Christopher Buckley: Thank You for Smoking

"That's good," Nick said.

"When some booze-besotten drunk goes and runs someone down, do you go banging on the door of General Motors and shout, 'J'accuse!' "

"You didn't tell him that?" Polly winced.

"Okay," Nick said, "but how are you handling the situation?"

Bobby Jay wiped a gob of tasso mayonnaise from his lips. A glint came into his eye. "The Lord is handling it."

Nick knew Bobby Jay to be an upright, car-prayer-pooling citizen, who occasionally salted his language with biblical phrases like so-and-so had "sold himself for a mess of porridge, like Esau's brother," but he was not a nut. You could have a normal, secular conversation with him. But this suggestion that the Lord himself was engaged in spin control made Nick wonder if Bobby Jay was crossing the line over into the Casualties column. He stared. "What?"

Bobby Jay looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward them. He said, "It had to be. Opportunities like this can only come from above. And they happen only to the righteous."

"Bobby Jay," Polly said, looking alarmed, "are you all right?"

"Listen, O ye of little faith, then tell me if you don't think the Lord was looking out for old Bobby Jay. I'm in the car driving to work—"

"With Commuters for Christ?"

"No, Polly, and I don't see the humor in that. It was just me. I'm listening to Gordon Liddy's call-in show—" "Figures," Polly said.

"Gordon happens to be a friend of mine. Anyway, he's yakkety-yak-yakking about the shooting, his lines are lit up, and suddenly he says, 'Carburetor City, you're on the air,' and there's this woman's voice saying, 'I was in that church and I want to tell that last person you had on that he is just wrong.' I practically drove right off the road. She was saying, 'I own a pistol, but because the law in Texas says you cannot carry it on your person, you can only keep it in your car, I left it in the glove compartment. And if I had had that handgun with me there inside the church, that choir would still be singing 'Walk with Me, Jesus.' "

Nick felt a pang of jealousy. No one had ever called while he was being flayed alive on a radio talk show to say, If I hadn't smoked five packs of cigarettes every day for forty years, I'd be dead by now.

Bobby Jay, eyes bulging, went on. "Gordon was in seventh heaven. He kept her on the line for must have been fifteen minutes. She went on and on about how what a tragedy it was she didn't have her little S & W.38 airweight with her in that pew, how the whole misery could have been avoided. She was this far away from him! She couldn't have missed him! A clean head shot." Bobby held out his arm in combat shooting stance and aimed at a person at the next table. "Bam!"

"You're scaring the other patrons." "So what did you do?" Nick asked.

"What did I do?" Bobby Jay bubbled. "What did I do? I'll tell you what I did. I put the pedal to the metal and went straight to National Airport and got on the next plane to Carburetor City. There is no 'next plane to Carburetor City.' You got to go through Dallas. But I was in that little lady's living room before six o'clock that afternoon."

" 'Little lady's'?" Polly said. "You're such a trog."

"Five-foot-four," Bobby Jay shot back. "In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest little old video you ever saw." He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. "We open with. 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' "

"Nice," Nick said.

"Gets better: '. attacks a church minister and choir. ' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—"

"How," Polly said, "do people rend their hair?"

"Everywhere a scene of carnage," Bobby Jay continued, "a scene of devastation. Red chaos!"

"Red chaos?" Polly said.

"Shut up, Polly," Nick said.

"Voice-over. And guess whose?" Bobby Jay asked coyly. "Charlton Heston?"

"No sir," Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. "Guess again."

"David Duke," Polly said.

"Jack Taggardy," Bobby Jay said triumphantly.

"Nice," Nick said.

"Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in People."

"What do his hips have to do with anything?" Bobby Jay said.

"Is he in a walker, or what?"

"No he's not in a any damn walker!"

"Go on," Nick said.

Bobby reframed the scene. "So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' " "Question," Nick said. "Why 'human'?" "Why not 'human'? They're humans." "I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?" "He's got a point," Polly said.

"Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?" "Yes," Nick said, "very much."

"Now we cut to my little lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up."

"Onion?"

"Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos i was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment. Then she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye — and that was not in the script — and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us protect ourselves? Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does your elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' " Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. "What do you think?"

"Transcendent," Nick said. "A deft manipulation of post-traumatic stress."

Bobby Jay grinned. "Sweeter than honeysuckle in moonlight."

"Congratulations," Polly said. "Really masterful."

"By this afternoon, every member of the Texas congressional delegation and the state legislature will have a copy. By tomorrow, every sinner in the Congress will have one. We may even air it nationally. Mr. Drum hasn't signed off on that yet, but I am most strongly recommending that we do."

Bobby Jay's boss was one of the few in Washington who insisted on the mister. It was part of his aura, and he did cast a large aura. When he had taken over the leadership of the troubled SAFETY years back, there had been only fifty million guns circulating in America. There were now over 200 million. He was a physically imposing man with a trademark bald head. Redekamp of the Sun had dug up the fact that at the age of sixteen he had shot to death a seventeen-year-old in a dispute over the ownership of a box turtle. The conviction was later overturned on the grounds that the box turtle, having subsequently died, probably of stress, had never been introduced as evidence. Ever since, the anti-SAFETY Washington press, comprising all of the press except for the conservative Washington Moon, included a reference to this unfortunate incident in every mention of him.

Coffee arrived. Nick asked Polly, "What's happening at Moderation?"

"We actually got some great news yesterday." This was a stunner. Nick could not recall such words ever having been spoken over one of their lunches. "The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that sobriety roadblocks were unconstitutional," she said.