Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) (2 page)

Jimmy drives a blue 2002 Ford pickup with a dented front fender and a busted taillight he's been meaning to repair for weeks. Brittany settles into the passenger seat and on the ride she talks to him about politics (“What kind of freak goes into that line of work?”)
,
her parents (“kind of annoying”) and the colleges she's thinking about applying to. Most of the schools are on the east coast and have fancy pedigrees. But maybe she won't go to college at all, she tells him. Her grades are excellent and her board scores, too, but doesn't the world belong to the entrepreneurs, the self-starters, new gods of the wild and relentlessly entertaining American pageant who bend reality to their implacable will? And they don't teach those skills in college, do they? Jimmy listens and nods, impressed with his niece. He drops her off and watches as she walks across the lawn and into the glass and steel building of the Upper School. Brittany almost makes Jimmy wish he were a father. Of course, that would mean he'd be yoked to his ex-wife Darleen for the rest of his life. He knows the kid who's worth that hasn't been born.

 

http://WWW.DESERT-MACHIAVELLI.COM

10.29 – 8:43
P.M.

Did it bother anyone besides the Machiavelli that Chief Marvin introduced the feisty former flight attendant otherwise known as Mary Swain at her rally today? Yes, Blogheads, I know that he looked like he was delivering a strip-o-gram at an all girl birthday party, but the Machi­avelli did not enjoy the symbolism. Is there something slightly South American or even, dare I say, German, about a guy in policeman mufti, with a gun at his hip, introducing a political candidate in the Land of the Free Giveaway? Aren't the police supposed to be neutral when they're in uniform? What kind of message does this send to the hoi polloi when cops in uniform are backing candidates? It's a little fascist, frankly. I don't mean to imply that Mary Swain understands fascism, it's not like they teach it at flight attendant school, but there's a direct line from uniforms shilling for candidates to someone knocking on your door at 3:00
A.M.
and dragging you off to where they hold you without trial until they feel like letting you go, unless they want to push you out a window and tell everyone you jumped. And was it me or did the Chief look a little turned on by the whole spectacle? Is Marvin hard for the flight attendant? Let us not forget, Blogheads: Mary Swain's danger lies in her cheerful erotic charge. When fascism arrives it will not be in jackboots but, rather, wrapped in an Ameri­can flag, carrying a cross and wearing fuck-me pumps.

 

 

 

F
ifty miles south of Palm Springs and three miles east of the Salton Sea, Calipatria State Penitentiary squats baking in the morning sun. Across the street from the prison is a television news van. A young reporter who looks like she studied at the Victoria's Secret School of Journalism has taken a position outside the gates. Her cameraman is ready to swing into action at the first sign of human emotion.

In the passenger seat of a Lincoln Town Car, Randall Duke checks his smile in a pocket mirror to make sure there's nothing left from the fruit plate he ate at breakfast. Satisfied his teeth are bright and television ready, he slides the mirror into the breast pocket of his cream colored suit. He is trim and broad-shouldered and his erect carriage suggests a height he does not possess. A couple of inches under six feet, with his helmet of perfect hair and glossy face, he looks like a successful Oldsmobile salesman, a quality he shares with many of his male colleagues in the United States House of Representatives, where he has served three terms.

The Lincoln's motor is running and the air conditioner on. The idling car isn't shrinking his carbon footprint but Randall is less concerned about the environment than he is about the possibility that the television camera might catch him perspiring. No one likes a sweaty politician.

He checks his watch. Jabs a number into his BlackBerry. Exasperation clouds his face when after three rings it goes to voice mail.

“Jimmy Ray, it's your brother again. We're down at Calipatria and it would have been nice if you were here like you said you'd be.”

Randall runs a finger along his smooth jaw line. He's getting impatient. There are hands to shake today, votes to wheedle. He's thinking about Mary Swain and the rally she staged yesterday. It's unheard of for a challenger to pull a crowd like that. Randall doubts he could get a hundred people to a rally that wasn't tied to a specific group that needs his help. Mary Swain herself was the draw. Randall hasn't faced a problem like this before, a magnetic opponent that could actually win. She has—a word he hates—“buzz.” Mostly, he hates the word because he doesn't have it. But Mary Swain? People are already talking about her in Washington.
Rolling Stone
did a story and that was bad enough, a major national publication covering a local race. But the headline! That sent Randall right over the edge: “Desert Fox”
.
Why was no one coming up with a sexy nickname for him? Randall had enlisted in the Army after high school to earn money for college and had served in a bomb disposal unit where he attained the rank of corporal. He never actually diffused a bomb in combat conditions because it was the 1980s and there were no wars going on at the time, but that shouldn't matter. Right now he knows he needs to stop thinking about the threat of the Mary Swain candidacy. His campaign has an answer for her and it's about to emerge from that prison.

The cameraman, Angels tee shirt and a backwards baseball cap, swings his lens to the prison gates. The reporter rouses herself. A thickset guard appears and then a young man in a sturdy, motorized wheelchair. The guard steps aside and the man rolls out on the blacktop. He's wearing jeans, a short-sleeved pale blue button front work shirt and a caved-in grin.

This is Randall's cue. The Town Car door flies open and he bounds out, walks briskly toward the wheelchair. Randall reaches down and embraces the seated man, pats him on the back, feels the television camera on them like sunlight.

“What's up, Wheels?” Randall says.

“Sure could use some pussy,” says the man in the chair.

Randall's smile curdles for a moment but he quickly shifts it back to grin-and-win. Turns to the reporter, Lacey Pall, who holds a microphone. She's two years out of college, her first on-air job.

“You're in a hard fought re-election campaign, Congress­man. Why are you here at the prison?”

They both know why he's at the prison. The news truck would not be here otherwise. But playing along, Randall says, “I'm here to welcome my brother Dale back because family is the most important thing to me,”
family
the code word that tests consistently well in focus groups. Who doesn't love family? Along with baseball and Jesus, it comprises the American Tri-fecta. Backwards Cap widens his lens to take in the scene.

“Even if I can't vote,” Dale says. Clearly energized by his release, he'd be bouncing if a motorcycle accident nearly twenty years earlier hadn't robbed him of the ability to walk. Dale Duke started out handsome but the desert sun lit a hard knock life and the combination of the two took care of his looks. Now his leathery cheeks are a wallet for his dwindling, discolored teeth.

Randall marvels that his brother just served a three-year stretch for burglary and he's smiling like he won the California State Lottery. “We're proud of Dale,” Randall informs the home viewers. “No one is above the law but everyone deserves a second chance. He's going to live right this time.”

“I like my tequila with lime,” Dale chimes in. Randall's eyes slide to his brother. He couldn't be drunk, could he, at nine in the morning? Randall's smile tightens. Lacey looks confused.

“Today I'm here to welcome my brother back.”

Lacey turns to the camera, flashes her perfect dentition. “Randall Duke, in a tight Congressional race, takes the morning off to welcome his brother out of jail and shows that family is more important than politics.” She runs her forefinger across her throat and asks her cameraman if that was good. He nods.

“Get everything you need?” Randall asks.

“Thank-you Congressman,” she says.

“Call me Randall.”

“Randall.” Smiles.

He squeezes her hand and tells her in a jocular way he hopes he has her vote. This is a running gag between them. Randall's face is like a promise and he believes that Lacey, despite her professional reserve, finds him harder to resist than she'd like. Lacey moves off and Randall eyes the curve of her hips.

Observing this from a discrete distance is a man in his thirties squeezing a tennis ball. A class ring with a blue stone accents the ring finger of his left hand and he wears a simple wristwatch with a black leather band. A dark suit hangs loosely on his lean form. He wears a starched white shirt and a red tie and his shoes are polished. Behind wire-rimmed sunglasses his eyes are closely set and blue. They hang over a thin nose, small mouth, and a chin that has seen the enemy and is now in retreat. Thinning blondish hair adds to his boiled potato pallor. This is Maxon Brae: campaign manager, aide de camp, and general factotum to the glory that is Randall Duke. It was Maxon's idea to make Dale's release a media event. His research has shown an unusually high number of families in the district have some experience in the world of addiction. Dale is meant to be Randall's ticket to their hearts and votes.

Briskly motoring himself to the car, Dale stops, looks at Randall. “Open the door, bro.” Randall opens the back door of the sedan and waits. Dale tells his brother he could use some help.

Randall wraps his arms around his brother and as Dale pushes off the chair, hoists him into the backseat. He notices that Dale smells of industrial soap. Maxon steps up and places the motorized chair in the trunk. Randall asks if Dale is comfortable.

“I need a car with hand controls.”

“Maybe we can figure out a way for you to earn one.”

 

They drive north toward Palm Springs, Maxon at the wheel, Randall riding shotgun. The Town Car doing eighty but the desolate landscape is so vast it barely feels like they're moving. Dale gazing out the window at an endless freight train heading south toward the Mexican border.

“
I like my tequila with lime
?” Randall's tone is incredulous. “What the heck was that?”

“Knew a Compton brother, played wheelchair ball, each day we'd scrawl pretty words large and small, pages and pages of song and poem, about life in a our new home, we doing hard time, busting hard rhyme.” The words flow out of Dale, the rhythm of the language relaxing him. Neither Randall nor Maxon react to the poetic burst, but this does not seem to bother him. “Was a human beat-box, too. Do the crime, do the time, tequila with lime? What's the problem?”

“If you're on camera with me, Dale, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your mouth shut. Are we clear? Things aren't the way they used to be.”

“They got newspapers in the joint, Randall. I know you're King Shit.”

“You can't be screwing up now, little brother, hear me? You'd have done two more years in the can if I hadn't worked that parole board. Stay clean, I'll put you on the payroll.”

“That'd be fine.” Dale offers a snaggletooth smile in anticipation of a star-bright future with the Randall Duke political juggernaut. After three years spent in the company of murderous Crips and Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood mutants, assorted sociopaths, psychopaths and generally bad actors, he can hardly wait to roll into his new life. Then, unable to resist: “Just like cherry wine.”

“Don't embarrass me.”

Maxon turns around to face Dale, says “At least wait til after the election.” Randall laughs, and then Dale does, too. The tension dissipates slightly. Dale removes a little notebook and a pen from his pants pocket and scribbles something down.

“What are you writing there, Dale?” Maxon asks.

“Can't remember shit I say, got to write it every day.” He finishes jotting, folds the notebook and places it back in his pocket. The brain injury that causes the memory lapses—another unfortunate result of his motorcycle accident—also left Dale prone to seizures. To control these he takes 200mgs of an anti-seizure medication three times a day. “How do you boys feel about making a pit stop at the Medjool Date Oasis?”

“The Date Oasis?” Randall says. “Heck, I'd like to take you bass fishing up at Lake Havasu with cooler full of beer and sandwiches, or treat you to a weekend in Las Vegas, wheel you up to a roulette table and stuff your pockets with chips. Take you to see Cirque de Soleil. Get you drunk. Pay a shady lady to do whatever it is they do.”

“That's what I'm talking about!”

“But I'm in the middle of a campaign, remember?”

“We'll do it after,” Dale says.

“Sure will,” Randall says.

“I'd like a date shake right now just the same,” Dale says. “Been dreaming about a date shake, every night I'd lie awake.”

“Good to have something to look forward to.”

“Remember that time Dad took us to the Medjool Date Oasis, you, me and Jimmy?

“You like that new hot-rod chair I got you?” Randall says, done with Memory Lane. Dale tells him it's a hell of a chair. “Got you the Ferrari of wheelchairs, Dale. You can't help family, what's the point?” Finished with his brother for the moment, Randall turns around and faces forward. The Town Car speeds through the desert waste, the only sound the rushing of the tires.

Scrolling through his emails, Randall turns to Maxon and says, “You get any new numbers?” He's referring to the daily tracking polls, the lifeblood of the modern campaign, the ever-shifting northern star by which they navigate.

“It's a toss up right now,” Maxon says.

“I'll tell you what, it's a bitch running against somebody Joe Sixpack wants to leave his wife for,” Randall says.

“Mary Swain, high octane,” Dale says. He takes the notebook out again and jots down this bon mot.

“That's pretty good, Dale,” Maxon says. “Don't let the other side hear it, they might start using it themselves.”

“That's all I need,” Randall says.

“We're lucky she's not campaigning in a bikini,” Maxon says.

This is a conversation Randall and Maxon have been having since Mary Swain emerged victorious from the other party's primary election last June. Four months of frustration and confusion. Randall may not have a high profile in Congress but he's been re-elected easily twice. Now along comes this pulchritudinous charm dripper with a sunlight smile, a rich husband, and a tongue that is slicing Randall Duke like Swiss cheese. Mary Swain hasn't heard the truism that states in a Congressional race the incumbent always wins. Randall can't be seen to be patronizing or he'll lose female voters who become resentful if they perceive one of their sisters is unfairly taking fire. The women stick together like snakes in winter, take care of their own. Randall has to be a gallant when it comes to Mary Swain or he can depend on endless grief from the
XX
chromosome cohort whose support he needs like oxygen.

The modern world is pounding Randall today.

But it's working for Dale.

If Mary Swain weren't running even in the polls, Dale would still be playing wheelchair prison ball. She shot out of her primary with such a powerful tail wind Randall and Maxon immediately began thinking about how to enhance Randall's chances. What they came up with: play up the family angle and humanize him. Dysfunction is something a politician used to run from. Today family meltdowns have replaced married with children as the new normal. Infidelity? Check. Substance abuse? Check. Teen pregnancy? It's a boon! And why should this previously impossible thought have become the new truth? Because people in America want leaders to whom they can “relate,” people who
feel
like them, who suffer their pains and are conversant with their woes on a visceral level, a level beyond thinking, because who wants to think? This preverbal emotional level is where they hope Dale will help. Randall has a contact on the state parole board and after some deft arm-twisting, it was concluded that Dale's rehabilitation was ahead of schedule. The California Department of Prisons wanted to hold him longer, but Randall made it clear that his vote on a bill to federally subsidize the pay of California prison guards was contingent on Dale no longer being within their purview.