Big If

by Mark Costello

  They were coming down the hallway of the sixth floor of the inn. A cop was tilted in a chair, reading the want ads.

  Gretchen said, “What’s doing?”

  “Quiet,” said the cop.

  A brace of cops stood outside the VP’s door. It was shift change for the cops. Three were going on, three were coming off. Gretchen walked past them down the hall.

  “Felker took the tour with Ranger Nguyen seven times a day and asked her many questions afterwards. Was there a stamp tax on stamps or just on tea? Why was it One If by Land and Two If by Sea? Didn’t the redcoats come by river, which is neither? He asked his questions and she answered brightly, missing part of her lunch hour. It pleased her to be quizzed on her beloved subject and he thought up new tough questions to please her further. She went back to work after lunch and he was there again. This went on for several days and after work one night he was waiting by her car.

  “He said, ‘I am here to protect you, Miss Nguyen.’

  “She became afraid. He followed her to Cambridge in his car, staying very close. He stood outside her apartment building and was still there in the morning. He followed her to work, staying very close. He took her tour again, again, again, asking no questions now, watching the crowd, as he had been trained to do at Beltsville long ago. He followed her to lunch and home again that night. She called the cops and they arrived, two meatheads in a cruiser. Felker flashed his creds and said he was a fed working on a case. The cops looked at him and saw a guy who looked exactly like a fed. They looked at Nguyen and saw a somewhat strung-out gook. They said, ‘Have a good one, Agent,’ and got in their car. Nguyen, by now a weeping mess, called her dad in Baton Rogue. Her father called an army buddy from the war. I’m not sure which army they were buddies in. I’m assuming it was ours, I mean theirs—our theirs, if you know what I mean. The father’s army buddy owned a string of Boston pizzerias. The pizzeria owner also owned a nickel-plated. forty-five, not the Double Eagle, but the next Colt up the line, I think it’s called the Binding Arbitrator. He crept into the parking lot of Nguyen’s building. Felker stood alone by the entryway, faithfully on post. The army buddy came around the dumpster, shouting at Felker to leave the girl alone. Felker saw him, saw the gun, and shouted something very similar. The army buddy fired, hit Felker in the chest. As they loaded Felker into the ambulance, Ranger Nguyen was beside herself, covered in his blood.”

  Gretchen and Tashmo were standing at the door to Gretchen’s room. Gretchen knocked once, quietly. Tashmo saw the knob turn from inside.

  “Why did you tell me all of this?” he asked.

  “Because she wants to see you one last time.”

  The balconies on Gretchen’s side of the inn looked across the parking lot at a river pier. It was a cold night by the ocean and Tashmo felt the cold, leaning against the railing, hands and wrists dangling over. Lydia Felker was standing at the end of the balcony, six feet away, as far away as she could be without jumping.

  “Lloyd’s dead,” she said, “and I accept it, and though I accept that most of what he told me toward the end was imaginary, I think that it was true in a different way. Ted and Fred and Ned, the battle over parking spaces—I think we could spend the rest of our lives decoding what he meant.”

  She was older. She was gray and shorter, which Tashmo knew was a certain filling out around the midriff, which looked like shorter on a woman. He saw troopers smoking in the street. This made him think of smoking, which made him think of sex, which made him think fleetingly of butter.

  “We’ll be fine, me and the boy,” Lydia said. “Your Director has promised to see about Lloyd’s line-of-duty pension, and there’s always my residuals. They rerun my Cannons, my two-part Harry O. Seventies crime drama is in vogue again on cable. The college kids just love it, the ties, the Fords, the facial hair. I get puppy-dog e-mails from sophomores at Caltech saying, ‘You are the greatest frightened witness ever.’ They ask me on dates, like I’m still the girl I was on television. So innocent, these kids. They ask me for a lock of hair. It’s like something from a Brontë sisters novel—a lock of hair, a token, a remembrance. It’s touching, this innocence, so I pluck a hair for them, dye it, and send it along with a form letter I’ve developed. Did you ever love me, Tashmo? Tell me, yes or no.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re a coward to deny it. Remember the day it rained at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? You tried to dump me that day, but I was undumpable. Remember Reagan at his ranch and you so sexy with your saddle sores? Remember the trailer on the beach? We made love and scrambled eggs. Then Reagan went to the Hilton, dragging you and Lloyd to a rendezvous with Hinckley. I know you loved me in the trailer. Tashmo, tell the truth.”

  Helplessly he said, “What difference does it make?”

  “I conceived a son the night we scrambled eggs. I named him Jasper Jason Felker, and we raised him together, Lloyd and I, and he has been nothing but a source of total joy since the first morning he made me puke from the womb, through pregnancy and birth and babyhood. Even his sullen adolescence was a gift to us. Jasper is a brilliant, soulful boy, an artist and a vagabond, and we loved him, Lloyd and I, and he is your son.”

  She was an actress. This was the first thing Tashmo told himself.

  He said, “I thought you used protection.”

  “Ironic, no? It’s always the small flaw which leads us, unwillingly, to something wonderful.”

  “Did you tell Lloyd?”

  “How could I tell Lloyd that you—of all people, you—had betrayed him? Lloyd admired only two men in the world: you and Ronald Reagan. He thought you and Reagan were the same, or similar, as pets resemble masters. He said you and Reagan had an easy way of living. He meant this as a compliment. He said it was an admirable knack. He always said, ‘Sure, intelligence and a glimmer of selfknowledge are attractive in a person, but there’s something to be said for simply living. Cowboy Tashmo simply lives.’ I think he always wished that he would someday find a way to escape his brain and simply live. No, I couldn’t tell him, not for many years. I waited until Jasper was a man. Then I told Lloyd about you and me, and he took it beautifully, as I knew he would. He said he didn’t care. He said a father is someone who’s around. He said he was at peace with his achievements. Then he quit the Plans Department or whatever you call it, and after that—well, we know what happened. Gretchen says he left the detail and walked into a flood. Did you see him when he did it? Was he happy? I think he was happy, Tash. He was simply living. Step outside the Dome. Step into the glorious and accidental world.”

  “Did you tell the kid?”

  “No, and I don’t plan to. Jasper shouldn’t lose his father twice.”

  The river slid by.

  Lydia said, “Jasper’s waiting in the Windstar.”

  The Ford Windstar minivan was parked in the turnaround outside the Governor Weare. Tashmo paused, one hand on the door, looking back at the women on the curb. Lydia looked exultant. Gretchen, next to her, looked merely hard.

  Tashmo climbed in the front seat.

  Jasper Felker sat in back, strumming a guitar, listening to a CD through earphones. The CD was called Learn to Play Guitar.

  Tashmo said, “They call me Tashmo. Your father was my best friend a long time ago. I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sick about it. And I want you to know that if you ever need to talk to someone—to a guy, an older guy, someone of your father’s generation, I’d be honored to be that guy for you. I can’t replace your father, Jasper. No one can. But maybe, I don’t know, you might feel the need one day to hash out some life problem with a man of the world, and I want you to know that you can always count on me.”

  Jasper took the earphones off. “What’s your name again?”

  “Tashmo. Got a pen?”

  “Not on me, no.”

  “Never mind, I’m in the book.”

  Jasper returned his hands to the guitar, touching but not playing. He was longlegged, as Tashmo was, and his hair was black,
the blue-black of comic-strip characters, as Tashmo’s had once been.

  Tashmo cleared his throat. “So. Do you like sports?”

  “I prefer modern dance.”

  “Oh yeah? Which ones? When I was your age we used to do the Funky Chicken. That’s probably not considered very modern anymore. You’re in college, right?”

  “I dropped out,” said Jasper. “Maybe I’ll go back someday.”

  Tashmo said, “You should. College is important, son. It’s the foundation of the rest of your life. I went to Vietnam and I got to college late. I wanted to drop out a million times, but I stuck it out, and you know what? I’m glad I did, because it’s been the foundation of my life ever since.”

  Jasper said, “I’d like to hitchhike to Vancouver. That’s my plan right now.”

  “Well, don’t do anything hasty. My daughter is in college and she loves it. She just pledged a top-notch sorority, Rho Rho Rho. She’s a beauty, my Jeanette, a real firecracker. You should meet her. I think you guys would really hit it off, and who knows? You two might even—no, wait a second, never mind, forget I said that. She only dates black guys anyway.”

  This wasn’t going well. Tashmo tried to think of sons and fathers he had known, to summon all his knowledge on the subject. His own father, the North Dakota tavern keeper, was never one to overdo the father thing. The best advice he ever gave young Tashmo was to steer clear of college girls, on account of most of them were lesbian, or worse. Tashmo thought of Loudon Rhodes and the cokehead, Kobe Rhodes—not a model either. Then he thought of Ronald Reagan, Tashmo’s hero in all things, and Reagan’s ballet-dancing son. Tashmo remembered how Reagan’s aides used to have to tell him that his son wasn’t in high school anymore. This was in ’86, when the son was nearly thirty. Maybe Reagan wasn’t such a hero after all.

  Tashmo blundered ahead. “But you do like girls, right?”

  “Some,” said Jasper. “Some I don’t.”

  “I mean, generally.”

  “Are you trying to ask if I’m gay?”

  “Of course not,” Tashmo laughed. “Why—is that a question in your mind?”

  “Not until you showed up.”

  “Well,” said Tashmo, “if you ever feel the need to talk sexual preference, give me a call. We’ll drink a beer, hit some wiffle balls, discuss the pros and cons. Or not. I leave it up to you.”

  The minivan went down the hill. Tashmo watched it go.

  Gretchen was waving from the curb. She smacked Tashmo on the back.

  She said, “Don’t just stand there. Wave.”

  Vi had meant to go to Center Effing earlier. She had no right to go at all, of course (she had asked Gretchen’s permission, which Gretchen had refused), which was why she had wanted to go that afternoon, when Gretchen and the detail were still mired in the hill towns. Vi had thought that she could hitch a ride with Christopher and Boone as far as Portsmouth, borrow a spare Taurus, visit Jens and Peta, and get back to the inn before the detail made it down from Rumsey, but this had proved impossible. After the lengthy (and, in Vi’s view, pointless) Q&A with the informant, Little Flower, Christopher and Boone took Vi into Portsmouth, stopping at a Denny’s on the highway, where they met two other threatmen coming up from Nashua with new bulletins concerning the recent theft of nitrate fertilizer from a golf course in that city. They had coffee at the Denny’s, four agents in a banquette booth, comparing leads, discussing threats, this one’s kind of interesting, this other one’s played out. Vi, who didn’t want to be there, spent half an hour listening to Boone work the phones as the two guys in from Nashua ordered cherry pie and Christopher called Beltsville to run a check on the names and AKAs Little Flower had supplied, Linda (also known as Lindy or Belinda) Johnson, Jo (for Josephine?) Jones, the threat men looking to the world like weary salesmen out hustling for customers.

  From Denny’s, the threat guys took Vi to the inn. By then the motorcade had come down from Rumsey, and Vi couldn’t slip away until sometime after eight, when she bummed a pool car from the comm techs and started driving down the shore. She was flouting regulations, leaving the hotel, and risking a rip, or formal command discipline, a major rip at that, ten or twenty lost vacation days, Vi estimated, which Gretchen would administer only after a stiff, humiliating dressing-down. Gretchen believed in leadership by fear, but Vi was not afraid of rips or Gretchen anymore. The day had somehow lost its weave, its forward-moving order. Maybe it was leaving the motorcade in Severance, or maybe it was seeing the informant Little Flower imprisoned in her cabin by imagined signals. It made Vi think of her Crim Division time, her New York City tour, watching soaps and Oprah in the pens at JFK, tailing John Doe Russians from Brighton Beach to Queens, the endless, inconclusive tails, or running out to Nassau to collect the girl who called herself Mariah who had bought a bird with counterfeit to get real money back as change. (Why the bird? Vi asked; Mariah said, He sings.) It was tired, the scene with Little Flower, and later, in the Denny’s—tired in the way New York had felt tired in the months after Walter Asplund passed away. Vi’s solution in New York had been a transfer to Protection. What was her solution now? A transfer back to Crim? For the first time since leaving her hometown to join the Secret Service, Vi did the math and figured out that she was fifteen years and three months from retirement with pension.

  1A came around the headlands into Center Effing. She saw the ocean by the road, beaches under streetlights, graffiti on cracked seawalls. She saw the gates to The Bluffs and signaled for a left.

  Kai Boyle-Asplund was sitting, Indian-style, in the front room of the house watching the last scenes of a video called Earthmovers! The video consisted of muddy, grainy footage of large pieces of road-building equipment, graders, backhoes, and front loaders, being operated in a skilled and stylish fashion by burly, bearded men in yellow hard hats. Rolls of soil driven forward, boulders dropped like sugar cubes from bucket cranes into waiting dump trucks—Kai was transfixed.

  “It’s his porno,” Peta said, pausing in the kitchen to look at her son. “He could watch it for hours.”

  Peta brought the pot of coffee from the counter to the table in the dining nook, where Vi and Jens were sitting surrounded by a homey clutter: sections of the morning Union Leader piled at the end, some bills, some torn-open window envelopes for bills, a dirty sippy cup, and a large blue bowl of oranges. Vi was drinking coffee, Jens was drinking some sort of reddish soda pop.

  Vi had been there for two cups of coffee, maybe twenty minutes, and in that time, she and Jens and Peta had talked about nothing really, catching up. Jens sat across the table, pale and work-obsessed, saying little. Vi thought that he had lost a lot of weight.

  Vi and Peta talked about Brian Ryan, the trainee threat investigator Peta had to deal with in connection with the Dental Building. Vi didn’t know Brian Ryan personally, but she knew threatmen as a group.

  “Ignore them,” Vi advised. “They’re paid to be obsessive. Eventually they go away and bother someone else.”

  Peta washed the sippy cup and left it in the dish rack. “I asked him why he cared,” she said. “I mean, what’s the connection? He said they couldn’t wait until the ball drops. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Different things,” Vi said. “You guys paint this kitchen?”

  Jens said, “It means a goddamn bomb, Pet, what do you think it means?”

  Vi said, “Really, Peta, it’s always nonsense with those guys. Was this kitchen yellow last time I was here?”

  “Yes,” said Peta, “but it was a different yellow. We got it painted in October. This yellow’s called Morning Lemon.”

  Kai’s video was ending.

  Peta said, “All right now, Kaiyahoga. Book and bed, you know the ritual. Let’s go, buddy, up.”

  The credits rolled as Peta hauled the boy onto her hip with a grunt and carried him into the small bedroom at the front of the house. Vi had slept in that bedroom when she came here after Hinman. She had slept on Kai’s racecar bed, surrounded by Kai’s toys
and books and blocks and stuffed animal collection. Kai had slept between his parents in the master bedroom. Sleeping with the toys was part of what had made it a disorienting visit, Vi thought, waking up to see twenty pair of dolls’ eyes staring into space.

  Peta and Kai came out of the bedroom, laughing about something. Kai wore a pull-up and spaceman pajamas. They settled on the couch to read a book.

  Vi listened from around the corner. She thought, I’m never in a home these days, a real home with real people living in it. Tower South, Vi’s cubicle/studio near the Pentagon, didn’t count as home. Little Flower’s squalid prison cabin wasn’t a home either—it was closer, in spirit, to the sinking mobile homes Vi had seen as drifting derelicts in Hinman, Illinois. But this formica-bright condo in The Bluffs was a real home to a real family—a sample of the country the bodyguards defended. Vi thought, that’s the problem—I’ve lost touch.

  Peta said, “Book time! What shall we read?”

  Kai wanted Look Out for Lollipops, but this was a baby book, Peta explained. “You’re not a baby, are you, Kai? You’re a big guy now. Now here’s a big-guy book—Bomb-Dog Bob. This was a special gift from your Auntie Vi.”

  It was typical of Peta to make a point of reading Vi’s book when Vi was there, a thoughtful little gesture. Vi knew that Bomb-Dog Bob was a creepy and not exactly age-appropriate choice. She had bought it just before she had cleared out of Beltsville for her mental health leave in May. Coming home, she’d felt she ought to bring a gift for Kai, and Bomb-Dog Bob was the only kid’s book they sold at the Protection Campus gift shop.