Interface (47 page)

"What are those things?" she asked as she got closer.

"They simulate what I would see looking through the view-
finder of a camera with a particular lens on it. It's just a visual device
that makes it easier to frame one's shots, figure out where to put the
camera."

"I've been following you around town" she said. "People said they've seen you out at the park, the high-school playing field, the
old train station."

"I don't get out to Tuscola very often," he said. "So as long as
I'm here I thought I'd get to know the place."

"Don't you think you're getting ahead of the game? Dad's
staying at home."

"I won't bullshit you," he said. "Cy Ogle wants to work for your
dad. This is important stuff to him. If anything happens, we'll need
to know where are the best places to shoot. And that's what I'm
finding out. Is that okay?"

Mary Catherine nodded at the little telescopes. "Do any of those
things work with a video camcorder?"

"Nah. These are all for professional film cameras."

"I'm confused," she said. "In some ways, you guys are taking this
thing way too seriously. In other ways, you're goofing off."

"You want to know why we're using that Kmart special to
videotape the Governor."

"Yeah."

"The whole point here is that these things are supposed to be
home movies. If the Governor chooses not to use our services, then
you end up with home movies in a format you can use. But if he
does hire us, we can make them into ads."

"Ads that look like shitty home movies."

"A-ha!" Myron Morris said, holding up one finger. "You were
expecting something a little slicker."

"If there's one adjective that's most commonly used in
connection with Cy Ogle, it is slick" Mary Catherine said.

"Which is why we want to go with the opposite of slick."

"I don't follow."

"Imagine it. A television ad showing big moments in the life of
William Anthony Cozzano. We see him horsing around this very
farm as a child. Scoring a touchdown in the Rose Bowl. We see
him in Vietnam. We see him playing for the Bears. Raising his kids.
All of this is going to be trashy, grainy, antiquated film stock.
Home-movie stuff. And then we see his recovery from the stroke
- some private moments at home - and all of a sudden it looks slick.
It's shot on 35-millimeter film stock, the lighting is perfect, he's
wearing makeup, all of a sudden it looks like goddamn Lawrence
of Arabia. You think people aren't going to notice that?"

Mary Catherine didn't have an answer for that one.

"Americans may be undereducated, lazy, and disorganized, but
they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth,
and that is watch television. The average eight-year-old American
has absorbed more about media technology than a goddamn film
student in most other countries. You can tell lies to them and
they'll never know. But if you try to lie to them
with the camera,
they'll crucify you. Which is why, when we shoot home movies of
your father, we use exactly the same machine that Joe Sixpack uses
when he sends a tape of his dancing Dalmation to
America's Funniest
Home Videos.
And to tell you the truth, we may actually have to go
through and process that videotape and make it look worse than it
does now."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Reagan did it in '80. I believe he made out okay." "But everyone will know that Ogle's working for Dad."
Myron shook his head dismissively.
 
"That's a verbal thing.
Nobody gives a shit about that, as long as the ads don't look slick.
Believe me, as long as we stick with half-inch videotape, and as
long as we avoid releasing any images of your Dad standing with one arm around Cy Ogle, nobody who matters will think that he's ever been near a slick media man."

28

As
Mary Catherine trudged back across the field to where
she had parked her car behind Morris's Suburban, a third car
cruised up the road and pulled on to the shoulder behind hers. It
was Mel's Mercedes.

Mel set the hand brake, climbed out, waved to her, and then
ambled around on the shoulder for a minute or two, squinting off
into the distance, taking in the vista. Views in this part of Illinois
were not exciting, but they were vast, and a person like Mel, who
spent much time pent up in a city, could come out here and stare
at the horizon in the same way that a vacationer in New York or
L.A. might go to the ocean and gaze off into emptiness.

Mel had given up cigarettes by the trick of switching to cigars,
which were so noxious that, like nuclear weapons, they could not
be used except in remote, desolate environments. He did not
smoke them in his Mercedes for fear of imparting an eternal reek
to the leather and the carpets. Now that he was out on the road,
he fished the extinct butt of a fat stogie from the pocket of his
trench coat and stoked it into life with a wooden safety match. Bubbles of silver smoke blew out from the corners of his mouth,
elongated in the wind, and whipped off across the prairie, picking
up almost palpable momentum as they headed for the Indiana
border.

After a minute or so, Mel's gaze settled on the farmhouse, which
he had helped to rebuild. The concept of a Jew learning to use a
claw hammer had been considered revolutionary by both the
Meyers and the Cozzanos, and had met with some resistance from
both groups. But the young Mel enjoyed his trips out of town and had insisted on riding the train down at least once a week during
the summers to pound nails. Three volumes of the library of
Cozzano family photo albums were devoted to the reconstruction of the house, and Mel showed up in a number of pictures, pale,
skinny, and bent as a peeled banana, kneeling on the bare plywood
of the new roof among burly, copper-hued Cozzanos, nailing
down the shingles one strip at a time.

Since then, Mel had always felt a proprietary interest in the
Cozzano farmhouse. He had only a distant relationship with the
Cozzanos who lived there now, but he liked to drive out from time
to time and look at it, as he was doing now. Mary Catherine did
not know whether he did this from pure nostalgia or from curiosity
about the durability of his handiwork or both. She did know that photographs of the completed farmhouse had circulated widely
among the Meyer family, as far away as Israel, as evidence of the
wonders that a Meyer could achieve if he was not afraid to brave
unknown fields of endeavour.

"When I was pounding in all those damn nails,
whack whack
whack,
day after day, I had this terrible fear that I didn't really know
what I was doing," Mel said, as Mary Catherine was vaulting the
fence again. "I would have nightmares that all of the nails I had
pounded in to that house would suddenly pop loose and all of
Willy's nails would hold fast, and everyone would blame me for the
house falling down."

"Well, it's still standing," Mary Catherine said.

"That it is," Mel said with satisfaction and finality, as if his sole
purpose in driving down from Chicago had been to make sure that the house was still there.

"Have you seen Dad?"

"Yeah, Willy and I saw each other," Mel said. "So the social
aspect of today's visit has been consummated."

"Oh. You don't want to socialize with me?"

Mel looked around them. A farm truck blasted down the road,
kicking up dust and rocks with its windblast, inflating Mel's trench
coat and Mary Catherine's hair for a moment. The red coal on the
end of Mel's cigar flared bright orange and caught his eye. He stared
into it as though mesmerized. "This is no place," he said, "to
socialize with a lady."

She smiled. Mel was old enough, and good enough, to talk this
way without seeming stilted or weird. "You didn't come down to
socialize with me anyway."

Mel took one last draw on his cigar and then examined it
regretfully. He pinched it carefully between the ball of his thumb
and the nail of his arched forefinger, straightened his arm, aimed it
into the ditch, and snapped the butt into a swampy patch. It died
with a quick sizzling burst. Mel stood still for a moment, staring at
it, and then expelled the last of the smoke from his mouth.

"Get in," he said. "Let's go get some coffee at the Dixie
Truckers' Home."

She grinned. The Dixie Truckers' Home was right out on I-57. Mel had driven by it a million times but never been there; for him
it was an object of morbid, sick fascination. Mary Catherine opened
the passenger door and climbed in. Normally Mel would have gone
all the way around the car and opened the door for her, but his
mind was elsewhere today. As he had implied, this was business, not
a social visit, and he wasn't thinking about the niceties.

The Mercedes was perfect for two, crowded for anyone else. It
was ideal for Mel, who was unmarried and childless and presumed
by many to be gay. He started up the engine and pulled out on to
the road and gave the car a tremendous long burst of acceleration
that took it all the way up past a hundred.

Mary Catherine's heart melted. Mel had always enjoyed thrilling
her and James with the power of his fancy European cars, ever since
they had been children. She knew that when he put the pedal down
and squealed the tires on this country road, he was evoking a
memory, for his own benefit as much as for Mary Catherine's.

"You know that the relationship between our families has been
strong and will continue to be," Mel said, "even though, over time,
it has gone through a lot of different shapes."

"What's going on?" she said.

Mel slowed the car down and looked sideways at Mary Catherine
for a moment. He seemed a little surprised by her impatience.

"Just take it easy," he said, "this is hard for me."

"Okay," she said. Her vision got a little blurry and her nose
started to run. She drew a deep silent breath and got the impulse
under control.

"The reason our families have gotten along together is that the
leaders - the patriarchs - have always been wise men who took the
long view of things. And who were willing to do what made sense
in the long run. Other people have looked at the strategies of the
Cozzanos and the Meyers and scratched their heads, but we have always had reasons for what we did."

"What are we doing now?" Mary Catherine said.

"Willy doesn't know this, because I didn't want to stress him out," Mel said, "but the shit is finally hitting the fan on what happened in February."

"What shit? What fan?"

Mel cocked his head back and forth from side to side, weighing
his thoughts. "Well, you know that we could have just hauled Willy down the front steps of the capitol and the whole thing
would have been splashed all over the evening news. Instead we took a more old-fashioned approach. Like when FDR was in a
wheelchair, but hardly anyone in America was aware of that fact
because his media coverage was manipulated so well."

"We concealed the extent of his illness," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. We let his organization run the state government for a
•while instead of just abdicating and turning things over to that putz,
the Lieutenant Governor, as we were technically supposed to do." Mel spoke the last phrase in a screwed-up, Mickey Mouse tone of
voice, as if the question of succession were a finicky bit of fine
print, a mere debater's point. "Well, it might be possible to make
the claim that what we did - what I did - was not, strictly speaking,
ethical. Or in some cases, even legal. And sooner or later this was
bound to come out."

"Let me ask you something," Mary Catherine said. "Did you
know, at the time you were doing this, that it might come out?"