Fallout Page 3

  He ducked into the men’s room and went immediately to the mirror. He arranged his remaining hair in the manner the consultant had suggested, straightened his black bow tie—he had switched to hand-tied at the consultant’s suggestion—and prepared for the parade of men and women who had paid extra to have their photographs taken with him, pictures they would proudly display on den walls and office credenzas all over America.

  Who could have imagined? What had the USA Today profile called him? A paunchy, balding congressman with a funny name from a backward state with few electoral votes? True, in large part, he conceded. But so what? Ike had been bald. He wouldn’t be the first “Harry.” Bill Clinton’s Arkansas didn’t offer any more electoral votes than did his West Virginia. And hadn’t the West Virginia primary given Jack Kennedy just the win he needed in 1960?

  He didn’t mind the photo ops, the endless grip-and-grins. They allowed each donor to feel personally connected, yet they required almost no effort on his part. The aide who handled the introductions indicated through a code whether the congressman and the donor had previously met. “Of course, I know who you are,” he would say to those he was meeting for the first time, inflating them with the illusion of official notice. “It’s so good to see you again,” he would say to the others, as if the previous meeting had been one of the memorable moments of his life.

  He left the men’s room and walked briskly to the private function area, shaking a few hands along the way. He took his place between the aide who introduced the donors and the aide in charge of ensuring they didn’t tarry after the photo. Through the thin partitions, he could hear the clattering of dishes, the buzz of the staff as they cleared the adjoining room. A line of well-dressed people waited.

  The end of the line did not arrive until after 11 p.m. By then, Dorn’s right hand ached. He’d been blinded by the camera’s flash so often that it took five minutes for his pupils to dilate enough for him to see. He passed the lobby bar—happily noting that Dan Clendenin, his chief political strategist, was procuring a paper cup of ice and scotch from a waitress in an intriguing Tinkerbell-like outfit—and collapsed into the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car that waited beneath the hotel portico. A moment later, Clendenin slid in beside him. Dorn accepted the paper cup once the door closed. “Possum Island,” he said, as much to comfort himself as to direct the driver. The congressman and Clendenin sipped and sat without speaking for thirty miles as the Lincoln swooshed over the interstate through the deep crevices of the West Virginia valleys, made darker than the night by the steep hills that loomed on either side.

  Clendenin broke the silence. “I talked with the Carbon Forward people. This global warming stuff’s really got their attention. You impressed them tonight. They want to help.”

  Dorn yawned. “They’ve helped us since they were the Fossil Fuels Council. They can’t afford to have more tree-huggers elected.”

  Clendenin swirled his drink. “Really help us. Not just piddly individual contributions to your campaign. We’re talking underwriting bloggers, Political Action Committees and 527 groups. It’s powerful stuff.”

  Dorn couldn’t argue. The Fossil Fuels Council had shown it had plenty of money to spend when it changed its name to the more progressive-sounding Carbon Forward and adopted the upbeat slogan, “Carbon—The Building Block of Life.”

  He retrieved that morning’s USA Today from his briefcase and turned to the politics page. “Harry Dorn,” the headline read. “Bigger Than The Boardroom.” The sub headline added, “Not Just in Corporate America Has W.Va.’s Harry Dorn Become a Hero.” Dorn, the story noted, was favored to become the next senator from his state and was already being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate following his Senate term, although possibly as soon as the next election. The story revealed that the head of the party in New Hampshire had issued a personal invitation for an escorted visit—a fact Dorn himself had only learned that morning when he’d first read the story in the breakfast alcove of his Georgetown brownstone.

  He marveled at the turn of events.

  As a boy, he had taken his state’s high unemployment and poverty and low education levels as a given. As an adult, he had come to believe that these problems could be remedied and that he could help do it. Once elected to Congress, Dorn had brought literally thousands of jobs to his district through defense contracts and tax breaks for new industry. There was no question he had worked hard and that he had a real passion to serve.

  He had also quickly become adept at playing political hardball—a requirement in West Virginia where votes were bought for a couple of slugs of moonshine and where terms in the governor’s office were often followed by longer terms in federal prison.

  But a lot of it, he had to admit, had to do with just showing up. You get elected to Congress. Then you get re-elected. And then you get a seat on an important energy committee because you represent a coal state and on a defense committee because you followed the party leaders and can always be counted on to support the military because, by God, that’s where half the boys and girls in your impoverished state land when they graduate from high school or drop out. Jobs and contracts for your district follow, along with no shortage of lobbyists with checkbooks waiting in your anteroom.

  He accepted the need to raise money. Despite all the recent efforts at reform, it was still the price of the game if you wanted to have an impact and especially if you had ambitions. He understood that it was endless.

  Asking for the money was the easy part. The hard part was repaying the favor once elected because nothing in this business was ever given away for free. They always wanted something. A mitigation of a fine. A delay in the implementation of a new pollution standard. Maybe something like a custom-made, one-time tax credit for some company or somebody. “So what do I have to do?” he asked Clendenin.

  “Carbon Forward has no doubt about your politics. They know you’ve been good for industry, good for America. Hell, good for the free world. They want to see you senator, then president. They’re believers in the Liberty Agenda because they understand the Creator intended for natural resources to be used and that government is getting in the way of that.”

  “Not to mention getting in the way of their profits,” Dorn interrupted.

  “And they’re right!” Clendenin continued. “We pay a bundle for gasoline while some of the world’s great gas and coal reserves lie unexplored and unexploited, for God’s sake. Harry, their only question is whether you can win. These people don’t like throwing their money down a rat hole. We have to show you ahead in the polls, ahead in the money-raising, a lead pipe cinch to become senator. We have to show them that lots of others are behind you.”

  Dorn finished his scotch. “We can. We’re going to shock them in the primary.”

  “By then, it’s too late. We need to lock up the money now before the other candidates come calling. We need a TV ad and we need to get it out there now.”

  “We don’t have money to spend on TV advertising this far in front of the primary.”

  “We won’t have to pay to run it, just to film it. The Swift Boat people paid to air their Kerry attack ad once or twice. The media ran it over and over for free. Think YouTube. We make the ad now and we leak it. Better yet, we invite some national media to watch it being made and they leak it for us. We get two hits that way—now and when it airs for real. Plus, we get national attention, not just here in West Virginia.” Clendenin leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Something dramatic and visual. Prosperity and patriotic crowds. Misty-eyed parents and their perfect two-point-five children bursting with hope, with belief in Harry Dorn and his agenda. We need a setting that really connects you to the Liberty Agenda, proof of what the Liberty Agenda can mean.”

  Dorn had been sucking on an ice cube and spat it back into the paper cup. He had intended to remind his advisor about some talking point but found now that he couldn’t remember wh
at it was. Clendenin’s vision had swept this—and all other thoughts—from his mind. Replaced them with cheering, adoring crowds.

  The scotch began to have the desired effect. He slipped off his shoes and loosened his seatbelt. In moments he had fallen into that world between sleep and consciousness—still aware of the hum of the tires on the concrete, the press of his head against the window. He saw himself standing at a lectern before a vast sea of howling supporters, their faces ecstatic with adulation, eyes glowing with orgiastic fervor, with strength, pride and solidarity of purpose.

  The Lincoln hit a bump. Dorn felt as if he were falling and jerked to full consciousness. “The TV ad,” he said. “I know just where to shoot it.”

  Chapter Four

  When Dr. Horace Wright ran The Winston Medical Clinic, he’d close at 1 p.m., walk three blocks to his house, enjoy a solitary lunch, catnap for twenty minutes and return to work refreshed.

  His daughter’s pattern was different. Occasionally, Allison would schedule a hair appointment, stop by the bank or—heaven forbid—eat a lunch she hadn’t made. More often, she simply hung the “Closed” sign on the door and immersed herself in a cheap romance novel for the full hour and a half while sipping Diet Coke and nibbling on a sandwich she’d brought from home. Sometimes Coretha ordered from the deli and they read together in silence. For both father and daughter, the pleasure was a buffer against the chaos of the day. Allison guarded the time jealously.

  Today, Coretha was using the lunch hour to be fitted for the costume she would wear in the town’s Old Fashioned River Days historical pageant. Allison was eating a tuna sandwich and at a point in Passions of the Prairie where she was disinclined to be interrupted. She became aware of knocking on the clinic door. Its tentativeness was unusual enough that it piqued her curiosity.

  With her black eyes and a shiny purple bruise that ran from her left cheek to her temple, the young woman reminded Allison of a raccoon.

  She shifted the beam of her flashlight to the woman’s mouth. “Open.” Candi Cloninger’s teeth were intact but her spittle was tinged with blood. Allison quickly located the source—the piercing for Cloninger’s tongue stud. The blow must have reopened the wound.

  “Tell me again what happened.”

  “I tripped and hit my face on the kitchen counter.”

  “A counter with knuckles?” She didn’t try to hide her skepticism.

  A long pause. “Darryl. He’s a trucker.”

  “I suppose the tongue stud was his idea.”

  Cloninger looked hurt. Allison hated herself for sounding judgmental. The woman needed support, not another reason to feel bad. She lifted Cloninger’s chin. “Nothing you might have done is worth being hit for. If he hit you, you need to leave before it happens again.”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “And go where?”

  Allison knew there was no good answer. Winston didn’t even have a domestic abuse hotline, much less a shelter. She x-rayed Cloninger’s skull, gave her some anti-diarrheal samples when Cloninger mentioned her boyfriend Darryl was suffering intestinal problems—even abusers were entitled to medical treatment—and asked her to wait while the x-rays developed.

  She remembered that she’d intended to pull the file of the woman with the earlobe infection but before she could, the clinic’s day spun out of control. Sally McCollum’s kidney stones acted up, Charlie Sizemore lacerated his arm when he tripped over a scythe and, at age one hundred and one, Lester Mullinax suffered cardiac arrest and died at home in bed. Allison made arrangements for Sally to get Vicodin, for Charlie to get stitched up in her examining room, and for Lester to get to the funeral home. She was still cleaning up when Coretha reminded her she’d asked Cloninger to wait.

  Allison picked up a stack of x-rays. “These hers?” Coretha nodded.

  Allison slipped one into the wall-mounted light tray and frowned. She quickly unclipped the film and substituted another. The film showed the outline of Cloninger’s skull. Good news: no evidence of fracture. But the second film registered the same anomaly she had seen in the first—a blurry black void roughly the size of a tennis ball in Cloninger’s mouth, obscuring her teeth and part of her jaw. It was as if there was a large hole in Cloninger’s head, allowing x-rays to pass right through and expose the film.

  Allison snapped all Cloninger’s films onto the light tray. All showed the same void. “Something’s off with the film. Get her back in here.”

  Coretha returned a few moments later. “She’s gone.”

  Allison scolded herself for probing too deeply into Cloninger’s personal life. She’d obviously made the woman uncomfortable. “I hope the whole box isn’t bad. Check other films we took today.”

  Coretha returned a few moments later with x-rays of Wade Pedroza’s broken arm. “No problem,” she pronounced.

  “What about yesterday?”

  Coretha pulled the only films taken that day—of Katie Gibbs, who had complained about pain in her left leg. She slid the three views into the light box. “Looks fine to me.”

  The films also looked defect-free to Allison but something caught her attention that hadn’t a day earlier. She held a magnifying glass over a section of the film showing Katie’s left tibia, right below the patella. She moved the film to a different position and studied more. She pored over the two other films inch by inch with the glass.

  “What do you see?” Coretha asked.

  “Maybe something, maybe nothing. Right now, I need you to call Josh Gibbs. See if he’s free for a cup of coffee after work.”

  Chapter Five

  Chief J. P Holt navigated his aging cruiser through Winston with growing dismay. American flags hung from the front porches of at least half the homes. Red, white and blue bunting decorated many of the rest. On one corner, the Sternwheeler Inn was festooned with both.

  How could it be festival time again already?

  Claiming a heritage that dated to George Washington, Winston had once been a bustling Ohio River community—a host to paddle wheelers and coal barges and home to boat captains and a riverfront hotel where guests legendarily fished from the mezzanine during the Great Flood of 1937.

  These days, Holt patrolled a town of eight thousand people consisting of a twelve-block Main Street of three-story buildings, several leafy in-town neighborhoods, a shopping center, a small industrial park of corrugated steel buildings north of town by the Interstate, and a large new subdivision of split-level homes perched on the low hills just to the east.

  Instead of river traffic, the economy depended on farmers who worked the bottomlands outside of town, Social Security checks, one large employer, and Old Fashioned River Days, a start-of-summer festival originally conceived as a weekend sales promotion which had evolved into a ten-day celebration of Winston’s past, attracting tourists from several states who stayed in quaint waterfront Victorian guest houses, took river rides on replica paddle wheel steamers, attended a nightly historical drama in Winston’s riverfront park and oohed and ahhhed at the fireworks after. There was even a carnival.

  Everyone loved River Days and eagerly anticipated it for the entire year. Everyone, it seemed, except him.

  He eased down Landing Street. Yard signs promoting an Old Fashioned River Days 10K run had sprouted overnight in neat front yards. A run? When had the organizers added that? What a pain. Of course, his over-worked men would be expected to provide traffic control. Naturally, no one had consulted him in advance.

  He hadn’t always felt this way. He had just hit the big five-o. That meant his first festival must have been—what? Forty years ago? The wonder he had felt when his father took him for the first time! The crowds! The clamor! The outsiders! Amid his boyhood memories, nothing topped the carnival rides, the shooting gallery, the delights of cotton candy, the thrill of successfully peeking through a tent flap at the girls who entertained at The Green Door.

  The thrill wa
s gone by the time he became chief. With festival crowds came petty crime. Events like 10K runs provoked howls from the citizenry about snarled traffic. Even the girls at The Green Door became an annual ordeal because of complaints from the clergy who knew full well the operation violated no local ordinances but demanded that he shut it anyway. He understood the preachers needed their congregations to think they tried. But every year, they wasted his time.

  He passed the mayor’s house. He couldn’t count how many times he’d listened to him spout off about the festival’s importance to the local economy. All that was true, but had anybody ever considered the impact on his tiny department? The festival produced lots of extra dollars for local businesses and lots of extra tax revenue for the state. But did any of that make its way back to law enforcement? Was there even an acknowledgement of the increased workload, of the fact that the population of the town suddenly increased by many times? Some decent money for overtime? Maybe even a bonus for his men? For him?

  No. He and his department were expected to suck it up. They were taken for granted. Heck, it hadn’t even fazed his old fishing buddy Woody Conroy when he’d pointedly noted there was no money to drag the river for Old Cheese Face. Then again, what could you expect? Conroy was a merchant, current head of the Chamber of Commerce. Maybe this year he’d send ’em a message, explain that his workload meant he no longer had time to be the chief and portray a trapper in the pageant.

  He pulled over by the entrance to the Winston Memorial Gardens cemetery and poured a cup of coffee from his Thermos. He was still hung over. He hadn’t gotten to bed until after 2 a.m. His beloved Cincinnati Reds were on the coast. The game with the Giants had gone into extra innings. At least the Reds had won. More important, the line had been Red -135/Giants +105, meaning his $100 bet had produced $135 in net winnings. Before Viggy’s cut, of course.

  He took a sip of coffee. Old Cheese Face. He saw the floating flap of flesh and smelled the decay. He spit the coffee back into his cup and fought not to be ill.