“What’s that?” McLane said.
Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with a white southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. “The power of JEEEEE - zuss!” he said.
“Good point,” Zorn said. “Let’s get our butts over to that damn picnic.”
thirty-three
“I WAS spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on my frankfurter just now,” the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said, holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people at the luncheon could see it, “when I noticed that there were some small flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the part of the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow and perfectly smooth and homogeneous in its composition. But since I have come to California . . .” Having telegraphed the joke, he paused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then, as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. “Let’s just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurters here in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in my part of the country probably would have been confiscated and analyzed in a police laboratory.” The crowd laughed dutifully, for the second time, but Rev. Sweigel would not let go of the theme. “I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about this mustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed me that these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actual seeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds.”
The crowd went dead silent, like Sunday school children who know that they are about to be told that they stand a high chance of burning in Hell. All of the people here at the Southern California Rightist Coalition who had been brought up Christian (which was most of them) knew what was coming. The non-Christians were already so alienated by the heavily pork-oriented meal that they weren’t talking much anyway.
Sweigel continued. “Now our lord JEEE-zuss once spoke of mustard seeds. He said that all one needed in order to perform miracles was to have faith the size of a mustard seed.
“This is a piece of Scripture that I have known since I was just a little boy. But I never really understood what it meant until today. You see, in all of my life, this is the first time that I have ever actually seen a mustard seed. My mustard has always been the bright yellow substance to which I earlier alluded. So I did not know, frankly, whether a mustard seed was a very small thing, like a poppy seed, or a very large thing, like a coconut. So when I read these words of our lord JEEE-zuss, I did not know whether he was saying that we needed just a tiny little bit of faith, or a whole lot of faith.
“But today the LORD has seen fit to educate me in these matters and I have had my first taste of expensive Southern California MOO-tard, and I have seen actual mustard seeds. And I can report to you that they are neither extremely small, as seeds go, nor are they extremely large.”
Ten feet away from the lectern, Nimrod T. (“Tip”) McLane was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, trying to resist the temptation to order another hot dog. He knew exactly where this was going and he had to keep his wits about him.
The Reverend Doctor Sweigel was an Odessa. He did things out of pure, dumb principle, and for that reason he was about to go upside Tip McLane’s head with a little bit of JEEE-zuss, as he had been doing for about the last couple of weeks—ever since William A. Cozzano had begun to make television appearances.
The media had given Sweigel a free ride all the way through Super Tuesday. They liked having a goofball in the campaign; it put variety in their tedious, ink-stained lives. When he had done well on Super Tuesday, they had turned on him in Illinois.
McLane had turned on him too. As part of their Illinois campaigns, all of the candidates had made ritual visits to the bedside of William A. Cozzano, who was still hospitalized at that point. McLane, like the others, had been shocked to see how bad Cozzano looked.
Billy Joe Sweigel had become a wealthy and powerful TV evangelist by claiming to heal people through the power of faith. He would heal anyone of any disease in return for a ten-dollar contribution. So the question had naturally arisen: as long as he’d been in the room, why hadn’t he just healed William A. Cozzano? It seemed like a fair enough question to Tip McLane and he had repeatedly raised the issue in public, and during debates. It seemed safe as anything, like asking Sweigel to heal the craters on the moon.
Then Cozzano had put on a miraculous recovery.
Sweigel continued, “So what our lord JEEE-zuss was saying was that in order to move mountains, one need not have a great deal of faith—one need not be some kind of a paragon—but a teeny little bit of faith won’t do it either. We have to have a reasonable amount of faith. A sort of in-between amount of faith.
“Now, some people have more faith than others. I don’t think that it’s unfair to say that. And I can remember a night a couple of months ago, in an auditorium in Illinois, when one of my opponents didn’t seem to have very much faith at all.”
A stir ran through the crowd. In the corner of his eye, McLane could see long lenses swinging in his direction, zeroing in on his face for reaction shots.
“And a certain candidate who shall go unnamed expressed skepticism that I could, through the divine power of JEEE-zuss, heal the terrible affliction that had descended upon a certain prominent Illinoisan. And I will admit that on the night of that debate, my faith was much smaller than a mustard seed. I went back to my hotel room and asked, as JEEE-zuss did on the cross, ‘God, why hast thou forsaken me.’ But it came to me that it was not God who had forsaken me, but the other way around. Gradually my faith returned and waxed until it was the size, not just of a mustard seed, but of a sunflower seed, or maybe even a Brazil nut. And just a few short weeks later I was astonished to turn on my television set and see this prominent Illinoisan suddenly looking the very picture of health. Praise the Lord!”
About three people in the audience, widely spaced, shouted, “Praise the Lord!” Everyone else just looked embarrassed.
“Truly doth the Lord work in mysterious ways,” Sweigel said.
That’s for sure, McLane said to himself, thinking of Goofy.
Norman Fowler, Jr., the Goofmeister himself, the reincarnation of Marvis, had not been invited to this little get-together, in the football-field-sized backyard of the Markham estate in Bel Air. The Southern California Rightist Coalition was not the kind of outfit that would let a moderate like Fowler anywhere near their campaign events, or their coffers. Tip McLane was a shoo-in, and the group had a large enough evangelical Christian wing that Sweigel had gotten an invite too.
After the debacle in Illinois, followed by severe drubbings in the northeastern states where television evangelists had a bit of an image problem, Sweigel had stayed in the race anyway, as a broker for the evangelical vote. He was a political vampire. His broadcasting network in the Bible Belt served as an inexhaustible source of funds, and in every city he had a hard core of supporters who could be relied on to sustain his campaign.
The incredible recovery of William A. Cozzano had caused a sudden surge in Sweigel’s popularity. Because of the number of people who believed that Sweigel had cured Cozzano, his numbers were now climbing up into double digits, and he was starting to become a major annoyance to McLane.
But nothing more than an annoyance. Sweigel was frightening enough that he served as his own worst enemy, his own personal Goofy. Whenever he rose in the polls, he started to get more television coverage, people started having bad dreams about him, and he sank again.
The hot dogs said everything about this luncheon. Hollywood people would not have served hot dogs. They would have served caviar, fine wines, California cuisine and all that, to show how rich and tasteful they were. But this luncheon was full of people who had come to California and staked claims to real estate prior to the invention of the movie camera, which was to say that they tended to be very old and endowed with a level of wealth that far transcended the petty plane of movie stars. Much of
this wealth was not in liquid assets; all together, the territory owned by the people at this luncheon probably composed an area larger than many northeastern states. But however you looked at it, they were loaded, and this was one invitation you did not turn down.
The man who had invited McLane to speak was none other than Karl Fort himself. Fort was now in his nineties. He had long since cashed in his agricultural holdings. Those original investments had made him a rich man, but they only produced steady dividends as long as Fort was right there on the ground, personally dispatching thugs with ax handles. This kind of micromanagement had grown wearisome, and so Fort had moved into less earthy forms of investment.
This had left him with a great deal of free time, only some of which could be taken up on the golf course. Karl Fort had begun dabbling in politics during the sixties, supporting the likes of Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Goldwater, and Wallace. He had been a major player in the California conservative movement of the seventies and eighties. He had given lots of money to the conservative think tanks that had provided Tip McLane with his first few jobs.
And when the Markhams had begun making plans to host this luncheon, Karl Fort had called Tip McLane personally and actually reminisced about the good old days back in the Depression, and Tip McLane had actually called him “sir.”
Sweigel eventually concluded his sermon with a prayer. A few people clenched their hands and bowed their heads fervently. Everyone else just looked restless or embarrassed. And then it was Tip McLane’s turn to speak.
They applauded generously. The nervous silence that had reigned during Sweigel’s performance was finally broken. McLane got up from his seat at the high table in the front and waved and nodded to the crowd: a hundred and fifty of the richest people in the West, seated at a few long tables with their paper plates and plastic wineglasses. To one side, the press corps was corralled behind a red plastic ribbon, like wild animals.
This was going to be a piece of cake. These people loved him; he could do no wrong here. “Thank you very much. And thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Markham for making the backyard of their magnificent home available for this event. In a few months I hope to return the invitation—though I’m afraid that you’ll have to fly all the way to Washington, D.C.”
A few men in the crowd barked out laughter and there was a smattering of applause.
“I have a dirty little secret for you: I’m sick to death of campaigning. I think everyone in America has heard my message by now. Most people who have heard it seem to agree with it. My opponents don’t, but, excepting Reverend Sweigel here, I’ve always found my opponents to be just a little bit on the goofy side.”
About half a dozen people—those who had already seen the Fowler/Goofy image on TV—laughed loudly at this. Everyone else tittered uncertainly. The line wasn’t intended for them. It was intended to be used on the evening newscasts, at the appropriate moment.
“So I’m not going to harangue you with my usual stump speech. Instead I’d like to speak, very briefly, about some of the ideas that I intend to put into action once I get settled into the White House next January.”
At this point McLane paused for a moment and pretended to fiddle with his note cards. He was doing this because some kind of a distraction had arisen at one of the tables, and he didn’t want to try and shout his way through it. He assumed it was something minor, like a glass of lemonade that had spilled into someone’s lap. But it didn’t die away. It kept building.
Several people had stood up now. They were all facing inward, looking at an elderly man who was leaning way back in his chair, almost lying down, pressing one fist into his breastbone. His mouth was open, he was gasping for breath.
“Are there any doctors present here? This man is in distress,” McLane said.
Something caught his eye: Zeke Zorn, standing up, waving him away from the lectern with both hands, like one of those guys at the airport directing the jetliners. McLane moved quickly away from the lectern. Only later would he understand that this had been good advice. There were very few things a man could say into a microphone at such a time that would make him look as though he had handled the situation presidentially. There were many ways to screw up.
No one had responded to the call for a doctor. All of the lenses and microphones in the makeshift press gallery had swung over and brought themselves to bear on the man in distress.
People were doing the normal sorts of folksy first-aid things. A couple of men cleared off a table in one instant by yanking at the tablecloth, sweeping all the plates and glasses off onto the ground, and then four people gathered around the stricken man and lifted him up onto the table’s clean surface. They loosened his tie. Someone offered him a glass of water. None of it was doing anything for his life expectancy, which clearly was measurable in seconds or minutes.
Mr. Markham approached the lectern, pulled down the microphone, and spoke into it. “I’d like to ask everyone to please remain in their seats for now. Give Karl some air.”
The stricken man was Karl Fort.
McLane couldn’t keep his eyes off the man. Fort had ruled over the McLanes’ portion of California like a demon king. McLane had known the man’s name and face since he had been a toddler. He had been fearsome and omnipresent to those Okies who worked for him, who suffered beatings from his goons and who wondered, each week, if Fort would see fit to sign their paycheck. Uncle Purvis had, for a period of three or four decades, personally vowed to kill Karl Fort with his bare hands at least once a day. And now, after all that, Karl Fort was dying right in front of Nimrod McLane’s eyes. If only Purvis could have been here to see it.
There was sudden motion off to McLane’s left. Someone had vaulted the high table and now was striding confidently across the lawn toward Karl Fort. Tip glanced over and realized that it was the Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel.
In the same instant, the entire press corps realized it too.
Karl Fort’s attack had been an unfortunate coincidence. But when Rev. Sweigel stepped in to lay on his hands, it became something else: a campaign event. The plastic ribbon snapped. It was like a dam breaking. The journalists charged toward Karl Fort.
There were three long rows of tables. Karl Fort was in the middle row. The first row formed a low barrier standing in the way of the journalists. The vanguard—nimble print reporters—made an end run. The second wave—burdened by minicams—simply rolled directly over the top of it, their knees nearly buckling from the weight as they jumped to the grass on the far side, and headed the print reporters off in the narrow pass between the first and middle rows.
Three minicam operators, with their instinct for seizing the high ground, jumped to the top of the middle row. One of these three planted his foot in the midst of a paper plate heaped with baked beans and slipped; his boot shot off to the side and slammed into the chest of the fifth richest man in California so hard that it sent him toppling backward onto the ground. The cameraman slithered to his knees and then his feet, trashing a few more plates of food as he tried to accelerate in pursuit of the two other minicam operators who were now well ahead of him. His boots got traction on the tablecloth but the tablecloth slipped over the table, and so for the first few moments he actually ran in place, like a cartoon character, his feet churning madly and his body going nowhere as the tablecloth, with its burden of plates and cups, accordioned down to one end of the table, depositing a slippery obstacle course of beans, ketchup, MOO-tard, and ice cubes as it went.
Finally he got traction and pursued the others, who had run into an obstacle of their own. Between them and Karl Fort was an ice sculpture, an intricately carved bowl of ice filled with pink lemonade. It had gone unnoticed by the cameraman who had momentarily taken the lead. His only concern was getting Karl Fort and Billy Joe Sweigel into his viewfinder as quickly as possible, and so he was running with one eye squinted shut and the other eye pressed into the neoprene cup of his eyepiece. Seeing the world in out-of-focus, black-and-white tunnel vision, he mis
sed the ice sculpture entirely and slammed into it at a full sprint, catching it with both knees. The impact knocked his legs backward. The weight of the minicam on his shoulder jerked his body forward. He spun in midair, appeared to become completely horizontal, and then fell straight down on top of the ice sculpture. Half of the lemonade went up in the air and then all of it burst down and sideways as the cameraman’s body crushed the sculpture into convenient bite-sized fragments. Nearby luncheon-goers caught the tsunami of ice and lemonade full in the face.
The second cameraman was only a pace or two behind the first; he tried to stop, his feet got ahead of his body, and he landed on his ass in the midst of the ice storm, sliding to a halt and then careening off the edge of the table and landing full-length in the laps of three consecutive luncheon-goers.
The third cameraman, also suffering from video tunnel vision, planted one foot in the small of the first cameraman’s back. That leg buckled. He caught his full weight on the other leg, hopped on it three times like a wide receiver trying not to go out of bounds, planted that foot on some ice, and skidded on one rigid leg for a distance of several feet, now looking perfectly like a figure skater. He finally got the other foot down on the edge of a serving platter, catapulting a dozen freshly grilled burgers into the chest of a prominent comedian-turned-real-estate magnate.
At which point he realized, finally, that he was about to run over Karl Fort’s body. He planted both feet and once again created an accordion effect on a tablecloth. This carried him forward until he reached the edge of Fort’s table, where his rubber-soled boots contacted solid, clean, dry Formica, and stopped dead. This slammed him forward onto his knees, which was perfect: he stopped in a kneeling position with the lens of his camera about four feet away from Karl Fort, looking straight down on his body.
Unfortunately, from a strictly media-conscious point of view, Fort’s face wasn’t visible; the view was blocked by the beefy arms of a young man, possibly a security person, who had the heels of both hands in the middle of Fort’s naked breastbone and was rhythmically shoving on it, compressing his entire ribcage, making his bony thorax bulge outward around the sides like a stepped-on balloon. Even if this man had not been there, Fort’s face still would have been obscured by another man who was gripping Fort’s chin in one hand and his temples in the other, holding his mouth open in a yawn, bending forward to fasten his mouth over Fort’s.