“Clyde, you’re going to make a fine mechanic,” Terry said.
The upshot was that Clyde’s budget was mostly transferred to the County Commissioner’s race, leaving Clyde without the wisdom of Dr. Jerry Tompkins except for the vaguely remembered, complimentary admonition that he must develop a persona and become a public figure. As a sort of consolation prize, Terry Stonefield gave Clyde the phone number of a company down in Arkansas called Razorback Media, which gave Clyde an astonishingly low price on bumper stickers, as long as he had them printed in white on University of Arkansas red.
Beyond the bumper stickers, all his politicking and persona building were going to have to be done on his own time. Which was how he hit upon his campaign strategy, which brought him to the office of the county surveyor.
“Very large.”
Clyde could never remember the difference between large-scale maps and small-scale maps until he read The Hound of the Baskervilles. There is a scene early in Hound where Sherlock bursts in carrying a bunch of maps of Baskerville-land and Watson asks whether they are large-scale maps. Sherlock’s mnemonic reply was tattooed on Clyde’s brain like a subdural hematoma.
The sheriff’s department had many maps of its assigned bailiwick tacked to the walls. When Clyde had asked his boss, County Sheriff Kevin Mullowney, where those maps had come from, Mullowney had tilted his head back to look at Clyde under the lenses of his tinted bifocals. This small adjustment enabled Mullowney to make believe that he was looking downward at Clyde from a greater altitude. In fact Clyde was taller than Mullowney; Clyde had wrestled at 192, and Mullowney was always around 167 or thereabouts. Among his many other personality disorders, Mullowney had the chip-on-his-shoulder attitude typical of a wrestler who believed that he could have attained greater glory if he had weighed a little more than he really did. Since graduating from high school three years ahead of Clyde, Mullowney had compensated for this by ballooning well past the 192 mark.
“Why would anyone want a map like that?” Mullowney had said. As far as Mullowney was concerned, these very large-scale maps were secret cop intelligence that should not be allowed to fall into the hands of ordinary citizens, or even mere deputies such as Clyde.
“Looking at some real estate,” Clyde had said immediately and, he thought, convincingly.
So far his decision was a private thing, a thing that Clyde had done inside his own head, and he didn’t want to reveal it to anyone just yet, least of all his opponent, who was also his boss. So he said he was looking at some real estate.
“How many of them things you own now?” Mullowney said, tilting his head down to a more normal position, relieving Clyde of his intense sheriff scrutiny.
“The house we live in. A lot down the street. And then two buildings with three units each.” Clyde went out of his way to use the jargon adopted by Buck Chandler, his realtor, and refer to them as units rather than apartments. It would be certain to cow Mullowney.
“They making money for you?” Mullowney asked a little less loudly. He had decided that his deputy might just be a sophisticated investment savant. Everyone knew that Clyde had been pretty good in school and had been a little surprised when he had refrained from going to college; maybe, Mullowney was seeming to think, maybe Clyde was even smarter than people had thought.
“They ain’t generating any cash flow, if that’s what you mean,” Clyde said. Use of the money term “cash flow” in these circumstances was guaranteed to keep Mullowney’s brain reeling.
“Then what’s the point of owning them?” Mullowney said.
“I’m buying them on fifteen-year mortgages,” Clyde said, “so the payments are pretty high.”
“Jeez. We got a thirty on our house.”
“Anything more than fifteen, you end up spending too much on interest,” Clyde said.
Mullowney was flummoxed. This was the first time it had ever occurred to him, or for that matter anyone in his vast extended family and circle of social contacts, that if you stuck with it long enough, it was actually possible to pay off a mortgage. For Mullowney making mortgage payments was kind of like putting money in the collection plate at church every Sunday: throwing money away for a payoff that would not materialize during your actual life span.
“That’s real smart,” Mullowney said. “Then what? You gonna retire?”
“Well,” Clyde said, “I was talking to Desiree about it and decided that I didn’t want to be still breaking up fights at the Barge On Inn when I was forty-five years old.”
“Oh,” Mullowney said. He sounded just a little bit surprised and almost hurt to think that a person might not be happy doing exactly that.