Big Guns

by Steve Israel

  The fund-raising consultant, surrounded by photographs of the senators, congressmen, and governors whose political paths she’d paved with gold, thought, We will, Diane! And by the way, now that you’re in our database, consider yourself one of 62,800 close, personal friends of Jack! As part of our not so inner circle, you’ll be hearing from us again. And again. Sometimes hourly. As a friend, we’ll be counting on you, Diane Fretzeil! We’ll be appealing, beseeching, and cajoling you for another five bucks. To match your first five. Or seven. Seven dollars is a small price to pay for Jack’s friendship, right Diane? How about ten dollars, Diane? For your grandchildren? Those little angels that Liberal Liebowitz will expose to criminal thugs and Muslim terrorists? Would you consider twenty? Click here for fifty. Thanks, Diane. Your Steele Supporter bumper sticker is on its way.

  Diane would come through. She and 62,799 others would affirm and reaffirm their affection for their new best friend, Jack Steele.

  One click and cha-ching at a time.

  *

  In Asabogue, the Organization met in the man cave, over some nacho cheese-flavored Bugles and a six-pack of Diet Dr Pepper. This time, Ralph withheld the beer—he wanted everyone completely clearheaded. Plus, he figured the diet soda would keep them in fighting shape. Louie Delmarco in particular needed to drop a good thirty pounds to perform Ralph’s mission without collapsing.

  Ever since hearing the news that Jack Steele had stabbed him in the back, Ralph had been plotting his revenge. The details clunked in his immense head, like the lumbering of Mrs. Kellogg’s dryer. At night he sat at his desk in a spare bedroom upstairs, furiously scrawling on a yellow legal pad under the harsh beam of a gooseneck lamp. A cassette tape recorder warbled his favorite war movie theme songs. His prized possessions were tacked to a cork bulletin board above him: his Certificate of Election to the Village Board, his Soldier of Fortune wall calendar, and a black-and-white photo of his first swearing-in, when a seemingly petrified town clerk named Eloise Vanpin had him raise his gigantic right hand and swear to “follow the code and ordinances of the Village of Asabogue, so help me God.”

  The plan veered from that oath. Considerably.

  Now he was unveiling it to the Organization. To avoid any distractions, he made sure Mrs. Kellogg had already completed the laundry. There were no baskets overflowing with her underwear, this time. Just a large map of Asabogue, fixed with black electrical tape to a rough cement wall.

  For the occasion, Ralph was dressed in army camos and black tactical boots. A pair of knock-off Oakley sunglasses that he’d shoplifted from the Shade Shack were straddled across his scalp. Ralph enjoyed the look. This would have been his everyday dress had it not been for the army recruiter who scrawled “Mentally Unbalanced!!!” on his file so many years ago.

  “Listen up,” Ralph commanded. The crunching of Bugles ceased. He began pacing in front of the map.

  “We have two enemies. Lois Liebowitz. And Jack Steele.”

  The words reddened Ralph’s cheeks. Jack Steele! His friend and mentor, his comrade in heavy arms. For years Ralph handled Jack’s dirty work in Village Hall, most recently arranging for that stop sign in front of the actress Caitlyn Turner’s house to torment her.

  And for what? Not a thank-you, but a fuck-you. Jack didn’t even have the decency to inform Ralph personally of his candidacy. Instead, a phone call from one of Jack’s buxom assistants informed him that “Mr. Steele is running for mayor and looks forward to scheduling a meeting with you to discuss your support.” The words dropped like an anchor in Ralph’s stomach. There must be some misunderstanding, he’d thought. But then he saw for himself: Jack announcing his candidacy live on SOSNews. He’d literally broadcast to the world that Ralph Kellogg had been thrown to the curb like an empty beer can, stepped on and crushed, like Ralph’s dreams.

  Schedule a meeting? Have your people call my people! I don’t have people. Except for the Organization.

  He stared at them. Sitting forward on that old stained couch, hanging on his next words, ready to accept the plan without question or pause.

  Ralph folded his arms against his wide chest. “Two enemies. Two objectives. One: take out Jack Steele. Two: defeat Lois Liebowitz.”

  They nodded.

  Ralph continued, “To save Asabogue, we’re gonna have to burn it down.”

  Bobby Reilly giggled excitedly, a cigarette jiggling between his lips.

  The plan was flawless. The planners were, well, flawed.

  20

  Congressman Roy Dirkey had been navigating through confusing and endless Capitol tunnels to a similarly confusing and endless hearing of the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law when his cell phone rang.

  “Where are you?” his chief of staff panted.

  “On my way to subcommittee. For my daily eye glaze.”

  “Turn around. Now. Go to the Speaker’s office.”

  “Go where?”

  “The Speaker.

  Wants you at a meeting.

  With the Leadership!”

  The words landed with both urgency and majesty.

  The Speaker.

  Wants you at a meeting.

  With the Leadership.

  Roy had passed by the Speaker’s office many times, off the gray stone alcove between Statuary Hall and the cavernous Rotunda. The corner of his eyes would catch the sign SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE FRANK PIERMONT. It might have well said NO FRESHMEN. He’d steal a glance at the long, forbidden corridor painted in regal red. He imagined the Speaker, behind those walls, pulling levers and twisting dials like the Great and Powerful Oz, complete with puffs of smoke and wheezing. Dirkey would then shift his eyes forward and continue walking, the echo of his footsteps clacking on the marble floor, punctuating the oohs and aahs of tourists as they craned their necks under the soaring Capitol dome.

  Now he found himself inside and, he contentedly assumed, an insider. He sat under two massive crystal chandeliers at a lustrously waxed conference table reflecting the ghostlike images of the luminaries around it: the men and one woman of the House Republican Leadership. They were gray hued with metallic sheens, like silverfish. The Speaker had handpicked each from competing factions of the Republican caucus to maintain his precarious hold on the gavel. This was Frank Piermont’s exquisite feat of political engineering—weights and pulleys, cogs and gears exerting equal force against each other, built so that he would last.

  Or, as Piermont frequently described it, “a bunch of loose screws and wing nuts.”

  They awaited the Speaker’s arrival, wedged around the table so that their elbows touched, engaged in the forced conviviality of rivals. Big egos conducted small talk, every syllable laden with artificial sweeteners. Most of them, however, sought distraction in their electronic devices. A profession once known for glad-handing and back-scratching was now consumed with hunting-and-pecking. Dirkey watched the most powerful people in America hunched over small screens, necks bent, eyes drooping, consumed by torrents of e-mails, texts, online subscriptions, and hot new apps. The state of the Union was ☹

  Piermont had once announced his temptation to put up a sign in the conference room: NO TEXTING WHILE LEGISLATING. His Leadership team was like the House steno pool. Piermont would say something, fingers would tap on keyboards, and within minutes some television correspondent was reporting it verbatim from “a Republican Leadership source attending the meeting with the Speaker.”

  Which meant that the Speaker hardly spoke.

  Roy eyed a painting that dominated the wall behind Pier-mont’s vacant chair at the head of the table. It was a portrait of a young nineteenth-century congressman sitting where all anonymous freshmen sat in the House chamber: far in the back. His hair was slightly tousled. His elbow rested on a book on his desk. He had dark eyes, a cleft chin, and he seemed to be suppressing a wry smile, almost winking at Dirkey.

  Congressman Abraham Lincoln.

  Dirkey took in the painting, marveling that he’d landed in the same cl
ub as Congressman Lincoln. In freshmen orientation, he was told that about twelve thousand people had served in Congress since 1789. Names like Lincoln, Calhoun, Webster, Longworth, McCain, Kennedy, Pelosi. But also Smith, O’Brien, Marcantonio, Dickstein, and González. The mere mortals had no portraits on the Capitol walls, no names chiseled into marble buildings or national holidays on birthdays. Of the twelve thousand who’d served, nearly as many were now permanent members of the Congressional Obscurity Caucus. They were called “former Members,” which was a polite term for “forgotten Members.”

  Not me, thought Dirkey.

  He always knew his name would go further than a flickering neon sign above a Little Rock Chevy dealership. There was always that burning in his chest, a heart that pumped ambition like adrenaline. Those fights in the Pine Bluff schoolyards defending his father’s duck costume had taught him not how to take a punch but how to dance around one. He’d developed a skin that wasn’t as thick as it was adaptable, so protective that even a bullet in Afghanistan couldn’t penetrate it.

  On that score, Dirkey knew that plenty of soldiers got shot at in Afghanistan. But how many took a bullet right through a Constitution pressed against their chest? Sure, there were a few cynics in his unit who suspected Dirkey of embellishing the story. No one had actually seen him tape a copy of the Constitution to his chest. The hole in the pamphlet did look like a cigarette burn. But, hell, when you escape a Taliban ambush you don’t counter each other’s stories, you count your blessings. And really, in the heat of battle, who didn’t layer on some added drama? Besides, Roy was a natural leader, with that toothy smile and aw-shucks charm, like the guy in the portrait.

  “Public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln had said. For Dirkey it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of his father’s mantra, smooth like butter and melodious: “Son, you can’t sell a Buick unless they think they’re buying a Cadillac.” It wasn’t lying exactly, it was polishing. Like the streams of hot wax and buffing at Dirkey Chevrolet. Lincoln probably never even split a rail, thought Dirkey, just like George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree. Slight enhancements grew to embellishments, embellishments became myths. It was all designed to make a sale, advance an agenda, win.

  Four muted televisions glowed from a mahogany console against a wall. Three news channels were covering recent comments by the bellicose president of Russia that “We have a score to settle with Napoleon.” Another screen showed the current debate on the House floor: one Republican, one Democrat, and one nation not paying attention.

  Dirkey heard a sudden spasm of coughing. A door opened and Piermont entered, led by his security detail and surrounded by staff, like pilot fish trailing a shark. He wore his usual blue suit and red tie. His face was leathery and dark, like an old catcher’s mitt, and his silver hair looked shellacked. He slumped into his chair. Even at the opposite end of the room, Dirkey could smell pungent tobacco.

  “Good morning,” Piermont said, his lips already twitching for a cigarette.

  “Good morning,” everyone mumbled.

  “I thought it would be useful to discuss the vote on this American Freedom from Fear Act. Where’s Mr. Dirkey?” The Speaker swept his reddened eyes around the table, searching for someone he’d hardly met and didn’t know. Then, with a shrug, said, “Tell us about your bill.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m honored to—”

  “It’s a wonderful bill,” Piermont interrupted. “Meticulously researched. Well constructed. Thoughtfully conceived.”

  Light to moderate applause encircled Dirkey. He nodded appreciatively and said, “Thank you. I—”

  “But we need to discuss some . . . concerns.”

  Dirkey didn’t like the tone of “concerns.” As in, “I’ve seen your biopsy. And there are . . . concerns.”

  “Do you have any thoughts, Mr. Teabury?”

  Piermont ran Leadership meetings like an orchestra conductor, a maestro of consensus. Pointing to different sections of the caucus to turn cacophony into harmony, or harmony into cacophony, depending on his objective. Guiding everyone to his conclusion as if it was their own, efficiently saving his own political capital.

  Benjamin Teabury of Georgia cleared his throat. He wore a blue seersucker suit, a white sheen of hair, and round glasses that widened his sparkling eyes to the size of Georgia peaches. He was known for courtly manners and a melodic voice that lulled his colleagues into a legislative death grip. Teabury chaired the forty-member GGOOP Caucus: Get the Government Out of Our Pockets. “Mistuh Speakuh,” he began. “The GGOOPs do agree with the intent of this very fahn meashuh.”

  Dirkey’s heart rose . . .

  “But ah regret to say we cannot suppoat it in its current fo-um,” Dirkey’s heart sank.

  “Why is that?” the Speaker asked, as if he didn’t know and as if almost everyone at the table didn’t know that he already knew. “Why it’s a hidden tax, suh. If we mandate that everuh American own a gun—worthuh as that goal may be—well, guns, like buttuh, cost people money. And that, Mistuh Speakuh, could not have the support of mah felluh GGOOPs.” Teabury smiled at Dirkey, who felt his mouth go dry.

  “Hmmmmm,” the Speaker mumbled, broken by a gurgling cough. “What do you think, Chairman Fogg?”

  Hiram T. Fogg, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, nodded. “I agree with the GGOOPs. But there is a solution.”

  “Oh?” said the Speaker.

  “The government can help people pay for their guns. A refundable tax credit. They did that with Obamacare. If you couldn’t pay the health insurance premiums, the government picked up the tab.”

  The mention of Obamacare seemed to send a low-voltage current through the room. Muscles twitched, skin crawled. Tears formed in some eyes.

  “Ike, what do you think?” asked Piermont.

  Congressman Ike Garvin of Texas was the chairman of the sixty-member ROBs: Republicans Opposed to Borrowing. He was a deficit hawk who looked the part: sharp, darting eyes and a long nose plunging to a bottom line. “Tax credits cost the Treasury money and increase the debt. The ROBs will oppose them. Unless you make them revenue neutral.”

  Ahhh, “revenue neutral.” The sweet and seductive sound of it seemed to pump pheromones into the cold blood of the fiscal hawks, whose idea of soft-core were their tattered copies of the Congressional Budget Office Manual of Long-Range Debt & Revenue Projections. They were turned on by “offsets,” their foreplay was “pay-fors.”

  Piermont rapidly tapped his tobacco-stained fingers on the table, a sign of nicotine withdrawal. “Millard Festersen?” he wheezed.

  Millard Festersen was chairman of the TRACs, the Tax Reform Action Caucus. He proudly announced, “We have found an offset,” as if proclaiming he’d discovered a cure for cancer.

  The Speaker absently fished through his empty shirt pocket for his pack of unfiltered Camels.

  Festersen continued: “Childcare! We’re spending billions on tax credits for parents to put their kids into cold, heartless daycare warehouses instead of being nurtured at their mother’s bosoms.”

  There was grumbling ascent in the room. The gentlewoman from Maine, Melanie Mills McMotten, suddenly found the bowl of peanuts in front of her wondrous, refusing to take her eyes off them.

  Festersen leaned forward on his elbows. “Ending the childcare tax credit would free up billions of dollars. Which can be used to purchase firearms. We call them PSTCs—Personal Survival Tax Credits.”

  Gurgle-hack-wretch. Then, “Everyone agree?”

  Teabury nodded his ascent. Fogg gleamed. Garvin smiled. Festersen gave a satisfied thumbs-up. Melanie Mills McMotten continued staring at the peanuts.

  The chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce asked, “Errrr, just checking here. Does the bill require everyone to own a gun? Without exception?”

  Roy raised his hand, desperately seeking acknowledgment.

  Piermont nodded in Dirkey’s general direction. “What do you think, Bill?”

 
; “Roy. I’m Roy.”

  Piermont scowled. “Yes, I know, Roy. But I was calling on Bill. Beaufort. Next to you.”

  Congressman William Jefferson Davis Beaufort shot an annoyed glance at Roy and muttered “rookie” under his breath, but loud enough for Roy to hear. He chaired the WACCs, the Women and Children’s Caucus. The group was Piermont’s idea to reverse a double-digit gender gap in the polls and blunt the Democrats’ rhetoric about “the Republican war on women.” And what better way to connect to women than a caucus of mostly white men whose idea of diversity was the color of their Brooks Brothers ties? Chaired by someone named William and Jefferson and Davis.

  “Mr. Speaker, the WACCs could vote for this if it contains some exemptions. You shouldn’t be required to own a gun if you’re on the terrorist watch list or if you’re a child.”

  One of the Speaker’s aides hurried to his side, bent toward his ear, and whispered urgently. Piermont nodded, then said: “We’d better run that one by the NRA. You know, you limit the responsibility of anybody to have a gun, you limit the responsibility of everyone to own a gun. Camel’s nose in the tent kinda thing.”

  And speaking of Camels, he thought.

  Beaufort frowned. “Are we really going to hand out Colts and crayons in kindergarten?”

  Hmmmm-hack-gurgle.

  Hiram Fogg leaned forward. “We could give you an amendment on the floor to exclude children under thirteen.”

  Someone said, “Make it nine and you got a deal.”

  They clapped.

  The bidding began.

  Wheeling, dealing, logrolling, horse trading. Dirkey sat quietly, watching as his masterpiece was bloated with gaseous elements, including (and as the parliamentary lexicon stipulated, “but not limited to”) a federal program for pre-K target practice; an American Gun Corps to retrain workers (in specified congressional districts) in firearms manufacturing; appropriations; authorizations; tax credits; grants; loans; subsidies; studies; pilot projects; demonstration projects; assistance for exports; duties on imports; fast-tracking; financing; funding and, inexplicably to some—but not all—a bridge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.