3

Charlie Martin had never read the book about the different stages of grief. He experienced four: disbelief, blind anger, fetal position and flight. On Wednesday, when he returned to his office after announcing the end of his campaign—a curiously peripheral act: most of the hotshot reporters were off with the surviving presidential candidates in Florida—Charlie succumbed to the senatorial equivalent of fetal position. He lay flat on his back, on the battered old leather couch from his grandfather’s law office in Fort Jeffords, thinking about other, more hopeful times in the Senate Caucus Room: he had announced his presidential candidacy there, just as John and Robert Kennedy had—their campaigns were considered “premature,” too. Back in 1987, his baptism as a serious player had taken place in that room, with a “quiet, searing” opening statement at the Iran-Contra hearings, or so it had been described by Mary McGrory in The Washington Post, who added, “Does anyone doubt that this young man will lead the nation one day?”

Charlie loved his office, which was located on the second floor of Russell, the oldest of the three Senate office buildings. He’d decorated the reception area in basic grain—lovely black-and-white photos of corn and wheat and sunflowers by Anne Hellstrom, whom he’d dated for a while on weekends in Des Pointe. There was a long, narrow hallway, with closets and cubicles for several dozen staff members (several dozen more were relegated to back office buildings and the Armed Services Committee space). His inner sanctum had the leather couch, two wing chairs and a marble fireplace, as well as his desk. The walls were covered with rural scenes by home-state artists; Charlie rotated the paintings from year to year, sending the old ones back to the Midwest, bringing a fresh set in—there were plenty of home-state artists, and his staff made sure that each relevant local newspaper received word that Silas Barnham or Beatrice Button had a landscape hanging in Senator Martin’s office. And now he stared at a cold, lonely blue winter scene—by a dairy farmer named Fred Dienst—as he listened to his chief of staff, Donna Mendoza, rattling off the coordinates of his disaster. “You’re lucky it happened the day before the election,” she said. “Limited the damage some. Too bad they got you on camera. Would’ve been a nonevent without that.”

“They missed me on camera,” he said. “They got jostling and blue sky.”

“The handheld with you flat on your dumpkin was pretty memorable,” she said.

Donna had been with him both Senate terms. She had come with the office, working her way up from receptionist to administrative assistant (which, in the Congress, is what you call a chief of staff) for his predecessor, Roger Pullman—who had recommended her, eloquently for Roger: “She’s a grown-up.” That she was, and more. Charlie figured Donna had been great-looking, in a bronze, slightly chubby kind of way, back in the sixties. Now she had the Nurse Blazer look, which was what women in Washington did to themselves when they wanted to be taken seriously: Ferragamo pumps, off-white stockings, a blue blazer with a gold pin—some form of eagle was appropriately patriotic and prim—which was worn with everything, dresses and blouses (subdued shades, subdued prints) and skirts (no higher than the knee). Women in Washington dressed about as creatively as men in Washington did.

Donna was the widow of Master Sergeant Luke Mendoza of Tucumcari, who had been blown away by a rocket-propelled grenade while assaulting a tree line in I Corps, the same general area where Charlie had been wounded. That was something he and Donna had in common. There was a lot, however, they didn’t: she had raised a boy and a girl by herself. They were grown now; Donna was in danger of becoming a grandmother.

“So,” she sighed. She was sitting at Charlie’s desk, with several manila folders in front of her, with her reading glasses on. “I’ve divided the list into categories: interview requests—although most of the A-list is gone now—messages from constituents, messages from colleagues, messages from friends and contributors, speaking engagements canceled . . .”

“Canceled?”

“Well, you’re no longer going to be the featured speaker at the Des Pointe League of Women Voters annual dinner, or . . .”

“Okay, okay.” he said.

“On the interview request list,” Donna continued. “Does Lanny Scott count as one of the Lords, or one of the press?”

“Both, I guess . . . why?”

“They’ve got a new feature on the evening news at ABC. ‘The Story Behind the Story.’ He wants to inaugurate it with a piece about you—going back to your days together in Vietnam, talking about the heroism and the stress . . . apparently, they dug out some old footage of you at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. He said it’ll be basically sympathetic, getting at why you did what you did—”

“Fuck no.”

“Okay,” Donna said, “but you can’t mess around on the home-state press. Hamblin wants an exclusive.”

“The sky is blue,” he replied. “How much of this do we have?”

“More than you can begin to imagine,” said Donna. “We had a lot to catch up on before your phantom grope, or whatever it was. You want some comic relief? Here’s my own personal favorite.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s an invitation from the Des Pointe Battered Women’s Shelter.”

“No kidding.”

“You want me to read or summarize?” Donna asked, pulling a fax from her pile. He waved his left hand, a whoop-de-doo motion with his index finger: whatever. “Well,” she said. “They’re very appreciative of the help you’ve given them in the past—and, it says here, they believe that you’re not the sort of man to abuse women, certainly not chronically—and so they want to give you the opportunity to redeem yourself by explaining your side of the story, and apologizing, if necessary, at their annual fund-raising dinner next November. And they have several suggestions about where you might go for therapy before then.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said. “I got a whole lifetime of this ahead of me?”

“I doubt it,” Donna said. “Things fade.”

“Not in a world with Nexis.” He could run for president in the year 2008, win, establish national health care, repel an alien invasion—and it would still be there, in his obituary: “President Martin, who once was decked by a Colorado pharmacist who believed the then-senator had groped his daughter during the 1992 presidential campaign, won the Nobel peace prize in . . .”

Rosemary Buffa, gatekeeper of the inner sanctum, poked her head in the door: “Senator, Mrs. Thurston on the phone. Second time today.”

Charlie nodded, and Donna exited: Lynn Thurston was the custodian of his Washington social life. He’d been dreading this moment.

“Oh, Charlie, Charlie are you okay?” Lynn leaped in as soon as he said hello—and then, before he could say anything more, “I’ve just had the most terrible scene. Lunch at the Occidental with Sally. She asked if you had taken leave of your senses, and I got very angry and said, ‘Sally, you know damn well that’s not Charlie.’ And she said, ‘Well, what did happen?’ And I had to say that I didn’t know. That we hadn’t talked. And she gave me a look, and I did the worst possible thing—I began to . . . weep a little. I was so angry with myself. I just up and left. It was awful.”

“I’m so sorry, Lynn,” Charlie said. “I should have called you last night. But I was so bummed.”

“Well, I assumed you’d be depressed—”

“You didn’t throw anything at her?” Charlie interrupted, hoping Lynn would have the sense not to attempt a glutinous, therapeutic intervention. “A bruschetta or something?”

“Char-lie,” Lynn said. “I was embarrassed.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Lynn was a good soul, and a good soldier.

“I just hate what everyone is saying.” She sighed. And, of course, Lynn would know what “everyone” was saying. She spent far too many evenings raising funds for liberal campaigns and causes—although Charlie was always surprised, and quite pleased, that she managed not to be callused by such antic sociability. She wasn’t hard, in the Capital way. She was from Oregon, and seriously Scandinavian in looks and demeanor; a stoic, not a cynic, and a very acceptable dinner date. They were an extremely plausible public couple; privately, they were careful with each other—casually affectionate and friendly, not quite enraptured even when intimate. And so this was a delicate moment.

He could ask her, What is everyone saying? But he didn’t care to hear the specifics (and, of course, he could guess the general outlines). Or he could confide in her—tell her what had happened in Colorado Springs, confess embarrassment, allow her to comfort him. Charlie shuddered at the thought: he’d owe Lynn then. He’d owe her more affection than had been their practice, a deeper level of devotion than he was prepared to give.

“They’re probably saying I’m—”

“No, not really,” she said, cutting him off, mercifully, before he disparaged himself. “No one who knows you takes the Colorado business seriously. They just think it was a particularly messy end to a sloppy campaign. Apparently, that’s unforgivable.”

“They’re right,” he said, wondering if no one really cared about the girl, or if Lynn was just being kind. He was mortified by her loyalty.

“They’re wrong,” Lynn scolded, “and we’re going to show them.” Indeed, she had a resuscitation campaign planned. “We are not going to act as if you’re some sort of pariah. I am taking you in hand. There’s a book party for Arthur Schlesinger at Kay Graham’s tomorrow. And this weekend there’s an Environmental Defense Fund ball at the Corcoran.”

“Lynn, no. I can’t.” She was proposing party penance, the stiffest of sentences, the opposite of the solitary confinement he craved. He would have to be civil, controlled, implicitly contrite. He wondered if Lynn was wily enough to understand the subtle brilliance of such punishment. “Actually,” he added. “I’m going away for a bit.”

He was flat on the couch again when Donna returned. “Hey, D, what would you say to me getting lost for a while?”

“I would say no. Absolutely not,” she replied reflexively. “Lynn wring you out or something?”

“No. Worse. She wants me to socialize.”

Donna laughed. “Tough love, huh? Beltway boot camp.”

“Why the hell can’t I get lost?” he asked, sitting up. “I’m gonna miss a vote on the National Furniture Day proclamation or something?”

“How lost?” The boss did need a vacation, although Donna was shocked he’d admit that. A sign of health, perhaps. “How long?”

“Pretty damn lost. Not sure how long.”

“If you disappear now, people are going to think—”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, swiveling, lying back down. “That I’m guilty of something. Lynn’s point exactly. But the hell with that. I’m gonna take a WTF on that. I’ve got one coming after all this, right?”

“There are those who’d argue that the last six months have been one long WTF,” Donna said.

“There are those who’d argue that I need some time off, clear my head, after being so useless for so long,” he replied, lifting himself up with his elbows and craning his neck around to give Donna a poor-little-me look. She peered at him over her reading glasses: she liked the poor-little-me look—the boss wasn’t being pathetic, he was riffing on being pathetic. He could certainly use a breather. There was no danger he’d fall off the map: he’d be gone for two days, think of some brilliant scheme—she remembered his last one: vaccination vans distributing candy and balloons in the ghettos, staffed by premed students on summer break—and then he’d be right back, making her life miserable . . . and more fun than it had ever been with Roger Pullman (or with Luke Mendoza, for that matter).

“So, where?” she asked.

“Thailand,” he said, surprising himself—although it did make sense from a WTF perspective: he had a history of being successfully irresponsible in Thailand. He’d gone to Bangkok for R&R in 1967, the last time he was in the process of being seriously defeated. He wasn’t thinking about going to Bangkok now, of course. He was thinking about the beach resort Corporal Larry Kenny operated down the Malay Peninsula. Kenny had been sending Christmas postcards for years—the place had thatched roof cottages on the beach, hammocks, rum drinks. It was hard to get more lost than that.

“Surely,” Donna said, “there must be an easier way to get laid.”

“I’m not going there to get—”

“Getting laid and setting up a sweatshop are the only reasons why anyone goes to Thailand,” Donna said, “and I’m sure, given the past few days, most people will assume that of all the possible places in the world to go, you haven’t chosen this particular spot for the air quality.”

“Most people won’t know that I’m there,” he said. “In fact, no one will.”

“And if they find out?”

“Tell them I’m on a fact-finding mission.”

“I hope the facts aren’t communicable,” Donna said. “You couldn’t go to Tahiti instead?”

“No.” Although Tahiti didn’t sound bad, either.

“You better call Buzz,” Donna sighed.

“I’ll do better than that,” he said. “Des Pointe is on the way to Thailand, sort of. I could go via DP, do the local press with Dunnsie—then Frisco, Narita, Bangkok—I think Kenny said you take a hydrofoil down the coast from there. Could you check it out? I’ll take the four o’clock to Chicago, surprise Buzz and Edsy in DP tonight. Call Proctor, have her set up some press things.”

“You’re sure about all this?” Donna sighed.

“Of course not,” Charlie said, coming around the desk, standing behind her, squeezing her shoulder and kissing her on top of the head. “But don’t worry, muchacha—”

“ ‘Muchacha’?” Donna said. “It’s señora to you, buster.”

*    *    *

“Hey, Pop, how’s it going?” Charlie said, pushing through the unlocked front door of the Oak Street house that night.

“Free and easy,” Buzz crooned, from his usual spot in the den.

“Better than Brie and freezy.” The senator completed their signature hello. Buzz hadn’t known what Brie was the first time Charlie tried the line on him—but he laughed when he learned it was runny French cheese that tasted a little like cardboard, and they served it at all the best cocktail parties in Washington, which were, indeed, frosty occasions.

“Brie and freezy’s better than grim and greasy,” Buzz sometimes said, in that wonderful, reedy crooner’s tenor—a voice that was born to be broadcast from a heartland bandstand. But he knew better than to try that after the events of the past few days.

“You look in serious need of a toddy,” he offered instead, putting aside the newspaper, getting up from his La-Z-Boy, giving his son a kiss on the cheek—the same sweet, casual kiss he’d always given Charlie at bedtime when he was a child, on those occasional evenings when Buzz was around at bedtime. When Buzz had a gig, he’d kiss Charlie much later, when he got home; Charlie remembered the late-night, reassuring smell of whiskey breath, although he wasn’t sure his mother had found it very reassuring. “You want your usual fancy stuff? Edsy’s getting her beauty rest.”

“Thanks, Pop,” Charlie said, surveying the place. He hadn’t been home in months, but it seemed forever: the campaign had distended time. Nothing much had changed—the family pictures on the spinet, the gig pictures on the walnut plywood walls, the saggy bookcase filled with Mom’s old favorites: Dorothy Day, Dr. Tom Dooley, William L. Shirer, Theodore H. White, all the John Gunther books—Popular Nonfiction Central.

Buzz returned from the kitchen with a brandy for Charlie and a Seagram’s V.O. for himself—Charlie loved the fact that the old man still drank rye, that most unfashionable of blends. He sat on the lumpy brown couch with the crocheted afghan throw splayed across the back, as it had always been. “So how’s life in Squareadelphia?” Buzz asked, plopping down into the La-Z-Boy. He was still tall and thin, but he’d gone gray—and didn’t look so much like Dennis the Menace’s father as he once had; although he did wear thick black-rimmed glasses all the time now.

“Grim and greasy, Pop,” Charlie said. “I blew it.”

“I ever tell you ’bout the yokel who popped me one in Omaha?” Buzz asked. “Said I was makin’ google-eyes at his damsel the whole first set—”

“This was like in ought-eight?” Charlie was tickled by the brilliance of his father’s diversionary action.

“More like ought-not,” he said. “See, I had been making google-eyes at the lady. She moved like a breeze. She had one of those, what do you call them—chiffon?—dresses, like a peach color and matching shoes, and sweet stems, let me tell you . . . and I could see she had caught what we were doing, caught our drift. Fact, I started moving the music along with her . . . nudgin’ the boys where she was going. It happened sometimes, you find someone in the crowd who’s diggin’ it and you let them lead you a little. Let them select the tunes, too, at least the ones you think they’re gonna want to dance to—boys’d get a little ripped over that, me screwing with the set . . . but where was I? Oh, yeah: set’s over. I’m puttin’ my squeezer on the stand, leanin’ over, and this boy comes over and says, ‘You makin’ eyes at my lady, accordion boy?’ That’s what he called me, and I gotta say, it ticked me off and so I said, ‘That’s what they’re there for—’ ”

“Did you mean your eyes or the girls?”

“The girls, but it could’ve worked both ways, now that I think of it,” he said. “Anyway, he popped me. Didn’t see it comin’. Wouldna’ got close if I hadn’t been leanin’ down, but he popped me a good one, knocked me back into Vern’s sax stand, bent the horn. . . . Vern had to fill with his licorice stick, second set.”

“And you? The show must go on?”

“Cramped my style a little. Trouble landin’ high C with a headache. Couldn’t sing falsetto on ‘Stardust.’ Got the girl, though.”

“Mom know about that?”

“This was before your mother—but, you know, Clarice was wearing one of those chiffon dresses and diggin’ our chops just the same as that other girl, the night we met at the Crescent Lake Casino. That girl in the peach dress was like a—what do you call it, a premonition?—of your mom.”

“Thanks, Pop.” Charlie figured the old man had riffed it on the spot, just to make him feel better: a clear jolt of classic Buzz. Of course, if the story was true, it probably hadn’t happened before Clarice. Everyone in the family assumed Buzz never stopped being a sucker for girls in chiffon dresses. But Charlie appreciated the effort: it was about as direct an acknowledgment of his predicament as he was likely to get from his father. Buzz had never been big on heart-to-hearts; Charlie’s mother, the mayor, had been tasked all the usual father-and-son topics.

“Early for Edwina to be shagging a break,” Charlie offered, slipping into Buzz’s idiom. “She okay?”

“Pretty swell, for an old bag.” Edwina had been married to Milky Flancik, the trumpet player; Buzz made the move on her just after Charlie’s mother died, with Milky still in mid-drool at the Meadows Nursing Home. Within weeks, they had set up light housekeeping together, right there in the house on Oak Street—which had been Clarice’s house, part of her inheritance from Judge Campbell. The haste had been unseemly, and it was the talk of the West Side Senior Center. But Buzz had never really bought into middle-class values—he’d always been a hayseed hipster—and Charlie was, in truth, relieved: Edwina would take care of him (although Charlie did wonder, given the speed of the move, how long it had been in the works). Clarice had always been far more interested in doing good than in looking after Buzz; it was a marriage of inconvenience, the sort that wouldn’t last in Charlie’s generation.

Clarice and Milky were long gone now; but Buzz and Edwina had never bothered to tie the knot, probably because he had never bothered to ask. And Edwina was okay for a trumpet player’s wife: they tended to be flashy and trashball. She still had a weakness for scalloped scoop-cut dresses when she went out (she had kept her figure, proportionally; everything was just a bit thicker now)—but she did dote on Buzz. To Edsy Flancik, he would always be the leader of the Buzzards, and a step up. To Charlie’s mom, he had been a lifelong salvage operation—a sacrifice lovingly performed at first, and then less so, one of her many good works, but not exactly what she’d been looking for, or deserved.

“Any gigs?” Charlie asked. Buzz Martin and the Buzzards were still in operation, though down to a trio now: Vern O’Donnell still handled the reeds, and Harlan Weeks was sitting in as the umpteenth drummer.

“We got an Elks in Proctor on the twenty-third, and a couple of

Gazebo shots when the summer comes around,” Buzz said. “Hey, you been diggin’ this Kenny G?”

“I’ve heard him.”

“Been thinking about moving one of his cuts into the Canadian Sunset medley.” Buzz had always been a great one for medleys: it had been a car game when they were kids—match three songs by lyrics or, more fun, by musical pattern—the Canadian Sunset medley had always been a clarinet thing. “It’s Vern’s big turn,” he said. “Remember? ‘Canadian Sunset,’ ‘Stranger on the Shore’—”

“You think Vern’s got the wind left for that, Pop?”

“I fill for him a little on the synthesizer—”

“No shit—very high-tech.”

“You know it,” Buzz crooned. “I got it up in the bedroom. You can play it sitting in bed, damn thing’s just a keyboard. Usin’ it a lot now. You can play it standing and face the crowd—that was always the bum deal with the piano: had to play it sideways, couldn’t look at the folks. Nothing better than the piano, musically, of course. It’s a lordly thing. Beats the old squeezer, hands down. But you could squeeze facing the folks. Farmers loved it, too. And I could make it swing a little, sometimes. . . . I’m thinkin’ about getting a sequencer when Harlan goes—but it’s cold, empty stuff. I like the feel of a live trap set behind me, even if it’s just barely alive.”

“Harlan’s in bad shape?” Charlie asked, marveling at how Buzz could talk about what he wanted to talk about.

“You ever hear an arthritic drummer? Bump and groan.”

“Pop, you—you sound pretty good. I—”

Buzz was silent, waiting, offering nothing.

“Pop, how’s this business playing out there? ’M I on the hit parade?”

“Well, Edsy says there was a lot of clucking on the checkout line,” he said. “And I hear the Muffler Man put you in the Hall of Fame.”

“He’s still around?”

“The grandson. He’s running the company now. Goes on the TV, just like his grandpa did, only different. Wears the American flag tie. Does these ads about things that need to be muffled. This week, it’s you.”

“Me, huh?”

“Yeah.” Buzz was clearly uneasy with this topic. “You can see it tonight. He’s usually on just after the news, before Leno.”

“Pop, I’m gonna take a breather,” Charlie said. “You remember me talking about Corporal Kenny, the guy who became a hippie and never came back from Thailand? He’s got a hotel down the coast.”

“You once sent me a postcard from Thailand,” he said. “You were on recreation, or whatever they called it—”

“R and R.” They hadn’t had R & R in Buzz’s war. And not much action, either: the old man had been a Supply Corps clerk in Hawaii, after Pearl Harbor.

“Great name. Bangkok,” the old man mused. “Pretty much describes it, right? Wonder if anyone ever used it in a lyric.”

“Could’ve rhymed it with ‘limp sock,’ ” Charlie said.

“Girl I never forgot . . . Bangkok, forget me not,” Buzz crooned.

“Not bad,” Charlie said. Buzz was one of the great two-phrase song-writers. Never found a bridge he could cross, though. “Pop—”

“Don’t forget your galoshes,” Buzz said, cutting Charlie off at the pass before he did something stupid like try to explain the Schollwengen business, or tell him how bad he hurt, or ask advice.

“Thanks, Pop—I won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” he said, donating a straight line to Buzz’s favorite charity.

“Leaves you lots of running room,” Buzz said, with a gentle smile, raising himself stiffly from the La-Z-Boy. “EGBDF, right?”

EGBDF: the lines of the treble clef. Buzz had taught him to read music before his mother had taught him to read words, and it all started with EGBDF: Every Good Boy Does Fine.

“Night, son,” Buzz said, giving him another of those odd kisses. Two in a night: Charlie realized that the old man must have been pretty upset by the recent events.

Perhaps the most generous thing a parent can do for a male teenager is give him a room with a separate entrance. Buzz and Clarice had done that for Charlie, clearing out the space above the garage, installing a bathroom and an outdoor staircase for easy access. It was a two-car garage, so there was lots of room. Charlie had lived there for most of his life, except for the few years after Vietnam when he was over in East Des Pointe, serving “the community” with Johanna Lecoutre Martin, his first and only wife, a woman whom Oskar Millar once said had brought do-goodism to a new level: too-goodism.

Charlie had upgraded the place over the years, adding a TV, computer, fax machine, Exercycle and king-sized bed. But it was still a teenager’s room, in spirit—although the senator was usually too exhausted on the weekend nights that he stayed there, after long days of politicking, to notice or think twice about the idea that he was nearing fifty years of age and still, in effect, living at home.

He called Mary Proctor, while clicking around the local cable system. He half listened as Mary suggested an elaborate cross-state implicit-apology tour; Charlie promised he’d think about doing one after his vacation. He said good-bye just as the news was ending.

And there it was: a handsome fellow with startling blond hair and a good voice—deeper, more authoritative than his appearance would lead you to expect—in a blue sportscoat with an American flag tie: “Hey, folks, it’s Lee Butler of Butler Muffler with another edition of ‘Things That Need to Be Muffled.’ ” He was standing in front of a slide of a Butler Muffler shop—Charlie had seen the cherry red plastic signs all over the Great American Anywhere, especially the Midwest.

“This week we have a new inductee into our Muffler-Worthy Hall of Fame,” Butler said. He was easy with the camera; he knew not to work it too hard. Pretty professional; very impressive. Butler was clean-cut, but also clever; innocent and sarcastic simultaneously. Impossible not to watch.

And then there was tape of the most awkward moment of Charlie Martin’s resignation press conference, just after he’d insisted that nothing untoward had happened with Martha Schollwengen. An elderly woman reporter had asked, “You’re asking us to believe that nothing happened?”

“Well, there was obviously a misunderstanding. . . .”

Which was where the ad began, with the Muffler Man providing commentary: “That’s right. Our own Senator Charlie Martin . . . who’s been out running for president instead of doing the job he was elected to do. But you have to give ol’ Charlie credit. Works hard, groping for answers to our nation’s problems . . .”

And then, sound again, Charlie saying—clumsily, very clumsily it seemed now: “There was no malicious or provocative action on my part—and I’m sorry if Miss Schollwengen misperceived any action on my part.” Then Lee Butler, close up and deadpan: “Too bad we don’t have a full line of Butler mufflers.”

Then a freeze-frame of Charlie Martin at the press conference with a crude drawing of a red muffler, the same color as a Muffler Man sign, covering his mouth—and a red glove covering his right hand (thank God, Charlie thought, it was his right hand) as he pointed out into the audience, soliciting a question.

“But,” the Muffler Man concluded, “we can do for your car what we can’t do for your country. Stop in at your local Muffler Man car care center tomorrow and help make America a nicer, quieter place.”

The next morning, as they were making the Des Pointe media rounds in Charlie’s official minivan, Dunn asked, “So, you see Muffler Boy’s ad?”

Charlie looked at him evenly. “Patsy, it scared the shit out of me.”

Dunn was amazed, as always, by Charlie’s self-deprecating candor. But this admission wasn’t credible—it was too easy, too casual. And Charlie had never admitted anything resembling fear before. Then again, maybe this was how a snake-eater admitted fear: fearlessly. “You? Scared?”

“Totally freaked, frozen on the bed, my stomach somewhere around my toes,” Charlie said. “Y’know, after the press conference, I thought maybe the worst was over.” Wishful thinking: his humiliation had been a passing media squall; the big story, the presidential campaign, had gone elsewhere. But the Butler ad ended that; it seemed a very personal sort of assault—a direct challenge on his home turf. “In the boonies, in the amp ward, there were always the other guys to think about, always something to do. Last night, there was nothing to think about but me. And I’m not much fun to think about these days.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, the first thought was busywork. Proctor wants me to take a cross-state jaunt. I called Donna, told her to cancel my plane tickets.”

Dunn whistled. “So you’re staying?”

“Nah, Donnzo talked me out of it,” Charlie said, smiling. “She said, ‘You’re freaked over a guy who sells mufflers? Two months from now, he’ll need a tax break and want to be your best friend.’ ”

“She’s probably right,” Pat said. “Although Mary’s probably right, too.”

“But Donna’s a better psychologist than Proctor,” Charlie said. In fact, Donna had proposed that he take a shorter, less ambitious vacation. Florida, maybe. The magic words: Charlie Martin never did anything less ambitious. If he was going away, he would go as far away as he possibly could.

“So,” Dunn asked. “You’re going?”

“As soon as we get done with illuminating the locals,” Charlie said, with a sigh, “I will give peace a chance.”