Dr. Matthews seemed sad so I told him delivering babies was more important than climbing a mountain with a Betamax camcorder, and that might have been true. I couldn’t decide.
Before I left, I told Dr. Matthews I’d suggest to my editors that we present “a more well-rounded portrait of Doctor Tom than we first intended.”
Dr. Matthews seemed satisfied. He told me he thought I was an impressive young man, and to let him know if I ever became curious about the medical game.
I was flattered. Now that I was back on the terrorist track, or at least infiltrating, I was tempted to think of medicine as yet another potential career I had to sacrifice to destroy Trash Mountain, but who was I kidding? I was a high-school dropout, pretty much. I wasn’t a genius at anything anymore. Dr. Matthews was just being nice.
While I typed up my notes I felt bad, not because of what the notes said about Dr. Tom (I couldn’t have cared less about Dr. Tom, that shiny-toothed gigolo) but because I had misrepresented myself to Dr. Matthews. What if Dr. Matthews read an article in the newspaper that had all the stuff he said? It wouldn’t matter that the writer had a different name. Dr. Matthews was no dummy.
When I gave Marie the notes, she was impressed. I asked her what she was going to do with them and she said not to worry. “You’re clean,” she said.
“But if Doctor Matthews—”
“Don’t worry about Matthews. That old glory hound was dying to tell you about his famous friend. You did him a favor. But it doesn’t matter anyway. There won’t be any articles, not in the conventional sense. We divide it all up.” Marie explained that no legitimate newspaper would accept notes like mine from somebody in the Connors campaign, so what she did was give the notes to online news sites that wrote little articles for money. Nobody read the articles, she said, but they changed what came up when you searched for Dr. Tom on the internet.
“This stuff is perfect because of the irony,” Marie said. “The smartass doctor congressman who almost flunked out of med school. The pro-life windbag who used to do abortions.”
“But what do abortions have to do with being treasurer?”
“I don’t know, kid, but what if he beat his wife? What if he called somebody nigger?”
“He’d be a jerk.”
“Exactly.”
“But Doctor Matthews said they had to do the abortions to pass med school.”
“What you and I believe doesn’t matter, Ben. This is the Bi-Cities. That shit won’t fly.”
The next day, Marie told me Whitey Connors was just as impressed as she was by my interview skills. So impressed, she said, that he wanted to meet me. She told me we were going to Bi-Cities HQ.
I drove us there in Marie’s burgundy Oldsmobile (I hadn’t bothered mentioning I didn’t have a license) while Marie worked in the passenger seat, marking up papers then calling somebody on the phone and talking in a loud voice about an Elks Lodge where Whitey was supposed to speak. When we got to the dump, Marie directed me to a special entrance. She had to lean across me to wave a badge at a little gray box with a light on it that beeped.
The special entrance led to a little parking lot full of luxury sedans and shiny trucks with brush-guards and gun-racks that probably cost more than Marie’s Oldsmobile.
Marie got out, still on the phone, and gestured for me to wait in the car.
I was disappointed to have to wait out there. Whitey Connors wanted to meet me, I thought, and I was ready to get the ball rolling in terms of casing the building for possible acts of terror. But I waited. And waited. It was pretty boring. When three guys in short-sleeve dress shirts and neckties came out to smoke cigarettes, I watched them in the rearview mirror for a change of pace. None of them said anything; they just smoked and stared off into the distance, like they had witnessed something unspeakable. Seeing them made me wish I could smoke to pass the time. Marie’s cigarettes were in a cup holder in the center console. But I didn’t dare smoke in Marie’s car. It would have been presumptuous. I was afraid even to turn on the radio, because what if Marie came back all of a sudden and heard me blasting metal and asked if I was a future school shooter or what? It annoyed me to be worried like that, to want so badly to please her, but I did. So I just sat there in silence for an hour and fifteen minutes.
I was half-asleep when the back door popped open and somebody slid into the backseat. I thought it was Marie, but why would she get in the back instead of the side? In the rearview mirror I could only see the outline of a head, all black with the sun behind it. I remember thinking it was small, the head, then hearing the sound of liquid slurped through a straw and the rattle of ice in a Styrofoam cup. That’s when I knew it was Whitey himself.
“I wanna thank you,” he said. He had a higher voice than I expected, and a thick country accent.
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“Polite. I like it.” He slurped his drink. “I hear you’re a local boy.”
“Yessir.”
“Let me guess,” he said, “Komer?”
I would have answered, but he was laughing. I wondered what was funny.
The straw made a honking sound as he knocked loose some ice. Then he popped the lid and poured the ice into his mouth and started to chew it. Through the ice he said, “Know the old joke about Komer?”
“No sir,” I said, even though I knew lots of jokes about Komer, old and new, and jokes about Haislip too, which were the same jokes switched around.
“What’s the difference between a Komer man and a carp?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“One is a bottom-feeding scum sucker, and the other is a fish.” He laughed, so I laughed too, to be polite. He must have liked the way I laughed because he told another: “Did you hear about the Komer man who tried to blow up a school bus?”
“No, sir,” I said, and that time I wasn’t lying. I hadn’t heard that one.
“He burned his lips on the tailpipe.” Whitey laughed again and I did too, even though the image of kids getting blown up sort of complicated the punch-line. He kept going: “Did you hear about the Komer kamikaze pilot?”
“No, sir.”
“He flew twenty-five missions.” Whitey laughed harder this time. My own laugh must have gotten feeble because he didn’t seem to hear it. “The pilot flew twenty-five missions because he didn’t get it right the first time,” Whitey explained. “He shoulda got killed that first time. He was a kamikaze pilot.”
“I see,” I said, and tried to laugh some more.
“Pretty good, right? Say, did you hear about the Komer man who won gold at the Olympics?”
“No, sir.”
“He liked the medal so much he got it bronzed.” Whitey laughed some more and I laughed loud enough to be heard this time. My face was getting sore from fake smiling so much, but Whitey kept going. He must have told a dozen. Lots of them had to do with hunting or sex. “A Komer man went hunting and shot two deer,” Whitey said. “The taxidermist asked if he wanted them mounted. You know what he said? No, kissing will do fine. Did you hear about the Komer man hunting in the woods? He came upon a pretty lady laying naked in the grass. He asked her if she was game. She said yes, so he shot her. Why did the rapist move to Komer? In Komer, everybody has the same DNA.”
I forced myself to laugh for so long that my laughter started sounding weird to me, like a crazy person’s laughter, and I wondered if laughing like that was a way to go crazy. Whitey seemed crazy. His eyes were wild and his mouth hung open between jokes in a way that made me think of a hungry wolf, like the jokes were meant to lull me into a stupor so he could spring from the back seat and bite my neck. But he didn’t. He kept telling jokes. “Did you hear about the jumbo jet that crashed into a Komer cemetery?” he asked.
“Yes. I mean no. I guess I—that doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Komer Search and Rescue has recovered three hundred bodies so far and they’re still digging. No, wait, I screwed that one up. There could be three hundred bodies on a ju
mbo jet easy, so they don’t gotta dig up no cemetery to get the bodies. It’s gotta be a smaller plane. What’s a type of smaller plane?”
“How about a helicopter?”
“That’s it! Did you hear about the helicopter that crashed—” He repeated the entire joke then laughed like hell again, like he hadn’t just told the same goddamn joke. By then I was through. I just couldn’t laugh anymore. That’s when he stopped.
It was like he knew he wore me out and was satisfied, or maybe he had worn himself out to the point of screwing up the plane crash joke, and the satisfaction he felt was like the feeling after a good workout. He said, “Let me tell you about Tom Donaldson. Call it a psychological profile, if you will.” He raised his cup and sloshed the last of the ice into his mouth. “Tom Donaldson was a rich kid who got told he was special all his life. He aced high school, aced college, and when college was over he heard that all the special boys went to law school or medical school to ace that. He just wanted to keep being special, see? Only problem was he wasn’t smart enough to ace it anymore. He had gone too far, beyond the limits of his natural abilities. That twisted him up inside. He started having personal problems. Urges. But he got through, even though he probably shouldn’t have—money weighs the dice of fortune, I like to say—and he got into a nice little life for himself. But the urges wouldn’t stop. He kept getting into trouble. So much trouble that one day he couldn’t be a doctor anymore. Well, what was he gonna do?” Whitey paused. “What was old Doctor Tom gonna do, Ben? What would make him still be special? Why, politics, of course!” Whitey laughed, then sighed. “Politics is like business, Ben: it helps to start with a couple million in the bank, and it helps even more to start with the kind of trust a doctor gets, even the shittiest, grabbiest doctor in town. But you know what? Fuck him. Fuck him, Ben. When I’m done he’ll be eatin’ mud from a trough like a goddamn pig.”
Whitey opened the car door, got out, and slammed it shut. I was startled. He headed for the building then turned around, came back, and stuck his face in the passenger window. He looked older up close, and meaner. His beady brown eyes were surrounded by fierce wrinkles. He said, “Whoever heard of a doctor tellin’ people the world is six thousand years old? He’s a liar or a goddamn idiot. You a religious man?”
“No, sir.”
“Good, because there ain’t no God. People talk that shit to get elected. They think we’re a buncha goddamn rubes.” He turned and left, for good this time.
I wasn’t as startled as I would have been if Whitey hadn’t worn me down with all those jokes, but I was surprised by what he said about God. I didn’t go to church but if pressed I would have said I believed in God. But maybe I only would have said it just in case: in case God did exist and would strike me with lightning for saying he didn’t, or would wait until I died for payback via sending me to hell. The slim chance of being tortured in hell for eternity wasn’t worth the risk, was the way I saw it. But maybe it was worth it to Whitey. Whitey seemed like a man of passion. A righteous man. I had to remind myself I was infiltrating him.
Chapter 14
WHITEY HAD THIS guy named Daryl, his buddy from high school, whose job was to follow Whitey everywhere and fetch him things and get people on the phone and refill his soda. Daryl had a comb-over and a big belly that hung over his khaki pants. Judging from Daryl, Whitey must have been about fifty years old, which surprised me. Whitey had a wrinkly monkey face, but his hair wasn’t gray and the way he moved made me think of an elf. Not a handsome bow-and-arrow-type elf like in movies but an Old World elf, the kind who steal babies and switch them with dirty elf babies, or maybe Whitey was the dirty elf baby all grown up. Anyway, people called Daryl Whitey’s “body man,” and pretty soon they were calling me Marie’s body man, Whitey especially, like it was some kind of joke. I didn’t like it. It made me think of myself as a sort of extra body Marie used to do her bidding, like a zombie almost. It was kind of true, though: I drove her around, I answered her phone sometimes, and I went with her to meetings, where I sat down next to her and took notes nobody read. Marie wanted to get me a suit, but Whitey said no. He said my western jacket rubbed a little “hotshot Texas mojo” on the whole operation. He started calling me Tex.
I didn’t see too much of Whitey except when Marie went with him to speaking engagements, but Whitey had a way of making you feel connected to him, like he was your buddy from way back. One time we were at a community meeting where an old codger was holding court about how deer season should be longer, and I glanced over at Whitey and he glanced back and rolled his eyes, then he slacked his jaw like he was dimwitted, then he turned back to the old guy and kept watching but nodding his head so earnestly that he looked kind of crazy. When the old guy finished, Whitey raised his hand and waved it around until the guy called on him and Whitey said, “Sir, what you’re saying is of great interest to me, and to everyone else here, I imagine, but tell me this: what’s your favorite thing about killing an animal?” The old guy hesitated, like he thought maybe Whitey was a secret tree-hugger. But then Whitey smiled and said, “My favorite thing is the smell of blood. Nothing gets me out of bed like the red promise of a bloody hunt.” Then Whitey laughed good-naturedly and everybody else laughed nervously, and the old guy said yes, that the smell of blood was pretty nice in the morning.
Since I spent all my time going around with Marie, I started to worry about the campaign office. Who was taking care of it? Who was greeting people? Who was offering info on Whitey Connors’s questionable platform? Then in January a half a dozen real interns started. They were college students who were supposed to work at Bi-Cities HQ for college credit, but Marie said each could spend one-sixth of his or her time staffing the campaign office. I showed them the ropes. Most were from the suburbs outside the city and went to good colleges, but one was none other than Kyle James.
I almost didn’t recognize him, with short hair and khakis and a coat-and-tie combo like a high school debater. He was handsome as ever but had gotten a little thick around the collar. He said he had rushed a fraternity and drank beer all the time, and he was trying to get into a workout routine but couldn’t fit it between his studies and fraternity engagements. He was in his second semester at Tech.
“How about you?” he asked. “I didn’t peg you for a college man—no offense.”
“I’m not,” I said, then explained how I had dropped out of high-school to work full-time for Whitey and Marie. I was expecting Kyle to be shocked. I was kind of hoping for it, honestly, so I could play it hard like he was just a college boy and I was a man of the world, but Kyle nodded. He looked thoughtful.
“Yeah,” he said, “if it wasn’t for how we got in trouble about that stupid book, I might have dropped out too. But my parents sent me to military school. It was good for me. Taught me a little responsibility, you know?”
“Sure,” I said, even though the only thing I knew about military school was from a movie where a truck driver kidnaps his own kid from one to teach him arm wrestling.
Kyle and I had that conversation alone in the campaign office, while I was showing him the campaign materials and telling him what to say on the phone. I was glad to see him. I thought we might be friends again. But when I saw Kyle back at Bi-Cities, he seemed afraid to let on he knew me. The other interns seemed to regard me with amusement. I heard one of them call me “little Whitey” to another, which just about made me spit. The only thing me and Whitey had in common was our size and accent, though I like to think I spoke better than he did. When I passed Kyle in the halls or had to speak to the interns as a group, I played it cool. I treated him brusquely. But the next time I saw him alone, at a makeshift desk in a Bi-Cities conference room where he was cold-calling potential donors, I came over to chat.
“Did you hear about Ronnie?” I asked.
“No,” Kyle said.
“He’s in jail.”
“Big surprise.”
That pissed me off. Ronnie and Kyle used to be friends. I said, “I guess
your college buddies stay out of jail, huh?”
“Most people stay out of jail, Ben. The rest of the world isn’t like Komer.”
“The rest of the world? You mean that city two hours away?”
“I know it isn’t much, but it’s better than this.”
“Then why are you here?”
“If Whitey wins, I can work for him in the capital next summer. If not, I’ll work for Hoffer in DC.”
“Who’s Hoffer?”
“Our congressman.”
“So you wanna be a politician?”
Kyle said he wasn’t sure about the whole politics game, but it probably looked good on his résumé. “The safest bet would be to get good grades and go to law school,” he said. “The money isn’t as good as banking or if you own your own business, like Whitey, but it’s lower risk. I’d have to start off at a firm in the city, but I could end up inhouse. It’s better hours. Hell, I could end up working for Whitey. I wouldn’t mind that one bit. A guy from Haislip could do a lot worse than Bi-Cities Sanitation.”
I didn’t know what to say. Kyle had thought it all out. But I didn’t like the way he talked about Whitey, like he knew him and could use him, like the world was a videogame and Kyle was playing it.
“What’s the rap on Ronnie?” Kyle asked.
“No idea,” I said.
“Well, it was only a matter of time.”
“It could have been you. You said so yourself.”
“I could have dropped out, not gone to fucking jail. Ronnie’s a born loser. God knows why we hung out with that guy.”
“Yeah, well, he never liked you either.”
“Good.”
I knew I should let it drop, but I couldn’t. I thought about the night I saw Ronnie behind my old apartment, how he had asked after Ruthanne, shown me his flaming skull Jesus tattoo. “Ronnie isn’t a loser,” I said. “He has vision. A secret inner life.”
“Deranged vision is what he has.”
“You didn’t think so back then.”
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