It was the second of November, the Friday before Election Day. At five o’clock in the morning Desiree had called from Fort Riley, wide-awake and very serious. Orders had been filtering down from on high, expanding and ramifying as they made their way through the chain of command, and last night she had got word from her commanding officer that her division, the Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry, was going to go over to Saudi Arabia to hammer Saddam’s legions into dust. She had been trying to get through to Clyde all night to tell him the news, but all the long-distance lines out of Fort Riley had been busy.
Clyde had been light-headed and woozy all day long. Many people were honking at him as he drove the Murder Car into Wapsipinicon; he couldn’t figure out why until he chanced to look at the speedometer and realized he had been driving fifteen miles an hour. The ample flanks of the station wagon were adorned with “Vote Banks” signs, and he didn’t think he was doing much for his already desperate standing in the polls by holding up traffic. So he pulled into a McDonald’s, got a large coffee, and burned his mouth on it, trying to get himself snapped back to reality. He turned off the radio, which carried no news of the impending deployment anyway—just endless repetition of George Bush giving a speech the day before and fulminating about the Iraqi soldiers’ “outrageous acts of barbarism.” He took a few deep breaths, got Maggie’s Binky back into her mouth, and then forced himself to drive into Wapsipinicon at a snappier pace. When he picked up speed, the wind flowing over the sides of the station wagon caused the campaign placards to flutter and buzz alarmingly.
They parked in the expansive lot of the University Methodist Church—a crucial repository of strategic espionage data. Clyde chose a space near the street, reckoning that it couldn’t hurt for the official Banks campaign vehicle to be seen at a church, and on a Friday no less. One or two closet Republicans honked their horns at him and waved as he was disengaging Maggie from the automotive transport module and socketing her little fuzzy pink-clad body into the backpack system. He swung her around onto his back and walked into the side entrance of the church. It was a crisp fall morning, but he still felt as if he were wading through syrup. The thing he had feared most since the beginning of August was happening. Desiree was going to the Gulf.
The Howdy Brigade worked out of a spare office donated by University Methodist, which was a sprawling and mighty church with a great deal of office space to spare. The church’s administrative wing had a particular churchy smell to it that took Clyde back to his boyhood; as if all churches, or at least all Protestant ones, used the same brand of disinfectant. Back in the sanctuary he could hear an organist practicing footwork, playing deep, rumbling scales on the pedals. He walked quickly by the pastoral offices, lest he cross paths with a minister and get caught up in endless socializing of the type he used to avoid but that was obligatory since he had become a candidate. Finally he came to a door festooned with snapshots of foreign students of all shapes and colors that had been laminated into a multiethnic collage and labeled “Howdy Brigade.”
“Well, howdy, Clyde, aren’t you the punctual one this morning,” said Mrs. Carruthers. “What can the Howdy Brigade do for you today?”
“I understand you’ve got a deal worked out with Dean Knightly’s wife where you get word of all the new international students coming into town.”
“That’s right. It’s part of our mission to make sure that within twenty-four hours of their arrival in Wapsipinicon, each foreign visitor is greeted by a member of the Howdy Brigade with a food basket and a three-W packet.”
“Three-W?”
“Welcome to Wonderful Wapsi. It’s a package of maps, phone numbers, coupons, and so on that helps them ease the transition to their new home.”
“Ma’am, do you keep records of which students arrived in town on which dates?”
Mrs. Carruthers considered it. “Well, we receive the notifications from Sonia Knightly—she usually faxes them to us or drops the list by in person. And I think we should have them filed away somewhere.”
She opened up one drawer of a massive battleship-gray institutional surplus file cabinet and picked through it uncertainly for a while. Maggie was fussing to a point that inhibited further conversation, so Clyde hustled her down the hallway to the nursery and changed her diaper on the table there.
By the time he got back, Mrs. Carruthers had drawn out one file folder and was spreading a miscellany of curly faxes and hand-scrawled notes out on a table. “Was there any particular time period you were interested in?”
“Mid-July of this year.”
“Oh. That would be an unusual time for new students to arrive—usually they come a week before the semester begins in August.”
“I’m pretty certain about it, ma’am.”
She picked up a note handwritten on EIU stationery. “This is Sonia’s writing. It’s not dated. But I haven’t seen it before—Roger and I were on vacation in mid-July.”
Clyde took the note from her hand and scanned it for a moment. “This is what I was looking for,” he said."May I take it with me?”
Mrs. Carruthers looked stricken and put one hand to her breastbone.
“What is it, ma’am?”
“Well, it’s just that, as I said, I was out of town when these students arrived, and I’m afraid they must have slipped through the cracks.”