Don DeLillo - Running Dog

Lightborne wore a hat with a little feather stuck in the band. It was a gift from one of his customers, who thought it would go well with his Norfolk jacket. He wore the hat just this one time, an after-dinner stroll through the gallery district. It made him feel like a veteran sportswriter covering the Army-Navy game on a clear and brisk November day. Or like a man out for a Sunday drive in his Buick Roadmaster in the year 1957.

The phone was ringing when he got back to the gallery. It was Richie Armbrister, the twenty-two-year-old smut merchant, calling from a special hookup aboard his customized DC-9, which had just landed at JFK.

"I'm back from Europe, Lightborne. We came down in the dark. I hate nighttime landings."

That squeaky voice sent little tremors rippling through Lightborne's nerve apparatus.

"Hear that music? That's my disco. People are dancing. They danced right through the landing. Listen, I want to ask. Is it still warm? Full-length, I mean. The business you mentioned. How hot's the trail?"

"I'd say very warm, Richie, without fear of overstating."

"Good, listen, we'll talk. I'm coming over there. It's a layover, for maintenance. I definitely want to explore this thing. The more I talk to people, the more I hear about profit potentials with first-run. I made new connections in the European capitals. Features. They're feature-crazy. Exhibitors are hollering for more product. So I think I want to get my toe in the water, Lightborne. Eventually distribute worldwide maybe."

These last remarks Richie delivered in a subdued and earnest manner. An encouraging development. Lightborne was heartened.

"Betty's Azalea Ranch," Moll said.

The man read a newspaper.

"Topside Pool Supplies."

About a hundred yards beyond the Centreville Free Will Baptist Church, the limousine turned into an unmarked dirt road. Half a mile in, they passed a one-story L-shaped building, both wings very long, no landscaping out front. Farther on, maybe two miles, the car stopped in a grove of scarlet oaks near a large stone house. Two Shetland ponies stood in a split-rail cedar corral. There was a pond to the side of the house and some stables beyond that.

They got out of the car. Molt watched a small helicopter setting down in a field nearby. Two men hopped out, both wearing skin-tight jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses and Stetsons. They walked toward the back of the stone house as the helicopter slowly rose, slanting now toward the deep woods in the distance. The men were Orientals, she was quite sure, looking boyish in those narrow pants and small-scale western hats.

Earl Mudger stood in the doorway. Molt was aware her escort had paused, leaving her to approach the house alone. Mudger wore a blacksmith's apron and heavy-duty gloves. He was a thickset man with curly hair trimmed close, with ashblond eyebrows and a strong jaw, slightly jutting-the picture of a man who wouldn't yield easily to aging. His eyes were a fine silky blue. He had a bent nose, broadly columned neck and something of a surfer's numinous gleam-his eyes and hair and brows shining just a bit, as though bleached by the elements.

She followed him to a wicker table set under an oak tree. He took off his gloves and apron and tossed them onto one of the extra chairs. An old woman, an Oriental, brought out lemonade and some cookies. Moll could tell Mudger fancied himself a charmer. Tough but winsome. She set her face to Executive Chill.

"Let's us talk some."

"Fine," she said.

"Fact number one, everything Percival told you last night was exaggerated by a factor of seven."

"What did he tell me last night?"

"I can replay it for you any time, Fact number two, it doesn't matter anymore because I'm no longer involved with PAC/ORD, or Radial Matrix, or Lloyd Percival. Born free, that's me. No more attachments. I'm shaking loose. Time to retire."

"A life of meditation," she said.

"Fact number three, you've got the alliances all mixed up, assuming you believe what the Senator's been telling you. Did you ever wonder how Percival's select committee gets their input? Lomax is Percival's man. Lomax is the source of everything the committee knows."

"Who is Lomax?"

"Man in the limousine."

"I've mistaken him twice for the Senator's man. Once in New York, I _think_. Now here."

"You weren't mistaken," Mudger said. "Loyalties are so interwoven, the thing's a game. The Senator and PAC/ORD aren't nearly the antagonists the public believes them to be. They talk all the time. They make deals, they buy people, they sell favors. I doubt if Lomax knows whether he works for PAC/ORD or Lloyd Percival, ultimately. You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what's happening. But they allow it. That's the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies."

"I assume you feed Lomax false information."

"Tell you what," he said. "Sometimes this is so much fun, I'd do it for nothing."

"Who is Glen Selvy?"

"No idea."

"Howard Glen Selvy?"

"Not a leaf stirs."

"Bullshit," she said.

"I like your smile."

"I'm not smiling."

"I thought that was a smile. I mistook that for a smile. Have some lemonade, why don't you?"

"These are Vietnamese, these people you've got here?"

"We have some Vietnamese here, definitely."

"That you got out just in time."

"I've had hairier moments. So have they. Compared to the life most of these people have had, getting out of Saigon was on the level of an escapade."

" Ho Chi Minh City," she said.

"Yeah, Ho Chi Minh City. A lark with firecrackers."

Moll nibbled on a cookie and drank some lemonade. She couldn't shake the feeling she'd crossed an invisible frontier into another way of life. The rules were different here. Sitting in the shade. White wicker and lemonade. Ponies motionless in their small corral.

"Back that way along the road," she said. "Radial Matrix?"

"Right."

"Thriving, by all accounts."

"Systems. It's one of the areas we still excel in."

"'We' meaning Americans."

"Nothing but,"

"In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?"

"We did some of that, We were a link, As I say, I've unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing's geared to electronics. There's a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There's a general sponginess, a lack of conviction."

"You had your own zoo in Vietnam,"

"Checking up on me."

"A little," she said.

"My pride and joy, that zoo. We got to the point where we were making exchanges with real zoos halfway around the world. We had an animal dealer from Michigan come all the way out to see our operation. I had more gibbons than I could use. I was laying off gibbons the way bookmakers lay off excess bets. I had this rare type lynx, Eurasian, almost extinct, this one variety, and we bred it successfully in captivity. I tell you what, that made my war."

"Victory after all."

"We won far's I'm concerned. Revise the texts."

"What sort of retirement plans-forgive the skeptical look,"

"Domestic bliss," he said. "My wife's off having a baby, matter of fact."

"Nice."

"I'm fifty-two years old."

"Interesting."

"Wife number three."

"Not bad."

"She's a gook," Mudger said.

Apron and gloves. Helicopter landing in a field. She recalled what Percival had said before his sour mash whisky slowed him to a crawl. One set of rules. Mudger's. Nobody else gets to use them. Vietnamese in cowboy hats.

"Not that I don't have something to fall back on," he said.

"Aside from domestic bliss."

"I've got a shop in the basement. Sometimes I go down there and work half the night. Do a little planing, a little sanding. Lock things in vises. It's good for the soul. Punch holes in metal, do a little buffing. So anyway I got to fooling around with a small machine of my own devising that tests the hardness and content of steel. Machines that size do hardness alone, normally. I can tell you high carbon, low carbon, how much nickel or manganese. Is this boring?"