Mark Costello - Big If

Lloyd drinking coffee, watching screens: “I don’t know, Tash — I worry about Lydia. She needs some outside interests. Maybe if you sat her down. She still talks about the time you changed the fuse. I think she looks up to you.”

Tashmo didn’t squirm. He tried to be a pro about it. He said, “She needs a change of scenery, that’s all, Lloyd. Go back to Fresno, have a kid. I bet they’d make you a group supervisor in Crim, bright young guy like you.”

But Lloyd, the trusting geek, said he couldn’t leave. He loved Protection, the idea of the perimeter, the science of the thing. He said, “She was an actress, Tash, did you know that? She was on TV in supporting roles. She was in a two-part Harry O .”

In fairness, Tashmo had tried to end it after a few weeks, his thing with Lydia. The record, he was thinking, should reflect this. The sex was unbelievable, yes, but Lydia, the actress, was into melodrama, which spooked him in his sober, nontumescent moments. Shirl was pregnant with Jeanette that summer — Tashmo had a family to consider. Lydia was risky for a hundred reasons. So he made his move. He called her from the White House and arranged a lunch-hour meeting at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a good place to remember their duties, Lydia to Lloyd, Tashmo to his family. The Tomb was Tashmo’s favorite place to end his love affairs. He had dumped many women in the pillared amphitheater over the years — it was the perfect setting, strategically and otherwise. The Tomb was always awash in out-of-towners, nobody he knew, and always hushed, the awesome, marble hush of fatherland and sacrifice. Even Lydia would find it hard to shout obscenities at him in such surroundings. He planned the breakup like a Secret Service op, doing the advance work in his mind. If she wept, a fifty-fifty bet, the tourists around them would assume that she had given a loved one to America’s defense and respectfully ignore her sobs. He had a whole plan for cutting Lydia loose — a sleazy, craven plan, brilliant in its way, but it was raining when he met her in the amphitheater, and they had to make a run for it. They wound up in the front seat of his government sedan. He tried to deliver the speech he had prepared. You know how much I care for you, that’s why this is so hard. It might have worked at the Tomb, but in the car it sounded phony. She was drenched through her blouse. Steam rose from both of them, fogging the windows. As he spoke, she slowly put her seat back, and unbuttoned the top button on her blouse.

Not a success. The next plan he came up with (equally craven, though less brilliant) was to never call her, never see her, never return the coded messages she left at the White House switchboard. Tell him he’s got a dentist’s appointment, Tuesday, say threeish, the usual place. He was guarding Jimmy Carter, going down the ropes, knowing she was elsewhere in the city, waiting for him on the greasy sheets of the ghetto motel.

He was saved by the elections. He traveled double hard with Carter, volunteering for every trip, keeping temptation far away. He came home in November 1980. Carter was defeated and good riddance to the pious little party-pooper. Jeanette was born and Lydia wasn’t calling anymore.

Ronald Wilson Reagan was Tashmo’s new beginning, his clean slate. Tashmo loved the Dutchman as a father, as a pal and fellow dude. He loved the team, Loudon Rhodes, Felker, Gus Dmitri, Billy Spandau, Panepinto — Reagan’s boys they were, and would always be. He loved the trips out west, door to door, coast to coast, the South Lawn to the California ranch, six hours in the air, three touchdowns in between, Memphis, Phoenix, LAX. They crossed the time zones like an arrow, nearly made the sun stand still, bringing Reagan west. They worked prepackaged rallies at the airports, shirtsleeve crowds, clapping hands, low rolling chants, music from the marching bands, tiny flags, red, white, and blue, a blizzard of these tiny flags, like unfalling confetti, and it was Reagan who did it, and Reagan who made it, word chanted into manglement, name chanted into stadiums of sound, A- gihn , A- gihn , A- gihn . They jumped from LAX to Point Mugu Naval Air, met the helo on the tarmac for the final leg, rising with the mountain walls to the Western White House, the Rancho del Cielo, which Lloyd Felker (bilingual and showoffish) tried to say meant the Ranch of the Ceiling, a concept of fixed limits, of you-can-go-no-higher-than, but which Tashmo and the other boys knew meant just the opposite, the Ranch of Heaven and no limits.

Shirl was always after Tashmo to come home. She got him when he was at his weakest, after sex and sloppy joes, after soapy hand jobs in the tub, when his daughters were asleep, when he kissed them both asleep, just before he went away. She’d be at the bathroom sink, washing the jism and soapsuds off her hands. His bags were on the bed, packed and zippered for a month in California. He’d be at the mirror, styling his pompadour, waiting for the burning sensation in his dick hole to die down.

“You should watch your daughters grow”—this was Shirl’s argument back then.

Tashmo thought the best way to watch a child grow was to see the kid something like once a month. That way you really noticed the progress. He didn’t share this insight with his wife.

Shirl said, “Men do projects around the house. That’s what a husband does. Look at Bo Gould. He redid their kitchen with his own two hands.”

Tashmo tied his tie. “He did not.”

“Did so.”

“Did not.”

“He paid the men who did. He paid them with his own two hands. Tash, it’s not for me. It’s for Mandy and the baby. Don’t you think they deserve a dad?”

Well, he thought, they had a dad. He had done his bit, sent his little cowboy DNAs along.

Shirl was stuck in Maryland — that was the problem. She didn’t understand how it felt, crossing time, taking Reagan west. Half a day of sunset, boys. We’re at the peak—

Heaven was a ranch in California. Who was more American than Dutch?

Reagan went riding most mornings at the ranch. He went out with Laxalt, his pet senator, or Charlton Heston, or with Mrs. Reagan and the Annenbergs. The Service bought a stable of used horses to cover Reagan on these rides. The horses had appeared in Mexican westerns and were trained not to buck at gunfire. Agents who could ride formed a mounted subdetail. Tashmo’s father had run a bar in Falling Rock and Tashmo grew up shooting pool, throwing rocks, pumping gas. He wasn’t any kind of rider, but he was a skilled and supple liar, and he bluffed his way onto the saddle squad. Reagan always cantered to this one high-country meadow, which looked like a set from Bonanza , the perfect tableau west, but only from one angle. Every other angle took in the sprawl beyond — snarling US 101, booming Santa Barbara, miles of arroyo burning for years, some vast drought management fuckup, which Reagan always blamed on too much government. Against this modern backdrop, men on horses looked hemmed in, endangered, asinine. But Reagan had a gift for making cameras see him as he saw himself, and in the thousand wire service photos of the meadow on the ranch there was never any evidence of 101, the city, or the smolder in the hills. In Tashmo’s memory they were really cowboys at the ranch, packing Uzis, wearing chaps and creaky Tony Llama boots. He was with the Reagans and the Annenbergs on the semifamous morning when someone’s horse kicked up a rattlesnake. Tashmo drew his Uzi and fired at the dirt, the muzzle exploding in his horse’s ear. The nag forgot its training and Tashmo fell backwards, emptying his clip into the sky. He landed on a stump, still firing, and nearly put a hole in Mrs. Reagan. All the agents opened up on the snake threat, a ring of blazing Uzis in the meadow. They couldn’t find the pieces later, but Betsy Annenberg swore it was a rattler.