Thinking of her son made Eleanor smile to herself as she sat on the bench in front of the Boulevard Mall. Across her lap was a large brick of orange cheese encased in a flimsy cardboard box, and several pounds of rolled oats and pinto beans in clear plastic bags. Above her head was a large sign in red metal saying THE RIDE.

All around her, people were strolling in from the parking lots, converging on the front entrance of the mall. These people had their very own rides, many with licence plates from outlying counties. She got more than one dirty look from these people. This was not unusual in Denver, which now had its ghettos at the outskirts of town, but even for Denver it seemed like she was getting a lot of dirty looks. Then she realized that every other one of these people was wearing a T-shirt or a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan EARL STRONG COMES ON STRONG.

Everybody knew that Earl Strong's real name was Erwin Dudley Strang, but no one seemed to care, and that was just one of the many things about the man that pissed Eleanor Richmond off.

Not that there was anything wrong with changing your name.

But political candidates had been crucified in the press for doing far less significant things. Earl Strong/Erwin Dudley Strang seemed to get away with murder.

He could have picked something a little less obvious than Strong. To change your name, and then use the name's double meaning as part of a campaign slogan ... it was a little much. As if he were nothing more than a new TV series. But even though people knew exactly what Erwin Dudley Strang was doing, they lapped it up like thirsty dogs.

Maybe one reason Eleanor felt bad when she heard of the man was that she had known of him from way back and she had never taken him seriously.

The first time she had ever seen the name Erwin Dudley Strang, it had been printed across the laminated face of a photo ID card. She had seen it through the distorting lens of the peephole on the front door of the house in Eldorado Highlands. She was on the inside of the house, by herself, waiting for the cable TV installer to show up; the cable company had promised that an installer would arrive between nine and five, and so she had spent the whole day waiting in an empty house. He had finally rung her doorbell at 4.54 p.m. and stood out on the front doorstep holding up his official cable TV installer's ID card so that it was the only thing she could see through the peephole when she looked out.

She could at least pride herself on one thing: she had known, just from that one little gesture, that Erwin Dudley Strang was a creep.

She opened her front door. Erwin Dudley Strang lowered the badge to reveal a narrow, concave face, cratered like the surface of the moon. He looked Eleanor Richmond in the eye, and his jaw dropped open. He stared at her without saying anything for several seconds. It was the look that white people gave to black people to let the black people know that they didn't belong there. To remind them, just in case they'd somehow forgotten, that they were on the wrong continent.

"Can I help you?" Eleanor said.

"Is the lady of the house in?" he said.

"I am the owner. I am the lady of the house," she said.

Keeping that fixed stare on her face, Erwin Dudley Strang blinked a couple of times and shook his head melodramatically. But he never said anything. It almost wouldn't have been so bad if he had said, "Shit, I never thought I'd see a black person out here." But he didn't do that. He shook his head and blinked, and then he said, "Yes, hello, I'm here to install your cable TV."

In the course of installing the cable system he had to go in and out of the house half a dozen times. Each time, he was careful to stare her down while standing in the corner of her peripheral vision so that she would know that he was there. Each time, she felt herself getting hot under the collar and turned squarely toward him, and each time he glanced away just a moment before her eye met his, blinked, shook his head, and continued about his work.

He walked around the house brandishing a power drill with a preposterously elongated bit, which he used to drill holes all the way through the exterior walls wherever she told him she wanted a cable TV wire. Even the way that he handled this tool raised Eleanor's hackles; it seemed clear, somehow, that a large portion of Erwin Dudley Strang's ego was bound up in this tool, and that penetrating the walls of total strangers' homes was the really swell part of the job as far as he was concerned.

And consequently he always pushed on the drill a little bit too hard, tried to make it happen a little bit too fast, and ended up shoving the drill bit through the wall with brute force rather than waiting for it to cut cleanly; everywhere he poked a hole through the wall he managed to burst a sizable hole through the drywall, and every time he did it, he came back in and shook his head in astonishment as if this were the first time it had ever happened. As if defective drywall had been used to build the Richmonds' new house, the Richmonds had been foolish enough not to notice, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

He ran the cables along the outside of the house, not by stapling them but by tucking them between the pieces of vinyl siding. As a result they all fell out within the first couple of days, leaving gaps in the siding where it no longer interlocked properly. Harmon ended up spending an entire weekend fixing the holes in the drywall and reattaching the cable to the house and getting the siding popped back together. Harmon also noticed that Strang had neglected to ground the cable system properly, which put the whole family at risk of electrocution, and so he rigged up a way to ground it to a cold-water pipe down in the basement.

All of this was in defiance of Erwin Dudley Strang's statement, which he repeated to Eleanor several times, that the stuff was cable company property and they were not allowed to mess with it in any way.

"It's all hooked up," he said, at some point when he had arbitrarily decided that he was finished. "Now, if you'll show me your TV, I'll hook it up for you."

The Richmonds had not moved into the house yet. There was not a stick of furniture in the house, or for that matter in the whole development. Erwin Dudley Strang had passed through every room in the place and must have noticed this. Now he was asking to see their television set, staring at her blankly, with the forced innocent expression of a sixth-grade bad boy who has just nailed the teacher with a spitball.

She was just completely baffled by the man. Clearly, what he was saying had no relationship to what he was thinking. He was playing some kind of game. She had no idea what it was.

"It's not here. We haven't moved in yet," she finally said. Mother had taught her, when in doubt, to be polite.

"Well, then I can't show you how to hook it up."

"It's cable-ready," she said. "All we have to do is screw the cable in the back and turn it on."

"And plug it into the power outlet," he corrected her, just a hint of a smirk on his face.

"Yes, and plug it in. Good point," she said.

"Now, is it ready for all bands of cable? Because the bands here might be different from the bands there."

She had been expecting something like this. Telling Erwin Dudley Strang that their set was cable-ready was tantamount to making fun of his drill bit. He could not let it go unpunished. He would have to one-up her and display his technical mastery.

"From the bands where?" she asked.

His eyes darted back and forth. Clearly this was something of a curve ball. "Wherever y'all came from," he said, putting a long, drawling emphasis on the "y'all."

"If you don't know where we came from, how do you know that the bands are different?"