Leon Uris (36 page)

“Without Greer my campaign would have never gotten off the ground, nor could it run so well.”

“Follow-up question, Governor. Were you and Ms. Crowder romantically linked?”

“We sure were. We were sweethearts at the University of Colorado thirty years ago. She was also an excellent baseball coach and raised my batting average almost forty points.”

“Doesn’t it seem newsworthy, sir, that Greer Little-Crowder is now a powerful person, throwing herself into your campaign?”

“Obviously, she was anguished by the Four Corners tragedy and, along with millions of Americans, believes the Second Amendment must be repealed.”

“Louise Markham,
Washington Times
. Have you and Ms. Crowder had contact in the intervening years?”

“Well, not the kind of contact you are hinting at. We’ve met on public occasions.”

“Governor, Chance Spencer, MSNBC. Did Ms. Crowder resign or simply take an extended leave?”

“Hold the phone, ladies and gentlemen. You’re leading me down a dirt road to the woodshed. For God’s sake, don’t throw us back to the dark ages of 1998 and the damage it wrought, and the torture imposed on a great but imperfect man.”

“What about the public’s right to know?”

“That right ends at my front door. I hope I will be able to invite everyone into my parlor. The rest of my home is a private place between me and my wife and family, and God.”

*  *  *

Showdown time in Dixie. Six of the eight primaries were in the South. Florida and Texas, two of the mega-states, loomed in front of Quinn. A favorite son candidate from Florida, Governor, and later Senator Chad Humboldt, girded to stop the O’Connell train.

Quinn’s family began to surface in the press and interviews. Rita and her smile and her kind ways. One had to think back to Jackie Kennedy, although Rita’s beauty could scarcely be matched.

Hey, that Duncan, what a hunk! He left the daily nuts and bolts of the ranch operation to Juan Martinez. He spent most of his hours in the veterinarian and animal research facility built on the property.

It was only fitting that Duncan fall in love with a Glenwood Springs veterinarian, Lisa Wong, of Asian-American heritage. She came to Troublesome on a research grant, to positively determine the shelf life of eggs. She saw Duncan enter through the chicken coop…and that was that.

Duncan went campaigning and saw to his father’s rest periods, filtered the incoming communications—a lion at the gate.

Lisa remained at the ranch, seeing to the comfort of her grandmother-in-law Siobhan, who was failing to cancer.

Rae, a computer scientist at the Atmospheric Research Institute in Boulder, took a leave of absence to set up and operate the campaign headquarters’ computers. She reported to Greer on everything from collections to travel reservations to advertising.

Rae tried one four-day campaign swing with the candidate, and that was enough!

…because everything blurred together: airports, welcoming committees, Secret Service men moving back TV cameras, shouting correspondents, “Would you mind a picture with Mrs. Gumport?” “I’d love it!” Quinn would answer…hamburgers, baloney sandwiches, tourist class, Big 8 motels, polls, TV studios, talk radio shows, ballrooms, school auditoriums, “Let’s hear a rah-rah O’Connell,” homes for the aged, beady-eyed big donors, wide-eyed girls with short skirts, throw out the first pitch, press conferences, more press conferences, short parades in small towns, Irish, Jews, Italians, Gulf Coast fishermen, Mexicans, wheat farmers, black mayors, white mayors, tan mayors…Sunday. “Rita, you go pray for me, honey, we’ve got meetings every twenty minutes”…Internet, outer nets, books as wisdom, “Can we get this pressed and have it back in an hour?”…“What the hell do you mean, I’ve got a fever? I can’t have a fever, because I’ve got to be in Des Moines,” “We need cash, boss,” position papers, “Happy Days Are Here Again!”…orange juice, lots of orange juice…“Am I going to have time to go to the john?”…“Sorry, not till our next stop, Governor.”

Chad Humboldt blistered the South through innuendo. The word Catholic was not used out loud, but it played in the Christian Right churches. The gist of it was that O’Connell is only pretending to be one of us, but he isn’t. He’s a brooding mountain man, and when he looks you in the eye it is impossible to know if he is truthful. “Let us not forget that we have had presidents who looked us in the eye and lied through their teeth.”

Chad Humboldt was a generations fixture supported
by a sudden coalition of politicians in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and mighty Texas. Be cautious of the stranger. Be cautious of his inexperienced views on the issues. Humboldt wove around the gun-control issue but warned of a stranger who would steal away the traditions.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI-MONDAY
MARCH 10, 2008

“You’re going to the well once too often,” Greer snapped. “It won’t play in Jackson.”

“It played in Atlanta.”

“It had great surprise and shock value, granted, but that was then and now is now. No electorate is going to keep listening to morality plays. We are in Apache country, Quinn.”

“Ummmm.”

“Rita, Mal, help me, for chrissake.”

Mal scanned the polls. “We’re behind in every Southern state—well, you’ve got a small lead in Oklahoma, but they’re a sister state to Colorado.”

Quinn did not speak. He seemed to be drifting off again in some kind of narcoleptic state with an inner concentration that shut out external noises.

“If I were a gambler,” Mal said, “I’d say, go ahead, make your doom-and-gloom population-control speech. This isn’t a gamble. You’re going to lay an egg.”

“So we’re going down either way! What can I do but gamble?”

“Play it safe,” Greer said. “And let’s get out of here with our ass intact and go crazy in the big Midwestern states. That’s only a week away…and then California.”

Duncan arrived with a late bulletin. “Dad, Denver reports we picked up over three hundred thousand this week.”

“Good, we won’t have to hitchhike out of here,” Quinn said.

Otherwise, Quinn was stubbornly silent and the rest, gnashingly frustrated, wanted to shake him.

“Fuck it!” Greer screamed.

“You’ve grown awfully hardheaded,” Mal said. “Your state senate office in Colorado was a place of conciliation and compromise.”

“Because,” Quinn answered drudgingly, “whether Democrat or Republican we were all hard-core Coloradans. Maybe we’ve treated these people down here like country bumpkins for too long. There are issues besides the Second Amendment that I have to save for Thornton Tomtree. We have to hold our fire until we see him in the crosshairs. Hey, guys, love you all. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“And the next president of the United States, Quinn Patrick O’Connell!”

“…one thing in this campaign has really bugged me, and that is my challengers trying to put across the idea that I come from a strange place to a place where I have no business. They go further. They say, ‘What can a governor from a small mountain and prairie state possibly know about Southern history and tradition and politics? If, God forbid, a Coloradan gets to the White House, what will happen to us?’ I resent the past isolation of the South, and I resent the Chad Humboldts who want to keep this isolation going.

“I resent it when I am told, do not make a doom-and-gloom speech in Mississippi. Do not bring up overpowering moral issues because the Mississippi
electorate can’t get it. They want honey on their hush puppies.

“I believe an informed electorate, an informed
American
electorate, North, East, South, or West, should be aware of the concerns of our leaders. I am deeply worried about a lot of things which can no longer be shoved into the closet.

“So, muffle the drums. We are gutting this planet close to the point of no return.”

Greer closed her eyes, but the thumping of her heart could almost be heard. Duncan took his mother’s hand. Both hands were wet. Maldonado felt a hard stab, and wanted to stand up and scream for Quinn to stop.

“…In a word, we are taking more out of the planet than the planet has to give in order to sustain life.

“All over we see ominous signs of a lessening quality of life, bald spots for shopping malls ripped out of the evergreen forests of New Zealand…Indians fighting off elephants coming right to the village edge to get at the leaves in the tall trees…wood bearers having to go miles to find firewood that used to be on the edge of their fields…dead fish who can’t get over the dam, crushed by generator blades…green slime we spill back into our waters that takes the oxygen away from millions of shellfish…the shark, the most ancient and perfect fighting machine, now facing extinction. Sixteen lanes of blacktop running the length of Florida, covering forever destroyed rich pastures. Deep plowing that has eroded our great prairie farmlands and blown away irreplaceable topsoil.

“Yes, I believe that the people of Mississippi understand this. And I know you understand when I say that fifty thousand people die of starvation and malnutrition every bloody day of the year. Sixteen
million deaths from hunger a year—a child dies every six seconds.

“The planet, with all its great agricultural innovations, cannot feed our present world population of four billion people. How in the name of God is it going to feed eight billion, the number that will inhabit the earth this century.

“We must chart an intelligent course through these minefields. I know that population control offends my church and many of your beliefs. I know that from the beginning of time poor men have counted their riches in the number of children they could produce. It is a luxury we can no longer afford, and it’s going to happen to your children and grandchildren unless we recognize what’s going on and do something about it!”

“Tell me, and I’m listening, how are we going to survive to see the next century without population control?…”

“Oh, Jesus, he did it!”

*  *  *

Thornton Tomtree took two top White House people and moved them to his election campaign. Hugh Mendenhall, a hefty, bubbly wizard of the polls, and Dr. Jacob Turnquist, the analyst. They were close enough to T3 not to be overcome with fear in his presence. Like any great executive, Thornton allowed those close to him to take him on and speak their minds.

The nation had undergone the first anniversary of the Four Corners Massacre. Thornton had flown over Six Shooter Canyon in a helicopter and afterward laid the cornerstone of the permanent memorial.

He had done just enough on his unopposed Republican reelection campaign to keep his name high, and took the convention by acclamation.

But so had Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell in a boisterous, bombastic Democratic convention in Detroit.

On Thornton’s return to Washington, he called in Hugh Mendenhall and Dr. Jacob Turnquist and repaired with them and Darnell to Camp David.

“Ahhh!” said the President.

“Ahhh!” Turnquist and Mendenhall agreed.

“Ahhh!” said Darnell, and poured from the large pitchers of Bloody Marys. The President’s steward adjusted the awnings to keep the sun off the patio.

Darnell Jefferson lay back in a chaise longue chair as a listener.

The time was here to start blazing away at the Democratic opponent. The weekend was to detail strategic warfare. There was the sound of celery stalks being crunched.

“Our jingle-jangle rope-a-dope cowboy is going to be a handful,” the President said.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mendenhall bubbled. “O’Connell talking birth control in Mississippi. He’s got to trip and fall; he’s too disorganized and reckless.”

Jacob Turnquist always had his authoritative, sincere, goateed, think-tank expression. “Or,” he suggested, “are we dealing with a political genius? He knows, like a bird riding the wind, just how far he can ride any issue. He is developing quasi-fanatic followers…and keep in mind, all he has done so far is to present himself with a soft-shoe dance. He has only touched on significant issues superficially. He has given the Second Amendment wide berth. Why? Until he got control of the party—now he can take dead aim at you. Up to the day he won the convention, he took wild gambles to gain attention…for example, financing through populist means…we are now facing close to two million voters who have invested in him, who will show up at the polls.”

“Clever desperation. It worked this time. It never worked before,” Mendenhall said. “We’ve got to look back to Four Corners to understand the trepidation the voters still have.”

Tomtree spoke, and both leaned forward, Darnell still the quiet, removed observer. “What the son of a bitch has done,” the President said, “is deliberately start an erosion of our Southern base. A lot of Baptist women are on birth-control pills, and a lot of Baptist women don’t like the guns in their husbands’ closets. His invasion was either going to blow him out of the race or establish him as a powerful new force. Now, what are we dealing with?”

Turnquist spoke keenly, sincerely, earnestly. “Quinn and Chad Humboldt barely slapped each other’s wrists. Our ace in the hole, Vice President Hope, has held his end of the coalition of the right wing together for twenty years.”

“It’s our imperative,” the President said. “The vice president will be here tomorrow to get his marching orders.”

“We’re still leading in the South,” Mendenhall insisted. “It’s still O’Connell’s to take, and my money is on Matthew Hope.”

“Have we got anything on O’Connell?”

“He’s refused to answer questions of a personal nature,” Hugh Mendenhall went on. “I think, maybe, the press has gotten his message. They now approach him with caution, even respect, one might say.”