ask you about him. Renesslaer’s client is Alhaji Sir Alakada Mejara Fulawa. He’s a northern Albertian, I understand. What’s the Alhaji mean?”

“It means he’s been to Mecca.”

“You mean to say Renesslaer’s got themselves a non-Christian for a candidate? What else you know about him?”

“He was educated in England, speaks with a perfect Oxford accent, if there is such a thing. He’s rich — I mean the private-Comet, fleet-of-Rolls-type rich. He’s the natural ruler of about seven million Albertians and he lives in a palace just south of the Sahara that’s something out of Arabian Nights . The British love him because he’s kept the troublemakers quiet.”

“And Pig Duffy wants me to go to Albertia and run old Chief what’s his name... Akomolo — Sunday Akomolo at that — against this A -rab Alhaji Sir Alakada Mejara Fulawa. Oh, ain’t he got a name that just rolls pretty off the tongue!”

“From what I’ve heard he’s had a few cut out.”

Shartelle shook his head slowly from side to side, a broad crooked grin on his face, sheer delight in his eyes. “I tell you, Petey, it’s Richard Halliburton and Rudolph Valentino and Tar zan all rolled into one big package and snuffed up tight with a pretty blue ribbon. Man, it’s foreign intrigue and Madison Avenue and Trader Horn and Africa! And Pig Duffy’s caught smack in the middle of it, wallowing around and squealing for help, and here comes old Clint Shartelle, all decked out in his pith helmet and bush jacket just a-rushing to the rescue. My, it’s fine!”

“Call me Peter,” I said. “Call me Pete, call me Mr. Upsham, or hey you, but for God’s sake don’t call me Petey.”

“Why, boy, you’re getting touchous again about my language.”

“Oh, hell, call me anything.”

“Now I take it that you are going to be working this campaign for Chief Akomolo?”

I nodded. “I drew the short straw.”

“Just what will your duties be?”

“I’ll be the writer. If there’s anybody to read it.”

“Well, now, that’s fine. What kind of writer are you, Pete?”

“A fast one. Not good, just fast. When I’m not writing sharpen the pencils and mix the drinks.”

“And just what does Pig want me to do?”

I looked at him and grinned. It was the first time I had smiled all morning. “Mr. Duffy said that he would like you — and I quote — ‘to inject a little American razzmatazz into the campaign.’”

Shartelle leaned back in his chair and smiled up at the ceiling. “Did he now? What do you think I’ll be doing?”

“You have the reputation as the best rough-and-tumble campaign manager in the United States. You have six metropolitan mayors, five governors, three U. S. Senators, and nine Congressmen that you can honestly claim credit for. You’ve defeated the sales tax in four states, and got it passed in one. You got an oil severance tax passed in two states and got the resulting revenue earmarked for schools in one of them. In other words, you’re the best that’s available and Padraic Duffy told me to tell you he said that. You’re to do whatever has to be done to get Chief Akomolo elected.”

“I tell you, Pete, I’m just about at the end of what might be called a sentimental journey.”

“How’s that?”

Shartelle reached for the check, signed it, and rose. “Let’s go take a little walk.” We left the hotel and headed up Broadway towards Colfax. Shartelle puffed away on one of his Picayunes.

“I happened to drop by that baseball game last night just after I’d bought a house,” he said. “I didn’t do too bad for an old fellow.”

“You’re forty-three. When Kennedy was forty-three he was playing touch football with a bad back.”

“I admit I’m a bit spry, but I owe it all to the wisdom of youth and my precocious reading habits.”

“You mentioned something about a sentimental journey back there,” I said. “About a block back.”

“The sentimental journey is associated with my youth. I used to live in this town, you know.”

We turned up Colfax towards the golddomed capitol where there is a marker that reads that at this exact spot the city of Denver is 5,280 feet above sea level. A mile high and a mile ahead.

“I lived here in a house with my daddy and a lady friend from 1938 to 1939. Not too far from that ball park which is — you might have noticed — in a somewhat blighted area. It was a plumb miserable neighborhood even then. I was sixteen-seventeen years old. My daddy and I had come out here from Oklahoma City in the fall driving a big, black 1939 LaSalle convertible sedan. We checked in at the Brown Palace and my daddy got himself a lease on a section of land near Walsenburg, found him a rig and crew, and drilled three of the deepest dry holes you ever saw.”

Shartelle touched my arm and steered us into a drugstore. We sat in a booth, and ordered some more coffee.

“Well, sir, my daddy went busted again. He had wildcatted in Oklahoma City and brought in ten producers in the eastside field there and he had a potful of money, even if he did have to spend a spell in jail for running hot oil. He swore up and down that there was oil in Colorado. And, of course, he was right. He just drilled in the wrong place.”

The waitress brought us coffee. Shartelle stirred his. “We moved out of the Brown Palace and rented that house I bought yesterday. Me and my daddy and his lady friend. Her name was Golda Mae, a nice looking little thing. It was surely hard times, but I just went on with my lessons and let my daddy worry about the finances.”

“What lessons?” I asked.

“My Charles Atlas lessons, boy. I went through the whole course of Dynamic Tension. Clipped an ad out of The Spider and sent off for it. That’s when my Daddy was in the money in Oklahoma City. Hell, it wasn’t anything but isometrics, the same thing that everybody is doing now. But I followed the instructions like they were the gospel — and that’s why I’m so spry today.”

“So what are you going to do with the house you bought?”

Shartelle put a hand out in front of him and made an abrupt shoving motion. “Now don’t push me. When I’m telling, I like to tell my way. Not too long after the money ran out, Golda Mae moved on and it was just my daddy and me. I was sorry to see her go, because she was a mighty pleasant person. So one day my daddy calls me in and he says, ‘Son, I’m not making enough to support us both so I guess you’re going to have to be out on your own for a while. But I tell you what, you can have the LaSalle.’

“That offer of his was generous, even if it was worthless. You see it was winter and we didn’t have enough money for alcohol so the block froze on the LaSalle and it busted wide open. But it was the only thing he had to offer and he made the offer and we didn’t talk about the fact that the LaSalle wasn’t worth a dime. I just thanked him and declined politely, the way he’d taught me.” Shartelle paused and stirred his coffee some more. “So yesterday I bought the house in Denver, and I bought three others in New Orleans, Birmingham and Oklahoma City. They are the four my daddy and I lived in longest. I own them now and whenever I want to I can walk in and look around at the rooms and remember, or not remember.”