by April Smith
The recording stopped and the loose end of the tape flapped until Fletch got up and shut off the machine. There was silence. Cal was drinking a can of a new soda called Diet Rite. The candidate was dressed for a summer night in town in an old madras jacket, a fresh shirt, and blue jeans. He rarely took off his boots nowadays, but did remove the jacket, as it was becoming stuffy in the office. Catching the contagion of distrust that seemed to rise up from the street, they’d shut the windows.
Fletch and Verna were absorbed with smoking their cigarettes. Over the years, Stell’s youthful face had not lost its innocence, and she often lightened situations with a cheeky comment, but at the moment she looked bamboozled, as if her pure soul could not comprehend such absolute malice.
“Betsy?” she asked. “Did you really say these things?”
“Of course not! Can’t you hear how it’s been doctored?”
“But it’s your voice.”
“The tape’s been altered,” Cal explained. “To make it sound like she’s implicating herself.”
“Pretty amateur job,” added Fletch.
Cal scowled and tossed the soda can into the trash. “It’s good enough to pass.”
“But where’d they get it?” Verna asked throatily.
“The principal was taping me all along,” Betsy realized.
“Who?”
“Mr. Emry.”
Stell’s baby-blue eyes widened. “Mr. Emry, the high school principal?”
Betsy explained that she’d been in Mr. Emry’s office to talk about Jo’s behavior. “He must have had a tape recorder hidden somewhere,” she said.
“Why would he do that?” Stell gasped.
Fletch smiled cynically at his wife’s naïveté. “Don’t mind her. She still believes in the tooth fairy.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Stell.
“It’s not even Mr. Emry!” Betsy was dumfounded. “The so-called interviewer is never identified. Cowards!”
“Just like the Spanish Inquisition,” Fletch remarked. “A hood over their faces.”
“What a hypocrite!” Betsy said. “And this is the man running the school? I want Lance and Jo out of there,” she told her husband impulsively. “We’ll transfer them out of the district, I don’t care.”
“Emry couldn’t have pulled this off alone,” Cal replied tightly. “He doesn’t have the imagination.”
“Then who’s behind it?” Betsy asked.
Fletch replied: “Has to be the FBI.”
“Outrageous!” Betsy exclaimed. “Are we now spying on our own citizens?”
“Hoover’s been doing it for years,” said Cal. “They’re all in it together: Emry, the bureau…and Thaddeus Haynes,” he added with disgust.
Verna intervened. “Take it easy, boys. Let’s not start imagining paranoid conspiracy theories like everybody else around here. We’ll get to the truth.”
She got up from a chair and leaned her wide bottom against Fletch’s mahogany desk. Her stout figure in the charcoal-gray banker’s suit dominated the room with businesslike authority.
“Where did you get this tape, Cal?” she asked crisply.
“Scotty Roy.”
“Fletch?” Verna asked. “Will you take notes?”
“Right,” Fletch echoed obediently. “We should have everything documented.”
“Why don’t you tape-record it?” sniped Stell.
“Funny.” Fletch drew a yellow pad from a drawer and unscrewed a fountain pen.
“What were the circumstances?” Verna went on. “What did Scotty Roy say?”
“He said, ‘You should hear this,’ ” Cal said, and rubbed thumb and forefinger along the vertical creases of his long Nordic face, looking thoughtful at the memory of when he saw his war buddy, just a few days ago. “I was busy in the barn when Scotty drove up,” Cal recalled. “He hands me a box and I open it and there’s the tape.”
“Where did he hear it?” Verna pursued.
“A meeting of the John Birch Society at the Roys’. Scotty thinks it’s the only copy. He gave it to me in order to put a stop to this nonsense,” said Cal. “The Roys got it from Wolf Harrington. The trail stops there, as far as I know.”
“People believe this?” Betsy huffed.
“People are idiots,” Stell demurred.
“How could Emry have pulled it off?” Betsy demanded, frustrated.
Cal had taken out his pipe and tobacco pouch and begun the painstaking, maddening ritual of cleaning the pipe, pinching and tamping the tobacco, and striking the match that drove Betsy crazy, especially when she was all keyed up like this.
“Emry made the recording, but that’s all.” Cal took a long, slow draw. “He doesn’t have the motivation or the smarts to take it further. The FBI must have set it up. We know they’re investigating Betsy, they’ve been to the house.”
“I don’t understand,” she protested. “I was interviewed by two FBI agents before we left New York, and they were a hundred percent satisfied that I quit the party and had nothing else to do with it.”
“Well, somehow Haynes must have got ahold of the tape—he’s got friends in the bureau—and sent it around.” Cal mused for a moment in a halo of blue smoke. “Haynes owns a TV station. He has announcers. He could have done this easily. I’m amazed he hasn’t put it on the air.”
“We should go to the police,” Betsy decided. “You can’t just secretly tape someone and then twist it all around! I thought this wasn’t Russia!”
“Don’t trust the police,” Verna warned.
“We can trust Randy Sturgis,” said Cal.
Verna was unyielding. “Don’t.”
“Oh, God!” Stell shrieked, theatrically wrapping her arms around herself. “We can’t trust anyone! This is like an Alfred Hitchcock movie!”
Fletch was up and pacing. “Troops?” he said. “We need to go on the offensive.”
Verna nodded and lit another cigarette. “How are we doing in the polls?”
“Leading the Democratic field by five points,” Fletch reported.
Verna blew twin tunnels of smoke through her nose. “Good! We leak this to the press before they do and deny all accusations—”
“No. That would be dead wrong,” Cal interrupted impatiently. “We can’t accuse them of a smear campaign—it would make us look weak. We can’t prove rumor and innuendo. So we don’t acknowledge it at all. We stick to our position.”
Fletch threw up his arms. “They’re vilifying your wife in order to undermine your campaign! We have to answer this!”
“Answer who? We’re fighting against shadows and they’re keeping it that way. The secret tape with the unidentified interviewer. It’s very cunning, to keep their get-togethers small and off the record, in private homes, inside a web of silence.”
Verna agreed. “Gets the gossip mill going. Everyone thinks he’s in the know, just itching to tell his neighbor. Did you hear? Kusek’s wife is a Commie! Then you’ve got a whisper campaign.”
All of this only hardened Cal’s resolve. “Haynes et al., they’ve got no answers to real-life problems,” he said forcefully. “All they’ve got is fear. The ranchers I talk to, they see through that, and they’re smart enough to smell a rat. The way to win is by winning. Focus on the everyday issues, like keeping nuclear missiles off our land. There’s strong backing for that. Do it the way we always have, stressing decency. Voter by voter, handshake by handshake—go back to our supporters and remind them that we’re the ones making sense!”
Betsy had been quiet. Finally she spoke. “I’m not afraid to talk about it, Cal. Maybe it would be for the better. Face this Communist Party thing and get it over with. Just tell our friends this is what happened: I made a mistake in my twenties—who hasn’t? Then it’s not a deep, dark secret anymore. Really, this has nothing to do with you running for office.”
Cal reached for her hand. “Thank you, sweetheart.”
“Betsy, you should talk to my bridge club,” Stell offered.
“We sh
ould talk to everyone,” Cal said decisively.
“How do you mean?” asked Verna.
“At a town meeting. Get it out in the open. Challenge Haynes to a debate. The subject: Do we want nuclear missiles in our backyards, or do we not?”
“I love it!” Verna said, hopping off the desk. “A town meeting, right before the elections, when hopefully you’ll get swept along with the Democratic vote for Kennedy.”
“Now you’re dreaming,” Fletch said. “This country will never elect a Catholic.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Verna replied cheerily. “This is going to be great. But we have to start rallying our side. Cal and Betsy will go to every rodeo, every barbecue. It’s a whole new ballgame. Nothing but confidence, you kids. They’ll visit the VA. Host fund-raisers. We’ll run a new ad campaign that talks about what Cal’s accomplished in the state house—hey! You!”
She snapped her fingers, indicating that Fletch should stop gawking and write everything down. They were going to call for a town meeting to talk about missiles.
—
Days later, a similar meeting took place just a few blocks away. Over the years, thousands of donations to The Hour of Truth had made Thaddeus Haynes rich enough to fulfill his dream of owning his own radio and TV station. It was housed in a building on Fifth Street within sight of the Hotel Alex Johnson, but he no longer was in a rented ballroom with a card table and a microphone. On the street level there was a hobby shop, yarn store, tourist kiosk, and the Hi-Ho Bar. The whole second floor was taken up with broadcast studios, and Haynes’s call letters, K-HAY, were painted in cocky yellow on a brick wall overlooking a parking lot.
Thaddeus Haynes welcomed the idea of a town hall meeting, but wasn’t taking any chances with a New York lawyer who, someone reminded him, had been on the Yale debate team. When Calvin Kusek took the podium he would be a lone voice; Haynes wanted the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir backing him up—from behind the curtain, naturally. To this end he called a meeting with two powerful men he had been cultivating for just such a decisive moment, to pool their interests in getting Haynes elected to the U.S. Senate by bringing Kusek down, once and for all.
The co-conspirators met in the second-floor reception area, where Haynes offered each a Cuban cigar. Dutch demurred as it aggravated his asthma, caused by decades of breathing grain dust and chemicals, but Master Sergeant Vance lit up. They gamboled along in a haze of smoke: the large gentleman rancher in his cowboy hat, brandishing his walking stick and wheezing; the air force officer, stepping along in uniform; and their corpulent host, who now dressed in three-piece suits, this one in brown pinstripe with a bright orange tie.
“Here is where the magic happens,” Haynes told his accomplices, guiding them past the lab where news photos were processed, the art department where a single illustrator painted all the logo cards for advertisers, the editing bench covered with rattling equipment, the mysterious dark control room filled with flashing dials.
At the end of the corridor they stopped at a small wood-paneled room with glass windows, through which they could watch a country grandma playing a guitar and singing. She wore a starched calico dress and cowboy boots, and stood in front of a white home-movie screen, which was the backdrop for the TV picture. An operator in a shirt and tie, wearing important-looking earphones, steered an enormous General Electric Orthicon camera, which stood on an elephantine tripod that was mounted with a large school clock for the performer to see. The group could hear her yodeling song coming through loudspeakers in the hall.
“Why, that’s Wendy-Rose Bixby, from The Talent Parade Show,” Dutch Roy said, recognizing the voice. “We get that on the radio.”
“It’s still on the radio, but now we’re putting picture to sound,” Haynes said proudly, leading them into his office, where a TV set, in a regular console like you’d have in your living room, showed a close-up of the singer’s gray hair and deeply lined face at the very same moment it was being broadcast from down the hall.
Dutch roared with laughter. “Wait till I tell Doris! We always thought Wendy-Rose Bixby was a little girl!” he exclaimed. “Got the voice of an angel and she’s a fine yodeler, but she sure ain’t no spring chicken!”
The office was spartan—a big oak desk, a tall safe, the operator’s license for K-HAY on the wall. They sat in leather armchairs around a low modern coffee table, on which there was a heavy glass ashtray for their cigars and a signed photograph of TV and radio star Jack Benny in a frame. It said “To Tad, Your pal, Jack.”
Master Sergeant Vance was awestruck. “Do you know Jack Benny?”
“The networks send those to all the affiliates,” Haynes said with a pompous wave of the hand. “Jack Benny wouldn’t know me from a load of wood.”
He got up and closed the door, turned to his partners, and got right to it.
“Gentlemen, we need to make the most of this town hall thing. It’s a golden opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”
“What did you have in mind, Thaddeus?” asked Dutch.
“Kusek has a lot in his favor. People like him in spite of his politics. He’s a fast talker and a lot of folks are still on the bench about the missile plan.”
“So?”
“So, I say don’t let him get out of the box,” replied Haynes. “Right off the bat, let them know his wife is a Communist.”
“She admits it on tape,” Dutch added knowingly.
“We know she joined the party, but what about this name change? She used to be Coline Ferguson and changed her name to Betsy. Why?”
“Fellas, I don’t give a damn what some bored housewife did twenty years ago,” said Master Sergeant Vance impatiently. “What’s facing us right here, right now, in South Dakota is national defense. The air force needs sixty percent of landowners to sign their rights of entry so we can build the silos. We’re at forty percent, which ain’t good. You send out an inspector, he comes back with resistance, and it’s all because of Kusek. That’s the problem, and why he has to go.”
“Have you read There Goes Christmas?” Dutch asked, blinking rapidly. “The Birch Society lays it out for you, the whole Commie plan to destroy the Christian way of life—”
Haynes laid a calming hand on the old cattleman’s arm. “Nobody’s arguing that.”
“Then what’re we talking about?”
“How to stop Kusek,” Master Sergeant Vance repeated wearily, wiping his face with a handkerchief.
“Coline Ferguson, that’ll stop him,” said Haynes. “The fact that his wife is a Commie and he’s sleeping with her—hell, that’s a violation of national security if I ever heard one.”
“Plus,” said the airman, “we cut off his cash flow.”
“That’s right,” Haynes agreed.
Dutch looked back and forth between his allies.
“You all been talking?”
“Yes, we have,” said Haynes. “And this is where you come in.”
“I wondered what in hell I was doing here. Hoping it was in order to meet Wendy-Rose Bixby,” cracked Dutch, and the others laughed, relieved he was still on the ball.
“Thaddeus tells me you’ve recovered your losses,” said Master Sergeant Vance.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re now in a position, should it come to pass, to supply the base.”
“True,” said Dutch, lying through his yellowed teeth.
“I can pull Kusek’s contract.”
“How?”
“On the simple grounds that he is un-American, and nobody will blink.”
“That don’t seem right,” Dutch said, shaking his head. “First of all, it’s not him, it’s Betsy who—”
“Coline,” interjected Haynes.
“Easy, my friend,” Master Sergeant Vance told Dutch. “None of this is written in stone. First I need proof you can provide what we need. Second I need your promise to sign the right of entry to Crazy Eights.”
Defense of the United States against Russia had recently been built on t
he jittery policy of “mutually assured destruction”—since everybody had the bomb, nobody would be the first to use it. But if some fool did push the button, it had been decided by the military experts out in California that the barren western states—wasteland anyway—would have to go, vaporized by a thousand Russian ICBMs that were trained on each of America’s Minuteman missiles, which meant every ranch that had one was a target.
Dutch could feel his blood pressure rise. “You want to put a nuclear warhead on my ranch?”
“Name of the game,” Master Sergeant Vance said with a shrug.
Haynes stood up and stretched, casually, as if what he was saying really didn’t matter one way or the other.
“You’ve got a lot of friends, Dutch. They trust you. You’re the big chief around here. They’ll follow wherever you go. Hell, you’re the commander of the American Legion post, am I right?”
“Nobody else would take the job,” Dutch quipped, while forcing his mind to roll over the uncomfortable thought of allowing someone to dig a big hole on his property and implant a real live, God-knows-how-big nuclear bomb. Immediately, a black shade of denial came down over that distressing picture. Once it was done he’d forget it was there, like a good-fitting set of false teeth. Nuclear war was never going to happen. Even the Reds had more sense than that. This missile thing was a shell game played by both governments, two sides of the same evil. He saw it dangling in front of him: his last chance. As for coming up with a couple of thousand pounds of hamburger every month—he’d figure that out later.
“Okay. You can build your silo.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Master Sergeant Vance sincerely, and shook his hand.
“I hate to do it to Cal,” Dutch said. “But I guess it’s business.”
“Business,” they all agreed gravely.
Haynes walked over to the safe and spun the lock.
“Now about your friends,” said Haynes. “The places you have influence: the Birch Society, the American Legion, the Cattlemen’s Association…We want them there. At the town hall meeting.”
He withdrew several packets of five-dollar bills secured with rubber bands. He placed them on the coffee table in front of Dutch.