Hooking Up Tom Wolfe

Prev Next

I, IRV

Way past midnight, up in the network’s New York control room, a man and a woman sat in a glass cubicle watching a pair of television monitors. The man was only in his early forties, but already he was bald on top except for a narrow little furze of reddish hair that arched up over his freckled dome like an earphone clamp. He had jowls, eyeglasses for nearsightedness, a shell back, rounded shoulders, and a ponderous gut, which his old gray sweater only made look worse. He also had a slovenly way of slouching in his seat so that his weight rested on the base of his spine. In short, a slob; which he realized; and the hell with it.

The woman was almost exactly the same age he was, but she had a terrific head of blond hair and correct posture to burn. She had big bones and nice broad shoulders, and she wore a pair of creamy white flannel pants, a heavenly heathery tweed hacking jacket, and an ivory silk blouse. Any single item of her ensemble, even her flat-heeled shoes, cost more than all the clothes he was likely to wear in a week. She made him look insignificant by comparison. He also realized that, and the hell with that, too.

Every now and then he glanced at her, a big blond mama sitting there as primly erect as a thirteen-year-old girl on a horse at a horse show, and he just slumped down a little farther. He was giving up on posture, poise, graceful bearing, first impressions, and all the other superficialities at which Her Blondness excelled. What did it matter, all this poise and grace, if you were up in a cubicle in the middle of the night monitoring a remote feed, f’r chrissake? Through the cubicle’s glass walls he could see an entire bank of monitors glowing and flaring in the control room outside. Or he saw them and he didn’t see them. The only things on his mind right now were the two screens in front of his face and getting Madame Bombshell to pay attention to them. To him, what was going on on those screens was the most important event in the world.

Both monitors were being fed the same action, via a hellishly expensive private fiber-optic hookup, from different camera angles. On both sets he could see the same three young white men in T-shirts, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, certainly not much more than that, boys really, drinking beer in a beat-up booth with leatherette seats, a speckled Formica tabletop, and a little café lamp. All three had smooth, tender jawlines and roses in their cheeks. Their hair was cut so close, their ears stuck out. Happy and high, they radiated the rude animal health of youth, even in the gloom of a topless bar as transmitted to this cubicle over the remote fiber-optic feed.

By now, after midnight, they had reached the garrulous stage. Their conversation chundered out against the irritating thud of a Country Metal band, which was beyond camera range. And yet such were the wonders of modern electronic surveillance—in this case, the microphone planted in the café lamp—he could hear every word they said, assuming you could call them words.

The biggest of the three boys was speaking, the one with all the muscles. His voice had a babyish quality: “Man … was some adder wit chew?”

“Dear God in heaven, Irv,” said the Blond Pomposity, “what’s he saying?”

“He’s saying, ‘Man, what’s the matter with you?’” said Irv. He spoke in a low voice and never took his eyes off the monitors and slouched down even farther into his seat, as if withdrawing into a shell, to indicate that questions and comments were not welcome.

On the screen, the boy continued: “You in see no snakes. I mean, hale, you caint tale me you seen no snakes outcheer in no broad daylight.”

“Deed I did, too, Jimmy,” said the rawboned boy right across the table from him. “You know, lack it gets sunny late’na moaning, toad noon? They lack to come outcheer on the concrete strip overt the depot? —whirr it’s warm?—and just stretch out fer a spale? Saw one yistitty, big ol’ rattler. Sucker mussa been big araound’s a gas’leen hose.”

The big blonde let out a ferocious sigh. “What—are—these—people—saying?! We’re gonna have to use subtitles, Irv. And see if somebody can’t do something about the light.”

“I don’t wanna use subtitles,” said Irv in a whisper meant to admonish her to keep quiet. “I don’t wanna create the impression that gay-bashers are some kind of strange alien creatures. Because they’re not. I wanna show they’re the boy next door. They’re as American as 7-Eleven or Taco Bell, and they’re bigots, and they’re murderers.”

“Well, that’s fine,” said Her Erect Highness, “but these three kidssuppose one of’em blurts out the whole thing while we’re sitting here. Suppose one of ‘em says, ‘Right, I’m the one who killed him,’ and it comes out, ‘Rat, ah’m the one whut kaled the quair.’ How’s the viewer supposed to know? I mean, these kids are speaking rural Romanian. I say we use subtitles.”

“It’s not that hard to understand,” whispered Irv, getting testy. “I thought you were from the South.”

“I am, but—” She broke off. Her eyes were pinned on the monitors. “Besides, the light’s too dim.”

Irv’s voice rose. “Too dim?” He gestured toward the screens. “Whattaya think that is, The Wonder Years? That’s a dive, a saloon, a gin mill, a topless bar in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Mary Cary! I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s real life you’re looking at, in real time, and that’s … the light that’s there!”

“Fine, but considering we’ve already gone to the trouble of wiring the place—who’s the field producer on this piece?”

“Ferretti.”

“Well, get him on the line. I wanna talk to him.”

“I’m not calling him in the middle of a live feed—when he’s monitoring an undercover operation!”

“I don’t see what difference—”

“Shhhhhh!” said Irv, slouching down still farther and concentrating on the monitors as if the three boys were about to say something pertinent. But it was just more redneck saloon jabber about snakes and God knew what else.

The truth was, Mary Cary was right. They probably would have to use subtitles. But he didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction of saying so. He couldn’t stand the way she was already saying we, as if she had actually done some work on this piece. Up until tonight, when she finally agreed to spend a couple of hours monitoring the feed with him, she hadn’t done a thing. But obviously she was ready, as usual, to march in and take credit if the piece worked out. He had a very strong instinct about this piece. It was going to work out. And suppose he hit the jackpot. Suppose the three soldiers hung themselves right on that videotape. Who would get the credit? All the newspaper stories, the editorials, the Op Ed pieces, all the pronouncements by the politicians, all the letters from the viewers, would talk about this big, gross, aging blonde sitting up in this chair with her regal posture as if she actually ran the show. All anybody would talk about would be Mary Cary Brokenborough.

The dumb, irritating way she said her own name on the air started running through his brain. On the air she still spoke with half a Southern accent. Merry Kerry Brokenberruh. That was the way it came out. She pronounced her own name as if it were a piece of rhyming trochaic duometer. It was ridiculous, but people loved it:

Merry

Kerry

Broken

Berruh

He stole a glance. The light of the monitors played across her big broad face. Up close, in person, she wasn’t much; not anymore. There was something gross about her supposed good looks. She was forty-two, and her skin was getting thick, and her nose was getting thick, and her lips were getting thick, and her hair was turning gray, so that she had to go to some hair colorist on Madison Avenue, or he came to her; whichever. Eight years ago, when she had first signed on with the network, she had still been—he closed his eyes for an instant and tried to envision her as she had been then; but instead of seeing her, he felt, all over again, the humiliation … the insouciance, the amusement, with which she had repulsed every effort of his to … get close … “Ummmmhhhhh .” He actually groaned audibly at the recollection of it. Little fat bald Jewish Irv Durtscher was what she had made him feel like … and still made him feel like … Well, her Southern Girl good looks were decaying fast … Another five years … although it was true that on camera she still looked great. She got away with murder. On camera she still looked like a blond bombshell; a cartoon rendition of a blond bombshell, but a blond bombshell all the same; and 50 million people tuned into Day & Night every week to see her.

And who the hell knew the name Irv Durtscher?

Well, that was nothing more than the nature of the business, and he had always known that. Nobody even knew what a television producer was, much less who Irv Durtscher was. Nobody knew that the producers were the artists of television, the creators, the soul, insofar as the business had any … Mary Cary knew that much. She wasn’t stupid, but she suffered from denial, in the sense that Freud used the word. She wanted to deny that she was really nothing but an actress, a mouthpiece, a voice box reciting a script by the creator of Day & Night, whose name happened to be Irv Durtscher.

They’d been sitting here in front of the feed for almost three hours, and she hadn’t stopped thinking about herself long enough to even acknowledge what a superb piece of investigative journalism she was looking at. Not a peep out of her about the ingenuity of what he had managed to pull off! What the hell would it cost her ego to say, “Wow, this is really fabulous, Irv,” or, “Nice work,” or, “How on earth did you know they’d be in that particular bar and exactly what booth they’d be sitting in?” or, “How’d you ever manage to install two hidden cameras and wire the place, for goodness’ sake?” … or just any goddamned thing …

No, she sits there and complains about the light. The light!—and up until now the Army and the locals in Fayetteville have managed to stonewall this whole atrocity, utterly, and insist there’s no evidence that anybody from Fort Bragg was involved. These three kids, these three rednecks he and Mary Cary were looking at right now—in real time, on these monitors—had beat up another soldier, a kid named Randy Valentine, killed him, murdered him, in the men’s room of a dive just like the one they were in at this moment, for no other reason than that he was gay. Everybody on the base knew who had done it, and there were soldiers who went around giving high fives to the big muscular kid there, the one who started it, Jimmy Lowe—and yet General Huddlestone himself denied all, and Day & Night had Huddlestone’s square, creased, lithoid, American Gothic WASP face on tape denying all—and I, Irv Durtscher, will gladly bury the general along with his three young Neanderthal enforcers … I, Irv Durtscher … I, Irv Durtscher, am the true artist of the modern age, the producer, the director, who can at one and the same time draw in television’s stupendous audiences and satisfy the network’s gluttony for profits—and advance the cause of social justice … The big thing in newsmagazine shows now was sting operations with elaborate setups, hidden cameras and microphones, incriminating statements on camera, and this case was perfect. It was I, Irv Durtscher, who convinced Cale Bigger, the network’s News Division chief, to authorize the huge expense of the spook operation to install the equipment and a live fiber-optic field feed from a dump, a topless bar called the DMZ, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And why did Bigger say yes? Because he cares for one second about the cause of gay rights? Eeeeyah, don’t make me laugh. It’s solely because I, Irv Durtscher, am the artist who can draw in the millions, the tens of millions, no matter what—and yet nobody knows my name …

He cut a quick glance at Mary Cary. She was looking straight ahead at the monitors. Why couldn’t he come on at the very beginning of the program, the way Rod Serling used to in The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock used to in Alfred Hitchcock Presents? Yeah, Hitchcock … Hitchcock was just as short, round, and bald as he was. More so. He could see it now … The titles come on … The theme music … and then … I, Irv Durtscher … but then he lost heart. They’d never go for it. On top of everything else, he looked too … ethnic. You could be Jewish and still be a star in television news, an anchorman or whatever, so long as you didn’t seem Jewish. And a name like Irv Durtscher didn’t help. No fat little baldheaded Irv Durtscher was going to be the star, the personality, of a big network news production like Day & Night.

So he had his mouthpiece, this big, blond, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Petersburg, Virginia, Mary Cary Brokenborough … Merry Kerry Brokenberruh … What did she care about the cause of gay rights? Who the hell knew? Did she even know, herself? Well, at least she was smart enough to know that she should act enlightened about such things. She’d be savvy enough to take directions …

A small cloud formed in Irv Durtscher’s brain. Why was he himself so passionate about gay rights? He wasn’t gay himself; he’d never even had a homosexual experience; and the truth was, every now and then he worried lest his two young sons, who seemed so passive, timorous, overly sensitive … (effeminate?) … lest they turn out gay … Christ, that would be a real goddamned horror show, wouldn’t it? Of course, he would never express anything like that to them. Their orientation would have to be … their orientation … Nevertheless, he felt so goddamned guilty … Ever since divorcing Laurie, he really hadn’t seen that much of the boys. So if they turned out gay, it might be considered his fault … Still—that had nothing to do with whether he was truly committed to gay rights or not, did it? Social justice was social justice, and he was truly committed to social justice; always had been; learned it at his mother’s knee, saw the importance of it in his father’s anguished face—

“ … gay rats …”

He lurched forward in his chair and concentrated on the monitors and held up his forefinger so Mary Cary would do the same. The tall, rangy one, the one right across the table from Jimmy Lowe, the one with the strange last name, Ziggefoos, had just uttered the expression “gay rats,” which in their patois, he knew by now, would mean gay rights.

“ … they nebber tale you what the hale they deeud fo’ they got that way. You jes see some may’shated sommitch with a fo’-day growth a beard and his cheeks lack this here”—he hollowed his cheeks and rolled his eyes up into his head—“lucking lack Jesus Christ and talking abaout AIDS’n gay rats.”

“Fuckin’ A,” said Jimmy Lowe.

“I mean, sheeut,” said Ziggefoos, “they act lack they jes flat out got sick fum ever‘buddy calling’em quairs or sump’m. Wasn’t nothing they deeud, natcherly.”

“Fuckin’ A wale told,” said Jimmy Lowe.

The third one spoke up, the small, wiry, dark-haired one, the runt of the trio, the one named Flory. “Member ‘at little Franch feller come overt obstickle course last munt with that fust bunch a UN trainees? Olivy-yay? I ever tale you what h’it was he called ‘em? Be talking about some gladiola, and he’d say, ‘He ain’t fum our parish.’”

“Ain’t fum our parish?” said Jimmy Lowe. “What’s’at spose mean?”

“It means—ovairn France everbuddy’s Cath’lic? And ever‘buddy’s in one p’tickler parish er’nudder? Y’unnerstan’? So him‘n’me, one time we seen Holcombe lane the ballin’ sun out back at the Far Department with his shirt unbuttoned taking a goddayum sunbath, and Olivy-yay, he don’t even know the sucker, but he’s spishus rat away, and he says to me, he says, ‘He ain’t fum our parish.’”

Holcombe! Irv’s central nervous system went on red alert. He leaned forward even farther and held up both hands toward the monitors as if he were Atlas ready to catch the world. Holcombe had been one of Randy Valentine’s closest friends at Fort Bragg. Even Mary Cary seemed to sense the three boys were now entering a minefield. She had leaned forward from out of her perfect sitting posture.

Up on the two screens, the tall one, Ziggefoos, didn’t intend to get sidetracked by Flory and his “not from our parish.” He took a swallow of beer and said, “An’ all’em shows on teevee, an’ all’is sheeut abaout ‘the gay lifestyle’? The wust thang they gon’ show you is, they gon’ show you a couple lesbians dancing or sump’m lack’at’eh. Jewer see two faggots dancing on teevee or kissing each other on’a lips? Hale, no. Ain’ gonna show you any a that sheeut.”

“Fuckin’ A wale told, Ziggy.”

“Oncet my old man rented us a hotel room somers up near the pier at Myrtle Beach,” Ziggefoos said, “an’ rat next doe’s this bowadin haouse or sump’m lack’at’eh, and abaout five o’clock in the moaning? —when it’s jes starting to geeut lat?—me’n’ my brother, we kin hear somebuddy grunting and squealing on the roof of the bowadin’ haouse, and we tuck a luck out the winder, and there’s two guys upair on the slope a the roof, unnerneath one a them great big ol’ teevee earls they used to have?—nekkid as a pair a jaybuds, and one uv’em’s jes buggering the living sheeut out th‘other’n. Me’n’my brother, we didn’t even know what they was doing. So we woke up the ol’ man, and he tuck a luck out the winder, and he says, ‘Jesus H. Christ godalmighty dog, boys, them’s faggots.’ Next thang you know, the fust two uv’em’s finished, and they go daown this little hatchway they got upair in the roof, and rat away two more uv’em pop up, buck nekkid just lack the fust two, and they’s lane on the roof, and one uv’m’s rubbing some kinda all on th’other’n’s butt. And the ol’ man, he’s smoking, I mean he’s flat out on far by now, he’s so mad, and he yales out, ‘Hey, you faggots! I’m gonna caount to ten, and if you ain’t off’n’at roof, you best be growing some wangs,’cause they’s gonna be a load a 12-gauge budshot haidin’ up yo’ ayus!’ Well, I mean I wisht I’d a had a cam’ra and some fi’m, the way them faggots set to scrambling up the roof and diving down that hatchway. Come to find out that haouse was packed fulla them fucking guys. They got ‘em hanging on hooks in’eh, they’s so many uv‘em, and they prolly been coming up on that roof all night long takin’ tons unnerneath that big ol’ teevee earl. And ‘at’s what I’m talking abaout. That’s what they ain’t abaout to tale you when they’s talking about gay rats and legal madge between homoseckshuls and all’at sheeut.”

Jimmy Lowe was nodding his approval of all this. Then he leaned over the table toward Ziggefoos and looked this way and that, to make sure nobody was eavesdropping, and he said, “You just put yer fainger on it, old buddy.”

Irv held his breath. It was beautiful. The kid had leaned over the table so he could lower his voice and not be overheard, but that had brought his mouth no more than six inches from the microphone hidden in the little lamp. At that range it would pick up a whisper.

“Anybuddy saw what I saw in—” He cut it off, as if a cautious impulse made him not want to say where. “Anybuddy woulda done what I deeud, er leastways they’d a wanted to. Soon’s I walked inair and I looked unner that tallit doe and I seen that guy’s knees on the flow, and I hud these two guys going, ‘Unnnnnh, unnnnnh, unnnnnh.’”

Even in the middle of it, in the middle of these words for which he had been lying in wait for two and a half weeks, Irv was aware of the sleazy throb of the Country Metal music in the background and the secretive sibilance of the kid’s near-whisper—and—perfection!—it was the perfect audio background! No one with all the money and time and imagination in the world could have dreamed up anything better!

“—I mean, I knew ‘zackly what h’it was. And when I walked overt the tallit and stood up on tippytoe and looked daown over the doe and seen it was a feller fum my own goddayum cump‘ny daown on his fucking knees gobblin’ at whangus sticking thew’at hole in the partition—I mean, I saw some kind a rayud, and ‘at was when I kicked inny doe. Broke’at little metal tab rat off’n it.”

Ziggefoos, also leaning in, right into the mike, put on just the beginning of a smile. “Summitch mussa wunner what the hale hit him.”

“Whole goddayum doe hit him, I reckon. That summitch, he was lane upside the wall when I grabbed him.”

And now little Flory had leaned in over the table, too. “And you nebber deeud see the other guy?” he asked.

“Nebber seen him t‘all,” said Jimmy Lowe. “Speck he hauled ayus real fayust,’cause whan y‘all come in’eh, y’all nebber seen nobuddy coming out.”

“That’s rat,” said Flory.

Then the three boys, still huddled over the table, looked at one another reflectively and solemnly, as if to say, “Maybe we’d better not talk about it anymore.”

An impulse like an alarm surged through Irv’s central nervous system and up his brain stem, and the significance of what he’d just heard swept over him even before he could sort it out logically.

They had just hanged themselves.

He looked at Mary Cary, and she was already staring at him. The same dawn was breaking over her. Her over-made-up eyes were open wide, her too-big lips were parted slightly, and a wondering, halfquestioning smile was beginning to form on her big, broad face.

That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve just hanged themselves?

Oh, that they had! They’d just confessed the actual motive: homophobia. They’d just established the fact that the killing began with an unprovoked, blind-sided assault. And they’d revealed the fact that there existed an as-yet-unidentified witness to the beginning of the attack.

Irv’s mind raced on ahead. A victory for justice—oh yes! But it would be a lot more than that.

Long after the three young rednecks had departed the DMZ and the live field feed was finished, Irv remained there in the cubicle and insisted that Mary Cary review the tape with him, over and over. He was soaring. He called Ferretti, down in Fayetteville, and he went over it with him, the same things, like a hero exulting after a battle.

The nice thing was that Mary Cary seemed almost as euphoric as he was. Perhaps she could already see how terrific this was going to make her look on Day & Night. Perhaps she could see herself depicted as the heroine who broke the Fort Bragg gay-bashing case, which was not inconceivable. But for the moment he didn’t even care. At this moment hers was the only face he could look into and see the reflection of his triumph.

“One of the beautiful parts,” she was saying, “is when the sort of rangy-looking one—Ziggy, is it?—when he wakes up, and he’s just a boy, I guess, and he sees the two gays on the roof, and he wakes up his father, and his father says, ‘Boys, them’s faggots,’ and he threatens to shoot them with budshot. Speaking of which, whatta you suppose budshot is?”

“Birdshot,” said Irv. “After you listen to these characters for two or three nights, something very bad happens to your brain and you actually begin understanding what they’re saying.” He was feeling so good, he didn’t even mean it as a rebuke for her reluctance, up until now, to take part in the two and a half weeks of surveillance. “A bud is a bird, a bub is a bulb, a bum is a bomb, a far is a fire, a tar is a tire, an earl is an aerial—I mean, I’ve been sitting here for two and a half weeks. I could write you a lexicological introduction to Florida Panhandle illiteracy.”

“Well, thank God you know what they’re saying!” said Mary Cary. Irv liked that. “But anyway,” she continued, “I think that whole business of the father saying they’re faggots and he’s gonna shoot the faggots—I think that’s a very important part of what we’ve got here, because it shows how homophobia is implanted, father to son, one generation to another. I mean, it’s a straight line from that scene in a hotel room ten or fifteen years ago to the scene in the men’s room where Valentine is killed. An absolutely straight line, Q.E.D. There it is.”

Irv reflected for a moment. “You’re right, you’re right. It definitely makes the point. But I’m not sure how much of that stuff about the roof we can use, if any.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I mean it’s … it’s so gross. I’m not sure how much of it we can get on the air in a prime-time network show. But there’s something else. It puts anal intercourse in such a vulgar light. I mean, all this about one man lubricating—the thing is, you could make ordinary heterosexual intercourse sound disgusting, too, depending on who you let describe it. Hell, you could turn Romeo and Juliet into a couple of dogs in the park, if you really wanted to get graphic about it. And frankly, we’ve got a similar problem with the scene in the men’s room.”

“Whattaya mean?”

“I mean I don’t wanna be the one who broadcasts to 50 million people this homophobic maniac’s claim that Randy Valentine was committing fellatio in a men’s room. And all that stuff about a hole in a partition—eeeeyah, it’s not even relevant.”

“Not relevant?”

“What’s it got to do with whether or not one man is justified in killing another for no good reason?”

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Mary Cary, “but I don’t see how we can touch that tape. It’s probably evidence. It could end up evidence in a trial, in court.”

“It can still be evidence. But for Day & Night we edit it.”

“How, Irv? That’s the most crucial part of the whole tape!”

“That’s the beauty of having two cameras going,” said Irv.

He didn’t have to explain it to her. If you had just one camera, and it was on someone who was talking, and you tried to edit something out, you would get a blip, no matter how carefully you did it, because the person would have moved, if only ever so slightly, from the moment you cut the tape to the moment you spliced it again. With two cameras you could just switch from one angle to the other at the cut, and the viewer would never know anything had been left out. On newsmagazine shows like Day & Night, this was standard practice whenever you wanted to eliminate something that was awkward or inconvenient.

“Well, I suppose we can do it, technically,” said Mary Cary, “but I think we’d be asking for a whole lot of trouble.”

Irv merely smiled. The truth was, he wasn’t even worrying about the problem any longer. Something else she had said, a phrase she had used a moment ago—“evidence in a trial, in court”—had just begun to register. The very idea gave him a warm, rosy rush. If the tape became the centerpiece of a successful criminal prosecution, then everything would come out … the whole story of how he, Irv Durtscher, had broken the case … of how he, Irv Durtscher, and not the celebrated face on the screen, actually created Day & Night and ran it and was its mind and soul … of how he, Irv Durtscher, was the Sergei Eisenstein, the Federico Fellini of this new art form, this new moral weapon, television journalism … of how he, Irv Durtscher—

He, Irv Durtscher, let his eyes pan over the studio around him, over the now-glassy gray screens of the two monitors right in front of him and the screens of all the monitors on the wall of the control room just beyond the cubicle. These were his palettes in the new art, the monitor screens of the control rooms where the producers practiced their magic. And perhaps it would come to pass … Day & Night would become Irv Durtscher Presents … The titles, the theme music, and then the world-renowned face and roundish form of—

A sudden small stab of guilt … I, Irv Durtscher. He was letting himself get carried away by personal ambition … Mustn’t let that happen … But then he worked it out. He was not doing all this for Irv Durtscher, or at least not just for Irv Durtscher. He was doing it for a dream passed on to him by his father and mother, two little but fiercely idealistic people who had eked by with a glass-and-mirror shop in Brooklyn, who had sacrificed everything to send him off to Cornell, who had never had the means, the opportunity, to bring their dream of social justice alive. This piece on the martyrdom of Randy Valentine, a poor, harmless gay soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was part of the final battle, the battle to end America’s secret feudal order and her subtle but pernicious forms of serfdom. The hour was at hand. The day of the Cale Biggers, the General Huddlestones, and those who did their dirty work, the Jimmy Lowes and Ziggy Ziggefooses and Florys, the day of the WASPs and their wanna-be’s with their constricted version of “families” and “the natural order”—that day was in its dusk and fading fast, and a new dawn was coming, a dawn in which no authentic genius of the future would ever need hide behind a mask of whiteness or heterosexuality or WASPy names and good looks … or Merry Kerry Brokenberruh.

He looked her right in the face. She stared back at him with a certain … something in her eyes, something he’d never seen there before. It was as if it was suddenly dawning on her what this all meant and she was seeing him, Irv Durtscher, in an entirely new light. Their eyes engaged in what seemed like a blissful eternity. He somehow knew that now if he just—well, why didn’t he go ahead and try it? She was … she had just gotten married for the third time, but it was ludicrous … The guy, Hugh Siebert, some eye surgeon, was solemn, pompous, pretentious, a stiff neck and a nonentity … Couldn’t last … Why didn’t he just reach forward and take her hand in his, and whatever happened … would just happen … Irv and Mary Cary … There was no one around to see them … He upped the voltage, stared into her eyes with the eyes of a victorious warrior. A confident, manly, and yet warm and inviting, even seductive, smile stole across his face.

And then he went ahead and did it.

He reached out and took her hand in his and let the current flow from him into her, let it surge up from his very loins, all the while pouring his victorious gaze into her eyes.

For a moment Mary Cary didn’t stir, except to bring her eyebrows together quizzically. Then she lowered her head and stared at his hand, which still held hers. She stared at it as if it were a Carolina anole, a tiny tree lizard, that had somehow made its way up twenty-odd stories in New York City and wrapped its little lizard self around her hand. She didn’t even deign to take her hand away. She just lifted her head, cocked it to one side, and gave him a look that said, “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

Pop. The bubble burst. The magic moment deflated. Sheepishly, oh so sheepishly, he took his hand away. He felt as repulsed and humiliated as he had ever felt in the eight years he had known this infuriating woman.

That did it. She had to go. From now on—if she actually thought her celebrated presence was the heart and soul of Day & Night—

Then his spirits sank all over again. The plain truth was, he needed her more than ever right now. This story, the Randy Valentine story, was far from over. In keeping with the newsmagazine format, somebody was going to have to execute the ambush. That was the term they used, the ambush. Somebody was going to have to confront the three violent redneck murderers on camera. Somebody was going to have to find them, surprise them on the base, on the street, wherever, and shove the incriminating evidence right in their faces, and stand there and take whatever they had to say—or do—while the cameras rolled. In his sinking heart, he, Irv Durtscher, knew he could never pull off an ambush like that, even if the network was dying to see him on camera. And yet it wouldn’t faze Mary Cary for a second. It wouldn’t worry her before, during, or after. She’d do an ambush, of anybody, anywhere, any time, in an instant, just like that, with gusto and without a moment’s fear or regret.

He looked away, out through the glass of the cubicle at the great bank of control-room monitors, which glowed and flared from feeds all over the world. The new palettes … the new art form … the new dawn … The very notions began to curdle in his mind.

He looked back at her. She was still staring at him, only now with a look of boredom. Or was she merely tired?

“Well, I guess that’s all we can do tonight,” he said. He sounded as if he had lost his last friend. Moreover, he knew he sounded that way.

I, Irv Durtscher … damn that woman! … Why was it that everything, even the grandest designs, boiled down at last, when all was said and done, to sex?

PART TWO

THE IMPORTANCE OF LOLA THONG

Ferretti, the field producer for the Fort Bragg gay-bashing piece, had been down in Fayetteville for weeks, and it seemed as though every time he called Irv in New York he had some new war story about Bragg Boulevard. Not only that, back in New York, Irv had spent untold hours monitoring the live field feed from the DMZ itself, which was a typical Bragg Boulevard topless joint. So what could be so surprising about Bragg Boulevard? He had had a picture of this garish, hellish nightmare alley in his mind long before he got here yesterday.

But actually being on Bragg Boulevard, as he was tonight—this had unnerved Irv Durtscher. Seriously. It had rattled him so, he wanted to talk to someone about it. Immediately. But how could he? The stakeout had already begun, and soon, all too soon, any minute perhaps, the ambush would be underway. And he, Irv Durtscher, the Costa-Gavras of television journalism, the Goya of the electronic palette, was supposed to be the maximum leader of this operation.

Once more he ran his eyes over everybody who was here inside the RV with him—the RV, the recreational vehicle, a term he, having lived all his life in New York City, had never heard of before yesterday, when Ferretti showed him this monster. They were all crammed into the RV’s rear compartment … Ferretti … Mary Cary … Mary Cary’s fat makeup woman … the two hulking technicians, Gordon and Roy … and Miss Lola Thong, the Thai-American topless dancer Ferretti had recruited … too many bodies in too tight a space … too much equipment … lit entirely by the Radiology Blue glow of a bank of monitor screens … so that Mary Cary’s famous shock of blond hair now looked a sickly aquamarine … Irv scanned his entire army, looking for emotional support and wondering if they could tell the maximum leader had the hoo-hahs.

From the outside, to anybody passing by on Bragg Boulevard or anybody turning in here to the DMZ’s parking lot, the RV was just an ordinary beige High Mojave touring van, a big boxy house-on-wheels. Nobody would even look twice (Ferretti had assured him), because Fort Bragg was a huge base with more than 136,700 soldiers, support personnel, and family members, a highly transient population that practically lived in RVs, trailers, and U-Haul-its. But if anybody had been able to look inside the van, that would have been a different story. Ferretti had had a partition installed two-thirds of the way back, with a concealed door; and the technicians, Gordon and Roy, had turned the hidden rear section, where they were now, into a spaghetti of wires, cables, monitor screens, headsets, and recording equipment that reminded Irv, morbidly, of Bone Zone, the notorious counterterrorist movie.

They were parked right behind the DMZ, which from the rear was a crude, one-story, cinder-block-and-concrete structure with a flat roof weighed down by air-conditioning compressors and rusting ducts. The three rednecks, Jimmy Lowe, Flory, and Ziggefoos, were inside the topless joint at this moment, drinking, as usual, and jabbering away in rural Romanian, as Mary Cary called it. Mary Cary was watching them on the two monitors that took the feeds from the cameras hidden inside the DMZ and listening to them over a headset that had the unfortunate effect of compressing her Blond Bombshell hair. Every now and then she took the headset off, and the fat girl, her makeup woman, fluffed up her hair and put some more powder on her forehead. Irv wondered if all the powder meant she was sweating. Other than that, Mary Cary didn’t show any sign of nervousness at all. She didn’t seem to have a nerve in her body. Look at what she was wearing!—one of her creamy white silk blouses, a short creamy white skirt, a Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket, and bone-white pumps with medium-high heels. For an ambush! The blouse was unbuttoned practically down to her breastbone. It was almost as provocative as the cocktail dress the topless dancer Lola Thong was wearing, which showed so much cleavage it was ridiculous. Irv, on the other hand, was wearing regular ambush gear: jeans, running shoes, and a Burberry trench coat. (The Daumier of the Digitized Era was unaware that if he, a short, bald, fat, fortyish little man with a freckled dome, a double chin, and bad posture, walked anywhere near Fort Bragg in the Burberry trench coat, he would be taken for a child molester; at best.)

Irv didn’t even want to look at the monitors anymore. The sight of the three young rednecks in that booth, probably no more than twenty yards from where he was right now, only jangled his nerves more … but his eyes kept straying to the monitors all the same. All three were wearing T-shirts, and even on these two small screens you could see the muscularity of their arms and the firmness of their necks and jaws and, above all, the way their ears stuck out. Their ears stuck out because the sides of their heads were shaved, and the way their heads were shaved—

Mary Cary took off her headset again, and Irv moved over beside her and said in a low voice, “So what are our three—our three skinheads talking about now?” Breezy and laid-back, and not nervous, he wanted to sound.

“Our three what?”

“Our three skinheads,” said Irv. “This whole place—I’ve figured out what it is.” He gestured, as if to take in all of Bragg Boulevard, Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Cumberland County, and Hoke County, the state of North Carolina, the entire South. “You wanna know what this place is? Skinhead country.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Irv,” said Mary Cary. “Relax.”

“What he say about skinheads?” Whadee say’bout skeenheads? It was the stripper, Lola Thong, talking to Mary Cary. “They’re skinheads?” Dey’re skeenheads?

Mary Cary shot Irv a reproachful look, as if to say, “You and your nerves and your big mouth.”

Lola, offspring of an American father and a Thai mother, was a tall, slender creature with black hair and pale skin that appeared milky blue in the glow of the monitors. She had an exotic Asian look through the eyes and cheekbones, and a trace of a Thai accent, which turned the short i in skinhead to a long e. Skeenhead. But her diction and grammar, like her jumbo breast implants, were strictly Low Rent American. At the moment she was agitated, twisting about on her high heels, so that her prodigious head of teased black hair bobbed about.

“He don’t say nothing to me about skinheads,” she said, nodding toward Ferretti, who stood a couple of steps away, looking at the monitors.

Mary Cary said, “They’re not skinheads, Lola. I promise you. They’re in the U.S. Army. That’s the way they make them cut their hair. You know that.”

“Then why he say skinheads?” To Lola, Irv was not the maximum leader. He was merely he.

Mary Cary sighed and shot Irv another look. “He was only making a joke. Because they cut their hair so short.”

“That’s true,” said Irv, whispering, afraid that Lola would start making too much noise. “It was just a figure—I was just talking about their hair. They’re just kids. They’re Gls. I was just trying to be funny.”

Lola did not look terribly reassured.

And funny Irv Durtscher had not tried to be since he had first laid eyes on Bragg Boulevard after arriving from New York thirty hours ago. The boulevard, which was six lanes wide in some places, ran right through the eastern end of Fort Bragg. Right through it; you could see the barracks. You weren’t separated from them by a wall or a fence or anything else. The soldiers could keep cars at the barracks. And did they ever! They spent everything they had on cars. You could see them barreling along Bragg Boulevard, three, four, five to a vehicle. You knew they were soldiers because you could see their shaved heads, with just little mesas of hair on top, and their ears, which stuck out. Many were black, but more were white, and it was the white ones Irv feared. Skinheads were white.

Between the base and Fayetteville, Bragg Boulevard turned into the sleaziest commercial strip Irv ever hoped to see. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not an inch of sidewalk, not a redeeming architectural feature from one end to the other—just a hellish corridor of one-story cinder-block sheds and wooden huts and blasted asphalt and stomped-sod parking lots and garish signs and fluttering Day-Glo pennants proclaiming pawnshops, mobile homes, trailer parks, massage parlors, pornographic-video stores, check-cashing establishments (KWIK KASH), dry cleaners (SPECIAL FOR FATIGUES), car washes, multiplex cinemas, takeout stands (SUBS, CAROLINA BAR-B-Q), automobile dealerships, motorcycle dealerships, auto suppliers, auto upholsterers, gasoline stations, fast-food franchises, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants, discount liquor stores, discount cigarette kiosks, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Black & Decker tools, concrete garden birdbaths and figurines, gun stores, attack dogs (K-9 C-Q-REE-T) and topless bars, topless bars, topless bars, one after the other, such as this one, the DMZ.

Last night, before Irv’s very eyes, as soon as the sun had gone down, this appalling fever-line of late-twentieth-century instant gratification had lit up. Ten thousand backlit plastic signs and banks of floodlights came on in every hot toxic radioactive microwave pastel shade perceivable by the eye of man, until a look down Bragg Boulevard led your gaze right into the gaudy gullet of hell itself. Irv knew it was hell because of what he had seen late in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon, Ferretti had taken him—just him, not Mary Cary, because her face was too well known—over to a shopping center off Bragg Boulevard called the Cross Creek Mall. The place was mobbed, and with a clientele such as Irv could not have imagined. By the hundreds, the thousands, they swarmed over the Cross Creek Mall: young males with the sides of their heads shaved, young males whose ears stuck out, young males and their young females, young females and their young children and their children-to-be. To Irv all of them appeared to be … bursting … The males were all young, tough, sunburned, pumped up with muscles and bursting out of their jeans. So many bulging crotches! Made him think of codpieces in those old prints, they bulged so much. Fort Bragg was the training ground for the Army’s elite divisions, the Special Operations Forces: Green Berets, Rangers, unorthodox-warfare and psychological-operations (PSYOP) units, commandos of every sort. Testosterone on the hoof! So many soldiers from Fort Bragg had fought in Vietnam, they used to call Fayetteville Fayettenam. Even now many of the wives of these young soldiers, as anyone at the Cross Creek Mall could tell, were Asians. And so many of the wives, Asian as well as American, were bursting, too. They were swaybacked from being so grandly, gloriously pregnant with the next generation of swaggering … skinheads … Skinheads they were! To Irv it had come as a revelation, a flash of insight right there in the Cross Creek Mall. Skinheads! Sex and aggression! Hell on earth! These young males, bursting with testosterone, were but the officially sanctioned, government-approved versions of the skinheads of Germany!—or the survival cults of Montana! And at night they poured out onto this nightmare alley, Bragg Boulevard, unbound, free of Army discipline, through the very gates of Hell, where he now waited inside a High Mojave RV for his rendezvous with—with—with—

What was he, a nice Jewish boy from New York, doing here, about to try to ambush—ambush!—three of this virulent, hormone-crazed species who had already murdered one man and would be primed with alcohol to … to do God knew what?

Irv Durtscher, the Zola of the Ratings Sweeps, was terrified.

Lola moved over beside Ferretti, who threw his arm around her shoulders. Even in this feeble light and these cramped quarters she rippled with sexuality beneath the little black cocktail dress. She touched Ferretti on the shoulder and whispered something to him. Then both of them looked around at Irv, who shrugged and arched his eyebrows in the look that says, “What can I tell you?”

Ferretti hugged Lola to him in a jolly fashion and turned her back toward Irv and Mary Cary. Irv envied Ferretti. He was a jovial Alley Oop of a man with a grizzled beard he allowed to grow down beneath his chin and his jawline, covering his jowls. He wore a polo shirt that barely made it over his beefy midsection, a Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket, and a John Deere Backhoe cap. He lit up when he smiled. He had the common touch. He was perfect for field assignments because he could deal with anybody, high or low. He leaned over until his head touched Lola’s. He was purring to her.

“For Christ’s sake, Irv,” he said with a big grin, “what’s this ‘skinheads’? These guys are yo-yos.” He hugged Lola again and said, “Yo-yos, baby, yo-yos!” He gave her such a squeeze and such a grin, it forced a reluctant smile out of her. “Besides, you don’t have to deal with ‘em. Mary Cary deals with’em, Irv deals with ‘em, these guys deal with’em.” He nodded toward Gordon and Roy, a Hawaiian and an Albanian, two great sides of beef in field jackets, the biggest technicians on Day & Night’s staff. (Irv had seen to that.) “You’re just the official greeter,” said Ferretti. “You issue the invitation. And Miss Lola, honey, when you issue an invitation, people are gonna come to the party. You know what I’m saying? The whole country’s gonna come to the party.”

Ferretti was shamelessly reigniting Lola’s craving for stardom. Lola was currently performing as a topless dancer at a Bragg Boulevard joint called Klub Kaboom. Just how she and Ferretti had become such buddies Irv didn’t know; on this subject, Ferretti’s only comment was a smile. The deal was that for her part in the ambush, Lola would receive $2,500, and more important, 50 million panting Americans would get a look at the ravishing but hitherto unknown entertainer Lola Thong. Ferretti had provided Lola with an entire catalogue of girls who had made their fortunes through tangential involvement in sensational cases. But as the moment approached, Lola was getting cold feet.

She started to say something, but Ferretti gave her another big hug and, keeping his arm around her, said to Irv, “Lola’s ready. How much longer do we give’em? We don’t want’em to get too bagged in there.”

Irv said, “Well, lemme see …” He suddenly had the panicky feeling that he had lost the power to make decisions.

Mary Cary broke in: “Lowe and Flory are on their third beers. Ziggy has switched to something called a vodka twilight. Or at least I guess that’s what twilat means.”

“That kid,” said Ferretti, “he’s so fulla shit. Well, I say we don’t wait much longer. After three beers these fucking kids, they don’t know it, but they’re drunk. And after a few vodka twilats …” He grinned.

Oh, Ferretti, the big Alley Oop, had the heart for this stuff. He relished it, and Irv envied him even more. Irv himself was torn. On the one hand, his visceral self, the instinctive part of him that knew this hide he had on was the only one he would ever possess, wanted to push the moment of ambush off, eternally perhaps. On the other hand, his rational self, the one who managed the career of Irv Durtscher the Bertolt Brecht of Broadcasting, knew he should start the ambush now. An ambush of three slavering drunks would not make for very convincing television journalism—and might be more dangerous. A fine balance was what they were looking for. The idea was to let the three soldiers have a few drinks first, not enough to get drunk, just enough to loosen up and lose their inhibitions, which didn’t seem to have a very high threshold to begin with.

Irv spoke as resolutely as he could: “Okay, you’re right. Is everybody ready?”

He looked at Ferretti, who nodded; then at Gordon and Roy, who nodded; then at Mary Cary, who not only nodded but also added a little exasperated twist of the lips, as if to say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Irv, get on with it.”

So Irv smiled at Lola as convincingly as he could and said, “You’re on.”

Ferretti gave her another hug. “Nothing to it, babe,” he told her. “You know what to say. Just be Lola. This is a cabaret act, and you’re the star.”

Ferretti opened the door in the false wall and led Lola into the RV’s forward section, and Irv followed. The RV’s big front windshield, which was high up off the ground like a bus’s, framed a rectangle of North Carolina sky turned a hideous hot mauve by Bragg Boulevard’s inferno of lights. Through the windshield Irv could see the backsides of electric signs all along the strip. They blazed. They blinked to electronic beats. Hyperkinetic patterns raced through fields of lightbulbs. Signs pivoted and oscillated against the sky’s feverish dome. The entire strip seemed to be rutting and wallowing and doing a jack-legged Crazy Dance. Lurid streaks and blooms of light and shadow bathed the RV’s darkened interior, making it hard to see at first that it was actually a living room, or an American Recreational Vehicle version of a living room, in any event. There was a built-in couch, covered in an indestructible Alumicron tweed, along one wall, with a television set, complete with built-in VCR, opposite it, plus a compact stainless-steel kitchenette and a pair of plush passenger seats that could be folded down into beds. Up in the very front were the RV’s driver’s seat and a separate passenger seat, now swiveled toward the rear, both with thronelike backs that would make it hard for anyone passing by outside to peer inside. Curtains were drawn over the side windows.

Ferretti opened the RV’s big right-hand door to usher Lola out, and the caterwaul of Bragg Boulevard came pouring in. Above the drone of the traffic rose the rutting wails and pounding thuds of the Country Metal music these … skinheads … loved, chundering out of their car stereos as they drove past the DMZ. From inside the DMZ itself you could hear the beat of an electric bass.

Now Ferretti and Lola were standing on the ground, outside the door, and he had his arm around her and his head close to hers, talking to her. Beams of light ran up and down them as cars drove in and out of the DMZ’s parking lot, and Irv could hear young male voices talking in … rural Romanian … His heart began accelerating … But it was just more of the usual, more young, bursting soldiers heading on foot into the DMZ. Apparently they didn’t even stop and stare. A grizzly, paunchy fellow in a Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket and a John Deere Backhoe cap hugging and nuzzling an Amerasian cocktail waitress, or whatever she might be, out by a High Mojave touring van in the parking lot of the DMZ didn’t even rate a second look. After all, this was Hell; this was Fayettenam.

Ferretti gave Lola one last hug, and she began teetering on her high heels along the stomped-dirt driveway toward the bar’s front entrance. Then he came back inside the RV and closed the door, shutting out the hellish noise, and he and Irv rejoined Mary Cary, who was standing in the doorway to the rear compartment.

“Well,” said Irv, “she’s on her way. I just hope to hell she doesn’t blow it.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Lola,” said Ferretti. “She’s nervous, but once she walks up to those three meatballs and their eyes start falling out of their heads over her”—with both hands he pantomimed a big curve in front of his chest—“she’ll be in Seventh Heaven. Lola’s a born prick teaser. Excuse me, Mary Cary. A successfully teased—well, you know what I mean—it brings out the ham in Lola. In front of the aroused male animal she has true star quality.”

“She’d better,” said Mary Cary. “I’d just as soon not have to go in there and get them myself.”

But Irv knew—and he marveled over it—he knew Mary Cary wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly that, if she had to.

“Well, we can watch the show,” said Ferretti. They went back into the rear compartment and shut the door and stood in front of the monitors receiving the live feed from inside the DMZ and put on headsets. Now Irv could see Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory in their booth and hear the DMZ’s Country Metal band banging and sloshing away in the background in a slow number that seemed even sleazier than the usual bawling headbangers. Jimmy Lowe was leaning back on his side of the booth. He had one hand on a bottle of beer on the table. His head was thrown back slightly, which made his neck look massive. He was trying to sing along with the chorus:

“She won’t abaout

To give me no haaaaaaaaid,

So all’s I got was

A piece uvver mind …”

Ziggefoos laughed and said, “‘Give me no haid’? Christalmighty, Jimmy,’at’s what ‘at ol’ gal Lucille told me she lacks about you. You’re so sent’mental.’Give me no haid …’ Hearing ‘em sweet words,’at’s every gal’s deepest desar.”

“Yeah, and you kin deep’is here,” said Jimmy Lowe, extending the middle finger of his right hand, “and leave Lucille out uv it.” He managed to twist his lips into half a smile, but his voice had a testy edge to it. Ziggy and Flory both started laughing.

Lucille, whoever she was, had come up a lot in the three soldiers’ conversations over the past week, chiefly as a way for Ziggy and Flory to rib Jimmy Lowe. Apparently she worked in the Wal-Mart on Bragg Boulevard and wanted nothing more to do with Jimmy.

All three boys’ heads swung in the same direction, toward some point in the middle distance. At first Irv thought they must have spotted Lola. But it soon became apparent that they were looking at one of the dancers up on the bar.

“Th’ow it, Sugar,” said Jimmy Lowe with no particular enthusiasm. “Beats me how the hale they do thayut.”

“Luck at the lamb chops on’at ol’ gal,” said Flory. “Mussa hadda brought her up in a double-wide.” After several weeks of monitoring the three rednecks, Irv had deduced that a double-wide was some sort of jumbo trailer home.

“What’s’at on her laig?” said Ziggefoos. “Lucks to me lack a open lesion.”

“A open what?” said Jimmy Lowe.

“A open lesion,” said Ziggefoos, “lack she’s got a vernerl disease.”

“What the hale’s a lesion?”

“It’s lack a—I don’t know, a sore, I guess, lack fum syph‘lis. There’s a whole cohort a vernerl diseases’at’ll fuck up yer skin, but you jes don’t hear’bout’em no more, because the onliest thang gits talked about no more is AIDS.” Irv tensed. Maybe Ziggefoos was about to get back on the subject of homosexuality—and Randy Valentine. “Hale, when I was ovair, I knew guys’at fucked evvy ho in Somalia—and you know how all the hose in Africa spose have the HIV virus?—these guys fucked evvy ho in a row, them and their sisters, too, and I never heard a one uv‘em catching AIDS. But plenty uv’em, they got syph’lis and the whole dayum cohort a vernerl diseases, until their goddayum dicks was falling off on the graound. But don’t nobuddy thank twice about thayut no more, because the onliest thang they wants to talk about is a buncha faggots with AIDS.”

“Fuckin’ A, wale tol’,” said Jimmy Lowe.

Irv stared at Ziggefoos on the screen. Where did he pick up this stuff? Lesions? Cohort? Cohort of venereal diseases? Or maybe, as Ferretti had put it, he was just fulla shit. Ziggefoos was not nearly as muscular and tough-looking as Jimmy Lowe, and yet to Irv, he had his own special air of menace. He was lanky and rawboned with a thin face, a long nose, and a long jaw. His eyes were set close together in a way that reminded Irv of a mean dog. His arms were not bulky like Jimmy Lowe’s but had big veins wrapped around the forearms like the servicestation mechanics and other intimidating types Irv remembered from when he was growing up.

“Jeemy? Hi.”

On the screen Irv could see the three rednecks look up. Irv looked over at Ferretti, who smiled and crossed his fingers. Jeemy. They couldn’t see the woman who had said it, but it could only be Lola.

“You remeember me? From the Wal-Mart?”

On the monitor screen Irv could see Jimmy Lowe staring, slackjawed. “I don’ zackly,” he said finally, “but I sure’s hale want to.”

Then he grinned and turned to Ziggefoos and Flory for approval of his powers of repartee. This they gave him, and you could see the three of them drinking in the hookery glories of Lola Thong.

“I’m Lola. You don’t remeember? Lucille’s friend?”

“How could I fergit, I reckon.” Jimmy Lowe turned to his buddies again and laughed, and then all three of them laughed, and their eyes went up and down the vision before them.

“You work at the Wal-Mart?” asked Jimmy Lowe. Lola must have nodded yes, because Jimmy Lowe said, “Whirr you work at the Wal-Mart?”

Oh shit. What was Lola going to say to that?

“In the back.”

“In the bayack?” said Jimmy Lowe, managing to turn back into two syllables. “If I was running the Wal-Mart, I’d sure’s hale figger out someplace to put you’sides the bayack!”

All three laughed heartily and drank Lola in some more.

“Well, I don’t always work at the Wal-Mart, you know.”

She said this so coquettishly and got such a rise out of the boys that Ferretti, wearing his headset, looked over at Irv and put a thumb up and mouthed the words “Star quality.”

“Come on, Jimmy,” said Ziggefoos, “ain’tchoo gon’ ask your fran to sit daown? Who you with, Lola?”

“Nobody.”

“Then you orta be with us. Move over, Jimmy.”

Jimmy moved over. Now on the screens Irv and Ferretti could see Lola and her big bouffant hairdo and her long eyelashes and her flashing Asian eyes and her confidently smiling lips and her custom-made bosom sidling into the booth.

“Wale, whudjoo lack to drank, Lola?” said Jimmy Lowe. “How’bout a beer?”

“A beer?” said Ziggy. “You got abaout as much class as a Port-o-San vac’um cleaner, Jimmy. Whyn’t you have what I’m having, Lola?”

“What you having?”

“A vodka twilat.”

“What’s a vodka twilat?”

Jimmy Lowe said, “It’s a drink fer fa—fer people lack Ziggy.” He raised his right hand and gave it a limp wrist and lifted his little finger.

“Don’t pay no nevermind to’im, Lola. Him and refinement ain’t never been innerduced.”

It went on like that for a while, with Ziggefoos and Jimmy Lowe ragging each other to see who could be the witticst and most manly. Little Flory didn’t have much to say. Lola compromised by ordering a tequila sunrise, and Ziggefoos said that showed she was a lady and didn’t want to sit around all night like some of the animals in here, swilling beer. Jimmy Lowe said Ziggefoos’s problem was, they almost hadn’t let him into the Rangers because he had … certain tendencies … and Lola changed the subject by asking Jimmy Lowe if it was true that part of Ranger training involved putting the recruit in a metal box the size of a coffin and shutting and locking the lid without telling him how long it would be before they let him out. This gave all three of them a chance to brag for a while and tell war stories about the rigors of Ranger training, whereupon Lola said she often had a dream just like that, about the metal box. She kept dreaming that she had been put in a metal box, stark naked, and she struggled and struggled. She pantomimed this part by twisting her shoulders and her chest this way and that. The three rednecks devoured every twist, every turn, every this, every that. Just when she thought she could hold out no longer, she said, someone would arrive mysteriously and pry the lid up, and she would wake up, trembling with excitement, before she ever found out who it was. The three boys were rendered practically speechless, trying to figure out what to do with this conversational opening without sounding totally crude.

Ferretti looked at Irv and mouthed the words once more: “Star quality.”

Then Lola put on the most suggestive smile Irv had ever seen and said to Jimmy Lowe, “You like veedeos?” She looked at Ziggefoos and Flory the same way.

“What kinda videos?” asked Jimmy Lowe.

“Unusual veedeos,” said Lola. The suggestive smile turned into a leer. She took a deep breath, and her breasts seemed to rise and fall a foot inside and outside the little black cocktail dress.

“Depends, I guess,” said Jimmy Lowe, who already seemed to be breathing rapidly. He looked at his two buddies and then said to Lola, “I spose. Whirr they at?”

“Out back,” said Lola with the same leering ham-actress smile.

“Out bayack whirr?”

“Een the parking lot,” said Lola with such a breathy voice and such a smoldering look it was as if she had said, “Een my boudoir.”

“In the parking lot?”

“Een my RV.” She lowered her chin and opened her big dark eyes and gave a look that was the Mother of All Insinuation.

The three of them looked at one another, their eyes darting back and forth in a silent conference. The perfectly sleazy Country Metal music continued to bang and slosh away in the background.

Finally Jimmy Lowe said, “Wale, hale, won’t hut to take a luck.” His eyes flicked toward Ziggefoos and Flory for confirmation of the decision. Then the four of them, Lola and the three rednecks, slid out of the booth.

Irv’s heart accelerated again. They were coming out. The feed from inside the DMZ now showed only the empty booth. The other monitor screens showed the RV’s empty living room, still dark except for the lurid streaks that came beaming in from Bragg Boulevard and the parking lot. He took off his headset and started talking to Gordon and Roy—to try to calm himself down more than anything else. They already knew what to do. Gordon had a rheostat with which to adjust the lighting in the RV. He had him turn it up, to test it. The living room rose up on six monitors, in color. You could see the appalling brown-and-yellow-plaid pattern on the Alumicron tweed of the built-in couch. Then he talked to Roy, who was monitoring the sound. Roy assured him that the hidden microphones, which were no bigger than the head of a nail, would pick up everything, even the sound of the door handle turning when they reached the RV. Then he turned to Mary Cary and started to say something, but she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes and twisted her lips in a fashion that said, “Irv. Calm down.”

Now Irv’s heart was beating at a terrific clip. He could feel it banging away inside his rib cage. Suppose it went into tachycardia? Or fibrillation? And he passed out? Fainted? The six of them—himself, Mary Cary, Ferretti, Gordon, Roy, and the fat makeup woman, whose name he never had caught—were packed into the little compartment, with the curtains drawn … silent … waiting … In the tubercular blue light of the monitors, they looked ghastly. He could hear the sounds of the strip and the DMZ seeping in … He put his headset back on … and waited some more.

Presently Irv thought he could hear voices—redneck voices—voices so close he wondered for an instant if the three soldiers had come inside the RV without his knowing it. He looked at the monitors, and on five of the screens the RV’s living room rose up in light and color before his very eyes. No one in there. He glanced at Gordon, who had his hand on the rheostat. Then, over the earphones, sure enough, Irv heard the handle of the RV door turning. Then the door opened, and the sounds of the strip came thrumming into the headset. On one of the monitors he could see Lola entering the RV. The camera was looking straight down her dress; he could see practically all of her prodigious breasts. Then in came Jimmy Lowe and Ziggefoos and Flory. Those little figures on the monitor screens, with their T-shirts, their muscles, their tight jeans, their … skinned heads … were barely six feet away from him now, on the other side of a flimsy fake wall, big as life.

Back in the secret compartment, Irv stole a glance at Mary Cary and the field producer, Ferretti. In the dead microwave glow, they looked ancient. They didn’t show a trace of emotion. They were absorbed in their headsets and the monitors.

Barely six feet away, on the other side of the false wall, Lola was directing the soldiers to sit on the couch. Little Flory wound up in the middle, with Jimmy Lowe on one side and Ziggefoos on the other. One monitor now showed you all three of them, sitting there. Three other monitors gave you close-ups of them, head and shoulders, one by one. A fifth monitor showed you Lola, now settling into the front passenger seat, which had been turned around. Her little black dress was so short that when she sat down and crossed her legs, it made you wonder if she was wearing anything at all.

Jimmy Lowe was craning his head around, his skinned head. His neck muscles were huge. “This here’s all yours, Lola?”

“Un-hunh.”

“What it setcha bayack?” said Flory.

“Oh … I’on know,” said Lola. “Eet was part of a kind of a deal.” She gave him a smile oozing with significance. They all looked at each other and laughed a little too loud and nervously.

Ferretti looked at Mary Cary and then at Irv and broke into a big grin, and once more mouthed the words “Star quality.” He kept on grinning, even after he turned back to the monitor. Irv wanted to smile, but a smile was beyond him. He was amazed that Ferretti could feel so genuinely amused in the middle of a situation this tense. They were both television producers, but they were very different animals.

Lola offered the three soldiers some malt liquor, which they reckoned was a good idea. She got up and went to the refrigerator of the kitchenette and took out a 40-ounce bottle of Colt 45 and poured it into three paper cups. On the monitors Irv could follow their eyes—and their skinned heads and their ears, which stuck out—as they followed every locomotion, every twist, every inclination of her body. Then she removed a videocassette from a cabinet beneath the television set and slipped it into the VCR mechanism. Irv saw the one blank screen on the bank of monitors come alive with an abstract pattern of colors. It was fed directly from the television set in the RV’s living room. Lola and the three rednecks settled back. Their eyes were pinned on the set: a pine forest … shady at ground level, green and gold way up above where the sun shines through the branches … music … an old Dionne Warwick number called “Anyone Who Had a Heart” … In the distance, the figure of a young woman in a white dress, a long, fancy, old-fashioned dress, down to her ankles. She’s wearing white gloves and a big Garden Party hat. She’s carrying a parasol and a small portfolio tied with a ribbon. She comes closer … It’s Lola … Her bodice is demurely covered with lacework that goes up to her neck and forms a little collar … but her breasts are obviously yearning to be free … She stops beneath a soaring pine, tucks the parasol under one arm, unties the little portfolio, and takes out three photographs … Dionne Warwick wails plaintively in the background about lost and unrequited love …

On the monitors Irv could see the three rednecks staring at the television set, all eyes. You could tell they had a delicious inkling of what was coming.

Lola, in her big belle époque dress, looks longingly at the three photographs.

Longingly; oh yes. As an actress, it occurred to Irv, Lola was worse than the worst silent-film hambone. But in pornography, subtlety is not a virtue. A cloud crossed Irv’s mind. This video was his brainchild. Ferretti and a camera crew had taken Lola out to a forest in the sand hills near a town called Southern Pines and shot it, but it was he, Irv, who had dreamed it up. Christ—had he gone too far this time? Well, no one but this lot would ever see the whole thing.

The camera follows Lola’s longing eyes, then comes in tight on the three photographs … Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, Flory … One by one their faces fill the screen …

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Ziggefoos, “how the hale’d you do thayut?”

“Yeah, how the hale didja?” asked Flory.

Jimmy Lowe merely stared at Lola with his mouth open. Now the other two were staring at her the same way. In fact, the pictures were stills adapted from the footage shot by the cameras hidden in the DMZ two weeks before.

“Shhhhh,” said Lola. “What I told you? Thees veedeo ees unusual.” She smiled with maximum suggestiveness.

In the dappled pine forest, Lola looks this way and that, as if to make sure she’s alone. She stoops, puts the parasol, portfolio, and pictures on the ground, stands up, and looks about some more. She takes off the long white gloves and lets them drop to the ground. She brings her hands to her throat and begins unbuttoning her lacy bodice.

The three rednecks could see that their fond, lustful yearnings were about to be fulfilled. No more questions about the production process.

A haunting saxophone solo … Lola’s busy taking it off … The Garden Party hat goes … With much writhing and wriggling she snakes her way out of the dress … She starts to go to work on her corset … Once more she looks longingly down at the three photographs on the ground before her … A still picture of Jimmy Lowe … All at once it comes alive and starts moving. Then Ziggefoos—same thing. Then Flory … Then the Country Metal music kicks in, and you see the three of them in the booth in the DMZ, drinking beer and talking.

Jimmy Lowe said, “Godalmighty dog, Lola. I mean, sheeut, whirr the hale’d you git thayut? What the hale kinda video this spose a be anyhows?”

“Eenteractive veedeo,” said Lola, in a way that as much as said, “Surely you know about interactive video.”

Eenteractive veedeo … Ferretti turned to Irv and Mary Cary with a huge grin. Star quality! Mary Cary smiled back. All Irv could think about was: Suppose Jimmy Lowe got angry and broke through the false wall and came hunting for the Wizard of Oz?

Fortunately, no one, not Lola or anyone else, had to provide further explanation, because now the video was back in the pine forest … Once more, Lola amid the soaring pines … in a thrall of ecstasy … rotating her hips and thrusting her pelvis in time with the Country Metal music … She has the corset undone down the front. She opens it wide and discards it, consigns it to the forest floor, revealing her glorious breasts.

The three rednecks were mesmerized. They were deep in a sexual coma.

She lowers her eyes coquettishly and looks down on the ground. There are the three photographs once more … Jimmy Lowe … Ziggefoos … Flory … the photographs … come alive again … in the booth in the DMZ … Ziggefoos is talking: “You jes see some may‘shated sommitch with a fo’-day growth a beard and his cheeks lack this here, lucking lack Jesus Christ and talking about AIDS’n gay rats.” Jimmy Lowe says, “Fuckin’ A.”

On the video they talk about Holcombe, who is suspected of being homosexual, and Ziggefoos tells about the boardinghouse in Myrtle Beach where he and his brother had seen the “quairs” up on the roof “jes buggering the living shecut out th’other’n—”

“It’s great, great, great!” thought Irv, breathing fast. They were in such a sexual trance, they were no longer looking at each other in alarm. They couldn’t see what was coming.

The camera is on Lola again … half-naked in the forest … The Country Metal music is banging away … Lola spreads her legs and puts her fingers down inside her cache-sexe and begins throwing back her head as if in an uncontrollable ecstasy … Suddenly the video is back to the booth in the DMZ. Ziggefoos is saying, “And ‘at’s what I’m talking abaout. That’s what they ain’t abaout to tale you when they’s talking about gay rats and legal madge between homoseckshuls and all’at sheeut.” Then Jimmy Lowe, nodding away, leans over the table toward Ziggefoos and looks this way and that, to make sure nobody is eavesdropping, and he says, “You just put yer fainger on it, old buddy” … The sleazy throb of the Country Metal music … “Anybuddy saw what I saw in—” He hesitates, then resumes: “Anybuddy woulda done what I deeud, er leastways they’d a wanted to—”

Now, on the monitors, Irv could see the three of them cutting glances at each other. They weren’t so drunk or so sex-besotted that they couldn’t realize this was dangerous territory … the details of what Jimmy Lowe had done when he had seen Randy Valentine committing fellatio in a toilet booth in a Bragg Boulevard bar—

But then the video is back to the forest … Lola, leering, running her pink tongue around her ruby lips. The camera closes in on her loins, on her very groin, her corona of pubic hair, the lips of her vulva … Bingo!—Back in the booth at the DMZ … Jimmy Lowe is saying, “I mean, I saw some kind a rayud, and ‘at was when I kicked inny doe. Broke’at little metal tab rat off’n it.” Ziggefoos says, “Summitch mussa wunner what the hale hit him.” Jimmy Lowe says, “Whole goddayum doe hit him, I reckon. That summitch, he was lane upside the wall when I grabbed him.”

On the monitor Irv could see Jimmy Lowe turn toward Ziggefoos. There was real alarm on his face now. “What the hale is’is sheeut?” Then he looked at Lola. He was angry. “What the sheeut’s going on here?”

Lola kept smiling, although Irv could detect the fear in her eyes. She rose up out of her seat, then gestured toward the television set.

Neither Jimmy Lowe nor Ziggefoos nor Flory could resist it. Their eyes swung toward the set—

—and there’s Lola in the forest, her fingers pressed into her crotch, her hips rolling, her garter straps swinging like tassels, her breasts pitching and yawing—and the three rednecks were transported. They couldn’t take their eyes off it.

Irv turned to Mary Cary, who was right beside him, her headset on, her eyes pinned on the monitors. He nudged her with his elbow, then held his forefinger in front of his face and revolved it clockwise, to indicate that the tape was near the end—and she would soon be on. He could barely see her, it was so dark on this side of the partition. Dark, crowded, and hot; he felt as if he could hardly draw a breath. But Mary Cary merely nodded and looked to make sure her makeup woman was still standing by, then turned back to the monitors. Irv nudged Ferretti. He couldn’t believe it. Ferretti had a smile on his face.

Lola’s back is arched. Both hands are on her genitals. Her pelvis is thrusting. She gasps, she sighs, she moans some more. And then she goes, “Hanh hanh hanh HANHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”—a dying shriek.

The camera pulls back … The saxophone solo refrain of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” resumes …

For a moment Jimmy Lowe remained agog, even though the tape had come to an end. Then Ziggefoos smacked him on the side of his leg with the back of his hand. “I ‘on know, Jimmy, I’on lack’is sheeut.”

Jimmy Lowe turned to Lola, who was now standing right beside the RV’s door. She was trying to hang on to her smile and beginning to lose the battle.

“Look here, goddayum it, Lola,” said Jimmy Lowe, “I wanna know what the sheeut’s going on, and I wanna know rat now.”

“Eenteractive teevee,” said Lola, “eenteractive teevee. Eenteractive teevee.” She was holding on to this term “interactive TV” for dear life.

“You kin innerack with my sweet ayus, Lola,” said Jimmy Lowe. “I ax you a simple question.”

“You don’ believe me?” said Lola plaintively. “Eenteractive teevee. Eenteractive teevee, Jeemy!”

PART THREE

GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!

Jimmy Lowe was now leaning toward Lola, beginning to snarl. Behind the partition, Irv’s heart was beating wildly. He still had his headset on, although he wanted to take it off. His central nervous system was going into the fight-or-flight mode, and he was definitely partial to flight, and the headset would be an impediment. He looked at Mary Cary and mouthed a single word: “Ready?” But she had anticipated him. She already had her headset off and was standing still, facing the partition, while the makeup woman fluffed up her great blond hair and touched up her forehead and nose with powder. The two technicians, Gordon and Roy, were already up off their stools, headsets removed, standing right behind her. What a pair of great wide hulks they were! (Thank God!) They must have been in their thirties, but in the pallid glow of the monitors, their faces looked like a pair of ancient underwater rocks. Right next to them stood Ferretti. He had taken his headset off, too. He gave Irv a wink!—a wink! As if he didn’t have a worry in the world! Once more Irv marveled.

“I’m gon’ show you, Jeemy, right now!” It was Lola’s voice, sounding in Irv’s ears over the headset. She was losing her composure. He looked at the monitor screen. She was trying to recapture her concupiscent leer. She also had her hand on the door handle. Miss Lola Thong was ready to bail out. “There!” She pointed toward the partition. “You have a special vees’tor!”

Irv turned back toward Mary Cary and with a frantic look in his eyes mouthed the word “Now!” But she was already heading through the concealed door in the partition. Didn’t have to be prodded! Marching straight out to confront these … skinheads! … murderers! Irv Durtscher, the Maxim Gorky of the Mass Media, involuntarily crouched. He needn’t have. Gordon, Roy, and Ferretti followed right behind her. Their hulking forms filled up the opening.

Irv spun back toward the monitors. None of the hidden cameras had yet picked up Mary Cary, but he could see all three of the soldiers, sitting on the couch, staring toward her. On another monitor—there went Lola, slipping out of the RV and closing the door behind her. The soldiers didn’t even notice. They were dumbstruck. Standing before them was a big blond bombshell in a creamy white silk blouse open down to the sternum, a sky-blue cashmere jacket, and a short white skirt showing off her terrific legs … and, moreover, perhaps the best-known blond bombshell in America.

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Mary Cary, “I’m Mary Cary Brokenborough.”

I’m Merry

Kerry

Broken

Berruh.

It was precisely the way she said it every week on the show! No different ! Not a tremor in her voice! Irv was astounded, even though he had seen her do it before. His admiration, his envy, cut through his fear as he crouched behind the partition, staring at the monitors and listening over the headset.

“Aw, come on naow,” said Jimmy Lowe, his mouth open, his head cocked to one side. “I don’ believe theeus.” He tried a smile, as if somehow she might respond with a smile and reveal that this was all some kind of harmless prank.

“No, you can believe it, Jimmy,” said Mary Cary. “I’m Merry Kerry Brokenberruh, and I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, we’re not the police. The bad news is, we’re from Day & Night.”

By now, as Irv could see on the monitors, Mary Cary had moved out in front of the couch and was being picked up by the hidden cameras. What was not picked up by the cameras, and what would not be seen by Day & Night’s 50 million viewers, was the line-up of heavies who now stood there as Mary Cary’s glum-faced centurions: Gordon, Roy, and Ferretti.

Jimmy Lowe didn’t say anything. He looked at Ziggefoos and then at Flory, and then all three looked at one another. This was the pivotal moment. The three of them were no brain surgeons, but they were bright enough to know that—Gotcha!—they were now in trouble. This was the moment in which they had to make a decision. An older trio, wiser or not, might very well refuse to say another word and depart or, conceivably, attack. But these three were children of the third television generation. To them, television was not a communications medium, it was an atmosphere you breathed. TV came into your life as naturally as oxygen, and you would no more think of trying to keep it out than you would the air in your lungs. A Merry Kerry Brokenberruh came into your home every week as inevitably as the barometric pressure—and now she had been beamed down into these boys’ very presence. They were shocked, awed, mesmerized—and in that moment they lost the battle with logic. They neither fought nor fled. They stood their ground, transfixed by the aura of the broadcast goddess, who might be feared, might be disliked, but who could not be denied. She was in their lives, just like their bloodstreams, and she had her questions.

On the monitors Irv could see the boys’ skinned heads and stuck-out ears turning. Mary Cary had moved to the seat Lola had vacated and was sitting down. She gestured toward the television set. “You recognize what you just saw, don’t you?”

“Sonamabitch,” said Ziggefoos. He had a small, incredulous smile on his face. “This really is you?”

“I think you recognize me, and I think you recognize what you just saw,” said Mary Cary, motioning toward the set again. She spoke calmly and firmly as if she played a game of Gotcha! like this every day.

“Goddayum!” said Ziggefoos with such a crazy sort of exaggeration it startled Irv. “Merry Kerry … Merry Kerry … you’re jes shittin’ us, rat?”

“Didn’t it look real to you?” said Mary Cary. “You, Jimmy, Flory—talking about what happened to Randy Valentine … in your own words?”

“Merry Kerry … Merry Kerry …” Ziggefoos had a dreamy tone and a dreamy look and a silly little smile. “Watchoo talking abaout, Merry Kerry?”

“It’s what you were talking about, Ziggy, you and Jimmy and Flory, on that videotape. Why don’t you tell me—”

“All’s I saw was some hooker shakin’ her fanny aout’na pineywoods, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos.

Mary Cary simply ignored the comment. “Why don’t you tell me”—she looked straight at Jimmy Lowe—“why don’t you tell me exactly what you did when you surprised Randy Valentine in that men’s room that night?”

“Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos. He paused. “Jewer have a vodka twilat?”

“No, and if I were you—”

“Let’s go git us a coupla vodka twilats, Merry Kerry. Rat’air inna DMZ.” He broke into a grin.

Goddamn this kid! thought Irv. “Merry Kerry.” Irv had seen this irritating familiarity before, especially among young people. The face and the voice of Mary Cary Brokenborough were so familiar, people felt as if they knew her. She already dwelt somewhere inside them. And this kid was just smart enough or just drunk enough to use this deluded sense of intimacy to try to transform the ambush into some kind of bullshit flirtation.

Jimmy Lowe’s panicked expression began to dissolve as the beauty of this strategy dawned on him, and he, too, grinned and said,”’At’s a goddayum good idy! Gitcher tail up, gal, and let’s go git it on!”

“Fuckin’ A!” said Flory.

Ziggefoos grinned at both of them, egging them on.

“Thank you very much,” said Mary Cary curtly, “but I’m not here to go honky-tonking. I’m here to get to the—”

“Awwwwww, come on, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos, “don’t be lack ‘at. You got on yer party clothes, gal! If you don’ want a vodka twilat, I’ll git us a Coors lat, long neck. If I got me a beer, you got half.”

Jimmy Lowe and Flory cracked up over that. You got half! That was rich.

Thus encouraged, Ziggefoos said, “And a pack a Salem One Hunnerts, too. We don’t git many vis‘tors fum New York daown here’ta DMZ. ‘At’s whirr you fum, ain’t it? New York City?”

Jimmy Lowe and Flory were doubled over with laughter. Irv began to despair. Mary Cary had confronted them, but they were turning it into a farce.

“You’re not going to have much to laugh about if you’re faced with a charge of murder,” said Mary Cary. She said it with such stentorian firmness, Jimmy Lowe stopped laughing. She had his attention. “On that tape, which you just saw, you describe how you made an unprovoked attack on Randy Valentine in the men’s room of a bar not far from here. You—”

“Awwwwww, latin up, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos. “This ain’t Day & Nat. This here’s nat time on Bragg Boulevard. Jes letcher hair daown and git it on.”

But Mary Cary kept boring in on Jimmy Lowe. “You just described how you kicked down a door, flattened Randy Valentine against a wall, and began beating him.”

She wouldn’t let up. She was staring him down. He was close enough to reach out and grab her by the throat.

“You need a drank,” said Ziggefoos. “You need to latin up.”

Ziggefoos continued to grin, but Jimmy Lowe and Flory no longer had it in them to be amused. They looked at each other and at Ziggefoos with alarm.

“You also described your motivation,” said Mary Cary. “You made it very clear what it was. It was homophobia. You assaulted Randy Valentine because he was different, because he didn’t have your sexual orientation, because he was gay. Isn’t that what you just told us?”

“Didn’ tale you any such thang,” said Jimmy Lowe. He had a helpless expression, as if he couldn’t comprehend how this national apparition, which had somehow materialized out back of the DMZ on Bragg Boulevard, was now hurling such accusations in his face.

“But we just heard you,” said Mary Cary. “We just saw you. You just said it in so many words.”

“All’s I said was—”

“Shut up, Jimmy,” said Ziggefoos.

“And we just heard from you, too,” said Mary Cary. “And from your friend here, Flory. You just admitted your own involvement, and you just described your own motivation. Randy Valentine wasn’t ‘from our parish.’ Isn’t that what you said, Flory? The gay lifestyle is disgusting. Isn’t that what we heard you say, Ziggy?”

Irv marveled. Mary Cary was staring them down. There wasn’t even the tiniest break in her voice. The sentences were rolling out perfectly. She had them on the ropes. If they didn’t stop talking now, they’d hang themselves for sure.

Ziggefoos hesitated. Then he said, “Whatchoo know abaout it?”

“I know what I’ve just heard you say—you and Jimmy and Flory—in your own words.” She looked at Jimmy Lowe again. “If it wasn’t for the reason you said, why did you attack Randy Valentine?”

Jimmy Lowe said, “All’s I did—”

“Jes shut up, Jimmy!” said Ziggefoos. “You don’ have to tale’er a dayum thang.” Then he looked at Mary Cary. To Irv, watching on the monitor behind the false wall, Ziggefoos’s narrow eyes and long, lean face looked more menacing than ever. “I’m not talking abaout thayut, Merry Kerry. Didn’t none a us have nothing to do with Randy Valentine. Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him. But I kin tale you one thang.”

“What’s that?”

“I kin tale you one thang abaout yer ‘gay lafstyle.’”

“All right—go ahead.”

“It won’t never made fer the U.S. Army.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“You ever knowed anybuddy in the U.S. Army?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. My father was in the Army. He fought in Korea.”

“You ever ask him what he thought a having homoseckshuls ‘long-side him?”

“No, I never did, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have been in favor of kicking down doors and beating them senseless.”

“You know what a soldier’s spose a do? You know what he’s spose a be there fer?”

“Tell me,” said Mary Cary. There was irritation in her voice. She didn’t like what this redneck kid was doing, taking over the role of interrogator.

“A soldier’s ther to fat,” said Ziggefoos. “He’s ther to risk his laf.” By now Irv knew the boys’ redneck elocution well enough to figure out that fat meant fight and laf meant life. But Christ—did Mary Cary?

“’At’s what h‘it balls daown to. Ever nawn’n’en, a country, any country, h’it needs men to fat and risk their laf. And do you think ther’s any man ‘at jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf?” He waited for her to answer.

Mary Cary, irritably: “Go on.”

Damn! thought Irv. This kid was fulla shit, but he had a knack for taking over the script and turning things around. If only she could have gotten Jimmy Lowe talking! But Ziggefoos had cut him off. Jimmy Lowe and Flory were just sitting there with their mouths open and their eyes blinking, looking from Mary Cary to Ziggefoos and from Ziggefoos to Mary Cary. Well, maybe he could—

“Hale, no,” said Ziggefoos, “ain’t nobody jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf. You know what I’m trying to tale you?”

“Go on.”

“You got to take ‘ose ol’ boys and ton‘em into a unit. A unit. You know what I’m saying? The unit’s the onliest thang that don’t know no fear. When you’re in the field and you’re pinned daown by spear far?”—once more it took Irv a couple of beats to translate: spear far meant superior fire—they’d have to use subtitles—“the unit’s the onliest thang’at don’t run away. The ind‘vigil? He’ll run on you, Merry Kerry. I’on keer who he is. He’ll run on you. But when he’s in a unit—ain’t jes his own mind and his own heart working no more. He’s got evvy mind and evvy heart in the platoon inside uv’im, whether he wants’em’air’not, and even if he don’t want to hear it, they’re saying to him, ‘A man don’t run, a man holts his graound, a man risks his laf if he has to.’ Being in a far fat’s—”

Mary Cary broke in: “Well, the only man whose life was risked in this case—”

“Being in a far fat’s—”

“—was a man who wasn’t trying to—”

“Lemme finish, Merry Kerry. Being in a far fat’s—”

“All right,” said Mary Cary, “if you’re so hipped on your firefights, let’s talk about your firefights.” Good girl, thought Irv, you figured out “far” and “fat.” “When were you ever in a firefight? Not a training excercise—a real one? Or—”

“I was—”

“Or is this some grand military theory of yours?”

“I been in a far fat.”

“Really? How interesting. When exactly? In Korea? In Vietnam?— which happened to have ended before you were born probably? You’ve never actually been in a firefight, have you?”

“Deed, I have, too.”

“Oh?—exactly when? Exactly where?”

“In Somalia.”

“Somalia,” said Mary Cary, pouring on the derision. “A UN mission to provide food to starving people. And you were in a firefight?”

“Jewer hear a Bloody Sunday?”

On the monitor in the rear compartment, Irv saw the consternation on Mary Cary’s face immediately. A sixth sense told her not to say no, because “Bloody Sunday” rang some kind of bell, but she didn’t know what the bell was tolling. Her expression went blank. The wheels spun—and she came up with nothing. Mary Cary might occasionally bone up on a subject for a Day & Night segment, but she was no daily devourer of current events, not via newspapers, not even via the nightly TV news; not the way he, Irv, was. Like a lot of people in television news today, Mary Cary had come into the business not from journalism school but from drama school; at the University of Virginia, in her case. The star in television news was not the newshound but the on-camera performer. When people like Mary Cary—and she was far from being the only one—were starting out as correspondents, they prided themselves on being able to go anywhere in the world, arrive with information zero, get briefed for ten or fifteen minutes by whatever researcher was on the scene, and then go on camera and regurgitate the stuff with an air of profound, fathomless, even smug, authority. That was … performing. Mary Cary’s ascent from the lower ranks had begun one evening in 1979. Her producer, a lovable but carbuncled gnome named Murray Lewis, had sent her from New York to Teheran on the spur of the moment to cover the Iran hostage crisis. She raced from the Teheran airport, reached the American Embassy just in time for the evening news in the United States, stood in front of hordes of screaming, placard-waving, flag-burning, effigy-stomping Iranian demonstrators, looked into the camera, and, with information zero, with not so much as thirty seconds of briefing from the network’s local researchers, flawlessly rephrased the Associated Press copy concerning the event as Lewis, who was in New York, read it to her over a satellite hookup and into a corded plug stuck in her ear and concealed by her luxuriant blond hair. Made it all roll out of those big lips of hers, she did, with an air of foreign-affairs profundity that would have made a Bismarck’s or a Kissinger’s jaw drop.

But at this moment she didn’t have Murray Lewis or even Irv Durtscher to whisper in her ear, and so she fell back on her standard device for those rare moments when she was stymied or nonplussed.

“Go on,” she said with a tone that always insinuated that the poor devil could only dig his own grave deeper.

Irv braced. Irv knew exactly what Bloody Sunday was.

“H‘it was Sunday, October the thud, nanteen-nanny-three,” said Ziggefoos. Suddenly he was giving Mary Cary a stern, unblinking look of rectitude. “Our unit, we was over east a the Bakhura Market, and our CO, Major Lunsford, he says—wale, the thang was, some informer or sump’m, he’s tipped us off that this Mohammed Aidid?—some of his top lieutenants, they’re having a secret meeting up’eh at the—”

Mary Cary broke in: “That’s very interesting, I’m sure, but let’s get back to the point, and the point is the murder of Randy Valentine.”

Ziggefoos was having none of it. The look in his eyes became even sterner, more accusatory. The boy did not blink, not even once. He just sawed away with his story in his rasping redneck twang.

“They was having a secret meeting up‘eh at the Olympic Hotel, Aidid’s people was, and so the CO, he puts forty uv’us into a buncha MH-60s. They’s helicopters. They call’em Black Hawks. It’s abaout three-thuddy inny afternoon, inny brat sunlat, and they’d already sent another unit a Rangers fum the HQ, and them and some Delta Commandos—”

“I’m not interested in—”

But Ziggefoos’s new voice ripped right through her. “—and in a couple minutes, all uv‘us, and the units fum the airport, we’re rat over the Olympic Hotel, and if you ever hud prakly twenty MH-60 helicopters up inny air at oncet—I mean, you talk abaout thunder—ever’buddy in‘at whole goddayum moth-eaten town’at had a gun, they strapped h’it on, because they knowed sump’m big was coming down.”

Mary Cary seemed stunned by the onslaught of his words and the damning stare. Goddamn it, thought Irv, you got to cut him off! He was aware that his heart was beating much too fast.

“Our unit,” said Ziggefoos, “we come rappelling down abaout fifty feet a rope to the hotel roof fum the helicopters, and the units fum the airport, they’d already broke in’at hotel and they’d got holt those summitches, Aidid’s people, and them and us, all the units, we jes waitin’eh for the Humvees to come transport the pris’ners when all hell broke loose.”

“You know about all hell breaking loose, don’t you?” said Mary Cary. That’s it! That’s it! But she doesn’t have her usual air of command. “Hell broke loose for Randy—”

“Them dayum Somali militiamen,” said Ziggefoos, “they figured later mussa been four or five hunnert uv’em. They didn’t have no uniforms, Aidid’s militiamen didn’t. They wasn’t quartered in no billets, either. They was all over town, looking just like ever‘buddy else, living in all’em dayum shacks or jes out on the dayum street. They was a goddayum perm’nen’ly installed living ambush ready to come daown on any uv‘us soon’s we exposed ourself. They was up in trees, they was hiding behind them goddayum hootches they got all over Mogadishu—look lack humps a dirt, one aft’other—they was lots uv’em men dressed lack women with AK-47s and grenades and I don’t know whatall hidden under their skirts. They got rocket-propelled grenades and ‘em Glock automatics an’evvy other dayum thang, them summitches did, and the next thang we knowed, one a the MH-60s, h‘it’s daown, h’it’s crashed, h‘it’s daown in the street, and now we got to go out fum the hotel inny goddayum street in the broad daylat’n form a p’rim‘ter’round the MH-60, ‘cause the pilot, he’s trapped inny wreckage, and he’s still alive. We can hear him yelling: ‘I got a man dead! I got a man dead in here!’ And all of a sudden, I’m seeing guys all around me, buddies a mine, guys I’ve knowed ever since I was in the Rangers, they’s getting blowed away, falling daown dead inny streets a Mogadishu. I move out abaout twenty feet to get a bead on a bunch uv’em’at’s farring at us fum a treetop and—blam!—I’m daown on my goddayum face inny dirt. Goddayum grenade shrapnel’s hit me alla way daown my left arm, my left leg, and the left side a my bayack.”

With that, he lifted his left arm until his elbow was up beside his ear, and Irv could see clear as day on the monitor a huge scar on the back of Ziggefoos’s upper arm that ran all the way down inside his T-shirt sleeve.

“That’s jes one uv‘em,” said Ziggefoos. “I got scars lack at’air all overt the left side a my body. We was caught in a ambush, Merry Kerry, a ambush! The ambush a all ambushes! By the time we come out the hotel with them pris‘ners, they was waiting. We didn’t know it, but we was in a ambush! Them Somalis?—and all’at spear farpower?—they‘d—wale, it was lack they’d jes growed up out a the graound and sprouted like leaves on the trees, and they was jes raining that sheeut’scuse me, Merry Kerry—jes pouring it on us from evvy which way.”

On the monitor fed by the camera fixed on Mary Cary’s face, Irv could see that her lips were parted and her eyes were wide. She looked as if she’d had her breath knocked out.

“Me, I couldn’t move,” said Ziggefoos. “My check was lying in the blood that was gushing out my own arm. Jimmy”—he motioned toward Jimmy Lowe, and on the monitors Irv could see Jimmy Lowe and Flory blinking away at a furious rate—“Jimmy come out to git me, come out inny street to git me ‘thout no cover’t‘all, and—blam!—Jimmy’s daown, too. AK-47 bullet tore rat thoo his shoulder and come out his bayack, and another’n went rat thoo his thigh, and the two uv’us, we’s both uv’us lane out inny middle a the street bleeding like stuck pigs, and the air’s full a shrapnel and the wust shitchoo ever saw—’scuse me, Merry Kerry—and I swear fo’ God in heaven I could see AK-47 bullets coming at us and going overhaid. You can see’ em at a certain angle. Look lack bees coming atchoo, bees fum hell. And you wanna know how we got out a that bloody street?”

“Not particularly,” said Mary Cary, “and I don’t—”

But Ziggefoos, his narrow-set eyes ablaze, talked right over her: “This little piece a steel ratcheer—” He reached over and put his hand on Flory’s shoulder. On the monitor fixed on Flory, Irv could see the runt’s eyes blinking away. “Hunnert’n forty-five pounds soaking wet, maybe, but he’s a piece a steel, Merry Kerry, and what h’it takes, he got it ratcheer.” He tapped his chest, right over the heart, with his fist. “Flory, he awready seen two uv’us cut daown, and he come out’air inny street running and crouching and weaving, and he grabbed both uv’us by our boots—our boots—and he starts dragging us back to the p’rim’ter. Shrapnel hits him in his left fo’arm and his rat calf and his neck—his neck!—and a bullet goes thoo’is ribs and breaks two uv’em, and this little piece a steel ratcheer”—he shook Flory’s shoulder with his hand—“he don’t even stop. He keeps draggin’ us till he got us bayack inside the p’rim’ter—and you wanna know if I ever been in far fat. Jesus Christ, Merry Kerry!”

“No,” said Mary Cary, “what I want to know is—”

But no mere words in the world were going to stop the righteous Ziggy Ziggefoos now.

“We was pinned down in’at ambush fer nigh onto fo’teen hours, Merry Kerry, and we didn’t have no medics, no morphine, no nothing. By and by it’s nattime, and it’s dark, and the muzzle flashes, I mean, you can see’em flashing out of the trees, fum behind the hootches, fum evvy goddayum place you look. And the grenades—it was a ambush that wouldn’t stop. Charlie Company, they send the QRF—the Quick Reaction Force?—they send the QRF out from the airport to give us some cover, and they git ambushed, daown at the K-4 Circle. And lack you was talking abaout the Yew N? What a goddayum joke! They’s trying to git the Pakistanis and the Malaysians to move in with some armored vehicles, and come to find out they’s so yellow, them worthless bastards, they wouldn’t move out till after midnight, and the onliest reason they moved out then was’at one of our officers put the muzzle of a .357 Magnum upside the haid a one a their colonels, and he says to him, he says, ‘You’re haidin’ for the Olympic Hostel with your armored vehicles or you’re one goddayum stone-daid gook motherfucker—’scuse me, Merry Kerry.”

“Okay,” said Mary Cary, “suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that you were—”

Not a word of it reached Ziggefoos, who kept on paralyzing her and the very camera and the very monitor in the hidden compartment with his glittering eyes. “Lack I was telling you, forty uv’us fum our unit? And twenty-eight uv’us was wounded, and seven uv’us got blowed away, got killed. One a our guys got blowed away out inny street, and he didn’t have no Jimmy Lowe, he didn’t have no Flory, to come out’air’n’risk their lafs to drag’im back inside any p’rim’ter, and the Somalis, they got to’im fo’ we could git to’im, and them fucking animals—’scuse me, Merry Kerry—they pulled the uniform rat off his body, and they drug him through the streets of Mogadishu by ropes tied to his wrists, laughing and hooting like hyenas, flat out grinning like hyenas with their teeth dripping blood after the kill because they’d slaughtered a’Merican.

“And you stand’eh, and you ax me if I ever been in a far fat.’Scuse me, Merry Kerry, but you’re fulla shit.”

“Spoken like a true credit to the military,” said Mary Cary with an icy sarcasm. The insult had roused her to anger, renewed her sharp edge. Irv’s heart was hammering away as he watched it all on the monitors. “So now that you’ve got all that out of your system, perhaps you’ll be so kind as to tell me what any of it has to do with the murder of Randy Valentine.”

“Okay,” said Ziggefoos, “that’s’zackly what I was fixing to tale you. Being in a military unit’s abaout being a man, and what the unit tales you and keeps on taling you is, ‘This here’s the test of a man. A man don’t cut and run. A man risks his laf . . fer the unit.’Yeah, I reckon he risks it fer his country and fer the flag and fer the folks back home and all’at, but you talk to anybuddy’s ever been in a real far fat, a real field a far, and if he’s honest, he’s gon’ tale you what I’m taling you rat now. You risk yer laf fer the unit, and the unit’s alia time hammering away at one thang: ‘Be a man.’ H’it don’t say, ‘Be a good person, and h’it shore’s hell don’t say, ‘Be a good woman.’ I mean, you start putting women in combat, and I kin tale you sump’m jes as shore’s the sun comes up in the moaning: You kin fergit abaout having real fattin’ units. Because the unit’s got jes one thang to say to you: ‘Be a man.’ Same thang with hom’seckshuls. ‘Zackly same thang. You try to put hom’seckshuls in a fattin’ unit? You kin jest fergit abaout thayut, too. The unit caint say, ‘Be a man—more or less,’ or ‘Be a man—in most respecks,’ because the kinda ol’ boy you got to have jes ain’t gon’ set still fer that, and you kin wait a thousand yers and try to enlatin’im, and he still ain’t gon’ set still. Naow, you kin call ‘at prej’dice if you want, and maybe h’it is, but that don’t change the facks a laf a’tall. You folks, you teevee folks, you best tale ‘Merica she better look after her Jimmy Lowes and her Florys,’cause when push comes to shove, she’s gonna need ‘em, and push always comes to shove sooner or later, an’ you gon’ need somebody—you teevee folks, too—you gon’ need somebody to fat yer wars for ya, and those somebodys gon’ be and always has been your Jimmy Lowes and your Florys.”

Long before he could begin to analyze what he had just heard, a red alert had gone off in Irv’s head. This kid Ziggefoos was a Tobacco Road throwback, an unrenovated native, a true Southern primitive, a Florida redneck—a skinhead—and he was spouting total fascist bullshit—but no way could this rant be allowed on Day & Night. To witless segments of a TV audience, to the idiot millions, he might come across as a sincere young fighting man from the bosom of rural America who had risked his life in the service of his country and been grievously wounded in a far fat in the godforsaken streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. He wasn’t blinking with nervousness the way Jimmy Lowe and Flory were. He wasn’t being hysterical or defensive or evasive. He was looking Mary Cary right in the eye. There had to be something Irv could do, something in the editing—

Apparently Mary Cary sensed the same sort of thing. “That’s all very well,” she said, “but do you call assaulting a gay soldier ‘being a man’?”

“Nawwwwww, I wouldn’t call ‘at being a man,” said Ziggefoos, “and neither’d anybuddy ailse I know, but we don’ need you to tale us’at. I know you’re ver enlatined. Everbuddy you see on TV is ver enlatined abaout all’ese thangs. But I wunner how you live yer own lafs. How many hom’seckshuls you got close to you? How many a you want yer own chilrun to be hom’seckshuls? How many a you want hom’seckshuls working’longside you? You don’t mind taling the U.S. Army, you don’t mind taling a fattin’ unit, whirr a man’s job is to risk his laf, you don’t mind taling us to jep’dize the integrity a the unit, when it’s laf and death, but what abaout you—when it ain’t nothing but yer own comfort and peace a mind?”

Why, the sonofabitch! He was turning the whole thing around! He was bending the English language out of all recognizable shape, but he was managing to turn the whole thing into an attack on the so-called media elite! It was a cliché, and it was preposterous, but he was managing to do it.

“You’re forgetting one thing,” snapped Mary Cary. “Nobody in the television industry, nobody I know of, is going around murdering colleagues just because their sexual orientation is different.”

It was a good retort, made under the gun, but there was something peevish and argumentative about it. Irv’s mind spun rapidly; this whole last part, the skinhead’s disquisition on the media elite, would have to go, too. No way would it be part of the broadcast. Much of the disquisition on the fighting unit—the fattin’ unit—Christ!—and Bloody Sunday—most of that would have to go, too. Ziggefoos had turned those two skinhead thugs, Jimmy Lowe and Flory, into some kind of heroes, and that Hee Haw accent might just put it over. Of course, he couldn’t cut it all, but—ahhhh! He had an idea. He’d let the sonofabitch talk, but he’d take the camera off him. He’d use the cameras trained only on Jimmy Lowe and Flory. You’d hear Ziggefoos’s voice, but you’d see the other two with their mouths open, looking alarmed and blinking … blinking … Lots of blinking! On television the close-ups of people blinking furiously were devastating. The blinks looked like uncontrollable admissions of guilt. Besides, Jimmy Lowe looked like a brute. If I, Irv Durtscher, kept Jimmy Lowe’s animal face on the screen, blinking guiltily, while Ziggefoos spoke, no one would really be able to pay close attention to Ziggefoos’s argument. He could use Flory and his guilty blinks, too. Flory looked like the usual gang runt, willing to go along with any caper the big boys dictated. Ah!—and he had another idea. Every time Ziggefoos used gross language, every time he said sheeut or anything else of that sort, he’d bleep it. That would make him seem cruder than the actual words would. Oh, he could fix this brute’s hash, him and his Dogpatch theories about manhood and the unit and life and death. Laf’n’death—meeyahhhh—

“Maybe not,” said Ziggefoos. “Maybe you don’ go’raound murdern each other, but you do sump’m ailse. You go’sem’natin’ stuff abaout the gay lafstyle you don’ even believe yer ownsef, and don’ nobuddy ailse believe it neither, and you git everbuddy worked up, and fellers’at jes natch’ly resent hom’seckshuls, fellers’at know dayum wale it ain’t gon’ work to put’em in a fattin’ unit, they git riled to whirr they do thangs they won’t lackly to do if you people’d jes to!’ the plain truth.”

“All right,” said Mary Cary, “for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s true. Are you telling me that’s why the three of you assaulted Randy Valentine?”

“I ain’t said nothin’ lack’at,” said Ziggefoos.

“But you did!” Mary Cary said, gesturing at the television set once more. “There you were! You said it in your own words! Jimmy just spelled it all out. He said he kicked in the door. The door knocked Randy Valentine up against the wall. And then he grabbed him.”

Good girl, Mary Cary! She was steering it back to the confession made on videotape.

“Wale, you got it all wrong,” said Jimmy Lowe, giving the television set a dismissive wave and getting up and turning his back on it, as if to leave.

“‘At’s rat,” said Flory, doing the same thing, “you got it all wrong.”

“But they’re your own words,” said Mary Cary, “from your own mouths.”

“Yeah, but y’all rigged’is all up,” said Jimmy Lowe.

It was beautiful. He didn’t even look at Mary Cary when he said it. It came out as a whine, not much above a mutter. For television purposes, it was as good as an outright confession. The retreat, the pout, the refusal to look the accuser in the eye, the muffled voice—it had guilt written all over it, and by now every television viewer knew the vocabulary.

Even Ziggefoos had gotten up and turned away. All three seemed like whipped dogs. They were gravitating toward the door of the RV.

Ziggefoos looked at Mary Cary and said, “If you think we’re gonna set still and talk to Day’n’Nat abaout all’is bullsheeut, you got another think coming.”

Irv couldn’t figure out what he was talking about at first. Then it dawned on him: they didn’t even know the ambush had been taped! They never dreamed that four cameras had been trained on them ever since they stepped into the RV! They thought this was some sort of preinterview! They didn’t even know it was an actual ambush!

Oh, it was beautiful. He had dreamed that this piece would work out, and now he could see that it would.

“Nevertheless,” said Mary Cary, “we’d like to give you a chance to respond.”

Jimmy Lowe, who was at the door, wheeled about. “Me, I’d lack a chance to respond to’at ho’at brought us aout here, whirrever the hale she went.’At’s who I’d lack to respond to. Didn’ know you people hard hose to do yer dirty work.”

Hard hose? Even Irv, practiced as he was in these boys’ patois, needed an extra moment to translate: hired whores. He’d love to use that line—even though referring to Lola as a whore was a little too close to the truth-because Jimmy Lowe sounded so ominous when he said it. Suppose he became violent? Attacked Mary Cary? (Attacked Irv Durtscher!) Had he gone too far in using a topless dancer to make sure the three skinheads watched their incriminating tape? Well—editing would solve everything. Could Gordon and Roy and Ferretti stop them, if it came to that? They were big, but these three skinheads were … Rangers! Irv crouched there in his secret compartment, his headset on, his eyes pinned on the monitors, his world lit only by their lifeless cathode glow, his mind furiously double-tracking from … Irv Durtscher the crusader against … fascism! … in America … to Irv Durtscher the possessor of this one and only skin, which God had never intended to go up against young Lords of Testosterone such as he saw on these screens.

To his vast relief, as he watched the monitors, he saw the three boys file through the door and depart the RV. He saw Ferretti pull the door shut behind them and lock it. Then he saw Ferretti break into a silent laugh and look at Mary Cary. Then he saw Mary Cary heave a big sigh and shake her head, as if severely disappointed. Then he heard Ferretti, grinning and chuckling, say, “If you think we’re gonna set still and talk to Day’n’Nat abaout all’is bullsheeut …” And still Irv did not take off his headset and forsake his secret compartment and join them in the RV’s living room. Suppose they came back! Suppose they stormed back into the RV!

But then, on the monitor, he saw Mary Cary heading back toward the partition. Mustn’t let—

Quickly he took off the headset and went through the concealed door. She was right there in front of him, breathing rapidly, her eyes flashing. She looked furious.

“Mary Cary!” said Irv. “That was great! You were fabulous!”

“Oh, I blew it, Irv,” said Mary Cary. “I lost’em. I couldn’t keep’em here. And I had them! They were finally where we wanted them! They were defensive! They were getting angry!”

He stared at her. He couldn’t believe it. “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he said. “We got everything we needed.”

“That’s not true.”

“Besides, the big one, Lowe, he was getting pretty hot. I was afraid—you never know with a guy like that.”

“Oh, please,” said Mary Cary. “Those kids didn’t know whether to whistle ‘Dixie’ or go blind.”

“All the same—” Irv broke off the sentence and studied Mary Cary’s big Blond Bombshell face. She was genuinely angry. She meant it. She actually wanted to stay here and keep slugging it out.

“I know what you mean,” he said finally. “But don’t worry about it. You were great.”

In fact, he didn’t know what she meant. He couldn’t even imagine it. His hide, the mortal vessel that contained Irv Durtscher the Rousseau of the Cathode Ray, was saying, Thank God, that’s over! Or is it? Keep one ear open lest those three return. Get this vehicle packed up! Let’s get out of here—out of Hell!—off Bragg Boulevard!—back to civilization!—back to enlightenment!—back to New York!

PART FOUR

THE ONE WITH THE BALLS

Well, this was New York, all right. Walter O. Snackerman, the network’s chairman, CEO, and corporate predator in chief, lived in one of those three-story apartments on Fifth Avenue in the sixties you wouldn’t believe could exist unless you actually set foot in it the way Irv was now doing. The building, which was twelve stories high, had been built in 1916 to compete with the ostentatious mansions that lined Fifth, so that each apartment was, in effect, a containerized ostentatious mansion with an enormous entry gallery, sweeping staircases, vast rooms, views of Central Park, walls a foot thick, and a legion of doormen, porters, and elevator men dressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The library, where the great Snackerman had now assembled his guests, was twice the size of Irv’s living room, or at least his present living room, now that he had to foot the bill for both his ex-wife Laurie’s apartment and his own. This one room, this library, had more leather couches, leather easy chairs, more antique bergères and fauteuils than Irv had furniture in his whole place. The assembled hotshots had their eminent fannies nestled into all the plush upholstery, with, of course, Mary Cary—Merry Kerry Broken Berruh—sitting at the right hand of Snackerman the Omnipotent. A ceiling projector was beaming Day & Night onto the 5- by 7-foot Sony television screen that had descended with such a soft, luxurious hum from a slit in the ceiling a few minutes earlier.

Irv, clad in a shapeless blue blazer, a button-down shirt, and a so-called Pizza Grenade necktie, which looked as if a pepperoni-and-olive pizza had just exploded on his shirt front, was seated over here on the side, at the right hand of Cale Bigger. In an ordinary network setting this might have been considered a prime spot. But tonight the mighty Cale was a mere hired hand, the chief executive of the News Division and a shameless, gibbering suck-up to the ruler. Most of the seats were filled by Snackerman’s fellow titans and Big Names, such as Martin Adder, the general partner of the law firm of Crotalus, Adder, Cobran & Krate; Robin Swarm, the comedian and movie actor; Rusty Mumford, the forty-one-year-old dork, wuss, nerd, and billionaire founder of 4IntegerNet; and the nitwit Senator Marsh McInnes; plus their wives. Mary Cary’s husband, Hugh Siebert, the eye surgeon, was sitting over on the side next to the senator’s overripe second wife. The good Dr. Siebert was a long-faced, wide-jawed nullity. Tall and handsome in a certain way, Irv supposed, with a head of steel-gray hair—it looked as if he probably spent two hours each morning brushing it back just so; but a nullity, a big somber zero, for all of that. At dinner—prepared and served by Snackerman’s own house staff of five—Siebert had sat between the Present Mrs. Martin Adder and Robin Swarm’s early-twenty-ish live-in girlfriend, Jennifer Love-Robin, or whatever her name was, and he hadn’t said a word. What a nullity, what a cipher, what a fifth wheel Mary Cary had married … What a stiff neck … Why would a block of wood like that even want to live in an electric city like New York?

Actually, Irv wondered if he himself would have been invited if his name hadn’t been mentioned so much in broadcasts and the newspapers, not as much as Mary Cary’s, naturally, but a lot. The network’s PR elves had started pumping out press-screening tapes yesterday, plus transcriptions, thirty-six hours before tonight’s network showing. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina and the state attorney general of North Carolina and the judge advocate of the U.S. Army and the sheriff of Cumberland County, where the DMZ was physically located, were already making a lot of noise. They were torn between the fact that Day & Night—Irv Durtscher, producer—had violated the laws of every conceivable jurisdiction by bugging the DMZ with cameras and microphones and the fact that they had nailed three murderers dead to rights in a sensational case.

Snackerman had put together this dinner and prime-time-television viewing on the spur of the moment. The story of the Day & Night coup had been on every network-news program. It was too big for the rival networks to ignore. It had been on page 1 of The New York Times this morning. Oh, what a surge, what a mighty cresting wave of publiciy! At this very moment Day & Night lit up the television screens of not merely 50 million but maybe 100 million souls, including Walter O. Snackerman and his friends.

On Snackennan’s huge Sony screen, there was Mary Cary, in her Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket and a cream-colored turtleneck, a jersey that covered up the age lines on her neck, sitting behind a futuristic news desk.

“For three months,” she was saying, “the United States Army has insisted it could find no link whatsoever between Army personnel and the savage beating and murder of Randy Valentine, a young soldier with a distinguished service record, a member of the Army’s elite Rangers—who happened to be gay. We found more than a link. Simply by listening in on the enlisted men’s own grapevine, we located three of Randy Valentine’s fellow soldiers at Fort Bragg—and you are about to see and hear them describe in harrowing detail, before our hidden cameras, how they committed this senseless assassination—and why: for no other reason than that Randy Valentine’s sexual orientation was … different … from theirs.”

For an instant, on the screen, Mary Cary’s face seemed to shudder with emotion. Her thick lips parted, and she executed a sharp intake of air, and she leaned closer to the camera, and her blue eyes blazed. “We try to avoid being personal, but I don’t think any of us at Day & Night, and certainly not myself, have ever stared more directly … down the bloody … throat … of wanton slaughter.”

Oh, it was dynamite. Irv glanced at Snackerman and noticed the slightly giddy expression on the tycoon’s wrinkled face, beneath his odd crew-cut dome, as revealed by the room’s soft lights and the glow of the television screen. He was leaning toward Mary Cary, and then he tried to look right into her face, but she kept looking straight ahead at the screen, reluctant to sacrifice even one millisecond of Merry Kerry Broken Berruh ego infusion. Her blond hair was fluffed out in full backtease. She was wearing a conservative, very expensive-looking red Chanel-style suit (Irv didn’t know the names of any more-recent designers), but with a creamy silk blouse open low enough to offer a hint of the lusty Brokenborough breasts and a skirt hemmed high enough to put a lot of the Brokenborough legs, sheathed in shimmering, darkish but transparent pantyhose, in Snackerman’s face as she crossed and uncrossed them.

Merry Kerry Broken Berruh was not about to tell Snackerman or anybody else that every word she had just uttered and the catch in her voice and the indignant blaze in her blue eyes had been scripted for her by Irv Durtscher.

Now there was a long shot of Fort Bragg, and then there were medium shots of buildings, drill fields, obstacle courses, barracks, and packs of soldiers off-duty in the Cross Creek Mall, as Mary Cary’s voice-over explained that Fort Bragg was command central for the Army’s elite troops, the Special Operations Forces, the commandos, the Army’s best, in short—and that one of the very best of the best was a young man named Randy Valentine.

Then you see some still pictures, the kinds of photographs you find in family albums, pictures of Randy Valentine in uniform shortly after his enlistment and Randy Valentine with his parents in Massilon, Ohio, and Randy Valentine in his high-school yearbook, and then two pictures of Ranger Randy Valentine at Fort Bragg.

Suddenly the shocker: Randy Valentine’s handsome young smiling face was replaced by a close-up of that same face as it appeared in the morgue photo, a face battered, cut, swollen, and caved in on one side until it no longer looked like the face of a human being. Then came the Cumberland County Sheriffs Office police photo of the young man’s body sprawled in a slick of blood on the floor of a men’s room in a gin mill on Bragg Boulevard, as the police had found it—Mary Cary’s voice explained—on that fateful night.

And next came the flinty face of General Huddlestone blinking with nervousness as he denied any knowledge of any of his men’s involvement in the case, despite an exhaustive investigation, blah, blah, blah.

Now you could see gaudy footage of Bragg Boulevard as Mary Cary explained how “we” had soon learned that the word around Fort Bragg was that a certain three soldiers had beaten Randy Valentine to a pulp in a Bragg Boulevard dive in a drunken rage over the fact that he was gay … the sleazy neon sign of the DMZ winking away at night … the interior of the joint … bored strippers shaking their booties and their hooters up on the DMZ’s bar runway … a medium shot of Ferretti, Gordon, and Roy installing the bugging devices, while Mary Cary’s voice says, “As we were now the duly registered lessees of the DMZ, its proprietors of record for the next four weeks, we set about installing our hidden cameras and microphones” … Jimmy Lowe, Ziggy, and Flory in the booth … then Mary Cary saying, “We spent one night, two nights, three nights, an entire week—and then a second week—monitoring the conversations of Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory without hearing anything out of the ordinary for three young soldiers who liked to come to a bar and drink beer and look at strippers. But then, three days into the third week, came the break we had been waiting for. Virgil Ziggefoos brought up the subject of … gay rights . . .”

Now you’re looking straight at Ziggefoos in that booth, and he’s finishing a sentence with those very words, “gay rats.”

It occurred to Irv, as he sat here in the Snackerman containerized palace on Fifth Avenue, that the camera and the light caught Ziggefoos’s thin face in a perfect way. He looked especially lean, mean, and menacing. The kid was a redneck Dracula.

“They nebber tale you what the hale they deeud fo’ they got that way,” this clay-sod skinhead was telling 150—or was it 175?—million Americans. “You jes see some may’shated bleep”—Irv had bleeped out son of a bitch to make it sound worse than the term itself sounded … then Jimmy Lowe, with his pumped-up muscles and his brutally strong face, saying, “Bleepin’ A.”

Now you’re looking at Ziggefoos again, and he’s saying, “Oncet my old man rented us a hotel room somers up near the pier at Myrtle Beach, an’ rat next doe’s this bowadin haouse or sump’m lack’at’eh, and abaout five o’clock in the moaning?—when it’s jes starting to geeut lat?—me’n’ my brother …” At this point Ziggefoos’s voice fades under the sound of the Country Metal music in the background, and Mary Cary’s voice comes up. You can see Ziggefoos’s lips moving and his hands gesturing, but what you hear is Mary Cary paraphrasing his description of how his father had imbued him with a hatred of gays one morning in a hotel in Myrtle Beach.

And now Ziggefoos’s voice comes back up, and you hear him say, “And the ol’ man, he’s smoking, I mean, he’s flat out on far by now, he’s so mad, and he yales out, ‘Hey, you faggots! I’m gonna caount to ten, and if you ain’t off’n’at roof, you best be growing some wangs, ‘cause they’s gonna be a load a 12-gauge budshot haidin’ up yo’ bleep!’”

Now, via another hidden camera, we see Jimmy Lowe and Flory grinning and nodding their approval of this call for violent action in response to public displays of gay closeness, and we hear Mary Cary say:

“Thus was the lesson passed on from one generation to another, and the lesson was: You do not tolerate homosexuality … You exterminate the gay life, if you can … You do so violently, if necessary … Lessons like that, taught in a hotel room one murky dawn in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and, no doubt, many other places in the years that followed, led these boys”—and now we see all three of the young Rangers grinning and drinking beer—“directly, as if impelled by Destiny, to the moment in which they … slaughtered … Randy Valentine because he dared … to display gay affection where they could see it.”

As he watched the screen there in Snackerman’s regal library, Irv’s heart quickened, and his spirits soared. The crux of the entire show was about to begin. The entire nation was about to hear the incriminating words of Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory. He cut a glance at Snackerman, at Cale Bigger, at Mary Cary. Their faces were lit up by the glare of the great Sony television screen. This show was going to have the highest rating of any television newsmagazine show of the decade; of all time, maybe. Naturally, Snackerman, Cale Bigger, and everybody else of any consequence at the network had already seen a tape of the show. But even for them, and certainly for Irv, there was nothing quite like watching a blockbuster such as this as it aired, nothing quite like feeling the ineffable thrum of the tens of millions of other nervous systems of people all over this country and Canada who would be resonating to it at this very moment. Snackerman, needless to say, cared nothing whatsoever about social justice, about gay-bashing, about Day & Night’s artistry, or about the entire News Division, except that it was only the existence of the News Division that enabled him to give his speech about “The People’s Right to Know” at conventions, conferences, annual meetings, etc., etc., etc. After all, the network’s top-rated show, a sitcom called Smoke’at Mother, didn’t do much to lend the great man dignity and gravitas. But not even a cynical, money-loving predator like Snackerman, this shark, this corporate eating machine, could resist the communal, tachycardiac heartbeats of the millions that vibrated in your bones when you watched a triumph like this as it aired. Yes, even he, Snackerman, would, on the morrow, with genuine enthusiasm, look into the faces of other American television watchers and say, “Did you see Day & Night last night?” and “Remember the part where …” Oh, you could talk all you wanted to about cable TV and the Internet and all the things that were supposedly going to supplant network television, but Irv knew, if others didn’t, that the network had a unique magic to it, the magic of the Jungian communal heartbeat … teased into tachycardia by the brilliance of the great producers of the new art form, the Irv Durtschers. True, Snackerman was listing heavily toward Mary Cary as if he just naturally assumed that all this magical tribal consciousness had been created by her … But if the whole thing ended up in court, as Irv prayed it would, even Snackerman would realize the truth at last.

And now, on the screen, Jimmy Lowe is into the evil heart of the matter. “Soon’s I walked inair and I looked unner that tallit doe and I seen that guy’s knees on the flow, and I hud these two guys going, ‘Unnnnnh, unnnnnh, unnnnnh’—I mean, I knew’zackly what h’it was. And when I walked overt the tallit and stood up on tippytoe and looked daown over the doe and seen it was a feller fum my own goddayum cump’ny—”

And now Jimmy Lowe’s voice sank below the Country Metal throb of the DMZ, and Mary Cary’s voice-over rose up, and once more she paraphrased, just the way Irv himself had written it:

“Now it was Jimmy Lowe who was witnessing—by eavesdropping—a display of gay affection. Randy Valentine was in that locked toilet booth, embracing another man—the two of them driven there by the public’s and, more severely, the military’s sanctions against amorous gestures in public by persons of the same sex.”

Then Mary Cary’s voice disappears, and Jimmy Lowe’s rises up again, as he says:

“I mean, I saw some kinda rayud, and ‘at was when I kicked inny doe. Broke’at little metal tab rat off’n it.”

“Summitch mussa wunner what the hale hit him,” says Ziggefoos.

“Whole goddayum doe hit him, I reckon,” says Jimmy Lowe. “That summitch, he was lane upside the wall when I grabbed him.”

Now the Bombshell face of Mary Cary fills the screen, and she says with the sincerity that only a truly gifted video performer can summon up: “As you have just seen … in unmistakable terms, these three young men, these three soldiers of the United States Army, these three members of an elite corps, the Rangers, revealed the motive for the crime they had committed: homophobia, pure and simple. They revealed the fact that the killing began with an unprovoked, blindsided assault. And they revealed the fact there exists an as-yet-unidentified witness to this senseless murder … the young man who was with Randy Valentine when the assault began …”

Once more Mary Cary stares into the camera without uttering a sound. Another eternity seems to elapse. Those blue eyes blaze as they have never blazed before. And then she says:

“We urge that young man … to come forward, to make himself known. We urge anyone who may know his identity to come forward. This crime was too monstrous … for anyone to allow society’s prejudice against the gay life or current military law and custom regarding the gay life to muffle … the ringing call for justice … in this case.”

Now, all at once, you’re back in the DMZ with Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory, and they’re grinning again and drinking beer again and chuckling and leering up toward what the viewer must figure is the bar and the topless dancers, as if nothing has happened, as if they don’t have a worry in the world. The same old Country Metal music is banging and sloshing away. And then you hear Mary Cary’s voice:

“James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory had made it clear, in their own words, as caught by our microphones and cameras, precisely how the murder of Randy Valentine had occurred. But here at Day & Night we were determined to show them what you have just seen and get their response. So we enlisted the services of a well-known Bragg Boulevard exotic dancer, Lola Thong”—now you see Lola, walking through a parking lot—“to invite the three of them back to a High Mojave recreational vehicle we had parked out back of the club. She was the one person we could find, on short notice, whose invitation … to view their own videotaped confession … the three soldiers just might accept. That night we sent Lola Thong into the DMZ … to make the trio a proposition. As you will see, it was not an entirely candid proposition, but it seemed to us that, under the circumstances, her less than full disclosure was justified …”

You see Lola at the booth inside the DMZ. “You like veedeos?”

“What kinda videos?” asks Jimmy Lowe.

“Unusual veedeos,” says Lola with a full-blown, star-quality leer.

And now they’re all sliding out of the booth and heading for the parking lot.

Suddenly, as Irv sat there slumped way down in an antique bergère in Snackerman’s vast library, his heart began racing—even as it had raced that night when he knew the three young thugs were leaving the bar and heading for the High Mojave and the immediate proximity of his mortal hide.

Now you see a medium-long shot of the High Mojave in the parking lot. From inside the RV’s living room, you see the door handle revolve, and then the door opens and in come the raucous traffic sounds and deep electric-bass strums of Bragg Boulevard, and in comes Lola, and you’re staring straight down her dress at her prodigious breasts, and behind her come Jimmy Lowe and Ziggefoos and Flory … with their T-shirts, their muscles, their tight jeans, their skinned heads …

When Lola slips the videocassette into the VCR, Mary Cary’s voice takes over: “Lola had promised James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory some ‘unusual videos,’ and that was what she proceeded to show them. All that she had left out was just how unusual they would turn out to be.”

You see the three rednecks sitting on the couch and staring at the TV, whose own screen has that scrolling blur you get when you try to film television images. Irv had cut out all of Lola’s striptease act, and now you’re aware that Randy Valentine’s murderers are watching the very tape on which they themselves disclose how they committed the heinous crime, and Mary Cary says: “Sitting on that couch, in that High Mojave, they watched everything … that you have just seen.”

The hidden cameras focus on each of the three, and each one is blinking furiously. Jimmy Lowe’s mouth is hanging open; Ziggefoos smacks him on the side of his leg and says, “I ‘on know, Jimmy, I’on lack’is bleep.”

And Jimmy Lowe turns on Lola and says, “Look here, bleep it, Lola, I wanna know what the bleep’s going on, and I wanna know rat now.”

And Lola keeps saying, “Eenteractive teevee, eenteractive teevee.”

And Jimmy Lowe says, “You kin innerack with my sweet bleep, Lola. I ax you a simple question.”

And Lola says, “You don’ believe me? Eenteractive teevee. Eenteractive teevee, Jeemy! I’m gon’ show you, Jeemy, right now! There! You have a special vees’tor!”

And all at once the three young thugs are blinking, dumbstruck and agog over quite something else:

“Hello, Jimmy. I’m Mary Cary Brokenborough.”

I’m Merry

Kerry

Broken

Berruh.

You see the three youths’ shock and incredulity at the sudden appearance in their midst, in the living room of the RV out back of a fifthrate topless bar on Bragg Boulevard, of the best-known female face in the United States. You see them with their mouths open and their eyes blinking and those damning blinks in the unspoken but universally known language of Newsmagazine Sting TV say: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Then you see the three of them, led by Ziggefoos, trying to turn the ambush into a joke. They start urging Mary Cary to “Gitcher tail up, gal” and join them inside the DMZ for some “vodka twilats.” Ziggefoos is the cool, cocksure, self-possessed one throughout this exchange, and so Irv had used the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory while Ziggefoos spoke. You hear Ziggefoos’s impudent, mocking words, but you see Jimmy Lowe’s and Flory’s blinking eyes saying, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” The rest was easy—if you knew this business the way he, Irv, did. He simply eliminated Ziggefoos’s Neanderthal rant, his self-pitying brute’s disquisition on manhood and “the unit,” and the rest of his utterly irrelevant bleat. Instead, we see Mary Cary, at the top of her form, grilling him relentlessly.

Ziggefoos says, “Whatchoo know abaout it?”

And Mary Cary says, “I know what I’ve just heard you say—you and Jimmy and Flory—in your own words.” Then, to Jimmy Lowe: “If it wasn’t for the reason you said, why did you attack Randy Valentine?”

Blinking furiously, looking furiously guilty, Jimmy Lowe says, “All’s I did-”

Ziggefoos cuts him off. “Jes shut up, Jimmy!”

Then Irv had shifted to the camera on Jimmy Lowe’s face. A damning, guilty silence, that face! With much blinking! Guilty! The brute looks as guilty on that screen as if he’s just made a full and open confession. Artistry!—

He had allowed Ziggefoos to say, “Didn’ none a us have nothing to do with Randy Valentine. Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him.”

But then he had cut to the cameras trained on Jimmy Lowe and Flory—and not merely to capture their frightened, bugged-out, blinking faces, which said, without a word, “We do, too, know what happened to Randy Valentine! We kaled’at quair!”

At that point, thanks to the simple magic of multiple cameras, it was easy for Irv to jump all the way from Ziggefoos saying, “Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him,” to a beaten Jimmy Lowe saying, “Wale, you got it all wrong,” and giving the television set a weak, guiltsapped, dismissive wave and getting up and turning his back.

“’At’s rat,” says Flory, also getting up and retreating, “you got it all wrong.”

“But they’re your own words,” says Mary Cary, “from your own mouths.”

“Yeah, but y’all rigged’is all up,” says Jimmy Lowe, now in a full and stricken retreat to the door.

Now Ziggefoos joins Jimmy and Flory, and he looks like a whipped dog, too. It was as if the entire ambush had taken all of ninety seconds. Overwhelmed by the evidence and the sternness of the Goddess of Television, the three thugs had mounted one brief show of loutish bravado, then buckled cravenly, the logorrheic Ziggefoos included, put their tails between their legs and slunk off like the worthless mutts they were. And so what if after the ambush, Irv had learned that in fact Jimmy Lowe and Flory had been decorated for their actions outside the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu on Bloody Sunday? What did that have to do with their actions as homophobic goons and murderers inside a gin mill one bloody night on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville, North Carolina?

And now, on the screen, back in New York, is the victor, Mary Cary Brokenborough, at her futuristic desk at network command central. She begins her peroration, which she had retaped—and Irv had written—earher this very day:

“Already, various legal jurisdictions, federal, state, local, and military, have informed Day & Night that in broadcasting what you have just seen, we have violated laws concerning the wire interception of private conversations.” She pauses, and those fabulous blue eyes blaze. “Perhaps we have … Perhaps we have … Although we have been assured otherwise by our own legal counsel from the very beginning. Yet whatever the legal technicalities of the matter may be, we know very well—and we think that most of the citizens of our country know very well—that we have obeyed a far higher and more important law … and the most vital of American traditions, the tradition that values, above all else, Fairness … and Justice … regardless of what legislators and prosecutors, who come and go, might care to say …”

Prosecutors!

He, Irv, had written the entire thing for his Big Blond mouthpiece, but suddenly—prosecutors!

The implications of the word hit him, and a horrible wave of fear went rolling through his central nervous system, and his heart began drumming away at an alarming rate.

What have I done? Jail! They’ll send me to jail—with relish! They won’t touch her. Oh no, not her, not Merry Kerry Broken Berruh! They’ll treat me like the accountant, like the accountant who goes to jail when the Big Celebrity cheats on her income taxes! They’ll subpoena all the videotapes! They’ll see what I did! Bugged the DMZ—violated the laws of at least four jurisdictions—five years on each count—the rest of my woulda-been working life! The porno video I concocted with Lola Thong—that cheap little hooker thrusting the gorged red lips of her labia majora right into the camera—entrapment!—they’ll pin it on me! Every insidious editing trick I played with the tapes—they’ll see it all and reveal it all! We’re going to make you, Irv, an example of everything Americans instinctively hate about the arrogance of the media and the reptilian perfidy of entrapment TV! Yes, you, Irv Durtscher—you coldblooded, slippery, slimy little snake, you—all fangs and no balls!

Now Irv’s heart had gone into not only tachycardia but a terrifying series of palpitations, and he slumped way down in the bergèreI’m having a heart attack! I’m—

—A beeper went off. Irv looked over. It was Dr. Siebert, Mary Cary’s husband, sitting over there on the far side by Senator McInnes’s wife. He pulled a little cell phone out of his jacket pocket. You could hear him speaking sotto voce.

Then he got up and strode rapidly over to where Snackerman and Mary Cary were sitting. Mary Cary’s image was still up on the screen. She was completing her stirring peroration—Irv’s peroration—about residual fascism in America. Nevertheless, Hugh Siebert said to Snackerman:

“Excuse me. I’m sorry.” And then he leaned right across Snackerman and said to his wife, “I’m sorry, honey. There’s been an accident on the FDR Drive. An eleven-year-old girl—corneal-scleral laceration with effusion of the vitreous humor.”

Then he bolted from the room. This big, square-jawed, graythatched, pompous piece of lumber—he literally ran out of the room and toward the elevator. Everybody, Snackerman, Rusty Mumford, Martin Adder, every last one of them, wives, Jennifer Love-Robin—all, that is, except for Mary Cary—they all craned their noggins away from the Sony TV screen and stopped listening to his, Irv’s, stirring prose pouring from the mouth of Her Smugness—and stared at the galloping surgeon. A medical emergency! A brave doctor! Fearless savior!

Irritably, Snackerman turned toward Mary Cary and said, “What’d he say?”

Mary Cary never for a moment took her eyes off herself on the screen as she replied, “An eleven-year-old girl’s had her eye sliced practically in two, and the insides are gushing out.”

That did it. Irv sat bolt upright. His heart was still hammering away, but no longer with fear. Now—clean, old-fashioned hate, in normal sinus rhythm. That son of a bitch! Him and his Dr. Daring stage whisper! Corneal-scleral laceration—meeeeeyah! Probably beeped himself and then faked the call! A pathetic failure at the dinner table who couldn’t even pick up, much less carry, his end of the conversation—and so now he has to try to steal the scene by playing Emergency Medical Hero during the very climax of his own wife’s triumph—as orchestrated by me, Irv Durtscher! Why, that ice-sculptured son—of—a—bitch!

“ … what we know it to be, in our hearts: a wake-up call for America.”

It was over. The last of Irv’s words had passed through the lips of the blond and Tiffany-blue goddess on the huge screen.

Now they were on their feet, Snackerman and all his assembled hotshots. They had all turned toward Mary Cary, and they were grinning and applauding. Mary Cary herself stood up, a modest, almost misty little smile on her famous face, as if the whole subject was too serious for her to break into the big donkey-toothed bray of triumph she’d obviously like to cut loose with.

Snackerman grabbed her around the shoulders and grinned down at her and hugged her, and the whole mob started applauding all over again. Even Cale Bigger, who knew exactly how these shows were put together, was over there in the Mary Cary/Snackerman huddle, giving them both his best lifetime-lackey’s shit-eating grin. Irv found himself standing alone. He was damned if he was going to walk the subservient eight feet it would take for him to join in the après-triumph pile-on.

Presently Cale walked away from the chattering, laughing, exulting hive and came over to Irv and stuck out his hand and said, “Great job, Irv! Great job!” Then he smiled and cast his eyes down and shook his big florid head and then looked up at Irv and said, “Jesus Christ. That girl’s got some balls, hunh?”

Prev Next