Buck had been an intermittently brilliant quarterback in high school and had been demoted to tight end when he’d matriculated at EIU and joined the Twisters, which was a much easier team to join back in his era. He and Tick Henry had scored quite a few touchdowns between them; in 1961 the Twisters had actually beaten both Iowa and Iowa State in the same year, which had not happened since and would probably never happen again.
After graduation he had done a stint in the military, then came home and knocked around town for a while, selling cars and insurance, and eventually became the Voice of the Twisters, announcing all the football and basketball games on the local 250-watt AM station. As a youth Clyde had listened to these broadcasts every Saturday afternoon while raking leaves or shoveling snow. But a few years ago the rights to broadcast the Twisters games had been bought up by a big media company out of Aurora, Illinois, and Buck Chandler had lost his job and his identity. He and Grace had eventually got into the real-estate thing. Grace had passed the realtor’s exam immediately. Buck had taken six runs at it. When Clyde had gotten around to buying some real estate, he had sought out the Chandlers to act as brokers, not because they were the best company but because he felt sorry for Buck.
And now Grace was off in Seattle making a new life, and Buck was passed out in a recliner in Tick Henry’s living room, reeking of whiskey.
Clyde unfolded the divorce papers and put them on Buck’s chest.
“Hope you’re proud of yourself,” Tick Henry said.
Clyde walked back to his unit, backed out into the highway, and departed. He had not even made it to the next section-line road before the dispatcher had called him up to inform him that Tick Henry had called the sheriff’s department to complain that a deputy had threatened to shoot his dog.
“Threatened nothing. I promised to,” Clyde said.
“Did you serve the papers?” the dispatcher said. She was a shirttail relative of Mullowney’s, implacably hostile.
“I did,” Clyde said. The dispatcher did not respond. Various deputies had been trying to serve those papers on Buck Chandler for six weeks. Clyde Banks, the Summonater, had, for the umpteenth time, come through where others had failed.
August
Chapter Twenty-Four
August 1 was not a good day for James Gabor Millikan. Saddam Hussein was marching into Kuwait. Millikan was being clobbered. All of the geopolitical brilliance he had expended in the service of his country was for naught. First he had been tripped up internally by a GS-11 who should have been shot for disrupting the elegance of his carefully laid out policy scenario, and then externally by the imbecilic actions of Saddam Hussein, who had not played the role he should have played.
Millikan carried a heavy burden, that of omniscience—and he carried it gracefully, most of the time. He always had known what was best. He always had known that God had intended for him to be the mind behind the throne, the man who would actually have the ideas, who would save the country but who would selflessly not claim credit. It was a tough role, but one he savored. Now his classic geopolitical formula to bring peace to the Middle East, to block the Iranians, to foil what was left of the Soviets—all of this was unraveling. And worst of all, as he set up the President’s schedule for his vacation in Kennebunkport, he had to include the bottom-fish analyst who had done so much to upset his plans and his timing. As he sat at his keyboard looking out of his office in the Old Executive Office Building toward the White House, he was bitter.
Millikan was not a Saddam Hussein enthusiast. It could be truly said that except for some colleagues at St. Antony’s and Harvard, he was an enthusiast for no human being except himself. Millikan wanted to achieve in foreign relations the elegant perfection that mathematicians achieved in calculating the digits of pi. He did not deal in terms of individual human beings; he did not, in the long term, believe that human beings, or what they thought, had anything more to do with the carrying out of state policy than had the ants and their little universes in affecting individual human life. He saw a large and imposing calculus dominating the affairs of state, and he saw himself as the Newton to apply that calculus to manipulate international affairs.
As he laid out the national-security arrangements for the President’s vacation, he knew that his Middle-Eastern scenario had failed. The question now was how to change policies in midstream without getting wet, how to find someone to blame for the debacle. But he had to remind himself that it was not his debacle: it was the failure of a man for whom he had contempt, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his total inability to move. Bush had scuttled the chance to take advantage of the Gorbachev opening, and Millikan felt deeply each and every one of the knives deftly shoved into his back by George Shultz’s people.