Typecasting (2 page)

Louise Williamson clucked, as if disappointed in Bill. “I understand all that,” she said—yes, she was unhappy with him. “It's more complicated than you're making it out to be, though.”

Or else Nicole's taken arms against a sea of troubles that aren't there
, Bill thought, remembering
Hamlet
from his own high school and college English classes. Twenty-one-year-olds were good at that. They saw how many things were wrong with the world, and saw them very clearly. They didn't see that fixing all those many things was usually harder than it looked. Bill hadn't at twenty-one, either.

*   *   *

Ashland was a town of about 15,000: a college town and, this past generation, a Shakespeare town, too. Hotels and restaurants and shops catered to the outsiders who came to watch the plays. The locals who didn't cater to tourists raised pears and apples and grain on the fertile soil of the Rogue River Valley.

They had reservations at the Columbia Hotel on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from the Festival campus. The Columbia was right next to the Varsity Theater, but that ran movies, not live drama. At the moment, the marquee plugged
Mad Max
and
Gilda Live
, which struck Bill as one of the odder pairings he'd run across lately.

One of the entrances into the hotel was tall enough for him to use without ducking very much, either. He didn't have to walk through the lobby all hunched over, either. He'd been in the Jefferson State Senate when the Equal Accommodations Act finally passed in the early 1970s. If you ran a business in Jefferson, you had to do so in a way that let sasquatches—or yetis, or other oversized visitors—have access to it without turning into quasi-Quasimodos. Not all of it had to fit their needs, but some did.

Businessmen had fought the law all the way to the Jefferson Supreme Court. They'd lost. They'd lost in Federal district court, too, and at the Federal appeals level. If they took it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bill expected them to lose there, too. Size was a civil-rights issue, dammit, just as much as race or gender.

The little man behind the registration desk smiled up at him and Louise. “Hello, Governor. Hello, Mrs. Williamson. “Welcome to the Columbia,” he said.

“Thanks.” Bill wondered whether ordinary sasquatches got the same kind of treatment he did. Remembering the days when he'd been on the road all the time selling real estate, he had his doubts. But he had the trappings and recognizability of rank now. He would till he lost an election. People would go on recognizing him even then. He wasn't exactly inconspicuous.

He and Louise went through the rituals of checking in. He presented his American Express card. This trip was on his nickel, not Jefferson's. “You'll be in the Governor's Suite—that's room 111,” the desk clerk said. “Would you like me to ring for someone to take your bags?”

“No, that's okay. Don't bother.” Bill always declined such “favors.” He was so much bigger and stronger than anyone the desk clerk would call, having a flunky carry luggage for him seemed more an embarrassment than a service.

“Here you go, then.” The clerk handed him two keys. He gave Louise one. The clerk pointed. “It's down that hallway and to your left.” “Thanks.” Bill already knew that; he'd stayed at the Columbia on the campaign trail. But he appreciated the way the clerk worked to treat him like anyone else. Everybody got along in Jefferson, or at least tried. No one here gaped at him like a movie special effect, the way little men and women back East did when he traveled for a governors' conference. (Some of the people who gaped most were other governors.)

The year before, the Yeti Lama, exiled since Mao's soldiers overran Tibet and the Himalayas in 1959, had visited Jefferson. He wanted to see for himself how people of many races and sizes could lived together without murdering one another over differences in religion and politics and hairiness.

People here didn't murder one another over such differences … these days. Bill hadn't gone into detail about his state's unfortunate past for the holy traveler. Well, damn few places didn't have unfortunate pasts. Too many places, the Yeti Lama's homeland among them, had unfortunate presents.

The door to Bill's room suited a person of his size. The Columbia dated back to 1910; this was the Governor's Suite because Bigfoot Lewis had stayed here back in the day. They didn't need the Equal Accommodations Act to get with the program. Bill hardly minded bending a little to put the key in the lock. Sasquatches weren't the only people who used the suite. You had to give to get.

Louise set down her bag and sat on the bed. She pulled a piece of paper from her purse. “Nicole's number at the dorm,” she said. “I'm going to call her, let her know we're here.”

“She'll be glad to find out,” Bill said. “Mom and Dad are in town! No more dorm food for a while!”

“It's not too awful, from what she says. And the meal plan … could be worse, anyhow,” his wife replied. Naturally, sasquatches ate more than little people. Just as naturally, university dorms expected them to pay more, too. Louise dialed the room phone. Actually, it was a modern one with buttons, and easier for her to use. She wasn't that much bigger than little people; in a pinch, she could manage with a real dial. Bill had always needed a pen or pencil to deal with one of those. From force of habit, he still used one most of the time even on the push-button models.

This one was quite loud. From halfway across the room, he heard two rings and then a “Hello?” he thought was his daughter's.

Sure enough, Louise said, “Hello, dear. We're in Ashland, at the Columbia. Can you meet us at Gepetto's at noon for lunch? You know—the place on Main, a couple of blocks down from the hotel.” She paused, listening. This time, Bill couldn't make out what Nicole said. But Louise nodded. “See you then. 'Bye.” She hung up.

“Noon, huh?” Bill said. “Well, fine. And then I'll hear the grand and gruesome story of why she isn't happy with her part?”

His wife nodded again. “That's right.”

“Oh, boy. I can hardly wait,” Bill said. Louise rolled her eyes.
I know I can fib better than that
, he thought.
If I couldn't, they never would have elected me to the State Senate, let alone governor
.

*   *   *

He and Louise got to Gepetto's ten minutes early. For Bill, that counted as right on time. He had a working politician's horror of being late. It was as pleasant a morning here as it had been down in Yreka. They waited outside for their daughter to walk over from campus.

Standing there soaking up the springtime sun, Bill people-watched. In a college town, he remembered John Donne.
No man is an island, entire of itself
, Donne wrote.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
.

Bill wanted to believe that, just as the old-time Englishman had. A pol who'd once sold houses and lots was, and needed to be, a gregarious soul. But Bill felt isolated in ways John Donne never could have imagined. Even in Jefferson, sasquatches were a tiny minority. Most people didn't see them every day. Yes, staring was rude, but the sidelong glances he got instead might have been worse.

Then he smiled. He couldn't help himself. Here came a pair of his own kind, walking down Main Street holding hands. They were both close to Nicole's age. The boy wore an outsized baseball cap with JSA on the front, so they were college kids. They didn't give a damn about feeling isolated, or anything else except each other. They walked past him and Louise without even noticing them.

They were lucky. They didn't know how lucky they were, which was another way of saying they were young. Still smiling, Bill glanced down at the top of his wife's head. Twenty-odd years ago now, he'd felt that way about her. He still did, even if experience tempered romance now. Louise wouldn't know what he was thinking. She would have had her own dark moments down through the years. Man or woman, big or little, you couldn't very well reach middle age without them.

She suddenly waved. “There's Nicole!” she said. Sure enough, up Main Street from the direction of campus walked their firstborn. Being no more than an inch taller than Louise, she didn't stand out that much from the little people around her. Jefferson's settlers mostly came from northwestern Europe, and ran tall for their kind. Some of them also had a trace, or sometimes more than a trace, of sasquatch blood. For that matter, Bill thought—though he wasn't sure—one of his great-grandmothers was a little person. Whether that story was true didn't matter to him one way or the other.

Nicole waved back. She hurried toward them. Her last few steps were a trot. She hugged Louise and then Bill. “Sometimes I forget there are people as big as you, Daddy,” she said.

“Here I am, such as I am,” Bill said. “Sometimes I forget there are people bigger than I am. I was looking up to the Yeti Lama every which way last summer. He's the only really holy person I ever met—and he's six inches taller than me.” Maybe that had to do with the great-grandmother he'd never met. Maybe yetis averaged taller than their North American cousins. Or maybe the Yeti Lama was just a great big fellow and Bill not so much.

His daughter pointed toward Gepetto's front door. “Let's eat,” she said. “They do pretty good burgers, and their wontons are great.”

“Works for me. I bet I could eat one ton of them all by myself.” Bill pronounced the weight so it sounded like the Chinese dish. Louise and Nicole both groaned. They knew that, tall as he was, he had a low taste for puns. He had to work hard not to let it out where it could alarm his constituents.

“Governor Williamson!” exclaimed the middle-aged woman at a lectern who seated people. “You'll want a table set up for big people, won't you?”

“Yes, please, if you have one,” he said.

“We sure do. Right this way.” She scooped up menus and led them to a table and chairs that suited their size. No trouble with the Equal Accommodations Act here—and Bill wouldn't need to worry about where to put his knees.

The waitress who took their orders was short even by little-people standards. Bill needed a moment to notice that; all little people, even basketball players, seemed short to him. He saw she was cute right away. Living in the wider culture his whole life made him as much aware of attractive little-people females as his own kind. He was happy with Louise, so he'd never done anything more than notice. The waitress' head hair almost matched his own russet pelt, which was interesting and uncommon among her kind.

When the food came, they spent a while giving the hamburgers and wontons and fries and shakes the attention they deserved. After a while, happily replete, Bill asked, “How's the play coming along?”

Louise shot him a warning glance. Like most such, it arrived too late. Nicole's face clouded over. “Pretty bad,” she said. “You know I'm one of the best at the school.”

“Uh-huh.” Bill nodded. He did know that. Quietly and without any fuss, he'd made it a point to find out. He also knew it would do his daughter less good than she hoped once she left the friendly confines of Jefferson State Ashland. He ate a few more french fries. Then he said, “So?”

“So we're doing
The Tempest
, right?” Nicole spoke to him as if sure he was none too bright: the tone that always did so much to endear the rising generation to its elders. “So I was hoping they'd cast me for Miranda. But the director isn't a JSA guy. The Shakespeare Festival brought him in—he's from
Pittsburgh
, for crying out loud.” She stopped, too disgusted to go on.

“So what part
did
he give you?” Bill asked, fearing he knew the answer before he heard it. And he did.

“Caliban!” His daughter spat out the name with so much venom, several little people's heads whipped around. In a slightly—but only slightly—softer voice, she went on, “Talk about stereotyping! My God!” She made as if to clap her hands to her head. But her fingers were greasy, so she didn't.

“You see what I mean,” Louise said.

Bill nodded unhappily. “Who's playing Miranda, then?” he asked.

“Jackie van Herpen,” Nicole replied.

“She any good?”

His daughter turned her right thumb toward the floor. Vespasian couldn't have done it with more imperial hauteur. She said, “I suppose she's pretty, if you like brainless blondes.”

Some men, little and big, did. Quite a few, in fact. Bill found another question: “Is the guy from, uh, Pittsburgh sleeping with her?”

For the first time since naming Shakespeare's mooncalf, Nicole smiled. “I don't
think
so,” she said. “He's gay as gay can be.”

“Okay. Good, even.” Most of the time, Bill didn't care who went to bed with whom, or why. But if the director was balling his Miranda, no way in hell he'd change his mind about casting. Since he wasn't, he might—possibly—listen to reason (which, to Bill, meant doing what he wanted). “What's his name, and how do I get hold of him?”

“He's Reggie Pesky, and he's at the Angus Bowmer Theatre, the small one—that's where we'll perform.” Nicole suddenly looked anxious. “Maybe you should call over there and meet him somewhere else. Out of his territory.”

Bill nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense, but I'll do it anyway.” Nicole stuck out her tongue at him. He went on, “Remember, just because we talk, there's no guarantee of anything. All I can do is try.”

“I know, Dad.” Nicole sounded confident, though, and why not? Wasn't her father nine feet tall (and then some)? Wasn't he governor of Jefferson? Didn't all that mean he could do anything?

As a matter of fact, no
, Bill thought. Nine feet tall or not, he was only human. And a recalcitrant Legislature had taught him a governor could only do so much. Of course, Reggie Pesky was a theatre guy, not a politician. He might not grok that. If he didn't, Bill had no intention of enlightening him.