Текст книги "All That Follows"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace,Jim Crace,Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

They leave their house by the back garden, like burglars, and walk unnoticed through their neighbor’s garden and side gate. There’s no one outside watching them. They walk once round the block, as dawdling as dog walkers, checking for unwanted company, before returning to the car. No stalkers at their backs, so far as they can tell. Still, they have to be discreet and take the country route again, where license-recognition pillars are thinner on the ground and there are no Routeway chargers to register their highway fees and distances. Leonard checks the wing mirrors obsessively at first, but as soon as they have cleared the suburbs and estates there is too much empty road behind them to suggest a shadow. Quite what they’ll do when they reach Lucy’s house – Leonard has retrieved the scrap of card from the Florentine box on which he noted the number and address on Thursday night – and how they’ll get to talk with Nadia Emmerson without being noticed, they are not sure. They’ve not discussed it, actually. They’ll extemporize – one note and one step at a time.

At first, with her husband at the wheel, Francine travels in silence. She is both burdened and elated. Undecided still. Once they have reached the country roads and there is spasmodic scenery – a nagging, undulating screen of protected hedgerows with vaults and cupolas of more distant woods and hills – she brightens up, sits straighter in her seat, breathes less reprovingly. “I’d better use mycell,” she says, and busies herself calling the eight guests for that evening’s birthday dinner party.

“Tell them you’re not well,” mutters Leonard, instantly regretting it. And, then, “Say that I’m not well.”

Francine’s not the sort to tell a lie. Nor is she the sort to break a confidence. “Something problematic has come up we’ve got to fix at once. We’re driving out of town,” she explains, managing to disguise the tension in her voice. “Don’t ask. It’s too embarrassing.”

“That’ll set their tongues wagging,” Leonard says, but does not add what he’s thinking, that sometimes fibs are best. More considerate, for sure.

Francine, convincingly warm and regretful on the phone, is clipped with him again. “Let them wag. So what?” But at least they’re talking now.

“I’m truly sorry about the dinner party,” Leonard says, a touch too stiffly, after he has spent some minutes planning how best to broker peace with his wife now that he has sulked for long enough.

“It’s not important, is it, now?”

“No, but it was kind of you. As usual.”

“A total waste.”

“It was a thoughtful … thought.”

“There’s presents too. And cards,” she says flatly. “You haven’t even opened them.”

“Who gives a damn about my birthday now, you selfish bloody idiot?” he says, risking the mimicry at her expense. “I’ve got another one next year. In fact, I’ve got one booked every year until I’m a hundred and one.”

“You hope. Not if it’s up to me, you haven’t.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I could’ve throttled you this morning.” At last Francine smiles at him.

“Still want to throttle me?”

“No question, yes, but not while you’re driving. Not while you’re driving my car. Not while I’m in it, anyway.”

“It’s ages since we’ve driven out of town together.”

“More fun than a dinner party, isn’t it? Less work! Less fattening!”

“It is more fun, if me and you are getting on.”

“We’re talking, aren’t we?” She runs her tongue along her bottom lip and looks at him. “And have you told me everything?” Leonard pulls a face. “Deep breaths are called for, don’t you think, Mr. Lessing? Actually, Lessing is the perfect name for you. Lessening. Keeping it moderate and—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard ’em all before. From you.”

“Well, have you?”

“What?”

“Told me absolutely everything?”

Leonard laughs. “Show me the man who will tell his wife everything. What is it that you think I ought to tell?”

“The truth might be interesting. The backstory. We’ve got all day.”

“None of it’s interesting, exactly. Let’s put some music on.”

Francine punches him softly in the arm. “I don’t want music now. No, absolutely not. Do what you’re asked for once.”

They sit in silence for some moments more, until they turn off the lorry route and reach open, quieter stretches of road. It isn’t quite the satiated, loving silence they enjoyed at Wilbury’s, but at least they have agreed to a working truce. Leonard reaches out with his good arm and takes his wife’s cool hand. His birthday’s saved, so long as he will talk.

“Now we are sitting comfortably,” Francine says, adopting her schoolteacher voice, “let’s begin at the beginning.”

“All that lousy David Copperfield kinda crap?” Leonard says evasively. He can see where this is heading.

“No, Austin, Texas, Maxie, all that meat.”

“It’ll be embarrassing.” But only if he tells the truth.

“Embarrassing for whom?”

“Well, not for you.”

“So what’s stopping you? Go ahead, embarrass yourself. But no embellishments. This isn’t jazz.”

9

WHENEVER LEONARD REMEMBERS AUSTIN and all that follows, as he must now for Francine, it is not long before the evening at Gruber’s Old Time BBQ intrudes itself, insists on being dwelled on once again. It seems, and is, an age ago, a time – the end of October 2006—when he is barely thirty-two years old, and as the single surviving heir unseasonably wealthy from the sale of his mother’s house. For the first time in his life, he is able to please himself – free of family ties, unexpectedly sprung from debt, his music training completed, his reputation as (yes, he boasts about himself) both adventurous and reliable onstage, “all styles,” growing. “That’s when we all met up,” he says. “When I was still political.”

Leonard has campaigned with Lucy’s mother, Nadia Emmerson. She is a spirited, tough-minded woman. He dates her once or twice, nothing more romantic than a campaign rally or the cinema. Nevertheless, because she is both lively and provocative, and like-minded too, he cultivates high hopes that eventually – if only he can dare to ask – they might become more than comrades. Their romance thrives in his imagination. When Nadia is there, he doubles his political exertions in order to impress her, phrasemaking excitably at meetings and leafleting with such speed or picketing with such fiery commitment that Perkiss would be proud of him. He even writes a strident piece for brass with Nadia in mind and fantasizes playing it at the head of some great march. But she has already accepted a visiting lectureship in politics at the University of Texas, commencing at the end of August, so their affair is brief and unresolved. “Come out and see me,” she has said more than once, a casual, noncommittal invitation that seems, in her absence, more promising the more he thinks about it. So, with his mother buried, the house finally off his hands, and half promises of session and recording work in New York, he e-mails her – [email protected] – explaining his misfortune and good luck, and presumes to say that he is missing her and plans on visiting, as she’s suggested.

Her reply is not discouraging. Yes, she has a loft apartment with a spare box room where he can “throw his coat.” And yes, she’ll be pleased to see him too, and catch up with his news. There is work to do in America, she says, ever the activist – wealth disparities need attending to, and then the war, the health-care crisis, the pirate corporations running everything, support for project families and victim neighborhoods. She’s joined Snipers Without Bullets, a local group of “Texan troublemakers.” “We’ve got something monster in the pipeline!!!” she writes. She knows that Leon, as he has taken to calling himself, will want to play his part. She can keep him busy, if he’s up for it. She’ll “welcome his political vitality.” It’s not exactly what he hopes to hear. She doesn’t mention Maxie or even that she isn’t living alone in Austin. She doesn’t mention that the loft is his. But he is there at the airport, on Nadia’s arm, the thickest head of hair in Texas, a handsome exclamation mark among the plumpers waiting at the foot of the exit escalator, and genuinely pleased, he says, to have another British visitor. Leonard tries not to let his disappointment show, but he cannot doubt that Maxie is at best a tiresome complication to his plans and preparations, and to the hopes – and contraceptives – he has packed.

They live in East Austin, between the looping railway track and Seventh Street, in what is a mostly black neighborhood of 1920s shingled bungalows and tarpaper shacks lately designated “cool” by landlords seeking higher white rents or undefended lots on which to build slab houses, McMansions, or “space-maximizing” apartments. Where there are still bungalows with porches, rocking chairs, loud dogs, and wide neglected yards, billboards are promising NEW FUTURE HOMES in “authentic Austin,” with every convenience from granite kitchen counters to poolside Wi-Fi access. “This quarter used to be realAustin,” says Maxie, sounding on early acquaintance to a British ear both hick and hip. High twang. “Now it’s just becomin’ realestate,” though what he introduces disapprovingly as his “residential livin’ unit,” a dull square three-room condo sparsely furnished with thrift-shop bargains, is neither authentic nor cool. “We’re the problem, white folks bustlin’ in,” he adds, with what seems to be conviction. “They oughta kick us out and pull this buildin’ down. They oughta drag us from our beds and murder one of us. That’d scare the yuppies off. I’m recommendin’ it. Works every time. You kiddin’ me? White flight.”

Indeed, the neighborhood is already culturally bipolar. From Maxie’s box room’s narrow balcony are views across a new “zen garden”—hard landscaping, a single cherry tree, and litter that stays beyond the reach of winds or brooms – toward a complex of new galleries and jewelry stores. There is an expensive coffee shop, an arty bar called Scofflaws, another bar called the Four T’s. Yet twenty steps across the street are the unadorned front gates of a poultry supply depot that employs only Mexicans and that, once locked at night, becomes a crack corner. Just a half mile downtown, and downmarket too, is an art-free strip of single-story tinnies: the Roadrunner Cocktails Bar, the Big Shot Grocery, a couple of thrift stores, the Reno Hotel (“Rooms by the Hour”), and, painted black and yellow in tiger stripes, behind its daily pall of smoke, Gruber’s Old Time BBQ, with – for almostdowntown Austin – its ironic promises “Hunters Are Welcome” and “Best Motorcycle Food.”

Leonard ventures to the store on his first evening in Texas, driven from the loft by Nadia and Maxie arguing and then not arguing. He has pretended to be watching CNN for almost an hour while his hosts whisper loudly at each other in their room. He hardly dares to overhear, as he fears they might be arguing about him, that he is less welcome in their home than they have pretended, even that Maxie has discerned Leonard’s amorous objectives. Finally he taps on their door – four beats to the bar – with his fingertips. “Off out,” he says, disturbing them as little as he can. When their door swings open in response, Maxie has her in his arms, laughing into her hair, as unrepentant as a boy. Her face is flushed and childlike. For the moment she is no longer mad at him, it seems, though clearly she’s been crying.

“I’ll take a stroll,” Leonard says. “Just checking out the neighborhood.”

“Get some juice,” she says.

Maxie comes with him into the hallway and downstairs as far as the street door. “She’s tense,” he explains. “It ain’t you.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure because … Guess what? She’s gonna have a kid.”

“Nadia’s pregnant?”

“That’s the only way you get a kid in Texas.”

“Do I congratulate?”

“No, don’t say anythin’. Just get the juice. I’ll let you know what she decides when you get back.” Maxie reaches out and pulls at Leonard’s coat. “This is gonna be embarrassin’,” he says, pushing his fingers through his beard.

Leonard nods. He understands at once. “You’ll need the spare room now, I guess?”

“Whoa, take your time. That’s eight months down the road, if that’s a road she wants to take. You know? For me, I’m only sayin’ that the time’s not … at its very best. The kid’s no bigger than a cashew nut, she says. It’s no big deal. No”—he leans further in and whispers—“I’ll let you know if we … we’re gonna go ahead or if … well, if we’ll have to put a stop to it. Hey, man, what I have to say to you, now this is strictly private stuff—”

“I understand.” But Leonard still does not understand.

“I said you would. That’s what I said to her. Because what with your mother’s house an’ all and how the dollar is right now, not worth a bean, you’re better placed than us to be a little generous. I hate to even mention it, but if it comes to it, hard times and hard decisions, man, could you let me have a thousand dollars, say? Twelve hundred tops. Just to lend a hand. You know, like rent? Except not rent.”

“For an abortion?”

“Volume, Leon, please! She’s pregnant, dude. She isn’t deaf. Okay, get juice.”

Leonard’s indignation, and jet lag, send him two blocks down the street in the wrong direction, away from homes, away from the stores and traffic, into an industrial block of empty warehouses, abandoned tire-and-muffler-fitting stores, and railroad sidings with patches of sagebrush on their berms and – eerily – a pair of turkey vultures killing time on a power line. Ry Cooder country, he thinks, trying to recall the Paris, Texassound track, which he has attempted to play once or twice. Despite the heavy, gluey air, he takes deep breaths. He balloons his diaphragm. He licks and purses his lips, practices his embouchures, blows vowels. All preparation for the saxophone – and his way of staying calm in any circumstances, even when, as now, his instruments are not at hand. A police car cruises by and turns, fixing Leonard in its headlights. It is only when the driver rolls down the window to stare at him and shake his head that Leonard stops miming notes, checks himself – and checks the neighborhood. It’s clear he’s lost, and vulnerable. He’s nervous, suddenly. This part of town is too shadowy and deserted for a newcomer – for this newcomer, at least.

By the time Leonard has retraced his steps, gone beyond the lofts, and caught his breath, he is less incensed by Maxie’s casualness and his damned cheek for dunning money for a termination from a man he’s only met this afternoon, a stranger who has just arrived. He’ll not part with a dollar, though, he decides. Except for rent. He will pay rent. That’s not unreasonable. And he will contribute toward the groceries. But as for funding an abortion – not a cent, not a cent unless it’s Nadia who begs for it and possibly not even then. She needs to hear what might go wrong, long-term: his sister’s suicide, his broken mother’s subsequent deliberate decline and early death, at hardly fifty-eight years old, the nephew never born. “No, not a single cent,” he says out loud, but it is only to himself and to the sidewalk. He’s practicing. He’ll stand his ground. He lets himself imagine it, the line of reasoning: mother, sister, nephew, all of it. He rehearses each phrase, imagines Maxie storming off, imagines Nadia’s relief. Then he lets himself drift home to England, where Nadia is with him, rescued from the Lone Star State and in her final weeks, in great wide skirts. Her hands are resting on her unborn child. Whose child is it? Hischild – it’s simply done. He only has to say it to himself, envision it. Then Maxie never was. Dragged out of bed, kicked out of town. His building’s down. He’s murdered, possibly. And it is Leonard who will help her to take deep breaths and push. Meanwhile, he takes deep breaths of air himself and parps the saxophone again for her – a skipping variation, “Mack the Knife.” For half a minute he is admirable and brave, a husband and a father to be proud of, until he’s summoned back to Austin first by the wolf call of a train and then by vehicles and voices that to his tuned ear sound dangerous.

Leonard has never been at ease abroad. It always seems that anything he does outside of England is a sham, even in America, where at least the language is familiar, if not the same: Here I am, being local, is his running commentary. Here I am, blending in; here I am, not acting the outsider. But fooling nobody. He is still nervous too, despite the distance he has almost run from the warehouse block – nervous of the dark and light, nervous of the street but uneasy about leaving it and pushing open doors, even the partly open doors to the brightly lit Big Shot Grocery with its wall-mounted amplifiers blasting hip-hop at the sidewalk and its come-hither kitchen smells.

Leonard is not unduly paranoid. Strangers truly pick on him. He’s twice been beaten up in pub car parks, one a robbery (his instrument case, with his first beloved saxophone inside), the other without any cause or not any cause expressed except in punches. And he’s been threatened countless times by men (and women too) who haven’t liked his voice or his opinions or what they take to be his “attitude.” His attitude, he knows, might come across – because he’s tall and scholarly and has reed-player’s lips – as supercilious. He admits that he can also sound intemperate, extravagantly unbending in his politics, though he prefers to characterize, mythologize himself as a plain and simple man of solid principle. He’s even invented a working-class background, useful in both jazz and politics, as it validates his stridency. At antiwar and antiglobalization meetings, at the more sedate China Solidarity vigils and Carbon Conscience pickets, and on the Asylum Support and Open Borders committees (his current campaigns), Leonard is the one who does his best to strike the fiercest notes, who calls for action every time, as Mr. Perkiss would, who says they should not surrender an inch to anyone but “be a limpet, cling to principle.” As far as possible, and certainly in his private life, such as it is, he matches what he says with what he does. No private health care for Leonard Lessing. He takes public transport when he can. What remains of his inheritance has been ethically invested. He carries an Amnesty credit card (“Buy One, Set One Free”). He plays for no fee at benefit concerts and charity gigs but does not accept corporate engagements. He has never crossed a picket line or stepped away from a trade boycott or defied an embargo. He does not patronize multinationals like Tesco, CaliCo, and Walmart. He will not wear clothes that have been sourced from sweatshops. He always checks the labels on his life.

Leonard cannot fool himself, however, with low-cost gestures such as these. He knows full well that he is at heart too civil and reasonable and too readily embarrassed to be truly militant on the street, no matter that the noises he makes indoors declare otherwise. He recognizes the flattening truth about himself: that he is a man of extreme principles, hesitantly held. So many activists of his acquaintance, the ones he envies, are the opposite, he thinks – comrades who seem to have weak principles but are still quick to shout and punch for them in public until they get their way or break a bone or two. Leonard might equal them in shouting, but he’s never been the sort to punch. Never will be, probably. Perhaps that’s why he makes a noise. Perhaps that’s why he’s ended up in jazz instead of in some more polite and rational form of music. Yes, the dynamo at meetings, like the all-styles hero on the saxophone, is tame and timid when there are risks and ferocious when it’s safe. That’s dispiriting.

So here is Leonard, shopping done, jealous, anxious, and annoyed, walking as invisibly as possible along the sidewalks of a Texan town, hurrying out of this run-down neon neighborhood where everything he notices augments his nervousness: the black men who call out to him from the poultry depot gates, the bony girls smoking cigarettes outside the bar, the two Mexicans idling, elbow to elbow, in their cars and talking unconcernedly while traffic waits in the street, the smell of chicken carcasses. He has expected to feel displaced and self-conscious for a while, the first few days. It’s Texas, after all. He has not expected, though, to be assailed by such discordance, so many disconcerting odors, sights, and noises. Nothing is familiar or comforting. Here the thud-slap of someone running at his back, a siren from an ambulance, a loudmouthed television set, the clanging of a shade-trees mechanic, even the sudden starter motor of a Frito-Lay truck are played in different keys from what he’s used to. They set his teeth on edge. They strike, then leave him jittery. He is convinced – how can he doubt it now? – that this journey to Austin will prove to be a costly blunder. He’s traveled – what, five thousand miles? – to pursue his love, if truth be told, for Nadia. Instead, he is her English gooseberry, and the unwelcome occupant of the box room and the single bed in a town with which he feels incompatible. Nadia is tearful at the window now, he thinks. Maxie’s at the street door waiting for the rent. There’s bound to be an argument, a scene. “Not a single cent,” he says again, but this time he has doubts.

By the time Leonard gets back to the loft, carrying a Big Shot paper bag with orange juice and some other groceries, he is feeling much less ruffled. He has decided what to do. Cut and run. It’s his highway code: be cautious and be sensible, obey the danger signs. He can easily promise to lend them money but do nothing. He can say that it will take up to a week to clear the British bank. That way he’ll neither have to be part of their plans nor be forced to sound a judgmental, moral note about abortion or his sister’s suicide. After all, it’s Nadia’s right to choose, not his. He shouldn’t bully her. No, he’ll avoid that argument, fly east to New York, spend time there – see MoMA and the Met, visit the Hall of Jazz Greats in Harlem Plaza, sit in on a few gigs, improvise a holiday – and then go home, to the country where he best fits in.

The mood in the loft has transformed during Leonard’s short excursion. Maxie is not waiting in the street. The scrounging abortionist is no longer even in evidence. He has washed and is drying three glasses, not for orange juice but for wine. There’s music on the CD player, something French cum African with banks of percussion and exuberant horns. Their little table has been dressed for a meal: three sets of silverware, unmatching plates, and saucer flames. The microwave is humming brightly, and rattling. Nadia has changed into a loose white top that makes her face seem pinker and healthier than before. Aren’t her breasts already plumper than they were in England, where she was overzealously flat-chested?

“I think I’d better move on somewhere else quite soon,” Leonard says, standing at the window, his face hidden, almost tearful. Nadia’s skin is blooming, especially in the fluctuating mix of arctic/tropic microwave and candle lights. “Tomorrow, possibly. I know I’m in the way.”

But “Absolutely not!” “No way!” Nadia and Maxie will not hear of it. They both come up and put their arms round him. He has to stay, at least until the “showdown” in the coming week. “Boy, don’t miss that. We need your manpower. We’re gonna shake this city up a bit. Smile for the cameras.” Leonard offers them his plucky smile.

Snipers Without Bullets, it transpires over dinner from two packets and a can – bean and tuna bake, a local pecan pie – has a membership of two. A third voice (Leon’s) would be welcome. “Essential. Crucial. Indispensable,” Maxie adds, bringing more wine to the table but topping up only his own tall glass. It’s Maxie’s “private enterprise,” Nadia explains, “his plague on all their houses. You know, not just the fat cats, the military and the Republicans, but Democrats as well …”

“And fuckin’ liberals.” Maxie is becoming more sweeping and profane by the glass, more twangingly and less persuasively American. The alcohol – or something else, done out of sight – has made him noisy, volatile, and jittery. Nadia, though, is calm and quiet and prettier by the sip.

“We want to make a difference – and Maxie thinks that liberals will never make a difference,” she says. “Voting isn’t enough. Having an opinion isn’t enough. Caringisn’t enough.” Repeating what Maxie thinks is clearly all that counts.

“Fuck them. Liberals are the front-row enemy. Prime target. Wipe ’em out. They’ve got this city by the balls. Do you hear what I’m sayin’, man?” Leonard both nods and shakes his head. Maxie is only striking attitudes, though he’s striking them a bit too tritely for Leonard’s tastes. It’s harmless boozy talk, he supposes, amusing more than bullying. “Hear this, then, heh? We’re pretty certain Bush is comin’ into town … yessir—”

“Next Saturday, to be exact,” interjects Nadia, being his dutiful British secretary.

“We know he’ll spend the weekend at his snake pit in Crawford bein’ Audie Murphy.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s wearing jeans, basically,” says Nadia.

“It’s wearin’ jeans and pullin’ wire …” Maxie’s beard is truly bristling.

“The Bushes have their place out there.” The secretary again. “Prairie Chapel Ranch. It’s White House West—”

“It’s Funk Hole Number One, is what it is. Where he goes hidin’ from the people. Buried hisself out there five whole weeks, that man, when Iraq was, you know, gettin’ difficult. Folks are layin’ dead. And he’s out on the ranch, fixin’ gates and clearin’ mesquite and bustin’ broncs and muckin’ stalls and being everythin’ ’cept the fuckbrain president. Cowboy George sure does love to dirty up when it gets tough.” Maxie is performing only for Leonard now, facing him excitedly across the table, talking fast and showing off. “How do we know what he’s gonna do next weekend? We know it ’cos we have a comrade workin’ there. The sister says they’ve set aside a patch of brush and cocklebur for the president to clear and there’s been Secret Service personnel crawlin’ all over it in case somebody’s left a thorn out there and he could scratch his thumb. We know it ’cos a comrade workin’ in the canteen at Fort Hood army base has seen the signs. Air Force One is scheduled for a drop, and there’s a chopper on standby all week. You gettin’ me, Leon?”

“I’m getting you.”

“There’s more. We know that the Bush bitch is coming down from Crawford into Austin on Saturday. That ain’t no secret, point of fact. It’s there in black-and-white, on the first page of the program for the Texas Book Festival. She’s come to patronize y’all. She’s gonna give a little talk, no shit … except it’s all bullshit … in the Texas State Capitol. She’s gonna give a little talk on ‘Libraries and Children’s Literature’ because, guess what? She used to be a little girl herself.”

“And she was trained as a librarian,” adds Nadia. “Books for kids.”

“Except Iraqi kids, natchoo.”

“You know, the Reading First initiative. The No Child Left Behind bullshit. It’s Laura’s special thing.”

“Don’t call her by her fuckin’ name. Jeez, Nadia. You countin’ her among your friends? That’s what the problem is, right there. Too much respect.”

“Maxie’s got no time for her,” says Nadia, rubbing Maxie’s arm by way of recompense for her slip of the tongue.

“Too right, I don’t. She deserves what’s comin’ at her Saturday.” Both Snipers Without Bullets look at Leonard, inviting questions. He doesn’t ask, “What’s coming at her Saturday?” as they expect. He wants to ask, “You’ll keep the baby, then?” He says, “You ought to pick on Bush, not her. The president.”

“It’s him we’re aimin’ at, you kiddin’ me? I said up front, he’s comin’ into town. The man himself. How do we know? We know ’cos George Senior has tickets. He says he and Barbara will be hoppin’ across from Houston to listen to the speech, and little George is bound to wanna see his mom and pa for the day. George’ll show, I’m sure of it—”

“You’re using Christian names yourself,” Leonard says, emboldened by his single glass of wine. He only means to defend Nadia.

“I’m usin’ ’em without respect, and that’s the difference. I’m usin’ ’em to differentiate. We’re talkin’ ’bout four Bushes here. You hearin’ me?”

“How could I not?” Leonard can’t decide whether he is exhilarated or annoyed by Maxie’s unembarrassed stridency or simply doesn’t trust it, the mix of street talk, Texas drawl and twang, and campus condescension.

How Nadia’s been taken in by such a showman is an irritation and a mystery.

“So don’t get the British smarties, Leon, por fayvore. Either you are with us or you ain’t.”

“With you where?”

“Not in the silent fuckin’ vigil on the Capitol lawns that those blowhards of the American Civil Liberties Union and Mrs. Pussyfoot of the Texas antiwar coalition have organized. No way. No, sir. We’re gonna take our shit into the House chamber and we are gonna dump it in his lap. AmBush, we’re callin’ it.”

“Sounds good.”

“Too right, it does sound good. And it is gonna be a breeze, my man, ’cos we mean it and we’ve got it organized. Tell him, Nadia. Tell our comrade what we’ve gotten ourselves.”

“Well, number one, Maxie knows a schoolteacher, and number two, she’s been invited to”—she hesitates—“the Bush wife’s speech, and number three, she’s handed us her tickets!”

“Three tickets, Leon. One, two, three.”