All the doors were open. Several men were getting out. They were all young men. They were all wearing sunglasses. At least two of them had walkie-talkies as well, and they were using them. And they were looking around, scanning all points of the compass through their dark glasses, swiveling their heads back and forth like

searchlights on a guard tower. One of them went up to the Datsun, put his face up close to the silvered glass, and cupped his hands around his eyes.

For the first few moments, Eleanor was convinced that they were Nazi hit men who had come to blow her away. But that was just paranoia. The followers of Earl Dudley Strang were not affluent men in suits and Lincoln Town Cars. And if they wished to do away with her, they would come in the middle of the night like the jackals they were. Not in broad daylight, in a big car, like this.

Besides, they didn't act like hit men, or how she thought hit men would act. They had gotten out of the car immediately on arrival, but then they just stopped. They made no move to enter Eleanor's trailer.

Eleanor raised her windowshade a little more, feeling bolder, and noticed that there was still one man inside the Lincoln Town Car. He was sitting in the middle of the backseat and he was talking on the telephone.

He finished his conversation, hung up, and scooted down to the end of the seat. He climbed up out of the car, assisted by one of the young men in the dark glasses, and stood up on the gravel. He squinted into the unfiltered sunlight, his face wrinkling up tremendously, like a High Plains arroyo.

She would have recognized him on the dark side of the moon: it was Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall, Republican of Colorado. He was so old that he was actually named after Teddy, not Franklin, Roosevelt. And he was so conservative that, during the thirties, when a lot of his idealistic young peers were going to Spain to fight on behalf of the revolutionaries there, he had volunteered to fight for the Fascists.

He had been virulently opposed to America's participation in World War II. A strong supporter of General MacArthur and a fierce advocate of "nuking the evil Chinks" (his words) in Korea. He had spent most of the fifties rooting out "Comsymps" from Capitol Hill and the media. He had called Goldwater a pinko. He had seen both the Berlin crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis as golden opportunities for a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and had stood side-by-side with Curtis Lemay in the recommendation that North Vietnam be bombed back into the Stone Age.

He had run abortively for president in four decades, from the fifties through the eighties, whenever he felt that the frontrunning Republican candidate was not gloomy, threatening, and violent enough. Consistently voted against affirmative action. Though Eleanor knew her civil rights history well enough to know that he had astonished just about everyone by voting in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

He was like that: he was fringy enough to teeter on the edge of becoming a one-dimensional stereotype, but one or twice a year he would do something freakish and astonishing. He had gained the grudging affection of some people by consistently hating Richard Nixon's guts from the very beginning. He had come down on the side of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and delivered a lengthy and profane speech in her defense on the Senate floor, using it as an occasion to lament the total implosion of American values.

Just when his image seemed on the verge of being rehabilitated, he would do something reactionary. For the last several years, he had celebrated Animal Rights Day by going out to his family ranch in southwestern Colorado and branding a few calves in front of the TV cameras. It got him tons of publicity, reinforced his caveman image, and made him wildly popular among farmers, westerners, and anyone else who made money from animals. The man knew how to get a campaign contribution.

Now this weathered, deathless, inexplicable gnome was standing in front of her trailer, surrounded by men that, she now realized, were Secret Service agents. She did not know if she should run away and hide, or welcome him.

Soon enough he was pounding on her front door and she had to make up her mind. She pulled her hair back and wrapped a scrunchie around it, went to the door, and opened it. But it was still chained shut and so it only came open a few inches. She found herself staring through the chain at Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. They were of roughly the same height.

"Take it easy, woman," he said, glancing at the chain. "I'm not here to burn a cross on your goddamn lawn."

She closed the door, unchained it, and opened it all the way. "Senator Marshall?" she said.

"Eleanor Boxwood Richmond?"

"Yes."

"Slayer of Erwin Dudley Strang?"

"Well..."

"Fastest tongue in the West?"

She laughed.

"If you would invite me in, I would have a few things to discuss with you."

"Come in."

"You don't have to invite any of these people in." Marshall said. He turned around and slammed the door in the face of an agent.

"Can I offer you anything to drink?" she said.

"I am in suspended animation. The only things I am allowed to drink are strange concoctions brewed up by pharmacists. You would not be able to afford them, and I can only do so by taking honoraria," he said. He talked like a guy who was used to having his voice heard by a million people.

"Well, then, please sit down anywhere you like."

"Whenever I lower myself to a seated or reclining position, it occurs to me that I may never stand on my feet again," he said. "To a man of my age, even sitting down becomes a morbid thing. So I hope it will not make you feel awkward if I stand up."

"Not at all." Eleanor pulled up a tall bar stool, one of the artifacts that they had salvaged from the wreck of their middle-class lifestyle, and sat down on it without losing any altitude. This way she could still talk to him face-to-face.

"I know that this conversation has already gotten off on the wrong foot because you think that I am an evil vicious old man who hates persons of your race," Senator Marshall said.

"The thought had occurred to me."

"But in fact, the only thing I hate is bullshit. I hate bullshit because I grew up on ranch and I spent the first three decades of my life shoveling it. I went into politics largely because it was a desk job and naturally I thought that in a desk job I would not have to shovel any more bullshit. Of course nothing could have been further from the truth. So you see I have spent my whole life up to my nostrils in bullshit and consequently know more about it, and hate it more, than anyone else on the face of the earth.

"Now, the reason that a lot of Negroes think I hate them is simple: there is a whole lot of bullshit in racial politics, even more than in other aspects of politics, and when I react against that bullshit, they think I'm reacting against them. But I'm not. I'm just reacting against their bullshit politics. Like affirmative action. That's bullshit. But civil rights isn't bullshit at all. I voted for that."

"I know you did."

"And all these different terms - colored, Negro, black, Afro-American - that's all bullshit too. They're always willing to come up with new rods for Negroes, but never to actually do something that will help them, and that's bullshit. The basic fact is that all people should be treated the same, as specified in the goddamn Constitution, and everything else is bullshit."

"Well, Senator, I am aware that you are not a totally one-dimensional person, and so I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt as long as you are a guest in my home."

"I thought you would. A lot of Negroes hate my guts and start jumping up and down and organizing protest rallies as soon as I come over the horizon, but I figured you would be able to see things a little more clearly. You know why?"