The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Bo was fit to be tied. “Don Quixote has found his windmills!” he raged. As soon as they got Vernon and George back in Fayetteville, Bo called a meeting and, since Bo was out of control, Arch took over and politely said to Vernon that he thought it would be a really fantastic achievement if Vernon eliminated tornadoes. It would hugely benefit not just the state of Arkansas but also Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, all the “tornado alley” states. But just how, for godsakes, did he plan to do it? Without batting an eye, Vernon launched into this complicated meteorological explanation of just how tornadoes could be—he didn’t use this word, but Arch couldn’t help thinking it—extirpated, that is, each tornado can be thought of as having a root at the base of its funnel, and that root, while the most powerfully destructive part of the tornado, is the most vulnerable part, and can be “tripped” and broken. But just what means would be used to trip and break the root was something that Vernon would discuss only after he was elected.

  They had their media event all right. The television commentators and all the newspapers, while they devoted the top of the news to accounts of the actual destruction and mounting death toll and the relief efforts, with just brief mention of Governor Bradfield’s appearance and no mention at all of the other five candidates, made side-of-the-news references, implicitly derisive, to, as the Southwest Times Record of Fort Smith put it, “the campaign promise to end all campaign promises: elect Vernon Ingledew and he’ll stop tornadoes!” The next day, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s editorial cartoonist John Deering had a lulu depicting Vernon in the stance of Charleton Heston as Moses parting the sea, lifting his arms to split a tornado. It wasn’t even a good caricature of Vernon, and, because he still lacked wide recognition, he had to be identified by a banner that said INGELDEW [sic].

  Although the other five candidates were loath to paint Vernon’s promise as sheer folly, out of fear of retribution from the files of Harry Wolfe, the media itself had a high old time with the matter, and Hank Endicott wrote a witty, satirical, slightly vicious column in which he suggested that the real opponents in this matter were Vernon Ingledew and God, and that God ought to be put on notice that if He tried to throw a tornado after Vernon became governor, He had better expect to have to file a “Tornado Permit” at least forty-eight hours before attempting to unleash a twister. “Tornado control is above politics,” Endicott concluded. “But Ingledew appears to have lost the Almighty’s vote, even if he hadn’t already lost it because of his refusal to believe in Him.” That was the first clear public allusion to Vernon’s atheism, and while a number of preachers lacking subjects for their Sunday sermons picked up on the matter and began to question the candidacy of a man who not only defied God by planning to stop His tornadoes but also didn’t believe in Him in the first place, the other candidates did not broach the subject…except, as we shall see, the Reverend John Colby Dixon.

  The tornado fiasco wasn’t the straw that broke Bo’s back, but it didn’t help. Arch turned on his computer one morning to find this email:

  Arch – the University has just informed me that they have decided to ‘postpone indefinitely’ the awarding of an honorary degree to me at commencement. Only reason? ‘Certain members of the Board of Trustees feel that partisan politics should not intrude upon academia.’ Well, fuck ’em! I thought the goddamn thing was for my past achievements, not what I’m doing lately. I’m sick about this, and I’m taking off. Catch you later. – Bo.

  The first thing Arch did was try to find Cast, to see if he knew anything about his mentor’s whereabouts. Monica didn’t know where Cast was. Arch thought of protesting the Board’s decision to John White, the chancellor of the University, but he and Arch weren’t the best of friends, not since Arch had countermanded his decision to close the University of Arkansas Press by offering a gift of a million from Tyson to keep it in business. So Arch went over him, and called Frank Oldham, chairman of the Board of Trustees, who owed Arch, and Arch gave him an earful. Politely, of course. Oldham consented to give Arch the names of the three members of the Board who had been responsible for the decision to rescind Bo’s honorary degree. Not all three of them owed Arch, just a couple, but Arch gave them all an earful, even dropping the politeness during several minutes, and Arch wound up getting their agreement to “strongly reconsider” their asshole stupidity.

  But Arch couldn’t find Bo to give him the good news that he’d probably get his degree, after all, even if Arch had to hood him himself. In the wee hours of one morning Lydia called Arch, waking him, and said, “You’re boss now, you know.” Arch answered that he wasn’t so sure, but he was “acting campaign manager” for the nonce. Well, she said, she’d just got a feed from a radio station manager with a possible media event looming behind it. In Morrilton a small grocery store called Sam and LaTonya’s, operated by blacks in a mixed neighborhood, was bombed earlier in the middle of the night. This very same night, meaning earlier this morning, across the river in Danville, La Comida, a tienda de comestibles, an Hispanic grocery store, was similarly bombed. Lydia thought they ought to get Vernon to both places as fast as George’s helicopter could take him. So Arch phoned Vernon in Stay More about 5:00 a.m., told him Arch was subbing for Bo, gave him the details and jokingly asked him to refrain from proposing the extirpation of bombs.

  George and Vernon got in that helicopter and George whisked his boss down to Morrilton, arriving simultaneously with the first television trucks out of Little Rock. After making a forceful and dramatic speech to the several dozen blacks assembled there, expressing his outrage at whomever planted the bomb, Vernon was televised standing between Sam and his wife LaTonya with his arms around them. “We’ll find who did it,” he told them, “and this will never happen again in the state of Arkansas. Not after I’m elected governor.”

  Then after they’d milked the situation for all it was worth, Vernon and George disappeared, reboarded the helicopter, which George had parked out of sight, and flew quickly to Danville, where the entire Latino population of the town, about three hundred people, were congregating in front of La Comida and the television cameras from Fort Smith. Vernon addressed them in Spanish, deploring this senseless violence and inviting their solidarity with their black brethren across the river, who had suffered an identical bombing. He told them in Spanish that when he became governor of Arkansas he would extirpar whatever root causes of such racism or bigotry had caused this. He told them that he hoped this incident would not diminish their pride in being Arkansawyers. He knew why they had come to Arkansas in the first place from Mexico and El Salvador: Trabajo. Tranquilidad. Familia. Work. Small-town tranquillity. Family. He would guarantee they could enjoy those things forevermore.

  They cheered Vernon wildly and yelled, Gobernador! Gobernador Ingledew! The television stations broadcast the performance to the entire Hispanic population of Arkansas, particularly in the northwest counties, where it was strongest, thanks in no small measure to the fact that Arch’s Tyson Foods had been hiring them in droves. The other five contenders for the gubernatorial primary could only mouth the customary pap of indignation; they had been caught flatfooted and were ignored by the media.

  Vernon’s appearances at Morrilton and Danville were all over the next day’s papers as well as on television and radio. The three or four Spanish-language newspapers published in the state really made a big deal out of it, making it look as if Vernon Ingledew were the only friend the Latinos had among the Anglo population. The Ingledew campaign couldn’t possibly have bought such good publicity. Vernon practically sealed the Hispanic vote, as well as a large part of the black vote, with that single morning’s work.

  Never mind that sharp FBI agents sent in to examine the bombings discovered that there had been no forced entry or other way of getting the bombs inside the stores, and this led them to the eventual discovery and analysis, weeks later, that the “bombs” had actually been defective or malformed cans of food that had exploded on the shelves in the stores. It was too late to reverse the image
of Vernon as a leader of the oppressed. And a lot of non-Hispanic white people began to notice and admire him because of his championing of the downtrodden and his forceful opposition to prejudice and injustice. Arch’s pollster told him he had nothing to worry about. The next public poll gave Vernon an astounding 20 percent, again more than doubling the previous poll. More incredibly, some of the media began to editorialize that Vernon just might be capable of abolishing tornadoes.

  One more candidate dropped out of the race, leaving only five, and Vernon was clearly in third place, even if a distant third behind Barnas and Reverend Dixon. Surely, wherever he was, Bolin Pharis was apprised of this. Arch kept up his efforts to locate him, even calling his Cincinnati house several times. Finally, Monica reported to Arch that Cast had returned to work, or, rather, he had never left work, but had been busy helping Carleton Drew plan an advertising campaign that would get around Vernon’s proscription of television by extensive use not only of newspaper ads and radio but also the Internet. Since Vernon would not allow yard signs, Cast had coaxed Carleton into the idea of using a blimp: they were going to hire a large dirigible, paint its sides with INGLEDEW FOR GOVERNOR in huge letters, and pilot it constantly all over the state. “Great idea, Cast!” Arch complimented him. And then Arch asked politely, “I don’t suppose you have any idea where Bo might be?”

  “Yes, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Cast replied.

  “In his absence, I’m your boss,” Arch called to his attention.

  “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  “Then I’m ordering you to tell me where he is.”

  After further persuasion of that nature, Cast finally relented. Bo had been gone for some time “back to the sticks”: he was spending a lot of time sitting on the whittler’s bench at the Harrison courthouse square, he was walking, not driving, along the backroads of the Ozarks, and he was even, supposedly, hanging out a lot around Stay More.

  Arch decided to go see if he could find him.

  But first there was one other big boost Arch needed to give Vernon in the polls, possibly even to propel him into second place. And it happened mostly by accident.

  Arch’s uncle, Dale Bumpers, was in Fayetteville leading a seminar at the University (the entire College of Agriculture had been named after him). Dale asked Arch to meet him for lunch, and they met at Herman’s, a real institution so popular it doesn’t even have any signs identifying it in its run-down stucco roadhouse along busy 71. Herman’s makes the best steaks in northwest Arkansas and that was what they ordered. It had been a long time since Arch had eaten with Uncle Dale, and it brought back memories of the hundreds of meals they’d taken together when Arch was his campaign manager in the seventies.

  Arch’s mother and Bumpers’s wife were sisters, and Bumpers had just been talking to Arch’s mother in Charleston. “Spike, what in the hell are you doing back in politics?” he wanted to know.

  “I guess the political junkie in me needed a fix,” Arch said.

  “The last time we talked about this, you were a total cynic about politics, and you were even asking me to help you talk some friends out of running for office. Do you remember you practically insulted me, calling politicians ‘nasty, partisan, self-serving killjoys’?”

  “There was a time, Uncle Dale, when I lost all respect for politicians. But never for you.”

  “So tell me about this nasty, partisan, self-serving killjoy who has lured you away from a respectable job at Tyson’s.”

  Arch told him as much as he could about Vernon. Arch even attempted to describe Vernon’s appearance. He told him some of Vernon’s more radical ideas, as well as his really common-sense ideas for leading Arkansas into the 21st Century. Arch spelled out a few, but not all thirteen, of Vernon’s albatrosses. And when Arch was all finished depicting Vernon, he asked Arkansas’ greatest modern governor, “Does he remind you of anybody?”

  At first Dale Bumpers looked puzzled, as if Arch were making up a riddle. Then he grinned, mildly. “So you’re just trying to recapture your lost youth by reliving or recreating those good old days.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Arch said. “But Beverly’s been telling me I look a lot younger these days. Do you think?”

  “Come to think of it, you do. But I just figured you’d dyed your hair.” He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “Well, I certainly wish you and your Ingledew the best of luck.”

  “You can do more than that, Uncle Dale. You can give him your endorsement.”

  “Godsakes, Spike! You know I never endorse candidates in the Primary. If he survives the Primary I’ll certainly endorse him in the General Election. Anybody to beat that shithead Shoat.”

  “He needs your endorsement now,” Arch told him. Arch sketched out the current situation: Senator James Barnas firmly entrenched in first place, the Reverend John Colby Dixon nipping at his heels, Vernon Ingledew bringing up a distant third but crowding out the remaining candidates. “All those guys, even the preacher, are career politicians, or has-beens or never-will-bes. Vernon’s the only answer.”

  “Sorry, Spike. If I endorsed your man, I’d hurt the feelings of all the candidates I’ve declined for years to endorse simply because I wouldn’t get involved in primary elections.”

  Arch sighed. He had the greatest admiration for his uncle, who was his family. When Arch’s father had died a couple of years before, Dale Bumpers had delivered the eulogy, as fine a speech as Arch had ever heard him make. Like Dale, like Vernon, Arch’s father had been an independent thinker, an idiosyncratic visionary, almost a pariah at times. “Throughout history the great men and women who left a great and enduring legacy,” Dale Bumpers said at the memorial service, “never hesitated to stand alone, to swim against the tide.”

  From memory Arch now quoted these words back to his uncle, and Arch beseeched him to swim against the tide once more, and, while he was still debating with himself whether to take the plunge, Arch added, “I promise you that Vernon Ingledew when elected will appoint you Adjutant General of the Arkansas National Guard!” That was a post which Arch knew that Uncle Dale, an old World War II Marine, had always coveted.

  They discussed the best place for the announcement—in front of Old Main? At the campaign headquarters off the Square? Why not the steps of the capitol building in Little Rock? Or even the steps of the Old Statehouse, which Clinton had used for such dramatic effect?

  “I don’t want anything special,” Uncle Dale said. “Why not simply the front porch of your lovely home?”

  Arch may have blushed with pride, but he did happen to have a nice big old two-story Shingle Neoclassical Craftsman in the heights west of the University. It had once been a fraternity house. Beverly and Arch had put a lot of work into its restoration.

  Anyhow, that was where Vernon Ingledew came to meet Dale Bumpers for the first time, to shake his hand in front of the cameras, and to thank him warmly for his endorsement in the primary, and then to make a little speech in which he said that Dale Bumpers’s original campaign for governor could never be duplicated but it could certainly serve as a constant source of inspiration.

  Attending that ceremony were Arch’s wife Beverly and their daughter Eliot, who was going to turn fifteen the week before the upcoming primary and who discovered that Vernon Ingledew was “the coolest guy” she’d ever met, even if he talked not to her but to the top of her head. Arch was surprised to notice that Vernon’s woman-shyness extended to young ladies too, but Eliot would later remark that Vernon’s bashfulness was what she liked best about him. Eliot was going to have some great ideas for enfranchising, as it were, the hundreds of thousands of Arkansawyers too young to vote but not too young to proselytize their parents. Eliot’s finest idea was to have a great campaign poster downloadable from the Internet, and this poster would, very shortly, be seen in the rooms of all of the state’s teenagers. It did not say INGLE WHO?, a question that no longer needed asking, but rather VERY VERNON. That poster became so ubiquitous that Vernon sent Eliot an ema
il in which he declared his intention to appoint her Secretary of Teenagers, and Arch didn’t think he was entirely joking. Arch was also proud of Eliot because she was the first person to notice (how had it escaped everyone else’s detection?) that Ingledew and Governor contain the same number of letters, eight, a handy thing to know when making posters, painting blimps, and having rich but subliminal mental associations.

  Also attending the ceremony were the Samurai—all seven of them, including Bo, who had flown in with Vernon and Jelena in George’s helicopter. It turned out that what Bo had primarily been doing was a combination of wandering all over Stay More or hanging out at the double-bubble, where he begged Jelena to permit him to help her plant her tomatoes (as well as the ones he’d brought from Cincinnati) and other stuff in the vegetable garden, and to help keep the weeds out of it, and where he’d had some long talks with Vernon whenever the candidate was at home. “Trust me,” Bo told Arch. “He really does know how to stop tornadoes.”

  Bo had returned to the campaign without having learned from Arch that he stood an excellent chance to get his honorary degree after all. In fact, he did get it, and all of them were there watching and applauding. All of them. The Seven Samurai. Vernon and Jelena and George and Day and Diana. Dale Bumpers, whose endorsement of Vernon had boosted him into second place in the polls. The lengthy citation for Bo’s degree, read out by Chancellor John White, carried no mention of his current occupation.

  Bolin Pharis III, LL.D., returned to his current occupation energetically. Arch didn’t mind being second in command again. Monica found and gave him an old button for Avis, the car renters. WE’RE NO. 2. WE TRY HARDER. Monica meant for it to refer to the fact that Vernon was now second in the polls, but Arch, proudly wearing the button on his shirt, thought of it as referring to himself.