“I remember this other time,” Bobbie said. “Super Tuesday in Atlanta, when the president was running the first time. You’ve never worked Super T, but let me tell you, it’s a fucking scene — six hundred delegates selected, the nomination on the line, careers are made and ruined, and bourbon is the balm. Everyone was staying at the same hotel on Peachtree, the candidates, the campaign staff, the press, and us. Georgia’s coming in, Tennessee is coming in, Florida is coming in, and everybody’s smashed. I’m in the hotel bar with Fundeberg, the president’s Rasputin, the architect of victory, the toast of Super Tuesday. We had a thing back then.”
“You and Fundeberg?”
“Why — is he so horrible? Don’t answer that. We’re drinking Charlie Mansons in the bar, and we go up to his suite with this twerpy little talking head from cable. We ride the elevator and it’s glass. The lobby had its own indoor jungle and we rose over it, like going up to heaven. We get to the suite and the phone is ringing. It’s a well-known syndicated columnist — I shouldn’t say his name.”
She said his name.
Vi said, “Him? But he looks so owlish.”
“Mr. Family Values, always calling for a moral renewal, horny little wormwood that he is. So he shows up, flings off his bow tie and we keep on drinking and I’m feeling good, you know. I’m feeling free. Here’s trashy little Bobbie Taylor from a Tulsa trailer park, drinking drinks with these big important men, and this is what I want and this is all I want, and we keep drinking and I lie back on the bed. I close my eyes and then I feel their hands on me. It’s like they’re searching me.”
Vi said, “Was it nice?”
“Not at first. The mood was off — ringing phone, three TVs, beepers beeping, and this moaning, keening, grinding sound like a goddamn ghost in chains, which turned out to be a fax-paper jam. The talking head was talking dirty and the columnist was bragging about the opinion-making power of his weekly dozen inches, but the body’s an amazing thing — I started going with it. You know that feeling, Vi? Your mind is here, your body’s there. You float away. That’s how Super Tuesday felt to me. The talking head’s between my legs, the columnist fills my mouth, but just as I’m about to come, Fundeberg starts leaking.”
“Leaking?”
“Some incredibly hot nugget of inside campaign dirt, I forget exactly what. They left me on the bed and went off the record. Deep background, they call it.”
They were sitting on a bench in the oasis. Dimes shimmered on the bottom of the fountain pool, magnified by water, looking like nickels. The fountain was on some kind of timer. It rose to a halo, fell to a burble, rose again and fell.
Bobbie said, “Oh well. Someday I’ll get there, Vi — the inner ring of power, sure. Come on, girl — let’s find this damn boutique.”
The elite boutique had no sign and no windows. They found a plain steel door under a surveillance cam.
“This must be it,” Bobbie said.
Vi looked at the camera.
Bobbie said, “That’s so they can peruse us and see if we’re their sort of person.”
She buzzed. They waited by the door.
Driving back to Washington, Vi said, “It was probably closed, that store.”
Bobbie didn’t say much, depressed by the rejection.
Vi said, “Let’s go up to Beltsville and goof off at the range.”
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.
6
There was always bullshit with the cars or 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.