Five Fortunes (35 page)

“Right. This is his local.”

“Well, thank you very much,” said Jill, and the bartender smiled again. Clearly, he found Jill cute.

Outside, the sky to the west was streaked with pink. To the east the street made a shadowed canyon between rows of buildings. She had a long block to walk to the avenue; she wondered if the working girls were still there. She wondered, too, what her chances would be of finding a taxi.

The wind was coming up, and the temperature was dropping. It had been a spring day, but it was a winter evening. Her feet made an almost silent
fuffing
sound as she hurried along in her soft boots.

She wondered why Colleen hadn’t come. Probably held up at home. That, or she had intuited somehow that Jill was a fat freshman and she never meant to come. It was all right. There would be a message when she got home. Jill would assure her it was no big deal. It

Five Fortunes / 275

was
no big deal. She’d found out what Carter needed to know. It would have been more fun with a friend, but
que sera
.

The working girls were not on the corner of the avenue. Must have gotten lucky, Jill thought. The wide street seemed unusually empty, but then again, what did she know about what was usual for this neighborhood?

On the sidewalk, half a block down the avenue, a couple was necking. Well, necking was a euphemism. They looked as if at any moment they might consummate an act that Jill’s father would find a good deal more boorish than eating in public. The woman, or at least the one in the skirt, was pressed against the wall. She had both arms wrapped around the man’s neck, and one leg wrapped around one of his. There was a good deal of heaving going on.

Jill turned her attention to the clump of traffic heading downtown toward her. It was sparse, and she could see no taxis. She waited through a long red light. She looked at her watch. It was 7:10. Too early for the theater rush, surely. Then she suddenly, irrationally, experienced a feeling of being watched, and remembered that you weren’t supposed to flash a watch as expensive as this in question-able neighborhoods.

She pulled her hands deep into her sleeves, and scanned the next wave of traffic approaching like a school of fish released downstream.

There were no yellow ones. One dark rather ramshackle four door edged over to her lane and slowed as it approached her; a gypsy cab. Jill made eye contact with the driver, but then shook her head.

She didn’t have the nerve. What if there were no door handles inside?

What if she were never seen again?

When the light changed, she hurried across the avenue. She would try her luck at the next avenue, and if nothing happened there, walk toward bright lights and the subway.

She was halfway down the block toward the next avenue when she felt the footsteps behind her. She could not turn to check out her fellow traveler; that would be rude. She could speed up, but it would be too terrible if the feet behind her sped up too. So she slowed down.

The person—a big man, young, with a drooping eyelid half cover-276 / Beth Gutcheon

ing a milky-blind eye, caught up with her. She glanced sideways at him for a very brief moment and found, to her horror, that he was looking straight at her. As her eyes met his, her panic meter went through the roof. This was it, this was the face of evil that everyone said she would see only in her dreams. Then the man lurched, throwing her sideways, and she was pinned against the wall. She could feel him shoving against her, and god knows she could smell him. She thought her eyes were open and yet she could see nothing except blackness. And her mouth was open, as she tried and tried to scream and nothing, nothing, nothing would come out.

This is it, she thought. This is it, I’m cracking right now. I am just going to leave this mind and never come back. No more horror.

In her blindness she felt a blade cut the watch from her wrist and at the same time felt a wrenching pain as he yanked the double strand of beads at her neck. He jerked savagely until the strands broke. She howled her silent howl.

And then from somewhere outside her body—but somehow caused by her, her straining, throbbing throat—came a roar of anger.

It was a shriek, huge, a howl; it was the sound she had been trying to make for five years.

A split second later some force wrenched the marble-eyed man sideways with such a power that Jill was knocked to the ground with him. His hands had been under her coat, in her clothes, gripping the strap of her small leather purse. As she fell, her head cracked hard against a pipe rail guarding a basement stairwell.

For a moment she saw popping lights and then sight returned, along with throbbing pain in her head and elbow. The thing that had howled was not herself. It was a man—another man, who had the milk-eyed one on the ground. The milk-eyed one was kicking viciously, twisting and swearing. The other one roared and pummeled him. The other one—she saw though she was now nearly blind with tears—was MacDuff.

A
my had rented an apartment for herself in Boise, a small, tidy, second-floor conversion in a once grand house off Warm Springs Avenue. She’d rented some furniture and a television and VCR, and bought some secondhand pots and pans and one fancy new coffeemaker. In the two months since she had become a campaign junkie she had learned to consider coffee one of the major food groups. It was nearly the only thing she consumed in her little apartment, since she was never there except to sleep and wake up.

Laurie’s Boise office was in a wide, low, brick building on the south side of the river. It had once been used for some sort of light manufacturing; you could still see scars and wheel marks where machinery had dug into the softwood floors. When Amy had arrived in the first chaos of setting up Laurie’s office, the campaign chair had taken one look at her and announced it was her job to get office furniture for dozens of workers the cheapest way possible, to have a platoon of phones installed, and have the place wired for office equipment. Within three days of her arrival Amy had found an old college beau working for the biggest of the new computer companies in Boise and persuaded him to donate two dozen used computers.

“They were fourteen months old. They can’t play CD-ROMs,”

Amy explained as a mountain of boxes was wheeled in and stacked everywhere. Within a week she had negotiated very favorable lease rates on a pair of jumbo copiers and an industrial-strength color printer.

277

278 / Beth Gutcheon

The office was being managed by a young man who had worked for Roberto. His name was Aaron Jackson but everyone called him Ajax. Ajax understood office systems, he had a brother who could fix anything, and he was thrilled, after years among grandmotherly office workers over at the capitol, to be with the podluscious volunteers who started showing up in droves after Laurie spoke at Boise State.

“You can
not
say ‘podluscious’ though,” Amy had to tell him, twice. Ajax was an earnest, shy, plastic pocket-protector kind of guy who would have been over the moon if anyone called
him
any kind of luscious. It took him a while to understand that a young lady could object to being so admired. But there was no danger that he was going to become addled by the presence of so much estrogen and become a masher. Within a week, Amy noticed, he was beside himself with undeclared love for a pale and desperately timid young creature named Sheila, who had large breasts and a picturesque head cold.

Amy spent a lot of time with Laurie. Usually she went to media events with her because Laurie got sick of delivering her stump speech and it helped her to keep it fresh to talk to Amy in the audience.

“You’re a born cheerleader,” Laurie said to her gratefully one afternoon.

“Made, not born. It was my job description in my marriage.”

“You know,” Laurie said, “when you’re happily married you don’t have much time for women friends. Or you don’t feel the need.

It’s one of the cruelest things about suddenly…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

Amy thought about Noah, always saying his wife was his best friend. For Roberto, it had actually been true. What had been true in her own marriage? It hurt too much to think about.

She said to Laurie, “This is fun.”

“It
is
. And it never occurred to me that it would be.”

Amy also went with Laurie to fund-raising events and coached her on how to make calls asking for money, which she was required to do at least an hour a day.

“It’s the only way to approach a major donor. Don’t worry—they know why you’re calling. It won’t kill you if someone says no.”

Five Fortunes / 279

“How do you know?”

Amy laughed. “I’ve done tons of this for Jill’s schools. You get off on it after a while.”

“If I live through this, you have no idea how I’m going to fight for campaign finance reform,” said Laurie.

“Here’s your list for today, honey. Dial.” It was now clear that even for the primary they would need a major media campaign.

They’d been running radio ads from the beginning, but they were going to have to go to television early. Lloyd Prince’s numbers were holding and his name recognition was way up. He’d even gotten on the
Today
show by coming out against the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“I’m going to kill myself,” Walter had said as they watched Lloyd proclaim from his wheelchair:

“It’s insane to spend billions of dollars to redesign the world for the two percent of Americans who are in wheelchairs. A hundred percent of our young people need much better schools.”

“But aren’t there times when you find it inconvenient yourself to…” asked pretty Katie Couric.

“Many. But I think I should play the hand the Lord dealt me, not demand a recount.”

“They never even mentioned Laurie’s name,” said Lynn when the segment was over.

“I’m going to kill myself,” said Walter again.

“Come on,” Amy said to him. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Laurie was right about Amy; she
was
a born cheerleader. Amy was the one who could muster unshaken faith in their ultimate victory when the others lost heart, as happened two or three times a week for one reason or another. She was unexpectedly helpful to Lynn and Walter as they worked on the media plan, and she was useful in dealing with Hunt, who was having trouble remembering that it was Laurie who was the candidate. Hunt Knox’s idea of a media campaign, for instance, was that
he
should make a series of television spots, sitting at his desk before a wall of photographs of himself with people like Lyndon Johnson.

280 / Beth Gutcheon

“I’ll say ‘When I was governor you wanted me to do X, Y, and Z, and you weren’t disappointed. And you won’t be disappointed now if you send my little girl down there to Washington….”

“That’s a great idea, Hunt…” Amy would say, and Hunt would beam.

“And then, we could do another one, of me out hunting with the dogs, and I’ll say: ‘You know me, Hunt Knox, and you know my family and we have always been straight shooters. We understand this state…’”

“I’m not sure how that’s going to work, Hunt. Laurie’s for gun control.”

“No, no. Gun control? I better talk to her.”

“But it’s a good idea for a spot. Laurie’s a great shot. She could be out with
her
gun and the dogs, and she could explain that she’s licensed to use it for hunting, but she doesn’t think she should be allowed to stockpile bazookas…”

Hunt looked troubled.

“I don’t think this is going to play. This is a western state, it’s a sportsman’s state…”

“But she’s going to Washington, Governor. To make laws for New York City, and Los Angeles and Chicago. Not just Hailey.”

“What business does someone in Washington have telling someone in Hailey what to do with his guns?”

“That’s a good question,” said Amy cheerfully.

They did use a clip of Laurie shooting skeet, also some footage of Laurie on skis at nineteen, in a tight crouch, shooting down the last chute of a giant slalom race at Sun Valley, with the announcer’s voice cracking with excitement as he shouted her time over the cheers of the crowd.

In March, Laurie maintained an increasingly demanding schedule around the state, and with every week she grew more relaxed and confident. She went to PTAs and canasta clubs and Rotary groups and union halls and Grange meetings and coffee klatches and shopping malls. People were curious to meet her, and the press was eager to cover her. Roberto Lopez was news, Hunt Knox’s daughter was news,

Five Fortunes / 281

and any serious challenge to Jimbo Turnbull was news. But before there could be such a challenge there was the weekly war of momentum and public opinion building toward the primary in May.

A third candidate, Carrol Coney, had joined the race. He had recently moved across from Oregon and built himself a house in the Owyhee desert out of 135 bales of hay covered with plastic garbage bags. “A dollar a bale,” he told the press proudly. He was very photogenic in his long beard, with tattoos up and down his arms.

The Sunday papers loved him. His campaign listed no phone number because, as he explained, he had no phone.

“I set out to put an initiative on the ballot outlawing gun control,”

he told the press. “But I found out that took forty thousand signa-tures. It only takes a thousand to run for senator, so I decided to do that.” He talked a lot about our brother freemen over the border, Men of Montana, and about Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Laurie was becoming a gifted listener, brilliant at responding to questions. She was good at pacing, comfortable with freewheeling, and she was funny but gracious. Inescapably, as she grew weary of following orders to “stay on message,” she began to ad lib. The first time she gave Walter full-blown apoplexy was at a senior citizen’s center at Twin Falls. Laurie had joined the line-dancing class, side touch, side touch, with a dazzling smile, her long gray skirt swirling among the pink and turquoise exercise suits. She had joined a widows’ grief therapy group, both talking and listening. But in the question-and-answer period at the end of her visit she had taken the inevitable questions about protecting Medicare from marauding Republicans.