Political Timber (9 page)

I poured another glass of his champagne for myself and slouched there, staring at the card.

I
N LIEU OF AN
entourage, or boosters, or hangers-on, or friends, like most political mucks haul around, I had Mosi. And with Sweaty Betty still awaiting her public apology, I had taken to picking Mosi up for school in the morning for the company, and because, if I couldn’t at least show off the Tourismo for
somebody,
then what was it all for? However, this pretty well erased my last quiet, crisis-free portion of the day.

“You remember I told you I had a friend working on
The School Newspaper
?” he asked, offering me half of a savagely beaten banana. He looked like he was afraid I was going to do him likewise.

“Yup,” I sighed, pulling away from his house. I heard the familiar opening chords of “Oh Jesus” in his voice.

“You want me to read it to you, or should we just wait till they tip the car over in the school lot?”

“Sing,” I said.

“‘Responding to the results of last week’s published poll,
alleged
candidate Gordon “Four Percent” Foley compared front-runner Robert O’Dowd to the transvestite played by Jaye Davidson in the film
The Crying Game.
’”

“Oh my
god
! No, Mosi, no. Please, tell me this is a joke. It doesn’t say that.”

Mosi paused. “Is that one of those things where you say ‘Mosi, tell me blah blah blah,’ because that’s really what you want me to tell you, or because you wish it was the truth?”

“Oh my
god
!” I swerved the Tourismo through a red light, around stunned pedestrians, across the lane divider, before regaining control.

They could say what they wanted about my being out of touch, but I certainly understood the impact on one’s lifespan of insulting a very popular member of the football team whose parents went away frequently and who threw reputedly excellent parties in their absence. Even if the team and the player actually sucked.

“There is more, if you’re interested,” Mosi added.

“What the hell. Once you’re dead, you’re dead, right? It’s not like they can dig me up and kill me again.”

“I don’t know. I heard about these voodoo guys in New Orleans who—”

“Read, Mosi.”

“‘Furthermore, Four Percent Foley had no idea that Marsha Brady, the fortyish former
Brady Bunch
character, was not, in fact, an Amber High student.’”

“God, what crap. If they called her Marsha Brady... of course I would have known. Who the hell knows who, ah...”

“Maureen McCormick.”

“Right. Who the hell knows who she is, anyway? I guess now I know, huh, what the yellow frigging press does with the facts? Poor O.J.—you know, I almost believed he did it.”

“Hey, Gordie, I was fooled too. But let me finish. Put both hands on the wheel now, okay?”

I did, carving small fingernail gouges into the wooden wheel. I leaned forward until my brow almost touched the windshield.

“‘In response to his dismal showing in the hearts of his fellow Amber High students, Four Percent Foley had this to say: “The question is, do I give a rat’s ass? ... Who, other than a complete putzball, would want to spend the greatest year of his life kissing asses to be elected head dildo of this peckerhead factory?’”

The horn sounded as I rammed my head into the center of the steering column. After a few seconds Mosi grabbed me by the hair and forced my eyes to the road just as I swerved toward an oncoming yellow school bus. With the two of us now steering, we guided the car to the curb, where, in a bold move, Mosi touched the gear shift for the first time ever. I did not protest as he parked us.

“I never talked to anybody from that ass-wipe toilet-paper rag of a—”

“You might want to think about choosing your words more carefully from here on,” Mosi wisely cut in.

“But how...?” I pleaded. “Who wrote the damn thing?” I grabbed the paper out of his hands. Which freed him to finally peel the banana. “‘The
I-Team
’ Who the hell is the I-Team?”

“Investigative,” he said, shrugging. “Seems they’re doing a series. Undercover stuff. I guess they got spies on the team. One in our homeroom.”

I draped the paper over my head like the pirate hats we used to make. I wished I was making pirate hats again. I really did.

“A series,” I repeated, without inflection. “There is more to come. It’s going to get worse.”

He extended the remains of the banana again. Mosi seemed truly sad for me. “Sure you won’t have some? I read that potassium is the stress mineral. Banana’s got a shitload of potassium. For the stress, like.”

I looked at Mosi’s perfectly round face, still carrying the trace-tan of summer’s end. And it came back to me, what it was I was after back when I was after something.

“
American Graffiti,
Mos.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
.
Rock and Roll High School
.
Dazed and Confused
.”

God love him, Mosi tried to follow.
“National Velvet.”

“Well... all right, in a way,
National Velvet.
My point is, it was supposed to be a different way, this senior-year moment. Not, like, something you wanted to do for the rest of your life, certainly, but I think we earned a right to a once-in-a-lifetime party here. We’ve been looking forward to this for... years. And it’s turning upside down, Mosi, getting away from me, way, way out of my control. And I’m afraid I’m just going to miss the whole goddamn thing, and that’s going to be the end of it. Because you don’t get invited into this situation again. I know it, you don’t get a second crack at right now.”

It wasn’t that Mosi didn’t already know everything I said, but I think it probably stings to hear somebody cry it out. And I don’t think missing out on the party had ever occurred to him. He went far sadder than I’d ever seen him before, his laugh lines smoothing out to nothing so that he looked strange to me, like my mother would without her teeth.

“You’ll get through it, Gordie,” he said. “You’ll have yours. This”—he waved his hands out the open window as if drying them in the breeze—“this’ll stop after a while. Then you can play again.”

The idea, spirit, the words themselves, lifted Mosi’s mood as he said them. His face opened back up into the miraculous, convincing thing it was. I believed that face, and I got better.

“When does this edition come out?” I asked, laughing now as I aimed the Studebaker Gran Tourismo Hawk straight at the school, no weaving this time.

“Tomorrow,” Mosi said, clapping me on the shoulder. “It’s at the printer’s now, and the school gets it before first bell in the morning.”

“Well, good,” I said. “At least I’ll have one more day of relative peace before the shit parade.”

I reached over, in my new light mood, and turned on the radio.

“If something good comes on, I’ll peel out for you,” I promised. Mosi clapped. “The Hawk is not just beautiful, you know. It can also fly.”

Before the tubes warmed up and let the music out, the flip phone bleeped. It was like a little shot in my side, hunching me over. I turned off the radio before it could even sing. The phone bleeped again, and it scored again. I was just not going to be allowed off the ropes.

“I’ll be there this afternoon, Da,” I said as soon as I picked up.

“You’ll be here
now
,” he answered.

“I’m sorry, Gordie,” Mosi said as I dropped him in front of school. “But I’m sure it’ll get better soon. Hang in. You’ll get to do all that
American Graffiti
stuff when it’s over.”

If you had walked in on my discussion that morning with my grandfather, you would not have been able to tell which of us was the prisoner and which was the free-range citizen. I never got up out of my chair as he paced and ranted and practically cried over what I was doing to the respected name he had spent decades of his life and millions of taxpayer dollars to build. “Am I right here, Chuckie,” he’d periodically ask the guard, “or am I wrong?” I thought Chuckie was going to hand his gun over to the old man.

I had heard there is a mental numbness that comes over a person who is stranded bobbing in a frigid ocean—which hadn’t happened to me yet, but probably would—and that envelops a boxer who is taking a pounding but who cannot fall down. Something like that must have been happening to me when I heard Da out, waited for him to take a few puffs on his new portable oxygen apparatus, then stood to respond.

“When I find out who’s been feeding you those stupid newspapers,” I groaned, “I’m gonna scale him and gut him like a fish, wrap him in his own newspapers, and drop him face-up and mouth-open under the raw sewage drain over by the science museum.”

Fins stopped sucking on air. The slits of his angry little red-veined eyes rounded and softened into them ol’ smilin’ eyes he sold for all those years. He turned, once again, to the guard.

“Do ya believe this, Chuckie? This late inta the game, and the kid suddenly develops some balls.”

He liked it. Why couldn’t my words ever achieve what my brain had planned?

“That’s the killer drive you been lacking, Gordie. That’s the thing I been waitin’ ta see. A politician’s gotta have that, or he’s goin’ nowhere.”

“I hear nowhere’s kind of nice this time of year.”

“But the smart mouth,” he said, waving the paper at me, “that’s gotta go. You go now, and take the attitude with you to the street, but don’t say nothin’ stupid no more.”

I sat there, unsure whether I had been given any actual advice, instructions, or marching orders.

“Get up, go on, get out,” he said, brooming me away with his long skeletal fingers, much more like a grandfather now than a godfather. “Next week is the primary runoff, Gordie, which you’re going to place well in. Then is the school thing, which you’re going to
win,
and then, on to the big pie.”

“Which I’m going to—”

“Did you change the oil in the car?”

“Da—”

“Every two weeks, Gordie, whether you drive it or not. Change the oil every two weeks, like it’s been getting for thirty years. The car’ll know if you ain’t doing it, and I’ll know if you ain’t doing it.”

“Fine, Da,” I said.

“And how ’bout money? You okay for money?” He reached into the pocket of his gray baggy prison pants and pulled out a wad.

“All set, Da,” I said.

“Here, change the oil, and run it through a wash and wax.”

Chuckie brought me the money, five twenties.

“Cloths, Gordie,” Fins said into his oxygen mask. “Soft cloths, no frigging brushes. And don’t forget to put the top up, for chrissake.”

I drove straight to Jiffy Lube and made them let me stay in the car while it was up on the lift. It was nice up there, airborne and incommunicado for the entire fourteen minutes of the oil change. I had a thrilling view of a mountain of old radiators, batteries, rims, and tires humping up over the back of the auto-parts joint. It was all relaxing and simple and made sense, the way car parts do, and I was truly sorry when I found that Jiffy Lube’s sub-fifteen-minute boast was no exaggeration.

The car wash I found—after driving past three places that used brushes—was worth the search. Jets jetted me from all sides as I squirmed around like a kid trying to catch it from every angle. The dream quality of it, the wild watery fantasy, was so complete that I wasn’t even fully aware what I was fantasizing. And when we came out of the froth, the Studebaker Gran Tourismo Hawk whiter and shinier than it probably had been thirty years before, we were both new. We were both refurbished and reanimated and coated with two impenetrable sheets of Turtle Wax. We were ready.

There was so much Fins didn’t know, about life for a guy like me. But he knew instinctively the power of a well-timed wash and hot wax.

When I finally showed up at school, well after lunchtime, I went to Vadala’s office. It was becoming my center, since classroom activity was taking up less and less of my time.

“Okay, Mr. Vadala, what do you know about the I-Team?”

“Foley? Foley, could this be possible? You know, most people who cut actually stay out the whole day. It attracts less attention that way.”

“I didn’t cut, not really. I had to attend to some campaign-related business.”

“Which campaign?”

“Both, actually. So it sort of counts as school time
and
Flex-Campus time, right?”

“I’ll give you points for creativity, but no, it counts as cut time.”

I shook my head, slid down into the chair many of us had slid down into before. “Oh, come on, Mr. Vadala. I could really use some indulgence here. I am a senior, you know.”

“Yes, I know. And you’re going to be one again next year if you don’t pull it together.”

I thought about that. Maybe, maybe. Another shot?

“Jesus, no. It could be even
worse
the second time around,” I blurted.

“Yes, it could. So you’d better not miss any more days.”

“Fine, Mr. Vadala. Now tell me, who are these I-Team geeks who are out to get me?”

“I don’t know. It’s a secret.” He got busy on his computer. The computer with all the in-depth files.

“Right. And if it’s a secret, then
you
know about it. Everybody knows you’re the dean of secrets.”

Vadala looked up with a pleased little smile on his face. “Do they really say that?”

“They do indeed. So, who are my tormentors?”

“I can’t tell you. This is their Flex-Campus assignment. They proposed to me an investigative-reporting project that required anonymity, and I have to respect that. Anyway, what would you do with the information?”

I hadn’t even thought of that. “I’d...
reason
with them.”

“Right,” he said, dubious. “Or your grandfather’d liquidate them.”

“Come on, Mr. Vadala. Have you heard the stuff they’ve been doing to me?”

“Well... I may have been privy to a little early information.”

“So, then—”

“Did you say those things?”

“Well, no... not
officially.
Not on the
record.
”

“Rule number one, Gordon: You are now a public figure. There is no such thing as off the record.”

Of all the sad truths I’d had served up to me lately, this was the most deflating. Boy, I longed to get off the record.