Political Timber (5 page)

Opposite that window, to the right of the entrance and just as prominent, was a banner. White background, alternating green-and-orange letters, a smattering of shamrocks, and at either end a lion rampant holding the whole thing up.

FOLEY FOR MAYOR

Welcome to campaign headquarters.

“Have a slice, kid. You like a slice?”

I was sitting in a booth with my head in my hands. Bucky had recognized me and come right over. He stood there smiling, one hand in the pocket of his brown double-breasted, the other hand stuck out to me for shaking. Spotless, with polished fingernails, old Buck was most definitely the proprietor here, not the help.

“And some fries. Maybe a steak-and-cheese with some onions, nice, over the top?”

I shook his hand, or rather, was shaken by it.

“No, thanks, can’t. Gotta watch the skin. Fins takes an oil sample on my face once a week. If he finds a new zit, he zucks it with his nail clippers.”

Bucky laughed heartily, as if there were a video camera recording him. “Sure, then. Let’s just get down to beeswax.”

“Huh?”

“Hell, I gotta remember how young you are. Beeswax. Business. Like, mind your own beeswax.”

I shrugged.

“Okay fine,” Bucky huffed. “We’ll work on your frame of reference later. Right now, come, let me show you your machine.”

My
machine.

Bucky flipped up the piece of counter that led to the back of the shop, then pushed open the door to Foley Central. He waved his arm over the room, and said, “Here it is, kid, and it’s all yours. They do for
you.
”

“
This
is cool,” I said as I surveyed the operation. “Can they, like, take care of my school election, too? See, I kind of got sucked into running for stupid student body president... but frankly I haven’t got the time.”

Bucky nodded, looked at the personnel. “Don’t waste none of your time, Gord. I’ll assign somebody right now. Hey you, college boy,” he said, waving some guy over.

“Good,” the guy piped as he stood up. “Finally.” The college boy, just two or three years older than me, with Mr. Peepers specs and straight black hair cut to one length all around his jawline, slapped a pile of envelopes down on the folding card table in front of him. He walked right up to me and pulled something like a baby condom off of his thumb, shoving it in my hand. “Your turn. You’re on collating and mass-mailing duty as of now.”

Bucky reached out his big hairy mitt and clopped the guy on the side of the head.

“This is the goddamn
candidate,
ya horse’s arse. Goddamn college donkey.”

Bucky reached out with the other hand for good measure, and clopped him again on the other side.

“Hey,” the kid squealed as he recoiled. “You better cut that shit out, Bucky man. I know my rights.”

“Ya? And I know your father. And if you don’t get some political patronage out of this, he won’t pay for your school no more.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” I said, but nobody wanted to hear that.

“Goddamn college monkeys,” Bucky snapped, turning to me. “Don’t take no shit from any of ’em, Gordie.”

Not from any of them. As the specs guy slinked back to his table with his thumb condom, I took in the rest of them. The day shift. Two geezers sitting in front of phones playing checkers. One guy in an apron, with about half a foot of Polish sausage hanging out of his kisser, actually talking on the phone. He wasn’t talking about my candidacy, however, unless “I’ll bring the ouzo, you bring the ooze,” was somehow part of the strategizing. A thirtyish woman in a knee-length dress and mountain-climbing boots ran up to me, blinded me with the flash of her camera, then ran away again backward, as if she were afraid of the ocean and I were a breaker.

It reminded me of the campaign headquarters in
Taxi Driver
and Joe College was nutso Travis Bickle.

“I’m a political-science major,” he said while madly leafing through a pile of envelopes and slapping computer-generated mailing labels on them.

“That’s good, Travis,” I said.

“My name is Anthony.”

In my pocket, my Batphone rang. Travis-Anthony looked up, surprised. I let it ring again as I stared at him.

“Well, I have a flip phone,” I said, pointing at myself in case he didn’t get it. Bucky excused himself to the kitchen as I picked up.

“Fffoley campaign,” I answered, to impress my grandfather as well as my office slaves.

There was nothing but moaning on the line. Exquisite, well-practiced moaning.

“Sweaty.” I covered up, walked toward the corner of the room near the drafting table. “Jesus, Sweaty, how did you get this number? Only Fins is supposed to have this number. If he finds you steaming up—”

“Fins gave it to me.”

“Bullsh—”

“Wanna know why?”

“I do not. Betty, I’m in the middle of—”

“I visited him.”

“Swell.”

“He’s really very lonely out there.”

“Don’t.”

“I am too, Gordie. Very, very lonely.”

“You’re just... teasing me. You’re always like this when I can’t get at you. So no, I’m not—”

“I think next time I visit the poor lonely guy I’ll ask him for the car. He really likes me—”

“With my bare hands, Sweaty. If you get your meat hooks anywhere near that car—”

Betty was giggling uncontrollably on the other end of the line. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll let you keep the car, but I do want you to come pick me up.”

“For god’s sake, Betty, I’m trying to become mayor here. ...”

“Okay, Gord. I can get somebody else. I think I just saw Marinovich. He’s always offering to—”

An involuntary groan slipped out. “Where are you? Don’t go
anywhere
in a car with that degenerate Marinovich. Maybe I can get away soon.”

“School. Teachers’ lounge. But I can’t wait forever, Gordie. My best years are, like, wasting away while you play politics.”

I slapped the phone shut and jammed it into my pocket. I spun around to find Bucky watching, and listening, with a wry grin on his doughy face.

“Women,” he said, like he’d known any.

I nodded.

“She voting age?”

I had to think for a second. “Ah, does it matter?”

Bucky laughed. “Just like the old man,” he said.

He gave me the day off.

By the time I burst through the door of the teachers’ lounge, she was gone. In her place was the counselor, Vadala, just sitting down with the dregs of the day’s last coffee, and Betty’s powerful scent. I was getting like a dog, the way I could smell whether she’d been in a spot within the previous six hours, and the way I wanted to roll over and over in that spot.

“Foley,” Vadala said brightly. “I sure don’t have any trouble remembering you now. Have a seat, boy, you’re all sweaty.”

“Is she still here? Have you seen her?”

“Who?”

I threw myself down into a chair. Yup, she’d been in it.

“Never mind,” I sighed.

“Staying late today?” he asked, and nodded approvingly. “Bravo.”

“Truth?” I responded. “Just arriving.”

“Oh, my. That’s not good.”

“Mr. Vadala, I have to tell you... it’s only the first week of Flexible Campus, and Jesus—”

“Don’t thank me, Foley. Hell, if one more senior thanks me for letting him have two cake days a week of working out at the gym or grooming horses... What is it with girls and horses, anyway? Can anybody tell me about this?”

“Or running for mayor.”

“How’s that going, anyway? Pretty exciting I imagine, and educational.”

“I imagine.”

“Wait, now, aren’t you also running for student body president?”

“No,” I sighed with fresh new fatigue. “I’m a politician now. I am running a political machine, and the
machine
is running for school president. Is there any more of that coffee?”

“The education of a public servant,” Vadala said.

“Exactly,” the candidate answered.

Mr. Vadala slid me his cup. I took it. I nearly spilled it when the door flung open again and the brown blur, Mr. Coffey, blasted into the room. He was dressed the way he was always dressed, like a UPS driver. Brown polyester pants and shirt, brown shoes.

Coffey was a snapper-pointer. He snapped his fingers, pointed at me, snapped his fingers, pointed at me, etc., rapidly.

Eventually he got it. “Foley, right?”

“Right.”

“Mr. Foley’s going to be mayor, Mr. Coffey. And student body president,” Vadala offered.

“So I hear, so I hear,” Coffey replied as he groped at a polyester itch. “Got an awful lot of ambition there, kid.”

“He’s been storing it up over freshman, sophomore, and junior years, so he’s got a surplus.” Mr. Vadala winked at me as he said it.

“Heard you on the radio last night,” Coffey said.

Why did the sound of that statement make my short hairs prickle? Was not fame the point of all this?

“Your grandfather is, in my opinion”—Coffey paused when his voice broke—“probably one of the ten greatest goddamn Americans of the twentieth century.” He misted.

I sighed, relieved and even touched. Fins wasn’t making it all up—he sure was beloved by his people.

“So how can you sit there and allow that... troglodyte to make jokes about him all night?”

I tensed up again, stomach clenching, palms sweating.

“Time-out here,” Vadala said. “Radio? Foley, you were on the radio?”

“It’s... a little internship thing I got. No big—”

“Yes, and as part of his little internship thing he sits there while a person named Mad Matt says things like, ‘Oh, the great irony: What the taxpayers once paid Fins Foley to do to them, they now pay three-hundred-pound convicts to do to Fins.’ Well, har-har.”

“What?” Vadala was way lost.

“I think you had to be there, Mr. Vadala. It sounded funnier last night.”

Coffey stomped to the cooler, blubbed himself a paper cup of water. As he swilled, I waved to Mr. Vadala and slithered out.

When I reached the car, she was there. I could see her from a hundred feet away, bouncing in the seat and jerking the real-wood steering wheel back and forth and back and forth. She looked truly happy and excited, like a little kid, there in the driver’s seat. And I knew just what she was doing because I did it myself, all the time: Driving in standstill with the mind doing seventy-five through the wiggly heat vapors on the wide-open road. Just like a little kid.

She jumped when I tapped on the glass. “Hey, hi,” she said nervously, straightening her hair in the rearview. As if I’d caught her in the back with a guy or two. She scooted over and I took my rightful place at the wheel of the Gran Tourismo Hawk, and none of it mattered now.

I started to say something, but she stopped me. “Can we just go, Gordie? Driving?” She smiled at me, put her hand on my arm, then smiled at the dashboard.

That was one reason I could love Betty. Because Betty loved the car as senselessly as I did.

A turn of the key and all other stuff wafted up and out in the cloud of blue-brown exhaust smoke. I watched it in the sideview. Gorgeous.

In the morning, early and clear-eyed this time, I was back at headquarters. At the slower speed, in the earlier light, it looked different to me now. It looked more realistic. I saw my position.

I saw it in the window.

FOLEY FOR MAYOR
. It was no accident that there was no first name there. It wasn’t even a new banner.

I was a stand-in. Which was perfect for me. A lark. But it was dawning on me that the old man didn’t quite feel the same way.

“Good to see ya so early, Gordie,” Buck said as he opened the front door to me before I was really ready to go in. I went in anyway.

“Pepperoni and egg? Pepperoni and egg. Sure, you’ll have one with me. Black pepper, ketchup, and a little sprinkled Romano.
That
is a breakfast, young man.”

In his shirtsleeves, Bucky whipped up a couple of fat breakfast subs for us. Then we took the sandwiches out back, to the War Room, as we office-seekers say.

We didn’t talk at first, as we both realized how disgusting that would be with the mash of food in our mouths. Instead, I started pawing at the papers spread around. There were drafts of letters to prospective voters introducing me, letters of support from prominent Amberians endorsing me even though they’d never met me, and there was the flier. A one-page sheet with some background information about my family (true enough), my Boy Scout achievements (greatly embellished), and my community service (news to me). But this was all standard stuff that we could have produced in our seventh-grade mock election in current-events class. What I did find interesting was common to every single piece of literature. Very lightly, ghostlike, in the background of every piece of campaign literature like a watermark, was the silhouette of the 1963 Studebaker Gran Tourismo Hawk. Top down, of course. My car, but, more importantly, for the last two decades or so, Fins Foley’s trademark.

So, not only had the car stolen my girlfriend from me, it was running for mayor.

I was so pissed off. I could have...

Jesus, though, look at that car. Who could stay mad at it?

“Jesus, Bucky,” I said, even though pepperoni and stuff was spilling from my mouth. “Will you just look at it. Wouldja?”

“Jesus, I know,” he said, and he did know, though I hadn’t even pointed at it or spoken its name or anything. Chilling.

Power.

The Hawk had it.

Maybe I could borrow some.

“OH, YOU HEAR THAT,
folks? Can you beeeelieve our boy here?” Mad Matt was on a rave. “And they say there are no Thomas Jeffersons anymore. They say there are no Leonardo da Vincis. No more Renaissance men? Phuoa!” Matt spat into his microphone, not for real, but an impressive simulation of expectoration. “All right, he’s running for mayor of our fine city; he’s running for student body president;
and,
I don’t mind telling you, he’s practically running the whole show here at WRRR, because Sol over there, he’s all but useless. Am I right, Sol? The kid’s gone beyond candidate already, beyond heroic. We’re sitting here with a demigod, is what we’re doing, only at station WRRR. The other guys have no demigods on staff.