“You might be surprised, Artie. Cocktail waitresses seem to hum around you like little bees.”
“Entertainment, my friend. Sweet music. In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune. Not a bad arrangement.”
“So it seems.”
He carefully lit a new cigarette from the old one. “Now love.”
“Yes. Love is another story.”
“And this you have in spades, my friend. You are loved by the multitudes. Ladies and gents standing in line down the block, waiting for your every word.”
Their opinion of me is approximately the same as for a talking pony. Frida said that. “Yes, I’m very lucky. Employed by the American imagination, as you put it.”
“Long may it wave.”
“Now I have a question for you, Artie.”
“Personal?”
“No. This friend in New York tells me foreigners are being deported there, for suspicion of just about anything. Working for Negro rights and so forth. My friend is dramatic, he can exaggerate.”
“Your friend in this case does not exaggerate.”
“That’s diabolical. To bolster support by deporting the opposition.”
“Diabolical is a polite term for this behavior.”
“Are they setting their caps mostly for noncitizens?”
“Mr. Hoover and Mr. Watkins at the INS are becoming very enthusiastic with their housecleaning. Some of the deportees have been living in this country since Homer was a pup. A fellow I know of, Williamson, labor secretary of the Communist Party, currently held without bond on Ellis Island. Accused of being an immigrant. He says he was born in San Francisco. Forty-five years of age, he has family, witnesses. But all the birth certificates in that city were lost in the earthquake and fire of ’06.”
“Goodness.”
“Shepherd, you have a birth certificate, do you not?”
“I do. It was some trouble with both parents dead, but I located the hospital. I have both passports, U.S. and Mexican. I had to sort it out during the war, as you’d guess. Called up to work for the Department of State, they like to see credentials.”
“Keep that U.S. passport with your guns and liquor. That is my advice.”
Breakfast was biscuits and gravy, sausages, and eggs on many heavy white plates. Artie rearranged it all to make room for his ashtray, and continued smoking right through the meal. With so much grease everywhere, I wondered about spontaneous combustion.
“Mrs. Brown does her best to keep me out of trouble,” I said. “She claims my ideology is transparent. But no criminal record as yet.”
“Who needs crimes? The INS has a stable of witnesses, professionals. Very well paid, very talented, they can produce a testimony for any occasion. If a man is not a Communist, they’ll prove he is. If he is, they can get him booked for ‘creating confusion and hysteria,’ to hold him until CP membership becomes illegal.”
“Outlaw a political party? What kind of country does that?”
“The kind in which you reside. The party has disavowed violence, as you know. Last year they also severed all ties with the Information Bureau of the Soviet Union, to be on the safe side. Turns out, there is no safe side. A federal grand jury just declared that Communist Party membership is a threat to the civilian defense. Now Congress is working on the Mundt-Nixon bill, requiring members to enter their names in a registry. So denying CP membership will soon be a crime also. These people are damned if they do, and damned if they do not.”
Outside in the parking lot under the restaurant’s jolly billboard, that yodeling boy in his lederhosen, a dark-colored auto pulled in and a couple emerged from it, in the throes of a terrible argument. The plate glass window shut out any sound, but their rage was visible. The man kept circling the woman to shout at her face, and she kept turning away, her loose raincoat swinging like a bell, her flat shoes stepping side to side. A child peered from the oval of the auto’s rear window, the small doomed fish in the bowl.
“Well. At least I’m no party member.”
“Mr. Shepherd, you have a colorful past. Your Mexican friends, do they stay in touch?”
“Frida does. Mrs. Kahlo. Intermittently. She’s just joined up again with the Communist Party, after a lapse. She says it’s all going strong there.”
“So it may be, and legal also, in her locale. But I suggest discretion.”
“You’re not saying I should simply cut off old friends, for fear of association?”
“No, I am not, and I recognize you, sir, as a man with a spinal column. But you would be amazed at the number of people who do exactly what you’ve just said.”
“I see. My stenographer would say, ‘Fairly warned is fair afeared.’”
“That is about the sum of what I can offer you, yes.”
“So, keeping old letters and so forth in the house. Maybe not a good idea.”
“A man with a spinal column, and a brain. Bravo. Now, what about our friend Agent X, who came calling last October. Does he also keep in touch?”
“Not another peep. He must have discovered what a lackluster stiff I am.”
“Maybe. We should all be so lucky. But these men don’t care who you are. Not even what you’re planning to do, despite what they may say. They’re like bloodhounds. What gets them baying is the whiff of where you have already been.”
“Well, that can’t change. I spent years around Communists, cleaning their dishes while they deliberated the transitional program and formalized party directives. You know something, Artie? They eat what people eat. They paint the dining room yellow, and love their children. I keep wondering, what have people got against Communists?”
“I told you. ‘Anticommunism’ is not very much concerned with ‘communism.’”
“So you said. Tuna fish, and the Spanish influenza. It’s hard to believe.”
“Think of religion. A virgin birth. Likewise hard to believe. Yet taken by many as evidence that purveyors of indecency are everywhere.”
The arguing couple outside got back in their car and drove away. A stop on their journey.
“Communism? Most people have no idea what it is,” Artie said. “I do not exaggerate. Look around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. ‘Excuse me, sir, I’ve been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their own production. What do you make of that?’ You know, he might be all for it.”