I ask him what court date he is going to request. He says Monday, October 17. Three weeks before the election.
When I talk to him, Bobby is getting ready for the debate. I tell him the news about Jeannie. He sighs and says civil court was the best they could have hoped for her, given the circumstances. He thanks me for helping take care of Annie. They thought she was fine spending the night at her friend Sally’s house, and that’s a mistake they’ll not be making again. Stress, end-of-summer pollen season, an argument with her best friend—the campaign has really put them all under the gun. He says Annie’s already started a series of new allergy shots they hope will help. He says nothing about my being drunk. Neither do I.
Jeannie insists that her mother and son and husband go to the debate in person to lend Bobby some moral support.
I arrange to watch the debate with her. Sitting up and adjusting a pillow, she tells me to make the best deal possible but absolutely to settle: she does not want Bobby being subpoenaed to testify in court.
“You said you invested sixty thousand dollars, right?” She nods. “And you got paid five hundred and ten thousand.” She nods again. “You had sixty thousand in savings?”
“No. I borrowed thirty-five thousand in a short-term loan. And paid it back from the proceeds.” Her voice, though a bit stronger, is still hoarse.
“When you can, send me the papers on that. I’ll try at the very least to get your money back. Plus your loan expenses.”
“Worried about getting your fee?”
“No, but I gather you are. Don’t. This is all professional courtesy.”
“I’d rather pay.”
“I know you would. But that would deprive me of the pleasure and satisfaction of knowing that you know you owe me.” She makes a genuinely sour face. She flicks on the television with the remote control as if she’s firing a weapon at it.
She gets up from the sofa unsteadily. I try to take her arm and, annoyed, she bats my hand away. Leaning on her cane, she limps into the kitchen. She is not as badly off as I feared.
She comes back with a bag of salt-free pretzels and catches me looking at her walk.
“Hey. Just because my body is systematically betraying me doesn’t mean I would profane its glorious temple by deceiving anyone about its true state.”
“It’s mighty useful that you got Rick Bruce to put off the bad publicity until after the debate.”
“Politics is a game of inches,” she says. An announcer comes on the television to introduce the candidates. She holds a finger to her lips and says, “Shh.”
I am right, and wrong, about Wheatley’s debate strategy. He immediately goes out of his way to portray himself as an underdog in the race, and then comes out aggressive, feisty, combative, all in a kind of Harry Truman give-’em-hell style. But he is not, as I guessed he would be, personal in approach at all. He fulminates against Bobby’s party, and he uses some incendiary language about “weird,” “shallow,” “corrupt,” “pathetic,” “incompetent” “creators of decay and failure,” but he has not a word—and rarely even a glance—for Bobby himself.
He is hot; Bobby is cool.
I thought we would hear a lot of subliminal attacks from Wheatley on the psychiatrist issue—lots of insistence on a United States Senator’s need to arrive at foreign policy in a rational, calm, orderly, stable way, with no need for wild-eyed radicals or supine postures in this complex time, etc. The polls all say that while people like Bobby, they worry about how he would do in a crisis. I assumed Wheatley would try to put enough pressure on to create that crisis right on television during the debate. But he doesn’t. He uses the word sick only once, about American permissive popular culture, and the camera catches Bobby nodding in agreement during his answer. The debate proves finally to be about the issues, even if both of them talk far more about domestic economics than actual foreign policy.
On balance I think they come out pretty evenly, though at least on debates I’m often a poor judge about how the voters will feel. Jeannie says Wheatley won it by a nose, though no one shot himself in the foot, and no one landed any knockout punches—the first two concerns, and mixed metaphors, the media gets wrought up over. She says Bobby wanted to show he was smart and optimistic and had a new sense of direction, Wheatley that he was vigorous and tough and experienced, and they both succeeded. I give an edge on points in both style and content to Bobby. He was pleasant to watch and engaging to listen to. Wheatley seemed to want to crawl into the camera and get into your living room to grab you by the lapels.
The next day most newspapers and television commentators call the contest as pretty even. The overnight polls, however, follow Jeannie’s call and show a bump upward for Wheatley. Voters in our state love an underdog, even a self-described one, especially when he fights back. Bobby’s position does not change much, though there is a large increase among those who said they support him who now “strongly support” him. Most polls say the race itself is still within the margin of error, too close to call.
That afternoon I call Bobby to congratulate him on a good job. I get Cindy Tucker instead. She tells me he’s busy with a round of television interviews. She herself is businesslike, focused entirely on the campaign. Nothing about the other night.
Except one thing. It turns out Annie was never at her friend Sally’s at all. Suspicious that anyone’s parent would have let their daughter’s friend just walk out at night while having an asthma attack, Cindy gave them a call. When she confronted Annie with her findings, Annie confessed she had been with Alex and they had an argument. She begged her not to tell her parents.
Cindy said she wouldn’t on one condition. Annie would have to tell them herself within a week.
“Is she going to do it?” I ask.
“I sure hope so. She knows it’ll be a lot better coming from her than coming from me.”
“Right.” I ask, “How’d Bobby feel about the poll results?”
“He said, ‘Well, at least Wheatley can’t use the underdog argument again.’”
“What do you think?”
“I’m nervous.”
“Over the twitch in standings?”
“No. I don’t think Wheatley’s little bounce means a damn thing. I’m nervous because things are going too well.”
“Too well?”
“Yes. It’s too quiet. If you can keep Erickson Bruce from making headlines with Jeannie’s stuff, and it goes like this all the way to November, Bobby’s going to win. I’m serious. But it’s not going to go like this. You know it and I know it. The quiet is eerie. The pause before the tornado touches down.”
“I have the feeling you know the way to the storm cellar. Perhaps you should just enjoy the pause. You may not get any more of them.”
“Enjoy it? Easy for you to say.”
Actually, it is not so easy for me to say it, or do it, either. Cindy’s anxious feelings mirror my own. And whether I intended to do it or not, I am now on board the campaign raft. I don’t exactly know how it happened, but it happened.
All is quiet for forty-eight more hours. And then Wheatley announces the hiring of a new consultant, the famous Howard Oates, the man who “goes negative.”
His hiring must have been planned weeks before, because within one day of his arrival in the state, the first attack ads are on the airwaves. They are slick, well-produced, and vivid. While a hand squeezes a large soap-filled sponge, noisy nerve-racking scenes of police making drug arrests at night in various menacing city streets are cut in. As the sponge is squeezed, we’re told Bobby is soft on crime, squishy-soft on gun ownership, liquid on the death penalty. The sponge is squeezed dry, dropped, and the empty hand, open, turns upward. “And drugs? Just where is he on drugs?” This ambiguous phrasing is read with a humorous, tart suggestiveness intended to imply, at some level, that Bobby is on drugs.
Another ad shows scenes from sixt
ies antiwar demonstrations in which the flag is burned, rock concerts in which hairy half-naked teenagers cavort in the mud and smoke dope while another screams unintelligibly during a bad acid trip, then a handheld sequence of the National Guard firing into the crowd of students at Kent State, people weeping at Martin Luther King’s funeral, looting and fires in the ghetto, LBJ looking pious, wounded GIs being carried through Vietnamese jungles to medical evacuation helicopters, Jimmy Carter looking malaised, the Ayatollah leading death-to-the-great-Satan-America demonstrations in Iran, long gas lines, and a clock ticking closer to midnight. Finally a deep voice intones, “Let’s not turn the clock back.” A picture of Wheatley comes up, bright, modern, reassuring. The voice says, “Elect Richard Wheatley.”
One last ad purports to show inconsistencies and flip-flops in some of Bobby’s positions. An unflattering photo of him is switched from one side of the screen to the other, and then left spinning like a top in the middle. This one, we’re told, is sponsored by The Friends of Congressman Richard Wheatley.
Although these ads are empty and demagogic and the last one involves outright distortions of Bobby’s statements and record, the television stations are so proud of refusing to show the most egregious attack commercial, they fail to screen these carefully enough. The banned ad—no doubt presented in order to distract the station executives from less obviously outrageous ones—involves a listing of alleged and unproven campaign abuses, an attack on legitimate items Bobby deducted from his publicly released income tax, and a clip from his press conference in which he discussed having seen a psychiatrist, all ending with the tag line “Wheatley for Senator. You’d Be Crazy to Vote for Anyone Else.” The TV stations’ sense of self-congratulation in refusing this ad is so great that many do a special news segment on Wheatley’s “going negative” in which they show excerpts of all these ads, including the one they won’t let on the air, thus giving them all free airtime and letting the charges get made and the innuendos get planted.
It takes Cindy four days to get them to stop showing the flip-flop commercial and a week to stop showing excerpts of the one not allowed to be aired. She asks me to rattle some legal chains about suing some of them for having failed to screen out the flip-flop commercial, and I manage to extract a couple minutes of free airtime from a few of them. But the damage Wheatley hoped to do has been done.
As each new ad comes on, Cindy and Scott Bayer list the lies, distortions, and half-truths within hours after it is shown, faxing their “truth sheets” to news desks and television stations all over the state. But they know this is shoveling sand against the tide.
Bobby and Scott talked a long time ago about what they would do under these circumstances, and they promptly do it. They run a flip-flop commercial of their own, accurate in every detail, and ending with Wheatley’s promise to run a clean campaign based entirely on the issues. They run another one showing stock-market crashes, the homeless, financiers and bankers and government officials on trial, clips about the national debt and savings-and-loan bailouts and foreign purchases of US property, desolate farmers watching their farms being sold at auction, and fur-bedecked jewel-laden women arriving in white stretch limousines at lavish parties, one of whom proves to be Mrs. Wheatley, for behind her, shown in slow motion emerging from the car, is her tuxedoed husband grinning vacantly into the bright lights. This image freezes and is held for a second before it fades to black. A picture of Bobby in rolled-up shirtsleeves comes on the screen. He is being applauded by a group of citizens at the state fair. A voice says, “Elect Bobby Parrish. For a change.”
Finally, they show an ad in which mud is being slung at a picture of Bobby. Most of it misses him. A hand holding a sponge much like the one Wheatley used in his first attack ad reaches in and wipes off the picture. Bobby appears, in person, and says it’s not too late to clean up the campaign, nor to clean up the government. “It’s simple,” says an announcer’s voice. “Bobby Parrish for Senator,” reads the closing shot.
When Bobby is asked by reporters for his reaction to Howard Oates being hired and Wheatley’s new attack ads, he says, “Howard Oates, Clive Sanford. These men work for the congressman. What they do has his knowledge and his approval. This campaign is Richard Wheatley’s responsibility, and he is the issue. Personally, I’m disappointed he has not lived up to his promise of running a positive campaign, one that upholds the dignity of the office of a United States Senator and gives the voters the opportunity to examine the serious issues before us as a state and a nation. Looking at these cynical ads, you could believe Rich Wheatley thinks he is still back in the fertilizer business.”
Because Bobby’s last statement gets a lot of attention, Wheatley says to reporters that with the way Bobby is running his campaign, “It’s clear he thinks he is still back in Vietnam.”
A reporter asks him what he means by that.
“He’s acting as if he’s in a war.”
This prerehearsed line is intended to remind people of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Cindy’s worry about things going too well is a thing of the past. And her prediction—Tucker’s First Law of Thermodynamics—that Bobby would not get away unscathed on the shrink story begins to come true. Good press now, bad press later. On Sunday, later arrives. The negative articles on post-traumatic stress disorder appear, partly through Wheatley’s orchestration. I read them with special attention, of course, and am told night terrors, depression, emotional numbness, free-floating anxiety, alcoholism, workaholism, drug abuse, battered wives and children, even spasms of murderous violence can all erupt unpredictably. Buried at the end of these articles is the indication that many, perhaps most, victims of the disorder work through it well without divorce or suicide or job loss and can lead productive lives along the way. Some do less well. But the articles’ drift, politically, is to make you wonder if that silent, gentle Vietnam vet who delivers your mail isn’t someday going to appear in full camouflage fatigues and spray you and your neighbors with his M-16. Or worry that your newly elected senator will one day take out the president and his cabinet with a few fragmentation grenades.
I sit back, put my legs up, and think about what applies to me. I read on to other articles, considering the idea of therapy for myself, when I notice buried on page seventeen of the same Sunday paper is the news that Congressman Wheatley has sold the de-accessed parkland to the Henry Corporation for condominium development. Part of the development will be devoted to housing for senior citizens.
I have never heard of the Henry Corporation. I wonder if it is from out of state. Or, better still, owned by the Japanese. After breakfast, to take my mind off myself and to use some of my anger about Wheatley’s smelly new campaign, I do a search through some records I keep at home on my computer. Henry Corporation shows up neither under real estate nor construction. I try finance companies. Still nothing. It’s not in the local phone book, new as of three weeks ago. This is good news. Finding nothing offers hope. Maybe Wheatley put his foot in it and doesn’t know it. Still, I regret I do not have a modem and a subscription to one of those information services. It would save me time and shoe leather.
The next morning I go to the County Registry of Deeds, fresh paper and newly sharpened pencils in my briefcase and a Parker pen in my pocket, ready for a long wallow. Fifteen minutes later, however, I am done. Henry Corporation, of Henry County, the county that lies between here and the capital, has been in business for eighteen years and has a number of other real-estate transactions on record, though none in our county until now. Wheatley bought the land, 143 acres, for $309,000, and he is selling it for $392,000, a handsome profit but hardly a Jeannie-level one.
Discouraged, I return to my office. There is the faint chance something else will turn up—say, financing for the deal was done through one of the local banks on which Wheatley relatives sit as directors. Since sometimes these loans are listed under the corporation president’s name, I ask Margie to call th
e Henry Corporation in Henry County and find out who runs it.
She does. It’s owned and run by one Henry Spencer.
The name rings a bell, though the sound is faint unto vanishing. I root around some on my office computer, find nothing.
Margie makes a couple of more calls and comes in my office with the information that the loan for this property has been made through Henry County National Bank. I make a call and find that Henry County National Bank is owned by the Lodestar Group, a large Midwest banking concern with which Wheatley and his kin have nothing to do. Dead end.
My disappointment is sharp. One more whiff of scandal before the last debate and Richard Wheatley will begin to look too clever by half, a very unpopular image with our state’s voters. And this in turn would have made the press and public muse over the sleaze factor, something usually fatal in this land of corn-fed Lutheran and Methodist and Baptist rectitude. But, I see, it’s not to be.
Margie asks if it’s all right if she leaves early for lunch today. She says she has a hankering to try the new Mexican restaurant.
No problem, I say, distracted for a second by the word hankering.
Hank Spencer? I think. The bell rings a bit louder. Hank Spencer, Hank Spencer, Hank Spencer. Who the hell is he?
By the time I get hold of Laura, I’ve got it.
It makes my heart pound with anxiety.
Karen Gillian, Laura’s old psychiatrist friend and confidante, has a new boyfriend she’s been living with.
Hank Spencer.
I tell Laura to meet me at my house as soon as possible.
14
Laura sits slumped into the corner of the couch, her face ashen.
“Explain this to me again,” she says.
“The man who bought Wheatley’s parkland up in the northern part of the state is Hank Spencer,” I say. “Karen Gillian’s new friend.”
Sounding the Waters Page 25