“Let me put it this way. When one of my kids comes to me with a lousy story idea for the school paper, I usually break the news personally—I don’t have the secretary of education call him from Washington and yell at him for fifteen minutes.”
“Why do you suppose they did it that way?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. The guy who bawled me out lives in Washington, if that tells youanything.”
“I’m not sure it does,” Clyde had said, remembering his and Fazoul’s conversation about how clueless Clyde was when it came to the big bad world.
“Look, all I’m saying is that this guy sounded scared,” Town had said.
And then Clyde had had an insight: Town was talking about how this big Register honcho was scared. And that might very well have been true; but what he really meant was that he, Jonathan Town, was scared. And when Clyde had understood that the big Register honcho and Jonathan Town were both scared, he had begun to feel scared himself. Not that he didn’t already have plenty to be scared about. But it was all local stuff, personal stuff, and the news that people who lived in Washington were scared threw a whole new layer of generalized dread onto the thing.
The area in front of Happy Chef’s cash register had two benches facing each other about six feet apart, and for several minutes an older fellow had been sitting across from Clyde, reading the newspaper and chewing on a mint toothpick that he had plucked from the cup next to the till. Clyde had glanced up at this gentleman when he’d come in. Not recognizing him, he had turned back to his intensive study of all items from all newspapers pertaining to Desert Shield. Someone had left a Chicago Tribune on the bench, and this provided a lode of data that Clyde wouldn’t otherwise have seen.
“Hell, I don’t know,” the older fellow said, tossing a newspaper onto the bench. “My niece says it’s all about oil.”
“Beg pardon?” Clyde said.
“My niece. Nice girl. College student—you know how they are.”
“I suppose.” Clyde hadn’t been a college student himself, but he had arrested enough of them to know their patterns.
“So last week I’m trying to carve the goddamn turkey, and all she wants to do is talk about how the Gulf thing is just a grubby squabble over oil.”
“What do you think?” Clyde said. He had participated in enough lunch-counter discussions to know that this was always a sure-fire comeback.
“Well, I suppose she’s got a point, in her self-righteous college-student way. I don’t imagine we’d have half a million people over there if it was some shitty little country in Africa. So maybe it is about oil.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Clyde said.
“So should we be over there like we are, just to keep dibs on a shitload of oil?”
“Yep,” Clyde said. “We should.”
“But all we hear about from Bush is that Saddam is like Hitler. It’s always gestapo this and Hitler that, and how we’re going to uphold democracy in Kuwait—which is a feudal aristocracy, for Christ’s sake.”
Clyde put his Trib in his lap and nodded out the window. The man turned round to see what Clyde was nodding at. The only thing in that direction was a First National Bank of NishWap; beyond that the barren cornfields stretched away to infinity. “What you looking at?” he inquired.
“The electric sign,” Clyde said.
The sign on the bank said 8:37, and then it said 6°F and then the equivalent in centigrade.
“Six degrees,” Clyde said. “Pretty damn cold. And I don’t see many trees out there that we could use for firewood. So. We get oil, we live. We don’t get oil, we die.”
The man turned back around and looked at Clyde. “Simple as that,” he said.
“Oh, there’s probably a lot more to it that I don’t know about,” Clyde said, “but that’s how I look at it.”
“Six degrees,” the man repeated. He picked up a USA Today and looked at the weather map on the back page. “That’s forty degrees cooler than Washington. Big difference. Forty degrees clarifies a lot of issues, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Clyde said, “I’ve never been to Washington.”
“Well, you haven’t missed anything,” the man said. “You can take my word for it.”
Something finally occurred to Clyde. He looked out into the parking lot and saw a couple of large navy-blue cars sitting in the lot with great clouds of steam coming from their tailpipes. Young men in suits and sunglasses sat in the cars talking into cellular telephones. He looked back at the other man, who had a slightly sheepish look on his face.
“You the guy?” Clyde said, rising to his feet.
“I’m the guy. Ed Hennessey,” the man said, rising and extending his hand. “Shit, you’re a big guy. But you weren’t a heavyweight?”
“Nah,” Clyde said. “One weight class below heavyweight. I’m not that big by local standards.”