“You people here to vote?”
“We’re waiting for a friend,” Matt said.
“Tremont Van Ort,” Roy said. “He’s your poll watcher today.”
“You’re all waiting for a poll watcher?”
“I’m from the Times Union,” Quinn said. “I’m doing an all-day story on the election.”
“We don’t need any poll watchers. What are you gonna watch, people pullin’ the lever?”
“That’s it,” Roy said. “See it’s done the way it’s supposed to be.”
Another man came to the door.
“They’re poll watchers,” the first said.
“Listen,” said the second, “I’m a Republican and I been livin’ in this ward forty years and I never saw anything down here that wasn’t legit.”
“I run this district,” the first said. “Anything funny I’d hear of it. Nothing at all. Nothing.”
“Then it’ll probably be a nice, quiet day,” Roy said.
“Here comes Tremont,” Matt said.
The two politicians watched Tremont approach with his game-legged strut. Gloria was with him, carrying two paper bags, and Tremont wore the new white shirt and blue tie Claudia bought for his big day at the polls.
“You’re the poll watcher?” the first man asked Tremont.
“Yes, sir,” Tremont said.
“Go home. There’s nothing to watch.”
“I got credentials to give to the man in charge.”
“That’s me,” the man said. “Fred Malloy, president of this ward.”
“Can we go inside?” Gloria asked. She pulled open the clubroom door and set the bags on an empty table. Quinn followed and asked her, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“School? You think I’d miss this for school? Show him your credentials, Tremont.” Tremont handed his accreditation to Malloy and Gloria said, “Here’s his list of duties from the attorney general. Check that the voting machine counter is set at zero, check the voting machine curtains. There’s more.” She offered the paper to Malloy, who didn’t take it.
“Curtains?” he said. “Whataya don’t like the color?”
“Make sure they’re not transparent, and that they close properly,” Gloria said. “And the counter.”
“You wanna see the counter, see it,” he said, gesturing to the machine.
Tremont closed and opened the curtains, then looked at the voting levers with the candidates’ names and parties. “I don’t see no zero,” he said.
“In the back,” Malloy said.
Tremont went to the back of the machine. “I still don’t see it.”
Malloy opened the counter’s cover. “Zeros. See that? All zeros.”
“Zeros,” Tremont said.
Gloria passed out coffee and donuts.
“Whata we got here, a coffee klatch?” Malloy asked.
“This isn’t done,” the Republican said.
Malloy handed the credentials back to Tremont. “You can stay,” he said, “but that don’t mean the rest of you. You’re lookin’ for somebody gonna pay five dollars a vote, is that what you wanna see? I been here all my life and never saw any of that stuff.”
“Anybody gonna do that,” the Republican said, “common sense they’d have done it last week.”
“Nobody said anything about any five-dollar vote,” Matt said.
For the first time Malloy saw Matt’s collar.
“You’re a priest?”
“A Franciscan, at Siena College. Matthew Daugherty, OFM.”
“What’s the Catholic Church doing in politics?”
“Hey, Pope Paul went to the U.N.”
“For peace,” Malloy said.
“And justice,” said Matt.
“You oughta be ashamed chasin’ politics, a priest.”
“God made us all sinners, and he included politicians,” Matt said.
“Shame.”
“I ain’t ashamed,” Tremont said. “It’s all legal. We got our rights to be here. You seen those papers.”
“Coffee klatchers outside,” Malloy said. “This guy wants to stay the chair’s right there. The rest of you get lost.” He motioned to the Republican and together they moved the metal fence behind which voters would line up to vote. The move pushed Tremont’s chair into a corner, as far from the registration desk as it was possible to be.
“I also got credentials,” Roy said.
“Is that so?” Malloy said. “What’re they doin’, passin’ ’em out with bubble gum?”
Roy offered his AG papers to Malloy who glanced at them but didn’t touch them. “One at a time is how it goes,” Malloy said.
“I’ll wait outside,” said Roy. “If Tremont has to leave I’m here.”
“You people got a regular army. Big stuff. But you ain’t gonna find squat. This is all on the up and up.”
The front door opened and a man walked in waving two letter-sized pages. “I got the dead list,” he said to Malloy.
Malloy snatched the pages from him and pushed him back out the door. “You fucking moron,” he said in a failed whisper. He turned to the others, holding the door open. “Everybody out.”
Tremont’s cheering section moved out onto the sidewalk into the frigid morning. Tremont sat in the corner with his coffee and donut and at 6:03 two voters came in and voted. They looked legal to Tremont.
At 6:40 Roy was on the corner alone, two policemen in a patrol car idling across the street. Quinn and Matt had gone to another polling place, and Gloria had left to drive Claudia to vote. She told Roy she’d be back. At 6:50 Tremont came out and told Roy a man had identified himself as Mortimer Monroe to the woman registering Democratic voters.
“He ain’t Morty Monroe,” Tremont said. “He’s white and Morty’s black. Not only that, Morty was shot in a card game. Morty’s dead.”
Roy went in and confronted the voter and Malloy.
“We’re challenging this man’s identification,” Roy said.
“On what authority?” Malloy asked.
“The attorney general, I’m a poll watcher. You know it. I showed you my credentials.”
“I never saw ’em,” Malloy said.
“Yes you did.”
Roy took his credentials out of his pocket and flashed them at Malloy, then moved toward the white Morty Monroe who was backing toward the door without having voted.
“Wait a minute, Morty,” Roy said. “You got a driver’s license?”
“You ain’t Morty,” Tremont told the man. “Morty’s dead.”
A uniformed policeman came in and he and Malloy converged on Roy, who countered with an elbow that put Malloy on his back atop the voting ledger in which Morty had almost registered from the grave.
One month later Roy was a public example of swift electoral justice in Albany: fourteen months for disorderly conduct and third degree assault. He served three months and, when his conviction was thrown out for insufficient evidence, Baron Roland welcomed him back to Holy Cross as a civil rights hero and put him to work with the Community Action group Better Streets. He shared a desk with Gloria.
After the election Alex found Gloria an apartment in an upscale Pine Hills housing development, in the same building where his seventy-three-year-old mother, Veronica Fitzgibbon, lived with an on-call chauffeur and a live-in maid. Alex visited Veronica almost daily, a dutiful son; and so any proximity to Gloria was unremarkable. He luxuriated in the frequency of love with Gloria. My gorgeous virgin, he would whisper.