The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “If I start building my house now,” she asked, “would the construction crews be in your way? Would you rather I waited until you’ve finished the job in the autumn?”

  “No, it would be better if the house was finished first.”

  “Good,” she said. She offered him her hand for a shake, and she held his hand too long.

  The next time he saw Vernon, he told him that he’d been thinking about it and had reached the conclusion that it was indeed possible to love two women at the same time. In fact, he said, it was even possible to love three women at the same time. But he didn’t tell Vernon which three. He might have, but Vernon was in a hurry. The Samurai were assembling in emergency session at Vernon’s house. Again Lydia and Arch would be Day and Diana’s houseguests for a couple of nights; each of them brought gifts, houseplants from Lydia and very fine wines from Arch. Governor Bradfield’s campaign had reached the seventh week of its attack on Vernon’s albatrosses, and planned to spend a concentrated effort calling attention to Vernon’s having never gone to college. Going back to Jeff Davis, nearly all the governors of Arkansas had gone to college even if, like Orval Faubus and Win Rockefeller, they hadn’t graduated. Bradfield’s TV spots (craftily authored by Carleton Drew) were going to be careful not to offend the great mass of Arkansawyers who had never been to college themselves, but they were going to leave the indelible impression that a man without any college education is simply not qualified to lead the state government. It wouldn’t be sufficient for the Ingledew campaign to counterattack with the information that Bradfield had flunked thirty hours at Southern State and had never actually received a degree himself. Bradfield, like Faubus and Rockefeller, had at least thought enough of college to matriculate (although Carleton Drew insisted that word would never be used by the Bradfield campaign because it sounded naughty).

  Now the emergency session of the Samurai were considering Cast’s suggestion that they call in a team of professors who were experts in each of the fields that Vernon had mastered in his self-education program (thirty-one so far, from art history through philosophy, but not yet including politics, which he was still in the process of mastering) and having these professors testify that Vernon was worthy of having a Ph.D in each of their fields; therefore, he was far better than a college graduate; he had, in fact, the equivalent of thirty-one doctorates.)

  Day did not get a chance to tell Vernon of his own idea for putting a stop to the negative campaign of mudslinging. Nor did he tell Vernon that Juliana was building a house in Stay More and had arranged for Day to restore the arboreal landscape; he assumed Vernon would find that out soon enough from Juliana herself. He decided to try out his idea of the campaign on Arch and Lydia, perhaps at supper. But although they were sleeping at his house, they were having their supper at Vernon’s. So he tried it out on Diana, and she bought it, wholeheartedly.

  This inspired him. He knew that what would really give him the confidence to present the idea to the Samurai would be not so much the approval of Lydia and Arch but the approval of the one man in whose realm of expertise it most resided. So later that night, after the meeting of the Samurai had broken up, he told Diana to make Lydia and Arch right at home and tell them he’d be back in a jiffy. Then he drove to Sharon’s and Larry’s house, the former Stay More post office (where, his first months in town, thirty years before, he’d “mailed” letters to Diana and received hers in return, every day when they were experimentally living apart from each other for a while). They were all sitting on the porch, Sharon, Larry, Monica, and Harry, enjoying the cooling darkness of early September.

  “Howdy,” Day said to them, and they exchanged howdies with him, although Harry said, “Mohammed of the Mountains.”

  Day smiled at Harry. “I’m taking it to the mountain, and you’re the mountain. Could I have a few minutes of your time, in private?”

  Harry looked at the others and then back at Day. Then he hefted himself out of his chair and walked down the steps of the old store/post office. He brought his drink with him. “Lead on,” he said to Day.

  They strolled up the road, not the main road but the Right Prong Road that Day had come in on.

  “I know nothing about politics,” Day began. “And I don’t understand the refinements of negative campaigning, your bailiwick. But it has occurred to me that while the public has learned to expect that two candidates will assault each other with innuendo and accusation and slander, the public possibly has a point of saturation. Do you agree?”

  Harry snorted. “If the public’s got a saturation point, I’ve never seen ’em reach it.”

  “But don’t you think it’s possible, hypothetically, that if two candidates attacked each other incessantly and viciously, the public would simply tune them out eventually?”

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” Harry admitted. “But calumny is like gossip for most people: you can’t get enough of it.”

  “We won’t listen to gossip if it’s outrageous. If the calumny were inflated and overdone beyond a certain point, wouldn’t the public get sick of it?”

  “So?”

  “So I’ve been thinking. Here are Bradfield and Vernon having at each other with everything they’ve got, and you have certainly provided Vernon with an arsenal of serious accusations against the governor, but it hasn’t particularly helped. The latest polls show Vernon falling farther and farther behind. My idea is this. Instead of trying further to counteract Bradfield’s calumny, why not help it along, until it is so bloated it self-destructs? Pad it, in other words. If necessary, fabricate all kinds of sins and errors and crimes that Vernon has committed, and have him confess to them on a daily basis, until the public begins to take a ‘So what?’ attitude. The populace will be innoculated against any further scandal. If a saturation point can’t be reached, super-saturate the public!”

  Day waited, but for a long time Harry Wolfe did not respond. They continued strolling, and once or twice Wolfe raised his glass to his mouth and took an audible gulp. At length he said, “You’re Vernon’s asshole buddy and you want to stick all those knives in his back?”

  “Maybe,” Day said, “people would start feeling sympathetic toward a guy with a back full of knives.”

  Harry continued to ponder for a while longer before saying, “It’s risky. It’s like you’re suggesting that I take my cannons and turn them around to shoot the wrong direction.”

  “Good metaphor,” Day said. “Possibly in all the noise and smoke of the cannons firing there might grow up a general wish for quiet and clarity and peace. Who knows? The candidates might even be compelled to concentrate on the issues.”

  “Heaven forbid!” Harry said mockingly. “I don’t know nothing about no issues.” He began laughing. He finished his drink and stopped and turned to face Day. “Mr. Whittacker, you know, I think you’ve really got something here. I’ll take it up with the others and we might even give it a try. Will you take all the blame if it backfires?”

  “I’d prefer to remain anonymous,” Day said. “Is there some way you could introduce the idea as if it’s your own?”

  “And if it works, I’ll be a hero?” Harry said. Day tried to catch any note of sarcasm in Harry’s words, but Harry really meant it. “I could even parlay this ploy into fat oppo jobs for the rest of my life. Only I wouldn’t be researching the opposition, I’d be researching my own man!” Harry continued laughing. He finished his drink and stared into his empty glass. “What’s this local moonshine called? Chism’s Dew? It’s pretty good stuff, you know. I could develop a real liking for it. Let’s go back to the house and get another one.” Harry turned around and began strolling homeward. “Say, you know, amongst all the other turpitudes we could leak the news that Vernon Ingledew is the head of the operation manufacturing Chism’s Dew!”

  “Why not?” said Day. And permitted himself a chuckle, while he envisioned all the vilification that could be heaped on Vernon.

  “I’ve got a better one!” Harry suggested. “A real one! Did yo
u know that those two Indians use peyote? It’s part of their religion, or whatever, but I believe it’s a controlled substance and illegal. We could claim that Vernon and Juliana get high together!”

  “I should have guessed you already knew about Vernon and Juliana,” Day said.

  “Yeah, and we’ll throw that in too, right on top of the heap, piling the dirt so high that the people of the great state of Arkansas won’t give a flying fuck what Vernon does or does not do in his private life!” Harry began cackling. “Of course, Vernon will have to deny everything. When we hit him with the peyote, he can say, ‘Yes, I used peyote, but I didn’t inhale!’” And Harry laughed so loudly Day wondered if the others could hear.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Day inquired, “how did you know that Juliana uses peyote?”

  “I asked her,” Harry said.

  “Does anything escape your all-seeing eye?”

  “Thank you, no. Not even the possibility that, even as we speak, Juliana may be pregnant.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “For the moment, I’m just speculating. Mr. Whittacker, I take it you’re just as familiar as I am with The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. You know, therefore, that Jacob Ingledew impregnated the Indian squaw who was, supposedly, the ancestor of Juliana Heartstays, and therefore if Juliana is trying to recapture the lost times of her people she is bent upon getting herself impregnated. No?”

  “No,” Day said firmly, “because that book also makes clear that Vernon is the very last of all the Ingledews because the woman he loves, Jelena, cannot have children. Of course it doesn’t say anything about Juliana coming along many years later, but it does make quite clear that there will never be any more Ingledews after Vernon.”

  “Yes, it draws a fabulous parallel between the lives of the Ingledews of Stay More and the lives of an ancient family of Arcadian Greeks, as expressed in a book in Latin Vernon found in a bookstore in Rome on his first trip around the world. The book is called De Arcadiae Architectura Antiqua, or The Archaic Architecture of Arcadia.”

  “The book we’re talking about—the Arkansas architecture book—makes clear that the Roman book tells the whole story of Vernealos Anqualdou, the last of the line of Anqualdous. The last, who could have no children because the woman he loved could not bear a child.”

  “And it also tells everything that will happen to Vernealos for the rest of his life—including whether or not he becomes elected as provincial eparch, or governor, of Arcadia, like his ancestor Iakobus Anqualdou.”

  “Which is the reason that Vernon deposited his copy of the book in the Library of Congress with instructions that they never let him see it, because he doesn’t want to know what is going to happen to him for the rest of his life.”

  “But which doesn’t stop a good pal of mine in DC from going to the Library of Congress and getting a copy made, which he sent to me, and which I have commissioned a fellow at the University of Arkansas, Professor Daniel Levine of the Classics Department, to translate for me. Any day now I’ll know not only whether or not Vernon will have a child with Juliana but also whether or not he’ll be elected governor of Arkansas in November.”

  “If you believe in fairy tales,” Day said. “I find it hard to accept that a man of your cynicism and objectivity would believe that an ancient book can accurately predict what’s happening now. Shades of Zoroaster!”

  “I think it’s Nostradamus whose shades you want to invoke,” Harry Wolfe corrected him, and then he thanked him for the “brilliant” idea of extirpating the negative campaign by supersaturation and he returned to the house of Larry and Sharon to get himself another Chism’s Dew.

  Day was to discover that there were no trucks with tree spades for hire in Harrison. He made several calls, and discovered the closest place he could find a big tree spade was Fayetteville. He decided to go have a look at it, and, while he was at it, have a little chat with the Author, and ask him if he knew this Professor Levine, who was translating this Arcadiae Architectura Antiqua and finding out everything that happened to Vernealos Anqualdou.

  Day decided not to tell Vernon that the ancient book was being translated from the Latin at Harry’s request. And of course he couldn’t tell Vernon that he himself had “planted” the idea of dumping so much scandal on Vernon that the populace would grow jaded and indifferent. But there was one thing he wanted to say to Vernon, and it was this question: “Do you use contraceptives when you’re with Juliana?”

  Vernon looked baffled. “Now what would I be doing with a contraceptive in my possession? I’ve never used one in my life. I’ve never had to.”

  “Don’t forget that personal motto of yours: ‘I’ll try anything once.’”

  Chapter sixteen

  Lydia had never particularly liked Harry Wolfe but now she had to wonder if the man wasn’t some kind of genius. She thought he was physically repulsive: obese, disheveled, constantly reeking of booze, and constantly wearing a facial expression dominated by what seemed to be a sneer contemptuous of the whole world. Once when he was thoroughly sloshed he had slapped her on the butt and she had been required to slap him on his flabby jowl, and that was the only time they had ever touched. She admired him for his sleuthing powers at the same time she was disdainful toward that entire aspect of politics which his powers fed: the intrusion of personal lives into campaigns. “Gotcha” politics. Whatever disappointment she’d had with her old boss Bill Clinton, she had always felt Clinton’s personal life should never have been an issue, as long as he performed his duties as governor and as president to the best of his considerable abilities. What we do in our bedrooms, she believed, should have no more bearing on our performance in our jobs than what we do at our dining tables.

  Harry Wolfe was therefore some kind of serpent, and she had as little to do with him as possible. But now he appeared to have proposed a bit of strategy which would seem to contravene his own principles, rendering the whole apparatus of smear campaigns ineffective. Her first reaction to his idea, which she sensed was shared by her fellow Samurai, was doubt and caution. The plan could so easily go haywire. What if the public was not surfeited by all the scandal that Harry proposed heaping upon their own candidate? What if the plenitude of muckraking simply increased the public’s appetite for it? In the Samurai’s discussion, Lydia had offered this idea: “What if they, the populace, think this whole big blob of mud is actually chocolate cake? And they want seconds? And thirds?”

  But the more she thought about it, the more tempting the plan seemed. It might be a huge gamble, but a gamble worth taking in view of Bradfield’s determination to concentrate his entire campaign on Vernon’s albatrosses. If Bradfield could devote a whole week of spots to each of the albatrosses, at God knows what expense, what could he do if there were two hundred albatrosses? Might not the very size of the intrusion-sheet discourage him from continuing his smears? There were still two months left until the November election. Quite possibly the people of Arkansas in their goodness and wisdom might prefer that those two months be spent in an honest contemplation of the ideological differences between the two candidates instead of their peccadilloes. Might that be too much to expect?

  The Samurai decided to take an extra day and night at Stay More, in order to complete their consideration and discussion of Harry’s proposal before presenting the idea to Vernon himself. Bo certainly approved of this extension of time; Lydia suspected that it would give him more time to be with Jelena, and Lydia was the first of the Samurai, other than Bo himself, to imagine it true that Bo and Jelena were having an affair; when Lydia had called early one morning to tell Vernon that they needed to find Bo because of Bradfield’s bombshell, Vernon hadn’t seemed to know, at first, that Bo was right there in his own house! And of course the Samurai had already speculated among themselves that there was something going on between their candidate and that ravishing Indian maiden who had taken up residence in a quaint little wigwam. When Lydia had first heard this gossip, it had hurt her as
if someone had slashed her with a knife, because she herself was very much in love with Vernon. One thing that made Lydia receptive to Harry’s radical scheme was that whatever hanky-panky was going on between Vernon and Juliana and Bo and Jelena would be smudged over and obscured in the onslaught of slanders.

  When Lydia had made that early morning phone call to Vernon, she hadn’t expected to find him home; she had a hunch that possibly Jelena might know of Bo’s whereabouts. Lydia was irritated that her bosses—her candidate, Vernon, and his campaign manager, Bo—had both taken to mysterious disappearances without any word to her. Pine Bluff had been a fiasco, and Vernon had simply got into his helicopter right after the rally petered out. After all the work she and Carleton had done, planning and setting up the rally and getting as much publicity for it as they could squeeze out of the media, and with a considerable expenditure for TV and radio spots, posters, and what Lydia had been led to believe was a good Democratic organization in the town, a little more than one hundred people had turned out, scarcely more than the numbers of Vernon’s hired troops, the band and cheerleaders and singers and all.

  Either owing to the meager crowd or because his heart was elsewhere, Vernon had not given an inspired speech, and the whole thing was desultory and discouraging. Lydia feared, against the sincerest wishes of her heart, that old-time stump speaking was dead, dead, dead, and nothing would revive it. Lydia had been left to do the post mortems and cleaning up, without any help from Carleton, who at least had the courtesy to come to her and inform her that he had after much soul-searching decided to take a lucrative offer from the Bradfield camp to switch sides. Lydia did not tell him, or anyone else, then or now, that she herself had also received a very good offer, delivered in person by Billy Joe Slade, Bradfield’s manager, and the offer was so high it should have caused her some soul-searching too but she hadn’t needed to search her soul, because she knew her soul would never give her a minute’s peace if she had accepted it.