Big If Page 7

  Gretchen said, “You will never live with him. Listen to me, Tev, I know the man, okay? He’ll hurt you, just like he hurt me.”

  “And you stole me off to Maryland just to hurt him back.”

  “Is that what he says?”

  “No, that’s what Brandy says.”

  “Who the hell is Brandy?”

  “She’s his fiancée. She’s the coolest lady in the universe. She does traditional African massage technique at her tanning salon in West Hollywood. They’ve been together almost seven months now.”

  So this was the final blow. Brandy.

  Tevon found his stance again. “Come on, put the token in.”

  There were four major supermarkets in Gretchen’s town, assuming that her town was Seat Pleasant and not some crooked gerrymander. There were other minor supermarkets and a million minimarts, but only four with everything she ever needed, whole departments for meat, booze, frozen foods, toys, pets, greeting cards. She pushed the cart along. They were somewhere in the coffee, tea, and powdered cocoas. Tevon was behind her, tarrying and loitering and up to no good, still in his full replica Oriole uniform and his pumped-up high-tops.

  She remembered loving shopping with her son when Maryland was new and he was small. He would ride in the seat part of the cart, facing her, kicking her, nibbling a cheese-and-peanut-butter cracker, the brown-and-orange kind. She always saved the torn-open package so that they could scan it at the checkout counter. But now he ran around the place, ashamed to be with Moms, and she shopped alone. She saw him down the aisle with a Ho-Ho and no package.

  “Tevon! How are they supposed to scan it, man? Get your buttside over here this minute.”

  He waited almost the full minute, testing her raw nerves, then came ambling up the aisle.

  She said, “Tell me what you ate so I can pay for it.”

  He said, “Ho-Ho.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. Just Ho-Ho.”

  “I saw you with Cap’n Crunch in the meat department.”

  “That was from the sample table. They’re giving them trial-size boxes away free. They’re doing a blind taste test.”

  “Against what?”

  “Um.”

  “See, you’re lying, Tevon Williams. They can’t test anything against Cap’n Crunch. There’s nothing even similar to Cap’n Crunch.”

  “That’s not true, there’s Kix.”

  “Kix? We’ll see about that.”

  Gretchen found the manager, a Sikh in a bow tie. She asked him if there were any blind Cap’n Crunch taste tests scheduled. He consulted a printout and said there were no taste tests of any type scheduled until Wednesday afternoon.

  Gretchen pushed the cart with one hand, pulling Tevon with the other.

  She said, “If you eat things, son, and don’t save the packages, they can’t scan them when we leave. That means I can’t pay and that’s as good as stealing. Now tell me what you ate.”

  “I told you, Ho-Ho. The Cap’n Crunch was free.”

  “That’s it—no computer for a month.”

  “I’ll wait until you leave. I’ll wait until the minute that you’re gone.”

  “I’ll tear it out of the wall.”

  “I’ll plug it in again.”

  “I’ll lock it in the basement.”

  “I’ll bust the basement door.”

  “I’ll give your computer to the retarded people’s center.”

  He was quiet after that, pondering his life with no computer. Then he said, “Chill out, Moms. It’s not stealing till we leave.”

  They went to the checkout when the cart was full. The lady scanned the Slim-Fast canisters, the tomatoes, the carrots, and the greens, the frozen dinners, the chicken parts, the cans of soup, the bread, the milk, the juice, the cereals and tuna fish. The lady totaled it.

  Gretchen said to Tevon, “Tell her what you ate.”

  He said, “Ho-Ho.”

  The lady waited.

  Gretchen said, “What else?”

  “Nothing. Only Ho-Ho.”

  “Please don’t be a liar on me, son. It kills me when you act like no one raised you.”

  She was begging. The other people in the line looked at her with pity and impatience, here’s another woman who can’t control her kid. Tevon saw the people pitying his mom. Pride rose up inside him. They had no right to pity her.

  “Cap’n Crunch,” he said.

  The lady rang it up.

  He said, “Nutter Butter, little bag of smokehouse almonds, single-serving Pringles.”

  “You must be thirsty,” said the woman.

  “Coca-Cola Classic. I left the bottle in the paperback best-sellers. You’ll find it, aisle ninety-one.”

  The lady gave him credit, five cents for the return.

  The thing she couldn’t figure out, driving to the house, was how it all began. Why did her son go searching for himself in cyberspace? At one level, it was natural, of course—the curiosity, and Gretchen knew that she was to blame for not taking the necessary preemptive steps (she was pretty sure that you could disable the databases on a kid’s account; she’d have to call AOL and ask them). So, yes, it was bound to happen sometime, but why did it happen now?

  Tev was eating pizza in his lap, a gooey slice from Papa Gino’s at the mall, a little slice-sized box/plate in his lap catching crumbs and drops of orange grease. She glanced at him, going down the P.G. Highway. She thought of what her mother had said that morning, how Tev had seen her on TV moving through a crowd. She thought about it for a mile and two stoplights, remembering the wet snow at the airport in Des Moines, the VP moving down the ropes, Gretchen and Vi Asplund moving with him, scanning hands and scanning hands, the blur of thumbs and palms, looking for the muzzle of a pistol coming up, or conceivably a knife or homemade grenade, or anything metallic they could not identify as not a pistol/knife/grenade, or a fist coming up holding anything they couldn’t immediately see. She had the Dome in her ear when she worked a crowd, the traffic back and forth, the snipers in concealment, the fast extraction team, aircrews on the gunships overhead.

  “Tevon, did you see me on TV?”

  “I always see you,” Tevon said. “You look pretty scared out there. My friends say you look bored, but I know it’s scared.”

  Gretchen drove in silence. Someday she would tell him all about it, how she felt out there, hanging on the VP’s flank, deep in what the agents called vacant mode, a stone defensive Zen, the mind both clean and empty except for what it sees. People leaning out, straining, almost falling over ropes. They touched his hand and took his hand, falling back to reestablish balance, and the mass effect of these human movements was to slow the VP, pull him closer, hands now up his arms and around his neck, dangerous, so dangerous. Every crowd sucked them in, a blind hydraulic suck. Gretchen’s job, straddling his leg, her shoulder to the crowd, was to counteract the suck, to drive and guide him through her pelvis to his thigh, to force him down the ropes, and yes it was a bit like giving birth, the push against the suck, and yes it made her think of Tevon and the night she forced him into light, pop and burst, the openness, pain hallucination, and no man to help her there, no so-called man to help. It was brutal in that way, saving the VP. Later, on the plane, she would cramp up from the pushing. She’d be talking to some colonel, he’d be talking flight plans and MAC-hops and gunship-tasking, his lips moving, and she would be so cramped up inside that she couldn’t listen to the moving lips. She’d sign off on whatever this fool wanted, then hurry to the nearest empty head, slide the latch and lock the door and sit on the pot, her skirt hiked up, fat hands between fat legs, and massage herself through scratchy pantyhose until her knots went slack and she could think again. She’d splash her face and try to picture Tevon growing up in Maryland, growing up in peace, growing up with soccer balls and roller blades and shoot-’em-up computer games and every other gift she could think of and afford. Life in vacant mode—someday she would tell him all about it.

  Tevon ate
the pizza, left a gummy crust. He said, “Do you love him?”

  Gretchen said, “Who? The VP?”

  “You’re always hanging on him on the news. It’s like you two are dancing.”

  “No, son, I don’t love him.”

  “Is he like your friend then?”

  “He’s a politician, Tev, same as all the rest. He’s less than a nothing. No, he’s not my friend.”

  “Why do you go with him then—if he’s not your friend?”

  “It’s not about friends, Tevon. They killed Dr. King, they killed Robert Kennedy. Leaders died and cities burned and everything went bad. I saw it happen, son. People tell you that it couldn’t happen now. Sure, look out the window—what do you see? Houses, lawns, SUVs, everybody’s rich. Well I’m not so sure. The country is a piece of supermarket meat. It looks pretty good, all tight and shiny in the cellophane, but if you break the package even just a little bit, the meat starts going bad inside. My agents are the cellophane. That’s why I go with him, that’s why I’m not around as much as other moms, whatever. We can’t let a handgun pick our leaders, son. I refuse to see you living in that world.”

  This seemed fundamental to her, driving past the Jewish spaceship and later waiting at a stoplight.

  Tevon said, “Would you die for him?”

  “Tevon, please—where is all this coming from?”

  “Well isn’t that what you’re supposed to do—someone shoots, you step in front?”

  She thought, he’s old enough to put it all together now, the meaning of the clips and what I do. He’s scared that something bad will happen on the news and, as a precaution, he’s preparing a new parent for himself—a new home in California, a new Dome, in case he loses what he has.

  Gretchen said, “No one’s gonna die.”

  Tevon took this in. They drove awhile.

  He said, “How do you know?”

  Well, this was a question, wasn’t it? They pulled into the driveway. He was waiting for an answer and she knew it.

  Gretchen did not believe in lying to a child except when absolutely necessary.

  “Tev,” she said, a little hoarse. “I’ll tell you a secret, son. The secret is important and it’s just between us two. Don’t tell Grams, don’t tell the kids at school, don’t tell your little chat room pals, because it’s an absolute top secret government scientific invention, and it’s called, it’s called the two-three-one-two-three-six-P. You can’t see it on TV, this special P machine. You can’t see in real life, but it’s real—I swear to you, it’s real—and you don’t have to be afraid when I go away, because I feel it when I’m out there in the crowds, it’s like a shield of energy, and it’s all around me in the air.”

  Vi had lived in Tower South since coming to Protection, but standing at the window of her studio that morning, she wondered for a moment if anybody lived here. Her plants lived here, three geraniums along a dusty windowsill. Her clothes lived here, her suits and blouses in a shallow closet, her woolens still in boxes stacked against the wall. Her books lived here, or some of them, a carton’s worth of fitness guides and sports biographies, but Vi herself was generally gone, and most of her possessions, the truly precious things—a box of family pictures, three unmatching chairs, a stand-up lamp with clawball feet—were taking up a corner of her brother’s basement in New Hampshire.

  Vi was making coffee in the kitchenette. The studio was puny, dim, and noisy through the walls, though she didn’t really mind the noise. The life of Tower South was in the narrow halls, which were carpeted, generic, and bewilderingly long, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at the faraway nirvana of the elevator bank. The complex, a multitower Habitrail on the Virginia side, was equally convenient to the Pentagon, the Metro, and Ronald Reagan Airport. Vi shared the floor with pilot-looking guys—Air Force? airline?—and their flight-attendant-looking wives. In a funny way it reminded her of the Coopers and the Buckerts on Santasket Road back home. Maybe this was why she didn’t hate the noise. She heard families going and arriving, the jangling of keys, the crackling of grocery bags, the vump of garbage sailing to perdition down the chute. She heard the children too, laughing, shouting, sugar-rushing, the parents saying Wait, wait, wait, the kids not understanding that the corridors of South were like a church, a place reserved for no unnecessary noise, not home—home is when we close the door—but not the playground either, where a kid was free to scream.

  Vi listened to the coffeemaker huff and start its trickling. The phone rang. It was Bobbie Taylor-Niles, Vi’s roommate on the road.

  Bobbie said, “I had a great idea. Let’s go malling, you and me.”

  Malling was Bobbie’s word for a certain type of shopping, not the hasty dash to Wal-Mart for a pack of razors, nor the duty-driven trudge for weekly groceries. Malling had more style, more serious intent, like going to an art museum except it’s a mall. Vi didn’t feel like malling on that Sunday morning, her first day off since Iowa, but Bobbie was insistent, as Bobbie often was.

  “I’ll pick you up,” she said. “Which tower is yours again?”

  “The southern one,” said Vi.

  “Is that the real, real ugly one right next to the Christian all-news cable network?”

  It was.

  “See you in an hour,” Bobbie said.

  Vi finished dressing for a run and took the elevator to the lobby, riding with the girls she called the Fiends, somber Arab sisters, diplomatic brats. The Fiends stood together, veiled to their eyes, holding their twin monkey bikes by the handlebars. The Fiends lived in the penthouse, up there with the weather and the blinking aviation beacons. They started on forty, racing through the corridors, taking corners at full tilt, touching every doorknob, or seeing who could go the slowest without tipping, moving down to thirty-nine when forty got boring.

  Vi smiled at the Fiends and they ignored her, swapping comments in fast Arabic. Their mouths were shrouded. Vi couldn’t see who was saying what. The conversation, disembodied, was sound and black expressive eyes. The elevator opened. Vi held the bucking doors. The sisters pedaled off into the lobby.

  Vi stretched her hamstrings from the heel, pushing on the marble wall. She saw the Fiends circling the atrium, thumbing their bells, the doormen in pursuit. Vi kneeled to tie her cross-trainers, unbunching the tongue, looping double knots.

  She set off at an easy pace from Tower South to Tower West to Tower Mezzanine. The lobbies and sublobbies and retail esplanades went on for 3.7 miles. The brochures in the rental office said so. Vi took this run whenever she was home, pounding over catwalks, weaving through the crush on weekday mornings, tenants, shoppers, office workers.

  She ran through the tubes, past the drugstores, the dry cleaners, the Thai place and the MIA memorial, the BYOB bistro, the indoor junior college, the new luggage rental place for people sent on unexpected trips, the Cinema 1-2-3-4-5 and, around the corner, 6-7-8.

  Vi had joined Protection out of New York station for a mix of cloudy reasons, most of which, in retrospect, seemed uninformed or misinformed or barely formed at all. In part, she had wanted to get out of New York, the grim routines of Crim, the days spent watching soaps and frisking prisoners. In part, she’d thought the travel and the challenge would drag her out of the numb and stupid grief she had felt since her father’s death. In part, she saw the move as a tribute to her father, the dutiful adjuster. Insurance and Protection—a metaphor so obvious it had felt like destiny. She put in for a transfer. The transfer was approved. She was sent to the Protection Campus for a training tour in weapons, tactics, doctrine, the whole theology known as the Dome. At Beltsville, the instructors taught it as a diagram, a picture on a page, circles within circles, zones of pure control, a dot inside the circles labeled P for protectee. The diagram had looked to Vi more like a target than a shield, though it was an awesome shield of poised defensive force. She spent three months in Beltsville, a full winter, sleeping in the dorms, eating in the dining hall, showing her ID at every door, reading old white papers in t
he lamplight on her bunk, the physics of a hit and how to throw it off, dense, technical and terrifying. Then she joined the VP’s team and went to work for Gretchen Williams and Gretchen’s deputy, a senior special agent named Lloyd Felker.

  Vi had heard a fair amount about Lloyd Felker, who had written the white papers Vi had studied on her bunk. He had been a line guy, a decorated veteran of the Reagan team. He’d earned his decorations on a rainy morning in March 1981, when a movie-addled drifter by the name of John W. Hinckley, Jr., opened up on Reagan outside the Hilton on Connecticut Northwest. Hinckley hit the chief-of-detail, Tim McCarthy, in the gut, hit a cop named Delahanty in the neck, hit the press secretary in the skull, hit Reagan in the chest, and it was Felker and another agent, Tashmo, who bundled Reagan to the waiting limousine, sped to the hospital, and probably saved his life.

  Something in the mess and narrow miss drove Felker into theory. He moved up to Beltsville as an analyst in Plans. He spent the next twenty years teaching doctrine to recruits and writing his white papers. Toward the end of Felker’s great career as a protection intellectual, he was asked to draft a plan for a presidential trip to Pakistan. He wrote a memo, circulating it division-wide for comments and criticism. The plan was vintage Felker, meticulous, obsessive, nothing left to chance, but it had one glaring flaw—or not a flaw exactly, more of an anomaly: it was, or seemed to be, a plan for how to kill the president in Pakistan. The other analysts, being thorough men, ran some crosschecks by computer simulator and concluded that it would probably work.

  Felker didn’t need computer simulations. “Of course it works,” he said. “You think I’d circulate my fantasy?”

  The other planners didn’t understand. Why write a plan to kill—what purpose could it serve?

  Felker said, “What purpose? We write our plans to counter plans hatched and set in motion days or weeks or months or maybe years before, or not at all—we can’t know this until later, so we counterplan against the plan as if the plan exists. But what is the plan? We have no idea. We’re a house of critics with no poet. Someone in this outfit needs to think along these lines. I make a plan, a murder plan; you counterplan against it. I find the holes; you plug them. It’s scientific peer review. I destroy your work and if I can’t, your work is sound.”