There were two banquet halls off the lobby at the inn. The first, the West Wind Room, had been rented to the campaign and transformed into a cavernous press center. Gretchen walked between the rows of folding tables, watching people type at laptops, talk on cell phones, type and talk and chew their pencils, looking at the ceiling.
“Before the flood, this person we call Earl was a guest of the State of Illinois, doing the back nine of a seven-to-fourteen, working in the barber shop, studying for his GE Ph.D. in boxing history, hoarding marijuana, snitching on his friends, abusing his free access to the law library, pestering the overburdened courts with nuisance suits complaining of various ills, slights, and due process violations — in other words, living the life of your typical mellow prison inmate.
“Then it rained and rained, and the river rose, and the person we call Earl was sent to Hinman with a work gang, throwing dikes against the flood. He was separated from the others when the levee broke. He wandered through the town, in no special hurry to find the nearest guard. Earl claims that as the water swallowed the lower-lying trailer parks he was bravely engaged in a volunteer salvage operation, rescuing televisions, sporting goods, and women’s underwear from the sinking trailers. As he was salvaging everything that wasn’t bolted down, he looked up and saw an apparition, nothing less — a crazy white man in tacky flight attendant clothes, wading through the water, telling Earl and his co-salvagers to disperse to the designated refugee processing center. The man was with a spindly-ass little white girl, who seemed to work for the same airline. When Earl and the other salvagers did not disperse as directed, the white man came up with an Uzi. Earl flees into a trailer, the flight attendants follow. Shots are exchanged inside the trailer as it slips into the river.
“Everything is dark and they are under water. Earl pushes through a window and pops to the surface, spinning in a nasty sucking current. He can’t see the banks. He thinks that he will die and opens negotiations with the Creator of the Universe, making certain promises: If You let me live, dear God, I promise I will never, never, never joyride or set poor examples for the youth of my community. He fights to keep his mouth up. He kicks and promises. He weakens and begins to fade. At that moment he is bashed in the face. He looks up and sees the old white flight attendant clinging to the roof of the floating trailer home. Felker — and of course it’s Felker — is trying to push a ladder to Earl, striking Earl in the face and head. Earl grabs the bottom rung and climbs to the roof, where he promptly vomits.
“They rode the house downriver. The trailer was small and vinyl-sided, winterized, airtight against the kind of drafts which can balloon your heating bill, and therefore semi-watertight. This is Earl’s version. I’m not saying I believe it. Boone has consulted home-buoyancy experts and even staged a secret reenactment with scale models in Nevada. The conclusion reached by Threats is that a fully winterized, vinyl-sided domicile could, if weighted properly, float and not capsize, but only in no current, not the monster wet stampede Earl has described, and even in no current, the house could float for, at best, some hours, not the day and night and dawn Earl has described, and so there is good cause to doubt the heart of Earl’s account. I don’t care about the floating house, myself. My question is, what did they talk about, Felker and the car thief, clinging to the roof? I assume there was some conversation. Be awkward without conversation, wouldn’t it?”
Gretchen left the press center in the West Wind Room. There was a complementary coffee bar by the front desk in the lobby, two steel urns, a sleeve of cups, little baskets holding sugar packets and half-and-half containers. Gretchen stopped to pour a cup. She took it black. Tashmo passed on coffee.
“The house was always breaking up,” she said. “What happens is, the stripping glue becomes unstuck. Water seeps into the drywall, the drywall swells, the plastic staples blow, panels float away, and the house begins to sink. First Felker and Earl had the house and roof, then part of the house and all of the roof, then a corner of the roof. They floated, clinging to it, and Earl again made final preparations. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘it’s me again — we spoke earlier today, and you’ll notice that I’ve thus far kept the promises I made, and haven’t joyridden or set a poor example for the youth, and so I’d like to propose that we continue with our mutual understanding about me not dying or joyriding.’”
Gretchen sipped her coffee, blew on it, and sipped again. “Prayer, it seems to me, is like a voice mail — you can get quite detailed, anticipating all replies, though it’s still basically a one-way conversation, until you hear the beep. My mother prays a lot. I never really saw the point of it.”
They moved on to the second banquet hall, called the Nor’easter, rented out that night to a wedding reception. Tuxedoed groomsmen spilled into the lobby, ties unclipped, cummerbunds askew, and formed, improbably, a human pyramid, a frat stunt and a tribute to their brother getting married. The pyramid collapsed in a welter of low-fives and booty checks. From the ballroom, Tashmo heard the rising tink-tink-tink of forks hitting goblets, guests calling for another kiss. Tashmo thought of several things: marriage, getting married, his wedding day in North Dakota, which was practically the last time he was ever in a church on his own time, and how Shirl’s father, a shrewd Jew-hating wheat farmer named Arne Skurdahl, was too choked up to give a wedding toast, standing there babbling, My daughter, my Shirley, my daughter, my girl, just full and overcome with love on his daughter’s wedding day, and Tashmo, who didn’t like the old blowhard all that much, liked or understood him for a moment at the wedding. Tashmo thought about fraternities, sororities, all that useless brutal energy, and how the girls at Rho Rho Rho beat his daughter up and called it a ceremony, how they beat his daughter, his Jeanette, his number two, his future and his past, the kid he raised from spit and sperm, how they blacked her eyes and made her pee blood instead of pee, and who were they to lay a hand on his Jeanette? And shouldn’t he be mad instead of somehow proud?
Gretchen moved along. “Earl says he woke up in some reeds on the Missouri side. He pulled Felker from the water, felt him cold, believed him to be dead, and went through his pockets, finding Felker’s empty holster, a billfold, and the creds. Earl took this — plausibly, I think — as a sign from God. He rented a big car and started west, charging every pleasure, posing as Lloyd Felker, Deputy Lead Agent. Earl had the best three days of Felker’s life. He tipped impressively, didn’t joyride, and tried to set a good example for the youth. When the SWATs tackled him in the casino, he was giving a staunch antidrug lecture to a cigarette girl.