Interface. Part 33

"Yeah, I got that d.a.m.n letter. I don't accept your resignation. I want you working for me. h.e.l.l, woman, you're like a pit bull trained to attack white men. I want you on my side."

Eleanor laughed. "I don't attack anyone."

"Well you sure do leave a lot of corpses in your wake."

The smile fell away from Eleanor's face and she drove in silence for a while.

She and Harmon hadn't spent a lot of time driving into the mountains. She was not really a mountain person. They looked dangerous to her. For years she'd felt trapped, in a way, between the mountain wall on one side and the endless plains on the other. The devil and the deep blue sea. Now that they were getting closer to the first real range of mountains, a ridge of red stone that swept smoothly up out of the gra.s.sland and broke off jaggedly hundreds of feet above their heads, she was beginning to remember that the mountains had their attractions, that they were a lot more interesting when you got up close instead of viewing them through miles of brown Denver smog.

"Sorry," Caleb said, "that was a real stupid thing for me to say." Clearly, the Senator was not a man who apologized very often, and he found it difficult.

"It's okay," she said. "I know what you meant."

"If I intended to run for another term, I'd have to sack you," he said, after they had drawn closer to the base of the first ridge and turned parallel to it along a rolling and winding road. They were now completely out in the country.

"You don't say."

"When one of my staffers steps up in front of the single largest collection of journalists ever a.s.sembled in Denver and announces that everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen, it makes things a little awkward for me."

This time Eleanor didn't laugh. She smiled, but it was a sheepish kind of grin. This was a Monday morning. She had spent yesterday morning reading scathing editorials and reb.u.t.tals in the editorial sections of the newspapers. To say that she had hit a nerve didn't do justice to the level of indignation.

"How many death threats have you gotten?" Senator Marshall asked.

"I stopped listening to my messages after the third one," Eleanor said.

"They actually put them on tape? They must have been really p.i.s.sed."

"Yeah."

"I can have the Secret Service check them out."

"It just sounds to me like a bunch of ranchers blowing off steam," she said.

"It ain't just Colorado. You're the most hated woman in the West," Senator Marshall said. "A lightning rod."

"I know it."

"People wouldn't be so vehement unless your words were largely true," Senator Marshall said.

She gave him a searching look. "What's your opinion?"

The Senator winced, as if he wished she hadn't asked this question. He looked out the window for a while, appalled.

"Well, of course you're right," he finally said. "The economy of this whole region is built on subsidies and federal programs. But people refuse to admit that because they want to believe in the cowboy myth. That their ancestors came out and made the desert bloom solely through their own hard work and pluck.

"Now, they were plucky, and they did work hard. But there are a lot of plucky, hard-working people in other places who have gone down the toilet anyway just because they were pursuing a fool's errand, economically speaking. The people who came here sort of lucked into a situation of cowboy socialism.

Without federal programs they'd go broke - no matter how hard they worked.""Federal programs that are kept alive by senators."

"Yeah. Colorado's small state population-wise. Our delegation in the House can't do diddly. But in the Senate, every state is equal. When one senator, like me, gets some seniority, works his way up into a few key committee chairmanships, then some states are more equal than others. My job - my raison d'etre - is to keep certain federal programs alive that prevent this region from turning back into the buffalo farm G.o.d intended it to be.

"It's a feedback loop. This is high-tech lingo that I picked up in the sixties when some G.o.dd.a.m.n ecologist was raving to me. I keep the programs alive. The economy thrives. People move to Colorado and vote for me. The cycle begins again.

"As long as those programs continue to exist, no one notices. They are part of the landscape. They are forces of nature, like the wind and the rain. The people who live off them, people like Sam Wyatt, have come to think of them as natural and divinely ordained. To them, living off of federal largesse is no different in principle than, say, fishing salmon from the Gulf of Alaska or tapping maple syrup from trees in Maine. So, when someone like you steps in front of the TV cameras and points out the obvious -that these people are no different in principle from people who live off of welfare checks - it just drives them crazy. It strikes at the heart of who they are."

Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn't believe that Senator Marshall was saying these things.

"So, why aren't you going to accept my resignation?" she said.

"My whole career I've been doing things because I had to. Now that I'm in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished I could do but was afraid to."

"Well, the press should have a field day with that."

"The press can f.u.c.k themselves. Now I can say that. Take a right here."

Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight into the mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing: steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the only place within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it. It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under gra.s.s and sage, its pink and peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.

"You must be getting a lot of pressure to sack me."

"To h.e.l.l with that. They'll forget all about it in a week, believe me. What I'll do is give you an internal transfer."

"Oh. So I'm getting a new job?"

"Yeah. You're getting a new job. I'm getting you out of Colorado before someone lynches your a.s.s. Or mine."

"Oh, my G.o.d."

"That's right. You are going to Washington, D.C., lady. Back to your hometown. And if you thought Denver was a nest of vipers, you just wait."

They both shut up for a moment driving through the gap. Caleb groped out with his left hand and turned the Resurrection Symphony up to the point where it was loud even to his leathery ears, and they cut through and suddenly found themselves in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Once it pa.s.sed through the gap, the road split off in three or four directions, and none of the signs meant anything to Eleanor. "Which way do I go now?" she said.

"I got you here," Caleb said. "Now you're on your own."

PART 3.

Vox Populi.

If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox . . . But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. . . . With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and a.s.semblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished.

Plato, Republic.

32.

On a gentle summer evening back during the Eisenhower administration, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane had once watched his uncle Pervis beat a man up with a sharpened motorcycle chain. It happened outside of a very inexpensive and dangerous bar in north central California that catered to agricultural laborers. Okies.

Nimrod's grandfather, James McLane, had obtained a piece of land in Oklahoma during one of the land runs in the late 1800s. He commenced to work that soil literally within the hour, scooping out shallow graves along the Cimarron River in which to place the bodies of the previous occupants, who had arrived shortly before he had, with faster horses but not quite so many guns.

A few decades later, that stream dried up and all the topsoil blew away to Arkansas. James had long since died, and so had his eldest son Marvis, who had gotten into an altercation with a piece of newfangled farm machinery and spectacularly lost. James's surviving sons, Elvis and Purvis, abandoned the land and went to California, following a rumor of jobs. Elvis married another Okie - actually, an Arkie - named Sheila White, and they started to have kids. Purvis joined the Navy and came back from World War II full of lies, liquor, and shrapnel. Half of him was covered with tattoos and the other half with burn scars. For the next few years of life, until he discovered some exciting new career openings in the benzedrine trade, he shuttled back and forth between short-term, low-paying jobs on the waterfront in Oakland and in the vegetable fields of the Valley. Purvis later obtained a sinecure of sorts, as a founding member of the h.e.l.l's Angels.

Elvis and Sheila, by contrast, were stay-at-home types. Elvis stuck to the one thing he had talent for, which was stoop labor, and over the years, more because of his reliability than because of brains or skill, he managed to work his way up into a position as foreman for Karl Fort Enterprises, Inc.

Karl Fort was also an Okie who had gone west in the 1930s, but he was different: he was from Tulsa, and he had gone west with money in his pocket and connections in Washington. His money bought him land.

The money went a long way because at the time he bought the land, it was worthless. His connections in Washington knew that the federal government was soon to establish huge irrigation projects in the area.As soon as water reached Karl Fort's land, it became worth a hundred times what he had paid for it. Fort established agricultural Gulags where his fellow Okies labored under the watchdog gaze of Fort guards, occasionally getting enough of a paycheck to keep them and their families alive.

Elvis McLane was not really cut out for management. He didn't understand that when you made the cut and moved up to the next rank, you had to stop drinking next to the people you were giving orders to, hiring, and firing. His brother Purvis sat him down and talked to him about it. Purvis had been in the military and understood the concept of fraternization and why it was a bad idea. But he never really got through to Elvis, who (it was rumored) had, while still in the womb, lost a wrestling match with his own umbilical cord.

It was only a matter of time before Elvis went into a bar and ran into someone he had fired, yelled at, or otherwise humiliated, and trouble broke out. Actually, it happened several times, but the most memorable case involved a sullen, dangerous broccoli picker named Odessa Jones. He was named after the city in Texas where he had been abandoned by his mother.

Nimrod McLane, who among other distinctions had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame, despised liberal hand-wringing types who were always whining about America being a violent society. These people had read too many poorly written accounts of bar fights that turned grisly.

The standard newspaper account of a grisly bar fight contained a deeply buried a.s.sumption: that people partic.i.p.ated in bar fights because they were stupid. Some minor slight, such as looking at another man's girl or jumping the line for the pool table, would degenerate into meaningless, pointless violence. Liberals would read about it in the paper the next morning, wring their hands, and advocate better education and gun control.

Nimrod McLane had seen a lot of these altercations as a child. After his voice changed he partic.i.p.ated in a few. He had a pretty clean understanding of how bar fights started and why they turned ugly. Americans partic.i.p.ated in bar fights for exactly the same reason they had joined, with such gusto, in the Civil War: because they had values and considered violence and mayhem a small price to pay.

Odessa Jones was a case in point. He was a proud, hard-working man who had been fired by Elvis McLane because of what amounted to a personality conflict. So when he walked up to Elvis in that bar and went upside his head with a gla.s.s beer pitcher, he wasn't doing it because he was a stupid low-cla.s.s drunk.

He was doing it because his honor had been violated and because honor was more important to him than temporal, earthly considerations, such as keeping his front teeth or staying out of jail. Odessa Jones probably had ancestors who, like him, were rootless white trash, but who had picked up rifles and gone North to fight the Yankees anyway, not because they believed in slavery but because they were incensed that the Northerners refused to stay at home and mind their own business. They were willing to have their legs shot off in Pennsylvania because principle, to them, was more important than flesh. This was what made America such an ethereal society.

Sprawling out on the floor of the bar, Elvis's eyes fell on the underside of a nearby table, and he realized that he could probably rip one of its legs off and use it as a cudgel. Which is what he did; but the much larger Odessa Jones beat the s.h.i.t out of him anyway, or at least continued to until both of them were thrown out of the bar, and he ran afoul of Purvis McLane and his motorcycle chain. Years after this event, when Nimrod was pursuing his philosophy degree, he spent a lot of time contemplating the following question: if Odessa Jones was fighting for a principle, and Elvis McLane was fighting out of a defensive reflex, then what was Purvis McLane up to?

Purvis McLane was engaged in long-range strategic thinking. He acted calmly and dispa.s.sionately. Uncle Purvis, Navy veteran and cofounder of the h.e.l.l's Angels, simply did what was needed to look out for the overall welfare of his family unit. Nimrod McLane had come to believe that all persons could be divided into Odessas, Elvises, and Purvises, and he considered himself a Purvis all the way.

Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane values. He went to church, he studied the Bible, he read Aquinas. All his life he had despised materialistic people who could only think about money. He had made himself famous and got on the cover of Time by becoming The Conservative Who Hated Yuppies. Whichwas why he wanted to become president: so he could clean up America.

Tip McLane watched his chief rival for the nomination, Norman Fowler, Jr., sign his own political death warrant, with a flourish, at precisely twelve o'clock noon on the day after Memorial Day. Norman Fowler, like Dan Quayle and a few others, belonged to a fourth category of humanity: he was a Marvis.

McLane was late for a luncheon in Bel Air and had stopped by his hotel suite in downtown L.A. for a quick change of clothing when he happened to notice the digital clock turning over 12:00. Reflexively he turned on his television, which was already set to one of the local network affiliates, and was treated to the never-to-be forgotten sight of Norman Fowler, Jr., at Disneyland, shaking hands with Goofy.

"My G.o.d," said his media consultant Ezekiel ("Zeke") Zorn.

"Is this something from Sat.u.r.day Night Live?" asked his campaign manager Marcus Drasher.

"He's a dead man," was the only comment Tip McLane would make.

"Jesus, the man is worth billions," Drasher said. "He can afford to hire the best. And what do they do? They sent him to Disneyland. And they let Goofy shake his hand!"

"This has got to be Cy Ogle's work. Ogle has a Goofy fetish. It's a known fact," Zorn said suspiciously.

"Are you crazy?" Tip McLane said.

Zeke Zorn was a high-intensity sort of guy. He was an Elvis - he reacted but he didn't think much. For all this, he has a basically sunny, open, California personality, and it was unusual to hear this kind of paranoia coming from him. This was the third time he had brought up the subject of Cy Ogle, apropos of nothing, in the last week.

"I would bet you money," Zorn said glaring suspiciously at the screen, "that the man in that Goofy suit is none other than Cy Ogle himself. It's just what he would do."

"You're off your rocker," McLane said.

"Well, let me just say that if this campaign ever went to Disneyland - which it never would - I would have half a dozen snipers following you around with orders to blow Goofy's head off if he came within half a mile. Because this is just the kind of thing that Ogle would cook up."

Drasher watched this startling performance and then burst out laughing. Drasher was a Purvis. Like McLane, he had grown up poor and become a highly educated conservative. He was black and had grown up in Mississippi; but he and McLane had much more in common with each other than they did with Zeke Zorn, a man who dressed so finely that they did not even know the names of many of the articles of clothing that Zorn wore every single day.

"You're serious," Drasher said in wonderment. "You think that Cy Ogle sent Goofy in to do a political hit on Fowler."

"It's just too perfect," Zorn said. "When these perfect things happen, you have to look for a guiding hand somewhere. It's like Dukakis and the tank helmet in '88. I suppose you think that just happened." Zorn said these words almost contemptuously. "Someone noticed that Dukakis looked like Snoopy. Someone put the Snoopy helmet in his hands. Mark my words - somewhere out there is a cartoon character with your name on it, Nimrod McLane."

"Yosemite Sam," Drasher suggested.

"Sounds paranoid to me," McLane said.

"Hey," Zorn said, throwing up his hands, "once Norman Fowler has shaken hands with Goofy, no force in the universe can stop us. But" - he shook his finger accusingly at the television, "once the presidential campaign gets underway, this is the kind of thing that we have to look out for."

"Let's not get c.o.c.ky," Drasher said. "There is still one force in the universe that can keep us from the nomination."

"What's that?" McLane said.

Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with a white southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. "The power of JEEEEE - zuss!" he said.

"Good point," Zorn said. "Let's get our b.u.t.ts over to that d.a.m.n picnic."

33.

"I was spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on my frankfurter just now," the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said, holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people at the luncheon could see it, "when I noticed that there were some small flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the part of the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow and perfectly smooth and h.o.m.ogeneous in its composition. But since I have come to California ..." Having telegraphed the joke, he paused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then, as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. "Let's just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurters here in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in my part of the country probably would have been confiscated and a.n.a.lyzed in a police laboratory." The crowd laughed dutifully, for the second time, but Rev.

Sweigel would not let go of the theme. "I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about this mustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed me that these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actual seeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds."

The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children who know that they are about to be told that they stand a high chance of burning in h.e.l.l. All of the people here at the Southern California Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was most of them) knew what was coming. The non- Christians were already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they weren't talking much anyway.

Sweigel continued. "Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to perform miracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.

"This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just a little boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today. You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have ever actually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the bright yellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know, frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppy seed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was saying that we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith. "But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in these matters and I have had my first taste of expensive Southern California MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go, nor are they extremely large."

Ten feet away from the lectern, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, trying to resist the temptation to order another hot dog. He knew exactly where this was going and he had to keep his wits about him.