Mark Costello - Big If

Gretchen said, “What is this, Vi, a college road trip? Thirteen your butt to Portsmouth and stay there, got it?”

“Fine,” said Vi. “And Gretchen?”

“What?”

“Thanks for everything.” Vi punched END.

Boone was down to his last picture in the living room. He pointed to a picture on the coffee table, two women side by side at a rally. Boone pointed to the woman Vi had picked out as a possibility. He said, “Who’s she? Lady on the right.”

Little Flower glanced at the picture. “I have no idea.”

Boone pointed to the woman on the left. “Okay, who is that?”

Little Flower looked a moment. “I don’t know.”

“That’s you, Little Flower. With the mailing tube.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Look again.”

Little Flower looked again. “God I was a blimp. Is my butt that big? I thought those slacks were slimming. What a fool I was.”

“The point is, you’re with this other woman here. We know the lady’s name. We just want you to confirm it.”

“I told you, I don’t know her.”

“Come on, Little Flower — what are the odds that two women would both go separately to the same hate rally in the same type of disguise and just happen to wind up standing next to each other?”

Little Flower squinted, concentrating. Then she shook her head and said, “I give up, what are the odds?”

“Little Flower.”

“Okay, okay, okay. Her name is Linda. Linda, Belinda. We called her Linda mostly. Also sometimes Lindy.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Linda. Linda B. Linda.”

“What’s her last name, Little Flower?”

“Johnson.”

“Christ,” said Vi.

“Jaw, jaw, Joe, Jones. She used that name sometimes — Jo Jones.”

Vi said, “That’s the fakest fucking name I ever heard.”

Little Flower saw it then. She said, “You don’t know.” She looked at Boone accusingly. She looked at Christopher. She said, “You’re asking me and you don’t even know.”

The motorcade continued east,heading to the next event, a brief speech to a small crowd at the Rumsey Moose Lodge. Tashmo and O’Teen, working the advance, got to Rumsey first, running twenty minutes ahead of the others and almost ninety minutes behind schedule.

Tashmo, looking at the town (a superette, two houses, a blinking yellow light, and a ghostly depot with no tracks), felt the need for some confirmation that this was, in fact, the Rumsey listed on the schedule, and not some other hill-and-hollow crossroads in New Hampshire’s Appalachia. He sent O’Teen off to ask a local. Tashmo, as the senior hand, stayed with the vehicle, ran the heater, had a smoke. He was in a foul mood by then, getting on toward five, the sky going pale behind the clouds, late winter in New England and he hated it, there’s no such thing as afternoon up here, it’s morning then it’s getting dark, and anyone with half a brain has moved away or is getting loaded in a bar, except they didn’t seem to have a bar in Rumsey.

Tashmo knew he couldn’t fairly blame his mood on Rumsey, or the weather, or the hour. No, he had been feeling dumpy since the session with the threatmen. He had called Shirl from Boone’s office, hoping, honestly, that she would be out having salads with her book club. He had planned to leave a message asking if Mandy’s sneaky English husband had dropped off the car seats at the neighbors as requested, so that Mandy and the twins could follow Shirl in the truck to Generoso’s. He didn’t need to know if this had happened (he assumed it hadn’t and he didn’t really care), but he needed to act like he cared, and a message would have done the trick quite nicely. But his strategy had backfired (why was he surprised?). Shirl had answered fast and said, “Oh Tash! I’m glad you called.” There was no plausible way to avoid a conversation at that point, so he asked her if she got the truck to Generoso’s. Shirl said, “Oh yes, and it worked out just like you said, Nigel left the car seats at the Goulds’, but we didn’t even need them as it turned out, because we left the twins with Leah Gould — she was overjoyed to baby-sit — and Mandy followed me to Generoso’s.” Several questions sprang to mind, the sort of tiny story-flaws Boone Saxon would have jumped on, but Tashmo, spooked by Shirl’s good cheer, didn’t want to probe. He asked if Jeanette got off to school okay with her swollen eye and slightly damaged kidneys. Shirl was, again, disturbingly upbeat. “Everything is great,” she said. “Jeanette rode the bus and no one took her picture as a disaffected icon of cauliflowered innocence, at least that I know of. Heck, I hope they took her picture, Tash. She looked great, so adult, going off like that.” Shirl closed the conversation with a kicker: “I love you and I trust you, Tash,” she said. “Everything is going to work out for us, you’ll see.”

Listening to Shirl, and thinking of it as he smoked and waited for O’Teen, Tashmo felt a slow-unfolding system-wide alarm, like coming to acknowledge and admit that you definitely need to piss without delay. She loves me and she trusts me, Nigel brought the car seats, everything worked out . What the fuck was going on? He wondered if his prostate tests had come back negative or positive or however they came back when you’ve got cancer on the glands. He wondered if Shirl was banging old Bo Gould and feeling the guilts about it. He doubted it (Bo was such a square), but what else would make his wife be so — pleasant?

He went into the superette and found O’Teen talking to a guy behind the counter.

“He says it’s Rumsey,” said O’Teen.

“It’s all Rumsey,” said the counter guy. “Which Rumsey are you looking for? There’s Rumsey Corner, Rumsey Crossing, Rumsey Bridge, and Rumsey Depot.”

Tashmo said, “We’re looking for the Moose Lodge.”

“That’s in Shawgamunk.”

“It says Rumsey Moose Lodge,” Tashmo said.

“Well, it’s in Shawgamunk. Go to Rumsey Bridge, take a left, follow the signs.”

“Are there signs before the bridge?”

“Yes, but don’t follow them. They go back to Willingboro.”

They motored up the road to Rumsey Bridge. They were pretty late by then, but Tashmo figured the motorcade was at least as lost as they were. They passed one of the press buses going the wrong way, heading for the superette.

O’Teen found the Moose Lodge off the highway, ten minutes past the bridge, a cinder-block building, a sign hanging by two bike chains from a rusty pole. The cops were there, sheriff’s men from Portsmouth, and a gang of campaign volunteers. Tashmo did a walk-through with the deputies. There was a beer hall in the basement where the VP would address a gathering of eighty Moose and invited guests, a side door to the parking lot, stairs up to the ground floor, a hallway in the basement going back to the latrines. The furnace room was locked, as was the door upstairs (O’Teen checked them both), so Tashmo put a deputy on the side door, another on the stairs, told O’Teen and the other deputy to set up a choke point at the entrance to the beer hall.

The Army truck arrived and the bomb dogs went to work as Tashmo watched the volunteers drape the basement walls in crepe and campaign placards. The volunteers had come up from the VP’s Portsmouth operation. Their leader, an officious prick named Tim, started asking questions about when the VP would be here, and which door he would use, obviously scheming to be in the VP’s path, to pump his hand and press his application for a judgeship, or whatever it was that Tim had in mind for Tim, post-election.