Interface (70 page)

"When you've recovered," she said, "I have one or two more
things."

"I think I feel a little better now," Ogle said. "Shoot."

"I feel like I'm being set up as some kind of a surrogate wife. It's
creepy."

"Yes, it is," Ogle said.

"It borders on the perverse. I'm not going to do it anymore."

"You don't have to," Ogle said. "The only reason it happened
today was that this is a formal event, kind of like a wedding. In a wedding, you know, the father is supposed to give away the bride.
But if the father of the bride is dead, or if he hit the road twenty
years ago with some white trash floozy and a fifth of Jack and never
was heard from again, then that place must be filled by some other
individual - it doesn't matter who - anyone with a Y chromosome.
Could be a brother, an uncle, even the bride's high-school
basketball coach. It just don't matter. Well, a campaign announcement is the same deal except that normally the wife is there in her
silly hat and her sensible shoes. You performed that role today; it's
just that you happened to look a hell of a lot better."

"Thanks," she snapped, rolling her eyes.

"Now that the ceremony is over, you can go back to being who
you are. No more creepy stuff at least until he gets inaugurated."

"One more thing."

"What's that?"

"I'm the campaign physician."

Ogle was a bit startled.
 
"We already hired-"

"I'm the campaign physician."

"We need you for other-"

"I'm the campaign physician," she said.

This time it sunk in. Ogle shrugged and nodded. "You're
obviously the best person for the job."

The direct hit to Ogle's head had put the little kid on the
pitcher's mound over the five-hundred-point mark. Mary
Catherine thought about starting another game, but her attention
had been drawn by a great deal of cheering and hilarity from one of the other playing fields. She headed in that direction.

A football game was in progress. Two teams of at least fifteen
players each had taken the field. The ex-Bears were evenly divided
between those two teams. Cozzano was, of course, the quarterback
of one team. The opposing quarterback wore two Super Bowl
rings. The ages of the teams ranged from ten years old up to the
early seventies. Some of the players were farmers and some ran
major corporations. Mary Catherine recognized Kevin Tice, the
founder of Pacific Netware, serving as a wide receiver; in person, he was bigger and more athletic than his nerdy image would lead
one to believe. Zeldo was in the trenches on the defensive line,
being blocked by none other than Hugh MacIntyre, CEO of
MacIntyre Engineering, who must have been in his early sixties but
looked as strong and healthy as Dad.

The game was an extremely loose and goofy affair, with players
of both teams constantly circulating on and off the field to get
refreshments or visit the portable toilets. It was too hot to play hard.
Still, each team had a hard core of adult men with highly com
petitive natures, and as the game wore on, all the little kids and the
dilettantes dropped out and left behind half a dozen or so guys on
each side, playing football that verged on serious. They didn't have
a formal timekeeper, but they did have a deadline: a formal
reception was taking place later at the Cozzano residence and they
all had to quit playing at six o'clock.

At the end, the game actually got exciting. Cozzano's team was
down by three points with time left for only one play. They came
out in shotgun formation; the ball was expertly snapped by a Nobel
laureate from the University of Chicago and Cozzano dropped
back to pass, faking repeatedly in the direction of a very tall retired
Celtic who was running toward the end zone, waving his arms
frantically. The defense shouted in unison "ONE MISSISSIPPI
TWO MISSISSIPPI THREE MISSISSIPPI!" giving Cozzano a
little bit of time, and then they attacked. Zeldo defeated the
blocking efforts of Hugh MacIntyre, despite the fact the MacIntyre
illegally held on to his belt and began to chase Cozzano around the
backfield. Cozzano scrambled expertly and wildly, evading tackle
after tackle; he was older and slower than Zeldo, but he was
wearing shoes with rubber soles. Finally, Zeldo managed to bring
Cozzano down near the forty-yard line, just as Cozzano launched
a desperation pass known as a Hail Mary. To no one's surprise, the
ex-Celtic grabbed the bull out of the air high over the outstretched
hands of the defenders and then fell into the end zone, winning the
game.

Mary Catherine applauded and cheered along with the rest of the
crowd, then looked back up the field at her father and Zeldo. They
were lying on the grass next to each other, propped up on their
elbows, watching the action, laughing the deep, booming laughter
of men completely out of their mind on a potent cocktail of dirt,
football, male bonding, and testosterone.

41

Mary Catherine extricated herself from the reception
around midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, she
stuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardware
and shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice at
the age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists had
left, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with her
old single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, her
own little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. For
the first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.

The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. A
barrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out the
Fourth of July. "God forgive me for this," Mary Catherine said,
reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, "but I have to see how this looked on TV."

It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. Mary
Catherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked different
on TV than they did in reality. But she didn't understand that well
enough to predict how something would turn out on the small
screen.

Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressive
enough in person. But on television, you didn't see any of the
boring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the good
stuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most of
Cozzano's run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse of
a string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.

And
she
looked incredible. She almost didn't recognize herself, but was embarrassed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?

The CNN report didn't last long. They hit all the high points of
the rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on a
silver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, including
some great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.

CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electro
magnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fishing shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, and
Star Trek
before finally
locating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad's speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he had
been saying while she was looking around and chatting with all the
little kids.

"About half a mile from here there's a factory that my father
built, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow,
during the 1940s. The Army wouldn't let him fight - his mother
had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he was
determined to get into the war one way or the other."

This was not true. He didn't build it with his own capital. The
Meyers raised most of the money.

On the TV, Dad continued. "That factory made a new product
known as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk -
the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion was
finally launched, my father couldn't be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of France
on that fateful day."

He didn't make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Army
bought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.

"After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father's factory
one beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr. Cozzano. Well, in
a lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from the
receptionists and the P.R. people but in my father's company you
could always go straight to the top. So in short order this man was
ushered into John Cozzano's office. And when he finally came
face-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad became
positively choked up with emotion and couldn't bring himself to
speak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a para
trooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion.
A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundred
of them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum loss
of life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzano
label printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that
name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang.
That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of the
airplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see,
because that meant more to him than any of the money or anything
else that he had gotten out of his factory-

The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed,
holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. She
was frozen in place.

The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad.
Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad
would never tell a lie. Mel was right.

A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that had
gripped her on the night of her father's first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax its
hold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought that
she and her family were out of the wood.

She'd been wrong. They weren't out of the woods. They had
just walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in the
heart of a deeper and vaster forest than she'd ever imagined.

The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. She
could hear a new sound from the next room. James's old room. It
was the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed and
power of a drumroll.

Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lights
and inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on a
black background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with at
least a dozen windows open on it, each one filled with long snaking
lines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computer
code.

"Hi," she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry to startle you."

"That's okay," Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning his
chair around to face her. "Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want."

"It's okay," she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and sat
down.

"Thanks. I'm running in blackout mode here," Zeldo said,
"been on this damn machine too long and my eyes won't focus anymore."

"What's going on?" she said. She had to assume, from what Mel
had told her, that they were probably being listened to right now.
For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of the
Network, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, in
the football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn't normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemes
Zeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A.
Cozzano.