The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (10 page)

He was right. I had wanted to be Paul Callahan for the first eighteen years of my life, now I was hoping we'd just pretend we didn't know each other. Maybe it was politics that had made me a self-centered, shallow shit. Or maybe I was good at politics because I came to it as a shallow, self-centered shit. Maybe there was just too much history between us.

“I gotta win this election, J.D.,” he blurted, with a suddenly desperate look.

“Why in God's name do you want to be on the public service commission anyway?” I asked. To my surprise, he had an answer. A good one.

“Because I'm going to be the meanest rate-cutting, rabble-rousing populist bastard you ever saw. And I can pull votes from Metairie and pull 'em from up north where they still remember how I used to make 'em hoot on Saturdays. Then I'm gonna run my ass for governor and I'm gonna win.”

“Governor?”

“Don't sound so goddamn skeptical. Look at the assholes we've elected governor. We're grading on the curve here, brother.”

“That's a slogan: ‘Not the Biggest Asshole We've Ever Elected.' ”

“I like it. A little long for a bumper sticker, but we could work with it.”

“You don't think people will be bothered by the fact”—for a second I thought about trying to sugarcoat the question but then gave up—“that you're a convicted felon?”

“Pardoned by the governor himself, fuck you very much. That makes me an
ex
-felon, white, forty-one, and free to do whatever the hell I want as long as my knees hold out.”

“But—”

“Look me in the eye and tell me this state could give a rat's ass from Sunday if they elect a convicted but pardoned felon governor. For a minor indiscretion like gambling? In Louisiana? Not if they like the son of a bitch.”

“Okay,” I said, and laughed. “Okay.”

“Fuckin' A, okay. And I'm the kind of son of a bitch they like. But first I got to win this public service commissioner's race and I got a problem because this asshole McGreevy I'm running against happens to have picked his parents better than you and me and he's spending a fucking fortune of his daddy's money.”

“Ah, yes, but you have the legacy of our father's heroic civil rights stance to propel you to victory.”

“Yeah, right. You take a look lately at what kind of vote David Duke used to get in this state? And all these troubles, from the fuckin' A-rabs to the illegals taking all the jobs, they haven't exactly made people feel like they need a dose of peace and love. I don't want to upset your day, little bruth, but Armstrong George would kick Hilda Smith's ass in this state. It's simple. And that stuff about sending all those brown people back over the border, they like that around here.”

“You trying to tell me you plan on endorsing Armstrong George?” I cracked, annoyed to be hearing anything from my brother that I knew was true. “I guess I can tell Hilda this thing is over, huh?”

“You still condescend to my ass. Just like always.” He shook his head. “No, what I'm trying to tell you is that I need money.”

“A candidate who needs money, what a shock. Look, I'll be glad to contribute to the cause.”

“I'm touched. But I need a little more help, kiddo, than one person can give me under these new do-good laws. I need some heavy support from the party. And I need some soft money.”

“What are the limits you can give?”

“Goddamn thousand dollars per person. These new limits are killin' us.”

“How much have you raised?”

“Four hundred and twenty-eight thousand,” Paul said.

“Not bad. Cash on hand?”

“Three hundred and ten grand, give or take.”

“Give or take what?” I asked. I knew from years of campaigns that no figure was as fungible as cash on hand. Everybody wanted it to be higher than it was. Nothing in a campaign was lied about as much as cash on hand.

“Give or take how much you eat for breakfast, if I'm buying. Look, I'm not a fucking idiot. You think I'm a fucking idiot, but I'm not. Some might say that's one of our fundamental problems. Little Bruth thinks Big Bruth is a moron.”

I held up my palms. “I surrender.”

It was well over one hundred degrees in McGuire's and my brother started to sweat. Veins in his thick neck surged. “All these fucking years you had me down for a stone-cold dunce, you ever stop to think there might be a little more to it than that?”

“More than you being a stone-cold dunce?”

“Screw you. You think blowing off your family makes you a tough guy?” Paul's voice was loud, carrying across the bar; a few of the regulars at the bar turned around. “Maybe I'm thinking you got me pegged for a dumbski because that way, you don't have to feel bad about never coming home and, when you do, trying to show up your big brother in the brains department. Jesus Christ, you got no other way to compete with me, J.D. You never got out there and knocked heads like the rest of us, but you like to compete. You took up that silly bike because you knew you could never get out there and do what I did, but maybe you could pedal that bike pretty fast. You know what I think? I think the big joke between us is that everybody thinks I'm the guy who would run into a freight train not to lose, big-time stud athlete and all that, but I ain't got nothing on you, little brother. You would do anything to win, anything to protect your precious reputation, which, believe you me, is a compliment in my book under the circumstances. Which is why…”

Paul took a deep breath, wiping his dripping forehead with tiny paper napkins. “Which is why you will help me.”

“It is?”

“Because helping me is the easiest way to deal with me.”

“Paul, look—”

“J.D., you can do this.” He reached over and took my arm. He was still incredibly strong. “I'm asking for your help, J.D.” He looked at me with a clear-eyed intensity that I remembered from when I was a kid and watched him play high school football. He'd be on the sidelines with that same look. I nodded.

“What can I do?” I asked.

He relaxed. “I've got me a little independent expenditure group. Okay, it's not my committee, because that would be illegal and I don't do illegal shit since that little gambling fuckup, but let's say that I am aware of a group of concerned citizens who have organized a little independent expenditure committee and that little committee, though full of goodwill and a desire to serve the public good, is a little short of resources. You can get some resources into that committee, and while you are doing it, make sure they don't step on their dicks and waste the goddamn money.”

“Who's running this independent expenditure committee?”

“Tobias Green.”

I had to moan. “He's still alive?”

“And thriving, more or less. At eighty-five.”

“How can you trust that guy?”

“He is a great American who is supporting my campaign because he realizes that the tragedy of high utility rates assails minorities in disproportionate numbers.”

“You do have the rap down.”

He smiled. “It is an honor to be on the same side as a true civil rights hero who was a comrade-in-arms with our crusading civil rights father.”

“You better move a little to the right,” I told him.

“What?”

“Because I'm going to throw up any second.”

“I knew you would grasp the concept.” He looked very pleased with himself. He reached down and picked up the photograph that had spilled out of the envelope that Ginny had brought to me. The small black-and-white Brownie snapshot with the white deckled edges was worn and creased, as if it had been carried in someone's wallet or purse. It showed a strikingly handsome couple, a big man in his mid-fifties in an elegant suit and rakish hat, his arm around a much younger woman, large-breasted, with long brunette hair hanging over her shoulders like a shawl. And with them were three children. One of them was me, nine years old, peering out at the world with a confused, hesitant look. Next to me was Paul, at thirteen already big for his age, bursting out of his white T-shirt, and, next to Paul, a toddler in a torn Mardi Gras bib.

“This is the only picture of all three of us together,” I said. “The only one I've ever seen.”

“Just one big happy family, huh?” Paul chuckled. “Well, except Mom didn't make the photo…”

Our mother had separated from our father when I was about six. Moved back in with her parents and died when their fancy sailboat went under out in the gulf. Paul remembered her, I figured, but he rarely talked about her. Me, I didn't really remember. Not much anyway.

He got up, leaving me with the photo, then came back to toss a business card on the table. It was a glossy card with images of large-breasted women touting a strip club called “The Body Shop.”

“That's Tyler's place,” Paul said.

Sitting in that ridiculously hot bar, I tried to conjure up my favorite image of our father: a large man sitting at his typewriter wearing his Marine aviator's flight helmet, typing like mad to finish his column. There would always be a bottle of George Dickel nearby, and he would dictate the column to an imaginary flight control officer on deck in the imaginary carrier below.
The trouble with this state isn't that we live in the past, it's that our past wasn't worth living in in the first place.
Great rants, Dickel rants, rants that were funny sometimes, sad others, but rants that always managed to piss off somebody. It was every Tuesday night, when the column was due for the Thursday papers. One thing Paul would tell me about our mother is how she always said she was raising children in a world that ended every Tuesday night.

“Hello, J.D.” The voice was deep and startling and one I remembered very well.

I looked up and saw a tall, painfully thin black man who looked ancient. He was smiling.

“Do I look that bad?” the man said in a wonderfully resonant voice. It was a voice from my childhood.

“I guess I look that bad,” he said, and his smile broadened. He put his hand out and covered mine. This was something I remembered as well: a gentle touch, though his hands were rough and large.

“I'm old and sick as a dog,” Tobias Green said. “But they ain't buried me yet. Come on, I got something to show you.”

It was a storefront just off Canal, not far from the abandoned casino. A large banner read
CITIZENS FOR JUSTICE
, and the space was filled with cheap furniture and kids in their twenties. It was like a campaign, but the kind of campaign I hadn't done in years: a grassroots, bootstrap operation where the yard sign budget would be greater than the media budget, and there probably wouldn't be any television, just digital, and then only if they were lucky. I liked this kind of place; it was where I had started. When I defied my father by working for a Republican running for the New Orleans city council, back when I was twenty or so and still at the University of New Orleans, we had worked in an office just like this. We got killed in that race, and it pleased my father immensely. He hated Republicans—which, if I was honest, was part of the reason I'd ended up working that side of the fence.

“We called the air conditioner repairman the first week,” Tobias Green told me. The space was stifling hot with a battery of old fans stirring the dead air. “He left laughing after a few minutes. Told us we didn't have no air conditioner to repair. Still charged us forty-two dollars fifty for the call.” Tobias Green chuckled, a raspy sound that turned into a deep cough. Several of the workers looked up, concerned. He pulled out a wrinkled handkerchief and coughed into it, wiping the corner of his mouth assiduously. He was still a proud man.

“Tobias,” I asked, “just what in the hell do the Citizens for Justice actually do?”

“I am shocked that the son of the great Powell Callahan even has to ask that question.” He was smiling.

Tobias took my arm and led me into the small, glass-enclosed space that was his office. There were pictures on the wall of Tobias Green with every Republican president since John F. Kennedy. And a large one of Tobias and my father taken at the Republican convention of '68 in Chicago. They were wearing what looked like identical snap-brim hats and seersucker suits. It was as remote and strange as a Victorian lithograph.

“He was a great one,” Tobias said.

“He was an alcoholic who couldn't keep his hands off any woman in a six-mile radius.”

Tobias laughed. “We've all had our problems with women.”

“Are you talking about me?” I asked. “I got dumped. I never screwed the babysitter.”

Tobias held a finger in front of his lips. “Sssshhhh,” he whispered. “We must give great men their respect.”

“Hey,” I said, “you don't have to worry about me. I'm holding the party line. Straight down the middle. I'd talk to Paulie, if I were you. He's the one who seems to want to start talking about family secrets.”

“Soon to be Commissioner Callahan, then governor,” Tobias said. “A great one in the making.” He paused for a second. “You asked about Citizens for Justice. We're a grassroots activist organization working for the oppressed in our community.”

“What does that really mean, Tobias? Who's paying you?”

“We were involved with the gaming industry for a while.”

I laughed.

“The gaming industry is a great employer of minorities and supports the minority community.”

“You mean they paid you a ton of money.”

“They were appreciative of our commitment.”

“Tobias, I love you. You delivered votes when there was a pro-casino initiative on the ballot.”

“Exactly.”

“And now?”

“We're expanding into utility rates.”

Ahh, what a scam. This was too good. “Utility rates?”

“High rates oppress the poor, Brother Callahan. That I assure you. We are very desirous to support your brother's campaign for public service commissioner. We are confident he will represent the little people when he's on the commission.”