Keep Waterloo Weird
(Page 4 of 4)
Sorry for what? Nick couldn’t think of a response. He tried to return the way he’d come, but the door was locked. After tugging at the handle for a while, he took a step back and pointed solemnly at it. “Guess this is locked.”
“It looks that way,” she said.
He breezed by her, down the alley and into the street.
The rose-tinted dome of the state capitol hovered to the north of the downtown skyline like the airborne skirt of a faded party dress. The building’s style was Renaissance Revival, all cornices and pediments, joined to a stalwart frame that had held up, uncomplaining, under this tedium of having been born and born again. And again. The interior had been retrofitted for modern devices. Spittoons had been replaced by electrical outlets. Miles of computer cable had been routed beneath exact replicas of the original carpets. Delegations of algebra teachers and agents of the optometrists marched past joyless oil portraits of former governors, while schoolkids scratched and prodded at marble effigies of men whose status as heroes had lately come into question.
If the Waterloo air sometimes grew thick with a warm, fond, vague idealism, a dreamy groupthink that rarely funneled itself into definitive action but instead pooled around selected backyards and nonprofit offices, the Capitol operated to reduce that element. This was where good intentions ran out of gas or were deflated in midflight by the raised fist of Lady Freedom, an unattractive stone woman who’d been installed on top of the dome during the first World War. Occasionally some draft of principle blew through an open window, but for the most part the interior was shielded from the higher winds, buffered by the ranks of silver-tongued (and some not-so-silver-tongued) emissaries who circled the building and used up all the oxygen nattering about job creation and dollar amounts.
A slow evening, quiet under the dome. Few footsteps sounded on the terrazzo; few office halogens illuminated the frosted glass of members’ doors. The assembly and its entourage had moved on to cocktail receptions, to restaurants. But the lights still blazed in one basement office, where a recently elected assemblywoman from the nearby Waterloo suburbs had been mounting a valiant but futile effort to grasp the logical underpinning of state water rules—futile because there had never been any such underpinning. And in the hallway outside stood an emissary, not known for diligence yet somehow reliably informed of comings and goings, of votes and nonvotes, of who was screwing whom, and in particular of the fact that he would find Beverly Flintic in her office this evening, a fact that had led him to postpone the day’s first vodka sour. Kenneth “Bones” Lasseter waited outside her door, tucking in his shirt, disgorging his nicotine gum, like a veteran performer carrying out his preshow rituals. A little dance step into the reception area, a compadre smile, the curtain rises . . . For years he’d kept a roof over his head just by winning people over. He had that knack.
He found her alone in her back office, at her desk, a fat bound volume of civil code open in front of her. She was, he saw, one of the grinds, who treated this place like college, trying for their A’s in Appropriations and Agriculture and Administrative Affairs. Wasted effort. Of course some background knowledge didn’t hurt, but expertise went only so far when you were thigh-deep in a mud bog. And it wasn’t worth shit if you lost the next election.
Beverly stood up. From the other side of her desk he proffered his card. She scanned it and at the same time extended her slender hand, as if for him to examine in turn.
“Assemblywoman.”
“Just Beverly is fine.”
“Just Ken Lasseter. Or you can call me Bones. Pardon the intrusion—”
“I’m sorry, but I’m trying to catch up on a few things,” she said, dropping the card on her desk. “If you could come back tomorrow, I’d appreciate it. I’m not really even here.” She indicated, as evidence, her pale yellow sweatshirt, something worn in the privacy of her office during times of heavy air-conditioning. Her white shirt collar hung neatly over the neckline. She was decent-looking, Bones thought, although it was a shame that so many of these women got rid of their hair, of all but a sprayed-stiff little pot cozy. He’d heard some rumors about Beverly Flintic, but in any given year it seemed that more than half the members had been linked to one or another coarse rumor. She had espied lint on the sweatshirt; she picked it off and—he was struck by this—turned to flick the lint into a trash can, not onto the floor.
“I apologize for barging in and I promise no business. I saw you had your light on is all. I thought I’d drop in and introduce myself.” His breathing was pronounced, and his words had the sound of having been pushed through a long, dank tunnel before arriving out in the open.
“Oh. Thanks.” She recognized that she’d been brusque. She was often brusque, unintentionally. “Hello.”
“So,” he said, and sat down on the corner of her desk. “Your first session. Are you getting the hang of things?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t collapsed yet.”
“To you I may look like some old boy just coming out of the woods, but I’ve been on this beat for longer than I care to think about. If you ever need anything, that’s my cell phone number right there. The damn thing’s always on. Call me whenever.”
“I appreciate that.”
“You want to know what anyone around here is all about, just ask.”
“All right.” With her right thumb and forefinger she twisted her wedding band in a circle. “How about you? What are you all about?”
“Moi?” He grinned expertly. “Oh, naturally I just want the best for the people of our fair state and my clients in particular.”
“Naturally.”
“You scratch where it itches.” His phone rang. “See what I mean? Always on,” he said. “I am that a-hole in the movie theater.” As he fished the phone out of his shirt pocket, a chewing gum wrapper poked out along with it, then fell to her desk, which she noticed and he did not.
“My wife,” he said. “Excuse me.” He strolled out to the reception area. Beverly could still hear him: “You’re kidding . . . the bastard . . .” She checked her watch. It was ten after six. She felt it was rude for a stranger to drop by her office at ten after six. She reached for the gum wrapper and threw it away.
When Bones returned, he seemed dazed. “A great man has left us,” he announced. “A good man, anyway. You ever meet Will Sabert?” She shook her head. “He was in Congress. From here. Big heart, big brain, not much sense . . . That mold got broke a long time ago. And he’s gone and died, the old f—.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He had it coming.”
“I do remember him.”
“You wouldn’t have voted for him.”
“No.”
“No,” he said contemplatively, as if this were a subject he’d been trying to get to the bottom of for a long time. Then he stood straight and held out his hand. “I barged in, I’m barging out. Forgive me.”
“Nice meeting you,” said Beverly, though “nice” wasn’t quite the word for it.
After the better part of a year in office, the protocols of the place still eluded her; the longer she was here the more coded everything seemed. There was a surface layer of information, the loose soil and carrot tops they fed to the reporters, and a second layer of wormier stuff you became privy to according to your position, and then beneath that were more strata and gopher holes and decommissioned sewers full of trivia, histories, grudges, petty paybacks she didn’t know how deep. Much as she tried to learn, there was never enough time. She wondered what else Ken Lasseter had meant to say before the phone interrupted him. She wondered whether the phone call had really been from his wife, whether this man Will Sabert had really died. She never used to be a suspicious person.
