Sounding the Waters by James Glickman

Author:James Glickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-10-17T22:14:18+00:00

10

For a few days, things seem to go reasonably well for Bobby. All is quiet even at the special prosecutor’s office. The press is restrained, and some editorialists are openly sympathetic about Bobby’s “mental health treatments.”

But then some peculiar things begin to happen. When Bobby appears for a fund-raiser at a large hotel in the capital, a hundred and fifty pizzas from three pizza parlors are ordered to be delivered to the ballroom where a one-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner is already being catered. There is even someone at an internal administrative office phone of the hotel who has confirmed the order. When they find which phone, they discover the office is dark, locked, and empty. Bobby is left with the choice of paying nearly a thousand dollars for undesired pizzas or injuring and alienating the owner-managers of the pizza parlors. The campaign pays two-thirds of the cost and gets Cindy on the phone to area shelters and food banks to see if they can use the food. An hour later, after giving pizza away to everyone she can think of, there are still eighty-four pizzas left. Finally, a pig farmer from outside of town comes in with his truck and picks up the whole lot.

Though there are two more similar incidents, in the end this sort of thing is an expensive nuisance. Worse, though, are the wild and phony diatribes against Wheatley written on a piece of Bobby’s campaign stationery and photocopied to be put under windshield wipers at area grocery stores and mall parking lots. This makes it appear Bobby is running an uncontrolled and scurrilous campaign. He has to counter-leaflet to explain that it is someone else’s dirty trick, and an already unhappy and turned-off electorate grows unhappier and more turned off, something that will ultimately serve to lower the voter turnout and thereby favor Wheatley. (Wheatley’s core support comes from this year’s angriest voters, and he knows nothing is going to keep them from the polls this November.)

And then there are the well-organized demonstrations that pop up at sites that Bobby has not even himself settled on visiting until the morning of the day they occur. When there are picketers targeting him outside the board of directors’ noontime meeting of a farm implements manufacturing consortium he has been privately invited to attend only two hours before, he knows he has some serious trouble.

There is a leak, or leaks, somewhere high up in his campaign. How else can the opposition know what he is going to do almost before he knows it himself?

I am reviewing the papers I am going to file this morning contesting Tom Vinster’s last will and testament. He died of Alzheimer’s at the relatively young age of sixty-four, but not before he left everything to his second wife and completely cut out his three children and five grandchildren. Margie, my secretary, buzzes to tell me that Gail Berenger is on the line. For a long moment I wonder about the health of my own hippocampus, the name Gail Berenger spearing up not a single faint association out of the mud of my memory.

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