The SAC loved Tashmo. He said, “You’re a dude.”
The SAC was an embarrassment, the way he brought his mitt to the ballpark, clapping for a rally, a fist into the mitt, and used it as a megaphone, The ump is a chump!, and knocked the kids aside for the foul balls.
Tashmo begged for orders out of Baltimore and they sent him to Protection, Carter’s detail. He took Shirl and Mandy camping in the microbus to celebrate, a week in Valley Forge, where Mandy learned to walk. Tashmo was something of a history buff, a fool for dioramas and ugly observation decks. He was happy anywhere there was a gift shop selling tasseled pencils, which were much too big for the see-through pencil cases, which they also sold. Shirl called the microbus a “camper” after that, thinking micro made the bus sound both metric and injectable. They drove the camper/microbus to Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Appomattox, and all the way out to Mount Rushmore, where Shirl took his picture guarding the stone presidents in a Hawaiian shirt, but mostly they took it to Generoso, who probably fixed the microbus twenty-seven times before Tashmo finally sold it to an EPA ecologist for two-hundred dollars over Blue Book.
The ecologist claimed the bus one afternoon. He brought his wife, a tall gal named Anita. Her hair was glossy-black, straight to her ass, and she came from Winnipeg. As the husband looked for rust, Tashmo had a vision in his driveway. It came to him full-blown, as movies come to you in theaters. He saw Anita kneeling at his feet in a buckskin dress, offering him a platter of cool butter. He snuck around to the back of the microbus and stole the tire iron.
A few days passed. Carter was R&R’ing at Camp David and the detail was standing three-day rotating watches, pretty decent duty, watching Carter agonize, better than skiing with the crazy fucking Fords everybody said, except for the ticks in the woods, and the protest-hippies and photojournalists sneaking through the underbrush.
Tashmo was coming back from a rotation. He went by the ecologist’s. He knew that the wife was home. He saw her car, an orange Karmann Ghia, sitting in the driveway. He didn’t see the microbus. He figured the ecologist was off ecologizing. He rang the bell, spinning the tire iron in his hands, kicking at the welcome mat.
Anita opened up. She wore a long suede skirt, ferny green, a studded seam running up the outside of each thigh. He offered her the iron and started to explain.
She said, “Aren’t you nice?”
And he was. He would always think of that time, Carter into Reagan, as his suede phase, remembering Anita’s seam, her saddle-smelling thighs. Looking back, it seemed he spent those months commuting to Camp David, living in a bunkhouse, patrolling the dirt roads, watching Sadat take a chilly dip, then home again to Shirl, by way of Anita’s.
Camp David made him horny, everything about it — the goofy swimmin’ holes, the timbered dining halls, the motor court cabins done up in a thrift-store Happy Angler motif, like Mamie Eisenhower’s vision of an Adirondack Berchtesgarden. The point of the place was to Retreat, clear the head of leadership in the bosom of the woods, some F. Scott Thoreau — type jazz, but the woods were rigged with the latest anti-SigInt gear, microwave bafflers under underbrush, emitting the acyclic hum of a wounded engine. Tashmo walked the fences in boots and Wrangler jeans, slinging his sixteen just like in the war, always in long sleeves and slathered in bug lotion, because the woods were ticky, and if the ticks bit you, you got this thing called Lyme disease, which was basically old age except you caught it from a deer. Walking the woods at night, Tashmo heard the bafflers, but couldn’t always find them. The humming wavelength was designed to bounce between the trees and carry forever. The term was propagate, the techies said, the description of this bouncing, like in the Bible (he remembered Vietnam), and Abraham did propagate with Sarah, or like Russia, where they had propaganda instead of democracy. He tried to follow the hum, but he found himself walking in big circles, the moon between the trees, on his left, then on his right. The bafflers he couldn’t find made his dick stand up. Many times on lone patrols he had to lean against a tree and jerk off in the dark just to get his mind back on Jimmy Carter.
He spent a lot of time in the duty hut, drinking rotgut coffee with Lloyd Felker, filling out the logs, watching a wall of CCTV, surveillance cameras sweeping fences all night long. They had motion sensors, infrared, scanners tuned to wide array. They tracked possum for fun and watched Johnny Carson, the monologue and guests, the smutty banter from the couches. They tracked the protest hippies, the anti-nukers trying to infiltrate from the west, saw them coming miles in advance.
Tashmo liked to interview the anti-nukers. He considered them hippies and perhaps they were. He offered them cigarettes, went easy on the frisks, gave them exciting jeep rides to the admin shack. He admired hippies, the whole Woodstock thing. They said that Vietnam was bad — he had seen it, and agreed. They advocated free love in the mud — he hadn’t seen it, but he wanted to. But the hippies he met under Carter were a dreary, worried group. He asked them how often they got laid, as hippies, in an average day, sincerely curious, but they could only talk about Three Mile Island, rads and rems and cataclysmic heat-exchanger failures.
Anita was a hippie, a suburban Buddhist, and she vacuumed in the buff. He saw her twice a week, stopping by for yogurt and a blowjob when Carter was at camp. Sex with her was exercise and, she said, a brief communion with the honesty of bodies. She grew bean sprouts in the basement, quoted Joni Mitchell, and wouldn’t let Tashmo smoke in the house even if he promised to blow it out the window. There was always a tension with Anita. The tension made it sexy, their little tug-of-war. Tashmo loved her clothes, her jerkins and her moccasins, and secretly he wanted to undress her partially and do the deed that way, but she was always in a rush for total honesty.
“It’s all wrapped up together,” Tashmo mused one day as she went down on him. “If we didn’t have clothes, being naked wouldn’t mean too much.”
She shrieked in his lap.
He said, “What’s the problem down there?”
“Your cock,” she gagged. “It, it — it tastes almost like the smell of Deep Woods Off.”
Tashmo said, “Oh that.”
He explained about the deer tick infestation at Camp David, how the agents smeared themselves in bug repellent, how it got from his hands to his manhood when he jerked off in the woods, and how he thought of her, jerking off alone. He thought she might be flattered by this honest revelation, but no dice. She made him take a shower with the soap she cooked at home.
He came back with a towel and described his driveway fantasy, Anita kneeling in a buckskin shift, holding the ample dairy platter. He was hoping for a little role-playing, but Anita was aghast. She said he was describing the Land O Lakes logo-woman, the box the butter comes in, the ethnocentric squaw. She strode off naked to the fridge, returning with a box of Land O Lakes. Sure enough, there she was, glowing on the package, his sexual ideal, a Pochahontan princess, offering him butter on her knees.
Things were never right with Anita after that, but he didn’t let it get him down. Suburbia was full of wives — wives like lawns, beautiful and useless and tended by their husbands once a week. Upper P.G. County was a civil service bedroom. The husbands in his town were civil service lifers, like the EPA ecologist, or Tashmo and his Secret Service buds, or like Tashmo’s neighbor, Bo Gould, who could sing all seven verses of the Fannie Mae fight song. The wives were mostly ex — flower children, transitioning to something else, like Canadian Anita with her orange Karmann Ghia, her well-thumbed Kama Sutra, and her closet full of suede.