by Mark Harris
“We are all very pleased to have you aboard,” said the boy once more, who, according to McGinley’s biographical material, was fifteen years old and had “fought valiantly against affliction.” Gripping Brown’s hand powerfully, the boy steered him along the line toward a table where campaign workers wearing chefs’ hats were pouring beer into paper cups. Their hats were striped with patriotic colors in the familiar campaign motif, and they bore various winning slogans, such as “Register bomb-throwers, not guns,” and “Unity.” The wall behind the beer table was a montage of photographs and headlines exhibiting McGinley in various stances and postures of his past life and recent campaign. Here was the Chairman of the Draft Board, here the “hard-driving lawyer,” and so forth. Some of the headlines had been written by Brown, and he took a certain pride in identifying those which were clearly his. Brown had once intended to become a writer and save the world, but events hadn’t worked that way. His nearest connection to literature was a writer living on Nineteenth Street, whose house Brown passed shyly when he did. Brown himself had been a most excellent writer at Faith Calvary Central, and in the end been rebuked for his skill, for Dr. Blikey told him that his essays were “too literary . . . too profound,” that the qualities truly valued in “this modern world of ours,” as Dr. Blikey phrased it, were “straight talk, easy sentences, direct thoughts, and only one thought to one sentence.” Dr. Blikey often said, “A good whip-cracking funny joke is worth a thousand highfalutin’ smart thoughts.”
“Are you studying your handiwork on the wall?” Schwarzlose asked. “It’s writ in water. It’s newspapers.” He was drinking beer.
“I’ve written some nice heads in my time,” said Brown.
“Well I’m off to dinner,” said Schwarzlose.
“I’ll see you after,” said Brown.
“I hope so,” said Schwarzlose. “Did you shake the candidate’s hand?”
“Certainly not,” said Brown to Schwarzlose, but it was no easy matter to avoid the candidate. The crowd was enlarging, and the pressure was great. Brown chose not to fight the direction of the crowd. He’d let its flow carry him. What had been here? Counters and counters of toys, and Junie running back and forth up and down the aisles, confounded by a thousand options. It was in another life. The boy had been recovering from Stanley’s cruelty when first Brown brought him here, moving in slowly on Stanley now (Brown, from behind, in his automobile) and nudging his knees — clipping, it was called, illegal in football — so that Stanley would fall forward and be gently ground to death by Brown’s Atlas tires. Junie’s favorite counter contained the Matchbox cars. These little cars had mattered a great deal to Junie, and he bought dozens of them, and treasured them, and knew them by name and color, lining them up all over the house. Brown and Luella turned their ankles in the dark on Matchbox cars. Sweet boy. Firebomb draft headquarters. Men who believe only in guns answer only to firebombs. “He who lives by the sword perishes by the sword,” said Brown to McGinley.
“Oh sure, I’ve heard that one before,” said the former Chairman of the Draft Board, throwing out his hand, which Brown refused. McGinley’s lips tightened while his eyes searched for assistance. Some people became difficult on the handshaking line, these debaters, these nuts. “I want to greet a few friends over here,” McGinley said, ushering Brown along. “Glad to have you aboard.”
“I’m not aboard,” said Brown. “You killed my son.”
“Never killed anybody,” McGinley said. “Have a beer.”
“You sent him to war without a gun,” said Brown.
“Who the hell are you, buddy?” McGinley softly asked. Still smiling, he added, “Get going along or you’ll be helped along.”
“If you’re going to be my Congressman you should answer my question,” said Brown.
“There’s no if,” said McGinley. “That’s not how we’re talking. This time tomorrow night I’ll be your Congressman.” This was a poor prediction, for “this time tomorrow night” he would be dead.
“I lost a boy in the war and you sent him there,” cried Brown. “Not my boy — my wife’s boy, I should say. A man must be held responsible.”
“Fuck off, creep,” said McGinley in a violent whisper, and at this point Brown was seized by a strong young man looping arms with Brown as if they were friends or companions (as they soon would be) and led from the presence of the candidate. Brown was stunned, as if in shock, and therefore easily led away. Was this his Congressman speaking? Was this dialogue? Was this debate?
“Sir, don’t struggle,” said the strong young man.
“I’m not struggling,” said Brown. “I surrender. I just hate that man, that’s all. I hate to say it, but I do.”
“You’re not the only one,” said the strong young man, releasing Brown into the crowd, letting him go, throwing him back, so to speak, as if he were a fish. “Go home, sir.”
But Brown, in picking his way through the crowd toward the street, noticed a telephone booth. What good deed had he performed today? The letter beginning My Very Dear Father of the Montana Shrine was unbegun, and Brown had no time for the library now. He’d call the Fernes, that’s what he’d do, and complain of Paprika whose barking had kept him awake. That Paprika! Well, Brown knew a tried and true method of accomplishing things worthwhile. Often he had promoted justice by telephone, and he proceeded to repeat himself now, dropping his last dime into the slot, and barking a few warm-up barks while dialing, and continuing to bark into the telephone after his ringing had been answered by the lady of the house, Lala, who replied to his barking by calling against it, “We understand you, there’s nothing we can do, my husband won’t part with the dog.” When she hung up Brown stopped barking. He, too, hung up.
Oddly, his dime came back. The Telephone Company is imperfect. His dime had new life. This time Brown dialed the operator. His dime again returned, but he was indifferent to it, speaking in a high, fierce, intense, passionate, disguised falsetto voice into the telephone, saying, “Operator, operator, we have planted a big bomb in the McGinley headquarters at Larkin and McAllister. Hurry, hurry, hurry, put it out, thousands will be killed, anyhow hundreds, the crowd is increasing in size, hurry and get the big bomb out.” After a slight pause he added, “McAllister and Larkin, don’t forget.” He hung up.
Two
Wow, did he feel good! Gollywhiskers! It was as if his lungs had opened and he had inhaled gallons and gallons of the purest air. He floated. Confronting McGinley he had been sweating, but now he was dry. He had been despondent, walking the boards of this floor where Junie once had run, but now he was serene. His body for the moment was blissfully relieved of its burden of hatred and chagrin, and his eyes were sharper and stronger and fully rested, as if he had had a good sleep last night in spite of the Fernes’ dog. His nose was keen.
This was the worst thing he had ever done. In the past he had addressed himself to all sorts of people on all sorts of issues, by mail and by telephone, but he had never before done such a thing as this, and he knew that it was a crime, and he therefore a criminal.
He realized, too, that now he was about to witness the consequences of his action. This seldom happened, although it had occasionally happened, notably in the case of Stanley Krannick, Luella’s husband. Brown had seen Stanley flee as a result of one simple anonymous letter. But in most cases, as, for example, with his letters to Former President Johnson, “Greatest Mass Murderer of Recent Time” (as Brown addressed him), Brown had no chance to see the reactions of his addressee. Possibly L. B. Johnson never even saw the letters Brown sent to him. Possibly they were forwarded directly to the F.B.I. and the Secret Service. “Please Forward,” someone scribbled on the envelope.
From the telephone booth he surveyed the scene. Nothing was happening. Perhaps Brown had made no such call at all, for whereas a few minutes ago his rage had reached unprecedented heights he was now so far relieved as to feel detached from himself. Aspects o
f his truest reality returned to him — it was evening, he should have a bite to eat, he should return to work, and he should speed to Luella afterward, to comfort her. Whenever Stanley came to town she became upset. What about voiceprinting? he thought. The authorites had techniques of voiceprinting these days, similar to fingerprinting. Anyhow, he had spoken in a disguised voice. He was protected, as if by flesh-colored gloves from Robert Kirk Ltd., dropping them nonchalantly into the wastebin on Madison Avenue. And then, because after all Brown had a little expectation of it, he saw, a moment before anyone else, a police car draw to a stop in front of the headquarters. At the same instant the “strong young man” who had escorted Brown from the presence of McGinley pressed firmly against the door of the telephone booth, opening it to a sufficient width to be able to say clearly and distinctly, “Sir, everyone must leave these premises. Please go quickly, but do not panic.”
The “strong young man” was James J. Phelps, Jr., a police officer moonlighting. He was about to become of enduring importance to Brown, upon whom he gazed briefly, swiftly, with recognition, as if they had met somewhere before, but continuing briskly then to other people, encountering them individually or in clusters and speaking to them clearly and effectively with the result that the crowd began to disperse in the safest possible way, emptying itself onto McAllister Street in obedience to Phelps’s command. Simply, Officer Phelps was a commanding person. He was tall and slender. His hair was black and his eyes were blue. His poise and his presence, not his badge, certified his authority.
Brown knew, after all, that nobody had “planted a big bomb.” That was a false report offered in a moment of frenzy by someone like himself at the pinnacle of his day’s rage, and he therefore sat calmly in the telephone booth, watching Phelps upon his rounds. There went Phelps into the men’s room, and soon out again, and now into — no, not into, only holding ajar the door marked Women and calling within, and continuing elsewhere, walking swiftly but inconspicuously into every corner of this headquarters, once Mordecai’s Toys, warning the people little by little, group by group, rather than by some broadcast which would have sent everyone at once into a race for the doorway.
Ah, see that! In haste now, Brown dashed from the telephone booth to be of assistance to Phelps, who had observed, as Brown had also observed, that the boy in the wheelchair, son of the candidate McGinley, had been left abandoned upon a low platform. Whether the boy had called for help, or whether Phelps, like Brown, had independently observed the boy’s difficulty, we have no need of knowing. We do know, however, that Brown and Phelps arrived at the same moment to assist the boy, together seizing the wheelchair and lowering it two steps to the floor, from which point the boy could propel himself.
“What’s the emergency?” Brown asked Officer Phelps.
“Possibly nothing,” Phelps replied.
“May I ask who you are?” Brown asked.
“May I ask who you are?” Officer Phelps replied. “May I ask what you were doing in the telephone booth?”
“Making a telephone call,” said Brown.
“But the phone was hung up,” said Phelps.
“I was done,” said Brown.
“Whom did you call?” asked Officer Phelps.
“Why, that’s a funny question,” said Brown. “I phoned my wife at her office.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“The line was busy.”
On the sidewalk near the police car McGinley stood among many people, none of whom yet knew what emergency had driven them from the headquarters. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Phelps, raising his hands above his head, “it will be better if you don’t crowd in too close around the store.”
“What the hell’s wrong?” McGinley asked.
“Possibly nothing,” said Phelps, “possibly an explosive.”
“You see what I’m up against,” said the candidate McGinley. “The radicals did it, the goddam colleges.”
“We don’t know,” said Officer Phelps, who himself had strong radical inclinations. “Ladies and gentlemen, it will be better for everybody if we move along just in case anything should actually be wrong in there.”
Here came another police car. Bomb scares these days were like false alarms in days gone by. In the old days it was fun to bring the firemen out. It warded off the dullness. Brown himself, with other boys, had once set fire to the grass on Solari Hill just to watch the firemen put it out. In some neighborhoods nowadays, having brought the firemen out, youths stoned them. Gone were the days of reverence for many things. Brown had taken Junie to many firehouses, and they had examined all the equipment together. So well known were Brown and Junie at the several firehouses that they had eventually been permitted to slide down the pole at the Sanchez Street firehouse, though it was strictly against the law. Two policemen emerged from the second car, one of them carrying a toolbag and a short stick. “He’s a bomb man,” said Officer Phelps to Brown.
“It must be dangerous work,” Brown said. Across the street the lights of the public library were going out.
“The night’s ruined,” McGinley said. “Where can I go and shake some hands?”
“Go home and get a good night’s sleep, Congressman,” said one of his campaign workers.
“You deserve it,” said another.
“I might go get my throat sprayed,” said McGinley, the candidate. This remark evoked laughter from his closer associates, who knew his euphemism: massage, he meant, but it was a gray area and he did not say it, it was slightly questionable. A good massage relieved his feelings, cooled his frustrations. “They’ve been harassing me all the way,” he said. “How many is this? This is the fifth or sixth time they phoned in a bomb scare.”
“Can’t they catch such people?” Brown asked Officer Phelps. “What about voiceprints?”
“What are voiceprints?” asked Officer Phelps.
Brown liked this Phelps. He was a very young man, extremely so, with a quality of humility about him. Observe how he avoided any pretense of knowing something he did not know.
McGinley smiled at Brown. “I hope I wasn’t rude in there,” he said. “I tell you, the strain of campaigning gets you down.” Oh yes, McGinley, smile, you’re staring right into the eyes of the fellow who phoned in the bomb scare, and you don’t even know it. Brown felt a certain satisfaction in this. Nobody could read minds. Look, for example, across the street, at the red-white-and-blue mailbox near the corner. In that famous mailbox (then painted green) some years ago Brown had mailed his first anonymous letter, addressed in that case to Luella’s husband, Stanley. Thus Junie was saved from Stanley.
But return to this side of McAllister Street — to the northeast corner — and here is the candidate McGinley, onetime Chairman of the Draft Board, who sent Junie to die in the war, so that Brown’s having mailed such a letter, and having saved Junie once, went finally for nothing, bringing grief and rage to Luella and to himself. Where is Stanley, Junie’s father? He is somewhere in the city tonight, having come down from Ukiah or Yreka to play golf. Officer Phelps will murder him. Where is Luella this moment, and who is she to McGinley, who sent her son to die? She is sitting in her storefront “real-estate office” on Geary Boulevard with a placard in her window advertising McGinley for Congress, and a McGinley button upon her bosom.
Oh yes, by the way, notice there, among the shuffling crowd, another James — James Berberick — known in one way to Luella, known in another to Brown, unknown to Officer James Phelps, whose first name he shares, although they have lived all their lives within three blocks of each other. Tomorrow night he will murder Congressman-elect McGinley. McGinley this moment consults his wristwatch by the light of the police car. Idly he winds his watch. He will wind it again in the morning. That will be all. “I’m going home,” McGinley said.
“I should be getting back to work,” said Brown to Officer Phelps.
“Where’s that?�
�� asked Officer Phelps.
“The Chronicle,” said Brown.
“I thought so,” said Phelps, excited suddenly. “I know who you are now, this is wonderful, you’re Junie Krannick’s father.”
“Indeed I am,” said Brown.
“How’s Junie?” Officer Phelps inquired.
“I’m sorry to tell you that Junie is dead,” Brown replied.
“I see,” said Phelps. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“In the war,” said Brown.
“I guess so,” said Phelps.
They crossed McAllister together, walking past that very mailbox, once green, now red-white-and-blue, where Brown had mailed his first anonymous letter. He touched it as they passed. The wind had almost stolen the letter from his hand, but there was no wind now, the night was still, and they were standing a few moments later beside Officer Phelps’s automobile, illegally parked in the bus stop before the public library. Upon his front bumper he carried a distortion of a popular sticker: Police Your Local Support.
“How can you park here?” Brown asked.
“Mr. Krannick,” said Officer Phelps, “I’m a policeman.”
“Brown, not Krannick,” said Brown.
“Oh yes, I remember.”
But what did Phelps mean, really? Brown would mull it over. Did Phelps mean that a policeman might park anywhere at any time? If so, Brown must protest. Perhaps Phelps meant only that he was illegally parked in the line of duty. “Are you on duty now?” Brown asked.
“You’re a scrupulous man,” said Officer Phelps. “Yes, Junie was always remarking about it. Junie said you had a very sophisticated moral code, and he admired you greatly. I admire it, too, I must say, you don’t see much around these days in the way of sophisticated morals.”
Brown was moved to hear such a thing. “Junie said that?” he asked. “I am pleased, believe me.”
“How is Mrs. Brown?” asked Officer Phelps.
