The Magic Journey by John Nichols

Author:John Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Soap Operas

A BUSINESSMEN’S CABAL, including Rodey McQueen, Bob Moose, Moe Stryzpk, and Randolph Bonney, appeared early one evening for a confab in Mayor J. B. LeDoux’s construction company office. With this group were Junior Leyba and Joseph Bonatelli. Icarus Suazo rounded out the gathering.

Leaning back, J. B. casually folded his hands. And, pretending nonchalance by tapping his lips with his thumbs, he attempted to assess the power structure paying him the honor of this visit. Except for Bonatelli, he knew everyone present: in both a construction and a political capacity, J. B. had been involved intimately with much of their profit-oriented skullduggery. Yet at this moment, J. B. wondered if he had ever really understood their schemes, or how they planned for things to happen. He felt totally ignorant of a future already mapped out, for himself, personally, and for others cooperating in the Betterment of Chamisaville.

Despite his supposed success in life, J. B. knew he was akin to those early black men allowed to break baseball’s color barrier because they could guarantee the owners a World Series payday, or at least a run for the pennant. Those ballplayers, never truly a part of the organization, were expected to sleep and chow down in separate hotels, they were ordered to endure racial taunts from the fans, opposing players, and their own teammates—“for the good of their race.” Talented individuals all, they were traded immediately—too quickly—when age, injury, or psychological pressures impaired their talents.

Despite his apparently lofty political position, J. B. had no clear overall view of how things were coming down. Buffeted in one direction or another by meetings like this, or through advice given by men like Junior Leyba, J. B. had intuited more than once that the Junior Leybas themselves were intermediaries for higher-ups, taking and transmitting orders from Moe Stryzpk and his ilk, people who also lacked an overall conception, being more conduits for orders, ideas, and opinions they had received from their bosses, the Bonneys, McQueens, and elder Mooses. And no doubt even those honchos atop Chamisaville’s festering heap received crucial input from higher-ups gazing down at the valley from Hija Negrita Mountain, or from enormous, almost empty airplanes drifting overhead at thirty thousand feet en route from New York or Chicago to Phoenix or Los Angeles.

Occasionally, J. B. suspected a rational plan was guiding all their overt and covert actions. But damned if he had the energy, these days, to try and figure it out. Swamped in shame and his flagging lust for a revenge he feared his cowardice would never let him carry out, J. B.’s only gambit had become survival. Puzzling, how everybody else seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Rodey McQueen, a no-nonsense tyrant responsible for creating a town so muddled it couldn’t tell its municipal ass from a pit in the ground, never wavered, he always understood exactly all the processes going on. And even if his plans, due to some human miscalculation or bizarre aspect of weather, crumpled

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