Interface (39 page)

So
am I,
Mary Catherine thought.

"You should meet this guy sometime," James said.

"Maybe I should."

An interesting thought had occurred to Mary Catherine. Maybe
Cy Ogle had manipulated her just as brilliantly as he had James.

Or maybe not. She had handed him something close to a quid
pro quo: help me out with James, this loose cannon on the deck of
the good ship Cozzano, and then we'll talk some more. And he had
delivered. He had done it in less than a week. He had solved a big
problem for them.

Cy Ogle might be a person that they could use.

23

Eleanor's first hint that anything funny was going on was
when she heard Doreen, in the next trailer over, going, "Whoo-ee!
Look at this, baby!" in the singsong falsetto that she used to attract
the attention of her children. Meanwhile, Eleanor could hear the
sound of tires grinding and popping on gravel, right outside of her
trailer.

Eleanor looked out the window. Mobile homes, like jet
airplanes, offered great views off to the sides but you couldn't see what was directly in front or behind. All she could see was the side of Doreen's trailer, and Doreen's big hairdo in one of the windows, flanked by the faces of her three kids, their eyes and mouths wide
open to accept new input. They were all looking at something that
was going on in front of Eleanor's trailer.

It must be the Nazis. They were coming to get her. Eleanor ran
up to the front of the trailer, slapping the chain on to her door as
she went by it. She got up to the front where two tiny little
windows looked forward, and she peeled the windowshade back
just a little.

It was a big old Lincoln Town Car, navy blue, freshly polished,
the cleanest and prettiest car within several miles of this trailer park.
You could back it into an empty slot here and make it pass for a
mobile home.

All the doors were open. Several men were getting out. They
were all young men. They were all wearing sunglasses. At least two
of them had walkie-talkies as well, and they were using them. And
they were looking around, scanning all points of the compass
through their dark glasses, swiveling their heads back and forth like

searchlights on a guard tower. One of them went up to the Datsun,
put his face up close to the silvered glass, and cupped his hands
around his eyes.

For the first few moments, Eleanor was convinced that they
were Nazi hit men who had come to blow her away. But that was
just paranoia. The followers of Earl Dudley Strang were not
affluent men in suits and Lincoln Town Cars. And if they wished
to do away with her, they would come in the middle of the night
like the jackals they were. Not in broad daylight, in a big car, like
this.

Besides, they didn't act like hit men, or how she thought hit men
would act. They had gotten out of the car immediately on arrival, but then they just stopped. They made no move to enter Eleanor's
trailer.

Eleanor raised her windowshade a little more, feeling bolder, and
noticed that there was still one man inside the Lincoln Town Car.
He was sitting in the middle of the backseat and he was talking on
the telephone.

He finished his conversation, hung up, and scooted down to the
end of the seat. He climbed up out of the car, assisted by one of the
young men in the dark glasses, and stood up on the gravel. He
squinted into the unfiltered sunlight, his face wrinkling up
tremendously, like a High Plains arroyo.

She would have recognized him on the dark side of the moon:
it was Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Republican of Colorado.
He was so old that he was actually named after Teddy, not Franklin,
Roosevelt. And he was so conservative that, during the thirties,
when a lot of his idealistic young peers were going to Spain to fight
on behalf of the revolutionaries there, he had volunteered to fight
for the Fascists.

He had been virulently opposed to America's participation in
World War II. A strong supporter of General MacArthur and a
fierce advocate of "nuking the evil Chinks" (his words) in Korea.
He had spent most of the fifties rooting out "Comsymps" from Capitol Hill and the media. He had called Goldwater a pinko. He
had seen both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis as
golden opportunities for a first nuclear strike against the Soviet
Union, and had stood side-by-side with Curtis Lemay in the
recommendation that North Vietnam be bombed back into the
Stone Age.

He had run abortively for president in four decades, from the
fifties through the eighties, whenever he felt that the frontrunning
Republican candidate was not gloomy, threatening, and violent enough. Consistently voted against affirmative action. Though
Eleanor knew her civil rights history well enough to know that he had astonished just about everyone by voting in favor of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.

He was like that: he was fringy enough to teeter on the edge of
becoming a one-dimensional stereotype, but one or twice a year he
would do something freakish and astonishing. He had gained the grudging affection of some people by consistently hating Richard
Nixon's guts from the very beginning. He had come down on the
side of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation
hearings, and delivered a lengthy and profane speech in her defense
on the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the total
implosion of American values.

Just when his image seemed on the verge of being rehabilitated, he would do something reactionary. For the last several years, he
had celebrated Animal Rights Day by going out to his family ranch in southwestern Colorado and branding a few calves in front of the
TV cameras. It got him tons of publicity, reinforced his caveman image, and made him wildly popular among farmers, westerners,
and anyone else who made money from animals. The man knew how to get a campaign contribution.

Now this weathered, deathless, inexplicable gnome was standing
in front of her trailer, surrounded by men that, she now realized,
were Secret Service agents. She did not know if she should run away and hide, or welcome him.

Soon enough he was pounding on her front door and she had to
make up her mind. She pulled her hair back and wrapped a
scrunchie around it, went to the door, and opened it. But it was still
chained shut and so it only came open a few inches. She found
herself staring through the chain at Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. They
were of roughly the same height.

"Take it easy, woman," he said, glancing at the chain. "I'm not
here to burn a cross on your goddamn lawn."

She closed the door, unchained it, and opened it all the way.
"Senator Marshall?" she said.

"Eleanor Boxwood Richmond?"

"Yes."

"Slayer of Erwin Dudley Strang?"

"Well . . ."

"Fastest tongue in the West?"

She laughed.

"If you would invite me in, I would have a few things to discuss
with you."

"Come in."

"You don't have to invite any of these people in." Marshall said.
He turned around and slammed the door in the face of an agent.

"Can I offer you anything to drink?" she said.

"I am in suspended animation. The only things I am allowed to
drink are strange concoctions brewed up by pharmacists. You
would not be able to afford them, and I can only do so by taking
honoraria," he said. He talked like a guy who was used to having
his voice heard by a million people.

"Well, then, please sit down anywhere you like."

"Whenever I lower myself to a seated or reclining position, it
occurs to me that I may never stand on my feet again," he said. "To
a man of my age, even sitting down becomes a morbid thing. So I
hope it will not make you feel awkward if I stand up."

"Not at all." Eleanor pulled up a tall bar stool, one of the artifacts
that they had salvaged from the wreck of their middle-class lifestyle,
and sat down on it without losing any altitude. This way she could still talk to him face-to-face.

"I know that this conversation has already gotten off on the
wrong foot because you think that I am an evil vicious old man
who hates persons of your race," Senator Marshall said.

"The thought had occurred to me."

"But in fact, the only thing I hate is bullshit. I hate bullshit
because I grew up on ranch and I spent the first three decades of my
life shoveling it. I went into politics largely because it was a desk
job and naturally I thought that in a desk job I would not have to
shovel any more bullshit. Of course nothing could have been
further from the truth. So you see I have spent my whole life up to
my nostrils in bullshit and consequently know more about it, and
hate it more, than anyone else on the face of the earth.

"Now, the reason that a lot of Negroes think I hate them is
simple: there is a whole lot of bullshit in racial politics, even more
than in other aspects of politics, and when I react against that
bullshit, they think I'm reacting against them. But I'm not. I'm just
reacting against their bullshit politics. Like affirmative action. That's
bullshit. But civil rights isn't bullshit at all. I voted for that."

"I know you did."

"And all these different terms - colored, Negro, black, Afro-
American - that's all bullshit too. They're always willing to come
up with new rods for Negroes, but never to actually do something
that will help them, and that's bullshit. The basic fact is that all
people should be treated the same, as specified in the goddamn
Constitution, and everything else is bullshit."

"Well, Senator, I am aware that you are not a totally one-
dimensional person, and so I am willing to give you the benefit of
the doubt as long as you are a guest in my home."

"I thought you would. A lot of Negroes hate my guts and start jumping up and down and organizing protest rallies as soon as I
come over the horizon, but I figured you would be able to see
things a little more clearly. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because you have a bullshit detector as good as mine, and that
is a rare quality."

"Well, thank you, Senator."

"And you're not afraid to use it."

"Well, that was a somewhat unusual thing for me to do. I was
very upset at the time and not thinking clearly."

Senator Marshall was peeved and disappointed. "Bullshit! You
were thinking as clearly as the human mind has ever thought. What
do you mean, you weren't thinking clearly?"

"I mean that I was raised to have good manners and be
diplomatic, and I would not have violated those standards if I had
not been at the end of my rope emotionally."

"Well, you and I have different interpretations of this. Shit, I've been at the end of my rope emotionally since I was five years old."

"This fact has been widely commented upon," Eleanor said.

"You were perfectly justified in saying everything you said," Senator Marshall said. "Do you realize that Earl Strong may never
recover, politically, from what you did to him?"

"I think you are being very optimistic to say that."

"Bullshit. This is your polite upbringing talking, isn't it?"

"Possibly."

"I got a stack of poll results an inch thick. We have been watch
ing this thing. Hell, I wanted to come over here and congratulate
you the same night you did it. But instead I waited a few days for the poll results. And lady, you blew that son of a bitch to smith
ereens. You ripped that little tick's head off. You deserve a medal."

Eleanor laughed. "A medal? I'd rather have a job."

Senator Marshall stuck out his right hand and looked at Eleanor
expectantly.

She didn't know what to do. The man was so weird. He was w
eird, he knew he was weird, he knew that she knew it, and he didn't care.