“Listen to me, please.” Jennifer put a hand on his arm impulsively. “You asked how long I’d known Jarrell. I told you four or five months. But that doesn’t mean much, I’m not good at knowing people. I don’t try to. I accept them instead. If Jarrell’s worried about something, that’s his business. I’m no good at belonging, Harry, I just work at, well, being. I try to understand me. What Jarrell believes, what he needs, that’s private, and I don’t trespass. How was that praline?”
She smiled and then waved at a tall, lanky man who was walking toward them across the green belt around the baseball diamond.
“It’s Clem Stoltzer,” she told him. “Plant superintendent. He said something last night about a guided tour, a VIP excursion. Are you up to it?”
With Stoltzer was a heavyset man in a gray drill uniform. His name was Crowley, Lee Crowley, Stoltzer told them. Crowley smiled at them, and touched a hand to his visored cap in a friendly salute. Crowley then joined the black boys who were prancing with excitement and shouting slangy encouragement and good-humored ridicule at the players. “Now that you got it, let’s see you catch it!” they yelled at a youngster calling for a fly ball. “Get y’self an ironing board,” they shouted at a batter and shrieked with laughter. “Can’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle.”
Stoltzer was in his forties, with a fringe of blond-gray hair neatly hedging his weathered bald spot. His eyes were watchful, but his manner was pleasant as he escorted them along serpentine paths towards Summitt City’s plants and facilities.
Glancing back, Selby saw the security guard, Crowley, leading the black youngsters away from the baseball field, walking between them with his arms casually about their narrow shoulders.
With Stoltzer providing what sounded rather like a practiced commentary, Selby and Jennifer visited a small, immaculate hospital and accident ward, a theater building with an editing room and a film library, and toured a complex of antiseptic buildings that housed generators and offices of the EPS — the environmental protection supervisor — “Not even a VP from the Harlequin headquarters in Pennsylvania, not even George Thomson himself, could overrule Mr. Nash’s orders,” Stoltzer told them.
They inspected a gymnasium equipped with bowling alleys and racquetball courts, mirrored weight rooms and exercise machines fitted with respiratory and blood pressure indicators.
They saw hot tubs, saunas and swimming pools. Most of the facilities were in use, men and women in yoga classes, others playing court games or attending golf and tennis clinics. The pools were full of schoolchildren darting through the water like well-schooled seals under the eye of instructors.
Harlequin’s main plant was a brilliantly lighted building where hundreds of employees, male and female, in white smocks, sat at counters and control panels monitoring instruments which (Stoltzer became animated as he explained this) profiled the quality of raw materials before their conversion into plastic end products, such as textile laminates, appliances of all types, insulating foam and so forth.
“Our function here,” Stoltzer told them, “is to polymerize particular monomers and convert them to pellets for final molding...”
An orderly, hivelike activity flowed from the various checkpoints and stations in this huge factory, which created (Stoltzer told them with pride) epoxy, polyesters and polyurethane from plastic derived from fractions of gas or petroleum recovered during refining processes.
Selby noticed cameras at various vantage points, slim beige cylinders mounted in ceilings and on the top of buildings. “They help us to record traffic efficiency patterns,” Stoltzer explained.
Lunch was a comparatively noisy interlude. Selby was grateful for the reassuring clatter of plates and cutlery, and the snatches of talk from adjoining tables.
The commissary was cheerfully decorated, with two wails painted in a buttery shade of yellow and the others sparkling with huge, clear glass panels which enclosed a well-planned jungle of green, leafy plants and tiers of potted flowers, herbs and small vegetables.
Music sounded from ceiling speakers. Air-conditioning created currents which were pungent with earth smells from the wall gardens, and the pleasant sharpness of lime.
Luncheon was excellent, a grilled white fish and mixed fresh vegetables. Selby sat with Jennifer, Clem Stoltzer and Jarrell. The conversation was casual, but sufficiently distracting to prevent Selby from talking with his brother.
The security guard, Lee Crowley, stopped by to tell Stoltzer that the fish stock had arrived for Summitt City’s lakes. Crowley appeared younger than he had with his visored cap on. His hair was dark and thick, and there was a high, healthy color in his rugged face.
“If you’re a fisherman, Mr. Selby,” the guard said, “we’ve got all the action you could hope for here. I’m putting in a new batch of fingerlings this afternoon, channel catfish, trout and bluegills. The old crop needs some thinning out. I can fix you up with a rod if you’d like to try your hand.”
After lunch Jennifer announced that she had a hair appointment. Jarrell mentioned to Selby that some people were stopping by that night, friends who wanted to meet him; not a party, just drinks and a pick-up dinner, and there would be time then to discuss what they wanted to do with the lots in California.
Selby spent the rest of the afternoon strolling about and trying to isolate the source of his frustration. As the day became grayer and colder, he crossed the baseball diamond and sat at a redwood table by the lake. The water now looked like a huge, flat mirror in its frame of dark trees.
It was too bad, he thought, that this brother of his, half brother, that is, seemed so indifferent to their shared link with Jonas Selby. That was his privilege, of course, not to give a goddamn about the past, his father’s, his own, or anybody’s, for that matter, but it wasn’t so easy for Selby; he couldn’t dismiss it that way, because his thoughts had a habit of turning backward to where his pain and troubles were rooted, where somebody else had made the rules.
A football landed with a thump on the grass and rolled end over end and toward him, stopping at his feet and rocking slowly from side to side.
Everything was quiet. The baseball diamond was empty and so were the green belts around the groves of trees. Winds made a lonely sound and created a trembling on the water.
Picking up the football, Selby’s hand instinctively found the seams and laces. He touched his cheekbone, absently tracing the blade-shaped scar below his eye.
It had happened in a game with an expansion team. The field had been slick with mud. They had blitzed on third and long, it looked like play-action, but it was a weak-side draw and they were caught coming in by the pulling guards. Selby remembered little after the first impact, when the offensive lineman’s helmet drove into his face mask, snapping a metal bar and scooping a neat hollow out of his cheekbone. “Like he used a teaspoon,” the team doctor told him.
An anxious voice called, “Hey, mister, throw us our ball, okay?”
They were standing near the woods, the two black youngsters he had seen earlier. They still wore jeans and T-shirts, but looked colder now — huddled together as if for warmth and protection. Their buoyant bravado was gone, they were watching him with nervous smiles. The taller of the pair put out a hand to him, but they both looked so tense that Selby realized they were about ready to bolt and run for it.
“This is your ball?”
“Yeah, mister, but we didn’t take it. It was on the ground loose.”