Landfall, page 2
He knew he’d reached number 4907, a big ranch house with a humongous green lawn and half-moon driveway, by the number of cars parked outside. Music was coming from somewhere on the premises. Ross tucked his bike, more from embarrassment than any concern with its security, between two azaleas on the lawn. The front door stood wide open, and he could see straight through the big house, all the way to the kitchen door, which was open too. Everybody, as well as the music, was out back by the pool.
He walked inside, feeling like a burglar, and noticed a framed GRANBERRY FOR LUBBOCK poster, a souvenir of the spring 1970 election that had made young Jim Granberry mayor just before the tornadoes came through. Since there was no basement in the Weatherall house on Twenty-first, Ross, then about to turn eight, had had to ride out the twisters in the first-floor bathtub with his older brother, while their parents hunkered down in the bathroom upstairs. Ross had brought a book into the tub with him, which Darryl, before flinging it out into the hall, thought was just about the funniest, dumbest thing he’d ever seen.
Now reaching the empty kitchen, Ross could identify the music coming from the pool patio as “Crazy Little Mama at My Front Door,” a record by Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys, local favorites. Ross thought he might see the former mayor out on the patio, maybe even shake his hand, but Jim Granberry wasn’t to be found in the little crowd of maybe twenty people. There was, fortunately, no sign of Darryl, either. TILT ME, I’M EASY read a label fixed to one of two beer kegs.
“Hey, kid, allow me,” said a guy who identified himself as “Bill, from Slaton.” He poured Ross a large cup of beer with very little foam. Ross would have been satisfied with a Dr Pepper, but the guy seemed so eager for him to have the beer that he accepted it. It was hard to believe that just down the street at Tech the biggest ongoing debate involved whether to allow the sale of alcohol on campus. Darryl was emphatically “pro” on this question, though on another current matter he took the conservative view that a student-drama production of Equus, featuring nudity, should not be allowed to proceed. That topic had dominated one recent dinner conversation in the Weatherall home; Ross himself had taken no position on the nakedness, because he could scarcely make himself think about a play that featured some crazy kid putting out horses’ eyes.
A single big BUSH sign, the “S” shaped in a way that suggested a pair of horseshoes, hung from a pole near the stereo. “Is he coming himself?” Ross asked Bill from Slaton, who told him, “He is indeed! He’ll be here in a bit, once he’s done shaking hands down at Town & Country,” which was the shopping center on the other side of Tech. “In the meantime, drink up!”
Nobody here looked especially stoked to Ross—just a bunch of guys and sorority girls who seemed like they were having a quick drink before heading someplace else. There were, however, two guys manning a card table stacked with flyers and bumper stickers, and one of them held a clipboard, scanning the attendees with a weak hopefulness, searching for ones who might like to sign up as campaign volunteers. Ross wondered if he should be doing that himself, if only as a thank-you for the hospitality, but the guy with the clipboard looked a lot more serious than Bill from Slaton and a lot more likely to object to the beer in his obviously underage hand. Ross had last shaved four days ago and wouldn’t need to again for another week. He was enjoying the beer—he’d never had more than a few sips at his parents’ parties—and could feel himself cooling off, his legs loosening. He went over to a bowl next to the chips and salsa that was full of campaign buttons; he picked one out and put it on.
He knew next to nothing about this election, which had been the subject of a classmate’s subpar Current Events presentation last week. All he remembered was that old Mr. George Mahon, who’d been in Congress since Grandpa came to Lubbock, was retiring, and that Bush was one of two young guys competing to replace him. Except for what it said on the posters around town, Ross wouldn’t have recalled that Bush was the Republican and the other guy the Democrat, and from what the Current Events kid had said, there wasn’t enough difference between them that it mattered.
The Alvin Crow tape finished, and when no one seemed able to find another, somebody shifted the boom box to its radio setting. A string of Japanese lanterns came on along with the outdoor house lights, and several of the guests clapped. It was at this moment that Ross noticed a pretty girl from school with reddish-brown hair, someone new in town whose name he didn’t think he’d heard and with whom he shared no classes. Even from a few feet away he could tell that she was wearing makeup to cover freckles. He wanted to say to her: Why would you do that? You sort of look like Sissy Spacek. If he got the words out he knew he’d then be fumbling to tell her they were a compliment, but right now, mutely looking at her, he found himself surprised that they had even occurred to him, and at how they wanted to be spoken. Was this what people meant when they said “that’s the alcohol talking”? When she got closer, he was positively startled to find himself touching her arm and saying, “Hey, didn’t I see you out at Reese over the weekend?”
Thousands of people had been out at the Air Force base on Saturday, watching the Thunderbirds and some Navy parachutists perform.
She was drinking her beer less furtively than he was sipping his, and she smiled. “You may have. It was pretty lame—though not as lame as this. Oh,” she added suddenly, moving toward the boom box to turn up the volume. “Listen.”
In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the Nineteenth Congressional District, his opponent George W. Bush was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And while Kent Hance graduated from University of Texas Law School, his opponent—get this, folks—was attending Harvard Business School. We don’t need someone from the Northeast telling us what our problems are.
A few good-natured boos issued from the crowd, but as the girl turned the volume back down and the radio station went back to music, Ross noticed how most of those standing by the pool seemed almost unaware that the commercial they’d just heard had any connection, even an antagonistic one, to the event they were attending.
“I’m Ross,” he said to the girl.
“I’m Allie.”
That’s right, he thought. Allison O’Connor. He had heard her name from somebody at school. “Aren’t you new here?” he asked.
“Three months. It only feels like thirty years.” Her father, she explained, worked in computers and had moved the family from Philadelphia to Lubbock to take a job at Texas Instruments.
“What brings you here tonight?” asked Ross, before they both laughed at how adult and stiff he sounded.
Allie waggled her beer cup, annoyed that it was empty. “My parents think I’m studying with some girl whose name I made up.”
Bill, the guy from Slaton, was regaling two guys with a joke the Hance people had been telling about this fellow who thought a “cattle guard” was a uniformed officer—and who was clearly supposed to be Bush, unacquainted with West Texas ways. It seemed odd to Ross that a guy wearing two Bush buttons would be telling this joke on his own candidate, but Bill’s two-man audience, preoccupied with tilting one of the kegs forward, wasn’t paying much attention.
“Isn’t Bush’s father a big deal?” Ross asked Allie.
“Try number-one spy at the CIA under Ford. And head of the Republican Party, or Committee, or whatever it is, when Watergate was going on.”
She was clearly better informed than the kid in Current Events. Finding that he wanted another beer, and wondering if anything might be left in the kegs, Ross laughed. “So does that mean you’re for the other guy? Hance?”
Allie rolled her eyes. “They’re both against giving the Panama Canal back to Panama.”
Ross got ready to say Give it back? Didn’t we build it?, but he was interrupted by some scattered cries of “Bush! Bush!” and some effortful, uneven applause around the pool. The candidate had arrived, in a white Oldsmobile Cutlass that Ross could see through the house’s open doors. George W. Bush waved to those who’d come to see him and pointed to the TILT ME, I’M EASY keg: “I usually like to have that second, and chasing something stronger, but if it’s all you’ve got…” Amidst laughter, the man who appeared to be his driver went and got Bush a cup of beer, while someone else handed the candidate a microphone he didn’t really need. A couple of guys who’d earlier gone into the house weren’t even bothering to turn down the Monday Night Football game they had on, let alone come out to hear Bush’s pitch. As he got ready to make it, he pointed toward the indoor TV with a look of feigned anger that he then erased with a shrug, prompting more ice-breaking laughter.
Allie whispered to Ross: “Don’t believe that little gesture. He’s actually pissed off. I can see it in his eyes.” Ross couldn’t tell, but he did observe that Bush was chewing a plug of tobacco.
“I appreciate y’all coming out,” the candidate began. “The last time I was here at Tech I was talking to a bunch of you in the Coronado Room.” He mispronounced the name of that space within the Student Union Building—made it rhyme with “tornado”—but he certainly sounded like a Texan, thought Ross, no matter what the Hance commercial had said. “It’s good to see students turn out,” Bush continued, “because frankly I think there’s too much apathy in today’s university. I was on campus maybe twenty times this spring during the primary campaign, and only seventy of y’all voted.”
A confused silence ensued. No one had been expecting a scolding, if that’s what this was.
“Of course,” Bush resumed, with a wink, “most of those seventy voted for me, so I guess I can’t complain. There were some rough moments in that campaign, but my opponent was a good man, and I’m now proud to have his endorsement.” A brief pause and a glance toward his shoes signaled a change of focus. “Okay,” said the candidate, looking back up, “how many of you think things are going well in Washington?”
Some soft requisite boos answered him.
“I didn’t think so,” Bush replied. “I don’t either. I grew up in Midland and I’m in the oil business down there. I’ll bet some of your folks are in it too, or are in natural gas. Well, it’s the overregulation embodied by Jimmy Carter’s Natural Gas Policy Act that got me into politics.”
Allie whispered to Ross: “Oh, please, he was born into it.”
“What about the farm crisis?” asked Bill from Slaton, startling the candidate and pretty much everybody else with the interruption. Bush looked uncomfortable, as if he really would like something stronger than beer to drink. He took a long sip and then stared at the questioner, seeming to ask: Why are you poking at my weak spot?
“You want to help the farmer?” he finally responded. “Deregulate natural gas and oil. In the end, what that saves him will do more good than any adjustment to the number of set-aside acres the government tells him not to farm.”
“Wasn’t Earl Butz really the cause of the current price mess?” asked the guy from Slaton.
Bush fixed him with a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you look. This wasn’t a debate, and he wasn’t about to put the blame for anything on a former Republican secretary of agriculture, even one now chiefly remembered for a godawful racist joke involving tight pussy and loose shoes. The guys behind the sign-up table also exchanged perplexed glances about the questioner.
“Anybody else?” asked Bush. Bill from Slaton appeared content to subside, but nobody had another question, so the candidate moved on to something new: “Jesse Jackson says the economic pie has to grow—and that makes sense to me.”
Even Allie looked mildly intrigued that Reverend Jackson’s name should be uttered with approval.
“In saying no to spending and in saying no to measures that erode free enterprise,” Bush continued, “you are actually saying yes to people at the bottom of the free enterprise system.”
Several people applauded, a few of them, it seemed, out of something beyond politeness.
“So if you’d like to help me, please sign up with those fellows over there and help us to make Texas a real two-party state at last. Thank you.” More applause, and then laughter, when Bush pointed to the second keg: “And, yes, I will have another, since my man Mike here is driving the car.”
Ross had joined in the clapping while looking around for Allie O’Connor, who seemed to have gone off somewhere. Heading toward the house, he felt a hard tap on his shoulder, courtesy of Darryl, who’d just arrived and was distinctly displeased to find him here. He grabbed the top rim of Ross’s shirt, the place where a real collar should be, and growled: “You’d better not let Anita Bryant see you in this fruity shirt, little brother, or she’ll kick your ass. And if you have another one of these”—he tossed Ross’s empty cup into one of Mayor Granberry’s flower beds—“I’ll kick your ass.”
Ross’s anger was threaded with the hope that Allie had actually left and wasn’t witnessing this humiliation. Still three inches shorter, and much lighter, than Darryl, he was mortified enough to consider taking a swing at his brother. But in the end he just let Darryl smirk and walk away, watching him until he felt a second, much gentler tap on his shoulder—from someone who’d witnessed the fraternal dustup.
“Hey,” said George W. Bush, with a consoling smile. “In my family it’s the big brother—that would be me—who screws up. At least now and then. See that fine, responsible young fellow over there?”
“Your brother?” asked Ross. The blond fellow being pointed to appeared about ten years younger than the candidate.
“Yo, Neil!” cried the elder Bush. “Wave hello to—what’s your name, dude?”
“Ross Weatherall.”
“Neil! Wave to my man Ross!”
Neil Bush, whom Ross had taken for a Tech student, waved.
“My campaign manager,” explained George Bush. “Twenty-three years old. Finished up at Tulane last year.”
Ross looked incredulously at the candidate’s brother. Could someone so young hold a job that important?
“He’s living over the Republican county chairwoman’s garage. I guess I can’t be all that bad if I inspire such devotion.” Bush laughed and handed Ross his beer. “Here, finish this.” He patted the boy’s arm, winked, and walked away. Darryl was now nowhere to be seen, so Ross took the beer and chugged it down. And while he did, Allie O’Connor’s beautiful russet hair came into view, as if it were the Olympic torch.
She told him it was 8:45 p.m. “You have just time enough to take me to the movies.” Hooper, with Burt Reynolds playing a stuntman, was at the four-plex, several blocks away.
Ross hesitated.
“I know you don’t have a car,” said Allie. “We can walk.”
Having her believe he’d come here on foot seemed less shameful than letting her know he’d arrived on a bicycle. He wondered if he could leave his Schwinn between the azaleas, not even come back for it until tomorrow morning. He wavered for another second or two—it was a Monday night—and then said yes. The stars had begun to come out; the strong, hot wind was turning into a cool breeze.
He caught a glimpse of the waving, departing candidate. He felt Allie pushing him in the same direction, toward the street that would lead them to the movies. Experiencing the wonderful, fine buzz of the beer, Ross looked ahead toward George W. Bush and then back toward Allie and vaguely realized that, in totally different ways, he was a little in love with both of them.
Thursday, November 2: Home of George W. and Laura Bush, 1405 Golf Course Road, Midland, Texas
Barbara Bush watched her daughter-in-law read The World According to Garp. Laura was not looking up at the clock the way she herself, flipping through a magazine, had been doing with visible irritation every couple of minutes.
Both women were waiting for their husbands to arrive and join them for a late supper that Laura had already cooked. But it was now 9:30 p.m., and from the elder Mrs. Bush’s point of view this was becoming ridiculous. George W. had been scheduled to appear at an early-evening candidates’ forum up in Lubbock, an hour and a half away; he’d promised that it would be over by seven-thirty and that he and Neil would drive straight down to Midland. George Sr. had spent the afternoon in Amarillo giving a speech for Bill Clements and John Tower, the gubernatorial and Senate candidates at the top of the ticket; he was supposed to fly into Midland in time for this delayed dinner, after which the senior Bushes would spend the five days until the election here at George and Laura’s starter house. Bar knew that she and her husband would be stir-crazy, in a variety of ways, by tomorrow night.
“Is that really any good?” she asked Laura, pointing to the novel by this man Irving.
“A little overstuffed,” said Laura, after a moment’s consideration. “Sort of like a modern, mediocre Dickens.”
“Why not read Dickens instead?” asked her mother-in-law.
“I have.”
“All of it?”
“Just about.” Her eyes had already gone back to the page.
She couldn’t be more different from me, thought Bar, who nonetheless doubted that, by the time all four of her sons had wed, she would like any of their wives better than this one. Laura had met young George only sixteen months ago and been married to him for less than a year, but she hadn’t been the least bit fazed the time or two she’d been thrown into all of the holiday commotion at the family compound up in Maine. Of course Laura still got to live in the town she’d grown up in, anchored to her own past in a way that Bar herself had never been permitted, not since she was twenty-four and her own George had dragged her to Midland—and then to all the other places, from Houston to Washington to Peking.
