Part 33 (1/2)
”Yeah, I got that d.a.m.n letter. I don't accept your resignation. I want you working for me. h.e.l.l, woman, you're like a pit bull trained to attack white men. I want you on my side.”
Eleanor laughed. ”I don't attack anyone.”
”Well you sure do leave a lot of corpses in your wake.”
The smile fell away from Eleanor's face and she drove in silence for a while.
She and Harmon hadn't spent a lot of time driving into the mountains. She was not really a mountain person. They looked dangerous to her. For years she'd felt trapped, in a way, between the mountain wall on one side and the endless plains on the other. The devil and the deep blue sea. Now that they were getting closer to the first real range of mountains, a ridge of red stone that swept smoothly up out of the gra.s.sland and broke off jaggedly hundreds of feet above their heads, she was beginning to remember that the mountains had their attractions, that they were a lot more interesting when you got up close instead of viewing them through miles of brown Denver smog.
”Sorry,” Caleb said, ”that was a real stupid thing for me to say.” Clearly, the Senator was not a man who apologized very often, and he found it difficult.
”It's okay,” she said. ”I know what you meant.”
”If I intended to run for another term, I'd have to sack you,” he said, after they had drawn closer to the base of the first ridge and turned parallel to it along a rolling and winding road. They were now completely out in the country.
”You don't say.”
”When one of my staffers steps up in front of the single largest collection of journalists ever a.s.sembled in Denver and announces that everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen, it makes things a little awkward for me.”
This time Eleanor didn't laugh. She smiled, but it was a sheepish kind of grin. This was a Monday morning. She had spent yesterday morning reading scathing editorials and reb.u.t.tals in the editorial sections of the newspapers. To say that she had hit a nerve didn't do justice to the level of indignation.
”How many death threats have you gotten?” Senator Marshall asked.
”I stopped listening to my messages after the third one,” Eleanor said.
”They actually put them on tape? They must have been really p.i.s.sed.”
”Yeah.”
”I can have the Secret Service check them out.”
”It just sounds to me like a bunch of ranchers blowing off steam,” she said.
”It ain't just Colorado. You're the most hated woman in the West,” Senator Marshall said. ”A lightning rod.”
”I know it.”
”People wouldn't be so vehement unless your words were largely true,” Senator Marshall said.
She gave him a searching look. ”What's your opinion?”
The Senator winced, as if he wished she hadn't asked this question. He looked out the window for a while, appalled.
”Well, of course you're right,” he finally said. ”The economy of this whole region is built on subsidies and federal programs. But people refuse to admit that because they want to believe in the cowboy myth. That their ancestors came out and made the desert bloom solely through their own hard work and pluck.
”Now, they were plucky, and they did work hard. But there are a lot of plucky, hard-working people in other places who have gone down the toilet anyway just because they were pursuing a fool's errand, economically speaking. The people who came here sort of lucked into a situation of cowboy socialism.
Without federal programs they'd go broke - no matter how hard they worked.””Federal programs that are kept alive by senators.”
”Yeah. Colorado's small state population-wise. Our delegation in the House can't do diddly. But in the Senate, every state is equal. When one senator, like me, gets some seniority, works his way up into a few key committee chairmans.h.i.+ps, then some states are more equal than others. My job - my raison d'etre - is to keep certain federal programs alive that prevent this region from turning back into the buffalo farm G.o.d intended it to be.
”It's a feedback loop. This is high-tech lingo that I picked up in the sixties when some G.o.dd.a.m.n ecologist was raving to me. I keep the programs alive. The economy thrives. People move to Colorado and vote for me. The cycle begins again.
”As long as those programs continue to exist, no one notices. They are part of the landscape. They are forces of nature, like the wind and the rain. The people who live off them, people like Sam Wyatt, have come to think of them as natural and divinely ordained. To them, living off of federal largesse is no different in principle than, say, fis.h.i.+ng salmon from the Gulf of Alaska or tapping maple syrup from trees in Maine. So, when someone like you steps in front of the TV cameras and points out the obvious -that these people are no different in principle from people who live off of welfare checks - it just drives them crazy. It strikes at the heart of who they are.”
Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn't believe that Senator Marshall was saying these things.
”So, why aren't you going to accept my resignation?” she said.
”My whole career I've been doing things because I had to. Now that I'm in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished I could do but was afraid to.”
”Well, the press should have a field day with that.”
”The press can f.u.c.k themselves. Now I can say that. Take a right here.”
Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight into the mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing: steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the only place within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it. It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under gra.s.s and sage, its pink and peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.
”You must be getting a lot of pressure to sack me.”
”To h.e.l.l with that. They'll forget all about it in a week, believe me. What I'll do is give you an internal transfer.”
”Oh. So I'm getting a new job?”
”Yeah. You're getting a new job. I'm getting you out of Colorado before someone lynches your a.s.s. Or mine.”
”Oh, my G.o.d.”
”That's right. You are going to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., lady. Back to your hometown. And if you thought Denver was a nest of vipers, you just wait.”
They both shut up for a moment driving through the gap. Caleb groped out with his left hand and turned the Resurrection Symphony up to the point where it was loud even to his leathery ears, and they cut through and suddenly found themselves in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Once it pa.s.sed through the gap, the road split off in three or four directions, and none of the signs meant anything to Eleanor. ”Which way do I go now?” she said.
”I got you here,” Caleb said. ”Now you're on your own.”
PART 3.
Vox Populi.
If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox . . . But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. . . . With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and a.s.semblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished.
Plato, Republic.
32.