“Nothing like death to enhance the old public image.”
“If his corpse were up for reelection, he’d probably win.”
I raised my glass. “What a concept. Suicide as a campaign tactic. The possibilities are fascinating- like adding the post of Official Exhumer to the cabinet.”
Both of us laughed. She said, “Lord, this is grisly. But I’m sorry, I just can’t start liking him because he’s dead. I remember how he used us. And what he liked to do with that call girl. Ugh.”
I said, “Any mention of Dobbs through all of this?”
“Respected psychologist, consultant, et cetera.”
“No mention of his working at the school?”
She nodded. “That was the respected psychologist part. They made it sound as if he’d been treating the kids all along- so much for an informed press. There were also a few questions about a possible connection to the sniping, but Frisk brushed them off with doubletalk: every contingency being investigated, top secret, et cetera, et cetera. Not that any cops’ve been down to talk to us.”
She licked her lips. “Then Latch goes out in front of City Hall, rolls up his sleeves, and lowers the flag to half-mast himself, looking real solemn. Twenty years ago he was probably burning it.”
“People have short memories,” I said. “He proved that by getting elected. He’s gotten his foothold; now he’s angling for respectability. The Great Conciliator. Combine that with the DeJon concert and the fact that it was his man who saved the day, and he’ll probably go down as the hero in this whole thing.”
She shook her head. “All the stuff they don’t teach you in civics class. When you get down to it, they’re all the same, aren’t they? One big power trip, no matter what they claim they stand for.”
No matter what wing…
She said, “What is it, Alex?”
“What’s what?”
“All of a sudden you got this look on your face as if the wine was bad.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said.
“You didn’t look fine.”
Her voice was soft but insistent. I felt pressure around my fingers; she’d taken my hand, was squeezing it.
I said, “Okay. Beady for more weirdness?” I told her about Ike Novato’s research. Wannsee II. The New Confederation.
She said, “Crazies on both ends putting their heads together. What a lovely thought.”
“The expert at the Holocaust Center doubts it actually took place. And if anyone would know, she would.”
“That’s good,” she said, “because that is too weird.”
We both drank wine.
I said, “How’s Matt the car basher working out?”
“No troubles so far. I’ve got him doing scut stuff, wanted to show him who was boss right at the outset. He’s really a meek little kid in an overgrown body. Pretty docile, no social skills. A real follower.”
“Sounds like Holly.”
“Sure does,” she said. “Wonder how many of them like that are out there.”
She let go of my hand. Touched her wineglass but didn’t raise it to her lips. Silence enveloped us. I heard other couples talking. Laughing.
“Move your chair,” she said. “Sit next to me. I want to feel you right next to me.”
I did. The table was narrow and our shoulders touched. She rested her fingers on my knee. I put my arm around her and drew her closer. Her body was taut, resistant. A tremulous, high-frequency hum seemed to course through it.
She said, “Let’s get out of here. Just be by ourselves.”
I threw money on the table, was up in a flash.
As far as I could tell, no one followed us home.
29
We fell asleep holding each other; by six-thirty the next morning we’d shifted to opposite sides of the bed. She opened one eye, rolled back to me, put her leg over my hip, fit me to her, eager for union. But when it was over, she was quick to get out of bed.
I said, “Everything all right?”
“Dandy.” She bent, kissed me full on the lips, pulled away, and went into the shower. By the time I got there she was out, toweling off.
I reached out to hold her. She let me, but just for a moment, then danced away, saying “Busy day.”
She left without eating breakfast. I sensed a reserve- a trace of the old chill?- as if the no-ugliness rule had sheltered us for a few hours, but at the expense of intimacy.
I showered alone, made coffee, and sat down with Terry Crevolin’s book.
Downright turgid would be flattery.
The book was full of typos and grammatical errors. If editing had taken place I couldn’t see it. Crevolin had a fondness for two-hundred-word sentences, random italics, creative capitalization, frequent references to “Ottoman manipulation,” “mercantile demonics,” “the new State-Management Bank,” and quotations from Chairman Mao. (“In wars of national liberation, patriotism is applied internationalism.”)
A sample sentence read: “None of the existent forms of conscious revolutionary rhetoric or transcultural revolutionary activity thus devised by the Labor Discipline and related Labor Vanguards as means of eliminating Commodityism and mercantile demonics seem so far able to self-defend against a steadily diminishing Proletarian Consciousness fermented by an anarchic, carnivalous, mirror-gratifying, and ultimately dissipated pseudo-Ideology concurrently nurtured by the Power Structure…”
All that and pictures, too- photo-snippets culled from textbooks and magazines, some of them sloppily hand-colored in crayon. Headshots of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, Buddha, Shakespeare, and a rhesus monkey. Cloth-capped workers waiting in bread lines. Byzantine icons. Greek statuary. Dustbowl migrants with faces out of a Woody Guthrie song. The Egyptian pyramids. Butterflies. Two pages of ancient weapons- maces, halberds, long swords. A Sherman tank.
I tried to make some sense of it, but the words passed through me without being digested- literary fiber. My eyes blurred and my head began to hurt. I flipped to the last chapter in hopes of finding a summation, some central message I could make sense of. Something that would tell me why Ike Novato had sought out the author.
What I found was a two-page spread of a crayoned mushroom cloud captioned BEAR LODGE, R.I.P., THE GREATS. On the next page was a photo-reproduction of a newspaper story from The New York Times. April 21, 1971. The word LIES! in large red letters had been hand-printed diagonally over the copy. The red letters were grainy. I read through them.
IDAHO BLAST THE RESULT OF RADICAL BOMB
FACTORY ACCIDENT SAYS FBI
BEAR LODGE, IDAHO- Federal and local law enforcement authorities in this rural logging community report that an enormous explosion that took place during the early morning hours was the result of the accidental detonation of a cache of high explosives stockpiled by left-wing radicals conspiring to carry out a program of domestic terrorism and violent political protest.
The explosion, described by witnesses as a “fire-storm,” occurred at 2:00 A.M. and totally demolished a former lumber warehouse and several vacant outbuildings a half mile outside Bear Lodge, in addition to setting off fires in surrounding heavily forested areas that took six hours to suppress. Structures within the town of Bear Lodge experienced shattered windows and minor wood and masonry damage. No Bear Lodge residents reported injuries but ten people in the warehouse are believed to have perished.
“The ground just started shaking. It felt like an earthquake,” said Nellie Barthel, owner of the Maybe Drop Inn Tavern and Truck Stop in Bear Lodge, as she swept up broken bottles and glasses. “Or one of those sonic booms, but a lot louder. Then we saw the fire and smoke pouring into the sky from the east and we knew something had happened out there with those people at the old log depository.”