Political Timber (2 page)

“Do I?” checked my look as well as I could in the scratched Plexiglas. “I know I can feel it, but does it show, really?”

“Chuckie, does the man got a glow?” Fins called back over his shoulder.

“I can’t hardly stand it. He’s hurtin’ my eyes.”

“See that, stop it now, Gordie, your hurting the officer’s eyes. He’s gonna put on the shades any second, and there ain’t nothing more depressing than one of them big cop types following you around all day wearing the mirror shades indoors.”

“Slinging with both hands today, Da,” I said, closing one eye like I was about to get hit. “What’re you going to drop on me?”

“Relax. Will you relax? I got a present for you, on account of you’re eighteen now and a legally recognized man.”

I smiled in anticipation. My grandfather was a creative and flamboyant gift-giver, even when he didn’t build up the moment like this.

“Chuckie, could you please?” he asked the guard as he drew an envelope out of his pocket. The guard came and took it, let himself out the special no-entry door that separated Fins Foley from Gordie Foley, and slipped me the paper. Quickly he got back to the incarceration side of the wall, since he really wasn’t supposed to allow Fins to give me stuff. But it was my big one-eight.

I read the form that was inside the envelope. It made no sense to me.

“This makes no sense to me, Da.”

“Read it again,” he said. “It’s kind of important that you can read, and comprehend stuff.”

“Nomination form?”

“That’s right.”

“‘Gordon Foley.’ That’s me, my name there at the top.”

“Correct.”

“Who am I nominating?”

“Gordon Foley.”

“Gordon Foley,” I echoed.

“Gordon Foley.” That echo would not go away.

I stared at the form, trying harder and harder to comprehend, but the more intensely I stared at the words, the more intensely they resisted me. I looked up from them to Fins, who now had one cigar clenched in his teeth and one pointed at me.

Chuckie the guard—whose name tag read
V. McGONNIGAL
—came around again and stuck the kielbasa cigar in my gaping orifice.

“I got a couple parking tickets—think you could fix ’em for me?” he joked. I think.

“Happy birthday, kid.” Fins beamed like a new father. “You’re gonna be goddamn mayor.”

“So what did he give you?”

Sweaty had been waiting in the car while I visited my grandfather. When I returned, she had the top down and the front passenger seat reclined all the way back to where it was lying on top of the rear seat. Her feet were crossed up on the dashboard.

“Didn’t I tell you no feet on the dashboard, Betty,” I snapped, pulling her feet down. I pulled the chamois cloth out of the glove compartment and started buffing.

“Come on, come on, what did you get? A big wad of money? A house? What?”

I couldn’t concentrate until I had finished polishing up the dash. There.

“Um.” I tried to assemble it in my own mind, then to frame it for Sweaty. “The city. He, pretty much, gave me the city.”

“I wasn’t aware he owned it. Damn generous of him.”

“Ya, well, eighteen is one of the big ones. And he does like me a lot.”

“Great,” she said, hopping up straight in her seat and pumping it back to upright position. “Let’s go play with your new present.”

Already Betty was enjoying the whole thing more than I was. This wasn’t good. I wanted to get it too. This was where I should have been fired up, peeling out of the lot with Sweaty on my lap, making for the beach. But...

“Wait here,” I said, trotting in reverse from the car back toward the prison.

Sweaty Betty took her sunglasses off once more and maneuvered the seat back into sunbathing position. I saw her wave way up high past me. I turned to see three or four somebodies waving back from behind a fence on the roof of the building.

“Better hurry,” she called.

“’Cause, as you know, Gordie, they aren’t letting me be mayor anymore, even though everybody wants me to be.”

“I heard,” I said, staring again at my name on the form. “So why do I fall into it?”

“’Cause you’re what I need. You remind me a lot of me a long time ago. You’re young, you’re cute, you’ll be a statement. And I’ve learned, when it’s really important, you can only trust family.”

“So, Da, why not run my dad? He’s your son.”

“Him? I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

So much for the family thing.

“See, I had what they call in the papers a ‘hand-picked successor,’ but,”—he let out a dramatic, wounded sigh—“she ain’t turning out too great. She’s kind of ignoring the boss now she thinks I’m outta the way.”

I waved my hands at him, crosswise, like
stop, stop
! “That’s all fine, Da. But frankly it’s not the part I’m interested in. What I want to know right
now
”—I pointed both index fingers at the floor beneath me, at the here and now, in case he missed my point—“is what are you doing to me? What is going to happen to me here? I’m a senior now, you know. I kind of had plans for this year.”

“What do you think? Think I don’t know? Think the old Da’s so decrepit I don’t remember? I know what your plans are. One big party, puffing your chest out and pulling your pants down, now till May, am I right?”

“Ohhh.” I was about to get indignant when the words registered. “Well, ya. I mean, you make it sound kind of stupid, but I suppose that’s about it.”

He beamed. “See. I been there. And know what? My plan is just going to help you. Jesus, Gordie, you know what it’s going to be like, going through senior year as an eighteen-year-old political superstar? You’ll be beating ’em off with a stick.”

Superstar.

I let him do it to me. The old snake.

“You’ll be goddamn near godlike. Hell, I only
wish
I could have been mayor at eighteen instead of—”

“Whoa. Stop right there for a second. Eighteen-year-old mayor. Da, you’re talking like I’m going to
win.
That’s not going to happen, is it? You’re not going to make me win, are you?”

Fins stood up, stretched his arms high and wide, groaned like a waking bear.

“Don’t sweat so much. It’s not becoming to a candidate for public office to perspire. You don’t have to win, anyhow. You’re going to run a very strong race. Early polls are going to show you opening up a respectable lead, throwing a mighty scare into your opponent. You will become the season’s phenomenon. Newspaper’s going to call you a juggernaut, but don’t be offended, ’cause it’s better than it sounds. Then, Sheena of the political jungle, my former protégée, will come in here and pay me a visit during which she will say the right things. Following that reconciliation, your candidacy will waver, then falter—or maybe it’s falter, then waver. Anyway, in the end you will go down to a very narrow, yet very noble, defeat.”

I thought about it, rode the whole ride on his words. I could see the thing play out, kind of a fun ride, with no resulting responsibility. A potential hoot.

And coincidentally, a hoot was precisely what I had in mind for the year.

“Cool,” I said. “Think there’s any way I could finagle some kind of school credit out of it?”

Fins grinned, turned to Chuckie the guard, then back to me.

“Kid, you’re going to be great at this.”

T
RUTH WAS, I WAS
always considered to be a very responsible guy by the small core of people who got close to me. But since most of them were musicians or people with no discernible hobby, avocation, or place to go, being responsible meant I was the one who wore a watch.

“Mayor?” Mosi screamed over his own distorting amp, at the back of his mattress-padded garage. “I didn’t even know the school had a mayor. That’s the balls.”

I strummed, much more quietly, on an acoustic guitar from Mosi’s collection of instruments, which stood upright on guitar stands all around us like rock-’n’-roll Stonehenge. I really couldn’t play much; mostly hung around with people who could.

“They don’t, Mos. I’m talking about, of the city. Amber. Mayor of Amber.”

“Get outta town.”

“I can’t. I’m gonna run it.”

Mosi nodded his great shaggy head, squinting hard as the smoke from the cigarette rolled back over his face. “Can I be police chief?” he asked, studying his fingers on the fretboard.

“Sorry,” I said. “Promised Sweaty.”

“School superintendent?”

“Hmmm. It’s yours.”

“Excellent. I’m gonna do some big-ass firing first day.”

Flexible Campus is basically the plum of all senior-year plums, where you get to take two days a week out of school to apply to a more worldly, adult pursuit. But you have to present them with a decent plan, like apprentice in an architectural firm, volunteer at a hospital, teach a gym class at a blind school, stuff like that. A lot of kids with no imagination take college classes to get a jump on next year. Yawn. Myself, I was going to try to get into a radio station, maybe learn to work an audio board, wear big professional headphones, get the jock to make jokes about me on air so I could be famous. It was the best-thought-out plan in the program.

But that was before.

I took my seat in Mr. Vadala’s office. Vadala was coordinator of the Flexible Campus program, and the career-track guidance counselor, the one who didn’t want to hear about why you’d been passing out cold in homeroom but would give you a thirty-page printout on the best vocational training programs in the country. In his way, he was the most practical, functional, useful guy on the faculty. Zero shit content, ol’ Vadala. He looked like a retired catcher, broad and squat with fat clumps of curly hair springing up over the collar of his shirt and around the back of his neck. Thinner clumps on the top of his head, which you stared into as he pored over his computer files.

“Mr. Vadala? Ah, I’m here.”

“I know you are. Be with you in a second.” Unlike most people, Vadala kept his computer directly in front of him, like a castle wall, so you had to conduct your business with him over it.

He looked up at me. Removed his glasses and rubbed the two residual red marks on the sides of his shark-fin nose.

“Foley,” I said, helping him along. “Gordon Foley.”

“Foley,” he answered, hit four keys. “Have I seen you before, Foley?”

“Hope so,” I said. “Been here four years.”

“Hmmm.” Vadala leaned in close to the green screen. “I’m sorry, Mr. Foley, but I have no recollection of seeing you before.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “That’s sort of the kind of profile I was after.”

“Here you are.” He pointed at the computer screen. “Foley, Gordon. But there’s nothing here, I’m afraid, Gordon. I keep fairly complete records of the student body, and, well... anyway, what can I do for you? You’re here to pitch your Flex-Campus plan, I imagine.”

“I am.”

“Shoot.”

“I’m going to be mayor.”

Mr. Vadala’s hirsute fingers were already working the keyboard, finally plugging me in there with the rest of the fully functioning student body, when he stopped. “Gordon, this is a very busy time for me, with all your classmates making presentations the same week. Now, I like a good joke as much as the next guy—just a half hour ago one guy proposed that he’d be spending Tuesdays and Thursdays working in quality control at the Sam Adams brewery. I laughed. Another said he was going to spend the two days a week in a sleep-study over at the Deaconess hospital. A young lady told me that if I would allow her to expand her Flex-Campus from two days to three, she would spend the extra day with me at my house.”

That tears it: She does not get the police chief job.

“But I’m serious, Mr. Vadala.”

“You’re serious. You mean to tell me you’re going to spend your senior year—” He stopped himself, staring at me. Put his glasses back on. “Whoa, wait a minute.” Back to the keyboard. He flew so authoritatively over the keys, it sounded like a tiny little Thoroughbred race. “Ah. The annex file tells the story. You’re that Foley.”

I sighed. I could see the political-legacy thing was going to be a burden, bringing knowing leers from everybody.

“So then,” Vadala chuckled, now keying in my proposal. “You’re not only going to run, then, you’re going to
win.
”

“No way, I’m—” I stopped myself when he turned a concerned look my way. “Of course I’m going to win. You don’t enter a race like this if you don’t expect to win it, dammit.” To bone up on attitude, I’d stayed up to watch The Last Hurrah the night before.

“Okay, Foley, Tuesdays and Thursdays you’re a full-time candidate. But remember, the other days you’re still a student.”

“No I’m not. I’m a senior.”

Vadala opened his mouth to snap at me, then let it soften into a gentle, ugly smile.

“Okay, that was a good one.”

I shook his hand when he stood.

“And at the end, you still owe me a report, just like everybody else. At least try to learn a small something from your experience.”

I continued to pump his hand. Practicing. And ignored what he was saying while I concentrated on making my pitch. Still practicing.

“So I hope I can count on your vote come election day,” I campaigned, through my wide, cheesy smile.

He sat down, spoke into his computer.

“Well... it’s not important to your grade, anyway.”

I passed Mosi on my way out. I gave him the thumbs-up, which caused him to charge right in.

“I’m going to be working in the incoming mayor’s administration,” I heard him say.

“I do not care to listen to another joke proposal,” Vadala popped.

“Hey, you. You don’t want to piss me off,” Mosi barked. “
You
just might come begging into
my
office after the election.”

He sounded awfully close to believing all this.

“No direction, huh?” I said to my dad as he came through the front door. I had his big easy armchair dragged over to the front door, where I sat regally, mayoralty, awaiting him. “Just getting by? No master plan? No ambition?”

“You joined the debate team,” he said hopefully.

I shook my head. “Debate’s so
negative.
”

The phone rang.