Warren Murphy: Missing Link

He got his jeans on but couldn't find a belt, but it didn't matter, he decided, because he wasn't into belts. They kind of constricted the free flow of his belly. He put on loafers without socks. He didn't need a shirt; his tee shirt was good for another day at least.

He stopped by the kitchen on his way out. He dropped his empty beer can into the open metal garbage can. The flies quickly rose to make room for it, then dropped to investigate. He took another can from the refrigerator, then grabbed a second

can and put it into his back pocket. You never could tell when you might run out.

The reporters were still waiting for him. The Secret Service men seemed to want to get Bobby Jack into a car and drive off, but Bobby Jack wanted to talk to the reporters. He could handle them. He had, back when his brother-in-law was running for president. The reporters had treated him as a charming rustic then. He hadn't changed a bit, so why should they change the way they wrote about him?

The reporters wanted to talk about the National Jewish Alliance.

"What is this here censure?" Bobby Jack asked one of them, a lean brunette with a big chest. "I thought censure was when you cut the good parts out of movies." He winked at her and sipped at his beer. He felt the two Secret Service men standing at his side on the dusty path. The reporters stood in front of him.

"The NJA said that you're a disgrace to America with your racist attitudes. They called you a vicious anti-Semite and asked the president to disavow your remarks. What's your reaction to that?"

"Well," Bobby Jack drawled casually, "Jews are always complaining about something. Why don't we forget that shit? I ever tell you the joke about the two niggers at the United Nations?"

He waited for an answer. That joke never failed. In the campaign, it had always been good for a chuckle from the newspapermen and they never wrote stories about it either. These reporters didn't seem to want to hear it. Billings tossed his empty beer can out toward the

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unpaved street. His bladder hurt. He should have gone to the bathroom again.

A neighbor passed and waved at him.

"Hiya, Bobby Jack."

" 'Lo, Luke. How's it hanging?"

"Straight, Bobby Jack."

"Keep it that way, Luke."

He smiled as the other man walked away. He realized though that his bladder was so full that even smiling hurt.

"Wait here a minute," he told the reporters.

A Secret Service man turned to walk with him.

"You stay here," Bobby Jack said. "Nobody goes with me when I pee."

Rather than go all the way inside, he walked alongside his house. He urinated against the wall of the building. He was zipping up his fly as he walked back to the reporters. The thin brunette looked as if she had just swallowed a lemon, peel and all.

Her tough luck, thought Bobby Jack. Did she think that men didn't have to pee once in a while? Maybe the men she went out with didn't.

He took the can of beer from his back pocket and snapped it open. The bouncing it had undergone caused the beer to spray up in the air. Quickly, he put his thumb over the hole and aimed the spray at the reporters. He caught the big-chested woman with a frothy spray that landed atop her curly sprayed hairdo, where it settled like droplets of dew on a spider web.

She slapped at her hair with her hand. Her face was contorted with annoyance.

"Jerk," she said.

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"Liberal," Bobby Jack said.

"Asshole," she said.

"Jew," he said.

"Cretin," she said.

"Nigger lover," he said.

She turned and walked away from him. He looked after her appreciatively, then turned to the other two reporters who still stood there, wiping beer from their faces.

"Nice ass," Bobby Jack said, gesturing toward the woman. "You getting any of that?"

The two reporters looked at each other, then walked away, following the brunette.

Bobby Jack watched them go, then turned to the Secret Service men.

"Glad those creeps are gone," he said. "Got things to do."

There were no reporters at the dusty dry train station when Bobby Jack and the two Secret Service men arrived there in his black Chevrolet station wagon. The car annoyed Bobby Jack. Everybody in Washington had Cadillacs. Why did he have to settle for a black Chevrolet station wagon? He had mentioned it to his brother-in-law, who had told him what kind of car to buy, and had demanded an answer.

"Image," the president had said. "An image of economy."

"How come every time I want something you talk about economy?" Bobby Jack had demanded. "I never hear economy about niggers."

"Stop using that word," the president said.

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"All right. Coloreds," Bobby Jack replied. "Why just me for economy?"

"Because you don't know how to act," the president told him. "The last thing you wanted was Air Force One to use to go duck hunting on weekends. They'd fry me for that. Then you wanted the presidential helicopter to go into the woods for a nudist beer bash with your buddies. I'm not God. I'm just the president."

"Yeah, 'cause I helped make you the president and you don't seem to remember that most of the time, and it's a helluva way to treat kin."

"By marriage," the president had said.

Bobby Jack sat on the edge of the back train • platform and looked at his watch. It was 10 a.m. He finished his last can of beer and decided he would give these goddamn Arabs exactly five minutes before he left to get a refill.

He didn't need Arabs and he didn't like the way they looked or talked or dressed or smelled. And he didn't need their money. He had money of his own. He had the old shoe factory where business was never better and he had a lot of other money besides.

At 10:04 A.M., just as he was rising to his feet, he heard the rumble of a train far down the track. He looked toward the north and saw the engine, pulling a single car, come over the slight rise and down the long incline that led into the bucolic town of Hills, its brakes squeaking and hissing air as it slowed down. Inside the building that doubled as passenger terminal and control center, an engineer pressed an automatic switch that turned a section

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of track so it would deflect the train off onto a siding. The train pulled into the siding and shivered to a halt.

Bobby Jack continued to sit on the train platform. After a few minutes, three men in Arab robes stepped out onto the rear of the railroad car, saw him, and came down the steps.

They carefully crossed the double sets of tracks and came up to him.

"I am Mustafa Kaffir," one man said. He was a big man with dark skin and the nose of an eagle. "And these are—"

"Don't bother," Bobby Jack said. He remained sitting. "I'm awful with names and besides all Ay-rab names sound alike."

Kaffir coughed slightly and said, "They too are representatives of the Free People's Government of Libya."

"Sure, swell," said Bobby Jack. "Where may we talk?" Kaffir asked. His deepset eyes glanced left and right. His thin lips were closed tightly as if he found the small Southern village of Hills somehow distasteful.

"Right here's fine by me," Bobby Jack said. He followed Kaffir's eyes as they glanced toward the two Secret Service men who leaned against the wall of the railroad station.

"Hey," Bßlings called. "You two get lost a while. I got to talk a spell here with my good Ay-rab friends."

"We'll be in front," the taller agent said. "Yeah, good. Wait out in front. When I'm done here, we'll go get a drink somewhere."

His eyes followed them as they left, then he

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glanced back at Kaffir. The Libyan was sweating, even though it was only in the low 90s, a relatively cool summer day in Hüls. Funny, he hadn't thought Arabs sweated. If they sweated in America, they must really sweat in Arabia or wherever the hell they came from. That must be some place to smell.