“America’s Tomorrow,” Jay says.
“What is this?” Charlie picks up the list, studying the printed names and then setting it back on his desktop without comment, except to say, “I would think it need not be said that I am no fan of Sandy Wolcott.” He tops off his scotch and again offers Jay a piece. From down the hall, Jay can hear the phone ringing at the receptionist’s desk. Charlie, his face florid and pink, his once sandy hair streaked with gray, like needles stacked in hay, looks as bitter as a man can, well aware that he inadvertently unleashed Sandy Wolcott on the world. Had she not beaten the Charlie Luckman in court, she would still be slogging through a caseload of rapes and burglaries and felony manslaughters and not at present be considered the front-runner to lead a city Jay would bet a hundred dollars she can hardly find her way around. She was Charlie’s monster. Well, Charlie’s and Oprah Winfrey’s. Charlie was humiliated, but his client, a prominent heart surgeon who used his considerable skills to gut his cheating wife, is sitting on death row. “It spooked me, losing like that,” Charlie says now, sipping his drink. He’s had a few doping cases since then, an outfielder from the Astros and a track star who almost lost every medal she won in Atlanta this summer, and he can count on his clients’ recreational drug use to keep him solvent for years, but murder, “I can’t do that shit anymore,” he says. He got married, became a father. “I’m in the goddamned PTA.” He raises his glass to Jay. “You’re a brave man. Or a fool.” He tosses back his toast. “I will say this. You have scared the ever-living shit out of quite a number of men in this town. They think you’re crazy. Or worse, reckless and undomesticated. You ever wanted to push your luck, ask for a cushy appointment, get on a board or two, now is the time to ask. Or, hell, don’t. I won’t say this other thing isn’t fun to watch. You got folks running scared,” he says, remarking on a quality he’d once had in hand and lost. Charlie has always had a grudging respect for Jay.
“What is America’s Tomorrow?”
“That?” He nods toward the donor list. “Thomas pulled me in on that.”
“Cole?”
Charlie nods. “He’s been telling everyone to get in early. First checks written, first names remembered when the time comes.” Charlie shrugs, glancing briefly at the phone lines flashing on his desk. “A Texan in Washington again, it could open up a lot of doors for folks down here, grease a lot of wheels. I figured I’d put in my down payment now, instead of playing catch-up in four years.” He looks up, his gaze hovering on the view outside his window, the bodies clad in Lycra. “Maybe a judgeship down the line,” he says, lost in his thoughts, some far-off dream for his future. “I might want something different one day,” he says.
“But what does any of this have to do with Wolcott?”
Charlie nearly laughs.
“Wolcott?” he says. “Oh, hell, nobody gives a shit about Wolcott. That money is for Reese Parker, a grant, shall we say, for her little experiment. She says she can deliver, that was the sales pitch. She and Cole, they had a bunch of high rollers out to his place, cocktails and fifty-dollar steaks, and she laid it out, the way the game is changing. The way elections are run, it’s all changing. It’s not precinct by precinct anymore, not for the ones who want to win. Four years from now, it’s going to come down to a handful of votes. ‘Trust me,’ she said. Folks were signing checks on the spot. We’re talking money to win the big prize.” He walks back to the bar behind his desk, hovering a little, as if he’s debating whether or not he has to behave himself if his wife is nowhere on the premises. “The mayor’s race,” he says, “this is just a test case for Reese Parker.”
Outside, Jay sits in his car, staring out the front window for a long time, so long in fact that Ellie starts to shift in her seat behind the wheel. “Dad?” She touches his arm, and he nods. I’m fine. But, still, he doesn’t move, looking through the windshield, playing in his mind an image of his last time in Pleasantville, when he’d seen Wolcott’s volunteers making an aggressive play for votes in what should have been enemy territory for a right-leaning political candidate; they were following a pattern of attack that Jay still doesn’t completely understand. What he does know is what he tells Lon when he calls her that night from his bedroom phone. “They’re trying to break Pleasantville.” The mighty 259 no more, he says, but a voting bloc that can be destabilized. The misleading flyers, the targeted approach in the streets–if they were able to do something similar in urban precincts across the country, pull votes that shouldn’t on paper belong to them, they could actually swing a national race. “This isn’t about Wolcott, or even about Houston. This is about the White House in 2000.”
“Holy shit, Jay.”
“Didn’t Parker work on Bush’s governor’s race last year?”
“She worked for Karl Rove’s firm for a bit.”