“Oh, God yes. ‘More time for your nickel.’ Beautiful lovely. Your famous ‘Fourteen Points.’ Continental Divide politics, watershed rhetoric. That caught the old hack off balance, that tumbled him.”
“Now now,” Druff, like a pop, remonstrated gently, “language. We don’t say ‘old hack.’ A little generosity, Dick, please. We say ‘old trouper.’ They also serve.”
But didn’t it just, the commissioner thought fondly, cheered by the memory of his inspired old promises. (With an Inderal assist, the soft toxins of his chemical ease, the solid confidence under his evaporated flopsweats like the stout barbecue, cunning pool and beautiful patio furniture on the beautiful patio behind his homely gray fence.) Flabbergasting his opponent with a sudden, off-the-cuff agenda, the sweet reasonables of ordinary life; astonishing the reporters there, the wide- eyed ladies and gentlemen of the press patting down their pockets for a spiral notebook or a pen that worked while he, on a roll, continued: “If the able-bodied won’t mow their lawns, the city gets someone on welfare to mow them and presents a bill.” Enforcing the weekend curfew for teenagers at the fast food hangouts. All moving violations to be paid by mail. No more futzing with City Hall’s byzantine arrangements. Free jump starts on cold winter mornings if the temperature hadn’t risen into double digits by 9 a.m. (“It’s all traffic,” he’d told them, “government is all traffic and threats to tow your car.”) “In the fall,” he’d said, and quoted himself directly now, in the car, “in the fall, until the first snow, we come by for regularly scheduled leaf pickups. And haul off your oversize objects too, your ancient washing machine, your moldy box spring and mattress. And, if I’m elected, no one—no one—will ever again be required to put anything on the windshield or rear window of his car, safety inspection or tax or city sticker, that has on it any adhesive stronger than the glue on the back of an ordinary envelope.” (“No more senseless scraping!” he’d vowed.)
“I liked the one where you promised to pull the cops out of the inner city and put them back into the good neighborhoods,” his chauffeur reminisced.
“Yeah,” said the quite suddenly downed City Commissioner of Streets (who could have been a contender), “that was a good one.”
“Yes,” Dick the chauffeur said, “the Fourteen Points. Let’s see now, the snow, the chlorine and stop signs and bus schedules. The parking meters, settling fines. Mowing the lawn, curfews. Jump starting the cars is nine. Leaf pickups, no senseless scraping, cops in the low-crime areas, coming by for the furniture in the alleys. I make that thirteen. Did I mention the parking meters? I think so. That’s thirteen. I leave something out?”
“Deuces and one-eyed Jacks are wild,” the stupid old man said sadly.
“God,” said his driver, “you could have been landslide material.”
“Through every Middlesex village and town.”
“What’s that, a Middlesex village and town?”
“Don’t rightly know.”
So they traveled over the potholes in the park, cruising the wintertime, salt-bruised paving, Druff, withdrawn and brooding in the deep, plush recesses of the outlandish automobile. (Because if you traveled in chauffeured limousines they really oughtn’t to have city seals blazoned on their sides, his department’s blacktop, bulldozer heraldics.)
But Dick wouldn’t let it go, relishing, almost licking, his memory like some kid in a school yard, say, recollecting the best parts in a movie, recounting the combinations, all the “he saids” and “you saids” of their (to hear Dick tell it) mythological confrontation. “Remember, Commissioner? ‘Hell no,’ you told him, ‘I’m not mudslinging. It ain’t even gossip. Gossip would be if I named you your lovers.’ Then you listed the facts and figures for him, all the old trouper’s inadequacies and ineptitudes, so that ‘incompetent’ was the least of it, the part the reporters crossed out when they wrote up the story. Hot damn!”
“Now now,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “it was hardly the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”
“Hardly the Lincoln-Douglas, he says.” And then respectfully, seriously, even gravely, “As close as this town gets, Commissioner.”
And Druff, who at his time of life — it was at least past late middle age in his head and even later than that in the cut of his cloth, his chest caving behind his shirts, emptying out, and his torso sinking, lowering into trousers rising like a tide and lapping about him like waves — was actually old enough to think “at my time of life” and so may have been — admittedly — subject to a sort of soft paranoia, all the compounding interest on disappointment, the wear and tear of ambition — hard by, as he was, the thin headwaters of the elderly — and was the first to admit the outrageousness of his surmise and discount the chinks in his argument, discounted his vulnerabilities anyway and suddenly knew the man, his driver, the chauffeur Dick, was some kind of spy.
Well well well.
And even appreciated the fact that he ought to have felt flattered. How many men his age had spies on their case? Even when he’d been on the campaign posters and big outdoor advertising there hadn’t been spies. It was a tribute at his time of life. So why, given his blues and vapors, didn’t Dick’s probable double agency perk him right up? Or at the very least offer some red alert of consciousness or push him to action? Why, if after all these years he was finally a target, didn’t he behave like one and get moving?
Ask him outright, Druff thought. Just put it to him. Say, Why, Dick?
And would have if, just then, a mounted policeman hadn’t called “Top of the morning there”—they were stopped at a stop sign — to them through the open window of the limousine. Druff turned sideways to wave and return the greeting. (Cops, he thought, in all their supposititious ethnics and green, adoptive blarneys; in their drawled, beefy flagpatch, redneck sheriff's ways; in their designer shades and presumptive cool.)
“And the same back to you, Offi—” the politician offered when the horse, or what was more likely, the man himself — startled — did this aborted, electric bolt, a maneuver like a double take.
“Oh,” the cop said recovering, smiling, “it’s you back there, Commissioner. Who’s that up front? Doug-go?”
“Stosh-o wants to know if it’s Doug-go, Dick-o,” the policeman’s City Commissioner of Streets told the driver, frowning.
“How you doing?” Dick said.
“Filling the quotas,” the centaur joked, “no complaints. Ain’t ten A.M. yet, maybe fifteen tourists took my picture. And yourselves?”
“On the trail of fresh potholes.”
“Well,” the cop said, “you’ve a grand morning for it.”
“Just how many people know you and Doug drive each other around?” the commissioner asked when they were again under way. (Under way indeed, thought Druff in the big, nautical-seeming car.)
“You know,” Dick said, “that’s a question that says something about people’s human condition. Lisher? Lisher,” he repeated. “The roughrider, the steed cop. Well, I’ll tell you something, Commissioner Druff. We get our share. More than our share. It ain’t only cavalry guys up on their coursers see that kind of action. You know how many people during the course of a day regard us as a photo opportunity? If I had a dollar.”
“Really,” Druff said.
“Oh,” Dick said, “six bits, four even. You don’t always see this. Often you’ll be indoors on important street business when they come up. They’ll want to know if it’s the mayor’s, the governor’s. They don’t know, it could be their senator’s. Your average citizen is easily impressed but don’t understand his city’s seals from Shinola.”