“CHUCK, CHUCK LARSON,” AS HE ALWAYS INTRODUCED HIMSELF, was the Senator’s man. He would say his first name, then his whole name, then pause to see if you recognized him. It was not an unreasonable expectation. He was at least six-feet-five, at least two hundred and ninety pounds, and he had been a stalwart on the offensive line for the Washington Redskins for many years.
Chuck had a broad red face and sandy hair that was getting thin but was still long enough to form curls. He had the kind of face that was built to smile, that made you think the only thing that made him sad was not smiling. When I told him about my visit from Mr. Andrews, the outer edges of his pale blue eyes became a mass of crinkles and the lines at the corners of his mouth turned into grooves.
“Oh,” he said, “I am so sorry, George.”
“Like, I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t. “He was threatening me without actually threatening, if that makes any sense.”
“Well, they’re feeling bad in that family, George, you can understand that. Girl they gave birth to, loved and raised, did everything they could for, something like this happens and they’ve got to make it somebody else’s fault.” He nodded his big round head at the tragedy of it all. He bathed me in sympathy as he explained, “Otherwise, the universe is in chaos. You have to find a reason something happened so you can restore order. Usual thing is finding it was somebody else’s fault.”
He was sitting on my couch, the same place where I had sat when I received Mr. Andrews’s guarantee of how bleak my future was going to be. Chuck’s job was to tell me that wasn’t so. He was wearing a short-sleeved collared shirt that was white but had faint red stripes spaced several inches apart. He was wearing blue jeans that had to have been purchased in the Midwest for use as work clothes, and tan lace-up boots that you might see at a construction site. This was pretty much the way he had dressed when he had first come to see me in Philadelphia, back in the spring, shortly after the visit from Roland Andrews.
Roland appeared. Chuck followed. Except this time I had called him.
“It’s almost as if he was telling me he was putting a curse on me, you know?” I laughed lightly, because guys like Chuck and me knew there was no such thing as a curse.
“You know,” he said back to me, “I once broke my helmet. It was just a snap for the chinstrap, but I borrowed someone else’s and ran onto the field. Didn’t fit quite the same, but it was still a helmet just like the one I always wore. First play, I’m supposed to trap the D-end. Dude blows right by me, flattens our quarterback, who lets the ball go fluttering away like a homesick brick. I sure looked bad on television, on the game film, in the coaches’ eyes, QB’s eyes. I blamed it on the helmet.”
“What are you telling me, Chuck?”
“That we get knocked out of our ordinaries and it can bother us in ways it never should. Ever see that movie Pumping Iron? Arnold Schwarzenegger, there, he’s in some Mr. Universe contest or something, and he wants to throw his opponent off his game so he hides the guy’s yellow shirt. It’s just a shirt the guy warms up in, but the guy freaks. You watch him come completely apart and, naturally, he loses the competition. Arnold had gotten in his head, see?”
“And you’re saying this guy Andrews wants to get into my head by making me think Mr. Powell’s going to cause bad things to happen to me?”
“Sure. And once he’s got you in that position he’ll come back to you, say, ‘Okay, now tell me something bad about the Gregorys and I’ll make everything all right for you again.’ ”
Chuck’s broad shoulders rose an inch or two and crashed back down again.
“But you’re saying his threats are all bullshit.”
“That’s right,” Chuck said.
And I believed him because under the circumstances he knew a whole lot more than I did.