“It’s time we found a common ground.”
“It’s shit, boy, it’s all shit. All the common ground any of us got, it’s shit.”
The white outline of the stallion cut into the blue and red, alienating the canvas of the New Freedom banner. The boarish elephant did likewise on its respective banner, facing off with the stallion in a display of strength. The campaign office’s whitewashed brick walls spread out from these two central banners suddenly, reaching out to the horizons of the corner, beyond the limits of the two icons of myth. Politics.
Captain was looking at him with the same old tuff-as-fucking-nails look, the one that mocked him at the same time as asking him a question, the teaching look that had gone beyond nails to
fucking nails ever since Carl had first met the grizzled veteran of the two-party system. A dark, bent up piece of cardboard something jutted down and out of Captain’s mouth: what could have once been a toothpick, chewed down to this state, or maybe just a type of miniature cigar the Cubans had never told Carl about. Some death stick that they only released to shitfaced old men like Captain that would buy cigars that had managed to lose their prime right on the factory floor. Floor was the key word.
“Greg, we need to do something. We have to get their support somehow. What do we have without a majority?
New Freedom probably won’t be able to pass Proposition 49 even if we get them to agree to it. I don’t see a fucking chance that we can get this bill past anywhere without someone else behind it.”
“Don’t call me Greg, you fucker. I have told you since the first day I met you that I don’t deserve to be addressed like a friend by any of you fancy-pants politicians, with your god-granted right to walk all over the rest of us with your fucking education. Besides, I hate it when people call me by my fucking first name when they don’t have a shit in heaven’s idea of what is going on.”
Carl walked over to the desk that faced the New Freedom’s stallion, the valiant symbol of a new age, of a new party, a horse charging with mouth open, tongue whirling, and burning eyes glaring. He sat down. The window was a good four feet above his desk in the basement of the area library and post office that he still strategized in, so he had figured that he may as well look at the object of his utmost frustration instead of nothing. Goals were shit. He looked over at Captain, who seemed to be about to speak. The crumpled cigar of sorts twirled from one edge of the old man’s mouth to the other, and Carl’s chair spun at the same time. Captain would never speak unless one stared right at him. No, New Freedom wasn’t the object of his utmost frustration right now. The object was Captain.
“New Freedom has gone to shit, sonny. They may be our source of well-being, at least up to this point, but they have still gone to shit. Sometimes you have to look beyond party, but at your own well-being. No, I’m not saying to please the people all of a sudden or any bullshit like that. Nobody does that. But I shifted right over from Republican to New Freedom when they came around, because I knew that my services would be better used there. This is just like that. You need to strive out on your own, do what will work for you. Do you understand me?”
“I’m a politician, not a mercenary-turned-campaign strategist for Christ’s sake. No matter what you think, I do care about what the people think. I am elected to represent them, god dammit. The only reason I listen to you is because you still know better than about eighty percent of the colleagues I meet, regardless of morals! You tell me what to do; I screw it up with my damned scruples. You know the game, Captain, we have played it for long enough.”
“Whatever you want, Carl, whatever you say. I get it. You’re the boss. No matter how many times I see you whipped for forgetting what I have said, you are the boss. I get it. Sure, you have a point. I can admit it. You can pull the old flipperoo while hiding it behind your pansy morals. John McCain did just that back in the uneasy O’s, didn’t he? But don’t call me fucking stupid behind my back because you can hide it behind goddamn nostalgia and your esteemed passivity because you are sitting down in that chair and I’m standing. I know all the tricks, boy, don’t get me wrong.”
This was just the way that Captain talked. He said fuck, he said shit, he talked about your momma, and he even said the shit that nobody is ever supposed to say. He got deep in there, right to the point, right into the ruthlessness of it all, and he wasn’t afraid to stare right at you and show it to you. He talked politics. The man was crazy, and the most brilliant political mind that had ever existed, too… if you asked Carl or anyone else that had met him.
He came from somewhere down in Louisiana, some killer swamp, probably filled with alligators and the most fucked up python mutes imaginable. Carl could imagine him growing up, sitting back in a hard-backed rocking chair on the porch of a shed, smoking a cigar, spitting, and swearing at any sort of wildlife that went past. If he hadn’t managed to shoot whatever it was already. The man was a mystery, at least the child and young man part of him, and it was as good as if he had emerged from nowhere. One day he had just shown up at Carl’s door after a good speech at his gubernatorial rally, and after that he had never left. Carl assumed he had been with some prominent politician of some sort before him, maybe even with a starting career back with Hilary, but it was just as likely that the man was from an Illuminati think tank or just some bad-tempered savant who watched too much CNN. Captain was Captain. Carl had almost gotten used to him, and the beef jerky, gunpowder, and tobacco smoke scent that he had imbued the office with.
Captain started to mumble to himself and frown more deeply than usual. That meant he was about to tell a story, usually.
“When I was a kid, I remember something on TV. Fucking TV, useless shit. Anyway, it was back when there were still a lot of natural residents down in the fucking swamps, before they all got killed by climate shit and before the greens got control and came back to put all the animals back in, even though they put them all in the wrong places. This was when things were first starting to go from majorly screwed up to obviously majorly screwed up in N.A. Somehow enough pythons had gotten released from captivty’ as pets or whatever, and the shits were starting to even reproduce in that kind of habitat. Down in the Everglades. People thought that it wouldn’t matter, stupid fucks, because it seemed like the alligators were dominant enough as the natural predators there to keep the python population down. Instead, these fucking pythons started eating the damn alligators. It was fucked up. The first one I saw went ahead and swallowed the damn thing, jaws and all, and wound up fucking exploding. The snake was parted like a trashed seam, torn all the way down and unfolded to either side. The alligator never woke up, though. At that point, it was quite apparent that things weren’t just ‘O.K.’ And you know what, Carl? This is a lot like that. You see, Cargill is the fucking python, and the Boars are standing in for the alligators today. Cargill thinks he is all up-and-coming and there to make a stand, just because he is the leading New Freedom senator and the conservatives haven’t taken back the majority yet. Cargill is willing to go ahead and swallow those shits just because he thinks they’re weak, no matter whether or not they’ve been there for years. He doesn’t know that we aren’t getting out of this one. Things are getting too close. Sure, the pythons might win out after a while, but at first they will be killing themselves to get the alligators. In the end, we might just kill each other off. It is what happened back then.”
“So? I am just trying to get this proposition past. I am trying to actually get something done in this cutthroat mess. Why do I have to get involved in this when all I am doing is garnering support?”
“Because you don’t know where you are, Carl. You don’t have the slightest idea where you are stuck right now. You’ve been with New Freedom for years, and you have supported Cargill all the way, even though I advised you not to. You’re the shit, sonny. You are the python’s shit. You are stuck right up in the digestive track of the python, and if the python attacks that damn alligator before that python gets rid of you, you are fucked. You aren’t ever going to get out of that python if you don’t do it now, because it is only so long before Cargill’s tiny little brain tells him to strike. Cargill, your colleagues, even you; you aren’t any smarter than those alligators. Those boars have the same tiny little brains that you do, and neither of you are getting out. No matter what damn morals either of you have. For most of you, it is all carnivore instinct. Strike, or you are the prey. You can forget survival unless you are smarter than those predators, unless you develop strategy beyond instinct. This isn’t an easy situation, Carl. You just don’t know it yet.”
“So you survived, sure. But what have you done? Ridden on coattails to glory? Trashed a couple opponents? Helped some corporate-funded stand-in survive a political ripple, shedding him of his values at the same time?”
“Carl, to tell you the truth, I’ve never met someone like you. The only person I have found values in happens to be you. I don’t know what to tell you! I’m not sure how you can survive this. You are made of more than instinct, more than I know. I don’t think you can win, all I know tells me otherwise. That’s the truth, Carl. I’m going back to my cabin.”
The old man walked out of the door, closing it softly… instead of the usual slam.
In all the years Carl had known Captain, he had never heard him say what he actually thought. What he actually believed about Carl’s seemingly sacrosanct morals, the blinding need to change things that Carl had felt since some of his earliest years of learning. For once, Captain actually told him the truth, at least truth beyond strategy and foresight, beyond what he thought other people were thinking but actually what he himself was thinking. What the fuck had that been?
Carl walked over to the window. He couldn’t see out of it when he was close by, as it was positioned so far up his wall. He climbed onto his desk. As he placed his hands on the wall to balance until he could stand, they lightly brushed the poster of the New Freedom’s stallion and it fell to the ground. He looked down at the poster, crumpled and torn in between the wall and the desk. The sun was setting. The light in the room bounced off the whitewashed brick walls in such a way that the red on the poster reflected onto the white stallion. The beaten poster’s noble icon looked as if it was washed in blood. The stallion and the area around it looked blood red, just like the shade offsetting the cool, calculated blue of the rest of the poster. He slowly lifted his right arm up to the matching elephant poster, eyes slowly following the path of the hand up the wall, and forcibly brushed it off the wall. The red shades made it onto the poster, lying spread on the ground, but they were not as deep as the bloody color on the stallion. Oh well.
Carl moved his gaze from the fallen poster to the window, finally looking out of the window from a short distance. He had never been able to see out of it before, never as clearly as he could now. His gaze focused, adjusting the glare of the red sun that sat straight in line with the eastward-looking window. The view was mainly of a small brick window well at the side of the sidewalk cut out to make more space for the glass. The well was completely filled with trash. Lots of trash. Most of it was boxes, ones made for some kind of cigarette. The boxes were worn and had a thin layer of some type of animal hide coating the edges. The one on top had resisted the elements the best, even though they had all lasted longer than anything else thrown carelessly into the gutter. Thousands of them, like they were placed there a pack a day. As he looked closer, Carl realized that the newest box wasn’t empty. There were still five or six of the cigarettes left. They were the type that Greg smoked.
They were unfiltered, the real kind of death sticks. Not the fixed kind they made now that didn’t cause cancer or any other problems which was the only kind they sold in America now. These things came from somewhere toxic. Captain had been trashing his body for years, draining the supply of destructive tobacco that drained right back. It was like he wanted to die.
Carl looked again. The box had a name embroidered onto it, worn almost into illegibility despite the fact that the box was probably newer than the rest of them. The brand name was New Freedom.
“In a last minute miracle, the controversial Proposition 49 passed today, following the wishes of independent Senator Carl Stevens, who announced his retirement today. Senator Stevens engaged in a nine hour filibuster, during which his passionate speech inspired both New Freedom senators as well as the minority party to change their minds in support of the proposition. Soon after the proposition had been passed and Stevens had left the room, Senator Cargill attacked the opposing party in a scathing dialogue. The resulting backfire has split the senate, involving a walkout that even included some members of the New Freedom party itself. It seems unlikely that procedure will resume tomorrow in the face of one of the deepest divisions the senate has experienced in years. In related news, Gregory “Captain” Slate, the longtime political analyst and advisor for former Senator Stevens was found dead early this evening in his lakeside cabin, which is located in an outer suburb of the capital city. He was found by neighborhood mailman Jack Rivers, who stated that at first the elderly man had appeared to be asleep in his chair. He died of lung cancer, a condition unknown to even his doctor and remaining family. Once a simple factory worker, Slate made his way up the ladder with a wit and cunning most would not expect from someone with his somewhat gruff and inarticulate exterior. Those who came to know him, however, always learned to see him as someone who truly wanted to make the most of whatever he came close to, even the trials and tribulations, as well as the pain, of life itself.”
Click.
