The Majors Page 6

  There were two briefcases. The first he had had since he graduated from the University of Alabama. It closed with one strap. He had carried his books in the single-strapper through the University of Alabama Law School. He had bought the double-strapper after the war, when he had been in Washington as administrative assistant to the Hon. Bascomb J. Henry (D–Fifth District, Ala.), and the single-strapper just hadn’t been big enough to hold all that he had to carry around.

  He resisted the temptation to open the double-strapper and take out the papers which made the secret official. But he rested his hand, casually, on the double-strapper, while he smiled a no-thanks to the stewardess’s offer of a Coke-or-coffee and a bag of peanuts.

  Thirty minutes out of Columbus, the Super DC-3 landed again, at Dothan, Alabama, and taxied to the one-floor frame terminal building. From Dothan it would go to Panama City, Florida, and from Panama City to Fort Walton Beach, eighty miles down the coast, where the flight would terminate.

  Three people got off at Dothan, two of them standing by the Super DC-3 while a ground crewman opened the door in the fuselage and removed their luggage. Howard Dutton had no luggage besides the briefcases. The single-strapper held two soiled white shirts, identical to the one he was wearing, a soiled sleeveless undershirt, soiled boxer shorts, and a soiled pair of black nylon socks.

  Howard Dutton had gone from Ozark, Alabama, to the nation’s capital, to the halls of Congress, to the seat of power, to deal with some of the most powerful men in the nation, with a change of underwear and two extra shirts, and he had returned victorious.

  A warm feeling swept through him, instantly replaced by one of annoyance, concern, and a little anger. He had seen his daughter, Melody, standing inside the plate glass doors of the terminal. Howard Dutton dearly loved his daughter Melody, who was seventeen, and a senior at Ozark High School, and had been touched that she had driven all the way here from Ozark to meet her daddy.

  But then he had noticed how Melody was dressed. Melody was wearing a white T-shirt, through which the brassiere restraining her pert young breasts was clearly visible, and a pair of blue shorts that were so short they reminded Howard, to his immediate shame, of the shorts worn by a whore in a Birmingham brothel he had gone to one drunken weekend when he was at the university.

  That was a hell of a thing for a father to think about his own seventeen-year-old daughter, he thought, but the cold facts were that that’s how the whore had been dressed. Melody, of course, was simply blind to what she looked like. She had never seen a whore, as far as he knew, and probably wasn’t sure what one did. It was hot, and, still a child, she did what she had done when she had been a child. She took off as many clothes as she could.

  Howard mentally cursed his wife. Wives were supposed to see about that sort of thing, make sure their daughters looked respectable when they went in public.

  Melody ran out of the building and gave him a hug and a wet kiss.

  “How’s my favorite daddy?” she asked.

  If it was anyone’s fault that she was running around in public looking like a fancy lady in a Birmingham whorehouse, Howard Dutton decided, it damned sure wasn’t this innocent child’s.

  “You shouldn’t have come all the way here in this heat,” he said. “You should have sent Clem.” Clem was the janitor at the bank, an amiable elderly black man who sometimes drove the car.

  “I was bored out of my gourd, Daddy,” Melody said.

  “That’s the only reason, you were bored?”

  “And I missed my favorite daddy,” she said. She hugged him again. One of the other debarking passengers happened to be male, happened to see Melody hugging her daddy, and happened to appreciatively notice Melody’s pink buttocks, about half of which were visible below the blue shorts.

  Goddamned pervert! Howard Dutton thought. Looking at an innocent young girl like that!

  He walked Melody around, rather than through, the Dothan Municipal Airport Terminal Building, to where she had parked the car, its nose against a cable strung between creosoted six-by-sixes stuck in the reddish clay. He set the double-strapper on the ground and opened the door of the 1951 Ford Super Deluxe. He tossed the single-strapper onto the back seat, and then picked up the double-strapper and tossed that onto the floor in the back.

  “You want me to drive, Melody, honey?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “You are one of the world’s worst drivers.”

  He had been afraid of that, and would really have preferred to drive, but he knew that you had to force yourself to let them grow up, and driving cars was part of growing up.

  He took off his suit jacket, its inner pockets sagging with the weight of still more paper, and carefully laid it on the seat back so that it wouldn’t slide off the slippery plastic upholstery.

  The senator had sent one of his assistants to take him to Washington National from the Capitol. In a 1953 Mercury four door. With an air conditioner. That air conditioner had really been nice in the muggy heat of Washington, and the muggy heat of Washington wasn’t anything like the muggy heat here. He really wished he could have an air conditioner.

  The 1951 Ford Super Deluxe belonged to the Farmers and Planters Bank of Ozark, of which Howard Dutton was president and chairman of the board. While the bank could well afford, financially, an air-conditioned Mercury for its president and chairman of the board, Howard Dutton could not afford, socially, to drive anything that suggested the bank was getting rich on the sweat of its depositors. Howard’s father had taught him that. Depositors were just looking for some excuse to badmouth their bankers.

  Maybe soon. Not right away, but soon, when everybody had a little more money, because of what he was doing for them, he could at least get a car with a goddamned air conditioner.

  He decided that they would go home the long way. Indulge himself. For one thing, Prissy (for Priscilla, Mrs. Howard Dutton) had told him on the phone that Tom Zoghby had dropped dead. One moment, Tom had been talking with somebody (Dudley Claxton, he thought Prissy said) and the next moment he was dead on the floor. Right on the sidewalk in front of Zoghby’s Emporium.

  The minute he got home, of course, he would be expected to go see the widow and young Tom and the girls. There was no getting away from that, even if he had wanted to, but at the same time it wasn’t the sort of thing you liked to do. That he liked to do. There were a lot of people who really got their pleasure rushing to console a widow and a bereaved family.

  Tom had probably left his family well fixed, which was something. But still, there might be a need for some cash money, and he would have to have a word with young Tom (he wouldn’t want to bother the widow) about maybe selling some of that land along County Highway 53.

  He was suddenly shamed with the thought. That would be dishonest and unethical, now that he had the secret. He was surprised with himself; he wasn’t, no matter what people thought, the kind of banker that went around taking advantage of widows and heirs. After a moment, he was able to convince himself that he had thought about buying the Zoghby land along Highway 53 without thinking about the secret. The secret was so new, that he just hadn’t thought about it. He really hadn’t been trying to take advantage of Tom’s boy.

  “Go up 84 toward Enterprise,” he told Melody.

  There were two ways to get from Dothan to Ozark. The short way was to turn left when leaving the airport, and then left again, and up US 231. The long way was to turn right when leaving the airport, and then right again, on US 84, toward Enterprise, and then, fifteen miles along, turn right again and cut through the Camp Rucker Reservation.

  He was entitled, as a reward, both not to rush home to see the Widow Zoghby and to take a look at Camp Rucker. He was a banker and a lawyer, and he knew he didn’t own Camp Rucker. But at the same time, he had a special relationship with it that nobody else could claim, not even Congressman Henry (May He Rest in Peace).

  In 1934, under Roosevelt’s Rural Reclamation Administration, the government had bought from Congres
sman Henry (and other people) 125,000 acres of worked-out cotton land, after they’d sent experts in who had decided the soil was so poor that nothing man could do was going to make it productive again for at least a generation.

  Goddamned fools had cottoned the land, and just worked it to death, destroying the topsoil, so it blew away, and then, when the rains came, gullied it, so that it wasn’t worth a damn for anything. Congressman Henry was as guilty as any of them, so you couldn’t just say the dumb rednecks were getting what they deserved, reaping what they had sowed.

  So the goverment had come in and bought it up, paying ten dollars an acre for land that was worth maybe a dollar, a dollar and a half, and they’d sent in the CCC, and stopped what they could of the worst gullying and planted it in loblolly pine, and said that in maybe fifty years they would think of clearing it again for planting. Maybe by that time they would have come up with some way to make topsoil or do something to clay that would make it grow things; and in the meantime they could timber it, twice, and get something out of it.

  And then, six years after that, when the pines were head-high, World War II had come along (or was coming along, and everybody could see it coming) and the military was looking for places to build training bases.

  The land was transferred to the War Department in late 1939, but it wasn’t until late 1941, right before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, when Howard Dutton had been in his last year in the law school at Alabama, that they announced plans to make it a base. And it was nearly a year after that, November 1942, before they did anything.

  Once they started, of course, they really got in high gear. When Howard Dutton left the Basic Officer’s Course in Miami, in the Air Corps, all there was on what was still called “the Reclamation Land” was some surveyors’ tapes and markers, but when he came back on leave three months later, there was Camp Rucker, named for General Rucker, who’d been a Confederate general.

  In ninety days they’d built a military post, everything from barracks to a laundry to rifle ranges. All Howard Dutton had seen around Courthouse Square on his leave, before going over to the China-Burma-India theater as an Air Corps lawyer, was khaki uniforms. And, oh, how the money had rolled in!

  Two divisions, eleven, twelve thousand men each, plus the support troops, had trained at Camp Rucker, and after they had gone off to war, they had changed it into a POW camp, and the place had held more than twenty thousand Italian prisoners from North Africa. They’d been lucky there, the Eyeties were glad to be out of the war, and they’d caused no trouble at all. They’d worked the farms. Hell, they’d even made out with the women, but nobody talked about that. There was something unpatriotic about the women doing that, with their own men off to war on the other side. But it happened, even if no one talked about it.

  Right after the war, the place had closed down again, and where there had been twenty thousand soldiers, there was maybe a dozen enlisted men and a couple of officers, just watching the place, to make sure people didn’t steal the place blind.

  It had opened again for the Korean War, not the way it had been (they had trained a National Guard regiment from Wisconsin, not a division) and not for as long. It had closed down again in 1953, last year, with the Korean War still going.

  And when the soldiers went, so had all that government money. When the camp was open, even with the Eyetie prisoners, they’d had to buy all sorts of things, mostly services, from Ozark and Enterprise and even Dothan. There were jobs, that was the thing, jobs ranging from fireman to barber, all kinds of clerks, people to work in the post exchange, fix the telephones, all the things the army needs and can’t do for itself. The best kind of jobs, to a banker’s way of thinking, ones that brought money into a community and took nothing out. If a factory opens, that means jobs, sure, but it also means you (the city) have to pay for firemen, and policemen, and sewers, and everything else people expect. But a military post either doesn’t need that sort of thing or pays for it itself.

  There was all kinds of idiotic talk going around about what to do with the post, when it closed down. Turn it into a university. Get industry to relocate on it. Even, when things got desperate, turn it into a prison. After all, they’d had all those Eyeties out there, so you knew that worked.

  But those weren’t answers and Howard Dutton knew they weren’t. He had seen it from the beginning, from the day he’d come home from the war. War or not, the thing to do with Camp Rucker was keep it Camp Rucker, keep it filled with soldiers.

  That was the reason Howard had gone to work on the congressman, gone off to Washington, instead of taking over from his father at the bank or opening a law practice. He had learned in the Air Corps that if there is a system, you can figure out how the system works, and then make it work for you.

  That was his secret. He had made the system work the day he wanted it to work.

  He didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite. What he had done was going to make a lot of people rich around town, be good for the whole county. But it was also, and he knew this, and was not embarrassed by it, going to make him a rich man, too. Richer than he ever would have gotten at the bank. Much richer.

  God helps those who help themselves. Say what you like. It was true.

  US Highway 84 was a two-lane macadam road, nearly straight, running through gently rolling land between farms and untended land. Fifteen miles from Dothan, Howard Dutton told Melody to take the right turn at a fork. This was the “new road,” built when they built Camp Rucker in ninety days from the time the first nail was driven. It cut across large patches of what the Rural Reclamation Administration had called “submarginal farm land” to Daleville, one of the oldest communities in the county.

  Daleville was a ghost town when Melody drove her Daddy through it, in the Ford Super Deluxe. When the camp was open, Daleville was just outside the gate, and the single street was lined with cheap frame buildings that used to house laundries and dry cleaners and Army-Navy stores and hamburger stands and used car lots.

  No bars or saloons. Dale County (named after the same Dale who had set up a store at the crossroads and named it Daleville) was Baptist dry. That’s not dry, that means that there are no bars, and you can’t get a drink in a restaurant or beer at the grocery store. You generally get your own beer when you’re out of town in a wet county, and you get your whiskey in pint bottles from a bootlegger. But there are no public places to drink, where people can go and ruin their lives with the Devil’s Brew.

  A small general store was still open, and the one-room post office next door, and there were half a dozen worn-out pickups and as many battered old Fords and Chevvies on the weed-grown lot of one of the used car places, but everything else was closed down and boarded up and falling down. There were no soldiers and there was no business.

  There was a sign at the deserted gate, where once MPs in white leggings and pistol belts had stood waving people through and saluting officers in their cars. The sign said, “MILITARY RESERVATION—DO NOT LEAVE MARKED ROUTE.”

  What that meant was that you were supposed to follow the one road, which ran on the fringes of the built-up area, and which led to the other side, to the road to Ozark. They didn’t want people running around loose in the built-up area, where they could help themselves to toilets and wire and pipe and even the barracks themselves because they were just sitting there asking to be stolen.

  Howard Dutton gestured with his arm.

  “Drive around the sawhorses, Melody,” he said. “I want to have a look around.”

  “Are we looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

  “Just drive around the area behind post headquarters,” he said.

  To their left were enormous wooden garages, where once the rolling stock of infantry divisions, trucks and tanks and cannon, had been repaired. He knew, although he couldn’t see it, that beyond the garages was a 2,000 bed hospital. A hundred or more single-story frame buildings connected with walkways to keep the patients out of the sun and rain as they were wheeled betwee
n the buildings.

  A flag still fluttered from the flagpole in front of post headquarters, for the caretakers had taken over that one building for their headquarters and living quarters. The last contract issued for more than a thousand dollars by the purchasing office before it had closed was to bring electricity from Dale County Rural Electrification Agency lines to the post headquarters. The coal-fired generators which had provided electricity to the post when it was open were still there, and ready to run, but it was cheaper with just a dozen men on the post to string a line and buy electricity from REA.

  The grass was cut right in front of post headquarters, but the parade ground in front was grown waist high with grass, and there was grass that high between the endless rows of barracks.

  Melody drove past post headquarters to the field house, and around it, and down crumbling macadam streets through regimental areas. The barracks looked in good shape, except for flaking paint and broken windows here and there. Beside each of the two-story wooden buildings, there was even a supply of coal for their furnaces in small concrete-block caches. There were even lights in the fixtures over the doors, and hanging from lamppoles every block.

  And then up ahead he saw an Army pickup truck blocking the road.

  Melody stopped the Ford with its nose a foot from the pickup’s fender and Howard Dutton got out of the car, a smile on his face.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mayor,” the major driving the pickup truck said. He waved his hand. “Hi, Melody!”

  Melody got out of the car and walked over to them. Howard Dutton wished she hadn’t done that, with half of her bottom hanging out that way.

  Howard Dutton was on his second term as mayor of Ozark. He had decided it was really easier to be mayor himself than to pick somebody for the job, and then have to watch every move he made.

  “Hot enough for you, Major?” Howard Dutton said, extending his hand. He was always very charming to Major Feeler, the post commander, even though he thought Feeler was a fool, and sometimes wondered what Feeler had done to find himself with an idiot job like this.