Eleanor listened to this numbly. She couldn't believe that Senator Marshall was saying these things. "So, why aren't you going to accept my resignation?" she said.
"My whole career I've been doing things because I had to. Now that I'm in my last term, I get to do all the things I always wished I could do but was afraid to."
"Well, the press should have a field day with that."
"The press can fuck themselves. Now I can say that. Take a right here."
Eleanor turned right on to a road that cut due west, straight into the mountains. Finally she understood what Caleb had been doing: steering them toward a cut through the mountain wall, the only place within miles you could get through it. The sight of it made her want to go fast and she punched the gas and surged toward it. It was a narrow gap with almost vertical sides that revealed a cross section of the ridge, normally hidden under grass and sage, its pink and peach and salmon and maroon strata fluorescing in the late afternoon sun.
"You must be getting a lot of pressure to sack me."
"To hell with that. They'll forget all about it in a week, believe me. What I'll do is give you an internal transfer."
"Oh. So I'm getting a new job?"
"Yeah. You're getting a new job. I'm getting you out of Colorado before someone lynches your ass. Or mine."
"Oh, my god."
"That's right. You are going to Washington, D.C., lady. Back to your hometown. And if you thought Denver was a nest of vipers, you just wait."
They both shut up for a moment driving through the gap. Caleb groped out with his left hand and turned the Resurrection Symphony up to the point where it was loud even to his leathery ears, and they cut through and suddenly found themselves in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Once it passed through the gap, the road split off in three or four directions, and none of the signs meant anything to Eleanor. "Which way do I go now?" she said.
"I got you here," Caleb said. "Now you're on your own."
PART 3. Vox Populi
If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox... But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy... . With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished.
Plato, Republic
32
On a gentle summer evening back during the Eisenhower administration, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane had once watched his uncle Pervis beat a man up with a sharpened motorcycle chain. It happened outside of a very inexpensive and dangerous bar in north central California that catered to agricultural laborers. Okies.
Nimrod's grandfather, James McLane, had obtained a piece of land in Oklahoma during one of the land runs in the late 1800s. He commenced to work that soil literally within the hour, scooping out shallow graves along the Cimarron River in which to place the bodies of the previous occupants, who had arrived shortly before he had, with faster horses but not quite so many guns.
A few decades later, that stream dried up and all the topsoil blew away to Arkansas. James had long since died, and so had his eldest son Marvis, who had gotten into an altercation with a piece of newfangled farm machinery and spectacularly lost. James's surviving sons, Elvis and Purvis, abandoned the land and went to California, following a rumor of jobs. Elvis married another Okie - actually, an Arkie - named Sheila White, and they started to have kids. Purvis joined the Navy and came back from World War II full of lies, liquor, and shrapnel. Half of him was covered with tattoos and the other half with burn scars. For the next few years of life, until he discovered some exciting new career openings in the benzedrine trade, he shuttled back and forth between short-term, low-paying jobs on the waterfront in Oakland and in the vegetable fields of the Valley. Purvis later obtained a sinecure of sorts, as a founding member of the Hell's Angels.
Elvis and Sheila, by contrast, were stay-at-home types. Elvis stuck to the one thing he had talent for, which was stoop labor, and over the years, more because of his reliability than because of brains or skill, he managed to work his way up into a position as foreman for Karl Fort Enterprises, Inc.
Karl Fort was also an Okie who had gone west in the 1930s, but he was different: he was from Tulsa, and he had gone west with money in his pocket and connections in Washington. His money bought him land. The money went a long way because at the time he bought the land, it was worthless. His connections in Washington knew that the federal government was soon to establish huge irrigation projects in the area. As soon as water reached Karl Fort's land, it became worth a hundred times what he had paid for it. Fort established agricultural Gulags where his fellow Okies labored under the watchdog gaze of Fort guards, occasionally getting enough of a paycheck to keep them and their families alive.
Elvis McLane was not really cut out for management. He didn't understand that when you made the cut and moved up to the next rank, you had to stop drinking next to the people you were giving orders to, hiring, and firing. His brother Purvis sat him down and talked to him about it. Purvis had been in the military and understood the concept of fraternization and why it was a bad idea. But he never really got through to Elvis, who (it was rumored) had, while still in the womb, lost a wrestling match with his own umbilical cord.
It was only a matter of time before Elvis went into a bar and ran into someone he had fired, yelled at, or otherwise humiliated, and trouble broke out. Actually, it happened several times, but the most memorable case involved a sullen, dangerous broccoli picker named Odessa Jones. He was named after the city in Texas where he had been abandoned by his mother.
Nimrod McLane, who among other distinctions had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame, despised liberal hand-wringing types who were always whining about America being a violent society. These people had read too many poorly written accounts of bar fights that turned grisly.
The standard newspaper account of a grisly bar fight contained a deeply buried assumption: that people participated in bar fights because they were stupid. Some minor slight, such as looking at another man's girl or jumping the line for the pool table, would degenerate into meaningless, pointless violence. Liberals would read about it in the paper the next morning, wring their hands, and advocate better education and gun control.
Nimrod McLane had seen a lot of these altercations as a child. After his voice changed he participated in a few. He had a pretty clean understanding of how bar fights started and why they turned ugly. Americans participated in bar fights for exactly the same reason they had joined, with such gusto, in the Civil War: because they had values and considered violence and mayhem a small price to pay.
Odessa Jones was a case in point. He was a proud, hard-working man who had been fired by Elvis McLane because of what amounted to a personality conflict. So when he walked up to Elvis in that bar and went upside his head with a glass beer pitcher, he wasn't doing it because he was a stupid low-class drunk. He was doing it because his honor had been violated and because honor was more important to him than temporal, earthly considerations, such as keeping his front teeth or staying out of jail. Odessa Jones probably had ancestors who, like him, were rootless white trash, but who had picked up rifles and gone North to fight the Yankees anyway, not because they believed in slavery but because they were incensed that the Northerners refused to stay at home and mind their own business. They were willing to have their legs shot off in Pennsylvania because principle, to them, was more important than flesh. This was what made America such an ethereal society.