The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Boss shook his head. “No, Bolin—may I call you Bolin?”

  “Just call me Bo, please,” says Bo.

  “Bo, we’re here to get you on board my campaign for governor.”

  “On board?” says Bo. “If you plan to run against that bastard Shoat Bradfield, I’d be glad to make a contribution…”

  “The contribution we want is your expertise as our campaign manager,” says Boss.

  George tried to figure whether Pharis’s smile was kindly wistful-like or just politely negative. He didn’t say sorry or nothing, though. He asks, “Who recommended me to you?”

  “Everyone,” says Boss.

  “Didn’t Everyone tell you that I’ve sworn off politics?” says Bo.

  “Yes, but they didn’t tell me why,” says Boss.

  Bo looked at his costly wristwatch. “Listen, fellows, we’re having this talk on company time, you know. If I had known the purpose of your visit, I would have declined outright, and spared you the trip, but if you had insisted on pursuing it I would have courteously offered to discuss it with you at any hour when I was free from my daily routines working for this company.”

  George admired the man’s honesty. He himself made a point of never letting salesmen into his office if they were trying to sell him something for his own use, not the company’s. Since he had been responsible for setting up the appointment with Pharis, he felt obliged to apologize. “Sorry,” says George, and waited for Boss to lead the way out the door.

  But Bolin Pharis asks, “How long are you boys in town?”

  “Our plane home is late this afternoon,” George declares.

  Pharis stood up. “Wish you could stay more,” he says, slipping in that little mention of their hometown in such a way it told them he knew they knew he was slipping it in. They stood too, and he walked them to the door and offered his hand for another one of those iron-man handshakes.

  Boss wouldn’t let go of Bo’s hand. “Don’t you want to hear why you should be my manager?” Boss asks him.

  “If you told me it would ensure my passage to Heaven, I still couldn’t do it,” says Bo without blinking an eye. “But if you could tell me on my time, not the company’s time, I could meet you for drinks downstairs after five. Better yet, I’d love to have a couple of Arkansas boys go to dinner with me tonight.”

  George blinked. Had Pharis forgotten that out home in the Ozarks “dinner” always meant the noon meal? Boss says, “We’d be delighted.” And that was that. It was George’s job to call the airline and cancel their afternoon flight and make a new flight for the following day, and then to tell the hotel they were staying another night. Then they had a whole day to kill so they split up; Boss took off to the Cincinnati Art Museum to see a Van Gogh painting called Undergrowth with Two Figures, and George went out to the Cincinnati Zoo to look at the undergrowth with big cats.

  The way it turned out, they didn’t just have drinks and dinner with Bolin Pharis, they come mighty nigh to spending the whole night with him. It was pretty close to midnight before George finally got to bed, and he was not used to that. When he got close to sixty, he learned that he needed to go to bed each and every night at the same time, ten thirty on the dot, and it really bothered him to miss out on that. But there they were, shooting pool in the feller’s game room way past George’s bedtime.

  The supper had been at this real swank place called Maisonette, where they was waited on not by gals but by men dressed like for a wedding, and for that reason Boss was able to speak to ’em and George didn’t have to order for him as he would’ve if they’d been waitresses. Chances are, I’ll never find myself in a place like this again, George told himself. So he passed up the idea of just a good old steak, which wasn’t on the menu anyhow, and he tried the Scottish wild pheasant, because Bo recommended it. Boss had the Scottish hare saddle, not to be contrary, but maybe on account of he’d rather eat rabbit than fowl. Pharis had the venison medallion. And they had a couple of bottles of the by-goddest wine George had ever swilled. When it was all done, Bo Pharis, being an old Razorback linebacker, had much quicker reflexes than George and managed to grab the check about .037 of a second before George could reach it.

  Things started out with Pharis saying an odd thing. “I apologize for my hypocrisy in refusing to use my company’s time to discuss this matter with you,” says Bo, “when I’ve spent a good part of my company’s time today looking into it. I’ve made calls to quite a number of my acquaintances in Arkansas, people in the know, you know, some pols who go way back with me, as well as a few people in the press.” The man stopped to make sure that George and Boss both understood just how much he’d been checking around, and then he says, real serious, “Not one of them has ever heard of you.” He let that sink in, and then he says, “Even Orval Faubus, who came out of nowhere in the Ozarks to run for governor back in 1954, had at least been elected to minor county office beforehand. You, Vern—may I call you Vern?—have never been elected to anything.”

  George gripped the man’s biceps in a mighty hold. “Don’t never call him Vern,” he says, low and mean as if he didn’t want Boss to hear him although of course Boss could. He repeats it, “Don’t never call him Vern.”

  Bo Pharis gave George a look as if they were about to square off right there and have it out. But he turns to Boss and says, “I was beginning to suspect that you are some kind of impostor, maybe running a scam on me.”

  Boss just smiled. He showed teeth when he smiled, George reflected, just like old Bill Clinton had always done. “The very fact,” says Boss, “that you went to all that trouble to check me out would seem to imply that you are not dismissing, out of hand, my request for your services.”

  “Whoa,” says Bo. “Let’s get this straight before we go another step. I will not, under any circumstances, serve as your campaign manager. Or anybody else’s. Would you like to know how much Al Gore paid me to handle his run for president? No, you don’t want to know. But it wasn’t enough to erase the pain of the defeat. Let’s please understand clearly from the outset, good buddies, that we are not going to negotiate my services. But we owe it to each other, as Arkansas men, as good old hillbillies—even if the part of Harrison I grew up in is actually flatland—we owe it to each other to understand each other: I want you to understand just why I will not under any circumstances operate your campaign, and in return I’d like to hear why you think you should be governor of Arkansas and how you think you could scare up enough votes to be elected. And I might even offer you, free gratis, some advice.”

  But the funny thing was, they never did get around to talking about that, not during the supper, leastways. They didn’t talk about politics at all. The closest they got to talking politics was this here great joke that Bo told. It was about that bastard governor, Shoat Bradfield, who got hisself re-elected even though everbody hated him. ’Course “Shoat” was just his nickname, and a shoat is a young pig after he’s been weaned, and the joke was about a pig, but there wasn’t no direct connection with his name. Seems this here state trooper who was Shoat’s chauffeur was driving him down the road on the way to a speech he had to give in some little Ozark town, and maybe the trooper was a-drivin too fast but anyhow he don’t see this pig a-crossin the road and he hits it. The state trooper knows he hit the poor pig hard enough to kill it, and he wants to stop and see, but Shoat’s in a hurry to get to where he’s givin that speech, and makes him drive on. But that trooper is a good man despite his employer, and he keeps tellin the governor how awful it was to hit that pig. And finally he says, “Sir, while you’re givin your speech, would it be okay if I just drove on back down there to find out who owned that pig and tell ’em I was sure sorry?” And Governor Bradfield says well if you have to, and gives him permission. So the governor gives his speech and the party’s all over but that trooper didn’t come back. The governor waits and waits for hours, until finally his car comes back into view, weaving back and forth across the road, and there’s the trooper, drunk as a coot,
and the back seat loaded up with enough meat and produce and jams and stuff to feed the entire state police. The governor gets in a rage and demands what the hell happened to him, and the trooper says, “I done what I thought was right. I went back to the farm where I hit that pig. When I knocked on the door and give them the news, they loaded me down with all these victuals and they fed me a big dinner and gave me a demijohn of fine whiskey and afterwards their real pretty daughter insisted on giving me a blow-job in the car before I could finally get away.” The governor demands to know exactly what the trooper told those folks. And the trooper says he don’t understand it hisself, all he said to them was, “I’m Governor Bradfield’s chauffeur, and I killed the pig.”

  Boss was about two or three full seconds ahead of George in getting the joke, but they both laughed so hard that people stared at ’em. George wasn’t the laughing type; he hardly ever heard or saw anything that struck him as funny enough to waste a guffaw over, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of those laughs that was completely involuntary and natural, without him having any control over it. He blushed a good deal, realizing he’d let the laugh get away with him. But Bo Pharis sure appreciated his audience.

  From then on, George was sort of left out of the talk, which wasn’t about any sort of governors or governorship or campaigning or nothing. Bo Pharis happened to ask what they’d done that day, and George mentioned he’d seen the zoo with all those big cats and that was about the last time he got a chance to open his mouth. When Boss said he’d been to the art museum, the two men got to talking about Van Gogh, and Bo Pharis even could quote the exact words that the artist Vincent had wrote to his brother Theo about that particular painting, Undergrowth with Two Figures, and then Bo and Boss got into this long talk about whether or not Van Gogh was really as wrought-up as he’d been cut out to be, and Boss seemed to really blow Bo away with his theory that the Undergrowth painting wasn’t spontaneous but calculated and orderly. After they’d talked about art for a good bit, Bo just says, “Ars est celare artem” and Boss says “Sutor ne supra crepidam,” and before you know it the two fellers was doing their chit-chat in Latin, and poor George had nothing to do but look over the various ladies in their finery who were eating their supper at other tables. It wasn’t too bad, studying all them pretty gals and wondering what-all they was a-talking about, you could bet not in Latin.

  Bo and Boss discovered they shared a passion for astronomy, and they talked about black holes through dessert, when they also discovered their interest in geology, and talked about rocks until Bo beat George to grabbing that check. Then Bo put them into his sleek black Jaguar and took them out to a place called Indian Hill, where Bo had this huge mansion, the finest house George had ever been inside of. The bar alone was bigger than George’s house. They had drinks and Bo and Boss talked about all kinds of stuff, horses and Ireland and nuclear physics and the Osage Indians.

  Maybe George had a little too much to drink, feeling left out, because when they were shooting some Eight Ball on this ten-thousand-dollar pool table in the game room (there was also a Ping-Pong table and a shuffleboard and a chess table, but Boss declined Bo’s offer to play a game of chess because he didn’t want to clobber him) and at one point Boss had to go to the bathroom and take a leak, so George and Bo were alone together for the first time, and George laid his cue-stick down and put his face up pretty close to Bo’s and says, “Lookee here, I reckon I ought to tell ye. I know ye aint a-fixin to jine the campaign anyhow, but afore ye git too chummy with Vernon I think ye ort to know something. Jelena don’t want him runnin for governor. Hell, I don’t want him a-runnin for governor. Aint nobody wants him runnin for governor.”

  Bo Pharis he just smiled and looked at George kind of tolerant, like George had crapped on the rug but he forgave him for it. Then he arched his eyebrows and says, “But what if I would like to see him running?”

  Chapter three

  Bolin Keith Pharis iii drank an extra cup of breakfast coffee and thought out loud, which had been his habit in this house ever since he’d moved into it. Kristin, his maid, no longer lived in, but came to work each day after he’d left, so he was alone. “If George is Sancho Panza,” he said to the empty house, and not just rhetorically, “then who, or what, am I? One of the windmills? The rascally publican who dubbed the knight? The Biscayan squire? Or perhaps”—he permitted himself a laugh—“I’m just the bony old nag Rosinante!” If there weren’t something so godawful ludicrous about the whole situation, Bo wouldn’t have wasted another minute of his considerable powers of cogitation on it.

  Surely his contempt for the present governor of Arkansas, the misbegotten Bradfield, would not have been enough excuse for him to get involved. If he truly cared about getting rid of Bradfield, there were any number of ways he could swing it, and any number of candidates he could back who had a good chance to defeat the man. Not that it mattered all that much who was the present—or future—governor of Arkansas. Although Bo still felt some concern for his native state, he had long ago severed most of his ties with it, and had been indifferent to the string of politicians such as Jim Guy Tucker and Mike Huckabee who had followed Clinton into the governor’s office, although when news of the election of Shoat Bradfield reached him he began to pay attention, because his experience with Bradfield was that the man was utterly without scruple or altruism. And the good Democrat whom Bradfield had defeated, Caleb Burdell, had used as his campaign manager one of Bo’s dearest old friends, a bright, bouncy woman named Lydia Caple, who, Bo had learned, had been truly wounded by Bradfield’s campaign tactics.

  Bo still wrote to his mother in Harrison three or four times a year, and he still called her at Christmas and on Mother’s Day. He followed, at least in the back pages of the Enquirer’s sports section, the fortunes of the Razorback football team. He paid his annual dues to the University of Arkansas Alumni Association. He kept in touch with several old friends, such as those he’d called yesterday, including Lydia Caple, to see if any of them knew anything about this Ingledew. Lydia hadn’t been soured on politics to the extent of giving up the trade of political consultancy, but she’d told Bo that whoever this Ingledew fellow was, however much money he had, she didn’t want to mess around with any more “amateurs.”

  Bo still had a few calls a make. He had told Ingledew, when he’d dropped him and George Dinsmore off at the Hyatt Regency late last night, that the least he could do was find a good man (or woman) in Arkansas willing to run the campaign for him. Ingledew had said, “I’m not interested in any amateurs in Arkansas.” Bo had resisted the urge to tell him that was the same epithet Lydia Caple had bestowed on him. Instead, Bo had kidded him about not having enough faith in the talent to be found in his own state. There were a few men and women in Arkansas who were anything but amateurs, and Vernon Ingledew could expect to hear from one of them in another day or so. Still, even in that last moment together, Vernon had not been willing to concede Bo’s refusal. “I’m offering you,” he had said, “something far greater than an obese salary with all conceivable expenses. I’m offering you a chance to do something that will save your soul.”

  “Coming from anybody else,” Bolin Pharis said to his empty house over an unprecedented third cup of coffee, “such a statement would have been inexcusably presumptuous, or at best hopelessly quixotic. But coming from Vernon Ingledew, it is disquietingly thinkable.” It was thinkable, Bo realized, because Vernon had thought it, and Bo had come to believe that Vernon was capable of better thought than any man he’d ever met. They had got to know each other remarkably well in the few hours they’d had together. Bo had understood Vernon well enough to know that when he said “soul” he wasn’t talking in any religious sense. Indeed, whatever notion Bo had been developing that Vernon just might be electable, because of his intelligence, his kindness, and his good looks, not to mention his money, was given a severe jolt when Bo learned that Vernon was not religious. Of all the things that Vernon had going against him—and the
se were formidable, such as his lack of experience and his relationship with his “own cousin” Jelena—his lack of any church affiliation would practically kill him with the Arkansas electorate.

  Bo knew that just as he had come to understand Vernon in ways that transcended the various weighty topics they had discussed, Vernon had probably come to understand him too, and thus, he realized, he might even have sensed that there was something lacking in Bo’s soul. “What did I say to him?” Bo asked the house. “What clue did I possibly give him that there is anything about my soul that needs saving?” Perhaps Ingledew had just been guessing. Or perhaps Ingledew had looked into his eyes and found there a hint of what one of his most recent girlfriends—had it been Lisa or Jan?—had called “a certain indescribable void.”

  Bo enjoyed and appreciated being by himself, and was never given to brooding about his soul, or feeling that anything was missing in his character or his personality. Ask Patricia, his once-upon-a-wife, and she would tell you otherwise: she would call him selfish and stubborn and, her favorite insult, “a little boy.” But the fact remained that he was happy with himself, he was not bothered by any frustrations or resentments or yearnings, he was not aware of anything that he ought to do to change himself or his life. He had a great job and he was damned good at it. He had not cast a backward glance at his career in politics for quite some time. He never gave it a thought…unless somebody like Al Gore or Vernon Ingledew made him an offer that was excruciatingly difficult to refuse.

  He loved Cincinnati. He was a die-hard Bengals fan and remained convinced that if only the Bengals could learn to tackle and learn to pass and learn to establish the run, and quit missing assignments and dropping passes, they had a good chance to make it to the Super Bowl someday, and Bolin Pharis intended to be here when it happened. His company had a skybox in the spanking new Paul Brown Stadium, and he never missed a home game. His company also had a booth at Cinergy Field, and Bo occasionally went to a Reds game. He would be even more of a sports fan if he didn’t dislike crowds so much. The older he got, the more uncomfortable he felt—a form of agoraphobia, he supposed—around large numbers of people. What he really liked to do with his spare time was a couple of private things, all by himself: fly fish and garden. He was really good at fly fishing, had practiced for years, owned the very best Orvis equipment, and liked nothing better than jumping into his second car, a Nissan Patrol 4-by-4, and heading for Twelve Mile Creek or Mad River or one of the creeks up in the Kentucky hills to spend a day reading the stream. There was only a bit of conflict in that the best season for fly fishing also coincided with the times when he needed to get out into his vegetable garden. Bo’s eleven-acre spread included a half-acre of good loam that he had devoted much time to enriching and planting and harvesting. He had the only vegetable garden in Indian Hill, and he’d had to plan it and screen it so that it couldn’t be seen from the road or the neighbors’. He never reflected that his green thumb had anything to do with his Arkansas heritage, because after all his folks back home in Harrison had never had a vegetable garden. Gardening didn’t make him a rustic. There was just something in it that was a handy metaphor for life and work: starting with a seed, which contains the incredible amount of information needed to make cells expand and multiply into a living plant, watching it grow, tending it, giving it everything it needed, knowing what it didn’t need, and being rewarded, finally, by the abundant, succulent harvest. It was too bad that there wasn’t anybody here to share the harvest with him. On occasion, he could serve his own fresh vegetables to his guests and his girlfriends, but usually he just put a couple of ears of still-in-the-husk corn into the microwave and ate them himself, and if there were too many ears he had to throw them on his compost pile. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to do so, but he judged his girlfriends on their taste for radishes. He hardly ever had a date who could eat a radish, not just the champion and cherry belle but even the French breakfast and white icicle. He was crazy about radishes himself, their earthy taste, and, thinking of them, he realized that the planting season was just a few weeks away. His orders to Burpee and Shumway and Park had all been filled. He had a dozen heirloom tomato plants already thriving in the south windows.