American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Across the room the phone rang, eliciting a groan from Lance. He figured it was another postponement. “Not again, Jack,” he said into the receiver, prompting his sister to respond, “Jack who?”

  “Ramsey? What’s the matter? You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Didn’t mean to intrude on you. It’s probably nothing. It’s just, you haven’t heard from Susannah, have you?”

  “Why would I hear from Susannah?”

  “I know, I know. I’m just worried, is all. Haven’t heard from her in a few days. It’s nothing, I’m sure. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “Ramsey, I—”

  She hung up before her brother could say anything else. At fifteen minutes till nine, daylight verging on sunglasses level, Ramsey stood on the balcony of her home in Los Angeles, trying not to worry over the whereabouts of her only child. She took a sip of weak coffee.

  It was silly for her to have called Lance. The whole thing was silly, in fact, especially how it all started. Three days ago, on an afternoon when Susannah stopped by the house, Ramsey had mentioned that the Hannigans, who lived down the street, had seen her, Susannah, having dinner at the Tulip earlier in the week. They said she’d been with a man. “So who is he?” Ramsey asked, casually, she hoped. “Some new boyfriend?” Anger was a rare emotion for her daughter. A self-proclaimed pacifist, vegan, transcendentalist, bohemian, and clairvoyant, in that order, Susannah Forster, perpetually clad in mandala patterns and her hair always spangled with lilac, gave the lie to the notion the 1960s had ended with the Tate murders. For that reason Ramsey was surprised to see Susannah launch into a fury. Her espadrilles thumped on the hardwood as she paced through the house, and beads jangled on her gesticulating wrists. Susannah claimed her mother had sent spies. Over and again she spoke about “him” as if they both knew to whom she referred—“I want to be with him,” “You can’t stop me from seeing him,” “I’m in love with him”—until she spoke one sentence that turned Ramsey’s heart into a pair of jagged halves tottering on the floor.

  “We’re not actually related, Mother.”

  Three days later, after hanging up the phone with her brother, Ramsey still believed the “we” in that sentence had been Susannah and herself, mother and daughter. That was part of the reason she had called Lance. From the day she was born, Susannah had been raised thinking Lance was nothing but her uncle. Ramsey still felt that was the right thing to have done. The problem was she had also done something she now thought was absolutely wrong. On Susannah’s sixteenth birthday, Ramsey had sat her down, poured them both a glass of wine, and, like a fool, told her she was adopted.

  She had not said Lance was her real father. After three long days of no word from her little girl, though, Ramsey thought perhaps Susannah, somehow intuiting the relation, might have reached out to him. It was ridiculous, she knew, too much of a stretch.

  In the kitchen Ramsey refilled her coffee and looked out the window, at its view of the Hollywood Hills. On first moving here, she’d grasped one aspect of Los Angeles quicker than any other, how it was all scenery and no scene, background with no foreground, a vista without a perspective. She wondered if it had been a mistake to raise a child in this city. Would Susannah have become a different sort of woman if she had grown up in the South? Ramsey’s childhood had been so unique, eating pain perdu and hopping john and pear salad, getting her clothes filthy from playing all day in gumball dirt, building forts with broken locust posts and cottonseed hulls. It made her feel immune to this world of false superiority. Whenever someone condescendingly asked her to “say ‘y’all’ again,” she happily deigned to fulfill the request.

  The day was turning into a gorgeous one, Ramsey thought while sipping her coffee. Sunlight filled the house she had managed to afford following her divorce from Arthur not because of alimony, nor even with help from her father, but with royalties from The Adventures of Catfish the Dog (vols. 1–12), a series of children’s books she had written about a French zoo full of animals that consider humans their pets. Most of the books had begun as bedtime stories she had told Susannah.

  “So that’s why you made Catfish an orphan,” said Susannah on her sixteenth birthday. “That’s why you had him adopted by the zoo. As some ridiculous way to prepare me for the truth.”

  “No, of course not, honey!”

  “The family’s always treated me different. Like I’m not even one of you. Now it makes sense. Now it makes so much sense. All of you knew I wasn’t really a Forster by blood.”

  But honey, you are! Ramsey had wanted to scream. You are a Forster!

  The phone sat on an end table by the sofa, next to her two framed Caldecott Medals. Even though she knew it was just as foolish an idea as it had been ten minutes earlier, Ramsey thought of calling Lance again, asking him, begging him to let her tell Susannah the truth, that she was his daughter, a genuine part of their family, a Forster by blood, flesh, and bone.

  He wouldn’t have picked up even if she’d called. At that same moment, half a continent and two time zones away, Lance was standing in his room at the Jacobs-Allen, fourth drink of the day in his hand, listening to Jack Moretti, CEO of Moretti Motors, describe how to launder money. None of it sank in. The Lance Forster from fifteen years ago would have dissected every detail, especially given that the plan had been devised by somebody like Jack Moretti. A former executive at Ford, youngest in the history of the company, Jack was known not for his ruthlessness and creativity but rather, as noted in a BusinessWeek cover story, for his “creative ruthlessness.” Lance could throw the man farther than he trusted him. That was why he had insisted on being at the meet. Nonetheless, as Jack Moretti went over the venture they were about to involve Moretti Motors in, Lance only heard the last part. “In a nutshell, we put their guys on the payroll, they give us money to pay them, and we keep a sizable cut. Placement, a partridge, layering, a pear tree, integration.”

  Right as Lance was about to ask, Who’s “they” again? the answer to his question knocked at the door.

  Jack took the lead. Brushing a hand through his mop of hair that had been the color of oyster shells since his twenties, an effective disguise for his relatively young age in the business world, he looked through the peephole and opened the door halfway, after which he welcomed three men and guided them to the sitting area. All three men wore matching gray suits, white shirts, no ties, high starch, as though they were in some kind of band. The only difference between them was that one carried a briefcase. No member of what Lance thought of as “Pancho Villa and the Bagmen” introduced himself.

  If Lance had been listening to Jack earlier, he would have known the men belonged to an outfit originally based in South America, one whose lion-esque territorialism and ferocity in cities like Bogotá and Quito had warranted its nickname, The Pride.

  “Get y’all a drink?” Lance said, holding up his own. “Bar’s stocked.”

  “Do you have any sparkling water?”

  The man with the briefcase had spoken. Lance told him he thought he could scrounge up a Perrier. At the bar alcove, making the man a sparkling water and himself another whiskey rocks, Lance did not look at his own reflection in the mirror on the back wall, not the swollen eyes, not the bristly cheeks, which upset the FBI agent watching via a camera behind the two-way mirror. He was hoping to get a nice head shot from a direct angle before the deal went down.

  “I’m sorry, Pancho, but we’re fresh out of lemons and limes,” Lance said as he handed the man with the briefcase his drink. The man held the drink without taking a sip, his flat expression the opposite of its content, and Lance returned to his seat.

  “The marker?” said the man.

  Jack answered, “We have it.”

  “What’s the problem?” Lance stood up, approached the man where he sat on the sofa, patted him on the shoulder, and, stumbling briefly, sat back down. “Don’t you fellas trust us with your drug money?” Lance’s laughter was not reciprocated.

  The leader of the group s
tared at his shoulder as though it had grown a pair of antlers. Without looking at his partners, he said to Jack, “We would like to know who is this man?”

  Jack acted confused for a moment. “Oh, I see. Well, he’s you, in a sense.” He hitched a thumb toward Lance and then pointed at the briefcase, saying, “That money had to come from somebody. Do you want us to say it came from you? Didn’t think so.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Jack and the man had a conversation that, were Lance not in such low cotton and on his fifth glass of Kessler straight, he might have understood, at least enough for it to worry him. An agreement seemed to have been met when the man pushed the briefcase across the shag carpet like the shuttle of a loom. With the nonchalance of a gambler checking his hand, Jack picked up the case, unsnapped its hinges, and stared inside for a moment, whereas Lance, nonchalant in the way of a table bystander, stifled a yawn.

  Lance’s lack of concern owed a great deal, albeit obliquely, to his lack of a relationship with Susannah. Her birth mother’s name was Patty, “not Patricia, just Patty, like the cake,” a woman who, at a St. Louis hotel, had given him the short time. Nobody had heard anything from her since she signed the papers, took the check, had the baby, and said she could sometimes be reached through a cousin in Toledo. It felt appropriate to Lance that Susannah be raised by his twin sister, not least of all because Susannah made Ramsey so ridiculously happy. He simply wasn’t the fatherly type.

  “Ask anyone,” Lance always said.

  Over the years, he’d watched his daughter grow into a beautiful child—she had dimples, blue eyes, blond hair, and was perfect—but watching her grow up also proved a problem. Ever since he used the image to understand Newtonian physics in high school, Lance had imagined that, inside the part of his chest where a normal heart should have been, resided instead a row of metal spheres suspended from wires. When the sphere on the end swung and struck the row, the spheres in the middle remained stationary and the one at the opposite end swung out and back, repeating the pattern. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Being near his daughter caused the wires to snap and sent the metal spheres plummeting. On her first birthday he lied about an urgent phone call so no one would see the tears he could not hold back. Snap. The evening she played the piano for him he used allergies as an excuse. Snap. Her first dance recital? Her senior prom? Her high school graduation? Snap, snap, snap.

  Lance wanted to tell her the truth but was worried about his sister. Who knew how Ramsey would take that? She’d probably consider it a betrayal. Eventually, after years of watching his daughter from afar, Lance had managed to overcome his feelings for her by burying them, so that Susannah, the baby in a crib wriggling her tiny fingers, the little girl curtsying to him by her piano, became an artifact of his subconscious. That solution generated, however, an even worse problem. For Lance, to stop caring about one thing was to stop caring about all things, just as to stop loving one person was to stop loving all people: he could only shut down the assembly line by blowing up the factory. The death of his wife in childbirth ten years ago had swept away whatever rubble that remained.

  “Gentlemen, I want you to know that this money, it’s not just an investment in some automobile manufacturer. Well then, in what? you ask. It’s an investment in the American dream,” Jack Moretti said to the three men in matching suits. According to a Rolling Stone article that would be published in September 1975, “Down and Out in the Paris of the West” by Lucinda Wong, he made the same speech to all potential investors. “I assume you know the name of our first model. The ADM-9. Advanced Development Moretti, ninth iteration since the prototype. I’ve always liked to think of those letters as standing for something else. The American Dream Machine. Ours is the sports car of the future, stronger, faster, and more beautiful than any before, the quintessence of this country. That’s where your money’s going. Toot?”

  In his hand Jack held a vial of cocaine and offered it to Pancho Villa like a toast. The vial might as well have been a starter pistol. From the door to the hotel room, entering with a key obtained at the front desk, burst a line of six federal agents.

  “Stay in your seats. You’re under arrest.”

  Each of the agents carried a badge in one hand, a gun in the other, brandishing both around the room, holding them in the faces of those under arrest. Lance didn’t mind the badges. “Would you please get that gun out of my face?” he said. “I don’t like guns. I’ve got a thing about guns.”

  There was a story as to why.

  * * *

  Throughout the years following the incident in the woods, Lance would tell people about it, minus key points, as a funny, self-effacing way to illustrate “what a stubborn little shit I am.” The story also served as an explanation for why he didn’t hunt. “I haven’t touched a gun since I was twelve years old,” he would say to friends whenever they invited him on hunting trips. “Did I ever tell you the story about the time I jumped the creek?”

  That morning it was cold even for February. Under a sky matted in gray, Lance and his father rode side by side on two mares—Peat and Repeat—their rifles tucked into scabbards. Lance was riding Peat. The horse was beautiful, her hair pale white with flecks of brown, milk at the bottom of a cereal bowl. She made for a much lovelier sight than the part of the estate they were now riding through, hoarfrost causing the trees to appear as though they were ghosts of themselves, ground a crosshatch of twigs, buttonbush turned into skeletons, the occasional hog wallow giving off ugly squishing noises when trod by hooves.

  Neither father nor son said a word to the other. Lance didn’t even know what they were hunting, whether deer or turkey, squirrel or duck, goose, bobcat, rabbit, or quail. Earlier that morning, when his father had woken him, all he’d said was, “Let’s go shoot something.” Afterward his father had tossed some nankeen trousers on the bed, made a let’s-hop-to motion, and resituated on his shoulder a musette bag stocked with breakfast. An hour later they still had not shot a thing.

  “How’s school?” asked Houghton.

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  Lance flicked his reins. “How’s work?”

  Much has been written, in other texts more so than this one, about Houghton Forster’s willingness to discuss business with his children, no matter their age. He considered it training for their future work, a step toward his goal of creating the nation’s quintessential family. So, without any hesitation, Houghton said to Lance, a boy whose face had yet to learn the need of a razor, “Governor Russell’s not being particularly helpful with the plant we’re about to build down in Biloxi.” His son asked why not. “He thinks I’ve grown too big for my britches. And he’s right.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Time to get bigger britches.”

  In Houghton’s opinion the most overrated American virtue was honesty. His favorite type of person was someone who, if others would not be hurt, had no qualms about cheating. Consider his tactics during the onset of World War II. After the war began, the subcommittee chaired by Senator Edmund Ainsworth yielded its influence to a group as powerful in policy-making as it was innocuous in title, the War Production Boards’ Sugar Section. The rivals of PanCola had already greased many of the WPB’s members. Such information Houghton did not take well. “Coke and Pepsi? For the love of God. During a championship game, does the coach put in his number two and number three players? Don’t fucking think so.” He doubled the salaries for his team of lobbyists, assigned a new head of the Panola Cola Export Corporation, hired a Capitol Hill tax lawyer who people joked could escape death, and engaged in all manner of backroom politicking. His efforts were a success. Over the course of the war, seventy-five PanCola bottling plants and hundreds of “jungle fountain units” were constructed throughout the world, particularly in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific theater, a situation heralded back home in newsreels that began, “PanCola Spans the Globe!”

  Houghton used similar methods when, decades before the war, his needs were not met b
y Governor Lee Russell, and he explained those methods, with the kind of detail many would deem improper, to his twelve-year-old son, Lance. Unfortunately, as he described how the governor could not pursue reelection this year because of term limits but that, nevertheless, campaign donations from various shell companies would ensure the next one would be a team player, his son internalized only part of the logic: that cheating to benefit one’s self was an acceptable practice, but without the qualifier that others should not be hurt.

  “Sounds like a smart plan,” Lance said, one hand in the pocket of his shearling coat, balled for warmth. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You know I hate that question. Yes. You can ask me something.”

  “What are we out here to hunt?”

  “My friend Sam once told me golf is a good walk spoiled.” Houghton chuckled. “I like to think of hunting as a pleasant stroll with protection.”

  “Har-har,” said Lance.

  Toward the western border of the estate, they reached an obstruction to their pleasant, protected stroll on horseback. The creek was roughly six feet deep. At its narrowest point it was over eight feet wide.

  His sigh a cloud front moving across the creek, Houghton said, “I think the embankment’s got a more manageable slope down the ways a bit,” but his son, trying to eyeball the distance from one ledge to the other, would have none of that.

  “I think I can jump it.”

  “What?”

  “I can jump this thing.”

  Houghton told his son to stop speaking nonsense and get his fool self along down the property with him.