29

Eleanor made the mistake of giving out her full name. Since her name was listed in the telephone book, she was now reachable by everyone, all the time. She had the impression that her phone number must have been spray-painted in digits ten feet tall on the wall of every public housing project in greater Denver. And somehow they had all heard that Eleanor Richmond was a nice lady who would help you out with your problems.

She began to get calls from constituents in the middle of the night. When some unemployed mother of three phoned her at one o'clock one night and asked her for a personal loan of a hundred dollars, Eleanor came to her senses and decided that this had to stop. She could not be unofficial mom to all of Denver. She soon got into the habit of turning off the ringer on her phone when she went to bed.

This was a difficult step for a mother of two teenagers to take, because once she turned off that ringer, she knew that her kids would not be able to wake her up in the middle of the night and ask her advice, or request help, apologize, or simply burst into tears whenever they got themselves into a Situation. And although Eleanor's kids were reasonably smart and fairly responsible and kind of prudent, they still had an amazing talent for finding their way into Situations.

But by this point in her mothering career, Eleanor had seen enough Situations that she had begun to suspect that her kids were more apt to get into them when they knew that Mom would be there at the other end of the phone line to bail them out. And sure enough, when she got in the habit of turning her phone off at night, the incidence of Situations dropped. Or maybe she just stopped hearing about them. Either way it was fine with her.

It didn't help her sleep, though. Turning off the phones pre­vented them from ringing. But she could still hear the mechanical parts inside her answering machine clunking and whirring all night long, as people left messages for her. She put the answering machine in the far corner of her trailer and buried it under a pillow, but that didn't help. She still lay awake at night wondering, Why the hell are these people calling me?

She had never called anyone. It had never even occurred to her, when she was broke, and her husband had gone on the lam to the Afterlife, and her mother was soiling her pants in the middle of the night, and Clarice and Harmon, Jr., were out getting into Situations, to pick up the phone and contact the office of the Senator. It would not have occurred to her in a million years.

Where had these people gotten the weird idea that the government was going to take care of their problems?

The answer to that one was pretty simple: the government had told them as much. And they had been dumb enough to believe it. When it turned out to be lie (or at least a hell of an exaggeration) they didn't go out and help themselves. Instead they stewed in their own problems and they got self-righteous about it and started calling Eleanor Richmond in the wee hours to vent their outrage.

She had to stop thinking this way. She was thinking exactly like Earl Strong. Blaming everything on the welfare mothers. As if the welfare mothers had caused the savings and loan crisis, the budget deficit, the decline of the schools, and El Nino all at once.

She would he awake every night for hours, sensing the distant clunking of her answer machine under the pillow in the next room, and run through this series of thoughts over and over again, like a rat on a treadmill, exhausting herself but never going anywhere.

One morning in the middle of April she got up, turned on her coffee maker, took the pillow off her answering machine, and played back the messages, as she did every morning. Today there were only four of them. The people who had Eleanor's phone number written on the walls of their trailers and project flats had begun to learn that she never responded to messages and, bit by bit, weren't bothering to call anymore.

One of the messages was from someone speaking a language that Eleanor had never heard before. He rambled on until the machine cut him off. Then there were a couple of irate voters. And then there came a voice she recognized: it was one of Senator Marshall's political aides, calling from Washington.

"Hi, this is Roger calling from D.C. at nine a.m. local time."

Eleanor glanced at her clock. It was 7:15. This message had just come in while she was showering.

"We have a major problem that's up your alley. Please call me as soon as you can."

Eleanor picked up her phone and started punching numbers. She got through to Roger in D.C. During her month of working for Senator Marshall she had spoken briefly to this man once previously, and seen his name on a lot of memos.

Senators were too important to do anything personally. They were like sultans being carried around on sedan chairs, their feet never actually touching the ground. They showed up at the Capitol to make speeches and cast votes, and they made a lot of essentially social appearances, but most of the actual grunge work was delegated to a few key aides. This Roger character was one of those aides. He was a highly media-conscious, touchy-feely sort who spent a lot of time worrying about Senator Marshall's image with the folks at home. When a high-school band made a trip to Washington, D.C., it was Roger who made sure that they got in to the Senator's office for a photograph and a brief chat.

"Hi, Eleanor, I'm glad you called back," he said. "Look, I got a call this morning from Roberto Cuahtemoc at the Aztlan Center over in Rosslyn."

Rosslyn was part of Arlington, Virginia, right across the bridge from Eleanor's hometown. Aztlan was a Hispanic advocacy group. Roberto Cuahtemoc had formerly been Roberto something-else and had switched to a Nahuatl last name during his college years. He was obscure to northeastern Hispanics, but in the Southwest, particularly among migrant workers, he was revered.

Naturally, he and Senator Marshall hated each other. At least, they did in public. In private they had apparently reached some kind of an arrangement. When Roberto Cuahtemoc phoned the Senator first thing in the morning it probably meant he was pissed about something.

"He's really pissed," Roger said. "He got a call from Ray del Valle this morning at seven a.m. our time, which means that our buddy Ray was up and at 'em at five a.m. in Denver."

Ray del Valle was a Denver-based activist and protege of Cuahtemoc. He was young, smart, and, considering the intensity of his convictions, Eleanor had found him easy to get along with.

"What's Ray up to?" she said.

"He's convinced that some migrant family is getting screwed over by Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center. There's a little kid involved. It's the kind of thing where he could really beat our brains out in the media, and believe me, if anyone understand that fact, it's Ray. So before he makes the Senator out to look like Francisco fucking Pizarro or something, please get over there and show the flag and tell everyone how concerned the Senator is. Are you ready to write down this address?"

"Shoot," she said.

Fifteen minutes later she was there. It was a straight shot. She'd used most of her first paycheck to fix up the Volvo. She crept up to the edge of Highway 2, looked both ways, and punched the gas, spraying dust and rocks back into the Commerce Vista, screaming a wild left-hand turn on to the highway, headed southwest toward Denver. She weaved her way through heavy truck traffic, passing one trailer park after another, eventually getting into the heavy industrial zone of southern Commerce City - all the stuff that Harmon had avoided when he'd first taken her to look at the Commerce Vista. Passing out of the refinery zone, over and under freeways and railway lines, she entered a flat, hot warehouse region of north Denver that catered entirely to semitrailer rigs and the men who drove them. One parking lot had been turned into a makeshift bus station where you could catch a bus straight to Chihuahua. Finally she passed under Interstate 70 and into the area she was looking for.