Mark Costello - Big If

Vi said, “Why the bird?”

Mariah said, “He sings.”

Vi wanted to smack Mariah, make a fist, aim for her mouth. The feeling came from nowhere, suddenly.

Vi said, “What the fuck made you leave Russia anyway? I’m talking to you. What made you think you could survive a month in this country? Do you have any idea how much it will cost the taxpayers to deport your ass, Mariah? Why are you my problem? Why are you my afternoon? Tell me why, Mariah.”

Mariah blinked at Vi, absolutely shocked. The blond American had been so kind till then.

Vi said, “Oh for God’s sake. Here, take this bagel. Take it. It’s garlic, it’s good. You won’t be seeing your next meal until breakfast tomorrow.”

Vi explained to Mariah that she was going to the tank at JFK for pre-arraignment, from arraignment to the Marshal’s and the Immigration maw.

Parakeets were not allowed in the pens and Wal-Mart didn’t want it back. The bird was another refugee. After processing Mariah, Vi threw the bird and travel cage out the window on the inbound BQE.

Vi was sick of Criminal by then and disgusted with herself. She asked the Service for a transfer and they sent her to Protection, the vice-presidential team, and this was how Vi started working crowds.

The problem with her energy was sleeping, said her doctor, Dr. Lee, and the problem with her sleeping was her weight. Dr. Lee was on the list of preapproved primary care/gatekeeper physicians for the Treasury health plan, which was why Gretchen Williams had called the doctor to begin with, Gretchen being forty-five, almost forty-six, and three years without a checkup. Gretchen was three years without a check-up because her former gatekeeper, a white guy by the name of Weiss, had retired to Palm Beach, leaving Gretchen gatekeeperless, adrift, and too busy at the time to notice.

When Dr. Weiss retired, the president was in the first year of his second term and gunning for a Nobel Prize. They didn’t say which prize, but Gretchen, then a presidential bodyguard, had assumed it wasn’t physics. The president was traveling to every fucked-up, war-torn corner of the world, Israel and Palestine, Bosnia and Kosovo, and other places which, though not formally war-torn, were very, very tense, Ireland and Ireland, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan (one side had a bomb named Shiva, the other had a bomb named something equally scary, much scarier than Fat Man and Little Boy and look at all the damage they had done), and going to these places with a sitting president was very, very tense. Gretchen remembered the flight from Islamabad to Delhi, brown earth and the running shadow of the jet. She was looking out the portholes at the roads and villages for the flash of missile-launch and wondering, how many Pakistanis want us dead? It was perfect somehow — the depth and crispness of the hate, like a big blue sky. There were other things going on in Gretchen’s life around that time. She was a single mother and her son, a boy named Tevon, a fine boy and a good boy and a kind one, she believed, was having problems at his school, acting out and talking back, even, once or twice, hitting other kids, and once making fun of a girl in a wheelchair. Gretchen, returning from a peace trip, didn’t know the words to tell her son how wrong it was to pick on a crippled kid, and it was the only time she ever hit him hard. She hit him because she didn’t know the words. She hit him in the bedroom, in the head, and he kind of sailed across the bed, and she felt sick, watching this. Two weeks later, they went to Pakistan.

She had the kind of life in which you could easily go three years without a checkup, and so when the Director of the Secret Service called her in and offered her promotion to lead agent/chief-of-detail to the VP’s team, she said no and flatly no — it was just too much. Gretchen knew that the VP would be running for president and that his entourage would be on the road six days out of seven for eighteen months on end, rallies, speeches, koffee klatches, nine and ten events a day. His campaign agents would be sleeping on the plane, working ropelines in their dreams. Pakistan was bad, but Iowa was worse. You walk up Main Street in a farm town, shaking every hand, people coming out of every shop and doorway. They mob your man, hug him, slap his back, and you have no idea who these people are.

She had worked the presidential cycle when the president himself was up for reelection and it was fairly brutal for a while, but the president didn’t have to fight inside the party and they coasted through the Super Tuesday states. The travel didn’t fire up until July, and then there was a crisis in the Middle East and two ugly budget showdowns with the Senate in September, and they had a fine excuse to stay in Washington, which was excellent for Gretchen, because her son had started at the special school that fall, and she could drive him there most mornings like a normal single mom, and have a little talk along the way, good and evil and don’t forget your lunch.

The Director tried to talk her into accepting the promotion. He said it wasn’t clear that the VP was definitely running (which was horseshit — it was clear; the guy had nine PACs by then and two different exploratory committees, and what were they exploring, outer space?) The Director sidestepped most of this and said, flatteringly, that he thought she showed great promise as a boss. There were only sixteen humans in the world under the protection of the Secret Service — the president, first lady, and first daughter, the VP and the second family, ex-presidents and ex — first family members (imagine that, the Director said, an entire agency organized around sixteen beating hearts) — and sixteen lives meant sixteen details, and, as the Director pointed out, chief-of-detail slots did not come open every week.

“I like you,” he said. “You keep them dawgies moving, Gretch. I admire that. I see you as the sort of fine young female type minority supervisor who could pretty much write his or her own ticket in this Service, maybe be directress in her own right one day, given six or seven years and a well-hung rabbi, meaning me, I mean. I’d hate to see you make a shit career move here. Think it over, Gretch.”

It was a remarkable speech, clever and pathetic all at once. No one called her Gretch, for one thing, and she wasn’t really all that young. She had been an L.A. cop for twelve years before she took the test for Treasury enforcement, and was actually quite old for a GS-11, her pay grade at the time, and looked even older than she was, her dreads gone lank and gray, lines around her eyes, a couple extra pounds on her butt and thighs. The business about female and minority was more on the pathetic side, and Gretchen happened to know that he had given the same speech to Debbie Escobedo-Waas when he’d offered her the job of VP’s chief-of-detail. Debbie was the only other woman of color above the rank of GS-10. Above GS-10 or so, the Service, like a mountain, grew white as snow and also very cold.

Gretchen thought it over in the Director’s office. She was not averse to moving up. It would mean a couple pay steps, for one thing, fifteen grand a year, and she was saving nothing as an 11, but then again she had a son, a troubled son it seemed. She couldn’t travel with a candidate, not ten events a day for eighteen months. Even Debbie Escobedo-Waas couldn’t handle that and she was only thirty-one, and childless, and had that sexy little dress size that she was so proud of, and ran five miles on her lunch hour every day, six hundred laps of the Rose Garden. Gretchen said no again to the promotion.