"Why?"

"Because you have a bullshit detector as good as mine, and that is a rare quality."

"Well, thank you, Senator."

"And you're not afraid to use it."

"Well, that was a somewhat unusual thing for me to do. I was very upset at the time and not thinking clearly."

Senator Marshall was peeved and disappointed. "Bullshit! You were thinking as clearly as the human mind has ever thought. What do you mean, you weren't thinking clearly?"

"I mean that I was raised to have good manners and be diplomatic, and I would not have violated those standards if I had not been at the end of my rope emotionally."

"Well, you and I have different interpretations of this. Shit, I've been at the end of my rope emotionally since I was five years old."

"This fact has been widely commented upon," Eleanor said.

"You were perfectly justified in saying everything you said," Senator Marshall said. "Do you realize that Earl Strong may never recover, politically, from what you did to him?"

"I think you are being very optimistic to say that."

"Bullshit. This is your polite upbringing talking, isn't it?"

"Possibly."

"I got a stack of poll results an inch thick. We have been watch­ing this thing. Hell, I wanted to come over here and congratulate you the same night you did it. But instead I waited a few days for the poll results. And lady, you blew that son of a bitch to smith­ereens. You ripped that little tick's head off. You deserve a medal."

Eleanor laughed. "A medal? I'd rather have a job."

Senator Marshall stuck out his right hand and looked at Eleanor expectantly.

She didn't know what to do. The man was so weird. He was weird, he knew he was weird, he knew that she knew it, and he didn't care.

Finally politeness took over and she reached out and shook his hand. He seized hers, not with the perfunctory squeeze of a politician, but with the powerful grip of a man who has to pull himself up out of chairs and beds. He didn't let go.

"Done," he said, "you're hired."

Eleanor laughed wildly. "You're crazy!" she said, "what are you talking about?"

"I don't know."

"So you're just kidding."

"Oh no. I sure as hell ain't kidding. You're definitely hired. I just haven't worked through all the bullshit yet."

"The bullshit?"

"Job tide, GSA level, what kind of desk to get you, what kind of goddamn picture to hang on the wall of your office. See, one of the things you learn, when you've hired a lot of people, and then fired most of them, is that when you find a quality person, you hire them right away and work out the details later. And I just hired you."

"Just on the strength of the fact that I said some nasty things to Earl Strong."

"You said some true things," Caleb Roosevelt Marshall said, "which is something that few people in Washington are capable of doing. And you said them well, which is just as unusual."

He still hadn't let go of her hand.

"I would have expected you to like Earl Strong."

"Ha! You think I'll support anyone who comes along and spouts a few positions similar to mine. What do you think I am, a senile old moron?"

"Isn't that how it works?"

"Positions change. People don't. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so-called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart, as you pegged him. I don't want to serve with him in the Senate. And you may have saved me from that fate. So I owe you a job."

"Well, I'm not sure I want to work with you."

"Eleanor Boxwood Richmond," he said, "you and I got exactly the same politics. Only thing is, you don't know it yet."

"How can you say that? I've been a liberal Democrat all my life."

Still gripping her hand, Senator Marshall shook his head dismissively. "All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit," he said. "And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way they use those words. They don't really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values."

"Values?"

"Values. I've got 'em. You've got 'em. Earl Strong doesn't. That means you and I are on the same side. We have to stick together, you and I."

"And that means you're going to give me a job."

"I already figured it out. Took me a few minutes, but I figured it out. I need a health and human services liaison for my Denver office. We can start you on Monday. You'll work your ass off and make forty-five thousand plus full medical. Interested?"

"What can I say?" Indeed, what could she say? "Sure. I'll take it. What do I have to do?"

"Answer irate phone calls from parasites who want to know what became of their welfare checks.

"Okay. I can do that."

"Done," the Senator said, and let go of her hand finally.

"One question."

"Yeah?"

"Do you expect me to blow these people off, or to actually help them? Because if someone calls me wanting to find their welfare check, I intend to help them out."

"None of them vote," the Senator said, "so they can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned. You can handle it any way you want."

24

The ride took her in slowly through Commerce City and north Denver, the attic of the West: square miles of warehouses, stacks of empty cargo pallets that must have consumed whole forests, entire blocks of businesses devoted to truck clutches. Eleanor had seen it too many times to count, but sitting on The Ride in her one and only decent dress, on her way to work - work - she saw it all from a new perspective, like a queen surveying her domain.

The sky was always sapphire blue when Eleanor looked straight up, but as she tracked it down toward the horizon it faded to a hot yellowish brown as if something had singed it around the edges. Eleanor was never sure if the stuff in the air was pollution or airborne topsoil, but it usually gave her a bad feeling about wherever she was going. She was tired of being able to see so far, and wanted to be hemmed in a little bit.

Downtown Denver fit that bill. It always looked clean because it was built-up, and so you couldn't see far enough to notice how dirty the air was. Eleanor sat on a bench for a while, waiting for another Ride, and marveled at the place. When you were used to the dusty flatlands out by the arsenal, the smallest things - a freshly painted GODS drop box sitting on a street corner, a young woman wearing white stockings, a Volvo with water beaded up on its hood from the car wash - looked impossibly clean and new, like images from a Kodak or Polaroid advertisement.

This was the world where a lot of people lived their whole lives. A world where Eleanor had lived for many years but that now looked like an alien planet to her dusty bloodshot eyes, and where she had just been given the tiniest of handholds.

Tree-lined Pennsylvania Street ran north-south behind the state capitol. At some point in Denver's early boom years it had been the fashionable place for barons to construct their mansions - not just homes, but seats of political and social influence. The architecture was diverse, and exuberant bordering on eccentric, including huge Victorian homes, plantation-style classical structures, arched-and-turreted Romanesques, and one especially large and bizarre structure, a red sandstone mission building that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Alamo.

Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall used that building as his home office, and he referred to it as the Alamo, which was not a popular joke among his Mexican-American constituents, but then he was not the type to care.