“Your generosity would put a king to shame,” Mohammed said. “Good-bye, my friend.”
“’Bye now,” Clyde said, stepping out onto the porch. He walked out into the yard, turned around, and looked back; Mohammed was gone, but the wrestler was still watching him through the open door. By the time he got back to the station wagon, the door had been closed; but he thought he could see the wrestler peering through a gap between the kitchen curtains. Clyde waved one more time and the gap disappeared.
Chapter Fourty-One
It was 3:33 A.M. on Election Day, and Clyde was already up and alert, sitting in his living-room La-Z-Boy trimming his nose hairs and watching CNN with the sound turned off. Maggie had awakened him for a bottle and a diaper change, and now he could not get back to sleep; the slightest thing kept him awake these days. And wild nose hairs were hardly a slight thing. They had never troubled him until his early thirties, when his nostrils had begun to sprout a new type of hair with the consistency of baling wire. Whenever one of them got long enough to reach the other side of the nostril, paralyzing discomfort resulted. The only solution was to push a rapidly spinning motorized knife up into his nose.
The first time Clyde had done this, he’d considered it the bravest act he had ever performed. Now it had become almost routine but still gave him a mild thrill of danger. It always made him feel much better. But the freshly cut hairs were square and sharp on the end and would only send him into a worse fit in a few weeks when they got long enough. In that sense the nose-hair trimmer was as addictive as cocaine.
Clyde’s insomnia had got pretty bad the last few months, for any number of reasons, including the fact that Sheriff Mullowney kept changing his schedule around, always giving him the most inconvenient and unpleasant shifts, never giving his biological clock a chance to settle down. This position—La-Z-Boy, muted CNN, nose-hair clipper—had become common. CNN seemed to show less nonsense at this time of day, concentrating on real news. This morning the news from the Gulf was dominated by images of Saudi women driving around in big Mercedes-Benzes and being arrested. Apparently it was illegal for women to drive there. Clyde shuddered to think of what would ensue if one of his Saudi Arabian counterparts tried to prevent Desiree from operating a motor vehicle. She would end up in the clink in Dhahran, no doubt, sentenced to amputation of her gaspedal foot, plus twenty years’ hard labor for putting the gendarme in a full nelson and teaching him some manners.
Clyde had only one thing left to endure before his political career came to a merciful end: the victory party that the Stonefields were throwing for all the county GOP candidates, out at the country club. He had spent enough time with the local Republicans to know their style and could hardly stand to imagine what it would be like this evening, once they all got into the Canadian Club and news began to flow in of how the people of Forks County had rejected their wisdom and leadership yet again. Clyde had tolerated them reasonably well until the UN Day party, when he and Fazoul had seen Anita Stonefield and Professor Larsen making out behind the gazebo. That image had impressed itself as deeply on Clyde’s mind as anything he’d seen all year.
He stayed up long enough to catch the four A.M. newscast. CNN always made him want to stay in front of the tube for another twenty-five minutes, just to see if anything new had happened in the last half hour. The sparse, ominous drumbeat of the “Crisis in the Gulf” logo had worked its way into his subconscious and triggered as many emotions as the cry of his baby. He forced himself to switch it off.
The only light in the living room now came from the blinking LED on his answering machine. He turned the volume way down and listened. There was only one message, and it was from Jack Carlson: “Clyde,I’m trying to organize a Clyde Banks defeat celebration at the pub Tuesday night. Wouldn’t be the same without you. Hope you can make it. ’Bye. Oh, and it’s okay if you should happen to win.”
This was not a difficult decision. None of the Republicans would have anything to do with him after today, anyway, so there was little harm in offending them by not going to the country club.