The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “You’re not opposed to colleges?” a boy challenged him.

  “I don’t honestly believe you can learn anything in college that you couldn’t learn better by yourself.”

  “So you consider yourself smart?” another boy asked.

  “Smart sounds like a handicap if you say it like that,” Vernon said. “And don’t confuse intelligence with knowledge. There are unfortunately a lot of smart politicians who don’t know anything. And a lot of really good politicians who aren’t particularly smart.”

  “But you’re both, right?” the boy said, and Monica made a note to get his name after class and try to recruit him. “You’re smart and you know it all.”

  “Thank you,” Vernon said, as if the kid had complimented him, not insulted him. “But as you’ve discovered every day you’re in college, the more you know, the more you know you do not know. Knowledge is a life-long process and I’ve still got forty years to go, I hope.”

  “You claim to know so much,” the same boy said. “But how do we know you know anything?”

  Vernon smiled. “Why don’t you test me? Ask me something.”

  The guy looked around at some of his fellow students as if for their help in furnishing questions. He apparently couldn’t think of a good one offhand himself. But then he opened the textbook on his desk, letting it fall open at random, and said, “What’s the difference between Hobbes and Locke?”

  Vernon summarized the contrasts between the philosophies of the two thinkers, making the explanation so clear that the professor complimented him.

  The student flipped to another page. “What is the purpose of the behaviorist conception of political science?”

  Vernon not only outlined the goals of behaviorism but contrasted them to Greek and nineteenth-century conceptions.

  “Shit,” the student said, “you just got ahold of our textbook and memorized it.”

  “What is your textbook?” Vernon asked.

  The professor showed Vernon a copy. “Looks like a good book,” Vernon said, “but it’s not in my library. Why don’t you ask me something else?”

  “Any subject?” a student asked.

  “Any subject from A through P,” Vernon said. “That’s as far as I’ve got in my autodidacticism.” He meant it as a witty observation and it drew much laughter. And then a student asked him to explain Laplace transform. Another student asked, “Who was the better painter, Rubens or Caravaggio?” And a third student asked him to define and give examples of “gunboat diplomacy.” For the rest of the class period they asked Vernon Ingledew questions and he answered them all.

  “A most impressive performance,” commented the professor when it was all over. And added, “I think you’ve got my vote.”

  What Monica decided—her best idea yet—was to start a radio call-in program. It would be called Ask Me Anything, and Vernon would do it for an hour twice a week and it would be on several different radio stations all over the state.

  She didn’t know whether it was that, or the tour that she and Cast had made to campuses, but the next poll showed that Vernon had 8 percent, almost ten times his ranking in the first poll! But Cast reminded her that she had bet him a week’s salary that Vernon would reach 10 percent in the next poll, and he hadn’t quite made it. Monica cheerfully paid up, even though she couldn’t afford it.

  Chapter nine

  At this point in the campaign he still felt pretty good about his new job. He got up every morning eager to get to work, and he no longer had to don his khaki workshirt, which all Tyson executives wore out of some kind of solidarity with the blue-collar (or rather khaki-collar) workers. What he was doing on behalf of the state of Arkansas in general and Vernon Ingledew in particular filled him with a greater sense of accomplishment than what he’d been doing at Tyson’s. One of the reasons he decided to take leave from Tyson’s was the frustrations he had been putting up with for ten years, trying to convince the public and elected officials across the country that Tyson’s was a good corporate citizen, paid its people a fair and competitive wage, provided a safe workplace, was environmentally responsible, and concerned about food safety. This was not easy with the prevailing attitude about Tyson’s in the media being that they, like all big corporations, were interested in nothing but the bottom line. And he still bore understandable resentment over Donald Smaltz’s federal case against him that got him a prison sentence for an innocent act…although President Clinton in his last days had pardoned him, and he’d never had to spend a day in jail.

  Of course Bo had had some of the same frustration, which may have been part of his reason for taking leave, but his company after all was one of the top American corporations while Arch’s was just a local chicken company, so to speak…even if it was the world’s largest poultry processor. But apart from that difference in the relative size of the companies they left behind them, Bo Pharis and Arch were remarkably alike, even in their appearance, and more than once they got mistaken for each other. Hank Endicott in his column took to referring to them as “The Smith Brothers,” because of their beards. But Bo still kept his linebacker’s body in trim. Arch had been a tackle at Charleston High, and if you know anything about the difference between linebackers and tackles you can imagine how his lower body weight had gotten a bit out of hand. He may as well confess something that Bo himself never knew, or if he did he kept his knowledge of it a secret from Arch: in the Class AA football playoffs of 1965, Arch’s Charleston High Tigers played Bo’s Harrison High Goblins, where Bo was the star of the defense. Arch’s job was to take him out, to knock him flat on his back. Arch did. Bo didn’t know who Arch was then. But in the heat of the campaign Arch could always remind himself that if Bo needed to be taken out Arch was the man for the job.

  If Bo was correct in his search for a Don Quixote allusion, Arch was his Sancho Panza. But Arch liked to subscribe to the Seven Samurai allusion, as everybody else did, in which case, if Bo was Kambei, the leader, Arch was not necessarily Shichiroji, his adjutant, but rather Kyuzo, the all-purpose deadly swordsman. Kyuzo was quiet and kept to himself and never ran out of energy. He never lost a duel. At every turn he could be counted on to do his job. He worked best under pressure. He was always ready. That was Arch.

  Without boasting, Arch recognized in himself certain qualities that set him apart from Bo Pharis. Sure, they had their similarities, which were endless, apart from their appearance. For example, they discussed art together, although Bo knew much more about nineteenth-century art than Arch did; they played golf together, although Bo’s handicap at Stonebridge Meadows, the new public (Democratic) course in Fayetteville, was seven, whereas Arch’s was eighteen at best; they fly-fished together on Kings River and Crooked Creek, but Bo always caught twice as many as Arch did (Arch didn’t wish to give the impression that they sneaked off from the campaign constantly to go fishing or golfing or chatting up modern art, but they did allow themselves an occasional break from the stress of their jobs, and they deferred until after the election even the thought of fishing for king salmon on the Kenai River in Alaska, or deep sea fishing off the Baja Peninsula at Cabo San Lucas).

  But Bo, like managers of any sort—boxers’ managers, writers’ managers, actors’ managers—could be tough, abrasive, even mean. Arch had always tried to be nice to people. He was easy to get along with. Bo could make enemies right and left without compunction; Arch couldn’t tell you the name of any enemy he’d ever made…except possibly his first wife, and even she, he believed, had good feelings about him overall. He had a talent for making friends, and the state of Arkansas was densely populated with his lasting go-way-backers. There was even a time, in the Seventies, when Witt Stephens, the super-rich kingmaker of Arkansas politics, tried repeatedly to persuade Arch to run for governor himself. His father, Archie II, always told Witt, “Spike would have to have an ego transplant even to consider such a thing.” (“Spike” was a nickname bestowed upon him in infancy by a relative and he never could outgrow it; by the way, Arch was h
is real familiar name; Archie is his actual birth-certificate name, the same as his father and his great-uncle; the distinction confused a lot of people who thought they were being chummy when they call him Archie.) Like Monica, he never met a politician who didn’t have a huge ego…until he met Vernon Ingledew, and while Vernon might have had ambition, a quality Arch was lacking in as well as ego, Vernon did not think that he was God’s gift to mankind—or, since like all the Ingledews he didn’t believe in God—he did not think that he was put on this earth for the purpose of attracting universal love for his personality and accomplishments. If Arch had had a smidgen of Vernon’s looks he would probably have had to have an ego to go with it, but he was convinced Vernon didn’t even have an idea of how good-looking he was. Arch never once saw Vernon glance in a mirror.

  One reason Vernon could pull off that little speech he gave to that political science class at the University was that he was not only poking fun at politicians but poking fun at himself too. You had to realize that to know how funny it was; otherwise it just seemed silly. The professor of that class requested a copy of the videotape, from which he had several copies made and sent to his colleagues who taught political science at other Arkansas campuses, with the result that Vernon was invited to speak at a number of campuses just before the semester was over, and to speak not just to political science classes of thirty or sixty students, but to the entire campus. This helped energize the good work that Monica and Cast had already started, and was one reason that so many hundreds of college students devoted themselves to the campaign in the crucial last weeks before the primary election.

  It was also the beginning of what would become an essential component of Vernon’s campaign: a return to stump speaking. Arch’s uncle Dale Bumpers, the last of the great old time stump speakers, and recently cited by a poll of historians as Arkansas’s best governor of the Twentieth Century, was not just a great orator but a firm believer in contact with the people, and as his chauffeur Arch had taken him to hundreds of rallies in little Arkansas towns. Arch knew that George Dinsmore intended to be Vernon’s chauffeur, but when Arch learned that George, a sensible and engaging old hillbilly, had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and still possessed a pilot’s license which he hadn’t had any reason to use for twenty-five years, Arch suggested, and Bo agreed, that they ought to lease a helicopter—even if it meant going to Tulsa to get a good deal—in order to get Vernon to all those campuses, and, subsequently, all those little Arkansas towns. In time, the only difference between old-time stump speaking and what Vernon did was that the candidate did not arrive on a dusty winding road but out of the sky.

  Vernon’s candidacy became noticeable and targetable to the other candidates. Endicott’s original column had scared three of them into quitting, but the others didn’t really start worrying about Vernon until he jumped from 1 percent to 8 percent in the polls. Bo and Arch hired their own pollster whose numbers were actually higher (and more accurate) than that. The other primary candidates began looking for ways to keep Vernon from getting any more attention, and their oppo men started sniffing around Stay More in such numbers that George Dinsmore had to run them off.

  The good thing about Vernon, despite those thirteen deadly albatrosses, any one of which would have killed his candidacy if it became widely publicized, was that he left no paper trail whatever: there were no documents or public or private records or anything at all on the Internet which could be used against him. Nevertheless, the other five candidates became thoroughly familiar with the fact that Vernon had lived out of wedlock for thirty years with his first cousin, had no children, that he was an atheist, that he had no experience in elective office, etc., etc. So it became Arch’s pleasant chore to call each of their campaign managers, each of them old friends of Arch’s, and politely inform them that the Ingledew campaign’s Director of Opposition Research, Mr. Harry Wolfe, had obtained sufficient information on each and every one of them (with one exception, to be discussed below) to thoroughly discredit, defame, and destroy each of them, “if the need arose.” That need would not arise, Arch politely warned them, if they did their utmost to refrain from making any personal attacks on Vernon Ingledew. These guys, who knew Arch and knew he played fair, cursed him aloud, making some really offensive insults, and if they did not do that, he could hear them over the phone gnashing their teeth and snarling in frustration. Even he felt sorry for them.

  This tactic didn’t faze Secretary of State Leon McCutcheon, who either didn’t believe Arch or else wasn’t afraid of anything. In his television spots he began to refer to Vernon as “Mr. Know-It-All” because of Vernon’s new radio call-in show, Ask Me Anything. The spot showed a not-very-bright farmer calling in to the radio show, who says, “I got a question for you, Ingledew. What makes you think that a egghead smarty pants is qualified to be governor?” And the spot ended with a smooth announcer declaring, “Leon McCutcheon may not know everything, but he knows how to govern!” Arch thought the spot was innocuous enough but Bo felt otherwise, and it was soon leaked to the press that Leon McCutcheon’s wife was in the process of filing for divorce, the grounds for which would be announced at a later date. McCutcheon shut up. He killed those spots and had nothing else to say about Vernon.

  Indeed, all the other candidates concentrated so fiendishly on attacking one another from top to bottom, without any further mention of Vernon, that the electorate (surely the intelligent electorate) must have begun to get a little suspicious. Here were these five guys slinging mud all over the place, and not a fleck of it hit Vernon. Was he a saint? Or, since he was so fabulously rich, had he bought the silence of his opponents? The Reverend John Colby Dixon, a popular television evangelist, who had used his pulpit on statewide TV for the past year to drum up votes for himself, and whose campaign manager was the only one Arch hadn’t fully intimidated, because indeed all that Harry Wolfe had been able to find on him was the allegation, never taken to court, that he had seduced a 16-year-old member of his choir (Cast had found a newspaper item about that very early on, but the news hadn’t diminished the size of the evangelist’s audience or voters), made bold to denounce Vernon from the pulpit, not for his atheism, strangely enough, but for the fact that he was “nothing but a pig farmer, an ex-hippie Ozark hillbilly living in the weirdest mansion you ever saw.”

  George Dinsmore had his hands full trying to keep photographers and television crews off the mountain trail to the Ingledew double-bubble. Erecting a locked gate on it wasn’t enough; photographers can climb fences. George had to delegate a posse of Ingledew factory workers to keep around-the-clock guard. Fortunately the majority of snoops hunting for Stay More couldn’t even find Stay More, let alone the trail to the Ingledews homestead. At any rate, no image of that double-bubble ever appeared in the media; the only public image of it remains the smudged and obscure final illustration in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

  Bo told Harry Wolfe, since he had nothing better to do, to devote his full energies to the Reverend John Colby Dixon, and to find, at all costs, that alleged 16-year-old seductee, and offer her whatever price necessary for her full confession. Harry did succeed in locating the girl’s mother, who lived alone in Beebe. She informed him that the girl, now twenty and twice-divorced, was living in “Boston or Seattle or one of those places” but had no mailing address, phone number or other means of contact. “Did she have an affair with Reverend Dixon?” Harry asked the mother. “Oh, no question about that,” the woman said.

  But without details or proof or a confession or anything, and nothing else in Harry’s meager file on Dixon (Garth Rucker had devoted a fruitless week to the task), there was no “leverage” to dissuade the evangelist from his weekly attacks on Vernon, or rather his disparagement of Vernon as a “mere” hippie pig farmer. Bo and Lydia and Arch wondered why the evangelist never brought up the matter of Vernon’s atheism. “Maybe he’s saving it,” Lydia suggested. After McCutcheon began to fade, Reverend Dixon rose until he was right behind Barnas i
n the polls.

  Fourth place was the highest Vernon could hope for. The Samurai did their damnedest, each of them, but they just couldn’t claw their way up those stingy polls. Vernon couldn’t lift himself by his bootstraps. In his own eagerness to improve his rating he was inclined to forget some of the lessons they’d tried to teach him about keeping a lid on his radical ideas for what he was going to “extirpate.” They didn’t mind too much when he proposed broad and revolutionary solutions to the “highway problem,” meaning not simply improving the condition of the highways, which all the other candidates were loud about, but totally eliminating litter by stepped-up patrols that would catch litterers and force them into on-the-spot clean-ups: one large bag of collected litter would be the fine for having tossed an item.

  What the Ingledew campaign really needed was not any more radical ideas but a media event. Arch knew very well that politics itself rarely makes news; the newspapers don’t give space to politicians’ attacks on each other, or the manipulations of the campaign, or even the fluctuations of the polls. For a candidate to get noticed in the media, he or she has to be involved in something newsworthy. Every candidate knew this. When, for example, in late April the horrible tornado hit the town of Barling in western Arkansas with so much destruction and death, all six of the primary candidates, plus Governor Shoat Bradfield himself, were on the scene before the wind died down. Shoat Bradfield got himself on television with a speech that promised relief and personally absolved God from any responsibility for the disaster. Five of the Democratic candidates rolled up their sleeves and tried to get themselves photographed clearing away the debris or serving food to the victims, but they were lost in the crowd. Vernon encountered a television cameraman who was curious to know if he and George had had any turbulence bringing that helicopter into Barling, and Vernon took the occasion to give a speech in which he actually promised, if elected governor of Arkansas, to eliminate tornadoes!