“What do you have in mind, Huey?”
Huey’s sneering smile made me think of a mean little kid laying out the details of a particularly nasty prank for his cohorts.
“One of the laws I’m gonna push through in this special session,” he said, “forbids any federal official or employee from disbursin’ any public funds appropriated or made available by the Congress…if, in the Louisiana state government’s opinion, that spendin’ would encroach upon states’ rights.”
“This is a law you’re talkin’ about?”
“Sure as hell ain’t a request. Violators’ll be sentenced to a year in jail! We’ll fill the hoosegow so full of them Roosevelt henchmen, there won’t be no room left for the honest crooks.”
Seymour seemed to have forgotten his teed-up ball; he went over to the tee bench and sat, numbly, and Huey joined him.
Quietly, reasonably, Seymour said, “Kingfish…you have one of the best legal minds in the country…”
“Why, thank you, Seymour. The Supreme Court of the United States, ’fore whom I’ve argued many a case for the great state of Loozyana, agrees with you.”
“…and you know, at least as well as I, that such a law would be found unconstitutional….”
“I don’t give a diddly damn. Either way, it’ll tie up them federal funds till after the election, come January.”
Seymour sighed; his expression was dark. “You’re playing into FDR’s hands with this one, Kingfish-with this probe he and the House of Representatives are about to launch…”
Huey stood, stamped his feet like a child in a tantrum. “They can probe my hind quarters till the cows come home! Claimin’ Louisiana ain’t a ‘representative form of government’ no more? Hell-that duck won’t hunt. Everybody knows that crippled fucker is afraid of me!”
“Then you haven’t…reconsidered?”
Huey spoke through clenched teeth; whatever subject Seymour had just broached, it was a sore one. “Reconsidered what, Seymour?”
Seymour said nothing.
Huey put his hands on his hips and leaned forward mockingly, inches from Seymour’s dour face, pronouncing every word distinctly.
“Yes, I’m runnin’ for president,” Huey said, “and no, I don’t necessarily expect to win…not in ’36. But by God, I’ll sure as hell set the stage for 1940!”
Huey backed off, folded his arms, raised his chin.
Seymour said, “Kingfish…we don’t even have the damn South sewed up. Does the word ‘Mississippi’ conjure up anything? Bilbo’s man just beat your candidate’s ass, there!”
Senator Bilbo, another rabble-rousing populist, had backed Hugh White for governor of Mississippi; Huey’s man Paul Johnson had been narrowly defeated. The papers were still full of the ongoing recount.
“That’s a goddamn fluke,” Huey said dismissively. “And it wasn’t me that got beat-it’s that shif’less sucker Johnson…he shoulda took more of my help! Look what my stumpin’ done for Hattie Carraway! Jesus Christ couldn’ta got that prune-faced old gal elected. But I did!”
Seymour was shaking his head. “I’ve told you how expensive a campaign of that magnitude would-”
“Fuck it! We got a war chest so fulla loot we cain’t close the goddamn fuckin’ thing!”
“It’ll clean us out, Kingfish.”
He nodded, and kept nodding. “And we’ll have another four years, ’fore ’40, to fill the ol’ dee-ducts box back up ag’in, won’t we? Now, git off your ass, and hit your goddamn ball, Seymour. I ain’t got all day.”
A weary Seymour got up, his demeanor at odds with his sporty golf apparel, addressed the ball, hit it hard and clean, but not as forcefully as Huey, who was heading down the slope while Seymour’s ball was still in the air.
“House of Representatives my ass,” he was muttering. “Four hundred and thirty-five fuckin’ dumbbells…”
As I trailed along, my pounding head barely functioning, I gathered that Huey and Seymour had moved on to discussing possible candidates for the next figurehead governor, now that O.K. Allen’s “reign” was coming to an end. Huey kept saying that he’d promised this one and that one the job.
“Jesus, Huey-who haven’t you promised this job to?”
“Hey, it keeps ’em all on my side, and when the time comes, I’ll find an excuse and a fat job for each of ’em, to keep ’em there. You worry too much, Seymour.”
“Fore!” someone shouted, and a ball went sailing over our heads.
“Jesus H. Christ!” a startled Huey shouted.
He stood fuming, like a bull preparing to charge, as up and over the hill came the party responsible. Trailed by his armed caddy, the blond heavyset man, with an eagle’s beak nose in an incongruously blue-eyed, boyish face, trotted down the hill, smiling benignly. He wore a straw hat, a short-sleeve white shirt with no tie, an argyle sweater vest, and-like Seymour-the childish knickers so many golfers insisted upon humiliating themselves in.
“Didn’t expect to get such a good piece of that, Kingfish!” he called, in a booming, pulpit-schooled baritone.
“You dumb sumbitch!” Huey shouted. “You tryin’ to kill me?”
“What,” Murphy whispered to me, “and end his meal ticket?”
This “dumb sumbitch” was Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith, the rabble-rousing revivalist preacher who headed up the Kingfish’s nationwide Share the Wealth Clubs.
Smith knocked his ball up over the next hill and he and his caddy moved on ahead of us, for a change.
“Why do you tolerate that two-bit bible-thumper?” Seymour muttered to Huey, as they walked along. “He’s only out to feather his own damn nest.”
Huey snorted a laugh. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”
Seymour frowned, and didn’t even bother lowering his voice. “The bastard’s a Jew-hating Fascist, and his ravings and rantings draw us the wrong kind of attention.”
“There’s no such thing as the ‘wrong kind’ of votes, Seymour.” The Kingfish laid a hand on his adviser’s shoulder. “Besides-next to me, the Rev is the best damn rabble-rouser in the You Ass of A.”
I whispered to Murphy, “Is Seymour right about Smith?”
“Guess you folks up North don’t get the priv’lige of Reverend Smith’s insights,” he said dryly. “We hear ’im on the radio, a lot, down these parts.”
“Really?”
Murphy nodded. “The Rev got bounced out of his home church ’cause he was spendin’ too much time workin’ with a North Carolina black-shirt outfit.”
“North Carolina Nazis?”
“If I’m jokin’, I’m chokin’. They advocate overthrow of the gov’mint by armed insurrection-the whole shootin’ match.”
We had the same thing in Chicago, of course-the Bund was always rattling imaginary swords-but I couldn’t dispel from my hungover brain the absurd image of a bunch of hillbillies wearing bib overalls over paramilitary black.
Then Seymour hit a long ball that sent him out ahead of the pack, and it was Reverend Smith’s turn to do the bad-mouthing.
“That Hebrew ‘friend’ of yours is untrustworthy, you know,” Smith said, in a hypnotically mellow voice. Like so many preachers, the resonance of his voice lent Smith’s words undeserved weight.
“If I can trust anybody,” Huey said offhandedly, it’s Seymour.”
“So Christ thought of Judas,” Smith insisted. “Weiss is one of that tribe that uses both capitalism and communism to dominate the world and eradicate the godly.”
Huey said nothing, as they trudged down a steep hill; his ball mocked him from a sand trap up ahead.
“And this is a worldwide problem, Kingfish,” Smith continued. “Brave men all around this globe are uniting to fight these godless forces….”
This guy obviously wanted to play Goebbels to Huey’s Hitler, but then he made the mistake of being too direct about it.
“America needs its own Fuhrer,” Smith began.
And Huey turned on him.
“Don’t you compare me to that son of a bitch!” he roared, his nose an inch from the blinking Smith’s, his forehead buckling the brim of the Reverend’s straw fedora. “And knock off the goddamn Jew-baitin’ bullshit!”