Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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Strachey’s Folly

By Richard Stevenson

Chapter 1

This is screwy. This is nuts. This has to be some kind of pathetic, sick joke!" Maynard Sudbury unexpectedly blurted out.

Timothy Callahan and I stared at Maynard as he stared down with a look of shocked bewilderment at one particular panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

"Jim Suter is not dead," Maynard said, gawking. "I don't think he's even sick. I saw him in Mexico not more than two weeks ago."

Maynard brushed away the shock of sandy-colored hair that had flopped across his ever-youthful Midwestern farmboy's face. It seemed as if he needed the clearest vision possible in order to take in and try to comprehend this shocking sight.

Just a few cottony clouds were strung out across a pale sky, and the sun was surprisingly warm for D.C. in October. At midday the Washington Monument cast a short shadow, none of it touching any of the forty thousand—plus panels of the Names Project quilt. The tens of thousands of visitors to the Columbus Day-weekend quilt display were silent or spoke to one another in low voices as loudspeakers broadcast a solemn recitation by grieving survivors of the names of the AIDS dead. Every two or three minutes a jet en route to National Airport screeched down an electronic flight path above the nearby Potomac, but no one seemed to mind the noise. Most of the people were too absorbed in remembering—lovers, pals, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, parents—or too caught up in one or another of the life stories, depicted or sketched, of people cut down by the plague.

A tanned, middle-aged woman with a bandage across the bridge of her nose and two younger women who bore what looked like a family resemblance to each other and to the older woman turned and peered at Maynard. They saw a short, raus-cularly lean, fifty-year-old man with a thick head of unruly hair, an open, expressive face, and intense brown eyes that were now full of angry perplexity.

Again, Maynard said disgustedly, "This is just so screwy. I can't figure out what the heck this panel could possibly be doing here."

Timmy and I, along with the three nearby women, looked down at the panel and then back at Maynard, whose outburst was not just out of sync with the sweet melancholy of the occasion but out of character for Maynard, one of the most subdued and even-tempered men I had ever known. Timmy had been Maynard's friend since their Peace Corps days in India in the late sixties, and, during our twenty years together, Timmy had often spoken, when Peace Corps stories were told, of Maynard's famous sangfroid.

Maynard Sudbury was a man who had once talked a small mob, one man at a time, out of beating an Andhra Pradesh taxi driver to death after the driver had struck and badly injured a cow. Maynard had accomplished this feat while employing no fewer than three languages: English, Hindi, and Telugu. The regional Peace Corps director had later admonished Maynard, telling him he had been lucky the mob hadn't left him broken and bloody as well—or, if the mob hadn't, then the police.

Maynard, Timmy said, had displayed the same equanimity with the Peace Corps staff man that he had with the street mob. He explained that it was not his rationality that had saved the driver, and certainly not his Peace Corps training, but that it had been his naivete. He had been living in rural India only a few weeks when the incident took place, he said, and—having spent his entire life up until then in small-town Southern Illinois—he had acted on impulse, and at the moment of Maynard's intervention the villagers had looked upon him as some kind of holy fool, and they let the driver go. Later, Maynard once told me, some of the same people came to regard him as an unholy fool, but that was another story.

"Maybe," Timmy said to Maynard tentatively, "this panel is for another Jim Suter, not the one you know. Who is Jim Suter, anyway?"

As the quiet throngs continued to circulate among the maze of quilt sections, the three nearby women stood and watched us, and a burly young man in a University of Tennessee T-shirt, who had paused by the Suter panel, seemed also to be interested in our small drama.

"Suter's a Washington freelance writer and conservative political operative," Maynard said. "Jim and I had a brief, torrid romance about fifteen years ago that didn't last. Jim was in his mid-twenties at the time and still in his caveman mode of spreading his sperm around. I was old enough by then to want to start nest-building, and anyway, we had some serious political differences. It was a real Carville-Matalin match, except there was no way this one was ever going to last."

The three women next to us walked on now, quietly murmuring to one another, and they were replaced by a young, whiffle-haired, apparently lesbian couple in huge farm overalls and with rings in their noses. The beefy Tennessean stayed on and gazed down at the Jim Suter quilt panel along with Maynard, Timmy, and me.

I said, "It does look, Maynard, as if this Jim Suter was a writer—like the one you knew."

"Is a writer," Maynard said flatly, "like the one I know. Jim sure wasn't dead when this panel was sewn into the quilt—the panel submission deadline for the main part of the display was last spring sometime. Jim wasn't dead two weeks ago, and I'll bet you he isn't dead now."

"And those look like his dates?" Timmy said. "Or date?"

"I think they are," Maynard said. "The birth date anyway."

The standard coffin-shaped, four-by-six-foot cloth panel with Jim Suter's name and the dates "1956-1996" on it was a plain black fabric with white Gothic lettering. Unlike so many of the colorful and even affectionately whimsical quilt panels spreading for acres around us, Suter's panel was stark and funereal except for a sketch of a typewriter, encased in clear plastic and sewn on, with typed pages streaming out of the typewriter and up toward Suter's name and dates.

Timmy got down on his hands and knees for a closer inspection and reported up to us, "These look like manuscript pages, but I don't recognize what they're from. What kind of writer was Jim Suter? Is."

"He's a freelance, right-wing political hack," Maynard said, as if this were a standard inside-the-Beltway job classification.

Maynard got down beside Timmy—we were all wearing khakis and light sport shirts—and I joined them as they examined the manuscript pages stitched to the panel and appearing to fly out of the picture of a typewriter. At the top of each page was the slug "Suter/Krumfutz" and a page number.

"This looks like Jim's campaign bio of Betty Krumfutz," Maynard said. "Jeez, what a cruel thing to do to a writer. We've all written things for money that we'd rather forget about. But congressional campaign biographies commissioned by a candidate represent about as low a form of literary endeavor as exists in the English-speaking world. Dead or alive, I don't think Jim ever did anything bad enough to deserve to be remembered this way. Although I know from experience that Jim was what I would call ethically challenged in some areas of life, and I know there are people around Washington, mostly gay men, whose opinion of Jim is rather low, mainly for personal reasons."

Maynard sprang back upright, and Timmy and I climbed back to our feet with more effort. He was the fittest of the three of us, although Maynard had joked the night before, when he met our train from Albany, that he maintained his youthful, lean physique with the aid of the intestinal parasites he picked up while writing the sixteen travel pieces that had been collected in Around the World by Yak and Kayak. Maynard had been doing more conventional, less adventurous travel writing over the past year, but he'd been unable to shake the bugs he'd picked up in—he thought—Zambia, Burkina Faso, or possibly Kyrgyzstan. He said he'd gladly learn to live with a nice set of love handles if he could rid himself of a persistent queasiness and regain his appetite for food that was spicier than New England boiled dinners or Congolese fufu.

Timmy said, "I suppose it would have been okay to be doing Republican campaign bios for, say, Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. But having worked for Betty Krumfutz certainly isn't what you'd want in your hometown obituary. I mean, if you were actually dead. Which you say Jim Suter isn't."

"Are the Krumfutzes behind bars yet?" I asked. Betty Krumfutz had been a Pennsylvania Republican congresswoman who had run on a "pro-family, pro-gun" platform in 1992, and even as Bill Clinton carried the state, she had easily replaced the retiring incumbent in her conservative upstate district. It came out, though, a year after her reelection in 1994 that both Mrs. Krum-futz's first– and second-term campaigns had been financed by illegal contributions from a Central Pennsylvania construction magnate, among others, and ineffectually laundered by the candidate's husband and campaign manager, Nelson—who had in any case, secreted half the five hundred and sixty thousand dollars in donations in an account he kept under his mistress's name, Tammy Pam Jameson, in a bank in Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, the Krumfutzes' hometown.

"Both Krumfutzes are out walking the streets right now," Maynard said. "Nelson was convicted in May but is free on bond while his conviction is appealed, and Betty was never charged with anything. She surprised everybody and resigned her congressional seat after she swore at a three-hour news conference last year that she'd been grievously wronged along with her constituents and she would never give up her seat. Then, when Betty quit abruptly, the speculation around town was that somebody had gotten the goods on her, too, and an indictment was imminent. None ever came, but people I know on the Hill are still waiting for the other Krumfutz shoe to drop. Nelson's a crook and Betty could well be. It's really an indication of how unprincipled Jim Suter could be—not just reactionary, but unprincipled—that he ever got mixed up with the god-awful Krumfutzes."

"But maybe he didn't know," Timmy said, "that they were crooks—or Nelson was—when he signed on with them. Didn't that all come out later?"

"Timothy, you're as charitable as ever," Maynard said. Then he went on gravely, "Jim didn't know the Krumfutzes were crooks, but he knew they had won an election partly by smearing the moderate-Republican fish-and-game official who ran against Betty in the 1992 spring primary. I ran into Jim in a bar right after he signed up with Betty and Nelson, and he said one of the tactics they'd used against this hapless fellow was, the guy had accepted a campaign donation from a Penn State gay group, and Betty and Nelson ran television ads showing two male officers of the group chastely kissing at the end of a gay-pride parade in Pittsburgh. The ad asked if this was what parents wanted taught to their children in local schools—as if Betty's opponent had come out for same-sex kissing instruction to be added to Pennsylvania's public school curricula. Jim knew the Krumfutzes had done this, and he still went to work for them."

Timmy said, "That does reflect poorly."

The crowds viewing the quilt continued to move by and around us. Some people stopped at quilt panels nearby and spoke quietly. Some pointed, some gazed with fierce concentration, some people hugged one another and wept. The two young lesbians beside us moved on, as did the man from Tennessee. The recitation of the thousands of names went on and on.

I asked Maynard, "If Jim Suter was such a creep, what attracted you to him fifteen years ago? Or was he less of a reprehensible character back then?"

Maynard blushed faintly. "The attraction was mainly physical. I mean, it wasn't just that. Jim is smart and knowledgeable and, despite a cynicism I eventually got pretty tired of, Jim can be fascinating on American political history and Washington his-

tory. He actually grew up here in the District. But I realize now that the attraction was mostly sexual. He had a great athlete's body—he'd been a wrestling star at Maryland—and he has a wonderful face, bright and handsome and with radiant skin, and with piles of blond ringlets all over his head, like a kind of sensual Harpo Marx. It's what's inside Jim's big, gorgeous head that sooner or later turns a lot of people off. It did me, anyway. And I've run into a couple of other people—or maybe it's a couple of hundred—whose experience with Jim was similar, or worse."

"When you saw Jim in Mexico recently," I asked, "what was he doing down there?"

"I only wish I knew," Maynard said, and pondered the question. "Here's what happened. I'd gone down to the Yucatan for a quick go-round for a piece I did for the L.A. Times on touring some of the lesser-known Mayan ruins. None of it was terribly exotic, but I hadn't been to the Yucatan for several years, so I went down mainly to update the hotel, restaurant, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff. I was in Merida walking across the zocalo one day when all of a sudden here comes Jim Suter, of all people, walking towards me. I said, 'Hey, Jim!' and I stopped. And what does he do? He pretends not to see me, and he walks right by me, eyes straight ahead. I stood there flabbergasted and watched him walk away, and he never looked back.

"I thought about running after him," Maynard said, "but it was obvious he recognized me—or that he'd been aware that somebody had called his name—and he had been careful not to look my way and to hurry away from there as fast as he could without breaking into a full trot. I had an appointment to keep with a hotel marketing director a few minutes later, so there was no time for me to go chasing after somebody who—it soon occurred to me—probably didn't want me to know he was in Mexico.

"Anyway, I couldn't think of any other explanation for Jim's behavior. When we broke up after our three-week fling back in '81 or '82, we'd parted on basically friendly terms, and we always talked and caught up with each other whenever our paths crossed—which in gay Washington happens fairly often, especially if you're both writers. Washington, this supposed great world capital, is more like Moline in that regard—very small-towny. Or so it seems, anyway, to gay New Yorkers who live here and tend to talk as if they've been exiled to Ouagadougou. As for me, the only other city I'd ever spent much time in was Vijayawada, so Washington has always seemed to me to be a pretty exciting place."

A sturdy-looking woman in a trench coat, shades, and a golf-cart-motif silk scarf tied tightly around her head had stopped in front of the quilt panel with Jim Suter's name and was looking down at it.

Timmy said, "Maynard, how can you be sure the guy you saw in Merida was actually Jim Suter? Couldn't it have been some other gorgeous, beringleted, blond North American?"

"Timmy," Maynard said, sounding faintly irritated in the casual and familiar way old friends can sound with each other without suffering any huffy consequences, "this is a very beautiful man whose very beautiful face I slurped on and chewed at rapturously nearly every night for three weeks. This was not an experience I repeated frequently in my life, it pains me to have to remind you. Do you think I might fail to recognize such a face if I saw it again?"

Timmy said, "You put it so vividly, Maynard, I can't fail to see what you mean."

"Anyway," Maynard said, "it was plain that the man I called out to in the zocalo was determined not to acknowledge my presence. All he wanted was to get out of there as fast as he could. And if it wasn't Jim Suter, then why would he? And, of course, if it was Jim—which I'm positive it was—why would he want to run away from me?"

We all puzzled over Maynard's question, but none of us had an answer to it.

The woman in the trench coat and golf-cart scarf had gone down on her hands and knees and had been examining the manuscript pages on the Jim Suter quilt panel. She quickly got to her feet now and moved toward us as Maynard pronounced Jim Suter's name aloud. We were unable to see her eyes behind the shades, but the woman's round mouth was open and her face frozen, as if in fear.

The woman stared hard at us for a brief moment. Then suddenly she turned and moved quickly away, running almost. She jostled one knot of five or six middle-aged men in jeans and plaid shirts who were spread across the walkway between the quilt sections twelve or fifteen feet from Maynard, Timmy, and me.

Maynard said, "Hey, what the heck was she doing here!"

"The woman in the trench coat?" Timmy said.

"Yes. Jeez."

"Who was she?"

Maynard said, "I've never actually met the woman, but a friend pointed her out to me in the lobby of the Rayburn building one time. And I'm reasonably certain that that rattled woman who looked like she was scared to death by Jim Suter's quilt panel, or by something on it, was the unindicted former con-gresswoman from Pennsylvania, Betty Krumfutz."

Chapter 2

Maynard had bought a small brick town house on the one hundred block of E Street, Southeast, back in the mid-seventies before the Reagan boom drove Capitol Hill real estate prices beyond the reach of mere adventure-travel writers. The rows of late-nineteenth-century houses on Maynard's side of the street had been built as servants' quarters for the burghers, pols, and lobbyists in the grander houses opposite Maynard's humble row. Maynard's house, like the next-door neighbors', was a simple, two-story box with bay windows, tiny patches of flowering shrubs, and a black wrought-iron front stoop. While the E Street houses' small rooms might have been considered claustrophobic in, say, St. Louis, on Capitol Hill, with its lingering emanations of life during the Van Buren administration, the little houses, now full of urban professionals instead of black cooks and Irish maids, just felt cozy.

Maynard had stuffed his home with folk art he had toted home from six continents, and in his ten-by-twelve-foot, fenced-in backyard, Maynard had built a rock fish pond surrounded on three sides by a garden he described as "Japanese-slash-ltalian-slash-Camerooni." The Camerooni part was a big clay pot out of which climbed a restless, meandering yam plant, now defunct for the winter.

We arrived back at the house just after ten. Maynard drove us from Washington's Adams-Morgan section in his little Chevy Sprint. This followed a leisurely Ethiopian dinner—Maynard stuck with the relatively mild vegetable dishes—and several cups of a type of Abyssinian coffee Maynard said would be sure to keep us awake for eight to ten days. We said that didn't sound like much fun, but the coffee, black as lava and nearly as thick, was ripe with cloves and other unidentifiable spices. It was so alluringly strange that we kept drinking it, thinking the next small cup would seem suddenly familiar. None ever did, and now, back at Maynard's house, we were wired.

Timmy was watching the ten-o'clock news on the little TV set on a shelf in Maynard's dining room, I was browsing in that morning's Post, and Maynard was sorting through the mail that had arrived after we left the house that morning.

"Will you look at this!" Maynard said. "It's a letter from– guess who? Jim Suter."

"Is it from Mexico?" Timmy asked.

"Yep, it is. The postmark is blurred, and I can't make out the date, and there's no return address. But I know Jim's handwriting, and this is from Jim, for sure," Maynard said, and ripped open the airmail envelope. I could see that the postage stamp pictured an Indian with a flat, sloped forehead in noble profile.

Before we'd left the quilt display earlier, Maynard had sought out a Names Project official. The woman had been disturbed when Maynard insisted that a panel for a living person had found its way into the quilt. The official explained that records on panel submissions were kept back in San Francisco, and she would attempt to track down the source of the Jim Suter panel when she returned to California on Monday. She and Maynard exchanged phone numbers and each agreed to try to sort out this weird development.

"Holy cow, Jim's in some kind of bad trouble," Maynard said to Timmy and me, his wire reading specs perched on his sunburned nose. "He's in trouble and—jeez, that's not all. This is awful." Maynard was holding what looked like a single page of dense script handwritten on one side of some crinkly, thin paper. He finished reading and said, "This is entirely amazing."

Maynard passed the letter to Timmy, who read it aloud. It was dated Monday, September 30, twelve days earlier.

" 'Dear Maynard,'" Timmy read. " 'No, you weren't hallucinating. That was yours truly you saw on Saturday in Merida. I'm guessing you were in the Yucatan for a travel quickie and you'll be back in D.C. by the time this letter makes its way through the Mexican postal system and lands at Dulles. (I once asked a postal clerk in Merida, 'Who do you have to fuck in order to get a letter out of this country in less than a month?' and, I have to admit, his unusually forthright reply caught me off guard.)

" 'Hey, Manes, I do apologize for my rudeness on Saturday. Although, in fact, it was not mere bad manners at all, it was sheer panic. The thing of it is, I did not want anyone in D.C. to know where I was. And when I saw you, I just clutched. What I should have done was to simply, straightforwardly, ask you not to tell anybody, under any circumstances, that you saw me down here, and of course you would have agreed to that, sans explanations, which unhappily I am unable to provide. But you always trusted me, if I haven't misread our friendship, which has been based on the flesh and the soul, rather than the mind, what with my being a sensible chap of the center and your being to the left of Enver Hoxha, somewhere out around Ted Kennedy, etc., etc.

" 'Hey, Manes, am I being evasive? Cryptic? A tiresomely cir-cumlocuting pain in the butt? Okay, then, friend, here's the actual deal. The actual deal is—hold on to your sombrero– somebody is trying to kill me. Did I write what I think I just wrote? A careful rereading of the text suggests I did. This extremely awkward state of affairs, Maynard, can be explained by the following: someone thinks I know something that could send quite a few rather large enchiladas to prison for muchos anos. Comprende, Senor Sudbury?

" 'And—I guess this is the main reason I am writing you, Manes—if any of these people knew that you had seen me in Merida, they might think that you know what they think I know, and they would want you out of what they perceive to be their hair, too. Sorry about this, but please do take it seriously. You've been around the world thirty-nine times—including bloody Africa, for chrissakes!—and you know as well as anybody that murder doesn't just happen in mall movies—and in malls—but that it can and does happen in real life.

" 'So please do not—DO NOT—mention to anyone that you saw me, here or anywhere. It's especially important that you tell no one on the Hill or with the D.C. Police Department that I'm down here or that you have seen me or spoken with me. Okay? Look, I'm sure your curiosity circuits are popping right about now. I know I'd be drooling down my bib with curiosity. All I can really say is, someday I'll explain all this, if I can—and if I can ever again show my still quite presentable face in D.C. Meanwhile, mum is definitely the word.

" 'Hey, Manes, if all this sounds just too, too ominous– well, believe me, it is.'

"Signed, 'Your friend Jim, still unlucky in love.'"

Timmy laid the letter on the dining room table and said, "Wow."

"Lurid, isn't it?" Maynard said, attempting jocularity, though he shifted in his seat like a man unnerved.

"Could Suter be making it all up?" Timmy asked. "You said he was unprincipled in a lot of ways. Maybe he's trying to manipulate you or manipulate events back here somehow."

"Jim's cynical," Maynard said, "about his own life and about the human race in general. But I've never heard of him jerking friends around in a devious way. If anything, he's known for his brutal honesty. That's why I guess I think I have to take what he's saying seriously."

Timmy said, "Nice guy, this Suter. By writing to you like this, now he's got you involved in whatever he's mixed up in. By warning you of the danger, he puts you in more danger. Now you've got this dangerous knowledge of some kind of plot. You don't know enough of the specifics to really protect yourself. This letter both helps you and increases your vulnerability. Suter sounds like an extremely complicated kind of friend to have."

Maynard blinked a couple of times, as if he didn't want to dwell on that. He said, "Maybe now we know why somebody put a panel for Jim in the quilt. It was meant as a threat or warning to him. Or," he went on, looking apprehensive, "maybe the panel was a threat or warning to other people who know Jim and who know what somebody thinks he knows, or who are thought to know what somebody thinks Jim knows."

"That part of the letter is murky," Timmy said. "About how somebody thinks Jim knows something that could send some big enchiladas to prison."

"What's murky about it?" Maynard asked. "It seems clear enough to me."

"But it sounds as if it's murky even to Jim," Timmy said. "If somebody thinks Jim knows something incriminating, why can't Jim simply tell these people he doesn't actually know what they think he knows?"

"Because," Maynard said, "maybe he doesn't know who 'they' are. 'They' are threatening and warning him—apparently they've made actual threats on his life—without ever identifying themselves."

"But if 'they' think Jim knows they did something criminal, then why would 'they' not identify themselves when they communicated their threats and warnings to Jim?"

I said, "Is the fatiguingly abstract tenor of this discussion typical of the conversations you guys had in the Peace Corps in India? It must have been exhausting. For you and for India."

"No," Maynard said, "our conversations back then tended to be more descriptive than analytical. We talked a lot about (a) poultry-debeaking techniques and (b) the peculiar qualities of our bowel movements."

"Of course, the latter is still true in your case," Timmy said, and he and Maynard both enjoyed a hearty guffaw over that.

One of the odder aspects of being the spouse—or "spouse-figure," as Timmy described me in his employment forms at the New York State Assembly—of a former Peace Corps volunteer was having to listen occasionally to these people converse not about the complexities of development in the third world—although they sometimes did that, too—but nearly as often, it sometimes seemed, about their memories of their exotic stools. When JFK spoke of tens of thousands of Peace Corps men and women bringing back their relatively sophisticated views of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to enrich our nation, could this have been what he had in mind?

Timmy suddenly said, "Hey, look, it's the quilt," and reached over and turned up the volume on the television set.

There it was, this gorgeous, heart-swelling mosaic of lost lives—lost but well-remembered—spread across acre upon grassy acre of some of Washington's most historic open space. These were the lawns where the Bonus Army had encamped, the hunger marchers had been ignored by Herbert Hoover, Marian Anderson had sung, Martin Luther King had had a dream. The television coverage of the AIDS quilt opened with some voice-over statistics and a slow, panning shot from the air. Then a Names Project volunteer was interviewed, as were several men, women, and children who had come to see the panels they had sewn for people they loved and who were gone. Finally there were sound bites from some sympathetic strangers, people who simply found this great monument to loss beautiful and moving.

Back in the studio, the news anchor concluded the quilt report by saying, "Today's display was also marred by a mysterious act of vandalism. Late this afternoon, just before the quilt panels were folded up for overnight storage, two men ripped a section off of one panel. The men escaped before security personnel could intervene. Typed pages coming out of the picture of a typewriter were taken from a quilt panel memorializing Jim Suter, of Washington. Police would not speculate on a motive for the vandalism. But a Names Project official said that earlier in the day questions had been raised about the Suter panel and the display organizers planned to investigate." The news reader had been somber, but now he looked instantly delighted, as if he were deranged, and said, "Today's balmy weather should con-linue, according to Flavius, and after a short break . . ."

Timmy turned down the TV sound and we all looked at each other.

Maynard's brown eyes were shining and he said, "Betty Krumfutz!"

"If the only parts of the quilt that the vandals took were the typed pages from the Krumfutz campaign bio," I said, "there does seem to be a connection to Mrs. Krumfutz's hurried, discreet appearance at Suter's panel."

"Hurried, not to say panicked," Timmy said. "That woman was in a complete state."

I asked Maynard, "Did you read what was on the pages? They were slugged 'Suter/Krumfutz,' but are you sure that what was actually typed on them was Jim's Krumfutz campaign bio?"

"That's what it looked like. I saw some stuff there about Betty's antiabortion record in the Pennsylvania legislature. And another page had a paragraph on school prayer and getting patriotism back into history textbooks. I didn't read any of it with care. It just looked like standard religious-right boilerplate. But the pages I saw seemed to be exactly what the page slugs said they were, Jim's Krumfutz campaign bio."

"I'm surprised," I said, "that that stuff doesn't move directly from the printer to the recycling bins. But I guess it must have some effect, or politicians wouldn't spend their campaign millions on it."

"A small percentage of voters—usually the slower, more gullible folks—actually read campaign handouts as if they were as imperishable as Alexander Hamilton," Maynard said. "And often all it takes to swing an election is one or two percent of the vote. So it's not a waste of money when a candidate churns that stuff out."