Primary Colors
evening news that night)--after the governor had led the homeless, the meek and the halt in a sing-along, after he had repaired to the study with Jackie to watch Texas play A&M, Susan snagged !Pe at the door.
    "You're down," she said.
    "I'm okay."
    "Come here--talk," she said. Momma and Uncle Charlie were sitting in rockers on the broad front porch, Momma yammering about this and that, smoking one of her too-long-to-be-reals; Charlie, perpetually bemused, comforted her with an occasional "Uh-huh" or "Ain't that the truth." Momma shot Susan a glance as we came out, just about missing a beat in her Grace Junction elegy, then continuing on--relieved--as it became clear we weren't going to join them. We took two rockers on the other side of the porch.
    "You're down," Susan said again. "Ozio's got you down." "He outthought us," I said. "He made us look slow."
    "We are slow," she said. "And anyway, you can never be fast enough for Ozio."
    "You think he's that good?"
    She laughed. "Nawwww," she reached over, tousled my hair like I was a little kid. "You don't get this, Henry? Ozio says it all the time, the line he stole from Sam Rayburn--`Any jackass can knock down a barn.' That's all lie ever does, sitting up there, leaking lies to this one and that one, taking potshots. And Jack has always been vulnerable to that, 'cause he's a believer."
    "That could be a problem," I said, stupidly.
    She ignored me, and went on. "You should have seen him back in the war days. 01' Jack seemed like a real wimp back then. You always had the guys who got up there and called the president a babykiller--it was real easy to be extreme. You were more credible if you were extreme. Jack wouldn't play that. The radicals made fun of him.
    He kept his hair relatively short, for those days. He wore a jacket and tie. When we were in law school, he was always down in Washington working, working the state delegation, trying to get them to oppose the war.
    "I'll never forget. There was a senator, real redneck hardball jerk, LaMott Dawson. Always going on about the 'commonists.' He found commonists all over the place, in Washington--and especially back home, especially when he was running for reelection. LaMott came from a little town northwest of Grace Junction named Anderson or Henderson--something like that. And a boy from there died. Now Jack had this thing--it was a grisly, self-flagellating kind of thing--but he'd always go visit the families of the people in the state who lost boys. I mean, he was just in school, right? What business did he have? No one else but Jack could get away with this. The obvious question would be 'Why ain't you over there in 'Nam, sonny?' And Jack would have to answer, seriously, 'Trick knee, ma'am.' He was so embarrassed about that--don't know what he hated more, the war or his excuse for getting out of it. But he'd go as often as he could, visiting the families. And he'd always find a way to get through to them, to comfort them. And the hard work paid off. He caught a break--up in Henderson, of all places, LaMott's hometown. He found Mrs. Ida Willie West, who said she had half a mind to go up to Washington and tell them what a waste she thought this whole business was.
    "Well, Jack supplied the other half a mind. He raised the money from some antiwar sources. He brought her up to LaMott, who didn't want any part of Jack, of course. Everyone knew what Jack was about. But Ida Willie wouldn't go in to see hint without Jack, and Jack told Sherman Presley--you know that sonofabitch was working for LaMott back then--that it would be unfortunate if the Mammoth Falls News-Tribune found out that Senator Dawson was refusing to meet a Gold Star Mother who wanted to meet with him. So they met. And Ida Willie just came out and asked, 'Why'd my boy die?' And LaMott goes on about commonists. And Ida Willie said, 'Now, LaMott, didn't we always take care of you?' And she talked about all the things the community had done to get LaMott ahead over

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