Big If Page 11

  Shirl put the plate in front of him, an open-faced sloppy joe with a side of shoestring fries. The bullshit with the truck, the car, the toy, was that it didn’t always start on wet mornings, especially the cool-but-not-quite-cold wet mornings which they had instead of winter here in Maryland. When it started, it didn’t always brake, at least not in the velvet, mindless fashion Tashmo liked and expected in his braking. Instead, he touched the pedal and felt a leftward drag down around his balls, fleeting but distinctly leftward, which he said was like aaagh, like saying aaagh, the feeling in your throat of saying aaagh, except it’s in your balls.

  Shirl poured two iced teas from the plastic jug and leaned against the counter by the bread machine. They drank their tea from tall plastic glasses, which were pebbled to look frosted. They had once owned two sets of glasses, one for indoors, made of glass, the other for the patio. They had once owned two sets of everything, plates and flatware, various-sized bowls, and used the plastic only when they ate out back under the string of hanging paper tiki lanterns and the ever-active bug zapper, which they did, all the time, when the girls were young, sometimes just the four of them, Tashmo, Shirl, Mandy, and Jeanette, sometimes with other Secret Service families, Tashmo’s pals from the Carter detail or the swingin’ Reagan team, Loudon Rhodes and Loudon’s wife and Kobe Rhodes, Loudon’s son, who breastfed into kindergarten and was husky for his age. Kobe Rhodes looked ten in kindergarten and he was a sight, climbing into his mother’s lap. Sue Rhodes untied her halter top, carried on with the conversation, as Kobe sucked and looked at Tashmo with one eye, like, Can I help you, bud? Lloyd Felker had been back there too, sectioned plastic plate in his khaki lap, with Lydia, his wife. The kids would play together, slipping on the SlipNSlide, mounting the wooden benches in their slappy bathing suits, except for Kobe Rhodes, who said he wasn’t hungry anymore. The other kids ate pickles, chips, and burgers, eating as kids ate, exactly half the bun, the burger crumbled into pieces, tweezered to their tongues, piece by tiny piece, three more bites and then a treat. Three more bites? Two more? Am I done yet, Mom? Eating like plea bargaining, and the tikis swayed, filling the patio with orange lurching voodoo light and the happy smell of citronella.

  Shirl said, “Aaah? Pay attention to me, Tash. I’m supposed to go to Generoso and say aaah? Like he’s some kind of goddamn dentist?”

  Tashmo said, “Not aaah, aaa-guh. From the gut, Shirl. Try it for me once.”

  Generoso was their family mechanic. He ran Generoso’s Citgo on the Balt-Wash in New Carrollton. The truck had an appointment in the morning. Tashmo had planned to drive the truck to Generoso’s with Shirl on his tail, describe the aaagh, the distinctly leftward drag, the sawing of the starter, then drive home in Shirl’s car and let the old mechanic work his magic. But Movements had ruined a good nap, putting Tashmo on deployment until Tuesday, which meant that Shirl would have to get the truck to Generoso’s on her own.

  She sipped her sweet iced tea. “Goddamn stupid toy.”

  So it was official: she was really pissed, and he, for one, knew why. She thought that he was going north to chase other women, as he once did, but didn’t anymore. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t anymore, but this would have required admitting that he did, once, or more than once, more than once a week in fact. So he was trapped again, ketchuping his fries, a lacy, spiral pattern, as Shirl made that nervous clucking noise.

  Age had mugged them both, but Tashmo was defiant. His hair was gray, though still his own and thick enough to pompadour. He refused to trim his sideburns to the fashion or stop dressing as he dressed, in yoked suits with slash pockets, a style called contemporary westernwear. Gretchen Williams wouldn’t let him wear the bolo ties, even though a suit with yoking and no bolo tie looked ridiculous. Why couldn’t Gretchen see this? Never mind, fuck her—he loved his dudeish suits. They made him look, with the ’burns and the pomp and the zippered boots, like the carny-barking stock car impresarios he had worshiped as a kid. This was what he had planned to be when he was old, when he was young and planned for being old.

  He chewed a fry and thought about a town called Falling Rock, the place where he was young, the grassland flats of eastern North Dakota. They used to hang out by the highway, Tashmo and his high school friends, drinking beer, pooling their pornography, and watching motorists mistake the city limits sign for a Highway Department warning. The motorists would brake behind their windshields, peering out for any sign of falling rock, or any height it might fall from. Tashmo and his buddies hunted through the grass, gathering stones, which they threw at passing cars. They gathered stones and talked about the future endlessly. One kid was going into radio, another to pro baseball, probably the Cubs, a third to the pipelines like his paw, and a fourth to glamorous stock car/funny car impresariodom, and this was the young-ass Tashmo. The kid who was going into radio already had a half-hour show on a twenty-watter in Fort Scott, beaming surfer hits—you could hear him all the way to Minnesota. The kid who planned to be a Cub could hit the city limits sign, a blue-sky peg and a satisfying ding. Tashmo loved the action of boys throwing rocks—the windup, the sliding sneaker-scrape, the click of elbow-wrist, the unt of shoulder muscle. Stay motionless until it hits, only a punk would turn his back and not watch it fall. Funny—when they talked about the future, no one even mentioned Southeast Asia.

  Of the four boys throwing rocks, three went to Vietnam. Two came home, one with medals, one with legs, and this again—the boy with no medals and two legs—was Tashmo. He was in the Air Cav, ’68 and ’69. He saw true courage in Chu Lap and Ha Bong and decided that it wasn’t up his alley. He scammed his way through the rest of his tour as a chaplain’s aide, Spec 4. The chaplain was a brimstone Presbyterian from Texas. They toured the wounded tents together, passing out peppermints and reading from the Good Book. When the chaplain wasn’t looking, Tashmo charged the GIs two condoms for a dramatic reading. The soldiers loved his Fats Domino rendition of the Song of Solomon, Your breasts are like great goblets, your eyes are like great jewels, your arms are like great boughs, and your momma ain’t around. This was how he saved his legs in Vietnam.

  He went to North Dakota State on the GI Bill, a twenty-two-year-old freshman, majoring in Business, English, Ag, Engineering, Ag again—he had more majors than the Army and they were about as relevant. He went to a football game in Grand Forks that November, State v. U, the homecoming. He sat next to a girl named Shirley Skurdahl, a one-in-fifty-thousand shot. They did the Wave and started chatting, and quickly realized that they had a lot in common. Shirl came from Blankenship, near Hebron, near Fort Scott, near Vercingetorix, which was only two exits from Falling Rock, which made them neighbors, nearly. They had grown up ninety miles and eighteen months apart, loving and believing the same things. They both thought the sideburned, ankle-booted racetrack impresarios were cool, the coolest, deliveries of cool from Californeeay, and even now, a lifetime and two daughters later, Tashmo was a version of these dudes, admittedly a pension-fully-vested, upper P.G. County, married-filing-jointly, no-thank-you-we’re-quite-happy-with-our-present-phone-provider version of these dudes, but still, he loved his suits and boots, his pool hall El Ranchero look, and he always would. Shirl loved it too and always would, but she didn’t understand that no one else loved the look, east of Forks, south of fifty. He had tried many times in the last few years to say or imply or insinuate that she didn’t need to worry when he went away, that he was finally faithful, finally settled, finally hers, but she wouldn’t let it go, this image of her husband as a stud. No woman wants a man no woman wants. She couldn’t see him as a relic of past futures, because what would that make her? Jealousy is vanity eventually, he thought.

  Shirl ran the disposall. “Well I won’t say ugh.”

  “Aaa-guh. And don’t forget: leftward. Generoso needs to know.”

  Generoso had fixed every car they had ever owned since the microbus with the little sink and faucets which connected to nothing and the manual in German, making the car care tips seem
all the more achtungful. Tashmo didn’t like taking orders from the Krauts, and was never big on car care, which was probably why that piece of shit was always on the fritz. They drove it up to Philly for the Bicentennial and had to get it towed by this real witty black guy in an afro. Mandy was a baby, Ford was president, and Tashmo was a trainee agent, buried in Baltimore, the Crim Division, working for a special agent in charge who liked to cut out early and watch the Orioles take batting practice.

  The SAC loved Tashmo. He said, “You’re a dude.”

  The SAC was an embarrassment, the way he brought his mitt to the ballpark, clapping for a rally, a fist into the mitt, and used it as a megaphone, The ump is a chump!, and knocked the kids aside for the foul balls.

  Tashmo begged for orders out of Baltimore and they sent him to Protection, Carter’s detail. He took Shirl and Mandy camping in the microbus to celebrate, a week in Valley Forge, where Mandy learned to walk. Tashmo was something of a history buff, a fool for dioramas and ugly observation decks. He was happy anywhere there was a gift shop selling tasseled pencils, which were much too big for the see-through pencil cases, which they also sold. Shirl called the microbus a “camper” after that, thinking micro made the bus sound both metric and injectable. They drove the camper/microbus to Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Appomattox, and all the way out to Mount Rushmore, where Shirl took his picture guarding the stone presidents in a Hawaiian shirt, but mostly they took it to Generoso, who probably fixed the microbus twenty-seven times before Tashmo finally sold it to an EPA ecologist for two-hundred dollars over Blue Book.

  The ecologist claimed the bus one afternoon. He brought his wife, a tall gal named Anita. Her hair was glossy-black, straight to her ass, and she came from Winnipeg. As the husband looked for rust, Tashmo had a vision in his driveway. It came to him full-blown, as movies come to you in theaters. He saw Anita kneeling at his feet in a buckskin dress, offering him a platter of cool butter. He snuck around to the back of the microbus and stole the tire iron.

  A few days passed. Carter was R&R’ing at Camp David and the detail was standing three-day rotating watches, pretty decent duty, watching Carter agonize, better than skiing with the crazy fucking Fords everybody said, except for the ticks in the woods, and the protest-hippies and photojournalists sneaking through the underbrush.

  Tashmo was coming back from a rotation. He went by the ecologist’s. He knew that the wife was home. He saw her car, an orange Karmann Ghia, sitting in the driveway. He didn’t see the microbus. He figured the ecologist was off ecologizing. He rang the bell, spinning the tire iron in his hands, kicking at the welcome mat.

  Anita opened up. She wore a long suede skirt, ferny green, a studded seam running up the outside of each thigh. He offered her the iron and started to explain.

  She said, “Aren’t you nice?”

  And he was. He would always think of that time, Carter into Reagan, as his suede phase, remembering Anita’s seam, her saddle-smelling thighs. Looking back, it seemed he spent those months commuting to Camp David, living in a bunkhouse, patrolling the dirt roads, watching Sadat take a chilly dip, then home again to Shirl, by way of Anita’s.

  Camp David made him horny, everything about it—the goofy swimmin’ holes, the timbered dining halls, the motor court cabins done up in a thrift-store Happy Angler motif, like Mamie Eisenhower’s vision of an Adirondack Berchtesgarden. The point of the place was to Retreat, clear the head of leadership in the bosom of the woods, some F. Scott Thoreau–type jazz, but the woods were rigged with the latest anti-SigInt gear, microwave bafflers under underbrush, emitting the acyclic hum of a wounded engine. Tashmo walked the fences in boots and Wrangler jeans, slinging his sixteen just like in the war, always in long sleeves and slathered in bug lotion, because the woods were ticky, and if the ticks bit you, you got this thing called Lyme disease, which was basically old age except you caught it from a deer. Walking the woods at night, Tashmo heard the bafflers, but couldn’t always find them. The humming wavelength was designed to bounce between the trees and carry forever. The term was propagate, the techies said, the description of this bouncing, like in the Bible (he remembered Vietnam), and Abraham did propagate with Sarah, or like Russia, where they had propaganda instead of democracy. He tried to follow the hum, but he found himself walking in big circles, the moon between the trees, on his left, then on his right. The bafflers he couldn’t find made his dick stand up. Many times on lone patrols he had to lean against a tree and jerk off in the dark just to get his mind back on Jimmy Carter.

  He spent a lot of time in the duty hut, drinking rotgut coffee with Lloyd Felker, filling out the logs, watching a wall of CCTV, surveillance cameras sweeping fences all night long. They had motion sensors, infrared, scanners tuned to wide array. They tracked possum for fun and watched Johnny Carson, the monologue and guests, the smutty banter from the couches. They tracked the protest hippies, the anti-nukers trying to infiltrate from the west, saw them coming miles in advance.

  Tashmo liked to interview the anti-nukers. He considered them hippies and perhaps they were. He offered them cigarettes, went easy on the frisks, gave them exciting jeep rides to the admin shack. He admired hippies, the whole Woodstock thing. They said that Vietnam was bad—he had seen it, and agreed. They advocated free love in the mud—he hadn’t seen it, but he wanted to. But the hippies he met under Carter were a dreary, worried group. He asked them how often they got laid, as hippies, in an average day, sincerely curious, but they could only talk about Three Mile Island, rads and rems and cataclysmic heat-exchanger failures.

  Anita was a hippie, a suburban Buddhist, and she vacuumed in the buff. He saw her twice a week, stopping by for yogurt and a blowjob when Carter was at camp. Sex with her was exercise and, she said, a brief communion with the honesty of bodies. She grew bean sprouts in the basement, quoted Joni Mitchell, and wouldn’t let Tashmo smoke in the house even if he promised to blow it out the window. There was always a tension with Anita. The tension made it sexy, their little tug-of-war. Tashmo loved her clothes, her jerkins and her moccasins, and secretly he wanted to undress her partially and do the deed that way, but she was always in a rush for total honesty.

  “It’s all wrapped up together,” Tashmo mused one day as she went down on him. “If we didn’t have clothes, being naked wouldn’t mean too much.”

  She shrieked in his lap.

  He said, “What’s the problem down there?”

  “Your cock,” she gagged. “It, it—it tastes almost like the smell of Deep Woods Off.”

  Tashmo said, “Oh that.”

  He explained about the deer tick infestation at Camp David, how the agents smeared themselves in bug repellent, how it got from his hands to his manhood when he jerked off in the woods, and how he thought of her, jerking off alone. He thought she might be flattered by this honest revelation, but no dice. She made him take a shower with the soap she cooked at home.

  He came back with a towel and described his driveway fantasy, Anita kneeling in a buckskin shift, holding the ample dairy platter. He was hoping for a little role-playing, but Anita was aghast. She said he was describing the Land O Lakes logo-woman, the box the butter comes in, the ethnocentric squaw. She strode off naked to the fridge, returning with a box of Land O Lakes. Sure enough, there she was, glowing on the package, his sexual ideal, a Pochahontan princess, offering him butter on her knees.

  Things were never right with Anita after that, but he didn’t let it get him down. Suburbia was full of wives—wives like lawns, beautiful and useless and tended by their husbands once a week. Upper P.G. County was a civil service bedroom. The husbands in his town were civil service lifers, like the EPA ecologist, or Tashmo and his Secret Service buds, or like Tashmo’s neighbor, Bo Gould, who could sing all seven verses of the Fannie Mae fight song. The wives were mostly ex–flower children, transitioning to something else, like Canadian Anita with her orange Karmann Ghia, her well-thumbed Kama Sutra, and her closet full of suede.

  There was something in the
air back then, Carter winding down, a funky sort of hope, like they were on the verge of a great discovery, and it made him horny, driving past the lawns, buying milk and fudgsicles at the supermarket, women pushing shopping carts in tennis dresses. He followed them for aisles. Shopping made him horny. Working made him horny. Breakfast made him horny—reaching for the Land O Lakes, he spread the melting squaw. Betty Crocker in the flour—what would that be like? Fishy Mrs. Paul, Aunt Jemima dripping syrup, the ripe-tomato Contadina wench. These vestals of the Pik’N’Save, always feeding others, but what about their needs?

  He didn’t jerk off in the supermarket. No, he was strong. He waited till he was in the car. Afterwards, he zipped his dick away, wiped his hands on a moist towelette, and had the best smoke of the afternoon, slouched behind the wheel, watching women in tennis dresses return their carts, unloaded, to the automatic doors, or leaving them to drift on wheels across the parking lot.

  America. Driving home from Camp David, Tashmo passed the subdivisions speading over hills, except for one stretch of razor-ribboned fence, undeveloped blankness, several miles’ worth. He passed it coming back from camp and wondered why this square of forest stood untouched as every hill around it sprouted homes. One night in the duty shack, he mentioned the blankness to Lloyd Felker. They were watching Johnny Carson and the heat-screen monitors, both of which were pretty dull that night. Felker said the thing you couldn’t see behind the trees, the undeveloped heart of P.G. County, was the black budget at Fort Meade, the National Security Agency.

  Tashmo said, “The spy guys?”

  “Bet your ass,” said Felker. “They have a fleet of satellites, biggest mainframe ever built. They can listen to any conversation in the world. They make us look pitiful.”

  Tashmo later realized that many husbands in his town were commuting to black budgets. He learned to spot them, off-duty at the dump, at his daughters’ school plays, or at Generoso’s on Inspection Saturday. The spies he knew were bearded, brainy, nervous men, good fathers and bad drivers. They would never say exactly what they did or where they did it. They always lived civilian-side cover and Tashmo tortured them for sport.