The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  And behold, his empty house answered him, for once. “Bo, son,” it said, “that’s not until May. Can you wait that long? Why don’t you go back now and help a good man start running for governor?”

  The house didn’t say anything more for the rest of the night, but Bo had trouble sleeping. Early the next morning he went to see his boss, the CEO of the company, and told him he needed some time off, a few months perhaps, for “spiritual enrichment.” No problem. Couldn’t Castor Sherrill and Jim Tompkins hold down the fort as long as need be? Sure thing.

  He called Cast into his office and laid it on the line. He told Cast he had decided to take a leave and “re-enter the lists” as a campaign manager for an offbeat visionary in Arkansas named Vernon Ingledew. Cast would be put in charge, even allowed to boss his rival Jim Tompkins, for at least three months and possibly longer if Vernon Ingledew managed to survive the primary and make it to the general election. Cast was a bright, able kid; although he was a native Hoosier, he’d taken his MBA at Harvard. Tompkins’ MBA was from Stanford, but Jim lacked Cast’s lively personality. All Cast needed for advancement was a little managerial experience, and here was his chance to get it.

  But Cast said, “Please take me as your disciple, sir.”

  Where have I heard that line before? Bo wondered. Was it something in Don Quixote? No, maybe Bo hadn’t heard it but had read it in the subtitles of a movie. “Listen,” he replied, “I don’t have anything to teach you. I had a lot of experience fighting political campaigns, but for your own good you don’t want to get into that.”

  “No,” Cast said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll follow you to Arkansas even if you won’t accept me.”

  “I forbid you to do that,” Bo said, and showed him to the door. He was flattered, but he owed it to the company not to leave Jim Tompkins solely in charge.

  Late that afternoon, while Bo was clearing off his desk, a call came in from his pal Archie Schaffer. Arch was dramatic: “Bo, because of you, I accept. I’ll do it. Tyson’s will let me off until the general election.”

  “But Arch,” Bo said, “I’ve talked myself into doing it!”

  Was Arch’s silence bitter disappointment? But it didn’t last long. “Great,” he said. “Really. I’m happy for you.”

  As consolation, Bo offered, “Would you consider being my second-in-command?”

  “Being second fiddle to you, Bo, would beat hell out of being first fiddle all by myself.”

  Bo Pharis laughed. “I hope you mean that. We could make some real music together. But who else would we need for our orchestra?”

  “We would have to get four or five more. We’d need a press secretary, a headquarters manager, a head of opposition research, and we’d need a good media advisor.”

  Bo made a scoffing noise. “Hell, I know all that,” he said. “I mean, who do we want for those jobs?”

  Arch sought clarification: “Money’s no object?”

  “Ingledew is more than loaded.”

  “Okay, so how about Carlton Drew for media advisor,” Arch suggested, naming a prominent dc consultant who had elected numerous senators and governors by the crafty use of television ads.

  “Fine, if we can get him,” Bo said. “But he might not appreciate Vernon’s opposition to television.”

  “God,” Arch sighed. “How opposed is he?”

  “Won’t allow it in his own house,” Bo said. “Although I suppose he wouldn’t object to other people having it.”

  “But he would object to using it for advertising his candidacy?”

  “I’m afraid he might,” Bo allowed.

  “All right, you give Carleton a buzz and ask him, hypothetically, if he would consider himself capable of electing a candidate without any use of television. Now, who’s the best oppo man you ever knew?”

  Of course Bo understood the euphemism: the head of opposition research was in charge of digging up all the dirt on the other candidates. “Would you buy Harry Wolfe?” Bo ventured.

  “Harry Wolfe’s our man,” Arch said. “But I haven’t talked to him yet. I think maybe you’d better talk to him.”

  “Right. And we’ll need an office manager, and some conspicuous headquarters in Little Rock.”

  “Better check with our man Vernon on that,” Arch suggested. “He might prefer having headquarters up here in the Ozarks.”

  “Will do. We’ll also need a topnotch press secretary.”

  “Shall I call Lydia Caple? Or do you want to?”

  “I’ve already talked to her twice,” Bo informed him.

  “Was that before or after you made up your mind to do it?” Arch wanted to know.

  “Before,” Bo admitted, and began to feel good all over with the prospect of getting Lydia for the job. For years Lydia Caple had been the ace political reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and when her job and her political savvy had been challenged by the popular columnist Hank Endicott she had decided to leave the paper and get into politics herself. She’d had legendary good luck with all the candidates she’d worked for, including briefly Governor Clinton himself, but his well-known propensity for requiring a certain sexual allegiance from his female underlings had cost him her services. Bo had not been able to resist feeling proud that he had succeeded in doing something the then-governor and future president had not succeeded in doing.

  “Okay, I’ll call her again,” Bo said. The only thing he’d left on his desk was his appointment book, and he was jotting things down in it. Reminders: Call Lydia tonight.

  When he’d finished his long talk with Arch, he needed a drink to help him catch his breath. He was pouring it at the little bar in the corner of his office when Cast Sherrill came back into the office. “Excuse me, sir,” said Cast, “but have you reconsidered?”

  Bo had so much on his mind he couldn’t figure out what Cast meant. Something about the Satanic old logo? “What’s that?” he said.

  “I want to go to Arkansas with you and be your disciple,” Cast said.

  “Hell, Cast, you’ve been my disciple ever since I hired you. Now it’s time for you to run the show in my absence.”

  “Don’t hold it against me, sir, but I don’t want to work here after you’ve gone. This place wouldn’t be the same without you, and I’d be lost.”

  It was a long drive to Arkansas, Bo realized, and it might not be too bad to have a traveling companion. Maybe Cast could help drive. Thinking of this, Bo realized something more important. Which of his two vehicles would he be taking? The Jaguar was the object of his greatest affections, and he couldn’t conceive of being without it. But it wouldn’t be any good in the backroads of the Ozarks. If he had to go to Stay More, six miles beyond where the pavement ends at Parthenon, he would need the Nissan 4-by-4. How about taking the Jag himself and getting Cast to drive the 4-by-4, and then he’d have the use of both?

  But no, he didn’t want the kid tagging along after him throughout the campaign. He was going to be so busy selling Vernon Ingledew to the people of Arkansas that he wouldn’t have time to teach anything to a goddamn apprentice. Or certainly not Castor Sherrill, who, despite his brilliance in college, had a peculiar background, the details of which Bo had picked up over several drinks when he’d first hired Cast out of Harvard Business: Cast’s mother, whom he hardly ever saw, was an Indiana farm girl who had a brief career in Los Angeles doing what budding starlets often have to do, making porn movies. Cast’s father was one of her co-stars, though Cast had never met him. The man had, however, named Cast, not after castor oil as his childhood friends assumed, but after the brother of Pollux, hatched from Leda’s eggs in Greek mythology.

  “I’m flattered you feel that way,” Bo told him. “But the company needs you to run things while I’m gone. You don’t want Jim fucking it all up, do you?”

  Cast opened a manila folder he was carrying and spread it out on Bo’s now-empty desk. There was a diagram that looked like an organizational chart. “Sir, if you’d take a look at this…”

&
nbsp; Bo expected to see how Cast intended to reorganize the staff while he was gone, but instead he found, to his great surprise, the names of the eight candidates who had already filed for the Democratic primary in Arkansas, and, beneath the name of each, a list of five or six “liabilities.” The candidate who was a former governor, for example, had been tried and convicted in court of fraud. The attorney general had been blamed for the suicide of a legislator. And the popular evangelist was suspected of child abuse. And so forth.

  “Where did you find all this stuff?” Bo wanted to know.

  “Sir, in the time since you left politics, the Internet has grown exponentially in a fantastic manner.”

  Bo stared at him for quite a while, awed by this display of swordsmanship. Then he invited, “Can I make you a drink?” He had never offered a drink to one of his employees before, but this was an exceptional situation. When Cast was halfway through his Scotch and soda, Bo inquired, “Can you handle a four-wheel-drive Nissan?”

  “I can drive anything,” Cast declared.

  At home that night, checking to see what he needed to do to the house to shut it up for several months, he said to the house, “Well, it would appear, in answer to the question I asked you the other morning, that I am the Knight of La Mancha, and Castor Sherrill is my Sancho Panza.” The house did not answer, this time. But then, thinking of Cast’s swordsmanship, Bo realized he had the wrong allusion. It wasn’t Don Quixote. No, it was The Seven Samurai. And he realized he had two more phone calls to make. But then, thinking of the wonders of the Internet that Cast had demonstrated, Bo decided to email Harry Wolfe instead of phoning him. If his guess was correct, Harry was probably sitting right beside his notebook computer in his spacious but squalid Georgetown apartment, waiting for email, or keeping an eye on the inbox while he did something else, like netsurfing for porn or serious drinking. One of the good things about email was that you didn’t need a salutation or a closing, and Bo omitted both.

  Long time no E. Anything good up at the Phillips Collection this season? It’s been a while but I’ll have to forego a trip anytime soon. You won’t believe this, Harry, but I’m coming back. Not to DC. But to The Fences. The Game. There’s a fellow running for governor of Arkansas who would be your dream, if you wanted to find a huge pile of shit on a candidate. The problem is, we’re on his side. We have to find the shit on his opponents. We have to find enough shit on his opponents to coerce them into ignoring the shit on our man. Are you interested?

  Just in case Harry wasn’t at home, he added Arch’s email address to his own. And he pushed the send button with his left hand while using his right hand to push the phone buttons for Lydia Caple.

  She was home, somewhere in Little Rock. “Do you still love me, Lydia?” he asked in greeting.

  “Bo,” she said, “if anybody could possibly love somebody like you, I’m qualified.” There was in her tone just the gentlest, faintest of reminders that she had enjoyed that one wild night they’d had together.

  “Have you given any more thought to that personable, clever, handsome, engaging, outright lovable aspirant I was telling you about?”

  “Hinkleberry, or whoever?” she said. “No, I put him forever out of my mind when you told me about the thirteen albatrosses. I might handle six or seven of those birds, but not all thirteen.”

  “But he’s a good man, Lyd. All you’d have to do is show the people of Arkansas how good he is.”

  “Where does he stand on the issues?”

  “Honey, believe me, he is for everything you’re for, and he’s against everything you’re against.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” she said. “But Bo, now it’s your turn to believe me: I don’t have any fight in me anymore. That bastard Bradfield took it all out of me.”

  “That’s what I thought about myself, after fighting Bush,” he said. “But Ingledew is so good that I’m going to be his campaign manager, and I want you to be his press secretary.”

  “No!” she yelled into the phone, and during the long silence that followed Bo was convinced that she had simply turned him down for a third time, but then it began to occur to him that she was simply expressing astonishment or incredulity.

  “Yes,” he negated her. “I mean it. And do you want to know who proposed you for the job? Your old pal Arch Schaffer, who’s also coming aboard the team.”

  “Arch is in it?” she said. “Really? Why didn’t you say so? If he’s in it, I guess you could count me in too!”

  “You’re a sweetheart, Lyd,” he said. “You and I will be having a leisurely lunch with Arch just as soon as I can get out there. And then we’ll have to get ourselves out to a place called Stay More.”

  Mention of Stay More made Bo realize that there was one more very important phone call he would have to make. First, before shutting off his computer, he checked for email and there was a speedy reply from Harry Wolfe. More and more people, alas, were beginning to believe that the ease and informality of email precluded proper punctuation and capitalization, and Harry was apparently one of these, but there were also mistakes to suggest that he was well into his cups.

  hey, i am gladc to hear fromj you again man. real white of you tto think of me. i havent had a gigg in 2 yeares ever since i guess you mayv heardd about itt i tracked down sso much shameful stuff on senator passmore that the bastard wonb by sympathetic backlash. not my fault reallly, but anyhow haven’t had a job since. what can i tell you man i’m real rusty. i mean I nee dsome practice real bad. but if you want to take a rat’s chanc eon me an make me your dung beetle, jus tsay when an where an i’ll be there. never been to arkansaw former home of the alltime scandalousest poiltician

  Bo made a quick email reply simply giving Harry the address and phone number of Arch Schaffer and suggesting that Harry catch the next plane to Arkansas, and then he closed his laptop and put it beside his Vuiton suitcases. Finally, he got around to making that most important call. “Why have I put it off so long?” he asked the house, and, since the house wouldn’t answer, he answered it himself: “I suppose I wanted to have everything in place before making it.” Nearly everything was in place. Six of the Seven Samurai were polishing their swords. And he had given Lydia permission to select the seventh one herself.

  Jelena Ingledew answered the phone, and Bo was thrilled to be speaking directly to her. He felt like a schoolboy calling his first date. He felt himself wanting to ask her if she’d like to do some homework with him. He felt giddy, almost silly, to be speaking to her. Losing his edge, he quickly asked to speak to Vernon.

  “Vernon’s not here right now,” Jelena said. “He’s over at some friends’.”

  “Did he tell you about me?” Bo asked. “Did he tell you that I turned him down?”

  “Yes, and we’re all very glad that you did.”

  “But I’ve changed my mind!” Bo declared. “I’ve thought it over and decided that I’ll do it. Not only that, but I’ve assembled the best team in the country!”

  “Sorry for all your trouble,” Jelena said. “But Vernon changed his mind too. It’s the first time I’ve ever known him to change his mind. But he’s done it. He’s going to devote himself to the study of quantum theory and put politics behind him.”

  Chapter four

  Something has gone out of life, she decided. And she wasn’t, for a change, thinking of herself. Or at any rate she was thinking of herself only in relation to the rest of humankind, and not just here in the Ozarks but everywhere she’d gone, which included a considerable part of the globe. Particularly in Ireland, particularly in Japan, she’d developed the same impression that people were almost suffocated with an unconscious nostalgia for a golden age they hadn’t even known and perhaps hadn’t even been told about but simply knew had once existed and now did not, not any more. Here in her familiar homeland it was inescapable: people everywhere seemed to be missing yesterday, as if it had possessed some magic no longer at work, as if tomorrow with all its fabulous wonders seemed to be a threat more than a promi
se of new delights.

  She had long ago taught herself not only to give up the past but also to maintain the same skepticism about the future that she had maintained about everything, and if there was one word to describe her (as reporters interviewing people were in the habit of asking “What one word would you choose to describe yourself?”) it was skeptical. In fact, the only word that she knew that Vernon didn’t know was Pyrrhonism. When she had first come across the word, years ago, she had asked him, as was her habit, what it meant. “Gee, I never heard of that. How do you spell it?” he had said. And she had spelled it and he still didn’t know. She couldn’t believe it, that she had stumped him, for the first time in his life. She couldn’t find the word in her dictionary, and had to look it up in the encyclopedia. Pyrrho of Elis founded the Greek school of Skepticism in the fourth century B.C., and taught that, since knowledge is unattainable, the only way to achieve happiness is to practice suspension of judgment.

  Skeptics are imperturbable. People like Vernon who think they can acquire knowledge are constantly disturbed and frustrated. People like Jelena, learning to suspend judgment, neither affirm nor deny the possibility of knowledge but remain peaceful, still waiting to see what might develop. The Pyrrhonist did not become inactive in this state of suspense but lived undogmatically according to appearances, customs, and natural inclinations.

  Once she had looked up Pyrrhonism, she didn’t tell it to Vernon. She kept it as her own private word, a precious little knowledge that he did not have, one more among several secrets (her occasional cigarette, her vibrator) she kept from him. It amused her to think of the paradox: that Pyrrhonism says knowledge is not attainable but she had at least attained the knowledge of Pyrrhonism, and she took the trouble to read several books on epistemology, particularly Hume, until she had a full knowledge not only of Pyrrhonism but of the nature of knowledge itself. She didn’t come to know anything about herself that she hadn’t already known; she didn’t become more skeptical than she had already been.