Found herself hunched over the steering wheel, her knuckles white, remembering.
It had been thirty years since the Purdys lost the farm. Four hundred and eighty acres of good black soil, gone with low crop prices and high interest rates. Gone with it was the three hundred thousand dollars that her parents had loaned to the newlyweds as a down payment on the mortgage loan, and to buy basic equipment. The loss of the three hundred thousand had crippled her father’s retirement. He’d planned to travel, to do great things in his final years; maybe even buy a February time-share down in Fort Myers. He’d been left as an old man staring at a TV screen, sitting out the Iowa winters.
Two years after the disaster, Marlys’s husband, Wilt, left their rented house, climbed in the rust-bucket Chevy, wound it up to ninety miles an hour, and pointed it into a concrete pillar on a railroad underpass. He’d been killed instantly, or, at least, that’s what the cops said.
Marlys had never remarried, had never gone with another man: no time, no inclination, and not many offers. Maybe a few, turned away before they had a chance to become real. She still flashed to the day of Wilt’s death, the sight of the sheriff and the Baptist minister coming up the flagstone path on the rental house . . . Sometimes at night she could roll over in bed and see the back of Wilt’s head on the next pillow, silhouetted in the silvery moonlight, and she’d reach out and touch an empty pillow and whisper, “Wilt.”
All she had left of Wilt was Cole’s wide gray eyes.
—
THE HIGHWAY PATROL kindly ruled Wilt’s death an accident and the insurance company had been forced to fork over the money that bought the current house and the acreage outside of Pella.
When they bought it, the house had essentially been abandoned, inhabited by bats and mice and even a raccoon that had nested in the thin attic insulation. Marlys put the kids in school and worked two part-time jobs during the day and then worked half the night fixing up the house and barn, planting her trees and berries and grapes, paying for the compact John Deere tractor she needed to work her gardens.
The kids worked with her: they’d had to.
She’d almost gotten straight with herself and with Wilt’s death, when Cole went off to Iraq in ’05 and ’07 and came back funny. The next year, the economy collapsed and friends and neighbors began losing jobs and homes again.
She could see so clearly that it was not their fault.
The system was rotten. The Administration was rotten, the Congress was rotten, the banks were rotten, the oil companies were rotten, the media were liars and thieves. Michaela Bowden was their instrument, mixed right in there with them.
Something had to be done to save America. The country needed a strong president whose heart was in the right place, who’d take care of the struggling folks at the bottom of the economic heap.
Somebody like Minnesota’s governor, Elmer Henderson.
—
THE MOUNT PLEASANT MEETING was in the home of Joseph Likely, an aging activist and gasbag who nevertheless knew a lot of history, and how history seemed to work through certain small moments—the assassination of John Kennedy or the 9/11 attacks. Moments that changed the world, usually for the worse.
But not always. Not always, Marlys thought.
—
AT LIKELY’S HOUSE Marlys got out of the car and took the insulated pizza-delivery bag, left from one of her part-time jobs, from the passenger seat. The bag was still warm. She climbed the porch and knocked on the door. She could see a dozen or so people already sitting in the living room and then Joe Likely threading his way through them. Likely was a sixties leftover, with a nicotine-stained beard and eyebrows like tumbleweeds.
He opened the door and smiled and said, “I hope to hell that’s apple pie you’re carrying.”
“Two of them. How are you, Joe?”
“Getting older,” Likely said. “Hoping to make it until Christmas.”
She followed him into the living room, where ten other people were sitting on metal folding chairs. She knew them all. Joe said, “Marlys has brought pie.”
A few people said, “Yay,” and “Thanks, Marlys,” and Joe took the pies into the kitchen, then came back and stood at the front of the room.
“Like I was saying before Marlys got here, the news isn’t real good, but I guess you all know that. Right now, politically, we’ve got nowhere to go. The Republicans, as usual, are batshit crazy, and with the Democrats, well, choose your poison. Dan Grady has filed papers to run for governor . . .” There was a smattering of applause. “. . . but even those of us who like Dan know that he won’t get even two percent of the vote. We’re back in survival mode. I have to admit that our network is getting thinner, not stronger. So, the question is, what do we do? We need fresh ideas.”
Fresh ideas from this group was virtually an oxymoron, Marlys thought, wriggling her butt against the comfortless chair.
She heard the same old things about organizing, about reaching out to young people, about getting in touch with the unions, about starting a website. The ideas were mostly inane; a few were actively goofy. None of them had even a touch of realism about them. Given what happened to her pies during the break, she began to wonder how many people still came to the meetings only for the free dessert.
She looked around: longtime acquaintances and friends now grown shabby, tired, broken. Cinders. In the old days, they’d all burned with righteous fire.
Anson Palmer stood up and said that he was talking to a press in Iowa City about publishing his book. His book was three thousand pages long now. Palmer suffered from an idée fixe, that is, that the Jews controlled everything. Everything. He was writing down every single human process he could think of, and tracing it back to Jewish control, like tracing every human being through six degrees to Kevin Bacon.
His three thousand pages only scratched the surface. His talks with the press were not far advanced, he admitted. He really needed an agent, but guess-what about most agents?
Marlys hadn’t met many Jews and those she had seemed ordinary enough—but it was clear to her who ran the banks, the media, the corporations. Or for that matter, the literary agencies. But with Jews, there was no leverage. Sure, you could go around blaming the Jews if you wanted, but they were so dispersed, there was nothing you could really do about them. They weren’t a fulcrum that you use to move the world.
Michaela Bowden was.
If she were elected president, it would be the same-ol’ same-ol’: sucking up to, and taking care of, the powers-that-be, the banks, Wall Street, the corporations, the foundations. Nothing but crumbs for the little people.
With Elmer Henderson, things would be a whole lot different. Henderson was independently wealthy and didn’t have to suck up to anyone. He came from a farm state, and even owned a farm, she’d learned. He knew what had happened to the average folks back in the eighties, and then in the 2000s. His heart was in the right place. If he became president, there was a chance for change.
Among the whole bunch, Marlys knew, she was the only one who had a real practical idea that might actually move the world. No way she could talk about it, not even here.
She let Anson Palmer’s words flow around her, eyes half closed. The people here, in this room, were right enough in their thinking, in their hopeless way. They knew something had to be done—but they didn’t know what, and they wouldn’t do it if they did know.
She knew.
And she would.
TWO
August, with the late-afternoon sun glittering off the ripples in the lake outside the double doors; a pleasant silence after the whine of the table saw.
Lucas Davenport sat in a battered office chair with a bottle of Leinie’s, looking at the unfinished interior of the room he was adding to his Wisconsin cabin. The place smelled of sawdust and coffee, with a hint of the piney woods that surrounded the house, and the beer in his
hand. Through the plastic sheet that separated the new room from the rest of the cabin, he could hear Delbert McClinton singing “Two More Bottles of Wine” over the computer speakers.
The carpenter had left, taking her coffee with her, after installing the tongue-in-groove pine planks on the wall facing the lake. Lucas had been doing the cutting, on the table saw, while the carpenter did the final fitting and nailing. Another two days and the walls would all be in, and then they’d start on the finish work. Jesus don’t tarry and the creek don’t rise, the room would be done before winter, with weeks to spare.
Of course, he’d heard that story before. In his experience with house construction, the creek did rise, or Jesus did tarry, or both. So far, though, they were on schedule.
Delbert had finished “Two More Bottles” and had gone to work on “Gold Plated Fool,” when Lucas’s phone rang. His wife, he thought, checking in after work. He dug his phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
A single word hung there: Mitford.
—
NEIL MITFORD WAS CHIEF WEASEL for the governor of Minnesota. A finger of pure pleasure touched Lucas’s heart: something was up. Mitford never called unless he had to.
Lucas clicked on Answer and asked, “What happened?”
“The governor needs to see you,” Mitford said. “Soon as possible.”
“He get caught with a teenager?”
“Don’t even think that,” Mitford said, as if thinking it might make it happen.
“Yeah, well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I no longer work for the state,” Lucas said.
“He needs to see you anyway.”
“I’m up at my cabin. I could probably make it down tomorrow afternoon.”
“Unfortunately, we’re in Iowa. We just left Fort Madison . . .” Lucas heard somebody in the background call, “Fort Dodge,” and Mitford said, “. . . Fort Dodge, on our way to Ames. We’ve got a noon speech there, tomorrow, followed by a reception at the student union. That’ll go on ’til two o’clock. We’d like you to be there by the end of the reception.”
“What’s the problem?” Lucas asked, because there would be a problem.
“I can’t tell you that because we’re talking on radios,” Mitford said. “Be here at two.”
“I’m a private citizen now and I don’t necessarily jump when the governor—”
“Two o’clock,” Mitford said, and he was gone.
Lucas smiled at the phone: something was up.
—
“GOOD,” SAID HIS WIFE, Weather, when she called to check in. “He’s got something for you to do. You’ll stop driving Jimi nuts and I’ll get to see you tonight.”
“Treat me right, I might even throw you a quickie,” Lucas said.
“As opposed to what?”
“Very funny,” Lucas said. “And I’m not driving Jimi nuts.”
Jimi was the carpenter. “Yes, you are. Nuts. Like you did when you drove the contractor nuts on this house. Then you spend all day looking at Jimi’s ass, up on that scaffold. Which might explain the quickie-ness.”
“She does have an exceptionally nice scaffold,” Lucas said. “Anyway, see you about seven o’clock. Maybe we can sneak out for a bite.”
“Before or after the quickie?” Weather asked.
“In between.”
“Big talk, big guy.”
—
LUCAS WAS A BIG GUY, but not a lunk.
He was a few pounds under two hundred, now, after much of a summer working on the cabin for three days each week. He’d had no easy access to restaurant food, the big killer, and so had been cooking on his own, mostly microwave stuff. He’d been running twice a day and doing early-morning weight work. Although he was a natural clotheshorse, he’d spent the summer in jeans, T-shirts, and lace-up boots, and was beginning to miss the feel of high-end Italian wool and silk and English shoes.
Lucas was a dark-haired man, with a long thin scar tracking down from his hairline, across his tanned forehead, and over one eye to his cheek; not, as some people thought, cop-related, but an artifact from a fishing misadventure. Another pink/white scar showed on his throat, left over from the day a young girl shot him in the throat. A surgeon—who was not yet his wife—saved his life by cutting open an airway with a borrowed jackknife.
—
HE WAS NO LONGER A COP. He’d quit Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when a combination of personality conflict and paperwork had finally done what street work hadn’t been able to do: push him out.
When he was a cop, still working with the BCA, he’d done a number of quiet jobs for the governor and they’d grown to somewhat trust each other. Only somewhat: politicians could rationalize the Crucifixion of Christ. And had.
The governor, Elmer Henderson, was currently campaigning for the Democratic vice presidential nomination, though that’s not what he said he was doing. He claimed to be campaigning for the presidency, but he knew quite well that rumors about his early interest in three- and four-way sex with young Seven Sisters coeds and fellow Ivy Leaguers, as well as in the life-enhancing effects of cocaine, would eventually get out and keep him from the nomination.
However, he was liberal enough that he could nail down the lefty fringe of the party for a candidate who ran more toward the middle; and he had a half-billion dollars, which would come in handy during a national campaign. The sex-and-drugs thing wouldn’t keep him from something as insignificant as the vice presidency.
He had a shot.
—
AFTER THE CALL from Weather, Lucas showered and shaved, put a Band-Aid and some antiseptic on his index finger, above the knuckle, where he’d picked up a splinter earlier in the day, and put on some fresh clothes. He took ten minutes to vacuum up an accumulation of Asian ladybugs that had found their way through the windowless addition, and bagged up the garbage and trash. He called Jimi to tell her he’d be gone for a short time, no more than a few days.
“Thank God,” she’d said.
“What?”
“I mean . . . that the time’ll be short,” the carpenter said.
Closing down the cabin took fifteen minutes. He hauled the garbage bag to his Mercedes SUV, locked up the cabin, and was on the dirt road out.
—
THAT NIGHT LUCAS’S FRIEND Del Capslock and his wife came over for barbecued steaks and salad, and they sat around speculating on the governor’s problem. “It better not involve a woman,” Weather said. “If he’s been caught with his hand in the wrong pair of pants, that’s not a problem I want you to solve.”
“A hand wouldn’t be such a big problem—a pregnancy would be,” Del said. “But Elmer’s not that dumb.”
“His penis might be,” Del’s wife said.
“He has a well-schooled cock, he only impregnates what he wants to impregnate,” Del said.
“Hope you’re right,” Lucas said. “If it’s that kind of problem, he’s on his own. I’ll turn the truck around and go back to the cabin.”
Lucas’s youngest kid, Gabrielle, was now old enough to sit in her own chair at the table. She pointed a spoon at Del and said, “Cock.”
“Oh my God,” Weather said.
Lucas’s son, Sam, now in third grade, said to Weather, “Mom, Gabby said ‘cock.’”
Del’s wife rapped Del on the head with a soup spoon.
—
AND THE NEXT MORNING, leaving behind a wife and two small children—Lucas had an older adoptive daughter going to college at Stanford, and another daughter who lived with the family of an ex-girlfriend—he put the Benz on I-35 and pointed it south for Iowa.
Weather waved from the doorstep. She was smiling.
Quickie, my ass, he thought, as he rolled out of the driveway.
—
FROM ST. PAUL to Des Moines was three hours, more or less str
aight down I-35. Ames was a half hour short of Des Moines, and a college town—Iowa State. A few miles out of St. Paul, Lucas was into the corn and soybeans, and corn and beans it would remain, all the way to Ames, the grain fields punctuated by snaky lines of junk trees along the flatland creeks, the windbreaks around farmhouses, and the occasional cow.
After he’d quit the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Lucas and Weather had taken a vacation trip to France. They’d spent most of their time in Paris, with a one-day run by train to London, but had also spent a week driving around the South of France, where they’d encountered a fundamental difference between European and American farmlands.
In Europe, it seemed, farmers mostly lived in villages, and during the day, went out to their farms. In America, they lived on their farms and during the day, went into the villages.
The European way seemed more . . . congenial. There’d always be somebody to talk to at night. Especially on long winter nights. When you were as far north as St. Paul or Paris, the nights began at four o’clock in the afternoon and ended at eight in the morning; Lucas had been surprised to learn that Paris was farther north than the Minnesota-Canada border. Looking at some of the old farmsteads out on the prairie, Lucas thought he might well have died if forced to sit through a winter in one of those isolated farmhouses, back in pre-TV days, nothing for companionship except the wind and a woodstove and a Sears Roebuck catalog . . .
—
HALFWAY DOWN TO AMES, Virgil Flowers, a former BCA subordinate, called: “Me’n Johnson Johnson are going over to Vilas County to rape the lakes of all their muskies,” Flowers said. “You want to come along? You might learn something.”
“I’ve done more fishing this summer than any summer in my life,” Lucas said. “So no. Besides, I’m on my way to Ames to meet the governor. He might have an errand for me.”
“You got your gun?” Flowers asked.
“In the car, not on me,” Lucas said.
“Stay in touch, I want to hear about it,” Flowers said. “Especially if it involves a woman.”
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