Nothing but Gossip

by Marne Davis Kellogg

  Regardless, they all went on the air live at that very second, interrupting whatever oral sex was going on in their network soap operas, to announce the Rutherford Oil takeover by what they interpreted to be a legitimate new group that included Michael Jordan. This would really put Rutherford Oil on the map.

  Wait till the actual business reporters, who were inside covering the actual meeting, get a load of this slate, I thought. They’ll fall on the floor in hysterics.

  I followed Edith Rutherford into the hotel. She barreled along like a little door-slammer cloaked in a heavy cloud of Tea Rose perfume. I trailed her across the lobby and up the escalators, during which ride she opened her purse and, without looking in a mirror, ground a tube of smashed-up bright-red lipstick onto her mouth. I followed her to the mezzanine, where she passed the check-in tables and announced to the surprised receptionists with a wave of her hand, “I don’t need any of that junk,” then cruised through the metal detector and disappeared.

  So far as I could tell, in spite of Mercedes’s claim that Security would be so tight it would be easier to get into the White House, it appeared minimal to nonexistent, and I decided whomever they’d used was either very, very good or not there at all. When I reached the entrance to the convention center/ballroom I noticed two gorillas in too-small cheap blue blazers with the Rutherford logo on their breast pockets, and too-tight gray pants. My first thought was that I hoped they didn’t have any weapons.

  Three airport-type metal detectors stood at the open doors into the convention-hall lobby. I showed my badge to one of the fellows.

  “We’re ready for anything, Marshal,” he informed me as I passed through. “Don’t worry.”

  Ha. This was Mercedes’s show, not mine, but if those two goons were her idea of beefed-up security, we hadn’t communicated. A little hole began burning in my stomach.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’d never been to the annual meeting of a major, publicly held company before. All our businesses are family-owned, so when the Bennetts gather officially once a year at the main ranch house, we sit down around the thirty-foot-long dining-room table where the ranch hands have their meals, suck up a number of cocktails, tell a lot of lies, laugh a lot, get into a few shouting matches, listen to my father report on the banks and say how much we made or lost overall (although we’ve never actually ended up in a deficit position), listen to Christian report on the newspapers and railroads, listen to Elias report on the ranch and the oil and the cattle, and listen to Cousin Buck tell us what a bunch of assholes he thinks we all are. Then we vote to keep everything the way it is and have some more drinks and rib eyes and pineapple upside-down cake. So even though I own stock in a few corporations and get invited to their annual meetings annually, this was my first time to attend.

  And I was totally unprepared for the chaos.

  The lobby was like a political convention, a mob scene of Americana, a combination of Wall Street, downtown Boulder, and Barnum and Bailey. Granola-heads, tree-huggers, and bean-counters, everything from people wearing hats in the shapes of oil derricks and oil-well pumps to a giant, very friendly looking Russian bear who was followed by a curvy young woman in a tiny, mink-trimmed Russian peasant outfit carrying a tray filled with shot glasses. The bear waved Wyoming and Siberian flags in one paw and handed out vodka from the tray with the other. Another young woman—heavyset, hirsute, simian, and arrayed in a large rhinestone crown and a mink-trimmed silver-lamé bathing suit with a banner introducing her as Miss Manily-Siberia—was kissing all the men, which none but a handful of the company’s oil-field workers brought down from Alaska for the meeting looked too crazy about.

  I spotted Wade having what appeared to be angry words with Kennedy McGee, who towered over him and spoke directly into his upturned face. Judging by Wade’s expression, his breath smelled like onions. Wade had just handed him an envelope with something written on its front.

  “We had a deal, McGee. So just give me the proxy and get the hell out of town,” I heard him say through clenched teeth as I approached them.

  “Not bloody likely, you mewling little mole-butt.” Kennedy slid the envelope arrogantly into his jacket. A cruel, defiant grin curled his lips. “I’ve changed my mind, and there’s not a bleeding thing you can do to stop me. The Russians’ offer makes this look like bus fare, you stupid gull. As far as I’m concerned, you can go screw yourself. It’s not as if you weren’t used to it.”

  “Hey, good morning, Lilly,” Johnny Bourbon yelled from behind. He spun me around by my shoulder and took my hand. Diamonds sparkled from the gold cross that held his leather-thong bolo tight to his throat. The brim of his white beaver Stetson shaded his eyes. I wondered if he knew the whole shebang now rested on his vote. “Praise the Lord,” he declared.

  Shanna hung back a little in her curvy powder-blue Western suit with bleached deer-antler buttons, a frilly little white crinoline-lined peplum, which needed to stick out at least six more inches if it were going to match her bosom, and oceans of fringe hanging from her sleeves and skirt. I wondered if she had as active a libido as her husband, and if she had a young Italian as her assistant. The more I looked at her, the more I decided she probably had two young Italians.

  “Excuse me.” I pulled away to see what had happened between Wade and Kennedy, but Kennedy was gone, and Wade, still red-faced, was trying to have a friendly conversation with someone else. I turned back to Johnny and Shanna. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here,” I said. “I mean … well, I don’t know exactly what I do mean.”

  “You mean why would a man of God, a man with feet of clay who begs for a living, be at an occasion that so concerns itself with earthly matters? Don’t you know, ‘Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own’? Mother Teresa herself, God rest her soul, said that.”

  “No, I had no idea she’d ever said any such thing.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” Johnny pressed his case. “Over the years, Alma gave Johnny Bourbon’s Christian Cowboys plenty of stock in this fine company, and I believe, although we won’t know until she’s gone—whenever that day is that the Lord decides to call her home—that she left our ministry a significant endowment. Now, I don’t know that for sure—you and I both know what our Alma’s like, that girl can change her mind quicker than the weather—but she loves the Lord, sure enough, and I pray He’ll have mercy and restore her to us.”

  “Praise the Lord,” said Shanna in her best television voice: long on delivery and short on conviction. I’m not saying she wanted Alma to die, and I’m not saying she didn’t. But I also didn’t think she especially cared if she lived or not, because Shanna and I both knew there always had been, and always would be, Almas orbiting Johnny. Just as there are always people anxious and willing to pay for salvation.

  Wade was now surrounded by a group of men who looked as if they’d been dressed by Hopalong Cassidy’s wardrobe person. All six of them were big, stocky, sturdy, muscular. Much too hefty for the wildly expensive high-slide-heeled, gila-monster-skin cowboy boots that kept them constantly rocking over backward and scrambling for balance. They had bandannas at their necks, color-coordinated with skintight shirts cowboy-trimmed with silver medallions and fringe and different-colored piping—red on white, white on red, white on black, black on white, saddle brown on Wedgwood and vice versa—tucked into matching skintight piped pants tucked into the boots, and absurd, old-fashioned ten-gallon hats.

  The Russians.

  They were yelling at Wade and towering over him like giant cannibals getting ready to snatch him up and stick him in the pot.

  “Wade,” I said. “How’re your friends?”

  “Hey!” They all turned and said at the same time. “It’s lady?”

  Then the biggest one, the chief oaf, the red-on-white, my old friend Sergei said, “Bride. She’s bride.”

  What they tried to do was bend their knees and thrust their pelvises forwar
d and act out a little hokey-pokey, but the boots prevented the action and simply turned them into a bunch of cheap, drunk Elvis impersonators.

  “Gentlemen, you know Marshal Bennett.”

  “Oh, da, lady policemans. You very beautiful, nothing like Russian policemans.” With this they all removed their hats and gave me a little teetering bow. Red-on-white snapped his fingers and the bear rumbled up next to him. “You want vodka?”

  “Not quite yet, thanks.”

  “Vodka good for you.” With that, they all tossed off shots.

  “You want hokey-pokey with me?”

  “Not at the moment, thanks.”

  “Maybe later?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be possible, thanks.”

  “Russian very good hokey-pokey.”

  “Thanks anyway. But no.”

  “You see. I very, very good hokey-pokey. Very big. Like bear.”

  “No.”

  “You vote yes or you sorry.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

  “You vote yes and you come Russia. We hokey-pokey.”

  I looked at Wade, who was smiling. “Can you believe this guy?” I asked.

  “Russian women aren’t exactly what you’d call liberated,” he answered.

  “No kidding. Listen, Boris. No hokey-pokey, ever. Understand?”

  Six pretty young women in matching navy suits with Rutherford logos on their breast pockets appeared out of nowhere, and each took one of the Russians’ arms. “Time for the meeting to start, gentlemen,” one girl said, and the six Russkis went meekly, their eyes sparkling with anticipation.

  These men were funny because of their provincialism, but they were not funny. Like bears, they were determined, and because they and their countrymen were hungry for food and money, they were dangerous. They had eaten their own before, and, if they had to, they’d do it again. But they’d rather try to eat us first.

  More company public-relations staffers urged stockholders to go in and be seated as quickly as possible, since the meeting was about to start. But there was a bottleneck by one of the doors because Edith Rutherford was handing out her ballots, and saying loudly over and over again, “My name is Edith Rochester Rutherford and I live in the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego, California. My suit is a Galanos. All these people said yes.”

  “Does she do this every year?” I asked Wade.

  “Every year like clockwork. Last year her slate included O. J. Simpson, Paula Barbieri, and Yasir Arafat. She’s very ecumenical.” As he watched her, he rolled and unrolled a thick annual report into a tube between his wide, flat hands, which had turned black with rubbed-off ink. “Looks like your whole family’s here.”

  “Just my parents, I think,” I answered. “Elias should be here any minute.”

  Before they disappeared through the door, I watched my mother, who looked just sharp as could be in navy and camel Chanel, whisper, “Paste” to my father, referring to Edith’s golf-ball ring and jeweled oil-derrick pendant. Daddy studied the Xeroxed ballot, slapped out a quick laugh, folded the sheet in thirds, and slid it into his jacket pocket. “Michael Jordan,” he said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sit with me?” Wade asked. The lights flashed twice, and a man’s voice came over the sound system asking people to take their seats because the meeting would start on time.

  “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  What I wanted to know was, where the hell was Elias? I waited on the far side of the lobby, watching for him until they began to close the doors. I punched the speed dial. He answered immediately. “Yo.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way. Got a lot to tell you. Big scandal. The neighbors said that Alma used to beat up Wade—always had black eyes and his jaws wired and stuff. But he never fought back because she’s so much bigger. Another guy said he has all those injuries because he gets into bar fights all the time. And then another guy said Mercedes was always rushing up there pretending to meet with Wade, but it was just a cover to meet with Duke. They don’t seem to have much else to do in Billings except gossip, and they sure do hate Alma.”

  “Where’d you hear all this, Elias?”

  “Bar at the Northern. But here’s the good part: After I’d drunk eight hundred thousand cups of tea with her, Duke Fletcher’s housekeeper …” The transmission broke up.

  I called him back, but he was somewhere out of range. It was 10:01. My stomach turned up the burner, the sort of aggravation that, when I was on the street, could be salved by a couple of glazed doughnuts, a cup of old coffee, and a handful of cigarettes. Now all I could do was suffer. No doughnuts. No cigarettes. And coffee by itself just made it worse. God, I wish I could smoke again. Sometimes the urge entered and tempted me so much I wanted to scream. To make a deal with the monkey. To throw all the research and facts out the window, believe they were wrong. Forget it. All roads lead to heart disease, cancer and death.

  I entered the convention hall.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The William Tell Overture thundered from one corner of the darkened hall to the other. But this was no Saturday-morning movie, no Lone Ranger and Tonto racing faster than was earthly possible across the screen. Instead, a video began with a dramatic high-speed shot of a threatening and empty North Sea, spinning fast across heaving, murky whitecaps until, far in the distance, a small speck appeared and grew into a derrick, a white-metal tower, an offshore rig with the Rutherford Oil name stretching around its cement base. Men in red hard hats, yellow slickers, high rubber boots, and life jackets with lifelines that connected them like leashes to rigging bars, waved at the chopper as it circled and then landed on the rolling deck.

  A narrator’s voice—it sounded like Gene Hackman—boomed above the music as the video proceeded at full volume from one Rutherford oil, gas, and coal project to another—Indonesia, California, Texas, Egypt, Venezuela, West Virginia, Wyoming.

  I edged my way along the paneled wall, stopped about a third of the way forward, and leaned there, waiting for my beloved brother, whose neck I looked forward to breaking. He had something. Something big. I stood motionless in the dark, and my chest tightened as I began to feel the unmistakable rumblings of danger. It draped the hall in sticky, wet, invisible cobwebs. I couldn’t see it, or hear it, but I could taste and smell it. My antennae searched the way giant receiving dishes listen blindly for sounds from space. Where would it come from? Where was Elias? It was 10:10.

  The music blasted and the room grew darker as we descended into a coal mine. You could feel the damp and cold as the elevator sank deeper into the earth. It made my hair stand on end. Suddenly an after-shave-soaked bulk materialized next to me and a meaty hand grabbed my breast and squeezed. Hard. I was so shocked I didn’t make a sound. I just instinctively turned and smashed my knee, hard and fast, into the man’s crotch. It was one of the Russians! Mr. Red-on-White. The provincial oil minister from Watchahoochee or whatever. He sank to his knees, groaning, and, as he crawled away, the tension drained out of my chest and I started laughing to myself. I was probably overreacting, looking for trouble. I took a deep breath. I needed to relax.

  Finally the video ended and the lights came up slightly, enough to see my Russian intruder slumped in his seat. Mercedes, flanked by two gray-suited men, ascended three steps to the stark dais and took her place at a draped banquet table in front of the big screen. She’d pulled her shoulder-length hair back into a severe chignon, and her charcoal suit coat absorbed the stage lights like a blotter. I tried again to picture her and Johnny Bourbon groping each other in the powder room while someone was shooting Alma, and all I could see were Tarzan and Jane. The Gorilla and the Lady. A real hanging-from-the-chandeliers deal. One big jungle yell and a lot of chest-pounding before you snap that girdle back on and return to the boardroom. This lady was all business.

  The table was bare except for pitchers of ice water, three glasses, and a gavel. A large stack of thick binders sat on the floor next to one of the
men, whom I took to be the secretary of the corporation. The other was the general counsel.

  Mercedes stepped to the podium and banged the gavel. “The Annual Meeting of the Rutherford Oil Company is officially open. We will first have the report from the secretary of the corporation.”

  “Madame Chairman. Madame Chairman.” Edith Rutherford stood in the aisle waving her sheaf. Her voice was nails on a blackboard. “Madame Chairman. I demand to be recognized.”

  “You will be recognized in the Other Business section of the agenda, Ms. Rutherford,” Mercedes said evenly. “We will now have the report from the secretary of the corporation.”

  While the gray suit droned on about the minutes of last year’s meeting and a lot of other dreary corporate stuff—punctuated every sixty seconds by Edith’s demands to be recognized and Mercedes’s evenly repeated answer—I made my way farther forward to look over the audience and see who was there.

  The board of directors, corporate executives, and their spouses all were seated in the front rows, staring straight ahead like West Point’s long gray line, ready to leap to their feet and take a bullet for the cause. I recognized a number of them: chairman and CEO of U.S. Airways; chairman and CEO of AT&T; chairman and CEO of Sumitomo, Japan’s largest shipbuilder; chairman and CEO of the First National Bank of Roundup—my father (he and my mother, the senior members of the team); former U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick; former senator Fletcher, whom I could not accept as a turncoat; and next to him a gray, humorless man I took to be the head of the SIBA Fund, Penn Holland, Mr. Bottom-Line-at-Any-Cost.

  Financial charts, spreadsheets and budgets appeared on the giant screen as the treasurer delivered his report. I glanced at my agenda; election of the officers was next. This was when Edith really went to town. She had made it halfway through her slate of nominees when the general counsel, with his thinning hair and tortoise-shell glasses and regimental tie, interrupted her.