Zorah laughed. “He used to be a fighter. These days, it’s ’Agitation’s a luxury I sure as hell can’t afford.’” She reached to perch a little drummer boy on a limb.
“What’s he mean?”
“He’s an insider. A political veteran now, with a reputation to protect. He can’t be reckless.”
“Do you think my posters were reckless?”
“At your age, your granddaddy would have done the same thing.”
This didn’t comfort me. Did she mean I’d soften, too?
As I stretched to fit a snowy angel on the tree, I felt dizzy, short of breath: the pine needles had provoked an allergic reaction in my lungs. Colors swirled through my head. Reds, purples, pinks. Now, as I gazed at the tree, all the figures seemed to shift. The wise men, the Virgin.
Zorah plugged in the lights. I focused on the bubbles; their pulse steadied my chest.
“Anyhow, don’t worry about your granddad. He thinks the world of you. You know he docs. What is it — History Man? His name for you?”
“History’s Keeper.”
“Right.” She rubbed my head.
“Come on, it’s serious, Grandma. ‘History Man’ sounds like a comic book.”
“I thought you liked comics? All right, all right, I’m sorry. All I’m saying is, this tempest’ll pass. And it’s not like this is anything new, is it? He’s been in the House longer than old Methuselah. Don’t let the old goat get to you, okay?”
“You remember coming up here, couple of years ago?” Harry asked me now in the car. We were nearing Jay, climbing through red and yellow hills.
“The Civil War field?”
“Exactly,” he said. One of his pet projects was preserving historic sites, talking landowners into donating significant property back to the state. Sometimes he took me with him, as a prop. “We want our children, like this young man here, to have a clear sense of their heritage, don’t we?” he’d ask some farmer whose pastures had been the scene of a nearly forgotten bloody skirmish a century ago. Folks rarely refused him.
“You had your tape recorder then,” he reminded me. “History’s Keeper. Didn’t we come back through the city that time and stop at Adair’s?”
“I think so.”
“We wrap up this Jay business pronto, we might do that again. What do you say?”
I shrugged, feigning indifference. He knew I loved the place — Adair’s Tropical Cafeteria in downtown Oklahoma City. He used to take me there after House votes. It’s where he’d turned me into his personal storyteller.
He lit another Chesterfield. Coughed. The smoke irritated me. I remembered Adair’s the way it looked the first time I saw it. It was in a drab shopping center, but the neon palm tree just inside the door promised an exotic experience. To a seven-year-old, the bamboo partitions and jungle wallpaper were thrillingly strange. Usually, Harry was in a fine mood at these meals, having just won a floor fight. Over beets, baked halibut, macaroni and cheese, he’d tell me stories of his early days when he traveled the state as the Boy Orator, speaking for the poor. Eventually I knew these tales by heart.
All my life I’d seen his name — my name — on posters, match-book covers, emery boards: “Vote for Harry Shaughnessy — He Has Always Been Your Friend!” I believed it. We were one and the same, Harry and me.
One day at Adair’s, flipping through my sketchpad, he asked me if I liked to write as well as draw.
I hadn’t thought about it. “Sure,” I said.
“Good. I hope you’ll practice hard, Pancho. Pictures and words. A powerful combination. A right cross followed by a swift left hook.” He leaned forward, over his pumpkin pie. “Every family, like every culture, needs a chronicler,” he said. “History’s our teacher, right?”
“Right.” What was I going to say? He’d told me so, many times.
“You can be History’s Keeper.”
“I can?” I dribbled strawberry ice cream onto the table.
“You bet. I’ve been watching you, and I think you’ve got the skills.”
He winked at me, the kind of comradely signal he’d sent around the House floor. I felt the sway of his charm: my cheeks burned.
Instead of getting me started with stamps, a rare coin collection, or an ant farm, he made his life my project.
I think now he had a sense of himself as a unique individual in a particular place and time, in a way that few of us do, and he shrewdly thought ahead. If I didn’t pan out as his Boswell, at least I’d have the stories to pass along to someone else someday.
He bought a Norelco tape recorder, a heavy, square machine small enough to fit into a coat pocket, and saved his thoughts for me on mini-cassettes. On my visits, he’d slip the tapes into my suitcase. “History’s Keeper,” he’d say, smiling, patting my head.
The next Christmas he gave me my own recorder, “to go with your pencils and paper.” It seemed to me the kind of device I’d seen in James Bond movies. At home, whenever I played Harry’s tapes, I remembered our afternoons in the buzzing light of the neon tree, and my mouth watered with the faint taste of slightly scorched macaroni.
On the hardscrabble outskirts of Jay, pickups lined the highway: rusting, door-sprung jobs, some in need of paint, some painted three or four shades of the same basic color. Empty gunracks filled their back windows.
The guns were in the hands of the Cherokees, Kiowas, and Creeks who flanked the main street into town, in front of hot dog stands, neon beer signs on dark bar walls, gas pumps, signs saying JESUS IS COMING. Store windows were shattered. The Indians wore overalls or jeans, leather coats. They cradled rifles or fingered pistols tucked into the tops of their pants. Their hair was long. I didn’t see any women.
Not far from here, the Joads had scraped and stabbed their sun-cracked acres, but today, with most whites out of sight and Indians in charge of the streets, I’d never seen a less Okie-looking town.
Harry parked the Olds by a state trooper’s car. He’d gone pale. “If I’d known they were armed, I wouldn’t have brought you,” he said, scared or angry or both.
He tossed a cigarette out the window, and we sat there wheezing. Something else we shared, besides a name: neither of us could breathe worth a damn. Years of tobacco had taken a toll on him. I was a mass of allergic symptoms. My hands still prickled from touching Zorah’s tree.
A young white man with short hair and a gray suit waved to us from the side of the road.
When we left the car, Harry told me to stick close by.
The young man introduced himself as Michael Van Buren, one of Governor Bartlett’s aides. “We’re so relieved you could make it,” he said.
“When I spoke to him on the phone, your colleague in the city didn’t prepare me for this,” Harry said. “I was under the impression I’d be talking to two or three representatives of the tribes. This looks like war.”
“They started coming out of the hills last night. Staking out the streets. No one took them seriously at first. I mean, you know, the Indians here have always been pretty much ignored.”
“The problem, perhaps.”
“Right, right. Now we’ve got a scalping party on our hands.” He forced a laugh. Harry didn’t join him. In the young man’s stare I saw a confused quality I’d noticed in many adults. I’d begun to understand — from things Harry had told me — that America’s old rules of civility and order no longer applied to daily life. The Kennedys and Martin Luther King were dead. Cities were on fire. This may have been Jay, Oklahoma, but it hadn’t escaped the nation’s troubles.