The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  “I don’t know anything about that either.” Lance hesitated, aware of erstwhile firm ground sinking under him. “But I guess —”

  “You guess? You stated! No facet of life exempt from this relentless moral scrutiny.”

  “It – has to be that way.”

  “No idea, no book or work of art, no simple urge, isn’t that true? I refer to your earlier testimony. Did you not work for such a reconstructed theocracy that should and would remove the fundamental rights of privacy you enjoyed in Kansas and still enjoy here? No private place exempt from that inexorable consistory of your neighbors? No hope of salvation but through the house brand of a faith enforced by prison or death? Is this not the true picture of what you endorse?”

  Lance looked like a man forced to pay out money he didn’t have. “I have described what I believe, sir.”

  Speed now stood in the center of the court area, facing the audience and cameras. “If this is a true picture of your beliefs, how in hell can you call yourself an American?”

  Lance bristled. “I am an American. No one can believe anything else. I died as an American. I know... I know it seems that one belief doesn’t go along with the other, but it does. It can. I’m an American, all right, Mr. Speed. I wouldn’t be anything else.”

  “Then I’ve only one more question for you, son.” Speed moved in close to the witness box. “This inerrant authority you invite into your house and your very bedroom; how will it deal with you and Ms. Ginsberg?”

  I knew I felt lucky. Noncommit ordered, “Close on Candor. Tight!”

  The monitor close-up revealed a face too white for color TV, absorbing the full shock of the damning question. Lance’s mouth worked; a sheen of perspiration covered his cheeks. Following her own instincts, Cathy Cataton punched up a quick shot of random audience stunned into utter silence, then split between Candor and Letti, whose kewpie-doll face was a study in trauma. Her fingers fretted at her sprayed hair. She stammered something to the large woman next to her. Cataton mourned that Letti wasn’t miked —

  “— he saying? That dirty-mouth man? Why’s he say a thing like that?”

  “Never you mind, Letti,” Bernice comforted her. “He’s just trash, you know that.”

  “Lying about mah husband” Letti quivered with a feral rage. “Goddam shitass liar.”

  On either side of stricken Letti, friends fluttered and whispered with offered tissues and feminine judgment, not all for publication. “Well, I never... do you think he... well, I’m her best friend, but you know Letti always had trouble with that.”

  Letti moaned, “Oh mah God oh mah God” Her reddening gaze zeroed in on her husband. In that lowering scrutiny one could read dark memories and something darker gathering like a Gulf storm.

  For the benefit of primetime coverage, Joshua Speed asked helpfully, “Shall I repeat the question, Mr. Candor?”

  — as Lance sent a furtive but urgent SOS to Helm and Scheherazade Ginsberg rose out of her seat with a wrath as biblical as Letti’s but quicker to act.

  “Shall I?”

  “Mr. Speed,” Lance choked, “you are no gentleman.”

  Speed’s smile remained sanguine. “Not today.”

  As Speed, the audience and the merciless cameras watched, Lance Candor began to weep.

  Helm sprang to his feet ready to fight. “Objection. Again he’s baiting the witness with a wholly unsupported, irrelevant and immaterial allegation.”

  Scheherazade heaved and writhed her way clear to the aisle, a tigress to the defense of what she held dear —

  “A cheap grandstanding trick with nothing to substantiate —”

  “LANCE!”

  Thousands of heads craned around at the apparition in paisley jeans and cerise hair streaking down the aisle toward Lance Candor.

  “Get her,” Cataton snapped. “Never mind the fish on the stand.”

  — as Scheherazade plunged past Speed to clutch Lance’s hand. “Tell him to go fuck himself. There’s nothing irrelevant about us. Remember what we stand for.”

  Lance could only gape at her.

  “Honey, what’s to be afraid of? We’re dead anyway. Remember what you did for the President. Remember me on the reactor. Remember the Weathermen. We stood for something.”

  — as Noncommit fairly drooled over a split image of Lance’s cheeks blossoming perspiration and Letti gasping like a beached fish, one hand to her Chaneled bosom, and Cataton implored her faithful Benny, “Can you get that broad on Candor’s mike?”

  “All I get is his heavy breathing.”

  “Shit.” In one Olympic leap, Cathy Cataton swept up her portable recorder; in another she was out of the press box heading for the nearest aisle with Nancy Noncommit no more than a second behind and trailing imperatives in her wake: “Stay on the whoziz with the hair. Cataton is not gonna scoop me.”

  She overtook Cataton in a few strides and hauled her up short, all girlish concern. “For God’s sake, Cathy, get a Tampax. You’re starting. “In the split second necessary for Cataton to realize she couldn’t be, her Below Stairs counterpart was past her with a three-length lead, sprinting down the aisle and fifty yards across the Megachurch in 4.3 flat, a gold medal time. Twelve seconds out of the starting gate, with Cataton a full length behind, Nancy Noncommit thrust her mike in Scheherazade’s face. “Say it to BSTV and the world, honey. Are you having an affair with Lance Candor?”

  “Sure I am,” Scheherazade crowed, grabbing the mike in one hand, Lance’s palsied paw in the other. “Lance will never deny me. I won’t deny him.”

  Lance looked faint.

  “But it’s not just an affair. This is love,” the heroine of nuclear resistance armed for the cosmos. “I mean we are dedicated.” Scheherazade felt a sharp tug; she appeared to be clutching a disembodied forearm, five of Lance’s fingers, palm, coat sleeve. The rest of him had slid from view down into the witness box in a profound faint.

  A new sound rose from the audience, a rising, manic roar of laughter and released tension. Somewhere in the rear a fight broke out and showed no sign of pacification. Letti Candor was being forcibly restrained by friends. Aurelius rapped harder, but no one heeded him. Helm sat rigid, surveying Speed with the gloom of a pool player doomed to a corner shot from behind the eight ball.

  “Mr. Candor?” Cataton and Noncommit strained far over into the witness box, down into its shadowed depths, microphones dipped like buckets in a well. “Would you like to make a statement?”

  Watching it all on television, George Kaufman snapped imperious fingers at Ricky Remsleep. “Fetus, come here. Look at this.”

  Ricky only glanced at the tube, busy with his guitar. “Yeah, that’s Ginsberg. She always has the hots for revolutionaries.”

  “Kid, read my fingers.” For the first time in life or death, Kaufman got physical. He grabbed Ricky by the shoulder and hauled him in front of the tube. “Not her, birdbrain. Take a look at a good second act curtain.” Kaufman’s cynical eyes glowed with the memory of opening night hits and failures. “Correction, a great one.”

  Cameras found dream coverage wherever they focused. Lance ashen and oblivious in the depths of the witness box. Letti, unmiked but scatological, crying to be loosed to murder. Cataton and Noncommit warring for lebensraum around Scheherazade Ginsberg, symbol of liberation. Aurelius pounding his gavel in a fruitless demand for order. From nowhere, the face of a sallow young man thrust into the very eye of a BSTV camera, waving enthusiastically —

  “Hey, Brain! Here I am, see me? Are we square?”

  — and Josh Speed, tranquil in the storm’s eye, hands in his pockets, grin broad as the prairie that spawned him. His sorrowful face, too burdened with care to be lightened by just any joke, now glowed with the brilliant light of classic absurdity. His grin widened and broke in a horselaugh that gave every indication of running as long as a Kaufman show. He clumped over to Helm, shoulders still heaving.

  “Your witness, sir.”

  16

  Double-parke
d in the City of God

  “Candor, stop that!”

  Peter Helm ranged the antechamber of the arena, trying to marshall his formidable thought processes. Trying to make Lance concentrate, difficult since the tarnished White Knight had retreated to escape mode and kept re-running his funeral in Wichita. When Helm looked at his client, he was as liable to see a flag-draped casket as the unhappy young man whose case he now had to pull out of the fire. Not a gambler, Helm still found them useful as weathervanes. From 3-1 odds in his favor, handicappers were now quoting 7-5 against.

  Again he saw the casket, rattled by the newest volley of shots Bred over Lance’s grave. “Stop that.”

  Reluctantly Lance tuned out past glories and gave his attention to Helm. The treacherous Speed had shattered him, and Sherry was just too much at the wrong time, love her as he did. But the reporters came; the trial was about him again. Throughout the proceedings and the arguments he could barely understand, he’d begun to feel irrelevant to the whole business and nagging doubts about his own motives, all made clearer through living with Sherry. Now that he wasn’t horny all the time, his mind worked in ways he once would have called backsliding, Speed’s line of attack brought home one indisputable fact of omission: he had never considered for one moment that what he strove for to save America was against its deepest principles. He could always pronounce his religious aims and the Pledge of Allegiance in consecutive breaths. Not that Speed had changed his mind, just it was something to think about and maybe talk over with Sherry. Was it that he believed so strongly to begin with or that belief made him feel like part of something that appeared to be moving? That question took considerable mental gymnastics, but for the first time in his life or death, the mind of Lance Candor asked him just what he did believe and stood there with arms folded, waiting for an answer.

  But they laughed at him. People like himself. That hurt. What kind of people would laugh at a man who gave his life for the President? Just because his wife didn’t like sex and forced him to look somewhere else. Well, if the cat was out of the bag, at least the cat stood up for him.

  Staring up at furious Helm, Lance didn’t care how mad the little bastard got or much about what happened now. What ever Helm or Speed or even Letti thought, that was tough darts. Something had snapped. There was a phrase he’d read somewhere, something about personal priorities. Lance was now groping these neglected considerations into some kind of order.

  “I knew what Speed would do to you on the stand. Now I’ve got to repair the damage you’ve done. I told you. I gave you clear orders not to see that woman again.”

  “I know, Mr. Helm. Except you didn’t say why”

  “Didn’t – Candor, can’t you hear me?”

  “I mean you never asked why I might want to see her.”

  Helm stopped pacing. He was once and might be again a supreme spiritual leader, not used to explaining orders. The fuzzy, dreamlike quality in Candor’s voice annoyed him but rang no warning bells. “You are not important in this.”

  “I know.”

  “You were never important except as an image on which we displayed an issue. Painful as that may be.”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “Good. When I put you on the stand, answer exactly as questioned and no more. Volunteer nothing, do you understand? How long has this been going on?”

  “How long has what been going on?”

  “Candor, you strain belief.”

  “Well, try harder!” Lance shot back with a new aggressiveness that surprised both of them.

  “That – description fails me – that motley-hued companion of yours.”

  “What’s it matter? You said I wasn’t important anymore.”

  “I must be prepared for any attack on you.”

  Lance got up, straightening his tie. To Helm’s amazement, he simply brushed the question aside. “I’ll handle that, Mr. Helm. What are you going to ask me?”

  “Quite simply if you admit your guilt and repent of it.”

  Lance’s expression, an erstwhile open book to his lawyer, was now opaque. “Oh.”

  “Are you ready?” Helm opened the door. “Do you hear them out there? I must put them back on your side. Do you think that is easy? Yes, you do: they’re your kind of people, howling along with you after Coyul. But remember an interesting habit of wolves, Candor. If the quarry wounds one of them, they slop to tear that unfortunate apart. Call them believers or what you will, they are a pack, a mob I must sway, and they are far less interested in your gossamer motives than your adulterous bed.”

  “I’m learning that.” Lance peered closely at the little lawyer. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “How should you know me when you can’t even recognize Joshua Speed?” Helm ventured a slight smile in which one might sense centuries. “I’m on your side.”

  “I wonder. What side is that?”

  “Come.”

  “No, wait. Don’t tell me what to say out there.”

  “Candor, I am losing patience.”

  “I mean it. No matter what he said, I’m an American and I have rights.”

  “Do you?” Helm challenged delicately. “You waived those rights gladly when you proclaimed the law of God superseded the Constitution in toto. Which it does. God is not a democrat. You can’t have it both ways. Come along, Mr. Candor – and if you must admit feet of clay, try to keep them out of your mouth.”

  Lance was nervous waiting to take the stand, jiggling loose coins in one hand. He scanned the audience to find Sherry. They’d have a lot to talk about tonight. At least he could talk to her. As for Letti, she still hadn’t come to see him and he guessed she wasn’t about to now. Tough darts, he decided, liking the go-to-hell phrase and the heady new sense of liberation. His gaze drifted across the court space to Speed, whose head was bowed over his notes. The gaunt head came up suddenly. Something in the profile plucked a chord of memory in Lance. He rattled the coins and considered Helm’s instructions. Then —

  The coins.

  “Mr. Helm.”

  “Don’t tell me. You cannot need to go to the lavatory.”

  “No.”

  Helm went on writing in his minute hand. “What, then?”

  “Nothing.” Lance contemplated the face on the coin in his palm. The stamped profile was idealized, majestic as that fuller image he’d once revered as he’d read the words on the flanking marble panels. Lance stared at the coin, then thoughtfully returned it to a pocket as Helm rose to address the court.

  “Your Honor, Defense desires only cross-examination of the Defendant before summation.”

  “I see. Plaintiff?”

  “Plaintiff has no more witnesses to produce.”

  “Defense may proceed.”

  “I recall Lance Candor to the stand.”

  No one applauded this time as Lance took his place on the stand. The jury looked bleak and the acres of people around him seemed to send a very different message to Lance now. Out of the vast, rustling sibilance he heard smothered sniggers and boos. When he thought about it – and today Lance was thinking with unaccustomed clarity – that seemed unjust. They cheered him yesterday. Before they laughed. He recalled Helm’s admonition on the social habits of wolves and his eyes went again and again to the homely giant seated next to Coyul.

  Helm’s normally cool manner was now warm and solicitous. “Mr. Candor, after the emotional bullying inflicted on you yesterday, I will be as brief as possible. I hope you were not too distressed by my colleague’s tactics, and I can only hope for the remainder of this trial that he will not resort to them again. I daresay every Christian spirit in this church is with you; how could they not be when everything you did or said was from convictions shared by them? Mr. Speed would introduce secular confusion into consideration of God. A faith that relies on fallible thought incorporates doubt, and I am sure you had none.”

  “Your Honor.” Speed elevated his lanky frame from the chair. “I was under the impression my colleague wished to cross
-examine, not summarize.”

  “I too,” Aurelius said. “Which will do much to explain why I so strongly lean toward hearing that summation in the Void. Defense will cease oration and return to his stated purpose, that of cross-examination.”

  Helm stood corrected most graciously, and addressed his remarks directly to Lance. “Did your actions throughout stem from your religious beliefs?”

  The answer was barely audible. “Yes.”

  “Do you still believe in the sanctity of your purpose?”

  Lance’s hesitation was apparent. “Yes.” He shifted restlessly in the witness box, eyes always drawn to Speed, surer than ever now. The yes felt wrong somehow. He didn’t know what he truly believed anymore, not with such a man against him.

  You can’t have it both ways.

  “You were given no chance to explain yesterday. Do you deny the allegation raised by my colleague regarding the woman known as Scheherazade Ginsberg?”

  “I – no, I don’t deny it.”

  “Thank you.” Helm turned slightly to face the jury. “A simple, manly admission of guilt. In all the years of your marriage, was this your only adultery?”

  “Adultery?” On television, Lance looked as if he were backing away from the word. “This... this was the only one.”

  “The only one. Remembering God’s forgiveness and your hopes as one of His Elect, do you sincerely repent?”

  Nancy Noncommit admired the image on her monitor; Lance struggling with conflicting emotions on unfamiliar terrain, “I don’t feel sorry for the little S. O. B., but Helm’s a bigger one.” Then her practiced eye caught a totally alien nuance in Candor that suffused the boyishness. He looked directly at Helm.

  “I feel dirty.”

  “Of course you do. And you repent of this woman?”