Nishnabotna’s Courthouse Square was lined with hundred-year-old buildings of rough-hewn, flame-red sandstone. Local legend still spoke of the day, early in the century, when the skies had turned purple and a tornado had approached, as they always did, from the southwest. The people of Nishnabotna had gathered there in Courthouse Square, just a couple of blocks northeast of the Iowa River, and watched it churn its way across the small village of Wapsipinicon; everyone knew, in those days, that tornadoes could not cross rivers. Many had crowded onto the roofs of the sandstone buildings to get a better view. The death toll had been well into the double digits, and the facades of the buildings were still pocked with tiny craters made by riverbank pebbles that had been picked up by the whirlwind and snapped through the air like bullets. A sentimental memorial had been erected in Courthouse Square, balancing the Civil War memorial, and a commissioned statue depicting the brave men of Nishnabotna trying futilely to shield the women and children with their bodies.
Having survived that cataclysm, the red buildings had been immune to just about all other ravages except for the human failings of bad taste and cupidity. Some of the best ones had been torn down and replaced with modern boxes, sheathed in metal and glass and covered with flat, leaky roofs. The First National Bank of NishWap had established its Courthouse Square branch in one of these. The upper story contained a small office suite that was occupied primarily by buckets and plastic garbage cans positioned under the worst leaks. From time to time their custodians would swing through and empty out the buckets.
A few years ago they had found a more lucrative use for that top-floor suite: they had rented it to the federal government, which had sited the Forks County office of the FBI there.
And so it was that, two days after his crushing defeat in the 1990 election at the hands of longtime incumbent Kevin Mullowney, Clyde Banks angle-parked his big wagon in front of that glass-and-metal box in Courthouse Square and turned off its big 460.
He did not, however, turn off the radio, because an interesting item was running on the news. It was President Bush, explaining to the nation that he was going to send a whole lot more troops to the Gulf. A whole lot more. Clyde sat and listened to the President for a while, drumming on the steering wheel. This did not exactly come as news to him, because Desiree had told him last week that the Big Red One was deploying. Knowing this so far in advance of the President’s speech gave him quite an unfamiliar sense of being a savvy insider. This, Clyde supposed, was probably how Terry Stonefield felt every day of his life.
Clyde did not listen to President Bush because the information was new to him. He listened because his heart fluttered and skipped beats all the time; because he could not sleep at night for thinking about Desiree; because he had lost his appetite and would only pick at his food; because a powerful urge to weep came over him at the oddest times. His courage needed bolstering. In some strange way the campaign had served this purpose for him until the day before yesterday.
Now there was nothing to occupy him except worry, and so he sat there in his station wagon for a few minutes, its woody sides all gummed up with duct-tape stickum from the recently stripped-off campaign signs, and listened to President Bush, hoping that he would hear something reassuring. He had inherited a skepticism of politicians from Ebenezer and was not in the habit of looking to Washington for comfort and spiritual guidance. But today he would take comfort wherever he could get it.
He did feel a little better by the time he switched off the radio and got out of the car. He wasn’t sure why; the speech had been all about how hundreds of thousands of military personnel, including his wife, were going to Saudi to clobber Saddam. But it always helped a little when the President complained about what a son of a bitch Saddam was. And it helped more to know that Desiree would be accompanied by half a million other people. If the President sent half a million people off on a fool’s errand, it would hardly be the first time. But half a million people possessed a good deal of common sense among them; if they were sent off on a fool’s errand, there would be repercussions. Half a million good people with tanks and helicopter gunships and telephone charge cards ought to be able to take care of themselves to some degree.