Purity

  Leila liked it. She came from the blue part of Texas, and from a time when the blue part was larger, but she still loved the whole state, not just San Antonio and the Gulf-softened winters and the burning green of the mesquite in spring but the in-your-face ugliness of the red parts. The embrace of ugliness; the eager manufacture of it; the capacity of Texan pride to see beauty in it. And the exceptional courtesy of the drivers, the enduring apartness of the old republic, the assurance of being a shining example to the nation. Texans looked down on the other forty-nine states with a gracious kind of pity.

  Phyllisha’s one of them girls that all she has to do is shake her goldy locks and the men all lose their mind. You know the expression “one-trick pony”? That’s her with her hair. Shakey-shakey-shakey. And Cody’s dumber than a post. A post knows it’s dumb and Cody don’t. And I suppose I’m the dumbest of all, because I married him.

  So after Cody was “reassigned,” Phyllisha Babcock left him?

  It was Mr. Flayner Senior made Cody break it off. That was part of their bargain if he wanted to keep working at the plant. That girl is some bad news. Not enough to wreck his home, she had to try and wreck his career.

  No sources were more reliably forthcoming than ex-wives. The former Mrs. Flayner, a dyed redhead whose facial features were somehow concave, giving her a look of bashful apology, had baked a coffee cake for Leila and held her captive at her kitchen table until her kids came home from school.

  Arranging to see Phyllisha Babcock had been harder. Since her break with Flayner, she’d shacked up with a controlling guy who screened her calls at the only number findable for her. All the boyfriend would say to Leila, the three times she called, was “I don’t know you, so good-bye.” (Even he was not without Texan courtesy; he could have said worse.) Phyllisha had also—another red flag of the controlling boyfriend—vanished from social media. But Pip Tyler was a very good researcher. By tedious trial and error, she’d located Phyllisha’s new place of work, a drive-in Sonic in the town of Pampa.

  Two weeks before going to Amarillo, at the dead hour of eight on a Tuesday night, Leila had reached Phyllisha by phone at the drive-in. She’d asked if they might talk a little bit about Cody Flayner and the July Fourth incident.

  “Maybe not,” Phyllisha had said, which was encouraging. The only words that truly meant no were fuck you. “Maybe, if you were from the Fox channel, but you’re not, so.”

  Leila explained that her employer, Denver Independent, was a foundation-supported investigative news service. She mentioned that DI had partnered with many national news outlets, including Sixty Minutes, in breaking stories.

  “I don’t look at Sixty Minutes,” Phyllisha said.

  “Why don’t I just stop by the Sonic some weeknight. Nobody has to know we even spoke. I’m just trying to get the story right. It can be as off the record as you like.”

  “I don’t like that you even know where I work. And my boyfriend doesn’t like me talking personal to people he doesn’t know.”

  “Sure. I respect that. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with him.”

  “No, I know, it’s kind of dumb. Like, what am I going to do, run off with you?”

  “Rules are rules.”

  “That’s for damned sure. For all I know, he’s sitting across the street right now, wondering who I’m on the phone with. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I won’t keep you, then. But if I come by some Tuesday, maybe this time of night?”

  “What did you say the name of your magazine was?”

  “Denver Independent. We’re online only, no print version.”

  “I don’t know. Somebody ought to tell about the crazy shit that happens at that plant. But I got to worry about myself first. So I guess that’s a no.”

  “I’ll stop by. You can decide when you see me. How’s that sound?”

  “It’s nothing personal. I’m just kind of in a situation.”

  The first Leila had seen of Phyllisha Babcock was in the Fourth of July pictures that Cody Flayner had posted on his Facebook page the previous summer. She was wearing a patriotically colored bikini and drinking beer. Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness, but her face and hair were on the verge of confirming a wicked little dictum of Leila’s: Blondes don’t age well. (Leila saw middle age as the Revenge of the Brunettes.) Phyllisha was mostly in the foreground of the pictures and mostly in focus, but the autofocus had erred in one shot, clearly revealing that the large object on the bed of Flayner’s Dodge pickup, in the background, parked in the driveway, was a B61 thermonuclear warhead. In the blurred background of another shot, Phyllisha was straddling the warhead and appeared to be making a show of licking its tip.

  Leila had been on assignment in Washington when Pip Tyler came to Denver to interview for a research internship, but word of the interview had quickly spread. Pip had brought screen shots of Flayner’s photos with her, as an example of a story she might like to pitch, and DI’s head of research had asked her how she’d come by them. Pip explained that she had friends in the Oakland nuclear-disarmament community who had hacker friends with access to object-recognition software and (illegally) to the inner workings of Facebook’s content delivery network. She said she’d already friended Cody Flayner through an antinuke friend who’d friended him under false pretenses. In response to her private query about the warhead pictures, which had long since been scrubbed from Flayner’s Facebook page, Pip had received a one-line answer: “It aint a real one, sugar.” Pip’s clips and her other credentials were excellent, and the head of research had hired her on the spot.

  The following week, returning from Washington, Leila had gone straight to the corner office of Tom Aberant, the founder and executive editor of Denver Independent. It was no secret at DI that she and Tom had been a couple for more than a decade, but the two of them kept things professional at work. She really just wanted to say, “Hi, I’m back.” But as she approached the open door of Tom’s office she caught a strange vibe.

  A girl with long and lustrous hair was sitting with her back to the doorway. Leila had the distinct impression that Tom was ill at ease with her; and the thing about Tom was that nothing scared him. Leila herself was afraid of death, but Tom wasn’t. The threat of lawsuits and injunctions didn’t scare him, corporate money didn’t scare him, firing employees didn’t scare him. He was Leila’s mighty fortress. But in his haste to stand up, before she was even through the doorway, she sensed a perturbation. Uncharacteristic also his fumbling for words: “Pip—Leila—Leila—Pip—”

  The girl had a strikingly deep suntan. Tom hurried around his desk and did a herding thing with his arms, bringing the two women together while also moving them toward the doorway, as if eager to get Pip away from him. Or as if to underline that he wasn’t trying to hide her from Leila. The girl’s face was honest and friendly and less than threateningly beautiful, but she seemed discomfited herself.

  “Pip’s already turned up more good stuff in Amarillo,” Tom said. “I know you’re slammed, but I thought maybe the two of you should work together.”

  Leila queried him with a frown and caught something in his averted eyes.

  “I’m very busy this week,” she said pleasantly, “but I’m happy to try to help.”

  Tom herded them through his doorway. “Leila’s the best,” he said to Pip. “She’ll take good care of you.” He looked at Leila. “If you don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Great.”

  And he closed his door behind them. The door he almost never closed. A few minutes later, he came out to Leila’s work space for the exchange of greetings they ought to have had in his office. She knew she shouldn’t ask if he was OK, since she hated being asked this herself and had trained Tom never to do it: How about I just tell you if I’m ever not OK. But she couldn’t help doing it.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. His eyes were masked by the reflection of the overhead light
ing on his wire-frame glasses. The glasses were of an awful seventies design and of a piece with the military buzz he gave to his remaining hair; another thing he wasn’t afraid of was anyone’s opinion of how he looked. “I think she’s going to be terrific.”

  She. As if Leila’s question had referred to her.

  “And … which of my other stories would you prefer that I neglect?”

  “Your choice,” he said. “She says she owns the story, but we have no way of knowing who else knows about it. I don’t want us to be chasing it after it goes viral.”

  “Broken Arrow II. That’s quite the first pitch from a research intern.”

  Tom laughed. “Right? Not Strangelove—Broken Arrow. That’s our association now.” He laughed again, sounding more like his usual self.

  “I’m just saying it seems a little too good to be true.”

  “She’s Californian.”

  “Hence the impressive suntan?”

  “Bay Area,” Tom said. “It’s like the flu viruses coming out of China—pigs, people, and birds all living under one roof. The Bay Area is where you’d expect a story like this to come from. All that hacker capability mingling with the Occupy mentality.”

  “I guess that makes sense. It’s just interesting that she came to us. She could have taken the story anywhere. ProPublica. California Watch. CIR.”

  “Apparently she has a boyfriend she followed here.”

  “Fifty years of feminism, and women are still following their boyfriends.”

  “Who better than you to straighten her head out? If you really don’t mind.”

  “I really don’t mind.”

  “What’s one more person on the long list of people Leila’s nice to?”

  “You’re absolutely right. It’s just one more person.”

  And so the handoff to Leila had occurred. Had Tom been vaccinating himself against the girl by teaming her with his girlfriend? Pip was by no means the most attractive intern to have worked at DI, and Tom had often stated, in the hard-fact-stating voice he had, that his type was Leila’s type (slight, flat, Lebanese). What could it be about Pip that had required vaccination? Eventually it dawned on Leila that the girl might be a former type of Tom’s, a type like his ex-wife. And it wasn’t quite true that nothing scared him. Anything to do with his ex-wife made him nervous. He squirmed whenever someone on TV reminded him of her; he talked back at the screen. As soon as Leila understood that she was doing him a favor by assuming responsibility for Pip, she went ahead and took the girl under her care.

  Did Cody talk about perimeter security when you were married? Were you surprised when you heard he’d taken a weapon home with him?

  There’s nothing so dumb that Cody could do it and surprise me. One time he was stripping paint off our garage and tried to light a cigarette with the blowtorch—took him a while to notice he’d set his shirt collar on fire.

  But the perimeter?

  They had a lot of parameters that him and his dad used to talk about. Parameter is a word I definitely overheard. Exposure parameters, and … what else? Something with protocols?

  But the gates, the fences.

  Oh, my. Perimeter. You meant perimeter and here I’m talking about parameters. I don’t even know what a parameter is.

  So did Cody ever talk about people sneaking things in or out?

  Mostly in. They have enough bombs in there to turn the whole Panhandle into a smoking crater. You’d think they’d be a little nervous and alert, but it’s the opposite, because the whole point of the bomb is to make sure we never have to use it. The whole show is kind of a big huge nothing, and the people who work there know it. That’s why they have their safety competitions, their softball league, their canned-food drives—to keep it interesting. The work’s better than meat packer or prison guard, but it’s still boring and dead-end. So they’ve had some problems with contraband coming in.

  Alcohol? Drugs?

  No booze, they’d catch you. But certain illegal stimulants. Also clean pee for the drug tests.

  And what about things coming out?

  Well, Cody had a whole chest of nice tools with a little bit of radioactive in ’em, enough so OSHA said they couldn’t use ’em anymore. Perfectly good tools.

  But no bombs going missing.

  Lord, no. They have bar codes, they have GPS, they have all these sheets you have to sign. They know where every bomb is every minute. I know about that because that’s where Cody worked.

  Inventory Control.

  That’s right.

  Leila turned off the recording as she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way.

  The Sonic parking lot was empty. She’d decided not to risk spooking Phyllisha by calling her a second time; if she happened to be off work, Leila could come back tomorrow. But Phyllisha was not only there but was hanging halfway out the drive-in window, trying to touch the ground without falling all the way out.

  As Leila approached the window, she saw the dollar bill below it. She picked it up and put it in Phyllisha’s hand.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Phyllisha levered herself back inside. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

  “Whoa. I would of sworn you’d be Texan.”

  “I am Texan. Can we talk?”

  “I don’t know.” Phyllisha leaned out the window again and scanned the parking lot and the street. “I told you about my situation. He’s picking me up at ten, and sometimes he’s early.”

  “It’s only eight thirty.”

  “You’re not supposed to stand here anyway. This is for cars only.”

  “Why don’t I come inside, then.”

  Phyllisha shook her head pensively. “It’s one of those things that only makes sense when you’re inside it. I can’t explain it.”

  “It’s like being a willing prisoner.”

  “Prisoner? I don’t know. Maybe. The Prisoner of Pampa.” She giggled. “Somebody oughta write a novel about me and call it that.”

  “How into him are you?”

  “I’m kind of nuts about him, actually. Part of me doesn’t even mind the prisoner part.”

  “I get that.”

  Phyllisha looked into Leila’s eyes. “Do you?”

  “I’ve been in situations myself.”

  “Well, shit. I don’t care. You can sit on the floor, down out of sight. The manager won’t see you if you come in through the back. Everybody else back here is Mexican.”

  The leading occupational hazard of Leila’s job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them. These were always the single-story sources, the “amateurs” whom she seduced by appearing to be whomever they needed her to be. (She also dissembled with the professionals, the agency staffers, the congressional aides, but they used her as much as she used them.) Many of her colleagues, even some she liked, were brutal in betraying their sources afterward and severing all contact with them, adhering to the principle that it was actually kinder not to return a call from a person you’d slept with if you didn’t intend to sleep with him again. In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be. And then she felt obliged to return her sources’ calls and emails, even their Christmas cards, after she was done with them. She was still getti
ng mail from the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, well over a decade after she’d written a sympathetic story about his legal plight. Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

  What Phyllisha told her, while she sat on the floor amid ketchup smears and Mexican music, was that Cody Flayner was an all-hat loser she’d counted the days till she could get away from. Between his fine ass and his soft eyes and his droopy little puppy eyelashes, she hadn’t been able to resist getting in the sack with him. But she swore to Leila that she’d never meant for him to leave his wife and kids. He’d surprised her with that, and then, for a while, she was stuck with him. All she’d wanted was a good time, and here she’d wrecked people’s lives. She felt bad about it, and so she lived with Cody for six whole months.

  “You stayed with him because you felt guilty?” Leila said.

  “Kind of! That and free rent and lack of immediate other options.”

  “You know, I did the same thing when I was your age. Wrecked a marriage.”

  “Maybe if it can be wrecked, it oughta be wrecked.”

  “There are different schools of thought on that.”

  “So how long’d you stick around? Or did you not even feel guilty?”

  “That’s the thing.” Leila smiled. “I’m still married to him.”