Interface (33 page)

But Buckaroo had now found another way to use it. The doors
opened up and several men in dark suits climbed out and walked, in a cluster, toward the entrance of the mall. In the middle of the
group she could clearly make out the pre-owned and remanufactured
face of Earl Strong, who in these parts was invariably
described as "the next Senator from Colorado."

A few moments after he went into the mall, a big cheer rose up
from inside. They were holding some kind of campaign event
inside there.

She shook her head, staring at a huge COMES ON STRONG
poster stuck to the side of a bus directly in front of her.

Her bus wasn't due to leave for half an hour. There was really no
reason for her to sit outside on this bench when she could go into
the mall and kill time. It was just that she felt so trashy, walking
through the nice mall in her clothes, rumpled from having been
slept in, and her rumpled hair, carrying big hunks of generic bulk food that she had gotten for free.

Right next to her was a big pseudoadobe litter basket, nearly

overflowing, and resting on the top layer, neatly folded and put
away, was a thick glossy shopping bag from Nordstrom.

Eleanor pulled the bag out and unfolded it. It was clean and new.

She put her cheese and oatmeal inside the Nordstrom bag, got up, and walked toward the entrance of the shopping mall. She wanted to see what Erwin Dudley Strang was up to.

As she was approaching the entrance, she saw her reflection in
the glass doors. She had thought it was a clever trick, hiding her
welfare cheese in the Nordstrom bag, but when she saw herself, she
recognized something about her silhouette, a shape she'd seen in many cities, on many park benches, and a realization came to her.

She had become a bag lady.

It was a spear through her heart. She lost her stride and stumbled
to a complete halt. Tears flooded her eyes uncontrollably and her nose began to run. She sniffed, blinked, swallowed, and fought it
back.

The Earl Strong supporters were veering around her, turning
back to look at her face. She couldn't just stand there. She picked
up her pace and punched through the glass doors and in so doing, transformed herself from a bag lady into a shopper.

In the central part of the mall, Earl Strong was standing up on a
raised podium, coming on strong.

"Thank you all for coming today. I wanted to do this in
January, but the mall wouldn't let me have the space because they
said it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I said that I certainly
wouldn't want to have my name associated with a man who
plagiarized his dissertation and shacked up with women he wasn't
married to."

Nervous but exultant laughter ran through the crowd: a lot of
heavy middle-aged white men raising their eyebrows at each other
to see if they dared laugh at Martin Luther King. They did.

"Then I wanted to do it in February, but they said it was
President's Day. And I said that I liked the sound of that, but that I was only running for the Senate, and the presidency would have to
wait for a few more years."

That line brought a round of applause and a slowly gathering
chant of "Run! Run! Run" from the crowd. Earl Strong, obviously pleased, let the chant build for a few seconds, long enough to be picked up by the TV cameras, then made a big show of quieting it
down by waving his hands over the crowd.

"That left March or April. But in April, we've got Easter, when Christ rose from the dead, and that one is a little out of my scope.
So I settled on March. March is a plain and simple month, raw and
honest, not tricked up with any fancy holidays, and I decided that
suited my style best. And another thing about the month of March:
it comes on strong!"

That cued an outburst of cheering and chanting that went on for
several minutes.

Below, Eleanor wandered through the crowd with her shopping bag, watching the Strong supporters cheering and jumping up and
down and pumping their fists in the air. She was totally invisible.
They had eyes only for Strong. The few who did notice her got the same shocked look that Erwin Dudley Strang had gotten years ago
when he had first seen a black woman standing in the doorway of
a suburban house. Then they looked away. Guiltily.

People were so easy to understand, when you were a mom.
Eleanor could see their guilt a mile away, see them trying to delude
themselves, like kids who believed that they could make unpleasant
things go away just by wishing.

The only thing they needed, she realized, was a good talking-to.
Which was one thing that Earl Strong could never give them.

Eventually the cheering died away and Earl Strong stopped
shaking his clasped hands over his head and returned to the
podium, shot his cuffs, adjusted his collar just a bit. Eleanor had wandered rather close to him, was now looking up at him from just
a few feet away. His face was thickly plastered with television makeup. In his perfect, stiff suit and his injection-molded haircut and his heavy pancake, he looked like a cardboard cutout.

"Now you might ask why I went to so much trouble, and waited
so long, for the opportunity to speak here at the Boulevard Mall.
After all, there are better places to hold a campaign event. But this
mall has something that none of those places can provide. As I stand
here in the crossroads of this beautiful mall I can look in all
directions and see economic prosperity at work."

Applause.

"I don't see people standing in line for a handout. I don't see people going to court and suing other people for what they think
the world owes them. I don't see people breaking into other
people's homes and stealing things. I see people working hard in
honest businesses, small businesses, and to me that is what makes
America the greatest nation on earth."

Applause.

"And I have particular respect for the small businessmen, and
women - let's not forget the women's libbers!-" laughter "-who
built these businesses, because for a number of years, I was a small businessman myself, owning and operating my own enterprise as an
independent contractor."

Eleanor could not restrain herself; standing now at the base of the
podium, she spoke up. "Excuse me! Excuse me?"

Earl Strong looked down at her with a fixed, glazed smile. He
noticed that she was black. Once again, he got that look on his
face.

But he was older and, if not wiser, then smarter. He didn't let it
throw him off. She could see the wheels turning beneath his
artificial face. She could see him having an inspiration, making a
quick command decision.

"I don't usually take questions from the audience at this point in the speech," he said, "but some people have been saying that I only
appeal to one kind of person, and I'm glad to see that a racially
diverse group is here today, and I see that one of them has a
comment she wants to make, and I'm very interested in hearing
what she has to say. Ma'am?"

Television sound men brandished their boom microphones like fishermen on a dock waving grotesque, furry lures, competing for
the attention of the only fish in the pond.

"You were saying that you were a businessman," she said, and
suddenly her voice was very loud through the amplifiers, and she
realized that she didn't have to shout anymore.

"That I was," Strong said. But his voice didn't come through;
Eleanor had the microphones.

"You were a cable TV installer," she said, in a normal tone of
voice. She sounded good. Everyone had always said she had a good
telephone voice.

"Yes, ma'am, that I was," Strong said, shouting toward the microphones now, his voice high and strained.

"Well, a cable TV installer isn't so much a businessman as he is a
burglar with pretensions."

Most of the crowd gasped. But a lot of them actually laughed.
Not the deep forced belly laughter with which they had responded
to Earl Strong's canned jokes. It was nervous tittering, choked off
in the middle, just this side of hysteria.

Earl Strong was cool. He was good. The smile on his face barely wavered. He was silent and calculating for a few moments, waiting
for the laugher to die away, searching her up and down with his
eyes.

"Well," he said, "I must say that's quite a disrespectful attitude for a woman who's carrying a big piece of cheese in her bag that
was paid for by my tax dollars."

A smattering of belly laughs, and sparse applause. Most of the
people were silent, nervously realizing that Earl Strong was verging
on dangerous territory. And in the near vicinity of Eleanor, there
was violent convection in the crowd. Die-hard Earl Strong
supports were stepping away from her as if she was going to give
them AIDS, and minicam crews and news photographers were converging on her as if she were going to make them famous.

"Well," Eleanor said, "I would say that even showing yourself in
public is pretty cheeky when you are nothing more than a pencil-
neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart."

This time, there was utter silence, except for a few sharp intakes of breath.

Earl Strong had gone bright red under his pancake makeup.

"Besides," she added, "this cheese didn't come from your tax
dollars. It was bought by churchgoers who give money to support
a public food bank. Have you ever been to church, Mr. Strong?

Before you started running for something, that is."

"I am a conservative Christian," he said. "I have no qualms about
saying so."

"You have no qualms about saying anything that'll get you
elected."

Another nervous titter from the crowd. But father away, around
the fringes, a cheer went up; passing shoppers had gathered,
attracted by the noise and now they were cheering her on.

"I saw you show up just now in that tacky limousine. Most of
the people who ride around in that thing are used-car salesmen or silicone beauty queens. Which one are you?" she said.

"I resent the implication that there's something wrong with the used-car trade."

"It's not exactly a character reference for you, Erwin Dudley Strang or whatever your name is."

"My name is Earl Strong. And it's an
honest
business like any
other."

"Oooh, Erwin Dudley Strang is giving me a lecture about how
to be honest," Eleanor said. "I know you think all black people are
dishonest. Well, the only dishonest thing I've ever done is tell
myself I had a chance to make it in a white society."

"There we have it," Strong said, addressing the crowd again. "The defeatist attitude that is bringing our economy down and
brainwashing many minority people into thinking that they have to
have affirmative action programs in order to succeed. This is a
classic example of the attitude problem that prevents black people
from succeeding, even where no real impediments exist."

"I don't have a car," Eleanor said. "That's a real impediment. I
don't have a job. My husband's dead. How many more impedi
ments do I need?"

"None whatsoever," Strong said. "That's plenty. Why don't you
just shut up now."

"I won't shut up because I'm hurting you on television, and you
don't have the brains or the balls to stop me."

A big
whooo!
went up from the shoppers.

Strong laughed. "Lady, I represent a political ground swell in this
country that is more powerful than you can imagine. And there is nothing you can do, on or off television, to hurt me. All you do is
annoy me."

"I know that's what you think. Ever since you took that belt
sander to your face you think you're the second coming of Ronald Reagan. You think you're made of teflon. Well, it takes more than
a simple mind and synthetic smile to be Ronald Reagan. You also have to be likable. And you aren't any more likable than you were
when you showed up at my door at 4:54
p.m.
and installed my
cable like some kind of a trained monkey."