Interface (40 page)

Finally politeness took over and she reached out and shook his
hand. He seized hers, not with the perfunctory squeeze of a
politician, but with the powerful grip of a man who has to pull himself up out of chairs and beds. He didn't let go.

"Done," he said, "you're hired."

Eleanor laughed wildly. "You're crazy!" she said, "what are you talking about?"

"I don't know."

"So you're just kidding."

"Oh no. I sure as hell ain't kidding. You're definitely hired. I just
haven't worked through all the bullshit yet."

"The bullshit?"

"Job tide, GSA level, what kind of desk to get you, what kind of
goddamn picture to hang on the wall of your office. See, one of the
things you learn, when you've hired a lot of people, and then fired
most of them, is that when you find a quality person, you hire them
right away and work out the details later. And I just hired you."

"Just on the strength of the fact that I said some nasty things to
Earl Strong."

"You said some true things," Caleb Roosevelt Marshall said, "which is something that few people in Washington are capable of
doing. And you said them well, which is just as unusual."

He still hadn't let go of her hand.

"I would have expected you to like Earl Strong."

"Ha! You think I'll support anyone who comes along and spouts
a few positions similar to mine. What do you think I am, a senile
old moron?"

"Isn't that how it works?"

"Positions change. People don't. Earl Strong may or may not
always be a so-called conservative populist. But he will definitely
always be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don't want to serve with him in the
Senate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe you
a
job."

"Well, I'm not sure I want to work with you."

"Eleanor Boxwood Richmond," he said, "you and I got exactly
the same politics. Only thing is, you don't know it yet."

"How can you say that? I've been a liberal Democrat all my life."

Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head
dismissively. "All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit," he
said. "And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very
promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don't really
mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide
divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more
overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The
only thing that matters is values."

"Values?"

"Values. I've got 'em. You've got 'em. Earl Strong doesn't. That means you and I are on the same side. We have to stick together,
you and I."

"And that means you're going to give me a
job."

"I already figured it out. Took me a few minutes, but I figured
it out. I need a health and human services liaison for my Denver office. We can start you on Monday. You'll work your ass off and make forty-five thousand plus full medical. Interested?"

"What can I say?" Indeed, what could she say? "Sure. I'll take it.
What do I have to do?"

"Answer irate phone calls from parasites who want to know
what became of their welfare checks.

"Okay. I can do that."

"Done," the Senator said, and let go of her hand finally.

"One question."

"Yeah?"

"Do you expect me to blow these people off, or to actually help them? Because if someone calls me wanting to find their welfare
check, I intend to help them out."

"None of them vote," the Senator said, "so they can all go to hell
as far as I'm concerned. You can handle it any way you want."

24

The ride took her in slowly through Commerce City and n
orth Denver, the attic of the West: square miles of warehouses,
stacks of empty cargo pallets that must have consumed whole forests, entire blocks of businesses devoted to truck clutches.
Eleanor had seen it too many times to count, but sitting on The
Ride in her one and only decent dress, on her way to work -
work -
she saw it all from a new perspective, like a queen surveying her domain.

The sky was always sapphire blue when Eleanor looked straight
up, but as she tracked it down toward the horizon it faded to a hot yellowish brown as if something had singed it around the edges.
Eleanor was never sure if the stuff in the air was pollution or
airborne topsoil, but it usually gave her a bad feeling about
wherever she was going. She was tired of being able to see so far,
and wanted to be hemmed in a little bit.

Downtown Denver fit that bill. It always looked clean because it
was built-up, and so you couldn't see far enough to notice how
dirty the air was. Eleanor sat on a bench for a while, waiting for
another Ride, and marveled at the place. When you were used to
the dusty flatlands out by the arsenal, the smallest things - a freshly
painted GODS drop box sitting on a street corner, a young woman
wearing white stockings, a Volvo with water beaded up on its hood
from the car wash - looked impossibly clean and new, like images
from a Kodak or Polaroid advertisement.

This was the world where a lot of people lived their whole lives.
A world where Eleanor had lived for many years but that now
looked like an alien planet to her dusty bloodshot eyes, and where
she had just been given the tiniest of handholds.

Tree-lined Pennsylvania Street ran north-south behind the state
capitol. At some point in Denver's early boom years it had been the
fashionable place for barons to construct their mansions - not just
homes, but seats of political and social influence. The architecture
was diverse, and exuberant bordering on eccentric, including huge
Victorian homes, plantation-style classical structures, arched-and-
turreted Romanesques, and one especially large and bizarre
structure, a red sandstone mission building that bore more than a
passing resemblance to the Alamo.

Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall used that building as his home
office, and he referred to it as the Alamo, which was not a popular
joke among his Mexican-American constituents, but then he was
not the type to care.

Like any big rambling eccentric old building, it had good offices
and bad ones. The office assigned to Eleanor Richmond was
especially bad, but that was a fact that wouldn't even occur to her
until she had been working there for a while. When she showed up
for her first day as Health and Human Services Liaison, all she cared
about was that she had a job. And a damn good job, as these things
went.

She was wearing her interview dress. She wasn't sure why. She
had worn it to all of her job interviews in the past several years and
it hadn't done a thing for her. She had interviewed for her job with
Senator Marshall in a Towson State University sweatshirt and nonmatching Army sweatpants. But this was the one dress that she
had been at pains to take care of through all the turbulence in her life. She had somehow thought that she could never become a true bag lady if she owned one clean, decent dress. So now she was
wearing it to work. When the paychecks started coming in, she
could go back to the Boulevard Mall, this time as a paying customer, and cut a swath through Nordstrom, like General
Sherman plowing through Dixie.

The first thing that anyone said to her was a sound effect:
"Foop-
foop-foop."

She had been walking down a hallway in her interview dress,
carrying a box full of photos and other personal effects in her arms,
looking into each door as she went by, trying to find the one that
belonged to her. And when she finally found it, walked into the
small windowless room (later she learned it had been the walk-in
closet of a railway baroness), and set her box down on the crated and elbow-worn formica of the desktop, she heard it. She turned
around. A man was standing in her office doorway. She didn't like him.

He was in his mid-to-late twenties, or maybe he was an older
guy who just looked young. He was wearing a pinstriped suit with
cowboy boots. His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. He had sparkly gray eyes and high
mischievous eyebrows that could have made him look wild and
fun, if he could have ditched the suit and the gel for, say, a pair of
shorts and a long outdoorsman's mane. But instead he struck
Eleanor as unnaturally pinned back.

When she first saw him, he was leaning into her office doorway,
holding one index finger straight up in the air, rotating his hand
around in a circle, saying ,
"Foop-foop-foop."

"Excuse me?" she said.

"Somebody ought to put a revolving door on this office," he
said. "Seems like I get a new neighbor in here every week - Hello,"
he said, segueing in midsentence like a game show host, and
turning the rotating index finger into an outstretched right hand,
"Shad Harper. You'd be Eleanor."

Eleanor took half a step toward him and began to extend her
right hand. He dove in, grabbed her hand too soon, seized the very
tips of her fingers, squeezed them together hard, and pumped for a
few seconds.

"Eleanor
Richmond,"
she said, but this hint was completely lost
on him, as she knew it would be.

"Good to know you, Eleanor."

"You have the next office,
Mr. Harper?"

"Yeah. Come on over any time you want to have a look at the
courtyard," he said, widening his eyes just a bit and staring
significantly at the blank wall behind Eleanor's desk. The office of
Shad Harper was a big old master bedroom or something, and she could already see that he had lots of windows.

These were all things that would bother her later. At the
moment, nothing could penetrate the endorphin buzz that she had
from actually being on a payroll.

"Thank you," she said, "you're very kind."

"Saw you on TV. That was quite a little tantrum you threw in
front of Earl Strong there."

"And what do you do for the Senator?" she said.

"Oh," he said, as if he were surprised that she didn't already
know, "I'm the BLM liaison."

"BLM?"

"Bureau of Land Management," he recited, with calculated
nonchalance.

Looking over his shoulder across the hallway, Eleanor could see
a bleached longhorn skull hanging on one of the rare parts of
Harper's office wall that did not consist of windows. That, and the
cowboy boots, told the story of Shad Harper.

Bureau of Land Management. Colorado had a lot of land that
needed to be managed. A lot of voters lived on or near that land.
When the land did get managed, it was through federal programs.
Shad Harper must be keeping tabs on a lot of money.

He was very young. Which was not a problem in and of itself;
Eleanor had known a lot of bright young things who were a
pleasure to be around. But Shad Harper didn't seem to realize that
he was still a young man. He ought to be out riding a mountain
bike around Boulder. Any man of his age who was not out goofing
off was difficult to trust.

He raised his eyebrows, showing exaggerated concern, and
puckered his lips into a silent O shape. "I think your phone's
ringing, Eleanor," he said.

Eleanor turned around and looked at her phone, an elaborate,
high-tech, multiline model with lots of tiny little buttons on it.
Each button had tiny little red and green lights next to it. Some
buttons had red lights going. Some had green lights going. Some
had both. Some of the lights were blinking others were not. It
looked like a Christmas decoration.

"Well, thank you," she said, "but I don't hear anything."

"I took the liberty of turning the ringer off while this office was vacant," he said. "It was driving me crazy. I gotta get back. I'll see
you later, Eleanor."