Shelley's Heart
Page 71
The new Speaker, Bob Laval, was out of the country and no former Speaker was able to attend, but Mallory, Lockwood, and Sam Clark were there. The only other mourner was Albert. A sergeant from the U.S. Marine Corps Band sang Attenborough’s favorite songs: “The Cowboy’s Lament,” “Army Blue,” and “America the Beautiful.” The sergeant’s unaccompanied baritone lent a sentimental timbre to these innocent works about the sorrows and joys of American manhood. As the last note faded there was a faraway look in Albert’s eye and a tear in Lockwood’s. Sam Clark lifted his hand as in a toast and said, “Absent friends.” Mallory silently nodded.
Lockwood said, “Sad day, Albert.” It was the first time since the day they had met in Attenborough’s office three decades earlier that Lock-wood had not called him Ablert. Albert had never mentioned this before, but now he said, “I see you’ve lost your speech impediment, Mr. President.” Peering into the open grave, Lockwood said, “That’s not all I’ve lost lately. I guess we’re not allowed to say any words?” Albert said, “No, but there’s nothing says you can’t stand here and think” for a while.”
It was late afternoon but still hot here on the fringe of the Chihuahua desert. A wind filled with powdery grit blew from the west. To the south, through the haze, they could make out the blistered humps of the Chisos Mountains where the Rio Grande made its Big Bend. Sam Clark said, “Which way is Terlingua from here?” Albert pointed toward the river, to the right of the mountains. There was nothing to be seen between the graveyard and the ghost town except a windmill with only one unbroken blade remaining. Lockwood said, “We all remember Terlingua and the blushing bride.” Albert’s eyes were fixed on the windmill. “True story.’’ he said. Clark said, “They were all true stories.” Albert said, “That’s right, Mr. President. But he didn’t necessarily tell every story he knew.”
Two old men, Mexicans, each holding a hat in one hand and a shovel in the other, stood fifty yards away by a fence made of twisted mesquite branches. Mallory said, “Albert, I’ve always wondered. How did you and Tucker get together in the first place?” Albert nodded toward Terlingua. “It was right by that windmill down there, year the two of us was eleven,” he said. “We ought to each of us throw in some dirt on top of the box, gentlemen, and get out of here and let those boys over there cover the Speaker up before dark.” Each of them scooped up a handful of dust and threw it in. It really was dust, all the moisture and weight long since bleached and blown out of it, and instead of falling onto the coffin it rose playfully back up out of the grave as if propelled by a breath. “Better go,” Albert said.
They walked by twos down to the cars, Lockwood and Clark first, Mallory and Albert following. There was one limousine for each President plus the hearse Albert had come in, all the way from El Paso, with the casket. The Secret Service and the teams were farther down and farther up the hill and flying around in helicopters overhead. Mallory said, “We may not see each other again soon, Albert, and I really would be interested in knowing how you and the Speaker got together, if you don’t mind saying.” Albert said, “I don’t mind. But wait a minute.” They stopped where they were and watched Lockwood walking on toward his limousine, talking earnestly to Clark. Mallory was President now and they were both in private life, and they looked diminished.
When Lockwood was out of earshot Albert said, “My father and I came through here in the summer of ‘46, headed for Mexico, traveling at night. He’d had a little trouble in Abilene over my mama. He was a gambling man just back from the war. Had a ‘29 Packard with a squeaky right rear wheel. The wheel fell off about five miles from Terlingua. It was Saturday night and a bunch of drunks came along in a pickup truck, jumped out, and beat up on him because he had a watch in his pocket and some rings on his hands. They put a rope on him and pulled him along behind the pickup for a ways, me running along behind, keeping out of sight like he told me to. Got to that windmill down there. They tied my daddy up with some rusty old bobwire they found lying around and threw him in the water tank, then drove off. He was unconscious and bleeding. I couldn’t wake him up or get him out, so I held his head above water till morning. Right after sunrise this kid just about my age but a whole lot smaller in size came down to water some real skinny horses. I told him my problem and he climbed up to help me out, but my father was dead. We talked it over. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ There was no going back to Abilene. I said, ‘I want to go on to Mexico.’ He said, ‘They’ll never let you across the river; look what they done to him. You say you’ve got a Packard automobile parked up the road?’ I said, ‘My father does.’ Tucker said, ‘In my opinion you just inherited it. You’ve got to have someplace to live till you’re old enough to travel. Will you authorize me to negotiate?’ Those were his words; he talked like that even then, loudest voice ever heard, got it from his old man, who was a preacher. I authorized him. The long and short of it is, his father took the car. In return he hauled my daddy out of the tank, buried him, and prayed over him, first and last nigger he’d ever done that for, he kept telling me, and I lived with the Attenborough family till I grew up. The Reverend would give me less on my plate than everybody else but Tucker would slip me food off his; eating never was one of his pleasures.”
Mallory said, “Thank you, Albert. Now I understand.”
“You’re the first one I ever told that to,” Albert said. “Years later I asked Tucker how he ever thought his father, who was a real son of a bitch, mean to the bone like runts can sometimes be, would take in a colored boy in a place where they’d just drowned his father for being colored. He said, ‘The key to the deal was, the Reverend Dick T. Attenborough was a believer, the first of many in my life, and for believers the whole idea is to do good if you’re going to get something out of it, going to Heaven and the life everlasting being the original examples. Do the trick right and you get the dog biscuit. My father’s reward for the meritorious act of taking you in was a ‘29 Packard that got him to his tent meetings in style. Plus points with the Almighty and all the work you did free of charge on what he called the ranch for the next ten years.’ ”
“What happened to the men who did that to your father?” Mallory asked.
“Nothing. What they did wasn’t unusual for the time. Everybody knew them. They were rich boys by West Texas standards, ranchers’ sons, pillars of the community, just out drinking and raising a little hell on a Saturday night.”
Lockwood had been eyeing Albert and Mallory as they talked. Now he walked back up the path to meet them. “Well, boys,” he said when they came together, “do you suppose he’s looking down on us?”
“Up,” Albert said.
Lockwood laughed and put an arm around Albert’s shoulders. “That list of mourners Tucker drew up,” he said. “You know, at first glance it looks snobbish—Presidents only. But I just realized that the only ones on it are us four poor boys.”
“That was on his mind a lot when he talked about what happened to ail you Presidents at the end there,” Albert said. “The Speaker always said the Lord must love rich boys because he made so many of the sorry dumb left-footed sons of bitches. His own words, gentlemen, not Scripture. Best friend the poor man ever had in this country.”
“Amen,” said Lockwood.
TO THE READER
Shelley’s Heart is a work of the imagination in which no resemblance is intended to anyone who ever lived or anything that ever happened. Outside the realm of fiction, on the other hand, I have tried to respect the historical record. Concerning the life, thought, writings, and posthumous influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley I have invented nothing except, presumably, the Shelley Society. The verbatim transcripts, press reports, and other records of the impeachment proceedings of the House of Representatives and the Senate against Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Richard M. Nixon in 1973 provided factual background for fictitious situations designed to be somewhat less unbelievable than the reality. Anthony L. Harvey provided expert advice on Senate rules and procedures. For material about Mani�
�te folkways I am particularly indebted to the classic Travels in the Morea by William Martin Leake (London, 1805). The techniques used to recover and preserve human embryos in the Mallory Foundation’s Morning After Clinics were modeled on well-established veterinary procedures described by George E. Seidel, Jr., in “Superovulation and Embryo Transfer in Cattle” (Science, Vol. 211, 23 January 1981) and elsewhere, but the idea that these methods might be applied with equal success to human beings originated in conversations with my brother Miles, an animal scientist. Although this novel is set in the near future, all of the technology described therein exists in the here and now; the computer program used by the San Francisco Giants to transform video images of batters and pitchers into graphic representations of body parts and physical movements, for example, is not so very different from the system employed by Wiggins and Lucy to establish the identity of Susan Grant’s assassin. In medical matters I have benefited, as in previous novels, from the technical advice of Bruce M. Cowan, M.D., who is in no way responsible for the un-Hippocratic way in which I have afflicted, medicated, and, in the case of the recovered embryos, deep-frozen my characters. Readers of The Better Angels, published in 1979, will recognize that some of the characters in this story are dealing with the consequences of acts described in the earlier work. Though I have striven to avoid inconsistencies between the two books, I will not be surprised if it is discovered that they do not match in every detail. In fiction as in life, people do not always reveal the whole truth about themselves on first encounter, and the novel, like the Congress of the United States, makes its own rules, by which it abides at its own convenience. De nil omnia fiunt.
C. McC.