by Steve Israel
Otis chose not to debate the likelihood of similar views in countries with certain features. Like coasts.
Steele stared at the ocean. “‘On such a full sea are we now afloat,’” he said. “‘And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.’”
“That from a movie?” Otis asked.
“It’s Shakespeare,” Steele said. “I was classically trained.”
That explains Guts of Steele Two, thought Otis as he wiped his sweaty neck with a handkerchief.
Jack leaned against the rail and sighed. “Otis, if this country continues its course, we’ll lose our ventures. The ship of state is sinking, brought down by people like . . . that woman.” He pronounced “that woman” the way he might say “that virus.”
Otis didn’t respond. Steele knew he was a compatriot when it came to loathing Lois Liebowitz.
“I don’t even know how Liebowitz got past my guard dogs,” Steele went on. “That animal rights group must have invited her. You know how they are. They shelter homeless animals and hopeless liberals.” He laughed at his own joke, a shallow cigarette smoke–infused gurgle from deep in his chest. “I don’t mind her in my house, but I can’t stand that she’s in Village Hall. Christ, this is a conservative town, Otis!”
“Well, she did stop Schwartzman,” Otis said.
“That was a goddamn lifetime ago!” Steele rasped. “Things were simple then. All about the quality of life. Now it’s about our way of life. It’s us versus them, my friend.” He underscored them by thrusting his forefinger at the horizon, in the general vicinity of the rest of the world. “And us, Christ we’re getting softer than the jellyfish on that goddamn beach.”
Otis felt it wasn’t a good time to remind Jack that Mr. Tough was hosting a fund-raiser to benefit stray kitties.
“We’re being taken over, Otis,” Steele went on. “Those illegals, pouring through the border. Soon as they get here they drop their anchor babies and pick up their ACLU membership cards.” “Jack—”
“Infiltrating our society. Taking over our institutions. Habla español, Otis?”
“I don’t—”
“America’s changing, Otis. Did you watch the news this morning? The story about your little . . . problem? With the Department of Injustice?”
Otis let out a growl. “I saw it on CNBC. The administration’s going to screw us.”
Steele smiled. “And you’re surprised? Republicans, Democrats. They’re all the same. One big jellyfish party. Want to know what I think?”
Otis nodded grimly.
“Instead of the Feds investigating you, someone should investigate the Feds, investigate how they allow our citizens to go defenseless, how our government lets criminals have guns and law-abiding Americans get shot at.”
Otis cocked his head, realizing Steele was actually, finally, coming around to some point.
“Know what I’d do if I ran this country?” Jack asked. “I’d give ’em all guns.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Every time there’s a shooting, the politicians stampede to the cameras to announce more gun control bills. It’s time to turn the tables. Instead of passing laws taking our guns away, pass laws giving them out. Everyone gets a gun. Annie gets a gun. Andy gets a gun. Two cars in every garage and a gun in every pot.”
“Jack, we’re having a hard enough time playing defense in Washington.”
Steele smiled, and soft creases spread across his tanned face. He pulled his cowboy hat lower on his forehead. “Otis, don’t you watch my movies? How does every one of them end? I’m half dead. My bones are broken. I’m sliced and diced. I’m outgunned and outmanned. But what do I do? I go from a losing defense to a winning offense. I stop taking punches and start throwing them. Bad guys lose. Good guys win. Fade to black. Roll credits. End of story.”
Otis stared at the horizon. Half of him wished Steele would simply shut up and let him enjoy the view, but the other half was interested—not that he’d let Steele know that.
“Your problem is you spend too much time on defense, Otis. Start fighting back. Before it’s too late. Carpe diem!”
The waves rolled in and out. The breeze refreshed Otis. His heart beat faster.
He said, in soft assent, “Carpe diem.”
*
The familiar number flashed on Sunny McCarthy’s cell phone, and each flash was a kick to the gut. Her mind warred with itself: Don’t pick up. At some point you have to talk to her. I don’t need this right now. She won’t stop calling.
Sunny declined the call and let out a long, fatigued breath. She began twisting locks of hair between two fingers, the only nervous habit she had. In the hours since the conference call with Otis, she’d sat at her desk, staring at the flood of television coverage from Chicago, racking her usually nimble mind for a response, but she was coming up unusually empty.
The crisis management textbooks instructed that when the shit hit the fan, you changed the direction of the fan. Deflect. Dance. Distract. At this point, however, changing the subject would be no less herculean a task than changing the Earth’s rotation. The textbooks further instructed that when you couldn’t change the narrative, you approached the controversy directly, with hands above your head. Acknowledge. Admit. Apologize. Use language like “We will strive to do better,” followed by heartfelt pleas for forgiveness from a) family, b) the public, c) God, or d) all of the above. But Sunny knew that remorse wasn’t in Otis’s repertoire. She no longer proposed acknowledgments, admissions, or apologies to the man who’d been known to belt out “My Way” in the shower every morning.
She glanced at a split screen on CNN. On one side, Chicago police were stretching yellow crime scene tape around a convenience store shooting. On the other, Mayor Rodriguez was performing his regularly scheduled sputtering about Cogsworth International.
Sunny’s cell phone rang again: Otis, wanting to know what she’d come up with, no doubt. She sighed and answered. “Hello, Otis, I’m still working on a response. I promise—”
“I got one.”
His voice was fuzzy and distant, which meant he was driving somewhere on Billionaires Bluff.
“You do?” Sunny’s mind raced. Was he messing with her?
“Yup,” he said. “And it’s a beaut!”
Oh, God, she thought.
His next words were drowned out by static. Sunny strained to listen, picking up references to Jack Steele and “best defense is a strong offense” and something about carpe diem.
“Whoa, Otis,” she said. “Slow down.”
There was a pause, and just when she wondered if the call had been dropped, Otis said, “I want a bill introduced in Congress requiring that every American own a gun.”
Sunny let her boss’s words linger on the line between them. Otis had never been shy about offering bad ideas, and her usual technique was to let him talk himself out of them. He paid her handsomely to do damage control, and some of Otis’s own suggestions could be, well, catastrophic. So she waited for Otis to shift into reverse.
He was silent.
“A law actually requiring gun ownership?” she asked.
“Yep. Mandatory gun possession. With fines if you’re caught without one.”
All she could come up with was a noncommittal “Hmm.”
“Don’t you see?” he continued. “We turn our shitstorm into their shitstorm! Let the administration explain why they refuse to give law-abiding Americans the tools to protect themselves from criminals! Instead of coming after us, we turn the attention on them.”
Sunny straightened in her chair and glanced at the television. His Honor was now hysterical, demanding new federal investigations of Cogsworth International for gun trafficking, tax evasion, and multiple other violations of local, state, and federal law. She wondered whether an international war crimes tribunal was next.
“We have enough friends in Congress to pass a bill, don’t we?” Otis asked. “I mean, good Lord, I’m like the U.S. Mint with all
the contributions you make me send!”
The third lesson in the crisis management books was to frame expectations. Sunny knew that Otis’s strategy had a dangerously high risk and a distinctly low probability of success. It would anger a president who didn’t exactly like having his squishy spine being forced against a wall. It would ignite a clash of special interests and require tens of millions in paid media. It would enjoin powerful Members of Congress, enflame the liberal editorial boards, empower the gun lobby and its millions of supporters. It would force gun control proponents back on their heels. It would be the gun control battle to end all gun control battles.
It was perfect.
Still, Sunny needed to temper Otis’s enthusiasm. “I think it’s a good message piece,” she said coolly. “Great, actually. But let’s not kid ourselves about passing a bill. I mean, legislation requiring Americans to own a product?”
“Obamacare!” Otis shouted. “That abomination said every American had to purchase health insurance! Why can’t we require that every American purchase life insurance? A gun!”
There had been moments in Sunny’s political career when someone said something, usually in the offhanded way that Otis just did, that lit a strategic path through the dark. These moments were rare. Washington strategists and consultants basically got paid to regurgitate old plays or perform political rain dances to summon good luck, but Otis Cogsworth had stumbled onto an idea which, properly executed, could be ingenious.
So Sunny said the only thing she could say: “Let me get to work.”
*
Several miles away, Air Force One landed at Joint Base Andrews with a barely noticeable thud. This concluded President Henry Piper’s surprise visit to Iraq, which caused, well, quite a surprise.
The idea had two presumed benefits. First, with domestic gun violence escalating, Congress fighting, and the economy breaking apart, a few days in a war zone didn’t seem like a bad idea. Second, the president’s political advisors assured him that visiting his troops would jump-start favorability ratings that weren’t just anemic, they were clinically dead.
The strategy backfired. The carefully orchestrated backdrop of adoring troops behind their commander in chief didn’t account for the fact that prolonged exposure to Piper’s circumlocutory oratory in a stifling airplane hangar near a desert could be categorized as a violation of the Geneva Conventions. By hour two, the cameras were focused on usually steely soldiers in various stages of gaping yawns and eye rolls. One, Staff Sergeant Charles Gatto, nodded off and toppled from the stage, resulting in the headline “WOUNDED INACTION.”
That was par for this president’s course. The former navy admiral found himself in command of a ship of state, trying to avoid comparisons to the captains of the Titanic and the Lusitania. That old mariner’s technique of sticking a finger in the air wasn’t helping matters against swirling gale-force winds.
As Air Force One taxied toward Marine One, the president sprawled in his stateroom, watching the latest news. There was Mayor Rodriguez, demanding that the president do something— anything—to stop gun violence in Chicago. The broadcast was interrupted by a commercial by a group called the Second Amendment Crisis Network demanding that the president do something—anything—to stop gun control in America.
At that point, Henry Piper was tempted to order his pilot to return to Baghdad.
5
The next morning, Lois Liebowitz was seriously distracted.
In addition to a heat wave that had brought Asa-bogue to an early-morning swelter and the air conditioner in the Old Sitting Parlor drawing its death-rattling breaths, there was the new matter of helicopter traffic over Billionaires Bluff, the overnight violence in Chicago, and the potentially violent Ralph Kellogg flexing his fingers on the other side of the conference table, all of which triggered a dull ache between Lois’s eyes and a nervous churning in her stomach.
A delegation from the Bluff had descended on Village Hall to protest the nuisance of helicopters flying low over their compounds, and they were now impatiently awaiting Lois’s response. Her eyes kept drifting to the television high on the wall. One network had upgraded the grizzly news from Chicago, assigning it its own funereal theme music and the stylized ever-present logo “CHICAGO MASSACRES.”
The room was crowded, which increased the heat and forced everyone to fan themselves with papers.
A hedge fund executive pounded a fist on the table, snapping Lois’s attention back to the room. “It’s like Grand Central station up there!” he was saying. “Helicopters right over my compound, back and forth, day and night!”
A commercial real estate developer dressed in tennis clothing nodded. “I’m not paying obscene taxes to live through something out of Apocalypse Now,” he said.
“And one of those birds,” said a reclusive actor in oversized sunglasses, “is gonna hit a CIA drone someday.”
The general nodding around the table ceased, and Lois saw a few brows furrow in confusion. At the far end of the table Sam Ger-gala said, “A CIA drone? Over Asabogue?”
“Over everywhere, man,” said the actor.
A real estate tycoon shook off the tangent. “Listen, Mayor,” he said. “We’ve raised a couple million dollars for something we call SHAA: Stop Helicopters Abusing Asabogue. We’re going to lobby the FAA to divert the helicopters. They can fly north. They can fly south. Anywhere but Asabogue.”
Almost everyone scribbled that down for its bumper sticker potential.
Lois looked up at the television again and mumbled, “Just terrible.”
“Exactly!” said the hedge fund executive. “Deafening!”
Lois sighed. “I mean what’s happening in Chicago.”
Heads turned to the screen—a crawler said there had been another six shootings overnight—then back to Lois and the urgent matter of helicopter noise. Against war, disease, and poverty, Lois thought, the people of Asabogue raised money at cocktail parties; but against invasions of their quality of life, they rose up, prepared, as Kennedy once said, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe” in defense of their values. Property values, specifically.
“Mayor?” said the actor, perhaps sensing that for once he wasn’t the most spaced-out person in the room.
Lois frowned and sat up straight, anxious to end the meeting. “All right,” she said. “I’ll contact the neighboring mayors. There’s strength in numbers. We’ll meet with our congressman. Ask him to pressure the FAA. I’ll do everything I can.”
Convinced that there would be peace and quiet in their time, the group adjourned and went their separate ways back up to the Bluff.
Lois went to her office, aware that she was under the suspicious gaze of Councilman Kellogg.
*
In Washington, Sunny bent over her laptop, reviewing whether there was any precedent for a federal law requiring citizens to own guns. But, nothing. On the issue of mandating Americans to carry guns, Congress had been strangely silent, which meant Sunny would have to find someone crazy enough to champion it as a new cause, but not so crazy as to trigger a rolling of eyes and chuckling of the cynical Washington press corps. According to her research, there was really only one possibility: freshman congressman Roy Dirkey of Arkansas. Sunny had already booked an appointment with him and Otis for the next day.
Dirkey had defeated a popular Democratic incumbent with the Dirkey American Dream Twelve-Point Plan, the twelve points of which were the dozen federal departments he proposed to abolish. Their functions, he promised, would be transferred to state and local governments as well as Walmart Service Centers (Walmart’s headquarters just happen to be in Dirkey’s congressional district). That would leave two Cabinet departments intact: the Defense Department and Agriculture (Arkansas, after all, had farms, and Dir-key had statewide electoral ambitions). Dirkey’s NRA rating was one hundred percent, with the notation “If we could give bonus points, we most certainly would!” He had potential.
The phone rang, and Sunny answered without giving herself a chance to back out. “Hello?”
“Sunshine? It’s me. Your mother.”
“I know, Mother,” Sunny said dully. “How are you?”
“Have you been watching the news? From Chicago?”
“Of course, Mother. I happen to be the lobbyist for the company that’s making news in Chicago. Remember?”
“All those innocent people being killed. Children! It said on the news that almost ninety percent of child gun fatalities in industrialized nations happen in the U.S.”
“Well,” said Sunny, twirling a lock of hair, “maybe people who don’t like gun rights should just move to those countries and—” “Sunshine.”
“Mother, we’ve been through this, and I’m pretty busy right now. As you know. From watching the news.”
“They’re saying your company may be investigated by the Justice Department. That worries me.”
Sunny struggled to control herself. Her mother wasn’t worried about her. She never worried about Sunny. She was worried about what people would think of a daughter who’d gone from Sunshine to the Queen of Darkness, which wasn’t what her mother had expected. Sunny often visualized her sitting at the elementary school play, leaning in to a neighbor, and whispering, “See that little blond girl? Playing the fairy princess? That’s my daughter! One day she’ll grow up to be a corporate lobbyist for the largest gunmaker on the planet. I’m so proud!”
“Why don’t you leave Cogsworth and go into business with your brother?” her mother went on. “No one’s investigating his company.”
True, Sunny thought. Starving artisanal chocolatiers in Vermont have somehow managed to escape the attention of the DOJ. “Mother,” she said, twirling her hair. “Let’s not do this.”
“Do what?”
“I have to go to a meeting. I’ll talk to you next week.” Sunny knew that next week meant at least several weeks.
“Sunshine . . .”
There was an uncomfortable silence, the same one that had permeated nearly every conversation between Sunny and her mother since she’d left home that day long ago and shortened her name from Sunshine Liebowitz-McCarthy to the simpler Sunny McCarthy.