“Mr. Ross.” Andre feels a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me, Andre?”
Andre opens his eyes, checks his watch. Fifteen minutes have passed.
“We can start now.” Brendan holds a laser pointer, faces a flat-screen on which appears: The History of Carthage County. From 1790 to Today. “I called the tech guys. Apparently, we had to remotely activate the equipment.”
Andre wipes his eyes, says, “That must be new.”
* * *
A little past midnight, Andre, gin in hand, sits at his desk, alone in the dark, face brightened by his laptop’s glow. He’s wide awake, refreshed by a late-afternoon nap, and now awaits an update to his ex-fiancée’s Instagram account. Tonight, so says the site, Cassie’s serenading a charity ball, a two-hundred-dollar-a-plate gala organized by a student-run nonprofit that teaches senior citizens how to practice safe sex. He guesses the gig will net Cassie a solid grand. Maybe more. About time his girl earned what she’s worth. At twenty-nine, she’s a working vocalist, days spent teaching tone-deaf housewives to broaden their range, nights spent performing sets for drunks who lack any appreciation of soul.
She’s recently become the darling of local college students, particularly the well-to-do hipsters who pride themselves on knowing the lyrics to “Strange Fruit.” So tonight, he knows, Cassie will indulge their fantasies, perform a set that ends with “Solitude,” a gardenia blossom tucked behind her ear. He pities the students, because tonight Cassie will break their hearts. Standing beneath the spotlight, she will be hopelessly beautiful, her lilt soulful and vulnerable, with a woundedness that’ll cause each man to believe that he, and he alone, can free her from a lifetime of sorrow.
The charity ball should’ve ended an hour ago, and he expects an Instagram update at any moment. She lives two miles from the event—far from the Mass Avenue condo they once shared—but before leaving the venue, she’ll accept the students’ plea to share a drink. Please, Cassie, we’re your biggest fans. She’ll have one drink—two and college kids get the wrong idea—and for thirty minutes, not a second longer, she’ll pretend these privileged kids are as interesting as they aspire to be.
Andre drinks his gin, ice clinking against his glass, and the photos appear. There’s Cassie between twin metrosexuals, both wearing bow ties and fur coats. Cassie singing beneath a spotlight, snapping her fingers, gardenia blossom behind her ear. Cassie leaning over a round banquet table, laughing, a glass of watery ice in hand. He wonders who took these pictures. Her fans? Her friends? Her new man? Right now, he doesn’t care. Because these pictures affirm what he knows to be true: that nobody knows his girl like he knows his girl.
He drains his drink, craves another with clean ice.
In the kitchen, standing before the portable freezer, he hears Brendan cheer. The outburst lasts but a second, followed by a hysterical, if not maniacal, laugh. Andre indulges his own curiosity, knocking at the kid’s door, then cautiously turning the knob.
The kid’s bedroom is simple and tidy, cracked plaster walls on which hang the Irish flag, a poster of Joyce, and a wood-and-stucco sign that reads HELP WANTED: IRISH NEED NOT APPLY. Bookshelves are packed with ornaments of a curious mind: economic philosophy, political theory, the Baltimore Catechism, and a history of Northern Ireland.
Brendan sits in his boxer shorts, cross-legged on the floor, back against his bed, heavy-lidded eyes like sea glass. He’s facing his flat-screen TV, a video game controller in hand. A small picnic lies spread before him, and, on his bed, within arm’s reach, a stack of National Geographics and a baggie of purple gummies.
“You having a little party?” Andre says.
“No. No. No. Well. Maybe. It’s not a party. So, I take it all back. No. What was the question?” Brendan breaks into giggles, lifts the bag of gummies. “Edible?”
Andre can only laugh. Brendan’s kind to share, but Andre hasn’t gotten stoned in years. He doesn’t have a moral objection to weed. He simply has too much to lose if ever he’s caught. A second criminal conviction, no matter how minor, would ruin his career.
“So.” Brendan takes a labored breath, face now grave and stern. “Is this covered by, you know? Road rules? Roads of the rules. It sounds funny when I say it out loud. Road. Rules.”
Andre likes the kid a little more. He wants to assure Brendan that weed is tame by firm standards, to say that staffers find all sorts of ways to alleviate a career that vacillates between stressful and mundane. Most consultants spend their days saddled by tight deadlines and demanding clients, then spend their nights decompressing alone in a motel far from home. Gambling. Coke. Prostitutes. Imagine all the ways lonely men can cure boredom with anonymity and access to petty cash. He knows junior partners who volunteer for road trips, fathers and grandfathers who approach travel assignments like frat boys throwing a bachelor party during spring break in Acapulco one day before the end of the world. Last year, an intern returned from New Orleans with a Percocet problem and a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea.
“Yes. What happens on the road stays on the road.” Andre sits on the floor, takes the spare game controller. “Mind if I join?”
“Sure, please, mate. Yeah. It’s football. I mean soccer. I mean . . . You play? Cheers, mate. Cheers.”
“When this game came out, years ago? My brother and I played for cash.”
Andre doesn’t share that Hector bought a boosted console, that the game disc just happened to be inside, which, of course, is one of the many risks of buying anything from the corner junkie. Sure, the price is always right, but you never really know exactly what you’ve purchased. Hector’s lucky that inside the console there wasn’t a severed toe. Nonetheless Andre remembers those days with fondness, good days for them both, Hector newly sober, Andre building his career, days that promised a bright and stable future.
“I don’t have a brother. Three sisters, I’m the youngest,” Brendan says. “I always wanted a big brother. When I was little, my sisters, they’d put me in dresses. Practice their makeup on me. You don’t know, man, but life is hard.”
“We don’t have to share. In fact, it’s probably best we don’t speak.”
“This is awesome, Dre,” Brendan says. “Are there any other road rules I should know about?”
“Pace yourself, kid. For now, one rule is as much as you can handle.”
Chapter Four
Andre receives an e-mail from Mrs. Fitz. The client, PISA, wishes the team to meet a local contact. Corporate clients often instruct teams to consult local officials, but this specific request strikes Andre as odd. For starters, Duke Boshears holds no elective office. In fact, four times the voters have denied Boshears the honor of serving. In the most recent contest, the Republican primary for state agricultural commissioner, Duke Boshears finished seventh, dead last, two places behind a fraternity’s write-in: Hugh G. Rection.
The Boshears meeting, however, may be an opportunity. The campaign needs a straw man: a local face lacking any real control, a figurehead to help collect signatures and submit those signatures to the county manager. The position is thankless: a lot of work, little influence, terms only a fool would abide.
“I still don’t understand.” Brendan yawns as a freight train, with stock cars of horses and cattle, crosses the road. The kid shows every sign of the lateness of their night. “Who’s this guy?”
“Duke Boshears is one of the wealthiest men in Carthage,” Andre says. “Once PISA buys the land, Boshears has a contract to clear away the trees.”
“So he’s a logger? A lumberjack?” Brendan leans back, ponders. “What’s the difference between a logger and a lumberjack?”
“Who the fuck am I, Paul Bunyan?”
Brendan chuckles—they understand each other perfectly this morning—says, “So how will this meeting go?”
Andre sinks into his seat, ashamed to admit his poor track record of predicting these meetings’ success. Just last year, in a hard-fought campaign to unseat Virginia’s attorney general, Andre scoure
d the state for weeks in search of potential challengers and thought, at long last, he’d found the perfect candidate: a small-town judge, mother of three, twenty-three years’ legal experience, thirty years married to a Gulf War vet. Her in-person interview, Andre assumed, would be a formality. And yet, two minutes into his visit, the judge began to rant against water fluoridation, spreading across her desk photos of deformed babies, proof, she claimed, that fluoride was no better than cyanide. Mass medication, she called it. Evil’s poison of choice. Did you know that Hitler put fluoride in the water at Auschwitz? He counts that meeting as among his worst, an interview that left him both in need of a new candidate and forever mistrustful of water from the tap.
* * *
Brendan pounds the door of the one-story concrete building. “This the right address?”
Andre checks his e-mail—right place, right time—then casts a glance over his shoulder. Across the street is a shuttered hospital that occupies a whole city block. The four-story building is crumbling, as though a construction crew in a hurry took a wrecking ball to the place, removed the roof, exposed the studs. Car-sized rubble is everywhere. The county’s encircled the block with a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and beside the gate appears a faded construction billboard, PARDON OUR PROGRESS, that promises a new hospital opening on this spot six years ago.
“You must be Andre Ross.” A man, maybe five foot five, opens the front door, offers his hand to Brendan, who points toward Andre. Duke scratches his head, studying Andre, says, “I see. Come in.”
A dozen desks face front, and a space heater broils the room. On the walls hang topographical maps and black-and-white photos of muddy lumberjacks and bone-thin mules pulling sleds loaded with felled pine.
“I gave my staff an extended lunch break. I know y’all like to keep your work confidential.” Duke Boshears is a handsome sixty-year-old man with a silver-streaked pompadour. If he were two inches taller, he might have won a local election. If he were four inches taller, he could’ve been governor. “PISA mentioned only an Andre Ross.”
Andre says, “This is my trusted associate. Brendan Fitzpatrick.”
“Fitzpatrick, eh? Scottish?”
Brendan narrows his eyes. “Irish.”
“There’s a battlefield a mile up yonder. Terrible battle. Not a large battle, but an important one. Thousands slaughtered. Both rebs and Yanks. There was an Irish battalion. The South Carolina Third, sharpshooters. I’m a bit of a history buff. The battalion was led by an Irish colonel, what was his name . . .” Duke snaps his fingers as though conjuring a spell. “Tavish McKenzie, from Edinburgh.”
Brendan sets his jaw.
Andre would like to see Brendan’s wrath. A barrage of insults. A quick jab to Duke’s nose. In Dublin, Brendan probably learned to dispense both. But, for now, the campaign needs Duke Boshears, a master of history, though apparently not of geography. So, Andre takes his assistant’s elbow and shakes his head as though to say: Let a fool be a fool.
“The county hosts a reenactment here every second year. Uses a lottery system to assign roles. Everyone wants to be a Confederate officer, everyone wants to ride a horse.” Duke smacks gray gum. “We pull names out of the hat. Sometimes, though, if a fella’s down on his luck in life, and he gets a good pull of the hat, then someone can buy the rank from him.”
“Makes sense,” Andre says. “Everybody wins.”
“Exactly! I end up buying my rank every year. And every year, it gets more expensive. I bought a colonel ten years ago. Five hundred dollars. Last year, I bought a captain. Cost me two grand.” Duke motions toward a back office. “I’m glad you understand.”
In Duke’s office, behind his desk is a mounted black bear, seven feet tall, on hind legs, paws raised. Against the wall leans evidence of a failed political campaign: buttons, bumper stickers, milk crates full of T-shirts and shot glasses and porcelain mugs. Duke must’ve spent a small fortune to lose that race. The primary passed a year ago; surely Duke must hate the constant reminder that 94 percent of fellow Republicans declined to check the box beside his name.
Andre takes a seat in a chair that is close to the ground; Duke sits behind his desk in a high-backed gilded chair, which gives him at least two inches over his guests.
Duke leans forward. “I want a progress report.”
Andre scratches behind his ear. “We’re still in the early stages.”
“The early stages of what?”
“The early stages of planning.” Andre forces a smile. “If you have suggestions, we welcome your thoughts.”
“My thoughts?” Duke takes the gum out of his mouth, sticks the gray wad into yesterday’s newspaper. “I want all your poll tests. Your financial records, the budget, any and all analytics you’ve got. Also, tomorrow, I want a list of ideas of how to collect signatures to get on the ballot. We got what? About three weeks? I want updates. Every day. Here’s my cell. Don’t call at six. That’s when I take my supper.”
Duke Boshears flings a business card across his desk. Andre lets the card sit there and casts a glance toward Brendan. The kid smirks, arches a brow: Now it’s your turn, Dre. Let a fool be a fool.
“Christian radio’s popular in this town.” Duke opens a pack of nicotine gum, shoves two squares into his mouth. “I want you to buy airtime. In my last campaign, I hired a guy out of Charleston. It cost a pretty penny, but he penned a popular jingle.”
“A jingle? I’m sorry. Were you running against Herbert Hoover?” Andre says.
“Should I be talking to you?” Duke points to Brendan. “What’s your name?”
“Someone from PISA will be in touch.” Andre stands, opens the office door to find a woman whose face seems unnatural, skin stretched taut against her skull, cat eyes that can’t possibly close. And yet, despite her alien appearance, the violet in her eyes is striking and spectacular. Duke Boshears stands, pale and panicked. “Baby—”
“You told me this meeting was at our house,” she says. “You told me this meeting was an hour from now. You knew I wanted to be here.”
“Baby, there must’ve been a mix-up. But I got everything under control.”
“I’m Victoria Boshears.” She offers Andre her hand. “Y’all the consultants?”
“These fellas have to get going.” Duke moves between Victoria and Andre. “Thank you both. Get us those reports like I asked. My wife and I’ll be in touch.”
“If y’all can spare a moment, I have questions,” Victoria says. “It won’t take long, I promise. And I do very much appreciate hearing whatcha have to say.”
The right thing for Andre to do is to help Duke Boshears, to accept personal responsibility for any scheduling mishap, and to make a gracious exit before contacting Duke later in the day. But Duke Boshears does not seem like a man who appreciates a rescue. Duke Boshears seems like a petty aspiring politician who would brag about slipping a blade between his rescuer’s ribs.
“We’re happy to answer any questions you might have.” Andre accepts her hand. “We told your husband that we welcome your thoughts.”
Victoria pulls a chair beside Andre’s and sits. “Did my husband tell you that this company has been in my family for more than a century? That my great-great-grandfather started selling timber, and that for four generations, we were the most successful logging operation in both Carolinas?”
“Honey, I mixed up the times,” Duke pleads. “Was an honest mistake.”
“And all’s forgiven, sweetie. Accidents happen. I’ve moved on.” She invites Andre and Brendan to sit, which they do. “Did he tell you that my grandfather was the only logger in the region to hire African Americans, and that he paid these good men the same exact wages he paid his whites? Did he tell you that both my mother and father, rest their souls, that they marched on Washington, that, though my parents’ support for civil rights cost this company a great deal of business, my father never laid off a single employee?”
“Baby, please. Do we have to do this now?”
“And did Duke tell you that he himself has squandered my family’s fortune? That, in the fifteen years since Daddy died, he has gambled away my family’s assets on silly ventures, ventures that I beseeched him not to pursue? Did he tell you that last year we had the first layoff in company history, that for the first time my family’s company has more debt than assets, that he, without my knowledge, put our home up as collateral, that if this PISA contract falls through, then we will be thrown out of my family’s house, the house in which I raised my babies—and that we would be forced to live in a cardboard box on the streets?”
“That will never happen.” Duke rests his hand on her shoulder, and she jerks away. Duke says, “Vicki, I promise.”
Victoria turns her back to her husband, her face red, eyes full of pain, slender frame casting a shadow over the bookshelf on which her pictures rest. These two have been together forever. Wedding photos. First-child photos. Looks like Duke and Victoria were prom king and queen. Now look at her. Disfigured. Destitute. Desperate. How many plastic surgeries has she undergone? Somewhere in Carthage, a sixty-year-old woman, still bitter over being prom queen runner-up, is having a hearty laugh.
Andre leans forward. Perhaps Victoria will be their straw man. “In order to appear on the ballot, county law requires a locally registered voter collect signatures and certify the authenticity of those signatures to the county manager. Brendan and I are obviously ineligible, but we can offer a substantial consulting fee to whomever you might recommend.”
The Coyotes of Carthage Page 5
