Big If Page 15

  “Sir, is it true—?”

  “Sir, does the defeat in Iowa—?”

  I don’t have your female, O’T—this was Bobbie.

  Teenaged members of a marching band in red. The mother with the child on her shoulders. The mother slipped, trying to get free, but a crowd against a barricade will always crush its front, and the mother couldn’t move. The child wailed, “Momma down. Momma down.”

  Okay—Gretchen—parka female, moving lot side now. Coming down the cars. She’s trying to go around. Herc and O’T—

  “Howyadoin howyadoin howyadoin—”

  They were nearly at the lobby doors when Vi saw the woman in a white, gray, or beige ski parka, fighting through the people to the ropes. The woman hit the ropes just in front of the VP. Her mouth was shouting. Vi tensed to start her pivot-curl as the woman’s hands came up. She fell back in the crowd and Vi lost sight of her.

  Tashmo’s shudder passed through the VP into Vi. They moved down the ropeline like a beast of fable, a creature with six arms, three heads, and one nervous system.

  Flashbulbs flashed, unsynchronized, a sparkling effect.

  the bluffs (monday)

  Coming down from Portsmouth in the clear bright winter morning, the van of canvassers passed the harbor on the river, saw the runty oceangoing tugs wearing beards of dirty ice, the long container ships pushing up the Piscataqua, the navy base across the churning straits, a tall gray water tower, a skyline of idle cranes.

  The people in the van were party faithful, volunteers, here to help the VP become P. All of them were Texans, half of them were women, and all of these were active or retired employees of the Longmont-Delgado Unified School District. The other half, the men, the husbands of the women, were in carpentry, pest control, or refrigeration, except for the driver, Raymond Rios, who was twenty-four and single and taught science in the bright and gifted program at Longmont-Westside High. He taught Life Science I and II, worth four credit hours each. He also taught Life Science III, a two-credit-hour elective, which was said to be a bear.

  They came around the headland, open ocean to the left. To the right was a line of bungalow motels, shuttered for the season, a line of signs, NO VACANCY, NO VACANCY, NO VACANCY, and t-shirt shops and tackle shops and similar establishments, white and aqua-blue, and also shuttered. Farther on, they would hit the year-round condominiums, and after that the mansions, and after that the junction with Route 32. The navigatrix knew this, the woman in the front seat with the map. Her name was Jackie Kotteakis, retired teacher of ninth grade. She had worked this primary twice before, becoming over time a troop leader and den mother to the placard-covered vans of campaign volunteers, a service to her party for which she expected no reward except the excitement and the fun of it, like a camping trip with friends. These people were her friends and she felt good, riding with them on a winter morning by the sea.

  The people in the van were called a pull team. The map in Jackie’s lap was marked with hot pink highlighter, indicating target roads and vote-heavy condo courts. Unmarked roads were to be left alone. These orders came from headquarters. Actually these orders came from Tim, a Rhode Island lawyer who hoped to be judge. Tim was the VP’s field director for Region C, boss of Jackie’s pull team. Region C was basically the southern chunk of New Hampshire’s First Congressional District, minus Manchester, which was split into Regions A and B. Tim had explained that Jackie’s team, the teacher volunteers, had to cover the pink areas, but not, absolutely not, any unpink areas, thinking that this skinny bird from Texas was a newbie at pull-teaming. But Jackie was a veteran and she cut him off. She knew all about the pink. She knew that pollsters and phone-bankers and past waves of canvassers had spent months combing the streets and roads and cul-de-sacs along 1A, seeking, door by door (and call by call and questionnaire by questionnaire), the opinions of the citizens, dividing this part of the state into preference categories: the unregistered or otherwise unlikely-to-show-up, who were set aside as meaningless; the likely voters who supported the insurgent senator, the VP’s rival in the primary; the likely-voters-and-weakly-leaning-toward-the-VP; the likely-and-the-strong; and, finally, the undecided. Tim had voter lists, big fanning printouts identifying residents by name, age, address, home phone, and a two-digit poll code, 01 for meaningless, 02 for rival, 03 for weak-VP, 04 for strong-VP, 05 for the undecided.

  The van was coming into Center Effing. Jackie said, “Now pay attention, y’all. Today we’re doing undecideds, that’s your poll code oh-five, folks, a crucial group of humans—they’ll decide the primary.”

  Jackie knew that good pull-teaming was a science and easily screwed up. She had learned the do’s and don’ts on her first trip to New Hampshire when the teachers’ union sent her to Berlin, way the heck up north, and the field director for that area, a lawyer from Ohio, in his zeal to serve the party, had Jackie and the other volunteers knock on every door, wasting a whole morning on the meaningless 01s, who weren’t going to vote no matter what you said, who wouldn’t vote for Jesus against Hitler for Pete’s sake, who simply would not vote, and, as a result, Jackie’s team failed to cover all the pink streets, rich in weak-leaners and undecided voters. Some field operatives believed in hitting the strong-leaners in the days before the primary, just to firm them up; others didn’t, Jackie knew. But everyone agreed—this was the gospel of Get Out the Vote—that weak-leaners were important, second only to the biggest prize of all, the mighty undecideds. They never hit the undecideds in Berlin that year, and though they won the city, they lost Coos County, which they were not supposed to lose.

  In Jackie’s second junket to New Hampshire, four years later, they sent her to a gloomy woolen town called Shawgamunk, somewhere between Manchester and Portsmouth. It was the year that Jackie’s husband came down with cancer, and the mills in Shawgamunk, brick, worthless, and deserted, made her ache. Her husband was the offensive line coach at Longmont-Westside, known in local schoolboy football circles as the Greek or Pete the Greek or Mustache Pete, or sometimes Nick, even though his name was Theodore, called Thea (to rhyme with me and he and we), and his real nickname, since Chicago as a kid, had always been Tiny, because he was enormous. Jackie didn’t want to go to New Hampshire that second time, but Thea said she needed a break from her nursing duties, so she went to Shawgamunk, and the field director got his codes reversed and sent his pull team in a snowstorm to a neighborhood of 2s (strongly-leaning-to-the-other-side). The neighborhood was up and down a steep hill, dirty clapboard houses, people on relief. Jackie sensed a problem halfway up the hill. She tried to tell the field director, “You know, I’ve got a feeling, these people seem pretty much against us.” The field director, another haggard lawyer with ambitions and bad breath, told her to knock on doors and keep her big yap shut, and she did, pushing through the snow, getting out the hostile vote, the vote against them, and they lost Shawgamunk by forty votes that year. The image stayed with Jackie for a long time—Texans in the snow, full of pep and spirit, beating themselves with each trudging step.

  They were past the motels now, condos on both sides. The nicer ones, on the left, had soothing pluraled nature-names carved on hanging wooden signs, The Coves, The Glades, The Meadowlands. The cheaper condos, on the right, were smaller and closer to the road, and had names like roaring powerboats, Seaspray, Barracuda’s, and Beachcomber III.

  Jackie sneezed, a snippy poodle kind of sneeze, God-blessed herself, and said, “I bet it’s on the left, Raymond. You better slow down.”

  Raymond Rios, the driver and young science teacher to the bright and gifted, didn’t nod or really hear. He was thinking of the motels they had passed and the problem with the signs, NO VACANCY. This message bothered him, he couldn’t decide why. Then Jackie sneezed and it came to him, the motels said no vacancy because they were closed for the season (or off-season or not-season) and were, therefore, totally vacant, as vacant as they ever got, and so the sign, NO VACANCY, was maximum-inaccurate, yet he understood exactly what it meant. This thought o
r chain of thoughts made him feel vacant and relaxed, done with a problem, a pleasant empty feeling driving by the beaches in the wind.

  They pulled into The Bluffs, a cluster of new units, the first location of the day. They took the speed bump gently, came around the half-moon drive. Jackie was talking to the other volunteers, explaining how you pull-teamed, the purpose and the tactics of the thing. Normally, she said, they would drop a group of workers here, two or three teams of two people each. The teams would knock on doors as Raymond took the others to their respective drop-off points. Raymond would then circle back, picking up the first group, who would by then be done, and the next group, and the next, and finally the last dropped-off, who would by then be done, but many of the Texans were doing their first canvas and the pink neighborhoods were scattered down to Rye, and Jackie thought it would be best to stick together and use The Bluffs as a training ground.

  They parked in front of a fenced-in playground, got out, and stretched their legs. Jackie was saying things like split up, take opposite sides, call folks by their names, Mr., Ms., don’t say Miss or Mrs. (Yankee women get offended). Suddenly she stopped, struck with another image, not squandered Texas pep, the Shawgamunk disaster, futility in snow, but how this moment, here and now, was so like her dead husband teaching blocking to his linemen, pulling guards and you flare out to pick up the nickel stunt, and how she often watched him on a dusty practice field, Jackie sitting in the bleachers, not liking football much, not understanding nickel stunts, but her husband did, and he would have understood this too, check your lists and don’t get lost and look enthused and let’s be a team here, folks. So much depends on pep and spirit, Jackie thought, your attitude to life, and she stopped talking to the volunteers because the image of her husband teaching blocking made her glad and weepy all at once, and what the heck was that?

  Raymond was pulling boxes from the back of the van. The boxes held the flyers and glossy issue packets, stacks of flyers tied together, which Jackie knew enough to call the literature.

  Across the road, in Eight The Bluffs, a faux-weathered A-frame on the rocky point, Jens Asplund was sitting in his breakfast nook with his wife and son. Jens was tapping at his laptop, writing code. The code he wrote was destined for a file called SmoShadow.exe, which Jens needed for a meeting at his office. Jens’ office was in West Portsmouth, where BigIf leased a disused building on a former Air Force base. The basement of the building, dug and reinforced in the ’50s as a bomb shelter, now held a ring of mighty servers—big computers—on which the game was running at all times. Sitting in the breakfast nook, Jens was hunched in concentration, drinking his fourth mug of Glucola, a fizzy, reddish beverage, naturally sweetened, loaded with caffeine, which he favored over coffee, water, and most types of food.

  Kai Boyle-Asplund, a boy of three, sat across the table, safely strapped into his booster seat, dressed for school and waiting for his breakfast. Peta Boyle was fixing oatmeal at the stove. Peta set a bowl in front of Kai.

  “But Mama, I don’t want the oapameal.”

  “You love the oapameal,” said Peta. “Remember we decided?”

  “But Mama, I want chewy sticks.”

  “No chewy sticks till later, Bimble,” Peta said. “Look, I’m packing them for lunch in your power box. See? Boom, right in the box.” She chopped Kai’s oatmeal with a spoon to cool it. “Jens—did you get any sleep last night?”

  Jens scrolled through his source code. “Why yes. Did you?”

  “I woke up at three,” said Peta. “You weren’t in the bed.”

  “I probably took a pee.”

  “I woke up to take a pee. You weren’t in there either.”

  “I took a pee outside,” said Jens. “I find it inspiring. I love the moon at night, don’t you?”

  The moon at night—it was the sort of thing Peta might have said. Jens was being slightly mean, mimicking his wife, and Peta knew it.

  “Make him eat it, Jens,” she said.

  She went into the bedroom to get dressed.

  Jens did not look up from his laptop. He said, “Eat your oapameal, Kai.”

  Kai touched the oatmeal with the tip of his spoon. “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Compiling a subroutine, juggling my function calls. I keep getting error flags. It’s driving me insane.”

  Kai nodded sympathetically. “Can I have a chewy stick?”

  “Sure,” said Jens. “For lunch. Now eat. Come on, Bongle, we’ll be late for school.”

  The front room was a mild mess, an hour’s worth—a couch cushion and a baby blanket on the rug in front of the TV where Kai had watched a Pooh video as he decompressed from sleep, plastic blocks scattered all around, a car or two, a wooden plane, several oil tankers, and a tippy-sippy cup of mango juice, tipped and slowly leaking on the rug. Jens looked through the picture window, checking the thermometer bolted to the house. His neighbors, Sybil Hammerschmidt from Nine The Bluffs and Beth Greco from Five, were talking in the street with a group of campaign volunteers.

  The phone rang in the kitchen. Peta got it. “Boyle-Asplund residence! Yes. No. No—can’t you let us live in peace?” She hung up sharply.

  Jens said, “Pollster?”

  “Christ, they’re vultures. Kai-bo, buddy, eat.”

  The phone rang again. They let it ring. Their voice mail listed their opinions on all subjects, so the pollsters wouldn’t have to call them back.

  Outside, the canvassers deployed, ringing doorbells. Jens, watching from the window, tried to guess their nationality. A group of college kids from Minnesota had come through the week before, followed by some autoworkers from Hamtramck, Michigan. The best day was when a van of prison guards from Buffalo had the fenderbender with the rabid tort reformers. Today’s contingent had a sober, churchy look. Jens guessed they came from somewhere flat and grassy where cyclone warnings often closed the malls. A canvasser, a young man in big mittens, was coming up the walk. Jens buckled his pants and opened the front door.

  “Morning, sir!” said the volunteer. “My name is Raymond Rios. I’m with the vice president. May I speak to Mr. Coakley today, sir?”

  Jens said, “I don’t see why not.”

  “Great. Is he at home?”

  Jens looked up the street. “I don’t see his truck. He usually leaves early.”

  “This isn’t Ten The Bluffs?”

  “No, Eight. Ten is the one that needs a gutter job. We’ve been after Coakley for months to do those gutters. Are you by any chance from Kansas?”

  “No sir. Longmont, Texas.”

  Jens was delighted. “The Longmont Easter Twister, 1977. A rare Fujita five. Eighty-mile track, ten dead, forty-seven hurt. Its angry soil-darkened funnel tore the asphalt from the roads. Did you see it, Raymond?”

  “Golly, I don’t think so. Did it come at night? I had an early bedtime in those days.”

  “No,” said Jens, “it came on Easter morning just as church was letting out. What do you do in Longmont, Ray? May I call you Ray?”

  “Most folks don’t, but what the heck,” said Raymond Rios. “I teach Life Science to the bright and gifted at the high school.”

  Jens leaned against the door. He liked meeting canvassers and engaging them in the breezy generality of strangers meeting. He had learned many things this way. One of the prison guards showed him how to carve a deadly weapon out of soap. A tort reformer showed him how to armpit-fart. He said, “That’s a lot of ground to cover, Ray, all of life and science.”

  “Well they’re bright and gifted,” Raymond Rios said. “Of course, by law I have to give equal time to both accounts.”

  “Both accounts of what?”

  “Creation,” Raymond Rios said. “We do the Big Bang in the fall, the birth of stars and planets, chemistry and physics, energy and matter, Darwin, speciation and genetics. Then we spend the spring on the first page of the Bible.”

  “Must go pretty quick, the Bible. Not a lot to say. God did
it, class dismissed.”

  “We cover it in depth.”

  “So if one of your students wrote on an exam that we evolved over three million years from a stooped, nut-grubbing primate known as Lucy Afarensis, would that student get an A or an F?”

  “Depends on the semester,” Raymond Rios said. “In the fall, that’s an A. In the spring, that’s an F, because the whole deal only took a week.”

  “Want to see a cool knife made of soap?”

  “I should probably hit the other units,” Raymond Rios said. “Do you all need some literature? This one’s about wetland preservation, this one’s about prescription drug benefits.”

  “My wife does all our politics,” said Jens. “She’s a volunteer for the VP. We’re pretty well stocked up.”

  “Petulia Boyle?”

  “She doesn’t use ‘Petulia.’ Makes her cringe, in fact.”

  “Says here she’s a strong-leaner, but you’re undecided.”

  Jens said, “I’m reassessing.”

  “Jens!”—Peta’s voice.

  Jens said goodbye to Raymond Rios, closed the door, and hurried to the dining nook.

  Kai was clapping in his booster seat. Peta was standing by the fridge, hands on hips, dressed to go. A star-shaped splat of oatmeal was on the linoleum between them.

  “He threw it,” Peta said.

  Kai said, “No I didn’t. It slipped.”

  Peta said, “Bull-loney. Jens, I’ve got to run. Tell him not to lie.”

  Peta kissed her husband and her son, grabbed her coat, purse, keys, shades, laptop, beeper, a travel mug of coffee, a binder of new million-dollar realty listings, and went out the door.