Mark Costello - Big If

Bobbie didn’t say much and they didn’t go to Beltsville. Crossing out of Fairfax, their beepers beeped, first Vi’s and then Bobbie’s. They didn’t check their beepers, didn’t need to. They knew it was the Movements Desk. They were going out again.

In a small act of rebellion,Vi put off calling Movements for almost an hour, waiting until she was back in her apartment and alone. Her orders, when she got them, were as terse as a road sign: the VP’s team was scrambled for New Hampshire through the primary on Tuesday, rendezvous and jumping-off at eighteen-thirty hours. Vi thanked the duty agent only half sarcastically and started unpacking from the trip to Iowa so that she could start packing for New Hampshire. She was thinking of Lloyd Felker— There is no theory, there is only what we do.

She heard the Fiends laughing by the elevators. Some days they took the stairwells down from the penthouse, headlong, forty floors, urban mountain biking. Vi listened to them as she unpacked her bags, kicking her dirty laundry in a pile in the middle of the floor, socks and pants and underwear. The Fiends came down the hall and moved off again, bumping into doors, their voices growing faint.

Vi’s life was on the bed. Two suits, both blue, one dirty and the other wearable. Six blouses, five dirty and one boxed. An Uzi Model Z, black, specially modified, reasonably clean, a level three kevlar vest, folded over once, and, on the pillow, her sidearm from New York, a simple semiautomatic nine.

Vi waited, standing by the door of the studio, but she didn’t hear the Fiends again. She fit the Glock into her mouth, butt up, her knuckles in her eyes.

What we do.

She wasn’t suicidal. It was not that kind of act. It didn’t even mean as much as self-annihilation. It was just a bored thing that you do — you have a gun and a mouth, a thing and a hole, and you’re a little curious. Sex was probably invented this way. She stood there, counting one one-thousand, two one-thousand , thinking of the undertaker’s shady lawn, the games of hide-and-seek with Peta Boyle long ago. She stood there until she was sure that she felt completely idiotic (one one-thousand later), then she tossed the pistol on the futon and finished packing for the primary.

There was always bullshit with the carsor actually the car, because they only owned the one and it belonged to Shirl. Shirl’s car was a silver Nissan Sentra with forty thousand miles and light opera in the CD. Tashmo’s car — or what she called his “car”—was, in fact, a truck, a sporty little pickup, fully loaded, cherry red. Shirl called his truck a car just to get his goat. (Tashmo knew this, and resisted, and yet it got his goat.) When she was pissed, she called the truck a toy. When she was really pissed, as she might be now — sitting in the kitchen, it was hard to tell — she called the truck a goddamn stupid toy.

Shirl put the plate in front of him, an open-faced sloppy joe with a side of shoestring fries. The bullshit with the truck, the car, the toy, was that it didn’t always start on wet mornings, especially the cool-but-not-quite-cold wet mornings which they had instead of winter here in Maryland. When it started, it didn’t always brake, at least not in the velvet, mindless fashion Tashmo liked and expected in his braking. Instead, he touched the pedal and felt a leftward drag down around his balls, fleeting but distinctly leftward, which he said was like aaagh , like saying aaagh , the feeling in your throat of saying aaagh , except it’s in your balls.

Shirl poured two iced teas from the plastic jug and leaned against the counter by the bread machine. They drank their tea from tall plastic glasses, which were pebbled to look frosted. They had once owned two sets of glasses, one for indoors, made of glass, the other for the patio. They had once owned two sets of everything, plates and flatware, various-sized bowls, and used the plastic only when they ate out back under the string of hanging paper tiki lanterns and the ever-active bug zapper, which they did, all the time, when the girls were young, sometimes just the four of them, Tashmo, Shirl, Mandy, and Jeanette, sometimes with other Secret Service families, Tashmo’s pals from the Carter detail or the swingin’ Reagan team, Loudon Rhodes and Loudon’s wife and Kobe Rhodes, Loudon’s son, who breastfed into kindergarten and was husky for his age. Kobe Rhodes looked ten in kindergarten and he was a sight, climbing into his mother’s lap. Sue Rhodes untied her halter top, carried on with the conversation, as Kobe sucked and looked at Tashmo with one eye, like, Can I help you, bud? Lloyd Felker had been back there too, sectioned plastic plate in his khaki lap, with Lydia, his wife. The kids would play together, slipping on the SlipNSlide, mounting the wooden benches in their slappy bathing suits, except for Kobe Rhodes, who said he wasn’t hungry anymore. The other kids ate pickles, chips, and burgers, eating as kids ate, exactly half the bun, the burger crumbled into pieces, tweezered to their tongues, piece by tiny piece, three more bites and then a treat. Three more bites? Two more? Am I done yet, Mom? Eating like plea bargaining, and the tikis swayed, filling the patio with orange lurching voodoo light and the happy smell of citronella.

Shirl said, “ Aaah ? Pay attention to me, Tash. I’m supposed to go to Generoso and say aaah ? Like he’s some kind of goddamn dentist?”

Tashmo said, “Not aaah, aaa-guh . From the gut, Shirl. Try it for me once.”

Generoso was their family mechanic. He ran Generoso’s Citgo on the Balt-Wash in New Carrollton. The truck had an appointment in the morning. Tashmo had planned to drive the truck to Generoso’s with Shirl on his tail, describe the aaagh , the distinctly leftward drag, the sawing of the starter, then drive home in Shirl’s car and let the old mechanic work his magic. But Movements had ruined a good nap, putting Tashmo on deployment until Tuesday, which meant that Shirl would have to get the truck to Generoso’s on her own.

She sipped her sweet iced tea. “Goddamn stupid toy.”

So it was official: she was really pissed, and he, for one, knew why. She thought that he was going north to chase other women, as he once did, but didn’t anymore. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t anymore, but this would have required admitting that he did, once, or more than once, more than once a week in fact. So he was trapped again, ketchuping his fries, a lacy, spiral pattern, as Shirl made that nervous clucking noise.

Age had mugged them both, but Tashmo was defiant. His hair was gray, though still his own and thick enough to pompadour. He refused to trim his sideburns to the fashion or stop dressing as he dressed, in yoked suits with slash pockets, a style called contemporary westernwear. Gretchen Williams wouldn’t let him wear the bolo ties, even though a suit with yoking and no bolo tie looked ridiculous. Why couldn’t Gretchen see this? Never mind, fuck her — he loved his dudeish suits. They made him look, with the ’burns and the pomp and the zippered boots, like the carny-barking stock car impresarios he had worshiped as a kid. This was what he had planned to be when he was old, when he was young and planned for being old.

He chewed a fry and thought about a town called Falling Rock, the place where he was young, the grassland flats of eastern North Dakota. They used to hang out by the highway, Tashmo and his high school friends, drinking beer, pooling their pornography, and watching motorists mistake the city limits sign for a Highway Department warning. The motorists would brake behind their windshields, peering out for any sign of falling rock, or any height it might fall from. Tashmo and his buddies hunted through the grass, gathering stones, which they threw at passing cars. They gathered stones and talked about the future endlessly. One kid was going into radio, another to pro baseball, probably the Cubs, a third to the pipelines like his paw, and a fourth to glamorous stock car/funny car impresariodom, and this was the young-ass Tashmo. The kid who was going into radio already had a half-hour show on a twenty-watter in Fort Scott, beaming surfer hits — you could hear him all the way to Minnesota. The kid who planned to be a Cub could hit the city limits sign, a blue-sky peg and a satisfying ding . Tashmo loved the action of boys throwing rocks — the windup, the sliding sneaker-scrape, the click of elbow-wrist, the unt of shoulder muscle. Stay motionless until it hits, only a punk would turn his back and not watch it fall. Funny — when they talked about the future, no one even mentioned Southeast Asia.