When she pulled into the old cul-de-sac, the White House was dead ahead, sitting up on its little hill, and it was all lit up from within. The only house within a mile that was lit up. Someone must have broken into it and turned all the power back on at the circuit panel.
Someone named Harmon.
Eleanor braked Doreen’s little car to a halt, there in the handle of the little lollipop street, and sat for a couple of minutes, staring through the windshield, up the hill, at the White House full of light and good cheer.
The Volvo was not visible anywhere. But the light inside the garage was turned on. Once he’d gotten the power restored, he must have used it to open the garage door, and parked the Volvo inside, just like in the old days.
Eleanor was trying to make up her mind what she should do now. Because her husband had clearly gone crazy. Either that, or gotten so drunk that he might as well be crazy.
She was tired of having crazy relatives. Her mother had Alzheimer’s. They had moved her to a much cheaper nursing home and might have to move her into the trailer any day now. She was basically crazy. Her kids were both teenagers, hence crazy by definition. Now her husband was crazy.
Eleanor Richmond was the only person in the whole family who was not crazy.
Not that she wasn’t tempted.
Eventually she reasoned that, crazy or not, it wouldn’t do her husband any good to wind up in jail. He might think, in his own crazy, drunk mind, that he still owned this house. But he didn’t. The Resolution Trust Corporation owned it; they had taken it over from the defunct savings and loan that had foreclosed on it. Eventually the RTC would probably sell it to speculators who would come and strip out the usable wiring and carpets, or maybe just bulldoze the whole thing down to its floor slab and turn the neighborhood into a dirt-bike track or a toxic waste dump. Eleanor knew that this house was walking dead, a real estate zombie, and that it was going to be wasted. But that didn’t change the fact that they didn’t own it anymore and Harmon could go to jail for having broken into it.
Maybe going to jail would do Harmon some good. Shame him a little, snap him out of his depression.
But she kept saying that to herself every time something bad happened to them and it never worked; he just got more depressed and bitter. He didn’t need any more shame.
She’d better go get him. Once again, Eleanor, the solid one, the noncrazy maternal figure, would bail everyone else out. Someday she would have to indulge herself and go crazy a little and let someone else bail her out. But she didn’t know anyone who was up for the job.
The front door was unlocked. The house smelled funny. Maybe it had been shut up for too long, baking in the sun that poured in through the windows all day, peeling all kinds of fumes and chemicals out of the paint and the carpet and making the air stink. She left the door open.
“Harmon?” she said. Her voice echoed off every wall.
There was no answer. He was probably dead drunk in the living room.
But he was not in the living room. The only things there, the only sign that Harmon had been in the place at all, were a few tools dropped on the floor in one corner of the room, over by a little broom closet where they used to store the slide projector and the Monopoly game and the jigsaw puzzles.
The door to the broom closet was open, the tools spilled out on the floor next to it. A hammer and a crowbar. Eleanor would have known that they were Harmon’s even if he had not carefully painted RICHMOND on the handle of each one, in her nail polish.
The thin strip of trim that ran around the door had been removed entirely and thrown on the floor, little nails poking up into the air. Uncovered drywall had been exposed where the piece of trim had covered it up, and Eleanor could see dents in it where Harmon had inserted the crowbar.
The door opening was lined with another piece of trim, a doorjamb with a little brass strike plate about halfway up where the latch of the door would catch. Harmon had tried to pry this jamb off.
Eleanor squatted down in the doorway and put her hand on the doorjamb. An uneven ladder of pencil and ballpoint pen marks climbed up the wood. Each mark had a name and a date written next to it: Harmon Jr.—age 7, Clarice—age 4. And so on. They reached all the way up to nearly Eleanor’s height; the last one was marked Harmon Jr.—age 12.
Harmon had tried to pry the jamb off and take it with him. But the wood was thin and cheap, and under the twisting force of his crowbar, it had split in half down the middle, half of it remaining nailed down to the door frame, the other half pulled halfway out, white unstained wood exposed where it had shattered.
She wondered how long Harmon had been sitting there on their broken-backed sofa in the trailer in Commerce City, his beer in his hand, meditating over this doorjamb, planning to come and take it away. Had it been eating away at him ever since they had moved out?
Clarice’s birthday was next week. Maybe he intended to give this to her as a birthday present. It had great sentimental value, and it was free.
“Harmon?” she said, again, and heard it echo again off the bare walls of the house. She went to check the bedrooms, but he wasn’t in any of them.
The sound of music finally drew her to the garage. Faint, tinny music was coming out of the Volvo’s stereo. It was barely audible through the mudroom door. She went into the garage.
Harmon was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Volvo, reclined all the way back. Once she got the door open, she recognized the music: Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Harmon’s favorite. Years ago, on their first trip to Colorado, they had parked on the summit of Pike’s Peak and listened to this tape, loud.
She walked quietly up the flank of the Volvo and looked in the driver’s window. Harmon had leaned the seat all the way back and folded up his jacket to make a little pillow on the headrest. His eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving.
The keys were in the ignition, in the ON position. The tank was empty. The engine was dead. The volume on the stereo was turned all the way up. The tape had been running for hours, possibly even days, auto-reversing itself back and forth, playing the symphony over and over again, running the battery down until hardly anything came out of the speakers.
Harmon was dead. He had been dead for quite some time.
Before she did anything else she reached inside the car and pounded the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor. The big door creaked open, letting in a rush of fresh clean air and opening up a clear glittering view of the suburbanized foothills.
It was a very sensible thing to do. Eleanor Richmond did it because she was not crazy, would not allow herself to be crazy, would not allow herself to succumb to the poison gas that her husband had used to kill himself. Her kids and her mother needed her and she could not indulge herself the way Harmon had.
She did not want to look at Harmon or touch his body and so she went and sat on the front steps of the White House for a while, letting tears run down her face and shatter her clear view of the lights of Denver. She did not have any shoulder to rest her head on and so she scooted over to one end of the step and leaned against the white vinyl siding of the house, which gave a little under the weight of her head.
After a while, she walked back in through the open front door and went back into the living room. She picked up her husband’s crowbar from where he had thrown it away. The floor was dented beneath it; he must have hurled it down there in a rage when the doorjamb had shattered. From there he had probably gone straight to the Volvo.
Eleanor worked the point of the crowbar underneath the portion of the doorjamb that was still nailed down, and prying gently, a little at a time, moving the crowbar up and down its length, worked the jamb loose from the frame of the house. It held together okay and she knew that a little Elmer’s glue would fix it right up. She would ask Doreen’s boyfriend to nail it up to the wall of the trailer and then she would have Clarice and Harmon, Jr., stand against it and she would measure their height and mark their progress. They would roll their eyes and say it was stupi
d, but they would secretly love it.
Every few seconds, all the way through this, she remembered, with a shock, that her husband was dead.
She carried the doorjamb out and fed it in through the open window of Doreen’s car. It still stuck out a little bit but it would be okay for the drive home. Living in Commerce City, watching Mexicans, she had learned that you could get away with letting just about anything hang out the windows of your car. She backed out of the driveway and turned around in the big circle and left the White House beyond, driving aimlessly into the heart of her old neighborhood, looking for another house with lights in it, a house where they might have a working telephone.
part2
the ride
five
MARSHA WYZNIEWCZKI’S relationship with her boss had never been ceremonious. When he didn’t answer for the third time, she got up from her desk, worked up a good head of steam accelerating across ten feet of office floor, and threw her full hundred and ten pounds against one of the two tall, narrow, Lincolnesque doors that separated her office from the Governor’s.
A small old gray man was hunched over in the Governor’s chair, in a pool of light in the dark office. Marsha had to look at him for several seconds before she was completely sure that this man was William Anthony Cozzano, the tall sturdy hero who had entered the office a few hours ago, ruddy from his afternoon jog up around Lincoln’s Tomb. He had somehow been transformed into this. A wraith from the VA Hospital.
A mother’s reflex took over; she groped for the wall switch, lighting up the office. “Willy?” she said, addressing him this way for the first time ever. “Willy, are you all right?”
“Call,” he said.
“Call whom?”
“Goddamn it,” he said, unable to remember a name. This was the first time she had ever heard him utter profanity when he knew that she was listening. “Call her.”
“Call whom?”
“The three-alarm lamp scooter,” he said.
Cozzano flapped his right arm, causing his whole body to bend perilously to that side, and pointed across the office at his wall of pictures. “Three-alarm lamp scooter.”
Marsha couldn’t tell which picture he was pointing at. Christina? The little Vietnamese girl? One of the bridesmaids? Or his daughter, Mary Catherine?
Mary Catherine was a doctor, three years out of medical school. She was a neurology resident at a big hospital in Chicago. The last time the Governor had gone to the city, he had visited her apartment and come back chuckling about one detail of her life: she spent so much time on call and slept so little that she had to have three alarm clocks by her bed.
“Mary Catherine?”
“Yes, goddamn it!”
Marsha went back to her little cockpit, where she sat all day, irradiated on three sides by video screens. Sliding a computer mouse around on the desktop, she located Mary Catherine Cozzano’s name and slapped a button. She heard the computer dialing the number, a quick tuneless series of notes, like the song of an exotic bird.
“South Shore Hospital switchboard, may I help you?”
Cozzano’s voice broke in before Marsha could say anything; he had picked up his extension. “The budlecker! Make the budlecker go!” Then, infuriated at himself: “No, goddamn it!”
“Excuse me?” the operator said.
“Mary Catherine Cozzano. Pager 806,” Marsha said.
“Dr. Cozzano is not on call at this time. Would you like to speak to the doctor who is?”
Marsha did not understand that the following words were true until she spoke them: “This is a family emergency. A medical emergency.”
Then she dialed 911 on another line.
Then she went back into the Governor’s office to make sure that he was comfortable in his chair. He had slumped over to one side. His right arm kept lashing out like a gaff, trying to hook onto something sturdy enough to pull his full weight, but the surface of his desk offered no purchase.
Marsha grabbed the Governor’s upper left arm in both of her hands and tried to move him. But Cozzano reached across his body with his right hand and gently, firmly, pulled her hands loose. She watched his hand for a moment, confused, then noticed that he was staring directly into her eyes.
He glanced significantly at the telephone on his desk. “Fuck me,” he said. “Get the maculator!” Then he closed his eyes tight in frustration and shook his head. “No, goddamn it!”
“The maculator?”
“The old Egyptian. Glossy head. He’ll fix this muggle. Get the boy of my father’s acehole! Ace in the hole.”
“Mel Meyer,” she said.
“Yeah.”
That was an easy one; Mel was the second preset on the Governor’s phone, a one-button job. Marsha picked up the phone and pushed that button, with a sense of relief that made her decisive. Mel was the guy to call. She should have called him first, before calling the ambulance.
She ended up having to try a couple of numbers before she reached him on his car phone, somewhere on the streets of Chicago.
“What is it!” Mel snapped, getting things off to a typically brisk start.
“It’s Marsha. The Governor has had a stroke or something.”
“Oh, no!” William A. Cozzano said. “You’re right. I had a stroke. That’s terrible.”
“When?” Mel said.
“Just now.”
“Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Is he in distress?”
“No.”
“Who is aware of this?”
“You, me, an ambulance crew.”
“Is the ambulance there?”
“Not yet.”
“Listen carefully.” In the background, Marsha heard honking, the squealing of tires, the dim filtered sound of other motorists shouting at Mel, their voices Dopplering weirdly as they veered and accelerated around him. He must have pulled onto the shoulder, sidewalk, or wherever else he saw clear space. Mel kept talking smoothly and without interruption. “You don’t want an ambulance there. Even at night the capitol is crawling with media jackals. Damn that glass wall!”
“But—”
“Shut up. I know you have to get him medical attention. Who’s on security detail? Mack Crane?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll call and tell him to get Willy into the dumbwaiter. You take the stairs down to the basement—don’t wait for the damn elevator, don’t talk to any press—and find Rufus Bell, who’s down in the boiler room, smoking Camels and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up on TV. Tell him that the Governor needs his help. Tell him to clear a path to the civil defense tunnel.”
Then Mel hung up. Marsha was saying, “Civil defense?”
The Governor was smiling at Marsha with one side of his face. The other side was expressionless. “He is a smart back,” he said. “No! You know what I mean. Do what he said.”
The Governor’s offices were separated from the rest of the capitol by a huge glass wall that completely sealed off the east wing. Just inside the glass wall was a generously sized reception area, furnished with leather chairs and davenports, where visitors waited to see the Governor or his staff. Right up against the glass was a security desk where Mack Crane or another member of the Governor’s security detail was always stationed, twenty-four hours a day, keeping a sharp eye on anyone who approached from the direction of the rotunda. Mack was a plainclothes Illinois cop, bald head fringed with straight, steely hair, wearing an unfashionably wide tie over a short-sleeved shirt. By the time Marsha had made it out of the Governor’s office, through her own office, and out into the reception area, Mack’s phone was already ringing, and as she punched her way out through the glass doors, heading for the Rotunda, she could hear him saying, “Hi, Mel.”
Rufus Bell was downstairs in his little asbestos empire, smoking unfiltered Camels and watching television on a little black-and-white set he had poised on an upended bucket, when Marsha drove her shoulder into the steel door of the boiler room. Something in her
manner caused him to rise to his feet.
“This is an emergency,” she said. “The Governor needs your help.”
Bell flicked his cigarette into a coffee can full of water, scoring a direct hit from ten feet away, simultaneously punching the TV’s off switch with a knee. Then he just stared at her and Marsha realized he was waiting for instructions.
“Is there a civil defense tunnel or something?”
By way of saying yes, Bell strode over to a big sheet of stained and lacquered plywood bolted to a wall. The plywood had dozens of cup hooks screwed into it. A key chain dangled from each cup hook. He grabbed one.
“Willy’s coming down,” Marsha said. She swallowed. “On the dumbwaiter.”
Rufus froze solid for a long moment, then turned around and looked searchingly at Marsha.
“You need to clear a path from the dumbwaiter to the civil defense tunnel. Big enough for a stretcher.”
Bell shrugged. “Shouldn’t be hard,” he said, exiting the room. He was a big round man with a rolling gait that looked slow, but Marsha had to hurry to keep up.
As they came into the hallway, Bell turned and held the key chain out to her, suspending it by a single one of its myriad keys, held between his thumb and forefinger. “You want me to clear that hallway, you gotta do the tunnel yourself. End of this hall, take a right, go to the very end.”
Marsha had thought that she knew her way around the state house but now was beginning to feel lost and uncertain. But Bell was staring at her remorselessly, holding the key chain right up in her face, and she had to do it. She took the keys, getting a firm grip on the important one, and ran down the hallway.
“Yo!” Bell said, “you’ll need this!”
She turned around to see Bell holding up a thick black rubber-coated flashlight. He clicked it on, waved it back and forth a couple of times, and underhanded it to her down thirty feet of hallway. She plucked it out of its spinning trajectory with a one-handed grab, shattering two fingernails, and spun on her heel.
Behind her she could hear a tremendous clattering; looking back she saw Rufus beginning to shove entire file cabinets this way and that. That was all she took in before she turned down the next corridor.