Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

“Did I tell you my fella’s gotten me a new horse?” she asked Merv. “ ‘No Strings.’ ”

“Ooh,” he replied. “Great name .”

Nancy chuckled. “Nothing comes without strings.”

Merv laughed. She could picture the way his tongue would now be pressing up against his front teeth.

“Any chance of lunch?” he asked. “Before we lose you again to Washington?”

“You bet,” said Nancy. “Though right now I’d better scoot. Thanks for cheering me up, Mervyn.”

She lingered on the couch for just a moment, reluctantly skimming a Post article on the death of Way Bandy, who’d done her makeup for the Scavullo shoot only three months ago. AIDS. She shivered just thinking about it. If he’d made one bad poke with the tweezers, my God, she could have…She dismissed the fear, telling herself she couldn’t be in any worse danger than Barbra Streisand and all his other clients. After all, Doris Day had actually hugged Rock, right up until the end.

She folded the paper, put it back on the pool table, and got up to get her straw hat. She never truly looked forward to riding; she’d only learned to do it to please him. She nodded to the agent, just beyond the open front door, to let him know she hadn’t forgotten the time. Through the doorway came the sound of the dogs, barking at some stray cats who’d joined the ranch’s menagerie only the other day. Eventually, they’d be buried with all the other dogs and horses and cats, under the patch of land that Ronnie called Boot Hill; each got a little grave marker that he carved himself. This was the man that the “activists”—the nuclear-freeze types, the AIDS protesters — called heartless!

She looked out the window toward the riding trails, wishing they could be paved over for golf carts instead of horses, the way Nixon had done with so many of the ones at Camp David. A second Secret Service man, carrying the nuclear football, came into view several paces behind Ronnie, who’d already said goodbye to Barney and was on his way, sure enough, to the tack barn.

Scarcely an hour ago, when he kissed her goodbye, she’d tenderly brushed two spots on his face that were scabbed over from the other day’s liquid-nitrogen procedure. Just the routine removal of a couple of brown spots from a handsome man who’d spent a little too much of his life in the sun: nothing to worry about. And yet, as she touched the half-healed punctures, she had winced, suddenly imagining them as bullet holes, the way even now, five years later, every slammed door or dropped fork still sounded like a shot.

—

Across the country, through a barred set of fourth-floor windows, John Hinckley looked down on the St. Elizabeths graveyard. A few of the headstones, he reasoned, were probably for people who’d died right here in the maximum-security ward of the hospital’s Howard Pavilion.

There was no way he would die here, unless he got shot escaping, which remained a possibility, if he could get his girlfriend in Chicago, or his other girlfriend, the one right here in St. Elizabeths, to aid and abet him. He would need, of course, a gun; his current lack of one still felt somehow curious, like the absence of an apostrophe in the hospital’s name.

But he did not believe he would have to shoot his way out of here. He had decided that he would talk his way out, gradually, incrementally, through the voices of his lawyers and, whenever Judge Parker permitted, by means of his own voice, addressed directly to the court. Twice a year he was allowed to petition for his release, but he’d never done that, because he knew what the outcome would be. He had adopted, instead, his slow-and-steady strategy, wearing his clip-on tie to court every several months and motioning for the next carefully calibrated expansion of his privileges: the right to walk on the hospital grounds; permission to speak with the news media. This latter request has been denied, despite the logic of his argument that such interviews would be helpful in building up his “self-respect and dignity.” Judge Parker’s refusal is a setback, but it does not refute the basic wisdom of his own long-term plan. His remorseful letters to the Washington Post are definitely shifting public opinion in his direction. And you have to consider this: he is able to write them only because the hospital no longer monitors his incoming or outgoing mail — itself a tribute to his increasing sanity.

Behind him the noise in the day room grew louder. Three angry residents of the ward, ignored by several more listless ones, were arguing over the choice of a TV channel. This afternoon there seemed to be nothing but soap operas and Love Connection , and the fruitless search for an action movie or sports event was raising tempers already inflamed by the District of Columbia’s August heat, which the pavilion’s air conditioning did little to alleviate.

Then a cry of delight changed the room’s mood. “ Damn! ” shouted the patient closest to the television. “Gonna get me some motherfuckin’ kaboom !”

Hinckley turned to look at the screen. A rocket was launching, and everyone knew how its brief journey would end. They had seen CNN’s Challenger clip so often these past seven months that it might have been playing on a loop, the means by which he’d once managed to watch Taxi Driver fifteen times in a row. The news channel ran the footage every chance it got, right now as the visual background for a story about a lack of progress in implementing recommendations from the commission that had investigated the Shuttle accident.

The live network anchor fell silent and allowed the sound of the January clip to take over. Yet again, less than half a minute after liftoff, one could hear: “good roll program confirmed… Challenger now heading downrange … ”

Thirty-one seconds — his age, thirty-one — on the clock. The explosion would come at seventy-three, an age Reagan had now passed, because the Devastator bullet, which John Hinckley had placed near his heart, had failed to explode. The rocket, by contrast, was at this moment being destroyed by the flaw it carried within itself.

NASA’s official spokesman, on the sudden fire in the sky: “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation…obviously a major malfunction—”

“A major motherfuckin’ malfunction!” shouted the patient nearest the screen. It was always “patients,” never “inmates”; they were all here “by reason of insanity.”

Hinckley turned back to the window, not to escape the happy shouting in the room, where a measure of good humor had been restored by the familiar cartoonish disaster, but to avoid looking at what came next, just after the explosion: a divergence of the smoke into two plumes that traveled in separate directions, as if trying to get away from each other. Never the twain shall meet , he thought, recalling a phrase he’d heard in junior high school.

He had made, in his own phrase, “the greatest love offering in the history of the world,” and she had spurned it, raced away from acknowledgment of his existence as quickly as one of those plumes.

But he is over Jodie. He is ready — gradually, incrementally — to step out of here, to reinsert himself, quietly, like an explosive charge, at some well-chosen point in the vast country beyond these locked windows.

Thanks to a strictly kept regimen in the gym beneath his Arlington condominium, Anders Little, at thirty-eight, maintained the lean physique with which he had once competed on the Wake Forest track team. Here inside the Old Executive Office Building, he always took the stairs instead of the elevators, and during breaks in his day he would do laps of the tiled corridors. He’d make several circuits, sustaining the pace of a speed-walker, hoping to look driven instead of ridiculous. His sandy hair was thinning, but he had the tight, trim look of a career military man. One expected him to say “ma’am,” and he often did — not because he’d ever been in the Army, but because his father, back in Mooresville, North Carolina, had taught him to.