The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Vernon rambled on about the anfractuous direction Arkansas had taken since these Republicans Mike Huckabee and then Shoat Bradfield had taken office. Arkansas might be enjoying a period of record economic prosperity but it wasn’t because of Huckabee and Bradfield. Vernon wanted a chance to show how tenebrific the state had really been during the Republican years. His own programs were still inchoate and perhaps ineffable, but he wanted a chance to enunciate them. Lydia made a mental note to pass out pocket dictionaries at Vernon’s next speech.

  Dark had settled in, the place was as tenebrific as hell, but the TV crews had turned on their bright lights. Vernon didn’t even say thank you. A good speech ought to end by expressing gratitude for the listener’s attention, but Vernon seemed to think he was doing everyone a favor. Lydia was beginning to feel depressed. She knew that even if Vernon survived the primaries, if Shoat Bradfield challenged him to a debate, there would be no way that Vernon could stand up against Bradfield’s powerful oratorical skills.

  But the worst part of it didn’t start until the question period, and the first reporter, a woman from the Northwest Arkansas Times, asked, “Mr. Ingledew, can’t you give us any idea of just what exactly you plan to do to improve the state of Arkansas?”

  Because the reporter was a woman, Vernon wouldn’t look at her, and Lydia wasn’t even sure he had heard her. But then he chose to address his answer to one of the TV cameras, “Certainly. For starters, I would like, eventually, to extirpate our institutions, particularly our prisons, our schools, even our hospitals.”

  Lydia wondered what extirpate meant and why he had to use such fancy words. If it meant improve, why couldn’t he just say improve? If it meant paint and fix up, why couldn’t he just say paint and fix up? She noticed that Bo Pharis had covered his face in his hands, so maybe Bo at least knew what the word meant. One of the reporters asked Vernon how to spell the word, and he spelled it out, but he didn’t bother to offer synonyms, and none of the reporters had the guts to admit that none of them knew what it meant.

  Another reporter, a man from the Springdale Morning News, asked, “What about churches? Do you plan to extirpate the churches too?”

  “No,” Vernon said. “As Plutarch wrote, ‘If we traverse the world, it is possible to find cities without walls, without letters, without kings, without wealth, without coin, without schools and theaters; but a city without a temple, or that practiseth not worship, prayer and the like, no one ever saw.’”

  “Where do you practiseth worship?” the same reporter asked. “What church do you go to?”

  “None,” Vernon said, but then he touched his heart. “Here’s my temple.”

  “You have no religion?” the reporter asked, rather challengingly.

  “Well, you might say I follow The Tao,” Vernon admitted, “So I suppose you could call me a Taoist if you had to.”

  Like the reporters, Lydia heard this the way Vernon pronounced it, as “Dow,” and she, like they, took it to mean that the only thing Vernon worshipped was the Dow-Jones average. Which, of course, the vast majority of other Arkansas people also worshipped, even if they were Christians.

  “Did you go to the University? Or where?” asked a teenaged (male) reporter from the Arkansas Traveler, the student newspaper at the University. Lydia realized she ought to have prepared in advance some bio sheets to give these people. If she had, they wouldn’t have to ask such questions. But she also realized why she hadn’t: a Vernon Ingledew bio would look awful to a reporter, let alone a voter.

  “I’m strictly an autodidact,” Vernon said. “And I’d like to see your children and your children’s children become autodidacts.”

  This time a reporter was brave enough to ask, “What’s an autodidact? How many wheels has it got?”

  After the laughter, Vernon said, “A self-taught person.”

  “So now you plan to teach yourself politics?” asked one of the reporters. And without waiting for Vernon’s answer, he commented, “I hope you’re a fast learner.”

  Lydia knew Vernon was a very fast learner but she had her doubts that he could learn fast enough such things as elocution, ebullience, posture, glad-handing, backslapping, and, above all, tact and restraint: in a word, politics.

  After it was over and the crews were on their way home, she asked Bo, “What does extirpate mean?”

  Bo rolled his eyes heavenward. “Abolish, dear Lydia. Literally, it means to pull up by the roots. I suppose our friend, our candidate, our employer intends the subtle implication that we find the root need for schools and prisons and hospitals and then yank out those roots. God knows. When’s the next plane back to Cincinnati? Wait. I’ve got a car. And a chauffeur. Where’s Cast? Cast?”

  Lydia took it upon herself to attempt to give Vernon Ingledew a good chewing-out. Somebody had to do it. But while she had often been unsparing in her critiques of the various candidates she had worked for, a carry-over from her years of lambasting all politicians in her columns, she hadn’t needed to criticize their delivery, their demeanor, and their absolutely crackpot ideas. Lydia could cuss better than a sailor when she had to.

  She dragged him off into a field where the old gristmill had been, far enough out of the earshot of the others, even when she began to holler. She was a little rusty with some of those cuss words but as she warmed up they all began coming back to her, in all their glory and power. Vernon could only stand there and take it, not once looking her in the eye. She was so busy cussing him that she forgot to remember the reason he was hanging his head was not because he was abashed at her chewing him out but because she was a female and he was congenitally shy toward all women, as had been all males in the Ingledew lineage going back a thousand years or more! How could she do a proper job of cussing him out if she couldn’t even get his attention? But she kept on cussing him. She cussed his poor performance, she cussed his posture, she cussed his lousy duende and eupatrid mien, and above all she cussed his harebrained ideas. He stood there and took it like a ten-year-old boy getting a scolding from his mother, and she realized that Vernon had been only ten when his mother died.

  It was not until this moment, or this sequence of profanity-laced moments, that Lydia Caple realized the real reason she was being so hard on him: she had fallen madly in love with him and believed with all her heart that he was going to be the best goddamn governor who ever governed any place on earth.

  Chapter seven

  Little Rock from the air at night is a jeweled Shangri-La, a fucking fairyland. He’d never seen it before, day or night. The closest he’d come was when the Bob Dole campaign had added him to the throng of oppo men reconnoitering Clinton’s whole life, but they had decided to keep him in dc and let others do the Little Rock search for secrets. To this day he remained convinced he could have found the tidbit or two that would have tipped the balance in favor of their client, but he was glad he didn’t, because when you got right down to it he hated Republicans. All his life he had always preferred working for Democrats. He’ll work for anybody who pays him, regardless of party, but when the great political balance sheets are drawn up, it turns out the debit side of the Republican sheet is besmirched with uglier scandals and misdeeds and sins and crimes. Look at Nixon. Harry would rather work against a Republican any day than for him. Of course the present job, at least until they got Ingledew past the primary, was going to mean lifting Democratic rocks to see what crawled out.

  “Don’t leave a stone unturned,” Bo Pharis had said to him at the Boone County airport in Harrison. Harry had promised to give him within a week full dossiers on each of Ingledew’s eight opponents, and Bo had told him not to give a thought to expenses. Really the only commercial way to fly from Harrison to Little Rock involves taking a Big Sky flight to St. Louis, and a TWA from there, eight hundred miles of travel just to cover 140 miles from Harrison to Little Rock. Ridiculous. So Bo had put him on a charter flight, hang the expense. But Bo wasn’t a happy man. They’d gone to visit his mother, who lived in this cute little
cottage just east of the courthouse square, and this sweet little old lady had known right away that something serious was troubling her son, but all Bo would tell her was, “I’ve let myself get deeply involved in a chimera, and my hopes have already been dashed.” He told her that he was home to stay for a while, however; at least until May, when he was due to get an honorary degree at the University and planned to have his mother attend.

  The previous night the Samurai had a Saturday night “emergency session” in Stay More, Bo and Harry and the others, to discuss whether or not Ingledew’s campaign wasn’t “dead in the water,” as Bo put it: whether it could still be salvaged after such a shitty beginning. It was Saturday night, which by time-honored tradition Harry devoted to serious recreation, primarily bonded in 86 proof, but he went easy on the sauce long enough to hear out Bo and Lydia and Carleton and even the kids, Cast and Monica. Monica made a cute little speech reminding them that the first time each of them ever tried anything they blew it: the first time they walked, the first time they wrote, the first time they rode a bike or drove a car, the first time they had sex. Harry couldn’t help guffawing at that last part, and he said, “The first time I had sex was the last time I had sex!” That got some laughs and he added solemnly, “And maybe Ingledew’s first speech was his last speech.” Arch said they ought to blame themselves for not having coached Vernon sufficiently in advance. Carleton said all the coaching in the world wouldn’t have corrected his ding-a-ling ideas about eradicating prisons, schools, et cetera. Bo said the only way this campaign could go forward would be to “straighten out” Vernon. They might not be able to persuade him that he was crazy even to think of abolishing the school system, but they could certainly warn him that such ideas had to be kept to himself until after the election. They had to make sure that such gaffes would not occur again. They had to find out just what he was for and what he was against.

  So they called Ingledew in and told him to lay it all on the line. Had he given any thought to legalizing marijuana? No, he said, he’d like to extirpate drugs. There was that word again. But Bo had explained it to any of the illiterati among them: “stirps” was Latin for roots, and ex meant out, so the word meant to pull up by the roots but the way Ingledew intended it he sort of meant to find the root cause of anything, the root of drugs, the root of prisons, and eliminate that need. Which wasn’t such a bad idea, if you thought about it. But then Ingledew looked at them as if he dared any of them to challenge him on that, and he added, “All drugs. Tobacco is a drug too. Guns are a drug.”

  A lot of them sighed. Was he in favor of strict gun control, then? Was he going to “extirpate” smoking? Well, he’d better save it for after he was in the governor’s mansion, because the state had thousands upon thousands of proud gun owners who didn’t think their possession of guns was a drug, and thousands upon thousands of smokers who didn’t consider cigarettes a drug, and Ingledew didn’t have a chance to get elected by alienating all those people. Harry wasn’t sure they convinced him. But they got him to agree to tone it down, to put a lid on it, to generalize and extemporize and euphemize. In short, they got him to agree to become a politician. And from that point, they could move forward.

  The charter plane, a Cessna, touched down on the same runway where a few years previously an American Airlines jet had overshot the runway and torn apart, killing eleven people. Knowing this didn’t make Harry nervous. Even if he weren’t such a goddamn fatalist anyway, he also knew why the airplane had crashed, he knew the pilot’s error that had caused it, he knew what the pilot was thinking when he shouldn’t have been thinking such thoughts at the moment he was supposed to have been thinking about deploying the wing spoilers but failed to do so. Listen: if you ever say anything, if you ever write anything, if you ever think anything, he can find out about it, believe him.

  When Day Whittacker suspected Harry of reading his mind, that business about Mohammed and the mountain, he wasn’t very far from the truth. We’re decades past Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 (a date which seemed so impossibly far in the future when he first thought of it over half a century ago but now seems hopelessly lost in the ho-hum Reagan years) but we’ve seen the near-complete erosion of personal privacy. Harry could tell you, if he had to (if he was paid well enough to), what you’re wearing, or not wearing, as you read this. He has got his Compaq notebook in his lap, and this charter airline thoughtfully provides a modem hook-up, and he has been plugged in the whole hour since Harrison.

  He told the cabdriver to take him to a good hotel. The route went past the site of the Clinton presidential library, and the cabby pointed it out to him, what they could see of it in the dark, and although Harry can see in the dark when he has to, this wasn’t one of those times. The cabby deposited him in front of a sleek glass cliff called The Excelsior, but he noticed across the street from it a Victorian Italianate oldie called The Capital, which he thought looked more cozy, even more political, than The Excelsior. So that’s where he checked in. The rooms were expensive, but it wasn’t coming out of his pocket. The decor was soft and old-timey and his King room had a modem line, no problem. He ordered a bottle of black Jack from room service and plugged in. It was Sunday night, but hit men never sleep. Well, actually, if they drink enough their demons will pass out, and he expected to join them in the land of oblivion but meanwhile he’d just as soon work on Sunday night as punch a nine to five on a workday.

  His Compaq notebook already had the chart of The Eight, as he’d begun to think of them, mapped out. Thanks to eager-beaver Cast Sherrill, who’d make a great oppo man himself someday if he hadn’t set his sights higher on a campaign managership or media expertship, Harry already had in his notebook’s many gigabytes a clunky file on all the basic known scandals involving The Eight: the ex-governor’s felony conviction, the evangelist’s suspected child abuse, the attorney general’s involvement in the suicide of the legislator. But all due credit to the kid Cast, these things were common knowledge: Cast had found them in newspaper accounts, probably lifted off Lexis-Nexis. Harry knew places to look beyond Lexis-Nexis that the kid had never dreamed of.

  When Harry had found himself unemployed after Senator Passmore’s defeat (which was, he would always believe, the fault of the other campaign consultants who violated a fundamental principle of Harry’s: if you find some real poison about a candidate, use it early in the campaign; don’t wait until toward the end, when it can look like desperation tactics and can backfire), when Harry found himself unemployable for a time, with nothing to do but haunt the corridors of the National Gallery, the Corcorcan, and the Phillips, he decided to keep in practice by doing a complete dossier on himself: every possible existence of any sequence of bytes spelling out “Harry Wolfe” on the Internet was retrieved and examined (there are 125 Harry Wolfes in the United States, and he didn’t even bother with those in Canada, Australia and England). Posing as a credit rating service, he obtained a complete record of Harry Wolfe’s credit, which led to investigation of bad debts, a few minor thefts, countless overdrafts at the bank, and the use of a Mastercard to subscribe to “love clubs.” Using the foia, or Freedom of Information Act, he obtained all of the FBI files on Harry Wolfe, which contained some interesting revelations of how he and his activities were viewed by others. Pretending to be a consulting physician, he obtained all of Harry Wolfe’s hospital and medical records, shocking in their revelations of his failure to take care of himself. And then by posing as a potential employer doing a security-clearance check, he obtained all the records of Harry Wolfe at South Hagerstown High School, as well as at Georgetown University, from which he was expelled as a junior. He hacked Harry Wolfe’s computer and uncovered a cesspool of salacious material and a private diary that would sear your eyeballs.

  So dedicated to this work did he become that he supposed for a while he was clinically a split personality: one Harry Wolfe was the fat, filthy, drunken loner who couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it, and overcompensated by doing just about anythin
g, short of rape and murder, to give himself a good time; the other Harry Wolfe, hot on his trail, was America’s premiere investigative oppo man. The first Harry had a habit, at least once weekly, of drinking himself into oblivion, of not even remembering what he’d done while loaded, so the second Harry took advantage of this to hide miniature videocams in his bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. Further, in disguise he interviewed various persons who had contact with Harry Wolfe during his blackouts, such as fellow patrons of the nude bars he frequented. Every loathsome deed of the man was recorded in lurid detail in a log on the computer. This surveillance reached its nadir when the sleuth paid a city sanitation department truckdriver a bribe to set aside the twice-weekly collection of Harry Wolfe’s garbage, an act (sometimes called in the trade “dumpster diving”) that depleted his financial resources. If you shake your head and say Why the fuck didn’t he just save his own fucking garbage? he could point out two things: one, that would have violated his sense of being split into dual personalities, and, two, he needed to find out how hard or easy it was to bribe a garbage collector. The experience created some unpleasant moments when he had to sift meticulously through all that dreck and analyze its possible meaning.

  And the conclusion? Don’t, for any office, vote for this man! Don’t trust him. Don’t buy anything from him; don’t even sell him anything. Don’t rent to him or borrow from him. Don’t, if possible, speak to the bastard. Don’t touch anything he has touched. Don’t breathe the same air.

  His very calling, once upon a time, was totally disreputable. Back in the Seventies he’d been a newspaperman stringing for a chain of small newspapers in Delaware when a man running for state senator had come to him and “wondered” if Harry knew anything about the man’s opponent. Nothing he hadn’t already published, he said. The man offered to pay him, and that’s how he got started. They weren’t called “opposition research” in those days; they were called a lot of unflattering names, the best of which was “lepers.” They were kept in small rooms behind closed doors all by themselves. It was lonely. Most of the men (and a few women) Harry worked for denied that they even knew him…sometimes to his face. Such researchers certainly weren’t allowed into the rooms where the key campaign decisions were discussed and reached. But then the Nixon White House hired a gum-shoe to research Chappaquiddick, Donald Segretti became Nixon’s “dirty trickster,” the Democrats answered with their own, Dick Tuck, and the muckraking escalated to the point where no politician in his right mind could live without oppo people, and they were afforded a place at the table in the highest campaign echelons.