The Shadow Cabinet by W. T. Tyler Read Free Book Online

drumming lightly against the dormer window drew his mind away and he finally put the book aside on the night table, turned out the light, and crawled under the covers. He lay in the darkness, unable to sleep, the rain bringing back the memory of Chuck Larabee’s ribald face, the obscenity of his ambition, and then Nick Straus’s forlorn figure at The Players, the damp spongy feet pushed out in front of him, the shoes that didn’t belong on Nick’s feet at all. How could you tell a man you’d known for fifteen years that his socks didn’t match or that his feet were a stranger’s, not his feet at all, the trouser cuffs damp and a little ragged, like the mop man’s in an all-night cafeteria in Times Square or over on East Baltimore Street.
    What kind of city was it that would abandon a man of his gifts, his insights, and then let him rot away in the basement of the Pentagon? What kind of city was it that bred people like Charles Larabee?
    Betsy’s weight, lowered to the twin bed next to his, stirred him. “Are you asleep?” she asked.
    He was angry then, but drew in a slow, deep, silent breath to contain it. He smelled cold cream and hand lotion. “Just about.”
    â€œYou don’t sound like it.” She lay back on the bed, pulling up the covers. She’d hurt her back playing tennis in August. An inch of plywood lay under her own thin mattress. “What were you thinking about? Your bad manners with Mr. Larabee?”
    â€œI didn’t do the talking, he did.”
    â€œThen what were you thinking about?”
    â€œTonight at The Players, what we were talking about.”
    â€œWhat was that? Tell me.”
    Released by fatigue, his anger returned, more satisfying this time. “How we’re going to bury the Moral Majority.” She didn’t answer. “After that, we’re going after Reagan.”
    Her sigh was audible. “It was only fifty dollars,” she reminded him softly. “If you’d stop talking about it, maybe I’d consider giving the money back. But you’d have to promise not ever to talk about it again. Would you promise?”
    â€œNo,” he said.
    He’d bet her fifty dollars the previous autumn that the Reagan Republicans wouldn’t win the election. They’d just returned from an evening with her music society friends, listening to a Handel opera, and the hour was late as they’d discussed it driving home; but even after they were upstairs, getting ready for bed, she still hadn’t understood why he was so convinced that Reagan would never be President.
    â€œIt’s simple,” he’d told her finally, logic and patience exhausted. “You remember a song called ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’? You remember it? It was in everyone’s head for a few months during the war. Everyone was singing or humming it, on the radio or jukebox everyplace you went, a stupid song that didn’t make any goddamn sense to anyone, but caught on anyway. They still sang it, whistled it, hummed it. There was Europe in rubble, all bombed out, the South Pacific a bloody mess, my mother’s trying to get me to take piano lessons, and a hundred million Americans are walking around in their zoot suits humming this idiot tune that didn’t have a goddamned thing to say about anything.”
    She didn’t remember the song.
    â€œHow about ‘Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy’? You remember that one, don’t you? The same thing.”
    She’d wondered instead how he could remember all those idiotic songs.
    â€œBecause they’re idiotic, that’s why! Because they don’t make any goddamn sense at all, just like Reagan—just a stupid little pop tune that’s dancing around in everyone’s head all of a sudden. That’s all he is, just two weeks on the old Hit Parade . He’s not an answer to anything. He comes out of the same consumer plastic