Surely someone would take it upon themselves to expose this man.

But no one ever did.

And then, all of a sudden, Earl Strong was running for the United States Senate, he was ahead in the polls, and everyone loved him.

19

A white limousine pulled into the parking lot of the mall, swung past the line of waiting buses, and came to a stop in front of the main entrance. This limousine was far from elegant; it was a rolling billboard for Ty (Buckaroo) Steele's Pre-Owned and Remanufactured Vehicles Inc. The only time it ever came out of the garage was during parades, when Buckaroo himself would drive it down the street with some local beauty queen popping out of the sunroof to wave at the crowd and pelt the young 'uns with hard candy.

But Buckaroo had now found another way to use it. The doors opened up and several men in dark suits climbed out and walked, in a cluster, toward the entrance of the mall. In the middle of the group she could clearly make out the pre-owned and remanu­factured face of Earl Strong, who in these parts was invariably described as "the next Senator from Colorado."

A few moments after he went into the mall, a big cheer rose up from inside. They were holding some kind of campaign event inside there.

She shook her head, staring at a huge COMES ON STRONG poster stuck to the side of a bus directly in front of her.

Her bus wasn't due to leave for half an hour. There was really no reason for her to sit outside on this bench when she could go into the mall and kill time. It was just that she felt so trashy, walking through the nice mall in her clothes, rumpled from having been slept in, and her rumpled hair, carrying big hunks of generic bulk food that she had gotten for free.

Right next to her was a big pseudoadobe litter basket, nearly

overflowing, and resting on the top layer, neatly folded and put away, was a thick glossy shopping bag from Nordstrom.

Eleanor pulled the bag out and unfolded it. It was clean and new.

She put her cheese and oatmeal inside the Nordstrom bag, got up, and walked toward the entrance of the shopping mall. She wanted to see what Erwin Dudley Strang was up to.

As she was approaching the entrance, she saw her reflection in the glass doors. She had thought it was a clever trick, hiding her welfare cheese in the Nordstrom bag, but when she saw herself, she recognized something about her silhouette, a shape she'd seen in many cities, on many park benches, and a realization came to her.

She had become a bag lady.

It was a spear through her heart. She lost her stride and stumbled to a complete halt. Tears flooded her eyes uncontrollably and her nose began to run. She sniffed, blinked, swallowed, and fought it back.

The Earl Strong supporters were veering around her, turning back to look at her face. She couldn't just stand there. She picked up her pace and punched through the glass doors and in so doing, transformed herself from a bag lady into a shopper.

In the central part of the mall, Earl Strong was standing up on a raised podium, coming on strong.

"Thank you all for coming today. I wanted to do this in January, but the mall wouldn't let me have the space because they said it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I said that I certainly wouldn't want to have my name associated with a man who plagiarized his dissertation and shacked up with women he wasn't married to."

Nervous but exultant laughter ran through the crowd: a lot of heavy middle-aged white men raising their eyebrows at each other to see if they dared laugh at Martin Luther King. They did.

"Then I wanted to do it in February, but they said it was President's Day. And I said that I liked the sound of that, but that I was only running for the Senate, and the presidency would have to wait for a few more years."

That line brought a round of applause and a slowly gathering chant of "Run! Run! Run" from the crowd. Earl Strong, obviously pleased, let the chant build for a few seconds, long enough to be picked up by the TV cameras, then made a big show of quieting it down by waving his hands over the crowd.

"That left March or April. But in April, we've got Easter, when Christ rose from the dead, and that one is a little out of my scope. So I settled on March. March is a plain and simple month, raw and honest, not tricked up with any fancy holidays, and I decided that suited my style best. And another thing about the month of March: it comes on strong!"

That cued an outburst of cheering and chanting that went on for several minutes.

Below, Eleanor wandered through the crowd with her shopping bag, watching the Strong supporters cheering and jumping up and down and pumping their fists in the air. She was totally invisible. They had eyes only for Strong. The few who did notice her got the same shocked look that Erwin Dudley Strang had gotten years ago when he had first seen a black woman standing in the doorway of a suburban house. Then they looked away. Guiltily.

People were so easy to understand, when you were a mom. Eleanor could see their guilt a mile away, see them trying to delude themselves, like kids who believed that they could make unpleasant things go away just by wishing.

The only thing they needed, she realized, was a good talking-to. Which was one thing that Earl Strong could never give them.

Eventually the cheering died away and Earl Strong stopped shaking his clasped hands over his head and returned to the podium, shot his cuffs, adjusted his collar just a bit. Eleanor had wandered rather close to him, was now looking up at him from just a few feet away. His face was thickly plastered with television makeup. In his perfect, stiff suit and his injection-molded haircut and his heavy pancake, he looked like a cardboard cutout.

"Now you might ask why I went to so much trouble, and waited so long, for the opportunity to speak here at the Boulevard Mall. After all, there are better places to hold a campaign event. But this mall has something that none of those places can provide. As I stand here in the crossroads of this beautiful mall I can look in all directions and see economic prosperity at work."

Applause.

"I don't see people standing in line for a handout. I don't see people going to court and suing other people for what they think the world owes them. I don't see people breaking into other people's homes and stealing things. I see people working hard in honest businesses, small businesses, and to me that is what makes America the greatest nation on earth."

Applause.

"And I have particular respect for the small businessmen, and women - let's not forget the women's libbers!-" laughter "-who built these businesses, because for a number of years, I was a small businessman myself, owning and operating my own enterprise as an independent contractor."

Eleanor could not restrain herself; standing now at the base of the podium, she spoke up. "Excuse me! Excuse me?"

Earl Strong looked down at her with a fixed, glazed smile. He noticed that she was black. Once again, he got that look on his face.

But he was older and, if not wiser, then smarter. He didn't let it throw him off. She could see the wheels turning beneath his artificial face. She could see him having an inspiration, making a quick command decision.

"I don't usually take questions from the audience at this point in the speech," he said, "but some people have been saying that I only appeal to one kind of person, and I'm glad to see that a racially diverse group is here today, and I see that one of them has a comment she wants to make, and I'm very interested in hearing what she has to say. Ma'am?"

Television sound men brandished their boom microphones like fishermen on a dock waving grotesque, furry lures, competing for the attention of the only fish in the pond.