Leon Uris (23 page)

“I hope I can love you as much.”

“You do.”

“Wow!” he whispered at the wonder of it.

“Yeah,” she said, “wow!”

Quinn pulled her tush into his tummy and kissed her shoulders.

“You kidding me, Quinn?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mind if I find out?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

THE ALAMO, MARYLAND
MOTHER’S DAY, 2002

AMERIGUN was a show dog with a single trick, the unimpeded promotion of gun sales. It swore to a single credo. Namely, that any American of any age could buy and own any weapon in any numbers without accountability…as
guaranteed
by Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. Anything less was unacceptable, including baby locks on pistols.

Central to AMERIGUN’s credo, anchored in bedrock, immovable, was to portray gun owners as victims for trying to defend themselves as they were being hounded by a government conspiracy.

The nation had undergone too many bombings, too many drive-by and schoolyard shootings, too many church burnings and too many grown men playing weekend warriors in the woods.

In Bill Clinton there was finally an American president ready to stand up against the violence and its chief perpetrators. Once one of the most feared lobbys in Washington, AMERIGUN’s bite-and-rip bully-boy Doberman tactics were not working quite so well now.

The Clinton reelection in 1996 forced AMERIGUN into a defensive posture. Unable to compromise or
think in any new direction, the organization began to sink in its own muck.

What had been unthinkable a decade earlier, newspaper articles and editorials, magazine pieces, and TV specials now catalogued the perils of reckless gun ownership. A big shift came as the American people solidly supported gun control. The issue was out in the open at last.

Bill Clinton, Southern boy from a Southern state, became the first American president to stand for gun control. He brought his message home by as many executive orders on gun control as he was able.

However, the American Congress defaulted on backup legislation. AMERIGUN used the time-tested stick-and-carrot method on the Congress. Donations to the campaign fund or face defeat in reelection. Because gun control crossed party lines in “traditional” gun states, the political parties were equally timid.

It fell to city councils and state legislators to enact the measures that Washington had defaulted on. In local situations the call against arms had such public support as to allow dozens of new gun-control laws to get on the books.

By 2000 AMERIGUN had been badly battered, having lost tens of thousands of members. Its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, was a dinosaur with a kaput eight-million-dollar computer system. It was crawl out or die.

AMERIGUN’s secret handlers formed a super committee to “guide” the future destiny of the organization. These nine men and two women innocuously called themselves The Combine. Their names were not known to anyone, including AMERIGUN. They represented the weapons makers, lobbyists, and financial controllers.

Weapons makers were always nervous over the
seamier sides of their product: gun smuggling, arms dealing, and massive domestic illegalities. Although AMERIGUN was somewhat diminished, it was necessary for The Combine to keep the organization going as a “clean” shield defending a dirty trade.

New AMERIGUN headquarters, the Alamo, were set up, out of harm’s way, in western Maryland with a view to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Combine reduced AMERIGUN functions. They could carry on shooting seminars, publish the magazine,
Weaponry
, conduct mailings and competitions, and rise up and scream when ordered.

Longstanding leader of AMERIGUN, King Porter, understood that without The Combine’s financial support the organization would collapse.

Once King had been a terrifying predator who gained his spurs in Congress by fear tactics. His fall from grace only lathered up his innards for the moment of revenge.

For two decades King Porter had been the “rock of ages,” cemented into bedrock with a fifty-foot-high, twenty-foot-thick brick wall enclosing his brain.

King didn’t stand very tall in actuality. Most people looking at eye level saw the naked crown of his head with an occasional upright hair from the horseshoe fringe. His skin was stretched tightly over his face, flattening his cheeks into a mouth set with the left side of his face a fraction higher than the right.

His dress, by ancient tailor, had a Western swag to it, back snug and straight with heavily seamed outlines. Heels of Western boots pumped him up a bit. King’s eyes and ears allowed little humor. Not infrequently had he envisioned himself a Confederate general about to lead a cavalry charge when he appeared before a House or Senate hearing.

King Porter was bred and brewed as the middle and smallest male of nine stunted hillbilly kids. In order to survive he had willed himself an aura of power through intimidation. No one doubted he’d set them afire if angry enough. With rage always near the surface he was able to gain mastery over his siblings. The level of rage was usually close to a boil, as was his memory of hunger and its pains.

Porter was at once an unpleasant person, bully, and righteous defender of the Second Amendment.

What really ticked King Porter off was that the names of The Combine were held secret from him. He had to deal with a single person representing The Combine. He loathed her.

Maud Traynor was the lawyer and sole contact to The Combine. She was a middle-aged, expensively dumpy bitch. Her language could startle a drunken sailor. She cracked her knuckles and blew foul cigarette smoke in his sensitive eyes. Maud Traynor, King was certain, was a practicing lesbian.

From his window he could see her pull into the circle in her vulgar red Ferrari. King greeted her at the elevator door with the stiffness of a Prussian field marshal. She pinched his cheek in passing. He smiled through locked teeth.

“Beautiful ride up here,” Maud said. “Saving your booze for the Fourth of July?” She was a nononsense rye drinker. King Porter slid into his seat tentatively.

“We’ve got a problem,” she said right off.

“We have?”

“It’s this off-year election. The polls show us clobbering the dirty dozen we tagged for defeat. But this cowboy running for governor of Colorado is opening his lead.”

“O’Donald?”

“O’Connell. Quinn Patrick O’fucking Connell. It was made clear, King, that we can’t have a gun-control freak in the middle of gun territory. He could poison all the states around him.”

King shook his head. “Too bad his daddy, old Daniel O’Connell, passed on. Dan was a real shooter.” King called for his records. Colorado had been saturated with infomercial tapes to three hundred radio talk shows in the region. Six hundred thousand pieces of literature had been mailed. Two or three weekly leaks to the tabloids had been accomplished. AMERIGUN’s website carried out a gnashing attack.

“Look at this,” King said.

Maud took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “You know what we’ve got here, King?”

“Well, he refuses to answer these charges publicly.”

“Well, fathom that. I said, do you know what we’ve got here?”

“What?”

“A shithole, and we’ve just poured six hundred thousand dollars down it. Your stupid campaign is only making people flock to him.”

“This stupid campaign has worked time and time again,” King argued.

“Can’t you even understand a man who can’t be intimidated!”

“You go with what works,” he answered reactively. “Our education programs have always been successful. Be patient, because eventually some charge is going to stick to him.”

“I’ll tell you what’s stuck. AMERIGUN and The Combine are stuck with a fucking Democratic liberal for the next four years.”

“You were the one who signed off on this Colorado strategy,” King retorted.

“Well, it’s not working,” she grunted. “Close down the Denver operation, phone banks, ads, talk show and media handout sheets, and slink off quietly.”

King pounded his little fist on his desk and wheezed in discomfort.

“As of now,” Maud said, “The Combine wants you to plan a post-election party for O’Connell. Our thinking is that we should move our 2003 convention from Dallas to Denver. What I mean is, we come in blazing and go after the legislators. We bring in Hank Carleton and every kid who ever owned a squirrel gun who has risen to fame. We bus in demonstrators from Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, et cetera, et cetera. We show them how unpleasant life is going to be if gun-control shit is enacted. Your campaign has got to have smarts this time, King!”

“Convention in Denver. You bet it will!”

Maud unzipped and popped open her alligator/lizard/twenty-four-carat gold-trimmed briefcase and tucked in her papers. “Battlefield, Denver 2003. Concentrate your plans on the legislature. I want everything run through me for approval.”

Maud consumed another belt of rye and said, “Ahhh.” She didn’t move. It wasn’t all over. The phone rang mercifully. It was for Maud. Probably her lesbian bitch partner, King thought, or maybe she’d brought a pretty boy to oil himself up in front of her.

“My granddaughter,” Maud said after she hung up. “We’ve a long horseback ride in the hills tomorrow. Ow-ee, I’m getting a bit of a buzz. I’ll bet you’d like me to drive off one of those curlicue roads back to Washington.”

“No such thing, Miss Maud. Do we have any more business?”

“Yeah,” she said, “we’ve got to do something about this fucking magazine,” she said, reaching to an end table and throwing a half dozen copies of
Weaponry
on his desk. She read the covers: “357 Sig, Colt 380, AR–15 keeps gaining fans despite media attacks, Springfields, H&K USP .45 ASP, Savage, how to carry concealed, protecting freedom, more guns less crime. And on page five the smiling face of King Porter on his continuing ‘to the bunkers’ sermon, rewrite one hundred and twenty. ‘We’re under siege, clean decent Americans are being stripped of their birthright by the United States government in defiance of our forefathers who gave us the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment,’ cha, cha, cha!”

Everything that could stretch and stiffen did so inside King Porter.

“Here’s a good one,” Maud said, “God made man. Guns made man equal. Guns are the legacy of liberty.”

“Just because…just because our magazine doesn’t feature a naked woman on the cover!” he cried.

Another belt of rye. “Hell, no, there’s no naked women. The sickos would rather squeeze a trigger than a woman’s breast. Guns are good old boys! They got them wham-whap two-fisted names, like…like Savage, Colt, Ruger, Beretta, Sigs, Winchester…”

Porter’s eyes widened. “Springfield!” he cried.

“Browning!” she exclaimed.

“Luger,” he cried.

“Smith & Wesson,” she said.

“Remington Viper,” he cried.

“Glock. Don’t forget Glock!” she said.

“Markov, Walther!” he retorted with a double.

“H and K,” she said.

“Mauser parabellum,” he cried.

“Anschutz,” she sang.

“Magnum! All sorts of mags,” he cried.

“I quit, you win,” Maud said. “Mags are it.”

King Porter was breathing hard and smiling at winnership.

“You start thinking about a few Sandis, or Debbies or Tracis on the cover.”

“What about Dixie?” he said, miffed. “I’m not turning
Weaponry
into a pornographic sex magazine.”

“Sex?” she said. “What the hell do you think this is all about, King? Guns are the little people’s sex machines. Hell, they are nothing more than the extension of a cock. Bang! The ultimate orgasm! Guns make pissants at the end of the bar as big as Hulk himself. Guns equalize the oppressed in his never-ending battle with the oppressor. Guns are empowerment!”

For a moment King Porter was in a little clapboard church in a gully by the creek at a footstomping
tirade by its preacher. He snapped back to consciousness.

“The Combine is sending some designers to work on
Weaponry
. Maybe we’ll have a miss bang-bang beauty pageant. Let’s sell fifty thousand of them from newsstands and not hide them inside our raincoats. Let’s get ads from Ford trucks and Seagrams and AT&T instead of all those chewing-tobacco ads. Let’s have stories written by real writers.”

Maud was tipsy. She managed to get into the elevator. King watched the circle. The Ferrari took off at a volume that shook the leaves on the trees. Maud Traynor’s red Ferrari screamed down the Alamo’s long driveway and onto the highway. King stood watching on his balcony and taking a few puffs from his inhalator, his baby blanket for years. Hope the bitch is found in scattered pieces at the bottom of a ditch, he wheezed to himself. Suppose she doesn’t run off the road, he thought; maybe I’d better tip off the state patrol there’s a dangerous drunk on the road.

The red tide of liberals was poisoning the country. No longer was he able to use “friendly persuasion” to make certain commies didn’t get on university teaching staffs and the subjects were kept pearly clean. No longer could he visit the local sheriffs and see that things were open for the gun clubs and shooting programs. It was even getting difficult to sway local and state government officials.

The colors outside flamed along with his red orange mood. His capacity to terrify had slithered away. He was in eternal battle, often with his own board.