The Snake Oil Wars Read online

  “Poor darling. You won’t have a moment for your music. Take your nap.”

  4

  Children of the century

  TOPSIDE AROUSED BY BOMBING!

  CONSERVATIVES SHAKEN. FUNDYS CLOSE RANKS

  BEHIND CANDOR

  CANDOR INDICTED. WIFE VOWS

  TO STAND BY HIM.

  Lance’s television was state of the heart, working on simple thought control. He willed it now to replay: there he was between two marshalls, leaving his arraignment, Letti hovering behind. As Lance passed out of shot, Letti turned to eyeball the TSTV cameras.

  Destiny’s second call. He was a hero again. In the coming trial, win or lose, he would be ranked with the martyrs. Lance watched the clip again, then willed the TV to run his funeral in Kansas. No matter how often he viewed the flag-draped casket, Letti brave beside it, Lance felt a lump in his throat and a deep satisfaction in the splendid closure to an American life not studded with prominence until its last, sufficing days.

  He and Letti had been part of a Christian Reconstructionist delegation to Washington to realign the Constitution with Biblical precepts. Nothing in Lance’s brief life had ever been so important. Obviously a nation constituted under God could not tolerate abortion, must reinstitute (Protestant) school prayer, must replace the teaching of evolution with creation science. The inerrancy of the Bible was urgently needed to replace ambiguous secular law, The Constitution was no longer adequate, if it ever had been; the ship of state was foundering. Lance admired the neatness of the phrase, especially since he thought it up himself.

  “A tight ship for a leaky barge,” he said at the Mayflower Hotel, pleased that even the suspiciously left-ish Washington Post quoted him.

  His last, utterly fine days. Their delegation descending on the Capital, setting up in the Mayflower. The dinner rally in the big convention room with coverage by the major networks – and sure enough, when they checked the ten o’clock news, there he was at the rostrum.

  Lance settled back and reran the rally clip. A shot from below as he stood behind the rostrum in his last one-for-the-gipper plea to the faithful before they met with their Representatives in the House and Senate. The drama of the scene always thrilled Lance: himself, visibly tired but flushed with sincerity, running on energy, the hair falling boyishly over his forehead —

  “We’re building a tight ship in place of a leaky barge! The Constitution no longer reflects the word of God, and where it doesn’t, it has to GO!”

  Cheers.

  They were cheering him for the first time since he’d won his eagle scout badge in Neosho Falls. That’s all he wanted, not money. He lost time and money from his civil service job working for the church. Lost out on a promotion for taking so much time oft, though Lance never grudged the effort. He wanted to give God back to the country. To the people. Just that, every now and then, Lance Candor wanted to stand in the warm light of destiny.

  And it came to pass that God and destiny beamed on him.

  Lance relaxed deeper into the French Provincial chair and plunked his feet up on the leather hassock before remembering that the hassock, like the large porcelain dogs flanking the never-lit fireplace, was Letti’s pride. He put his feet down quickly. Now he called up the news film of his last day, last moments of life on Connecticut Avenue in the Capitol. The President stepped out of his limousine, smiling genially in the sunlight, waving to the crowd. The camera panned the press of spectators, passing over Lance and Letti.

  “There we are, honey,” Letti brayed from the living room arch, “Big’s life’n twice as purty”

  “Wait.” Lance leaned forward, eager, “Here it comes.”

  A shot rang out, strangely flat on the soundtrack. The camera jerked back and forth across the crowd, then found the assassin, a reedy young man with mad eyes, brandishing a small automatic.

  “Looky there,” Letti hooted. “There’s that li’l shitass sunvabetch! What’s his name anyhow?”

  “Herman J. Detweiler.”

  In the passion play of Lance’s own immortality, Detweiler was a mere extra. Below Stairs, brooding over whisky for a lost love, Herman saw it differently: twenty-two, unemployed, and his girl friend had called him a useless wimp. Since he didn’t like the President anyway, he could erase two bad impressions with one shot.

  “This is the good part.” Letti rattled the ice in her vodka and Coke. “Do it slow”

  Fate unfroze and moved forward in slow motion. The gun came up in Herman’s hand.

  An alert Secret Service guard reached for his own weapon, but not fast enough, not near fast enough and —

  — then Lance Candor, slim interceptor, dove out of the crowd to shield the President with his own body. CLOSE-UP: Lance, mouth open and twisted with agony as the bullet thudded into him, crumpling slowly, frame by frame, to die at the President’s feet. Accompanied in less than a second by the hapless Herman when the Secret Service blew him all over the sidewalk. His girlfriend wept demurely for the evening news, carefully underscored the fact that they hadn’t dated much, mumbled about Herm’s problems, and married a CPA. Below Stairs, Herman took up with a waitress who thought him dangerous and exciting.

  About Herman’s plot resolution, Lance knew or cared nothing; his own was marching onscreen with cadenced tread to glory. Interior of a white-walled church in Wichita; Lance’s funeral, six honorary pall bearers from Fort Myer stalwart over the casket. Cut to the cemetery and the interment – and Letti again looking directly into the camera. “You always do that.”

  “Do what? Honest, honey, I just thought someone said something to me and I turned around to see who was it.”

  The thirty-inch screen filled now with a Time cover depicting Lance with lean cheeks and indomitable chin against a backdrop of the American flag.

  LANCE CANDOR, AMERICAN

  The end was worth an unhappy married life, Lately when Letti had stoned herself to sleep with vodka and Valium, Lance added a Mantovani soundtrack while his favorite movie queen undulated into shot, wickedly knowing and intent, to ravage him in delightful slow motion. Neither death nor glory had improved his sex life, Lance was as deprived in death as in life.

  “Still a martyr,” he sighed cryptically. “They’ll be coming soon.”

  “Don’t you fret,” Letti soothed, straightening a picture over the plastic-covered couch, “House looks real nice and so will I, just give me a minute and make me a fresh drink while you’re resting.”

  “I’ll miss you so much,” Lance yearned. “I mean why can’t we go upstairs and —”

  Letti headed him off at the pass with the skill of long practice. “I would but I got one of those headaches.”

  “You always have a headache. Even dead you have headaches?”

  “Just I’m delicate and too much of a lady to complain” Letti guttered a plump hand across her brow. “if they’re coming, you don’t want your wife looking tacky.”

  The burden of tack was a cross Letti bore beyond death. Her house was done only nominally in French Provincial, adulterated by a kind of Reader’s Digest Awful. The print she straightened was a Keen moppet, large-eyed and lachrymose. Her pride, the porcelain hearth dogs, further diluted any purity of style. There were heart-shaped red pillows on her bed, a needlepoint sampler above the veneered headboard proclaiming: GOD IS LOVE.

  God perhaps, but not Letti Candor.

  Letti was on record as having learned her Bible at her daddy’s knee. She learned more on his knee when her mother was absent. Daddy alternated between furtive molestations and bouts of guilt in Old Testament doses. He dramatized his redemptive mode by not shaving, which made him look more unkempt than patriarchal. Letti liked Lance all through school and during their chaste engagement, but always equated sex with Daddy fumbling under her clothes and making her uncomfortable. She never linked on him, but neither forgot nor forgave. Until her wedding day, Letti avoided sex on principle. Five hours after the ceremony, she found she disapproved because she didn’t like it – es
pecially with Lance, whose lovemaking was more spastic than effective.

  Not that he got all that much practice. In the moment before he leaped in the path of the bullet, he was fantasizing about the likely young woman on Detweiler’s right, nearest his gun arm – and died as he lived, unslaked. Through his years with Letti he pondered with no answer how a woman with shrieking relish and total recall for every dirty joke ever heard had so little interest in the real thing. In private Letti had a mouth like a Texas prison guard bullhorning through a riot. In public she wore a sunhat, prim white gloves, and got more Southern than usual. Lance always ascribed to inconsolable grief the fact that Letti died a week after he did; actually she dipped deeper than usual into the vodka and forgot how many sleeping pills she’d taken. There were no newsreels of her funeral, but she kept some of the flowers.

  To be fair, Letti endured her own disabusements. Expecting to meet God immediately on death, she was puzzled by Barion and put off by his Yankee accent, flatly refused to accept Yeshua as her Jesus —” I mean, Bernice, he’s so Jewy-lookin’” — and felt Saint Paul was not the sort she’d want to be seen with in nice places like Topeka or Wichita. She settled down in a pretty house with Lance. If Topside was not Heaven, there was still recompense. With imagination the only limit, Letti could “do” her house continually and at will. Her fancy ran barefoot through the Hereafter. She had a whole “suit” of rooms, one for dressing, one for lounging, a few extra for redecorating when inspiration struck. Bathrooms virtually expired in their deodorized, pink and blue, his-and-hers daintiness. In the (separate) chintz-choked bedrooms, blankets and spreads tucked tight enough for a Marine D. I. were forbidden Lance to nap on until he retired at night. Someone might come and see them messy.

  Letti swept into her dressing room now as to a council on national crisis. There would sure as hell be news cameras with the officers come to get her Lance. The hero’s lady would not be caught looking tacky. By iron rule, Letti never emerged from her dressing room without doing her morning makeup, nor from her house, God forbid, without doing it over. With a generous blob of cold cream, she now obliterated the morning’s creation and began from scratch. Letti’s scratch was unremarkable as a measured mile of Texas Panhandle. Daumier might have found it interesting. Letti Candor did not. As with her furniture, so her face; cover it pretty.

  On her satin-skirted dressing table, her makeup awaited like munitions set out for battle, but Letti was a nearsighted cannoneer with the cosmetic touch of a stonemason. Her pallid coloring soon vanished under several layers of Ever After Tan #2, while cheekbones appeared in startling white to be dry-sponged into the overall illusion. Eyes might be the windows of the soul, but to Letti a bare window was an admission of neglect. No casement uncurtained, no eye unadorned. When finished, with huge DuPont lashes and dramatic liner for accent, Letti’s eyes, marooned in the Sahara of her pancake, looked like two roaches crawling through a sandstorm. She had little regard for the difference between diffuse daylight and the mellow lights that bathed her TV idols. Indoors or out, Letti looked as if she’d been done by an apprentice mortician working in shadow.

  Lance came into the dressing room to cup her breasts and nestle his cheek against her hair, his voice husky with need. “You are the prettiest thing in the world.”

  Letti wriggled with annoyance. “Lance, honey, you’re gonna mess me up. Leave me be now, y’hear?”

  He sat backward on the bench beside her, disconsolate and doom-ridden. “Just that they’ll be coming soon, and I thought —” He tried to hug her. Letti writhed him off again.

  “Now, Lance —”

  “Aw please, Letti.”

  “Ali told you I have a headache. It’s my period again.”

  “You can’t get periods here.”

  Letti pouted into the mirror. “I got sympathetic pains.”

  “That’s what I get when you’re pregnant, which you never got. You mean phantom pains.”

  “Well, that’s what I got.”

  Lance got up and wandered morosely to the chinz-curtained window. “You know how long it’s been?”

  Letti didn’t, concentrating on her lip gloss, “Can’t be but a couple weeks.”

  “Couple – Letti, it was last December.”

  “Well, that was for Christmas. You were so cute in your li’l red blazer. What you looking so sad about?”

  “They’re here. English soldiers again. You’d think at least they’d send Americans.”

  “Shit, I ain’t even dressed.” Letti flew between dressers, drawers and closet, snatching at clothes. The rap on the front door sounded H-hour. “Lay-once! Zip me up, goddammit.”

  Lance complied with a sigh. “I don’t want to be unfaithful to you, Letti.”

  “What?” The idea froze Letti in her tracks. Beneath layers of gloss, her kewpie-doll mouth quivered. “Lance Candor, that is the most un-Christian thing a husband ever said.” She never wanted to sleep with him but refused to think of anyone else trying. Taking him away, leaving her alone. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, honey?”

  Lance had enough dramatic instinct to answer her with no more than an eloquent glance. Another rap on the door. He started downstairs.

  “Shee-it, I hate to go out half done, feel so tacky” In the mirror Letti primped her brassy blond hair with nervous fingers, added her largest earrings and sunhat; snatched up a pair of white gloves – and descended like Gloria Swanson to her close-up.

  5

  Song of Scheherazade

  “... Cathy Cataton for TSTV news outside the Candor home where Lance Candor is about to be taken into custody for the bombing of Coyul’s office, His forthcoming trial will be seen by many as more a referendum on Coyul’s power than Candor’s action. As you can see —”

  On Coyul’s screen, the TSTV camera panned over a crowd of several hundred, a forest of placards raised high:

  FREE LANCE CANDOR

  WE LOVE LANCE

  DOWN WITH COYUL

  CHRISTIANS WANT GOD, NOT EXPERIMENTS

  GOD FIRED SATAN ONCE. LET’S DO IT AGAIN

  “— the emotional support for Candor is out in force and far more vocal than the opposition in what promises to be the Topside issue of the century. And here comes Lance Candor with his wife.”

  Observing the tragic Lance onscreen, Coyul wondered when humans would come up with a new script. He might have shrugged off the whole sad scene but for the job to be done and a sense of responsibility inconvenient as a hangnail, Barion started from ego but stayed to try with these creatures. He could do no less.

  “Purji, stop gyrating and watch this, Saint Lance is about to be ingenuous for his public.”

  Learning Earth customs and language with the speed of an ambitious computer, Purji had just discovered the Charleston – airborne, long legs flying in syncopation. She vanished mid-kick and reappeared in his lap to nibble at his earlobe, “Take me, lover. Ravage me.”

  “Peace, you insatiable force of nature. Watch this.”

  “I don’t want to watch a newsreel, The cartoons are better written.”

  Flanked by two massive guards, Lance looked painfully vulnerable and sincere. He swallowed, pushed the hair back from his forehead, “I – I just want to say that if I have to go to hell for what I’ve done, I’d do it again, Ten times over.”

  The crowd screamed their support, placards bobbing furiously. Now a shot of Letti: Purji became more interested, “Is that a tragic mask she’s wearing?”

  “Only her taste,” Coyul said.

  Letti – brave but fighting back tears: “Ali will stand by my husband in his hour of trial. And God will come to our aid.”

  “Visually fascinating,” Purji mused, “So barbaric – AGHH!” She went indigo with shock as the moving camera presented barbarism beyond anything from the dark night of the Keljian stone age. Over several hundred million years and countless galaxies, Purji had never seen anything like the new apparition raging on the screen. In living color, WE LOVE LANCE placard on
high over electric pink hair, the skinny young woman looked like a Bakshi creation done in one of Ralph’s darkest moments. Her knobby-kneed, slightly bowed legs, encased in skintight leopard pants, teetered on platform shoes. Around her waist was draped a decorative brass cartridge belt.

  “This is unique.” Purji froze the classic image. The whatever-it-was petrified in mid-swing, placard raised like a battle ax ready to descend in mayhem. “Coyul, that is a female?”

  He chuckled with recognition, “Scheherazade Ginsberg, a seething relic of the late sixties. Very radical chic.”

  Purji unfroze the action. History jerked forward with Scheherazade Ginsberg, tigress of revolution —

  “Let him go, you fucking establishment PIG!”

  Ms, Ginsberg swung her sign like a power hitter. WE LOVE LANCE broke over the head of a resentful British sergeant, now edited to WE LOVE. Scheherazade glared into the camera, challenging the home viewers of Topside.

  “Lance is meaningful!” she screamed as police dragged her away, “He is now.”

  A dungeon: dark, damp stone walls, a drain in the middle of the floor from which rose noxious odors. Now and then gray rats ventured from crevices to slither obscenely along the wall and disappear again. Lance’s cot was no more than a block of stones built out from the wall, with a crude straw mattress and one thin, filthy blanket. Water dripped somewhere with a monotonous echo.

  Lance hunched on the cot, blanket shawled about his resolute shoulders. He might have imagined a more comfortable incarceration, but this grim cell seemed more fitting. This was the true martyr’s lot; this was how they imprisoned Robert Ryan when he played John the Baptist. Lance just wished he could have gotten Letti into bed before they took him away.

  He had never cheated on Letti. Only the Lord knew how often he’d been tempted, considering her baking aversion to sex. Maybe God would give him a sympathetic discount on his secret fantasies, since they remained in the realm of dream. The very gates of hell could not prevail against a virtuous man.