Part 24 (1/2)

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 neversure 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 a.r.s.enal, the smallest things - a freshly painted G.o.dS 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt.

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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 cla.s.sical structures, arched-and-turreted Romanesques, and one especially large and bizarre structure, a red sandstone mission building that bore more than a pa.s.sing 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 const.i.tuents, but then he was not the type to care.

Like any big rambling eccentric old building, it had good offices and bad ones. The office a.s.signed to Eleanor Richmond was especially bad, but that was a fact that wouldn't even occur to her until she had been working there for a while. When she showed up for her first day as Health and Human Services Liaison, all she cared about was that she had a job. And a d.a.m.n good job, as these things went.

She was wearing her interview dress. She wasn't sure why. She had worn it to all of her job interviews in the past several years and it hadn't done a thing for her. She had interviewed for her job with Senator Marshall in a Towson State University sweats.h.i.+rt and nonmatching Army sweatpants. But this was the one dress that she had been at pains to take care of through all the turbulence in her life. She had somehow thought that she could never become a true bag lady if she owned one clean, decent dress. So now she was wearing it to work. When the paychecks started coming in, she could go back to the Boulevard Mall, this time as a paying customer, and cut a swath through Nordstrom, like General Sherman plowing through Dixie.

The first thing that anyone said to her was a sound effect: ”Foop-foop-foop.”

She had been walking down a hallway in her interview dress, carrying a box full of photos and other personal effects in her arms, looking into each door as she went by, trying to find the one that belonged to her.

And when she finally found it, walked into the small windowless room (later she learned it had been the walk-in closet of a railway baroness), and set her box down on the crated and elbow-worn formica of the desktop, she heard it. She turned around. A man was standing in her office doorway. She didn't like him.

He was in his mid-to-late twenties, or maybe he was an older guy who just looked young. He was wearing a pinstriped suit with cowboy boots. His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. He had sparkly gray eyes and high mischievous eyebrows that could have made him look wild and fun, if he could have ditched the suit and the gel for, say, a pair of shorts and a long outdoorsman's mane. But instead he struck Eleanor as unnaturally pinned back.

When she first saw him, he was leaning into her office doorway, holding one index finger straight up in the air, rotating his hand around in a circle, saying , ”Foop-foop-foop.”

”Excuse me?” she said.

”Somebody ought to put a revolving door on this office,” he said. ”Seems like I get a new neighbor in here every week - h.e.l.lo,” he said, segueing in midsentence like a game show host, and turning the rotating index finger into an outstretched right hand, ”Shad Harper. You'd be Eleanor.”Eleanor took half a step toward him and began to extend her right hand. He dove in, grabbed her hand too soon, seized the very tips of her fingers, squeezed them together hard, and pumped for a few seconds.

”Eleanor Richmond,” she said, but this hint was completely lost on him, as she knew it would be.

”Good to know you, Eleanor.”

”You have the next office, Mr. Harper?”

”Yeah. Come on over any time you want to have a look at the courtyard,” he said, widening his eyes just a bit and staring significantly at the blank wall behind Eleanor's desk. The office of Shad Harper was a big old master bedroom or something, and she could already see that he had lots of windows.

These were all things that would bother her later. At the moment, nothing could penetrate the endorphin buzz that she had from actually being on a payroll.

”Thank you,” she said, ”you're very kind.”

”Saw you on TV. That was quite a little tantrum you threw in front of Earl Strong there.”

”And what do you do for the Senator?” she said.

”Oh,” he said, as if he were surprised that she didn't already know, ”I'm the BLM liaison.”

”BLM?”.

”Bureau of Land Management,” he recited, with calculated nonchalance.

Looking over his shoulder across the hallway, Eleanor could see a bleached longhorn skull hanging on one of the rare parts of Harper's office wall that did not consist of windows. That, and the cowboy boots, told the story of Shad Harper.

Bureau of Land Management. Colorado had a lot of land that needed to be managed. A lot of voters lived on or near that land. When the land did get managed, it was through federal programs. Shad Harper must be keeping tabs on a lot of money.

He was very young. Which was not a problem in and of itself; Eleanor had known a lot of bright young things who were a pleasure to be around. But Shad Harper didn't seem to realize that he was still a young man.

He ought to be out riding a mountain bike around Boulder. Any man of his age who was not out goofing off was difficult to trust.

He raised his eyebrows, showing exaggerated concern, and puckered his lips into a silent O shape. ”I think your phone's ringing, Eleanor,” he said.

Eleanor turned around and looked at her phone, an elaborate, high-tech, multiline model with lots of tiny little b.u.t.tons on it. Each b.u.t.ton had tiny little red and green lights next to it. Some b.u.t.tons had red lights going.

Some had green lights going. Some had both. Some of the lights were blinking others were not. It looked like a Christmas decoration.

”Well, thank you,” she said, ”but I don't hear anything.”

”I took the liberty of turning the ringer off while this office was vacant,” he said. ”It was driving me crazy.

I gotta get back. I'll see you later, Eleanor.”

He dodged out the door and across the hallway and made a diving grab at his own telephone, then burst into a good-natured, booming, masculine welcome. Whomever Shad Harper was talking to, if he had been there in person, Shad would have been pounding him on the back and possibly even giving him noogies.

Eleanor set her box of stuff down on her desk, went around behind it, and looked at the silently ringing telephone. She wanted to sit down, but there was no chair in the office, just a desk.

She knew the deal here. Shad Harper, being a boy, had figured out how to turn off the telephone's ringer.

And she, being a girl, was supposed to sit helplessly for a while, and then go across the hallway and meekly ask him to turn it back on for her. Ten minutes into her job, she would already owe him one.

She already knew that she would rather shove a freshly sharpened pencil into her eye than ask Shad Harper for a favor. She picked up the telephone, clamping the handset down into its cradle with her thumb, and rotated it around, looking at all the tiny little switches and jacks and plugs and connectors. It took some looking and some experimenting, but eventually she found it. She flicked a switch. The phone rang.

She picked it up. But before it even reached her ear she could hear a conversation, already in progress.

It was Shad Harper listening to a crusty old rancher somewhere complaining about the cultural and geneticdeficiencies of the Mexican race. He was doing this by listing all of the ways that, in his view, they were similar to ”n.i.g.g.e.rs.” After the man made each point, Shad Harper would say, ”Uh-huh,” in a chuckling and indulgent tone of voice.

Her phone was still ringing. She pushed another b.u.t.ton.

It was Senator Marshall himself, now in D.C., talking to someone about polls. Her phone was still ringing; she pushed another b.u.t.ton.

It was a young black woman who apparently worked here in this office, talking trash with another young black woman who apparently worked in someone else's office. Her phone was still ringing; she pushed another b.u.t.ton.

”h.e.l.lo?” a voice said. White female. Screaming kids in background.

”h.e.l.lo, Senator Marshall's office,” Eleanor said.

”I know I already reached the Senator's G.o.dd.a.m.n office,” the woman said, ”but who am I talking to?”