They came up on the first quarter mile. People watched from driveways, sidewalks, porches, lawns. They watched from upstairs windows, from carports and garages. They stood there holding mugs, folded newspapers, car keys, crullers, muffins, and the garbage. They stood alone, amazed, unsure of what to do. Some heard the muffled wud-wud-wud and looked for the gunship overhead. Others went in and got their families, spouses, kids, excited dogs, and the families stood together, watching. Motorcycle cops were parked along the road every hundred feet. They twisted in their saddles, watching too.
One curve fed into the next. Two paperboys on mountain bikes kept pace with the joggers, jumping curbs, tossing papers at the houses, yelling to each other, slaloming the street. Gretchen saw the paperboys and spoke into her fist. Tashmo and Elias, hanging from the van, touched their ears and stepped off to the street. They tried to shoo the paperboys. The boys evaded them with ease, laughing, pedaling ahead.
The leading cruiser had almost disappeared around the second bend when the press bus came around the first, and for a moment the whole slow strobing spectacle was visible, complete. Somewhere in the center was a jogging man, hips rolling, feet shuffling. He wore a ball cap from a local high school hockey team. He waved the cap at the families in their yards as the paperboys popped wheelies up the hill.
17
The rain predicted for that morning started falling, stray drops, then a downpour for an hour. The VP finished his jog just before the heavens opened. He motorcaded to West Portsmouth for a breakfast drop-in at McDonald’s.
Half the press corps covered breakfast. The rest, bored with photo ops and mindful of the rain, had stayed at the inn, calling sources from their rooms or mobbing the lobby coffee shop. The press hall, off the lobby, was a trading pit of tips and inside dope, journalists from twenty nations running, shouting, hunt-and-pecking at their laptops. Three assistant innkeepers were at the front desk in gold blazers. Six New Hampshire troopers were lounging among ferns. In the hotel’s business center, the VP’s volunteers were getting a pep talk from their leader, Tim the lawyer, field director for the region.
Tim was speaking to a circled group of fifty people, local and imported, one of whom was Peta Boyle. She was dressed for work (corporate pearls, Italian pumps, a houndstooth suit showing off her knees), and she had a business-woman’s day ahead of her. She had no time to volunteer, but she had made the time. She was here because her father, Philip Boyle, mortician of C.E., was a figure of some tonnage in the county party structure, and Peta had inherited his talent for the practical. It wasn’t lost on Peta that Moss Properties did a fair amount of business with the city — vacant lots auctioned off, little whispers about zoning — and it never hurt to hold a chit or two, or many chits, with the mayor’s office. When the county chair, a man named Thomas Monahan (criminal attorney and a family friend), asked Peta to work for the VP, she was glad to be a name he could circle on his list. She had a deep, near-glandular belief in the concept of a party as a tribe, of we pick a guy and back a guy and get him into power — otherwise, what are we doing, thumbs stuck up our asses, while rival tribes get power. The VP, as the choice of the machine, was entitled to support; it wasn’t complicated. Plus, she liked the guy. From what she saw on TV, there was nothing major to dislike.
Tim started the pep talk with a poll. “Who here has done GOTV before?”
Many hands went up. Among the volunteers, there were three hungry-looking women from Mothers for the Truth About Gun Violence, an Oregon school safety group, several tort reformers, two global-warming Deadheads, a smattering of action-seeking retirees up from Sarasota, ten boys from the UMaine football team (earning gut credits for a class on governmental processes offered only to prize athletes at that university), and a dozen bleary Texans from the teachers’ union. When Tim asked the question about GOTV, Peta raised her hand, as did the Deadheads and the tort reformers, and several of the caravanning retirees, and two of the ten football boys (who had somehow managed to flunk the gut class as freshmen the first time around and were taking it a second time in hopes of graduation). The others — the women from Mothers for the Truth and all of the Texans — didn’t raise their hands.
One old woman was a little hard of hearing. She cupped her hand to her ear and said, “What did he say?” This was Jackie Kotteakis, the retired prairie schoolmarm, the captain of the Texas volunteers.
“Who’s done GOTV,” Peta paraphrased for Jackie.
Tim was pacing like a general. “We could win or loose this thing by a thousand votes statewide. GOTV will be essential. Do you have a question, ma’am?”
“I’ve done GOTV,” said Jackie Kotteakis.
“You can put your hand down,” Peta whispered.
Tim continued pacing. “Our goal for today is one hundred percent turnout of our base. Now, how do we do that? Well, we have a plan.”
The plan, like Gaul, consisted of three parts or three subassignments. One group of volunteers would man the bank of phones along the wall, calling the base and generally urging it to vote. A second group would do visibility, pumping signs at intersections, Honk for the VP, Honk If You Love Reform, Honk If You Hate Dead Seas Due to Greenhouse Gases, the purpose being both to flash a last message to the eyeballs of the electorate and to deny prime intersections to the forces of the senator, who would also be asking motorists to honk. A third group would be assigned to GOTV.
“Now,” Tim said, “who here knows the meaning of GOTV?”
GOTV meant get-out-the-vote, the eternal ground game of elections. It meant sending vans of volunteers out into the countryside armed with lists of voters needing rides to the polls. Done properly, GOTV was a satisfying exercise, raw muscle, group effort, people pitching in. Peta knew the meaning of GOTV, but she didn’t raise her hand (Tim’s Q&A routine was getting on her nerves). To Peta, it was more than satisfying. It was the system vindicated, the world working as it was supposed to work.
A volunteer was handing out maps and voter lists, as Tim explained GOTV.
“G,” he said, “stands for Get. Who can guess what O stands for?”
Peta felt like raising her finger, but raised her hand instead.
They took the back roads out of Portsmouth, avoiding the slow death of 95, Peta and four volunteers riding in a placard-covered van. Jackie Kotteakis sat up front. The women from Mothers for the Truth sat in back. Peta, driving, finally felt a purpose, the gathering momentum of the day.
Jackie Kotteakis wore a button on her coat. Peta read the button: Kiss me — I’m a teacher. The button was designed to say a lot about the wearer, to convey a certain sassiness, irreverence, pride in one’s fill-in-the-blank profession or ethnicity (Peta had seen many variations, Kiss me — I’m Irish, Kiss me — I’m Slovakian, Kiss Me — I’m a roofer). On anyone, the button would have made a statement, but on Jackie the effect was particularly striking, Peta thought. Jackie’s skin was deeply wrinkled, lightly powdered. Her hair was silver, flapperishly bobbed. Her shoes were cushioned nylon, an orthopedic sneaker with aggressive arching. Jackie’s manner in the van suggested many things to Peta, the patience of great age, kindliness, good posture, but not sassiness or kissing.