Hardscrabble Road (15 page)

Of all the vulgarities in a vulgar age, Neil thought that the “women’s movement” was the very worst. It made ugly what had
the right to be beautiful, and harsh what had the right to be gentle. It wasn’t that he begrudged women the right to be lawyers
if they wanted to be. It was that he begrudged the loss of grace in the world that had come about when women began to shriek.
Maybe he just begrudged the loss of Katherine, who had not only
walked out on his life and let him arrange the divorce in any way he wanted to, without so much as a backward glance at the
property settlements, but had never bothered to send him a Christmas card in all the years since. He sent Christmas cards
to her, when he knew where she was, which was less often than he liked. He kept the photograph album of their wedding that
she had left behind.

Right now, he kept only the orange juice. The rest of the food—toast, coffee, ginger preserve, butter—he put away or threw
away. None of it appealed to him. It was one thing to say he didn’t like to get into the office before nine. It was another
thing to waltz into the office after nine. Even Grayson Barden didn’t do that. The fact was, he’d been sitting here at this
table for an hour and a half, thinking not about work, not about getting ready to get going, not about Drew Harrigan and his
problems, but about Kate, and the fact of Kate was making it impossible for him to move. He should have married again. He
should have abandoned his principles and found some nice Philadelphia debutante who wanted nothing more than to spend her
days arranging charity functions and playing tennis at a country club, and married her, and done what all partners do, put
up with it. If it had felt too sordid, he wouldn’t have had to have a mistress on the side. He just couldn’t seem to make
himself care, one way or the other, about the sort of woman who would be interested in marrying him. The divorcées and widows
his own age were the least attractive of all. They were not only not-Kate, they had hardened in their tastes and attitudes.
They already knew all they wanted to know.

It was already eight forty-five, and if he hadn’t wanted to see Kate again he should have told someone at the firm what the
situation was, and asked to be taken off Drew Harrigan’s account. He should have done that in any case, because he truly hated
Drew Harrigan and everything he stood for, and the attitude was plain on his face every time the man’s name was mentioned.
The problem was, the rest of the firm felt the same way. Even the secretaries were Old Philadelphia enough to consider Mr.
Harrigan something of an embarrassment to the name of Barden, Savage & Deal.

It was eight forty-five and he had to get out of the house. He had to get his car, or find a cab, and go into the office.
He had to sit behind his desk and behave as if nothing important was happening, because nothing important was. Kate would
not be embarrassed to see him, and he knew it. She would not be intimidated by the idea of negotiating with her ex-husband,
and he knew that too. She would not be shy about letting everybody in the room know that they had a long shared past that
she didn’t look back on with fondness. She would not let any of this get in the way of the work she was supposed to do, and
that was the final straw. Neil would be sitting there barely able to get any work
done at all, and Kate would be on the other side of the conference table—she had insisted on either a conference room or a
meeting in her own office at the Justice Project, which nobody at the firm was going to agree to—as cool and focused as if
she were in her own living room with nobody else in sight.

He was sweating, and the meeting wasn’t until noon. He had the whole morning to get through without throwing up or doubling
over in pain from the cramps that kept spasming through him like labor pains. He had no idea why it was this bad, or why Beethoven
did nothing to cure it, as Beethoven always had in the past. He just wished it was all over with, and he could go back to
worrying about Drew Harrigan’s escrow arrangements, which mattered far more than Sherman Markey at this point, and would matter
far more in the future. It would be different if there was any possibility that Drew Harrigan had killed him, but there was
no evidence that the homeless old man was dead, and Drew was more securely locked up than he would have been in jail.

Not for the first time, Neil Elliot Savage thought that he might really like to see Drew Harrigan in jail.

T
he nine o’clock show
was just about to go on, and not for the first time, Marla Hildebrande felt guilty. She felt especially guilty because it
was clear that Frank Sheehy didn’t feel guilty at all.

“It isn’t like we murdered the man,” Frank said, stretched out on the couch in her office again like he was beached there.
“We don’t even know he’s dead. He’s just disappeared.”

“For two weeks in weather like this,” Marla said. “You know as well as I do he must have frozen to death somewhere. And we
were wishing for it.”

“We weren’t wishing for it. We were just hoping for something to come up that would make it politically feasible for the DA
to go for a pretrial diversion program or probation or whatever the hell would get Drew back in front of a mike as soon as
possible. And here we are.”

“Assuming he isn’t found. And I’m hoping he’ll be found.”

“So am I, because it doesn’t matter if he’s found,” Frank said. “The disappearing act is going to make him look bad, which
will make Drew look better. Really. That’s all we need. We don’t need anybody dead. We don’t need apocalypse and destruction.
We just need Drew.”

Marla sighed. She switched on the speaker next to her on the desk. They were keeping Drew’s big opening. It was still The
Drew Harrigan Show, after all. The hokey announcer’s voice came on, riding a crest of horn music. “It’s Drew Harrigan, the
man with his heart in the right place, coming to you from Philadelphia.” She shut the speaker off.

“After this, you don’t want to know.”

“That bad?”

“I told you. None of them are bad. They’re just bland. And they lack fire. Have you given any thought whatsoever to what I
said to you about finding other talent? Even if Drew comes back from rehab and we don’t have to worry about another hiatus,
we still need a more diversified list. We can’t go on like this letting one person hold us hostage.”

“So, go looking. Didn’t I tell you you could go looking?”

“Yes,” Marla said. She hesitated a little and opened the long center drawer of her desk. “I have gone looking. Or listening,
as the case may be. I’ve been listening to satellite pickup of little stations all over the West.”

“Why the West?”

“Because you need the accent,” Marla said. “God forbid anybody should sound like they came from New York or New England. It’s
guaranteed to brand them as an intellectual snob. But I don’t like the Southern ones. It’s overkill.”

“And under brains,” Frank said. “Why is it that a Southern accent always makes people sound twenty IQ points stupider than
anybody else?”

“You don’t think Ray Dean Ballard sounds twenty IQ points stupider than anybody else.”

“It’s not the same kind of Southern accent. Did you know his name isn’t really Ray Dean?”

“What did he change it from, Joe Bob?”

“Aldous.”

“Like Huxley.”

“It’s his mother’s maiden name.” “Whatever,” Marla said. She was fiddling with the tape. It was a very good tape, even though
she’d made it off the satellite hookup, which made everything sound like a cat pissing. She got it into the tape machine and
hit the rewind button, because she’d listened to it last night, and it was obvious from the way the thing looked that she’d
forgotten to rewind it. She always forgot to rewind things. She wondered why that was.

“I like this one,” she said, “not only because I like the guy, but because I like the content. I know politics sells, but
I think we’re coming to the end of that on a lot of levels. There’s too much rancor, too much anger.”

“I thought you said that was the point. That our listeners are angry.”

“They are. But they’re angry about a lot of things, not just ‘liberals.’ And they’ve got a couple of dozen angry white guy
talk radio hosts to listen to.”

“So, this is what, a shock jock?”

“No. We’ve got FCC problems,” Marla said. “The FCC is suddenly forcing all the ‘obscenity’ off the air. It’s enough to make
you crazy. Also, I don’t
really get the shock jock thing. I don’t have an ear for it. No, this is something else. His name is Mike Barbarossa, and
he’s from Seattle.”

“Uh-oh,” Frank said. “Seattle, the home of Starbucks, computer programmers, and the lowest citizen church attendance of any
part of the country.”

“Wanna move?”

“Let me hear the tape,” Frank said.

Marla heard the hard chunk that meant the tape had stopped rewinding and pushed the play button. At first there was nothing
but fuzz. Marla thought she needed to learn how to burn a CD off the satellite feed. It might be clearer. Then there was some
tinny music that sounded as if it were being run through yet another not very good tape machine.

“Ignore the technical level,” Marla said. “This is a small station, they probably don’t have the money or expertise. We could
fix that.”

The tinny music stopped and a mildly twangy voice said, “It’s five o’clock in the city of Seattle and this is Mike Barbarossa
coming to you with sanity, common sense, and an uncorrupted crap detector. We ought to apply the crap detector to the commercials,
but we never do. Give a listen to this message from our sponsors and I’ll be right back, with the day’s first winner in the
Just How Stupid Can You Get contest.”

Frank Sheehy frowned. “We couldn’t let him do that to the commercials, could we?”

“Sure we could. People know the commercials are propaganda. They know they’re crap. And the sponsors don’t give a damn as
long as they have the captive audience, which they will have, in the car with nowhere to hide. Seriously. Listen to this.”

“Okay,” Mike Barbarossa said. “We’re back from that fantasy land where a new car can get you a love life and a new cake recipe
can bring you closer to God. It’s time for Mike’s How Stupid Can You Get roundup, the way we start the day with news that
makes you think the human race should have been extinct long ago. Let’s start with Mr. Tim Mayfield of Marden, Oklahoma, who
cut off his own penis in order to blame the ‘crime’ on a woman who came home with him from a bar and then refused to sleep
with him. After he’d cut his penis off and thrown it across the parking lot of the trailer park where he lived, he called
the police and blamed the whole thing on Shirley, resulting in a manhunt lasting three days—maybe I should say womanhunt for
our feminist listeners—that left police more and more suspicious that something was wrong with Mr. Mayfield’s story. Mayfield
finally confessed, and he’s being charged with making a false crime report. It turns out that it’s not illegal to cut off
your own penis in Oklahoma.”

“What the hell?” Frank said.

Marla was ecstatic. “Don’t you love it? It’s like the Darwin Awards for radio. Sometimes he does stuff from the Darwin Awards,
and then he gives them credit. Oh, and plugs their books and their Web site—www.darwinawards.com.”

“The whole show is this?”

“No.” Marla turned the tape off for a moment. “This is the opening bit, where he collects stories of people being stupid from
all over the country and then reads them. There’s a section later in the show where he takes phone calls, but that’s not the
best part. At the end of the show, every once in a while, probably when he has material, he does stories on local charlatans.
Psychics. Alternative medicine scams. Faith healers.”

“He goes after religion?”

“Calm down.” Marla said. “It’s not as bad as you think. He doesn’t go after regular religion, churches, things like that.
He goes after these guys who get people to come and pay them money so they can pray over them and declare them well, except
the people never are well. You know what I mean.”

“I know that shows like that get absolutely no money and have absolutely no audience,” Frank said. “For Christ’s sake, Marla,
what are you thinking? That group up in New York, what’s their names, CSICOP, those people, they’ve been trying to get into
radio or television for years, and it’s always bombed flat. People like their illusions. They don’t want to hear that their
favorite psychic is an alcoholic fraud who’s using their money to take vacations in Barbados.”

“Listen,” Marla said. “The problem with CSICOP’s stuff is that it’s always too serious. I like CSICOP a lot, I really do,
but they’re always dead serious and full of references to I don’t know what, scientific protocols and things. Most people
get bored with that stuff and won’t follow it, and a lot of people can’t follow it. But that isn’t what Mike Barbarossa does.
What he really is is debunking for the same audience that listens to Drew Harrigan, well, some of them, plus a lot of guys
in the same situation who can’t stand Harrigan. The guys we’ve never been able to reach before. What Mike Barbarossa does
is to make those guys feel smarter than the idiots around them and smarter than the kind of PhD that falls for this sort of
nonsense. It’s perfect. And Mike Barbarossa is perfect. Listen to that voice.”

Marla pushed the play button again.

Mike Barbarossa said, “Now we come to the case of Mr. James Burns, of Alamo, Michigan, where they have one of those little
liberal arts colleges you can never figure out why anybody goes to them. Mr. Burns was trying to fix his truck one night.
He’d been hearing a niggling little noise, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. So what Mr. Burns did was to get a friend
of
his to drive the truck out to the Interstate while he hung on underneath it and listened. They found his body wrapped around
the drive shaft.”

“Oof,” Frank said.

Marla turned the tape off again. “It’s good stuff, Frank, and it will work. At least let me call this guy and ask him if he’ll
send me an audition tape. It won’t cost us anything, it won’t cost him any more than a FedEx package, we’ll have better quality
sound. We can have him on the network in a month and on the syndication list in three. It won’t matter if Drew Harrigan has
to go to jail for life. We’ll have a backup. And a good one. Listen to me, Frank. I think this is the coming thing.”