Interface (32 page)

He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As a
result they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps in
the siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon ended
up spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall and
reattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding popped
back together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected to
ground the cable system properly, which put the whole family at
risk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to a
cold-water pipe down in the basement.

All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang's statement,
which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cable
company property and they were not allowed to mess with it in any
way.

"It's all hooked up," he said, at some point when he had
arbitrarily decided that he was finished. "Now, if you'll show me
your TV, I'll hook it up for you."

The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There was
not a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the whole
development. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through every
room in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was asking
to see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forced
innocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailed
the teacher with a spitball.

She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he was
saying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playing
some kind of game. She had no idea what it was.

"It's not here. We haven't moved in yet," she finally said.
Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.

"Well, then I can't show you how to hook it up."

"It's cable-ready," she said. "All we have to do is screw the cable
in the back and turn it on."

"And plug it into the power outlet," he corrected her, just a hint
of a smirk on his face.

"Yes, and plug it in. Good point," she said.

"Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands here
might be different from the bands there."

She had been expecting something like this. Telling Erwin
Dudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount to
making fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. He
would have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.

"From the bands where?" she asked.

His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of a
curve ball. "Wherever y'all came from," he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the "y'all."

"If you don't know where we came from, how do you know
that the bands are different?"

"Well, you came from back East, didn't you? From one of them
big cities?"

"No. We were at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center for a couple
of years. Before that we lived in Germany."

"Oooh, Germany," he said. Then, moving so suddenly that he
made Eleanor startle, he stood up straight, clicked the heels of his
work boots together, and jutted his right arm out in a Nazi salute.
"Sieg Heil!"
he hollered. He dropped his arm and a smile spread
across his face as he watched Eleanor's reaction. "Lots of those
kinds of people there? You know, National Socialists?"

"You mean Nazis?"

"Well, that's kind of a slang term, but yeah, that's what I mean."

"Never saw one
there,"
Eleanor said. "If you're finished, you can
leave now."

Strang raised his eyebrows fastidiously. "Well, technically
speaking, I'm not finished with the installation until I have hooked
up the TV set and gotten it running to the satisfaction of the
owner."

"My husband is an engineer. He'll get it running. If we're not
satisfied, we'll call the cable company."

"But before I leave, I have to get your signature on this docu
ment," Strang said, holding up an aluminium clipboard, "which
states that the installation is complete and you are satisfied with the
quality of service."

"I'll sign anything, at this point."

"You sure?" Strang said, wiggling the clipboard just out of
Eleanor's reach.

"Positive."

"We could test it right now if you could get a TV set."

"For the eight hundredth time, I do not have a TV."

"I'll bet you could get one, though."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

Strang looked out the windows of the living room, down the
block. "Must be some other houses around here that have TVs. I'll
bet you could figure out a way to get your hands on someone else's
TV set, if you really wanted it."

She just stared at him, narrowed her eyes, shook her head in
amazement.

He continued, "Course now that
y'all
are out here in the nice
part of town, I'll bet you don't do that kind of thing no more. But
I'll bet you still got the skills.
Y'all
are just a little rusty."

"I'm gong to call the cable TV company and they are going to
fire your ass," she said.

"They can't," he said. "I don't work for them. I'm an inde
pendent contractor. Just a small-time entrepreneurial businessman
struggling to make my way."

"Then I'll make sure they never hire you again."

"Your word against mine," he said, "and even if they believe
you, there's plenty of other cable systems out here in Colorful
Colorado that keep my services in high demand."

She knew it was crazy for her to be arguing this with him. She
should just throw him out of the house. But her parents had
raised her to talk things out. They had worked their fingers to the bone paying for an expensive Catholic education so that the nuns could teach her to be a rational, intelligent citizen. She could not
get over the impulse to make Erwin Dudley Strang see reason.
"Why shouldn't they believe me?" she said. "Why would I
bother to call in such a complaint? It's not something I would do
for fun."

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," he said.

"What!?"

"I seen the way you been looking at me," he said. "If you want
a taste, why don't you just ask for it?"

"Oh, Jesus," she said, "get out of my house. Get out now. Just
get out."

"Upstairs bedroom has some nice carpet in it. Almost as good as
a bed."

Then she astonished herself by kicking him in the nuts. Hard. A
direct hit. His mouth formed into an O shape, his eyes got big, he
stuck his arms down between his thighs, sank to the living room
floor, and lay down on his side, sucking in quick, short breaths
through his puckered lips.

She went right out to her car, rolled up the windows, locked the
doors, and started the engine.

After a few minutes, Strang came out, walking in little tiny baby
step, climbed gingerly into his van, and after sitting there in the front seat for a few ominous minutes, backed out of the driveway
and went away.

Later they found out that he had forged Eleanor's signature on
the work order form. She didn't care.

The next time Eleanor saw Erwin Dudley Strang, he was on
television, his name was Earl Strong, and his complexion was
frighteningly, unnaturally smooth, as if he had been lovingly
spackled, buffed, and polished. The white skin of his cheeks was
luminous under the lights of the television studio, and almost fuzzy,
like an off-focus beauty shot of an aging movie star. As if the camera
could not find any feature or blemish to focus on.

She saw his face on the local public-access cable TV channel one
night when she was flipping through the channels after Harmon and the children had gone to bed. It went without saying that the
cable had never worked perfectly ever since Strang installed it. It
was always a little snowy, with a bit of fuzz in the audio, and
whenever the wind blew, the picture started to jump. But putting
up with bad television was preferable to phoning the cable TV
company and having them send
him
back to fix it.

It was creepy and ironic to be flipping through the channels,
cursing the bad reception, cursing the man who had installed it, and suddenly to have
him
show up on screen, in a full talking head shot, wearing a business suit.

She looked at him for a moment and flipped on to the next
channel. She didn't want to see the man. So he was wearing a
business suit. He had found some other profession to give a bad
name to. She didn't care.

But a few nights later she saw him again, and this time the letters
EARL STRONG were superimposed on the bottom of the screen, and finally she had to stop right there and watch.

It was some kind of talk show. Not a slick network production
by any means. Just a sheet-metal desk in front of a big piece of blue
paper with a Goodwill sofa next to it where the guests sat.

But Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang wasn't sitting on the sofa.
He was sitting behind the desk, in a cheap folding sheet-metal chair
that creaked whenever he shifted his weight. He was the host.

Eleanor had to go and dig up the little channel guide, the little
slip of cardboard that Strang had given her years ago, to find out
what channel she was watching. It said CH. 29 - PUBLIC
ACCESS CABLEVISION.

Earl Strong was talking politics with an assortment of off-brand
philosophers who drifted across his little stage, seemingly following
their own cues. The camera angle never varied. Clearly there was only one camera taping this thing, and it was sitting on a tripod, running on autopilot. It was comically inept, just the kind of thing
that he would throw together.

The title of tonight's broadcast was "The Three-Fifths
Compromise: Error or Inspiration?" Eleanor could only listen to about thirty seconds of it before she was overcome by an odd
combination of boredom and fury.

The name of the show was
Coming on Strong.
Earl Strong kept
coming on, week after week, year after year. It seemed that every time she happened to flip past his little program, he looked a little
different: he did something about those crooked teeth. Got his chin
lengthened. Fixed the nose. Bought a narrower and more conser
vative set of neckties. Played endlessly with his hairstyle until he
found one - close-cropped but carefully sculpted - that worked.
Bought himself a chair that did not creak. Moved to a better studio,
got a two-camera setup, then a three-camera setup. Got com
mercial sponsorship from Ty (Buckaroo) Steele, a prominent local
purveyor of cut-rate used cars, and made the jump from public-
access cable to one of the local commercial stations.

And at each step of the process, Eleanor laughed and shook her
head, remembering him curled up on the floor in her living room,
sucking in short little breaths, and she wondered how long it would
take for this man to be found out for the shabby little fraud he really
was. Each time he attained a little more success, Eleanor was
shocked for a moment, even a little frightened. Then she calmed
herself down by reminding herself that the higher he got, the
harder he would fall in the end.

Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this
man.

But no one ever did.

And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the
United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved
him.

19

A white limousine pulled into the parking lot of the mall,
swung past the line of waiting buses, and came to a stop in front of
the main entrance. This limousine was far from elegant; it was a
rolling billboard for Ty (Buckaroo) Steele's Pre-Owned and
Remanufactured Vehicles Inc. The only time it ever came out of
the garage was during parades, when Buckaroo himself would drive
it down the street with some local beauty queen popping out of the
sunroof to wave at the crowd and pelt the young 'uns with hard
candy.