Mark Costello - Big If

Tashmo said, “How many?”

“Well, there’s Billy. There’s Gladys Aaron, Ken Howell, and Ken Ochs. Dusty lost his sister. And Reagan too, the man himself — remember, with the polyps? And Mrs., with the breast. It’s a pattern, Billy says. He says the Reagan era had become a cancer cluster. We’re all contracting growths, and why is this? Billy has two theories. One, cancer is secretly contagious. The other is that we were all exposed to some powerful mutagen on Air Force One.”

“Like what,” said Gus Dmitri, “some chemical or ray?”

“Billy didn’t know for sure, but he thought maybe it was fallout from glitzy campaign advertising. Maybe ads have rads and they bombard our genes. We fill the air with glitz. It has to effect something .”

“Billy is an idiot,” said Loudon Rhodes. “I love the guy like a brother, but let’s face it, he’s an idiot.”

The girl stood up and walked along the path. Hinckley followed her, still holding the book.

“They read each other poetry,” Gus Dmitri said. “I saw that in a magazine.”

Loudon shook his head. “It makes me sick, seeing Hinckley walk around like that. Look at him. Look at him. He should be in jail, the very coldest hole. Oh, but that might violate his precious little rights or mess up his precious little therapy.”

“That’s the problem with this country,” Panepinto said. “We’re afraid to punish. No wonder the young generation is walking around lost.”

“Hinckley needs a bullet,” Gus Dmitri said.

“Bang,” said Loudon Rhodes.

He still liked sex with Shirl.He liked it best just before he went away. He’d find her with her orchids in the UV room and take her in the kitchen from behind, or any old way she wanted. Married couples didn’t bang enough; this was, he felt, the root of many national problems. Sex with his wife made him feel patriotic.

They lay in bed, Tashmo drifting off to sleep. Shirl was bundled under covers, as she always was when naked in this room. She was talking about the problem with the car, the truck, the starter and the brakes, the trip to Generoso’s, Nigel, Mandy, and the car seats, sounding very far away.

Tashmo had a crazy thought, lying there. What if Lydia Felker had called Shirl? What if Lydia had told Shirl the whole story, the old affair, all of it? Was this why his wife was so on edge?

Shirl was up and busy. She copied Nigel’s number from her Palm Pilot, reaching to the night table, holding the covers to cover her breasts, like if she wasn’t careful he might see one. She brought the phone to Tashmo and he dialed.

Nigel taught a seminar on plagiarism at UMaryland. Tashmo didn’t like professors as a group and wasn’t wild about Britons either, except for Winston Churchill, who seemed like an okay guy. Tashmo had told the guests at Mandy’s wedding that Nigel taught a course in plagiarism, rather than on . Nigel, who was drunk, got pissed, saying that in meant he was teaching how , whereas on meant that he was deconstructing. The number rang somewhere in the District.

Nigel here. Kindly leave a message at the tone and I’ll return your call.

Tashmo waited for the tone. “Hi, Nigel, it’s your father-in-law, Sunday around six. I’m calling because we really need the car seats first thing tomorrow and I figure you don’t need them, since you dumped your family like the scumbag punk you are, and three weeks is probably too soon for you to have new kids with someone else, I’m assuming, so kindly drop the car seats at the Goulds’. You remember Bo and Leah from the wedding. They live down the street, the brick house on the corner, number forty-one. Don’t let us down, okay?”

The pickup started in the driveway.

Shirl said, “Hallelujah,” and threw it in reverse.

They took Laurel Road to the Balt-Wash. Tashmo made Shirl drive so that she could feel the leftward drag for herself and better describe it to Generoso.

He said, “Brake.”

She braked.

“Feel it?”

“No.”

“It’s like an aaagh . Tell him that. Try again.”

She tried it. She didn’t feel it.

He said, “I swear it was doing it before.”

It was dark. They were southbound on the Beltway.

“Try it now.”

She tried it.

“Feel anything?”

“A pain in the ass.”

“Oh that’s funny, Shirl. That’s really really funny.”

Shirl pulled in front of Building 00 at Andrews Air Force Base. They sat in the no standing zone and still there was this bullshit with the car.

“You mean the truck,” he said. “It’s a truck, a pickup truck. Say truck .”

“I can’t walk home.”

“Nigel will bring the seats, you’ll see. Mandy can follow you to Generoso’s.”

“Nigel will let us down.”

The jet beyond the fence was fueled and floodlit, waiting. Tashmo knew that Nigel would let them down.

He said, “Get one of your girlfriends to follow you to Generoso’s. Jeanette can take the bus to Custis.”

“That’s just great,” said Shirl. “A girl alone on a Greyhound bus with a fat black eye. Knowing our luck, she’ll be captured by a documentary photographer and become a famous haunting icon of American disaffection. How embarrassing for her — it could devastate her self-esteem.”

Shirl.

“You and your book club,” Tashmo said. “Besides, there ain’t nothing wrong with our luck.”

As the youngest agent on the VP’s team, Vi drew the duty of driving Gretchen Williams. Vi would leave Tower South in a four-door Taurus from the government’s leased fleet of four-door Tauruses, pick up Gretchen at her house in Maryland, take her to meetings at Old Treasury downtown, at the Pentagon, or out in Beltsville with the planners. Vi didn’t hate the duty. It was long days of no thinking, of focus on the road, as Gretchen shot the rapids of official Washington, pestering the higher-ups for better gear, or more down time, or replacement agents. Gretchen rarely got the things she lobbied for, but she tried, which Vi thought was impressive.

Vi pulled into Gretchen’s driveway around four that Sunday afternoon. She saw Gretchen in the doorway of her house, fighting with her son. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes, then Gretchen came down the steps with her suit and duffel bag.

From Gretchen’s house to Beltsville was twenty minutes without traffic, and there wasn’t too much traffic going northbound. In the twenty minutes, Gretchen said two things: “Hey” (as in hello , when she first came down her driveway and got in) and “Hey” (as in Pass this asshole already , when Vi was caught behind a rattle-trap Toyota in the slow lane on the Beltway). Gretchen spent the ride looking at the VP’s schedule for the New Hampshire trip, a fat printout in a plain manila folder. This was another good thing about driving Gretchen Williams: not a lot of claustrophobic small talk in the car.

They pulled up to the gate of the Protection Campus, passed their creds out the window to the guard, who ran them through a reader and waited for approval on his screen. The buried sensor net around the grounds was undergoing routine maintenance. Vi saw the techies and the backhoe and the trench, the SWATs in ball caps drinking coffee, standing by the trench, everybody looking like they were making overtime. The guard handed the IDs through the window and stepped back to let them pass.

A short road up the hill, lawns on either side. Three cars at the crest, parked end to end along the shoulder, flashers flashing, two Tauruses and a big black Lincoln Town Car with a whiplash aerial. An agent saw them coming and stepped into the road. The agent was a black guy, Levi Harris, one of the Director’s bodyguards. The Director, being king of all the details, had the Town Car and a driver and a detail of his own, and Levi was the weekend guy apparently.