Big Guns

by Steve Israel

  Sunny smiled weakly. “I’m just visiting. Two days.”

  “Oh. Too bad.” Kay placed a white pie box in a crinkled plastic grocery bag and leaned toward Sunny. “I’m real sorry about your mother. Can’t wait for this election to be done with. Get our town back, ya know?”

  *

  Sunny resumed her ride. The car radio droned about a new poll that affixed President Piper’s favorability somewhere between root canal and head lice. Plus, there’d be a vote in Congress on much-needed legislation declaring National Cancer Awareness Day, which, Sunny thought, deserved congressional attention for more than one day.

  Then—“Jesus!”

  Sunny knew that Asabogue traffic was particularly heavy just before Labor Day weekend. But this had the feel of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Red blinking brake lights stretched endlessly ahead. Blue-uniformed police and olive-green-clad members of the National Guard lined the curbs. Her car radio was drowned out by the honking of horns and spuming of protestors.

  Sunny inched her car toward Love Lane, the pie at her side.

  The years hadn’t been kind to 28 Love Lane. Red shingles dangled loosely from the front of the house. The roof sprouted unworldly clumps of thick green moss. The yard was a jungle of overgrown grass and gangly weeds, barely revealing a crumbling slate path that meandered to the front porch.

  Sunny gave her hair a few twirls. Since leaving Washington on the noon flight, she’d been anxious about her reunion with Lois— the tearful embrace, the weepy remonstrations about years wasted. But this was a business trip. Her plan was to analyze Lois’s most recent tracking polls, review the campaign budget, tweak the media buy, overhaul the voter turnout operation, save her reelection, and then quickly return to Washington to get AFFFA back on track.

  All in a day’s work.

  She grabbed the pie and exited the car, then walked up the path and opened the squeaky front door.

  She smelled pizza.

  *

  Nothing in the kitchen had changed. Not the yellow Formica cabinets or the yellow-orange linoleum floor; not the boxy burnt-orange refrigerator-freezer humming in the corner; not even the shaft of late-afternoon sunlight peaking through the yellow sunflower curtains. Lois was hunched over the kitchen table, just as Sunny remembered, except for that bulky cast around her wrist. She was lost in piles of tattered folders. Oblivious.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  Lois looked up, blinked several times, and smiled. “Welcome home, Sunshine. Sam told me you were coming, so I ordered a pizza. You must have missed Gino’s!”

  On the subject of missing things—say, for example, a neglectful mother missing her estranged daughter—Gino’s Pizzeria wasn’t high on Sunny’s list. Her stomach tightened.

  That’s it? That’s the dramatic reconciliation between neglectful mother and victimized daughter? Have a slice of pizza?

  Lois continued, “I’m researching for my debate with Jack Steele. Sam thinks we should cancel it because of the shooting. But I think that’d be a victory for our opponents. What do you think?”

  I think I shouldn’t have come, Sunny wanted to say.

  “It’s not till October. But you know me. I like to be prepared. How long are you staying?”

  “I have to be back in DC. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  Lois blinked and said, matter-of-factly, “Let’s eat.”

  Sunny thought, One slice.

  They cleared Lois’s files from the table and opened the white pizza box. Sunny watched plumes of steam rise high above the table. They grabbed slices straight from the box, resting them on flimsy paper plates.

  “Patsy Hardameyer called just before you got here,” Lois said. “She said you ran into Kay.”

  “Mmmm-hmmmm,” Sunny chewed. Spices exploded on her tongue, putting Washington pizza to shame, she had to admit.

  “I never understood why Kay never got married. She’s so lovely. And such a beautiful disposition.”

  “Cheap rent, from what I’m told,” Sunny snarked.

  “And you heard about Ethel Fisher’s sister? Such a pity.”

  “I don’t know who that is, Mother.”

  “Violet! Ethel Fisher’s sister.”

  “Mother, I don’t know Ethel Fisher. Or her sister.”

  “Yes, you do, Sunshine. You met them at one of our block parties. In tenth grade, I think.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyway, she died.”

  “Oh.”

  “I left you a message about it. Maybe you didn’t get it. You’re so busy.”

  “Very.”

  Lois chewed hurriedly, then asked, “Did you hear about the Dosemart Drugs application?”

  “Guess that slipped by as well.”

  “Another one of those chain drugstores. They’re applying to rezone the old Tuthill farm. Can you imagine? They want to go from R1 zoning to C4! Well, that just won’t fly.”

  On she went, prattling about zoning applications, the disease states of various neighbors, the mighty challenges of the artisanal chocolate industry in Vermont, the wars in the Middle East. Sunny nibbled on one pizza slice, then two, nodding politely and venturing an occasional “uh-huh.” She recognized exactly what her mother was doing because it sounded so familiar.

  Sunny McCarthy knew a good filibuster when she heard one.

  *

  After that early dinner, Sunny climbed the creaky wooden stairs to her old bedroom. She opened the door and walked in. It smelled strangely familiar, even comforting. Pink floral wallpaper peeled at the seams. Tangled blinds covered a small rectangular window. A pink blanket was rumpled over a small bed. Two stuffed animals were perched on a pillow, plastic eyes frozen on Sunny, as if pleading to be liberated. She walked aimlessly around the room, her feet crunching against a ragged shag carpet. She absently ran her fingers across layers of dust on the furniture—a white pine dresser, a teetering nightstand. Then she pulled on a closet door, which refused to budge. She tugged harder, until it opened with a bark of protest and a stinging whiff of dust and age. Her eyes wandered across a childhood locked away for years, like an archaeological dig: tangles of flannel shirts and frayed jeans, shelves of dolls, toys, and games. Sunny reached for an item on a high shelf, a bicycle helmet, pink and purple; she cradled it against her chest and carried it to the bed, which groaned as she sat.

  She thought back to her fifth birthday. Lois was at the kitchen counter, absorbed in the act of scrambling eggs. Her father sat at the table, arms resting on a newspaper opened to the sports pages. A smile broke across his unshaven face. “Sun’s up!” he liked to pronounce, acknowledging the light and warmth that she brought to his day.

  They took her outside. The yard was modest but manicured by a weekly landscaping service. Cattails rocked in a gentle breeze, and Lois’s wind chimes tinkled. Sunny crinkled her nose at the salt air. Her gifts were in the driveway: a pink and purple bicycle and matching helmet, sparkling in the early-morning sun. Even now— sitting on her old bed—Sunny could feel her father’s hands at her sides as she mounted the bike, holding her steady and safe. She could hear his soft voice, encouraging her to pedal. She remembered the feel of the pedals against her feet, resistant at first, then lighter as she gained speed. Her father was still beside her, one hand pressed against her back, the other clutching the bike seat, breathing heavily as he ran. She could hear Lois’s voice. “Let her go, Larry. Let go.” Finally her father gave a last long grunt. She felt his hands slipping away from her as she pushed against the pedals. She remembered the fear of falling mixed with the pride of letting go, of racing ahead, breaking free.

  And how she lost control of the bike and it toppled when she turned her head back.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by soft knocking on the door. Lois stepped in tentatively. Her eyes scanned the room, falling on Sunny. “I never cleaned up in here. I wasn’t sure what to do with everything.”

  “It’s fine, Mother.”

  Lois sighed. “Maybe after
the election. Sam thinks I’ll have plenty of spare time.”

  “That sounds like a concession speech,” said Sunny.

  Lois shrugged. “Everyone in town thinks I’m losing. You can see it in their eyes. Like I have some kind of horrible disease or something.”

  “Do you think you’ll lose?”

  Lois’s eyes widened incredulously. “Oh, darling, we don’t think like that in this family. Do we?”

  Sunny nodded softly.

  “We’re having a campaign meeting tomorrow. Vera Butane’s bringing blueberry cobbler.”

  “I’ll be there,” Sunny promised.

  “Well, I’d better get back to debate prep. I bet Jack will criticize me for the Peace Pole. Can you imagine? Who could be against peace?”

  The door closed behind her.

  Sunny realized that her father may have taught her how to ride a bike, but Lois had taught her how to pedal. Always forward. Back turned defiantly on the past.

  31

  The next day, Sunny sat in Lois’s kitchen with the senior staff of the Liebowitz reelection campaign and thought, I’m assisting a political suicide. Crowding the table were Lois, Sam, Vera Butane, and Patsy Hardameyer, of lawn sign fame. Vera’s blueberry cobbler was surgically sliced onto chipped plates with daisy patterns. An ancient coffee maker gurgled, its glass pot coated with brown crust.

  Sunny had just asked for the most recent polling.

  “We didn’t do a poll,” Sam said.

  “How do you know if you’re ahead or behind?”

  “We’re winning,” Lois said assuredly.

  “What’s your cash on hand?”

  Patsy Hardameyer reported: “Three hundred fifty-six.”

  “Please tell me that’s three hundred fifty-six thousand.”

  “No. Three hundred fifty-six dollars.”

  “Do you have a voter turnout model?”

  Silence.

  “Television budget?”

  Stares.

  “Mail plan?”

  Shrugs.

  “We don’t have a chance,” Sunny pronounced.

  “We have you,” Sam said.

  “And Vera’s pie!” chirped Patsy as she slid a plate toward Sunny.

  “Which would help if this were a pie competition. But it’s not. It’s an election.” Sunny felt stinging remorse and put her hand on Vera’s, which felt like a brittle old leaf. “But keep baking. We need all the firepower we can get.” Vera smiled vacantly.

  Sunny scanned the table. This was the war council that would defeat the combined might of the national gun lobby, the conservative media, Sidney Schwartzman, a network of think-tank academics who thought mostly with the far right side of their brains, and a group of Super PACs with treasuries dwarfing the operating budgets of several states.

  We can’t win. Steele has to lose. But how?

  “I need a walk,” she announced. Her chair screeched against the linoleum floor. She pushed against the front screen door; it rattled closed behind her. A line of heavy dark clouds was drifting in from the ocean. Sunny folded her arms against a morning breeze that hinted at the last days of summer and ambled down Love Lane. She could hear the din of protestors on the village square blocks away and the cawing of birds. Old trees leaned toward the street, forming a canopy of green leaves. She passed cottages squatting on measly plots of sandy soil—a dingy, paint-peeled landscape of brown, gray, white, and yellow facades, with one identical feature: a front porch. Sunny remembered the summer cacophony of screen doors squeaking open and clacking closed; the rhythmic groaning of metal rockers; the eruptions of laughter up and down the block. That was when neighbors gathered on porches. Before neighborhoods became communities and communities became gated; when the biggest threat to Asabogue wasn’t a mass shooting but a chain drugstore.

  A line of traffic was stalled at the intersection of Main Street. Billionaires Bluff rose in the distance. She remembered that its foliage was first to turn a lush orange each fall. The powerful were first in everything, Sunny thought, even seasons. They progressed while the rest of the village clung to the past, like those summer leaves above her, clinging stubbornly against the breeze. She imagined the forces gathered at Villa di Acciaio. The high command of campaign consultants, pollsters, press assistants, fund-raisers, researchers, targeting analysts, and field organizers. All huddled in a high-tech war room, planning and budgeting, mobilizing and organizing, summoning allies large and small to the great national cause of defeating this seventy-two-year-old liberal woman with a lisp. Up there. On the Bluff. Once it was Sunny’s weekend home. Now it was enemy territory.

  Enemy territory.

  She whispered: “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.”

  Not Sunny, but Sun Tzu.

  Who also had a few good strategies in his day.

  She turned back. For the first time since returning to As abogue, she felt a twinge of hope.

  32

  In the course of her career, Sunny McCarthy had dined at Michelin-rated restaurants and attended several state dinners (including one with the president of France and another with Their Royal Highnesses the King and Queen of Some Tiny but Opulent Emirate Sitting on an Ocean of Oil). She was proficient in the State Department’s Protocol for the Modern Diplomat. Plus she could, with a sharp sniff and gentle swirl, identify the appellation of the finest wines.

  At the moment, however, these skills offered limited utility. She was in Ralph Kellogg’s basement, trying to ignore the overpowering stench of sweat, farts, and fast food as Ralph devoured a Big Mac. She watched as his jaw thumped up and down, like a hydraulic machine. A dozen of his men sat tensely on couches around the room, clutching their weapons, their eyes fixed on Sunny, who wore tight jeans and a revealing camisole top for the occasion. (When she left DC, she didn’t pack an appropriate outfit for militia-visiting.) Had she the courage to sniff, she thought she’d pick up the distinct scent of raging testosterone.

  The room was dim. Guns and explosives had been heaped carelessly in piles around the room. The dryer clonked loudly. Sunny noticed a framed photo of Louie Delmarco propped on the washing machine, with a homemade sign: IN MEMORIUM.

  She didn’t think it made sense to point out that memoriam was spelled incorrectly. Latin probably wasn’t a prerequisite for admission to the newly minted Delmarco Division of Defiance.

  Ralph took a final chomp of his burger and crumpled the wrapper into a ball. Then he narrowed his eyes on Sunny and said, while still chewing, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That it?”

  The man knows his proverbs, thought Sunny.

  Ralph washed down his food with a voluminous chug of his vanilla shake, which left a glob of white frost on his mustache. His thick pink tongue washed it away, like a windshield wiper. He released a satisfied belch and said, “Still don’t make sense to me. Helping you beat Steele.” He began picking at his teeth with a plastic straw.

  Sunny had anticipated Kellogg’s reservations. She was going to say, “It’s for the betterment of Asabogue,” but she knew that civic virtue was never really Ralph’s strong suit. So she got right to the point. “Revenge.”

  Ralph’s lips curled.

  “Let’s face it, Ralph. Turns out we’re not so different after all. I was always the lonely kid with the cheap clothing and weird mother. And you. You’ve always been . . .” Sunny began stammering. “Well . . . you.”

  Ralph grunted.

  “Remember how people laughed at us? Behind our backs?”

  “I got laughed at to my face.”

  “How they mocked us?”

  “I wanted to kill ’em. Coulda, too!”

  This wasn’t where Sunny wanted to go. She watched Ralph’s fists pump and crimson flush into his cheeks. “Yes, you could have, Ralph. But you didn’t. You did what I did. Tried to become one of them. Right? Doing their dirty work. Giving them our total loyalty and getting squat in return.”

  Ralph nodded slowly, then said, “Mr. Fixit.”

  “H
uh?”

  “That’s what Jack Steele calls me. Mr. Fixit. ‘Fix this building permit, Ralph.’ ‘Fix that zoning application.’ ‘Pay off this guy.’ I coulda lost my seat on the Village Board. Maybe even gone to jail. And for what? The man didn’t even show up to Louie’s funeral.” Everyone lowered their heads, so Sunny lowered hers.

  Ralph continued. “Ever hear of Stockholm syndrome?” Somewhere in Sunny’s head, an alarm pinged.

  “I read about it once. It’s psychology,” he said. “It’s when a hostage thinks the guy who’s gonna behead him is a friend. That’s us. We’re like hostages to those people on the Bluff.”

  The words hostages and behead, pronounced in the underground headquarters of a militia committed to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, in a basement cluttered with heavy weapons and thick with seething resentment, concerned Sunny. She quickly changed the subject. “You and my mother don’t agree on much, Ralph. But she has always respected you. Always will. That’s more than you can say for Jack Steele. Let’s join forces, Ralph. Let’s take him down.”

  She watched as Ralph scanned the room. Ever since Louie’s demise, retention of fighters had suffered. Evidently, there was something about that loss that suggested to some that a safer method of overthrowing the government might be posting anonymous rants on Facebook from the comfort of their parents’ basements. Bobby Reilly remained, and about a dozen others. They were outcasts and castoffs, convinced of conspiracies because life had ruthlessly conspired against them.

  He raised his half-crushed McDonald’s cup and proclaimed, “For Louie.”

  “Louie!” they responded.

  Ralph returned his focus to Sunny, nodding slowly. “One condition. I got my own plan. So I do my thing. You do yours. We stay outta each other’s way. Where we can cooperate, we will. Deal?”

  Sunny smiled. “Deal. Now tell me, Mr. Fixit. Exactly what did Jack Steele ask you to fix?”