All That Follows (18 page)

“And you’re supposed to be against the war.”

“Leon, now I’m warnin’ you. Don’t cheapen it. Don’t get confusin’ this or that, because the way I feel, all dandered up, I might be tempted to take a poke at you myself, just in the name of fair play. And parity.”

“What kind of father are you going to make?”

“He’ll be the perfect dad,” Nadia says, interrupting finally, her hands still resting on his full and springy head of hair. “No need to make it personal.”

Maxie stands, stretches out, and takes hold of Leonard’s shoulder, a fifty-fifty grip, loose enough to be mistaken as friendly contact, firm enough—after it is held for far too long—to hurt a little. “Best keep it calm, Leon. Don’t say another word.”

“Maxie, this is all I want to say. You went too far. You frighten me. You’re hurting me. You really hurt that guy.”

“Yes, I did. Oh, boy, I hurt him bad.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s deserved. We walked all over him.”

“You walked all over him. I didn’t touch the man.”

“Well, yes indeedy-deed. Comrade Leon walks away unscathed.”

Leonard pushes Maxie’s hands away and turns toward his room. “I’m not unscathed. I’m hurt.” He points at the cuts and bruises on his face and flexes his shoulders. “I’m hurt real bad,” he adds. “By
both
of you.”

“Real bad? You’ve no idea what real bad means. The fat guy knows.”

“Enough.”
Eee-nuff!

“See, that’s it, you’re still runnin’ off … Some two-trick circus pony you turned out to be, either runnin’ off or down on your knees—”

“Leave him. Let him go. You guys are ugly drunk. Let’s fix your hair before the evening’s completely spoiled and wasted.” Nadia pushes Maxie back onto his seat and holds up her scissors, clicking the blades. “Sit still and stop talking, unless you want to bleed,” she warns. She lifts the first tress and pulls it clear of his scalp, starting at his widow’s peak. “You’re sure of this?”

“Just cut.”

“Farewell, the lunatic fringe.”

“Amen.”

When Leonard comes back an hour later—he has to show he isn’t in a sulk—his face and nostrils wiped clean of blood, his bruises dressed, his trousers changed, Maxie has become a different man. His black mustache and sparse and adolescent beard have gone. Nadia’s cut has almost reached the top of his head. All the hair around is harvested and cleared. It’s only stubble that remains, black bristles on white, unweathered skin, and two inches of Mohican, standing straight and vulnerable as wheat. He’s nothing but an exclamation mark. A crest. A military plume. But already Maxie is virtually unrecognizable. The familiar piled hair made him unmistakable. Perhaps that’s why so many people greet him on the street. They recognize the hair and think they know the man. The loss of hair has aged and brutalized him—criminalized him, in fact. His lips and nose seem huge. His eyebrows—till she trims them too—hang heavy on his face, like bats. And once the Mohican is gone and Nadia is rubbing Maxie’s scalp with the same tea tree oil that Leonard has rubbed into his bruises, the original Sniper Without Bullets has disappeared entirely. Nadia holds up the mirror. “You clean up good,” she says, though she does not sound impressed; regretful, rather.

“He looks like a skinhead,” suggests Leonard. “Or like a serviceman.”

“What kind of serviceman, Leon? Am I fixin’ TV sets or swimmin’ pools? Or am I fixin’ for Uncle Sam?”

“We’re speaking different languages. In England, servicemen are … army personnel. They don’t fix anything. That’s for sure. You look like a marine.”

“No bull. Just look at me. Back to the bone. Ain’t that a head of hair?”

“Looks more like rawhide than a head of hair.” Leonard disapproves of what he sees, of what the haircut has confirmed.

“Yessir, I’m all spit-shined and polished up. So hats on, ladies. Let’s go greet the president.”

11

IT IS A SAPPHIRE
, late October day, warm enough for shorts or hiking pants, but Leonard does his best to dress conservatively, a Bush supporter, though to dress like a Republican in Texas does not necessarily mean the light jacket, trousers, and button-down shirt that he has chosen from his few British clothes. It could mean the cowhide boots and the pair of Wranglers cinched by a buckle bigger than your brain that the president favors for himself at weekends. Or even the full black and unlikely business suit that Maxie has, without a word of explanation for its provenance, taken from his closet. His court suit, possibly. He looks less like a skinhead now, and less like a serviceman. His scalp stubble is only thirteen hours old but has already darkened. Today he seems most like an excitable Baptist pastor heading for a prayer breakfast or gospel brunch, with, at worst, a nerdish streak. No one can see how muscular he is, or wildly menacing, or know for sure what he has tucked under his shirt.

“My, don’t you look the part?” Nadia says, picking off bits of fluff and thread from the back and shoulders of his suit.

Maxie is surprised and elated by the sight of himself, it seems. He turns and twists in front of the mirror, changing his expression. “Well, look at me. I’m Tony Perkins for the day. So welcome to the Bates Motel. Your shower’s ready, Mr. President.” He glimpses Leonard’s tense, unsmiling, damaged face in the mirror. The men have not yet exchanged a civil word this morning. The fug of last night’s fights and squabbles has not cleared. Besides, Leonard is too nervous to be civil—and he is hoping to engineer a final row, something upsetting enough for him to take offense and run from Austin in a righteous huff, flying out while Bush is flying in.

“Buck up, Leon,” Maxie says eventually. “That’s yesterday. Today is gonna be your fifteen minutes of fame. We’re on active service now. Be big about it, man. Step up to the plate.” He pulls Leonard toward the mirror, gently, playfully. “Be sweet.” For a moment the pair pose, an arm round each other at the waist. Leonard knows that he has been defeated. There’s no escape. Then Nadia, still in her pajamas, comes up behind and rests her chin where their two shoulders form a cleft. “See what I see, right there?” asks Maxie, not entirely without irony. He jabs his finger at the mirror. “I see the Three Musketeers. Ain’t we the Bushbashers today? Ain’t we the warriors?”

“You don’t look good,” Nadia says, on tiptoe at their backs. Leonard can feel a soft breast pushed against his shoulder blade. She smells of warm cotton, a more provocative odor than any bottled scent.

“You don’t like the cut, lady?” Maxie rubs a hand across his scalp. “Feels like baby seal to me.”

“You’ll do just fine. No, I mean Leon Trotsky here.” Nadia pulls Leonard away from the mirror and sits him on a high-backed kitchen chair in the bright light by the window. “You look too weird like that. They’ll never let you through. I’m going to have to fix that face.”

“Boy, yes,” says Maxie. “A little field surgery. Hide those gaping wounds.”

Nadia stands between her one-time British boyfriend’s legs and dabs off the remnants of dried blood on his lips and jaw with a Q-tip. She cleans him up with arnica gel. “Bit shiny now,” she says, holding Leonard’s chin and turning his face into the light. “What we need”—she rummages inside her cosmetics bag—“is this. This is going to minimize the shine. This is going to make you matte. Grab hold.” She drops the moisturizer into Leonard’s hand and leans into him.

“Jesus, have you seen what’s in this stuff?” he asks, squinting at the small print on the tube and reading out the listed ingredients. “Palm oil, propylene glycol, cyclomethicone, stearic acid, hydroxylated milk glycerides, talc …” But Leonard is only trying to distract himself. The closeness of Nadia’s breasts to his eyes and face, that half-buttoned pajama top, that bedclothes smell (is it the smell of pregnancy?), the pressure of her knees on his when she opens her legs to crouch and peer at his cuts and bruises, have made him start to sweat, and worse. He wants to reach out, lay his hand across her abdomen, and bless the child. He wants to touch her everywhere. That’s why he’s come to Austin, isn’t it? Not to be caught up in some madcap plot. “Cetyl alcohol,” he reads, while Maxie stares across the room at him, shaking his head. “Sodium magnesium silicate, tocopheryl acetate …” He’s trapped. There’ll be no flying out. He no longer wants to find excuses, actually. What he most wants, for Nadia’s sake, is to be her bold comrade. “Titanium dioxide, paraffin—”

“Enough already,” Maxie says. “Paraffin schmaraffin. Who gives a shit? Let’s go. Come on, Snipers, hit the street.”

AmBush does not work out quite as Maxie hoped. The three participants set off at different times and follow separate routes downtown. Leonard is the first to leave. Following instructions, he walks along Seventh as far as the interstate and then cuts across the Red River district toward the southeast corner of the Capitol and its encircling lawns. He couldn’t get lost even if he tried. The sunset-red granite building with its commanding dome and its zinc-skinned goddess of liberty presiding over Austin is almost never out of view.

Leonard is carrying his passport, six ten-dollar bills, his ticket to the Laura Bush address, a Book Festival program, and spare keys to their apartment. “Penny plain is the order of the day,” was Nadia’s advice. She wrote her dissertation on Mondavi’s resistance handbook
Infiltration and Identity
and so knows the tested protocols of blending in, including the recommended contents of their pockets. Avoid too little and too much, is the rule; carry nothing to raise alarm, nothing to reveal your plans should you be stopped and frisked. She dropped an apple in Leonard’s pocket as he left the loft, “for authenticity, while you’re in line. Apples are the most innocent of fruit, Mondavi says.”

“Go tell it on the mountain. Let my apple go! Lermontov says.” Maxie is in a strangely expansive and skittish mood, now that AmBush draws close.

Leonard is eating his apple as he crosses San Jacinto Street. He does his best to keep to an unsuspicious pace as he nears the southern entrance to the Capitol and the already bustling festival tents in the streets beyond. He can hear some poet reading too close to the microphone, and there is laughter from a second tent and then applause. The adjacent streets have been closed to traffic by the Austin city police. Their cruisers are parked across the roadway. Only official vehicles can pass. Leonard is expecting to be challenged and half hoping to be turned away. He will have failed, but he will have done his best, or seemed to, anyway. To Nadia. Yet no one pays attention to him or any other pedestrians, even the ones who have not dressed like Republicans. The city police are entirely relaxed, just taking it easy with their thumbs in their belts and their backs against their cars. Why not? The day is mild. The president might wave at them.

It is not until Leonard has walked through the southern entrance gate that he sees anything of note: a family of five, three girls and their parents, dressed up Sunday smart and waving the Stars and Stripes together with a photo portrait of a uniformed young man. His name and dates are written underneath:
Pvt. Alexander M. Sharp
, 1987–2006. Leonard calculates the young man’s age and makes the appropriate face. It is a dreadful war, he reminds himself. It’s in this family’s interests that he’s here, on active service, though they might not appreciate it now. One of the girls has a T-shirt inscribed “Lubbock Loves Laura.” The father has a Bible in his hand, which he waves at Leonard and anyone that passes. “Support
our
troops,” he says. “God bless America.” And Leonard offers him and his family “Good afternoon” in return.

Although there is more than an hour yet before the scheduled arrival of the president and his wife, there is already another protest group gathering among the rose beds, lawns, and monuments on the west side of the Capitol and loosely circled by state troopers in their Boy Scout uniforms. This is the “silent fucking vigil” that Maxie has talked about, organized by the Texas antiwar coalition. Their message is laid out on a banner on the grass in front of them in letters three feet high and made from photographs of all the soldiers who have died in Iraq so far—Alexander M. Sharp included, presumably—and some Iraqi civilians:
TROOPS. OUT. NOW. BRING OUR BOYS HOME
. There are about thirty demonstrators, but the numbers are growing by the minute. They are working hard to show restraint and dignity, facing forward in two rows like veteran soldiers, doing their best not to fidget, talk, or seem amused or even angry when a younger, tattooed man, not one of them, calls out repeatedly and manically, from behind their backs, “Bring our girls home. Save one for me.”

Leonard could step up and join the vigil here and now. This is more his type of protest than the one he’s caught up in. He could happily stand in the second row, his bruised face well hidden, staying quiet and grave, until the president goes home again. These are people he can be at ease among. He understands their etiquette. Not one looks less than peaceable. He’s tempted to stroll across and offer them his smiles, more sincere smiles than the ones he gave to the family from Lubbock, until he is invited to take part. But he has to toe the AmBush line—and that means staying distant and discreet, not drawing any attention to himself or seeming to be anything other than a man who’s keen to hear the first lady talk about children, libraries, and reading. He turns away and kills time by walking round the building, looking at the monuments, “all the fucking brass and marble,” as Maxie has described it. “Monuments to whom?” Leonard asked. And Maxie replied, much to his own amusement, “Well, it sure ain’t Willie Nelson. And it sure ain’t Reckless Kelly.” What Leonard finds instead are tributes to a Texas that is both historical and cinematic: the heroes of the Alamo, Texas pioneer women, the Spanish War veterans (though not the Spanish War that Leonard cares about), the Boy Scouts of America, the Pearl Harbor survivors, the fighting men of the 36th Infantry Division, the heroes of WWI. Its lyric is vainglorious, “God and Texas, Victory or Death” rather than “Come lie with me, my Texas rose.”

By the time Leonard has examined most of the many monuments and numbed himself by reading the legends and dedications, as he had tried to numb himself that morning with the moisturizer ingredients, the atmosphere in the Capitol grounds has modified. The vigil has been separated from its banner and pushed back fifty yards toward Lavaca Street and the festival tents, where the protesters are required to be dignified, disapproving, and silent out of sight of the Capitol’s main entrance. The save-a-girl-for-me campaigner, after being frisked for drugs, is “taking a walk,” as advised. A platoon of state troopers has created a security corridor through which the ticket holders for the Bush event are required to walk. Secret Service men, in suits not dissimilar from Maxie’s but wearing sunglasses, ear sets, and chest holsters, stand on the Capitol steps watching everything and everyone. Security at last. Leonard’s throat goes tight and dry in seconds. He wishes he had kept the apple now. Eating it would give him something innocent to do while he takes stock, while he identifies his options. He needs a coping strategy.