Big If Read online

  mark costello

  w. w. norton & company

  new york / london

  Copyright © 2002 by Mark Costello

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue,

  New York, NY 10110

  The text of this book is composed in Transit 521 BT

  with the display set in Backspacer Square

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Costello, Mark, 1936-

  Big if / Mark Costello.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-05116-2

  1. Assassination—Fiction. 2. New Hampshire—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O763 B54 2002

  813'.54—dc21 2002000512

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue,

  New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.,

  Castle House,

  75/76 Wells Street,

  London W1T 3QT

  for delia

  Contents

  Part One: In Us We Trust

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: The Primary

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Center Effing is a town between the ocean and I-95, on the old and settled seaboard of New Hampshire. To the north is salt marsh. To the south is salt marsh, four square miles of state forest, and the town of Rye. It has a bit of money now, high tech and retirees, condos on the beaches and a new downtown. It was different twenty years ago when Vi Asplund was growing up. In those days, Center Effing was a town of lobstermen, dads commuting into Portsmouth, and, of course, the Air Force out of Pease.

  The house where Vi grew up was your basic saltbox, New Hampshire’s answer to the ranch. The house was on a quarter acre down Santasket Road, three bedrooms on the second floor, an attic and a basement and a small attached garage, with views of nothing special—on one side, Captain Cooper’s house (saltbox, painted gray); on the other, Major Buckert’s (saltbox, painted gray and briefly a bright orange just before the Buckerts filed for divorce). These men—Cooper, Buckert—were SAC pilots based at Pease, nine miles up the interstate. The bomber dads were gone six months of the year, deployed to forward-ready status in Thule, Greenland, and when they were away, their families always went a little crazy on the street. The older kids set fires, the younger kids went naked, the mothers took lovers (other bomber pilots, waiting to deploy). The lovers came and went in the hours before dawn and the Asplunds had a view of this as well, the craziness, the lovers, and the kids.

  The front windows of the Asplunds’ house overlooked a rather ordinary lawn, twin Rose of Sharon bushes and a boxwood hedge, and past Santasket Road to the wavy pampas of the intertidal marsh. Behind the house was a patio and yard, a swing set and a garden where Vi’s mother, Evelyn, a sun-brown housewife, grew very tricky roses, obscure Chinese vines, and Dutch Blaster tulips, which were time-intensive and pest-prone but famous for the power of their blooms.

  When Vi was six and her brother, Jens, was ten, Evelyn started forcing tulips in the den. The den was in the northwest corner of the house and sunny over the middle saddle of the day, which made it the perfect place to force a tulip bulb. She started in late winter, when the marsh was toast to the horizon, and the bomber wing was off to Greenland on a friendly weather mission, and Mrs. Buckert got up one night and started painting her house orange, and Mrs. Cooper was working on her French with the help of Major Wade, and the Coopers’ oldest kid was picked up by the cops and sent to military school, and the other Cooper kids discovered streaking (which came late to New Hampshire), and the youngest Cooper girl ran away from home and got as far as Colonel Krutland’s house around the bend.

  Jimmy Carter was in power and Evelyn was in the Center Effing public library. She let Vi pick a book. No, two books. No, one book and a tape, and not that damn We Sing business either, Vi, gives your mom a splitting migraine. Vi picked her book and tape as Evelyn in snowboots looked up tulip horticulture in the card catalogs. They stopped at Monsey’s Luncheonette on the rotary downtown, then at Aulette’s Greenhouse down the road, where Evelyn bought three knee-high terra-cotta vases tapered to the top like antiaircraft shells, which Aulette recommended for the serious forcer. Tulip forcing, Vi later figured out, was a matter of taking the ugly, sometimes even hairy bulbs, which looked like giant bunions, something you might pay a guy to razor off your foot, and freezing them or chilling them to simulate the winter, then putting them in shells with dirt and other substances, covering the shells and leaving them in a sunny corner of the den. The bulbs, bamboozled by the dark and heat, would think that it was spring and crack into a shoot. The shells stayed in the den until the marshes came alive and Mrs. Buckert packed her kids into the station wagon and went back to Indiana, leaving her husband for not being there.

  Vi’s father, Walter Asplund, groused about the shells, the garden’s sly invasion of the den. The den, he said, was his after-supper sanctum, the place he went to end his day with a glass of Pabst, a pipe of Borkum Riff, and a stack of old insurance journals. Walter Asplund was a claims adjuster for the Connecticut Casualty Corporation of Connecticut, which meant that he investigated losses under policies, measuring the damage, negotiating pay-outs according to a chart devised in Hartford, this much for a hand, this much for a toe, this much for one-quarter loss of vision in one eye. He was solid seacoast burgher, a complicated man, a cheap-skate and a brooder and a reader of the sort of books most people only read in college (Mill, Locke, Thucydides, Moll Flanders), a man who laughed at jokes but rarely told them, who got his hair cut on the same day every month, who shoveled his own driveway, ironed his own shirts. He dabbled in town politics as a Lodge Republican, chaired the C.E. bloodmobile, and was elected chairman of the Rotary, an honor he declined on the grounds that the national Rotarians required every chair to swear an oath on the Christian scripture, which Vi’s father, in good conscience, couldn’t do. Walter Asplund believed in many things, the dignity of humankind, the Genius of Democracy, the sanctity of contract, The Origin of Species, the mission of the bloodmobile, the charts devised in Hartford, poplin suits in summertime, brown bread with baked beans, little oyster crackers (with chowder, not with oysters), baseball, tennis, The New Yorker, travel hats he purchased from the back of The New Yorker (which he sometimes wore to baseball games), the pleasures of night skiing with his children on the bunny hill in Rye. He believed, that is, in almost everything but God. He declined to serve the Rotary, and announced the reason why, and after that he was known in Center Effing as the Atheist and his kids were known in school as the Little Atheists.

  People said that atheism was a funny line of thinking for a moderate Republican insurance man. Walter said that people were confusing insurance with assurance when, in fact, the two were opposites. If you had assurance, you wouldn’t need insurance, and if it was God’s plan that your car should be rear-ended in the parking lot at Monsey’s, who were you to defray His will through a no-fault auto policy? Did Sodom have homeowner’s? Did Mary collect on the death of her son?

  Small towns in New England will tolerate the crank, the village irritant, but Vi’s father really pushed it. He wouldn’t swear an oat
h or let his children pledge allegiance to the flag. He sat up in the den when his family was asleep, writing on his money, striking out the GOD from IN GOD WE TRUST, lest anybody think that by paying with the slogan he was buying into it, which got him kicked off the bloodmobile and defeated in a landslide for town meeting. People hated standing in the checkout line at the supermarket, opening their wallets and finding a stray five bearing Walter's personal graffiti, IN WE TRUST. The scribble forced them to imagine the chain of small transactions which had put his money in their clothes: Walter pays Mrs. Souza, his kids’ piano teacher, giving her the five; Mrs. Souza buys a quart of sherry at Townline Liquorama, paying with the five; someone else buys a case of ’Gansett and gets the bill as change, spending it on pens and gum at Rexall’s; the girl at Rexall’s gives the bill as change to someone buying God (or ) knows what, anal cream or something, and this itchy person spends it on a coffee frappe at Monsey’s or at the day-old-bread store on Route 32. Finding a little piece of Walter in one’s wallet forced the town to see itself as a set of lives, or one collective chorus-life, consisting of piano teachers, sherry, pens and anal cream, rummy lobstermen drinking ’Gansett on bare mattresses with stains the shape of South America, stains with coastlines and dark interiors. It was bleak somehow, IN WE TRUST, not a welcome vision at the supermarket. Vi knew that her father was never fully satisfied with his altered motto. He did not believe that we trust, or could trust, or should trust, in nothing. Some months after Walter started crossing out the GOD, Vi was at Aulette’s with her mother. They were buying nitrates for the Rose of Sharon bushes and Aulette, making change at the register, gave Evelyn a bill which said, IN WE TRUST.

  Aulette said, “Your husband’s got a new one, Mrs. A.”

  Evelyn, embarrassed, went out of there with dignity.

  People grumbled Walter’s name on every shopping trip, especially the bomber dads (who were good Americans and proud to pledge allegiance), and their children, being children, picked on Jens and Vi. Bullies taunted them at recess, spitting “Pledge allegiance!” as the punches flew. Jens took his beatings as a salesman takes rejection, philosophically (removing his glasses, pronouncing himself ready to be hit). Vi, who didn’t take a beating, never, anywhere, fought back like a girl, the dirtier the better, kicks and bites and scratches. She fought the bullies of all grades, her brother’s and her own, and though she never won these fights, she always got her money’s worth. She went for the balls and eyes and lied about it afterwards because, unlike her bookish father, Vi had no morality.

  She loved her father simply and completely then. She watched him as astronomers watch stars. She saw him in the house across the marshes from the sea, slippered after dinner in the den, puffing Wild Cherry Borkum Riff, leafing through The Accident Reporter, Shop Safety Monthly, and the latest OSHA circular. He said the hour after supper was the best time in the world. He said the den was civilization.

  Evelyn was in the kitchen, feeding slop to dogs. They always had a pack of dogs, never any cats. They had a dog named Dingo, a string of dogs named Dingo, and when a Dingo died, Vi and Evelyn took the station wagon to the pound behind the dump, picked out another mutt, and named him Dingo too. Jens, the budding scientist, was balled up on the couch, wiping smudges from his glasses, smudging smudges, giving up and going back to whatever he was reading, pop astronomy, titles from the Mathemagic series, a battered Best of Asimov overdue from the grown-up library, or the monthly magazine Ham Radio Today, to which Jens sent penciled letters correcting the errata of prior writers.

  The phone would ring, the dogs would bark. Evelyn would answer at the kitchen sink. Walter was already moving, reaching past Jens for the extension in the den. It was duty on the phone. It was Ligourie the lawyer, Boyle the mortician, the Portsmouth fire marshal, the state police dispatcher, or the morgue. Disasters were average when Vi was growing up. Her father shaved for them. She watched him shave upstairs in the master bath, the care he took about the neck, chin pointing, kissy-lipped. He tied his tie and went out to the car and was usually home again for breakfast the next day.

  Jens got all the brains in the family; this was understood and not especially disputed. He was locally considered something of a wonder, a math and physics prodigy. He was often in the Doings section of the Effing Reveille under headlines like Boy Wins Science Prize and Jr. Engineers Visit Troubled Seabrook N-Plant. He loved his radio, a ham-bands-only Hallicrafter with a slide-rule dial. He camped out in the basement, tapping Morse, jotting Morse, the walls covered with his globe-girdling collection of QSLs, postcards hammers sent to hammers verifying contact, Greetings from JH1VRQ-Tokyo, Cheers from 8P6EU-Barbados. When other boys were asking Santa for dirt bikes and toy rifles, Jens was asking Walter for a new beat-frequency mixer and a half-dipole antenna.

  Vi was seven when they got the powerful antenna. Jens and Walter tried to find a place to rig it. Jens said the roof wasn’t high enough and they looked around the yard for an even higher place, baffled by the problem until Major Wade wandered through the trellis from the Coopers’ pool. Major Wade was another bomber pilot, Captain Cooper’s friend. When Cooper was in Thule, Major Wade’s Camaro was often in the Coopers’ driveway. Major Wade and Carol Cooper went swimming in the Coopers’ pool, did the frug on the lawn, and were always wearing terry cloth.

  Major Wade inspected the antenna and the roof. Carol Cooper came over too, carrying a clinking pitcher.

  She said to Vi, “Ever taste a whiskey sour, dear?” and dipped a finger in. She wore a zebra swimsuit. Her breasts were true bazooms.

  “No,” said Vi.

  “No thank you,” Walter prompted.

  Vi drew it out, “No thank you, Mrs. Cooper.”

  Carol Cooper said, “I wish my goddamn kids were that polite.”

  Major Wade, having a pilot’s mind, saw the answer right away. He started digging through the trunk of his Camaro. He came back with a bow and a quiver full of arrows.

  “Keeps me lean,” he said, slapping his gut. “Little hobby I picked up in Guam.”

  “Jesus we’re hungover,” Carol Cooper said.

  The bow had many knobs. Major Wade adjusted them as Walter got a fishing rod. Wade tied the line to an arrow and Walter stood back with the rod. Wade bit his lip, aiming at the highest limb of a tall copper beech in the corner of the Asplunds’ yard. Everyone was watching him, Carol Cooper holding Vi by the shoulders, Jens ten feet away, clustered faces on the driveway looking up. The major drew the bow. The fishing line snapped several times and several arrows arched into the woods. Several others landed in the Coopers’ yard, in the Coopers’ bushes, in the Coopers’ pool. The middle Cooper daughter came out and asked what was going on.

  Carol Cooper said, “We’re shooting at a tree. Go back inside and watch cartoons before you get an arrow in the head.”

  Major Wade drew the bow and let the arrow fly. It cleared the limb, the reel in Walter’s hand was singing, the fishing line went taut, and the arrow fell. They cut the line at the rod, tied it to a rope, tied the rope to a steel cable, and hoisted the antenna to the tree.

  Jens discovered weather through his new antenna. He monitored CONELRAD, the government’s storm-warning band, created in the ’50s to spread the word of mushroom clouds. Weather was the ghost of war, Jens said, the marching fronts, the blue high-pressure domes, or maybe it was war’s original. A hurricane in Bangladesh killed half a million people, four Hiroshimas. Jens said that a hurricane was like all the nukes going off at once in terms of energy set free and he hoped to see one in the sky above the yard. When Vi was eight, Jens and Walter built a weather-watching shed, a chicken coop on stilts between the garden and the doghouse. Inside the shed was a barometer, a two-foot thermometer, and a double-bulbed device which measured dew point and humidity and was strangely named a psychrometer. On top of the shed was a mast and spinning cups. Vi could see the cups from the window where she slept. When the wind was strong, bowling down the marshes from the Gulf of Maine, the cups would spin into a hal
o blur.

  Jens spent a year waiting for a hurricane. He checked the shed twice a day. He took his readings to the basement, where he puttered with a soldering iron, or stood in the front yard, cradling Evelyn’s transistor radio, which he had rewired to pick up the static claps of thunderheads offshore. Vi remembered the summer when he rewired all their radios for practice, Evelyn’s bedside AM-FM with the well-worn snoozebar, Walter’s old stereophonic monster in the den, the sleek Toshiba at the kitchen sink.

  The coup was uncovered in the afternoon. Evelyn was scheduled to lead a walking tour of the see-touch-smell exhibit at the Fort Odiorne Nature Center. She was in the garden, pouring bonemeal on the roses. She looked up and saw the clouds stacking on the harbor. She wondered if the tour might be rain-delayed. She wondered how to dress and whether an umbrella might be called for. She tried the Toshiba, hoping for the weather, and it buzzed—there were no thunderstorms broadcasting at the time. She played the dial and it buzzed. She tried the stereo in the den, the clock radio upstairs. She summoned Walter from the ladder—he was cleaning gutters—and they tried the cars, the station wagon, then Walter’s red company LeBaron, hearing the same buzz.

  Vi followed them around, getting scared. Why would all the radios fail together? Jens said that in a thermonuclear exchange, the Russians would knock out the Top 40 first. Vi wondered if the Russians had finally attacked—it would have been just like them to destroy the world during school vacation. As her father trolled the dial, sitting in the front seat of his car, Vi imagined cities disappearing. Portsmouth’s gone, Nashua is gone—

  Walter reassured her. “If the Russians bombed us, Vi, we’d definitely know.”

  She thought he meant that they would get a call from Ligourie the lawyer or Boyle the mortician. Portsmouth’s been irradiated, Walt. Better hustle up there and start adjusting.