Neal Stephenson - Interface

Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in the Cozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with the Cozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from time to time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine did not know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosity about the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widely among the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of the wonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to brave unknown fields of endeavour.

"When I was pounding in all those damn nails, whack whack whack, day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn't really know what I was doing," Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting the fence again. "I would have nightmares that all of the nails I had pounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all of Willy's nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for the house falling down."

"Well, it's still standing," Mary Catherine said.

"That it is," Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his sole purpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.

"Have you seen Dad?"

"Yeah, Willy and I saw each other," Mel said. "So the social aspect of today's visit has been consummated."

"Oh. You don't want to socialize with me?"

Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road, kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel's trench coat and Mary Catherine's hair for a moment. The red coal on the end of Mel's cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He stared into it as though mesmerized. "This is no place," he said, "to socialize with a lady."

She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk this way without seeming stilted or weird. "You didn't come down to socialize with me anyway."

Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined it regretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumb and the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed it into the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It died with a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring at it, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.

"Get in," he said. "Let's go get some coffee at the Dixie Truckers' Home."

She grinned. The Dixie Truckers' Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for him it was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine opened the passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have gone all the way around the car and opened the door for her, but his mind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, not a social visit, and he wasn't thinking about the niceties.

The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. It was ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumed by many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out on to the road and gave the car a tremendous long burst of acceleration that took it all the way up past a hundred.

Mary Catherine's heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrilling her and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever since they had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal down and squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking a memory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine's.

"You know that the relationship between our families has been strong and will continue to be," Mel said, "even though, over time, it has gone through a lot of different shapes."

"What's going on?" she said.

Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherine for a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.

"Just take it easy," he said, "this is hard for me."

"Okay," she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nose started to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulse under control.

"The reason our families have gotten along together is that the leaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took the long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense in the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of the Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did."

"What are we doing now?" Mary Catherine said.

"Willy doesn't know this, because I didn't want to stress him out," Mel said, "but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February."

"What shit? What fan?"

Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing his thoughts. "Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in a wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact because his media coverage was manipulated so well."

"We concealed the extent of his illness," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. We let his organization run the state government for a •while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz, the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do." Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine print, a mere debater's point. "Well, it might be possible to make the claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking, ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was bound to come out."

"Let me ask you something," Mary Catherine said. "Did you know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?"

Mel was pained. "Of course I knew it, girl! But it's like dragging a man out of a burning car. You have to act, you can't think about the possibility that he'll later sue you for spraining his shoulder. I did what I had to do. I did it well." Mel turned and looked at her, a dry grin coming to his lips. "I was awesome, frankly."

"Well, what are you getting at?"

"You know who Markene Caldicott is?"

"Of course I do!" She was surprised that Mel would even ask this question.

"Oh, that's right. You're probably the type who listens to RNA all the time."

Mary Catherine grinned and shook her head. Most people considered Radio North America to be the height of journalistic sophistication, but Mel still had it lumped together with MTV and Arena Football. He got his radio news via shortwave, from the BBC.

"What about Markene Caldicott?" she said.

"Well, apparently she's some hotshot reporter," Mel said skeptically.

"You could say that."

"She's after my ass. And I don't mean that in the sexual sense," Mel said. "She's called every single person I've ever worked with. I can read this woman's mind like a fucking cereal box."

"What's she doing?"

"She'd really like to shoot down your father," Mel said, "but she can't, because Willy is without flaw, and was incapacitated for the last couple of months besides. So instead, she is going to do a big expose where she makes me out to be this sort of Richelieu with a yarmulke. The shadowy power who pulled the strings while Cozzano drooled down his chin. You know the kind of thing."

"Your basic over inflated election-year scandal."

"Yeah. She probably figures that Willy is going to get into the race and she wants to be the first to take shots at him. So I'm going to head her off at the pass."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I'm going to drive back up to Daley," Mel said. He and Mary Catherine had both fallen into the habit of using Cozzano's poststroke jargon. "And have dinner with Mark McCabe. A political reporter from the Trib. And I'm going to spill my guts. Going to lay the whole thing out."