“You also said the ankle rash would go away, but you were wrong there too.”
“Use the ointment,” said Christopher, moving to the kitchen.
“Did you bring me some?”
“No, I brought you chocolates. They’re in the bag. Go ahead, indulge.”
“I don’t feel like it,” said Little Flower, asserting her authority. “Where is my probation officer? I called him fifty times. I demand to speak to him.”
Boone was spreading photos on the coffee table. “He’s a busy guy.”
Little Flower turned to Vi. “Busy guy, my ass. He was always after me to get a job. ‘Get a job’—that’s all he ever said. He said, ‘I need to check the box next to you’re gainfully employed, or else I catch hell from my supervisor.’ I said, ‘How can I get a job? I can’t go anywhere.’ He said, ‘That’s not true. You can shop for necessities, one hour, once a week, and attend the religious observance of your choice.’ I said, ‘What if I choose the Church of Blown-Up Buildings?’ He said, ‘What the heck is that supposed to mean?’ He said, ‘You can find a job that lets you work from your house.’ I said, ‘Like what? President?’ He said, ‘I know a man in phone solicitation. He’s reputable and desperately needs help.’ He said, ‘Most of the people who call you selling things are actually sentenced federal prisoners earning money from the comfort of their home confinements.’ So I called the guy and tried it. Turns out I suck at phone solicitation. They give you a written script, but I can’t read and talk and listen and think of a response all at the same time.” She itched her ankle rash, then picked a chocolate from the box, bit it, something white inside—she forced herself to finish it. “Yesterday, or I don’t know, it could have been last week—anyway, pretty recently I measured a hundred feet from the jack in my wall.”
Vi said, “Why?”
“Signal from my ankle, my wall dials Colorado, computer pages my PO—it doesn’t sound quite real to me somehow.”
Vi said, “You thought it wouldn’t work?”
“I knew it would work—honey, it’s the government. It’s just that I thought it wasn’t real. So I stood ninety-six feet from my phone. I marked it off exactly and I stood there waiting for the cops or my PO to come bombing down the road. Maybe I was lonely, I don’t know. I waited hours, standing there, and nobody came. Then I tried ninety-seven feet—nothing. Ninety-eight, ninety-nine—nothing. Then I got the courage—I tried one hundred feet. I was out there half the day and no one came. I laid out on this big rock and watched the clouds. My ankle was a hundred feet from the phone jack, so the rest of me was even further.”
Boone had his pictures set. “We’re doing names and faces, Little Flower.”
Vi recognized the pictures—rallies, protests, people in the street.
“We did these guys a million times,” Little Flower said. “That’s Dick Laurent. That’s Mater with him in disguise. Dick again. There’s Gordon, Gordo. That’s the kid with the Jesus Rocks tattoo. That’s Martin from the Army in the back. He’s the one who brought the fertilizer. What happened to Martin?”
“I told you,” said Christopher. “Shot by troopers in Nebraska. Routine traffic stop.”
Little Flower shook her head. “He wasn’t even twenty yet.”
Boone turned the pictures.
Little Flower peered at them. “That’s the kid, sometimes we called him Thad and sometimes Baxter, sometimes Jesus Rocks. That’s—him, I never knew his name. That’s Dick again, behind the car. We had that car when we lived in the cabin in Vermont. It was a pretty cabin. We were sad the day we torched it for insurance.”
Boone turned the pictures. “We’re doing names and faces, not cars and cabins.”
“That’s Dick again. That’s Baxter and that’s Mater with him. Is Mater dead too?”
“No,” said Boone. “Death row.”
“That’s Gordo with a beard. Is Gordo on death row?”
“No, he’s doing life.”
“That’s Baxter. Is he doing life?”
“No, he’s doing seven hundred months in Terre Haute.”
“That’s Dick. Is he in Terre Haute?”
“No, he’s on the Ten Most Wanted, presently at seven. We’ll get him, Little Flower, don’t you doubt it.”
“That’s Gordo, God I can’t believe it. That’s Martin, who you cruelly blew away. That’s Thad and Baxter. That’s Claudio and Norbert. That’s Timmy Tuckahoe. That’s Johnny Poopooface.”
“Stop it,” Boone said. “There is no Timmy Tuckahoe.”
Vi started for the bedroom down the narrow hall.
Little Flower said, “Where the fuck is she going?”
Vi turned and said, “Relax yourself.”
Little Flower’s bedroom was a miniature wilderness, limp curtains in the window, the mattress flopped over, clothes and pennies on the rug, jars of Vaseline, a TV on a milk crate, a lamp with a badly dented shade. Vi took out her cell phone.
Little Flower was standing in the doorway. She said, “My prison is weak signals.”
Vi said, “Let me make a call here, Little Flower. I’ll just be a sec.”
Little Flower whispered, “They come out and rape me. This is not my fantasy. Boone cannot control them—he has no idea. Brian was bad, but Christopher is worse. You have an honest face, lady. Help me. Help me.”
Vi looked at Little Flower. She said, “Yeah okay, just let me make this call.”
Little Flower went back to the living room.
Vi called Gretchen Williams, who was on the way to Rumsey Moose Lodge with the motorcade.
Gretchen said, “How’s it going there?”
Vi said, “This is bullshit.”
Gretchen told her to meet the team in Portsmouth.
Vi said, “If I get to Portsmouth before the rest of you, can I take an hour off? I want to see my brother. He’s just down the road from Portsmouth—it won’t even take an hour.”
Gretchen said, “What is this, Vi, a college road trip? Thirteen your butt to Portsmouth and stay there, got it?”
“Fine,” said Vi. “And Gretchen?”
“What?”
“Thanks for everything.” Vi punched END.
Boone was down to his last picture in the living room. He pointed to a picture on the coffee table, two women side by side at a rally. Boone pointed to the woman Vi had picked out as a possibility. He said, “Who’s she? Lady on the right.”
Little Flower glanced at the picture. “I have no idea.”
Boone pointed to the woman on the left. “Okay, who is that?”
Little Flower looked a moment. “I don’t know.”
“That’s you, Little Flower. With the mailing tube.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Look again.”
Little Flower looked again. “God I was a blimp. Is my butt that big? I thought those slacks were slimming. What a fool I was.”
“The point is, you’re with this other woman here. We know the lady’s name. We just want you to confirm it.”
“I told you, I don’t know her.”
“Come on, Little Flower—what are the odds that two women would both go separately to the same hate rally in the same type of disguise and just happen to wind up standing next to each other?”
Little Flower squinted, concentrating. Then she shook her head and said, “I give up, what are the odds?”
“Little Flower.”
“Okay, okay, okay. Her name is Linda. Linda, Belinda. We called her Linda mostly. Also sometimes Lindy.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Linda. Linda B. Linda.”
“What’s her last name, Little Flower?”
“Johnson.”
“Christ,” said Vi.
“Jaw, jaw, Joe, Jones. She used that name sometimes—Jo Jones.”
Vi said, “That’s the fakest fucking name I ever heard.”
Little Flower saw it then. She said, “You don’t know.” She looked at Boone accusingly. She looked at Christopher. She said,
“You’re asking me and you don’t even know.”
The motorcade continued east, heading to the next event, a brief speech to a small crowd at the Rumsey Moose Lodge. Tashmo and O’Teen, working the advance, got to Rumsey first, running twenty minutes ahead of the others and almost ninety minutes behind schedule.
Tashmo, looking at the town (a superette, two houses, a blinking yellow light, and a ghostly depot with no tracks), felt the need for some confirmation that this was, in fact, the Rumsey listed on the schedule, and not some other hill-and-hollow crossroads in New Hampshire’s Appalachia. He sent O’Teen off to ask a local. Tashmo, as the senior hand, stayed with the vehicle, ran the heater, had a smoke. He was in a foul mood by then, getting on toward five, the sky going pale behind the clouds, late winter in New England and he hated it, there’s no such thing as afternoon up here, it’s morning then it’s getting dark, and anyone with half a brain has moved away or is getting loaded in a bar, except they didn’t seem to have a bar in Rumsey.
Tashmo knew he couldn’t fairly blame his mood on Rumsey, or the weather, or the hour. No, he had been feeling dumpy since the session with the threatmen. He had called Shirl from Boone’s office, hoping, honestly, that she would be out having salads with her book club. He had planned to leave a message asking if Mandy’s sneaky English husband had dropped off the car seats at the neighbors as requested, so that Mandy and the twins could follow Shirl in the truck to Generoso’s. He didn’t need to know if this had happened (he assumed it hadn’t and he didn’t really care), but he needed to act like he cared, and a message would have done the trick quite nicely. But his strategy had backfired (why was he surprised?). Shirl had answered fast and said, “Oh Tash! I’m glad you called.” There was no plausible way to avoid a conversation at that point, so he asked her if she got the truck to Generoso’s. Shirl said, “Oh yes, and it worked out just like you said, Nigel left the car seats at the Goulds’, but we didn’t even need them as it turned out, because we left the twins with Leah Gould—she was overjoyed to baby-sit—and Mandy followed me to Generoso’s.” Several questions sprang to mind, the sort of tiny story-flaws Boone Saxon would have jumped on, but Tashmo, spooked by Shirl’s good cheer, didn’t want to probe. He asked if Jeanette got off to school okay with her swollen eye and slightly damaged kidneys. Shirl was, again, disturbingly upbeat. “Everything is great,” she said. “Jeanette rode the bus and no one took her picture as a disaffected icon of cauliflowered innocence, at least that I know of. Heck, I hope they took her picture, Tash. She looked great, so adult, going off like that.” Shirl closed the conversation with a kicker: “I love you and I trust you, Tash,” she said. “Everything is going to work out for us, you’ll see.”
Listening to Shirl, and thinking of it as he smoked and waited for O’Teen, Tashmo felt a slow-unfolding system-wide alarm, like coming to acknowledge and admit that you definitely need to piss without delay. She loves me and she trusts me, Nigel brought the car seats, everything worked out. What the fuck was going on? He wondered if his prostate tests had come back negative or positive or however they came back when you’ve got cancer on the glands. He wondered if Shirl was banging old Bo Gould and feeling the guilts about it. He doubted it (Bo was such a square), but what else would make his wife be so—pleasant?
He went into the superette and found O’Teen talking to a guy behind the counter.
“He says it’s Rumsey,” said O’Teen.
“It’s all Rumsey,” said the counter guy. “Which Rumsey are you looking for? There’s Rumsey Corner, Rumsey Crossing, Rumsey Bridge, and Rumsey Depot.”
Tashmo said, “We’re looking for the Moose Lodge.”
“That’s in Shawgamunk.”
“It says Rumsey Moose Lodge,” Tashmo said.
“Well, it’s in Shawgamunk. Go to Rumsey Bridge, take a left, follow the signs.”
“Are there signs before the bridge?”
“Yes, but don’t follow them. They go back to Willingboro.”
They motored up the road to Rumsey Bridge. They were pretty late by then, but Tashmo figured the motorcade was at least as lost as they were. They passed one of the press buses going the wrong way, heading for the superette.
O’Teen found the Moose Lodge off the highway, ten minutes past the bridge, a cinder-block building, a sign hanging by two bike chains from a rusty pole. The cops were there, sheriff’s men from Portsmouth, and a gang of campaign volunteers. Tashmo did a walk-through with the deputies. There was a beer hall in the basement where the VP would address a gathering of eighty Moose and invited guests, a side door to the parking lot, stairs up to the ground floor, a hallway in the basement going back to the latrines. The furnace room was locked, as was the door upstairs (O’Teen checked them both), so Tashmo put a deputy on the side door, another on the stairs, told O’Teen and the other deputy to set up a choke point at the entrance to the beer hall.
The Army truck arrived and the bomb dogs went to work as Tashmo watched the volunteers drape the basement walls in crepe and campaign placards. The volunteers had come up from the VP’s Portsmouth operation. Their leader, an officious prick named Tim, started asking questions about when the VP would be here, and which door he would use, obviously scheming to be in the VP’s path, to pump his hand and press his application for a judgeship, or whatever it was that Tim had in mind for Tim, post-election.
Tashmo, who knew Tim’s type, eyed the volunteers. “How many people did you bring?”
“Ten or so I guess,” said Tim. “We have two vans.”
“And you know them?” Tashmo asked.
“Well, of course—what do you mean?”
“You know them, you know who they are. We don’t like a lot of strangers in the room. The rest of these people here are Moose.”
Tim said, “Oh, I get it. We have a group of Texas teachers, and three women from Mothers for the Truth About Gun Violence, it’s an issue group, strong for the VP, and two lobbyists on leave from the—”
“I’m just saying, do you know them?”
“Sure I do,” said Tim. “The Texans came in yesterday, the women from The Truth came in last night, and the others have been up here even longer. So what about it, buddy, which door will he be using?”
Tashmo didn’t like the buddy. He said, “We’ll use the furnace room. We’ll stage it all from there.”
“Great,” said Tim, hurrying off to the furnace room.
The Moose had been waiting in the basement, drinking beer and coffee, eating doughnuts by the box, and the line to the bulls’ room, AKA the crapper, wasn’t short. O’Teen rechecked every Moose returning to the beer hall from the loo, the mag wand bleating at their watches, keys, and coins.
“Anything metal,” said O’Teen, holding out a tray.
The Texas teacher volunteers worked quickly in the hall, unrolling bunting in the colors of the flag. Tashmo watched them closely, checking to see if any of the teachers were young and hot and possibly worth putting a move on later, at the hotel. Not that he would actually put a move on anyone, not that he was even up to it. He hadn’t banged a volunteer since Super Tuesday in Atlanta the last time around, and even that had been a stretch. Tashmo had hooked up with some old corporate broad who said she worked for Coca-Cola, who claimed that she had never cheated on her husband, had never even thought about it, until Tashmo swept her off her feet at a victory party, and yet this never-cheating woman had a room at the Hilton, and what the fuck was that, good luck? He figured he would play it smooth and soulful, tell his stories of the war, his adventures with Dutch Reagan, act like this was not about fucking, but rather about two people having an intense spill-your-guts type personal encounter, thinking this would be the right tack, but finally, in her room, the woman said, “For God’s sake, just shut up and do it.” She handed him a condom wrapped in foil, like a chocolate from a restaurant, and the whole scene was so beat, so threadbare, that Tashmo had to will himself a boner, which he was able to maintain just long enough to get the condom on. He lost radi
o contact with his boner the minute he was in her, felt himself go rubbery and small, and he had to fake a climax, pulling out, panting like a terrier, and when he did, the condom stayed inside her. The woman was nice—or mortified—enough to pretend that it hadn’t happened. She got up, got dressed, said she had another gala function to attend. They left her room, rode the elevator down, talking about the new mass transit system in Atlanta. She was smiling and talking, all Coca-Cola corporate, the little latex ring inside her the whole time. And that was it—Tashmo’s last illicit piece of ass, like the final sad at-bat of a fading slugger. Tashmo, disgusted, walked over to the choke point.
O’Teen was rattling his tray and watching an old man deloop his belt.
Tashmo told the man to go ahead.
O’Teen protested, “But I didn’t wand him yet. Everyone who leaves the room gets checked when they come back.”
Tashmo said, “The codger took a piss.”
“He left the room and came back, Tash. Maybe he hid a gun behind the toilet. He’s clean when he arrives, nips off to the bathroom, comes back with the gun. How do we know he didn’t?”
“Search the bathroom,” Tashmo said. “Bet you don’t find a gun. Me, I’m going for a smoke.”
Tashmo climbed the basement stairs to the parking lot. He called Sean Elias, who was with the motorcade.
Elias said, “We’re running late, we got a little lost. Turns out there’s four different Rumseys.”
“Of course there are,” said Tashmo. “Can’t you people read a map? We never had these problems on the Reagan team. Which Rumsey are you in?”
“We aren’t. We’re in Shawgamunk.”
“Keep going. If you hit a bridge, you’ve gone too far. I think we passed a press bus coming up here. You guys missing one?”
“Stand by, let me ask.” Elias hailed the press section on the radio. As he did, the lost bus pulled in from the road.
Tashmo said, “Hey Eli.”
“What?”
“Never mind, they found the place.”
Tashmo had a smoke in the dusk of the rural parking lot, brooding over Shirl, the disturbing conversation of that afternoon. Everything worked out like you said. I love you and I trust you. His inner threat investigator went to work on the known facts: Lloyd’s disappearance in the flood; the calls from Lydia since Hinman, unwanted and unanswered; the iffy starter on his pickup truck; the black eye and the mild kidney damage inflicted on Jeanette by her sorority sisters; Shirl, his wife, his ball-and-chain of thirty years, in a liberated mood. I love you and I trust you.
Big If Page 24