Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

Get in the car, boy .

He wondered, Why me?

The runt month, February, half over before it started, saw the beginnings of a battle for public opinion in St. Louis. All the ingredients were at hand. There were two sides. They were committed to fight. They had the personnel. They had the materiel. They were opposed to each other. But seldom in the history of warfare had a battle been fought for a more dubious piece of ground.

What would happen if the city and county merged? The few definite answers — the Republicans would suffer, West County would be bridled and broken, Chief Jammu would eat the Missouri Democrats for breakfast, four thousand county employees for lunch, and the $200 million county budget for dinner — could not be mentioned in public argument. They required swaddling in phrases, and here the war machine really began to balk. The Globe-Democrat warned that a merger (“this nonsense”) could unbalance the regional economy disastrously. Martin Probst warned that a merger (“unrealistic thinking”) would do nothing at all, not even enough to justify the cost of a special election. Chief Jammu maintained that it (“this godsend”) would rationalize local government at the expense of nothing but unfairness. Ronald Struthers, more cautious, admitted that some unfairness might linger, but promised his constituents that for once they wouldn’t get the short end of the stick. Mayor Pete Wesley likewise ignored the fears of countyites; he said a merger would free the city from the burden of many basic services and allow it to regain its rightful ascendancy. Ross Billerica was derisive in every direction, unable to believe that both city and county residents would run the risk of higher taxes by voting in a merger. KSLX-TV and KSLX-Radio disputed Billerica’s logic and announced the ceaselessly interesting results of their weekly phone polls.

The salvos plopped in the bog, disappeared. Public Opinion, its lily pads and meandering canals, could not be taken by a frontal assault. And yet the battle affected it. Rumors bubbled to the surface after shells had fallen. Subtle forces of drainage and reflooding were at work, unseen, and at night there were flickerings and flashes in the air that looked like ghosts.

After a month of quiescence the Osage Warriors had reappeared, this time on the outskirts of the county, where open spaces grew with the square of their distance from downtown. At 3:15 a.m. on January 22, a sequence of detonations collapsed the pillars of a six-lane overpass on U.S. Highway 40 north of Queeny Park. The human toll was relatively slight. Sixteen travelers were injured when a California-bound Trailways bus overturned in braking to avoid the sudden precipice, and a motorcyclist suffered a broken spine plunging off it before the police closed the road. The blast also shattered windows up to half a mile away, injuring three more.

The real headache began the next morning, when thousands of commuters from the distant suburbs flooded narrow county roads in search of alternate routes. A heavy snowfall on the night of the twenty-second completed the disaster. Work began on a temporary overpass, but weeks would become months before the commuting situation returned to normal. West County homeowners, already facing steeper property taxes and the distant threat of mortgage foreclosures, demanded to know how the terrorists could function with impunity in what was supposedly a highly civilized district.

In the second week of February, a series of machine-gunnings terrorized isolated subdivisions along the county perimeter, in Twin Oaks, Ellisville, Fenton, St. Charles, and Bellefontaine. As usual the Warriors showed a curiously high regard for human life, firing their guns into dark windows and tool sheds, and as usual they were prompt in claiming credit for the attacks. In response, state and county police staged frequent roadblocks, but they had only the sketchiest physical descriptions of the terrorists, could only guess at their numbers, and were able to cover only a fraction of the vast network of county roads. The roadblocks did, however, compound the traffic tie-ups.

West County was slipping, a little, in public opinion.

Meanwhile Chief Jammu was rising. Even though she’d been in the news for months, she hadn’t really been a phenomenon. Like so much of the ephemera of American popular culture, from funk rhythms to rollerskates, her popularity began to blossom only after sinking roots in the inner-city black community. It was in the ghetto that the first tank tops stenciled with the Chief’s image were marketed. It was in the Delmar paraphernalia shops that the first Jammu posters were sold (she was fully clad), in the windowless unisex hair salons on Jefferson Avenue that kinks were straightened and bangs pulled back to form the stark, easy-care “Jammuji,” and in the studios of KATZ-Radio that Titus Klaxon’s irreverent “Gentrifyin’ Blues” began its climb to the top of local charts.

But the Jammusiasm spread. It spread through the young people, the high-school and college kids. Somehow the Chief always found time to play to yet another crowd of young people. She spoke at concerts and basketball tournaments, at science fairs and Boy Scout expositions, at student art shows and Washington University debates. Her messages were contingent on the circumstances. Science is important, she would seem to say. Sports are important. Boy Scouts are important. Chess is important. Civil rights are important…Wherever she went there were cameras and reporters, and it was they who sent her message to the youths: I am important.

The rest of the city, the upper two-thirds of the demographic pyramid, respected and admired its youthful underpinnings. Youth got around. Youth knew the score. Youth was beauty, and beauty youth. That was all that mature St. Louisans needed to know before joining the parade. Jammu became the star of a hitherto glamourless city. Earlier, the city’s “stars” had been talented older men or married female politicians; following their nightly movements hardly thrilled. But Jammu was a nova, a solid-gold personality, as bright (in the eyes of St. Louis) as a Katharine Hepburn, a Peggy Fleming, a Jackie or a Di. She wasn’t pretty, but she was always where the action was. The typical middle-aged man of the suburbs could hardly help loving her.

This man was Jack DuChamp.

Jack’s idea, propounded mainly during coffee breaks, was that Jammu would win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate as soon as she was eligible, and would handily beat whatever Republican opposed her. He said it made sense. She was a good cop, but she was obviously more than that. He said he wasn’t sure he’d vote for her, in the eventuality. But darn it. He might.

If he did, it would be a million-dollar vote. Jack DuChamp possessed a God-given aptitude for calling elections. If you checked the results of all the state, local and national elections of the thirty years Jack had been voting, and if you read the voting histories of all St. Louis County residents, and if you hunted for the closest correlation, Jack’s was it. With an instinctive jerk he’d yanked the Kennedy lever in 1960. After a last-minute struggle with himself he’d gone Republican in the very close ’84 senatorial election. Bond issues, special propositions, referenda, Crestwood city-council votes — in every case his ballot turned out to be the list of winners.

He knew his record was good. He bragged about it, sometimes even staked small sums of money on the strength of it. What he didn’t realize was that it was perfect. Perfect, that is, in every election in which he’d bothered to vote. And the frequency with which he’d voted (rather less than half the time) bore a suspicious resemblance to the average voter turnout for the average election over the years.