Spinning Dixie (2 page)

“I was asked only to deliver that envelope,” she said firmly.

“Was it an easy delivery?”

“Eventful,” she said, studying my eyes.

“Mine are green, too,” I said. “The eyes. Different shade.”

She seemed embarrassed. We were about the same height, and Ghosty's sandals had no heels.

“This is so strange,” I said. “Would you wait while I read this? Is that what I am supposed to do?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Rattle & Snap, sir.”

“You've got some sass, don't you?”

“Nobody knows where I got it.”

“Well, Ghosty, I know Rattle & Snap is a plantation.” By plantation, I didn't mean some nouveau riche development of tract mansions riddled with social-climbing orthodontists calling itself The Plantation. I meant the kind of place that God had set aside long ago for the fleeting use of American nobles.

“Look—” Stall her, Jonah. “Would you like to come into the White House? We've got cable.” I felt like a child molester. Still, she'd have to show her identification to get in, which might help with the whole Who-Is-She thing. She said no.

Several tourists walked by and recognized me. I heard one of them say my name. The ghost overheard it, and nodded warmly, as if to say,
And I'm with him.
I liked it, and I wished I had this job when I was single.

Ghosty saw my confusion as I studied the envelope, and she appeared to be pained. She began walking away. A few of the network camera guys sidled closer from the other side of the gate. Not good. I took a few steps to follow her, but a disgraced White House press secretary chasing a Victoria's Secret model down Pennsylvania Avenue might not look good.

“You'll have to reckon with Claudine Polk,” she said.

“Claudine wasn't much of a reckoner, as I recall.” I stood helpless, watching her step toward Lafayette Park. As my instincts turned protective, she turned to me one more time and said, “You don't look like a thief, Mr. Eastman.”

“I'm not…a thief.” This came out sounding like a question, and I wanted to do another take, but this was real-time—unforgiving.

“And those men you saw out in the field that summer, and in the town?” She swallowed, and I thought she said, “They worry, spaz.”

“What? I'm sorry? I don't—”

Then she said it again, but with the blaring of a nearby siren, all I caught was something like “They worry, spaz.” While I stood perplexed and shivering, the moonlight touched her in a way that reddened her hair. Then she disappeared among the subversives of Lafayette Park.

 

The president of the United States, Joseph Truitt, stood facing out the window of the Oval Office. The Washington Monument cut the April night sky like a razor, blurring slightly because of the funhouse effect of the thick bulletproof glass. There is a plaque on the wall beside his desk reading
OMNIA VESTIGIA RETRORSUM
, Latin for “All footsteps turn back on themselves.” No one is more amazed that he is president than the president, which is why he contemplates his position so often. He believes that men who can appreciate their smallness make better leaders.

The Oval Office is another thing that is small. Photographers always use the wide-angle lens that conveys greater majesty than the room really possesses. What the Oval Office lacks in grandeur, however, it makes up for in gravity. The biggest egomaniacs on the planet instinctively lower their voices in here.

The president saw me at the threshold of his assistant's post and gestured to his twin sofas by the fireplace. As the Secret Service agent on duty, a mountainous black man named Roscoe, closed the door behind me, I heard him softly say for the last time, “Riptide is in the Egg.” The finality sickened me.

The president spread his arms out on the sofa across from me. Like a great bird of prey, his wingspan was immense. I held my hands on my lap, which accentuated the difference in our natural sizes. “Jonah, son, did those eagle eyes of yours ever notice the difference between the presidential seal on the desk and the one on the ceiling?”

“Yes, sir, someone pointed it out to me years ago.” I once had a mid-level polling job on President Reagan's staff. My boss at the time had pointed out that the Great Seal carved on the front panel of the president's nineteenth-century desk displayed the eagle facing the arrows, while the version on the newer dome of the Oval Office showed the eagle facing the olive branch.

“Harry Truman changed the direction of the eagle, son. Didn't want us looking warlike.”

“Probably a good move, sir. After he sat at that desk and incinerated a few hundred thousand Japanese.”

“Yup. When you're at peace, you romance war, but when you're at war you romance peace,” he drawled in his prosecutor's baritone.

The strain of the job was showing around his eyes. The muddy circles were a contrast to his pewter hair. I had the impulse to summon a makeup crew to dab out the darkness, but not everything that is born in this room survives the light. “You know, son, there's a lot of true things we're just not allowed to say, and your mistake was that you said it. My mistake was that I said some cuckoo thing, too.” The president tapped on an eyetooth. “It's true, of course. We
say
we don't negotiate with terrorists, but we
always
do in some form or another, which is why they do it. Now I have to make your successor fib her tail off while I have lunch with some sheik who'll compliment me on my statesmanship as he plans to hand over a sack of cash at dinner to a psychopath who'll blow himself up at a Starbuck's in Cleveland.”

“Well, sir, it was time for me to go anyway. The great lesson of the Clinton years was that in a bull market, the public
wants
the president to have an intern under his desk; in a recession, he's on his own.”

The president laughed so hard he started coughing. When he recovered, he said I had been like a son to him. This wasn't a caramelized brush-off. I had seen him tiptoe plenty of folks out of the White House, and he had plenty of less controversial choices for press secretary than yours truly. That a Jewish, Northeastern, Ivy League–educated gangster's grandson could be so close to a Republican president—a Dixie-bred Vietnam veteran, former Oxford, Mississippi, sheriff and prosecutor—had been the source of much K Street gossip over the past few years. In a screeching article in
The New Yorker
entitled “The Consigliere,” a columnist alternatively attributed my loyalty to President Truitt to my desperation for a father figure or to an ethnic self-loathing tantrum. She even hinted at a desire to see me shot by a racist cop. The big northeastern urban city newspapers referred to the president by his full three names whenever possible—Joseph Lee Truitt—as they habitually did with Texas death-row inmates (those hair-trigger bubbas). While campaigning in Virginia, I sometimes hinted that Truitt was related to General Robert E. Lee (utterly false; the name derived from his beloved grandmother Lee Anne). I also winked to folks in Manhattan that the name had been shortened from Liebowitz just to frost
The New York Times.
The American Civil War drags on into the toddling millennium.

“You know I appreciate your sacrifices,” the president said. He wasn't just referring to the flak I took for him this week. During his tenure, I had relentlessly beat back media interest in his wife's alcoholism and his college-age son's antics with women, some of whom were impressively no longer Brownies. During Truitt's election campaign, I had also cut a deal with my union contacts in New Jersey to endorse him over his Democratic opponent. New Jersey was a notoriously Democratic state, and deeply disinclined to support a conservative Republican. When the union endorsement came through, it dealt a psychological blow to the Democrats, and Truitt won the state on election day.

What the world did not know were the secret terms of the endorsement: If elected, Truitt would have to support certain federal judges. These judges, as it happened, were skeptical of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) judicial template that was used to prosecute organized crime. Which apparently flourished in New Jersey. Who knew?

While the president always executed the final meeting like a statesman, I had never seen him talk to anyone quite like he had to me. I believe in
omertà
and other antique laws of loyalty. This belief has served me well with the president, Mickey's gang, and, of course, my wife.

“In a way, Jonah, I envy you leaving,” the president said, a fleeting expression of romance dancing across his pupils.
Aaah INvee yew.
“I thought I'd never miss the white skies of the Mississippi summers and hunting jackrabbits, but I do, Jonah. I do.”

“If you're not careful, sir, you'll be a gentleman farmer soon enough.”

“My spin doc is always the one to tell it to me straight. Why couldn't I have found myself a good liar like all the other boys?”

“Because you're a rebel at heart.”

He knew that I meant this and had long been drawn to Southerners. We had discussed my youthful summertime at Rattle & Snap. I knew down deep that my boss was more impressed by Polks than he was by kings. Growing up in Oxford and painting William Faulkner's fence one summer (a favorite campaign story), President Truitt was eminently conscious of the Dixie caste system that had survived Sherman's March.

“I know I am, son. I want you where they can't see you, where you can play possum, dead on the side of the road. You and I know that we're not through and I will be hurt if you don't call upon me. I see myself as being in your debt. What did they call it in your grandpop's day, a stand-up guy?”

“Right. A stand-up guy.”

The president's leonine head turned toward the panorama of monuments.

“If I may say, sir, just one more time…it's not your imagination. You really are here,” I said.

“I am grateful for your reminder of my coordinates, son.”

“May I ask if it was all worth it by your calculations? Getting here?”

“Obsession overwhelms reason, son. You're asking me to make a rational calculation about something that cannot be measured by any device man has invented to date. I've fixated on this coordinate my whole life. I don't claim it was healthy, nor will I be so bold to suggest it was even sane. All I can tell you is that this job was—and remains—a star out on the horizon that has come to define me. It may yet be my Lorelei—that siren who lures sailors to her breast until they are crushed upon her rocks. You were always able to spot those rocks for me, son. My prayer for you is that you can always spot them for yourself.”

 

After I left through the Rose Garden door, I sat on the steps that went down to the Rose Garden. I opened the letter from my Lorelei.

Claudine had written a phone number on the bottom of the stationery. I returned to my lair, and asked Tigger to set me up with a special telephone line, one that played whatever tricks must be played to frustrate the efforts of eavesdroppers.

The first syllable of Claudine's elemental voice on the line (scientists have proven that certain molecules in the tiniest densities can be devastating) drew me back to Rattle & Snap, where I had hidden out from the worst gangland war since Prohibition. When I collapsed into my cracked leather chair trying to collect the events of 1980, I couldn't decide if civil war had broken out in Philly and South Jersey at the moment I met Claudine, or if I had met Claudine at the moment when the civil war broke out. The order mattered somehow.

The truth was that the White House wasn't the first pillared mansion I had been bounced from. My ejection from the Polks' place had long preceded events at the Executive Mansion. I think Ghosty was alluding to this when she said I didn't look like a thief.
Of course not, Love. The best thieves look good on TV.

Claudine's voice sounded breathy, vulnerable. “I thought my heart would stop when my caller ID said the White House,” she said.

“We're very covert and espionage-y here,” I said, cursing Tigger, and thinking that the same intelligence agencies that supposedly assassinated President Kennedy and kept it silent for forty years couldn't hook up a blind phone line.

Claudine refused to elaborate upon the ghost. Nor would she speak on the phone about all of the things she had to tell me. When I told her I couldn't just come to Rattle & Snap for the first time in a quarter century without knowing more, she surrendered a few more details, and sighed. “I'm losing.”

You'd have to know Claudine to appreciate how much she abhorred victims. That she sounded like one now shook me to my core.

When we hung up, I called in Tigger. “You saw her, too, right?” I asked. “The one outside? I'm not going crazy, am I?”

“I saw her, Wonderboy.” Tigger's glasses slipped from her nose onto the floor. She kicked them a few times accidentally before reacquiring them.

 

I lay back on the sofa in my office and closed my eyes. The lights outside penetrated my drawn window shade, and I could hear activity on the White House driveway. Alas, the nation's welfare had fumbled out of my hands. A deputy press secretary had been named to succeed me, so when the protests began in a few weeks against Judge Dewey's confirmation hearings, it would be her career challenge.

I teared up a bit (or a lot) while lying down, which isn't smart because of the choking. Fluids and faces didn't mix. I hated guys like me. As soon as I patted my face dry, I dreamt about ghosts, specifically, silvery women in great hoop dresses tiptoeing in between great columns, in search of someone they had lost in the mounds of ash that were swelling on the steps. I could actually taste the ashes. The ghosts were not frightening as much as they were desperate.