Blackjacks

Kaylee saw the bandage at ten past ten and came down off the chair.

She did not come down off the chair. Not for anything. Not for the queue, or the woman from Tulsa, or a child crying on the edge, or the siren; she blew the whistle, from the top, and things happened. But at ten past ten on Monday morning, when he came round the corner of the snack hut from the bathrooms with the yellow gloves in his hand and the bandage on his right arm from the wrist to the elbow, white, with a brown stain coming through it at the inside of the forearm in rows, she looked at it from the top of the chair, over her sunglasses, for one second; and then she climbed down the six rungs, and walked round the edge of the pool, and stood in front of him on the hot concrete, and looked at it close.

“Turn it over,” she said.

He turned it over.

She looked at the stain coming through the bandage in rows. She looked at it for a long time.

“Noodling,” said Kaylee.

“Yes.”

“Who took you?”

“Mr Rowe.”

Kaylee looked up from the bandage at his face. She did not say anything for a moment, and her own face, under the visor and the zinc, did something he had not seen it do, which was look surprised.

“Cecil took you?”

“Yes. On Saturday. Off the stumps at the far end of the cove.”

“Cecil Rowe doesn’t take anybody,” said Kaylee. “Cecil Rowe took my uncle once in 1999 and my uncle still talks about it at Thanksgiving.” She looked at the bandage. “How big?”

“Thirty-one pounds,” said Frederick. “Maybe two. Mr Rowe said.” He paused. “I put him back. He had eggs.”

Kaylee looked at him for a long, long time. Then she turned round, without a word, and walked back round the edge of the pool, and climbed the six rungs of the high white chair, and sat down at the top, and put the whistle in her teeth; and from the top, looking at the pool and not at him, round the whistle, said:

“You do the skimmer with your other hand today. And you don’t put that arm in the chlorine. Not the pool, not the test, not the bucket.” She blew the whistle at a boy on the far side, short, and the boy stopped running. “Rule five.”

“There isn’t a rule five.”

“There is now,” said Kaylee.

---

The news came at eleven.

It came on the radio on the shelf in the snack hut, between the pickled eggs and Bonnie Tackett’s husband with his fish; and Bonnie Tackett had not turned the dial that morning, so it was the country station, and the man reading the news was the man who read it every hour, quick and level, in exactly the voice in which he read about the price of cattle; and Frederick was at the hatch, counting the till into its cups with his left hand, slowly, because the right was in the bandage, when the man said it.

”… and the Prime Minister left New Westminster this morning on a Royal American Air Force flight to Will Rogers World Airport, at Oklahoma City, and is understood to be travelling on by road to Blackjacks, the Prime Minister’s country residence in Logan County. Charter House has declined to give a reason for the journey. Lord Whitlock had no engagements in the State announced in his published diary for this week. The flight was not expected. In other news…”

He stopped counting.

Behind him, at the griddle, Bonnie Tackett put down the tongs.

“Well,” she said.

The man on the radio went on to the weather. A hundred and two. Storms, possible, in the panhandle, later in the week. Bonnie Tackett did not pick the tongs up.

“Well, well,” she said.

Frederick turned round.

“Is that bad?”

Bonnie Tackett looked at him over her shoulder. She looked at him for a moment as though she were deciding how much a boy from New Westminster in a red T-shirt with a bandage on his arm could be expected to know; and then, he saw, she remembered who he was, and her face did something very complicated, and settled on nothing.

“Hon,” she said, “they don’t go to Blackjacks. Not like that. Not without saying.” She turned back to the griddle. “When they go to Blackjacks without saying, it means something’s happened.”

---

Hal Buckner said so at a quarter to twelve.

Bonnie Tackett turned the dial. She did it without discussing it, at half past eleven, when the man on the country station had read the news again and said the same thing again, in the same voice, with one sentence added, the Opposition has called on the Prime Minister to make a statement; and she reached up between the pickled eggs and the fish and turned the dial until the hiss came, and the crackle, and Hal Buckner’s big warm voice came out of it, in the middle of a sentence, talking faster than Frederick had heard him talk on the day of the phone-in, and not laughing at all.

”… and I’ll tell you what my granddaddy told me, folks, and he was a newspaperman in Guthrie for forty years. He said, Hal, when a Prime Minister flies to Will Rogers on a Monday morning in August with nothing in the diary, you put your coffee down and you start ringing people. That’s what he said. Because they don’t go out there for the fishing. They go out there for one reason, and one reason only, and that’s to decide something they can’t decide in New Westminster.” A pause. “Nixon went out there in the summer of seventy-four. You know what happened in August seventy-four. Gore went out there in oh-six, after the ministry fell, and came back and resigned. And now we’ve got a twenty-seven-year-old Prime Minister of five parties who signed a piece of paper last September saying he’d resign when the business was done, and the House rose a fortnight ago, and he’s on a plane to Will Rogers on a Monday morning with nothing in the diary.” Another pause. “Folks, the lines are open. What do you think he’s gone out there to do?”

The lines were full in a minute.

Frederick stood at the hatch with the till half counted and listened to them. A man from Okmulgee who said the Prime Minister was going to resign, no question, it was all over, the five parties had fallen out over the Territory and he was going to Blackjacks to write the letter. A woman from Bartlesville who said he was going to call an election, she’d bet her house on it. A man from Owasso who said it was the Treasury, it was always the Treasury, something had happened with the money, and the markets were down in New York already, he’d seen it on his telephone, ninety points. A man from Pryor who said he’d heard from a cousin who knew a man who drove for the Blackjacks manager that they’d been told on Friday to air out the guest cottages, all of them, every one, and that meant delegations, and that meant the five leaders, and that meant talks, and that meant the coalition was coming apart and he was going to try and stick it back together out there where nobody could go home for the afternoon.

“The Blackjacks talks,” said Hal Buckner, with relish, as though tasting a wine. “Folks, if that’s right, we haven’t had a set of Blackjacks talks since Valdez.”

At the hatch, a queue had formed. It was the cabin people. They stood in the sun with their money in their fists and their children by the hand and they did not ask for anything; they listened to the radio, with their faces turned up towards the shelf between the pickled eggs and the fish, and a man at the front, in a sun hat, with a can of something in his hand that he had forgotten to pay for, said to the man behind him, low, ninety points, and the man behind him said Jesus.

Frederick took the money for the can. He counted the change into the man’s hand. One. Two. Five. The man did not notice.

He was thinking.

He was thinking about a fax, on shiny paper, curling, warm, and the grey letters on it, and number seven.

Tuesday 14 August. Big Cabin. County road 4510. A visit, with the Prime Minister, to the site of the Big Cabin Creek bridge.

The Prime Minister has expressed a particular interest.

---

The Private Secretary rang at ten past twelve.

He rang the office. Bonnie Tackett came to the snack hut with the headset round her neck and said hon, it’s New Westminster, for you, in the office, and he says it’s not urgent, and he sounds like a man who’s been told to say it’s not urgent; and Frederick went across the path to the cabin by the marina, and in, under the eleven fish, with the air conditioner roaring and dripping into the coffee tin, and picked up the receiver from the desk.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary. “Thank you. I’m sorry to ring you at your work.”

“It’s all right. It’s my lunch.” It was not his lunch. He did not say so. “Is it the Prime Minister?”

There was a pause.

“You’ve heard, sir.”

“It’s on the radio. Every station. A man in Pryor says the guest cottages have been aired.” He looked at the fish. “The markets are down ninety points.”

“A hundred and twelve, sir, at the last count.” The Private Secretary’s voice did not change. “The leader of the Liberal Federal Democrats has telephoned Charter House three times this morning to ask whether the Prime Minister is resigning. The leader of the Left and Solidarity Bloc has telephoned twice to ask whether he is calling an election, and once, I understand, to say that if he is, she would like to be told before the newspapers. Alternative for the Realm has put out a statement calling on the Boy Premier to come home and explain himself to the House, which is not sitting.” A pause. “The Prime Minister’s office has told all of them that the Prime Minister is not resigning and is not calling an election and is not in difficulty of any kind, and none of them believes it, because he has gone to Blackjacks without saying why.”

“Why has he?”

There was a longer pause.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, “he is going to stand on a bridge.”

Frederick closed his eyes.

“The Big Cabin Creek bridge, sir. On county road 4510. Tomorrow at ten o’clock. With the county commissioner for Craig County, and a photographer from the Vinita paper, and the Minister of State for Transport, who is flying out tonight and is not pleased.” Another pause. “It was in the Prime Minister’s published diary for Tuesday. Ms Fenner put it in on Friday. Local engagement, Craig County. Nobody read it. Nobody in New Westminster has ever read the word Craig in a Prime Minister’s diary, sir, and nobody this morning connected a local engagement in Craig County on Tuesday with a flight to Will Rogers on Monday.” A pause. “He is staying at Blackjacks tonight because it is the Prime Minister’s house in the State and the nearest place he can sleep without a hotel, and because he has never been, and because he says that a Prime Minister who flies a thousand miles to look at a bridge ought at least to see the house that comes with the job.” The Private Secretary’s voice changed, very slightly, for the first time. “And because, sir, I think, he has not had a day off since the eleventh of September, and Blackjacks is the only place in the Realm where nobody can come into the room.”

Frederick stood at Bonnie Tackett’s desk with the receiver at his ear and his bandaged arm on the blotter and could not say anything at all.

“He’s going to stand on the bridge,” he said, at last.

“Yes, sir.”

“With the commissioner.”

“Yes, sir. In the heat. With a photographer.” A pause. “The commissioner, I’m told, rang Charter House on Friday afternoon when he saw it, and asked whether it was possible for him to be ill, and was told that it was not.”

“And the whole Realm thinks the government’s falling.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Private Secretary. “The whole Realm thinks the government is falling because the Prime Minister has gone to look at a bridge that the King suggested he look at.” A very small pause. “Ms Fenner has not told anybody that it was the King’s suggestion. She has told everybody that it was hers. I gather she has been told she is a genius by three separate people in Charter House this morning and has not slept since Friday.”

---

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, after a while. “There is something else.”

“Yes?”

“The Prime Minister has asked whether he may call upon you.”

Frederick stopped.

“Tomorrow, sir. After the bridge. Big Cabin is twenty miles from Ketchum by road.” A pause. “He was very particular about the terms. He asked me to give you his message exactly as he gave it to me.” The Private Secretary cleared his throat. It was the first time Frederick had ever heard him do it. “Not as an audience. As a customer.”

“A customer.”

“He would like to buy a day pass, sir. At the pool. He says he understands the price is five pounds.” A pause. “He says he will pay it himself.”

Frederick looked at the eleven fish on the walls of Bonnie Tackett’s office.

He thought about it. He thought about it the way Castellanos thought about a midway in the dark. He thought about a Prime Minister, any Prime Minister, getting out of a car at the Cove Point Resort in front of a hundred people from Tulsa and Joplin and Kansas City who had spent the whole morning listening to the radio say that his government was falling; and about the cabin people seeing him, and knowing him, which they would, because they had seen nothing else on their telephones all morning; and about what they would do then, with their telephones. And about every newspaper in the Realm, which was in Guthrie by now, or on its way, sitting outside the gate at Blackjacks waiting for the Prime Minister to come out and say what he had come to say; and following him, when he came out, wherever he went. To a bridge. And then twenty miles up the road to a resort on a lake, where there was a boy in a red T-shirt with a badge that said FREDERICK going over both edges.

“Sir?” said the Private Secretary.

“If he comes,” said Frederick, slowly, “they’ll follow him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Every paper in the Realm. They’re at Blackjacks already, aren’t they. At the gate.”

“Since half past eleven, sir. Our time.”

“They’ll follow him to the bridge, and they’ll follow him from the bridge, and they’ll follow him here.” Frederick looked out of the window, past the dripping air conditioner, at the white fence round the pool, and the umbrellas, and the high white chair with Kaylee on it. “And then it’s over. All of it. The whole summer.”

There was a silence on the line.

“Yes, sir,” said the Private Secretary. “I said so to the Prime Minister.”

“What did he say?”

The Private Secretary paused.

“He said, sir,” he said, “leave that to me.”

---

He went back to the snack hut. He did the till with his left hand. He did not do the chemicals, because of rule five, and Kaylee did not ask him to. He did the skimmer, left-handed, slowly, round the whole pool, and did not find a frog; and all afternoon, from the shelf between the pickled eggs and the fish, Hal Buckner talked about Blackjacks, and the cabin people stood at the hatch with their faces turned up to the radio and forgot to buy things.

At half past two the news said that the Prime Minister had arrived at Blackjacks, by road, from Will Rogers, at a quarter past one, and had gone into the house without speaking to the press at the gate, and that the press at the gate now numbered more than sixty.

At half past three it said that the markets in New York had closed down a hundred and forty points.

At half past four it said that the Minister of State for Transport had been seen boarding a flight at New Westminster for Oklahoma City, and that a spokesman for the Minister had declined to say why; and Hal Buckner said folks, that’s a Cabinet minister on a plane to Will Rogers on the same day, that’s not a resignation, that’s a reshuffle, I’ll eat my hat; and Bonnie Tackett, at the griddle, said he’ll eat his hat in a voice of the deepest satisfaction, and did not explain.

At five o’clock Kaylee came down off the chair for her break and came round the corner of the snack hut and stood in the door of it, with her sunglasses up in her hair, and looked at the radio, and then at him.

“Is it true?” she said. “Is the government falling?”

He looked at her. He thought about what he could say. He thought about the Private Secretary, and the bridge, and number seven, and Ms Fenner, who had been told she was a genius and had not slept since Friday; and about a twenty-seven-year-old man at a plain house in the oak scrub a hundred and eighty miles away, who had not had a day off since September, sitting in a room where nobody could come in.

“No,” he said. “He’s gone to look at a bridge.”

Kaylee looked at him for a long time.

“A bridge,” she said.

“On county road 4510. At Big Cabin Creek. It’s been closed for years. It’s in the schedule of an Act.” He looked at the radio. “He wanted to see it.”

Kaylee did not say anything. She looked at the radio on the shelf, which was saying, in Hal Buckner’s voice, that a man in Stillwater had rung in to say that it was obviously a war; and then at the cabin people at the hatch, with their faces turned up to it; and then back at him.

“Huh,” she said. “Bonnie’s going to love that.”

---

Theo was waiting at the gate at six, and he had heard.

They had all heard. Theo and Marcus and Felix had heard it at the farmhouse, on Mrs Sixkiller’s radio on the kitchen windowsill, which they had never turned on before, and had turned on at eleven because Mrs Sixkiller had rung on the telephone with the long curly cord to tell them to; and they had listened to it all day. Theo told him so, walking beside the blue bicycle across the car park, with Castellanos’s car starting up behind them.

“She said, turn on your radio,” said Theo. “Like that. Then she rang off.” He looked at Frederick. “Is he resigning?”

“No.”

“Is there going to be an election?”

“No.”

“Is it a war? A man in Stillwater says it’s a war.”

“It’s a bridge,” said Frederick.

Theo stopped walking.

He stood in the middle of the Cove Point car park in the evening sun, with the dust coming up round his feet off the gravel, and looked at Frederick for a long time, and his face went through several things, very fast, the way Mrs Ledbetter’s had on the van, and came out at the end in a sort of slow, dawning, radiant horror.

“Number seven,” said Theo. “On the fax. You said put the commissioner on the bridge.”

“Yes.”

“You said with the Prime Minister if the Prime Minister wants to go.”

“Yes.”

“And he wanted to go.” Theo looked at the sky, enormous and white and going orange at the edges. “The markets are down a hundred and forty points because you told a woman in Charter House to make a county commissioner stand on a bridge.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Theo sat down on the gravel, in the middle of the car park, and put his head on his knees, and his shoulders went, and did not stop.

---

They went to the Cove Café for supper, and the television was on.

It was on a bracket on the wall above the pie case, at the end of the counter, small and old, and Frederick had never seen it on; it had sat dark above the pies every day he had been in, with a cloth over the top of it. Tonight the cloth was off and it was on, and the sound was up, and the whole café was looking at it. Not the booths, which were talking, about other things, loudly, on purpose, the way they had on the first Sunday. The counter. The nine stools. Eight people on them, side by side, in a row, with their plates in front of them, eating, and looking up at the television above the pie case, all at once, like people in a church looking at the window.

On the television there was a gate.

It was a plain wire gate, between two posts, on a dirt road, in flat country with scrubby dark trees on it under a white sky, and on the other side of the gate, a long way off, at the top of a slight rise, there was a house: plain, two storeys, white, with a porch round three sides, and a barn, and a windmill. And on this side of the gate there were people. A great many people. Sixty, seventy, more, with cameras and microphones and telephones held up, and vans parked along the verge of the dirt road with dishes on their roofs, unfolded, pointing at the sky; and in front of them all, with her back to the gate, a woman with a microphone, talking, very seriously, with the house on its rise behind her shoulder.

BLACKJACKS, said the words along the bottom of the screen. PM’S UNEXPLAINED VISIT. MARKETS DOWN 140. COALITION LEADERS DEMAND ANSWERS.

Darlene came down the counter with the coffee pot.

She looked at the four of them in the door. She looked at Frederick, and at the bandage on his arm, and at his face; and then she looked up at the television above her pie case, at the gate, and the sixty cameras, and the house on its rise; and then back at him.

“Sit anywhere, hons,” she said. “Four on the end.”

They sat on the four on the end.

---

He ate his supper under the television and listened to it.

They had found Nixon. They had found old film of him, in colour gone orange, standing on the porch of the same house in 1974, in a dark suit, in the wind, looking out at nothing; and they played it, and then they played the woman at the gate saying the last time a Prime Minister came to Blackjacks without explanation in the month of August, and then they played Nixon again. They found Gore, at the same gate, in 2006, getting out of a car. They found a professor of politics at a university in New Westminster who said that the terms of the Heads of Agreement were quite explicit about resignation once the business was concluded, and that in his view the business was very nearly concluded, and that a premier who wished to resign at the right moment and with the right gravity could hardly choose a better setting. They found the leader of Alternative for the Realm on the steps of something, saying the Boy Premier.

They did not find a bridge.

Nobody on the television said the word bridge. Nobody said Big Cabin, or county road 4510, or Craig County. Nobody said that it had been in the Prime Minister’s published diary since Friday as a local engagement, or that a Minister of State for Transport was on a plane to Will Rogers because a bridge was in the schedule of an Act; and Frederick sat on the stool at the end of the counter under the television with his biscuits and gravy going cold and understood that nobody would, because a bridge was not a story, and a resignation was.

Along the counter, three stools down, the man in the tractor cap was eating pie.

He looked up at the television. He looked at the gate, and the sixty cameras, and the vans with the dishes on their roofs, and the woman with her back to the gate, talking. He looked at it for a long time, chewing.

Then he looked along the counter at Frederick.

“They’ll follow him,” said Cecil Rowe.

It was the first thing anybody at the counter had said.

“Wherever he goes,” said Cecil Rowe. “Out of that gate. Every one of ‘em. In them vans.” He looked back at the television. “Like they followed my granddaddy round his yard.”

The whole counter had stopped eating.

“He’s going to stand on the Big Cabin bridge,” said Frederick. “Tomorrow. At ten. With the commissioner.” He looked at his plate. “And then he’s coming here.”

Nobody said anything.

Darlene, at the till, had put the coffee pot down.

“Here,” she said.

“To the pool. At Cove Point. As a customer. He wants a day pass.” Frederick looked up at the gate on the television. “And they’ll follow him. Every one of them. From the bridge. Twenty miles. And then they’ll be here. At the pool. And on the gravel road. And at the café.” He looked along the counter, at the eight people on the stools, and at Darlene, and at the slate on the wall behind the till with DUANE (BOAT) 31.75 on it and a pale grey smudge underneath where his name had been. “And it’ll be over.”

There was a very long silence at the counter of the Cove Café.

On the television above the pie case, the woman with the microphone said that the Prime Minister was expected to remain at Blackjacks overnight, and that there was no indication of when he might come out of the gate, or what he might say.

Darlene picked up the coffee pot.

She came down the counter, and filled Frederick’s cup, which was full; and Theo’s, which was full; and Marcus’s and Felix’s; and the man in the tractor cap’s, which was empty; and then she stopped, at the end of the counter, under the television, and stood there with the pot in her hand and looked up at the gate, and the vans, and the dishes on their roofs.

“Well,” said Darlene. “Then he’ll have to come ordinary.”

---

He thought about that all the way home in the car, in the cold, in the dark, with the hazards off and the road going under.

He’ll have to come ordinary.

He did not know what it meant. He did not know how a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America with sixty cameras at his gate and the markets down a hundred and forty points and three coalition leaders on the telephone could come anywhere ordinary. He thought about the Private Secretary’s voice saying leave that to me, and did not know what that meant either.

At home, on the porch, at ten o’clock, in the row, under the eave, with the four of them on their backs on the boards and the heat lying on them like a blanket, Theo said, into the dark:

“Freddie.”

“What?”

“If the government falls,” said Theo, “because of a bridge.”

“It’s not going to fall.”

“But if it does.”

Frederick lay on the boards and looked up at the edge of the stars past the eave, and the galaxy going across them, faint, edge on.

“Then I’ll have to ask somebody to form a new one,” he said. “On a Tuesday. In a red T-shirt. On my lunch.”

There was a silence on the porch. Then, from the far end of the row, by the swing, Marcus began to laugh; and Felix; and then Theo, beside him, helplessly, with his raw bandaged arm over his eyes; and then Frederick, too, at last, on his back on Mrs Sixkiller’s porch, at the edge of the stars, until the light in the trailer came on, and went off again.