Up and Down (30 page)

I hit Send and then went back to Google. I wanted to learn more about Eugene Crank now that it appeared he was a bit of a troublemaker. I started with a Google Image search, being careful to run his name in quotation marks. I didn’t want every photo of every Eugene on the planet, just those of Eugene Crank. Because of his rather unusual name, I figured it wouldn’t take me long. I was right. There were a couple of group shots from a recent Texas law-enforcement conference, and a headshot of him in full uniform from the Wilkers Sheriff’s Office website. There was a family shot of him and his wife from a few years ago on what must be his church’s website. And then I found a photo of
a baseball team, the players looking ecstatic with a large trophy on the field in front of them. The caption listed the players, including Eugene, under the heading “Mississippi High School State Champions.” That rang a bell. I scanned the players’ list in the caption again, and then confirmed it by looking at the player standing right next to Eugene Crank. Unbelievable audacity.

On a whim, I snagged a screen capture of the team photo and emailed it to Amanda with the Subject line:
Just between you and me
.

I checked my BlackBerry just before turning out my light and saw that Sarah Nesbitt had responded.

I awoke at 6:00 the following morning, our second full day in Houston. I grabbed my iPad while I was still horizontal and did a Google News search on “Landon Percival” for the previous twenty-four hours. Twelve pages of news hits came back from as far away as Melbourne and Moscow. Every single one of the stories recounted the now infamous lesbian question. About half the stories included quotations from others critical of Phillip Lundrigan for asking in the first place. Spokespersons for gay and lesbian rights organizations in Canada and the U.S. were all over the story. But at least a third of the stories featured vitriol from the anti-gay movement and hard-core right-wing Christian groups. In several stories I was pleased to see quotations supporting Landon from my former minister. Even though the story was less than twenty-four hours old, many newspapers ran editorials favouring or denouncing Landon’s status as a citizen astronaut. As one might expect, there was a certain ideological geography to the editorials.
Starting in Canada, they were mostly, though not exclusively, supportive of Landon. Major dailies like the
Globe and Mail
, the
Toronto Star
, the
Vancouver Sun
, and many others were clearly in Landon’s corner. But a few of our own right-leaning papers and columnists used Landon as a platform to rail against same-sex marriage. There was still support for us in the U.S., but it declined as you travelled south. This was not the kind of coverage we’d wanted for the public launch of the program.

I picked up the phone and dialled, even though it was only just past 7:00.

“Kelly Bradstreet.”

“Good morning, Kelly. It’s David Stewart.”

“Well, good morning,” she replied, sounding unusually chipper. “I assume you’ve scanned the coverage. It was almost exactly what I expected, after yesterday.”

“That’s why I’m calling. It looks like it’s running about 50–50 so far. But there are regional pockets of strong opposition. Look, I know this isn’t what either of us were hoping for coming out of the newser, but I think it will recede or even improve as the training unfolds and people get to know more about Landon and her story.”

“David, I love her story. The lesbian thing caught us all off-guard but she handled it beautifully. And she’s such a contrast to Captain America Eugene. I like the tension that’s being created between them. We need that to sustain interest. Yesterday took us a bit far afield from the
NASA
story, but it’s only day two. I know we’ll get our message out there over the next several weeks
and definitely during the mission itself. I just hope Landon makes it through the training.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say that,” I replied. “I was worried you’d want to talk about easing her out.”

“Well, Crawford Blake would like that, based on his four voicemails to me this morning, but I’m not inclined to do anything for the time being. Let’s just try to keep the reporters focused on the training in the next few days.”

It looked like Landon would survive a few more days at least.

My BlackBerry buzzed ten minutes later. I glanced at the screen. Yep.

“Hi, Crawford.”

“Nice job. You’ve just hijacked the entire news cycle! Have a look at the coverage. Just look at it.
NASA
is barely mentioned, neither is the space shuttle. It’s wall-to-wall Landon fucking Percival. She is not the client!
NASA
is paying our fees, and you’d better remember that.”

“Crawford, I understand that yesterday didn’t exactly roll out the way we thought it would. But I’ve just been on the phone with Kelly, and she’s okay with what went down. Landon turned out to be our big media play on day one, but we’ve got them hooked now. So when this initial flurry dies down, we can then shift the story back to
NASA
.”

“She’s our media hook, is she? She’s old! She’s a pagan, for Christ’s sake, and she’s a goddamned dyke to boot. Congratulations, you’ve scored the trifecta. Tell me she’s a commie and
my day will be complete. And Eugene got nothing out of yesterday. Sweet fuck-all!”

“I thought Eugene did fine. But he wasn’t very nice to Landon.”

“Nice? We’re lucky Gene will even be in the same room with her. He was very tolerant.”

By this time, I had nearly bitten a hole through my tongue. But I was about at my limit. I hate when people use the word “tolerant” to describe how enlightened they are about gays and lesbians. It would never be acceptable to say that someone is “tolerant” of women, or blacks, or Roman Catholics. But somehow it’s still okay to be “tolerant” of a lesbian. What’s to “tolerate”? I could feel my blood pressure rising but managed to reply in a calm, measured tone.

“I thought it was interesting that Eugene’s high school baseball exploits in Mississippi were never mentioned in his bio or in Kelly’s introduction yesterday. I gather he was quite the star in his day.”

Silence. For what must have been about ten seconds, he said nothing. Ten seconds of dead air on the phone is an eternity.

“Don’t you fuck with me, Stewart,” he hissed. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

Then he hung up. He was right. I really didn’t know what I was getting into, but I just couldn’t listen to him any more.

I opened my door and on the floor was a photocopied media coverage package with
NASA
Clips emblazoned across the cover
page. There were copies in front of almost every door up and down the corridor. Next to me, there was no clipping package in front of Landon’s door. I flipped through the clips and saw a few more articles than I’d seen online, but nothing that changed the pattern.

At 7:45 a.m. there was light tap on my door. When I opened it, a smiling Landon greeted me. She must not have received the clipping package.

“Breakfast beckons,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I closed the door behind me and trotted to catch up.

“Um, how did you sleep?” I asked.

“Heavy and deep.”

“Did you watch the news last night, or this morning?”

“Nope. I was in my own little world last night,” she said.

Good. Perhaps she was oblivious to the media storm she had triggered.

“And this morning, I was too busy reading through the newspaper clippings conveniently left on my doorstep to turn on the tube.”

Great.

“Oh, so you’ve seen all the coverage. Are you all right?” I asked.

“David, calm yourself, I’m fine. After that toad’s question yesterday, I knew exactly what would be in the paper this morning. I hope that by tomorrow or the next day, it will have run its course and we can get back to why we’re really here.”

“You certainly seem relaxed about it all,” I said.

“Well, I’d rather it had not happened at all, but it was perhaps inevitable. And better for it to be a distraction now, at the very start, than for it to break two days before launch. Right? It’s common sense.”

“This is what I do for a living, Landon, and common sense doesn’t always prevail when it comes to the media. The beast needs to be fed and I think we might have a difficult week ahead of us. I doubt it’ll clear up quite as quickly as we might like.”

“As long as they don’t throw me out, I can live with what’s coming.”

After breakfast, Landon and Eugene went into a three-hour briefing on the content and schedule of the training program. The rest of the crew, including Commander Hainsworth, Martine Juneau, and the shuttle pilot, Jefferson Rand, were there, too. After I escorted Landon to the classroom in a different building on the
JSC
campus, I headed back to my room to get ready for our first
TK
status call. Every second day we had scheduled a teleconference so I could update Diane, Amanda, Crawford, and the rest of the
D.C.
team. As I walked back outside along a paved path, I could hear faint shouting, even chanting, in the distance. I followed the noise, and then picked up my pace as it grew louder. I started my own chanting in my head: “Please let it not be a well-organized anti-Landon
rally. Please let it not be a well-organized anti-Landon rally.”

When I reached the main security gate of the Johnson Space Center, my prayers were answered … technically. It was not a well-organized anti-Landon rally at all. It was a massive, very badly organized anti-Landon riot. I made a mental note to aim higher when praying.

I stood on the safe side of the fence, hoping not to see five satellite trucks from mainstream media outlets. Right again. There were seven. And it looked as if at least half of them were beaming live reports from the scene, the on-the-spot reporters trying to get close, but not too close, to the two hundred or so very angry and animated demonstrators. Because they were so rally-challenged, three or four different chants were going on at one time, so no one could really make out the message. Although the placards were reasonably clear.

I watched a group of demonstrators handing out to media what appeared to be Landon Percival apple voodoo dolls, dressed in miniature orange coveralls. They attached a line of them to the chain-link fence. It was creepy. It was also uncanny just how much the apple doll’s face looked like Landon’s.

By listening carefully, I could discern at least one chant delivered in that old familiar cadence: “Hey hey, ho, ho, lesbo Landon’s got to go!”