Interface (54 page)

The hospital doors slid open and Bianca Ramirez rolled out in a
wheelchair, pushed along by a smiling nurse, escorted by her entire medical team.

A disturbance moved through protesters and suddenly Carlos
and Anna Ramirez emerged from the crowd, smiles on their faces,
tears streaming down their cheeks. They moved across the
horseshoe drive, unhindered by journalists or INS agents or Shad Harper or anyone else, and engulfed their daughter in their arms.
And they were engulfed, in turn, by hundreds of their supporters.

The whole thing was a lot warmer and calmer than anyone had
expected. The only real disturbance was off to the side, where an
INS van, a paddywagon with steel grilles over all the windows, had
begun rocking from side to side. The driver jumped out, leaving
the van empty, and a broad open space suddenly appeared in the
crowd. Then a dozen men, their arms and backs burly from
stooping in Arkansas Valley truck farms, rolled it all the way over
on to its roof and left it there like a turtle upended on a highway.

31

Eleanor was in the middle of cleaning out her office. This
wasn't much of a job since she had barely moved into it and the
empty boxes were still stacked conveniently in the corner. Bent
over with both hands in a file drawer, she didn't notice Caleb
Roosevelt Marshall coming into her office until he got her
attention by tossing a keychain on to her vacant desktop.

"I'm taking you on a ride, lady," he said.

She straightened up, startled to see him standing right in front of
her, dressed in a blue work shirt and chinos, leaning on a cane. "I
have my best conversations when I'm driving flat out into the
mountains," he said, nodding at the keychain. Eleanor picked it up;
it was a set of keys to a rented Cadillac. "But now I'm getting too
old to drive. Can't even see the goddamn hood ornament."

"Allow me, then," Eleanor said.

It was a nice Cadillac, a convertible, parked in the Senator's
private space in back of the Alamo. The Senator had apparently
dismissed his security detail, so Eleanor offered her arm and helped
him out of the building and into the passenger seat. Then she got
in and cranked it up. The car had a nice sound system with a tape player, and although the Senator complained that he wanted to get
going, Eleanor decided to rummage around in the hollow center
armrest for one of his tapes.

"What are you going to play? Rap music?" he said as she popped
a tape out of its case and shoved it into the dashboard.

"Resurrection Symphony," Eleanor said, as the opening bars
came from speakers hidden all over the car.

"Good," Marshall said. "I been listening to it a lot. Figure I'd
better become expert in the subject. Now let's get going, damn it."

The Senator had a particular, highly detailed route he wanted to
follow through Denver and up into the mountains. He eschewed
the newfangled foolishness of freeways in favor of a devious route that took them down alleys, through parks, along curvy residential streets. For a while, as she followed his barked and seemingly
improvised instructions, she was afraid that he had gone completely
off his rocker and was getting them hopelessly lost. But they never got stuck at a slow stoplight, never had to make an impossible left
turn, and in time the city began to spread out and undulate as the landscape awoke from the thousand-mile slumber of the prairie.

"Thanks for saving my ass," Senator Marshall said, when he wasn't giving directions.

She smiled. "I was wondering whether you'd see it that way."

"Course I do. I'm not senile," he said. "Sooner or later a senator
has to rely on someone like you."

"How do you figure?"

"A senator has a big staff. He has to, in order to carry out the
basic functions of his office, and to get reelected. Normal people
don't take those kinds of jobs. If I could take people off the street, I would. That's how I got you. But normally I gotta hire the kinds of people who angle and maneuver for such work, which means
weasels like Shad Harper. And almost the moment they get into the
job, they start spinning their own goddamn agenda. Some of them
know what they're doing and some are just complete assholes. And
when the assholes get themselves into trouble, like Shad did, then
a senator has to have some way to get rid of them without bringing
down his whole career. And you served that purpose admirably in the affair of Shad Harper."

"Did you get my letter?"

"What letter? The resignation?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, I got that damn letter. I don't accept your resignation. I
want you working for me. Hell, woman, you're like a pit bull
trained to attack white men. I want you on my side."

Eleanor laughed. "I don't attack anyone."

"Well you sure do leave a lot of corpses in your wake."

The smile fell away from Eleanor's face and she drove in silence for a while.

She and Harmon hadn't spent a lot of time driving into the
mountains. She was not really a mountain person. They looked dangerous to her. For years she'd felt trapped, in a way, between
the mountain wall on one side and the endless plains on the other. The devil and the deep blue sea. Now that they were getting closer
to the first real range of mountains, a ridge of red stone that swept
smoothly up out of the grassland and broke off jaggedly hundreds of feet above their heads, she was beginning to remember that the
mountains had their attractions, that they were a lot more
interesting when you got up close instead of viewing them through
miles of brown Denver smog.

"Sorry," Caleb said, "that was a real stupid thing for me to say." Clearly, the Senator was not a man who apologized very often, and
he found it difficult.

"It's okay," she said. "I know what you meant."

"If I intended to run for another term, I'd have to sack you," he
said, after they had drawn closer to the base of the first ridge and
turned parallel to it along a rolling and winding road. They were
now completely out in the country.

"You don't say."

"When one of my staffers steps up in front of the single largest
collection of journalists ever assembled in Denver and announces
that everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen, it makes
things a little awkward for me."

This time Eleanor didn't laugh. She smiled, but it was a sheepish kind of grin. This was a Monday morning. She had spent yesterday
morning reading scathing editorials and rebuttals in the editorial
sections of the newspapers. To say that she had hit a nerve didn't do justice to the level of indignation.

"How many death threats have you gotten?" Senator Marshall
asked.

"I stopped listening to my messages after the third one," Eleanor
said.

"They actually put them on tape? They must have been really
pissed."

"Yeah."

"I can have the Secret Service check them out."

"It just sounds to me like a bunch of ranchers blowing off
steam," she said.

"It ain't just Colorado. You're the most hated woman in the
West," Senator Marshall said. "A lightning rod."

"I know it."

"People wouldn't be so vehement unless your words were
largely true," Senator Marshall said.

She gave him a searching look. "What's your opinion?"

The Senator winced, as if he wished she hadn't asked this
question. He looked out the window for a while, appalled.

"Well, of course you're right," he finally said. "The economy of
this whole region is built on subsidies and federal programs. But
people refuse to admit that because they want to believe in the cowboy myth. That their ancestors came out and made the desert
bloom solely through their own hard work and pluck.

"Now, they were plucky, and they did work hard. But there
are a lot of plucky, hard-working people in other places who have
gone down the toilet anyway just because they were pursuing a fool's errand, economically speaking. The people who came here
sort of lucked into a situation of cowboy socialism. Without
federal programs they'd go broke - no matter how hard they
worked."

"Federal programs that are kept alive by senators."

"Yeah. Colorado's small state population-wise. Our delegation
in the House can't do diddly. But in the Senate, every state is equal.
When one senator, like me, gets some seniority, works his way up
into a few key committee chairmanships, then some states are more
equal than others. My job - my
raison d'
ê
tre -
is to keep certain federal programs alive that prevent this region from turning back
into the buffalo farm God intended it to be.

"It's a feedback loop. This is high-tech lingo that I picked up in
the sixties when some goddamn ecologist was raving to me. I keep
the programs alive. The economy thrives. People move to
Colorado and vote for me. The cycle begins again.

"As long as those programs continue to exist, no one notices.
They are part of the landscape. They are forces of nature, like the wind and the rain. The people who live off them, people like Sam
Wyatt, have come to think of them as natural and divinely
ordained. To them, living off of federal largesse is no different in
principle than, say, fishing salmon from the Gulf of Alaska or
tapping maple syrup from trees in Maine. So, when someone like
you steps in front of the TV cameras and points out the obvious -
that these people are no different in principle from people who live
off
of welfare checks - it just drives them crazy. It strikes at the heart
of who they are."

Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn't believe that
Senator Marshall was saying these things. "So, why aren't you
going to accept my resignation?" she said.

"My whole career I've been doing things because I had to. Now
that I'm in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished I
could do but was afraid to."

"Well, the press should have a field day with that."

"The press can fuck themselves. Now I can say that. Take a right
here."

Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight into
the mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing:
steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the only
place within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it.
It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under grass and sage, its pink
and peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.

"You must be getting a lot of pressure to sack me."

"To hell with that. They'll forget all about it in a week, believe me. What I'll do is give you an internal transfer."

"Oh. So I'm getting a new job?"

"Yeah. You're getting a new job.
 
I'm getting you out of
Colorado before someone lynches your ass. Or mine."

"Oh, my god."

"That's right. You are going to Washington, D.C., lady. Back to
your hometown. And if you thought Denver was a nest of vipers,
you just wait."

They both shut up for a moment driving through the gap. Caleb
groped out with his left hand and turned the Resurrection
Symphony up to the point where it was loud even to his leathery
ears, and they cut through and suddenly found themselves in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Once it passed through the gap, the
road split off in three or four directions, and none of the signs meant
anything to Eleanor. "Which way do I go now?" she said.

"I got you here," Caleb said. "Now you're on your own."

PART 3

Vox Populi

If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is
promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule
and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox . . . But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is
often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. . . . With a view
to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs.
And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts
and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall
make unlawful gains and not be punished.