Night of Camp David Page 14

  And this complex, driven man whose mental balance he doubted, had picked him as his vice-president. Mark had confided in him, trusted him with the vision, proposed that they shoulder the future together. What right had he to soil this trust by secretly investigating the man’s youth as though he were a shoddy public welfare case? And was the picture he’d formed of the young Hollenbach an honest one or was he chinking in the gaps with suppositions drawn from the memory of Aspen lodge? Jim wondered whether he had the right to weigh the President’s mental stability. After all, he was but one of a hundred senators, a single cog in the intricate machinery of government, unauthorized by law to investigate anything or anybody, unless empowered by vote of a Senate committee.

  Still, didn’t he have a duty to—well—to the country to pursue his misgivings and somehow settle this question which baffled him? If Mark Hollenbach was unbalanced, action had to be initiated….

  His circuitous ruminations were interrupted by a shout from downstairs.

  “Hey, Pops,” yelled Chinky in her fluttering soprano. “There’s a good-looking man down here who says he has to see you right away.”

  “All right. Send him up.”

  As his visitor came up the steps, MacVeagh could see a broad smile and the flash of white teeth in a swarthy face. It was the Secret Service agent Luther Smith. He entered the den, closing the door behind him.

  “Senator,” said Smith, “I don’t like to barge in on you like this on a Sunday afternoon, but I’m ordered to ask you some questions.”

  “Questions?”

  “Yes.” Smith stood uneasily, holding his felt hat in his hands and fingering the narrow brim. “Senator, I’ve just come back from a little town in Florida named La Belle.”

  8.

  Sweet Water

  Slim Carmichael hung his blue suit carefully in the closet, smoothing the crease in one sleeve and arranging the trousers on the hanger so that they would remain neatly pressed until he donned them again for church next Sunday. He was glad to be out of his once-a-week town clothes with the collar and tie which always made a prisoner of his neck and the coat that seemed to put a bind on his shoulders.

  He pulled on blue dungarees, work boots, and a short-sleeved khaki shirt with a feeling of relief. He was a good Baptist by his own accounting, but he felt the Lord could be worshiped more earnestly if custom didn’t dictate that he must listen to the preacher in clothes that gripped like a vise. He preferred his own nightly prayers. The idea was to nourish the spirit, not strangle it.

  Slim strode to the wooden porch of his loose-jointed frame house, jammed his big hands into the front pockets of his dungarees, and stood looking proudly at his land. It stretched flat and powdery gray to the west, like a bed of ashes pressed smooth by a giant hand iron. Slim owned 2,000 acres of this shimmering, treeless ground and he loved every foot of it, for there was twenty years of himself lying there. A generation of sweat had oozed from his body, leaving him bony and parched, as dry as old leather that will no longer absorb oil. His joints ached occasionally now, as though the very juices of his marrow had seeped into the soil.

  The ever-blowing wind was coming from the west this Sunday noon. The window frames rattled and the sign near the gate, which read CARMICHAEL, creaked as it swayed. Slim tilted his straw sombrero, flared sharply at the sides like the banks of a gully, and gazed across the land to the south. The sun drilled fiercely, making an oven of the porch and turning the soil almost white in the glare. Squinting toward the horizon, and the hazy bulk of the Davis Mountains, Slim could see two brown funnels rising to the sky. With the end of the thaws, the great dust storms would soon begin, sweeping across the west Texas plains like airborne armies. The dirt would drift through the cracks of the house, lay a powderlike film over the furniture and burrow into the fence posts, filling them as though they were sponges. Out in the fields in a sudden dust blow, a man could only squat like a frog and bury his head in his arms, waiting for the suffocating fury to pass. For a cotton farmer like Slim, the soil was always with him: in his hair, thick in his nostrils, embedded in his pores. No amount of scrubbing could entirely free him from the brand of his own land.

  But Slim loved this bare, dusty expanse, perhaps more than his wife Betsy, certainly more than any man-made article he owned. The land lay there, flaky and gray, burnished by the sun, annually churned by the tractor-drawn harrows, fortified by costly fertilizers, and laved by some of the purest water in America.

  The water was the miracle. It sprang from a deep, underground river and turned a narrow band of near desert in West Texas into a bursting garden. Years ago, before World War II, this had been cattle country. Then the rains ceased, the grasses withered, and the cattle died of famine. Hard times throttled the country along the Pecos River. The towns, which had rung with the shouts of the cowhands who knew no “law west of the Pecos,” began to shrivel in the dust clouds swirling across the grassless plains. Then a blessing, the miracle of the underground river, was discovered. Soon great irrigation pumps were hoisting the clear, cold, sparkling water to quench the thirst of the topsoil. A single pump would fetch up hundreds of gallons every minute of this colorless, liquid gold, and within a few years more than 100,000 acres whitened with high-priced cotton.

  Slim Carmichael came after the pumps, a migrant from East Texas with a bent for farming and $10,000 in savings. First he leased 500 acres in the watered band south of Pecos and north of Saragosa, and borrowed heavily to make his first cotton crop. Weather and luck were with him. He made enough to put a down payment on acres of his own. In the years that followed, he and Betsy, childless, gave everything to the land, stinting themselves, never buying a fancy town house as so many of the cotton men did, spurning the new model cars, and seldom taking a trip outside Reeves County. Slim Carmichael became a good credit risk and the bankers trusted him with bigger loans each year. Now he owned 2,000 acres, mortgage free, and of the $100,000 it would cost him this year to make his crop, he had to borrow only $40,000. The rest was his own money.

  Slim Carmichael was in sounder financial condition than most of his neighbors, but recently he also had differed in another respect. His name now was known beyond Reeves County, for last summer Slim had the son of the President of the United States, Mark Hollenbach, Jr., working as a hand on his cotton farm. The boy had roomed at Yale with the son of Doc Peyster, and Peyster had come to Slim when young Hollenbach wrote, saying that he’d like to work a summer in the West Texas cotton fields. The kid had done well, Slim thought, working easily with the dozen Mexicans whom Slim employed. Young Mark was a big boy, powerful in the shoulders, a rugged towhead who didn’t mind hard work. He was serious enough about the labor that blistered his palms, but he joked around the house and delighted Betsy by calling her his “second girl”—anybody under twenty-five he could find would be his first. Slim was pleased because some of the timidity and anxiety seemed to leave Betsy when Mark Jr. was around the house. Betsy lived in fear of a crop failure because of the big loans Slim had to negotiate each year. She always envisioned them impoverished by one bad year, and the strain sapped her spirit and nagged at her worn body like a chronic sore. But with Mark Jr. around, blithe and carefree, her eyes brightened and her worries faded. It was like having a son of their own in the house for the first time.

  The early part of Mark’s stay had been annoying for Slim, for they were plagued by newspapermen from Pecos, Odessa, San Angelo and Dallas, and even a writer-photographer team from Look magazine. But after three weeks Mark Jr. and Slim agreed that they’d had it. No more reporters, they vowed, and they shook hands on it. After that, the kid worked with the Mexicans, getting his shirt wringing wet, driving the tractors, operating the pumps, turning the big valves and repairing the machinery in which the dust fought a constant battle with lubrication for the life of the small parts.

  The boy fitted easily into the routine of farm life, and Slim even became accustomed to the chubby Secre
t Service agent who stayed in the guest room and paid his bill as a boarder. While the agent never allowed more than a few hundred feet to come between himself and the President’s son, he was remarkably unobtrusive. Dressed as a hired hand, the agent frequently worked in the fields and smilingly shook his head when Slim tried to pay him the going hourly rate. He was doing all right on government per diem, he said. At first, after a day in the sun, young Mark was too tired to stir after supper, except for Saturday nights when Slim took the boy and the agent to a highway beer hall for a few drinks and a game of darts. By the end of the summer, though, Mark Jr. had built up his stamina, and many week nights, he would play his guitar while the Mexicans sang old folk melodies in Spanish and the agent beat out an accompaniment on an oil drum.

  Slim was thinking of young Mark this Sunday as he left the farmhouse and walked across the fields, scuffing at the dirt and adjusting his straw sombrero to deflect the rays of the sun. Slim was thinking of Mark Jr. because the boy would be back in a few months for another summer of work before he went to law school. But Slim also was thinking of his young friend because of this thing about the water—the sweet, icy water which sprang wondrously from far beneath these arid plains.

  Slim and Mark Jr. had exchanged a number of letters last fall, and then at Christmas time, Slim had received a White House card and an accompanying handwritten letter from the President, on official stationery with the President’s seal. The President thanked him warmly for helping young Mark and for keeping an eye on him. The President also said that he would like to repay the favor, and if he could be of any assistance, Slim should be sure to write him.

  So, in January, after considerable thought, Slim did write the President about his chief worry—the sweet water. The water under the land in this part of West Texas, he wrote, was a priceless natural resource that should be preserved. But, wrote Slim, he was afraid that too many pumps were going to bring up too much water to produce too much cotton that wasn’t needed. Slim cited geologists and their reports. He urged that the federal government could help by sponsoring a conference of the cotton farmers and trying to find some formula to put a limit on the pumping. Slim wrote that he, for one, would be glad to cut back voluntarily, but others refused, so the prestige of the federal government was needed. Perhaps the government could produce an agreement which all farmers would sign. Or, if voluntary methods wouldn’t work, perhaps there ought to be a federal law limiting the take of water. But something ought to be done, concluded Slim, so that the flow could be preserved for years to come. He labored over the letter for several nights, for words were not Slim’s trade.

  By return air mail, Slim received a polite letter from the President, this one typewritten, saying that the President thought Slim’s idea had merit and that he was referring it to the Interior and Agriculture departments for recommendations. But now, Slim had heard nothing in six weeks, and his interest was piqued as to just what Hollenbach’s federal men would come up with as a solution.

  He was standing near one of his pumps and gazing down a long, boarded irrigation channel, which stretched to the horizon like a ribbon of silver, when he heard Betsy call him. Her thin, piping voice was almost lost in a freshet of wind, but he turned to see her on the porch. She was waving something and motioning to him. When he reached the house, she held out a letter to him.

  “It just came special delivery,” she said. “It says White House on the envelope, so I guess it’s the one you’ve been expecting.”

  Slim took the letter and went to the kitchen, first swallowing a glassful of the cool water which, he assumed, was the subject of the letter. The stationery was a pale-green color, bearing the presidential crest, and the handwriting was the President’s, the same, clear, neat loops that Slim remembered from the Christmas note. He read it carefully:

  Dear Mr. Carmichael:

  As you know, and as I wrote you, I was very appreciative of the help and counsel you gave my son last summer, and I was anxious to do anything of a personal nature that I could to return the favor.

  But I am irritated and distressed that you presumed on this relationship to try to foist onto the federal government a problem which is essentially an individual one. Frankly, my dear Carmichael, you are completely out of bounds when you solicit the aid of the federal government in general, and the President in particular, in solving a problem that is one of your own making. Time, effort and money in considerable quantities would be required here in Washington to fulfill your request.

  At this particular time, the administration has its hands and its heart full with enormous responsibilities on the national and international scenes. Our very survival as a nation rests on the manner in which we confront these difficulties and surmount them. I am, at this very moment, seeking to formulate a concept by which our nation and our world can live in security and peace for the unknown centuries ahead.

  You could not, of course, know this, but it does seem to me that the broad outlines of America’s dilemma would have penetrated even your area of West Texas and that you would have been aware of the burden we are carrying.

  In short, Carmichael, these are hours when every citizen should do his utmost to find his own way over the personal obstacles which face us all.

  It was President Kennedy who said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It is not too late for all of us to heed those words.

  Sincerely,

  Mark Hollenbach

  Bewildered, Slim, ran his finger over the presidential seal, as though assuring himself it was genuine. He snapped the letter and read several sentences again. Then he shoved it across the kitchen table to Betsy.

  “Read that,” he ordered, and the harshness in his voice made her look up in surprise.

  When she finished reading, her brows creased in a frown. “I don’t understand,” she said. “There must be some…”

  “Some mistake?” he asked. “Oh, no. That’s the President’s handwritin’ all right. I know it from the Christmas note. Now just where in the hell does he get off telling me that this water is a personal problem of ours?”

  He thought a minute, and as he thought, Betsy could see the skin tightening on his bony features. His jaw set. Slim was getting angry.

  “I was trying to help,” he said, “and he reads me a snotty lecture on citizenship. Why, that high-horse professor! Who does he think he is anyway?”

  “Now, Slim,” Betsy protested. “There has to be some explanation. It sounds to me like he never read your letter.”

  “Sure he did.” Slim’s reedy voice was rising. “He said he liked the idea and he was askin’ two departments about it. Now he gives me the back of his hand.”

  Betsy fingered her cheek nervously. She hated these outside troubles. They had enough of their own. “Probably the letter was written for him by somebody else and he never even saw it,” she suggested.

  “Oh, no. I tell you that’s his own handwriting, all cute and careful like an old-maid schoolteacher. Damn these eastern smart-alecks. They think the rest of us are a bunch of slobs.”

  “Slim,” she admonished. “President Hollenbach’s from Colorado. He’s no Easterner.”

  Slim slapped the table. “Oh, it’s all the same. A fellow goes back there to Washington, and he gets all slick and know-it-all like that New York crowd. Just because he’s in the White House he thinks he can insult ordinary people. And I wasn’t askin’ for help. I was trying to help him. That’s what gets my goat. By God, I’ve got a good mind to stump Reeves County this fall and whip the tar out of that guy.”

  “Slim, please,” she pleaded.

  He snatched the letter and read it once more. When he spoke again, he had calmed somewhat.

  “On second thought, Betsy,” he said, “I think maybe somebody got to that ol’ boy. He’s a politician, and no politician would write a letter like that, especially in a year when he
’s runnin’ again, unless somethin’ was up. Maybe Bill Spicer and his gang got in the act. Spicer and ’em don’t want no meters on the pumps. They want to take that water until it dries up and to hell with the future. Maybe I ought to show the letter to the county agent and see what he knows.”

  She shook her head. “Please don’t do that, Slim. Why should we get involved? It’s none of our business. I don’t like messing in something like that. The government has too many ways to get back at you.”

  Her pinched little face, as fleshless as his own, showed the years of sun and toil. The worry lines bunched about her eyes and her fingers plucked at a place mat. Everything seemed to unnerve Betsy these last few years.

  “Well, all right,” he said, “but how about sending the letter to Mark, Jr.? He’s a sensible young fellow, and he might have an idea. Maybe, just maybe, this is the President’s idea of a joke.”

  “Please don’t, Slim,” she implored. “It would only upset young Mark. What could he do about it anyway? Why not wait until he comes out here this summer? Then you can show him the letter someday without making anything special out of it.”

  Slim looked at his wife and sighed. “All right, Betsy.” He replaced the letter in the green envelope and carried it into the dining room. He put it in a small drawer of the old roll-top desk which both he and Betsy used for their accounts. “We’ll just leave it there for the time being and forget about it,” he said.