When people dream of Easy Street there is usually a view, some imagined elevation from which things can be more capably overseen. A view like this one, from Ben’s offices on the twenty-seventh floor of the Oklahoma Tower skyscraper. He can think, up above the world like this. On a clear day the rustic prairielands south of town threaten to stretch directly down to Texas. The vista packs such punch it has a belittling effect upon even Oklahoma City’s vaunted sprawl.
Take the capitol building there, with its two functional oilrigs thirsty-birding crude out of the earth. The workmanlike statehouse, still waiting on its dome after the raw materials were diverted to support the first world war, presides over an ordered urban gridwork reminiscent of Ben’s first Erector Set: a scale-model boomtown populated with scale-model buildings and industrious, scale-model citizens and their going concerns.
He is waiting, again, for his right-hand man. And Vincent is running late. Again.
Ben waves a remote control wand at the flatscreen television mounted behind the wet bar and the display surges to life with a plasmatic purr. The smug mug of Crash Lambeau takes shape. The habitually camera-shy radio host is strutting his stuff on some distant soundstage. Trying out a new format, apparently. Look at that Rorschach-blot nightmare of a necktie. Crash pauses in his virtual victory lap to bask in the dittohead war cry bellowing from his well-heeled fans: ooh-ooh-ooh, rah-rah-rah, Crash!
“Is this the best-looking audience on television or what?” Crash croons.
A soft knock at the door and Ken Vincent slides quietly in. Ben pours two fingers of Maker’s Mark, raises his glass in greeting and says, as if they’ve been discussing the subject for hours now: “But you know what Columbus’s biggest problem was, Ken? After stumbling onto the new world?”
Vincent slumps humpbacked into a chair, looking like a man who’s just come through a minefield.
“What in hell to call every damn new thing under the sun. How do you know a jaguar’s not just some spotted tiger, first time you see it? Newt and company are in the same boat. They’re making such an airtight case against big government, the public is about to send half of Washington packing. But our soon-to-be-anointed Mr. Speaker and Senator Dole and . . .” He wags his head toward the television screen, “. . . mister Majority Maker Lambeau here—in this new world they are that big, scary government specter. Crash and Newt are tying their own silver tongues. The situation demands an entirely different vocabulary.”
“I’m not sure your analogy holds. Though I see . . .”
“Mr. Bright-and-Early’s feeling awful feisty today.”
“. . . what it is you’re trying to say.”
“Doesn’t hold how?”
“Columbus was trying to describe an entirely new experience. To name the truth. Newt has a simple labeling problem.”
“Simple my ass,” Ben says. “In war and politics, truth’s the first casualty.”
“What’s the phrase? In times of universal deceit . . .”
But Ben waves him off. “Holier-than-thou doesn’t suit you, Ken. Spit it out. What’s got you spooked?”
“Chambliss has thrown a spoke in our wheel.”
“You were fixing it.”
“Fixing it.” Vincent’s mouth withdraws into a pained rictus, the way a dog smiles against the heat. “Fixing it is a few notches above my pay grade, boss.”
“How many notches are we talking about?”
“You’re looking at a hundred thousand,” says Vincent. “Cash.”
Ben whistles.
“How worried should we be?”
“I think this is real. Something you’ll need to deal with, one way or another, before the oversight committee votes next month.”
There is a disturbance of some sort onscreen. Crash has ceded the floor to a middle-aged black woman, and she proceeds to give Lambeau an earful.
“Bully!” she shouts. “You are nothing but a big bully!”
Lambeau’s having trouble grasping the dynamics of the moment. Here he is, live, on national television. And he’s being taken to pieces. Crash blanches. He blinks twice and opens his mouth but nothing comes out.
Vincent worrying at a hangnail.
“Can you take it to the mayor? Have Chambliss kicked off the committee?”
“This close to the election? He’d shoot me as messenger boy. Probably ask us to walk back our own bid for the project coordinator spot, just to play it safe. Terry’s not taking any chances with M.A.P.S.”
An element of partisan paranoia is playing among Crash’s spectators. They’re getting involved. Someone shouts down the black woman, saying how dare you. Saying keep it to yourself. The situation is degenerating. The crowd convulses, a muscular shudder. A woman screams. Lambeau looking like he’s seen a ghost.
“Hold on now, folks,” Crash is saying, praying for calm. “Let’s just settle down.”
The studio cuts awkwardly to commercial. On the plasma screen a sexy pitchwoman touts gold as the best hedge against an uncertain future: “Secure your future,” she says, “today.”
Vincent looks to Ben. “What are you thinking?”
Ben mutes the television set and walks to the window.
“Stop doing that.”
“What?”
“Saying you.”
Vincent makes eye contact. It seems to take a great deal of willpower.
“Ben. Where this is going . . .”
“You know what I want most of all? The dam. Look at that sad little backwater down there. Just hardly piddling along at all. It took millions of years for the North Canadian to carve its way through this state. In a matter of months we could dam the riverbed, flush it out, fill it up. Give this city a riverfront to be proud of. A dam represents human ambition in the purest, most elemental sense. Earth and air. Fire and water. Working with the soil, it does something to your soul.”
“I can’t follow, Ben. Where you’re taking this, I mean.”
Crash has returned to the tube. But the radio jockey is talking to himself now. He’s had to dismiss the entire studio audience. The camera closes in on Lambeau’s face. A black-box, stenographic typescript creeping across the mute screen, several seconds behind the movements of the man’s mouth. But there seems to be a bug in the broadcaster’s voice recognition software.
“I HAVE ATTACKED PERSONALY . . . KNOW ONE HERE TWO DIE . . . ,” the closed-captioning reads, “TRYING TWO DISCUS . . . INTELLIGENTLY THESE SHOES . . . IS IM POSSUM ABLE. I DONUT . . . THINK ANY ONE SHOULD BE EXPECTED TWO WITHSTAND THESE AND SULTANS . . .”
Ben savors the bourbon’s perfect burn. He looks past the plate glass at the flat-line horizon outside. The sun trundling down a wall of dead blue calm. There is this desperado thing building inside of him and nothing in the landscape to argue against it.
“I want to get my hands dirty, Ken.”