“It was... I hate the stupid word, but... a fling. We were together at work a lot, he was having trouble at home, I admired him, still do admire him, I could tell he liked me... and it just, you know... happened. It lasted all of a week and we both came to an awareness that there were things bigger and more important than both of us and our... petty desires.”
That sounded like somebody else’s words not hers. Somebody who had something in his pants that had gotten bigger than both of them.
“But you stayed on with the Coalition,” I said.
She nodded vigorously. “Yes. The cause really is more important than some personal relationship that... that...”
“Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Something from an old movie. When was this? The fling, the breakup?”
She sighed. “Last month. It’s been a strain at headquarters ever since. His wife wants... wants me fired... guess I can’t blame her... but so far Raymond has refused. I’m hoping I can just, just weather it.”
I raised my Coke glass. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
She lit up. “Oh. That movie.” She grinned but her eyes were moist. “I don’t think anybody ever looked at me and thought of Ingrid Bergman before.”
“Oh I don’t know. I think maybe there’s a Swede in the woodpile.”
Her mouth dropped like a trapdoor and she tried to be offended, but could only smile. “Jack, you can be so outrageous sometimes.”
“I’m out there, all right.”
Before we left the truckstop, I picked up a L’Amour novel that was new to me, The Broken Gun.
Back on the bus, the portable radio was playing, “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers, and she did, getting a little sleep now that the sun had gone down. I slipped an arm around her. God, she smelled good.
Now that I knew how that prick Lloyd had taken advantage of her, getting rid of him didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Eight
About an hour and a half before the rally was to begin, the bus rolled into a lushly wooded campus that blazed with orange, yellow, red, purple, the dying sun cutting through dying leaves like it was jealous.
We were at the west end of DeKalb, a modest farm community, but every college campus is a world of its own and Northern Illinois University was no exception. The student union was a couple of modernistic glass-and-stone floors with a sudden skyscraper at the left end, like a Howard Johnson’s had turned abruptly into the UN.
That add-on obelisk was mostly hotel, the eighth through fourteenth floors anyway, nine rooms each, most of which the Coalition had booked. Through crisp football weather, staffers and their suitcases moved from parking lot into the student center and checked in at the front desk off the lobby; with that busload it took a while.
It was two to each reservation, but I’d been a late addition and wound up with a Holiday Inn-like room of my own, on the twelfth floor. I freshened up but did not change my clothes, and collected Ruth and went down to a central café called the Pow Wow for a bite before the rally.
The place was packed, every table taken, so we joined an overflow of kids carrying their burgers, fries and Cokes into a nearby lounge with walls of that same rec-room paneling I’d seen at the Nazi church. We snagged side-by-side orange-cushioned metal chairs, turning sideways to eat off a small white table between us. The food was barely edible, but we wolfed it.
“I don’t see any sign of either man of the hour,” I said, between bites of burger.
Ruth had changed into a Zebra-print maxi-dress that hugged her slender curves. Oversize hoop earrings again, dark eye shadow, very red lip gloss. She was a stunning young woman and a lot of eyes found her, standing out as she did among this mix of sweatshirt-and-jeans college kids and Coalition staffers in Brady Bunch colors and bells.
“Mr. Nimoy and the Reverend,” she said (avoiding calling Lloyd “Raymond” now), “are meeting with the black student group who invited them. They’ll each make an entrance at the rally. Anyway, if they walked through here, it’d start a riot.”
She didn’t mean race riot — she meant the young people among us who wore LIVE LONG AND PROSPER t-shirts.
I said, “I’m a little surprised no Nixon supporters were around when we got here.”
She shrugged. “They’ll probably be out there by now. On either side of the sidewalk, an idiot gauntlet for attendees to run. But, really, we haven’t run into too much trouble lately.”
I figured that was because Nixon was so far ahead in the polls, but kept it to myself.
“For having two such famous guests,” she said, licking mayonnaise from a plump red upper lip (get your mind out of the gutter), “the college hasn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet.”
“No red carpet even for reds?”
She smiled a little. “Not even for reds. They have a lovely auditorium here, I understand. It’s sitting empty tonight. So is the ballroom upstairs. Meanwhile, we’ll be in the cellar.”
Soon enough we were down there, in a low-ceilinged, tiled-floor, gray-walled space about the size of a grade-school gymnasium. Vending machines lined one wall like hoods waiting for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to start; some couches and chairs were pushed against the other walls, indicating this was a rearranged lounge area. Maybe fifty folding chairs (with standing room behind) faced a small riser with a microphone on a stand and no podium. A wall-draped McGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT banner, white letters on blue, provided a backdrop.
As staffers, we were let in early by members of the black group sponsoring the event. Security was limited to a pair of DeKalb-uniformed cops and a trio of light-blue-uniformed NIU security guards. The whole thing was feeling a little half-hearted and sad to me, but when the doors opened, kids came pouring in. The fifty folding chairs were gone faster than life-boats on a sinking ship, which was maybe fitting for the McGovern campaign.
The Coalition staffers, most of whom were not much older than these college kids, didn’t take any of the chairs, spreading themselves among those who wound up in the standing-room area. As the audience buzzed and settled into their seats, a recording of “Abraham, Martin and John” came over the scratchy sound system.
“Is that Nimoy singing?” I asked Ruth, who was standing beside me.
She nodded.
It didn’t suck, but the Star Trek contingent among us — likely the majority — began to whoop and applaud as if the Beatles had showed up suddenly to rescind their break-up and run through a few numbers.
As the song finished, Nimoy — in a gray turtleneck and blue jeans — came in and strolled to the little stage, smiling, nodding, waving. With his shaggy side-burned hair and square-lensed glasses, he looked more like the hippest professor on campus than a TV star. The folding-chair winners were on their feet, clapping, whistling, hooting, and he gave them the Vulcan salute — palm out, middle finger and ring finger parted, thumb extended.
With that same hand, he settled everybody down, and when somebody started to dim the lights, he asked for them to stay up.
“I am not a politician,” he said into the microphone. “I don’t have to support local candidates if I don’t believe in them. But I’m here to tell you why I’ve visited thirty states, campaigning for George McGovern.”
He was unpretentious and low-key and easy to listen to, but my focus was on the crowd — probably around two hundred of us in here — to see if there were any interlopers, any troublemakers. If there were, and I could handle them without much fuss, that would get me points and closer to the inner circle. But almost everybody here looked like a college kid or a little younger or a little older, and it was clear this was more a Star Trek event than a George McGovern one, not that those were mutually exclusive.