“It’s Susan Day, isn’t it? You got the job of protecting her while she’s in town.”
“Hole in one. Of course the State Police will be around, but they stick pretty much to traffic control in situations like this. There mlly be some FBI, too, but what they do mostly is hang back, take pictures, and give each other the secret Club Sign.”
“She’s got her own security people, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how many Or how good. I talked to the head guy this morning and he’s at least coherent, but we have to put in our own guys. Five of them, according to the orders I got on Friday.
That’s me plus four guys who’ll volunteer as soon as I tell em to.
The object is… wait a minute… you’ll like this…
.” Leydecker shuffled through the papers on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and held it up… presence and high visibility.” to maintain a strolig He dropped the paper again and grinned at Ralph. The grin did not have a lot of humor in it.
“In other words, if someone tries to shoot the bitch or give her an acid shampoo, we want Lisette Benson and the other vidiots to at least record the fact that we were there.” Leydecker looked at the rolled-up poster leaning in his wastebasket and flipped it the bird.
“How can you dislike someone so much when you’ve never even met her?”
“I don’t just dislike her, Ralph; I fucking hate her. Listen-I’m a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic my kids-if I ever have any-are all gonna be altarboys at Saint Joe’s. Great. Being a Catholic’s great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means I’m in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, I’m the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers.”
Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph.
“Mary, Mother of Jesus. I’ve worn this since I was thirteen.
Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his two-year-old stepson. This is a true thing I’m telling you.
Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldn’t stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and I’ll tell you what, after you’ve seen something like that, the photos the right-to-life assholes like to show of vacuum abortions don’t look so bad.”
Leydecker’s voice had picked up a slight tremor.
“What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tell You… and as far as the Pope goes, I don’t think he should be allowed to have an opinion until he’s had a kid himself, or at least spent a year or so taking care of crack-babies.”
“Okay,” Ralph said. “What’s your problem with Susan Day-?”
“She’s stirring the motherfucking pot!” Leydecker cried. “She comes into my town and I have to protect her. Fine. I’ve got good men, and with just a pinch of luck, I think we can probably see her out of town with her head still on and her tits pointing the right way, but what about what happens before? And what happens after?
Do you think she cares about any of that? Do you think the people who run WomanCare give much of a shit about the side-effects, as far as that goes?”
“I don’t know.”
“The WomanCare advocates are a little less prone to violence than The Friends of Life, but in terms of the all-important ass-ache quotient, they’re not much different. Do you know what this was all about when it started?”
Ralph cast his memory back to his first conversation about Susan Day, the one he’d had with Ham Davenport. For a moment he almost had it, but then it squiggled away. The insomnia had won again.
He shook his head, “Zoning,” Leydecker said, and laughed with disgusted amazement. “Plain old garden-variety zoning regulations.
Great, huh-?
Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence. I doubt if that’s exactly the right word, but you get the gist, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Uh-huh, So the pro-choicers ask Susan Day to come to town and make a speech, help them to raise a warchest to combat the pro-life grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a chince of rezoning District 7, and the WomanCare people knew it Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is on the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall.
“Rezoning District 7 was a pipe-dream from the start, because WomanCare is technically a hospital, just like Derry Home, which is only a stone’s throw away. If you change the zoning laws to make WomanCare illegal, you do the same to one of only three hospitals in Derry County-the third-largest county in the state of Maine. So it was never going to happen, but that’s okay, because it was never about that in the first place. It was about being pissy and in-your face. About being an ass-ache. And for most of the pro-choicersone of the guys I work with calls em the Whale People-it’s about being right,”
“Right? I don’t get you.”
“It isn’t enough that a woman can walk in there and get rid of the troublesome little fishie growing inside her any time she wants; the pro-choicers want the argument to end. What they want, down deep, is for people like Dan Dalton to admit they’re right, and that’ll never happen. It’s more likely that the Arabs and the Jews will decide it was all a mistake and throw down their weapons. I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers’ holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They’re the new Puritans, as far as I’m concerned, people who believe that if you don’t think the way they do, you’re going to hell… only their version is a place where all you get on the radio is hillbilly music and all you can find to eat is chicken-fried steak.”
“You sound pretty bitter.”
“Try sitting on a powderkeg for three months and see how it makes you feel. Tell me this-do you think Pickering would have stuck a knife in your armpit yesterday if it hadn’t been for WomanCare, The Friends of Life, and Susan Leave-My-SacredTwat-Alone Day?”
Ralph appeared to give the question serious thought, but what he was really doing was watching John Leydecker’s aura. it was a healthy dark blue, but the edges were tinged with rapidly shifting greenish light. It was this edging which interested Ralph; he had an idea he knew what it meant.
Finally he said, “No. I guess not.”
“Me either. You got wounded in a war that’s already been decided, Ralph, and you won’t be the last. But if you went to the Whale People-or to Susan Day-and opened your shirt and pointed at the bandage and said ’This is partly your fault, so own the part that’s yours,” they’d raise their hands and say ’Oh no, goodness no, we’re sorry you got hurt, Ralph, we Whale Watchers abhor violence, but it wasn’t our fault, we have to keep WomanCare open, we have to man and woman the barricades, and if a little spilled blood is what it takes to do that, then so be it.” But it’s not about WomanCare, and that’s what drives me absolutely bugfuck. It’s about-”
“-abortion.”
“Shit, no! Abortion rights are safe in Maine and in Derry, no matter what Susan Day says at the Civic Center Friday night. This is about whose team is the best team. About whose side God’s on.
It’s about who’s right. I wish they’d all just sing ’We Are the Champions’ and go get drunk.”