“They made us read it last year, in eighth-grade English.” A wheeze scratched the back of my throat.
“A lot of Sooners didn’t like the book when it first came out,” Harry said. “Thought it showed poor Okies in a bad light. Longing for the Pastures of Plenty and all. But I always felt it was a mighty fine novel. He knew the way it was.”
“My teacher said he’s a traitor,” I said quietly: a humble little smart-ass.
Harry frowned. “How’s that?”
“Early on, he was on the workers’ side, right? Anti-capitalist, anti-war. Then he got rich. He supported all the killing.”
“I see. We’re back to Vietnam, are we?”
I didn’t answer.
He lifted some weight off the gas pedal. “A wise fellow, a former governor, told me once, it takes a mature man to see the complexities of our culture, Pancho. To change his mind when he has to. I think Mr. Steinbeck must have been a very mature man.”
Paul Harvey finished his newscast. Harry and I stared at the road. The Beatles came on. Their music no longer seemed upbeat or innocent to me the way it once had, and I didn’t enjoy it much anymore. The Fab Four looked old now. They’d grown mustaches and beards and, posing for the camera, didn’t smile as much as they used to. John Lennon had said they were bigger than Jesus, and a radio station in my hometown had sponsored a “Beatles Record Burning.” One of the DJs showed up in a KKK outfit and waved a wooden cross. I didn’t destroy my “gear” 45s, but I didn’t play them, either. Instead, I watched the TV news. Mayhem in Chicago. War wounds. Oh boy. The world seemed a punctured balloon, with all the joy leaking out.
“… nah-nah-nah …”
I reached over and turned the music off.
We stopped at a Dairy Queen just off the highway and ate onion rings. Dead rose bushes twitched in the breeze, tapping the mustard-streaked window by our booth.
“So you’re disappointed in me, is that it?” Harry said, wiping his fingers with a napkin.
I didn’t know what to tell him. His anger, yesterday, was new to me. “I guess I don’t understand you. All the stories you’ve told me
… your resistance over the years …” I faltered.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like opposing the draft,” I said.
“But I registered, didn’t I? Right after the Lusitania. You need to listen harder, Pancho. I followed the law. Everything I did — everything I’ve ever done — has been legal and proper. That’s the point of my stories.” He sipped his coffee. “You remind me of my dad, the Last of the Okie Reds. He wanted revolution and he wanted it now. Well, that’s not the way things work in this country, believe me. I’m mature enough to know that now. It’s not realistic.”
“All right,” I said. “But you don’t really support this war, do you?”
He lit a Chesterfield and coughed. Behind him, a woman in orange stretch pants ordered fries for her two fat kids. “I’m a Democrat,” he said softly. “Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat. It would be unseemly of me, as a representative of the people, to criticize my president.”
“But now that Tricky Dick’s in charge — ”
He picked up a cracked plastic spoon and batted away my remarks. “You’ve got to be realistic.” He looked to me vastly tired, a man who’d suffered for years, bearing lost causes all his life. A spent fighter who’d found it easier just to give in.
The woman herded her kids out the door. “Because I say so!” she snapped. The people have spoken! “Now get in the car!”
If I was a young ideologue, it was Harry’s own damn fault. As a child, I was as familiar with the Oklahoma House of Representatives as I was with swimming pools and merry-go-rounds. Along with Mother Goose I’d been spoon-fed Mother Jones. Before I could read I was spelling out “Come Hear Harry Shaughnessy, The Boy Orator,” copying into my coloring books fat letters from Harry’s old campaign posters. My first real drawings were sketches of his face, from pictures on old socialist fliers he’d shown me, brittle, yellowed, crumbling in my hands.
When the Socialist Party died in Oklahoma, in the patriotic fervor of the First World War, he’d become a liberal Democrat (against his father’s still-militant wishes), running for local offices in Cotton County, just north of the Red River in the southwest part of the state. Finally, in the late fifties, he’d been elected to the House.
Whenever the legislature was in session, he stayed in the Huckins Hotel in downtown OK City. Sometimes my family drove up from Texas to see him. I’d sit in his room with a stack of hotel stationery, copying the latest Herblock cartoons. Harry saved them for me from the Daily Oklahoman. Herblock’s Nixon had caterpillar eyebrows and a slim, spiked schnoz. Pure Evil. I was delighted.
Or from one of Harry’s books I’d trace Bill Mauldin’s weary GIs, Willie and Joe; or Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us”). From the time I could form a reasonably straight line, I wanted to be a cartoonist.
For hours I entertained myself sketching. In ’62—’63, when I was seven, Harry brought me often to the House chamber. He knew I was fascinated by the surroundings, that I thrilled to his speeches. Normally, visitors weren’t allowed on the floor, especially during a vote, but I was just a kid, easy to overlook. It pleased Harry to have his little namesake there. I scribbled it all down.
One afternoon, I sat in the heat, in Harry’s leather chair, watching the edges of my drawing paper curl. Harry stood in the aisle jawing with a couple of other reps. They all wore light gray suits and — at least in my memory — ties the bright morning-blue of the Oklahoma flag. In the air, a faint smell of sweat and aftershave.
The chamber was a rectangle with a green carpet and cream-colored walls. Black, high-backed chairs bumped small wooden desks topped with silver mikes. Up front, a tote board, tallying votes, flashed green and red lights behind the House Speaker’s helm. From the walls, electric globes cast peach-colored circles across the room’s bottom half; the top, an open gallery for newspaper reporters, swam in a cool fluorescent bath.
Young aides in freshly pressed shirts rushed here and there ferrying telephones with long, twisted cords. They’d connect the phones to a desk; a legislator would holler instructions into the receiver, then the aides would collect the cords and sprint to another desk.
Harry leaned near me as I sketched all this. He jotted several names on a piece of notepaper and handed it to one of his partners. “We might have some influence with these knuckleheads,” he said. “I’ve already run our road bill by them, but it wouldn’t hurt if you paid them one more visit before the vote.” The man nodded. “No deals,” Harry warned him. “We’re not in the horse-trading business. Not on this one. Either we have their support or we don’t.”
In the warm chamber light his gray hair looked silky. He sat by me. With a nicotined finger he tapped my drawing pad. “That’s very good,” he said. “Did you just do that?”
“Yessir. What’s a horse-trading business?”
“You know that road north of Walters, that muddy mess out by Harlan Egbert’s farm?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m trying to get the state to pave it. That way, whenever I take you swimming out there, the car won’t get stuck. Won’t that be nice?”