"Well, we all go through transitions," Eleanor said. "This sort of thing - a big campaign - is a kind of upheaval that can be useful."
"Useful how?"
"It shakes everything up. Everything's in flux for a moment, you have the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems in your life. Believe me on this."
Mary Catherine smiled. "I believe you," she said.
Ever since the beginning of William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, the high-tech wristwatch strapped to Floyd Wayne Vishniak's arm had been flaring into action several times a day, confronting him with live coverage of the events that were taking place only a couple of hundred miles away. He welcomed the free entertainment, which took his mind off the stupid work he was doing.
He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemployment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself a job. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, by virtue of the PIPER watch on his arm, had become, in effect, a personal adviser to Governor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was not going to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was going to start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learn about all of the candidates and the issues.
A week or two after he had first donned the PIPER watch, back in June, Vishniak had been in downtown Davenport to take care of a bit of business, and he had seen a cluster of newspaper machines on a street corner. In addition to the Quad Cities paper and The Des Moines Register, these included the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. As it happened, his pockets were heavy with quarters, and so he brought a copy of each, blowing two and a half dollars. He took them all back to his trailer and read them. There was some interesting stuff in there.
Since then it had become a habit. Two and a half bucks a day, six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional five bucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars a month. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak's budget it was a lot of money. He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summer wore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had taken a job detasseling.
Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the mass castration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. The actual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walking up and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak would drive out to the fields early each morning to put in a couple of hours before the sun became hot, go back into Davenport to feed rolls of quarters into the newspaper machines, read the papers and drink Mountain Dew all day, then drive back out to the fields in the cool of the evening to continue his work. For the first couple of weeks of the detasseling season, the evening shift had been rather dull, but things perked up when Cozzano's National Town Meeting finally got started, and he began to get coverage two or three hours a night.
The Town Meeting had seemed a little bit hokey when they announced it, but in practice it turned out to be damn impressive. Some very important people were showing up at this thing. They had a couple of so-called surprise appearances every evening, as movie stars, ex-football heroes, captains of industry, and even a few renegade politicians began to show up at the Meeting and throw their support behind Cozzano.
By the third or fourth evening, a clear pattern emerged in the coverage. At seven p.m. the PIPER watch would come on, with the familiar logo and theme music. For fifteen minutes or so it would show an edited broadcast of that day's events at McCormick Place, Chicago's huge lakeside convention center, the site of the National Town Meeting. Then there would be fifteen minutes of analysis from a team of pundits, some pro-Cozzano, some anti-. Then half an hour of taped stuff, like a speech by Cozzano from earlier in the day. Then the program would cut to a hotel suite somewhere, a living-room-type environment, and Cozzano would sit down with various groups of Americans who wanted to bitch about their problems: unemployment, lack of heath insurance, shitty public schools, and so on. Cozzano would sit there and listen to them ventilate, jot down the occasional note, ask the occasional question, and then he would usually deliver some kind of a little sermon that was intended to calm them down and make them believe that he cared about their problems and would certainly do something about them at the White House.
The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thing moving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and down rhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching out with both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when something especially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance by a major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and stand motionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these evening shifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, but as he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer, until finally the moon and the stars came out and Vishniak was groping his way across the field in darkness, the images of the National Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.
Tonight, Governor Cozzano was meeting with a group of black persons who had organized themselves out of the undifferentiated mass of Americans gathered together for the National Town Meeting. They had got together and formed their own little organization which had then promptly splintered into little groups who all hated each other. Now, the leaders of the little factions were meeting with Governor Cozzano over a nice dinner in his hotel suite. They were eating tiny little miniature chickens and drinking wine.
One of the black people was using an analogy to explain why black people were not becoming successful executives in large enough numbers. In the game of football, he pointed out, black people were often valued as wide receivers and running backs, but coaches were resistant to making them quarterbacks. Governor William A. Cozzano listened to this analogy soberly and thoughtfully, chewing on a morsel of the miniature chicken and nodding his head from time to time, never taking his gaze off the face of the man who was speaking. When the man was done, Cozzano sat back in his chair, took a sip of wine, and went on a little stroll down memory lane.
"You know, that business about quarterbacks really hits home to me. I can remember back in about 1963 when I was on the Illinois team, and we traveled to Iowa City to play a game against the Hawkeyes. They had a starting quarterback and two others on the bench, all of them white, and they also had a few black players recruited from across the river, here in Illinois. In particular they had a young man named Lucullus Campbell, who had been the starting quarterback for his high-school team in Quincy, Illinois, a river town. He had been splendid in that role - an incredible passer who could also run the ball. Well, before the game even started, the Hawkeyes' starting quarterback was out with the stomach flu. They started their second-string quarterback, and sometime in the second quarter of the game, he took a very serious hit and went down with a knee injury that knocked him out of the game. And so they put in their third-string quarterback.
"And let me tell you, that young man - with all due respect to him - was just no good as a quarterback. He dropped the ball. He threw interceptions. He tried to hand off the ball to people who weren't even there." Cozzano paused for a moment and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin while the people around the table laughed. "Now, I was an offensive player, and so, when their offense was on the field - while this poor fellow was making all of these mistakes - I was on the sidelines, looking straight across the field at poor Lucullus Campbell. He was watching this third-string quarterback in disbelief. I could clearly read the frustration on his face. Finally he got up and approached the coach and spoke to him. I couldn't hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. It's a universal plea: 'Put me in, Coach. I can do it.' And you know what? The coach didn't even look up at him. He wouldn't look Lucullus Campbell in the eye. He just shook his head no and kept going through his clipboard. And I remember thinking that that was just about the most unfair thing I had ever seen. I went up to him after the game and I told him so, and I'd like to think that he took a bit of comfort in my words." Cozzano had delivered the first part of this story with kind of a wry humorous tone, then turned sad. But at this point he became angry at the memory, sat up straight in his chair, and began pounding his index finger into the dinner table. His guests sat riveted. Cozzano, pissed off, was a formidable presence. "Ever since that day, I have found it heartrending to see talented, ambitious black people, willing and able to compete in whatever field, held back by tired old white men who don't want to give them a chance. And I vow to you that I will never become one of those tired old white men - and I won't allow any of them to serve under me either."