Political Timber (8 page)

“Hi, everyone,” I said, so quietly that Matt had to signal me to speak up. “This week’s report is, yes, it appears that I am starting slowly in the school race—”

“Slowly?” Matt jumped in. He had a control where he could not only talk over me, he could shut my mike off completely while he did it. “Slowly? Gordie, the
Titanic
started slowly. For you they would have just built the ship right there on the bottom of the ocean.”

“I’m building some momentum,” I countered with no conviction. “And secondly, I don’t care for the name ‘Little Fins.’”

“You don’t. All right, I admit, it wasn’t my best work, but some days... Wait a minute.” Matt’s face lit up. His voice rose and he got up out of his chair. “Where do we always turn when we are in need?”

Shit, I thought. It’s gonna be a long night. Sol was laughing already, which he was now doing with more regularity than he had in the history of the show.

“To our loyal and insightful listeners, of course. So pick up your phones, kiddies, and join in the great American political process. Let your voice be heard as we play the all-important Name the Candidate game! Help the boy out, gang. It’s no wonder he’s getting drubbed. Can’t be a decent candidate without a gripping handle.”

“I like Gordie,” I tried.

There was a loud buzzing sound effect that blasted my eardrums. “Nope, sorry, Gord. Doesn’t rhyme.”

Sweaty was the first to call. “How ’bout Gord the Sword,” she moaned. She sounded like a 900 number.

“Would you please get off the line,” I snapped. “This is hard enough.”

“I bet,” she added before clicking.

The Hawk, for all its greatness, is definitely no more than a four-passenger vehicle. This worked out well for the fund-raiser because I wound up squiring not only my volunteer/nonsupporter mother and her date, my nonvolunteer/nonsupporter father, but also my visionary assistant, Mosi. Sweaty refused to come after I told her to shut up over the public airwaves. She insisted on an apology over those same airwaves, and since I wouldn’t have the chance until tomorrow night, no Sweaty tonight.

Anyway, I had Mosi. My parents hopped into the backseat together, and let Mosi ride up front like he was my date. He was wearing a maroonish suit that clung to his big short arms and thick neck like he was growing right out of it before our eyes. And though we were on our way to dinner, he came packing a gigantic bag of Smartfood.

As I warmed up the Tourismo in the driveway—regardless of the weather, you let her idle for exactly four minutes or you are abusing her—Mos sat in the passenger seat, bearing down on the popcorn like a horse with a feedbag.

“What’s up with you?” I asked, whispering a little bit lower than my folks were whispering and giggling in back. I turned on the radio, but nothing would come out of it until the tubes heated up.

“Nuth,” he garbled.

“Look at me, Mosi.”

He looked up. Popcorn cheese ringed his mouth and sprinkled his eyebrows like fairy dust. The eyes themselves were dewy and unfocused. I sniffed him.

“Jesus Christ,” I snapped.

“What is it?” my father asked.

The radio, warmed, blasted in out of nowhere. The four minutes was not quite up, but I threw the car in reverse, apologizing to it as I did.

“Nothing, Dad. Mosi just has popcorn cheese on his suit, and he looks like a
dick
!” I snarled.

“Gordon!” Ma gasped. Dad and Mosi seemed not to mind.

“Want some Smartfood?” Mosi asked, swinging around and aiming the bag at my parents.

I swiped the bag out of his hand, threw it out the window. “No eating in the Studebaker. I told you this a million times.”

“A little nervous about tonight, son?” Ma asked.

I grunted.

“What’s that sound? What’s that sound I hear back there?” I was just asking for dramatic effect. I knew very well what the sound was, just as I knew the Hawk’s every sound. It was the creaking of the tiny spring that holds down the lid on the mini-ashtray in the rear door handle. “There’s no smoking in the Studebaker, Dad. You know that.”

I watched his laugh lines in the mirror. He was enjoying himself. “Used to be able to smoke in the Studebaker,” he said, grandly draping his arm over my mother’s shoulders.

What is it about this car that makes guys do that?

“In fact,” he reminisced, “everybody did. My dad would be tooling along in the front seat on a Sunday afternoon, one arm around my mom, beeping and waving at everybody we passed. He really was king back then, I’ll give him that. Anyhow, he’d have a big old stogie stuck in his kisser, Mom would be smoking a tiparillo—she was a maverick herself—and me and my sister would be all scrunched down in back sharing a butt out of the ashtray.”

Dad paused to laugh at his story. “With the top down, and all the parade-waving they did, my folks never even knew what we were doing back there. Everybody in town saw us smoke except our own damn parents, heh-heh.” There was an extra little twist to that last laugh that was kind of chilling.

“Awesome story, Mr. Foley,” Mosi doofed.

“Ya, really cool, Dad. But you still can’t smoke now. Times have changed. New regime. Get with the program.”

He booed me. I was a high-school kid, last in the poll, on his way to make a speech to adults with money. My date, who was
not
pretty enough to get away with it, smelled like a Rastafarian priest. And my very father was booing me.

“It’s called preaching to the converted,” Bucky said, in an effort to calm me down. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. You don’t have to win anybody over. This is your grandfather’s core of support, his inner circle. They love him, they love you. And all two hundred of ’em have paid a buck fifty apiece to prove it.”

“Two hun... at a hundred fif...”

Bucky stood patiently, waiting for me to defeat the equation. He couldn’t wait any longer.

“Gord, has anyone mentioned to you that the mayor has to manage a one-hundred-million-dollar budget?”

“Jesus, I wish people would stop saying that to me.”

“Forget it. Just go out there and accept the people’s love. Tell a joke, do some rah-rah, talk about your dear da. Then get down before you put your foot in it.”

“Thanks, coach,” I said.

I worked up a full greasy sweat at dinner, mumbling to myself like a psychopath as I practiced sounding natural. Fifty different people came by to introduce themselves as lifelong FOFs (Friends Of Fins), and I established my credibility as a politician by slipping every one of them the slimiest handshake of his life. My father laughed at almost everything because he, unlike his son, had not lost the ability to not take any of it seriously. I had to stop looking at my mother after a while because the pain became too great. She saw the anguish in my face, which brought her to the brink of tears, which, when I saw that, brought me to the brink of tears, and so on. Mosi ate his chicken cordon bleu in three bites, ate his baked potato and its skin, and some of its foil wrapper. He ate the wrinkled peas, the garnish, and the lemon slice in his water.

“You gonna finish that?” he asked me.

My food was untouched. “Mosi, first why don’t you ask me if I’m going to start it?”

“You gonna start—”

I shoved my plate toward him.

“...
Gordon... Foley
!” That was all I heard. There must have been an intro of some kind because I had a vague recollection of Bucky’s voice over the P.A., but nothing registered until I heard my name, and the terrifying applause that followed it.

I toddled up the two steps to the podium and settled in under the four-foot-by-six-foot photo of my grandfather, smiling broadly and waving, cigar in fingers, from the driver’s seat of my car. So why wasn’t
he
up here doing the dirty work, I thought. Anyway, I was happy to see half the room still concentrating on eating, receiving desserts, trading tastes, flagging waitresses for more coffee. So I just said hi and launched, hoping my seven minutes would evaporate before they noticed me.

“So when Bucky told me... a hundred and fifty dollars a plate, just to come and listen to
me
...” I paused. My comic timing, at least, was functioning. “I asked him, ‘What’s on the plate, Buck, cocaine?’”

I had thought, previously, that silence was one of those absolute things, that there were not
degrees
of silence. But this, this
thing
, this fearsome black nothing of silence, was a new experience in my eighteen years. Not even a fork grazing a plate.

That was, of course, until Mosi caught up to us.

“
Bar-har-ar-har-ar-har
...” and so on. His laugh, zipping through the still room, bouncing off this wall and that one, back again, crisscrossed the room several times, slicing me every which way like a Star Wars laser.

Despite what common sense tells him, a guy just has to look to his mother at a time like that. I was actually relieved to find her finally crying, in a controlled, dignified way. Now it was behind us, and I could slog through. My father held her hand, with the other hand cupped over Mosi’s mouth, and nodded for me to continue.

I looked over to Bucky, who was doing a mime version of driving a car. Pause. Comprehension.

“Well, what I really just want to tell you is, when you see me behind the wheel of that car. ...”

Bucky mimed a shark now, weaving through the imaginary water, his hand sticking up like a divider in the middle of his head. Oh ya, mention Da, mention Da.

“
Fins
, Fins’s car. When you see me in Fins’s car, you should know that it’s not just a coincidence. It’s not just appearance. It’s a tradition. This symbolizes continuity, a carrying on of the tradition of fine service the Foley family has provided the people of Amber for decades. The spirit of populism, our commitment to all the little men and women of our city—will not diminish in the transition from one Foley to the next.”

There was a nice swelling of polite, sincere, relieved applause from the crowd. Bucky did the shark-fin thing again.

“Oh, so, remember, if you loved Fins Foley as mayor—and who didn’t?”—laughs, claps—“you’re going to love Gordie Foley. The common man’s new best friend.”

I checked my watch, and realized that I was quite short of my seven minutes. I looked up to find Bucky frantically waving me down off the podium anyway. I waved, and left. That brought the big applause.

As I stepped down, Bucky rushed to meet me. He smiled and shook my hand excitedly, then leaned close to my ear. “Please don’t say any more refreshing things. They’re going to kill us.”

I shook hands, shook hands, took a beer that was offered me without thinking. Bucky, escorting me from table to table, snatched it out of my hand. “Thank you very much,” he said to the nice man who’d given it to me. “He’ll drink it three years from now, when it’s legal.” Laughs, laughs.

“This,” said Bucky with unusual respect, “is a very good friend of your grandfather’s, Mr. Saltonstall.”

Mr. Saltonstall stood up, a lanky and elegant white-haired guy about six three. I wiped my hand off on my pants leg and shook.

“A pleasure, Gordon,” he said. “Have a seat.”

I took the vacant seat at the circular table next to Mr. Saltonstall. Then he gave Bucky a look that quickly got rid of Bucky. Then others from his group quietly slipped away.

“Manager wouldn’t let you have the beer, huh?”

I shook my head, feeling now like the kid that I was.

Mr. Saltonstall reached across the table and grabbed the neck of the orange-label champagne bottle. He poured two long, tall, dainty glasses and handed me one.

“My parents are here, though,” I said.

“I know. Your father sipped champagne while sitting on my
knee
at one of these a long, long time ago.”

“Wow,” I said, and turned to check out my parents’ reaction. My dad nodded and blinked just slightly, like at an auction. Mosi pumped his fist.

“I’m proud to see you doing this, Gordon,” Mr. Saltonstall said. “And I love your grandfather.”

I sipped. “Everybody does,” I said.

“I believe that’s true. And I’ll bet this all makes for a pretty heady senior year of high school, am I right?”

I sighed, took a longer sip.

“How are you holding up? Anything you need to make it easier? Anything, you just let me know.”

“I could use another glass of champagne,” I said, smiling. He poured it.

“I just wanted you to know, Gordie, how much all of us in this room feel for Fins. And that this”—he made a sweeping gesture over the full gathering of people—“is more or less our testimonial to that. To him.”

I looked around the room, which was full of Fins’s people, his old friends, supporters, cronies. I noticed that even though they were all mingling, joking, drinking, buzzing around, they all seemed to have one eye on this conversation. Like they were awaiting some outcome.

“And for me,” I said boldly, me and the champagne looking him squarely in the eyes.

“Certainly,” Mr. Saltonstall said, brightly but without conviction. “Of course it’s for you too.”

“Good,” I said. “Good. Now, tell me. How does it look? Have I got a chance to win, really?”

“Oh,” he said, pulling back from me by a few very noticeable inches. “Oh, it looks quite good. Of the eight candidates for the preliminary runoff, four get into the final. I would be shocked if you did not reach the final.”

“And then?”

“Then,” he said, looking off over my shoulder. “Then. Well, Gordon, then, we just never know, do we? But if I were you, I would simply concentrate on having the best time of it I could have. This is a rare experience for a lad your age, a once-in-a-lifetime. Savor it. And do know, that all the people in this room are behind you ninety-nine percent.”

Saltonstall stood up and started waving at somebody far across the room, the way you do when you want to get away from whoever you’re with.

“Whoa,” I said. “Isn’t the saying
one hundred percent
? You know, ‘We’re behind you, old boy, one hundred percent.’ Like that?”

He extended his hand and passed me a business card, smiling, grandfatherly. “If you need anything, Gordie. Just give us a call,” he said, and slipped away.